Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

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.

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.

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,

“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?”

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.

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.” “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.

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.

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 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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

“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 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.

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.

“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?”

“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.”

There had been an argument over breakfast with his stepmother. He has been saving money for years to extend the farmhouse, to put on an upper floor and further rooms at the back—he is weary of sleeping in a hall with endless children, a gurning stepmother and various beasts. Joan has been obstructive about the plan from the start. This place was good enough for your father, she cried, as she served the porridge this morning, why isn’t it good enough for you? Why must you raise the thatch, take the roof from over our heads?

In the new house, Susanna sleeps at the furthest end of the corridor; she locks her door against her mother’s nocturnal wanderings. Judith has the chamber next to Agnes’s; she skims over the surface of sleep, waking often, never quite reaching the depths. If Agnes opens the door, just the sound of the hinges is enough to make her sit up, say, Who’s there? The cats sleep on her blankets, one on either side of her.

Agnes is able to believe that if she were to walk down the street, across the marketplace, up Henley Street and in through the door of the apartment, she would find them all as they were: a woman with two daughters and a son. It would not be inhabited by Eliza and her milliner husband, not at all, but by them, as they ought to be, as they would be now.

Agnes has heard it all. The new house is a jam pot, pulling flies towards it. She will live in it but it will never be hers. Outside its back door, though, she can breathe. She plants a row of apple trees along the high brick wall.

The father comes home to the new house twice, sometimes three times a year. He is home for a month in the second year they live in the house. There have been food riots in the city, he tells them, with apprentices marching on Southwark and pillaging shops. It is also plague season again in London and the playhouses are shut. This is never said aloud.

It’s as if her mother needs London, and all that he does there, to rub off him before she can accept him back.

Judith’s cats have kittens and, in time, those kittens have kittens. The cook tries to seize them for drowning but Judith will have none of it. Some are taken to live at Hewlands, others at Henley Street, and others throughout the town, but even so, the garden is filled with cats of various sizes and ages, all with a long, slender tail, a white ruff and leaf-green eyes, all lithe and sinewy and strong. The house has no mice. Even the cook has to admit that there are advantages to living alongside a dynasty of cats.

She takes it upon herself, at her father’s bidding, to buy furniture for the new house: chairs, pallets, linen chests, wall hangings, a new bed. Her mother, however, refuses to give up her bed, saying it was the bed she was married in and she will not have another, so the new, grander bed is put in the room for guests.

All this activity in the garden sets Susanna’s teeth on edge; she keeps mostly to the house.

She makes an effort, once a day, to teach Judith her letters. She has promised her father that she will do this. Dutifully, she calls her sister in from the back and makes her sit in the parlour, with an old slate in front of them. It is a thankless task.

It takes a year for Judith to reliably produce a signature: it is a squiggled initial, but upside down and curled like a pig’s tail. Eventually, Susanna gives up.

When she complains to their mother, about how Judith will not learn to write, will not help with the accounts, will not take some responsibility for the running of the house, Agnes gives a slight smile and says, Judith’s skills are different from yours but they are skills just the same.

Nobody ever sees her trials and tribulations. Her mother out in the garden, up to her elbows in leaf mulch, her father in London, acting out plays that people say are extremely bawdy, and her sister somewhere in the house, singing a winding song of her own devising in her breathy, fluty voice. Who will come to court her, she demands of the air, as she flings open the door and lets it slam behind her, with a family like this? How will she ever escape this house? Who would want to be associated with any of them?

Agnes looks at this face; she looks and looks. She tries to see Judith for who she is, for who she will be, but there are moments when all she is asking herself is: Is this the face he would have had, how would this face have been different on a boy, how would it look with a beard, with a male jaw, on a strapping lad?

Except for Judith. She is coming along the street, wrapped in a cloak, the hood covering her head. She goes past the school, where the fox was until a moment ago; she doesn’t see it but it sees her, from its hiding place in an alleyway. It watches her with widened pupils, alarmed by this unexpected creature sharing its nocturnal world, taking in her mantle, her quick-stepping feet, the hurry in her gait.

“Many a time,” she continued, “I’ve been coming along Henley Street, past the house where you were born, and I’ve seen something.” Judith stared at her for a moment. She wanted to ask what, but also dreaded the answer. “What have you seen?” she blurted out. “Something, or perhaps I should say someone.” “Who?” Judith asked, but she knew, she knew already. “Running, he is.” “Running?” The old midwife nodded. “From the door of the big house to the door of that dear little narrow one. As clear as anything. A figure, it is, running like the wind, as if the devil himself is at its back.”

