Hamnet(43)
And underneath its end, where it once stood in the earth, is a hollow – dry, sheltered, big enough for several people. Agnes and Bartholomew used to come here when they were children, if Joan had been shouting or if she gave them too many tasks. They would bring a cloth sack of bread and cheese, crawling in under the tree roots and say to one another that they would stay there for ever, live in the forest like elves; they would never go back.
Agnes lowers herself to the ground. It is dry, in the lee of the uprooted tree, with a carpet of pine needles. She feels another pain coming, driving towards her, getting closer, like thunder over a landscape. She turns, she crouches, she pants through it, as she knows she must, holding tight to a tree root. Even in the throes of it, when it has her in its clutches, when it drives everything from her mind but the narrow focus of when it might end, she recognises that it is getting stronger. It means business, this pain. It will not leave her be. Soon it will not let her rest or gather herself. It means to force her out of herself, to turn what is inside outside.
She has seen women go through this. She remembers her mother’s time: she saw it from the doorway; she heard it from outside the house, where she and Bartholomew were sent. She attended Joan at each of her labours, catching her brothers and sisters in her hands as they made their entry into the world, wiping the grease and blood from their mouths and noses. She has seen neighbouring women do it, has heard their cries rise into screams, smelt the rusty coin scent of new birth. She has seen the pig, the cow, the ewes birth their young; she has been the one called on by her father, by Bartholomew, when lambs were stuck. Her female fingers, slender, tapered, were required to enter that narrow, heated, slick canal, and hook out the soft hoofs, the gluey nose, the plastered-back ears. And she knows, in the way she always does, that she will reach the other side of birth, that she and this baby will live.
Nothing, however, could have prepared her for the relentlessness of it. It is like trying to stand in a gale, like trying to swim against the current of a flooded river, like trying to lift a fallen tree. Never has she been more sensible of her weakness, of her inadequacy. She has always felt herself to be a strong person: she can push a cow into milking position, she can douse and stir a load of laundry, she can lift and carry her small siblings, a bale of skins, a bucket of water, an armful of firewood. Her body is one of resilience, of power: she is all muscle beneath smooth skin. But this is something else. Something other. It laughs at her attempts to master it, to subdue it, to rise above it. It will, Agnes fears, overtake her. It will seize her by the scruff of her neck and plunge her down, under the surface of the water.
She raises her head and sees, across the clearing, the silvery trunk and delicate leaves of a rowan tree. Despite everything, she smiles. She says the word to herself – rowan, rowan – pulling out the two syllables. Reddened berries in autumn, used for stomach pains, if boiled, and wheezing chests; if planted by the door of a house, it will repel evil spirits from the inhabitants. People say the first woman was made from its branches. It was her mother’s name, although her father never let it past his lips; the shepherd had told her, when she’d asked him. The branches of the forest.
Agnes plants her hands in front of her, on all fours, like a wolf, and submits to another pain.
In Henley Street, he wakes. He spends a while staring up at the dark red curtain above him. Then he gets up, walks to the window and gazes down into the street, absently scratching at his beard. He has two Latin tutorials this afternoon, at houses in town; he is aware of the stifling boredom of them, as you might be of the stench of a nearby carcass. The drowsing boys, the squeal of slates, the flutter and crease of the primers, the intoning of verbs and conjunctions. This morning he is meant to be helping his father with deliveries and collections. He yawns, leans his head into the wood frame of the window, glares at a man yanking a donkey by its bridle, a woman pulling a wailing child by its jacket, a boy running in the opposite direction with a bundle of firewood under his arm.
Is it to be, he asks himself, that they remain here, in this town, for ever? Is he never to see any other place, never to live elsewhere? He wants nothing more than to take hold of Agnes and the baby and run with them, as far as they are able to go. When he married, he had thought that a larger, freer life might begin, the life of a man, and yet here he is, a mere wall separating him from his boyhood home, his family, his father, and the vagaries and flashes of his inconstant tempers. He knew, of course, that they had to wait for the baby, that nothing could be achieved until the safe arrival of their child. But now that time is near and he is no further on in his plan to leave. How can he ever get away? Are they to live like this, in a narrow appendage to his parents’ house? Is there to be no escape for them? Agnes says that he must—
At the thought of Agnes, he straightens up. He looks at her side of the bed, where the straw still holds the indent, the shape of her. He calls her name. Nothing. He calls it again. Still nothing. His mind is traversed, for a moment, by an image of her body in its current astonishing shape, as he saw it last night: limbs, neat ribcage, the spine a long indent down the back, a cart-track through snow, and then this perfectly rounded sphere at the front. Like a woman who had swallowed the moon.
He lifts his clothes from the chair beside the window and shrugs himself into them. He makes his way across the room in his stockinged feet, shaking his hair out of his collar. Hunger growls in his stomach, low and menacing, like a dog crouched inside his body. Downstairs will be bread and milk, oats and eggs, if the hens have laid. He almost smiles to think this. As he passes his desk in the corner, it seems to him, from the corner of his eye, that something has altered about it. Something has changed. He pauses. The quill rests in the inkwell, point down, fronded feathers up. He frowns. This is something he never does: to leave a quill like that, overnight, in the damp dark of a well. What a waste, what profligacy. It will be quite spoilt.