The Hand That First Held Mine

by Maggie O'Farrell

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On what you’re going to pay me.’

  Innes’s face clouded for the first time. ‘You mercenary little so-and-so. I offer you the opportunity of a lifetime, a chance to lift yourself – so to speak – from the deadliest of deadly jobs and—’

  ‘It’s not mercenary at all. Merely practical. I can’t live on thin air. I’ve got to pay my rent, I’ve got to eat, I’ve got to buy my Tube tickets, I’ve got to pay for—’

  ‘All right, all right,’ he said testily, ‘spare me the inventory of your spending habits.’ He lifted the cigarette to his mouth and inhaled. ‘Hmm,’ he said, addressing the ceiling. ‘She wants paying.’ He thought a bit more. ‘There’s no money, of course, none at all. I suppose I could sell one of my paintings. That ought to keep you in nylons for a while and—’

  ‘I don’t wear nylons,’ she put in.

  He looked at her. ‘Don’t you? Good. Can’t abide them.’ He looked back at the ceiling. ‘So. I sell a painting. We can pay you out of that until I come up with a better solution. And, of course, you’ll have to move in with me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘To save on your rent. I shan’t charge you for bed and board.’

  ‘Innes, I can’t possibly—’

  ‘We all have to make sacrifices.’ He was grinning, one hand behind his head. ‘I’m going to sell my Hepworth lithograph of the bisected sphere. The least you can do is bunk up with me for a while.’

  ‘But . . . but . . .’ She floundered. Innes used the opportunity to put his hand up and caress her right breast. ‘Stop it,’ she said, ‘I’m trying to have a serious conversation.’ She pushed his hand away. ‘But what about your wife?’ she came up with.

  The hand was back. ‘What about her? I don’t need to ask her permission about who I employ,’ he murmured, starting to nuzzle the underside of her breast.

  ‘I meant about living with you.’

  ‘Oh.’ He flopped back to the sofa. He exhaled a stream of smoke and stared for a moment at the drifting coils, then reached out and started to grind his cigarette into a saucer. ‘You don’t need to worry about that. We don’t live together – haven’t for a while. It’s none of her business.’

  She said nothing but began to plait the tassels of the blanket together.

  ‘It’s none of her business,’ he said again.

  Lexie continued with her plaiting. ‘Do you often ask girls to live with you?’ she asked, without looking at him. She didn’t care about the other women but she did rather want to know where she came in the order of things.

  ‘Never,’ he declared. ‘I’ve never asked anyone else. I’ve never had anyone else back to my flat before, even to spend the night. I don’t like to clutter the place up with . . . with . . .’ he waved a hand in the air, ‘. . . people.’ They both reflected on this for a moment and then, without warning, Innes leapt from the sofa. ‘Let’s go,’ he said, starting to pull on his clothes.

  ‘Go where?’ she asked, bewildered. She had not, as yet, got used to Innes’s abrupt changes of course.

  ‘To pick up your things.’ He took hold of her hand and pulled her from the sofa.

  ‘What things?’

  ‘From your bedsit.’ He handed her her coat, seemingly unmindful of the fact that she was still naked. ‘You’ve lived in that shrine to virginity long enough. You’re coming to live with me.’

  Innes’s flat today is no longer a flat. At first glance, it is unrecognisable, fifty years on. But the door jambs are the same, the window fastenings, the light switches, the ceiling covings. The raised grain of his wallpaper is just discernible under the awful lilac paint that has been daubed on the walls. There is still the loose board on the landing, which always tripped people up, now covered with beige carpet, and no one who lives here now knows that under there, still, is a spare key for the Elsewhere offices. The fireplace has survived the rooms’ various renovations and incarnations. It is still the same narrow, early-Victorian affair with the outlines of leaves and stems pressed into the iron. There is a scorch mark on the left-hand side from an accident with a candle that Lexie lit in the winter of 1959, when they’d run out of sixpences for the meter. Under the carpet by the door there is a stain on the floorboards, which appeared during a party they held the same year. There is a strong sense of them both in these rooms – that and the hope that time might blur and collapse and, if one were to turn round fast enough at the right moment, one might catch a glimpse of Innes. Sitting in a chair, a book in his lap, his legs crossed, cigarette smoke spiralling to the ceiling. Standing at the windows, looking down into the street. Sitting at the desk, swearing as he struggles to fit a new ribbon into the typewriter.

