The Hand That First Held Mine Read online

  ‘Yes. You like it?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ She takes a step back to consider. ‘I’ve never seen a suit made of felt before.’

  ‘I know.’ He grins. ‘That’s the point. My tailor wasn’t at all sure either. But he came round to my way of thinking in the end.’ He seizes her hand and sets off along the pavement. ‘Right. Lunch. Are you hungry? I hope you’re not one of those girls who doesn’t eat.’ He is talking almost as fast as he is walking. ‘You don’t look like you eat much. But I’m famished. I could eat a flock of sheep.’

  ‘You don’t look like you eat much either.’

  ‘Ah, but I do. Appearances being deceptive, sometimes. You’ll see.’

  They pass at a fair pace along the street, down an alley, round a corner, past a man holding hands with two women, one on each side, both in shiny leather belts, all three of them laughing, past a shop with foreign papers in turning racks, past a group of girls carrying heavy sacks. Innes stops outside a restaurant. The sign above the door reads ‘APOLLO’, then nothing, ‘APOLLO’, then nothing, the word flashing on and off in blue neon. He opens the door. ‘Here we are,’ he says.

  They go out of the sunshine, down a dark, twisting staircase to a low-ceilinged room. People are hunched at tables, with candles stuck into wine bottles flickering beneath their faces. In a corner, a man wearing a woman’s feathered hat is playing the piano rather badly. Two other men sit squeezed on the stool with him and they are conducting a loud conversation above the player’s head. It could, Lexie thinks, be any time of day at all outside – mid-afternoon, the dead of night – but down here you’d never know. There is a group of men, sitting around three small tables that have been pushed together. They greet Innes with shouts, raised wine glasses, expansive waves. Someone says, ‘Is that a new one?’ And ‘What’s happened to Daphne?’

  Innes takes Lexie’s arm and leads her to the back of the room. Catcalls and whistles follow them. They sit opposite each other in a booth.

  ‘Who are they?’ Lexie asks.

  Innes turns to survey the group of men, who are now throwing candle stumps at the pianist and calling for more wine. ‘They have many names,’ he says, turning back. ‘They call themselves artists but I’d say only one of them, no more than two, deserves that appellation. The rest are alcoholics and hangers-on. One is a photographer. One,’ he says, leaning in close, ‘is a woman who passes for a man. But only I know that.’

  ‘Really?’ Lexie is fascinated.

  ‘Well,’ he shrugs, ‘me and her mother. And her lover, I’d imagine. Unless she’s a very dim sort of girl. Now, what shall we eat?’

  Lexie tries to look at the menu but she finds instead she’s looking at Innes, at his blue felt suit, at his frown of concentration as he reads the menu, at the artists or alcoholics, one of whom now has the waitress – a florid, large woman in her fifties – on his lap, at the row of empty wine bottles that line the shelves, at the swirling patterns on the table-top.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Innes is touching her sleeve.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she bursts out. ‘I wish . . . I don’t know. I wish I had a pair of red heels and some gold hoop earrings.’

  Innes pulls a face. ‘You wouldn’t be sitting here with me if you did.’

  ‘Wouldn’t I?’ She sees Innes is getting out his cigarettes. ‘May I have one?’

  He puts two into his mouth, watching her, strikes a match, holds it to the cigarettes until they ignite, then hands one over to her, all without taking his eyes off her face. ‘You think you want hooped earrings but you don’t.’

  Lexie puts the cigarette to her own mouth. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I know what you need,’ he says, in a low tone, still looking her in the eye.

  She stares at him, then bursts out laughing, without quite knowing why. What can he mean? Then she stops laughing because she has felt an unfamiliar sensation, low in her body, a kind of pull or drawing down. It is as if her blood and bones have heard him and are answering him. Then she laughs again and, as if he has understood, he laughs too.

  He reaches out, cups a hand around her face, runs his thumb along her jawline.

