The Hand That First Held Mine

by Maggie O'Farrell

  She appeared to be banked up on numerous pillows. Something – she wasn’t sure what, the morphine, perhaps – was making her eyes roll backwards in their sockets every few minutes. It made the room lurch and pitch and Elina had to struggle to stay in the here and now, not to give in to the medicine’s dragging force. It was like a strong current in the sea, pulling her down.

  Ted was across the room, a long way off, it seemed, in a chair. He had a pen in his hand and he was filling in some forms. As she looked, he raised his head, and Elina almost gasped because his face was such a shock: drawn, grey, tense, it was a skin-covered mask. She felt that he might be a stranger, might be anyone. What’s happened? she wanted to say. Why do you look like that?

  The door swung open and Elina turned her head and suddenly Ted’s mother was in the room.

  ‘Ohhhh!’ she squealed. ‘Ohhhh! My darling!’ She swooped across the room and for a disconcerting moment, Elina thought she meant her. But Ted’s mother wasn’t looking at her. She was lifting up the baby and settling him in her arms. ‘You,’ she said, and Elina wondered why she was talking so loudly, ‘just look at you.’

  She had her back to the bed now and was walking away towards the window. Where the baby had been on Elina’s chest felt damp. She could feel the outline of the baby on herself, where warmth had generated between them. She saw her hand, her chrysalis hand, raising itself from the bed, as if she would speak. But she wasn’t sure what she would say and Ted was getting up from the chair and her eyes were doing that rolling thing so that all she saw before she forced them down again was the ceiling, the bags of fluid hanging above her.

  ‘. . . just terrible,’ Ted was saying, with his new, grey face, and Elina had to strain to hear him, ‘. . . lost his heartbeat and . . . whisked into theatre . . . but then everything just . . . everywhere, an unbelievable . . . Elina nearly—’ Ted came to a halt, swallowing his final word.

  For a moment, no one spoke. There was the slight, impossible sound of the baby’s breathing: a rapid, fluttering in – out. The silence in the room seemed as fragile, as intricate, as frost.

  ‘Mmm, oh dear,’ Ted’s mother said. ‘Get my camera, would you? It’s in my bag there.’ She was gazing down at the baby. Her expression was hard to read. It was rapt, fierce, complicated. It was one of covetousness or avid desire, and it sent a pulse of fear through Elina. And the baby, as if sensing this, let out an abrupt high-pitched cry.

  From the bed, Elina saw her arm rise up again. This time Ted saw. He came over and leant his head towards her, his hand taking hold of hers. ‘What is it?’ he said. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘The baby.’ Elina was surprised at how hoarse her voice was. ‘I want the baby back.’

  And here she is again, Ted’s mother, sitting on the sofa she’d complained about, waiting for the baby to wake up so she can ‘have a hold’.

  ‘Vilkuna?’ she is saying, as if it’s a swearword. ‘He’ll be a Vilkuna? You’re not going to give your son his proper name?’

  Ted adjusts the angle of his mug, keeping his eyes on the rug under his feet. ‘There’s no reason why a child should have his father’s name instead of—’

  ‘No reason? No reason? There’s every reason in the world. People are going to think he’s a . . . that he’s illegitimate, that he’s—’

  ‘Well, he is,’ Elina says.

  Ted’s mother turns her head with a jerk, as if she’d forgotten Elina was there and the sound of her voice had given her a fright.

  ‘In my day,’ she begins in a shaking voice, ‘that was not something people broadcast. In my day—’

  ‘The world’s changed, Mum.’ Ted stands, picking up his mug. ‘Let’s face it. More tea?’

  After his parents leave, tucking themselves into their neat little silver car and driving back to Islington, Ted returns to the sitting room. There isn’t a surface that isn’t covered with the flotsam and jetsam of the day: nappies have washed up all over the floor, coffee cups on the tables, a breast pump on the television, cards brought by his mother, a half-eaten plate of biscuits on the bookshelves, a baby-care manual face down on a chair.

