The Hand That First Held Mine (28 page)
Read The Hand That First Held Mine Online
Authors: Maggie O'farrell
Tags: #Literary, #Psychological, #Family Life, #Historical, #Fiction
And her mother? Elina glances at the clock on the wall. It says eleven thirty, which means one thirty in Finland. Despite having been away so long, despite professing to loathe the guesthouse, its occupants, the archipelago, the small town, the whole country, despite having run away as soon as she could, as far as she could, as often as she could, Elina is still aware of the rhythms of the place. Her mother will be serving lunch to people outside in the garden, on mismatched plates with fluted edges. Drinks come in glasses of different colours, in varying sizes. If it’s a rainy day, the guests will be lined up along the veranda. She can see her mother stepping from the door to the kitchen, with that rolling, unhurried gait of hers, bearing four plates, an apron over the inevitable cambric dress, those pink-lensed sunglasses hiding her eyes. If the tourists want to order, she will fish in her apron pocket for a pen, a pad, her half-moon glasses, all in the same meditative way. Then she will sway back to the kitchen, the pad in one hand, past the enormous beech tree, past the sculpture in chicken wire and stone and shell that Elina did at school and now cannot look at.
A longing to be there, fierce as a slug of whisky, passes through Elina. She wants to be sitting with her back against the beech tree, Jonah beside her, watching her mother come and go. She cannot, for the moment, imagine what she is doing here on her own in a house in London when she could be there. Why is she here? Why did she ever leave?
Elina reaches, carefully, carefully, without moving Jonah, for the phone, which is lying abandoned on the coffee-table. She dials the number, and as she listens to the pulsing rings, she imagines the phone sitting squat on the oak reception desk; she pictures her mother hearing it from the garden and walking through the sunroom, over the uneven boards and—
‘Vilkuna,’ an unfamiliar voice says, in an offhand tone.
Elina asks for her mother. The unfamiliar person goes away and then Elina hears unhurried steps coming towards the phone, along the passage, in shoes that flap free of the heels and the longing tightens like a scarf about her throat.
‘
Aiti?
’ Elina says, surprising herself by using a term she hasn’t said for years. Since she was a teenager, she’s always called her mother by her given name.
Aiti?
’ Elina says, surprising herself by using a term she hasn’t said for years. Since she was a teenager, she’s always called her mother by her given name.
‘Elina?’ her mother says. ‘Is that you?’
‘Yes,’ Elina says, switching to Swedish, like her mother.
‘How are you? How is the little man?’
‘He’s fine. Growing, you know. He smiles now and he’s just started to—’ Elina breaks off because she realises that her mother is talking in a low tone to someone else, in Finnish this time.
‘. . . into the garden. I’ll be there in just a minute.’
Elina waits, holding the phone to her ear. She lays the list on Jonah’s back.
Unreliable, kite, same man
.
Unreliable, kite, same man
.
‘Sorry,’ her mother says. ‘What were you saying?’
‘Are you busy? Should I call back?’
‘No, no. It’s OK. It’s just that . . . it’s OK. You were telling me about Jonah.’
‘He’s fine.’
There is a pause on the line. Is her mother talking to someone else again? Or gesturing to them?
‘Thank you for the photos of him,’ her mother says. ‘We enjoyed them so much.’ We? Elina thinks. ‘We couldn’t decide if he was like you or Ted.’
‘Like neither of us, I think. Yet, anyway.’
‘Yes.’
There is another pause. There is something in her mother’s voice, a particular strain in tone, that makes Elina think someone is in the room with her again.
‘I can call back if this is a bad time,’ Elina says.
‘It’s not a bad time,’ her mother says, with just a hint of annoyance. ‘It’s not a bad time at all. I’m always happy to talk to you, you know that. It’s not often I get the chance. You’re always so busy and—’
‘I’m not busy,’ Elina exclaims. ‘I’m not busy at all. My life is . . . I spend all day at home and . . . and all night too. And I—’ She breaks off. She wants to say, please, please,
Aiti
, I don’t know what’s happening, I don’t know why Ted is drifting away from me, I don’t know how to fix it, and please can I come home, can I come now?
