The Hand That First Held Mine Read Free Page B

three days and she considers the pain in her abdomen but decides not to mention it now.
     
    ‘Elina?’
     
    ‘What?’
     
    He is peering into her face. He smooths the hair away from her brow, then rests his hands on her shoulders. ‘You’re probably . . . you must be terribly tired and . . . Why don’t you go back to sleep?’
     
    She doesn’t answer. She struggles out from under his touch, across the mattress. She clutches at her abdomen as she does so, pressing her teeth into her lip. It feels, down there, as if something might very easily spill out unless she holds it in. She crouches above the baby, looking carefully down. He, Ted said. A boy, then. He is awake, eyes wide and alert. He looks up at her from his wicker basket, his face quizzical, enquiring. He is wrapped up like a gift in a white blanket, his hands covered with white mittens. Elina reaches out and pulls them off – tiny things they are, light as cirrus clouds. His hands flex, opening and closing on empty air.
     
    ‘Ah,’ he says. A strangely adult noise. Very firm, very considered.
     
    Elina puts out her hand and touches the damp heat of his forehead, the rising and falling of his tiny, bird-like chest, the curve of his cheek, the curled flesh of the ear. His eyes blink as her fingers cross his vision, his lips opening and shutting like someone lost for words.
     
    She slides her palms under him, lifts him up. He is her baby, after all; she is allowed. She puts him against her, his head below her shoulder, his feet in the crook of her arm. There is, she acknowledges, something familiar in the weight of him, the lie of him. He twists his head towards her, then away, towards her, away, then gazes fixedly at the strap of her T-shirt.
     
    ‘You do remember, don’t you?’ Ted says again, from the bed.
     
    Elina pulls her face into a smile. ‘Of course,’ she says.
     
    When she returns to bed, a long time later – she has been staring at the baby, lifting off his hat, looking at his hair, the surprising deep-water blue of his eyes, putting her finger in his palm to feel the answering clench – Ted is asleep, his head resting on his arm. She is sure she won’t sleep again: how can she when she’s got so cold, when there is this pain, when she seems to have had a baby? She edges as close as she dares to Ted, whose body seems to fan heat towards her. Elina pushes her head down underneath the duvet, where it is dark and hot. She won’t sleep again.
     
    But she must have, because what feels like minutes later she comes round to a bedroom so bright and glaring she has to hold her hand over her face and Ted is dressed and saying he has to go and kissing her goodbye.
     
    ‘Where are you going?’ she says, struggling on to her elbow.
     
    His face falls. ‘To work,’ he says. ‘No choice,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘The film,’ he says. ‘Behind on the assemblies,’ he says. ‘Take some leave at the end of the shoot,’ he says. ‘Hopefully,’ he says.
     
    This is followed by a short argument because Ted wants to call his mother to come and help. Elina can hear herself saying no, can feel herself shaking her head. He then says she can’t be on her own, that he’ll call her friend Suki, but the idea of anyone in the house is horrifying. Elina cannot think how she would talk to these people; she cannot imagine what she might say. No, she says, no and no again.
     
    And she must be winning this argument because Ted is scratching his head, fiddling with his bag and kissing her goodbye, and then she hears him descend the stairs, the front door slam and the house is silent.
     
    She longs more than anything to sink again into the oblivion of sleep, to press her cheek into the pillow, to bring down the portcullises of her lids over her eyes. She can feel the proximity of such sleep, she can taste it. But next to her is the noise of puffing, struggling, small mammalian pants.
     
    She peers over the edge of the bed and