The Hand That First Held Mine

by Maggie O'Farrell

  She holds Jonah’s curled hand in the palm of her own. He sits in his car seat, awake, alert, his eyes wide. He seems to be as astonished as she is by this sudden outing. In the front, Ted and Simmy are arguing over which CD to play. Ted is wearing the straw hat now, set back on his head, and Simmy is driving with one hand on the wheel and the other over the slot in the CD player, preventing Ted from inserting whichever CD he’s holding. Both men are laughing and the windows are all rolled down and warm air is streaming through the car.

  They go to the National Portrait Gallery. Simmy insists on carrying Jonah in the sling and Ted has the canvas nappy bag so Elina can swing her arms lightly by her sides. Ted wants to head up to the café on the top floor but Simmy tells him not to be a Philistine. They are there to see a John Deakin exhibition, he tells them, not to drink overpriced cappuccino.

  ‘Who is John Deakin anyway?’ Ted grumbles.

  ‘Little My?’ Simmy turns to her.

  ‘Um,’ Elina has to think, ‘a photographer. I think. A contemporary of Francis Bacon?’

  ‘Full marks to you,’ Simmy says. He takes them both by the hand. ‘Children,’ he announces, in such a loud voice that several people look over, ‘we are about to enter the world of seedy, Bohemian postwar London. Are you ready?’ He turns to Ted.

  ‘No, I want to go for a c—’

  ‘Are you ready?’ Simmy turns to Elina.

  ‘Yes,’ she murmurs, holding in her laughter.

  ‘Are you ready?’ he asks, looking down at Jonah. ‘No, you appear to be asleep. Never mind. Let’s go.’ And he pulls them along, through the doors, by their hands.

  Elina first met Simmy in the living room, early one morning. She’d been renting a room off Ted for a month or so, she’d come down early before heading out to her teaching job in East London and there was a large, overweight, sandy-haired man asleep on the sofa, fully dressed, in an extraordinary ensemble of scruffy clothes. She tiptoed across the room, towards the kitchen, and filled the kettle as noiselessly as she could.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ a booming voice came from the sofa, ‘you’re making a pot of tea.’

  She looked over and saw that the man was regarding her from above the sofa’s back. ‘Coffee, actually.’

  ‘Even better. You complete angel. You couldn’t spare me a cup, could you?’

  Elina could. She brought it to him on the sofa and sat on the carpet to drink hers.

  ‘Jesus,’ the man gasped, after his first swallow, ‘that’s enough to take the skin off my throat.’

  ‘Too strong?’ Elina asked.

  ‘Strong’s not the word.’ He massaged his neck. ‘I may never speak again. So let’s make the most of it.’ He smiled at her and sat up, settling the rug about him. ‘Tell me everything you know, Ted’s Lodger.’

  When she saw Ted that evening – he and his girlfriend Yvette were cooking dinner together – she asked him about the man on the sofa.

  ‘Simmy?’ Ted had said, without turning away from the wok. ‘James Simpkin, to give him his full name. He stays here sometimes – he has his own key. I told him the attic was occupied so he probably crashed out on the sofa instead. I’m glad he remembered,’ Ted added, ‘and didn’t burst in on you in the middle of the night.’

  ‘Did he talk to you loudly about random things?’ Yvette, dropping an olive into her mouth, had asked her. ‘And was he wearing mismatched shoes?’

  ‘No, but his trousers were held up with green garden string.’

  ‘Don’t be deceived by appearances,’ Yvette said, rolling her eyes. ‘His family owns half of Dorset.’

  ‘Really?’

  Ted had turned, selected a knife from the drawer. ‘It’s a prerogative of the very wealthy in this country, dressing like a tramp. Don’t ask me why.’

