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 (9 page)
At the corner, she is pulled to a stop. The street, the pavement, the lampposts seethe and swing in front of her. She can go no further. It is as if she is tethered to the house, or to something in the house. Elina turns her head, first one way, then the other. She is interested in this. It is a curious feeling. She bobs there for a moment, like a tugboat at the end of its rope. Rain is soaking through the sweatshirt, gluing the pyjamas to her skin.
Elina turns. She is, she feels, no longer two people, but one. This Elina goes back along the pavement, holding on to the wall, up the path and into the house. She leaves wet footprints on the floorboards as she walks.
The baby is tussling with the blanket in his cot, fists clenched around wool, his face screwed up with effort, with need. Then he sees Elina and forgets all about his fight with the blanket, his hunger, his want for something he cannot express. His fingers uncurl like petals and he stares in amazement at his mother.
‘It’s all right,’ Elina tells him. And she believes herself, this time. She reaches to lift him and his arms shudder with the surprise of being airborne. She settles him against her body. She says it again: ‘It’s all right.’
Elina and the baby walk together to the window. They don’t take their eyes off each other. He blinks a little in the bright light but stares up at her, as if the sight of her to him is like water to a plant. Elina leans against the windows to the garden. She raises the baby so that his forehead touches her cheek, as if anointing him or greeting him, as if they are starting all the way back at the beginning.
H
ere is Lexie, standing on a pavement at Marble Arch. She is adjusting the back of her shoe, smoothing her hair. It is a warm, hazy evening, just after six o’clock. Men in suits and women in heels and hats, pulling children by the hand, flow around her as if they were a river and she were a rock in their path.
ere is Lexie, standing on a pavement at Marble Arch. She is adjusting the back of her shoe, smoothing her hair. It is a warm, hazy evening, just after six o’clock. Men in suits and women in heels and hats, pulling children by the hand, flow around her as if they were a river and she were a rock in their path.
She has been at her new job two days. She is a lift attendant in a big department store. The labour exchange sent her there after a dismal result in the typing test, and she’s been saying, ‘Which floor, madam?’; ‘Going up, sir’; ‘Floor three, household goods, haberdashery and millinery, thank you.’ She had never known anything could be so dull. Or that it was possible for her to hold the layout of an entire seven-floor shop in her head. Or that one person could buy so many things – hats, belts, shoes, stockings, face powder, hairnets, suits. Lexie has seen the lists, clutched in gloved hands, over people’s shoulders. But she knows it’s just a start. She is here, she is in London: any minute now the technicolour part of her life will commence, she is sure, she is certain – it has to.
Look at her, standing there on the pavement. She looks different from the Lexie in Innes’s room, the one naked under a candy-striped shirt. She looks different from the Alexandra in a blue dress and yellow kerchief, sitting on a tree stump in her parents’ garden. She’ll have many incarnations in her time. She is made up of myriad Lexies and Alexandras, all sheathed inside one another, like Russian dolls.
She has her hair pinned up. She is wearing the red and grey livery of the shop, the regulation red scarf tied around her throat, the corded hat stuffed in her pocket. Her coat is belted at the waist and is rather hot for this warm afternoon. Look at how high, how tense her shoulders are. You can’t be unflinchingly polite to people all day without feeling the strain. She’s loosening the scarf from her neck, pulling it free and stuffing its scarlet length into her other pocket. She is rubbing her shoulders, trying to ease the stiffness. She smiles at two other lift girls as they come out of the door. She watches as they head, arm in arm, up the crowded pavement, wobbling a little on their patent-leather heels. A bus chunters past, the sound of its bell creating a clear, widening circle in the air.
She breathes in. She breathes out. Her shoulders lower a fraction. She looks up at the bright strip of sky balanced on top of the buildings, then sets off across the street, leaving the department store, the lift, its buttons, its dinging bell, behind her until tomorrow. She has to dash because another tram is coming, a car hoots just as she reaches the pavement and she has to sidestep a man pushing a cart full of flowers, and she feels something like laughter crowd up into her throat. Or not laughter. What is it? She turns the corner and is suddenly drenched in low evening sun, the pavements and streets striated by long, spiked shadows. A newspaper seller is coming towards her, repeating two drawn-out syllables: ‘
Eeeeeee Nuuuuuuus, Eeeeeeee Nuuuuuuus
.’ And Lexie decides: glee. What she feels is utter, unadulterated glee. She is on her way to meet a university friend who has been in London a year, and they are to go to the pictures together. She is working for herself, she has a place to live, she has made it to London and the feeling is glee.
