It’s a whole year, almost, that he’s been away. Summer has come again and it is almost the anniversary of their son’s death. She does not know how this can be, but it is so.
She stares at him, stares and stares. He has come back among them, embracing them all, shouting for them, pulling gifts from his bag: hair combs, pipes, handkerchiefs, a hank of bright wool, a bracelet for her, in hammered silver, a ruby at the clasp.
The bracelet is finer than anything she has ever owned. It has intricate circling etchings in its slippery surface and a raised setting for the stone. She cannot imagine what it must have cost him. Or why he would spend money on it, he who never wastes a penny, who has been so careful with his purse ever since his father lost his fortune. She fiddles with it, spinning it round and round, as she sits at the table, across from her husband.
The bracelet, she realises, has something bad coming off it, like steam. It was too cold, at first, gripping her skin with an icy, indifferent embrace. Now, though, it is too hot, too tight. Its single red eye glowers up at her with baleful intent. Someone unhappy, she knows, has worn it, someone who dislikes or resents her. It is steeped in bad luck, bad feeling, polished with it to a dull lustre. Whoever it used to belong to wishes her harm.
Eliza sits, smiling now, as she finishes speaking. The dog has settled itself beside the open window. John is seizing the ale and refilling his cup.
Agnes looks at her husband and suddenly she sees it, feels it, scents it. All over his body, all over his skin, his hair, his face, his hands, as if an animal has run over him, again and again, leaving tiny pawmarks. He is, Agnes realises, covered in the touches of other women.
She looks down at her plate, at her own hands, her own fingers, at their roughened tips, at the whorls and loops of her fingerprints, at the knuckles and scars and veins of them, at the nails she cannot stop herself gnawing the minute they emerge. For a moment, she believes she may vomit.
Grasping the bracelet, she draws it off her wrist. She looks at the ruby, holds it close to her face, wondering what it has seen, where it has come from, how it came into her husband’s possession. It is a deep interior red, a drop of frozen blood. She raises her eyes and her husband is looking straight at her.
She puts the bracelet down on the table, holding his gaze. For a moment, he seems confused. He glances at the bracelet, then at her, then back; he half rises, as if he might speak. Then the blood rushes to his face, his neck. He lifts a hand, as if to reach out for her, then lets it drop.
She stands, without speaking, and leaves the room.
He comes to find her that evening, just before sunset. She is out at Hewlands, tending her bees, pulling up weeds, cutting the blooms off chamomile flowers.
She sees him approach along the path. He has taken off his fine shirt, his braided hat, and is wearing an old jerkin that he keeps hanging on the back of their door.
She doesn’t watch him as he walks towards her; she keeps her head averted. Her fingers continue to pluck at the yellow-faced flowers, picking them, then dropping them into a woven basket at her feet.
He stands at the end of the row of bee skeps.
‘I brought you this,’ he says. He holds out a shawl in his hands.
She turns her head to look at it for a moment, but doesn’t say anything.
‘In case you were cold.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Well,’ he says, and he places it carefully on top of the nearest skep. ‘It’s here if you need it.’
She turns back to her flowers. Picks one bloom, two blooms, three blooms, four.
His feet come nearer, scuffing through the grass, until he stands over her, looking down. She can see his boots out of the corner of her eye. She finds herself seized by a passing urge to pierce their toes. Over and over, with the tip of her knife, until the skin beneath is nicked and sore. How he would howl and leap about.
‘Comfrey?’ he says.
She cannot think what he means, what he is talking about. How dare he come here and speak to her of flowers? Take your ignorance, she wants to say to him, and your bracelets and your shining, fancy boots back to London and stay there. Never come back.
He is gesturing, now, at the flowers in her basket, asking are they comfrey, are they violas, are they—
‘Chamomile,’ she manages to say, and her voice, to her ears, sounds dull and heavy.
‘Ah. Of course. Those are comfrey, are they not?’ He points at a clump of feverfew.
