Read The Hand That First Held Mine Online
Authors: Maggie O'farrell
Tags: #Literary, #Psychological, #Family Life, #Historical, #Fiction
The Hand That First Held Mine (10 page)
Lexie laughed. ‘But I’m not a cat, Mrs Collins,’ she said, and ran the rest of the way down the stairs.
Lexie looks up the street that on her map is marked as Moor Street. It seems quiet for a place full of inebriates. There is one car parked at the side of the road; a man is standing in a doorway, reading a newspaper; there is an awning half closed above a shop; in a third-storey window a woman is leaning out to water some flowers in a window box.
Lexie takes one step into Soho, then another, and another. She has the odd sensation that she is motionless, that the pavement is moving under her and that the houses and buildings and street signs are reeling past. Her shoes make a clear
toc-toc
sound as she walks. The man with the newspaper looks up. The woman in the window pauses with her watering.
toc-toc
sound as she walks. The man with the newspaper looks up. The woman in the window pauses with her watering.
She walks past a shop with cheeses, big as wheels, stacked in the window. A man in a white apron is standing on the doorstep, shouting something in a foreign language to a woman with a baby across the street. He grins and nods at Lexie as she passes and she smiles back. Around the corner is a coffee-house, with men standing on the pavement outside, talking in a different language. They part, just enough to let her through, and one of them says something to her but she doesn’t look back.
The buildings are crowded together, dark brick, the roads narrow. The gutters run and ripple with the earlier rain. Around another corner, and another, past a Chinese grocer’s, where a woman is stacking pitted yellow fruits into a pyramid, past a doorway where two African men are sitting on chairs, laughing. A gaggle of sailors in blue and white uniforms are walking down the middle of the road, singing in staggered, off-key unison; a delivery boy on a bicycle has to swerve to avoid them and he turns to shout something over his shoulder. Two or three of the sailors seem to take exception and dart after him but the delivery boy pedals hard and disappears.
Lexie watches all this. She takes it all in. Everything she sees seems freighted with significance: the fluttering ribbon on one of the sailor’s hats, a marmalade cat washing itself on a window, the billow of steam that gathers in the air outside that bakery, the chalked words – Italian? Portuguese? – on a board outside a shop, the strains of music, interspersed with laughter, that wreathe up from a grating in the pavement, the fur-collared coat and gold-clasped bag of a woman passing on the opposite pavement. Lexie drinks it in, every detail, with a feeling between panic and euphoria: this is perfect, this is all perfect, it couldn’t be more perfect, but what if she can’t remember it all, what if even the tiniest element were to slip from her?
She arrives rather suddenly outside the address in Bayton Street. It is a building squeezed between two taller buildings, with a symmetrical arrangement of sash windows and steps up to the door. Paint is peeling in curls off the sills and gutters. A pane on the second floor is missing.
Beyond the windows on the ground floor, Lexie can see a great number of people. Two men are peering at something they are holding up to the light; there is a woman on the phone, nodding, writing. Another woman is measuring a piece of paper with a ruler, talking over her shoulder to a man at the desk behind hers. In a corner of the room a group of people are bunched together, crowding round to look at some pages pinned to the wall. And there, next to the men holding something up to the light, jacketless, with his sleeves rolled up, is Innes.
Innes is, at this very moment, electrified by his magazine. The whole thing is being redesigned – the look, the content, the feel of it. The relaunched issue will feature an artist whom Innes believes will make an impression, will leave her footprint on history, will be remembered long after all these people have crumbled to dust.
And dust is something that is preoccupying him greatly today. Because this artist works with white clay, brushed and planed so smooth it assumes the texture of warmed infant flesh, making it imperative that—
Flesh? Innes’s thoughts trip and stumble on the word. ‘Flesh’ is not a good word. Does it necessarily denote death? No, he decides, but the implication is enough to banish it from the paragraph he is privately composing in his head as he points out to the photographer that his lens must have been covered in dust when he shot this roll because the clarity, the slightly impure white that is the artist’s signature, is by no means apparent.
