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

curlicues. When Lexie turned it down she saw the mattress was grey, stained, sagged in the middle. She twitched it back again quickly. She took off her coat and looked around for a peg on which to hang it. No peg. She draped it over the chair, which had also been painted, some time ago, a pale yellow but a slightly different shade from the skirting-boards. What was her landlady’s obsession with the colour?
     
    The landlady, Mrs Collins, had met her at the door. A thin woman in a zipped housecoat and crescents of iridescent blue eyeshadow, her first question had been: ‘You’re not Italian, are you?’
     
    Lexie, taken aback, had said no. Then she’d asked Mrs Collins what her objection was to Italians.
     
    ‘Can’t stand them,’ Mrs Collins grumbled, as she disappeared into the front room, leaving Lexie in the hall, staring at the brown, peeling wallpaper, the telephone on the wall, a list of house rules, ‘dirty so-and-sos. Here’s your keys.’ Mrs Collins reappeared in the hall and handed her two latchkeys. ‘One for the front door, one for your room. The usual rules apply.’ She gestured at the list on the pinboard. ‘No men, no pets, always use an ashtray, keep your room clean, no more than two visitors at a time, in by eleven every night or the door will be bolted.’ She leant in closer and scrutinised Lexie, breathing hard. ‘You may look like a nice, clean girl but you’re the sort that might turn. You’ve got that look about you.’
     
    ‘Is that so?’ Lexie said, depositing the keys in her bag and snapping it shut. She bent to pick up her case. ‘At the top, you say?’
     
    ‘Right at the top.’ Mrs Collins nodded. ‘On the left.’
     
    Lexie took the keys from where she’d left them in the lock and put them on the mantelpiece. Then she lowered herself to the bed. She allowed herself to think, there, it’s done, I’m here. She smoothed her hair, passed her hand over the purple curlicues. Then she turned into a kneeling position and, leaning on the window-sill, peered outside. Far below there was a rectangular patch of scrubby grass, boxed in on all sides by ivy-furred walls. She looked down the gardens. Some had rows of beans, lettuces, sprays of roses or jasmine; some still had the arched-spine shape of Anderson shelters hidden under lawn or soil or rockeries. One, further along, had a child’s swing. She was pleased to see an enormous chestnut tree, leaves waving and dipping. And opposite was the back of a terrace similar to hers – that grey-brown London brick, zigzagged by guttering, the windows uneven, higgledy-piggledy, some open, one taped over with cardboard. She could see two women, who must have crawled out of a window, sunbathing on a flat bit of roof, their shoes kicked off, their hitched-up skirts inflating and deflating in the breeze. Below them, unseen by them, a child was running in decreasing circles, round and round his garden, a scarlet ribbon in his hand. A woman a few doors down was pegging out some washing on a line; her husband leant in the doorway, his arms folded.
     
    Lexie felt lightheaded, insubstantial somehow. It was strange to look back into the gloom of her room, then out again at the scene beyond the window. For a prolonged heady moment, she and her room didn’t feel real or animate. It was as if she was suspended in a bubble, peering out at Life, which was going along in its way, people laughing and talking and living and dying and falling in love and working and eating and meeting and parting, while she sat there, mute, motionless, watching.
     
    She reached up to free the catch and force open the window. There. That was better. The veil between her and the world was lifted. She stuck her head out into the breeze, shook it vigorously, pulled the pins from her hair, freeing it so that it fell about her face. And the feel of it there, the zooming noise made by the boy running in circles, the faint sound of the sunbathing women’s chatter, the graze