And the smell of leather, of whittawing, of hides, of singed fur: he cannot get away from it. How did he spend all those years in this house? He finds he cannot breathe the sour air here, now. The knock at the window, the demands of people wanting to buy gloves, to look at them, to try them on their hands, to endlessly discuss beading and buttons and lace. The ceaseless conversation, back and forth, over this merchant and that, this whittawer, that farmer, that nobleman, the price of silk, the cost of wool, who is at the guild meetings and who isn’t, who will be alderman next year.
It is intolerable. All of it. He feels as though he is caught in a web of absence, its strings and tendrils ready to stick and cling to him, whichever way he turns. Here he is, back in this town, in this house, and all of it makes him fearful that he might never get away; this grief, this loss, might keep him here, might destroy all he has made for himself in London. His company will descend into chaos and disorder without him; they will lose all their money and disband; they might find another to take his place; they won’t prepare a new play for the coming season, or they will and it will be better than anything he could ever write, and that person’s name will be across the playbills and not his, and then he will be kicked out, replaced, not wanted any more. He might lose his hold on all that he has built there. It is so tenuous, so fragile, the life of the playhouses. He often thinks that, more than anything, it is like the embroidery on his father’s gloves: only the beautiful shows, only the smallest part, while underneath is a cross-hatching of labour and skill and frustration and sweat. He needs to be there, all the time, to ensure that what is underneath happens, that all goes to plan. And he longs, it is true, for the four close walls of his lodging, where no one else ever comes, where no one looks for him or asks for him or speaks to him or bothers him, where there is just a bed, a coffer, a desk. Nowhere else can he escape the noise and life and people around him; nowhere else is he able to let the world recede, the sense of himself dissolve, so that he is just a hand, holding an ink-dipped feather, and he may watch as words unfurl from its tip. And as these words come, one after another, it is possible for him to slip away from himself and find a peace so absorbing, so soothing, so private, so joyous that nothing else will do.
He cannot give this up, cannot stay here, in this house, in this town, on the edges of the glove business, not even for his wife. He sees how he may become mired in Stratford for ever, a creature with its leg in the jaws of an iron trap, with his father next door, and his son, cold and decaying, beneath the churchyard sod.
He comes to her and says he must leave. He cannot stay away from his company for long. They will need him: they will be returning soon to London and they must ready themselves for the new season. Other playhouses would be only too glad to see theirs go under; the competition, especially at the start of the season, is fierce. There are many preparations to be made and he needs to be there to see all is done right. He cannot leave it to the other men. No one else can be relied upon. He has to leave. He is sorry. He hopes she understands.
Agnes says nothing as he delivers this speech. She lets the words wash over and around her. She continues to let the slops fall from a basin into the pig trough. Such a simple task: to hold aloft a basin and let its contents fall. Nothing more is required of her than to stand here, leaning on the swine wall.
‘I will send word,’ he says, behind her, and she starts. She had almost forgotten he was there. What was it he had been saying?
‘Send word?’ she repeats. ‘To whom?’
‘To you.’
‘To me? Why?’ She gestures down at herself. ‘I am here, before you.’
‘I meant I will send word when I have reached London.’
Agnes frowns, letting the last of the slops fall. She recalls, yes, a moment ago, he had been talking of London. Of his friends there. ‘Preparations’ had been the word he used, she believes. And ‘leave’。
‘London?’ she says.
‘I must leave,’ he says, with a hint of crispness.
She almost smiles, so ridiculous, so fanciful is the notion.
‘You cannot leave,’ she says.
‘But I must.’
‘But you cannot.’
‘Agnes,’ he says, with full-blown irritation now. ‘The world does not stand still. There are people waiting for me. The season is about to begin and my company will return from Kent any day now and I must—’
‘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.’