The Hand That First Held Mine

by Maggie O'Farrell

  ‘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.

  After a while, she turned back to the room. She moved the chair nearer the window. She shunted the bed against the wall. She straightened the mirror. She went clattering down the stairs to a surprised Mrs Collins to borrow a bucket, a scrubbing brush, some soda crystals and vinegar, a broom and dustpan. She swept, she dusted, she scrubbed the floor and the walls, the cupboard shelves, the gas-ring. She shook the eiderdown out of the window, beat the mattress, folded the clean sheets she’d stolen from home around it.

  They smelt of lavender, of washing powder, of starch, a mixture that always summoned her mother to her mind – and always would, as she’d find out. Lexie pummelled the pillow into its case. She’d announced last night at the dinner table that she was leaving for London in the morning. It was all set up. She had digs, she had an appointment at the labour exchange on Monday morning, she’d withdrawn all her savings to last on until she started earning. Nothing they could do would stop her.

  The expected uproar had ensued. Her father had pounded his fist on the table, her mother had shouted and then dissolved into tears. Her sister, with the baby in her arms, comforted their mother and told Lexie, with that drawn-in purse-strings mouth she had sometimes, that she was being ‘characteristically irresponsible’. Two of her brothers had started to whoop and run circles around the table. The second youngest child, sensing a change for the worse in the atmosphere, began to wail from its high-chair.

  She tossed the pillow on to the bed, then pulled the eiderdown in from the window. It was dark outside now; the windows of the terrace opposite were lit yellow boxes, suspended in inky space. In one, she saw a woman pulling a brush through her hair; in another a man was reading a newspaper, his glasses perched on his nose. Someone else was pulling a blind down, and a girl was leaning out into the night, just as Lexie had done earlier, loosening her hair into the just-moving air.

  Lexie undressed, lay between the sheets, tried to close her nose to their smell. She listened to the noises of the house. Feet on the stairs, doors banging, a woman’s laugh somewhere, then someone saying sssh. Mrs Collins’s voice, querulous, complaining. A cat outside in a garden, emitting a series of yowls. A pipe knocking, then hissing in the walls. The banging and clatter of pans. Someone in the lavatory on the floor below, the surge and rush of the flush, then the slow trickle of the cistern filling. Lexie turned and turned in her starched sheets, smiling up at the cracks in the ceiling.

  The next day she met a girl called Hannah from the ground floor who told her about a junk shop round the corner, and Lexie went there to buy some plates, cups and pans. ‘Don’t pay the first price,’ Hannah warned. ‘Always haggle.’ She came back carrying a piece of hardboard, which Hannah helped her to drag up the stairs. On the third-floor landing, they had to stop to catch their breath and hoist up their stockings. ‘What do you want this for?’ Hannah panted.

  Lexie propped the hardboard between the bed-end and the edge of the sink. She arranged the few books she’d brought from home on it, her fountain pen, a bottle of ink.

  ‘What are you going to do on it?’ Hannah said from the bed, where she was reclining, trying to blow smoke-rings.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lexie said, staring at it. ‘I need to get a typewriter, practise my typing and . . . I don’t know.’ She couldn’t say that she needed to carve something out for herself, something better than this, and that she didn’t know how she was going to do it but that she thought having a desk might be a start. She ran her hand along its edge. ‘I just wanted it,’ she said.

  ‘If you ask me,’ Hannah said, grinding out her cigarette on the sill, ‘pots and pans might have been more useful.’

  Lexie smiled as she stretched up to take down the curtains. ‘Perhaps.’

