Hamnet(66)
Agnes may not sleep, it seems. She may not rise from the bed. She may not have a hand spare or empty. One or both of the babies will need to be held at any given moment. She will feed one, then the other, then the first again; she will feed them both at once, heads meeting in the centre of her chest, their bodies podded under each of her arms. She feeds and feeds and feeds.
The boy, Hamnet, is strong. This she has known since the moment she first saw him. He latches on with a definite and sure force, sucking with great concentration. The girl, Judith, needs to be encouraged on to the breast. Sometimes, when her mouth is opened for her and the breast placed inside it, she looks confused, as if unsure what she is meant to do. Agnes must stroke her cheek, tap her chin, run a finger along her jaw, to remind her to suck, to sup, to live.
Agnes’s concept of death has, for a long time, taken the form of a single room, lit from within, perhaps in the middle of an expanse of moorland. The living inhabit the room; the dead mill about outside it, pressing their palms and faces and fingertips to the window, desperate to get back, to reach their people. Some inside the room can hear and see those outside; some can speak through the walls; most cannot.
The idea that this tiny child might have to live out there, on the cold and misted moor, without her, is unthinkable. She will not let her pass over. It is always the smaller twin who is taken: everybody knows this. Everyone, she can tell, is waiting, breath held, for this to happen. She knows that for the girl child, the door leading out of the room of the living is ajar; she can feel the chill of the draught, scent that icy air. She knows that she is meant to have only two children but she will not accept this. She tells herself this, in the darkest hours of the night. She will not let it happen; not tonight, not tomorrow, not any day. She will find that door and slam it shut.
She keeps the twins tucked into bed, on either side of her; she has one breathing in one ear and one in the other. When Hamnet wakes, with a creaking cry, to feed, Agnes rouses Judith. Feed, little one, she whispers to her, time to feed.
She fears her foresight; she does. She remembers with ice-cold clarity the image she had of two figures at the foot of the bed where she will meet her end. She now knows that it’s possible, more than possible, that one of her children will die, because children do, all the time. But she will not have it. She will not. She will fill this child, these children, with life. She will place herself between them and the door leading out, and she will stand there, teeth bared, blocking the way. She will defend her three babes against all that lies beyond this world. She will not rest, not sleep, until she knows they are safe. She will push back, fight against, undo the foresight she has always had, about having two children. She will. She knows she can.
When her husband comes, there is a moment when he doesn’t recognise her. He is looking for his handsome, full-lipped wife, standing by her pots and pestle, but he finds instead, prostrate on the bed, a waif, half crazed with sleeplessness and determination and single-minded purpose. He finds a woman worn thin with feeding, with grey-ringed eyes, with a face desperate and focused. He finds two babies with the same inscrutable face, one double the size of the other.
He takes them in his hands; he meets their steady gazes; he looks into their identical eyes; he arranges them, head to foot, upon his knee; he watches as one takes the thumb of the other into its mouth and sucks upon it; he sees that the pair have led a life together that began before anything else. He touches their heads with both of his palms. You, he says, and you.
She can tell, even through her dazed exhaustion, even before she can take his hand, that he has found it, he is fitting it, he is inhabiting it – that life he was meant to live, that work he was intended to do. It makes her smile, there on the bed, to see him stand so tall, his chest thrown wide, his face clear of worry and frustration, to inhale his scent of satisfaction.
They still believe, as they sit together in the birthing room, that she will join him in London soon, that she will bring the three children to the city and they will live there together. They believe that this is shortly to happen. She is already planning what to pack and take with them. She is telling Susanna that soon they will live in a big city and she will see houses and boats and bears and palaces. Will the babies come with us? Susanna asks, with a sidelong glance at the cradle. Yes, Agnes says, hiding her smile.
He has already looked at houses; he is saving money to buy a place for them. He has envisaged taking Susanna on his shoulders to look at the river, bringing them all to the playhouse. He has imagined his new friends looking with wistful envy at his wife’s dark eyes and slender gloved wrists, at the pretty heads of his children. He pictures a kitchen with two cradles, his wife bending over the fire, a yard at the back where they might keep hens or rabbits. It will just be the five of them, perhaps more in time: he permits himself this thought. No one else. No family next door. No brothers or parents or in-laws bursting into the place at odd hours. Nobody at all. Just them, this kitchen, these cradles. He can almost smell this kitchen: the beeswax on the table surface, the curdled-milk smell of the babies, the starch of the laundry. His wife will hum to herself as she works, the babes will gurgle and chatter, Susanna will be out at the back, talking to the rabbits, examining their liquid eyes, their sleek fur, and he will sit at his hearth, surrounded by his family, not cramped into a lodging room, writing letters that take four days to reach them. He will no longer lead this double life, this split existence. They will be there, with him; he will need only to raise his head to see them. He will be alone no more in the big city: he will have a firmer foothold there, a wife, a family, a house. With Agnes there, beside him, who knows what may be possible for him?