  At the exhibition, Elina stares into the hooded dark eyes of a famous Italian sculptor, the wide, kohled ones of a 1950s actress who later became famous for her drug problem. There is the gaunt, handsome face of Oliver Bernard. And Francis Bacon, close to the camera, as if about to kiss it. There are three men standing with their backs against a wall, unsmiling, their skin a silvery bromide sheen. She finds Ted in front of a portrait of a man and a woman. The man has his arm lightly about the woman’s shoulders and with his other hand he holds a cigarette. She is in black, a scarf around her hair, the ends of which trail over her shoulder. The man is looking sideways at her but she looks out, with a candid, assessing gaze, at the viewer. The sign on the wall behind them reads ‘elsewher’, the end of the word obliterated by the man’s head.

  Elina lays her cheek, briefly, on Ted’s sleeve, then moves along to see an unidentified man in a white shirt crossing a road in Soho, a side of meat over his shoulder, more pictures of Bacon, in his studio, on a pavement, standing with the same man from the picture with the sign and the woman.

  Simmy appears at her side. ‘You wouldn’t have thought he was an incurable drunk, would you?’ he says, in his version of a whisper.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Elina muses, looking again at the man carrying the meat across a road, ‘they all have a kind of starkness to them, don’t you think? A kind of melancholy.’

  Simmy snorts. ‘That’s because they’re of the past. All photos of the past look melancholy and wistful precisely because they capture something that’s gone.’

  Elina reaches down to touch Jonah’s head, to readjust his hat.

  ‘Stop fiddling, will you? Leave the child alone,’ Simmy says. ‘And where’s Ted? Let’s get him that coffee.’

  Ted is sitting in the café, with Simmy and Elina. Not the café he wanted to go to, the one up in the roof, with the views over Trafalgar Square, but the one in the basement. He is sitting at the table, drinking coffee, talking with his friend and his girlfriend and, without warning, something rears its head. The recollection of himself as a child on a woman’s knee. The woman is wearing a red dress of slightly slippery material and it is tricky for him to stay in position: he has had to wind his arm into hers and this makes the woman laugh. He feels the reverberation of it through her chest, through the fabric of the dress.

  This keeps happening, Ted finds, and more since Jonah was born. Flashes of something else, somewhere else, like radio static or interference, voices cutting in from a distant foreign station. He can barely hear them but they are there. A hint, a glimpse, a blurred image, like a poster seen from the window of a speeding train.

  It must be, he decides, that having a baby leads you to relive your own infancy. Things you might never have thought about before suddenly emerge. Like the sensation of sitting, or trying to sit, on this woman’s knee. He has no idea who she was – a friend of his mother’s, perhaps, a visiting relative, a glamorous colleague of his father’s – but he can recall the sensation of losing his hold on her with sudden, vivid clarity.

  Someone behind him bumps into his chair. Ted is thrown forward into the edge of the table. He turns to see a man with a rucksack amble past, oblivious. Ted adjusts his chair so that it’s away from the thorough-fare, closer to Elina. He picks up his cappuccino and takes a sip. The image of the woman in the red dress is gone. Transmission terminated. Simmy is shovelling walnut cake into his mouth, talking animatedly. Elina is leaning towards him, listening, holding Jonah on her lap. Jonah, his head wobbling, is looking at something on the table; he clings to Elina’s thumb with both of his hands, fingers clenched tight, as if he will never let go. Ted feels a sudden empathy with his son, with his need of Elina. He feels a corresponding tug in his own chest, puts out a hand and lays it lightly on her leg. Actually, he really wants to pull her to him, so that her shoulder fits underneath his arm, so that her head is against his chest, so that she’s as close as she can be, and then he would like to say, don’t go, don’t ever go.

  Elina is getting up, Ted sees. She is still listening to Simmy but she is handing Jonah to Ted. As he puts out his arms to take him, he sees that she has to wrest her thumb free. ‘Where are you going?’ Ted says.

  ‘
To the toilet.’ She turns back to Simmy. ‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ she says to him, as she slides behind Ted’s chair.

