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 (13 page)
Ted’s mother turns back to the room, shifting herself against the sofa. She’d said when they’d first bought it that it would never be comfortable as there was no head support. Elina wonders now if she is feeling the lack of cushioning in her cranial area.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘I never thought that by the time my grandson was almost a month old I still wouldn’t be able to send out cards. All my relatives are dying to get one.’
‘Why don’t you just send them?’ Ted’s father says, with only a hint of gritted teeth, from behind a newspaper. And Elina is surprised to see him because it’s rare for Ted’s parents to come together: they usually operate on separate schedules.
‘Yeah,’ Ted says, as he comes in, carrying a tray. ‘They don’t have to have his name on, do they?’
His mother gasps, as if they are suggesting something lewd. ‘Not have his name on? Of course they must have his name on!’
Ted shrugs and starts to pour the tea.
‘What about Rupert?’ his mother says brightly. ‘I’ve always loved the name Rupert and it’s an old family name on my side.’
‘Sounds like . . . a whatdyoucallit?’ Ted’s father says, folding up the newspaper and tossing it to the floor.
‘What?’
‘A . . .’ Ted’s father puts his hand to his brow ‘. . . you know . . . a thing that children take to bed. Um . . .
Brideshead
. . . um . . . teddy-bear! That’s it. A teddy-bear.’ He reaches down and picks up the newspaper again. ‘It sounds like a teddy-bear,’ he says, as he scans the front page for the second time.
Brideshead
. . . um . . . teddy-bear! That’s it. A teddy-bear.’ He reaches down and picks up the newspaper again. ‘It sounds like a teddy-bear,’ he says, as he scans the front page for the second time.
‘What does?’ his mother says.
‘The name Rupert.’
Elina hears the word: clamp. She hears: rupture. She hears: stargazer presentation.
Ted makes another uninterpretable noise, then says, ‘Here’s your tea. How have things been with you? Been busy this week?’
‘Or Ralph. How about Ralph? He looks like a Ralph. And it was my grandfather’s middle name. It has a lovely ring to it. It would go well with the surname, too.’
‘Um.’ Ted glances at Elina. She keeps her face very still; she shifts the paperweight in her hands. The glass surface has become warm to the touch. She can see Ted debating whether to broach this or not, then she sees him decide to take the plunge. ‘Actually,’ he says, handing his parents cups of tea, ‘we’ve decided to give him Elina’s surname. He’ll be a Vilkuna.’
When Ted’s mother came to visit at the hospital, the baby was three hours old. Elina can remember it all now. With her one free arm, Elina was holding him against her chest, where he was asleep, his limbs folded under him, his face pressed up against her skin. Her other arm was bandaged and wrapped into a mysterious chrysalis. Tubes came in and came out again. Various bags were suspended above her head. From under the blanket, there were more tubes entering and leaving her. She wasn’t yet allowing herself to think about where those ones were going in.
She appeared to be banked up on numerous pillows. Something – she wasn’t sure what, the morphine, perhaps – was making her eyes roll backwards in their sockets every few minutes. It made the room lurch and pitch and Elina had to struggle to stay in the here and now, not to give in to the medicine’s dragging force. It was like a strong current in the sea, pulling her down.
Ted was across the room, a long way off, it seemed, in a chair. He had a pen in his hand and he was filling in some forms. As she looked, he raised his head, and Elina almost gasped because his face was such a shock: drawn, grey, tense, it was a skin-covered mask. She felt that he might be a stranger, might be anyone. What’s happened? she wanted to say. Why do you look like that?
The door swung open and Elina turned her head and suddenly Ted’s mother was in the room.
‘Ohhhh!’ she squealed. ‘Ohhhh! My darling!’ She swooped across the room and for a disconcerting moment, Elina thought she meant her. But Ted’s mother wasn’t looking at her. She was lifting up the baby and settling him in her arms. ‘You,’ she said, and Elina wondered why she was talking so loudly, ‘just look at you.’
She had her back to the bed now and was walking away towards the window. Where the baby had been on Elina’s chest felt damp. She could feel the outline of the baby on herself, where warmth had generated between them. She saw her hand, her chrysalis hand, raising itself from the bed, as if she would speak. But she wasn’t sure what she would say and Ted was getting up from the chair and her eyes were doing that rolling thing so that all she saw before she forced them down again was the ceiling, the bags of fluid hanging above her.
