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

freak.’
     
    He shifts in his seat. ‘Don’t be silly. I wasn’t. Of course I wasn’t.’
     
    Elina pushes herself forward and struggles from the sofa. The noise of the football is suddenly too much. At one point she thinks she won’t make it to standing, that she won’t be able to straighten her legs, that they will buckle beneath her or that whatever it is that is inside her will fall out. But she grips the sofa arm and Ted lurches forward and seizes her wrist and together they hoist her up and she moves across the room, bent over a little at the waist.
     
    She has been overcome by a desire to look at the baby. She needs to do this, she’s noticed, at regular intervals. To check he’s there, to check she hasn’t dreamt it all, to check he’s still breathing, to check he’s quite as beautiful as she remembered him to be, quite as astonishingly perfect. She limps towards the Moses basket – it must be nearly time for another of those painkillers – and peers in. He is there, wrapped in a blanket, fists clenched beside his ears, his eyes screwed tight, his mouth shut in a firm pout, as if tackling this sleeping business with all the seriousness and concentration it deserves. She puts a hand to his chest and, even though she knows he’s fine, she can see that he’s fine, she feels a surge of relief flood through her. He’s breathing, she tells herself, he’s alive, he’s still here.
     
    She makes for the kitchen, holding on to the cooker for support, chiding herself. Why does she constantly fear that he’s going to die? That he will slip away from her, out of this life. It’s hysterical, she tells herself, as she scans the shelves for the teapot, and ridiculous.
     
    The next morning the palette knife is on the floor next to the sofa. Elina gets down on her hands and knees to pick it up. And while she’s there, she takes a look under the sagging weft of the sofa’s underside. She sees other things: coins, a safety-pin, a reel of cotton, a hair-clip that could be an old one of hers. She considers getting a ruler or a wooden spoon and hooking out all these things – she would if she were properly interested in keeping a nice house. But she isn’t. There are better things to do with your life. If only she could remember what they are.
     
    She gets up and, as she does so, is aware of that sharp scorch of pain in the abdomen again. She wonders whether the time has come to ring Ted, to say, Ted, why is that scar there, what happened, tell me what happened because I can’t remember.
     
    But now would not be a good time. He’ll be in his editing suite, his cave, as Elina thinks of it, removing and splicing the bad bits from films, making sure it all appears smooth and faultless, as if it was never any other way. And, anyway, it may all come back to her, she may remember on her own. He’s been under so much pressure recently, since this film overran, since the baby came, walking about with that drawn, pale face he gets when he’s either ill or stressed. She really shouldn’t worry him.
     
    She goes instead to the window. The weather has still not let up. It has rained and rained for days, the sky blurred and swollen, the garden sodden. Around her, the house ticks to the rhythm of water: on roof tiles, on gutters, down drains.
     
    Before, when she was still pregnant, the weather had been sunny. For weeks and weeks. Elina would sit in the shade of her studio with her feet in a bucket of cold water. In the morning she would do her yoga exercises out there, when the grass was still cool with dew. She ate grapefruit, sometimes three a day, she did sketches of some ants, but lazily, without any real intent, she watched the skin of her stomach ripple, move, like water before a storm. She read books about natural births. She wrote lists of names in charcoal on her studio walls.
     
    Elina stands at the window, watching the rain. The man from down the street is walking along the pavement towards the Heath,