The Hand That First Held Mine

by Maggie O'Farrell

Alexandra arches her brows, as if pretending to think about it. Part of her doesn’t want to give in to this man. There is something about him that suggests he is used to getting his way. For some reason she thinks thwarting him would do him good. ‘That might be possible, I really don’t know. Perhaps—’

  Unfortunately for everyone, Dorothy chooses that moment to make her entrance. Some signal on her maternal radar has informed her of a male predator in the vicinity of her eldest daughter. ‘May I help you?’ she calls, in a tone that contradicts the sentence.

  Alexandra whirls around to see her mother advancing down the lawn, baby’s bottle held out like a pistol. She watches as Dorothy takes in the man, all the way from his light grey shoes to his collarless suit. By the sour turn to her mouth, Alexandra can tell at once that she does not like what she sees.

  The man gives Dorothy a dazzling smile and his teeth appear very white against his tanned skin. ‘Thank you, but this lady,’ he gestures towards Alexandra, ‘was assisting me.’

  ‘My daughter,’ Dorothy stresses the word, ‘is rather busy this morning. Sandra, I thought you would be keeping an eye on the baby. Now, what can we—’

  ‘Alexandra!’ Alexandra shouts at her mother. ‘My name is Alexandra!’ She is aware that she is behaving like a cross child but she cannot bear this man to think her name is Sandra.

  But her mother is adept at two things: ignoring her daughter’s tantrums and extracting information from people. Dorothy listens to the story about the broken-down car and, within seconds, has dispatched the man off down the road with directions to a mechanic. He looks back once, raises his hand and waves.

  Alexandra feels something close to rage, to grief, as she hears his footsteps recede down the lane towards the village. To have been so close to someone like him and then for him to be snatched away. She kicks the tree stump, then the baby’s pram wheel. It is a particular brand of fury, peculiar to youth, that stifling, oppressive sensation of your elders outmanoeuvring you.

  ‘What on earth is wrong with you?’ Dorothy hisses, jiggling the pram handle because the baby has woken up, squawking and tussling. ‘I come down here to find you flirting with some – some gypsy over the hedge. In broad daylight! For all to see. Where is your sense of decorum? What kind of an example are you setting for your brothers and sisters?’

  ‘And, speaking of them,’ Alexandra pauses before adding, ‘all of them, where’s your sense of decorum?’ She sets off up the garden. She cannot spend another second in her mother’s company.

  Dorothy stops jiggling the handle of the pram and stares after her, open-mouthed. ‘What do you mean?’ she shouts, forgetting momentarily the proximity of the neighbours. ‘How dare you? How dare you address me in such a fashion? I’ll be speaking to your father about this, I will, as soon as he—’

  ‘Speak! Speak away!’ Alexandra hurls over her shoulder as she sprints up the garden and crashes her way into the house surprising, as she does so, a patient of her father’s who is waiting in the hallway.

  As she reaches the bedroom she is forced to share with three of her younger siblings, she can still hear her mother’s voice, screeching from the garden: ‘Am I the only one in this house to demand standards? I don’t know where you think you’re going. You’re supposed to be helping me today. You’re meant to be minding the baby. And the silver needs doing and the china. Who do you think is going to do it? The ghosts?’

  Elina jerks awake. She is puzzled by the darkness, by the way her heart is fluttering in her chest. She seems to be standing, leaning against a wall of surprising softness. Her feet feel a long way away from her. Her mouth is dry, her tongue stuck to her palate. She has no memory at all of what she is doing here, standing in the dark, dozing like this against a wall. Her mind is blank, like a ream of unmarked paper. She turns her head and suddenly, with a great heaving, everything swerves on its axis because she sees the window, she sees Ted next to her, she sees that she is not in fact standing. She is lying. On her back, hands clasped over her chest, a stone lady on a tomb.

  The room is filled with the sound of breathing. A pipe somewhere in the house shudders, then falls silent. There is a slight scratching on the roof tiles above her, like the clawed foot of a bird.