  But he is gone. And so is Lexie. A young woman from the Czech Republic lives in these rooms. She plays tinny electronica music on the stereo and writes letters in blue biro on squared notepaper. She’s the au pair for the family who lives in the house – the flat has reverted to being the attic of a large house, which would interest Innes. He was always saying that they lived in what would have been the servants’ quarters.

  It is a different place, these days. Different and yet the same. It has radiators, painted walls, carpets, blinds on the windows. The tiny kitchen, which had a gas stove, a temperamental water-heater, a tin bath, is gone, knocked through to make the landing bigger. The small room at the back, where they used to eat and Innes used to work, is now a bathroom with an enormous corner bath. The panelling that separated their door, with its rusted latch and lock, from the other flats in the building is gone and, these days, the children of the house run up and down the stairs. The au pair sometimes sits in the place where Innes kept his doormat, to talk on her mobile phone in lachrymose Czech to her faraway boyfriend.

  Lexie didn’t move in with Innes that night. Innes was far too used to having his own way, to people jumping when he called, jump. Lexie dug in her heels. They were a good match, in terms of stubbornness. He drove Lexie back to her digs. They had a furious argument in the car when she refused to pack her case. The argument continued on the steps to the house and she flounced through the front door. He and his MG were back outside the department store the following evening. They had another session on the Elsewhere sofa and this time they managed to have supper as well. Lexie handed in her notice and went to work at Elsewhere. She did not give up her bedsit.

  At Elsewhere, she began by answering the phone and running errands, to the printers and back, to various bookshops and galleries and theatres. All the way there and all the way back she would turn over in her head the things she had overheard, the things they had said to each other, the things she had yet to learn.

  ‘Your shittiest standfirst ever,’ Daphne had hurled at Laurence.

  ‘Where’s the galley?’ Innes sometimes stood up and demanded.

  ‘There’s no kicker,’ Laurence said, as he pointed at what she’d learnt was called a ‘page proof’.

  Set, widow, justified, puff, credit: all these words had their own elusive meaning inside the Elsewhere office and ones she had yet to pin down. So she walked about the blue-flowered carpet, holding this new vocabulary in her head, and she made cups of tea (this, with bad grace and often sour milk) and, after a few weeks, she was allowed to type up the handwritten copy for the magazine. Typing never was her strong point. It used to make Innes shout. ‘What’s Dructuralism, Lex?’ he’d bawl across the tiny office. ‘Anyone heard of Dructuralism? And “piminal”? What the hell is a “piminal space”?’

  Laurence became very good at decoding her mistakes. ‘Liminal, Innes,’ he’d reply, without looking up from his own work. ‘She means “liminal space”.’ And she’d make him a cup of tea, unasked, unsour, to say thank you.

  Innes was constantly furious that Lexie refused to move in with him. But she didn’t like to give him the upper hand. He was her boss, she would tell him, what more did he want? Why did he want to be her landlord as well? Lover, yes, he’d reply, but landlord never. So Innes and L
exie ricocheted like metal balls in a pin-machine, arguing over the matter of where she lived and why, from the settee in Bayton Street, to jazz clubs, to eating houses, to Innes’s flat, to gallery openings, to Jimmy’s on Frith Street, to poetry nights in a smoke-hung basement where thin girls with black polo-necks and parted hair circled like moths around the poets with beards and pints. On the pavement outside the Coach and Horses they once saw her erstwhile colleague pass arm in arm with a girl Lexie recognised from the perfume counters. Could have been you, Innes remarked, placing his hand on her thigh under the beer-ringed table. Lexie leant over and stole the cigarette from his mouth.

