Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

  ‘No, of course not. I—’

  She pushes her face right up to his. ‘Why are you going?’ she hisses.

  He averts his eyes from hers but does not let go of her hands. ‘I told you,’ he mutters. ‘The company, the other players, I—’

  ‘Why?’ she demands. ‘Is it your father? Did something happen? Tell me.’

  ‘There is nothing to tell.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ She tries to withdraw her hands from his grasp but he will not let go. She twists her wrists one way and then the other.

  ‘You speak of your company,’ she says, into the space between their faces, which is so narrow they must be breathing each other’s breath, ‘you speak of your season and your preparation, but none of these is the proper reason.’ She struggles to free her hands, her fingers, so that she may grip his hand; he knows this and will not let her. That he prevents her makes her livid, incensed, red-hot with such fury as she has not felt since she was a child.

  ‘It is no matter,’ she pants, as they struggle there, beside the guzzling swine. ‘I know. You are caught by that place, like a hooked fish.’

  ‘What place? You mean London?

  ‘No, the place in your head. I saw it once, a long time ago, a whole country in there, a landscape. You have gone to that place and it is now more real to you than anywhere else. Nothing can keep you from it. Not even the death of your own child. I see this,’ she says to him, as he binds her wrists together with one of his hands, reaching down for the bag at his feet with the other. ‘Don’t think I don’t.’

  Only when he has shouldered his bag does he let go. She shakes her hands, the wrists scored and reddened, rubbing her fingers against the marks of his grip.

  He is breathing hard as he stands two paces away from her. He crushes his cap in his hand, avoiding her eye.

  ‘You will not bid me farewell?’ she says to him. ‘You will walk away without bidding me goodbye? The woman who bore your children? Who nursed your son through his final breath? Who laid him out for burial? You will walk away from me, without a word?’

  ‘Look after the girls,’ is all he says, and this smarts like the slender but sharp prick of a needle. ‘I will send word,’ he says again. ‘And hope to return to you again before Christmas.’

  She turns away from him towards the swine. She sees their bristly backs, their flapping ears, hears their satisfied gruntings.

  He is suddenly there, behind her. His arms circle her waist, turn her around, pull her towards him. His head is next to hers: she smells the leather of his gloves, the salt of his tears. They stand like this, together, unified, for a moment, and she feels the pull towards him that she always does and always has, as if there is an invisible rope that circles her heart and ties it to his. Our boy was made, is what she thinks, of him and of her. They made him together; they buried him together. He will never come again. There is a part of her that would like to wind up time, to gather it in, like yarn. She would like to spin the wheel backwards, unmake the skein of Hamnet’s death, his boyhood, his infancy, his birth, right back until the moment she and her husband cleaved together in that bed to create the twins. She would like to unspool it all, render it all back down to raw fleece, to find her way back, to that moment, and she would stand up, she would turn up her face to the stars, to the heavens, to the moon, and appeal to them to change what lay in wait for him, to plead with them to devise a different outcome for him, please, please. She would do anything for this, give anything, yield up whatever the heavens wanted.

  Her husband holds her close as she clasps him with both arms, despite everything, just as she did that night, his body fitted to hers. He breathes in and out, into the curved side of her coif, as if he might speak, but she doesn’t want the words, has no need of them. She sees, over his shoulder, that travelling bag of his, at his feet.

  There will be no going back. No undoing of what was laid out for them. The boy has gone and the husband will leave and she will stay and the pigs will need to be fed every day and time runs only one way.

  ‘Go, then,’ she says, turning from him, pushing him away, ‘if you are going. Return when you can.’

  She discovers that it is possible to cry all day and all night. That there are many different ways to cry: the sudden outpouring of tears, the deep, racking sobs, the soundless and endless leaking of water from the eyes. That sore skin around the eyes may be treated with oil infused with a tincture of eyebright and chamomile. That it is possible to comfort your daughters with assurances about places in Heaven and eternal joy and how they may all be reunited after death and how he will be waiting for them, while not believing any of it. That people don’t always know what to say to a woman whose child has died. That some will cross the street to avoid her merely because of this. That people not considered to be good friends will come, without warning, to the fore, will leave bread and cakes on your sill, will say a kind and apt word to you after church, will ruffle Judith’s hair and pinch her wan cheek.

