Hamnet(37)

Agnes has a strong sense that this arrangement has something to do with her brother, and was perhaps part of his terms for the marriage. Bartholomew had been there when they first came over the threshold. He had looked over the narrow rooms, going up the stairs and coming back down, walking from wall to wall, before nodding at John, who had remained standing at the door.

Bartholomew had had to nod at him twice before John turned over the key to his son. It had been an odd moment, interesting to Agnes. She had watched as father slowly, slowly, held out the key to son. The father’s reluctance to relinquish it was matched – perhaps outdone – by the son’s unwillingness to accept it. His fingers had been listless, slack; he hesitated, examining the iron key in his father’s hand, as if unsure what it was. Then he plucked it from him with only finger and thumb, and held it, at arm’s length, as if deciding whether or not it might harm him.

John had attempted to smooth over the awkwardness, making a remark about hearths and happiness and wives, reaching forward to slap the son on the back. It was a gesture intended to be kind, in a gruff, fatherly sort of way, but was there not, Agnes would think later, something uneasy about it? Something unnatural? The slap had had a little too much force, a little too much intent. The son wasn’t expecting it and it made him stagger sideways, lose his balance. He had righted himself, quickly, almost too quickly, like a boxer or a fencer, raising himself on his toes. They looked for a moment, the pair of them, as if they might begin to exchange blows, not keys.

She and Bartholomew had observed this from either end of the room. When the son turned away and instead of putting the key into the purse at his waist, placed it on the tabletop, with a dull, metallic click, she and Bartholomew had looked at each other. Her brother’s face was expressionless, except for a minor inflection of one eyebrow. To Agnes, this spoke a great deal. You see now, she knew her brother was saying, what you are marrying into? You see now, that eyebrow movement meant, why I insisted upon a separate dwelling?

Agnes leans towards the glass panes, allowing her breath to collect upon them. They remind her, these rooms, of the initial letter of her name, a letter her father taught her to recognise, scratching it into the mud with a sharpened stick: ‘A’. (She can recall this so clearly, sitting with both her parents on the ground between her mother’s shins, her head leaning against the muscle of her knee; she could reach down and grip her mother’s feet. She can summon the sensation of the fall of her mother’s hair on her shoulder as she leant forward to see the movements of Agnes’s father’s stick, saying, ‘Here, Agnes, look.’ The letter manifesting itself from under the blackened point, hardened to charcoal in the kitchen fire: ‘A’. Her letter, always hers.)

The apartment is formed like the letter, sloping together at the top, with a floor across its middle. Agnes takes this as her sign – the letter etched in the dirt, the memory of her mother’s strong feet, the brush of her hair – not the owl, not the long, pained looks of her mother-in-law, not the youth of her husband, not the narrow feel of this house, its atmosphere of emptiness and inertia, that hard back slap of her father-in-law, none of this.

She is untying a cloth bundle and laying out items on the floor when a voice from the bed makes her start.

‘Where are you?’ His voice, deep anyway, is made deeper still by sleep, by the muffled layer of curtain.

‘Here,’ she says, still crouched on the floor, holding a purse, a book, her crown – wilting now and dishevelled, but she will tie it up and dry the flowers and none will be lost.

‘Come back.’

She stands and, still holding her possessions, moves towards the bed, pushes aside the curtains and looks down at him. ‘You’re awake,’ she says.

‘And you’re very far away,’ he says, squinting up at her. ‘What are you doing all the way over there when you should be here?’ He points at the space next to him.

‘I can’t sleep.’

‘Why not?’

‘The house is an A.’

There is a pause and she wonders if he heard her. ‘Hmm?’ he says, raising himself on one elbow.

‘An A,’ she repeats, shuffling everything she is holding into one hand so that she can inscribe the letter in the chill winter air between them. ‘That is an A, is it not?’

He nods at her gravely. ‘It is. But what has it to do with the house?’

She cannot believe he can’t see it as she does. ‘The house slopes together at the top and has a floor across its middle. I do not know that I shall ever be able to sleep up here.’

‘Up where?’ he asks.

‘Here.’ She gestures around them. ‘In this room.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘Because the floor is floating in mid-air, like the cross stroke of the A. There is no ground underneath it. Just empty space and more empty space.’

His face breaks into a smile, his eyes examining her intently, and he flops back to the bed. ‘Do you know,’ he says, addressing the covering above him, ‘that this is the foremost reason I love you?’

‘That I cannot sleep in the air?’

‘No. That you see the world as no one else does.’ He holds out his arms. ‘Come back to bed. Enough of this. I put it to you that we shall have no need of sleep for a while.’

‘Is that so?’