The Long Farewell Read Free

beyond Appleby’s linguistic reach, but it went on for so long that one had to suppose a feast of enormous elaboration was being projected. Preparing it and eating it would both take so long that he wouldn’t be in Verona till midnight. He rather regretted the perfectly idle impulse that had made him halt on the road to look up this eccentric man of learning.
    Still, it was a lovely evening in a lovely place. They sat on the terrace and sipped, uncontaminated by gin, the sweet commonplace vermouth that draws such subtlety from its native air. But Packford wasn’t built for the Italian climate, Appleby thought – and he didn’t feel surprised when the massive figure opposite him produced a silk handkerchief and mopped his brow. ‘My dear Appleby,’ he murmured, ‘how I envy you your well-preserved youth. And O, that this too too solid flesh would melt!’
    ‘I doubt whether that would be very comfortable.’
    Packford suddenly sat up. ‘Do you know,’ he demanded, ‘that it’s fashionable nowadays to accept the reading of the Good Quarto?’
    Appleby smiled. ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t.’
    ‘It’s “sallied,” you see. And they declare that to be a rare form of “sullied.” Absolute nonsense, believe me.’ Having got well on his hobbyhorse, Packford was animated. ‘Hamlet, after all, is fat and scant of breath.’
    ‘But haven’t eminent persons – I do seem to remember this – declared that to be fat was merely to be sweaty?’
    ‘Pitiful twaddle, my dear man. I think I can prove – I’m pretty certain I can prove – that Shakespeare’s original Hamlet, who was of course Richard Burbage, weighed close to eighteen stone. Have you ever considered why Hamlet is so marvellous a play – such tremendous stuff?’
    Appleby merely shook his head at this large question.
    ‘Partly, at least, it’s because Shakespeare had that wonderful inspiration of the delicate suffering soul in the great puffing wheezing body of a sedentary out-of-condition scholar.’ Packford, as he announced his discovery, gently wheezed himself. ‘Think of the effectiveness of it! Think of the effectiveness of the moment when the great man-mountain declares that Yorick used to carry him shoulder-high! Wonderful stuff, Appleby. And then the grave.’
    ‘Ophelia’s grave?’
    ‘Exactly. Think of the episode of supreme savage comedy when Hamlet jumps into her grave and gets jammed in it.’ Packford leant forward as he spoke, and his bulk blotted out the long line of tiny lights that had begun to prick the dusk from Salo to Gardone.
    Appleby chuckled to himself in the dusk. Oh, matter and impertinency mixed , he said to himself. And Packford, he knew, loved linking a sober discovery to some extravagant hypothesis. When he was able to prove that Burbage was really a very fat man, all this would come out. Meanwhile, Packford relished keeping a discovery up his sleeve for a time. He had his regular technique for surprising the world. First the foolproof case, painfully elaborated and checked and polished in deep secrecy. Then the leak – so that one interested scholar heard uneasily from another that there was some reason to suppose Lewis Packford was at it again, was nursing this or that monstrously upsetting discovery. Then the swift unmasking of his design – in a long letter to The Times Literary Supplement , or in a small book attractively got up with telling illustrations, instantly commanding the attention of the fashionable metropolitan reviewers. Before the learned journals could lumber into reasoned appraisal, the whole thing had been accepted as gospel by the common reader and become established as a plain fact of literary history.
    And almost certainly Packford was up to something of the sort now – although Appleby didn’t really believe that it had much to do with the corpulence or otherwise of Richard Burbage. All this talk was a determined if light-hearted smokescreen put up by Packford to obscure some actual