  Another lapse. Elina is downstairs again, in the kitchen, and she is walking, up and down, back and forth, with her son over her shoulder and she’s wearing her pyjamas with the baggy, flowered sweatshirt over them and the room is filled with noise. A driving, constant shrilling, and it is Elina’s job to stop this noise. She knows this noise. It has begun to feel as if it is the only thing she knows: its pitch, its variations, its progressions. It starts as a heh-heh. There can be a few of these. Five, six, seven – anything up to as many as ten. After that begin the ha-ngggs: ha-nggg, ha-nggg, ha-nggg. It can stop there, if Elina gets it right, if she does a certain thing at an exact moment, but because she isn’t sure what it is she must do or when, the noise can broaden and deepen out to the dread uhHggg: uhHggg uhHggg uhHggg uhHggg. After four of these, a gulp of silence, then on to the next four.

  If she could just sleep, everything would be all right. Just a stretch of three hours, four maybe. She is so tired that if she turns her head there is a crackling sound, like someone crumpling paper. But she keeps moving. She moves around the kitchen, past the cooker, past the kettle, past the answerphone, which is telling her she has no fewer than thirteen messages, round by the fridge and back, an ache pulsing in her temples. It’s roughly two seconds for every uhHggg, so that’s eight seconds for each set of four and let’s say another two seconds for the silent break, which makes ten seconds for the lot. Which makes twenty-four uhHgggs a minute. And how long has this been going on so far? Thirty-five minutes, which makes – how many? Elina’s brain fails at the maths.

  Later, in the silence that is always so taut, so fragile, Elina climbs the stairs alone. On the landing she hesitates. There are three doors to choose from: hers and Ted’s room, the bathroom and the attic-room door, which is above her head in the ceiling.

  She pulls down the squeaking silver ladder for the attic and climbs the rungs, rising into the room as if emerging from
the sea. She looks at the way the light knifes in through the gaps in the blind, illuminating a dusty row of nail varnishes on the mantelpiece, the books lined up on the shelves, shut spines facing her, the vase containing a splayed arrangement of paint brushes, their bristles stiff, set into points. Her bare feet hiss on the carpet. From the desk under the window, Elina picks up a diary and leafs through it. Dinner, she reads, cinema, meeting, exhibition opening, haircut, appointment at gallery. She puts it down. This had been her room, her studio, back when she was Ted’s lodger. A long time ago. Before the before. Before any of this. She opens a drawer and finds a necklace, a wand for mascara, a red lipstick, a half-used tube of ochre paint, a postcard of Helsinki harbour. The wardrobe door is stiff but Elina gives it a sharp tug with her dusty fingers and it opens.

  In here is the only full-length mirror in the house. The door swings open, rectangles of light wheel across the room and Elina is suddenly face to face with a woman in a stained sweatshirt, the bleach growing out of her hair, her face waxy white.

  She avoids her own eye in the mirror as she raises the sweatshirt and holds it under her chin. She puts her fingers in the elastic holding up her pyjama bottoms and turns it down, just enough, just for a second. Long enough to take in where the gash starts, at one hipbone, and where it ends at the other, its crooked, stumbling path through her flesh, the delicate violet of the bruising, the metal clips holding it all together.

  She lets the hem of the sweatshirt drop. She remembers – what?

  That she had been numb up to her armpits, like a floating head and shoulders, as if she were a marble bust. But it was a strange kind of numbness, where pain was absent but sensation was still present.

  She could feel them, the two doctors, rummaging about inside her, like people who had lost something at the bottom of a suitcase. She knew it ought to hurt, it ought to hurt like hell, but it didn’t. The anaesthetic washed coolly down and then up her spine, breaking like a wave on the back of her head. There was a green canvas screen bisecting her body. She could hear the doctors murmuring to each other, could see the tops of their heads, could feel their hands in her innards. Ted was nearby, at her left, perched on a stool. And there was a great heave and suck and she almost cried out, what are you doing, before she realised, before she heard the sharp, angry cry, surprisingly loud in the hushed room, before she heard the anaesthetist, behind her, saying, a boy. Elina repeated this word to herself as she stared ahead at the tiled ceiling. Boy. A boy. Then she spoke to Ted. Go with him, she said, go with the baby. Because her mother and her aunts had discussed in hushed voices stories about babies being given to the wrong mothers, babies disappearing into the labyrinths of hospital corridors, babies without name-tags. Ted was getting up and going across the room.