Eeeeeee Nuuuuuuus, Eeeeeeee Nuuuuuuus
.’ And Lexie decides: glee. What she feels is utter, unadulterated glee. She is on her way to meet a university friend who has been in London a year, and they are to go to the pictures together. She is working for herself, she has a place to live, she has made it to London and the feeling is glee.
‘
Eeeeeee Nuuuuuuus
,’ the newspaper seller calls again, the sound behind her now. She leaps off the pavement, with a glance over her shoulder, and crosses the road, and when she gets to the opposite pavement, she begins to run, swinging her bag, opening her coat. Ah, the delirium of first realising you can do exactly what you want and that no one is going to stop you. People turn to look at her as she runs, an old woman tuts and she can still hear the long, mournful cries of the newspaper seller: ‘
Eeeeeee Nuuuuuuus
. . .’
Eeeeeee Nuuuuuuus
,’ the newspaper seller calls again, the sound behind her now. She leaps off the pavement, with a glance over her shoulder, and crosses the road, and when she gets to the opposite pavement, she begins to run, swinging her bag, opening her coat. Ah, the delirium of first realising you can do exactly what you want and that no one is going to stop you. People turn to look at her as she runs, an old woman tuts and she can still hear the long, mournful cries of the newspaper seller: ‘
Eeeeeee Nuuuuuuus
. . .’
She gets back to Kentish Town late, but not so late, she is relieved to find, that Mrs Collins has bolted the door. She struggles for a minute with the key, then the lock gives, she steps inside and closes the door carefully behind her. But instead of the dim, hushed hallway she was expecting, the lights are blazing and there is a cacophony of chatter and laughter coming from somewhere. A number of people are sitting on the stairs. Lexie recognises several women who have bedsits in the house.
Puzzled, she heads towards them. Is someone having a party? Does Mrs Collins know about this? Maybe she’s out for the evening.
‘Oh, here she is!’ someone cries, as Lexie comes towards them.
‘We were getting worried,’ Hannah says, leaning round someone else’s back. She has a glass in her hand, Lexie notices, and her cheeks are a little flushed.
Lexie, unable to go any further even if she might have wanted to, starts to take off her coat. ‘I’m fine,’ she says, surveying them all. ‘I went to the pictures with a fr—’
‘She went to the pictures!’ Mrs Collins who, Lexie now sees, is perched on a chair on the landing, is calling up to unseen people on the next flight of stairs.
‘What’s going on?’ Lexie says, with a smile. ‘Are we having a house party?’
‘Well,’ Mrs Collins says, with a hint of her usual severity, ‘someone had to entertain your visitor.’
Lexie looks at her. ‘My visitor?’
Mrs Collins takes her arm and propels her through the thicket of legs and people. ‘Such an amusing young man,’ she says. ‘I don’t usually ask gentlemen in, as you know, but he did say he’d made an appointment with you and, to be frank, I was embarrassed on your behalf that you hadn’t seen fit to honour it and—’
Lexie and Mrs Collins and Hannah turn the corner to the next flight up and there, sitting on the fourth step, is Innes.
‘And what did he say when you told him?’ he is saying to a mousy girl with prominent gums. ‘I hope he was excessively sorry.’
‘Mr Kent has had us all playing a game,’ Mrs Collins says, squeezing Lexie’s arm. ‘We had to tell him about our most embarrassing moment ever. And he is going to decide which is the worst and whoever it is wins.’ She laughs wheezily, then seems to think better of it and covers her mouth with her hand.
‘Is that so?’ says Lexie.
Innes turns towards her. He looks her up and down. He gives a slight gesture with the hand that holds a cigarette which could be a wave or perhaps a shrug. ‘ There you are,’ he says. ‘We were wondering what had happened to you. Did you walk through the wrong door again? A portal to another world?’
Lexie puts her head on one side. ‘Not today, no. Just the door to the pictures.’
‘Ah. The lure of celluloid. There was some talk of you being abducted but I said you were the kind of girl who could see off any potential abductors.’
