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 (6 page)

BOOK: The Hand That First Held Mine
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When he hears about Elina’s childhood, the camping in the woods, the trips out in boats to uninhabited islands, ice-skating on the archipelago on Christmas night, the sitting out on the roof tiles to watch the aurora borealis, he is astonished. More, he wants to say, tell me more, but doesn’t because he feels he has nothing to offer in exchange. What could he tell her in return for a story about when, aged ten and eight, she and her brother decided to leave home and lived in a den they made in the forest for two days before their mother came to fetch them back? His au pair taking him to John Lewis to buy new shoes? Or what about Elina’s account of the time she’d built a bonfire as big as the shed, which, when lit, burnt down the shed? Or when she sledged down a hill so steep, she slid all the way out on to an iced-over lake and sat there until she was numb with cold because the way the ice distorted sound was so fascinating she couldn’t leave? He could tell her about his father taking him to the zoo and how he kept looking at his watch and suggesting lunch. Or about how, when he thinks of his childhood, he remembers most of all the feeling that life was going on elsewhere, without him. His father away for work. His mother attending to correspondence at her roll-top desk – ‘Not now, darling, in a minute, Mummy’s busy’ – the au pairs coming and going to their English classes, the lady who came to polish the brass runners on the stairs and talked, compellingly, of her trouble ‘down below’.
 
Ted looks down at Elina. He tucks the blanket around her more tightly. He looks across at the basket, which contains the sleeping, bundled form of his son.
His son
. He has yet to get used to the words. Ted wants sledging for this child, and dens and fairs and bonfires that accidentally cause infernos. He will take him to the zoo and he will not look at his watch once. He will learn to make
tarte Tatin
and he will make it for him once a week, or every day, if he wants it. This child will not be expected to go to his room for an hour after lunch for ‘quiet time’. He will not be taken by teenagers who have only a passing acquaintance with English to buy school shoes or to look at Egyptian mummies in glass cases. He will not have to spend afternoons alone in a frosty garden. He will have central heating in his bedroom. He will not be taken to the barber once a month. He will be allowed – encouraged, even – to remove his shoes in communal sandpits. He will be able to decorate the Christmas tree himself, with whatever colour baubles he likes.
 
Ted drums his fingers on the sofa arm. He would like to get up. He would like to write these things down. He would like to stand over his sleeping son and say them to him, as a kind of pledge. But he can’t disturb Elina. He picks up the remote control and changes the channel until he finds a football match he’d forgotten about.
 
 
In the dream – and it’s one of those curious, halfway states when you’re dreaming and you somehow know it – Elina is being made to hold a pillowcase. Someone has crammed it with fragile things. An alarm clock, a glass tumbler, an ashtray, a swirling snow scene of a wood, a girl and a wolf. The floor she is standing on is cold stone and the pillowcase too full. She cannot get a proper grip on it so she struggles to hold it, to contain all the things that are jostling and slipping. If they fall, they will smash. She must not let them drop.
 
A noise interrupts her. It is someone saying, ‘ow.’ A voice she knows. Ted’s. Elina opens her eyes. The alarm clock, the snow scene, the tumbler, the stone floor disintegrate. She is lying squeezed between Ted and the end of the sofa, her head on Ted’s thigh.
 
‘Why did you say “ow”?’ she asks the underside of his jaw. He is watching television, football by the sound of it – that odd drone and mumble, interpersed with hooting. He hasn’t shaved for a while. Black bristles cover his chin, his throat. She puts out a finger to touch them, pushing them first one way then the other.
 
‘You hit me,’ he says, without taking his eyes off the screen.
 
‘I did?’ Elina struggles upright.
 
‘You were asleep and you started flailing around and—’ There is a surge of noise from the television, a crashing roar, a crescendo of hooting and, without warning, Ted emits an impassioned, garbled speech. Elina can’t make out what the words are. Some are YES and some GOD and some are swearwords.
 
