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 (3 page)
‘Elina . . . you’re joking. Aren’t you?’ He lets out a nervous, low laugh. ‘Don’t, it’s not funny. Maybe you . . . Maybe you’ve been dreaming. You must have been dreaming. Why don’t you . . .’ Ted trails into silence. He puts a hand on her shoulder and for a minute he doesn’t seem to know what to say. He stares at her and she stares back. She allows the thought: There is a baby in the room with us. It’s here. She wants to turn around and look at it again but Ted is clasping her shoulder now and clearing his throat. ‘You had the baby,’ he says slowly. ‘It was . . . in hospital. Remember?’
‘When?’ she says. ‘When did I have it?’
‘Jesus, El, are you—’ He stops himself, rubs a hand over his face, then says, in a more level voice, ‘Four days ago. You had three days of labour and then . . . and then he came. You came out of hospital last night. You discharged yourself.’
There is a pause. Elina thinks about what Ted has said. She lays out the facts with which he has provided her, side by side, in her head. Hospital, baby, discharged, three days of labour. She considers the idea of three days and she considers the pain in her abdomen but decides not to mention it now.
‘Elina?’
‘What?’
He is peering into her face. He smooths the hair away from her brow, then rests his hands on her shoulders. ‘You’re probably . . . you must be terribly tired and . . . Why don’t you go back to sleep?’
She doesn’t answer. She struggles out from under his touch, across the mattress. She clutches at her abdomen as she does so, pressing her teeth into her lip. It feels, down there, as if something might very easily spill out unless she holds it in. She crouches above the baby, looking carefully down. He, Ted said. A boy, then. He is awake, eyes wide and alert. He looks up at her from his wicker basket, his face quizzical, enquiring. He is wrapped up like a gift in a white blanket, his hands covered with white mittens. Elina reaches out and pulls them off – tiny things they are, light as cirrus clouds. His hands flex, opening and closing on empty air.
‘Ah,’ he says. A strangely adult noise. Very firm, very considered.
Elina puts out her hand and touches the damp heat of his forehead, the rising and falling of his tiny, bird-like chest, the curve of his cheek, the curled flesh of the ear. His eyes blink as her fingers cross his vision, his lips opening and shutting like someone lost for words.
She slides her palms under him, lifts him up. He is her baby, after all; she is allowed. She puts him against her, his head below her shoulder, his feet in the crook of her arm. There is, she acknowledges, something familiar in the weight of him, the lie of him. He twists his head towards her, then away, towards her, away, then gazes fixedly at the strap of her T-shirt.
‘You do remember, don’t you?’ Ted says again, from the bed.
Elina pulls her face into a smile. ‘Of course,’ she says.
When she returns to bed, a long time later – she has been staring at the baby, lifting off his hat, looking at his hair, the surprising deep-water blue of his eyes, putting her finger in his palm to feel the answering clench – Ted is asleep, his head resting on his arm. She is sure she won’t sleep again: how can she when she’s got so cold, when there is this pain, when she seems to have had a baby? She edges as close as she dares to Ted, whose body seems to fan heat towards her. Elina pushes her head down underneath the duvet, where it is dark and hot. She won’t sleep again.
But she must have, because what feels like minutes later she comes round to a bedroom so bright and glaring she has to hold her hand over her face and Ted is dressed and saying he has to go and kissing her goodbye.
‘Where are you going?’ she says, struggling on to her elbow.
His face falls. ‘To work,’ he says. ‘No choice,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘The film,’ he says. ‘Behind on the assemblies,’ he says. ‘Take some leave at the end of the shoot,’ he says. ‘Hopefully,’ he says.
This is followed by a short argument because Ted wants to call his mother to come and help. Elina can hear herself saying no, can feel herself shaking her head. He then says she can’t be on her own, that he’ll call her friend Suki, but the idea of anyone in the house is horrifying. Elina cannot think how she would talk to these people; she cannot imagine what she might say. No, she says, no and no again.
And she must be winning this argument because Ted is scratching his head, fiddling with his bag and kissing her goodbye, and then she hears him descend the stairs, the front door slam and the house is silent.
She longs more than anything to sink again into the oblivion of sleep, to press her cheek into the pillow, to bring down the portcullises of her lids over her eyes. She can feel the proximity of such sleep, she can taste it. But next to her is the noise of puffing, struggling, small mammalian pants.
She peers over the edge of the bed and there he is again. The baby. ‘
Hei
,’ Elina says, surprising herself by talking Finnish.
Hei
,’ Elina says, surprising herself by talking Finnish.
The baby doesn’t answer. He is intent on his own battle with something unseen: his arms flail in the air around him, he makes small, gruff, growling noises. And then, as if a switch has been flicked, he lets out a yell, a long, loud shout of anguish.
Elina draws back, as if she’s been slapped. Then she sees that she has to get up. She has to address this situation. It is up to her. There is no one else. The baby takes a big breath and launches into another cry. Elina bends, wincing, and picks him up. She holds his rigid, angry body. What can be wrong with him? She tries to summon up the advice of the baby books she’s read but can remember nothing. She walks to the window and back. ‘There, there,’ she tries. ‘It’s OK.’
But the baby screams, arching his back, his face all mouth, his skin a livid pink.
‘It’s OK,’ she says again, and then she sees that he is twisting his head, stretching wide his mouth, like a front-crawl swimmer turning for air. Hungry. That means he’s hungry – of course. Why didn’t she think of that?
