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 (40 page)

BOOK: The Hand That First Held Mine
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Mrs Gallo and Lexie were in the kitchen, fiddling with the cooker dials and arguing amiably about whether or not it was right for Mrs Gallo to cook Lexie a chicken pie. Mrs Gallo had just commandeered the oven when the doorbell rang.
 
‘I’ll go,’ said Lexie, backing away from the oven and touching Theo’s head as she passed. He was piling cushions into a soft, towering heap.
 
‘Darling,’ Felix said, when she opened the door, stepping forward to envelop her in a rather lingering embrace, ‘how are you?’
 
‘Fine.’ Lexie disentangled herself from him. ‘I didn’t know you were coming. You should have phoned.’
 
‘Don’t be anti-social. Can’t I drop in on my son and heir if I want to?’
 
‘Of course. But you should phone first.’ They glared at each other in the close confines of the hallway.
 
‘Why?’ he said, without moving his eyes from her face. ‘Who have you got here?’
 
She sighed. ‘Paul Newman, of course. And Robert Redford. Come and meet them.’
 
‘Going away, are you?’ he said, pointing at the bags in the hall. Lexie and Theo had just returned from seeing Robert in Eastbourne.
 
‘Just got back, actually,’ she threw over her shoulder, as she walked into the sitting room, where Mrs Gallo was watching Theo leap off the sofa and on to the cushions.
 
Felix stood at the edge of the rug, like a man hesitating before deep water. ‘Hello, young man,’ he boomed down at Theo, before nodding at Mrs Gallo. ‘Mrs Gallo, how are you? You’re looking terribly well.’
 
Mrs Gallo, who did not entertain a high opinion of Felix, based on the view that any man worth his salt would have made an honest woman of Lexie long ago, gave a sound between a tut and a cough.
 
Theo looked up at his father and said, with devastating clarity, ‘Robert.’
 
Lexie almost laughed but managed to stop herself. ‘Not Robert, sweetheart, it’s Felix. Felix. Remember?’
 
‘Who’s Robert?’ Felix was saying, as Lexie went into the kitchen.
 
She ignored him. ‘Would you like tea, Felix? Coffee?’
 
He followed her into the kitchen, just as she had known he would. She got out three mugs from the cupboard, milk from the fridge, eyeing Felix as she did so. He read the notes pinned to her fridge; he picked up a beaker of Theo’s, looked at it, put it down again; he took an apple from the fruit bowl, then put it back.
 
‘How’s work?’ he said abruptly.
 
Lexie filled the kettle at the tap. ‘Fine. Rushed. You know.’
 
‘I saw your piece on Louise Bourgeois.’
 
‘Oh.’
 
‘It was very good.’
 
‘Thank you.’
 
‘I . . .’ he began, then stopped. He leant on the counter and buried his head in his hands. Lexie replaced the lid on the kettle, then put it on the hob, striking a match and holding the flame to the gas, all the time watching Felix or, rather, the top of his head.
 
‘I’ve got myself into a bit of a tight spot,’ he said, his voice muffled behind his hands.
 
‘Oh?’ Lexie opened the caddy and spooned tea leaves into the pot. ‘What kind of tight spot?’
 
‘There’s a girl.’ Felix straightened up.
 
‘Ah. And?’
 
‘She . . . she tells me she’s got a bun in the oven. Claims it’s mine.’
 
‘And is it?’
 
‘Is it what?’
 
‘Yours.’
 
‘I don’t know! I mean . . . it could be, I suppose . . . but how does one ever know?’ He glanced at Lexie, then said hastily: ‘I don’t mean you, darling, I mean her. It’s not that often we’ve . . . that she and I . . . I mean, I’ve hardly . . . you know.’
 
‘I see. Well, you’ll have to take her word for it, I suppose.’ She gives him a sideways look. ‘What does she want to do about it?’
 