She shakes her head and she is struck by how dizzy it makes her feel, as if the slight movement might topple her over into the grass.
‘No,’ she gestures with fingers stained a greenish-yellow, ‘those.’
He nods vigorously, seizes a spear of lavender in his fingers, rubs it, then lifts his hand to his nose, making exaggerated appreciation noises.
‘The bees are thriving?’
She gives a single, downward nod.
‘Yielding much honey?’
‘We’ve yet to find out.’
‘And . . .’ he sweeps an arm towards Hewlands farmhouse ‘. . . your brother? He is well?’
She lifts her face to look at him, for the first time since he arrived. She cannot continue this conversation for a single moment longer. If he says one more thing to her about flowers, about Hewlands, about bees, she doesn’t know what she will do. Invert her knife into his boots. Push him backwards into the bee skep. Run from him, to Hewlands, to Bartholomew or to the dark green haven of the forest and refuse to come out again.
He holds her frank gaze for the count of a breath, then his eyes skitter away.
‘Can’t look me in the eye?’ she says.
He rubs at his chin, sighs, lowers himself shakily to the ground beside her, and holds his head in his hands. Agnes lets the knife slip from her hands. She doesn’t think she can trust herself to keep holding it.
They sit like that, together, but facing away from each other, for some time. She will not, she tells herself, be the first to speak. Let him decide what should be said, since he is so skilled with words, since he is so fêted and celebrated for his pretty speeches. She will keep her counsel. He is the one who has caused this problem, this breach in their marriage: he can be the one to address it.
The silence swells between them; it expands and wraps itself around them; it acquires shape and form and tendrils, which wave off into the air, like the threads trailing from a broken web. She senses each breath as it enters and leaves him, each shift as he crosses his arms, as he scratches an elbow, as he brushes a hair from his brow.
She stays quite still, with her legs folded beneath her, feeling as if a fire smoulders within her, consuming and hollowing out what is left there. For the first time, she feels no urge to touch him, to put her hands on him: quite the opposite. His body seems to give off a pressure that pushes her away, makes her draw into herself. She cannot imagine how she will ever put her hand where another woman’s has been. How could he have done it? How could he leave, after the death of their son, and seek solace in others? How could he return to her, with these prints on him?
She wonders how he could go from her to another. She cannot imagine another man in her bed, a different body, different skin, different voice; the thought would sicken her. She wonders, as they sit there, if she will ever touch him again, if perhaps they shall always be apart now, if there is someone in London who has ensnared his heart and keeps it for her own. She wonders how he will tell her all this, what words he will choose.
Beside her, he clears his throat. She hears him inhale, about to speak, and she readies herself. Here it comes.
‘How often do you think of him?’ he says.
For a moment, she is taken aback. She had been expecting an account, an explanation, perhaps an apology, for what she knows has occurred. She was bracing herself for him to say, We cannot go on like this, my heart belongs to another, I shall not return again from London. Him? How often does she think of him? She cannot think to whom he refers.
&
nbsp; Then she realises what he means and she turns to look at him. His face is obscured by his folded arms, his head hanging down. It is an attitude of abject grief, of sorrow, of such utter sadness that she almost rises to go and put her arms around him, to comfort him. But she recalls that she may not, she cannot.
Instead, she watches a swallow swoop down to skim the tops of the plants, searching for insects, then lift up towards the trees. Beside them, the trees inflate and exhale, their leaf-heavy branches shuddering in the breeze.
‘All the time,’ she says. ‘He is always here and yet, of course,’ she presses a fist against her breastbone, ‘he is not.’
He doesn’t reply but when she steals a glance at him, she sees he is nodding.
