Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth Page A

of monsters on Miranda. As usual, Prospero could hardly wait for him to draw towards the end of this—as he viewed it comunnecessarily protracted bout of chuckling. And in fact his impatience had already been a cause of altercation between the two, the curate complaining that he was not being given time to do justice to this laughter, which was, as he pointed out, a very important element of dialogue, highly significant, though not expressed in words. “All the more so for that very reason,” he would point out to them, his fair hair standing up with electric tension all around his head.
    But now Prospero swelled up and did exactly the same thing again. “Abhorred slave!” he shouted, before Parker could get far into his ho-ho’s, then went on at a spanking pace: Which any print of goodness wilt not take, Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes With words that made them known. But thy vile race - A pause, however, was obligatory here and Parker was quick to seize on it. “No, just a minute,” he said. “Upon my soul, you did it again, Bulstrode. You do not seem able to forbear. I must be given time to carry out that laughter.” The curate’s hair had bristled delicately up.
    His face was pale with vexation. “Caliban has no words, you see. They have taught him language but he has no words. That is the paradox of it.”
    “Caliban is a malignant savage,”
    Bulstrode said loudly. “He is beyond all reach of good. I say it in my speech. Damn me, man, it is here in my text, before my eyes.”
    “No need for oaths,” the curate said. “My profession does not allow me to believe that there can be a soul which will take no print of goodness. Ergo -“
    “No words, Mr Parker? Did you say no words?”’ This sharp question came from a girl called Elisabeth Jane Edwards, who was playing Ariel. She had a beautiful voice—it was her singing that Erasmus had heard the previous Sunday when he had blundered through the trees into the open and been ensnared. “He has some of the best speeches in the whole play.”
    “Ah, yes.” The curate wore an air of pale triumph. “Quite so, but may I ask when those speeches are delivered? Allow me to answer. They are spoke when Caliban is intoxicated or in fear or pain, are they not? When he has to argue his case, he has no words, he is lost. He has no language for debate.”
    “Caliban is no more than a buffoon,” one of the shipwrecked mariners said. People were getting rather tired of Parker.
    The curate smiled with superior wisdom.
    “If he were no more than that, why should Prospero rant at him so?”’
    “Prospero does not rant,” Bulstrode said. “I repudiate the aspersion. I deliver that speech with -“
    ‘As a matter of fact,” Sarah Wolpert said, “I think I should have the speech.”
    Both curate and tutor turned to regard her with expressions of surprise and displeasure almost identical.
    ‘Which?”’
    “The one you have just uttered, beginning, “Abhorred slave”. I think Miranda should have it, not Prospero.”
    “But that is my speech.” Bulstrode had an air of swollen and furious bewilderment. “It is set down so in the text.”
    “It comes better from Prospero,” the curate said. “A great gust of rage is needed after my laughter, otherwise the point is lost.”
    “I think Miss Wolpert ought to be allowed to state her case.”
    This came out more loudly and emphatically than Erasmus had really intended. He had said almost nothing so far, remaining on the edge of the group, conning his lines, looking occasionally in private anguish across the narrow expanse of the lake to the sunlit fields beyond. The moment he dreaded was approaching, when in response to Ariel’s first song he would have to walk forward, round the lakeside, holding his head up,