“Agnes,” he says, with full-blown irritation now. “The world does not stand still. There are people waiting for me. The season is about to begin and my company will return from Kent any day now and I must—” “How can you think of leaving?” she says, puzzled. What must she say to make him understand? “Hamnet,” she says, feeling the roundness of the word, his name, inside her mouth, the shape of a ripe pear. “Hamnet died.”