  Then she was alone on the table. The anaesthetist somewhere behind her. The doctors below her. The screen cutting her in half. She lay, her hands folded on her chest and she had no control over them, couldn’t move them if she wanted to and she didn’t want to. There was a sound like a Hoover on the other side of the screen but she wasn’t thinking about that because she was thinking, a boy, and listening for sounds from across the room, where two nurses were doing something to the baby and Ted was watching over their shoulders. But then something happened, something went wrong. What was it? It was hard for Elina to order her thoughts. The doctor, the student, the woman, said, oh. In the kind of voice you’d use if someone barged in front of you in a queue: a tone of disappointment, of dismay. Just after this, Elina had felt a cough rising in her throat, which exploded from her lips with quick force.

  Was that right? Or was it the other way round? Did she cough and then afterwards the doctor said, oh?

  Either way, what came next was the blood. So much of it. An unaccountable amount. Over the doctors, the screen, the nurses. Elina saw it falling to the floor, fanning out over the tiles, forming rivulets and gullies in the grouting; she saw people treading it as footprints around the table; she saw a plastic bag hanging from the wall filling with red-soaked cloths.

  Her heart reacted almost instantly, setting up a rapid, panicked knocking in her chest, as if trying to attract someone’s attention, as if trying to communicate that there was a problem and would someone please help? It needn’t have worried. The room was suddenly swarming with people. The student doctor was calling for assistance, the anaesthetist was standing up, peering over the screen, a frown on his face, and then he was making an adjustment to the clear bag suspended above Elina’s head, and a moment later she felt whatever it was hit her veins. She seemed to swoon, her vision wavering, the ceiling moving above her like a conveyor-belt, and the thought occurred to her that perhaps this wasn’t the drug, that perhaps it was something else, that she mustn’t whatever happened lose consciousness, she must stay, she mustn’t go anywhere, and part of her wished someone would come and speak to her, to tell her what was happening, why she could feel people’s hands far up inside her skin, up by her ribs, why someone was shouting, quickly now, quickly, and where the baby was and where Ted was, why the student doctor was saying, no, I can’t, I don’t know how, and the other doctor was saying something to her, something cross-sounding, and why Elina was being pushed by something or someone to the top of the table so that it felt as if her head might tip off the end.

  With the rim of the table pressing into her skull, with the female doctor calling for assistance, she felt herself almost go again, as if she was in a train that had swerved on to a new track, as if clouds had been blown across her brain. To go would be such a relief. She longed to loosen her grip, to release herself to that down-pulling force. But she knew she must not. So she screwed her eyes shut and popped them open again, she drove the nail of one hand into the fingertip of the other. Help me, she said to the anaesthetist, because he was the nearest person, please. But her voice came out as a whisper and, anyway, he was talking to a new man who’d appeared above her and this man was carrying small clear sacks filled with fluid of an incredible red.

  She turns from the mirror. Downstairs, the noise is starting up: ha-nggg, ha-nggg. Elina takes the stairs, clutching the banister for support, along the hall, where the noise has tipped into uhHggg uhHggg, and then she goes out through the front door.

  Outside, on the step, she feels curiously like two people. One is standing on the threshold and is feeling very light, as if she might take off in her pyjamas and sweatshirt, float up and up into the sky, disappearing into the clouds and beyond. The other is calmly watching her, thinking, so this is what it is to be mad. She sets off down the path, opening the gate and stepping on to the pavement in her bare feet. She is going, she is leaving, she is off. You’re leaving, the calm Elina observes. I see. The other Elina’s lungs inflate and her heart seems to answer them, tripping into a fast, fluttering pound.

  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 ba
by 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.

  Here 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.