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 (43 page)
She wanders to the open window. On the promenade below, people are eating ice-cream, leaning on the railings, walking up and down. The tide has come in since they were on the beach: its frothed waves lap and lick at the promenade wall. An old man is letting his dog pee against a statue. A small child skips out of a shop with an armful of oranges. It amuses Lexie that everyone is going about their business while she, a woman in a dress at a window, can secretly look down on them.
She is thinking about where they might eat later, about when Theo might wake up, about whether he might like to fly a kite – she’s seen a red one with a yellow tail in a shop she might get him. She is looking at the great grey Cobb, lying like a sleeping serpent, half out of the sea.
A movement from the buggy makes her turn. She crosses the room. Theo is waking up, twisting his head from side to side. She turns the buggy around and crouches in front of him. ‘Hi,’ she whispers.
He yawns and then says, quite precisely, with his eyes still shut, ‘I said I didn’t want it.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes.’ Then he frowns and blinks and looks around him. ‘This isn’t home.’
‘No. We’re in Lyme Regis, remember? In a hotel. You’ve had a little nap.’
‘Regis,’ Theo repeats, then his face seems to tense with a thought. ‘A . . . a bucket with stones.’
‘That’s right. It’s over there, look.’
He stretches and then pushes himself out of the buggy, tucking his knitted cat up under his arm. ‘Alfie doesn’t like Regis,’ he states, as he goes towards the bucket, which Lexie has left beside the door.
‘Doesn’t he?’
Theo leans over the bucket and examines it carefully. ‘No,’ he says.
‘Why not?’
Theo has to think for a moment. ‘He says it’s too damp.’
Lexie, sitting on the edge of the bed, tries not to smile. ‘Well, he is a cat. Cats hate the wet.’
‘No, not wet. Damp.’
‘Damp is wet, darling.’
‘No, it’s not!’
‘OK.’ She bites her lip. ‘Would you like a drink?’
Theo is lining up the stones in a row, taking them one by one out of the bucket. The grey ones, she notices, he discards.
‘Theo?’ she tries again. ‘A drink?’
He places a smooth white stone next to an orange one. ‘Yes,’ he says, distant but firm. ‘In fact, I would.’
Later, they go out again. Lexie buys the red kite with a yellow tail and they go to the beach beyond the town, beyond the Cobb. Theo holds the string in his hand and Lexie puts her hand around his. Robert watches them from a rock where he is searching for fossils.
‘That’s it,’ she murmurs to Theo. ‘You’ve got it.’
The kite floats directly above them, an inverted plumbline, its tail swirling and snapping. Theo gazes up at it, rapt, unable to believe that when he jerks his hand this ethereal thing above them will dance in response.
‘It’s like . . .’he struggles to find what he wants to say ‘. . . a dog.’
‘A dog?’
‘A . . . a floating dog.’
‘Oh, like on a lead, you mean?’
He turns his blue eyes to hers, in joy, in delight at being understood. ‘Yes!’
She laughs and hugs his body to her and the kite above them dips and sways.
After a while they join Robert and sit together on a rock. Robert finds an ammonite, a ridged creature, curled into itself, petrified into rock. He puts it in Lexie’s hand and she feels it begin to warm in her palm. Theo is lining up stones again, this time in diminishing size order.
Lexie stands. ‘I might go for another quick swim. And then we’ll find something to eat.’
Robert looks at the sky, at the sea, which is flecked with white horses. ‘Are you sure?’ he says. ‘It’s getting cold.’
‘It’s fine.’ She slips the ammonite into her dress pocket.
‘We haven’t got a towel.’
‘I’ll dry,’ she says, laughing. ‘I’m waterproof. I’ll run around until I’m warm.’ When she’s down to her underwear, she crouches to kiss Theo on top of his head. ‘I won’t be long, sweetheart.’ And then she’s off, down the shingle, on to the sand, into the water. Robert watches as more and more of her disappears into the sea – it claims her quickly. Her ankles, her knees, her thighs, her waist. Then she’s in, with a small cry. He watches as she does a few strokes of crawl, the water churning in her wake; he watches her dive under, sees her slick head break the surface, further out now, and then she glides into an even breaststroke.
Robert looks back to Theo. He is pushing the stones, one by one, into the sand, saying, ‘There you go,’ with each one. ‘There you go, there you go.’
It will be unclear to Robert, later, how much time passes here. He knows that he started looking again, idly, for fossils. He knows he took a few stones and hammered them against rocks, to crack them open like eggs, to see if their innards revealed anything. He knows he looked out to sea at least once and saw her head, near the curve of the Cobb. He knows he listened to Theo, saying, there you go and, occasionally, she’ll run around until she’s warm.
After cracking open the third stone, he hears Theo say something else. Robert looks up. Theo is no longer crouched over his stones. He is standing up, his sandy hands held away from his body, fingers splayed, staring out to sea.
‘What did you say, Theo?’
‘Where’s Mama?’ the child asks, in his clear, high voice.
Robert is weighing a fourth stone in his hand, considering it, examining it – will it yield another perfect ammonite, like the one he gave Lexie? ‘She’s gone for a swim,’ he says. ‘She’ll be back soon.’
‘Where’s Mama?’ he says again.
Robert looks out to sea. He looks left, towards the Cobb, he looks right. He straightens up. He follows the charcoal line of the horizon. Nothing. He shades his eyes against the dull glare of the setting sun. ‘She’s . . .’ he begins. Then he walks towards the shore. Waves rise and collapse against the sand. He scans the sea stretched before him.
