The Hand That First Held Mine

by Maggie O'Farrell

  ‘Miss Sinclair?’ he said.

  She swivelled towards him. Hand on gatepost.

  ‘Miss Alexandra Sinclair?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘I hereby serve you with these papers,’ he said, and held out an envelope.

  She took it. She looked at it. Plain, manila, unsealed. ‘Papers?’

  ‘Eviction papers, madam.’

  She looked at him, at his moustache. She thought how odd it was that the moustache was brown yet his hair was grey. She looked at the gatepost under her hand. It felt grainy, rigid with frost. She took her hand away from it and felt for the doorkey in her pocket. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘My client, Mrs Gloria Kent, requires you to vacate said property by tomorrow, taking with you only items expressly belonging to your own person. Should you remove anything belonging to the estate of her late hus—’

  She heard no more. She ran up the path and into the house and slammed the door behind her.

  Laurence appeared later. He’d been looking for her all over London, he said. He plucked the pink eviction papers from her hand and read through them. He swore several times, then said that Gloria was living up to her reputation. Lexie found out later that Gloria had already sent a lawyer’s letter to the Elsewhere premises, informing them the magazine was to be sold. But Laurence didn’t mention this at the time, or explain that this letter was how he and Daphne had learnt that Innes had died. He poured her a whisky, sat her in an armchair and wrapped an eiderdown around her. Then he set to work, dismantling the flat, her home, her life.

  By the early morning, Laurence and Lexie were waiting outside the flat for a cab. Two suitcases stood next to them. Lexie was shivering or shaking or perhaps both, still clutching the eiderdown around her. ‘Do you think,’ she said, between her chattering teeth, indicating the eiderdown, ‘that this belongs to the estate of Innes Kent?’

  Laurence glanced at the eiderdown, then up at the lightening sky. Clouds were streaked with gold above them, the trees still, black cut-outs. He let out a laugh but his eyes were brimming with tears. ‘Jesus, Lex,’ he murmured, ‘what a thing to happen.’

  When a cab came past, they hailed it and Laurence loaded Lexie and the suitcases into it. ‘Wait here,’ he said to the driver, ‘won’t be a sec,’ and raced back into the house.

  Lexie sat in the taxi, her belongings pressed together into two suitcases and a parcel or two, the eiderdown clasped around her. A long black car was pulling up and in it, at the wheel, was the unmistakable profile of Gloria. Lexie stared out at her. Those haughty lips, those arched brows. Gloria was snapping down the car mirror and checking her lipstick, saying something chattily, brightly to someone beside her. The daughter. There she was in the passenger seat, nodding, yes, Mother, no, Mother.

  They were getting out. Gloria was settling her skirts clear of the car door, before slamming it smartly behind her. They were looking up at the house, at the flat at the top. Gloria suddenly frowned and shouted, ‘You! You there!’

  Lexie turned to see Laurence hurrying down the steps, lugging something large and bulky, which was wrapped in blankets. Instantly, she knew what they were – Innes’s paintings. Laurence was saving the paintings.

  ‘Stop! I demand that you stop!’ Gloria shrilled. ‘I must know what you’ve got there!’

  Laurence leapt into the taxi. ‘Go,’ he said to the driver. ‘Go, please!’

  The driver let off the brake and then they were sweeping away from the house, down Haverstock Hill, and Gloria was running in her heels beside them, trying to see in, and the daughter was running the other side. She did a better job of keeping up. For several seconds, she ran alongside where Lexie was sitting, her face inches away on the other side of the window, her eyes never leaving Lexie’s. Her stare was unbroken, fathomless, the dull eyes like those of a shark, fixed on Lexie’s in – what? Accusation? Curiosity? Anger? Impossible to say. Lexie put up her hand to the glass to obliterate that terrible Medusa gaze. When she removed it, Margot had gone.

  The time after Innes died was for Lexie an endless trail of days, blank hours, years that ticked by. In a sense, there is nothing to say about it. Because it was a time of nothingness, of lacking, a time marked by absence. When Innes died, existence as Lexie had come to know it ended and another began: she dropped, like Innes in his parachute, out of her life and into another. The magazine was gone, the flat had gone, Innes had gone. She didn’t know it at the time but she would never return to the grid of streets that made up Soho, not even once.

  If she thought back to the time just after her flight from the flat, she might claim she remembered nothing, that it was a long time before life and sentience re-emerged. But certain scenes would present themselves to her sometimes, like tableaux vivants. Her lugging her suitcases along Kingsway in Holborn; the hem of her coat has caught on a railing and is torn, hanging down at the back. Her looking around a basement bedsit, the landlady clutching a large tortoise-shell cat to her bosom. The room is narrow and smells of mice and damp, the window small, a peculiar oblong shape. ‘What happened to the window?’ Lexie is asking. ‘Partitioned,’ the landlady said. ‘Cut in half.’ Lexie staring at the cat and the cat staring back with wide, glossy pupils. Reflected in each of these pupils is the imprint of the partitioned window. Her trying to light the gas fire and failing. This causing her to burst into tears. The tears causing her to hurl a shoe at the wall opposite. Spent matches on the carpet around her. Stealing a handful of bluebells from Regent’s Park. The stems weep into her palm, into her sleeve. She puts them in a jam-jar. They die. She throws them out of the window, jam-jar and all. Her standing beside her partitioned window, looking up at the pavement, at people’s ankles, their shoes, the feet of dogs, the wheels of prams. With one hand she holds a cigarette she isn’t smoking, with the other she tweaks hairs from her head, one by one, and lets them float to the floor.

