The Hand That First Held Mine

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Elina waits, holding the phone to her ear. She lays the list on Jonah’s back. Unreliable, kite, same man.

  ‘Sorry,’ her mother says. ‘What were you saying?’

  ‘Are you busy? Should I call back?’

  ‘No, no. It’s OK. It’s just that . . . it’s OK. You were telling me about Jonah.’

  ‘He’s fine.’

  There is a pause on the line. Is her mother talking to someone else again? Or gesturing to them?

  ‘Thank you for the photos of him,’ her mother says. ‘We enjoyed them so much.’ We? Elina thinks. ‘We couldn’t decide if he was like you or Ted.’

  ‘Like neither of us, I think. Yet, anyway.’

  ‘Yes.’

  There is another pause. There is something in her mother’s voice, a particular strain in tone, that makes Elina think someone is in the room with her again.

  ‘I can call back if this is a bad time,’ Elina says.

  ‘It’s not a bad time,’ her mother says, with just a hint of annoyance. ‘It’s not a bad time at all. I’m always happy to talk to you, you know that. It’s not often I get the chance. You’re always so busy and—’

  ‘I’m not busy,’ Elina exclaims. ‘I’m not busy at all. My life is . . . I spend all day at home and . . . and all night too. And I—’ She breaks off. She wants to say, please, please, Aiti, I don’t know what’s happening, I don’t know why Ted is drifting away from me, I don’t know how to fix it, and please can I come home, can I come now?

  Her mother is speaking again. ‘. . . Jussi was saying the other day that they had all of his sleeping through by four weeks. There’s a book, apparently, that you can follow and . . .’

  Jussi – Elina’s brother. Elina sets her teeth as her mother talks on about the book and sleep training and about her four grand-daughters and how they never wake up at night, even now, and how Jussi’s wife, the bovine Hannele, wants another but Jussi isn’t sure and neither is Elina’s mother.

  ‘Is Jussi with you, then?’ Elina asks.

  ‘Yes!’ Her mother’s voice lightens suddenly. ‘They’ve come for the summer – all of them. Jussi has been painting the front room and he’s about to start on the veranda. The girls and I have been swimming every morning – we’ve booked them in for the lessons, you remember the lessons, in the bay, and Jussi was saying he thinks the girls ought to go sailing today so I said that later I would . . .’

  Elina holds the phone to her ear. She examines Jonah’s fingernails, sees that they need trimming. She brushes some stray crumbs off the sofa. She discovers a stain on a cushion. She turns the cushion round so that the stain doesn’t show. She takes the list off Jonah’s back and holds it between her finger and thumb.

  ‘I was wondering . . .’ she interrupts a monologue about the second granddaughter’s accomplishments on the flute ‘. . . I was wondering, was Dad . . . OK . . . after we were born?’

  ‘Was he OK?’

  ‘I mean, did he . . . go a bit funny?’

  ‘Funny, how?’

  ‘Sort of . . . I don’t know . . . absent. Withdrawn.’ Elina waits, holding the phone to her ear, as if anxious not to miss a sound.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ her mother says eventually.

  Elina bites her lip, then sighs. ‘No reason,’ she says. ‘Just wondered. Listen, Aiti, I was thinking I might . . . we might . . . come.’

  ‘Come?’

  ‘To Nauvo. To you. I . . . I thought that . . . you know, you haven’t met Jonah yet and I’m . . . Well, a change of scene would do Ted good and . . . it’s been ages since I was there.’ There is a silence down the line. ‘What do you think?’ Elina says finally, desperately.

  ‘Well, the thing is, Jussi is here for a month and then he’s going back to Jyväskylä and the girls are staying here with me. I’ve got them all to myself for two weeks. And then I think Hannele is coming to collect them – I’ll need to check – so I’m not sure when we might—’

  ‘Right. Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I mean, we’d love you to come. The girls would love to see Jonah. And so would I.’

  ‘It’s fine. Forget it. Another time.’

