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 (24 page)
Elina takes them, helplessly, then lowers herself to the bottom step. ‘What are you doing, Sim?’
‘Don’t you have a bag?’ he demands, holding up a small green leather pouch with multiple zips, then casting it aside. ‘One of those proper suitcase-like things. With stuff in.’
‘What stuff?’ she asks, as Simmy continues to ransack the coat rack.
‘Baby stuff. Nappies, et cetera. You know. Those quilted monstrosities you people cart about.’
Elina points at the canvas bag beside the door.
‘That?’ Simmy says, poking it with his toe. ‘You can’t be serious. It looks like the thing my mother keeps horse-feed in.’ He pulls it open. ‘Hmm. Let’s see. Nappies,’ he says, ‘check. Cotton wool, check. Bottom-wipes, check. Unidentifiable small white things, check. What else do we need?’
‘Sim, I can’t just—’
‘Bottles. How about bottles? Don’t we need those?’
‘No.’ She gestures towards her chest. ‘I’m—’
‘Oh,’ he wrinkles his nose, ‘of course. You’re doing all that business. Well, you can carry those yourself. Where’s Ted? Ted!’ Simmy shouts. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’
Let’s go, Elina thinks, as they whiz in Simmy’s car through streets full of people, of children on bicycles, of teenagers in groups, of trees in full bloom. It is one of her favourite expressions. Let’s go. It seems to call to her from her other, old, life, when she was always arriving or departing or somewhere between the two. She feels sessile now, like a mussel shell, welded to the house, to the few streets around it. Let’s go.
She holds Jonah’s curled hand in the palm of her own. He sits in his car seat, awake, alert, his eyes wide. He seems to be as astonished as she is by this sudden outing. In the front, Ted and Simmy are arguing over which CD to play. Ted is wearing the straw hat now, set back on his head, and Simmy is driving with one hand on the wheel and the other over the slot in the CD player, preventing Ted from inserting whichever CD he’s holding. Both men are laughing and the windows are all rolled down and warm air is streaming through the car.
They go to the National Portrait Gallery. Simmy insists on carrying Jonah in the sling and Ted has the canvas nappy bag so Elina can swing her arms lightly by her sides. Ted wants to head up to the café on the top floor but Simmy tells him not to be a Philistine. They are there to see a John Deakin exhibition, he tells them, not to drink overpriced cappuccino.
‘Who is John Deakin anyway?’ Ted grumbles.
‘Little My?’ Simmy turns to her.
‘Um,’ Elina has to think, ‘a photographer. I think. A contemporary of Francis Bacon?’
‘Full marks to you,’ Simmy says. He takes them both by the hand. ‘Children,’ he announces, in such a loud voice that several people look over, ‘we are about to enter the world of seedy, Bohemian postwar London. Are you ready?’ He turns to Ted.
‘No, I want to go for a c—’
‘Are you ready?’ Simmy turns to Elina.
‘Yes,’ she murmurs, holding in her laughter.
‘Are you ready?’ he asks, looking down at Jonah. ‘No, you appear to be asleep. Never mind. Let’s go.’ And he pulls them along, through the doors, by their hands.
Elina first met Simmy in the living room, early one morning. She’d been renting a room off Ted for a month or so, she’d come down early before heading out to her teaching job in East London and there was a large, overweight, sandy-haired man asleep on the sofa, fully dressed, in an extraordinary ensemble of scruffy clothes. She tiptoed across the room, towards the kitchen, and filled the kettle as noiselessly as she could.
‘Don’t tell me,’ a booming voice came from the sofa, ‘you’re making a pot of tea.’
She looked over and saw that the man was regarding her from above the sofa’s back. ‘Coffee, actually.’
‘Even better. You complete angel. You couldn’t spare me a cup, could you?’
Elina could. She brought it to him on the sofa and sat on the carpet to drink hers.
‘Jesus,’ the man gasped, after his first swallow, ‘that’s enough to take the skin off my throat.’
‘Too strong?’ Elina asked.
‘Strong’s not the word.’ He massaged his neck. ‘I may never speak again. So let’s make the most of it.’ He smiled at her and sat up, settling the rug about him. ‘Tell me everything you know, Ted’s Lodger.’
