"Hamnet"

[fiefoe]

It's hard not to recall "Lincoln in the Bardo" while listening to this book, but Maggie O'Farrell mostly writes about this quiet domestic tragedy from the female perspective, and that makes it even tougher to get through.

• Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicenter, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother's: the boy, the empty house, the deserted yard.
• He thought of the snip and snap of the words that punctured the air between his father and grandfather,
• the honey leaves the comb with a cautious, near reluctant drop. Slow as sap, orange-gold, scented with the sharp tang of thyme and the floral sweetness of lavendar, it falls into the pot Agnes holds.
• It has been going on for years, but ever since her grandfather was fined for not attending church, many of the townsfolk have dropped the pretence of civility and will walk past without acknowledging them. Susanna sees how her grandmother plants herself in the woman’s way, so that she cannot get past, cannot avoid talking to them. She sees all of this. The knowledge of it burns the inside of her head, leaving black scorch marks.
• a Latin tutor is standing in this place at the window, absently tugging on the hoop through his left ear. He is watching the trees. Their collective presence, lined up as they are, fringing the edge of the farm, brings to his mind the backdrop of a theatre, the kind of painted trickery that is unrolled, quickly, into place to let the audience know they are now in a sylvan setting, that the city or streets of the previous scene are gone,
• Agnes. Said differently from how it might be written on a page, with that near-hidden, secret g. The tongue curls towards it yet barely touches it. Ann-yis. Agn-yez. One must lean into the first syllable, then skip over the next.
• This new mother would also remove her shoe if Agnes said, You are not my mother, or if Bartholomew trod on the dog’s tail, or if Agnes spilt the soup, or let the geese out into the road, or didn’t lift the pig-pail all the way to the slop trough. Agnes learnt to be agile, quick. She learnt the advantages of invisibility, how to pass through a room without drawing notice. She learnt that what is hidden within a person may be brought forth if, say, a sprinkling of bladderwort were to find its way into that person’s cup. She learnt that creepers disentangled from an oak trunk, brushed against bed linen, will ensure no sleep for whoever lies there.
• Then one day she came upon her father behind the pig-pen, his knee on the neck of a lamb, bringing down his knife. The smell, the sight, the colour took her back to a bed soaked red and a room of carnage, of violence, of appalling crimson. She stared at her father, stared and stared, yet did not see him at all. Instead, she saw a bed with a red bloom at its centre and then a narrow box. In it, she knew, was her mother, but not as she had been.
• She calls on him, she bawls his name. You, she says, you, do you hear me, I am finished with you. After this time, I will go to your church because I must but I shan’t say a word there because there is nothing after you die. There is the soil and there is the body and it all comes to nothing.
• She grows up fascinated by the hands of others, drawn always to touch them, to feel them in hers. That muscle between thumb and forefinger is, to her, irresistible. It can be shut and opened like the beak of a bird and all the strength of the grip can be found there, all the power of the grasp. A person’s ability, their reach, their essence can be gleaned. All that they have held, kept, and all they long to grip is there in that place. It is possible, she realises, to find out everything you need to know about a person just by pressing it.
• If the plague comes to London, he can be back with them for months. The playhouses are all shut, by order of the Queen, and no one is allowed to gather in public. It is wrong to wish for plague, her mother has said, but Susanna has done this a few times under her breath, at night, after she has said her prayers. She always crosses herself afterwards. But still she wishes it. Her father home, for months, with them.
• ‘Is “nothing” the only thing you’re willing to say?’ she says.
  She sees his mouth twitch and knows that he is drawing on all his lessons in rhetoric and argument to find a way to answer this question with that very word.
  ‘You can’t do it,’ she says, with glee. ‘You can’t find a way to reply “nothing”, can you, however hard you try? You can’t do it. Admit it.’
  ‘I admit nothing,’ he says triumphantly.
• So Eliza says nothing. Her brother does not appreciate being pressed or rushed. He is someone who must be approached sideways, with caution, as with a restive horse.
