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 (7 page)
Looking at these stars gives her an odd sensation. She is sure she has never seen them before and yet she can picture herself sewing them, the needle strung with silver, the sparkling thread led through and through the cloth. She knows the feel of the fleece, knows that a star near the hem is squashed slightly, and yet, and yet, she’s never seen it before. Has she? As she looks she is sure that she did this embroidery in the hospital, in between—
She looks down to the hallway. Sunshine is glowing through the twin glass panels of the front door. She stands, picking up the baby and the starry cloth or blanket, or whatever it is, it’s too small to be a blanket really, and descends the stairs. The light coming through the door is dazzling and she realises, with a leap in her chest, that it must have stopped raining.
She could, Elina realises, go out. What a thought. To go out into the streets, where the rain will be drying in patches from the roads and the leaves will have printed themselves on to the pavements. Out, where cars rev and turn, where dogs scratch themselves and sniff at the bases of lampposts, where people are walking, speaking, going about their lives. She, Elina, could walk to the end of the road. She could buy a paper, a pint of milk, a bar of chocolate, an orange, some pears.
She can imagine it so clearly, as if it’s only a week or two since she was out there, in the outside. How long has it been? How long is it since—
The problem is there is so much to remember. She’ll need, let’s see, her wallet, her keys. What else? Elina sees a calico bag on the floor of the hall and she crams into it the blue-star blanket, then some nappies and wipes. Surely that will do?
There is something else, though. Something tugs at her, insistent, something she knows she has forgotten. Elina stands for a moment, thinking. She has the baby, she has the pram, she has the bag. She looks up the stairs, she looks at the lozenges of light set into the front door, she looks down at herself. She has the baby in one arm and the bag slung over her shoulder, across her body, across her pyjamas.
Clothes. She needs something to wear.
In the bedroom she surveys the heap of clothes on her chair. She picks them up with her spare hand and drops them to the floor. A pair of jeans with an enormous waistband, some dungarees, grey jogging pants, a sweatshirt with a trailing flower design. She finds something green tangled up with something red and she can’t separate them with one hand so she gives them a shake, snaps them in the air, and a red scarf soars free, tossing out into the bedroom. Elina watches it as it falls in a graceful arc away from her, as it settles to the floor. She looks at it there, the red against the white carpet. She tilts her head one way, then the other, considering it. She looks back at the baby, who is making movements with his mouth, as if trying to communicate something to her. She doesn’t look at the scarf again but she thinks of it, the way it shot out like that into the air. She thinks that it somehow reminds her of something she has seen recently. And then she recalls what it is. Jets of blood. Beautiful, in their way. The pure, garnet brightness of them in the scrubbed white of the room. The way they would spin and resolve themselves into droplets as they travelled, before hurling themselves with definite, sure force against the fronts of the doctors, the nurses. The way they commanded such attention, the way they brought everyone running.
Elina drops the green smock and sits quickly on the chair. She is sure to keep a careful hold of the baby, of her son, and to keep looking at him, at nothing else, and she sees he is still mouthing secrets to her, as if he has all the answers to everything she needs to know.
L
exie stands at the window, cigarette in hand, looking down into the street. The old woman from the flat below is setting off on her daily walk. Dog lead in one hand, shopping-bag in the other, back bent into a comma under her coat, she inches, inches into the road, without looking left or right.
exie stands at the window, cigarette in hand, looking down into the street. The old woman from the flat below is setting off on her daily walk. Dog lead in one hand, shopping-bag in the other, back bent into a comma under her coat, she inches, inches into the road, without looking left or right.
‘She’s going to get run over one day,’ Lexie murmurs.
‘Who?’ Innes says, from across the room, lifting his head from the mattress.
Lexie points with the tip of her cigarette. ‘Your neighbour. The one with a hunchback. And probably by you.’
She looks different from the girl who was reading on a tree stump. For one, she is naked, wearing only a candy-striped shirt of Innes’s, open down the front. For two, her hair has been cut in sloping, silken curtains about her face.
