Felix considers his options. He could continue the argument – he and Lexie are practised at arguing with each other, after all – or he could forget their disagreement and ask her back to his flat. He places an arm on her sleeve, taking a surreptitious look at his watch. He then gives her a slow, deep smile. ‘How much time do you have?’ he says.
How to explain Felix? When Lexie first met him, in the mid sixties, he was a correspondent for the BBC. He was just graduating from radio to television. He had the exact looks for television then: good-looking but not distractingly so, tanned but not too much, blond but not too blond; he dressed well but not too well, his hair parted in the right way, in the right place. He specialised in war-zones, disasters, acts of God, the kind of bombastic reportage Lexie disliked. An army from a large, powerful nation drops bombs on a small Communist state: call for Felix. A sea rises up and engulfs a village: call for Felix. A dormant volcano rouses itself, a fleet of fishing boats is lost in the Atlantic, a fork of lightning strikes a medieval cathedral: Felix will be on the scene, usually in some dangerous spot, often in a bullet-proof vest. He liked to wear them. His voice was firm, serious, assured: ‘ This is Felix Roffe, for the BBC.’ That line, delivered with an assertive nod, always concluded his reports. He pursued Lexie with all the determination, charm and focus with which he pursued natural disasters, political tyrants and a photogenic yet suffering populace. They were lovers, intermittently, for several years. They were in a constant state of flux, Felix and Lexie, separating, reuniting, parting, coming back together, over and over. She would leave, he would follow, he would draw her back, she would leave again. They were like clothes invested with static, adhering to each other but with an uncomfortable, aggravating friction.
They had met, some months prior to their argument on Piccadilly, with a single word, a single shout. His. ‘Signora!’
Lexie looked down from her vantage-point of a balcony, three floors up. The street was swirling with bubbling brown water, on which floated tree branches, chairs, cars, bicycles, street signs, strings of washing. The shops and apartments at street-level were engulfed, obliterated, the shop signs – FARMACIA, PANIFICIO, FERRAMENTA – just visible above the lapping scum of flood water.
It was November 1966. An entire season’s rain had fallen in two days, the river Arno had burst its banks and now the city of Florence was drowning, awash, submerged: the river had spread itself everywhere. In the apartments, in the shops, in the Duomo, up staircases, into the Uffizi. It had claimed furniture, people, statues, plants, animals, plates, cups, paintings, books, maps. It had swept away all the jewels and necklaces and rings from the shops on the Ponte Vecchio: it had folded these things into its brown waters and taken them away, down into the silty mud of its bed.
‘Sì?’ she shouted back, to the two men in the boat, hands cupped around her mouth. She had just turned thirty – it was four years since she had walked out of the Middlesex Hospital with a bunch of violets, nine years since she had escaped Devon for London. She had been sent to Florence by her newspaper; she was meant to be cabling back stories about the untold losses from the city’s art collections but instead she was bashing out accounts of the fifteen thousand people made homeless, the numerous dead, the farmers who had lost everything.
The fair-haired man put down his oars and stood up in the boat, somewhat unsteadily. ‘Cathedral,’ he shouted. ‘Cath-e-dral!’
Gennaro, the photographer whose flat Lexie was in, appeared next to her on the balcony. He, too, looked down into the street. ‘Inglese?’ he muttered.
She nodded.
‘Televisione?’ he said, indicating the other man’s camera.
She shrugged.
Gennaro made a dismissive noise with his lips and went in to speak to his wife, who was trying to coax their small son into a high-chair.
Lexie watched as the man thought for a moment. ‘Signora,’ he began again, ‘cathedral? Dov’è cathedral?’
She stubbed out her cigarette on the balcony ledge. She considered giving him directions in Italian but thought perhaps her own language skills weren’t up to it. ‘First, the word is duomo,’ she called down. ‘Il duomo. And it’s that way. Don’t you think you ought to have done a bit of homework before you came out here?’
