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 (33 page)
The shock of motherhood, for Lexie, is not the sleeplessness, the troughs of exhaustion, the shrinkage of life, how your existence becomes limited to the streets around where you live, but the onslaught of domestic tasks: the washing and the folding and the drying. Performing these makes her almost weep with furious boredom and she more than once hurls an armful of laundry at the wall. She eyes other mothers when she passes them in the street and they look so poised, so together, with their handbags hooked over the pram handles and their neatly embroidered sheets tucked in around their babies with hospital corners. But what about the
washing
, she wants to say, don’t you loathe the
drying
and the
folding
?
washing
, she wants to say, don’t you loathe the
drying
and the
folding
?
Theo grows out of the drawer. He grows out of the matinée jackets people knitted for him. Again, this is not a surprise but it happens faster than she’d expected. She rings the
Courier
. She writes a piece about the Anthony Caro exhibition at the Hayward Gallery and she is able to buy a cot. Theo grows until his feet touch the bottom of the pram. She rings the
Courier
again and she goes for a meeting, taking Theo with her. Carruthers seems horrified at first and then intrigued. Lexie jiggles Theo up and down on her knee as they talk. She gets a commission for an interview with an actress. She takes Theo along with her to the house. The actress is charmed and Theo crawls under the sofa, chasing the actress’s cat. Then he appears with a shoe of the actress, the strap of which he has chewed. The actress is suddenly less charmed. Lexie gets paid and she buys a pushchair. It has red and white stripes. Theo sits forward in it, hands gripping his knees, leaning sideways to take the corners. She finds a neighbour, Mrs Gallo from a few doors down, who is willing to mind Theo for a few days a week. She is from Liguria and has reared eight children. She sets Theo on her knee, calls him ‘Angelino’, pinches his cheeks and says, ‘May God protect him.’ And then Lexie goes back to the office, back to the reporters’ room, to earn a wage, to commune with her old life. Her colleagues know why she’s been away but very few of them mention the baby, as if he’s something not to be spoken of in the noisy, concentrated atmosphere of the newspaper. When she leaves the house on these mornings, she senses a thread that runs between her and her son, and as she walks away through the streets she is aware of it unspooling, bit by bit. By the end of the day, she feels utterly unravelled, almost mad with desire to be back with him, and she urges the Tube train to rattle faster through the tunnels, to speed over the rails, to get her back to her child as quickly as possible. It takes her a while, once she’s there again with him, to wind herself back to rightness, to get the thread back to where it ought to be – a length of no more than a couple of feet or so feels best, Lexie decides. When Theo sleeps at night she goes to her desk to finish whatever she hasn’t managed to get through that day. She sometimes thinks that the sound of typewriter keys must be, to Theo, a kind of lullaby, wreathing like smoke into his dreams.
Courier
. She writes a piece about the Anthony Caro exhibition at the Hayward Gallery and she is able to buy a cot. Theo grows until his feet touch the bottom of the pram. She rings the
Courier
again and she goes for a meeting, taking Theo with her. Carruthers seems horrified at first and then intrigued. Lexie jiggles Theo up and down on her knee as they talk. She gets a commission for an interview with an actress. She takes Theo along with her to the house. The actress is charmed and Theo crawls under the sofa, chasing the actress’s cat. Then he appears with a shoe of the actress, the strap of which he has chewed. The actress is suddenly less charmed. Lexie gets paid and she buys a pushchair. It has red and white stripes. Theo sits forward in it, hands gripping his knees, leaning sideways to take the corners. She finds a neighbour, Mrs Gallo from a few doors down, who is willing to mind Theo for a few days a week. She is from Liguria and has reared eight children. She sets Theo on her knee, calls him ‘Angelino’, pinches his cheeks and says, ‘May God protect him.’ And then Lexie goes back to the office, back to the reporters’ room, to earn a wage, to commune with her old life. Her colleagues know why she’s been away but very few of them mention the baby, as if he’s something not to be spoken of in the noisy, concentrated atmosphere of the newspaper. When she leaves the house on these mornings, she senses a thread that runs between her and her son, and as she walks away through the streets she is aware of it unspooling, bit by bit. By the end of the day, she feels utterly unravelled, almost mad with desire to be back with him, and she urges the Tube train to rattle faster through the tunnels, to speed over the rails, to get her back to her child as quickly as possible. It takes her a while, once she’s there again with him, to wind herself back to rightness, to get the thread back to where it ought to be – a length of no more than a couple of feet or so feels best, Lexie decides. When Theo sleeps at night she goes to her desk to finish whatever she hasn’t managed to get through that day. She sometimes thinks that the sound of typewriter keys must be, to Theo, a kind of lullaby, wreathing like smoke into his dreams.
