Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page B

suffered between the son and the daughter she had successfully borne. In Gerutha’s sense of it this fine-spirited wife had been worn to a wraith by the demands of Corambus’s goatish lust.
    The counsellor recalled himself, with a rasp in his voice, to his queen’s vague complaints. “The lack of children leaves a woman too idle,” he pronounced, “especially if her husband rules a scattered island kingdom, with miles of coast bare to foreign assault.”
    “My husband”—Gerutha hesitated, but she had a sore grievance within, and sensed that what she said would gratify her sly listener—“is all that my father promised he would be, but”—she hesitated again, before giving way to her weaker side—“I did not choose him. Nor did he choose me but as part of a personal polity. He cherishes me, but as one of his public duties, at no risk to his many others, or to himself.”
    She was bringing the attentive courtier too close to treason; Corambus recoiled into stiffness. “Why desirerisk?” He leaned forward again, his lower lip gleaming. “You read too many of these immoral Gaulish romances, which would make idle, sterile adoration the main business of life. If I may speak with the frankness of a father, you should read and embroider less, and exert your body in sport more. You should ride, you should hunt, as you did as a girl. You grow heavy, Your Majesty. Rorik’s quick blood turns stagnant in you and tips your balance of humors toward melancholy.”
    She laughed, to wave him away with his effrontery, in which she heard a jealous fondness speak. “I never thought, my substantial old friend, to hear you admonish me for heaviness.”
    “It was a manner of speaking—a spiritual heaviness.”
    “Of course. Good Corambus, it has much lightened me to have you listen to my idle thoughts. Just to speak them revealed them as airy, and groundless.”
    Doffing his conical green hat, swirling his abundant sleeves, the Lord Chamberlain took his leave, satisfied that he had offered what bracing advice he could. If he had irritated her, she had irritated him by asking that he give serious ear to a woman’s vagaries. Yet it pleased him to know that there was a crack in the King’s arrangements, a stir of unease near the throne. He bowed his way out, leaving Gerutha to her days.
    O the days, the days in their all but unnoticed beauty and variety—days of hurtling sun and shade like the dapples of an exhilarated beast, days of steady strong cold and a blood-red dusk, tawny autumn days smelling of hay and grapes, spring days tasting of salty wave-frothand of hearth-smoke blown down from the chimney pots, misty days of sifted sunshine and gentle fitful rain that glistened and purred on the windowsill like a silvery cat, days of luxurious tall clouds that brought thunder east from Jutland, days when the shoreline of Skåne lay vivid as a purple hem upon the Sund’s rippling breadth, days of high ribbed skies like an angel’s carcass, December days of howling sideways snow, March days of hail from the north like an angry knocking at the door, June days when greenness smothered every vista, days without qualities, days with a hole in the middle, days that never knew their own mind and ended in insomnia, days of travel, days of ceremony when she and Horwendil were fixed in place like figures beaten in brass or else overanimated like actors, dancing through sheets of candlelight and forests of food, wash days when amid laughter and lye she slaved with the red-handed wenches in thrall to Elsinore, sick days when she floated in a fever and received a parade of soft-spoken visitors one of whom might be faceless Death taking her to join Rorik and Marlgar and Ona, Ona who had died when younger than she, and then days of tender recovery, days when beech trees were in long red bud and the willows yellow, days when a serving-girl dropped a stillborn child, days when Horwendil was absent, days when she and he had made love the night