  She was standing like this when, without warning, the door was pushed open and a figure stepped through.

  ‘There you are,’ it said.

  Lexie turned her head. She didn’t recognise the person. It was a woman with hair cut short, above the ears, and she was wearing a swing coat and little flat shoes with buckles.

  ‘Daph?’ Lexie said.

  ‘Good God.’ Daphne advanced towards her. She shook her head and seemed unable to speak. ‘Look at you,’ she said eventually.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What’s happened to your—?’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘Never mind.’ Daphne let out a small tutting noise, then took a cigarette from the packet on the window-sill, lit it and unbuttoned her coat. She looked as if she was about to take it off, then cast her eyes around her and seemed to think better of it. She began to pace the room instead. Lexie watched as Daphne kicked the bed-end, twisted the tap, tugged at a piece of peeling wallpaper. ‘Christ,’ she said, ‘it’s a dungeon. And it stinks. How much are you paying for this?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘Lex,’ Daphne came to a stop in front of her and seized her by the shoulders, ‘this has to stop. Do you hear me?’

  ‘What has to stop?’

  ‘This.’ She gestured around her, at the room, at Lexie’s head. ‘And this.’

  Lexie disengaged herself. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘You can’t do this. To yourself. To Laurence and me. We’ve been going frantic over you, you know, and we keep thinking . . .’

  ‘Sorry.’ Lexie stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray balanced on the sill.

  Daphne moved towards the armchair, picked up the cashmere scarf left there and brandished it at Lexie. ‘It’s not going to bring him back, you know. And what do you think he would say? If he could see you now?’

  ‘Put that down,’ Lexie said and Daphne, as if realising she’d gone too far, did. She slumped into a chair and puffed away at her cigarette. Lexie turned back to the street and watched someone in brown shoes walk past.
/>   ‘Do you remember Jimmy?’ Daphne said, behind her.

  ‘Jimmy?’

  ‘Tall, ginger hair, works at the Daily Courier. Had a thing with Amelia, ages ago.’

  ‘Um.’ Lexie picked up the ashtray, then put it down again. ‘Sort of.’

  ‘I saw him last night at the French Pub. He’s got a job for you.’

  Lexie turned. ‘A job?’ she repeated.

  ‘Yes, a job. You know. Work and pay and all that. Out in the world.’ Daphne tapped her ash into the grate. ‘It’s all arranged. You start on Monday.’

  Lexie frowned and tried to think of a reason she couldn’t but was unable to come up with one. ‘What is the job?’ she asked.

  ‘They need a person in Announcements.’

  ‘Announcements?’

  ‘Yes.’ Daphne sighed impatiently. ‘You know – births, deaths and marriages. It’s hardly thrilling and you could do it in your sleep but it’s better than this.’

  ‘Births, death and marriages,’ Lexie repeated.

  ‘Yes. All the important things in life.’

  ‘Why don’t you want it?’

  Daphne shrugged. ‘I’m not sure it’s very me – Fleet Street and all that.’

  ‘Maybe it’s not me either.’

  Daphne stood up and brushed down her coat. ‘It is,’ she said. ‘Or it might be. At any rate, it’s better than going slowly mad among your blue roses. So. Monday, nine o’clock sharp. Don’t be late.’ She stood up and grabbed Lexie by the arm. ‘Come on, get your coat.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Out. You look like you need a square meal. I touched Jimmy for ten bob, so we’re in luck. Let’s go.’

  On Lexie’s first day at the Daily Courier she was shown to a desk squeezed in between a larger desk and a set of bookshelves. It was in a small room off a long corridor; the ceiling was low, the floor uneven and a murky window gave a view over a passageway that connected Nash Court with Fleet Street. The whole office had an air of hush, of stasis. There seemed to be hardly anybody about. Had she arrived too early?

  She sat at her desk, placing her bag beneath it. The chair was covered with chipped green paint and had one unstable leg. On the desk were a typewriter, a blotting pad and a pair of rusted scissors. Lexie picked these up, opened them, shut them. The blades, at least, were operational. A heap of papers from the neighbouring desk had slumped on to hers. These, she pushed upright, tidying them into a neater pile. She picked up a mug off her desk and peered into its dark depths. A strong smell of coffee rose into her face. She put it down again. There was a note propped on her typewriter, which read, ‘Ask Jones abt poss of 2 wks’ worth copy.’

  At noises in the passageway below, she stood up and went to the window. People were walking in off Fleet Street. She watched them from above and reflected that there was something about the angle that made the tops of their heads, the backs of their necks look vulnerable.