When Theo begins to pull himself up on chair legs, when he begins to walk, when he begins to drag things off tables, when he very nearly kills himself by pulling the typewriter down on himself, Lexie realises something.
‘I need to move,’ she said to Laurence.
Laurence was watching Theo noisily emptying a kitchen cupboard on to the floor. ‘Amazing,’ he said, ‘that something so simple can be such fun. It makes one want to be a baby again.’ He turned to look at her. ‘You need to move? Why? Is the landlord turfing you out?’
‘No.’ Lexie cast her eyes around the room. It was a large room, admittedly, but it contained her bed, Theo’s cot, the sofa, a playpen, a desk where she worked at night.
Laurence was following her gaze. ‘I see what you mean,’ he said. ‘But where will you go?’
Theo dropped a metal sieve on the floor, which produced a resonant clang. ‘Ha,’ he said. ‘Ha.’ He bent to lift it again. Laurence leant forward to cut himself another slice of cake. Lexie watched her son hurl the sieve to the floor again. She found a particular pleasure in his green towelling romper-suit, the way his hair was growing in a V over his brow, in his fingers gripping the handle of a pan.
‘I thought . . . I was thinking . . .’ she began ‘. . . that maybe I should . . . buy somewhere.’
Laurence’s head snapped round. ‘Have you won the pools?’
‘If only.’
‘Is whatshisface paying?’
‘Certainly not. I wouldn’t accept money like that from whatshisface.’
Laurence frowned. ‘Well, more fool you. How are you going to—’ He put down his cake plate. ‘Ah,’ he said, in a different tone and, if circumstances had been different, Lexie might have smiled. It was one of the things she liked best about Laurence – the speed of his intuition.
He and Lexie looked at each other for a moment and then they turned to the wall opposite. The Pollock, the Bacon, the Freud, the Klein, the Giacometti. Lexie put her hands over her face and slumped down into the sofa. ‘I don’t think I can,’ she said, from behind her fingers.
‘Lex, I don’t see that you have a choice. You either ask whatshisface for a slice of his fortune—’
‘Not an option.’
‘Or you sell Theo to slave traders.’
‘Also not an option.’
‘Or you sell one of these.’
‘But I don’t want to,’ she moaned. ‘I can’t.’
Laurence got up, walked over to the pictures and looked at them, one by one. ‘If it’s any consolation,’ he said, as he stopped in front of the Lucian Freud portrait, ‘I think he would have told you to do exactly this. You know that. He wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment. Remember how he sold that Hepworth lithograph so that you could come and work with us?’
Lexie said nothing but took her hands away from her face.
Laurence moved on, past the Minton and the Colquhoun and the Bacon and came to a stop in front of the Pollock. He tapped the frame with his fingernails. ‘This’ll get you and Theo a palace somewhere. Dying is such a clever commercial move for an artist.’
‘Not that one,’ Lexie muttered, picking cake crumbs from the folds of her dress.
Laurence turned to look at her questioningly.
‘His favourite,’ Lexie said.
Theo, from the kitchenette, suddenly let out a mournful howl. Lexie went through and lifted him out of the mess of pans, baking trays, biscuit cutters. He immediately leant into her shoulder, exhausted, putting in his thumb, twirling his spare hand in her hair.
‘The Giacometti sketch might fetch you something. It’s signed,’ Laurence said. ‘ They’ve gone up in recent years. David and I can sell it for you, if you like.’
‘Thank you,’ Lexie murmured.
‘We’ll do it anonymously. No one will ever know.’
‘OK,’ she said, turning away from the wall. ‘Take it now, will you?’
She bought the third place she saw – the bottom half of a house in Dartmouth Park. Two rooms upstairs, two rooms downstairs, a passage running right through it from front door to back. A patch of garden at the back, with a snaggle-branched apple tree that yielded sweet-fleshed yellow fruit in autumn. Lexie hung a swing from its branches, and the first weeks in which she and Theo lived there, he would sit in the swing, fists resting on the wooden spars, watching in amazement as she scaled the branches, feet bare, collecting apples in her knotted skirt. She peeled up the rotten carpets and old, damp lino, scrubbed the boards and varnished them. She whitewashed the back of the house. She rubbed the windows with newspaper and vinegar until sunshine glowed through, Theo coursing back and forth across the garden with a watering-can. It seemed astonishing to her to own a patch of land, an arrangement of bricks, mortar and glass. It seemed an impossible swap: some money for a life like this. In the evenings, after Theo was asleep, she would often walk from room to room, around the perimeter of the garden, unable to believe her luck.
