The Hand That First Held Mine

by Maggie O'Farrell

  ‘Gracious me,’ the nurse tuts. Then Lexie hears her say to someone else, ‘Would you telephone the father? His telephone number is down here and—’

  ‘Don’t you bloody dare,’ Lexie roars. ‘I don’t want him here.’

  Several hours later she is clinging to the leg of a hospital bed, a sailor in a storm holding on to a mast, and she is still saying it’s too early, that she has work to do, and she is still swearing. She is swearing like she’s never sworn before.

  ‘Get up off that floor, Mrs Sinclair, this minute,’ the midwife says.

  ‘I will not,’ Lexie gets out from between her teeth, ‘and it’s Miss not Mrs. How many times do I have to tell you?’

  ‘Mrs Sinclair, get off the floor and on to the bed.’

  ‘Shan’t,’ she says, and then she lets out a howl, a scream, followed by a string of invective.

  ‘Such language,’ the midwife tuts. They keeps saying that to her. That or ‘Get on the bed.’ She is still crouched on the floor when she gives birth. They have to catch the baby in a towel. The doctor says he’s never seen the like. Like a savage, he says, or an animal.

  Such language. These were the first words Lexie’s son ever heard.

  Later, at visiting time, the ward began to fill with husbands in hats and raincoats, bearing flowers. Lexie watched them, looked at their nervous fingers gripping ribboned boxes of chocolates, their tight collars, their overshaven chins. The squeak of their shoes, the rain on their hats, the redness of their hands as they leant on the cots of their new children. Lexie smiled. She looked down at her son, who was swaddled in a yellow blanket, staring up at her with an expression that said: At last, there you are.

  ‘Hi,’ Lexie whispered, and put her finger into his hand’s grip.

  A nurse appeared beside her. ‘You shouldn’t be holding that child unless it’s feeding time. You’ll make a rod for your own back. You should put him in his cot.’

  ‘But I don’t want to,’ Lexie said, without taking her gaze away from him.

  The nurse sighed. ‘Shall I draw the curtains for you?’

  Lexie looked up sharply. ‘No.’ She settled the baby so that he was closer to her. ‘No,’ she said again.

  Towards the end of visiting time, there was the sound of regular, assertive footsteps in the ward. Lexie knew those footsteps. She raised her head to watch Felix take his walk of honour past all the beds, where the women looked up at him, their eyes wide, their mouths breaking into smiles. He was on television every night, these days. He nodded and smiled back at them. His coat was loose, as if he’d run here in a rush, and he was carrying an enormous spray of orchids in one hand and a basket of fruit in the other. Lexie rolled her eyes.

  ‘Darling,’ he boomed, as he neared her, ‘I just got the call. I would have come sooner.’

  ‘Really?’ Lexie said, glancing at the clock. ‘Haven’t you just finished tonight’s programme?’

  He laid the flowers on the bed, on top of Lexie’s feet. He said: ‘A boy. How marvellous. How are you?’

  Lexie said, ‘We’re fine.’

  She saw him smile, lean towards her. ‘Congratulations, sweetie, very well done,’ he said, and kissed her cheek. Then he sank into a chair. ‘Although I’m a tiny bit cross,’ he said, ‘that you didn’t call me straight away. You poor darling, coming in here on your own. Very naughty of you.’ He treated her to one of his deep, intimate smiles. ‘I sent a telegram to my mother. She’ll be delighted. She’ll be looking out the family christening robe as we speak.’

  ‘Christ,’ Lexie muttered. ‘Tell her not to bother. Felix, haven’t you forgotten something?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Have you forgotten why you came?’

  ‘To see you, of course.’

  ‘And the baby, perhaps? Your son? Whom you don’t seem to have glanced at yet.’

  Felix sprang to his feet and peered at the baby. His face, fleetingly, showed a mixture of distaste and fear before he retreated back to his chair. ‘Wonderful,’ he declared. ‘Perfect. What name are we going to give him?’