  Ted takes hold of her wrist. He feels that queasiness again, senses that flat, unending sea. For a moment, he sees a woman with long hair bending over him, her hair swinging into his face, putting a plastic cup into his waiting hands. He sees himself sitting on a landing with a green rug, its woollen strands between his fingers, listening to his father’s voice downstairs, which sounds pleading and apologetic. Ted has to shake his head to rid himself of these impressions. Jonah seems to sense something, too, because he starts to sob, his face crumpling. Ted wonders what to say. ‘Where is the toilet?’ is what comes out.

  Elina looks down at where he is holding her arm. ‘Over there,’ she murmurs. She looks at his face, perplexed. ‘I won’t be a minute.’ And then she turns, her arm parting company with his fingers, and he watches her as she walks away from him and he tries not to see the operating theatre, her lying in that sanctifying white light, that featureless, heaving sea.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Simmy is asking him from across the table.

  ‘Yeah,’ Ted says, without meeting his eye.

  ‘You look a bit . . . peaky.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ Ted stands, hoisting Jonah to his shoulder. ‘I’m going to the shop.’ He’s suddenly remembered that there is a postcard he wants from the exhibition.

  It was a busy time at Elsewhere – Lexie had persuaded Innes to expand the magazine, to get in more advertising. They had upped the number of their features and had stopped using low-grade matt paper. The pages were now glossy, slightly grainy to the touch, the photographs bigger. They had just launched a section for rock and roll, the first arts magazine to do so. Innes had been dubious but Lexie had insisted and even found a critic, a young man studying the guitar at the Royal College of Music. The magazine was, at the time, revolutionary. Unfortunately they had no more staff than before so they were rushed in what they did, working until after ten most nights. They were, that winter, all ill, to varying degrees. Someone had caught a cold and passed it round the rest of them. The office rang to the sound of sneezing and wheezing and coughing.

  Lexie had to go to Oxford that day, by train, to interview an academic who had written a surprisingly racy roman à clef about life in the cloisters – all grizzled tutors and palpitating young undergraduates. She dashed around the office, collecting her pen, a pad of paper, a copy of the novel to look over on the train. She paused briefly behind Innes’s desk. He was hunched over a page proof, his hands cupped over his ears (he always said their noise distracted him).

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said, and kissed one of his hands.

  He straightened up and caught her by the wrist. ‘Where are you off to?’

  ‘Oxford. Remember?’

  He tapped his fountain pen against his teeth. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘the priapic lecturer. Good luck. Stay on the other side of the desk from him.’

  She smiled, kissed him again, on the mouth this time. ‘I will.’ Then she frowned, touched his cheek, his brow. ‘You’re very hot,’ she said. ‘Do you feel feverish?’ She felt his forehead again.

  He waved her away, beginning to cough. ‘I’m fine, woman, be off with you.’

  ‘Innes, are you sure—’

  He turned back to his proof. ‘Away to your seat of learning. Come back unscathed.’

  Lexie turned to Laurence and Daphne, who were on the other side of the room, leaning over some copy together. ‘Will you keep an eye on him?’ she said. ‘Send him home if he gets any worse.’

  Laurence looked up and smiled. ‘We will,’ he said, and she left, satisfied. Innes was lighting a cigarette when she looked back from the door, arranging his jacket about his shoulders, scoring a line through the proof.

  There is no need to dwell on the details of Lexie’s trip to Oxford, of the academic’s inflated sense of self, the clumsy passes he made at her, how delayed her train was on the way back, that she was rehearsing in her mind how she would tell Innes all about the passes, that he would relish the details and make her tell him all over again. She was imagining them in bed, the only warm place in the flat that January; she would make him drink hot whisky with honey, tuck the covers about him, make him rest.

  Lexie knew he’d still be at the office so, even though it was late when she made it back to London, she went there. The fog was thick that night. Walking from the tube to Bayton Street she almost lost her way several times and her hair was damp about her face. She was wrong, she remembers thinking, when she reached the office. Innes’s desk was empty. She could see only Laurence through the window. She was pleased, thinking Innes must have gone home.

