The Hand That First Held Mine

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Lexie still did not speak.

  ‘She doesn’t care about me,’ Innes insisted.

  Lexie took a sip of her gin and felt its heated path sink down through her body. The dancing man had changed his record and was now gyrating to a hectic, fast tune, his head snapping back and forth on his neck. ‘I’m not so sure about that.’

  ‘Well, I am.’

  ‘What about Margot?’

  Uncharacteristically, Innes was silent. He picked up his glass and drained it. ‘She’s not mine,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘One hundred per cent.’

  ‘How can you be so certain?’

  He looked up. He smiled quickly, then looked down at the table again. He reached out and took his empty glass in his hands, rolled it between them. The elderly woman chose this moment to lean across the gap between their tables and rattle a tobacco tin in Innes’s face. ‘Could I trouble you,’ she said, in arch, upper-class tones, ‘for the price of a drink?’

  Innes sighed but dropped a shilling into the tin. ‘There you are, Nina,’ he said. Then he turned back to Lexie. ‘I’d been away for two years,’ he said, ‘by the time Margot was born.’

  ‘But she doesn’t know that you’re not her father?’

  Innes played with a strand of Lexie’s hair, putting it behind her ear, then pulling it free.

  ‘Innes,’ Lexie persisted, pulling away, ‘why doesn’t she know?’

  ‘She . . .’ Innes began, then stopped. ‘Because I’ve always thought the alternative would be worse for her. It’s not her fault, after all. If I were to disown her, there would be no father at all. And having someone, no matter how feckless, is better than no one. Don’t you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. I feel she ought to know the truth.’

  ‘Ach.’ Innes waved his hand and got up to go back to the bar. ‘You young people are always so obsessed with truth. The truth is often overrated.’

  Innes’s marriage was, largely, a mystery to Lexie. He didn’t talk about Gloria much; when he did, it was generally to swear and curse and think up more and more elaborate insults for her.

  Lexie was able to glean only the barest facts. That Innes had been seventeen when the war started, that his mother Ferdinanda had refused to leave the house in Myddleton Square, even though air-raid sirens were sounding all round them. He went to school; Ferdinanda stayed at home with her maid Consuela. What did they do? Lexie asked Innes one night, when the window to his past was briefly opened. Embroidery, he replied, of samplers and the truth. At eighteen he went up to Oxford, to study art history. At twenty he came down again, conscripted into the RAF.

  Imagine a twenty-year-old Innes in his blue serge uniform, in formation at some training camp, forced away from the study of art to perform drills on an airstrip in the Home Counties. His misery would have emanated from him like an odour. He did not have the temperament for the RAF, for war.

  So, these are the bare facts. But in between are layer upon layer of subtleties, strata of unknowns. Lexie never knew for certain how Innes looked, what he was wearing, whether he was sitting or standing or walking when he had first met Gloria.

  It was at the Tate Gallery, he once gave away, and he was home on leave. They were in front of the Pre-Raphaelites, looking at Beatrice with her flaming hair. Let us imagine Gloria before the painting of Beatrice with her hair spread about her shoulders. Drabber than usual – this is wartime Gloria, don’t forget – in low, laced shoes, a Utility coat. Her hair would have been curled at the ends, set in a side parting. She’d have been wearing bright scarlet lipstick. A scarf, perhaps. A crocodile handbag over her arm.

  Would she have felt his presence? Been aware of him sidling towards her? Might she have turned her head once, quickly, then turned it back to the painting? Innes would have approached her first. What would have been his opening gambit? Something about the painting? They fell into conversation, they walked into the next room, they might have consulted the gallery map together. They might have had tea and a bun in the café next. And then, perhaps, a walk along the river.

  A month later they were married. Innes got shifty and irritable if questioned about why, whether he loved her, what he had been thinking at the time. It’s possible that his imminent posting was uppermost in his mind but he would never say. He didn’t like to admit to fear of any kind, liked to think he was invincible, unshakeable.

  Ferdinanda, excited by the prospect of grandchildren, gave them the basement of the house to live in. Her new daughter-in-law would be company for her. Lexie never met Ferdinanda – she had died before her time – but let’s have her as a tall woman with steel-grey hair pulled away from her face, sitting in a silk wrap in the upstairs room in Myddleton Square (a fine room with floor-length double windows opening out over the square, the trees, the benches there), with Gloria in a chair opposite and Ferdinanda directing her faithful servant to pour the tea.

  Innes was posted shortly afterwards to an airfield in Norfolk. In his second week he was taking part in a raid over Germany when the plane was shot down. Everyone was killed, apart from Rear Gunner Kent, aged twenty-one, who opened his parachute and floated like thistledown into enemy territory.

  Actually, it wouldn’t have been like thistledown at all. It must have been fast, furious, terrifying, the cold night air rushing, rushing into his face, his injured leg, which had swallowed up broken bits of the fuselage and bits of the splintered cranium of his fellow gunner, smarting and throbbing, and all the time he was hanging from his straps, like a puppet, watching as the treetops rose up to meet him.

