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Authors: Maggie O'farrell

Tags: #Literary, #Psychological, #Family Life, #Historical, #Fiction

The Hand That First Held Mine (36 page)

BOOK: The Hand That First Held Mine

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It is the right-angled corner of a canvas. Peeping out from its hiding-place behind the dressing-table. Here, in Ted’s mother’s dressing room. The incongruity of it makes her want to laugh.

At first she registers only this: its existence, the strangeness of its position between the furniture and the wall. She sees the thickness of the paint, the colours: grey, muted blue, black. At this point she lets go of the zip. She crouches beside it. She goes to touch it, to feel the grain of the paint, but stops herself at the last second.

Elina gets closer and closer to the canvas, then pulls back. She can see perhaps a ten-centimetre strip of the painting. She looks at the swirled colours, dripped thick to the canvas; she sees hairs from the brush, set deep into the paint. There is no doubt in her mind whose work this is but incredulity, disbelief, makes her crawl into the space under the dressing-table to see as much of the painting as she can. She crouches at skirting-board level, edging along the rim of the canvas, until she finds the artist’s signature, unmistakable, in black paint, slightly smeared, at the bottom right-hand corner.

The knock at the door gives her such a fright that she thwacks her head on the underside of the dressing-table.

‘
Auts
,’ she whimpers. ‘
Kirota
.’

‘Are you all right?’ Ted’s mother’s voice comes from the other side of the door.

‘Yes.’ Elina shuffles backwards, rubbing her head. ‘I’m fine. Sorry.’ She opens the door, pushing hair away from her face. ‘I . . . er . . . I . . .’

Ted’s mother comes into the room. They regard each other for a moment, wary, unsure, like cats who have just met. It is not often they are alone together. Ted’s mother looks about the room, in the manner of someone who thinks she may have been burgled.

‘I dropped something,’ Elina mumbles, ‘and, er . . .’

‘Do you need a hand with your zip?’

‘Yes,’ Elina says, relieved. ‘Please.’ She turns round. As Ted’s mother’s hands land on the small of her back, she sees the corner of the canvas again, the swirls and drips of paint. ‘You’ve got a Jackson Pollock behind your dressing-table!’ she blurts out.

Ted’s mother’s hands pause halfway up her back. ‘Is that right?’ The voice is cool, calm.

‘Yes. Do you have any idea how much it’s . . . I mean, that’s not the point. But . . . it’s incredibly valuable. And incredibly rare. I mean, how come . . . how did you . . . where did it—’

‘It’s been in the family for years.’ The hand continues up to the nape of Elina’s neck. Then Ted’s mother walks towards the dressing-table. She looks down at the edge of the canvas. She touches the bottles and pots, as if counting them, straightens a hand mirror. ‘There are others—’

‘Other Pollocks?’

‘No. I don’t think so. Other paintings from the same era, I believe. It’s not something I know much about, I’m afraid.’

‘Where are they?’

She waves a hand through the air, dismissively. ‘Around. I’ll have to let you look at them one day.’

Elina swallows. She cannot quite catch up with the strangeness of this situation. She is here, in Ted’s mother’s dressing room, zipped into Ted’s mother’s dress, in the same room as a Jackson Pollock, which has been shoved behind some furniture like a piece of car-boot-sale tat, talking about a possibly priceless art collection as if it’s an array of homemade doilies. ‘Yes,’ she manages to say, ‘that would be good.’

Ted’s mother gives a gracious smile, indicating the subject is now closed. ‘How is your own work going? Are you managing to get anything done at present?’

‘Er . . .’ Elina has to think. Her own work? She can’t even remember what that is. ‘No. Not at the moment.’ She scratches her head. She is unable to look away from the strip of that painting.

‘Shall we go down?’

‘Yes. Sure.’ Elina turns towards the door, then back to the painting. ‘Um, listen, Mrs R—’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Ted’s mother interrupts, sweeping out of the dressing room, holding the door open for Elina. ‘Call me Margot, please.’

L
exie sits at her desk in the
Courier
office, tapping her pen against the phone. Then she snatches up the receiver and dials. ‘Felix?’ she says. ‘It’s me.’

‘My darling,’ he says, down the phone, ‘I was just thinking about you. Am I going to see you tonight?’

‘No. I’ve got a deadline.’

‘I’ll come over. Later on.’

‘No. Didn’t you hear what I said? I’ve got a deadline. I need to work as soon as Theo goes down.’

‘Ah.’

‘You could always come and make him his dinner. Then I could start earlier.’

There is a short silence. ‘Well,’ Felix begins, ‘I could, I suppose. The problem is—’

‘Forget it,’ Lexie says impatiently. ‘Listen, I need a favour.’

‘Anything.’

‘The paper has asked me to go to Ireland to interview Eugene Fitzgerald.’

‘Who?’

‘Sculptor. Greatest living. It’s extremely rare for him to agree to an interview—’

‘I see.’

‘So obviously’ – Lexie ignores the interruption: she has to say this quickly or she’ll never get it out – ‘I have to go and I was wondering if you could come and look after Theo for me while I’m away.’

Another silence. This time stunned. ‘Theo?’ Felix says.

‘Our son,’ she clarifies.

‘Yes, but . . . What about the Italian woman?’

‘Mrs Gallo? She can’t do it. I’ve already asked her. She has family visiting.’

‘I see. Well, I’d love to. Obviously. The thing is—’

‘OK,’ Lexie snaps. ‘Forget it. I had serious misgivings about even asking you, but if you can’t be bothered to even contemplate looking after him for three days, then just forget it.’