Innes’s mind is running on several planes. He is thinking, will the magazine masthead be all right at an angle like that, will it set off the plainness of the new font, I want the font to be plain, Helvetica perhaps, or Gill Sans, definitely not Times or Palatino, it must not fight for attention with the shot of the sculpture. He is thinking, warmed infant skin? No. Does he need the word ‘infant’ at all? Warmed skin? Warmed flesh? Does the juxtaposition of ‘warmed’ with ‘flesh’ expunge any overtones of death? He is thinking, will I trust Daphne to call the printers or shall I see to it myself?
As he crosses the room he looks out reflexively at the street, and so preoccupied is he with his magazine, with the impending font decision, with his article, that the image of the woman outside enters his mind and takes up a place there as a noise from the external world will incorporate itself into a sleeping man’s dream. Innes immediately pictures this woman sitting with a typewriter at the desk next to his, her neat ankles crossed, her hand supporting her chin, that neck of hers turned so that she can look down at the street.
He stops in his tracks. The masthead must not be at an angle after all. It must be straight and at the bottom of the cover, justified right. It’s never been done before! The font must be Gill Sans, bold, forty-eight point, lowercase, like so:
and the shot of the sculpture will float above as if the masthead, the name of the magazine itself, is the floor, the essential strut, the jumping-off point for the work. Which, in a way, Innes tells himself, it is!
elsewhere
‘Stop!’ Innes cries, at the layout man. ‘Wait. Put it here. At the bottom. Like this. No, here. Gill Sans, bold, forty-eight point. Yes, Gill Sans. No. Perfect. Yes.’
The men with the contact sheet, Daphne on the phone, the visiting film critic and the layout man watch, unsurprised, as Innes stares at it for a moment, then bursts out through the door.
Suddenly Innes Kent is leaping down the steps. ‘You,’ he is saying. ‘You took your time. Come here this instant.’ He throws his arms wide.
Lexie blinks. She is still holding her map and his business card. But she moves towards him – how can she not? – and he envelops her in an embrace. Her face is pressed against the cloth of his suit and it registers somewhere that its nap is something familiar. She touches it with a fingertip, then pulls back to look. ‘Felt,’ she says.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Felt. Your suit is made of felt.’
‘Yes. You like it?’
‘I’m not sure.’ She takes a step back to consider. ‘I’ve never seen a suit made of felt before.’
‘I know.’ He grins. ‘That’s the point. My tailor wasn’t at all sure either. But he came round to my way of thinking in the end.’ He seizes her hand and sets off along the pavement. ‘Right. Lunch. Are you hungry? I hope you’re not one of those girls who doesn’t eat.’ He is talking almost as fast as he is walking. ‘You don’t look like you eat much. But I’m famished. I could eat a flock of sheep.’
‘You don’t look like you eat much either.’
‘Ah, but I do. Appearances being deceptive, sometimes. You’ll see.’
They pass at a fair pace along the street, down an alley, round a corner, past a man holding hands with two women, one on each side, both in shiny leather belts, all three of them laughing, past a shop with foreign papers in turning racks, past a group of girls carrying heavy sacks. Innes stops outside a restaurant. The sign above the door reads ‘APOLLO’, then nothing, ‘APOLLO’, then nothing, the word flashing on and off in blue neon. He opens the door. ‘Here we are,’ he says.
They go out of the sunshine, down a dark, twisting staircase to a low-ceilinged room. People are hunched at tables, with candles stuck into wine bottles flickering beneath their faces. In a corner, a man wearing a woman’s feathered hat is playing the piano rather badly. Two other men sit squeezed on the stool with him and they are conducting a loud conversation above the player’s head. It could, Lexie thinks, be any time of day at all outside – mid-afternoon, the dead of night – but down here you’d never know. There is a group of men, sitting around three small tables that have been pushed together. They greet Innes with shouts, raised wine glasses, expansive waves. Someone says, ‘Is that a new one?’ And ‘What’s happened to Daphne?’
Innes takes Lexie’s arm and leads her to the back of the room. Catcalls and whistles follow them. They sit opposite each other in a booth.
‘Who are they?’ Lexie asks.