Aiti
, I don’t know what’s happening, I don’t know why Ted is drifting away from me, I don’t know how to fix it, and please can I come home, can I come now?
Her mother is speaking again. ‘. . . Jussi was saying the other day that they had all of his sleeping through by four weeks. There’s a book, apparently, that you can follow and . . .’
Jussi – Elina’s brother. Elina sets her teeth as her mother talks on about the book and sleep training and about her four grand-daughters and how they never wake up at night, even now, and how Jussi’s wife, the bovine Hannele, wants another but Jussi isn’t sure and neither is Elina’s mother.
‘Is Jussi with you, then?’ Elina asks.
‘Yes!’ Her mother’s voice lightens suddenly. ‘They’ve come for the summer – all of them. Jussi has been painting the front room and he’s about to start on the veranda. The girls and I have been swimming every morning – we’ve booked them in for the lessons, you remember the lessons, in the bay, and Jussi was saying he thinks the girls ought to go sailing today so I said that later I would . . .’
Elina holds the phone to her ear. She examines Jonah’s fingernails, sees that they need trimming. She brushes some stray crumbs off the sofa. She discovers a stain on a cushion. She turns the cushion round so that the stain doesn’t show. She takes the list off Jonah’s back and holds it between her finger and thumb.
‘I was wondering . . .’ she interrupts a monologue about the second granddaughter’s accomplishments on the flute ‘. . . I was wondering, was Dad . . . OK . . . after we were born?’
‘Was he OK?’
‘I mean, did he . . . go a bit funny?’
‘Funny, how?’
‘Sort of . . . I don’t know . . . absent. Withdrawn.’ Elina waits, holding the phone to her ear, as if anxious not to miss a sound.
‘Why do you ask?’ her mother says eventually.
Elina bites her lip, then sighs. ‘No reason,’ she says. ‘Just wondered. Listen,
Aiti
, I was thinking I might . . . we might . . . come.’
Aiti
, I was thinking I might . . . we might . . . come.’
‘Come?’
‘To Nauvo. To you. I . . . I thought that . . . you know, you haven’t met Jonah yet and I’m . . . Well, a change of scene would do Ted good and . . . it’s been ages since I was there.’ There is a silence down the line. ‘What do you think?’ Elina says finally, desperately.
‘Well, the thing is, Jussi is here for a month and then he’s going back to Jyväskylä and the girls are staying here with me. I’ve got them all to myself for two weeks. And then I think Hannele is coming to collect them – I’ll need to check – so I’m not sure when we might—’
‘Right. Doesn’t matter.’
‘I mean, we’d love you to come. The girls would love to see Jonah. And so would I.’
‘It’s fine. Forget it. Another time.’
‘Maybe in the autumn or—’
‘I have to go.’
‘September? The thing is it’s not that—’
‘Got to go. Jonah’s crying. See you. ’Bye.’
Elina is pulled upwards from sleep. It feels as if she’s been there for just minutes. The room is in pitch darkness, the two windows to her right casting only a very slight orange glow. Jonah is crying, calling to her. For half a second more, she lies on her back, unable to rise, like Gulliver with his hair tied down. Then she pushes herself from the mattress, lurches into the room towards the bars of the cot and lifts Jonah from it.
She changes his nappy, badly, clumsily, in the dark. Jonah is tense with hunger, his feet waving, she can’t get them back into the poppered legs of his sleepsuit. She tries to push them in, tries to ease the fabric around his knees but he roars with outrage. ‘OK,’ she says, ‘all right.’ She scoops him up and carries him to the bed, settling herself on her side to feed him.
Jonah sucks, his fists gradually uncurling, his eyes becoming unfocused. Elina drifts in and out of consciousness: she sees the veranda on her mother’s house in Nauvo, she sees the curve of Jonah’s head in the dark, she sees the flat water of the archipelago on a windless day, she sees her brother walking away from her down a gravelled track, she sees a painting she was working on before Jonah was born, she sees the grain of the canvas beneath a thick layer of paint, she sees Jonah again, still sucking, she sees the pattern of intersecting tramlines on a Helsinki street corner, she sees—
Suddenly she is wide awake, back in the bedroom. She is cold, she thinks first. The duvet has gone.