  Just before lunch, a man rushed in through the office door. He had greying, wildish hair, an unbuckled raincoat, and he dumped a bursting briefcase on his desk, muttering to himself, then sat down in his chair, reaching for his telephone. ‘GEO five six nine one,’ he muttered under his breath, and began to dial. Only then did he notice Lexie. ‘Oh,’ he said, with a start, and let the receiver clatter back into place. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Lexie Sinclair. I’m the new Announcements person. I was told—’

  But the man had his face buried in his hands, ranting, ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God, will they ever listen to me? I told them, I specifically told them, not another—’ He gestured towards Lexie. ‘I mean no offence to you, my dear, but really. This won’t do. I’ll phone Carruthers now.’ He snatched up the receiver. ‘No, I won’t.’ He put it down again. ‘What shall I do?’ He seemed to be asking her. ‘Carruthers won’t be in yet. Simpson? He might help.’

  Lexie stood up and smoothed the scarf covering her hair. ‘I wasn’t sure where to start,’ she said, ‘but a sub brought in some proofs earlier, for today’s edition, so I marked them up. Here they are.’ She handed them to him and he snatched them suspiciously. ‘I wasn’t entirely sure on the house style,’ she continued, ‘but I’ve put a question mark next to anything I wasn’t a hundred per cent certain about.’

  The man pushed his glasses to the top of his head and perused the proofs, the pages held close to his face. First one, then another, then the third. ‘Hmm,’ he said to himself. ‘Umm.’ When he finished the third, he let them fall to his desk. He sat for a moment with his head tipped back, his fingers laced together. ‘The Courier doesn’t italicise the titles of individual poems,’ he said, addressing the ceiling.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘The titles of books, yes, but not individual poems or essays within a collection.’

  ‘My mistake.’

  ‘Where’d you learn to proof-read like that?’

  ‘At . . . my last job.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he said again. ‘Can you type?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you cut copy to fit?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you edit copy?’

  ‘I can.’

  ‘Where was this job of yours?’

  ‘It was . . .’here Lexie has to pause ‘. . . at a magazine.’

  ‘Hmm.’ He flung the proofs at her desk. ‘You need to initial them,’ he said, ‘or they’ll never find their way back to us.’ He fidgeted about with some papers on his desk. He withdrew a pencil from a pot and put it behind his ear. ‘Well, don’t just sit there, my dear,’ he said, suddenly rather peeved, and flapped his hands at her. ‘Take them back to the subs. Ring Jones. Find out when he’s filing. Go and see if they’ve set the crossword yet. And your announcements need typing up. I like to have three days’ worth at the very least under our belts. And the Country Reflections. Chop, chop, not a moment to lose.’

  Lexie spent several months typing out lists of births, details of marriages, those of people’s lifespans and descendants and survivors. The addresses of funeral parlours where flowers should be sent. She became adept at wheedling copy out of the recalcitrant Jones, at calming down her boss, Andrew Fuller, when he felt as though he was losing control, when the Country Reflections stockpile dipped below five, at relaying messages from Mrs Fuller about what time dinner would be served in Kennington. She also had to learn ways of sidestepping the attentions of the newspaper’s various single men – and several of the unsingle ones. She quickly developed a few cast-iron methods of refusing an invitation to lunch, a request to share a pint, an outing to the theatre. Fuller wholeheartedly supported these refusals. He didn’t like his assistant distracted. ‘Don’t come sniffing around here,’ he’d shout at a man who’d appeared hopefully in the doorway, brandishing a pair of free tickets or a concert flyer. ‘Let the woman work!’ She acquired a reputation for being rather serious, distant, aloof. A ‘blue stocking’, one of her would-be suitors dubbed her, which was the one time she snapped, was ungracious. She would go to the pub at lunchtime with Fuller, or with the editor of the women’s section, or with Jimmy. At one time a rumour circulated that she had a thing going with Jimmy, which Jimmy did nothing to quash; the rest of the office didn’t know that during their lunches, Lexie counselled Jimmy as to what to do about the engaged girl with whom he was in love. She found the pace of a daily newspaper gratifyingly hectic, soothingly distracting, the way it was an insatiable machine that had to be fed and fed, that as soon as one day’s work was done there was no break before you had to start on the next. There were no gaps, no crannies in which she could think or reflect: she simply had to work. The one photograph of her from her early years at the Courier is of a woman in a camel-coloured skirt, sitting on the edge of a desk, frowning at the camera, hair cut short, a particular cashmere scarf around her neck.

  It might have continued like this for years had she not, as she thought of it later, given herself away. She was walking back from putting some crossword proofs on the subs’ desk when she passe
d a group of three men talking in the corridor. The deputy editor, the assistant editor and the back-page editor.

  ‘. . . profile possibility,’ the back-page editor was saying, ‘is Hans Hofmann—’

  ‘Who?’ Carruthers, the deputy editor, interrupted.

  ‘Well, quite. To my mind—’

  ‘Bavarian-born abstract impressionist,’ Lexie heard herself say to them, ‘emigrated to America in the early 1930s. Known not only for being a painter but also a teacher. Students include Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler and Ray Eames.’

  The three of them stared at her. The back-page editor went as if to speak but didn’t.