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 (35 page)
Elina escapes to the loo and when she gets back, the table, the whole room, is empty. For a moment or two she has an uneasy, sickish feeling in her stomach, like a child who discovers it has been left out of a game. Then she sees them all, arranged on various deck-chairs and rugs, in the garden. As she comes out, she hears Ted’s mother say, ‘Now, give me that baby, quick, before—’ She swallows the rest of the sentence as Elina crosses the patio. Elina takes a place on a rug beside Ted’s father without meeting anyone’s eye.
Harriet gets up and gives Jonah to Ted’s mother. She makes a small, unintelligible noise as she takes the baby and Elina catches sight of long, sharpened nails next to Jonah’s cheek before she looks away. Ted’s mother will, she knows, be rearranging Jonah to her liking. His hair, which always stands on end, will be smoothed flat. She will button his jacket to the top; she will pull his socks higher or comment that he’s not wearing any; she will tug his sleeves down over his fists.
Elina doesn’t look at this; she looks about her. Harriet is reclining on a rug, her head in Clara’s lap. Together they are looking at a bracelet Clara is wearing. The grandmother has been parked under a tree, where she has fallen asleep, slippered feet propped up on a stool. Ted is sitting hunched in a deck-chair, legs crossed, arms folded. Is he watching his mother with Jonah? It’s hard to tell. He could be or he could be staring into space.
Elina finds Ted’s parents’ house strange. It’s tall, with floors stacked on top of each other, the staircase curling up through the middle of it like a helix. Its front faces out over a square lined with duplicate houses – iron balconies, evenly spaced sash windows, black railings around the basement windows. At the back, though, there is a garden that seems too small, too inadequate for the house’s height. Elina doesn’t like looking up at the house from the back. It is as if it might topple at any moment.
‘How are you, Miss Elina?’
She turns to Ted’s father. He is putting a cigarette to his mouth and patting his pockets for a lighter.
‘I’m well, thank you.’
‘How are you finding the whole . . .’ he sparks the lighter and holds it to the cigarette until the end glows ‘. . . baby thing?’
‘Well.’ She considers what to say. Should she mention the nights spent awake, the number of times she must wash her hands in a day, the endless drying and folding of tiny clothes, the packing and unpacking of bags containing clothes, nappies, wipes, the scar across her abdomen, crooked and leering, the utter loneliness of it all, the hours she spends kneeling on the floor, a rattle or a bell or a fabric block in her hands, that she sometimes gets the urge to stop older women in the street and say, how did you do it, how did you live through it? Or she could mention that she had been unprepared for this fierce spring in her, this feeling that isn’t covered by the word ‘love’, which is far too small for it, that sometimes she thinks she might faint with the urgency of her feeling for him, that sometimes she misses him desperately even when he is right there, that it’s like a form of madness, of possession, that often she has to creep into the room when he has fallen asleep just to look at him, to check, to whisper to him. But instead, she says, ‘Fine. Good, thanks.’
Ted’s father flicks ash to the ground, then looks Elina all over, from her sandalled feet, up her legs, over her torso, to her face. ‘It suits you,’ he says finally, with a smile.
She recalls, not for the first time, that Ted once described his father as ‘a randy old goat’ and she pictures him fleetingly with a white beard, tethered to a stake, straining at his chain. She feels her face twitching with amusement. ‘What does?’ she says, and with the effort of not laughing, the words come out louder than she intended.
He takes another drag of his cigarette, regarding her with narrowed eyes. She can see that, in his day, he would have been handsome. The blue eyes, the curled upper lip, the once-blond hair. Odd how the beautiful can’t ever quite let go of that expectation, that assurance of admiration.
‘Motherhood,’ he says.
She tugs her skirt further down, over her knees. ‘Do you think?’
‘And how about my son?’
Elina glances at Ted and sees that he is alternately screwing his eyes shut and opening them again. ‘What about him?’ she asks, distracted.
‘How is he acquitting himself as a father?’