  For the next two years, until the end of the war, Innes was in a prisoner-of-war camp. He would never talk about this, ever, no matter what wiles Lexie employed. ‘You don’t want to hear about that,’ he would say.

  ‘I really do,’ she’d reply, but he was immovable.

  What is known is that when he returned to Myddleton Square he found Gloria occupying the whole house. Ferdinanda was gone, put into a home for the elderly run by the Church. Consuela had disappeared into the confusion of wartime London. Gloria had cleared out the entire house: all Ferdinanda’s clothes, photographs, ostrich-feather fans, hats, shoes had been burnt in the back garden. The blackened circle was still there to see on the grass. Also in residence was a four-month-old baby and a lawyer called Charles. When Innes arrived and opened the front door with his key, Charles appeared at the top of the stairs, wearing Innes’s father’s dressing-gown, demanding to know who Innes was.

  The details of the scene that ensued are not known but Innes became remarkably articulate and verbose when riled. There would have been long, vicious speeches from Innes, tears and shrieking from Gloria, confused interventions from Charles. Anyway, Gloria agreed to a separation but not a divorce. She kept Myddleton Square and lived there with the baby, Margot. There must have been some money from somewhere – Gloria’s, perhaps? – because Innes took a flat on Haverstock Hill to live in and, for a while, Ferdinanda lived there with him.

  She was the real casualty of this story. When Innes went to find her, she no longer recognised him. Gloria had told her that Innes was dead, killed in action, slaughtered in the night-time German sky. Here is the nub, the rub, the font of all Innes’s hatred and bitterness towards his wife. Why had she done it? Only Gloria knew, and she wasn’t telling. She might have thought her young husband wasn’t coming back, she might have taken a fancy to that beautiful big house. Perhaps Ferdinanda irritated her, plagued her. Perhaps when she got pregnant she knew it would be impossible to pass off the baby as Innes’s with Ferdinanda around. Ferdinanda kept a calendar, ticking off the days, measuring how long it had been since she’d seen her beloved son. She would never have been fooled by a twenty-month pregnancy. So, she had to be got out of the way.

  The news of her son’s death caused Ferdinanda’s mind to wander off and not come back. Innes took her from the Catholic home and looked after her until she died. She was always, he
said, distant but unfailingly polite. She addressed him as ‘young man’ and would tell him stories about her son who’d been killed in the war.

  The presence of Lexie in Innes’s life seemed to torment Gloria, in a way that none of his other women had. She began appearing at their office at regular intervals, sometimes crying, sometimes demanding money; she called at the flat early in the mornings. She made scenes in stairways, in restaurants, in the foyers of theatres, in the doorways of bars, weeping and accusing, her daughter standing mute behind her. They seemed to come in waves, these visitations: there might be two in a week and then they wouldn’t see Gloria for months. Then she would appear again, the sound of her heels clipping up Bayton Street. She wrote letters to Innes, entreating him to remember his legal vows. These, Innes shredded into pieces, which he then fed into the fire. For a while one summer, when Lexie left the house in the morning, she would often see the daughter sitting on a wall on the other side of the road. Margot never spoke to her or approached her and Lexie never mentioned these incidents to Innes. Once Lexie looked up from a newspaper on the Tube to find the girl sitting in the seat opposite her, a school satchel clutched on her lap, those pale eyes fixed on Lexie’s face.

  Lexie stood and gripped the handrail above them. ‘Why are you doing this?’ she said to her, quietly. ‘What do you want from me?’

  The girl moved her stare from Lexie’s face to the area of her shoulder. Her waxen cheeks began to stain red.

  ‘Nothing can be gained from this, Margot,’ Lexie said. The train lurched around a corner and Lexie had to cling tight to the rail so as not to be thrown forward on to the girl. ‘I am not to blame for this situation. You have to believe me.’

  This seemed to sting the girl. She looked up, clutching her satchel tighter. ‘But I don’t,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘I promise you that it’s not my fault.’

  Margot started up from her seat. The train was pulling into Euston. ‘It is your fault,’ she hissed. ‘It is. You took him away from us and I’m going to make you sorry. I am. You see if I don’t.’ Then she was gone and Lexie did not see her again for a long time.

  For the final two hundred yards or so, after he turns off the main road, Ted pushes himself into a sprint. His feet work against the pavement, his arms slice back and forth, back and forth, the blood screeches around his body and his lungs snatch at air. He arrives at his parents’ door with a scattering of gravel and sweat and he has to hold on to the railings, allowing his lungs to fill and flatten, fill and flatten, before he can straighten up and ring the bell.

  His mother takes a long time to answer.

  ‘Darling,’ she says, automatically proffering her cheek for him to kiss before she takes in her son’s jogging clothes. She retreats, nose wrinkled. ‘Would you like to use the shower?’