She watches him gesticulating, arguing with the television. Then, from over by the kitchen, there is another noise. A quiet, almost inaudible cheep, like a bird or a kitten. Elina’s head snaps around. The baby. There it is again. A tiny ‘eeuup’ sound.
 
‘ Ted,’ she says, ‘don’t. You’ll wake the baby.’
 
The television is still booming but Ted is talking more quietly, about how he can’t believe it. She listens hard but there is no more noise from the Moses basket. An arm appears over the side, arching slowly through the air, as if he’s doing
t’ai chi
. But then he is still. ‘What do you call those things with water and fake snow inside?’ she asks.
 
Ted is sitting forward, his body tense. ‘Hmm?’
 
‘You know, children have them. You shake them and the snow swirls around.’
 
‘I don’t know what—’ he begins, but something happens on screen and he hisses, ‘No!’ and hurls himself back into the cushions, in an attitude of profound grief.
 
Elina picks up something lying on the sofa next to her. It is a palette knife, with a malleable, soft blade, and she bends the blade this way and that between her fingers. Then she holds it close to her face, looking at it as a historian might examine an artefact from another age. The ingrained paint at the join where the blade meets the handle – she can see red, green, a fleck of yellow – the tiny crack in the pearly plastic of the grip, the trace of rust at the tip. ‘Knife’ is really the wrong word for it, she thinks. You couldn’t cut anything with this. It wouldn’t slice, it wouldn’t pierce or gash or saw or any of those things that knives do, because real knives—
 
‘What are you doing?’
 
Elina turns. Ted, she is surprised to see, is looking straight at her.
 
‘Nothing,’ she says, and lowers the palette knife to her lap.
 
‘What is that?’ he says, in the kind of tone that implies she might very easily reply
just a hand-grenade, darling
.
 
‘Nothing,’ she says again, and as she does so it comes to her what the palette knife is doing on the sofa, instead of in her studio. She’d been using it in here, mixing some plaster of Paris on the coffee-table, which is not something she would normally ever do. The house is for living, the studio is for working. But it had been hot and the short distance down the garden had seemed so long.
 
She becomes aware that Ted is still looking at her, this time with an expression close to horror.
 
‘What?’ she says.
 
He doesn’t reply. He seems to be in some kind of trance, staring at her with a kind of guardedness, a nervous fascination.
 
‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ She sees that he is staring at her neck. She raises her hand to the spot and feels her pulse, leaping beneath her touch. ‘What’s the matter?’
 
‘Huh?’ he says, and appears to come back from wherever he was. ‘What did you say?’
 
‘I said, why are you staring at me like that?’
 
He looks away, fiddles with the remote control. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbles, then says, suddenly defensive, ‘Like what?’
 
‘Like I’m some kind of freak.’
 
He shifts in his seat. ‘Don’t be silly. I wasn’t. Of course I wasn’t.’
 
Elina pushes herself forward and struggles from the sofa. The noise of the football is suddenly too much. At one point she thinks she won’t make it to standing, that she won’t be able to straighten her legs, that they will buckle beneath her or that whatever it is that is inside her will fall out. But she grips the sofa arm and Ted lurches forward and seizes her wrist and together they hoist her up and she moves across the room, bent over a little at the waist.
 
She has been overcome by a desire to look at the baby. She needs to do this, she’s noticed, at regular intervals. To check he’s there, to check she hasn’t dreamt it all, to check he’s still breathing, to check he’s quite as beautiful as she remembered him to be, quite as astonishingly perfect. She limps towards the Moses basket – it must be nearly time for another of those painkillers – and peers in. He is there, wrapped in a blanket, fists clenched beside his ears, his eyes screwed tight, his mouth shut in a firm pout, as if tackling this sleeping business with all the seriousness and concentration it deserves. She puts a hand to his chest and, even though she knows he’s fine, she can see that he’s fine, she feels a surge of relief flood through her. He’s breathing, she tells herself, he’s alive, he’s still here.
 