‘Um.’ She watches as Ted sits forward in his deck-chair, putting a hand over first one eye then the other. ‘Well,’ she murmurs, ‘fine, I think.’
Ted’s father stubs out his cigarette in a saucer. ‘It was easier in my time,’ he says.
‘Was it? How?’
He shrugs. ‘Nothing was expected of us – no nappies, no cooking, nothing. We had it easy. Just turn up at bathtime every now and again, a trip to the park on Saturday mornings, that kind of thing, the zoo on birthdays. And that was it. It’s hard for them.’ He nods in Ted’s direction.
She swallows. ‘But how about—’
From across the garden, she hears someone say, ‘Oh dear.’ Elina is on her feet before she’s even aware of moving. Ted’s mother is holding out Jonah at arm’s length, her nose wrinkled. ‘I think he needs a bit of attention.’
‘Of course.’ Elina takes him, carries him against her shoulder into the house. Jonah twines his fingers into her hair and says, ‘Ur-blurmg, ’ into her ear, as if imparting a secret.
‘Ur-blur-mg to you too,’ she is whispering, as she picks up the bag from the hall, as she carries him into the bathroom. It is a small bathroom – Ted’s mother calls it ‘the cloakroom’, and Elina had initially expected it to be filled with cloaks. She unpacks the wipes, the clean nappy, the tissues, and lays them out beside the sink. She then seats herself on the closed toilet seat and places Jonah across her lap.
‘Eeeeeuuuuuurrrrrkkkkkk!’ he shrieks gleefully, at the top of his voice, grabbing for his toes, for her hair, for her sleeve as she bends over him, and the noise bounces around the walls of the tiny bathroom.
‘Ow,’ she murmurs, as she disentangles her hair from his fingers, unpopping his suit. ‘That’s a very loud noise. Some would say it’s a very—’ Then she stops. Then she says: ‘Oh.’
The shit has gone down Jonah’s legs and up his back. It has soaked through his vest, his Babygro, his jacket and, now she thinks about it, it is soaking into her skirt as she sits there. He hasn’t done one of these overflowing ones for ages and it would have to be here, it would have to be now.
‘Damn,’ she mutters, ‘damn, damn.’ She unpops the rest of the Babygro and eases Jonah’s hands out of the sleeves, taking care to avoid smearing him. Jonah suddenly decides that the undressing is a step too far. His face looks unsure and then his lower lip goes stiff.
‘No, no, no, no,’ Elina says. ‘It’s OK, it’s OK. Nearly done.’ She whips the Babygro away, trying to hurry through the last bits. As she pulls the vest over his head, she must have caught his ear by mistake because he lets out a roar. His body goes stiff with outrage and he takes in a shuddering breath, ready for the next cry.
Elina balls up the shitty clothes and drops them on to the floor. She turns Jonah over very quickly, he screams and struggles, and she cleans the shit off his back as quickly as she can. It feels incredibly hot in here. Sweat is pricking at her upper lip, under her arms, in a trail down her back. Jonah is naked now, and furious, slippery with cleaning wipes, and she is scared she might drop him. She is just reaching for the clean nappy – get the nappy on, then everything will be all right – when she feels his body strain. She has the nappy in her hand, it’s almost there, she is so close, when she looks down and Jonah is letting out another stream of shit.
It is an incredibly large amount. And it comes out with remarkable force. She will reflect on this later. It spatters the wall, the floor, her skirt, her shoes. She hears her own voice say, ‘Oh, God,’ and it sounds very far away. She is frozen for a moment, unable to move, unable to see what she should do next. She is holding the nappy under her chin, and as she starts scrabbling for the wipes, he lets out another. She can only think: There is shit all over Ted’s mother’s cloakroom. All over her. All over Jonah. Tears spring painfully into her eyes. She doesn’t know, she can’t see, what to clean first. The baby? The wall? The skirting-board? The impossibly white hand-towel? Her skirt? Her shoes? She can feel shit between her toes, squelching and sticky. She can feel it soaking through her skirt into her underwear. The smell is indescribable. And Jonah screams and screams.
