The Hand That First Held Mine

by Maggie O'Farrell

  ‘You know what I mean,’ he says, still in tones of Arctic courtesy. ‘Lexie’s stuff. Where is it?’

  ‘What stuff?’ she blusters, but she knows he’s got her and she knows he knows.

  ‘Her clothes, her books, her things from the flat. The letters Laurence wrote to Ted, before he died.’ He lists these things with infinite patience. ‘All the stuff I cleared out of her flat and put in the attic.’

  Margot shrugs and shakes her head at the same time. She reaches for another tissue.

  Felix puts down the typewriter. He advances towards her. ‘Are you telling me,’ he murmurs, ‘that it’s gone?’

  Margot holds the tissue to her face. ‘I . . . I don’t know.’

  ‘This is unbelievable,’ he says, and his tone has moved up a notch or two in volume. She’d forgotten that this is where the voice goes next – strident, domineering, in for the kill. ‘Unbelievable. It’s gone, hasn’t it? You and your bitch of a mother got rid of it all. Behind my back.’

  ‘Don’t shout,’ she whimpers, even though she knows he isn’t shouting, that Felix never shouts, never needs to.

  ‘Tell me,’ he says, standing above her. ‘Did you throw everything out?’

  ‘Felix, I really—’

  ‘Just give me a simple answer. Yes or no. Did you throw it out?’

  ‘I will not be bullied like this—’

  ‘Yes or no, Margot.’

  ‘Please stop.’

  ‘Come on. If you’re brave enough to do it, you’re brave enough to say it. Say, “Yes, I threw it out. All of it.” ’

  There is silence in the room. Margot picks at the skin around her nails, discards a tissue on the floor.

  Felix turns and walks to the window. ‘You realise,’ he says to the glass, ‘that Elina is coming? That I asked her to come. I told her we had all Lexie’s things up in the attic. That we’d give them to Ted and he could look through them. The least we could do, I said. You realise she’s coming here to collect it and you,’ he turns to her, ‘have gone and thrown it out.’

  Margot begins a fresh bout of sobbing. ‘I’m sorry,’ she wails, ‘I didn’t mean to . . . I . . .’

  ‘You’re sorry. You didn’t mean to,’ Felix repeats. ‘I’ll tell Ted that, shall I? Margot didn’t mean to throw out all your dead mother’s things but she did anyway. Dear God,’ he spits, ‘Elina will be here any minute. You’ll have to tell her that all we’ve got is an old typewriter and some dusty paintings, and you can tell her why as well—’

  Margot half rises from the chair. ‘Those paintings are mine, Felix,’ she begins. ‘They were never Lexie’s. They were mine all along. I took what belonged to me and—’

  ‘Spare me your petty, avaricious—’ Felix stops. The doorbell is ringing downstairs.

  Felix opens the door to the street. Elina stands on the step. She is, as ever, dressed in an ensemble of extraordinary clothes: a long, loose cloth thing with hems that are ripped and fraying. Purple tights. Paint-stained sneakers on her feet. Jonah is in a sling on her front, like a small marsupial. He is awake, his eyes wide with astonishment, and when he sees Felix his face breaks into a delighted smile. Which is more than can be said for his mother.

  ‘Elina,’ Felix says, standing back to allow her to step inside, ‘how are you, my darling?’

  ‘I’m . . .’ She shrugs, avoiding his eyes. ‘You know.’

  ‘Thank you so much for coming.’

  She shrugs again. ‘I don’t have much time. I have to get back.’

  Felix realises at this point that he usually greets Ted’s girlfriend, the mother of his grandchild, with a kiss on the cheek. But it seems too late to give it now.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Felix clenches and unclenches his hands. He finds it often helps him think. ‘So, how is he?’

  ‘Not good.’