  But Laurence stood up as she came in, reaching for his jacket.

  ‘Oh, what a day I’ve had,’ she was saying. ‘I—’

  But Laurence interrupted her: ‘Lexie, Innes has been taken to hospital.’

  They had a rapid review of their money situation. She had exactly ninepence in her purse, Laurence even less. Was it enough for a cab to the hospital? No. They rummaged through Innes’s desk for the petty-cash tin, rattled it, were heartened by the sound of coins but couldn’t find the key.

  ‘Where would he keep it?’ Laurence said to Lexie. ‘Come on, you know him best.’

  She thought about it. ‘It’ll be in the desk somewhere,’ she said. ‘Unless he has it with him.’ She opened another drawer and swept aside paperclips, split and broken cigarettes, torn scraps of paper with bits of Innes’s scrawl on them. She found a ha’penny and added it to the pile. All the time, her heart was squeezing painfully, painfully in her chest, and her hands, searching through the mess in Innes’s drawers – was he really this untidy, why did the love of her life need so many paperclips, what did these scraps of paper say – were trembling. Innes in hospital, Laurence had said, and her mind turned over the other words: breathing difficulties, collapsed, called an ambulance.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ she said finally. She marched to the back room and returned with a screwdriver. Steadying the petty-cash tin with her foot, she rammed the screwdriver end between the lid and the base. The lock made a grinding noise, then broke. Coins burst out, all over the desk, the chair, the floor. In an instant, she and Laurence were on their knees, gathering them up, filling Laurence’s jacket pockets. Then they were running, through the door, out into the street, up the road, to where the taxis congregated.

  At the hospital, they ran again, along the corridors, around the corners, up the stairs. At the ward door, there was a nurse with a clipboard.

  ‘We’re here for Innes Kent,’ Lexie said breathlessly. ‘Where is he?’

  The nurse glanced down at the watch on her chest. ‘Visiting hours ended half an hour ago. I’ve asked his sister,’ she pronounced the word with a leaning sarcasm, ‘three times now to leave but she says she won’t until his wife gets here. Am I to take it that you are his wife?’

  Lexie hesitated. Laurence jumped in: ‘Yes, she is.’

  The nurse looked at him. ‘And who are you? His grandfather?’ Laurence, a slight, fair-skinned Anglo-Saxon, treated her to a dazzling smile. ‘His brother.’

  She regarded them both a moment longer through narrowed eyes. ‘Ten minutes,’ she said, ‘and no more. My patients need their rest. I can’t have this place filling up with the likes of you.’ She pointed with her pen. ‘Fourth bed on the left and no noise.’ She turned away, muttering, ‘Wife, my foot.’

  Lexie slipped between the curtains, which had been drawn to make a cubicle, and inside was Daphne, sitting on a chair, and there on the bed was Innes. He had a mask strapped over his face, his hair was plastered back from his forehead and his skin was greyish white.

  ‘Lexie,’ he mouthed, from behind the mask, and she could see him smile. She immediately climbed on to the bed, put her arms around him, laid her head next to his on the pillow. She was aware of Daphne and Laurence disappearing at this point, of hearing their footsteps recede down the ward.

  �
��I don’t know,’ she murmured into Innes’s ear. ‘I turn my back for five minutes and you go and get yourself admitted to hospital. That’s the last time I’m going to Oxford.’

  His arm came up to grasp her waist. He put his other hand up to her cheek, her hair. ‘How was the academic?’ he said, behind the mask.

  ‘It couldn’t matter less,’ she replied, ‘and you’re not allowed to speak.’

  Innes removed the mask. ‘I’m absolutely fine,’ he rasped. ‘All this is a lot of fuss about nothing.’

  ‘It didn’t sound like nothing. Laurence said you collapsed.’

  He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. ‘I had a moment of . . . of pain but it was nothing at all, really. It’s a touch of pleurisy, they say. I’ll be back on my feet tomorrow.’