Hamnet and Judith by Maggie O'Farrell

Author:Maggie O'Farrell [O'Farrell, Maggie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2020-07-21T00:00:00+00:00

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In the still of the night, she whispers to him, asks him what is wrong, what is on his mind, can she help him? She puts her hand to his chest, where she feels his heart tap against her palm, over and over, over and over, as if asking the same question and getting no answer.

‘Nothing,’ is what he replies.

‘It must be something,’ she says. ‘Can you not say?’

He sighs, his chest lifting and falling under her hand. He fidgets with the sheet edge, rearranges his legs. She feels the scrape of his shin against hers, the restless tug of the sheet. The bed-curtains are close around them, forming a cave where the two of them lie together, with Susanna asleep on the pallet, arms flung wide, her mouth pursed, hair plastered to her cheeks.

‘Is it…’ she begins, ‘…are you…do you wish we had not…wed? Is that it?’

He turns to her, for what feels like the first time in many days, and his face is pained, aghast. He presses his hand down on top of hers. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Never. How could you say such a thing? You and Susanna are all I live for. Nothing else matters.’

‘What is it, then?’ she says.

He lifts her fingers, one by one, to his lips, kissing their tips. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Nothing. A heaviness of spirit. A melancholy. It’s nothing.’

She is just falling into sleep, when he says, or seems to say, ‘I am lost. I have lost my way.’

He moves towards her, then, and grips her round the waist, as if she is drifting away from him, into huge, tidal waters.

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