Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

  ‘Do you think so?’

  Susanna nods. ‘I never . . . I never confused the two of you. I always knew which was which, even when you were babies. When you used to play those games, the two of you, swapping clothes or hats, I always knew.’

  There are tears now, sliding out of Judith’s eyes. Susanna lifts a corner of her apron and wipes them away. She sniffs and turns back to the pot, seizing the plunger. ‘We should get back to this. I think I hear someone coming.’

  Agnes searches for him. Of course she does. In the nights and nights and weeks and months after he dies. She expects him. Sits up nights, a blanket around her shoulders, a candle burning itself up beside her. She waits where his bed used to be. She seats herself in his father’s chair, placed on the very spot he died. She goes out into the frost-gilded yard and stands under the bare plum tree and speaks aloud: Hamnet, Hamnet, are you there?

  Nothing. No one.

  She cannot understand it. She, who can hear the dead, the unspoken, the unknown, who can touch a person and listen to the creep of disease along the veins, can sense the dark velvet press of a tumour on a lung or a liver, can read a person’s eye and heart like some can read a book. She cannot find, cannot locate the spirit of her own child.

  She waits in these places, she keeps her ear tuned, she sifts through the sounds and wants and disgruntlements of other, noisier, beings, but she cannot hear him, the only one she wants to hear. There is nothing. Just silence.

  Judith, though, hears him in the swish of a broom against the floor. She sees him in the winged dip of a bird over the wall. She finds him in the shake of a pony’s mane, in the smattering of hail against the pane, in the wind reaching its arm down the chimney, in the rustle of the rushes that make up her den’s roof.

  She says nothing, of course. She folds the knowledge into herself. She closes her eyes, allows herself to say silently, inside her mind, I see you, I hear you, where are you?

  Susanna finds it hard to be in the apartment. The unused pallet propped against the wall. The clothes kept on the chair, the empty boots beneath. The pots of his stones that no one is allowed to touch. The curl of his hair kept on the mantel.

  She moves her comb, her shift, her gown next door. She takes up the bed that was once her aunts’. Nothing is said. She leaves her mother and sister to their grief and moves in above the workshop.

  Agnes is not the person she used to be. She is utterly changed. She can recall being someone who felt sure of life and what it would hold for her; she had her children, she had her husband, she had her home. She was able to peer into people and see what would befall them. She knew how to help them. Her feet moved over the earth with confidence and grace.

  This person is now lost to her for ever. She is someone adrift in her life, who doesn’t recognise it. She is unmoored, at a loss. She is someone who weeps if she cannot find a shoe or overboils the soup or trips over a pot. Small things undo her. Nothing is certain any more.

  Agnes bolts her casement, closes her door. She doesn’t answer the knocks that come in the evening or the early morning.

  If people stop her in the street, with questions about sores, gum swellings, deafness, a rash on the legs, heartache, coughs, she shakes her head and walks on.

  She lets the herbs grow grey and crisp, no longer waters her physick garden. The pots and jars on her shelf become covered in a layer of pale dust.

  It’s Susanna who gets a damp rag and wipes the jars, who takes down the desiccated and useless herbs from the rafters and feeds them into the fire. She doesn’t fetch the water herself but Agnes hears her instructing Judith to carry a pot, once a day, to the small patch of earth, on the other side of the henhouse, where the medicinal plants grow. Ensure all are watered, Susanna calls after Judith’s retreating back. Agnes listens, realising that she’s adopting her grandmother’s voice, the one Mary uses for the serving girls.

  Susanna is the one to shred the marigold petals into vinegar, to mash and add honey. She is the one to ensure the mixture is shaken every day.

  Judith begins to lift the window latch when people knock. She speaks with the person outside, standing on tiptoe to hear them. Mamma, Judith will say, it is a washerwoman from down by the river. A man from outside town. A child on behalf of his mother. An old woman from the dairy. Will you see them?

  Susanna won’t answer the knocks, but watches and listens and gestures to Judith if someone comes to the window.