  It must have been the baby who woke her, shifting its curled position inside her, stirring perhaps after a long sleep, a leg kicking out, a hand flailing against skin. It’s been happening a lot lately.

  Elina swivels her head to look around the darkened room. The furniture, crouching blackly in the corners, the blind over the window that glows with same dirty orange as the streetlights. Ted beside her, hunched under the duvet. Books are piled up on Ted’s bedside table, his mobile phone glows green in the gloom. On her bedside table there is a stack of something that looks in the dark like outsize handkerchiefs.

  There is another noise that comes from somewhere near Elina’s head, a sharp, sudden heh-heh sound, like someone clearing their throat.

  She starts to turn over in bed, towards Ted, but she is struck with a searing pain in her stomach, as if her skin is splitting, as if someone is holding a blowtorch against her. It makes her gasp and she puts down her hands to check, to reassure herself with the feel of the drum-tight skin, the swell of the baby. But there’s nothing there. Her hands encounter only space. No swollen bump. No baby. She clutches her stomach and feels deflated, loose skin.

  Elina struggles upright – the scald of that pain again – letting out a strange, hoarse scream, and seizes Ted by the shoulder. ‘Ted,’ she says.

  He groans, burying his face in the pillow.

  She shakes him. ‘Ted. Ted, the baby’s gone – it’s gone.’

  He springs from the bed and stands in the middle of the room, in just a pair of shorts, his hair spiked, his face stricken. Then his shoulders slump. ‘What are you talking about?’ he says. ‘He’s right there.’

  ‘Where?’

  He points again. ‘There. Look.’

  Elina looks. There is indeed something on the floor beside her. In the half-darkness, it appears to be a bed that a dog might sleep in, an oval basket. Except this one has handles and inside it something is swaddled in white. ‘Oh,’ she says. She reaches for the light switch, clicks it on and the room is immediately flooded with yellow brightness. ‘Oh,’ she says again. She looks down at the empty skin of her stomach, then at the baby. She turns to Ted, who has flopped down again on the bed, muttering about how she’d scared the shit out of him.

  ‘I had the baby?’ she says.

  Ted, caught in the act of plumping his pillow, stops. His face is uncertain, frightened. Don’t be frightened, she wants to say, it’s all right. But instead she says, ‘I had it?’ because she needs to establish this: she needs to ask, to vocalise it, to hear it asked.

  ‘Elina . . . you’re joking. Aren’t you?’ He lets out a nervous, low laugh. ‘Don’t, it’s not funny. Maybe you . . . Maybe you’ve been dreaming. You must have been dreaming. Why don’t you . . .’ Ted trails into silence. He puts a hand on her shoulder and for a minute he doesn’t seem to know what to say. He stares at her and she stares back. She allows the thought: There is a baby in the room with us. It’s here. She wants to turn around and look at it again but Ted is clasping her shoulder now and clearing his throat. ‘You had the baby,’ he says slowly. ‘It was . . . in hospital. Remember?’

  ‘When?’ she says. ‘When did I have it?’

  ‘Jesus, El, are you—’ He stops himself, rubs a hand over his face, then says, in a more level voice, ‘Four days ago. You had three days of labour and then . . . and then he came. You came out of hospital last night. You discharged yourself.’

  There is a pause. Elina thinks about what Ted has said. She lays out the facts with which he has provided her, side by side, in her head. Hospital, baby, discharged, three days of labour. She considers the idea of three days and she considers the pain in her abdomen but decides not to mention it now.

  ‘Elina?’

  ‘What?’

&n
bsp; He is peering into her face. He smooths the hair away from her brow, then rests his hands on her shoulders. ‘You’re probably . . . you must be terribly tired and . . . Why don’t you go back to sleep?’

  She doesn’t answer. She struggles out from under his touch, across the mattress. She clutches at her abdomen as she does so, pressing her teeth into her lip. It feels, down there, as if something might very easily spill out unless she holds it in. She crouches above the baby, looking carefully down. He, Ted said. A boy, then. He is awake, eyes wide and alert. He looks up at her from his wicker basket, his face quizzical, enquiring. He is wrapped up like a gift in a white blanket, his hands covered with white mittens. Elina reaches out and pulls them off – tiny things they are, light as cirrus clouds. His hands flex, opening and closing on empty air.