‘I find,’ he says, his voice still muffled, ‘that I am constantly wondering where he is. Where he has gone. It is like a wheel ceaselessly turning at the back of my mind. Whatever I am doing, wherever I am, I am thinking: Where is he, where is he? He can’t have just vanished. He must be somewhere. All I have to do is find him. I look for him everywhere, in every street, in every crowd, in every audience. That’s what I am doing, when I look out at them all: I try to find him, or a version of him.’
Agnes nods. The swallow circles around and comes back, as if it has something of importance to tell them, if only they could understand. Its cheek flashes scarlet, its head purple-blue, as it passes. Across the surface of the pot of water beside her, a series of clouds roll by, indifferent and slow.
He says something in a subdued, hoarse voice.
‘What was that?’ she says.
He says it again.
‘I didn’t hear you.’
‘I said,’ he says, lifting his head – she sees that his face is scored with tears, ‘that I may run mad with it. Even now, a year on.’
‘A year is nothing,’ she says, picking up a fallen chamomile bloom. ‘It’s an hour or a day. We may never stop looking for him. I don’t think I would want to.’
He reaches out across the space between them and seizes her hand, crushing the flower between their palms. The dusty, pollen-heavy scent fills the air. She tries to pull away but he holds her fast.
‘I am sorry,’ he says.
She pulls at her wrist, trying to wrest it from his grasp. His strength, his insistence surprises her.
He says her name, with a questioning lilt. ‘Did you hear me? I am sorry.’
‘For what?’ she mutters, giving her arm one last, futile tug, before letting it fall limp in his grasp.
‘For everything.’ He sighs unevenly, shakily. ‘Will you never come to live in London?’
Agnes looks at him, this man who has imprisoned her hand, this father of her children, and shakes her head. ‘We cannot. Judith would never survive it. You know that.’
‘She might.’
There is a distant sound of bleating, carried on the wind. Both of them turn their heads towards it.
‘Would you take that risk?’ Agnes says.
He says nothing, but holds her hand between both of his. She twists her hand inside his until it is facing upwards and she grips the muscle between his thumb and forefinger, looking right at him. He gives a faint smile but doesn’t pull away. His eyes are wet, lashes drawn into spikes.
She presses the muscle, presses and presses, as if she might draw juice from it. She senses mostly noise, at first: numerous voices, calling in loud and soft and threatening and entreating tones. His mind is crammed with a cacophony, with strife, with overlapping speech and cries and yells and yelps and whispers, and she doesn’t know how he stands it, and there are the other women, she can feel them, their loosened hair, their sweat-marked handprints, and it sickens her but she keeps holding on, despite wanting to let go, to push him away, and there is also fear, a great deal of fear, of a journey, something about water, perhaps a sea, a desire to seek a faraway horizon, to stretch his eyes to it, and beneath all this, behind it all, she finds something, a gap, a vacancy, an abyss, which is dark and whistling with emptiness, and at the bottom of it she finds something she has never felt before: his heart, that great, scarlet muscle, banging away, frantic and urgent in its constancy, inside his chest. It feels so close, so present, it’s almost as if she could reach out and touch it.
He is still looking at her when she releases her grip. Her hand nestles, inactive, inside his.
‘What did you find?’ he says to her.
‘Nothing,’ she replies. ‘Your heart.’
‘That’s nothing?’ he says, pretending to be outraged. ‘Nothing? How could you say such a thing?’
She smiles at him, a faint smile, but he snatches her hand to his chest.
‘And it’s your heart,’ he says, ‘not mine.’
He wakes her that night as she is dreaming of an egg, a large egg, at the bottom of a clear stream; she is standing on a bridge, looking down at it, at the currents, which are forced around its contours.
The dream is so vivid that it takes her a minute to come to, to realise what is happening, that her husband is gripping her tightly, his head buried in her hair, his arms wound about her waist, that he is saying he is sorry, over and over again.
She doesn’t reply for a while, doesn’t respond to or return his caresses. He cannot stop. The words flow from him, like water. Like the egg, she lies unmoving in their currents.
