The Hand That First Held Mine

by Maggie O'Farrell

  She laughs. ‘You don’t look like one either.’

  Robert places his cutlery on his plate and pushes it to one side. ‘Thank you. I think.’ He takes a long time selecting a piece of fruit for himself. He picks up an apple, puts it down; he toys with a plum, then discards it before settling finally on a pear. ‘You’re married to that war-reporter chap, aren’t you?’ he says, as he slices it lengthways.

  ‘Pear!’ Theo shouts in delight. ‘Pear!’

  Lexie twists the stalk off her apple with a snap. ‘Not married.’

  ‘Oh. Well. I merely meant that you’re . . .’ He circles his knife in the air, waiting for her to fill the gap.

  She refuses to help him out. ‘I’m what?’

  ‘With him. Together. An item. A couple. Lovers. Partners. However you want to put it.’ He hands Theo a slice of the pear.

  ‘Hmm,’ Lexie says, sinking her teeth into her apple. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘About Felix. And me.’

  ‘That’s a rather paranoid question,’ he says.

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘I saw you with him once, at a book launch. A year or two ago. You were pregnant at the time.’

  ‘Was I? Which book launch?’

  ‘That biography of Hitler.’

  Lexie thinks. ‘I don’t remember meeting you.’

  ‘You didn’t.’ He smiles. ‘Television folk tend not to mix with men of letters.’

  She is riled now. ‘I’m not television folk.’

  ‘You’re married to one.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Married, attached. Let’s not split hairs.’ He cuts Theo another slice of pear. ‘I met you before that, though.’

  Lexie looks at him. ‘When?’

  ‘A long time ago.’ He’s concentrating on his plate, on a piece of pear, which he is peeling, defrocking. ‘You came to my house once.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘With Innes Kent.’

  Lexie puts down her apple, straightens her fork. She smooths the hair off Theo’s brow, pulls his bib straight.

  ‘My wife is quite a collector of art,’ Robert says. ‘She bought a few things from Innes. We always trusted his judgement – he knew what he was about.’

  She clears her throat. ‘He did.’

  ‘You came with a Barbara Hepworth lithograph, I think it was. We still have it. He had it propped up in the back of his car. You stood in our hall and talked to our daughter about fire engines while Innes brought it in.’

  She takes up her fork, a slim, silver thing. It feels peculiarly unbalanced, top heavy, as if it might pitch forward out of her hand if she doesn’t cling to it. ‘I remember,’ she says. ‘It was . . .’

  He shoots her a glance from under his brow, then looks away. ‘It was a long time ago,’ he finishes for her.

  ‘Yes.’

  They eat in silence.

  The next day Theo wakes up early and so, therefore, does Lexie. She manages to persuade him to stay in the room until seven. Then she bathes in astonishingly cold water and they are out in the courtyard after breakfast. She needs to do the interview with Fitzgerald today; she has to see the work; and then she has to get back to London.

  She asks the housekeeper if she would mind Theo for her and the housekeeper is very happy to do so. Lexie watches them wander off together towards the orchard, with a basket of washing and some pegs. The housekeeper is talking and Theo is exclaiming lots of words back to her: peg, flower, foot, shoe, grass.

  The doors of the studio are shut but the padlock that was on them last night hangs unlocked from a chain. Lexie stands next to it, staring at it. She puts a hand around it. It is, she thinks, the size of a human heart.

  ‘He won’t be in there,’ Robert says, from behind her, ‘not at this time of the day.’

  She whirls round. ‘Do you make a habit of creeping up on people?’

  ‘Not always.’

  She sighs, her breath exploding white into her face. ‘I’ve got to get back to London. I was hoping to get to the ferry tonight.’

  He frowns, kicks at a stone. ‘Are you going all that way on your own?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘I’ll have Theo with me.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ he murmurs. ‘I meant that it’s not . . . it’s hardly ideal, is it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A woman alone, travelling about with a young child.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ she says, a touch impatiently. ‘And it’s not as if I have any choice.’ She takes two steps away from the studio door, then stops. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she says, almost to herself. ‘I can’t hang around indefinitely like this.’

  A loud hammering sounds behind her. Robert Lowe is banging on the barn door with a closed fist. Almost immediately, it opens a crack.

  ‘Fitzgerald,’ Robert says, ‘may I introduce you to Lexie Sinclair, from the Daily Courier in London? You agreed to an interview with her, I believe. She has to hot-foot it back to London tonight. Would you be able to see her now? Here she is.’

  The interview goes rather well. Fitzgerald shows her a nude he’s working on. He is forthcoming and lucid, which she’s heard is not always the case. Maybe she got to him early enough in the day. She asks him about his childhood and he gives her several quotable stories about his violent father. He is garrulous on the subject of his inspiration, on the history of his house, his views on the Anglo-Irish in Ireland. At the end of the interview Lexie makes a show of putting down her shorthand pad, just as she always does, because an interviewee will always say the most interesting, most revealing things if they are under the illusion that they are no longer on record. Innes taught Lexie this and she thinks of him every time she puts down her pad. Make them think you’re their friend, Lex, he’d told her, and they’ll tell you anything, show you everything.

