He covers first one eye, then the other, turning to regard the city. It is a game he can play. One of his eyes can only see what is at a distance, the other what is close by. Together they work so that he may see most things, but separated; each eye sees only what it can: the first, far away, the second, close up.
Close up: the interlocking stitches of Condell’s cape, the lapped wooden rim of the boat, the whirlpool drag of the oars. Far away: the frozen glitter of stars, shattered glass on black silk, Orion forever hunting, a barge cutting stolidly through the water, a group of people crouching at the edge of a wharf – a woman, with several children, one almost as tall as the mother （as tall as Susanna now?）， the smallest a baby in a cap （three, he’d had, such pretty babies, but now there are only two）。
He switches eyes, with a quick movement, so that the woman and her children, night-fishing （so close to the water, too close, surely）， are no more than indistinct shapes, meaningless strokes of a nib.
He yawns, his jaw cracking with a sound like a breaking nutshell. He will write to them, perhaps tomorrow. If he has time. For there are the new pages to be done, the man from across the river to see; the landlord must be paid; 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, never let on to anyone else how he avoids this boy, never speaks to him, how he hates to look upon him）。
He throws off his cloak, suddenly hot, and shuts both eyes. The roads will be clear now. He knows he should go. But something holds him back, as if his ankles are tethered. The speed of his work here – from writing to rehearsing to staging and back to writing again – is so breathless, so seamless, it is quite possible for three or four months to slip past without him noticing. And there is the ever-present fear that if he were to step off this whirling wheel, he might never be able to get on it again. He might lose his place; he has seen it happen to others. But the magnitude, the depth of his wife’s grief for their son exerts a fatal pull. It is like a dangerous current that, if he were to swim too close, might suck him in, plunge him under. He would never surface again; he must hold himself separate in order to survive. If he were to go under, he would drag them all with him.
If he keeps himself at the hub of this life in London, nothing can touch him. Here, in this skiff, in this city, in this life, he can almost persuade himself that if he were to return, he would find them as they were, unchanged, untrammelled, three children asleep in their beds.
He uncovers his eyes, lifts them to the jumbled roofs of houses, dark shapes above the flexing, restless surface of the river. He shuts his long-sighted eye and stares down the city with an imperfect, watery gaze.
Susanna and her grandmother sit in the parlour, cutting up bed sheets and hemming them into washcloths. The afternoon drags by; with every piercing of the cloth and the easing through of the thread, 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.
She shifts in her seat, clears her throat, bends closer over her needle.
‘Are you quite well?’ her grandmother asks.
‘Yes, thank you,’ Susanna says, without looking up. She wonders how much longer they will be hemming cloths: they have been at it since midday and there seems to be no end in sight. Her mother was here, for a while, and Judith, too, but her mother disappeared next door with a customer who wanted a cure for ulcers, and Judith had drifted off to do whatever it is she does. Talk to stones. Draw indecipherable shapes with her left hand, in chalk, on the floors. Collect the feathers fallen from the dovecote and weave them together with string.
Agnes steps into the room behind them.
‘Did you give him a cure?’ Mary asks her.
‘I did.’
‘And did he pay you?’
Without moving her head, Susanna sees, from the corner of her eye, her mother shrug and turn towards the window. Mary sighs and stabs her needle through the cloth she is holding.
Agnes remains at the window, one hand on her hip. The gown she is wearing is loose on her this spring, her wrists narrow, her fingernails bitten down.
Mary, Susanna knows, is of the opinion that grief is all very well in moderation, but there comes a time when it is necessary to make an effort. She is of the opinion that some people make too much of things. That life goes on.