The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell Read Free Book Online

sugar-tainted steam that rose off it. It had been so surprising that he had burst into tears and the French girl had hugged him to her angora jumper. But she hadn’t lasted long and was replaced, if he remembers rightly, by a Dutch girl who fed him rye crackers.
     
    When he hears about Elina’s childhood, the camping in the woods, the trips out in boats to uninhabited islands, ice-skating on the archipelago on Christmas night, the sitting out on the roof tiles to watch the aurora borealis, he is astonished. More, he wants to say, tell me more, but doesn’t because he feels he has nothing to offer in exchange. What could he tell her in return for a story about when, aged ten and eight, she and her brother decided to leave home and lived in a den they made in the forest for two days before their mother came to fetch them back? His au pair taking him to John Lewis to buy new shoes? Or what about Elina’s account of the time she’d built a bonfire as big as the shed, which, when lit, burnt down the shed? Or when she sledged down a hill so steep, she slid all the way out on to an iced-over lake and sat there until she was numb with cold because the way the ice distorted sound was so fascinating she couldn’t leave? He could tell her about his father taking him to the zoo and how he kept looking at his watch and suggesting lunch. Or about how, when he thinks of his childhood, he remembers most of all the feeling that life was going on elsewhere, without him. His father away for work. His mother attending to correspondence at her roll-top desk – ‘Not now, darling, in a minute, Mummy’s busy’ – the au pairs coming and going to their English classes, the lady who came to polish the brass runners on the stairs and talked, compellingly, of her trouble ‘down below’.
     
    Ted looks down at Elina. He tucks the blanket around her more tightly. He looks across at the basket, which contains the sleeping, bundled form of his son. His son . He has yet to get used to the words. Ted wants sledging for this child, and dens and fairs and bonfires that accidentally cause infernos. He will take him to the zoo and he will not look at his watch once. He will learn to make tarte Tatin and he will make it for him once a week, or every day, if he wants it. This child will not be expected to go to his room for an hour after lunch for ‘quiet time’. He will not be taken by teenagers who have only a passing acquaintance with English to buy school shoes or to look at Egyptian mummies in glass cases. He will not have to spend afternoons alone in a frosty garden. He will have central heating in his bedroom. He will not be taken to the barber once a month. He will be allowed – encouraged, even – to remove his shoes in communal sandpits. He will be able to decorate the Christmas tree himself, with whatever colour baubles he likes.
     
    Ted drums his fingers on the sofa arm. He would like to get up. He would like to write these things down. He would like to stand over his sleeping son and say them to him, as a kind of pledge. But he can’t disturb Elina. He picks up the remote control and changes the channel until he finds a football match he’d forgotten about.
     

     
    In the dream – and it’s one of those curious, halfway states when you’re dreaming and you somehow know it – Elina is being made to hold a pillowcase. Someone has crammed it with fragile things. An alarm clock, a glass tumbler, an ashtray, a swirling snow scene of a wood, a girl and a wolf. The floor she is standing on is cold stone and the pillowcase too full. She cannot get a proper grip on it so she struggles to hold it, to contain all the things that are jostling and slipping. If they fall, they will smash. She must not let them drop.
     
    A noise interrupts her. It is someone saying, ‘ow.’ A voice she knows. Ted’s. Elina opens her eyes. The alarm clock, the snow scene, the tumbler, the stone floor disintegrate. She is lying squeezed between Ted and