  Fitzgerald shows her his tools, the rows and rows of chisels, the type of hammer he prefers. He shows her the blocks of marble he is yet to start on. He starts to talk about his wives, counting them off on his fingers. He becomes graphic on the subject of sex. Lexie nods distantly, her head on one side. She is sure to keep the bench between them. But as she’s thanking him and turning to leave, he catches her arm and presses her up against the hard edge of a sink, his old-man breath in her face, his arthritic fingers clutching at her waist.

  Lexie clears her throat. ‘I’m flattered, really I am,’ she says, beginning the words of the speech she always delivers at a time like this, ‘but I’m afraid—’ She immediately forgets the rest of her speech because she sees that Robert Lowe is standing in the room with them.

  Fitzgerald turns. ‘Yes?’ he snaps, at his biographer. ‘What can we do for you?’

  ‘Miss Sinclair is wanted on the telephone,’ Robert says, his eyes averted.

  Lexie slides herself out from between the basin and Fitzgerald’s pelvis and walks towards the door with as much nonchalance as she can muster.

  In the hallway, she picks up the receiver. ‘Lexie Sinclair,’ she says. She waits a moment, then replaces it and goes into the kitchen. Robert is sitting in an armchair by the range, a book in his lap. ‘There’s no one there,’ she says.

  He doesn’t look up. ‘I know.’

  ‘Well, then, what . . . ?’ She gazes at him, perplexed. ‘Why would you do that?’

  He coughs and mumbles something that sounds like ‘. . . of course.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I said,’ he glances up now, ‘I thought perhaps the interview had run its course.’

  Lexie is silent.

  ‘But I’m sorry if I interrupted.’

  ‘No.’ She looks away into the garden. ‘You didn’t. It was . . . The interview was finished. I should . . . I thought . . . Well, thank you.’

  ‘It was my pleasure,’ he says quietly. They look at each other for a moment and then she turns and leaves the room, heading up the stairs to pack her case.

  On a Saturday afternoon Lexie
is standing in her bedroom. Theo is in the room next door, asleep, tired out by a long walk across the Heath. She is sorting through a pile of toys that has collected around her chest of drawers. A dog on a string, a tin drum, a rubber ball, which slips through her fingers and bounces away over the boards, vanishing under the bed.

  She bends to find it, lifting the edge of the counterpane and looking under the bed. She sees the ball, just out of reach; she sees a shoe lying on its side; she sees something else, further in. Lexie peers closer. She reaches in and gets hold of it. It is a hairband. One of those rigid plastic ones that grip your head. Polka dots, white on navy blue. Lined with rows of small, sharp teeth.

  Lexie sits back on her heels. She holds the hairband at arm’s length, between thumb and finger. There is a long, lightish hair attached to it, like the sticky thread of a spider. She tweaks the hair off it, holds it up to the light. In her other hand, she turns the hairband over. She examines every plane, every surface of it, every tiny tooth. Then she drops it and the hair to the bedside table.

  She stands. She walks to the window. She looks down into the street, her arms folded. A man and a woman are getting out of a car below; the woman tugs at the hemline of her skirt as she steps to the pavement; the man is bouncing a tennis ball as he stands waiting for her, bounce, catch, bounce, catch; the woman is laughing at him, tossing her hair in the bright sun.

  Lexie turns. She goes downstairs, into the kitchen, where she pours herself a glass of wine. She walks about drinking it. She goes to her paintings and seems to count them: the Pollock, the Hepworth, the Klein. They are all here. She touches each one, as if to reassure herself. Back up the stairs, into Theo’s room to check on him, into her own where she avoids looking at the hairband. She tidies her notes on the desk, reads through a line or two of her current piece. She straightens a lamp. She lifts a hairbrush from the dresser, puts it down. Then she opens the window. She picks up a shirt of Felix’s, a grey one with a long collar, from where he left it last night on a chair and flings it out into the warm, afternoon air. It floats, arms stretched out, down to the front garden where it comes to rest near a bank of tulips. She takes a few sips of her wine. Then she picks up a pair of his socks, drops them out of the window. She follows this with some cufflinks from the dresser, a belt, a fistful of ties, which writhe and snake as they fall to the ground.

  As Felix is paying the taxi driver, he sees a number of people grouped on the pavement. They are all looking up at something, pointing. Felix shifts his wallet to his other hand. At this point it occurs to him that the group of people are near Lexie’s flat – but nothing more.

  Then he sees it is Lexie’s flat they are pointing at. He crosses the road, shoving his wallet into his jacket. He sees Lexie, or her head and shoulders, appear from her window. In her hands is a suitcase. Which she drops. It falls with a crash to the front step. She reappears a second later with an armful of what look like clothes. These, she also empties into the garden.

