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

the end of the sofa, her head on Ted’s thigh.
     
    ‘Why did you say “ow”?’ she asks the underside of his jaw. He is watching television, football by the sound of it – that odd drone and mumble, interpersed with hooting. He hasn’t shaved for a while. Black bristles cover his chin, his throat. She puts out a finger to touch them, pushing them first one way then the other.
     
    ‘You hit me,’ he says, without taking his eyes off the screen.
     
    ‘I did?’ Elina struggles upright.
     
    ‘You were asleep and you started flailing around and—’ There is a surge of noise from the television, a crashing roar, a crescendo of hooting and, without warning, Ted emits an impassioned, garbled speech. Elina can’t make out what the words are. Some are YES and some GOD and some are swearwords.
     
    She watches him gesticulating, arguing with the television. Then, from over by the kitchen, there is another noise. A quiet, almost inaudible cheep, like a bird or a kitten. Elina’s head snaps around. The baby. There it is again. A tiny ‘eeuup’ sound.
     
    ‘ Ted,’ she says, ‘don’t. You’ll wake the baby.’
     
    The television is still booming but Ted is talking more quietly, about how he can’t believe it. She listens hard but there is no more noise from the Moses basket. An arm appears over the side, arching slowly through the air, as if he’s doing t’ai chi . But then he is still. ‘What do you call those things with water and fake snow inside?’ she asks.
     
    Ted is sitting forward, his body tense. ‘Hmm?’
     
    ‘You know, children have them. You shake them and the snow swirls around.’
     
    ‘I don’t know what—’ he begins, but something happens on screen and he hisses, ‘No!’ and hurls himself back into the cushions, in an attitude of profound grief.
     
    Elina picks up something lying on the sofa next to her. It is a palette knife, with a malleable, soft blade, and she bends the blade this way and that between her fingers. Then she holds it close to her face, looking at it as a historian might examine an artefact from another age. The ingrained paint at the join where the blade meets the handle – she can see red, green, a fleck of yellow – the tiny crack in the pearly plastic of the grip, the trace of rust at the tip. ‘Knife’ is really the wrong word for it, she thinks. You couldn’t cut anything with this. It wouldn’t slice, it wouldn’t pierce or gash or saw or any of those things that knives do, because real knives—
     
    ‘What are you doing?’
     
    Elina turns. Ted, she is surprised to see, is looking straight at her.
     
    ‘Nothing,’ she says, and lowers the palette knife to her lap.
     
    ‘What is that?’ he says, in the kind of tone that implies she might very easily reply just a hand-grenade, darling .
     
    ‘Nothing,’ she says again, and as she does so it comes to her what the palette knife is doing on the sofa, instead of in her studio. She’d been using it in here, mixing some plaster of Paris on the coffee-table, which is not something she would normally ever do. The house is for living, the studio is for working. But it had been hot and the short distance down the garden had seemed so long.
     
    She becomes aware that Ted is still looking at her, this time with an expression close to horror.
     
    ‘What?’ she says.
     
    He doesn’t reply. He seems to be in some kind of trance, staring at her with a kind of guardedness, a nervous fascination.
     
    ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ She sees that he is staring at her neck. She raises her hand to the spot and feels her pulse, leaping beneath her touch. ‘What’s the matter?’
     
    ‘Huh?’ he says, and appears to come back from wherever he was. ‘What did you say?’
     
    ‘I said, why are you staring at me like that?’
     
    He looks away, fiddles with the remote control. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbles, then says, suddenly defensive, ‘Like what?’
     
    ‘Like I’m some kind of