  ‘Ah,’ he says. A strangely adult noise. Very firm, very considered.

  Elina puts out her hand and touches the damp heat of his forehead, the rising and falling of his tiny, bird-like chest, the curve of his cheek, the curled flesh of the ear. His eyes blink as her fingers cross his vision, his lips opening and shutting like someone lost for words.

  She slides her palms under him, lifts him up. He is her baby, after all; she is allowed. She puts him against her, his head below her shoulder, his feet in the crook of her arm. There is, she acknowledges, something familiar in the weight of him, the lie of him. He twists his head towards her, then away, towards her, away, then gazes fixedly at the strap of her T-shirt.

  ‘You do remember, don’t you?’ Ted says again, from the bed.

  Elina pulls her face into a smile. ‘Of course,’ she says.

  When she returns to bed, a long time later – she has been staring at the baby, lifting off his hat, looking at his hair, the surprising deep-water blue of his eyes, putting her finger in his palm to feel the answering clench – Ted is asleep, his head resting on his arm. She is sure she won’t sleep again: how can she when she’s got so cold, when there is this pain, when she seems to have had a baby? She edges as close as she dares to Ted, whose body seems to fan heat towards her. Elina pushes her head down underneath the duvet, where it is dark and hot. She won’t sleep again.

  But she must have, because what feels like minutes later she comes round to a bedroom so bright and glaring she has to hold her hand over her face and Ted is dressed and saying he has to go and kissing her goodbye.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she says, struggling on to her elbow.

  His face falls. ‘To work,’ he says. ‘No choice,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘The film,’ he says. ‘Behind on the assemblies,’ he says. ‘Take some leave at the end of the shoot,’ he says. ‘Hopefully,’ he says.

  This is followed by a short argument because Ted wants to call his mother to come and help. Elina can hear herself saying no, can feel herself shaking her head. He then says she can’t be on her own, that he’ll call her friend Suki, but the idea of anyone in the house is horrifying. Elina cannot think how she would talk to these people; she cannot imagine what she might say. No, she says, no and no again.

  And she must be winning this argument because Ted is scratching his head, fiddling with his bag and kissing her goodbye, and then she hears him descend the stairs, the front door slam and the house is silent.

  She longs more than anything to sink again into the oblivion of sleep, to press her cheek into the pillow, to bring down the portcullises of her lids over her eyes. She can feel the proximity of such sleep, she can taste it. But next to her is the noise of puffing, struggling, small mammalian pants.

  She peers over the edge of the bed and there he is again. The baby. ‘Hei,’ Elina says, surprising herself by talking Finnish.

  The baby doesn’t answer. He is intent on his own battle with something unseen: his arms flail in the air around him, he makes small, gruff, growling noises. And then, as if a switch has been flicked, he lets out a yell, a long, loud shout of anguish.

  Elina draws back, as if she’s been slapped. Then she sees that she has to get up. She has to address this situation. It is up to her. There is no one else. The baby takes a big breath and launches into another cry. Elina bends, wincing, and picks him up. She holds his rigid, angry body. What can be wrong with him? She tries to summon up the advice of the baby books she’s read but can remember nothing. She walks to the window and back. ‘There, there,’ she tries. ‘It’s OK.’

  But the baby screams, arching his back, his face all mouth, his skin a livid pink.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she says again, and then she sees that he is twisting his head, stretching wide his mouth, like a front-crawl swimmer turning for air. Hungry. That means he’s hungry – of course. Why didn’t she think of that?