‘My God,’ she heard him say to his cameraman, ‘she’s English.’
On Piccadilly, Felix is smiling at her in that way he has. Confident, intimate, unmistakably sexual, his lower body brushing hers. ‘How much time do you have?’ he asks.
He has been on at her all morning – is she coming out to Paris, she should come to Paris, she must stay at the St Jacques with him, she mustn’t let the Courier put her up in some fleapit, she must let him take her to the Correspondents’ Club there, he’ll introduce her to useful people. He has ploughed his way through a lobster, pausing only to lecture her about Saigon, from where he has recently returned: the grenades, the explosions, the defoliating chemicals dropped by US planes, a city deluged by press and bombs and prostitutes and soldiers, how he could have got malaria, dengue fever, giardia and worse.
Lexie replaces her sunglasses, pushes back her coat cuff to check her watch. She is annoyed with herself for feeling a curdling, responsive desire. ‘Precisely none,’ she snaps.
‘Dinner, then? Tonight? My plane doesn’t leave until nine.’
She steps to the edge of the pavement. ‘Perhaps,’ she says. ‘I’ll phone you later.’ She crosses the road at a sprint, or as much of a sprint as her boots will allow, and turns from the opposite pavement to wave to Felix. But he’s gone, swallowed by the crowds.
She sets off, slinging her bag further up her shoulder. The world, even from behind her dark glasses, looks bright, the sun giving everyone walking down Piccadilly a fiery corona, as if they are all angels, as if they are all here in the afterlife, walking about London on a fine May afternoon. She is due to interview a theatre director in ten minutes at a restaurant in Charlotte Street. She quickens her pace, across Piccadilly Circus, up the curve of Shaftesbury Avenue, towards Cambridge Circus, where she will turn left up Charing Cross Road.
She will not take the direct route, through Soho. She never goes there, even now.
To flatten that thought, she reflects on the possibility of Paris, on Felix, on whether she should go. Felix had said, at their lunch, that it would also be good for her career. ‘They must realise,’ he said, twirling his wine glass, ‘that you have more in you than pretty paragraphs about painting.’
She’d slammed down her fork. ‘Pretty paragraphs about painting?’ she’d repeated, the alliteration lending itself to fury. ‘Is that how you view my work?’ And then they were off. They were good at arguing. It was one of the things they did well together.
Elina is excited, charged. Everything seems to be coming together today. The baby bag is packed and ready by the door, the washing-machine is unloaded and rows of tiny vests and sleepsuits are leaping on the line, she’s had breakfast, Jonah has fed, the sun is shining and she feels well. She actually feels well: Jonah woke only twice last night and she doesn’t have the feeling that she might pass out at any moment. There is even a tinge of colour in her cheeks – just a tinge, but it’s there – and earlier she found she didn’t have to pause halfway up the stairs. She’s well again! She feels almost crazed with excitement. She has it in her head that she will go for a walk and that she will make it up Parliament Hill for the first time since the birth. She will, she’s determined. She will put Jonah in his pram and they will walk over the Heath, up the steep hill, along the avenue of trees. She has a clear picture of this: Jonah in his red hat and striped jacket, tucked neatly all around by his star blanket, her in sunglasses and a white shirt of Ted’s, pushing the pram smartly, competently. She has forgotten nothing – muslin squares, nappies, wipes, the parasol. She will walk steadily and pleasantly. She will bend over her son in the sunshine; she will talk to him. Passers-by will smile to see them. She has had this image in her mind since early this morning, whe
n she woke to see sunlight glowing around the edges of the blind: the two of them passing together under the dappled, refracting and re-forming light of the trees.