‘That’s just it,’ Felix says despairingly. ‘She says we have to get married. Married!’ He pushed himself away from the kitchen cupboard and roamed to the window and back. ‘The idea makes me sick. And now,’ he muttered, ‘I’ve got her damn mother breathing down my neck as well. And a right battleaxe she is.’
 
The kettle started to shudder and tremble, letting out a jet of steam. Just as the whistle shrilled in the kitchen, Lexie seized it and lifted it off the heat. She put it down next to the sink. She placed her hands on the edge of the cupboard. She didn’t look at Felix. She could see the backs of his trouser turn-ups, his heels, as he stood at the window. ‘Are we,’ she said, ‘talking about Margot Kent?’
 
His silence was enough. She saw his feet move as if he was about to come towards her. Then he must have changed his mind because he headed for the table. She heard him pull out a chair, sink into it. ‘It’s damned bad luck,’ he murmured. ‘That’s what it is.’
 
When she didn’t answer, he fidgeted in his chair, twisting round and twisting back. ‘I don’t want to marry her,’ he said, a trifle petulantly. ‘I think it’s all her bloody mother, pushing her from behind.’
 
Lexie let out a short bark of a laugh. ‘I’ll bet,’ she said.
 
Felix stood up and came towards her. ‘You know her mother as well?’ he asked.
 
‘I do,’ she said, ‘have that particular pleasure, yes.’
 
She saw a flicker of interest in Felix’s eyes. ‘What is your connection with them again?’ he said.
 
‘None of your business,’ Lexie said, and her throat felt raw and scraped. ‘That’s what it is.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Has Margot never said?’
 
Felix pulled a grape from a bunch in the fruit bowl and tossed it fretfully into his mouth. ‘I don’t believe she has. Look, Lex,’ he said, still chewing the grape, ‘only you can help me.’
 
She looked at Felix. ‘Sorry?’
 
‘Only you,’ he said urgently. ‘If I . . . if we say that we are . . . you know . . . married, then I can’t marry her. They can’t pressure me into it. Do you see? I mean, they know about you and me. And Theodore. God knows how. But if I could tell them we’d got married, which isn’t totally out of the question, is it, then that would be that. Problem solved.’ He beamed at her with a mixture of hope and lust. He placed a hand on her shoulder, applying a little pressure, to draw her towards him.
 
Lexie put a hand against his chest. ‘I find it hard,’ she began, very slowly, ‘to say which part of that speech is more odious to me. Maybe it’s just the idea of being married to you. Or is it that you want to marry me to save yourself from being forced into marrying someone else? No. Perhaps it’s that, in your mind, our getting married isn’t – how did you put it? – totally out of the question. Perhaps it’s the thought of my having any connection whatsoever to those evil, manipulative, devilish . . .’ she searched for the right word, before she remembered ‘. . . maenads that strikes such sheer horror into my soul. But, like I said, it’s hard to say.’ She knocked Felix’s hand off her shoulder. ‘Get out of my house,’ she said. ‘Now.’
 
 
 
M
idnight in the Blue Lagoon Café Bar. The baristas have gone for the night, having swept the floor, wiped the tables, bagged up the rubbish and locked the door behind them.
 
In the dark, shut café, the cappuccino machine cools, unplugged at the socket. The chrome of its casing will give a loud click every few minutes. Cups and glasses stand inverted on the draining-board; tepid water slides off them to pool in circles around their rims.
 
The floor has been swept, but not very well. There is a focaccia crust under Table Four, dropped by a tourist from Maine; the floor around the door is littered with fragments of leaves that have fallen from the plane trees of Soho Square.
 
Far above in the building, a door slams, muffled voices are heard and there is the sound of feet rapidly descending a staircase. The café seems to listen attentively. The dried glasses on the shelves vibrate against each other, in sympathy with the crashing footsteps. The contracting metal of the cappuccino machine clicks. A drop of water falls from the tap, spreads over the bowl of the sink, then trickles towards the plughole. The footsteps are thudding along the passageway beside the wall of the café, the front door slams and out on to the pavement comes the girl who works nights upstairs.
 
