Hamnet(75)

It is even more difficult, Agnes finds, to leave the graveyard, than it was to enter it. So many graves to walk past, so many sad and angry ghosts tugging at her skirts, touching her with their cold fingers, pulling at her, naggingly, piteously, saying, Don’t go, wait for us, don’t leave us here. She has to clutch her hem to her, fold her hands inwards. A strangely difficult idea, too, that she entered this place with three children and she leaves it with two. She is, she tells herself, meant to be leaving one behind here, but how can she? In this place of wailing spirits and dripping yew trees and cold, pawing hands?

Her husband takes her arm as they reach the gate; she turns to look at him and it is as if she has never seen him before, so odd and distorted and old do his features seem. Is it their long separation, is it grief, is it all the tears? she wonders, as she regards him. Who is this person next to her, claiming her arm, holding it to him? She can see, in his face, the cheekbones of her dead son, the set of his brow, but nothing else. Just life, just blood, just evidence of a pumping, resilient heart, an eye that is bright with tears, a cheek flushed with feeling.

She is hollowed out, her edges blurred and insubstantial. She might disintegrate, break apart, like a raindrop hitting a leaf. She cannot leave this place, she cannot pass through this gate. She cannot leave him here.

She gets hold of the wooden gatepost and grips it with both hands. Everything is shattered but holding on to this post feels like the best course of action, the only thing to do. If she can stay here, at the gate, with her daughters on one side of her and her son on the other, she can hold everything together.

It takes her husband, her brother and both of her daughters to unpeel her hands, to pull her away.

Agnes is a woman broken into pieces, crumbled and scattered around. She would not be surprised to look down, one of these days, and see a foot over in the corner, an arm left on the ground, a hand dropped to the floor. Her daughters are the same. Susanna’s face is set, her brows lowered in something like anger. Judith just cries, on and on, silently; the tears leak from her and will, it seems, never stop.

How were they to know that Hamnet was the pin holding them together? That without him they would all fragment and fall apart, like a cup shattered on the floor?

The husband, the father, paces the room downstairs, that first night, and the one after. Agnes hears him from the bedroom upstairs. There is no other sound. No crying, no sobbing, no sighing. Just the scuff-thud, scuff-thud of his restless feet, walking, walking, like someone trying to find their way back to a place for which they have lost the map.

‘I did not see it,’ she whispers, into the dark space between them.

He turns his head; she cannot see him do this, but she can hear the rustle and crackle of the sheets. The bed-curtains are drawn around them, in spite of the relentless summer heat.

‘No one did,’ he says.

‘But I did not,’ she whispers. ‘And I should have. I should have known. I should have seen it. I should have understood that it was a terrible trick, making me fear for Judith, when all along—’

‘Ssh,’ he says, turning over, laying an arm over her. ‘You did everything you could. There is nothing anyone could have done to save him. You tried your best and—’

‘Of course I did,’ she hisses, suddenly furious, sitting up, wrenching herself from his touch. ‘I would have cut out my heart and given it to him, if it would have made any difference, I would have—’

‘I know.’

‘You don’t know,’ she says, thumping her fist into the mattress. ‘You weren’t here. Judith,’ she whispers, and tears are slipping from her eyes, now, down her cheeks, dripping through her hair, ‘Judith was so ill. I . . . I . . . was so intent on her that I wasn’t thinking . . . I should have paid more attention to him . . . I never saw what was coming . . . I always thought she was the one who would be taken. I cannot believe that I was so blind, so stupid to—’

‘Agnes, you did everything, you tried everything,’ he repeats, trying to ease her back into the bed. ‘The sickness was too strong.’

She resists him, curling into herself, wrapping her arms around her knees. ‘You weren’t here,’ she says again.

He goes out into the town, two days after they buried him. He must speak to a man who leases fields from him, must remind him of the debt.

He steps out from the front door and finds that the street is full of sunlight, full of children. Walking along, calling to each other, holding their parents’ hands, laughing, crying, sleeping on a shoulder, having their mantles buttoned.

It is a sight past bearing. Their skin, their skulls, their ribs, their clear, wide eyes: how frail they are. Don’t you see that? he wants to shout to their mothers, their fathers. How can you let them out of your houses?

He gets as far as the market, and then he stops. He turns on his heels, ignoring the greeting, the outstretched hand of a cousin, and goes back.

At the house, his Judith is sitting by the back door. She has been set the task of peeling a basket of apples. He sits down beside her. After a moment, he reaches into the basket and hands her the next apple. She has a paring knife in her left hand – always her left – and she peels the skin from it. It drips from the blade in long, green curls, like the hair of a mermaid.

When the twins were very small, perhaps around their first birthday, he had turned to his wife and said, Watch.