  ‘Still in bed, is he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Felix swears, very softly, then says, ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘Would you . . . would you give him a message for me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Tell him . . .’ He hesitates. He is acutely aware of the presence of Margot, a floor above him, and that of Gloria, a floor below. ‘Tell him I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m truly sorry. For all of it. Tell him . . . tell him it wasn’t my idea. And that I never agreed with it.’ He sighs. ‘They cooked it up between them and I . . . It sounds pathetic, I know. I should have made a stand at the time, but I didn’t and I must take responsibility for that. It was a terrible, terrible mistake. And . . . and tell him I’d like to see him. Whenever he’s ready. Tell him to call me. Please.’

  She inclines her head. ‘I will.’

  Felix carries on. He finds he cannot stop speaking now that he has started. He finds himself saying things about Lexie, about how they met, about the night he picked up Theo in Lyme Regis, about how he got into an argument with Robert Lowe at the police station and a policeman had to come tell them to keep it down, to think of the boy, please, gents. At one point, he is clutching Elina’s arm and telling her that he loved Lexie, like no one else, that he made mistakes, yes, but that she was the love of his life, does she hear him, does she understand? Elina listens with a kind of doubtful intensity. She looks down at the tiled floor of the hallway. She runs the toe of her sneaker, stained red with paint, over the cracks. And then Felix tells her that the things have gone. Been thrown out. That there’s nothing. Nothing for Ted.

  Elina looks straight at Felix, shaking her fringe out of her eyes. Then she says, ‘Nothing?’

  Jonah chooses this moment to start to yell. He struggles and shouts in his sling, arching his back, his face reddening. Elina jigs up and down. She makes soothing, clicking noises at him. She unstraps him from the sling and hoists him to her shoulder.

  ‘There’s a typewriter. And some pictures.’

  Elina is rubbing her hand up and down Jonah’s back. She is turned away from him, still jigging up and down in the way that women with babies have. Jonah’s cries are subsiding. He looks at Felix over his mother’s shoulder with an expression of injured outrage. Sorry, Felix wants to say, I’m sorry. He is filled with an urge to apologise to all of them, one by one.

  ‘I can show you,’ he says instead. ‘Come up.’

  He and Elina and Jonah go up the first flight of stairs. There on the landing sits the typewriter. It is clogged with dust, the ribbon dried and flimsy. Looking at it gives Felix a feeling close to vertigo. He realises he can replicate in his head the exact sound it used to make. The clac-clac-a-clac of the metal letters hitting the paper, the ribbon raising itself each time to make the impression. The machine-gun fire of it, when the work was going well. The stops and pauses when it wasn’t, to allow for a sigh, a draw on a cigarette. The ding every time the carriage reached its limit. The whirr as the page was snatched out, then the rolling ratcheting as a new one was wound in.

  He looks away from it. He clears his throat. ‘And these are the pictures. I think I found all of them. There might be a couple more around but I can always—’

  Elina astonishes him by handing him the baby.

  ‘Oh,’ Felix says. Jonah dangles there, hoisted by his armpits in Felix’s hands. His feet circle each other, as if he’s riding an imaginary bike. He looks at a point above Felix’s hair, at Felix’s ear, down at the ground; he tips back his head to check the ceiling.

  ‘Jubba jubba whee,’ Jonah says.

  ‘Right,’ Felix says, ‘old chap.’

  Elina is wiping her hands on her cloth dress. She is crouching beside the pictures stacked up against the wall. She looks at the outermost one – a jumble of triangles in murky colours, Felix has never liked it much – eases it forward and looks at the next, then the next, then the next. She is frowning the whole time, as if displeased. Perhaps, Felix thinks, she doesn’t much want these dusty old things in her house, but then he’d have thought that she might have shown a bit of interest, painting being her thing, after all, and—<
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  She astonishes him again by saying: ‘I can’t take these.’

  ‘But, my darling, you must.’ Felix is firm. ‘They are rightfully Ted’s. They belonged to Lexie. They hung in the flat where, you know, he lived when—’

  ‘No,’ Elina interrupts. ‘I mean I can’t take them.’

