On an afternoon in the summer of Susanna’s first year, Agnes notices a new smell in the house.
She is spooning meal into the waiting mouth of Susanna, saying, Here’s one for you, here’s another, the spoon going in laden with meal and coming out streaked and shining. Susanna is seated at the corner of the table on a chair piled high with cushions. Agnes has fastened her in place on this throne with a knotted shawl. The child is rapt, miniature hands scrolled into themselves, like the shells of snails, eyes fixed on the spoon as it travels from bowl to mouth and back again.
“Dat,” shouts Susanna, her mouth pitted with four blue-white teeth, in a row, on her lower gum.
Agnes repeats the sound back to her. She finds herself frequently unable to look away from her child, to remove her gaze from her daughter’s face. Why would she ever want to behold anything else, when she could be taking in the sight of Susanna’s ears, like the pale folds of roses, the winglike sweep of her tiny eyebrows, the dark hair, which clings to her crown as if painted there with a brush? There is nothing more exquisite to her than her child: the world could not possibly contain a more perfect being, anywhere, ever.
“Deet,” Susanna exclaims, and, with a deft and determined lunge, grabs at the spoon, causing meal to be splattered to the table, to her front, to her face, to Agnes’s gown.
Agnes is finding a cloth, wiping the table, the chairs, Susanna’s disbelieving face, trying to quell the outraged roaring, when she raises her head and sniffs the air.
It is a damp, heavy, acrid scent, like food gone off or unaired linen. She has never smelt it before. If it had a colour, it would be greyish green.
Cloth still in hand, she turns to look at her daughter. Susanna is gripping the spoon, banging it rhythmically on the table, blinking with each impact, her lips pursed together, as if this percussion is an act that requires the fullest concentration.
Agnes sniffs the cloth; she sniffs the air. She presses her nose to her sleeve, then to Susanna’s smock. She walks about the room. What is it? It smells like dying flowers, like plants left too long in water, like a stagnant pond, like wet lichen. Is there something damp and rotting in the house?
She checks under the table, in case one of Gilbert’s dogs has dragged in something. She kneels down to peer under the coffer. She puts her hands on her hips, standing in the middle of the room, and draws in a deep breath.
Suddenly she knows two things. She doesn’t know how she knows them: she just does. Agnes never questions these moments of insight, the way information arrives in her head. She accepts them as a person might an unexpected gift, with a gracious smile and a feeling of benign surprise.
She is with child, she feels. There will be another baby in the house by the end of winter. Agnes has always known how many children she will have. She has foreknowledge of this: she knows there will be two children of hers standing at the bed where she dies. And here is the second child now, its first sign, its very beginning.
She also knows that this smell, this rotten scent, is not a physical thing. It means something. It is a sign of something—something bad, something amiss, something out of kilter in her house. She can feel it somewhere, growing, burgeoning, like the black mould that creeps out of the plaster in winter.
The opposing natures of these two sensations perplex her. She feels herself stretching in two directions: the baby, good; the smell, bad.
Agnes walks back to the table. Her first and only thought is her daughter. Is this scent of sadness, of dark matter, coming from her? Agnes buries her face in the child’s warm neck and inhales. Is it her? Is her child, her girl, under threat from some dark, gathering force?
Susanna squeals, surprised at this attention, saying, Mamma, Mamma, fastening her arms around Agnes’s neck. Her arms, Agnes can feel, are not long enough to go right around her, so they grip with their fierce fingers to Agnes’s shoulders.
Agnes sniffs her as a dog follows a trail, with both nostrils, as if sucking up her daughter’s essence. She smells the pear-blossom hint of Susanna’s skin, the warm hair, the scent of bedclothes and meal. Nothing else.
She lifts her daughter’s diminutive round form, saying, will they find a slice of bread, a cup of milk, and she is thinking about the new baby, curled small as a nut inside her, and how Susanna will love it, how they will play together, how it will be a Bartholomew for her, a friend and companion and ally, always. Will it be a boy or a girl? Agnes asks herself and, strangely, can locate no sense of the answer.
With Susanna at her feet, she cuts a slice of bread and slathers it with honey. Susanna sits on her lap now, at the table, because Agnes wants her close, wants her right there, in case this smell, this darkness, should try to come near. And Agnes talks, to keep her daughter distracted, to keep her safe from the world. The child is listening to the stream of talk coming from Agnes’s mouth, hooking out the words she knows, to shout them loud: bread, cup, foot, eye.
They are singing a song together, about birds nesting and bees humming, when Susanna’s father comes down the stairs, into the room. Agnes is aware of him lifting a cup, filling it with water from the pitcher, of him drinking it, then another and another. He walks around them and slumps into a chair opposite.
Agnes looks at him. She feels herself breathe in, then out, in, out, like a tree filling with wind. The sour, damp smell is back. It is stronger. It is right here before them. It drifts off him, like smoke, collecting above his head in a grey-green cloud. He pulls it with him, this odour, as if he is enveloped in its mist. It seems to exude from his skin.
Agnes examines her husband. He looks the same. Or does he? His face, under his beard, is sallow, parchment pale. His eyes seem hooded and have purplish shadows under them. He stares out of the window, and yet doesn’t. He seems not to see anything before him. His other hand, resting on the table between them, is filled with empty air. He is like the picture of a man, canvas thin, with nothing behind it; he is like a person whose soul has been sucked out of him or stolen away in the night.
How can this have happened, right under her nose? How can he have fallen into this state, without warning, without her seeing the signs? Were there signs? She tries to think. He has been sleeping more than usual, it is true, and spending more time out in the evenings, at taverns with his friends. It has been a long time since he read to her, at night, by candlelight, in their bed—she cannot remember the last time he did this. Have they been speaking together, as they used to, beside the fire at night? She thinks they have, perhaps less than usual. But she is busy, with the child, with the house, with her garden, with callers at the window, and he has been carrying on with his afternoons of tutoring and mornings of running errands for his father. Life has been sweeping them all along together, in step, she had thought. And now this.
Susanna is still singing, clapping her hands together. Her knuckles are dimpled, each one, indented on the bone. The song goes round and round, the same four notes, the same drone of sounds, round and round. It evidently does not please him because he winces and covers one ear with a hand.
Agnes frowns. She thinks about the baby, there in her belly, curled in water, listening to all that is going on, breathing in this foul air; she thinks about the warm weight of Susanna on her lap; she thinks about this cloud of grey and rot coming off her husband.
Is this marriage, this child, their life together causing his malaise? Is it their home in this apartment that is draining the life out of him in this way? She has no idea. The thought fills her with panic. How can she tell him about the new child in her belly while he is in this state? It might only worsen his melancholy and she cannot bear to see her news greeted with sorrow, with anything less than rapture.