  Agnes refuses for a while. She shakes her head. She waves off her daughters’ entreaties. She turns back to the fire. But when the old woman from the dairy comes for a third time, Agnes nods. The woman comes in, takes up her place in the big wooden chair with the worn arms, and Agnes listens to her tales of aching joints, a phlegmy chest, a mind that skids and slips, forgetting names, days, tasks.

  Agnes rises and goes to her worktable. She brings her pestle and mortar out of the cupboard. She does not allow herself to think that last time she used this it was for him; the last time she held this pestle in her fingers, felt its cold weight, was then, just before, and how useless it was, that it did no good. She doesn’t think these things at all, as she breaks up sharp stems of rosemary, for blood to the head, comfrey and hyssop.

  She hands the old dairywoman the packet. Three times a day, she tells her: a sprinkling in hot water. Drink when cool.

  She will not take the coins the woman tries to give her, fumblingly, hesitatingly, but she pretends not to see the wrapped cheese left on the table, the bowl of thick cream.

  Her daughters show the woman out, saying goodbye. Their voices are like bright birds, taking wing, swooping around the room and out into the skies.

  How is it these children, these young women came from her? What relation do they bear to the small beings she once nursed and dandled and washed? More and more, her own life seems strange and unrecognisable to her.

  Sometime past midnight, Agnes stands in the street, a shawl around her. She was woken by footsteps, light, fast ones, with a familiar tittuping rhythm.

  She was pulled from sleep by a sense of feet approaching her window, by a definite feeling that someone was outside. And so here she is, alone in the street, waiting.

  ‘I’m here,’ she says aloud, turning her head first one way, then the other. ‘Are you?’

  At that very moment her husband is sitting under the same sky, in a skiff rounding a bend in the river. They are travelling upstream but he can sense that the tide is turning; the river seems confused, almost hesitant, trying to flow in two directions at once.

  He shivers, pulling his cloak around himself more tightly (he will catch a chill, he hears a voice inside his head chide, a soft voice, a caring voice). The sweat from earlier has cooled, sitting uneasily and clammily between his skin and the wool of his clothes.

  Most of the company are asleep, stretching themselves out in the bottom of the boat and lowering their hats over their faces. He does not sleep; he never can on these evenings, the blood still hurtling through his veins, his heart still galloping, his ears still hearing the sounds and roars and gasps and pauses. He longs for his bed, for the enclosed space of his room, for that moment when his mind will fall silent, when his body will realise it is over and that sleep must come.

  He huddles into himself as he sits on the hard board of the boat, watching the river, the sliding by of the houses, the dip and sway of lights on other vessels, the shoulders of the boatman as he wrestles the craft through trickier currents, the dripping lift of the oars, the white scarf of breath that streams from his mouth.

  The Thames has thawed now (he had told them it was frozen in his last letter); they can reach the Palace once more. He sees, again, for a moment, the vista of eyes beyond the edge of the stage, beyond the world that encases him and his friends, blurred by candle flames. The faces watching him, at these moments, are colours smeared with a wet brush. Their shouts, their applause, their avid expressions, their open mouths, their rows of teeth, their gazes that would drink him up (if they co
uld, but they cannot, for he is covered, protected in a costume, like a whelk in a shell – they may never see the real him).

  He and his friends have just performed a historical play, about a long-dead king, at the Palace. It has proved, he has found, a subject safe for him to grapple with. There are, in such a story, no pitfalls, no reminders, no unstable ground to stumble upon. When he is enacting old battles, ancient court scenes, when he is putting words into the mouths of distant rulers, there is nothing that will ambush him, tie him up and drag him back to look on things he cannot think about (a wrapped form, a chair of empty clothes, a woman weeping at a piggery wall, a child peeling apples in a doorway, a curl of yellow hair in a pot). He can manage these: histories and comedies. He can carry on. Only with them can he forget who he is and what has happened. They are safe places to stow his mind (and no one else on stage with him, not one of the other players, his closest friends, will know that he finds himself looking out, every evening, over the watching crowd, in search of a particular face, a boy with a slightly crooked smile and a perpetually surprised expression; he scans the audience minutely, carefully, because he still cannot fathom that his son could just have gone; he must be somewhere; all he has to do is find him).