  Felix looks at her, perplexed. She has, he’s always thought, unusually large eyes, set into that pale, pierrot face of hers. They look larger than ever in the dim light of the landing. ‘Sweetie, I’m afraid I don’t follow you. They were Lexie’s pictures. They are now Ted’s. He may want them.’

  ‘Do you have any idea . . .’ She stops. She puts a hand to her forehead. ‘Felix, these paintings are extremely valuable.’

  ‘Are they?’

  ‘Beyond valuable. I have no real idea what they’re worth but they ought to be . . . I don’t know . . . somewhere. In the Tate. In a gallery.’

  ‘No,’ Felix says. ‘I want Ted to have them. They’re his.’

  She rubs her hand over her face, seems to think. ‘I understand,’ she says. ‘I understand why you want that. But . . . the thing is . . . it’s not as if we can . . .’ For a few seconds, she lapses into a foreign language, Finnish, he supposes, muttering something under her breath, turning towards the pictures, then away. ‘I can’t take them now, anyway,’ she says again.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Felix, I can’t just sling them into the boot of Simmy’s car. Please understand. These are . . . They need proper crates and packaging. Insurance. We need a qualified art transporter.’

  ‘We do?’

  ‘Yes. I can get you the number of someone, if you like. I just don’t know . . .’she leans out and takes the baby from him ‘. . . I don’t know what Ted will think about this.’ She looks at her son. She straightens his hat. ‘I should go,’ she murmurs.

  Felix walks with her down the stairs, out of the front door and into the sharp sunshine of the street. As she buckles the baby into his carrier, Felix places the typewriter on the passenger seat.

  They face each other on the pavement.

  ‘Tell him,’ Felix says, ‘tell him . . .’

  She nods. ‘I will.’

  ‘And you’ll get me the number of a transporter person?’

  She nods again.

  Felix reaches forward and kisses her first on one cheek and then the other. ‘Thank you,’ he mutters.

  She responds by putting her arms around his neck and giving him a hug of surprising intensity. He is so taken aback by this that he feels sudden tears rising in his throat. He has to hang on to the thin frame of his son’s girlfriend as they stand there in the early-autumn sun; he has to close his eyes to the glare.

  He carries the impression of her touch at the back of his neck, around his shoulders, long after she has got into the car and after she has driven away around the corner. Felix stands on the pavement, staring at the spot at which her tail-lights disappeared, as if waiting for her to return, as if not wanting to break the spell.

  Elina sits in traffic on Pentonville Road. The cars ahead of her stretch out like a glacier of chrome and glass. Tributaries of traffic wait at crossroads to join the line. She glances back at Jonah, who has fallen asleep, his thumb held slackly in his mouth. She switches on the radio but the only sound that comes out is the lonely blizzarding of static. She twiddles various knobs for a while and occasionally she finds the blip and peep of a voice, struggling to make itself heard through the storm. But nothing more. She turns it off. She glances across the car at the typewriter. She takes her hand off the wheel and touches its metal casing. She runs her fingertips over the keys, along the roller, into the dip where the letter struts wait for instruction. She looks back at the road, at the traffic-lights turning pointlessly from red to amber to green and back again. She looks again at the typewriter; she glances back at Jonah; she watches the branches of a plane tree caught in the wind, the leaves released, showering down on top of the cars. One falls to her windscreen, right in front of her face, and as she stares at it, its webbed veins, its waxy greenness, its stiff stem, an idea comes to her.

  Elina checks her watch. She rummages in her bag and brings out her mobile phone. She rings Simmy. ‘How is he?’ she asks. ‘Can you stay for a bit longer?’ Then she indicates, wheels the car around and drives into an empty road.

