Hamnet(4)

Hamnet gives a polite cough.

His grandfather wheels around, his face wild, furious, his arm flailing through the air, as if warding off an assailant. ‘Who’s there?’ he cries. ‘Who is that?’

‘It’s me.’

‘Who?’

‘Me.’ Hamnet steps towards the narrow shaft of light slanting in through the window. ‘Hamnet.’

His grandfather sits down with a thud. ‘You scared the wits out of me, boy,’ he cries. ‘Whatever do you mean, creeping about like that?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Hamnet says. ‘I was calling and calling but no one answered. Judith is—’

‘They’ve gone out,’ his grandfather speaks over him, with a curt flick of his wrist. ‘What do you want with all those women anyway?’ He seizes the neck of the pitcher and aims it towards the cup. The liquid – ale, Hamnet thinks – slops out precipitously, some into the cup and some on to the papers on the table, causing his grandfather to curse, then dab at them with his sleeve. For the first time, it occurs to Hamnet that his grandfather might be drunk.

‘Do you know where they have gone?’ Hamnet asks.

‘Eh?’ his grandfather says, still mopping his papers. His anger at their spoiling seems to unsheathe itself and stretch out from him, like a rapier. Hamnet can feel the tip of it wander about the room, seeking an opponent, and he thinks for a moment of his mother’s hazel strip, and the way it pulls itself towards water, except he is not an underground stream and his grandfather’s anger is not like the quivering divining rod at all. It is cutting, sharp, unpredictable. Hamnet has no idea what will happen next, or what he should do.

‘Don’t stand there gawping,’ his grandfather hisses. ‘Help me.’

Hamnet shuffles forward a step, then another. He is wary, his father’s words circling his mind: Stay away from your grandfather when he is in one of his black humours. Be sure to stand clear of him. Stay well back, do you hear?

His father had said this to him on his last visit, when they had been helping unload a cart from the tannery. John, his grandfather, had dropped a bundle of skins into the mud and, in a sudden fit of temper, had hurled a paring-knife at the yard wall. His father had immediately pulled Hamnet back, behind him, out of the way, but John had barged past them into the house without a word. His father had taken Hamnet’s face in both of his hands, fingers curled in at the nape of his neck, his gaze steady and searching. He’ll not touch your sisters but it’s you I worry for, he had muttered, his brow puckering. You know the humour I mean, don’t you? Hamnet had nodded but wanted the moment to be prolonged, for his father to keep holding his head like that: it gave him a sensation of lightness, of safety, of being entirely known and treasured. At the same time, he was aware of a curdling unease swilling about inside him, like a meal his stomach didn’t want. He thought of the snip and snap of words that punctured the air between his father and grandfather, the way his father continually reached to loosen his collar when seated at table with his parents. Swear to me, his father had said, as they stood in the yard, his voice hoarse. Swear it. I need to know you’ll be safe when I’m not here to see to it.

Hamnet believes he is keeping his word. He is well back. He is at the other side of the fireplace. His grandfather couldn’t reach him here, even if he tried.

His grandfather is draining his cup with one hand and shaking the drops off a sheet of paper with the other. ‘Take this,’ he orders, holding out the page.

Hamnet bends forward, not moving his feet, and takes it with the very tips of his fingers. His grandfather’s eyes are slitted, watchful; his tongue pokes out of the side of his mouth. He sits in his chair, hunched: an old, sad toad on a stone.

‘And this.’ His grandfather holds out another paper.

Hamnet bends forward in the same way, keeping the necessary distance. He thinks of his father, how he would be proud of him, how he would be pleased.

Quick as a fox, his grandfather makes a lunge. Everything happens so fast that, afterwards, Hamnet won’t be sure in what sequence it all occurred: the page swings to the floor between them, his grandfather’s hand seizes him by the wrist, then the elbow, hauling him forward, into the gap, the space his father had told him to observe, and his other hand, which still holds the cup, is coming up, fast. Hamnet is aware of streaks in his vision – red, orange, the colours of fire, streaming in from the corner of his eye – before he feels the pain. It is a sharp, clubbed, jabbing pain. The rim of the cup has struck him just below the eyebrow.

‘That’ll teach you,’ his grandfather is saying, in a calm voice, ‘to creep up on people.’

Tears burst forth from Hamnet’s eyes, both of them, not just the injured one.

‘Crying are you? Like a little maid? You’re as bad as your father,’ his grandfather says, with disgust, releasing him. Hamnet springs backwards, thwacking his shin on the side of the parlour bed. ‘Always crying and whining and complaining,’ his grandfather mutters. ‘No backbone. No sense. That was always his problem. Couldn’t stick at anything.’

Hamnet is running back outside, along the street, wiping at his face, dabbing the blood with his sleeve. He lets himself in through his own front door, up the stairs, to the upper room, where a figure lies on the pallet next to their parents’ big curtained bed. The figure is dressed – a brown smock, a white bonnet, the strings of which are untied and straggle down her neck – and is lying on top of the sheets. She has kicked off her shoes, which lie, inverted, like a pair of empty pods, beside her.