She makes for the kitchen, holding on to the cooker for support, chiding herself. Why does she constantly fear that he’s going to die? That he will slip away from her, out of this life. It’s hysterical, she tells herself, as she scans the shelves for the teapot, and ridiculous.
 
The next morning the palette knife is on the floor next to the sofa. Elina gets down on her hands and knees to pick it up. And while she’s there, she takes a look under the sagging weft of the sofa’s underside. She sees other things: coins, a safety-pin, a reel of cotton, a hair-clip that could be an old one of hers. She considers getting a ruler or a wooden spoon and hooking out all these things – she would if she were properly interested in keeping a nice house. But she isn’t. There are better things to do with your life. If only she could remember what they are.
 
She gets up and, as she does so, is aware of that sharp scorch of pain in the abdomen again. She wonders whether the time has come to ring Ted, to say, Ted, why is that scar there, what happened, tell me what happened because I can’t remember.
 
But now would not be a good time. He’ll be in his editing suite, his cave, as Elina thinks of it, removing and splicing the bad bits from films, making sure it all appears smooth and faultless, as if it was never any other way. And, anyway, it may all come back to her, she may remember on her own. He’s been under so much pressure recently, since this film overran, since the baby came, walking about with that drawn, pale face he gets when he’s either ill or stressed. She really shouldn’t worry him.
 
She goes instead to the window. The weather has still not let up. It has rained and rained for days, the sky blurred and swollen, the garden sodden. Around her, the house ticks to the rhythm of water: on roof tiles, on gutters, down drains.
 
Before, when she was still pregnant, the weather had been sunny. For weeks and weeks. Elina would sit in the shade of her studio with her feet in a bucket of cold water. In the morning she would do her yoga exercises out there, when the grass was still cool with dew. She ate grapefruit, sometimes three a day, she did sketches of some ants, but lazily, without any real intent, she watched the skin of her stomach ripple, move, like water before a storm. She read books about natural births. She wrote lists of names in charcoal on her studio walls.
 
Elina stands at the window, watching the rain. The man from down the street is walking along the pavement towards the Heath, his dog behind him. She cannot fathom, cannot grasp what happened to that person, that Elina of the charcoal lists, the ant sketches, the natural births, the buckets of cool water in the shade. How did she become this – a woman in stained pyjamas, standing weeping at a window, a woman frequently possessed by an urge to run through the streets, shouting, will somebody please help me, please?
 
Elina Vilkuna, she says to herself, is your name. That is who you are. She feels she must confine herself to known things, to facts. Then perhaps everything else will fall into place. There is her and there is the baby and there is Ted. Or that’s what everybody calls him – he has another, longer name but that one never gets used. Elina knows about Ted. She could recite his life to anyone who asked. She could sit an exam on Ted and pass with an A grade. He is her partner, boyfriend, other half, better half, lover, mate. When he leaves the house, he goes to his office. In Soho. He takes the Tube and sometimes he cycles. He is thirty-five, which is exactly four years older than her. He has hair the colour of conkers, size-ten feet, a liking for chicken Madras. One of his thumbs is flatter and longer than the other, the result of sucking it in childhood, he says. He has three fillings in his teeth, a white scar on his abdomen where his appendix was removed, a purplish mark on his left ankle from the sting of a jellyfish in the Indian Ocean years ago. He hates jazz, multiplex cinemas, swimming, dogs and cars – refuses to own one. He is allergic to horsehair and dried mango. These are the facts.
 
She finds she is sitting on the stairs, as if she is waiting for something or someone. It seems to be much later. Somewhere in the house she is aware of the phone ringing, the answerphone clicking on, and a friend of hers speaking into the silence. Elina will call her back. Later. Tomorrow. Some time. For now, her head is leaning against the wall, the baby is on her knee and beside her on the stair is a piece of blue cloth. Soft, fleecy material. Silver stars have been embroidered all over it.
BOOK: The Hand That First Held Mine
12.08Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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