Elina leans forward and unlatches the door. ‘Ted!’ she yells. ‘TED!’
Clara swishes into the hall, one brow arched. Elina sees her pleated silk dress, the gold shoes that lace up her calves. ‘Hi,’ Elina says, in what she hopes is a normal voice, through a crack in the door. ‘Could you ask Ted to come here?’
Minutes later, Ted is slipping into the cloakroom. Elina thinks she has never been so pleased to see him.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he says, surveying the room. ‘What happened?’
‘What does it look like?’ she says wearily. ‘Can you take Jonah?’
She sees him hesitate, glance down at his clothes.
‘You can either take Jonah or clean the poo off the floor,’ she says, over the noise. ‘It’s your choice.’
Ted takes his screaming, writhing son and holds him at arm’s length. Elina wipes him again then straps a clean nappy on to him. ‘Right, the clean clothes are there. You get him dressed and I’ll clear this up.’
Ted squeezes past her to the basin and Elina gets on her hands and knees to mop the shit off the walls, the skirting-board, the floor. When she’s finished, she steps past Ted, who is putting on Jonah’s vest inside out.
She stands for a moment in the hallway, her back against the wall, her eyes shut. Jonah’s screams are settling into hoarse, shuddering sobs. After an interval, she hears Ted step out of the cloakroom. She opens her eyes and there before her is her son, face wet with tears, his thumb jammed tight in his mouth.
‘You need some clean clothes,’ Ted says.
Elina sighs and brings her hands up to cover her face. ‘Can we go home now?’ she says through them.
Ted hesitates. ‘My mum’s just made a pot of tea. Do you mind if we stay for that? Then we’ll go.’
She lets her hands drop; he avoids her eyes. She feels the possibility, the temptation of arguing over this, but then she remembers something. ‘Is everything OK, by the way?’
He looks at her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You were doing that thing again.’
‘What thing?’
She mimes the blinking. ‘That thing.’
‘When?’
‘In the garden. Just now. And you seem a bit . . . I don’t know . . . out of it.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Yes, you do. What’s the matter? Did you have one of those things again? Did you—’
‘It’s fine. I’m fine.’ Ted hefts Jonah to his shoulder. ‘I’ll ask my mum about some clothes,’ he says, and disappears.
Elina follows Ted’s mother up the stairs, up and up the winding centre, past door after shut door. She has never been in this part of the house. She doesn’t think she’s ever been further up than the big drawing room on the first floor. Ted’s mother leads her two floors above this, to a bedroom thick with beige carpeting, with draped curtains held back with swags of tasselled material.
‘Well,’ Ted’s mother says, opening her wardrobe, ‘I don’t know what I’ll have that will fit you. You’re so much bigger than me.’ She pushes a hanger to one side, then another. ‘Taller, I mean.’
Elina stands by the window, looking down into the street, into the square, into the gardens there, the trees swaying in the breeze. The leaves, she notices, are edged with orange-brown. Can autumn really be coming?
‘How about this?’
Elina turns and sees that Ted’s mother is holding out a dress in fawn jersey material. ‘Great,’ Elina says. ‘Thanks.’
‘Why don’t you get changed in here?’ Ted’s mother says, opening a door, and Elina darts through.
She finds herself in a dressing room. The walls are papered with large yellow chrysanthemums and winding stems. There is a dressing-table by the window, covered with a surprising number of bottles, pots, tubs. Elina goes closer as she unfastens her skirt. As it drops to the floor, she tilts her head to read: ‘anti-ageing formula’, says one, ‘for neck and décolletage’, says another. She is smirking – who’d have suspected Ted’s mother of such indulgences? – when she catches sight of herself, skirtless, in a shit-stained blouse, hair standing on end, grinning lopsidedly, in the mirror. She drops her gaze, rips off her blouse and pulls on the unpleasant dress. Just as she is struggling with the zip, she sees something else.
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