The Hand That First Held Mine

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Which means they must be back in Poland by now. Elina looks down the garden at the studio they built for her, the straight sides panelled in ash, the bitumen roof. It says in her passport, on her tax return, on forms she has to fill in that she is an artist. But she doesn’t know what it means. She cannot recall when she was last in her studio, she cannot remember how you be an artist, what you do, how you spend your time. Her life in that small wooden building, all the hours she’s spent in there, seem as distant as her time in kindergarten.

  She could – it is possible – go down there today. She could take the key from where it hangs next to the fridge, pick her way over the wet grass, pushing the baby in his squeaking pram, open the door and go inside. She could look at what is pinned to the wall, at any canvases she’s left leaning against the cupboards; she could try to reconnect with whatever it was she’d been doing before. She isn’t meant to be working, she knows. But she could read in her studio, she could sit and look at the light coming in through the window in the roof. There is a chair in there – she reupholstered it herself in green wool, next to a window. It would be a good place to perhaps try and remember things.

  She is thinking about this, biting her lip, considering, when she realises that there is a scent, an odour in her nose that has been there all morning. A slightly cloying musk. Like unaired clothes. Like wet paper. Like milk.

  Elina turns. She sniffs the air. Nothing except the slight tang of laundry soap. She sniffs her pyjama top, then her hair, the skin of her wrist, the crook of her elbow, the hard heel of her palm.

  It’s her. She is astonished. A new smell. She doesn’t smell like she used to, the way she has smelt all her life. It’s her.

  Ted yanks back his chair and slumps into it, tossing his bag to the sofa behind him. He switches on the screens and, while waiting for them to flicker to life, he scoots in the chair across the editing suite towards the in-tray. Phone messages, a couple of letters, a request for a reference, a scrawled note from a producer about an editing copy of a film Ted finished recently. He pushes his chair towards the phone and is about to pick it up when he stops.

  He flips a pen between thumb and finger. He uncaps it, recaps it. He places both hands on the curved edge of the desk. He glances at the screens in front of him, one of which is displaying some kind of error message, something about a missing file. He looks away, at his shoes, one of which he sees is coming undone, at the phone, which has a red light flashing on and off, at the fathomless black faces of the speakers, at the pile of stuff sitting on the sofa. Fruit baskets, bunches of flowers sheathed in cellophane, a baby blanket tied up with a ribbon, a monstrous satin dog with an expression of vapid joy. On his desk, right beside his elbow, is a gold carrier-bag. It is the stiff, cardboard type, given out in only the most expensive shops, with a blue thread wound through the top. The editing-house receptionist gave it to him as he came through the door. ‘Congratulations,’ she’d said. ‘A little boy!’ And she’d hugged him and Ted had felt the zip on her trousers dig into the flesh of his hip, the cold metal of her bangles on the back of his neck.

  ‘Thank you,’ he’d said, when he took the bag, nodding at all the people who had gathered around – the office manager, the girl who fetched the coffee, an actress he vaguely recognised, a few other editors. ‘That’s really nice of you. It’s really . . .’ And then he’d had to stop because if he ventured any further into that sentence he would start to cry. He hasn’t cried since he was a child, not once in his adolescence, not even when he’d had that accident, coming off a scooter in Greece. But he could feel the tears right there, like a wave rising up in his chest. Dear God, what was wrong with him?

  Ted reaches again for the phone but withdraws his hand, using it instead to roughly massage his forehead. He allows himself the thought: What are you doing here? This is madness, he should be at home, he should be with Elina, with the baby, not here, fiddling about with the rushes of a project he has no interest in – how many more bungled-heist movies does the world need anyway? Why is he here?

  It seems astonishing to him, as he surveys the desk, that everything looks so exactly the same. The DVDs lined up on the shelf, the sheaf of pens in their pot, the screens sitting side by side, the computer mouse with its trailing leash, his reinforced wrist rest (a futile attempt to ease his RSI), the postcard of one of Elina’s paintings pinned to the wall.

  He stares at the postcard, the red line that bisects the blue triangle, that towers over the black shape crouched in the corner. He’d seen the painting as it emerged on the canvas. He wasn’t supposed to have seen it – she didn’t like anyone to see her work before she deemed it finished – but he’d peered through the window of her studio when he’d known she wasn’t looking. It was his way of keeping up with what went on inside her head. He’d seen it hang on the wall of her gallery, he’d watched the red dot go up beside it at the private view and the glow on her face as she saw this. And now it hung in the house of a music producer and Ted often wondered if he loved it as much as he should, if he looked at it as much as he should, if it was hung in the right way, in the right light.

  Four days ago, she’d almost died.

  The thought has a physical effect on him. One of disorientation and nausea, like seasickness or looking down from a high building. He has to lean his head in his hands and breathe deeply, and he feels the earlier tears crowding into his throat.