  He covers first one eye, then the other, turning to regard the city. It is a game he can play. One of his eyes can only see what is at a distance, the other what is close by. Together they work so that he may see most things, but separated; each eye sees only what it can: the first, far away, the second, close up.

  Close up: the interlocking stitches of Condell’s cape, the lapped wooden rim of the boat, the whirlpool drag of the oars. Far away: the frozen glitter of stars, shattered glass on black silk, Orion forever hunting, a barge cutting stolidly through the water, a group of people crouching at the edge of a wharf – a woman, with several children, one almost as tall as the mother (as tall as Susanna now?), the smallest a baby in a cap (three, he’d had, such pretty babies, but now there are only two).

  He switches eyes, with a quick movement, so that the woman and her children, night-fishing (so close to the water, too close, surely), are no more than indistinct shapes, meaningless strokes of a nib.

  He yawns, his jaw cracking with a sound like a breaking nutshell. He will write to them, perhaps tomorrow. If he has time. For there are the new pages to be done, the man from across the river to see; the landlord must be paid; there is a new boy to try out for the other has grown too tall, his voice trembling, his beard coming in (and such a secret, private pain it is, to see a boy growing like that, from lad to man, effortlessly, without care, but he would never say that, never let on to anyone else how he avoids this boy, never speaks to him, how he hates to look upon him).

  He throws off his cloak, suddenly hot, and shuts both eyes. The roads will be clear now. He knows he should go. But something holds him back, as if his ankles are tethered. The speed of his work here – from writing to rehearsing to staging and back to writing again – is so breathless, so seamless, it is quite possible for three or four months to slip past without him noticing. And there is the ever-present fear that if he were to step off this whirling wheel, he might never be able to get on it again. He might lose his place; he has seen it happen to others. But the magnitude, the depth of his wife’s grief for their son exerts a fatal pull. It is like a dangerous current that, if he were to swim too close, might suck him in, plunge him under. He would never surface again; he must hold himself separate in order to survive. If he were to go under, he would drag them all with him.

  If he keeps himself at the hub of this life in London, nothing can touch him. Here, in this skiff, in this city, in this life, he can almost persuade himself that if he were to return, he would find them as they were, unchanged, untrammelled, three children asleep in their beds.

  He uncovers his eyes, lifts them to the jumbled roofs of houses, dark shapes above the flexing, restless surface of the river. He shuts his long-sighted eye and stares down the city with an imperfect, watery gaze.

  Susanna and her grandmother sit in the parlour, cutting up bed sheets and hemming them into washcloths. The afternoon drags by; with every piercing of the cloth and the easing through of the thread, Susanna tells herself she is a few seconds closer to the end of the day. The needle is slippery in her fingers; the fire is burning low; she feels slumber approach, then back off, approach again.

  Is this what it feels like to die, to sense the nearness of something you can’t avoid? The thought falls into her head from nowhere, like a drop of wine into water, colouring her mind with its dark, spreading stain.

  She shifts in her seat, clears her throat, bends closer over her needle.

  ‘Are you quite well?’ her grandmother asks.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ Susanna says, without looking up. She wonders how much longer they will be hemming cloths: they have been at it since midday and there seems to be no end in sight. Her mother was here, for a while, and Judith, too, but her mother disappeared next door with a customer who wanted a cure for ulcers, and Judith had drifted off to do whatever it is she does. Talk to stones. Draw indecipherable shapes with her left hand, in chalk, on the floors. Collect the feathers fallen from the dovecote and weave them together with string.

  Agnes steps into the room behind them.

  ‘Did you give him a cure?’ Mary asks her.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And did he pay you?’

  Without moving her head, Susanna sees, from the corner of her eye, her mother shrug and turn towards the window. Mary sighs and stabs her needle through the cloth she is holding.

  Agnes remains at the window, one hand on her hip. The gown she is wearing is loose on her this spring, her wrists narrow, her fingernails bitten down.