  It is hard to know what to do with his clothes.

  For weeks, Agnes cannot move them from the chair where he left them before taking to bed.

  A month or so after burial she lifts the breeches, then puts them down. She fingers the collar of his shirt. She nudges the toe of his boot so that the pair are lined up, side by side.

  Then she buries her face in the shirt; she presses the breeches to her heart; she inserts a hand into each boot, feeling the empty shapes of his feet; she ties and unties the necklines; she pushes buttons into holes and out again. She folds the clothes, unfolds them, refolds them.

  As the fabric runs through her fingers, as she puts each seam together, as she flaps out the creases in the air, her body remembers this task. It takes her back to the before. Folding his clothes, tending to them, breathing in his scent, she can almost persuade herself that he is still here, just about to get dressed, that he will walk through the door at any moment, asking, Where are my stockings, where is my shirt?, worrying about being late for the school bell.

  She and Judith and Susanna sleep together in the curtained bed, without discussing the matter: the girls’ truckle is never pulled out but remains tucked away. She draws the curtains tight around the three of them. She tells herself that nothing can get them, nothing will come in through the windows or down the chimney. She stays awake most of the night, listening for the knock and keen of bad spirits trying to find a way in. She puts her arms around her slumbering daughters. She wakes often, during the night, to check them for fevers, swellings, strange colorations of the skin. She switches sides, from time to time, throughout the night, so that she lies between Judith and the outside world, and then Susanna. Nothing will get past her this time. She will be waiting. Nothing will come to take her children. Never again.

  Susanna says she will pass the night next door, with her grandparents. I cannot sleep here, she says, avoiding her mother’s eye. There’s too much shifting about.

  She gathers her nightcap, her gown, and leaves the room, her skirts gathering the dust mice that have collected on the floor.

  Agnes cannot see the point of sweeping the floor. It just gets dirty again. Cooking food seems similarly pointless. She cooks it, they eat it and then, later on, they eat more.

  The girls go next door for their meals; Agnes doesn’t stop them.

  To walk by his grave every Sunday is both a pain and a pleasure. She wants to lie there so that her body covers it. She wants to dig down with her bare hands. She wants to strike it with a tree branch. She wants to build a structure over it, to shield it from the wind and the rain. Perhaps she would come to live in it, there, with him.

  God had need of him, the priest says to her, taking her hand after the service one day.

  She turns on him, almost snarling, filled with the urge to strike him. I had need of him, she wants to say, and your God should have bided His time.

  She says nothing. She takes her daughters’ arms and walks away.

  She has a dream t
hat she is in the fields at Hewlands. It is dusk and the earth is bare and dug into deep furrows. Ahead of her is her mother, bending to the soil and straightening up. When Agnes gets closer she sees that her mother is sowing tiny pearl-white teeth in the ground. Her mother doesn’t turn or pause as Agnes approaches, just smiles at her, then carries on dropping milk teeth into the ground, one after another.

  Summer is an assault. The long evenings, the warm air wafting through the windows, the slow progress of the river through the town, the shouts of children playing late in the street, the horses flicking flies from their flanks, the hedgerows heavy with flowers and berries.

  Agnes would like to tear it all down, rip it up, hurl it to the wind.

  Autumn, when it comes, is terrible too. The sharpness on the air, early in the morning. The mist gathering in the yard. The hens fussing and murmuring in their pen, refusing to come out. The leaves crisping at their edges. Here is a season Hamnet has not known or touched. Here is a world moving on without him.