  She’d almost died right there in front of them all. He’d felt death in the room, like a cloud gathering itself somewhere up near the ceiling, and its presence felt oddly familiar, as if he’d been somehow expecting it, as if part of him had known all along that this was how it might end. Don’t look, the nurse said to him, don’t look. And plucked at his sleeve. But how could he not? How could he turn away, like the nurse wanted him to, when it was Elina lying there, when it was his fault she was pregnant in the first place, it was him who’d done it, he was the one who’d whispered that time, in that hotel in Madrid, let’s not bother, just this once? The nurse had taken his arm then. Come away, she’d said, more firmly. You mustn’t look.

  But he couldn’t not look. He’d held on to the metal rail of a gurney, shaken off the nurse. People were running and shouting to each other, and in the middle of the room lay Elina and her top half looked so serene. White and immovable, her face expressionless, her eyes half closed, her hands folded on her chest, she was a medieval saint from a painting. Her bottom half – Ted had never seen anything like it. And at that moment, he seemed to stop seeing it. He seemed to stop seeing anything at all. Except a horizon that was possibly the sea, a lead-coloured sea that heaved up and heaved down, a featureless expanse of water. It was its endlessness that made him feel queasy, its reflective skin that mirrored the clouded sky. Where is she? he could hear a voice saying. Where is she?

  Ted pushes his chair away from the desk with such force that it strikes the edge of the glass coffee-table behind him. He stands, he walks to the porthole in the door and back again. He sits down in his chair. He stands again. He strides to the window and lowers the blinds with a flick. He pushes the mouse one way, then the other. He picks up the phone, calls through to Reception and tells them to send the heist-movie director straight through when he arrives.

  Elina keeps having these odd jumps. Lapses, she thinks of them. She must tell Ted about them. It’s like the needle on the record player her family once had. She and her brother used to put on one of their parents’ old Beatles LPs and take turns in stamping on the floor. The needle would leap from one song to another. The glee, the unpredictability of it! You could be in the middle of Lucy and her diamond sky when all of a sudden John was on about a show tonight on trampoline. And then on again to Paul and the rain coming in.

  But there must be some kind of karmic punishment for inflicting damage on LPs because this seems to be happening in Elina’s life. Maybe ‘jumps’ isn’t the word. Maybe her life has sprung four thousand holes. Because one minute it was early morning and she was dis
covering the new smell and then suddenly she is lying on the living-room floor and the phone is ringing.

  Elina eases herself to her feet. The baby is lying on a rug next to her, arms waving in the air, as if he is directing traffic. She can feel that her hair is sticking up on one side, a little like the punk effect she used to try for when she was a teenager. She squints at the phone for a moment before picking it up. She is so tired that the floor tilts if she moves too fast. She rests a palm on the sofa arm to steady herself, remembering that she has done this very same thing only recently, steadying herself before answering the phone, and she has the distinct impression that she has spoken to her mother at some point today but cannot recall what they talked about. Maybe this is her again.

  ‘Hello?’ she says.

  ‘Hi.’ Ted’s voice is speaking into her ear. It comes from a place of noise. She can hear people shouting, people walking, a rustle, a bang. It is not the hushed, respectful silence of the editing suite. He must be on set. ‘How are you?’ his voice says from out of the din. ‘Are you OK? How’s it going?’

  Elina has no idea how she is, how it is going. But she says, ‘Fine.’

  ‘What have you been up to?’

  ‘Um.’ Elina looks about the room and catches sight of the laundry basket, full of wet washing. ‘I did some laundry. And I spoke to my mother.’

  ‘Uh-huh. What else?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Oh.’

  There is a pause. She considers telling him about the lapses, the holes. How would she begin? With the story about the record player? Or would she just say, Ted, I have these moments where life disappears into a hole and I can’t remember what happens in them? I can’t, for example, recall the small matter of having had a baby?

  ‘I . . . er . . .’ she begins, but Ted interrupts.

  ‘Have you eaten anything?’

  She thinks about this. Has she? She might have. ‘I can’t remember,’ she says.

  ‘You can’t remember?’ Ted repeats, and his voice is full of horror. Someone close to him is shouting loudly about the catering van. Elina tries to comb her hair flat with her fingers and, as she does so, she catches sight of a yellow leaflet beside the phone entitled Coping With Blood Loss. She picks it up. She holds it to her face and looks at the printed words.

  ‘Elina?’ Ted’s voice startles her.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. She drops the leaflet. It swoops and slides under a chair. She’ll get it later.

  ‘You need to eat. The midwife said so. Have you eaten anything? Can you remember eating anything?’

  ‘I can,’ she says quickly, and lets out a little laugh. ‘I mean I did. I mean I can’t remember what I was going to have for lunch.’

  But she still isn’t getting it right. ‘Lunch?’ Ted says. ‘El, it’s three thirty.’

  She is genuinely surprised. ‘Is it?’

  ‘Have you been asleep?’

  She looks round the room again, at the place where she was lying on the rug before he rang. The thick pile of it is imprinted with the shape of a body, like a murder scene. ‘Maybe. Yes. I probably was.’

  ‘Have you taken your painkillers?’

  ‘Um.’ She casts her eyes around the room again. What would the right answer be here? ‘Yes,’ she says.

  ‘Listen, I have to go.’ There is a pause. ‘I think I’m going to call my mum.’