They regard each other for a moment. Innes narrows his eyes as he puts his cigarette to his mouth.
Hannah steps in. ‘Mr Kent was telling us he knew you from university.’
Lexie raises an eyebrow. ‘Was he indeed?’
‘That’s right,’ Innes cuts in, ‘and then these kind people took pity on me and invited me in. Someone had some brandy and your gracious landlady even provided me with some rissoles to eat. And there you have it. The whole story.’
Lexie can’t think of what to say next. ‘How were the rissoles?’ she comes out with.
‘Like none I have ever eaten.’ He stands, stretches, grinds his cigarette into an ashtray balanced on the step below him. ‘Well, I must be off. I’m sure you all need your sleep. Ladies, it has been a pleasure. I hope we can repeat it soon. Mrs Collins, you win the prize for the most embarrassing story. And perhaps you, Lexie, will see me out?’ He proffers his arm.
Lexie looks at the arm. She looks at him. All around her are cries of ‘Must you really leave?’, ‘What does Mrs Collins win?’, ‘What was Mrs Collins’s story again?’ She takes the arm and they walk together out into the hall. The crowd of women follow them to the bottom step, where they tactfully but reluctantly drop back.
Lexie thinks they will say goodbye at the front door but he pulls her through it. As soon as they are outside, Innes says, in a low voice, ‘Truthfully, they were the worst things I have ever eaten. The texture of sawdust, the taste of shoe leather. Don’t ever ask me to eat rissoles again.’
‘I shan’t,’ she says, then catches herself. ‘And I never asked you to in the first place.’
He ignores this. ‘What are rissoles anyway? What are they for? You’ll have to make it up to me.’
Lexie pulls her hand away from his arm. ‘What do you mean? And what are you doing here? How did you ever find me?’
He turns to her. ‘Do you know how many women-only rooming houses there are in Kentish Town?’
‘No, how would I know such a—’
‘Two,’ he says, ‘so it was really not that difficult. A simple process of elimination, balanced against chance. I knew you’d come soon, you see, knew you wouldn’t last much longer there. But I couldn’t be sure exactly when. All this is beside the point, anyway, because the point is, when are you coming to lunch with me?’
‘I don’t know,’ Lexie says, lifting her chin. ‘I’m rather busy.’
Innes smiles and moves a shade closer. ‘How about Saturday?’
Lexie pretends to be straightening her cuff. ‘I don’t know,’ she says again. ‘I work on Saturdays, I think.’
‘As do I. How about one o’clock? You’re allowed lunches, aren’t you? Where are you working? Did you reach your sixty words per minute?’
She stares at him. ‘How did you remember about the sixty words per minute?’ She starts to laugh. ‘And how on earth did you remember I was planning to live in a rooming house in Kentish Town?’
He shrugs. ‘I remember everything. It’s either a disability or a form of genius. I can’t decide which. Tell me something once and it’s there,’ he taps his head, ‘never to leave.’
She glances involuntarily at his cranium and imagines it, beneath his thick hair, teeming with information. ‘I don’t know what time I’ll finish. It’s my first week, so—’
‘All right, all right. I’ll tell you what. You come and find me. I’ll be at my office, in Soho. I’ll be there all day and probably all night. So any time. Come whenever you’re finished. I gave you my card. You still have it?’
Lexie nods.
‘Good. The address is on there. So I’ll see you Saturday?’
‘Yes.’
He smiles and hesitates for a moment. Lexie wonders if he is going to kiss her. But he doesn’t. He goes down the steps without a wave and crosses the street.
When Lexie reaches the fringes of Soho, she stops. She feels for Innes Kent’s note and business card, which she has kept in her bag since the day she met him. She doesn’t need to look but she does anyway.
Editor,
it reads,
Elsewhere Magazine, Bayton Street, Soho, London W1.
Editor,
it reads,
Elsewhere Magazine, Bayton Street, Soho, London W1.
Mrs Collins had been shocked that morning when Lexie came upon her on the stairs and let slip she was going to Soho later in the day. Lexie had asked her why. ‘Soho?’ Mrs Collins replied. ‘It’s full of bohemians and inebriates.’ Then she narrowed her eyes. ‘You,’ she said, and pointed at Lexie, ‘you’re always asking why, aren’t you? Curiosity killed the cat.’
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