When she saw Ted that evening – he and his girlfriend Yvette were cooking dinner together – she asked him about the man on the sofa.
‘Simmy?’ Ted had said, without turning away from the wok. ‘James Simpkin, to give him his full name. He stays here sometimes – he has his own key. I told him the attic was occupied so he probably crashed out on the sofa instead. I’m glad he remembered,’ Ted added, ‘and didn’t burst in on you in the middle of the night.’
‘Did he talk to you loudly about random things?’ Yvette, dropping an olive into her mouth, had asked her. ‘And was he wearing mismatched shoes?’
‘No, but his trousers were held up with green garden string.’
‘Don’t be deceived by appearances,’ Yvette said, rolling her eyes. ‘His family owns half of Dorset.’
‘Really?’
Ted had turned, selected a knife from the drawer. ‘It’s a prerogative of the very wealthy in this country, dressing like a tramp. Don’t ask me why.’
At the exhibition, Elina stares into the hooded dark eyes of a famous Italian sculptor, the wide, kohled ones of a 1950s actress who later became famous for her drug problem. There is the gaunt, handsome face of Oliver Bernard. And Francis Bacon, close to the camera, as if about to kiss it. There are three men standing with their backs against a wall, unsmiling, their skin a silvery bromide sheen. She finds Ted in front of a portrait of a man and a woman. The man has his arm lightly about the woman’s shoulders and with his other hand he holds a cigarette. She is in black, a scarf around her hair, the ends of which trail over her shoulder. The man is looking sideways at her but she looks out, with a candid, assessing gaze, at the viewer. The sign on the wall behind them reads ‘elsewher’, the end of the word obliterated by the man’s head.
Elina lays her cheek, briefly, on Ted’s sleeve, then moves along to see an unidentified man in a white shirt crossing a road in Soho, a side of meat over his shoulder, more pictures of Bacon, in his studio, on a pavement, standing with the same man from the picture with the sign and the woman.
Simmy appears at her side. ‘You wouldn’t have thought he was an incurable drunk, would you?’ he says, in his version of a whisper.
‘I don’t know,’ Elina muses, looking again at the man carrying the meat across a road, ‘they all have a kind of starkness to them, don’t you think? A kind of melancholy.’
Simmy snorts. ‘That’s because they’re of the past. All photos of the past look melancholy and wistful precisely because they capture something that’s gone.’
Elina reaches down to touch Jonah’s head, to readjust his hat.
‘Stop fiddling, will you? Leave the child alone,’ Simmy says. ‘And where’s Ted? Let’s get him that coffee.’
Ted is sitting in the café, with Simmy and Elina. Not the café he wanted to go to, the one up in the roof, with the views over Trafalgar Square, but the one in the basement. He is sitting at the table, drinking coffee, talking with his friend and his girlfriend and, without warning, something rears its head. The recollection of himself as a child on a woman’s knee. The woman is wearing a red dress of slightly slippery material and it is tricky for him to stay in position: he has had to wind his arm into hers and this makes the woman laugh. He feels the reverberation of it through her chest, through the fabric of the dress.
This keeps happening, Ted finds, and more since Jonah was born. Flashes of something else, somewhere else, like radio static or interference, voices cutting in from a distant foreign station. He can barely hear them but they are there. A hint, a glimpse, a blurred image, like a poster seen from the window of a speeding train.
It must be, he decides, that having a baby leads you to relive your own infancy. Things you might never have thought about before suddenly emerge. Like the sensation of sitting, or trying to sit, on this woman’s knee. He has no idea who she was – a friend of his mother’s, perhaps, a visiting relative, a glamorous colleague of his father’s – but he can recall the sensation of losing his hold on her with sudden, vivid clarity.