  ‘ Theo.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘As in Theodore.’

  ‘Isn’t that rather a . . . ?’ He stopped. Smiled at her again. ‘Why Theodore?’

  ‘I like it. And it suits him. Maybe because it contains the sound “adore”.’

  He put his hand over hers. ‘My darling,’ he began, in a low voice, ‘I spoke to the nurses on the way in and they think – and, of course, I agree with them – that you can’t possibly go home alone to your flat. I really think that—’

  ‘Felix, don’t start on this again.’

  ‘Won’t you come and live in Gilliland Street with me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m not talking about marriage, I promise. Just think about it. The two of us under one roof—’

  ‘ Three.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The baby, Felix.’

  ‘I meant three, of course. Slip of the tongue. The three of us under one roof. It is for the best. The nurses think so too and—’

  ‘Please stop!’ Lexie shrieked, making several of the bedjacketed mothers look over. ‘And how dare you speak to the nurses about me behind my back? Who do you think you are? There’s no way I’d live with you. Ever.’

  But Felix was impervious. ‘We’ll see,’ he says, covering her hand with his own.

  Lexie checks herself out early – she cannot stand the intimate camaraderie of the ward, the public life of it – and takes her baby home. They get a cab together. It seems a very simple equation: she went to the hospital as one person and she comes back as two. Theo sleeps in the bottom drawer of a chest. Lexie takes him out for walks in a big squeaking silver pram, given to her by a neighbour. She is awake for a great deal of the night. This is not a surprise but no less a trial. She stands at the window with her baby, in her dressing-gown, looking down into the street; she listens for the whirr-stop-whirr of the milk float and wonders if she is the only person awake in the city. The warm weight of Theo’s head balanced in the crook of her left arm, always her left, his ear pressed to her heart. His body slack with sleep. The room shimmers with the metallic white light of dawn. Around the bed are strewn the spoils of the long night they have lived through together: several soiled nappies, two crumpled muslin squares, an empty water glass, a jar of zinc ointment. Lexie scuffs her bare foot against the rug, then stops to look down at her son. His features cloud briefly in his sleep, then relax. His hand rises up, flails through the air, in search of something – texture, purchase, reassurance – finds a fold of her dressing-gown and clenches decisively around it.

  The shock of motherhood, for Lexie, is not the sleeplessness, the troughs of exhaustion, the shrinkage of life, how your existence becomes limited to the streets around where you live, but the onslaught of domestic tasks: the washing and the folding and the drying. Performing these makes her almost weep with furious boredom and she more than once hurls an armful of laundry at the wall. She eyes other mothers when she passes them in the street and they look so poised, so together, with their handbags hooked over the pram handles and their neatly embroidered sheets tucked in around their babies with hospital corners. But what about the washing, she wants to say, don’t you loathe the drying and the folding?

  Theo grows out of the drawer. He grows out of the matinée jackets people knitted for him. Again, this is not a surprise but it happens faster than she’d expected. She rings the Courier. She writes a piece about the Anthony Caro exhibition at the Hayward Gallery and she is able to buy a cot. Theo grows until his feet touch the bottom of the pram. She rings the Courier again and she goes for a meeting, taking Theo with her. Carruthers seems horrified at first and then intrigued. Lexie jiggles Theo up and down on her knee as they talk. She gets a commission for an interview with an actress. She takes Theo along with her to the house. The actress is charmed and Theo crawls under the sofa, chasing the actress’s cat. Then he appears with a shoe of the actress, the s
trap of which he has chewed. The actress is suddenly less charmed. Lexie gets paid and she buys a pushchair. It has red and white stripes. Theo sits forward in it, hands gripping his knees, leaning sideways to take the corners. She finds a neighbour, Mrs Gallo from a few doors down, who is willing to mind Theo for a few days a week. She is from Liguria and has reared eight children. She sets Theo on her knee, calls him ‘Angelino’, pinches his cheeks and says, ‘May God protect him.’ And then Lexie goes back to the office, back to the reporters’ room, to earn a wage, to commune with her old life. Her colleagues know why she’s been away but very few of them mention the baby, as if he’s something not to be spoken of in the noisy, concentrated atmosphere of the newspaper. When she leaves the house on these mornings, she senses a thread that runs between her and her son, and as she walks away through the streets she is aware of it unspooling, bit by bit. By the end of the day, she feels utterly unravelled, almost mad with desire to be back with him, and she urges the Tube train to rattle faster through the tunnels, to speed over the rails, to get her back to her child as quickly as possible. It takes her a while, once she’s there again with him, to wind herself back to rightness, to get the thread back to where it ought to be – a length of no more than a couple of feet or so feels best, Lexie decides. When Theo sleeps at night she goes to her desk to finish whatever she hasn’t managed to get through that day. She sometimes thinks that the sound of typewriter keys must be, to Theo, a kind of lullaby, wreathing like smoke into his dreams.

