Hamnet(51)

Agnes looks at him. She feels herself breathe in, then out, in, out, like a tree filling with wind. The sour, damp smell is back. It is stronger. It is right here before them. It drifts off him, like smoke, collecting above his head in a grey-green cloud. He pulls it with him, this odour, as if he is enveloped in its mist. It seems to exude from his skin.

Agnes examines her husband. He looks the same. Or does he? His face, under his beard, is sallow, parchment pale. His eyes seem hooded and have purplish shadows under them. He stares out of the window, and yet doesn’t. He seems not to see anything before him. His other hand, resting on the table between them, is filled with empty air. He is like the picture of a man, canvas thin, with nothing behind it; he is like a person whose soul has been sucked out of him or stolen away in the night.

How can this have happened, right under her nose? How can he have fallen into this state, without warning, without her seeing the signs? Were there signs? She tries to think. He has been sleeping more than usual, it is true, and spending more time out in the evenings, at taverns with his friends. It has been a long time since he read to her, at night, by candlelight, in their bed – she cannot remember the last time he did this. Have they been speaking together, as they used to, beside the fire at night? She thinks they have, perhaps less than usual. But she is busy, with the child, with the house, with her garden, with callers at the window, and he has been carrying on with his afternoons of tutoring and mornings of running errands for his father. Life has been sweeping them all along together, in step, she had thought. And now this.

Susanna is still singing, clapping her hands together. Her knuckles are dimpled, each one, indented on the bone. The song goes round and round, the same four notes, the same drone of sounds, round and round. It evidently does not please him because he winces and covers one ear with a hand.

Agnes frowns. She thinks about the baby, there in her belly, curled in water, listening to all that is going on, breathing in this foul air; she thinks about the warm weight of Susanna on her lap; she thinks about this cloud of grey and rot coming off her husband.

Is this marriage, this child, their life together causing his malaise? Is it their home in this apartment that is draining the life out of him in this way? She has no idea. The thought fills her with panic. How can she tell him about the new child in her belly while he is in this state? It might only worsen his melancholy and she cannot bear to see her news greeted with sorrow, with anything less than rapture.

She says his name. No response. She says it again. He raises his chin and looks at her: his face is horrifying to her. Grey, puffy, beard straggly and unkempt. How did he get like this? How did it happen? How can she not have noticed this change coming? What is it she has not seen, or chosen not to see?

‘Are you ill?’ she asks him.

‘Me?’ he says, and it seems to take him a long time to hear her, to articulate a response. ‘No. Why do you ask?’

‘You do not look well.’

He sighs. He rubs a hand over his brow, his eyes. ‘Do I not?’ he says.

She stands, shifting Susanna to her hip. She touches his forehead, which feels clammy and cool, like the skin of a frog. He twists irritably out of her grasp, waving away her hand.

‘All’s well,’ he says, and his words are heavy, as if he is spitting out pebbles as he speaks. ‘Don’t fuss.’

‘What ails you?’ she says. Susanna is kicking her legs, trying to turn her mother’s face towards her, telling her she needs to sing.

‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘I’m tired. That is all.’ He stands, scraping the chair against the floor. ‘I’m going back to bed.’

‘Why don’t you eat?’ Agnes asks, trying to shush Susanna, bouncing her up and down. ‘Some bread? Honey?’

He shakes his head. ‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Remember your father wanted you to go early to—’

He interrupts her, with a curt wave of his hand. ‘Tell him to send Gilbert. I’ll not go anywhere today.’ He heads for the stairs, dragging his feet across the floor, pulling the misty smell after him, like a ream of old, unwashed cloth. ‘I need to sleep,’ he says.

Agnes watches him go up the stairs, pulling himself up by the rail. She turns to look into the round, dark, wise eyes of her daughter.

‘Sing, Mamma,’ is Susanna’s advice.

In the still of the night, she whispers to him, asks him what is wrong, what is on his mind, can she help him? She puts her hand to his chest, where she feels his heart tap against her palm, over and over, over and over, as if asking the same question and getting no answer.

‘Nothing,’ is what he replies.

‘It must be something,’ she says. ‘Can you not say?’

He sighs, his chest lifting and falling under her hand. He fidgets with the sheet edge, rearranges his legs. She feels the scrape of his shin against hers, the restless tug of the sheet. The bed-curtains are close around them, forming a cave where the two of them lie together, with Susanna asleep on the pallet, arms flung wide, her mouth pursed, hair plastered to her cheeks.

‘Is it . . .’ she begins, ‘. . . are you . . . do you wish we had not . . . wed? Is that it?’

He turns to her, for what feels like the first time in many days, and his face is pained, aghast. He presses his hand down on top of hers. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Never. How could you say such a thing? You and Susanna are all I live for. Nothing else matters.’