Someone behind him bumps into his chair. Ted is thrown forward into the edge of the table. He turns to see a man with a rucksack amble past, oblivious. Ted adjusts his chair so that it’s away from the thorough-fare, closer to Elina. He picks up his cappuccino and takes a sip. The image of the woman in the red dress is gone. Transmission terminated. Simmy is shovelling walnut cake into his mouth, talking animatedly. Elina is leaning towards him, listening, holding Jonah on her lap. Jonah, his head wobbling, is looking at something on the table; he clings to Elina’s thumb with both of his hands, fingers clenched tight, as if he will never let go. Ted feels a sudden empathy with his son, with his need of Elina. He feels a corresponding tug in his own chest, puts out a hand and lays it lightly on her leg. Actually, he really wants to pull her to him, so that her shoulder fits underneath his arm, so that her head is against his chest, so that she’s as close as she can be, and then he would like to say, don’t go, don’t ever go.
Elina is getting up, Ted sees. She is still listening to Simmy but she is handing Jonah to Ted. As he puts out his arms to take him, he sees that she has to wrest her thumb free. ‘Where are you going?’ Ted says.
‘To the toilet.’ She turns back to Simmy. ‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ she says to him, as she slides behind Ted’s chair.
Ted takes hold of her wrist. He feels that queasiness again, senses that flat, unending sea. For a moment, he sees a woman with long hair bending over him, her hair swinging into his face, putting a plastic cup into his waiting hands. He sees himself sitting on a landing with a green rug, its woollen strands between his fingers, listening to his father’s voice downstairs, which sounds pleading and apologetic. Ted has to shake his head to rid himself of these impressions. Jonah seems to sense something, too, because he starts to sob, his face crumpling. Ted wonders what to say. ‘Where is the toilet?’ is what comes out.
Elina looks down at where he is holding her arm. ‘Over there,’ she murmurs. She looks at his face, perplexed. ‘I won’t be a minute.’ And then she turns, her arm parting company with his fingers, and he watches her as she walks away from him and he tries not to see the operating theatre, her lying in that sanctifying white light, that featureless, heaving sea.
‘Are you OK?’ Simmy is asking him from across the table.
‘Yeah,’ Ted says, without meeting his eye.
‘You look a bit . . . peaky.’
‘I’m fine.’ Ted stands, hoisting Jonah to his shoulder. ‘I’m going to the shop.’ He’s suddenly remembered that there is a postcard he wants from the exhibition.
I
t was a busy time at
Elsewhere
– Lexie had persuaded Innes to expand the magazine, to get in more advertising. They had upped the number of their features and had stopped using low-grade matt paper. The pages were now glossy, slightly grainy to the touch, the photographs bigger. They had just launched a section for rock and roll, the first arts magazine to do so. Innes had been dubious but Lexie had insisted and even found a critic, a young man studying the guitar at the Royal College of Music. The magazine was, at the time, revolutionary. Unfortunately they had no more staff than before so they were rushed in what they did, working until after ten most nights. They were, that winter, all ill, to varying degrees. Someone had caught a cold and passed it round the rest of them. The office rang to the sound of sneezing and wheezing and coughing.
t was a busy time at
Elsewhere
– Lexie had persuaded Innes to expand the magazine, to get in more advertising. They had upped the number of their features and had stopped using low-grade matt paper. The pages were now glossy, slightly grainy to the touch, the photographs bigger. They had just launched a section for rock and roll, the first arts magazine to do so. Innes had been dubious but Lexie had insisted and even found a critic, a young man studying the guitar at the Royal College of Music. The magazine was, at the time, revolutionary. Unfortunately they had no more staff than before so they were rushed in what they did, working until after ten most nights. They were, that winter, all ill, to varying degrees. Someone had caught a cold and passed it round the rest of them. The office rang to the sound of sneezing and wheezing and coughing.
Lexie had to go to Oxford that day, by train, to interview an academic who had written a surprisingly racy
roman à clef
about life in the cloisters – all grizzled tutors and palpitating young undergraduates. She dashed around the office, collecting her pen, a pad of paper, a copy of the novel to look over on the train. She paused briefly behind Innes’s desk. He was hunched over a page proof, his hands cupped over his ears (he always said their noise distracted him).
roman à clef
about life in the cloisters – all grizzled tutors and palpitating young undergraduates. She dashed around the office, collecting her pen, a pad of paper, a copy of the novel to look over on the train. She paused briefly behind Innes’s desk. He was hunched over a page proof, his hands cupped over his ears (he always said their noise distracted him).
‘Goodbye,’ she said, and kissed one of his hands.
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