Innes yawns, stretches, turns on to his stomach. ‘Why would I want to run over my neighbour? And if you mean the old battleaxe from downstairs, it’s not a hunchback it’s a dowager’s hump. Known in the medical trade as thoracic spinal osteoporosis. Caused by—’
‘Oh, shush,’ Lexie says. ‘How do you know all these things anyway?’
Innes raises himself on to his elbow. ‘A misspent youth,’ he says. ‘Years squandered on books instead of on the likes of you.’
She smiles and exhales a stream of smoke, watching as the woman and her dog reach the pavement. It is a stifling, close day in October. The sky is heavy, threatening electric clashes, but the woman is dressed, as she always is, in a thick tweed coat. ‘Well,’ Lexie says, ‘you’ve made up for it since.’
‘Speaking of which,’ Innes twitches back a corner of the counterpane, ‘come here. Bring me your cigarette and your body.’
She doesn’t move. ‘In that order?’
‘In whichever order you damn well like. Come on!’ He slaps the mattress.
Lexie takes another pull on her cigarette. She scuffs her bare foot against the arch of its twin. She takes a last glance into the street, which is empty, then sets off, running, towards the bed. Halfway across the room, she leaves the ground in a balletic leap. Innes is saying, ‘Christ, woman,’ the striped shirt is flying out behind her, like wings, the cigarette is trailing white ash, and all she knows is that she is about to make love for the second time that day. She has no idea that she will die young, that she does not have as much time as she thinks. For now she has just discovered the love of her life, and death couldn’t be further from her mind.
She lands on the bed with a crash. Pillows and counterpane are tipped off, Innes seizes her by the wrist, the arm, the waist. ‘We won’t be needing this,’ he says, as he pulls off the shirt, as he flings it to the floor, as he manoeuvres her back on to the bed, as he shoulders his way between the V of her legs. He pauses for a moment to pluck the cigarette from her fingers, takes a drag, then stubs it out in an ashtray on the bedside table.
‘Right,’ he says, as he turns to her again.
But this is anticipating. The film needs to be rewound a little. Watch. Innes sucks in a nimbus of smoke, lifts a cigarette stub from the ashtray, appears to envelop Lexie in a shirt and push her across the room, the pillows jump on to the bed, Lexie zooms backwards towards the window. Then they are back on the bed and they are both naked and, goodness, doesn’t sex look oddly the same in reverse, except now they are lovingly putting on each other’s clothes, one by one, then whisking out of the door, running down the stairs, and Innes is pulling his key out of his door. The film speeds up. There are Innes and Lexie in his car, scooting backwards along a road, Lexie with a scarf over her head. There they are forking food out of their mouths in a restaurant and putting it down on the plates; here they are in bed again and then their clothes fly towards them. Here is a woman in a red pillbox hat walking in reverse away from Lexie. Here is Lexie again, looking up at a building in Soho, then she is walking away from it with a jerky, reversed gait. Lexie is walking backwards up a long, dim staircase. The film is getting faster and faster. A train pulls out of a big, smoke-filled station, rattles backwards through countryside. At a small station, Lexie is seen to get out and put down her suitcase. And the film ends. We are back, neatly, to where we left off.
Lexie’s mother gave her two pieces of advice when she left for London: 1. Get a secretarial job in a big, successful firm because that will ‘put you in the path of the right sort of man’. 2. Never be in the same room as a man and a bed.
Her father said: don’t waste your time with any more studying because it always makes women disagreeable.
Her younger siblings said: remember to visit the Queen.
Her aunt, who had spent some time in London in the 1920s, told her never to use the Underground (it was dirty and full of unsavoury types), never to go into coffee bars (they were full of germs), always to wear a girdle and carry an umbrella, and never to go to Soho.
Needless to say, she disregarded them all.