The lost Giacometti sketch haunted her, though. She hung and rehung the paintings over and over again, trying to find an arrangement that didn’t show its absence. You had no choice, she kept telling herself, you had no choice. And: he wouldn’t have minded; under the circumstances, he’d have suggested it himself. But she was still gnawed by guilt, by regret, in the small hours of the night, as she lifted the paintings off the walls, to try another new combination.
To distract herself, as ever, she worked.
The women we become after children
, she typed, then stopped to adjust the angle of the paper. She glanced at the paintings, almost without seeing them, then cocked her head to listen for Theo. Nothing. Silence; the freighted silence of sleep. She turned back to the typewriter, to the sentence she had written.
The women we become after children
, she typed, then stopped to adjust the angle of the paper. She glanced at the paintings, almost without seeing them, then cocked her head to listen for Theo. Nothing. Silence; the freighted silence of sleep. She turned back to the typewriter, to the sentence she had written.
We change shape
, she continued,
we buy low-heeled shoes, we cut off our long hair. We begin to carry in our bags half-eaten rusks, a small tractor, a shred of beloved fabric, a plastic doll. We lose muscle tone, sleep, reason, perspective. Our hearts begin to live outside our bodies. They breathe, they eat, they crawl and – look! – they walk, they begin to speak to us. We learn that we must sometimes walk an inch at a time, to stop and examine every stick, every stone, every squashed tin along the way. We get used to not getting where we were going. We learn to darn, perhaps to cook, to patch the knees of dungarees. We get used to living with a love that suffuses us, suffocates us, blinds us, controls us. We live. We contemplate our bodies, our stretched skin, those threads of silver around our brows, our strangely enlarged feet. We learn to look less in the mirror. We put our dry-clean-only clothes to the back of the wardrobe. Eventually, we throw them away. We school ourselves to stop saying ‘shit’ and ‘damn’ and learn to say ‘my goodness’ and ‘heavens above’. We give up smoking, we colour our hair, we search the vistas of parks, swimming-pools, libraries, cafés for others of our kind. We know each other by our pushchairs, our sleepless gazes, the beakers we carry. We learn how to cool a fever, ease a cough, the four indicators of meningitis, that one must sometimes push a swing for two hours. We buy biscuit cutters, washable paints, aprons, plastic bowls. We no longer tolerate delayed buses, fighting in the street, smoking in restaurants, sex after midnight, inconsistency, laziness, being cold. We contemplate younger women as they pass us in the street, with their cigarettes, their makeup, their tight-seamed dresses, their tiny handbags, their smooth, washed hair, and we turn away, we put down our heads, we keep on pushing the pram up the hill.
Felix would come, between his stints in Malaysia, Vietnam, Northern Ireland, Suez. He stayed sometimes for an afternoon, sometimes for a day, sometimes for weeks at a time. Lexie made sure he kept his own flat. He proved to be a fond, if semi-detached, parent. He would bounce Theo up and down on his knee for a few minutes, then put him down and pick up a newspaper, or lie on a rug in the garden while Theo pottered around him. Lexie once came out into the garden to find Felix asleep, covered with sand – and Theo industriously heading from sandpit to prone father, trowel in hand, burying him bit by bit.
It’s hard to say what Theo thought of Felix, of this man who appeared in the house after long gaps, bearing expensive yet inappropriate gifts (Meccano for a one-year-old, a cricket bat for a child who couldn’t yet walk). Theo didn’t call him ‘Daddy’ or ‘Dad’ (‘Rather silly names, don’t you think?’ said Felix) but ‘Felix’. Felix called him ‘old chap’, which never failed to irritate Lexie.
T
ed stands in his back garden, contemplating the flowerbed. Perhaps ‘flowerbed’ isn’t quite the right word. Bindweed-and-dock-bed. Tangled thicket of weeds. Complete bloody mess.
ed stands in his back garden, contemplating the flowerbed. Perhaps ‘flowerbed’ isn’t quite the right word. Bindweed-and-dock-bed. Tangled thicket of weeds. Complete bloody mess.
He sighs, leans forward to pull at a particularly voracious plant with a fronded top but it refuses to leave the soil, breaking off in his hand. He sighs again and tosses it aside.
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