She looks up at her father and sees that he has stopped pacing. His legs are still, straight, a pair of tree trunks. He is standing in front of his mother, who is still sewing, her needle disappearing and reappearing through the fabric. It looks to Susanna like a fish, a slender silver one, a minnow perhaps or a grayling, leaping out of the water and diving back down, leaping out, diving down, and she is thinking about her river again when she realises that her grandmother has slammed down her sewing, has stood up, has begun to shout at Susanna’s father, right up into his face. Susanna watches, aghast, spoon-paddles poised. She takes in this unusual sight, presses it into her mind: her grandmother, face distorted by anger, her hand gripping the arm of her son; her father wresting his arm from her grip, speaking in a low and menacing tone; then her grandmother gesturing towards Susanna’s mother, rapping out her name – said by her grandmother so that it sounds like Annis – making her mother turn around. Her mother’s dress is stuffed out at the front with another baby. A brother or sister for you, she has been told. Her mother is also holding a squirrel on her arm. Can this be true? Susanna knows it is. The animal’s tail flares red as a flame in the sunlight coming through the glass. It scampers up her mother’s sleeve, to nestle under her cap, next to the hair, which Susanna is sometimes permitted to unravel, to brush, to plait.
Her mother’s face is serene. She contemplates the parlour, the grandmother, the man, the child in the boat-basket. She strokes the squirrel’s tail; Susanna feels a pull, a longing to do the same, but the squirrel will never let her come near. Her mother strokes the tail and shrugs at whatever is being said to her. She gives a vague smile and turns away, lifting the squirrel down from her shoulder and letting it escape out of the open casement.
Susanna watches all this. The ducks and swans swim closer and closer, crowding in.
Mary stitches and stitches, the needle rising from the seam and falling into it. She hardly knows what she is doing but she can see that, as she listens to what her son is saying, her stitches are getting bigger, clumsier, and this annoys her in a specific way because she is known for her needlework – she is, she knows it. She tries to keep her head, tries to remain calm, but her son is saying that he has no doubt this plan will work, that he will be able to expand John’s business in London. Mary can barely contain her rage, her scorn. Her daughter-in-law is contributing nothing to this discussion, of course, but merely standing at the window, making half-witted noises into the air.
There is a reddish, rat-faced squirrel that lives in a tree outside the house: Agnes likes to feed and pet it, from time to time. Mary cannot for the life of her understand why, and she has told her daughter-in-law that it must not enter the house, heaven knows what diseases and plagues it might carry, but Agnes will not listen. Agnes never listens. Not even now, when her husband is proposing to leave the house, to run away, to hide, when what he really ought to be doing is falling on his knees and begging forgiveness, from his mother, who took him and his bride and her swollen belly into her own house not three years ago, from his father who, with God as their witness, has his faults but always tries to do his best by his family. Not-listening is Agnes’s customary state.
She cannot look at her son; she cannot look at her daughter-in-law, standing there, her belly swollen once more, fussing over that damn squirrel in her hands, as if nothing of any consequence is happening here.
John treats Agnes as a simpleton, a rural idiot. He nods at her, if he passes her in the house or sees her at table. How are we today, Agnes? he will say, as if to a child. He will look upon her mildly, if she brings a tangle of filthy roots out of her pocket, or opens her hands to show them a collection of shining acorns. He tolerates her eccentricities, her night-time wanderings, her sometimes dishevelled appearance, the daft imaginings and predictions she on occasion comes out with, the various animals and other creatures she brings into the house （a newt, which she put in the water pitcher, a featherless dove, which she nursed back to full health）。 If Mary complains to him as they lie in bed at night, he pats her hand and says, Let the girl alone. She’s from the country, remember, not from the town. At which Mary could say three things: Agnes is no girl. She is a woman who enticed a much younger boy, our boy, into marriage for the worst possible reason. And: You forgive her too much, and only because of that dowry of hers. Don’t think I don’t see this. And: I am also from the country, brought up on a farm, but do I run about the place in the night and bring wild animals into the house? No, I do not. Some of us, she will sniff to her husband, know how to conduct ourselves.