Then she brings up a hand to his shoulder. She senses the hollow, the cave, made by her palm as it rests there. He takes the other hand and presses it to his face; she feels the resisting spring of his beard, his insistent and assertive kisses.
He will not be stopped, diverted; he is a man intent on one destination, on one action. He yanks and pulls at her shift, bunching its folds and lengths in his hand, swearing and blaspheming with the effort, until he has parted her from it, until she is laughing at him, then he covers her with himself and will not let her go; she feels herself as a separate being, a body apart, dissolve, until she has no idea, no sense of whose skin is whose, which limb belongs to whom, whose hair it is in her mouth, whose breath leaves and enters whose lips.
‘I have a proposal,’ he says afterwards, when he has shifted himself to lie beside her.
She has a strand of his hair between her fingers and she twists and twists it. The knowledge of the other women had receded during the act, pulled away from her, but now they are back, standing just outside the bed-curtains, jostling for space, brushing their hands and bodies against the fabric, sweeping their skirts on the floor.
‘A marriage proposal?’ she says.
‘It is,’ he says, kissing her neck, her shoulder, her chest, ‘I fear, a little late for that and besides – ow! My hair, woman. Do you mean to separate it from my head?’
‘Perhaps.’ She gives it a further tweak. ‘You would do well to remember your marriage. From time to time.’
He raises his head from her and sighs. ‘I do. I will. I do.’ He smooths the skin of her face with his fingers. ‘Do you wish to hear my proposal or not?’
‘Not,’ she says. She has a perverse desire to thwart whatever it is he is about to say. She will not let him off so easily, will not let him think it is all as meaningless to her as it is to him.
‘Well, stop your ears if you don’t want to hear it because I’m going to speak whether I have your permission or not. Now—’
She begins to move her hands to her ears but he holds them fast, in one of his.
‘Let go,’ she hisses.
‘I shan’t.’
‘Let go, I tell you.’
‘I want you to listen.’
‘But I don’t want to.’
‘I thought,’ he says, releasing her hands and drawing her close to him, ‘that I would buy a house.’
She turns to look at him but they are enclosed in darkness, a thick, absolute, impenetrable dark. ‘A house?’
‘For you. For us.’
‘In London?’
‘No,’ he says impatiently, ‘Stratford, of course. You said you would rather stay here,
with the girls.’
‘A house?’ she repeats.
‘Yes.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you money for a house?’
She hears him smile beside her, hears his lips cleaving away from his teeth. He takes her hand and kisses it between each word. ‘I have. And more besides.’
‘What?’ She pulls her hand away. ‘Is this true?’
‘It is.’
‘How can that be?’
‘You know,’ he says, flopping back on the mattress, ‘it is always a pleasure for me to be able to surprise you. An unaccustomed, rare pleasure.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean,’ he says, ‘that I don’t think you have any idea what it is like to be married to someone like you.’
‘Like me?’
‘Someone who knows everything about you, before you even know it yourself. Someone who can just look at you and divine your deepest secrets, just with a glance. Someone who can tell what you are about to say – and what you might not – before you say it. It is,’ he says, ‘both a joy and a curse.’
She shrugs. ‘None of these things I can help. I never—’
‘I have money,’ he interrupts, with a whisper, his lips brushing her ear. ‘A lot of money.’
‘You have?’ She sits up in amazement. She had grasped that his business was flourishing but this is still news to her. She thinks fleetingly of the costly bracelet, which she has since covered with ashes and bone fragments, wrapped in hide, and buried by the henhouse. ‘How did you come by this money?’
‘Don’t tell my father.’
‘Your father?’ she repeats. ‘I – I won’t, of course, but—’
‘Could you leave this place?’ he asks. His hand comes to rest on her spine. ‘I want to take you and the girls out of here, to lift you all up and to plant you somewhere else. I want you away from all . . . this . . . I want you somewhere new. But could you leave here?’
Hamnet Page 27