Except that she can’t find her shoe. One of her sneakers is on the shoe rack by the front door but the other is – who knows where? Elina laces the one available shoe on to her foot, darting hurried glances around the hallway because she knows that this is a race against time, because she can feel the gap narrowing between the feed they’ve just finished and the next one. With one bare foot, she looks in the kitchen, she looks under the sofa, she goes upstairs to look in the bathroom, the bedroom. But there’s no sign of it anywhere. For a moment, she is assailed by the wild idea that she could go out with only one shoe but then she rips off the partner-less sneaker and slips her feet into a pair of flip-flops she finds under the bed. They will have to do.
She races downstairs again, Jonah clutched to her shoulder. She must have moved in too jolting a way because he starts to fuss, just a little.
‘Sssh,’ she croons to him, ‘sssh,’ as she lowers him into the pram and tucks the blanket around him. But babies don’t like a sense of urgency. Jonah looks up at her, anxiety gathering in his brow. ‘Don’t cry,’ she tells him, ‘don’t cry.’ She slings the bag around the pram handle, and this seems to upset Jonah even more. His face splinters into a cry. Elina jiggles the pram as she snatches her keys off the hook, as she bounces it over the step and down the path.
At the gate, Jonah is still crying. As she turns the corner of the street, he is crying louder, throwing off his blanket, twisting his head from side to side and, with a sinking heart, Elina recognises that particular cry. She has, she tells herself, learnt that much. He’s hungry. He needs a feed.
Elina stops at the entrance to the Heath. She looks about her. She looks down at her son, who is crying real tears now, his fists clenched with need. How can he be hungry again? She only fed him – what? – an hour ago. She brushes the hair out of her eyes. In the distance, she can see the trees on the Heath, bowing and tossing their branches, their leaves invitingly green. They are so close. She could keep going and feed him on a bench somewhere but what if it turns out to be one of his bad feeds, where he cries and struggles?
She grits her teeth, she tilts the pram, she wheels it around and back to the house.
They sit in a chair by the window and he feeds, concentratedly, for ten minutes. She lays him on his stomach across her knee, the way he seems to like after a feed, but instead of burping, he instantly falls asleep. She stares at him, hardly daring to believe it. Can he really be asleep? Is it possible? The lightly closed lids, the pouting mouth, thumb held near, at the ready. He is, she tells herself, asleep. Without doubt.
She looks about her, in the manner of a traveller who hasn’t seen their home for a long time. She is light-headed with the possibilities open to her. She could read a book, phone a friend, send an email, write a letter, do a sketch, make some soup, sort out her clothes, wash her hair, go for that walk, turn on the television, check her diary, mop the floor, clean the windows, fiddle about on the Internet. She could do anything.
But should she risk moving him? She gazes at him speculatively. Is he far enough into sleep to accept a change of scenery? Will he wake if she were to lift him from her lap and put him in his cot or the pram?
Gently, gently, she slides her hands under his body, fingers under his ribs, thumbs under his head. He sighs and smacks his lips together but doesn’t wake. With infinite care, she begins to lift. Instantly, his eyes flicker open and a hoarse, small sob escapes him. Elina puts him down. Jonah inserts his thumb and sucks it with a desperate, betrayed air. She sits motionless, barely breathing. He seems to drift back into sleep.
So, she thinks, no walk for you today. And she must sit here for however long he sleeps. Which isn’t the worst thing in the world. Is it?
But for a moment it seems to Elina that it is. She has such an urge, such an ache to go out, to see something other than the interior walls of this house, to apprehend the world, to move about in it. Sometimes she finds herself eyeing Ted when he has come in from work, when the life of the city still seems to cling to him. She sometimes wants to stand near to him, to sniff him, to catch the scent of it, the sense of it. She wants, desperately, to be somewhere else – anywhere else.
She casts her eyes around restlessly, and catches sight of a folded piece of paper on the sofa next to her. She picks it up, smooths it out, and sees what she believes for a moment to be a shopping list, in Ted’s handwriting. Then she realises it is not a shopping list at all:unreliable
stones
the same man?
name possibly beginning with R
kite
There are two more words at the end, which Elina cannot decipher. One begins with c – it could be cat or cot or cut – and another that might be lump or damp or maybe clump. On the back is written Ask E. This has been crossed out.
