Hamnet(86)

‘For everything.’ He sighs unevenly, shakily. ‘Will you never come to live in London?’

Agnes looks at him, this man who has imprisoned her hand, this father of her children, and shakes her head. ‘We cannot. Judith would never survive it. You know that.’

‘She might.’

There is a distant sound of bleating, carried on the wind. Both of them turn their heads towards it.

‘Would you take that risk?’ Agnes says.

He says nothing, but holds her hand between both of his. She twists her hand inside his until it is facing upwards and she grips the muscle between his thumb and forefinger, looking right at him. He gives a faint smile but doesn’t pull away. His eyes are wet, lashes drawn into spikes.

She presses the muscle, presses and presses, as if she might draw juice from it. She senses mostly noise, at first: numerous voices, calling in loud and soft and threatening and entreating tones. His mind is crammed with a cacophony, with strife, with overlapping speech and cries and yells and yelps and whispers, and she doesn’t know how he stands it, and there are the other women, she can feel them, their loosened hair, their sweat-marked handprints, and it sickens her but she keeps holding on, despite wanting to let go, to push him away, and there is also fear, a great deal of fear, of a journey, something about water, perhaps a sea, a desire to seek a faraway horizon, to stretch his eyes to it, and beneath all this, behind it all, she finds something, a gap, a vacancy, an abyss, which is dark and whistling with emptiness, and at the bottom of it she finds something she has never felt before: his heart, that great, scarlet muscle, banging away, frantic and urgent in its constancy, inside his chest. It feels so close, so present, it’s almost as if she could reach out and touch it.

He is still looking at her when she releases her grip. Her hand nestles, inactive, inside his.

‘What did you find?’ he says to her.

‘Nothing,’ she replies. ‘Your heart.’

‘That’s nothing?’ he says, pretending to be outraged. ‘Nothing? How could you say such a thing?’

She smiles at him, a faint smile, but he snatches her hand to his chest.

‘And it’s your heart,’ he says, ‘not mine.’

He wakes her that night as she is dreaming of an egg, a large egg, at the bottom of a clear stream; she is standing on a bridge, looking down at it, at the currents, which are forced around its contours.

The dream is so vivid that it takes her a minute to come to, to realise what is happening, that her husband is gripping her tightly, his head buried in her hair, his arms wound about her waist, that he is saying he is sorry, over and over again.

She doesn’t reply for a while, doesn’t respond to or return his caresses. He cannot stop. The words flow from him, like water. Like the egg, she lies unmoving in their currents.

Then she brings up a hand to his shoulder. She senses the hollow, the cave, made by her palm as it rests there. He takes the other hand and presses it to his face; she feels the resisting spring of his beard, his insistent and assertive kisses.

He will not be stopped, diverted; he is a man intent on one destination, on one action. He yanks and pulls at her shift, bunching its folds and lengths in his hand, swearing and blaspheming with the effort, until he has parted her from it, until she is laughing at him, then he covers her with himself and will not let her go; she feels herself as a separate being, a body apart, dissolve, until she has no idea, no sense of whose skin is whose, which limb belongs to whom, whose hair it is in her mouth, whose breath leaves and enters whose lips.

‘I have a proposal,’ he says afterwards, when he has shifted himself to lie beside her.

She has a strand of his hair between her fingers and she twists and twists it. The knowledge of the other women had receded during the act, pulled away from her, but now they are back, standing just outside the bed-curtains, jostling for space, brushing their hands and bodies against the fabric, sweeping their skirts on the floor.

‘A marriage proposal?’ she says.

‘It is,’ he says, kissing her neck, her shoulder, her chest, ‘I fear, a little late for that and besides – ow! My hair, woman. Do you mean to separate it from my head?’

‘Perhaps.’ She gives it a further tweak. ‘You would do well to remember your marriage. From time to time.’

He raises his head from her and sighs. ‘I do. I will. I do.’ He smooths the skin of her face with his fingers. ‘Do you wish to hear my proposal or not?’

‘Not,’ she says. She has a perverse desire to thwart whatever it is he is about to say. She will not let him off so easily, will not let him think it is all as meaningless to her as it is to him.

‘Well, stop your ears if you don’t want to hear it because I’m going to speak whether I have your permission or not. Now—’

She begins to move her hands to her ears but he holds them fast, in one of his.

‘Let go,’ she hisses.

‘I shan’t.’

‘Let go, I tell you.’

‘I want you to listen.’

‘But I don’t want to.’

‘I thought,’ he says, releasing her hands and drawing her close to him, ‘that I would buy a house.’

She turns to look at him but they are enclosed in darkness, a thick, absolute, impenetrable dark. ‘A house?’