  She sits down in the chair, just in time because her legs are feeling strangely shaky, and lifts her T-shirt, hesitating, trying to remember those mystifying diagrams of breastfeeding. Latching on. Positioning. Common feeding problems. But she needn’t have worried. The baby seems to know exactly what to do. He goes for the breast like a dog offered a bone and begins to suck, avidly for a few seconds, then more slowly, then avidly again. Elina stares down at him, dumbstruck by his calm, his efficiency. They sit there for what feels to Elina like an unaccountably long time. Is this normal? To sit like this for half an hour, three-quarters of an hour, more than an hour? The morning goes on outside in the street: people walking up the street towards the Heath, people walking down the street towards the bus stop. The patches of sunlight edge across the carpet towards Elina’s feet and the baby still feeds.

  Elina thinks she may have fallen asleep in the chair because she comes to and her whole body is in sunlight and the baby lying on her lap, rather like a cat, staring this time at her wristwatch.

  She tests herself, scans her mind. Has she remembered anything? Has it come back to her while she was sleeping? The birth, the birth, the birth, she intones to herself, you must remember, you have to remember. But no. She can recall being pregnant. She can see the baby here, lying in her lap. But how it got there is a mystery.

  She puts both hands to her face and rubs her skin, scuffing it with her palms, trying to rouse herself. ‘So,’ she says into the silence, her voice wavering slightly. Why is the house so silent, as silent as someone expecting an answer? ‘Here we are.’ She is, she notices, talking Finnish again. ‘What would you like to do now?’ she asks the baby, as if he is a guest with whom she has only the slightest acquaintance.

  She raises herself up, slowly, slowly, clutching his body to her, and trails downstairs, feeling her way, never taking her eyes off the baby’s face. Her son. He came out of her. She knows this because Ted says so and because there is something in the angle of the baby’s forehead, the swirl of hair there, that brings to mind her father. She passes the open bathroom door as she drifts downstairs and she sees on the floor a changing mat with red stripes and she remembers, she actually remembers, buying this. She remembers being disgusted by the decoration on such things – arrays of mincing teddy bears, anthropomorphised fish with leering grins, ducks with long-lashed, kohled gazes. Around the mat are arranged some nappies, a packet of wipes, a cloth octopus, a jar of ointment. Who put these things there? Was it her? And when?

  At the bottom of the stairs is a pram and this, too, she remembers. Their friend Simmy bought it for them. He arrived with it one evening, pushing it in front of him. This was before. When she was still pregnant. A strange contraption it is, with silver wheels, a concertinaed hood in navy blue, a smart, shiny brake for the wheels. There are sheets in the pram, she sees, and a blanket. She hovers next to it for a moment. Then she lowers the baby into it, just to see what will happen. The baby lies there matter-of-factly, as if used to such things. He kicks his legs. He gazes at the hood, he gazes past her, he gazes at the rivet holding the hood to the pram sides. He closes his eyes and falls asleep. Elina stands there, watching him for a while. Then she goes into the kitchen.

  She arrives, somehow, at the doors to the garden. Two of them, large pan
es of reinforced glass. For security, Ted said, when she asked why the glass was so thick, so solid. She finds she is holding a mug, a folded newspaper. She bends to put them on the floor, and as she does so, something in her abdomen twangs and she gasps with the pain of it, dropping the mug and paper. She grips the door frame to stop herself falling, leaning her forehead into the glass, pressing her hand over the spot. She swears, in a variety of languages, over and over.

  When she opens her eyes again, everything is still as it was. The kitchen behind her. The garden in front of her. It is very simple, she tells herself. You were pregnant and now you have a baby. But why doesn’t she remember having it?

  At the bottom of the garden is a wooden building, a room. Elina’s studio, built for her by Ted. Or, at least, Ted paid two Polish men to build it for her. It is made of ash, bitumen, glass-wool insulation, stainless steel – she had asked them the words and they had had to look them up in a Polish dictionary to find the English word for her to compare, side by side, in her head with the Finnish. It had made them all laugh. One asked her if she missed Finland and she had said no, and then said yes, sometimes. But she hadn’t lived there for a long time now. And did they miss Poland, she asked them. They had both nodded, silently. ‘We go back,’ one told her, ‘in two years.’