She sits down in the chair, just in time because her legs are feeling strangely shaky, and lifts her T-shirt, hesitating, trying to remember those mystifying diagrams of breastfeeding. Latching on. Positioning. Common feeding problems. But she needn’t have worried. The baby seems to know exactly what to do. He goes for the breast like a dog offered a bone and begins to suck, avidly for a few seconds, then more slowly, then avidly again. Elina stares down at him, dumbstruck by his calm, his efficiency. They sit there for what feels to Elina like an unaccountably long time. Is this normal? To sit like this for half an hour, three-quarters of an hour, more than an hour? The morning goes on outside in the street: people walking up the street towards the Heath, people walking down the street towards the bus stop. The patches of sunlight edge across the carpet towards Elina’s feet and the baby still feeds.
Elina thinks she may have fallen asleep in the chair because she comes to and her whole body is in sunlight and the baby lying on her lap, rather like a cat, staring this time at her wristwatch.
She tests herself, scans her mind. Has she remembered anything? Has it come back to her while she was sleeping? The birth, the birth, the birth, she intones to herself, you must remember, you have to remember. But no. She can recall being pregnant. She can see the baby here, lying in her lap. But how it got there is a mystery.
She puts both hands to her face and rubs her skin, scuffing it with her palms, trying to rouse herself. ‘So,’ she says into the silence, her voice wavering slightly. Why is the house so silent, as silent as someone expecting an answer? ‘Here we are.’ She is, she notices, talking Finnish again. ‘What would you like to do now?’ she asks the baby, as if he is a guest with whom she has only the slightest acquaintance.
She raises herself up, slowly, slowly, clutching his body to her, and trails downstairs, feeling her way, never taking her eyes off the baby’s face. Her son. He came out of her. She knows this because Ted says so and because there is something in the angle of the baby’s forehead, the swirl of hair there, that brings to mind her father. She passes the open bathroom door as she drifts downstairs and she sees on the floor a changing mat with red stripes and she remembers, she actually remembers, buying this. She remembers being disgusted by the decoration on such things – arrays of mincing teddy bears, anthropomorphised fish with leering grins, ducks with long-lashed, kohled gazes. Around the mat are arranged some nappies, a packet of wipes, a cloth octopus, a jar of ointment. Who put these things there? Was it her? And when?
At the bottom of the stairs is a pram and this, too, she remembers. Their friend Simmy bought it for them. He arrived with it one evening, pushing it in front of him. This was before. When she was still pregnant. A strange contraption it is, with silver wheels, a concertinaed hood in navy blue, a smart, shiny brake for the wheels. There are sheets in the pram, she sees, and a blanket. She hovers next to it for a moment. Then she lowers the baby into it, just to see what will happen. The baby lies there matter-of-factly, as if used to such things. He kicks his legs. He gazes at the hood, he gazes past her, he gazes at the rivet holding the hood to the pram sides. He closes his eyes and falls asleep. Elina stands there, watching him for a while. Then she goes into the kitchen.
She arrives, somehow, at the doors to the garden. Two of them, large panes of reinforced glass. For security, Ted said, when she asked why the glass was so thick, so solid. She finds she is holding a mug, a folded newspaper. She bends to put them on the floor, and as she does so, something in her abdomen twangs and she gasps with the pain of it, dropping the mug and paper. She grips the door frame to stop herself falling, leaning her forehead into the glass, pressing her hand over the spot. She swears, in a variety of languages, over and over.
When she opens her eyes again, everything is still as it was. The kitchen behind her. The garden in front of her. It is very simple, she tells herself. You were pregnant and now you have a baby. But why doesn’t she remember having it?
At the bottom of the garden is a wooden building, a room. Elina’s studio, built for her by Ted. Or, at least, Ted paid two Polish men to build it for her. It is made of ash, bitumen, glass-wool insulation, stainless steel – she had asked them the words and they had had to look them up in a Polish dictionary to find the English word for her to compare, side by side, in her head with the Finnish. It had made them all laugh. One asked her if she missed Finland and she had said no, and then said yes, sometimes. But she hadn’t lived there for a long time now. And did they miss Poland, she asked them. They had both nodded, silently. ‘We go back,’ one told her, ‘in two years.’
Which means they must be back in Poland by now. Elina looks down the garden at the studio they built for her, the straight sides panelled in ash, the bitumen roof. It says in her passport, on her tax return, on forms she has to fill in that she is an artist. But she doesn’t know what it means. She cannot recall when she was last in her studio, she cannot remember how you be an artist, what you do, how you spend your time. Her life in that small wooden building, all the hours she’s spent in there, seem as distant as her time in kindergarten.
She could – it is possible – go down there today. She could take the key from where it hangs next to the fridge, pick her way over the wet grass, pushing the baby in his squeaking pram, open the door and go inside. She could look at what is pinned to the wall, at any canvases she’s left leaning against the cupboards; she could try to reconnect with whatever it was she’d been doing before. She isn’t meant to be working, she knows. But she could read in her studio, she could sit and look at the light coming in through the window in the roof. There is a chair in there – she reupholstered it herself in green wool, next to a window. It would be a good place to perhaps try and remember things.
She is thinking about this, biting her lip, considering, when she realises that there is a scent, an odour in her nose that has been there all morning. A slightly cloying musk. Like unaired clothes. Like wet paper. Like milk.
Elina turns. She sniffs the air. Nothing except the slight tang of laundry soap. She sniffs her pyjama top, then her hair, the skin of her wrist, the crook of her elbow, the hard heel of her palm.
It’s her. She is astonished. A new smell. She doesn’t smell like she used to, the way she has smelt all her life. It’s her.
Ted yanks back his chair and slumps into it, tossing his bag to the sofa behind him. He switches on the screens and, while waiting for them to flicker to life, he scoots in the chair across the editing suite towards the in-tray. Phone messages, a couple of letters, a request for a reference, a scrawled note from a producer about an editing copy of a film Ted finished recently. He pushes his chair towards the phone and is about to pick it up when he stops.
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