  When Theo begins to pull himself up on chair legs, when he begins to walk, when he begins to drag things off tables, when he very nearly kills himself by pulling the typewriter down on himself, Lexie realises something.

  ‘I need to move,’ she said to Laurence.

  Laurence was watching Theo noisily emptying a kitchen cupboard on to the floor. ‘Amazing,’ he said, ‘that something so simple can be such fun. It makes one want to be a baby again.’ He turned to look at her. ‘You need to move? Why? Is the landlord turfing you out?’

  ‘No.’ Lexie cast her eyes around the room. It was a large room, admittedly, but it contained her bed, Theo’s cot, the sofa, a playpen, a desk where she worked at night.

  Laurence was following her gaze. ‘I see what you mean,’ he said. ‘But where will you go?’

  Theo dropped a metal sieve on the floor, which produced a resonant clang. ‘Ha,’ he said. ‘Ha.’ He bent to lift it again. Laurence leant forward to cut himself another slice of cake. Lexie watched her son hurl the sieve to the floor again. She found a particular pleasure in his green towelling romper-suit, the way his hair was growing in a V over his brow, in his fingers gripping the handle of a pan.

  ‘I thought . . . I was thinking . . .’ she began ‘. . . that maybe I should . . . buy somewhere.’

  Laurence’s head snapped round. ‘Have you won the pools?’

  ‘If only.’

  ‘Is whatshisface paying?’

  ‘Certainly not. I wouldn’t accept money like that from whatshisface.’

  Laurence frowned. ‘Well, more fool you. How are you going to—’ He put down his cake plate. ‘Ah,’ he said, in a different tone and, if circumstances had been different, Lexie might have smiled. It was one of the things she liked best about Laurence – the speed of his intuition.

  He and Lexie looked at each other for a moment and then they turned to the wall opposite. The Pollock, the Bacon, the Freud, the Klein, the Giacometti. Lexie put her hands over her face and slumped down into the sofa. ‘I don’t think I can,’ she said, from behind her fingers.

  ‘Lex, I don’t see that you have a choice. You either ask whatshisface for a slice of his fortune—’

  ‘Not an option.’

  ‘Or you sell Theo to slave traders.’

  ‘Also not an option.’

  ‘Or you sell one of these.’

  ‘But I don’t want to,’ she moaned. ‘I can’t.’

  Laurence got up, walked over to the pictures and looked at them, one by one. ‘If it’s any consolation,’ he said, as he stopped in front of the Lucian Freud portrait, ‘I think he would have told you to do exactly this. You know that. He wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment. Remember how he sold that Hepworth lithograph so that you could come and work with us?’

  Lexie said nothing but took her hands away from her face.

  Laurence moved on, past the Minton and the Colquhoun and the Bacon and came to a stop in front of the Pollock. He tapped the frame with his fingernails. ‘This’ll get you and Theo a palace somewhere. Dying is such a clever commercial move for an artist.’

  ‘Not that one,’ Lexie muttered, picking cake crumbs from the folds of her dress.

  Laurence turned to look at her questioningly.