‘. . . just terrible,’ Ted was saying, with his new, grey face, and Elina had to strain to hear him, ‘. . . lost his heartbeat and . . . whisked into theatre . . . but then everything just . . . everywhere, an unbelievable . . . Elina nearly—’ Ted came to a halt, swallowing his final word.
For a moment, no one spoke. There was the slight, impossible sound of the baby’s breathing: a rapid, fluttering in – out. The silence in the room seemed as fragile, as intricate, as frost.
‘Mmm, oh dear,’ Ted’s mother said. ‘Get my camera, would you? It’s in my bag there.’ She was gazing down at the baby. Her expression was hard to read. It was rapt, fierce, complicated. It was one of covetousness or avid desire, and it sent a pulse of fear through Elina. And the baby, as if sensing this, let out an abrupt high-pitched cry.
From the bed, Elina saw her arm rise up again. This time Ted saw. He came over and leant his head towards her, his hand taking hold of hers. ‘What is it?’ he said. ‘Are you OK?’
‘The baby.’ Elina was surprised at how hoarse her voice was. ‘I want the baby back.’
And here she is again, Ted’s mother, sitting on the sofa she’d complained about, waiting for the baby to wake up so she can ‘have a hold’.
‘Vilkuna?’ she is saying, as if it’s a swearword. ‘He’ll be a Vilkuna? You’re not going to give your son his proper name?’
Ted adjusts the angle of his mug, keeping his eyes on the rug under his feet. ‘There’s no reason why a child should have his father’s name instead of—’
‘No reason? No reason? There’s every reason in the world. People are going to think he’s a . . . that he’s illegitimate, that he’s—’
‘Well, he is,’ Elina says.
Ted’s mother turns her head with a jerk, as if she’d forgotten Elina was there and the sound of her voice had given her a fright.
‘In my day,’ she begins in a shaking voice, ‘that was not something people broadcast. In my day—’
‘The world’s changed, Mum.’ Ted stands, picking up his mug. ‘Let’s face it. More tea?’
After his parents leave, tucking themselves into their neat little silver car and driving back to Islington, Ted returns to the sitting room. There isn’t a surface that isn’t covered with the flotsam and jetsam of the day: nappies have washed up all over the floor, coffee cups on the tables, a breast pump on the television, cards brought by his mother, a half-eaten plate of biscuits on the bookshelves, a baby-care manual face down on a chair.
Ted sighs and slumps on to the sofa. He had had no idea that having a baby would entail so much entertaining, so many visitors, so many phone calls and emails, so many pots of tea to be made, served, cleared away, washed up, that the mere act of procreation meant that people suddenly wanted to come around several times a week and sit in your house for hours on end.
Ted clears away the tea tray. He walks about the sitting room, past Elina, who is wiping something off one part of the baby’s body while simultaneously smearing something on another, picking his way through toys, rattles, nappies, wipes, muslin squares. He gathers up stray coffee cups, cake plates, moves them from the sitting room to the kitchen. Elina hands him the baby before getting down on her hands and knees and scrubbing at a stain – milk? sick? shit? – on the rug.
Ted holds his son to his chest and does circuits of the room, round and round the table. The baby’s eyes roll in their sockets, he sucks absently on his thumb – surely he’ll sleep. Ted walks on, listing from side to side, a ship in calm seas. The baby’s eyelids droop, his sucking slows, but as soon as he falls asleep his thumb drops out and he jerks awake again, his eyes rolling open in dismay. Suck, suck, eyes close, thumb falls out, eyes open and round they go again, past Elina, who is now folding muslin squares, through the toys, over the changing mat, through the nappies. Ted adjusts his position so that the thumb arm is wedged against him, immovable, but the change seems to remind the baby of something because he starts, back stiff, neck twisting, alert to the possibility of food.
Ted tries a bit longer to get him to sleep but all he wants now is to eat – he cries, he frets, he strains and struggles – and eventually Ted taps Elina on the shoulder. Without a word, she sweeps a mess of wipes, instructions for sterilisers, baby socks, unopened cards off the chair on to the floor and sits, lifting her blouse.