  Felix breaks into a sprint. ‘Lexie!’ he shouts, as he rounds the gate. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

  She leans against the window-frame. She tosses a silk handkerchief out into the air, then a tie, then a pair of underpants, like a croupier dealing cards. Felix moves forward in an attempt to catch them but stumbles on the suitcase, then slides on a stack of records.

  ‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘Or, rather, nothing out of the ordinary.’

  ‘Christ almighty, Lexie.’ Felix is furious now. ‘What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Giving you a hand clearing your stuff out of my flat.’ She says this with a flick of her wrist and a toothbrush comes hurtling towards him.

  Felix darts to catch it but misses. Two people in the crowd behind him say, ‘Ooooh.’

  Felix draws himself up to his not inconsiderable height. ‘May I ask what this is all about?’

  Lexie disappears from the window for a moment, then reappears, holding something out to him. ‘This,’ she says, and drops it.

  It is horseshoe-shaped, flimsy, and it twists in the air before it falls to the steps, bouncing towards him. Felix picks it up. It is blue with white spots. A hairband. For a moment he can’t place it, but there’s one thing he knows for sure – it’s not Lexie’s. He experiences, for the first time, a slight tremor of foreboding. ‘My darling,’ he says, stepping forward, ‘I have no idea where this came from. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before and—’

  ‘It was under the bed.’

  ‘Well, isn’t it entirely possible that the charlady left it there? I mean . . . Look,’ he says, ‘we can’t talk about it like this. I’m coming in.’

  ‘You can’t,’ she says, pushing her hair off her brow. ‘I’ve bolted the door. You’re not coming in here ever again, Felix, and that’s final.’

  ‘Lexie, I’ll say it again. I have no idea where this came from. It’s nothing to do with me, I assure you.’

  ‘I’ll tell you where it came from,’ Lexie says, leaning menacingly out of the window. ‘It came from the head of Margot Kent.’

  ‘It can’t possibly . . .’ He falters to a stop. There is a fatal pause before he continues, ‘I’m not sure I even . . .’

  Lexie folds her arms, looking down at him. ‘I told you,’ she says quietly. ‘I warned you. I said, not her. And you have the gall,’ her voice rises to a shout, ‘to do it with her, here, in my flat. In my bed. You’re a shit, Felix Roffe. How bloody dare you?’

  He has no idea what she’s talking about. He doesn’t even remember the girl. Unless it’s that pallid wisp of a creature who made a play for him that time and has been phoning him up ever since. Could it be that one? Felix feels a weakening in his chest. He did have her here, come to think about it, while Lex was away in Ireland. His flat was having plumbing work done. But he hadn’t meant to. And, frankly, it’s unlike Lexie to be threatened by a girl like that.

  ‘Sweetie,’ he attempts to speak soothingly, his usual tone with Lexie, ‘don’t you think you’re getting this a little out of proportion? Whatever it was, it was nothing. You know me. Nothing at all. Why don’t you let me in and we can talk about it properly?’

  Lexie shakes her head. ‘No. I knew she’d do this. I knew it. I warned you, Felix, I warned you and I always mean what I say.’

  ‘What do you mean,’ he says, ‘you warned me? Warned me about what?’

  ‘About her. About Margot Kent.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘After that lunch at Claridge’s.’

  ‘What lunch at Claridge’s?’

  ‘We saw her outside and I said, stay away from her, and you promised me you would.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘Lexie, I have no memory whatsoever of this conversation. But I can see you’re upset. Why don’t you let me in and we can—’

  ‘No. That’s it, I’m afraid. Everything should be there.’ She gestures at the garden. ‘Goodbye, Felix. Good luck with getting it back to your place.’ She slams the window shut.

  It is one of their more dramatic splits. And, as things turn out, their last.

  A week or so later, Lexie was having a bad day. She had been late for an appointment with someone at the Arts Council, the Tube train having sat in a tunnel for half an hour. She was supposed to be writing a piece on a production of Accidental Death of an Anarchist but the director she’d been hoping to speak to had come down with shingles so Lexie had to push the piece back a week and come up with something else at short notice. Felix had called three times this morning, in contrite, pleading mode. Lexie hung up on him every time. Theo had looked this morning as if he was coming down with a cold, and at the back of Lexie’s mind all day was the hope that it was only a cold. She still hadn’t got used to the constant undertow of maternal anxiety, the pull he exuded from their house in Dartmouth Park, as she went about her business in central London. He was her magnetic north and her needle swung always in his direction.

  ‘Thank you so much
. . .’ Lexie was saying into her telephone, already halfway out of her seat and scrabbling with her spare hand for her bag under the desk. ‘Please tell her I really appreciate it . . . Yes, absolutely . . . I’ll be there in half an hour at the latest.’

  She yanked on her coat, hauled her bag on to the desk and threw in a pad and pencil. ‘Off to Westminster,’ she said to her colleagues, ‘if anyone asks. Back soon.’

  She hurried into the corridor, belting her coat, going over in her mind what she needed to establish in the interview, when someone touched her elbow. She jumped and whirled round. There, next to her, was a man. The corduroy jacket, the open-necked white shirt were instantly familiar but it took her a moment to place him.