Lexie stood in the doorway, suitcase in hand. The bedsit was high among the eaves of a tall, thin terraced house; the ceiling, she saw, sloped towards itself at five different angles. The door, its frame, the skirting-boards, the boarded-up fireplace, the cupboard under the window were all painted yellow. Not a vibrant yellow – daffodil yellow, if you like – but a sickly, pale, dirty one. The yellow of old teeth, of pub ceilings. It was chipped off in places, revealing a gloomy brown underneath. This cheered Lexie in an odd way, the thought that someone had had to live there surrounded by an even worse colour.
She stepped further into the room and set down her case. The bed was narrow and sagging, the headboard listing to one side. It was covered with an eiderdown of fading purple curlicues. When Lexie turned it down she saw the mattress was grey, stained, sagged in the middle. She twitched it back again quickly. She took off her coat and looked around for a peg on which to hang it. No peg. She draped it over the chair, which had also been painted, some time ago, a pale yellow but a slightly different shade from the skirting-boards. What was her landlady’s obsession with the colour?
The landlady, Mrs Collins, had met her at the door. A thin woman in a zipped housecoat and crescents of iridescent blue eyeshadow, her first question had been: ‘You’re not Italian, are you?’
Lexie, taken aback, had said no. Then she’d asked Mrs Collins what her objection was to Italians.
‘Can’t stand them,’ Mrs Collins grumbled, as she disappeared into the front room, leaving Lexie in the hall, staring at the brown, peeling wallpaper, the telephone on the wall, a list of house rules, ‘dirty so-and-sos. Here’s your keys.’ Mrs Collins reappeared in the hall and handed her two latchkeys. ‘One for the front door, one for your room. The usual rules apply.’ She gestured at the list on the pinboard. ‘No men, no pets, always use an ashtray, keep your room clean, no more than two visitors at a time, in by eleven every night or the door will be bolted.’ She leant in closer and scrutinised Lexie, breathing hard. ‘You may look like a nice, clean girl but you’re the sort that might turn. You’ve got that look about you.’
‘Is that so?’ Lexie said, depositing the keys in her bag and snapping it shut. She bent to pick up her case. ‘At the top, you say?’
‘Right at the top.’ Mrs Collins nodded. ‘On the left.’
Lexie took the keys from where she’d left them in the lock and put them on the mantelpiece. Then she lowered herself to the bed. She allowed herself to think, there, it’s done, I’m here. She smoothed her hair, passed her hand over the purple curlicues. Then she turned into a kneeling position and, leaning on the window-sill, peered outside. Far below there was a rectangular patch of scrubby grass, boxed in on all sides by ivy-furred walls. She looked down the gardens. Some had rows of beans, lettuces, sprays of roses or jasmine; some still had the arched-spine shape of Anderson shelters hidden under lawn or soil or rockeries. One, further along, had a child’s swing. She was pleased to see an enormous chestnut tree, leaves waving and dipping. And opposite was the back of a terrace similar to hers – that grey-brown London brick, zigzagged by guttering, the windows uneven, higgledy-piggledy, some open, one taped over with cardboard. She could see two women, who must have crawled out of a window, sunbathing on a flat bit of roof, their shoes kicked off, their hitched-up skirts inflating and deflating in the breeze. Below them, unseen by them, a child was running in decreasing circles, round and round his garden, a scarlet ribbon in his hand. A woman a few doors down was pegging out some washing on a line; her husband leant in the doorway, his arms folded.
Lexie felt lightheaded, insubstantial somehow. It was strange to look back into the gloom of her room, then out again at the scene beyond the window. For a prolonged heady moment, she and her room didn’t feel real or animate. It was as if she was suspended in a bubble, peering out at Life, which was going along in its way, people laughing and talking and living and dying and falling in love and working and eating and meeting and parting, while she sat there, mute, motionless, watching.
She reached up to free the catch and force open the window. There. That was better. The veil between her and the world was lifted. She stuck her head out into the breeze, shook it vigorously, pulled the pins from her hair, freeing it so that it fell about her face. And the feel of it there, the zooming noise made by the boy running in circles, the faint sound of the sunbathing women’s chatter, the graze of the window-sill against her elbows was good. Very good.
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