Elina turns it over. She reads it again and then again. She reads it backwards, she reads it forwards, she tries to assemble it into a sentence or verse. What is this list? Why has he written it? Does he mean unreliable stones or unreliable space stones? And what’s the difference? What same man? And why was he going to ask her but then changed his mind? Whose name begins with R? She turns it over and sees how the outer corners have turned blue: Ted must have been carrying it about in the pocket of his jeans. It must have fallen out as he sat on the sofa last night. She reads it and reads it until the loops and dashes of ink start to jitter before her eyes, until unreliable men with kites and stones are marching unchecked through her mind.
She is folding and unfolding it when she is struck by a thought. Or, rather, a sensation. She realises that she wants her mother. It is such a visceral, unbidden feeling that it makes her almost laugh. She wants to see her mother. How long is it since she felt that? Twenty years? Twenty-five? Since she started kindergarten? When she was pushed into a nettle patch by a big girl on the way home from school? Since that camping trip, aged about nine, when she forgot her sleeping-bag?
It will be midsummer in the archipelago now; high season at her mother’s guesthouse. The children of Nauvo will be having swimming lessons in the sandy water of the bay; the hardware shop on the main street will be selling spades and buckets and fishing tackle to holidaymakers from Germany, families up for the weekend from Helsinki. Stalls will be lining the harbour edge, arrayed with knitted hats, deck shoes, T-shirts bearing the word ‘Suomi’.
And her mother? Elina glances at the clock on the wall. It says eleven thirty, which means one thirty in Finland. Despite having been away so long, despite professing to loathe the guesthouse, its occupants, the archipelago, the small town, the whole country, despite having run away as soon as she could, as far as she could, as often as she could, Elina is still aware of the rhythms of the place. Her mother will be serving lunch to people outside in the garden, on mismatched plates with fluted edges. Drinks come in glasses of different colours, in varying sizes. If it’s a rainy day, the guests will be lined up along the veranda. She can see her mother stepping from the door to the kitchen, with that rolling, unhurried gait of hers, bearing four plates, an apron over the inevitable cambric dress, those pink-lensed sunglasses hiding her eyes. If the tourists want to order, she will fish in her apron pocket for a pen, a pad, her half-moon glasses, all in the same meditative way. Then she will sway back to the kitchen, the pad in one hand, past the enormous beech tree, past the sculpture in chicken wire and stone and shell that Elina did at school and now cannot look at.
A longing to be there, fierce as a slug of whisky, passes through Elina. She wants to be sitting with her back against the beech tree, Jonah beside her, watching her mother come and go. She cannot, for the moment, imagine what she is doing here on her own in a house in London when she could be there. Why is she here? Why did she ever leave?
Elina reaches, carefully, carefully, without moving Jonah, for the phone, which is lying abandoned on the coffee-table.
She dials the number, and as she listens to the pulsing rings, she imagines the phone sitting squat on the oak reception desk; she pictures her mother hearing it from the garden and walking through the sunroom, over the uneven boards and—
‘Vilkuna,’ an unfamiliar voice says, in an offhand tone.
Elina asks for her mother. The unfamiliar person goes away and then Elina hears unhurried steps coming towards the phone, along the passage, in shoes that flap free of the heels and the longing tightens like a scarf about her throat.
‘Aiti?’ Elina says, surprising herself by using a term she hasn’t said for years. Since she was a teenager, she’s always called her mother by her given name.
‘Elina?’ her mother says. ‘Is that you?’
‘Yes,’ Elina says, switching to Swedish, like her mother.
‘How are you? How is the little man?’
‘He’s fine. Growing, you know. He smiles now and he’s just started to—’ Elina breaks off because she realises that her mother is talking in a low tone to someone else, in Finnish this time.
‘. . . into the garden. I’ll be there in just a minute.’
The Hand That First Held Mine Page 20