  ‘No, it’s OK.’ Ted shakes himself, like a dog exiting a river, pushing his hair off his brow. ‘I can’t stay. I just came because Dad said—’

  ‘Did you run all the way?’ she asks, as she leads him down to the kitchen.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘From work?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Is that wise?’

  ‘Wise?’

  ‘With all the . . .’ she shrugs a cashmere-clad shoulder ‘. . . I don’t know, pollution. And your joints.’

  ‘My joints?’

  ‘Yes, I’m told that jogging can be very bad for you.’

  Ted slumps into a chair at the table. ‘Mum, I think you’ll find the general consensus is that exercise is, in fact, very good for you.’

  ‘Well,’ his mother looks doubtful, ‘I don’t know about that. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to have a shower?’

  ‘I’m sure. I can’t stay. Got to get home.’

  ‘We have towels. They’re in the—’

  ‘I know you have towels, Mum, and I’m sure they’re very nice but I can’t stay. Dad said he had some papers he wanted me to sign so I’ve come for that and then I have to go.’

  ‘You don’t want dinner?’

  ‘I don’t want dinner.’

  ‘You’ll have coffee, though. How about a sandwich? I can make you a nice ham and—’

  ‘Mum, I’d love to but I can’t.’

  ‘You’ll pop upstairs and see your grandmother, won’t you? It would make her day, darling, you know it would.’

  ‘Mum,’ Ted holds his brow in his fingertips and massages his temples, ‘another time, I promise. Right now, I have to go. Elina’s been on her own all day—’

  ‘Well, so has your grandmother.’

  Ted takes in a breath and lets it out again. ‘Elina’s been on her own with a small baby. The feeding’s not going so well and—’

  ‘Really?’ His mother turns from the coffee-maker, her face ablaze with alarm. ‘What’s happened? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong. He’s—’

  ‘He’s not eating? He’s losing weight?’

  ‘He’s fine. He’s just crying a lot, that’s all. It’s just wind or colic, Elina thinks.’

  ‘Colic? Is that serious?’

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘lots of babies get it. I probably had it. Don’t you remember?’

  His mother turns back to the coffee-maker and flicks a switch, her reply drowned by the grinding of beans.

  ‘What did you say?’ Ted sits forward in his seat. ‘Actually, you know what? I’ll have just water. That would be great.’

  ‘Not coffee?’

  ‘No. Water.’

  His mother opens the fridge. ‘Still or sparkling?’

  ‘Was I breastfed or did you—’

  ‘Still or sparkling?’

  ‘Either. Anything. Just tap water’s fine. I don’t know why you buy that crap anyway.’

  ‘Language, Ted.’

  ‘So, was I?’

  His mother is searching in a high cupboard for a glass, her back to him. ‘Were you what?’

  ‘Breastfed.’

  ‘Do you want lemon?’

  ‘Yes, OK.’

  ‘Ice?’

  ‘Anything. Doesn’t matter.’

  She puts down the glass and starts rummaging in the freezer. ‘I told your father to fill the ice-trays the other day but I bet he didn’t.’ She extracts a whole fish, frozen solid inside its wrapping, a plastic box of some clear, brackish fluid. ‘Here’s one,’ she mutters, ‘empty, of course, but where’s the other?’

  ‘Mum, forget the ice. I’ll have it just as it is.’

  ‘I ask him to do these things and it’s as if he doesn’t even—Aha!’ She holds aloft an ice-tray triumphantly. ‘Here am I, maligning your poor father, and look – ice.’ She drops three cubes into Ted’s water and they split on impact. She replaces the frozen fish before handing Ted his glass.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says, and takes a long drink. ‘So, was I breastfed?’

  His mother sits opposite him at the table. She shakes her head, her mouth pursed with distaste. ‘I’m afraid not. It was bottles all the way with you.’

  ‘Really?’

  His mother jumps up again. ‘Now, where did I put those papers?’

  ‘It’s funny,’ Ted says, as she moves a pile of newspapers from a chair, then puts them back, ‘they tell you nowadays that you have to breastfeed for their immune systems. Elina’s always saying I’m more resistant to illness than anyone she’s ever met. And if I wasn’t breastfed that just disproves the whole theory, doesn’t it?’

  His mother opens a cupboard door, peers inside, then shuts it. ‘I know they’re here somewhere, I had them only this afternoon, but where . . .’ She darts forward and pounces on a sheaf of white documents. ‘Here they are! I knew they were here somewhere.’ She puts them down in front of Ted.

  ‘What are these, anyway?’

  ‘Some financial dealing of your father’s.’

  ‘Yes, but what?’ Ted drains his glass then picks up the paper on top of the pile.

  ‘Don’t ask me, darling. He doesn’t discuss th
ese things with me. Something about a trust. For the baby. You get some money back from the government or something.’

  ‘He’s setting up a trust for the baby?’

  ‘I think that was it. We both worry sometimes, you know. Especially now you have the baby.’

  ‘Worry about what?’

  ‘Well, you know. Yours and Elina’s income is so . . .’

  ‘So what?’