Innes turns to survey the group of men, who are now throwing candle stumps at the pianist and calling for more wine. ‘They have many names,’ he says, turning back. ‘They call themselves artists but I’d say only one of them, no more than two, deserves that appellation. The rest are alcoholics and hangers-on. One is a photographer. One,’ he says, leaning in close, ‘is a woman who passes for a man. But only I know that.’
‘Really?’ Lexie is fascinated.
‘Well,’ he shrugs, ‘me and her mother. And her lover, I’d imagine. Unless she’s a very dim sort of girl. Now, what shall we eat?’
Lexie tries to look at the menu but she finds instead she’s looking at Innes, at his blue felt suit, at his frown of concentration as he reads the menu, at the artists or alcoholics, one of whom now has the waitress – a florid, large woman in her fifties – on his lap, at the row of empty wine bottles that line the shelves, at the swirling patterns on the table-top.
‘What’s the matter?’ Innes is touching her sleeve.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she bursts out. ‘I wish . . . I don’t know. I wish I had a pair of red heels and some gold hoop earrings.’
Innes pulls a face. ‘You wouldn’t be sitting here with me if you did.’
‘Wouldn’t I?’ She sees Innes is getting out his cigarettes. ‘May I have one?’
He puts two into his mouth, watching her, strikes a match, holds it to the cigarettes until they ignite, then hands one over to her, all without taking his eyes off her face. ‘You think you want hooped earrings but you don’t.’
Lexie puts the cigarette to her own mouth. ‘How do you know?’
‘I know what you need,’ he says, in a low tone, still looking her in the eye.
She stares at him, then bursts out laughing, without quite knowing why. What can he mean? Then she stops laughing because she has felt an unfamiliar sensation, low in her body, a kind of pull or drawing down. It is as if her blood and bones have heard him and are answering him. Then she laughs again and, as if he has understood, he laughs too.
He reaches out, cups a hand around her face, runs his thumb along her jawline.
Something unusual has happened to Innes. He does not fully understand it. But he can pinpoint when it began, this slight madness, this possession. When, a little over two weeks ago, he peered over a hedge and found a woman sitting on a tree stump. He looks at the restaurant table, at the floor, how it seems to feed and feed itself under all the furniture in the room. He feels for a moment the vastness of the city, the whole breathing breadth of it, and he feels as if he and this girl, this woman, are sitting together in its very centre, at the very eye of its storm, and he feels as if they might be the only people who are doing this, who have ever done this. He steals a half-glance at her, but only to be able to see her wrists, the way the sleeves drape over them, the way her hands are crossed over each other, the handbag placed on the bench next to her.
It seems at once peculiar and utterly right that she should be sitting there with him. He registers a vague desire to buy her something – anything. A painting. A coat. A pair of gloves. He would like, he realises, to watch her unwrapping a gift, to see her fingers negotiating the ribbon and paper of a present. But he pushes the thought from his mind. He cannot mess it up, not this one, not her. He doesn’t know why but he recognises that this one is different, this one is necessary to him. It’s an unaccountable thought.
To distract himself, he talks. He tells her about his magazine, about his recent trip to Paris, where he bought several paintings and two sculptures. He does a little dealing in art, as a sideline. Has to, he says, because the magazine makes no money at all. He tells her the sculptures were by unknown artists and that this is what he finds exciting. Anyone, he says, can buy work of an established artist. She interrupts at this point to say, anyone with money, and he nods and says, true. But it takes skill and a degree of recklessness to take a punt on an unknown. He says he can’t describe the feeling of walking into an artist’s studio and thinking, yes, this is it, this is something. And then he spends a long time trying to describe just that.
Other books
Never Look Away by Barclay, Linwood
Stranded by Barr, Emily
Below Suspicion by John Dickson Carr
Deceived by James Koeper
Dip It! by Rick Rodgers
Heartless Episodes 1-3: A Serial Romance by J. Sterling
The Shadow’s Curse by Amy McCulloch
The Japanese Corpse by Janwillem Van De Wetering
The Waterless Sea by Kate Constable