  ‘Maybe in the autumn or—’

  ‘I have to go.’

  ‘September? The thing is it’s not that—’

  ‘Got to go. Jonah’s crying. See you. ’Bye.’

  Elina is pulled upwards from sleep. It feels as if she’s been there for just minutes. The room is in pitch darkness, the two windows to her right casting only a very slight orange glow. Jonah is crying, calling to her. For half a second more, she lies on her back, unable to rise, like Gulliver with his hair tied down. Then she pushes herself from the mattress, lurches into the room towards the bars of the cot and lifts Jonah from it.

  She changes his nappy, badly, clumsily, in the dark. Jonah is tense with hunger, his feet waving, she can’t get them back into the poppered legs of his sleepsuit. She tries to push them in, tries to ease the fabric around his knees but he roars with outrage. ‘OK,’ she says, ‘all right.’ She scoops him up and carries him to the bed, settling herself on her side to feed him.

  Jonah sucks, his fists gradually uncurling, his eyes becoming unfocused. Elina drifts in and out of consciousness: she sees the veranda on her mother’s house in Nauvo, she sees the curve of Jonah’s head in the dark, she sees the flat water of the archipelago on a windless day, she sees her brother walking away from her down a gravelled track, she sees a painting she was working on before Jonah was born, she sees the grain of the canvas beneath a thick layer of paint, she sees Jonah again, still sucking, she sees the pattern of intersecting tramlines on a Helsinki street corner, she sees—

  Suddenly she is wide awake, back in the bedroom. She is cold, she thinks first. The duvet has gone.

  Ted is sitting up in bed, his back straight, his hands cupped around his face.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she says.

  He doesn’t answer. She reaches out and touches his back. ‘Ted? What’s up?’

  ‘Oh,’ he says, turning round. His face is bewildered. ‘Oh.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I had this—’ He stops, frowning, and looks around the room.

  ‘It’s very early,’ she says, in an attempt to cover for him, ‘one thirty.’

  ‘Huh,’ he says slowly. Then he lies back down, curving his body around Jonah’s, putting his hand on her hip. She fits her knees to his, sliding her foot between his calves. ‘God,’ he whispers. ‘I had this dream – a really horrible dream. That I was here in the house and I could hear someone, somewhere, talking. I was looking everywhere for you, all over the house, calling your name, but I couldn’t find you. And then I came into our bedroom and you were sitting in the chair, with your back to me, with Jonah in your arms, and I put my hand on your shoulder and when you turned your head, it wasn’t you at all, it was someone else, it was—’ He rubs a hand over his face. ‘It was horrible. I got such a fright that I woke up.’

  Elina sits, raising Jonah to her shoulder. He feels slack in her hands, like a beanbag, and she knows by now that this is the feeling she needs, that this means more sleep, for him and for her. She rubs her palm against his back. ‘That sounds awful,’ she whispers to Ted. ‘What a weird dream. I have dreams sometimes where I go to the cot and Jonah is gone. Or I’m pushing the buggy and I see he isn’t in it. I think it’s part of the bonding, you know, that—’

  ‘Hmm,’ Ted says, scowling up at the ceiling, ‘but this was so real, as if—’

  Jonah interrupts this with an enormous, resounding belch.

  ‘Here,’ Ted says, reaching for him, ‘let me take him. You go back to sleep.’

  Here is Lexie, on a humid spring night in Paris. She sits at a hotel dressing-table, her typewriter balanced in front of her. Her shoes are kicked off, her clothes sprawled on the narrow bed. She wears just a slip, her hair raised off her neck and secured with a pencil. The room is cramped, unbearably hot; she has left the windows to the tiny iron balcony op
en. The breeze inflates the thin curtains, then sucks them flat. The sounds of people running, shouts, police sirens, glass shattering reach her from the street below. She has been up all night, on the Boulevard St-Michel and around the Sorbonne, watching the students put up barricades, tear up the pavements, overturn cars and then the police attacking with clubs and tear gas.