Ted is sitting up in bed, his back straight, his hands cupped around his face.
‘What’s the matter?’ she says.
He doesn’t answer. She reaches out and touches his back. ‘Ted? What’s up?’
‘Oh,’ he says, turning round. His face is bewildered. ‘Oh.’
‘What is it?’
‘I had this—’ He stops, frowning, and looks around the room.
‘It’s very early,’ she says, in an attempt to cover for him, ‘one thirty.’
‘Huh,’ he says slowly. Then he lies back down, curving his body around Jonah’s, putting his hand on her hip. She fits her knees to his, sliding her foot between his calves. ‘God,’ he whispers. ‘I had this dream – a really horrible dream. That I was here in the house and I could hear someone, somewhere, talking. I was looking everywhere for you, all over the house, calling your name, but I couldn’t find you. And then I came into our bedroom and you were sitting in the chair, with your back to me, with Jonah in your arms, and I put my hand on your shoulder and when you turned your head, it wasn’t you at all, it was someone else, it was—’ He rubs a hand over his face. ‘It was horrible. I got such a fright that I woke up.’
Elina sits, raising Jonah to her shoulder. He feels slack in her hands, like a beanbag, and she knows by now that this is the feeling she needs, that this means more sleep, for him and for her. She rubs her palm against his back. ‘That sounds awful,’ she whispers to Ted. ‘What a weird dream. I have dreams sometimes where I go to the cot and Jonah is gone. Or I’m pushing the buggy and I see he isn’t in it. I think it’s part of the bonding, you know, that—’
‘Hmm,’ Ted says, scowling up at the ceiling, ‘but this was so real, as if—’
Jonah interrupts this with an enormous, resounding belch.
‘Here,’ Ted says, reaching for him, ‘let me take him. You go back to sleep.’
H
ere is Lexie, on a humid spring night in Paris. She sits at a hotel dressing-table, her typewriter balanced in front of her. Her shoes are kicked off, her clothes sprawled on the narrow bed. She wears just a slip, her hair raised off her neck and secured with a pencil. The room is cramped, unbearably hot; she has left the windows to the tiny iron balcony open. The breeze inflates the thin curtains, then sucks them flat. The sounds of people running, shouts, police sirens, glass shattering reach her from the street below. She has been up all night, on the Boulevard St-Michel and around the Sorbonne, watching the students put up barricades, tear up the pavements, overturn cars and then the police attacking with clubs and tear gas.
ere is Lexie, on a humid spring night in Paris. She sits at a hotel dressing-table, her typewriter balanced in front of her. Her shoes are kicked off, her clothes sprawled on the narrow bed. She wears just a slip, her hair raised off her neck and secured with a pencil. The room is cramped, unbearably hot; she has left the windows to the tiny iron balcony open. The breeze inflates the thin curtains, then sucks them flat. The sounds of people running, shouts, police sirens, glass shattering reach her from the street below. She has been up all night, on the Boulevard St-Michel and around the Sorbonne, watching the students put up barricades, tear up the pavements, overturn cars and then the police attacking with clubs and tear gas.
She looks at what she has written.
Whether they were incited or provoked remains to be seen
, it reads,
but such a reaction from the authorities seems
. . . And there it stops. She has to finish this but, for now, she has no idea how.
Whether they were incited or provoked remains to be seen
, it reads,
but such a reaction from the authorities seems
. . . And there it stops. She has to finish this but, for now, she has no idea how.
She taps a full stop, pulls the carriage to a new paragraph, watching the woman in the dressing-table mirror do the same. The woman is thin in her slip, the bone of her clavicle stark, her eyes ringed by shadows. Lexie puts a hand to her brow, leaning in close to the mirror. She has fine, almost invisible lines now, around her mouth, at the corners of her eyes. She thinks of them as fault-lines, glimpses of the future, the signs where her face will fold in on itself, come away slack from the bone.
She doesn’t know that this will never happen.
There is the sound of a knock at the door and her head snaps round.
‘Lexie?’ Felix’s voice whispers loudly. ‘Are you in there?’
She’d seen him earlier, positioned beside a blazing barricade, gesticulating for the camera, figures haring back and forth behind him.
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