• Her brother thinks before he answers. ‘She is like no one you have ever met. She cares not what people may think of her. She follows entirely her own course.’ He sits forward, placing his elbows on his knees, dropping his voice to a whisper. ‘She can look at a person and see right into their very soul. There is not a drop of harshness in her. She will take a person for who they are, not what they are not or ought to be.’ He glances at Eliza. ‘Those are rare qualities, are they not?’
  Eliza feels her head nodding and nodding. She is amazed at the detail in this speech, honoured at being its recipient. ‘She sounds . . .’ she gropes for the right word, recalling one he taught her himself, a few weeks ago ‘. . . peerless.’
• Each apple is centred in a special groove, carved into the wooden racks that run around the walls of this small storeroom.
• Rock, rock, jolt, jolt.
  The fruit has been placed with care, just so: the woody stem down and the star of the calyx up. The skin mustn’t touch that of its neighbour. They must sit like this, lightly held by the wooden groove, a finger width from each other, over the winter or they will spoil. If they touch each other, they will brown and sag and moulder and rot. They must be preserved in rows, like this, separate, stems down, in airy isolation.
  The children of the house were given this duty: to pluck the apples from the twisted branches of the trees, to stack them together in baskets, then bring them here, to the apple store, and line them up on these racks, spaced evenly and carefully, to air, to preserve, to last the winter and spring, until the trees bring forth fruit again.
  Except that something is moving the apples. Again and again and again, over and over, with a shunting, nudging, insistent motion.
• Her ears, tuned so acutely that they can, if required, discern the heartbeat of a mouse a hundred feet away, a stoat’s footfall across the forest, the wingbeat of a wren over a field, pick up on the following: twenty score apples being nudged, jostled, bothered in their cradles. The breathing of mammals, of a size too large to elicit the interest of her appetite, increasing in pace. The hollow of a palm landing lightly on muscle and bone. The click and slither of a tongue against teeth. Two planes of fabric, of differing texture, moving over each other in obverse direction.
• Something she would never have expected to find in the hand of a clean-booted grammar-school boy from town. It was far-reaching: this much she knew. It had layers and strata, like a landscape. There were spaces and vacancies, dense patches, underground caves, rises and descents. There wasn’t enough time for her to get a sense of it all – it was too big, too complex. It eluded her, mostly. She knew there was more of it than she could grasp, that it was bigger than both of them. A sense, too, that something was tethering him, holding him back; there was a tie somewhere, a bond, that needed to be loosened or broken, before he could fully inhabit this landscape, before he could take command.
• ‘A crown?’ Agnes says, and Eliza can hear in her voice that she is smiling. ‘I would like that very much indeed. Thank you.’
  Eliza rolls over and the two of them stare into each other’s faces, sudden conspirators.
  ‘I don’t know,’ Eliza says, ‘what flowers we will find, this time of year. Maybe some berries or—’
  ‘Juniper,’ Agnes cuts in. ‘Or holly. Some fern. Or pine.’
  ‘There’s ivy.’
• With trembling hands, Agnes is sweeping the scattered petals and roots back into the mortar and begins to grind, her wrist twisting, twisting, her knuckles whitening, her fingernails gripping the wooden pestle. The dried rhubarb stalk, the rue, the cinnamon are mashed together, their scents mingling, the sweet, the sharp and the bitter.
  As she grinds, she counts off to herself the people this mixture has saved.
• In the early weeks of her marriage, Agnes collects impressions as a wool-gatherer hoards wool: a tuft from here, a scrap from there, a few strands from a fence, a bit from a branch, until, until, until you have a whole armful, enough to spin into yarn.
  She sees that John loves Gilbert the best of the boys – because he is strong and likes to set people against each other for sport – but that Mary favours Richard. Her head jerks up if he speaks; she shushes the others in order to hear him.