  She looks at what she has written. Whether they were incited or provoked remains to be seen, it reads, but such a reaction from the authorities seems . . . And there it stops. She has to finish this but, for now, she has no idea how.

  She taps a full stop, pulls the carriage to a new paragraph, watching the woman in the dressing-table mirror do the same. The woman is thin in her slip, the bone of her clavicle stark, her eyes ringed by shadows. Lexie puts a hand to her brow, leaning in close to the mirror. She has fine, almost invisible lines now, around her mouth, at the corners of her eyes. She thinks of them as fault-lines, glimpses of the future, the signs where her face will fold in on itself, come away slack from the bone.

  She doesn’t know that this will never happen.

  There is the sound of a knock at the door and her head snaps round.

  ‘Lexie?’ Felix’s voice whispers loudly. ‘Are you in there?’

  She’d seen him earlier, positioned beside a blazing barricade, gesticulating for the camera, figures haring back and forth behind him.

  She doesn’t move from her seat. She bites the end of her pencil; she pleats and unpleats a section of her slip. Any man who isn’t Innes would tonight be a travesty, a crime. She doesn’t know why but she’s felt him all day, hovering, slightly behind her, slightly to the left of her. She’s kept turning her head, as if trying to catch him out. She finds she wants to say his name aloud, here in this hotel room with its peeling furniture and stained bedclothes. The word swells inside her throat, her mouth, like a balloon.

  The knock comes again. ‘Lexie!’ Felix hisses. ‘It’s me.’

  A moment longer and he gives up. She hears him shambling back along the corridor, yawning. She moves to the bed and lies down on her back. She stares up at the ceiling. She closes her eyes. Immediately she is presented with an image of Innes, sitting on the dressing-table stool she has just vacated, here, in the room with her. She opens her eyes again. The tears run sideways down her temples, soaking into her hair, finding their way into her ears. She shuts her eyes again. She sees: the view from the window of their flat on Haverstock Hill. She sees: Innes’s hand and the way he held a pen, in a tilted, left-handed grip. She sees: him leaning against their bookshelves, searching for a book. She sees: him shaving at the kitchen sink, his face half lathered. She sees: herself, walking down a hospital corridor, dropping violets as she goes.

  In London, a fortnight or so later, Lexie and Felix are walking together into the opening of Laurence’s new gallery. Something about Felix’s impeccable cuffs, his broad-shouldered blondness set against the crowd-pressed, wine-fuelled, frantic anxiety of the gallery makes Lexie want to laugh. But Felix, as ever, is striding into the room as if his place in it is assured, as if hordes of people are just waiting to make his acquaintance.

  Which, annoyingly, they are. After the third person comes up to him with the words, ‘Sorry, but aren’t you . . .’ Lexie steps out from his encircling arm and begins making her way through the crowded gallery to where Daphne is standing with Laurence, at the side of the room, their heads inclined to one another’s. She knows they are talking about her, and they know she knows. They smile to see her approach.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she says, sliding sideways between a woman talking in a braying voice about Lichtenstein and a man knocking back a glass of wine.

  ‘Here she comes,’ Lexie hears Daphne say.

  ‘Hello, gossips,’ Lexie says, kissing first the cheek with which Daphne presents her, then Laurence’s. ‘Congratulations, Laurence. Good party. Good turn-out.’

  ‘Yes, it’s gone off rather well, hasn’t it?’ says Laurence, surveying the room. ‘So far.’

  ‘Don’t say “so far”,’ Daphne scolds. ‘It’s good. People came. People are buying. Be happy. Enjoy it.’

  ‘I can’t, though,’ Laurence mutters, running a finger around his collar. ‘I won’t be able to until it’s over.’

  Daphne turns to Lexie and looks her up and down. ‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘we want to talk to you.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes. Tell all.’

  Lexie takes a swig of her cocktail. ‘About what?’

  Daphne lets out a small noise of exasperation at the same time as Laurence says, ‘I like your get-up, Lex.’