Ted is surprised at how smoothly and quickly she does the latching on: unsnaps her bra with one hand, while the other does a swift tilting motion with the baby. He gives a final, high cry of relief and is then silent. Elina settles herself deeper into the chair and lets her head fall back to the wall. Ted registers again how pale she is, how dark and deep are the circles around her eyes, how thin her limbs look. He is possessed with an urge to apologise – for what he isn’t sure. He scans his mind for something to say, something light and perhaps witty, something to take them out of themselves, to remind them that life is not all like this. But he can’t think of anything and now the baby is rearing back, crying, fidgeting, fists flailing, and Elina is having to open her eyes, sit up again, lift him to her shoulder, rub his back, untangle his hands from her hair and Ted cannot bear it. He cannot bear to watch her having to rouse herself, to lift that tired head from the wall, to rev herself into action. He lunges for a forgotten cake plate and makes for the kitchen.
The baby cannot settle to his feed. Elina pushes herself into a standing position. Sometimes the only thing that works is feeding him while she walks around. The movement seems to soothe him, seems to allow him to digest. Or something. She walks slowly, slowly to the window, then back. The baby fusses, turns his head this way, then back, and finally latches on. Elina keeps walking, letting out her breath a bit at a time. Ted is in the kitchen now, his hands in the washing-up bowl.
‘Ted,’ she says, as she passes on the way to the television, where she turns round and walks back, because she wants to say something to him, wants them both to recall that they are more to each other than just parents of the same child.
‘Mmm?’ He lifts a dripping cup from the water.
The problem is she can’t think of what to say. ‘How are you doing?’ she tries.
He looks at her, surprised. ‘I’m fine. How are you doing?’
‘I’m fine too.’
‘Good. Tired?’
‘Of course. You?’
‘Of course.’ He extracts a plate from the sudsy water and lays it on top of the cup. ‘Maybe you should have a nap when he’s finished.’
‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘He might sleep. Then we could all have a nap.’
Ted nods. ‘Sounds good.’
Elina cannot bear it. Why are they talking to each other like this? What has happened to them? She tries to think of one thing, one interesting thing to say, to snap them out of it, but her brain fails her. She turns and marches through the room with the baby – how can it be that she has produced a child who can only eat on the move? – from the sofa, past the table, through the kitchen and to the window.
It was not always like this. She would like to set this down: they were not always like this.
She puts the baby to her shoulder, his forehead falling into the curve of her neck, the damp warmth of his breath spreading into her collar. She’d met Ted because she was looking for somewhere to live; she was looking for somewhere to live because she’d decided to leave Oscar; she decided to leave Oscar because he never bought his own materials and constantly stole hers, because he couldn’t cook anything other than a bacon fry-up, because he’d slept with a waitress; he’d slept with the waitress, so Oscar said, because he felt threatened by the success of Elina’s last show. And so because of all this – a chain reaction of bacon, pilfered paintbrushes, sex with waitresses, and a place to live – she had rung the number advertising a room in Gospel Oak. Near the Heath, it had said, which was why she chose it. And there, in the house near the Heath, was an attic room up a ladder, with the best kind of washed, level, London light. The man, Ted, had helped her carry in her toolboxes, her paint, her unstretched canvases. There was a garden, out the back, a kitchen painted blue and, sometimes, a girlfriend called Yvette, a thin woman with the watchful gaze of a cat. Elina worked and slept in her attic room, she gave up smoking, she avoided calls from Oscar, she had another show, bigger this time and just for her, she took up smoking again, Ted came and went downstairs, as did Yvette. If Elina heard them in the bedroom below, she put on her headphones and turned up the volume. And then suddenly Yvette was gone. Had left Ted for an actor. Ted came up the ladder to tell Elina. Elina said, never trust an actor. She took Ted out to a private view of photographs of drag queens and afterwards they went to a bar. Ted got drunk. Ted fell down. Elina called a cab and helped him into the house. The next day they looked up the actor on the Internet, using Elina’s laptop – Elina said he had the kind of looks that don’t last and, also, weren’t his trousers pulled up slightly too high? Ted began to visit her in her room. He liked to lie on her bed and tell her about the film he was working on, the rushes he’d edited that day. Elina had to stop work – she couldn’t work with anyone watching – but she could always clean her brushes, stretch a canvas, tidy her bench.
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