  Mary, Susanna knows, is of the opinion that grief is all very well in moderation, but there comes a time when it is necessary to make an effort. She is of the opinion that some people make too much of things. That life goes on.

  Susanna sews. She sews and sews. Her grandmother asks her mother, Where is Judith, how are the serving girls getting along with the washing, is it raining, doesn’t it seem that the days are getting longer, was it not kind of their neighbour to return that runaway fowl?

  Agnes says nothing, just keeps on looking out of the window.

  Mary talks on, of the letter they received from Susanna’s father, how he is about to take the company on tour again, that he had a chest cold – caught from river fumes – but is now recovered.

  Agnes gives a sharp intake of breath, turning to them, her face alert, strained.

  ‘Oh,’ Mary says, putting her hand to her cheek, ‘you frightened me. Whatever is—’

  ‘Do you hear that?’ Agnes says.

  All three pause, listen, their heads cocked.

  ‘Hear what?’ Mary asks, her brows beginning to knit.

  ‘That . . .’ Agnes holds up a finger ‘. . . There! Do you hear it?’

  ‘I hear nothing,’ Mary snaps.

  ‘A tapping.’ Agnes strides to the fireplace, presses a hand to the chimney breast. ‘A rustling.’ She leaves the fireplace and moves to the settle, looking up. ‘A definite noise. Can’t you hear it?’

  Mary allows a long pause. ‘No,’ she says. ‘It’s likely nothing more than a jackdaw come down the chimney.’

  Agnes leaves the room.

  Susanna grips the cloth in one hand, the needle in the other. If she just keeps on making stitches, over and over, of equal size, perhaps all this will pass.

  Judith is in the street. She has Edmond’s dog with her; it lies in the sun, one paw raised up, while she weaves green ribbon into the long hair of its neck. It looks up at her trustingly, patiently.

  The sun is hot on her skin, the light in her eyes, which is perhaps why she doesn’t notice the figure coming down Henley Street: a man, walking towards her, hat in his hand, a sack slung on his back.

  He calls her name. She lifts her head. He waves. She is running towards him before she even says his name to h
erself, and the dog is leaping along beside her, thinking that this is much more fun that the ribbon game, and the man has caught her in his arms and swung her off the ground, saying, My little maid, my little Jude, and she cannot catch her breath for laughing, and then she thinks she has not seen him since—

  ‘Where have you been?’ she is saying to him, suddenly furious, pushing him away from her, and somehow she is crying now. ‘You’ve been gone such a long time.’

  If he sees her anger, he doesn’t show it. He is lifting his sack from the ground, scratching the dog behind his ears, taking her by the hand and pulling her towards the house.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ he booms, in his biggest, loudest voice.

  A dinner. His brothers, his parents, Eliza and her husband, Agnes and the girls all squeezed together around the table. Mary has beheaded one of the geese, in his honour – the honking and shrieking were terrible to hear – and now its carcass lies, dismantled and torn, between them all.

  He is telling a story involving an innkeeper, a horse and a millpond. His brothers are laughing, his father is pounding the table with his fist; Edmond is tickling Judith, making her squeal; Mary is remonstrating with Eliza about something; the dog is leaping for scraps thrown to it by Richard, barking in between. The story reaches a climax – something to do with a gate left open, Agnes isn’t sure what – and everybody roars. And Agnes is looking at her husband, across the table.

  There is something about him, something different. She cannot put her finger on what. His hair is longer, but that’s not it. He has a second earring in his other ear, but that’s not it. His skin shows signs of the sun and he is wearing a shirt she hasn’t seen before, with long, trailing cuffs. But it is none of these things.

  Eliza is talking now and Agnes glances towards her for a moment, then back at her husband. He is listening to whatever Eliza is saying. His fingers, shining with goose fat, toy with a crust on his plate. How the goose complained and then shrieked, Agnes thinks, and then ran for a moment, headless, as if sure it could get away, could change its fate. Her husband’s face is eager as he listens to his sister; he is leaning forward slightly. He has one arm around Judith’s chair.