  ‘No,’ Elina says quickly. ‘It’s OK. I’m OK, honestly.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ve got her number, haven’t you? Just in case. I’ll be back around six, I think. We’re pretty much finished here.’ His voice is placatory, wary. ‘I’ll cook us a nice dinner then. But eat something now, OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  She is sitting in a chair near the back door, looking at her studio again when the doorbell rings. Elina freezes, one hand pressed to the window. She waits. Ted’s mother? Did he call her after all? She’ll just stay here in the kitchen. Whoever it is will think no one’s in and go away. She turns back to the garden. The doorbell shrills again, for longer this time. Elina ignores it. It goes again, for even longer.

  Still at the window, Elina begins to imagine a scenario in which Ted’s mother calls him to say that Elina isn’t answering the door. And then Ted will worry that something has happened and he’ll have to leave work and come home. Elina raises herself out of the chair, carefully, carefully, and, leaning her weight on the wall, goes through to the hall. The baby, she sees, is back in his pram, asleep.

  When she opens the door, the person on the doorstep – not Ted’s mother, but a woman with frazzled yellow hair, her large body squeezed into stretchy blue trousers – doesn’t wait to be invited in. She doesn’t even wait for Elina to speak. She pushes past her, muttering about the rain, marches down the hallway and sits on Elina’s sofa, busying herself with papers and files and pen lids.

  Elina follows and stands before her on the carpet, astonished. She wants to say, who are you, what are you doing here, who sent you, but something about the files and papers strikes her dumb. She waits to see what will happen next.

  ‘So.’ The woman sighs and shifts her blue bottom against the sofa. ‘You’re Natalie.’

  It isn’t a question and Elina has to think about this. Is she Natalie? She doesn’t think so. ‘No,’ she says.

  The woman frowns. She scratches her hair with the end of the pen. ‘You’re not Natalie?’

  Elina gives a firm shake of the head.

  The woman flips over a piece of paper, screwing up her eyes, and says, ‘Oh.’ It is a sound full of disappointment, of weariness, and Elina wants to say sorry, she wants to apologise for not being Natalie. She wants to say that maybe she could be.

  ‘You’re Elina,’ the woman says, with another sigh.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how are we today, Elina?’

  Elina finds the interchangeable use of the plural in English confusing. She is one person, one only. How can she be a ‘we’? ‘Fine,’ she replies, hoping this woman will leave.

  But the woman has a list of other questions. She wants to know what Elina is eating and how often. She wants to know if Elina is going out, how much she is sleeping, whether she has joined a group, if she is planning to join a group, if she’s taking her pills, if she is getting any help.

  ‘Help?’ Elina repeats.

  The woman shoots her a sharp glance from under her yellow fringe. Then she looks around the room. Then she looks at Elina’s pyjamas. ‘Do you live alone?’ she says.

  ‘No. There’s my boyfriend but . . .’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘He’s at work. He didn’t want to be. I mean, he was going to take time off. But he’s got this shoot that’s overrun and . . . well . . . you know.’

  This causes much scribbling in the file. This woman with her files and questions is making Elina tired. If she weren’t here, Elina could stretch herself out on the rug, lay her head on her arm and fall asleep.

  ‘And how is everything healing up?’ the woman asks, peering at something in her file.

  ‘Healing up?’

  ‘The scar.’

  ‘What scar?’

  The woman gives her another sharp look. ‘The section scar.’ An expression of doubt crosses her features for a split second. ‘You did have a section, didn’t you?’

  ‘A section?’ Elina circles the word warily. It means, she is sure, a part of something or a bit of something. A slice. She puts her hands to her abdomen and thinks about the searing, blowtorch pain there. ‘A section,’ she murmurs again.

  The woman glances again at her notes. She lifts a page in her file, she lets it fall. ‘It says here . . . let’s see . . . non-progressive labour, complications and – yes – emergency surgery, blood loss.’

  Elina stares at her. She would like to reach down, pick up the woman’s bag by its straps and hurl it through the window. She imagin
es the tinkling clatter of smashing glass, the fragmenting of something so perfect, so clear, and the satisfying thud as the bag hits the pavement.

  The woman is glaring back at her, her brows lowered, her mouth open slightly.

  ‘I need you,’ Elina says, forming each word very slowly, ‘to leave. Please. I’m very busy. I have to . . . I have to be . . . somewhere. Would you mind? Maybe we could do this another day.’ She is careful to be polite. She has no idea who this woman is but that is no reason to be rude. She walks the woman through the hall towards the door. ‘Thank you so much,’ she says, as she shuts the door. ‘Goodbye.’

  Alexandra shuts herself in her room for the rest of the day, pushing a chair under the door handle to keep out the siblings. They chitter and moan on the other side but she doesn’t relent. She pores over a map of London. She gets down a suitcase from the wardrobe, shakes the dust out of its purple satin interior, flicks through her coat-hangers, deciding what she’ll take for her new life and what she’ll leave. The smaller siblings, enthralled by the drama of it all, start to pass notes and biscuits and, inexplicably, a hair ribbon under the gap.