  Letters come, from London. Susanna reads them aloud. They are briefer, Agnes notices, when she examines them later, not quite covering one page, his script looser, as if written in haste. They don’t speak of the playhouse, of the audiences, of the performances, of the plays he writes. None of this. Instead, he tells them of the rain in London and how it soaked his stockings last week, how his landlord’s horse is lame, how he met a lace-seller and bought them all a handkerchief, each with a different edging.

  She knows better than to look out of the window at the hour school begins and ends. She keeps herself busy, head averted. She will not go out at this time.

  Every golden-haired child in the street puts on his gait, his aspect, his character, making her heart leap, like a deer. Some days, the streets are full of Hamnets. They walk about. They jump and run. They jostle each other. They walk towards her, they walk away from her, they disappear around corners.

  Some days she doesn’t go out at all.

  The lock of his hair is kept in a small earthenware jar above the fire. Judith has sewn a silk pouch for it. She drags a chair to the mantel when she thinks no one is looking and gets it down.

  The hair is the same colour as her own; it might have been cut from her own head; it slips like water through her fingers.

  What is the word, Judith asks her mother, for someone who was a twin but is no longer a twin?

  Her mother, dipping a folded, doubled wick into heated tallow, pauses but doesn’t turn around.

  If you were a wife, Judith continues, and your husband dies, then you are a widow. And if its parents die, a child becomes an orphan. But what is the word for what I am?

  I don’t know, her mother says.

  Judith watches the liquid slide off the ends of the wicks, into the bowl below.

  Maybe there isn’t one, she suggests.

  Maybe not, says her mother.

  Agnes is upstairs. She is sitting at the desk where Hamnet kept his collection of pebbles in four pots. He liked to tip them out periodically and sort them in different ways. She is peering into each pot, observing that the last time he arranged them, he did so by colour, not size and—

  She looks up to see her daughters standing before her. Susanna has a basket in one hand, a knife in the other. Judith stands behind her, holding a second basket. They are both wearing a rather severe expression.

  ‘It is time,’ Susanna says, ‘to gather rosehips.’

  It is something they do every year, at this time, just as summer tips towards autumn, scouring the hedgerows, filling their baskets with the hips that swell and grow in the wake of the petals. She has taught them, these daughters of hers, how to find the best ones, to split them with a knife, to boil them up, to make a syrup for coughs and chest colds, to see them all through the winter.

  This year, though, the hips’ ripeness and their brazen colour are an insult, as are the blackberries turning purple, the elder tree’s darkening berries.

  Agnes’s hands, curled around the pebble pots, feel enfeebled, useless. She doesn’t think she is able to grip the knife, to grasp the thorned stems, to pluck the waxy-skinned hips. The idea of harvesting them, bringing them home, stripping off their leaves and stems, then boiling them over a fire: she doesn’t think she can do that at all. She would rather lie down in her bed and pull the blankets over her head.

  ‘Come,’ says Susanna.

  ‘Please, Mamma,’ says Judith.

  Her daughters press their hands to her face, to her arms; they haul her to her feet; they lead her down the stairs, out into the street, talking all the while of the place they have seen, filled with rosehips, they tell her, simply filled. She must come with them, they say; they will show her the way.

  The hedgerows are constellations, studded with fire-red hips.

  When they were first married, he took her out one night into the street and it was passing strange, to be there, the place so quiet, so black, so empty.

  Look up, he had said to her, standing behind her and putting his arms around her, his hands coming to rest on the curve of her stomach. She leant back her head so that it lay propped on his shoulder.

  Balanced on the tops of the houses was a sky scattered with jewels, pierced with silver holes. He had whispered into her ear names and stories, his finger outstretched, pulling shapes and people and animals and families out of the stars.

  Constellations, he had said. That was the word.

  The baby that was Susanna turning over in her belly, as if listening.

  Judith’s father writes to say that business is good, that he sends his love, that he won’t be home until after winter because the roads are bad.

  Susanna reads the letter aloud.

