‘A year is nothing,’ she says, picking up a fallen chamomile bloom. ‘It’s an hour or a day. We may never stop looking for him. I don’t think I would want to.’
He reaches out across the space between them and seizes her hand, crushing the flower between their palms. The dusty, pollen-heavy scent fills the air. She tries to pull away but he holds her fast.
‘I am sorry,’ he says.
She pulls at her wrist, trying to wrest it from his grasp. His strength, his insistence surprises her.
He says her name, with a questioning lilt. ‘Did you hear me? I am sorry.’
‘For what?’ she mutters, giving her arm one last, futile tug, before letting it fall limp in his grasp.
‘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.