  Something unusual has happened to Innes. He does not fully understand it. But he can pinpoint when it began, this slight madness, this possession. When, a little over two weeks ago, he peered over a hedge and found a woman sitting on a tree stump. He looks at the restaurant table, at the floor, how it seems to feed and feed itself under all the furniture in the room. He feels for a moment the vastness of the city, the whole breathing breadth of it, and he feels as if he and this girl, this woman, are sitting together in its very centre, at the very eye of its storm, and he feels as if they might be the only people who are doing this, who have ever done this. He steals a half-glance at her, but only to be able to see her wrists, the way the sleeves drape over them, the way her hands are crossed over each other, the handbag placed on the bench next to her.

  It seems at once peculiar and utterly right that she should be sitting there with him. He registers a vague desire to buy her something – anything. A painting. A coat. A pair of gloves. He would like, he realises, to watch her unwrapping a gift, to see her fingers negotiating the ribbon and paper of a present. But he pushes the thought from his mind. He cannot mess it up, not this one, not her. He doesn’t know why but he recognises that this one is different, this one is necessary to him. It’s an unaccountable thought.

  To distract himself, he talks. He tells her about his magazine, about his recent trip to Paris, where he bought several paintings and two sculptures. He does a little dealing in art, as a sideline. Has to, he says, because the magazine makes no money at all. He tells her the sculptures were by unknown artists and that this is what he finds exciting. Anyone, he says, can buy work of an established artist. She interrupts at this point to say, anyone with money, and he nods and says, true. But it takes skill and a degree of recklessness to take a punt on an unknown. He says he can’t describe the feeling of walking into an artist’s studio and thinking, yes, this is it, this is something. And then he spends a long time trying to describe just that.

  He explains how he has ordered the work to be packed, in sawdust and then in newspaper and then in crates. When it’s unpacked he has to take a soft brush, made from the hair of small mammals, and dust off the bits of sawdust. He doesn’t trust anyone else with this job, which is, he admits, a little ridiculous. It means, he says, I spend most of my evenings in the back room at the office with a tiny paintbrush in my hand. Painting a painting? she says, and he laughs. Yes, I suppose so.

  She doesn’t ask much but she listens. God, but does she listen. She listens to him like he has never been listened to before. She listens as if every single word he says contains oxygen. She listens with widened eyes and an incline to her body. She listens so intently that he would like to lean towards her until their heads meet, at which point he would whisper: what? What is it you’re hoping I’ll say?

  His father, he tells her, was English, but his mother was a mestizo from colonial Chile. Half Chilean, half Scottish, he explains, hence his Hibernian Christian name and also his black hair. This causes Lexie’s eyes to widen the most. She was from Valparaiso, he says, and he watches Lexie mouth the word to herself, as if committing all this to memory. His father was sent out there to make his fortune. He was, Innes tells Lexie, the second son of a wealthy family. And he returned with a fortune and also a somewhat exotic wife. He died in a motor accident when Innes was two. Do you remember him at all, Lexie asks, and Innes says, no, he does not. His mother talked about returning to Chile then, he says. She never did. She wouldn’t have been able to. Why not? Lexie wants to know. She always wants to know, it seems. Because there was nothing there any more, he says, nothing she knew. It’s a different country now.

  Ted walks, pushing the pram in front of him. He doesn’t think he’s ever been out on the Heath this early in the morning. Some time after five a.m. he had been woken by a hand on his arm,
and for a moment he couldn’t work out what was happening, why a woman was swaying above him in the dark room, why she was crying, what she wanted from him. Then it had all come back to him. It was Elina, holding their son, and she was asking, please. Please can you take him.

  Ted hadn’t quite been able to make sense of what she was saying – a broken jumble of English and Finnish, with possibly some German mixed in, was coming out of her mouth, something about sleep, something about crying – but the sense of it was clear, what he had to do was clear. He took the baby she was holding out to him; she collapsed on to the bed and, within seconds, she was asleep, her head not quite on the pillow.