  She is away for several hours. She has been so absorbed in what she’s been doing that she’s got a parking ticket, which she crams into her bag. When she gets back, the house is silent. It feels as if she’s been away for days, weeks, instead of hours. With her bag still slung across her body and Jonah on her hip, she climbs the stairs. ‘Hello?’ she calls. ‘I’m back.’

  Simmy is waiting at the top.

  ‘How is everything?’ she whispers to him.

  ‘Fine. He’s been asleep but I think he’s awake now. I was just about to go down and make a cup of tea. You go in.’

  Elina comes into the bedroom. Ted is lying in bed, much as he was when she left him, the duvet draped over his body. He is curled up, facing the wall.

  ‘Ted?’ she says. ‘Sorry – I was longer than I thought. How have you been? It’s a beautiful day out there.’

  She sits down on the bed. She puts Jonah on the floor with his favourite wooden rattle.

  ‘Ted,’ she says. She knows he’s not asleep. She can tell by the shallowness of his breathing. But he doesn’t move.

  She climbs further on to the bed, dragging the bag with her.

  ‘You know what?’ she says, laying a hand on his side. ‘I’ve found out that’s not really your name. She called you something different.’

  She waits. He doesn’t answer but she can tell he’s listening. She delves into her bag and brings out a sheaf of paper. ‘I’ve been to the newspaper archives. It was amazing – they were so helpful. I found out all sorts of things,’ she spreads the papers out on the bed and shuffles through them. ‘Lexie was an art critic. She wrote articles about Picasso, Hopper, Jasper Johns, Giacometti. She knew Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. And John Deakin – that whole group. She interviewed Yves Klein and Eugene Fitzgerald and Salvador Dalí. She had dinner with Andy Warhol in New York. Did you hear that? Andy Warhol. And . . .’ Elina shuffles though the papers, looking for a certain article ‘. . . she was out in Vietnam at one point. Can you believe that? There’s one here about life in Saigon during the war. Somewhere. I can’t find it now. Maybe that’s how she knew your dad. You could ask him, I suppose. Anyway, she wrote hundreds and hundreds of articles. And I’ve got some of them here. For you. Ted? Do you want to see them? Look.’ She picks up a sheaf and, leaning over his prone form, places them next to his face. His eyes, she sees, are shut. His lips look dry and cracked, as if it’s been a long time since he drank anything. From downstairs, there comes the noise of Simmy moving about in the kitchen, a kettle being filled, water rushing through pipes.

  ‘Ted?’ she says again and she hears in her voice that she might cry so has to take a deep breath. ‘This one has a photo of her, on a balcony. Do you see? In Florence, it says. Look. She’s older there than in that other photo. Ted, please look.’ Elina lays her cheek on his arm. ‘Please.’

  She sits up and riffles through the papers again. ‘You know what else?’ Tears are falling now, to make dark, transparent circles on the photocopies. She dashes them from her face, scrubs at her cheeks with her sleeve. ‘She wrote about you.’

  Elina finds the pages she wants – she remembers now that she pinned them together specially at the archive place. ‘She did a column called “From the Frontline of Motherhood”.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘It’s about you. Do you want to hear?’

  She sees his arm twitch and she watches, breath held. Will he move? Will he speak? The hand reaches up and scratches the back of his head. But he says nothing.

  ‘This is the first one,’ Elina says. ‘I put them in order. Listen. “As I write, my son lies sleeping across the room. He has been alive two hundred and fifteen days. He and I
live together in one room. He has three teeth and two names: Theodore, which is what health visitors call him, and Theo, which is what I call him.”

  ‘Did you hear that?’ Elina lowers the papers. She takes his hand. ‘She called you Theo.’

  His body stirs beneath the sheets. He twists his head from one side to the other. His eyes, she sees, are open. Then she feels a pressure on her hand and he speaks his first words for a week. ‘Keep going, El,’ he says, ‘keep going.’

  And so she does.

  Acknowledgements

  I could not have written this book without the help and encouragement of several people. My heartfelt thanks to:William Sutcliffe

  Victoria Hobbs