  ‘Never mind her get-up,’ Daphne snaps, then seems to see Lexie’s dress for the first time, ‘although it is fab. Where did you get it?’ Without waiting for an answer, she shakes Lexie by the elbow. ‘We want to know all about it.’ She jabs a finger towards the door.

  Lexie looks over at where Felix is talking to two women who are leaning keenly towards him. ‘Oh,’ she waves her hand, ‘that’s just Felix.’

  ‘We know who he is,’ Laurence says. ‘We’ve seen him on the box, braving the boulevards.’

  ‘And,’ Daphne cuts in, ‘we’ve just been putting two and two together. You must have been in Paris with him. How dare you not tell us? I mean, we knew you’d had a bit of a thing but that was ages ago. We didn’t know he was still present tense. Come on,’ she jabs Lexie in the ribs, ‘spill the beans. What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Lexie says.

  ‘Nothing,’ Laurence scoffs.

  ‘It’s . . . on and off.’ Lexie shrugs and drains her glass. ‘Nothing really.’

  The three of them stand for a moment, gazing down into their glasses, until David, Laurence’s lover, appears next to them. ‘What are you three looking so serious about?’ He puts a hand on Laurence’s shoulder. ‘And shouldn’t you be mingling?’

  ‘We were just grilling Lexie about her consort,’ Daphne says.

  ‘Her consort?’ David enquires, and Laurence nods towards Felix, who is now regaling a rapt group with some story involving expansive gestures. ‘Oh.’ David raises his eyebrows. ‘I see. You are a dark horse, Lexie.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Lexie says again, and tugs at the hem of her dress to straighten it.

  ‘It can’t be nothing,’ Daphne objects, ‘if you’re out and about with him like this.’

  ‘I’m not out and about with him. I just mentioned I was coming and he said he’d come along.’

  ‘Are you going to introduce us?’ Laurence says. ‘We promise to behave.’

  ‘Not now,’ David says. ‘Can’t you see the man’s busy furthering his career?’

  ‘I have one question,’ says Daphne, in a serious voice, ‘and then we’ll leave you alone. Why him?’

  Lexie turns to her. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m intrigued. Why him, rather than any of the others who’ve beaten a path to your door?’

  ‘I can think of several reasons,’ David murmurs, looking Felix over, and Laurence laughs softly.

  ‘Because . . .’ Lexie tries to think. ‘Because he doesn’t ask anything,’ she says eventually.

  ‘What did you say?’ David says, leaning towards her. ‘He doesn’t ask anything?’

  ‘Any questions,’ Lexie says. ‘He doesn’t ask anyone anything. He’s the most incurious person I’ve ever met. And that—’

  ‘That suits you,’ Laurence finishes for her.

  Lexie half smiles at him. ‘Yes.’ She nods. ‘It does.’

  There is a pause. Then Daphne leans back and seizes a bottle of wine from the desk. ‘A toast!’ she cries. ‘We haven’t drunk to your gallery yet.’ She slops wine into all their glasses. ‘To Laurence and David and the Angle Gallery,’ she says. ‘May they live long, happy and prosperous lives.’

  The middle of the night, the dead of night, and not much is stirring in Belsize Park. A car sped down Haverstock Hill a while back. A squirrel – one of the rat-like, overfed grey ones – has just crosse
d the road, pausing in the middle to look around.

  In front of the house is a small knot garden made of closely clipped box hedges. The children like to walk within its low spiral, turning and turning to its inevitable centre, although the mother prefers them not to. It weakens the roots, she says. Between this and the pavement is a low red-brick wall that was there in Lexie’s day. There’s a gatepost topped with a heavy white stone that glistens in frosty weather.

  Lexie stood with her hand on this gatepost stone when she got back from the hospital after Innes died. It was early evening. Somehow she’d got herself to the flat, still holding the scarf and the magazines – the violets had gone by now – and just as she was about to go up the path, a man stood up from where he’d been sitting on the low wall.