  And now Ted is pushing his son up Parliament Hill, slowly, slowly, because there is no rush, they aren’t going anywhere special, he and his son, they are just walking for the sake of walking. The sun has risen to make the dew on the grass glint like shattered glass and Ted finds himself wishing that the baby was old enough for him to point this out, finds himself looking forward to a time when he and this child can walk together and discuss the visual effect of early-morning sun on dew, the astonishing number of people out jogging and dog-walking at this ungodly hour, the way you can already see that the day is going to be a hot one. It gives Ted a sting of pleasure to know that this will happen, that this child will be here, with them, that he is theirs. It seems an impossible concept. Ted still half expects someone to come along and put their hand on the pram handle and say, I’m sorry, you didn’t really think you could keep him, did you?

  A man – older than Ted, perhaps in his forties, with skin tanned to the hue of oiled teak – jogs past and gives Ted a quick, rueful smile. And Ted sees that the man, off down the path now, is a father too, that in his time he has probably done exactly what Ted is doing, the early-morning shift while the woman sleeps after a long night, the circuit with the pram and the sleeping baby. Just for a moment, Ted would like to run after him, would like to say something to him, to ask, does it get easier, does it pass?

  Instead, he looks down at the baby. He is dressed, parcelled up, in a striped all-in-one. Alternating red and orange bands with green poppers running the length of his stomach and down his legs. Elina has said she doesn’t understand why people dress babies only in white and pastels. She loathes pastels, Ted knows: the diluted cousins of real colour, she calls them, claims they make her teeth ache. Ted can remember the day they bought this outfit. Elina was only just pregnant, they were still speechless with the shock of it, when they passed a shop with tiny outfits strung from mock tree branches. Somewhere in East London it was; they were on their way to an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. They’d spent several minutes looking in at them, bemused, side by side but not speaking to each other. A green one with orange spots, a pink one with blue zigzags, a purple one, a turquoise one. Ted couldn’t decide whether they seemed astonishingly small or unaccountably large. Then Elina had said, ‘Right.’ Bitten her lip. Folded her arms. Ted saw that she was steeling herself, she was making up her mind; he knew then that they were going to have this baby, that this child would be born, and he realised that up until this moment he hadn’t been sure what Elina would decide, whether she did want it, whether she would go through with it. ‘Right,’ she said again, took two steps towards the shop door and pushed it open. Alone on the pavement, he felt his face break into a smile. They would be parents and their baby would always be dressed in colour. He watched through the window as Elina selected two outfits, still biting her lip, still with her arms folded, like a woman psyching herself up for a high dive, and he saw that she would stay with him, that she wasn’t going to disappear off to New York or Hong Kong or wherever, as he sometimes feared. He remembers feeling as though he had X-ray vision, watching her there in the shop, that he could look at her and see through her body to the curled being suspended inside.

  He is smiling now, thinking about it, as he looks down at his son. The baby’s eyes waver towards his, seem to lock with his, and then they waver away to focus on something just past Ted’s head. Ted cannot imagine, cannot comprehend what it is like to see the world for the first time. To have never seen a wall, a washing-line, a tree. He is momentarily filled with a kind of pity for his son. What a task lies ahead of him: to learn literally everything.

  Ted reaches the apex of Parliament Hill. Ten past six in the morning. He inhales a lungful of air. He glances down at the tiny, bundled form in the pram and sees that the baby has fallen asleep, arms flung wide. He sees that inside the pram are pinned abstract black and white sketches, geometric shapes, probably done by Elina. She said something the other day about how babies of this age only see in black and white and, as Ted is stepping backwards to sit down on a bench, he is wondering how scientists can possibly know this.

  He is stepping back. Three or four steps. Towards a bench he knows is there. He recalls this later. Because although he is sure of what he is and what he is doing – a father of a young baby, out for a walk – he cannot be entirely sure that he isn’t a child, standing at the window of his yellow-curtained bedroom, listening to the surprising sound of his mother arguing with someone who has come to the door. Ted stands at his window, gripping the fabric of the curtain, looking down into the street, where a man is stepping backwards, three or four steps, off the pavement and into the street, and the man is looking up at the house, scanning the windows, his hand shading his eyes, and when he sees Ted, he waves. There is something frantic, urgent, in the way he waves. As if the man has an important message for him, as if he is beckoning him down to the street.