• She thinks, as she holds the grain, of that landscape of caverns and hollows she sensed within him. She thinks of the seams of a glove, running up and down and over each finger, keeping close the skin that does not belong to the wearer. How a glove covers and fits and restrains the hand. She thinks of the skins in the storeroom, pulled and stretched almost – but not quite – to tearing or breaking point. She thinks of the tools in the workshop, for cutting and shaping, pinning and piercing. She thinks of what must be discarded and stolen from the animal in order to make it useful to a glove-maker: the heart, the bones, the soul, the spirit, the blood, the viscera. A glover will only ever want the skin, the surface, the outer layer. Everything else is useless, an inconvenience, an unnecessary mess. She thinks of the private cruelty behind something as beautiful and perfect as a glove.
• In their apartment, he lets her take his hand, lets her lead him from the fire to a chair, lets his eyes lose focus, lets her rub her fingers through his hair, and she can feel him switch from one character to another; she can sense that other, big-house, self melt off him, like wax sliding from a lit candle, revealing the man within.
• For the pestilence to reach Warwickshire, England, in the summer of 1596, two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people, and then these people need to meet.
• One of his fellow workers, then, is the one to pack up the tiny red, yellow, blue, green and purple beads into boxes the following day. This man doesn’t know that the master glassmaker – now at home, bandaged and dosed into a stupor with poppy syrup – usually pads and packs the beads with wood shavings and sand to prevent breakage. He grabs instead a handful of rags from the glassworks floor and tucks them in and around the beads, which look like hundreds of tiny, alert, accusing eyes staring up at him.
• In Alexandria, at exactly the same moment, all the way across the Mediterranean Sea, the cabin boy must leave his ship, for Judith to contract the pestilence and for a tragedy to be set in motion, halfway across the world. He must receive orders to go ashore and find some victuals for his hungry and overworked shipmates.
  So he does.
• The fingers on the monkey’s hand are familiar and strange, to the boy, all at once. Black and shiny, like boot leather, with nails like apple pips. Its palm, though, is striated, just like the boy’s and there passes between them, there, under the palm trees that line the wharf, the confluence of sympathy that can flow between human and beast. The boy feels the golden chain, as if it is around his own neck; the monkey sees the boy’s sadness, his longing for his home, the bruises on his legs, the blisters and calluses on his fingers, the peeling skin on his shoulders from the relentless scorch of months in the ocean sun.
• By the time the rider reaches Stratford, the fleas have laid eggs: in the seams of his doublet, in the mane of the horse, in the stitching of the saddle, in the filigree and weave of the lace, in the rags surrounding the beads. These eggs are the great-grandchildren of the monkey flea.
• Then the idea strikes him. He doesn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before. It occurs to Hamnet, as he crouches there, next to her, that it might be possible to hoodwink Death, to pull off the trick he and Judith have been playing on people since they were young: to exchange places and clothes, leading people to believe that each was the other. Their faces are the same. People remark on this all the time, at least once a day.
• He breathes in. He breathes out. He turns his head and breathes into the whorls of her ear; he breathes in his strength, his health, his all. You will stay, is what he whispers, and I will go. He sends these words into her: I want you to take my life. It shall be yours. I give it to you.
  They cannot both live: he sees this and she sees this. There is not enough life, enough air, enough blood for both of them. Perhaps there never was. And if either of them is to live, it must be her. He wills it.
• And now the moment has arrived. Agnes conjugates it: he is going, he will be gone, he will go. She has put these circumstances together; she has set it in motion, as if she were the puppeteer, hidden behind a screen, gently pulling on the strings of her wooden people, easing and guiding them on where to go. She asked Bartholomew to speak to John, then waited for John to speak to her husband. None of this would have happened if she hadn’t got Bartholomew to plant the idea in John’s head. She has created this moment – no one else – and yet, now it is happening, she finds that it is entirely at odds with what she desires.
• How odd it feels, to move along the same streets, the route in reverse, like inking over old words, her feet the quill, going back over work, rewriting, erasing. Partings are strange. It seems so simple: one minute ago, four, five, he was here, at her side; now, he is gone. She was with him; she is alone. She feels exposed, chill, peeled like an onion.
  There is the stall they passed earlier, piled high with tin pots and cedar shavings. There is the woman they saw, still making her decision, holding two pots in her hands, weighing them, and how can she still be there, how can she still be engaged in the same activity, in the choosing of a pot, when such a change, such a transformation has occurred in Agnes’s life? Her very world has cloven in two, and here is the same dog, dozing in a doorway.