She stalks the pavement outside the shut door of the Blue Lagoon; back and forth, back and forth, she goes, in her red ankle boots with dagger heels. She crosses and recrosses the paving slab where Innes first embraced Lexie in 1957; she passes the kerbstone where Lexie stood, trying and trying to hail a cab to take her to the hospital; she leans for a moment against the piece of wall against which Lexie and Innes posed for John Deakin on an overcast Wednesday in 1959. And right where the girl from upstairs is grinding out her cigarette is where, in wet weather, it is possible to see the ghost-outline of letters spelling ‘elsewhere’, and probably no one notices this and if they did they wouldn’t know why.
 
The girl flicks the butt into the gutter, wrenches open the door and disappears. Her footsteps judder the glasses on the shelves, the salt cellars on the tables, even that chair by the window with one leg shorter than the others.
 
After this the café is quiet, the cappuccino machine cooled, the cups standing in wet circular pools, the focaccia crust lolling on its side. A magazine on a table lies opened at a page with the headline
How to Become Someone Else
. A sack of coffee beans slumps, exhausted, against the counter. A bicycle skims past the window, the beam of its light veering over the dark street. The sky outside is mineshaft black, washed with orange. As if sensing the night-time calm, the refrigerator obligingly shudders into silence.
 
A light wind outside pushes a drink can off the top of a bin on to the pavement, where it rolls into the gutter. A police car glides along Bayton Street, its radio crackling and spitting.
Two males . . . heading south . . .
it sputters brokenly . . .
disturbance in Marble Arch
.
 
The earth continues to turn. The sky is no longer mineshaft black but five-fathom blue, and this drains slowly into a milky grey, as if the street, the whole of Soho, is rising upwards, towards the surface of the sea. The girl from upstairs leaves, replacing her red boots with trainers, locking the door behind her, buttoning her coat. She looks both ways, up and down the pavement, then sets off towards Tottenham Court Road.
 
At six in the morning, an elderly man in a suit comes walking down the middle of the street, with an uneven, limping stride. He has a little dog at the end of a purple leather lead. He pauses outside the Blue Lagoon. The dog looks up at him, puzzled, then strains forward on the lead. But the man continues to peer at the café. Perhaps he comes here during the day. Or perhaps he is one of the few who remembers it as the
Elsewhere
offices; perhaps he used to drink with Innes in one of the places around here. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it just reminds him of another place. He walks on and in a few moments he and his dog disappear around the corner.
 
At eight o’clock, the morning baristas arrive: first a woman, who unlocks the door, turns on the lights, plugs in the cappuccino machine, opens the fridge to check the milk, repins a fallen poster to the wall. She is followed by a male barista, who fills a bucket with water and pushes a mop around the floor. He, too, fails to find the focaccia crust.
 
And, at precisely a quarter to nine, as the first customer of the day, in comes Ted.
 
 
 
 
Ted orders a latte to go and waits at the counter. He is early today. The waiter is still mopping, dipping the strings of the mop into the grey, greasy water, then slopping their tangled mess out on the floor. Ted watches the mop strings as they swish back and forth, like hair caught in a current. And without warning he is suffused with the feeling he keeps getting – that something he’s never seen before is oddly, closely familiar. Importantly familiar. A mop swishing back and forth on a bare, wooden floor. Why should this sight fill him with such a sense of significance, of meaning? As if he believes it could tell him something. Isn’t that the first sign of madness, seeing signs in everything, believing mundane things and acts are imbued with messages? He finds he wants to put out a hand to the man and say, please. Please stop that.
 
He blinks and forces himself to look away. At the rows and rows of glasses on the shelves behind the counter. At the waitress who is pulling levers on the cappuccino machine. At the nimbus of steam wisping from the machine’s side.
BOOK: The Hand That First Held Mine
10.86Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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