Felix sighs. ‘Did I say that? Did I say no?’

‘You didn’t need to.’

‘Three days, you say?’

‘I said forget it. I’ve changed my mind. I’ll find someone else.’

‘Darling, of course I’ll have him for you. I’d love to.’

Lexie is silent this time, trying to sense if there’s a catch in this, if he’s lying.

‘I’m sure my mother will come down from Suffolk,’ he continues. ‘She’d be delighted. You know how she dotes on the boy.’

Lexie sniffs, considering this. Felix’s mother has taken everyone by surprise and put aside her initial horror at Felix and Lexie not being married and become a devoted grandmother, abandoning her WI meetings and jam-making at the drop of a hat to come to London to see Theo and to take him out for the day if Lexie needs to work. This is, if Lexie is honest, the outcome she’d been hoping for. She’d never leave Theo in the sole care of Felix. God only knows what would happen to him. But Felix’s mother, Geraldine – there is something comforting and utterly dependable about her muddied wellies and silk headscarves. And Theo adores her. But Lexie is still annoyed that Felix sounded so reluctant at first. ‘I’ll see,’ she says.

‘Very well,’ Felix replies, and she can hear the amusement in his voice. ‘I’ll speak to my mother about it, shall I? See if the old girl’s willing?’

‘If you like,’ Lexie says, and hangs up the phone.

In the event, Geraldine Roffe is tied up. She is sorry but she cannot get out of whatever church activity she’s committed to. It’s something to do with the altar cloths and their need to be laundered – the precise details are unclear to Lexie. She has, then, no option but to take Theo with her. It is early February. England is shrouded in misty sleet; dirty snow is piled up at the sides of the pavements. She takes a train to Swansea and then catches the night ferry to Cork. She clings to the rails as the boat rides the steel-grey waves of the Irish Sea. She pulls Theo’s knitted hat far down over his ears, tucking a blanket around him. The boat docks in a blue, drizzling dawn at Cork. Lexie changes a nappy on the floor of a toilet in the port. Theo screams and kicks out at this indignity and several women come to stand and watch. She catches a train towards the ragged dog-legged coastline. Theo presses his face to the window, letting out a stream of surprised nouns: horse, gate, tractor, tree. They arrive on the Dingle peninsula around lunchtime and Theo’s vocabulary runs dry. Sea, Lexie tells him, beach, sand.

When the train slows and she sees a green sign with SKIBBERLOUGH flash past, she jumps to her feet, puts Theo in his carrier, hauls it to her shoulders and pulls her suitcase down from the rack. SKIBBERLOUGH – SKIBBERLOUGH – SKIBBERLOUGH, the window tells her, SKIBB—She swings open the door and has to step back: below her there is no platform, just a large drop to a muddy path beside the train tracks. Lexie peers out of the door, looks up and down. The station, if you can call it that, is deserted. There is a small wooden shelter, the green sign, the single set of rails – and nothing else.

She hurls the suitcase to the ground with a thud and climbs down after it. The train begins to clank and groan as it gathers itself into movement. Theo chatters and exclaims at the sight, the noise of it. Lexie hauls her suitcase up out of the mud and, as she reaches the wooden shelter, a man appears from around it.

‘Excuse me,’ Lexie says. ‘I wonder if you can help me—’

‘Miss Sinclair, I assume, of the
Daily Courier
,’ the man says, in a clipped English accent. Not Fitzgerald, then. He is unsmiling, slightly dishevelled, his collar crooked, his jacket undone. He takes her in with an expression of naked shock – her muddy shoes, the child on her back, her disarrayed hair – but refrains from comment. Wisely, Lexie feels. ‘This way.’ He reaches out for her suitcase, closes his fingers around the handle.

Lexie doesn’t let go. ‘I can manage,’ she says, ‘thank you.’

The man shrugs and relinquishes the handle.

Beside the road there is an open-backed truck that, beneath the filth and rust, would once have been red. The man climbs into the driver’s seat and fires the engine while Lexie tries to find a place for her suitcase in the back, which is mainly occupied with dog baskets and rolls of chicken wire.

When she has sat herself in the passenger seat, with Theo on her knee, when they have swung out on to the road, Lexie turns to examine her driver. She clocks the glasses, folded and stuck into the breast pocket of his tweed jacket, the stain of blue ink on the index finger of his right hand; she clocks the book pushed between the car seats, the week-old copy of an English newspaper – not hers, the
Courier
’s direct competitor – beside it, the hair pushed back off the brow, greying a little at the temples.

‘So,’ she begins, ‘you work with Fitzgerald?’

The man frowns, just as she had known he would. ‘No.’

They continue along a narrow road for some minutes in silence.

‘Brrm, brrm,’ Theo comments.

Lexie smiles at him, then turns to look at a church as it flashes past, the woman coming out of its wooden doors. ‘You’re a friend of his?’

He doesn’t frown this time. Just says, ‘No,’ out of the corner of his mouth.

‘A neighbour?’

‘No.’

‘A relative?’

‘No.’

‘His valet?’

‘No.’

‘His dealer? His doctor? His priest?’

‘None of the above.’

‘Do you always answer questions with one-word answers?’

The man glances in the rear-view mirror, removes a hand from the wheel to scratch his chin. The road rolls past. Twisted, blackened branches of thorn trees, a donkey tethered to a stake. ‘Technically,’ he says, ‘they were not questions.’

‘They were.’

‘No.’ The man shakes his head. ‘They were statements. You said, “You work with Fitzgerald. You are a relative.” I merely refuted what you said.’

BOOK: The Hand That First Held Mine

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