  Ted sighs and slumps on to the sofa. He had had no idea that having a baby would entail so much entertaining, so many visitors, so many phone calls and emails, so many pots of tea to be made, served, cleared away, washed up, that the mere act of procreation meant that people suddenly wanted to come around several times a week and sit in your house for hours on end.

  Ted clears away the tea tray. He walks about the sitting room, past Elina, who is wiping something off one part of the baby’s body while simultaneously smearing something on another, picking his way through toys, rattles, nappies, wipes, muslin squares. He gathers up stray coffee cups, cake plates, moves them from the sitting room to the kitchen. Elina hands him the baby before getting down on her hands and knees and scrubbing at a stain – milk? sick? shit? – on the rug.

  Ted holds his son to his chest and does circuits of the room, round and round the table. The baby’s eyes roll in their sockets, he sucks absently on his thumb – surely he’ll sleep. Ted walks on, listing from side to side, a ship in calm seas. The baby’s eyelids droop, his sucking slows, but as soon as he falls asleep his thumb drops out and he jerks awake again, his eyes rolling open in dismay. Suck, suck, eyes close, thumb falls out, eyes open and round they go again, past Elina, who is now folding muslin squares, through the toys, over the changing mat, through the nappies. Ted adjusts his position so that the thumb arm is wedged against him, immovable, but the change seems to remind the baby of something because he starts, back stiff, neck twisting, alert to the possibility of food.

  Ted tries a bit longer to get him to sleep but all he wants now is to eat – he cries, he frets, he strains and struggles – and eventually Ted taps Elina on the shoulder. Without a word, she sweeps a mess of wipes, instructions for sterilisers, baby socks, unopened cards off the chair on to the floor and sits, lifting her blouse.

  Ted is surprised at how smoothly and quickly she does the latching on: unsnaps her bra with one hand, while the other does a swift tilting motion with the baby. He gives a final, high cry of relief and is then silent. Elina settles herself deeper into the chair and lets her head fall back to the wall. Ted registers again how pale she is, how dark and deep are the circles around her eyes, how thin her limbs look. He is possessed with an urge to apologise – for what he isn’t sure. He scans his mind for something to say, something light and perhaps witty, something to take them out of themselves, to remind them that life is not all like this. But he can’t think of anything and now the baby is rearing back, crying, fidgeting, fists flailing, and Elina is having to open her eyes, sit up again, lift him to her shoulder, rub his back, untangle his hands from her hair and Ted cannot bear it. He cannot bear to watch her having to rouse herself, to lift that tired head from the wall, to rev herself into action. He lunges for a forgotten cake plate and makes for the kitchen.

  The baby cannot settle to his feed. Elina pushes herself into a standing position. Sometimes the only thing that works is feeding him while she walks around. The movement seems to soothe him, seems to allow him to digest. Or something. She walks slowly, slowly to the window, then back. The baby fusses, turns his head this way, then back, and finally latches on. Elina keeps walking, letting out her breath a bit at a time. Ted is in the kitchen now, his hands in the washing-up bowl.

  ‘Ted,’ she says, as she passes on the way to the television, where she turns round and walks back, because she wants to say something to him, wants them both to recall that they are more to each other than just parents of the same child.

  ‘Mmm?’ He lifts a dripping cup from the water.

  The problem is she can’t think of what to say. ‘How are you doing?’ she tries.

  He looks at her, surprised. ‘I’m fine. How are you doing?’

  ‘I’m fine too.’

  ‘Good. Tired?’

  ‘Of course. You?’

  ‘Of course.’ He extra
cts a plate from the sudsy water and lays it on top of the cup. ‘Maybe you should have a nap when he’s finished.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘He might sleep. Then we could all have a nap.’

  Ted nods. ‘Sounds good.’

  Elina cannot bear it. Why are they talking to each other like this? What has happened to them? She tries to think of one thing, one interesting thing to say, to snap them out of it, but her brain fails her. She turns and marches through the room with the baby – how can it be that she has produced a child who can only eat on the move? – from the sofa, past the table, through the kitchen and to the window.