  His company are having a great success with a new comedy. They took it to the Palace and the word was that the Queen was much diverted by it. The river in London is frozen over. He is looking to buy more land in Stratford, she finishes. He has been to the wedding of his friend Condell; there had been a wonderful wedding breakfast.

  There is a silence. Judith looks from her mother, to her sister, to the letter.

  A comedy? her mother asks.

  It is not easy to be alone in a house like this, Judith finds. There will always be someone bustling in on you, someone calling your name, a person on your heels.

  There is a place that was always hers and Hamnet’s, when they were small, a wedge-shaped gap between the wall of the cookhouse and that of the pig-pen: a narrow opening, just possible to squeeze yourself through, if you turned sideways, and then a widening three-corner space. Room enough for two children to sit, legs outstretched, backs to the stone wall.

  Judith takes rushes from the floor of the workshop, one by one, hides them in the folds of her skirt. She slips through the gap when no one is looking and weaves the rushes into a roof. The kittens, who are cats now, slink in after her, two of them, with identical striped faces and white-socked feet.

  Then she may sit there, hands folded, and let him come, if he will.

  She sings to herself, to the cats, to the rush roof above her, a string of notes and words, toora-loora-tirra-lirra-ay-ay-ayee, sings on and on, until the sound finds the hollow place within her, finds it and pours into it, filling it and filling, but of course it will never be full because it has no shape and no edge.

  The cats watch her, with their implacable green eyes.

  Agnes stands in the market with four other women, a tray of honeycombs in her hands. Her stepmother, Joan, is among them. One of them is complaining, telling of how her son refuses to accept an apprenticeship she and her husband have arranged for him, how he shouts if they try to talk to him about it, how he says he will not go, they cannot make him. Even when, the woman says, her eyes popping wide, his father beats him.

  Joan leans forward to tell of how her youngest son refuses to rise from his bed in the morning. The other women nod and grumble. And in the evening, she says, her face in a grimace, he will not get into it, stamping around the house, stirring the f
ire, demanding food, keeping everyone else awake.

  Another woman answers with a story about how her son will not stack the firewood in the way she likes, and her daughter has refused an offer of marriage, and what is she to do with children like that?

  Fools, Agnes thinks, you fools. She keeps several hand-widths between herself and her stepmother. She stares down into the repeating shapes of the honeycomb. She would like to shrink herself down to the size of a bee and lose herself among them.

  ‘Do you think,’ Judith says to Susanna, as they push shirts, shifts and stockings under the surface of the water, ‘that Father doesn’t come home because of . . . my face?’

  The washhouse is hot, airless, full of steam and soap bubbles. Susanna, who hates laundry more than any other task, snaps, ‘What are you talking about? He does come home. He comes home all the time. And what has your face to do with anything?’

  Judith stirs the laundry pot, poking at a sleeve, a hem, a stray cap. ‘I mean,’ she says quietly, without looking at her sister, ‘because I resemble him so closely. Perhaps it is hard for Father to let his eye rest upon me.’

  Susanna is speechless. She tries to say, in her usual tone, don’t be ridiculous, what utter nonsense. It is true, though, that it has been a long time since their father came to them. Not since the funeral. No one says this aloud, however; no one mentions it. The letters come, she reads them. Her mother keeps them on the mantel for a few days, taking them down every now and again, when she thinks no one is watching. And then they vanish. What she does with them after that, Susanna doesn’t know.

  She looks at her sister, looks at her carefully. She lets the laundry plunger fall into the pot, and puts a hand on each of Judith’s small shoulders. ‘People who don’t know you so well,’ Susanna says, examining her, ‘would say you look the same as him. And the resemblance between you both is . . . was . . . remarkable. It was hard to believe, at times. But we who live with you see differences.’

  Judith looks up at her, wonderingly.

  Susanna touches her cheek with a trembling finger. ‘Your face is narrower than his. Your chin is smaller. And your eyes are a lighter shade. His were more flecked. He had more freckles than you. Your teeth are straighter.’ Susanna swallows painfully. ‘Father will know all these things, too.’