He sprints back up the beach towards the child, who is still standing, fixed to the spot, his hands covered with sand. Robert picks him up and hurries over the shingle. ‘We’ll go up to the Cobb and look from there, shall we?’ he says, and the words come out not as he’d hoped, reassuring and calm, but ragged and panicked. ‘She might have swum round the end and be coming down the other side.’
Robert climbs the steps on to the Cobb’s high wall. He races along the sloped stones, Theo clutched in his arms. Halfway along, he comes to a stop.
‘Where’s Mama?’ Theo says again.
‘She’s . . .’ Robert looks. He looks and looks. His eyes ache with looking. He cannot remember ever seeing anything other than sea, endless, puckered water, unbroken. Every few seconds, his heart leaps at something – a buoy, a particularly peaked wave. But there is nothing. She is nowhere.
He scrambles down off the wall, to the lower part of the Cobb, and runs towards its end. The water here is deep, sinister green, dipping and snatching at the wall. Theo begins to cry. ‘I don’t like it,’ he says. ‘That sea is too close. That sea there.’ He points at it, in case Robert hasn’t understood.
Robert turns, rushes back along the wet Cobb as carefully as he can, to where several fishing-boats are moored. In one of them a man is standing, his arms full of knotted nets.
‘Please,’ Robert calls down to him. ‘Please. We need help.’
Then there is a long stretch of time when Robert is sitting on a bench on the Cobb, with Theo in his arms. Beams from the lights of trawlers, the lifeboats, the coastguard sweep over them from time to time. He has wrapped the child in his coat. Only his hair is visible. Theo shivers rhythmically, gently, like an engine in low gear. Robert rocks him back and forth, sings a song he used to sing to his own children a long time ago, his voice cracked and hoarse. Someone – he doesn’t see who, one of the policemen, perhaps – brings a woven bag and places it next to him. He doesn’t recognise it for a moment. At the top of the bag is a loosely folded piece of fabric. Then he sees that it is Lexie’s dress, Lexie’s bag, that someone has collected them from where they were sitting on the beach. Without letting go of Theo, he picks up the dress. It unfolds in his fingers like something sentient, like something alive. He almost drops it but doesn’t, and then he is puzzled by the weight of it. How can something of thin cotton be so heavy? It swings back and forth like a pendulum in the stiff breeze. Then he remembers the ammonite. She put it into her pocket just before—
He puts the dress down quickly, stuffs it back into the bag. And then he sees the toy Theo loves, the stuffed cat, among a tangle of beakers, spare shorts, buckets and spades, a green rake. He lifts it out, places its nonplussed face at the gap in the top of his coat, where Theo’s bright, golden hair can be seen. For a moment nothing happens. Then fingers appear, clutch at the cat and pull it down inside the cave of the coat.
And then two policemen are running down the brow of the Cobb towards the dock. The other police, seeing them, start moving too. Robert stands, hoisting Theo up. He hears someone mutter, ‘They’ve got her.’
And he is moving forward. A boat is rounding the tip of the Cobb, a small trawler, its lights blazing, a man at the helm and another standing at the stern with a rope. Robert strains his eyes and sees, unbelievably, a shape crumpled at the bottom of the boat, half covered with tarpaulin and he finds he wants to shout, to cry out to her, but then a policeman is standing between him and the docking boat and he is saying, stand back, sir, please, get back, take the child, take him away.
This is how it ends. Those words were running through her head.
So this is how it ends
. She knew what was coming. There was a stretch of time, out there beyond the reach of the Cobb, several minutes long, where she was flailing against the cold, muscular clutch of the current. And she saw. She saw what was coming. She knew the struggle had begun and she knew that she was losing.
So this is how it ends
. She knew what was coming. There was a stretch of time, out there beyond the reach of the Cobb, several minutes long, where she was flailing against the cold, muscular clutch of the current. And she saw. She saw what was coming. She knew the struggle had begun and she knew that she was losing.
She didn’t think in that moment of herself, of her parents, her siblings, of Innes, the life she left behind when she stepped into the waves, the moment when she could have changed everything, when she could have stayed on the beach, turned her back on the sea. She didn’t even think of Robert, who was sitting there with her clothes, who would soon be calling her name into the restless wind.
As the waves thrust her under, she could think only of Theo.
They heaved her up and heaved her under, and every now and again she could struggle to the surface, she could make the waters part so she could take a breath, but she knew, she knew it couldn’t be long, and she wanted to say, please. She wanted to say, no. She wanted to say, I have a son, there is a child, this cannot happen. Because you know that no one will ever love them like you do. You know that no one will look after them like you do. You know that it’s an impossibility, it’s unthinkable that you could be taken away, that you will have to leave them behind.
She knew, though, that she would not see him again. She would not be helping him cut up his dinner tonight. She would not be folding the kite or airing his damp clothes or running him a bath at bedtime or taking his pyjamas out from under the pillow. She would not be rescuing his cat from the floor in the middle of the night. She would not be able to wait for him at the gate at the end of his first day at school. Or guide his hand as he learnt to shape the letters of his name, the name she’d given him. Or hold the seat of his bicycle as he did without stabilisers. She would not be nursing him through chicken pox and measles; it would not be her measuring out the medicine, or shaking down the themometer. She would not be there to show him how to look left, then right, then left again, or to tie his own shoelaces or brush his teeth or manage the zip on his cagoule, or to pair his socks after a wash or to use a telephone or to spread butter on bread, or what to do if he got lost in a shop, or how to pour milk into a cup or catch a bus home. She would not see him grow as tall as her and then taller. She would not be there when someone first broke his heart or when he first drove a car or when he went alone out into the world or when he saw, for the first time, what he would do, how he would live and with whom and where. She would not be there to knock the sand out of his shoes when he came off the beach. She would not see him again.
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