  ‘His favourite,’ Lexie said.

  Theo, from the kitchenette, suddenly let out a mournful howl. Lexie went through and lifted him out of the mess of pans, baking trays, biscuit cutters. He immediately leant into her shoulder, exhausted, putting in his thumb, twirling his spare hand in her hair.

  ‘The Giacometti sketch might fetch you something. It’s signed,’ Laurence said. ‘ They’ve gone up in recent years. David and I can sell it for you, if you like.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Lexie murmured.

  ‘We’ll do it anonymously. No one will ever know.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, turning away from the wall. ‘Take it now, will you?’

  She bought the third place she saw – the bottom half of a house in Dartmouth Park. Two rooms upstairs, two rooms downstairs, a passage running right through it from front door to back. A patch of garden at the back, with a snaggle-branched apple tree that yielded sweet-fleshed yellow fruit in autumn. Lexie hung a swing from its branches, and the first weeks in which she and Theo lived there, he would sit in the swing, fists resting on the wooden spars, watching in amazement as she scaled the branches, feet bare, collecting apples in her knotted skirt. She peeled up the rotten carpets and old, damp lino, scrubbed the boards and varnished them. She whitewashed the back of the house. She rubbed the windows with newspaper and vinegar until sunshine glowed through, Theo coursing back and forth across the garden with a watering-can. It seemed astonishing to her to own a patch of land, an arrangement of bricks, mortar and glass. It seemed an impossible swap: some money for a life like this. In the evenings, after Theo was asleep, she would often walk from room to room, around the perimeter of the garden, unable to believe her luck.

  The lost Giacometti sketch haunted her, though. She hung and rehung the paintings over and over again, trying to find an arrangement that didn’t show its absence. You had no choice, she kept telling herself, you had no choice. And: he wouldn’t have minded; under the circumstances, he’d have suggested it himself. But she was still gnawed by guilt, by regret, in the small hours of the night, as she lifted the paintings off the walls, to try another new combination.

  To distract herself, as ever, she worked. The women we become after children, she typed, then stopped to adjust the angle of the paper. She glanced at the paintings, almost without seeing them, then cocked her head to listen for Theo. Nothing. Silence; the freighted silence of sleep. She turned back to the typewriter, to the sentence she had written.

  We change shape, she continued, we buy low-heeled shoes, we cut off our long hair. We begin to carry in our bags half-eaten rusks, a small tractor, a shred of beloved fabric, a plastic doll. We lose muscle tone, sleep, reason, perspective. Our hearts begin to live outside our bodies. They breathe, they eat, they crawl and – look! – they walk, they begin to speak to us. We learn that we must sometimes walk an inch at a time, to stop and examine every stick, every stone, every squashed tin along the way. We get used to not getting where we were going. We learn to darn, perhaps to cook, to patch the knees of dungarees. We get used to living with a love that suffuses us, suffocates us, blinds us, controls us. We live. We contemplate our bodies, our stretched skin, those threads of silver around our brows, our strangely enlarged feet. We learn to look less in th
e mirror. We put our dry-clean-only clothes to the back of the wardrobe. Eventually, we throw them away. We school ourselves to stop saying ‘shit’ and ‘damn’ and learn to say ‘my goodness’ and ‘heavens above’. We give up smoking, we colour our hair, we search the vistas of parks, swimming-pools, libraries, cafés for others of our kind. We know each other by our pushchairs, our sleepless gazes, the beakers we carry. We learn how to cool a fever, ease a cough, the four indicators of meningitis, that one must sometimes push a swing for two hours. We buy biscuit cutters, washable paints, aprons, plastic bowls. We no longer tolerate delayed buses, fighting in the street, smoking in restaurants, sex after midnight, inconsistency, laziness, being cold. We contemplate younger women as they pass us in the street, with their cigarettes, their makeup, their tight-seamed dresses, their tiny handbags, their smooth, washed hair, and we turn away, we put down our heads, we keep on pushing the pram up the hill.