• Agnes hears their words from a great distance. Her thoughts are brief now, snipped short, pared back to the bone. Husband, she thinks. Gloves. Players. Beads. Theatre. Envious duke. Death. Think kindly. She is able to form the realisation, not in words, perhaps, but in a sensation, that he sounded not different in that letter but returned. Back to himself. Restored. Better. Returned.
• Before her is the body of a child. His bared feet splay outwards, his toes curled. The soles and nails still bear the dirt so recently accrued from life: grit from the road, soil from the garden, mud from the riverbank, where he swam not a week ago with his friends.
• She, like all mothers, constantly casts out her thoughts, like fishing lines, towards her children, reminding herself of where they are, what they are doing, how they fare. From habit, while she sits there near the fireplace, some part of her mind is tabulating them and their whereabouts: Judith, upstairs. Susanna, next door. And Hamnet? Her unconscious mind casts, again and again, puzzled by the lack of bite, by the answer she keeps giving it: he is dead, he is gone. And Hamnet? The mind will ask again. At school, at play, out at the river? And Hamnet? And Hamnet? Where is he?
• One of her hands rests on her son’s hair; the other still grips his fingers. These are the only parts of him that are familiar, that still look the same. She allows herself to think this.
  His body is different. Increasingly so, as the day wears on. It is as if a strong wind – the one from her dream, she believes – has lifted her son off the ground, battered him against rocks, whirled him around a cliff, then set him back down. He is misused, abused, marked, maltreated: the illness has ravaged him. For a while after he died, the bruises and black marks spread and widened. Then they stopped. His skin has turned to waxy tallow, the bones standing up beneath.
• Then, together, they reach up to the rafters. Agnes selects rue, comfrey, yellow-eyed chamomile. She takes purple lavender and thyme, a handful of rosemary. Not heartsease, because Hamnet disliked the smell. Not angelica, because it is too late for that and it did not help, did not perform its task, did not save him, did not break the fever. Not valerian, for the same reason.
• 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?
• ‘How can you think of leaving?’ she says, puzzled. What must she say to make him understand? ‘Hamnet,’ she says, feeling the roundness of the word, his name, inside her mouth, the shape of a ripe pear. ‘Hamnet died.’
  The words make him flinch. He cannot look at her after she has spoken them; he bows his head, fixing his gaze on his boots.
  To her, it is simple. Their boy, their child, is dead, barely cold in his grave. There will be no leaving. There will be staying. There will be closing of the doors, the four of them drawing together, like dancers at the end of a reel. He will remain here, with her, with Judith, with Susanna. How can there be any such talk of leaving? It makes no sense.
• Our boy was made, is what she thinks, of him and of her. They made him together; they buried him together. He will never come again. There is a part of her that would like to wind up time, to gather it in, like yarn. She would like to spin the wheel backwards, unmake the skein of Hamnet’s death, his boyhood, his infancy, his birth, right back until the moment she and her husband cleaved together in that bed to create the twins. She would like to unspool it all, render it all back down to raw fleece, to find her way back, to that moment, and she would stand up, she would turn up her face to the stars, to the heavens, to the moon, and appeal to them to change what lay in wait for him, to plead with them to devise a different outcome for him, please, please.
• Balanced on the tops of the houses was a sky scattered with jewels, pierced with silver holes. He had whispered into her ear names and stories, his finger outstretched, pulling shapes and people and animals and families out of the stars.
  Constellations, he had said. That was the word.
  The baby that was Susanna turning over in her belly, as if listening.
• 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,
• 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.
• Is this what it feels like to die, to sense the nearness of something you can’t avoid? The thought falls into her head from nowhere, like a drop of wine into water, colouring her mind with its dark, spreading stain.
• Several streets away, the owl leaves its perch, surrendering itself to a cool draught, its wings silently breasting the air, its eyes alert. To it, the town appears as a series of rooftops, with gullies of streets in between, a place to be navigated.