  Like a traveller across continents, she had to shift her hours. She would get up late, aim to be in the office by mid-morning or occasionally lunchtime. Mrs Collins was regularly horrified by the sight of Lexie making her way to the bathroom at ten or eleven a.m. ‘I knew it,’ she shrieked at her one morning, ‘I knew you’d turn!’ Lexie had shut the door, turned the tap on full, smiling to herself.

  At Elsewhere, they would work until the evening and then they would head out into the streets to Soho – sometimes all together, sometimes in splintered groups of three or four – to see where they might end up. Laurence preferred the Mandrake Club, where they could find a table and listen to whoever was on stage, but Daphne complained that Laurence became ‘a crashing bore’ as soon as he stepped over the Mandrake threshold because he was so mesmerised by the music he wouldn’t converse. She always campaigned for them to come with her to the French Pub: she liked the close, fetid interior, the hordes of whores and sailors, the way the proprietor greeted her with a kiss on the hand, and the contraption on the bar that dripped water through a sugar lump into a glass of absinthe. Innes always voted for the Colony Room. He was not a big drinker, as a rule, but he argued that a great deal of work could be achieved within its green and gold walls. Laurence, however, had fallen foul too many times of the proprietress’s acid tongue, and Daphne referred to her as ‘that twisted Belcher bitch’. The Elsewhere staff would regularly be seen arguing on street corners as to who was going where and whether they would meet up again later.

  These nights tended to end at two or three in the morning, so Lexie regularly missed Mrs Collins’s curfew. After a week when she was absent from her room every night, Lexie collected her things while Innes waited in the MG at the kerb, smoking behind his sunglasses, the engine running. Mrs Collins was so outraged she wouldn’t speak to Lexie or even look at her. She shrieked, ‘Jezebel!’ as Lexie closed the front door, which made Innes roar with laughter. For years afterwards he often called her that.

  Innes’s flat was a revelation to her. It was like nowhere she’d ever been. It had no curtains at the windows, the floors were bare boards, the walls were whitewashed, and what little furniture there was was of smooth, light-coloured wood, curved to form a seat, a shelf, a sideboard. Scandinavian, Innes threw over his shoulder, when she ran her fingers over its planed surface, like someone stroking a dog. He had a bookshelf that ran around the entire place, at the level of the ceiling. ‘So no one bloody well steals them,’ he said, when she asked why. The walls were hung with art: a John Minton, he pointed out, a Nicholson, a de Kooning, a Klein, a Bacon, a Lucian Freud, a Pollock. Then he took her hand. But enough about them, he said, come and see the bedroom, it’s through here.

  Innes took her to a shop in Chelsea and bought her a scarlet coat with outsized fabric buttons, a dress in green wool crêpe with ruffles at the wrists, a pair of peacock blue stockings – ‘You are a blue stocking,’ Innes said, ‘so you might as well wear them’ – a sweater with a draped cowl neck. He took her to a hairdresser and stood beside the chair. ‘Like this,’ he instructed, sweeping a finger along her jaw, ‘and this.’

  When her parents heard that Lexie was living with a man, they told her she was dead to them, that she should never contact them again. And so she didn’t.

  It is hotter than Elina had thought. Inside, before they left, the house had been its usual temperature – cool, slightly damp, the air still and unmoving. Now she is outside, in her jeans and red sandals and blouse with a pattern of apples, she is too hot. Sweat rises to the surface of her skin; she can feel it coursing down the groove of her spine. The jeans she has on are from before – they have no elastic waist, they are ordinary jeans, worn by ordinary people. The waistband is a little tight but she has them on. She is wearing proper clothes. In them, she gets a hint, a whiff, of the possibility of feeling normal again.

  Beside her, Ted carries the A – Z, into which is tucked a letter from the doctor. They are going for the baby’s check-up to a health centre on the other side of the Heath. Ted had suggested they walk, but Elina hadn’t told him that, two days ago, she’d tried to take the baby out in his pram and only got as far as the corner before she saw the sides of the pram waver, the stars on the blanket shimmer and break free. She’d had to sit down on the kerb, her feet in the gutter, her head between her knees, before she could make it back to the house. Instead she said: ‘Let’s call a cab.’