She shuts her eyes. She can feel him. She is so sure of this. The skin on her arms and neck shrinks and she is desperate to reach out, to touch him, to take his hand in hers, but she dares not. She listens to the roar of her pulse, her ragged breathing and she knows, she hears, underneath her own, another’s breathing. She does. She really does. She is shaking now, her head bowed, her eyes shut tight. The thought that forms inside her head is: I miss you, I miss you, I would give anything to have you back, anything at all. Then it is over, the moment passing. The pressure drops like a curtain. She opens her eyes, puts her hand up to the wall of the house to steady herself. He is gone, all over again.

The truth is that Agnes’s husband hasn’t written for several months, save a short letter assuring them he is well, and another, addressed to Susanna, asking her to secure the purchase of another field. Agnes has told herself, and the girls, that nothing is amiss, that he will be busy, that sometimes letters go astray on the road, that he is working hard, that he will be home before they know it, but still the thought has gnawed at her. Where is he and what is he doing and why has he not written?

“His new play is of course not a comedy,” Joan cuts across her. “But you knew that, I expect.” Agnes is silent. The animal inside her flexes itself restlessly, starts to scrape at her innards with its needling claws. “It’s a tragedy,” Joan continues, baring her teeth in a smile. “And I am certain he will have told you the name of it. In his letters. Because of course he would never call it that without telling you first, would he, without your by-your-leave? I’m sure you’ve seen the playbill. He probably sent you one. Everyone in town is talking about it. My cousin, who came back from London yesterday, brought it. I’m sure you have one but I carried it with me, just the same, for you.”

Agnes cannot understand what this means, what has happened. How can her son’s name be on a London playbill? There has been some odd, strange mistake. He died. This name is her son’s and he died, not four years ago. He was a child and he would have been a man but he died. He is himself, not a play, not a piece of paper, not something to be spoken of or performed or displayed. He died. Her husband knows this, Joan knows this. She cannot understand.

Susanna tries to tweak it from her grasp but Agnes isn’t letting go, there is no way she’s letting go, not of that piece of paper, not of that name.

Agnes takes to her bed, for the first time in her life. she goes to her chamber and she lies down and will not get up, not for meals, not for callers, not for sick people who knock at the side door. She doesn’t undress but lies there, on top of the blankets. Light streams in through the latticed windows, pushing itself into cracks in the bed-curtains. She keeps the playbill folded between her hands.

Susanna, scorched with rage, sits down at her desk-box with a blank sheet of paper. How could you? she writes to her father. Why would you, how could you not tell us?

“Do you not wonder what is in it?” the baker’s wife asks, ripping off a hunk of the bread and offering it to Agnes. “In what?” Agnes says, ignoring the bread, barely listening. The baker’s wife pushes the strip of bread between her own teeth, chews, swallows, tears off another shred before answering: “The play.”

Bartholomew is sent for. He and Agnes take several turns around the garden. Past the apple trees, past the espaliered pears, through the skeps, past the marigold beds, and round again. Susanna and Judith and Mary watch from the window of Susanna’s chamber. Agnes’s hand is tucked into the crook of her brother’s arm. Both their heads are bowed. They pause, briefly, beside the brewhouse for a moment, as if examining something on the path, then continue on their way.

They ride through the village of Shepherd’s Bush, the name of which makes Bartholomew smile, and past the gravel pits of Kensington and over the brook at Maryburne.

At the top, she waits for a moment, to catch her breath. There is a door before her. Panelled wood with knots flowing through it. She reaches out a hand and taps it. She says his name. She says it again. Nothing. No answer. She turns to look down the stairs and almost goes down them. Perhaps she doesn’t want to see what lies beyond this door. Might there be signs of his other life, his other women? There may be things here she does not want to know.

She doesn’t know what she expected but it wasn’t this: such austerity, such plainness. It is a monk’s cell, a scholar’s study. There is a strong sense in the air, to her, that no one else ever comes here, that no one else ever sees this room. How can the man who owns the largest house in Stratford, and much land besides, be living here?

It is the only place to be alone in such a crowd. He feels like a bird, above the ground, resting on nothing but air. He is not of this place but above it, apart from it, observing it. It brings to mind, for him, the wind-hovering kestrel his wife used to keep, and the way it would hold itself in high currents, far above the tree tops, wings outstretched, looking down on all around it.