  It was not always like this. She would like to set this down: they were not always like this.

  She puts the baby to her shoulder, his forehead falling into the curve of her neck, the damp warmth of his breath spreading into her collar. She’d met Ted because she was looking for somewhere to live; she was looking for somewhere to live because she’d decided to leave Oscar; she decided to leave Oscar because he never bought his own materials and constantly stole hers, because he couldn’t cook anything other than a bacon fry-up, because he’d slept with a waitress; he’d slept with the waitress, so Oscar said, because he felt threatened by the success of Elina’s last show. And so because of all this – a chain reaction of bacon, pilfered paintbrushes, sex with waitresses, and a place to live – she had rung the number advertising a room in Gospel Oak. Near the Heath, it had said, which was why she chose it. And there, in the house near the Heath, was an attic room up a ladder, with the best kind of washed, level, London light. The man, Ted, had helped her carry in her toolboxes, her paint, her unstretched canvases. There was a garden, out the back, a kitchen painted blue and, sometimes, a girlfriend called Yvette, a thin woman with the watchful gaze of a cat. Elina worked and slept in her attic room, she gave up smoking, she avoided calls from Oscar, she had another show, bigger this time and just for her, she took up smoking again, Ted came and went downstairs, as did Yvette. If Elina heard them in the bedroom below, she put on her headphones and turned up the volume. And then suddenly Yvette was gone. Had left Ted for an actor. Ted came up the ladder to tell Elina. Elina said, never trust an actor. She took Ted out to a private view of photographs of drag queens and afterwards they went to a bar. Ted got drunk. Ted fell down. Elina called a cab and helped him into the house. The next day they looked up the actor on the Internet, using Elina’s laptop – Elina said he had the kind of looks that don’t last and, also, weren’t his trousers pulled up slightly too high? Ted began to visit her in her room. He liked to lie on her bed and tell her about the film he was working on, the rushes he’d edited that day. Elina had to stop work – she couldn’t work with anyone watching – but she could always clean her brushes, stretch a canvas, tidy her bench.

  Sometimes they went for walks on the Heath in the dusk. Sometimes they went to the cinema. They talked about the films. He lent her books. They talked about the books. He cooked for her, if she was in; if she was out, he left a note for her, saying that supper was in the fridge. She picked up the shoes he left in the sitting room, lined them up in pairs on the shoe rack. She replaced his keys on the hook. She liked to draw on the mirror in the steam of his morning shower, after he’d left for work – abstract lines that flowed to a single centre. She liked coming down in the morning and finding the water in the kettle still warm from his cup of tea. Once, finding herself cold in the late afternoon, she put on the first thing she found – a jumper of his left on the stairs – and returned to work. But she couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t make the paint work the way she wanted it to, couldn’t be anything other than what she was: a woman in a room with a brush in her hand. She flung down the brush and stalked to the slanted window and there she discovered she was holding up the jumper sleeve to her nose, breathing in, breathing in. The smell of him filled her face, surrounded her. She yanked the jumper over her head, shocked, and dropped it down the hatch to the floor below. For a week she avoided him, made sure she was out, lived her evenings in cafés, in bars, in galleries. She ate his dinners in the middle of the night, slept until lunchtime, worked in the afternoons. She collected the notes he wrote her, cooking instructions, a request for the gas money, a phone call she’d missed, and shut them inside the pages of her books. She began a series of smaller paintings, all in blacks and reds. Then one day, another note, longer this time, saying he was going to Berlin, to the film festival, had an extra ticket and did she want to come? She went. Berlin was cold, the air filled with sleet, the trams powering through mounds of dirty snow. They ate apple cake in cafés, saw films in the afternoons, went to look at the remains of the Wall. They stayed in a hotel with twin beds and tinted-glass windows that made the sky appear tea-coloured. The bedcovers were nylon and slid off in the night. Elina listened to his breathing as he slept. She peeped at his passport photo while he was in the bathroom. She looked at his empty clothes, crumpled on a chair. They went to the art gallery, more films, some parties where people were drinking frozen vodka that Ted said made his teeth ache; she watched as he chatted to a producer from Canada called Cindy and as they exchanged email addresses. Elina got drunk. Elina fell down. Ted helped her back to the hotel and put her under the bedcovers. He brought her water to drink in the morning. They went to find Potsdam Square and found only a shopping arcade. They ate tortillas that were too greasy, they wrote postcards. She asked Ted who his were to and he told her; he didn’t ask about hers. They saw another film, they ate more apple cake, they went to another party. She listened to his breathing as he slept. Both their bedcovers slid off during the night, into the space between their beds. Elina woke early, the sky a dark tannin brown, to find them there, jumbled together. They went home. Back in her attic room, she propped the black and red paintings against the wall, facing in. She mixed some paint but let it dry on the palette. She shook the notes out of the books into the bin. She lay on her bed, head tipped over the end, smoking, looking out of the skylight. She was smoking in the garden when Ted got back. She heard him come in, heard him move through the house, turning on lights, opening the fridge. After a while, he came out into the garden. He called her very softly, Elina, with a lilt at the end, which made a question of her name. But she didn’t turn round. He said: I didn’t think there was anybody here. He came across the lawn, his bare feet soft in the grass and he picked up the end of her belt – a long, fabric belt it was, connected to her top, that wound round and round her, many times – and he pulled her towards him, hand over hand, like a man hauling himself from deep water.

