Free Alms for Oblivion by Philip Gooden Page B

they were printed in. Then the speaker moderated his delivery, imparting a tender, almost trembling quality to what
followed.
    “‘
As the weaker growth must needs find some stronger plant to prop it up, so I turn respectfully but fearfully towards your lordship in hope of your favour, since only in the sun
of your gaze can my lines thrive and my verses grow. If these first fruits of my brain prove deformed, I shall be sorry they had so noble a godfather, and vow no more to plough so profitless a
furrow, but if posterity find in them some scrap of worth, then may all the honour and praise be his to whom these lines are dedicated.
’”
    There was a pause. When he’d first opened the
Garland
, I expected Lord Bumpkin to read one of Richard’s poems but he had chosen instead to read the dedication – the
dedication to himself. R.V. THE ONLY BEGETTER, Robert Venner. A dedication may be a kind of poem, I suppose, with a similar degree of pretence and deceit in it. In fact Bumpkin hadn’t so much
read as recited it, and I realized that he had the words off by heart. Well, if a volume of verse was dedicated to me I expect I’d know the words pretty thoroughly too. Although I probably
wouldn’t read them aloud to a stranger. Not unless I was very self-assured – or stupid.
    “Very good,” I said.
    Richard Milford coughed, as if with embarrassment.
    “Our poet, eh, Vinny?”
    “Some of those verses are about me, they are,” said the woman called Vinny. She hadn’t moved from her seat in the corner. I wondered that she didn’t need to wear more
clothing on such a cold and dank afternoon. Now she made a give-me gesture to her husband. He handed over the precious volume. Without opening it, she brandished it like a prize. “About me
these verses are. Master Milford told me so.”
    Another compromised cough from Milford.
    “Better than having words about you scrawled up in the jakes, eh, Vinny?” said Lord Venner.
    I expected the lady to object to the imputation that people wrote items about her on the walls of a privy, but to my surprise she found her husband’s remark extremely witty. Her large tits
quivered. Her cheeks puffed out in delight.
    “Especially when you wrote those words in the first place,” said this lady to her beloved.
    “One must do something when one is at stool,” said my lord.
    “The devil finds work for idle hands,” said his lady.
    They guffawed together. Then, glancing down at the book in her hand, she made an effort to elevate the conversation and repeated, “But these verses
are
about me. Master Milford says
so.”
    “Then they must be, my lady,” I said, “since we all know that poets never lie either in their verses – or in their persons.”
    I gulped at my glass. Whether from the ginger in the wine or from some other cause I felt my face growing warm in this little sea-coal-heated playhouse box.
    “We are informed that Richard has written a new play,” announced Lord Bumpkin.
    “
The World’s Diseas’d
, you know, Nicholas,” said Richard Milford, the complacent satirist.
    “What? Oh yes. I do know it. I have been privileged to receive the foul papers.”
    “Foul papers? Is it horrid?” said the lady. “Is it dirty?”
    Richard hurried to explain this piece of theatrical jargon, before someone could make some fresh comment about privy walls.
    “You’ve seen it,” said the lord in surprise.
    “Not only seen it, I’ve read it,” I said.
    “It is a great work, though, is it not?” said Lord Bumpkin to me. “Fit to rival Master Shakespeare’s.”
    “Never thought much of
him
meself,” said his lady.
    “
The World’s Diseas’d
has blood and sinew, certainly,” I said.
    (And the odd severed limb and head.)
    “I look forward to reading it – fair or foul – guts and all,” said the woman called Vinny.
    “I don’t have time to read, not even to read the works of our poet,” said Lord Bumpkin, “I am too busy with more important things. I