  Neither of them is familiar with this area, a grid of streets, hidden behind a busy road going north. Dartmouth Park, Ted says it is called. The taxi driver dropped them on the main road, pleading one-way systems, and now they are walking down a street, looking for the health centre. Ted is sure it’s this way. Then he changes his mind and says it’s the other way. They have to double back. He hands the baby to Elina as he consults his map.

  ‘Over here,’ he says, and strikes out over a road. Elina trails after him, worrying that the baby is in the sun, that the blanket is too hot, that she might faint in this heat if Ted makes her walk much further.

  At the next corner Ted comes to a stop. He looks up the street, he looks down. The map dangles in his hand. Elina waits. She takes a deep breath and the air seems to burn her throat. She is not going to faint. Everything is fine. Nothing that shouldn’t be moving is moving; the stars on the baby’s blanket are just pieces of embroidery, nothing more. The baby is sleeping, mouth in a pout, one hand curled by his cheek, as if holding an invisible telephone receiver to his ear. Elina is smiling at this thought when she hears Ted mumbling: ‘. . . somewhere else . . .’

  ‘Sorry?’

  He doesn’t answer. She watches as the letter slips out of the A – Z and on to the pavement. He doesn’t bend to pick it up but just stands there, his back to her, hands at his sides.

  Elina frowns. She crouches and scrabbles for the letter, carefully balancing the sleeping baby on one arm. ‘Ted?’ she says. She touches his sleeve. ‘Ted, we should get a move on, the appointment’s in two minutes.’ She takes the A – Z from him. She looks at the letter, she looks at the map. ‘It’s along here and then left.’

  He turns the wrong way and seems to be gazing over the road at a fence.

  ‘Ted!’ she says, more sharply. ‘We’ve got exactly two minutes before our appointment.’

  ‘You go,’ he says, without turning round.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said you go. I’ll wait here.’

  ‘You’re telling me . . . you’re . . . you don’t want to come to—’ Elina is so cross she cannot finish the sentence. She cannot be in his presence a minute longer. She hefts the bag strap further up her shoulder, spins round and marches off up the street, clutching the baby to her. Her red sandals seem to burn her feet and she feels more sweat soaking into the waistband of her jeans.

  ‘“I’ll wait here,” ’ she is muttering to herself, as she pushes her way through the swing doors. ‘“I’ll wait here” indeed, selfish pig of a—’ She breaks off because she has to give her name to the receptionist. The interior of the centre is cool and smells of lino. Elina sits on a plastic chair, still seething, still half expecting Ted to appear. She surveys the notices about breastfeeding, smoking, meningitis, vaccinations, all the while composing speeches on the subject of paternal involvement, to be delivered when Ted decides he can spare the time to show up. She has just hit on the phrase abdication
of responsibility when she is called for her appointment.

  ‘Name?’ the nurse says, bending towards her computer screen.

  ‘Um,’ Elina fidgets with the bangle on her wrist, ‘we haven’t decided yet. It’s ridiculous, I know,’ she hears herself give a strained laugh, ‘I mean he’s almost six weeks old but—’

  ‘I meant your name,’ the nurse says.

  ‘Oh.’ That strange high laugh again. What is wrong with her? ‘It’s—’ Elina finds, to her surprise, that her adolescent stammer seems to have momentarily resurfaced. She always had trouble with words beginning with E, could never get them out, never force them beyond the area of her tonsils. She swallows, then coughs to cover it and manages to get out, ‘Elina Vilkuna.’

  ‘Swedish, are you?’

  ‘Finnish.’ Her voice seems normal, she is relieved to hear. Perhaps the stammer has gone back to wherever it’s been hiding. ‘My mother’s Swedish, though,’ she adds, without knowing why.

  ‘Oh. You’ll have to spell it for me.’