  So they were not always like this. Elina tells herself this as she watches Ted tip out the washing-up water, as she coaxes the baby towards sleep, as she surveys the wreckage of the room.

  Lexie doesn’t hear from Innes as soon as she thought she might. At the end of their dinner, he had walked her to Leicester Square Tube station, talking the whole way. He was still talking – about a painting he’d bought once in Rome, about a flat he’d lived in near here, about a book he was reviewing that he thought she ought to read – as he kissed her cheek, the lightest possible kiss, a graze of his mouth on her skin, as he adjusted the scarf about her neck, as she waved goodbye and walked down the steps to the Underground.

  She works on Monday and Tuesday: going up, going down, going up again, and again, and again. On Wednesday, she accepts a lunch invitation from a man in Accounts. He tells her he is about to leave to work for a company that is buying up the City’s remaining bombsites. They go to a café – an Italian café, and Lexie thinks of Mrs Collins as she orders – to eat cutlets smothered in gravy. The colleague drops gravy from his fork on to his suit and enumerates the different types of bombs used during the war and the particular sorts of damage caused by each. Lexie nods as if interested but she is thinking about the bombsites she has seen around London – blackened craters choked with nettles, terraces with a sudden raw gap, windowless buildings with that sightless, vacant appearance – and she is thinking she wouldn’t go anywhere
near them, wouldn’t have anything to do with them.

  She works some more. She ferries people from footwear to electrical goods, from millinery to corsetry, from gloves and scarves to the café on the top floor. On Thursday, she gets out Innes’s business card from her bag and looks at it. She puts it into the pocket of her uniform. She touches it, every now and again, between operating the lift’s machinery. At the end of the day, she puts it back. Friday, she refuses another invitation – for a walk in Hyde Park – from the man in Accounts.

  At the weekend, she goes to the Tate Gallery; she walks along the river. She goes to the pictures in Hampstead with Hannah. She rearranges the furniture in her room again, polishes her shoes, writes a shopping list. The weather turns humid and heavy, and Lexie sits at her open window, her stockings drying on the ledge, staring up at the sky, struck by how oddly like the sky at home it looks.

  At five past six on Monday evening Lexie walks out of the doors of the department store with the accountant and there, parked half on, half off the kerb, is a silver and ice-blue MG. Its owner is leaning against the bonnet, reading a newspaper, cigarette smoke drifting from him like a scarf. He is wearing curious pointed boots with elasticated sides and a turquoise shirt.