Hamnet(82)
He shivers, pulling his cloak around himself more tightly (he will catch a chill, he hears a voice inside his head chide, a soft voice, a caring voice). The sweat from earlier has cooled, sitting uneasily and clammily between his skin and the wool of his clothes.
Most of the company are asleep, stretching themselves out in the bottom of the boat and lowering their hats over their faces. He does not sleep; he never can on these evenings, the blood still hurtling through his veins, his heart still galloping, his ears still hearing the sounds and roars and gasps and pauses. He longs for his bed, for the enclosed space of his room, for that moment when his mind will fall silent, when his body will realise it is over and that sleep must come.
He huddles into himself as he sits on the hard board of the boat, watching the river, the sliding by of the houses, the dip and sway of lights on other vessels, the shoulders of the boatman as he wrestles the craft through trickier currents, the dripping lift of the oars, the white scarf of breath that streams from his mouth.
The Thames has thawed now (he had told them it was frozen in his last letter); they can reach the Palace once more. He sees, again, for a moment, the vista of eyes beyond the edge of the stage, beyond the world that encases him and his friends, blurred by candle flames. The faces watching him, at these moments, are colours smeared with a wet brush. Their shouts, their applause, their avid expressions, their open mouths, their rows of teeth, their gazes that would drink him up (if they could, but they cannot, for he is covered, protected in a costume, like a whelk in a shell – they may never see the real him).
He and his friends have just performed a historical play, about a long-dead king, at the Palace. It has proved, he has found, a subject safe for him to grapple with. There are, in such a story, no pitfalls, no reminders, no unstable ground to stumble upon. When he is enacting old battles, ancient court scenes, when he is putting words into the mouths of distant rulers, there is nothing that will ambush him, tie him up and drag him back to look on things he cannot think about (a wrapped form, a chair of empty clothes, a woman weeping at a piggery wall, a child peeling apples in a doorway, a curl of yellow hair in a pot). He can manage these: histories and comedies. He can carry on. Only with them can he forget who he is and what has happened. They are safe places to stow his mind (and no one else on stage with him, not one of the other players, his closest friends, will know that he finds himself looking out, every evening, over the watching crowd, in search of a particular face, a boy with a slightly crooked smile and a perpetually surprised expression; he scans the audience minutely, carefully, because he still cannot fathom that his son could just have gone; he must be somewhere; all he has to do is find him).
He covers first one eye, then the other, turning to regard the city. It is a game he can play. One of his eyes can only see what is at a distance, the other what is close by. Together they work so that he may see most things, but separated; each eye sees only what it can: the first, far away, the second, close up.
Close up: the interlocking stitches of Condell’s cape, the lapped wooden rim of the boat, the whirlpool drag of the oars. Far away: the frozen glitter of stars, shattered glass on black silk, Orion forever hunting, a barge cutting stolidly through the water, a group of people crouching at the edge of a wharf – a woman, with several children, one almost as tall as the mother (as tall as Susanna now?), the smallest a baby in a cap (three, he’d had, such pretty babies, but now there are only two).
He switches eyes, with a quick movement, so that the woman and her children, night-fishing (so close to the water, too close, surely), are no more than indistinct shapes, meaningless strokes of a nib.
He yawns, his jaw cracking with a sound like a breaking nutshell. He will write to them, perhaps tomorrow. If he has time. For there are the new pages to be done, the man from across the river to see; the landlord must be paid; there is a new boy to try out for the other has grown too tall, his voice trembling, his beard coming in (and such a secret, private pain it is, to see a boy growing like that, from lad to man, effortlessly, without care, but he would never say that, never let on to anyone else how he avoids this boy, never speaks to him, how he hates to look upon him).
He throws off his cloak, suddenly hot, and shuts both eyes. The roads will be clear now. He knows he should go. But something holds him back, as if his ankles are tethered. The speed of his work here – from writing to rehearsing to staging and back to writing again – is so breathless, so seamless, it is quite possible for three or four months to slip past without him noticing. And there is the ever-present fear that if he were to step off this whirling wheel, he might never be able to get on it again. He might lose his place; he has seen it happen to others. But the magnitude, the depth of his wife’s grief for their son exerts a fatal pull. It is like a dangerous current that, if he were to swim too close, might suck him in, plunge him under. He would never surface again; he must hold himself separate in order to survive. If he were to go under, he would drag them all with him.
If he keeps himself at the hub of this life in London, nothing can touch him. Here, in this skiff, in this city, in this life, he can almost persuade himself that if he were to return, he would find them as they were, unchanged, untrammelled, three children asleep in their beds.
He uncovers his eyes, lifts them to the jumbled roofs of houses, dark shapes above the flexing, restless surface of the river. He shuts his long-sighted eye and stares down the city with an imperfect, watery gaze.
Susanna and her grandmother sit in the parlour, cutting up bed sheets and hemming them into washcloths. The afternoon drags by; with every piercing of the cloth and the easing through of the thread, Susanna tells herself she is a few seconds closer to the end of the day. The needle is slippery in her fingers; the fire is burning low; she feels slumber approach, then back off, approach again.