  Ted lands on the bench with a thud. The recollection is gone. The image of the man walking backwards outside his house is gone. Ted looks at the silver pram handle, where the sun is glancing off it in sharp rays; he looks at the grass, the long swaths of it still glistening; he looks at the ponds at the bottom of the hill, and as he looks he is aware that there is a space at the centre of his vision. The periphery is clear but he cannot see the very thing he looks at, as if a hole has been burnt in the centre of a lens, as if he is looking through a shattered windscreen, and he realises that he is having one of the visual disturbances he used to suffer from as a child. A ‘bizzy’, his mother used to call them. This hasn’t happened for years, and the old familiarity of it almost makes him laugh. The crackling, fiery bonfire that flares in front of his eyes, illuminating whatever he looks at, the prickling sensation down his left arm. He can’t remember the last time this happened – when he was twelve, perhaps, thirteen? Ted knows it will pass, that it means nothing, that it’s just a neurological blip, a momentary confusion of pathways. But he keeps a firm hold of the pram handle, as if to ground himself. He is tempted to ring his mother and say, guess what? I’m having a bizzy. Bizzies once united him and his mother. She watched him, eagle-like, and if he so much as closed his eyes, she would be there beside him, saying, ‘What is it? What’s wrong? Is it happening again?’ She took Ted to doctors, optometrists, consultants. She tracked down specialist after specialist with detective zeal. He had examinations, scans, referrals, X-rays, and after each of these appointments – which meant a day off school for Ted – he and his mother would go for tea. So instead of maths or chemistry or history, he would be sitting in Claridge’s or the Savoy, eating sandwiches and cream cakes as his mother poured the milk. The doctors could find nothing wrong with him, they told his mother. It’s just one of those things. He’ll probably grow out of it. And meanwhile his mother wrote notes to the school, excusing Ted from games, from rugby, from swimming lessons. Ted told his father once that it was like seeing angels, like watching sunlight on moving water. His father had fidgeted in his chair, asked him if he wanted to bowl a few cricket balls. He didn’t go in for fanciful talk.

  Just as Ted knew it would, the refracting blaze at the centre of his vision breaks slowly into pieces and these pieces float to the edges of what he sees and then, finally, vanish. And Ted is back to the way he was, a man sitting on a bench, holding on to a pram. The baby is stirring in his wr
appings, a hand flailing out, curled fingers brushing against the sketches done by his mother. Ted, taking this as a sign from the baby, stands and starts to push him back down the hill.

  Elina is in the garden. Daytime. The sun horizontal above her, the plant pots, the coiled hose, that old tin bucket all standing in inky pools of their own shadows. She is sitting cross-legged on a rug and, on the grass next to her, her shadow is struggling to hold its shape. She watches it for a moment, fighting a losing battle with its surface, the millions of blades of grass all growing in different directions, at different rates. The shadow’s edges are splintered, ragged, like something lost at sea.

  Elina looks away from it and, as she does so, sees that she is holding a rattle in her right hand: a complex thing of coloured rods, bells, strips of elastic, beads inside balls. Beneath where it is suspended, the baby is lying. On his back, his eyes fixed on her. The frank interrogation of his gaze gives her a start.

  She moves the rattle from side to side and the coloured beads ricochet around inside their clear globes. The effect on the baby is instantaneous and remarkable. His limbs stiffen, his eyes spring wide, his lips part in a perfect round O. It is as if he’s been studying a manual on how to be a human being, with particular attention to the chapter, ‘Demonstrating Surprise’. She shakes it again and again and the baby’s limbs move like pistons, up, down, in, out. She thinks: This is what mothers do.