The Hand That First Held Mine (47 page)

BOOK: The Hand That First Held Mine

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Felix walks with her down the stairs, out of the front door and into the sharp sunshine of the street. As she buckles the baby into his carrier, Felix places the typewriter on the passenger seat.

They face each other on the pavement.

‘Tell him,’ Felix says, ‘tell him . . .’

She nods. ‘I will.’

‘And you’ll get me the number of a transporter person?’

She nods again.

Felix reaches forward and kisses her first on one cheek and then the other. ‘Thank you,’ he mutters.

She responds by putting her arms around his neck and giving him a hug of surprising intensity. He is so taken aback by this that he feels sudden tears rising in his throat. He has to hang on to the thin frame of his son’s girlfriend as they stand there in the early-autumn sun; he has to close his eyes to the glare.

He carries the impression of her touch at the back of his neck, around his shoulders, long after she has got into the car and after she has driven away around the corner. Felix stands on the pavement, staring at the spot at which her tail-lights disappeared, as if waiting for her to return, as if not wanting to break the spell.

Elina sits in traffic on Pentonville Road. The cars ahead of her stretch out like a glacier of chrome and glass. Tributaries of traffic wait at crossroads to join the line. She glances back at Jonah, who has fallen asleep, his thumb held slackly in his mouth. She switches on the radio but the only sound that comes out is the lonely blizzarding of static. She twiddles various knobs for a while and occasionally she finds the blip and peep of a voice, struggling to make itself heard through the storm. But nothing more. She turns it off. She glances across the car at the typewriter. She takes her hand off the wheel and touches its metal casing. She runs her fingertips over the keys, along the roller, into the dip where the letter struts wait for instruction. She looks back at the road, at the traffic-lights turning pointlessly from red to amber to green and back again. She looks again at the typewriter; she glances back at Jonah; she watches the branches of a plane tree caught in the wind, the leaves released, showering down on top of the cars. One falls to her windscreen, right in front of her face, and as she stares at it, its webbed veins, its waxy greenness, its stiff stem, an idea comes to her.

Elina checks her watch. She rummages in her bag and brings out her mobile phone. She rings Simmy. ‘How is he?’ she asks. ‘Can you stay for a bit longer?’ Then she indicates, wheels the car around and drives into an empty road.

She is away for several hours. She has been so absorbed in what she’s been doing that she’s got a parking ticket, which she crams into her bag. When she gets back, the house is silent. It feels as if she’s been away for days, weeks, instead of hours. With her bag still slung across her body and Jonah on her hip, she climbs the stairs. ‘Hello?’ she calls. ‘I’m back.’

Simmy is waiting at the top.

‘How is everything?’ she whispers to him.

‘Fine. He’s been asleep but I think he’s awake now. I was just about to go down and make a cup of tea. You go in.’

Elina comes into the bedroom. Ted is lying in bed, much as he was when she left him, the duvet draped over his body. He is curled up, facing the wall.

‘Ted?’ she says. ‘Sorry – I was longer than I thought. How have you been? It’s a beautiful day out there.’

She sits down on the bed. She puts Jonah on the floor with his favourite wooden rattle.

‘Ted,’ she says. She knows he’s not asleep. She can tell by the shallowness of his breathing. But he doesn’t move.

She climbs further on to the bed, dragging the bag with her.

‘You know what?’ she says, laying a hand on his side. ‘I’ve found out that’s not really your name. She called you something different.’

She waits. He doesn’t answer but she can tell he’s listening. She delves into her bag and brings out a sheaf of paper. ‘I’ve been to the newspaper archives. It was amazing – they were so helpful. I found out all sorts of things,’ she spreads the papers out on the bed and shuffles through them. ‘Lexie was an art critic. She wrote articles about Picasso, Hopper, Jasper Johns, Giacometti. She knew Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. And John Deakin – that whole group. She interviewed Yves Klein and Eugene Fitzgerald and Salvador Dalí. She had dinner with Andy Warhol in New York. Did you hear that? Andy Warhol. And . . .’ Elina shuffles though the papers, looking for a certain article ‘. . . she was out in Vietnam at one point. Can you believe that? There’s one here about life in Saigon during the war. Somewhere. I can’t find it now. Maybe that’s how she knew your dad. You could ask him, I suppose. Anyway, she wrote hundreds and hundreds of articles. And I’ve got some of them here. For you. Ted? Do you want to see them? Look.’ She picks up a sheaf and, leaning over his prone form, places them next to his face. His eyes, she sees, are shut. His lips look dry and cracked, as if it’s been a long time since he drank anything. From downstairs, there comes the noise of Simmy moving about in the kitchen, a kettle being filled, water rushing through pipes.

‘Ted?’ she says again and she hears in her voice that she might cry so has to take a deep breath. ‘This one has a photo of her, on a balcony. Do you see? In Florence, it says. Look. She’s older there than in that other photo. Ted, please look.’ Elina lays her cheek on his arm. ‘Please.’

She sits up and riffles through the papers again. ‘You know what else?’ Tears are falling now, to make dark, transparent circles on the photocopies. She dashes them from her face, scrubs at her cheeks with her sleeve. ‘She wrote about you.’

Elina finds the pages she wants – she remembers now that she pinned them together specially at the archive place. ‘She did a column called “From the Frontline of Motherhood”.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘It’s about you. Do you want to hear?’

She sees his arm twitch and she watches, breath held. Will he move? Will he speak? The hand reaches up and scratches the back of his head. But he says nothing.

‘This is the first one,’ Elina says. ‘I put them in order. Listen. “As I write, my son lies sleeping across the room. He has been alive two hundred and fifteen days. He and I live together in one room. He has three teeth and two names: Theodore, which is what health visitors call him, and Theo, which is what I call him.”

‘Did you hear that?’ Elina lowers the papers. She takes his hand. ‘She called you Theo.’

His body stirs beneath the sheets. He twists his head from one side to the other. His eyes, she sees, are open. Then she feels a pressure on her hand and he speaks his first words for a week. ‘Keep going, El,’ he says, ‘keep going.’

And so she does.

Acknowledgements

I could not have written this book without the help and encouragement of several people. My heartfelt thanks to:

William Sutcliffe
Victoria Hobbs
Mary-Anne Harrington
Jenna Johnson
Françoise Triffaux
Susan O’Farrell
Daisy Donovan
Bridget O’Farrell
Ruth Metzstein

I am also indebted to the following books:
Soho in the Fifties and Sixties
by Jonathan Fryer (National Portrait Gallery publications, 1998);
Never Had it So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles
by Dominic Sandbrook (Abacus, 2005).

The Hand That First Held Mine

MAGGIE O'FARRELL

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BOOK: The Hand That First Held Mine

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