The Hand That First Held Mine

“Her bottom half—Ted had never seen anything like it. And at that moment, he seemed to stop seeing it. He seemed to stop seeing anything at all. Except a horizon that was possibly the sea, a lead-coloured sea that heaved up and heaved down, a featureless expanse of water. It was its endlessness that made him feel queasy, its reflective skin that mirrored the clouded sky. Where is she? he could hear a voice saying. Where is she?”

Ted’s traumatic experience with Elina’s near death recalls his traumatic experience with his mother’s death. The language metaphorically suggests this mirroring of twin traumas; just as the “lead-coloured sea” reflects the grey sky, so does Elina’s birth reflect Lexie’s death.

“She reads the note twice and the postscript three times. She folds it and puts it into the pocket of her blue dress. She sits down on the tree stump in the dark. She is Lexie. She is going to London. She will have lunches with men in duck-egg ties.”

Alexandra becomes Lexie both because Innes suggests it and because a transformation of identity—country girl to city girl, student to worker, etc.—requires a change of name. This is the first instance of a renaming corresponding to a change in identity, a recurring pattern.

“She doesn’t look at the scarf again but she thinks of it, the way it shot out like that into the air. She thinks that it somehow reminds her of something she has seen recently. And then she recalls what it is. Jets of blood. Beautiful in their way. The pure, garnet brightness of them in the scrubbed white of the room. The way they would spin and resolve themselves into droplets as they travelled, before hurling themselves with definite, sure force against the fronts of the doctors, the nurses.”

The Effect of Trauma on Memory is one of the novel’s central themes. Here a red scarf erupting from clothing unlocks Elina’s memory of giving birth and the trauma associated with it. To an artist like Elina, color brings back what she has rejected in self-preservation up to this point.

“All she knows is that she is about to make love for the second time that day. She has no idea that she will die young, that she does not have as much time as she thinks. For now she has just discovered the love of her life, and death couldn’t be further from her mind.”

This directly foreshadows Lexie’s death. The reference to that death frames Lexie’s story as contained within the past and predetermined in ways that the other characters’ fates are not, which speaks to her role as the “originator” of the story: Her life is historical in the foundation it lays for the lives of Ted, Elina, etc.

“Then she spoke to Ted. Go with him, she said, go with the baby. Because her mother and her aunts had discussed in hushed voices stories about babies being given to the wrong mothers.”

This moment foreshadows the revelation that Ted has been raised by the “wrong mother.” It also serves as a connection between past and future that underscores The Universality of Motherhood: Elina’s fears as a new mother are the same fears as those of the women who came before her.

“She’ll have many incarnations in her time. She is made up of myriad Lexies and Alexandras, all sheathed inside one another, like Russian dolls.”

Female identity and its relationship to names figure prominently throughout the novel. The nesting doll simile reflects how women have multiple roles and identities throughout their lives.

“And now Ted is coming out of the house and, in the bright sunlight, the shape of him seems to shimmer and bifurcate and, for a moment, it is as if there is another person there, hovering just behind him.”

Elina seeing a person beyond or behind Ted points to Lexie’s influence, which stretches beyond death and even beyond memory. It also suggests that there’s more to his identity than what Elina has come to know. Ted is now a father, but he’s also Theo—the boy he has forgotten in the wake of the trauma of his mother’s death.

“Mrs. Collins was so outraged she wouldn’t speak to Lexie or even look at her. She shrieked, ‘Jezebel!’ as Lexie closed the front door, which made Innes roar with laughter. For years afterwards he often called her that.”

Lexie consistently chooses her own identity, claiming or refusing her own names. When Mrs. Collins derides Lexie’s choice to live with Innes as an unmarried couple, she and Innes simply turn the misogynistic insult into a term of endearment. This makes clear that Innes embraces the very elements of Lexie that break with expectation and tradition, reinforcing the value of a feminine identity that defies societal expectations.

“Ted’s mother isn’t looking at the work, she isn’t looking at the rough sketches and stretched canvases and the photographs and the transparencies on the lightbox and the tools on the walls, she’s only looking at the baby, in that hungry, needful way she has.”

This passage focused on Margot points both to The Transformative Power of Art and to Margot’s identity as a woman who cannot have biological children. Her reaction to Jonah is “hungry,” as though she craves something she never had: the baby-ness of Jonah. She simultaneously ignores the art and thereby refuses to be transformed by it.

“During this speech, Lexie had stolen a covert glance at Margot. She felt an odd sense of alignment between them—both observers to what seemed to be a well-trodden argument. When her eyes met Margot’s, the girl didn’t look away. She didn’t flinch, she didn’t move a muscle. She just kept Lexie fixed with a chillingly still, open-mouthed gaze.”

O’Fallon’s use of the word “alignment” pairs Margot and Lexie, who will later fill the same roles with respect to both Felix and Ted/Theo (partner and mother, respectively). Although the relationship with Innes puts them at odds, even this first meeting foreshadows the complex relationship they will have in the future.

“Lasse, she makes herself think, as she looks down at his silken head, Arto, Paarvo, Nils, Stefan. How are you supposed to choose one name for your child? How does anyone decide? Does he look like a Peter, a Sebastian, a Mikael? Or is he a Sam, a Jeremy, a David?”

Elina’s rhetorical questions about the baby’s name reveal the thematic relationship between identity and naming. Elina is not asking which name she prefers but who Jonah is. Her sense that choosing “one name” is impossible points to the multifaceted nature of identity.

“He must have been taking Ted somewhere without his mother because Ted can feel the sensation—so distant now—that consuming urge, that overwhelming need to see her, to go back to her, to grip and hang on to that metal railing until she hears him crying, until she comes for him.”

The language here reflects the power of memory, which is a major theme. Even though Ted does not yet know that his mother died and Margot became his adoptive mother, he recalls the emotions and sensations associated with the loss of his mother.

“That Innes, the love of her life, had died alone: this, Lexie would never get over. That she had been sleeping, across the city, in their bed, at the time he drew his last breath, at the time his heart stopped its pulsing. That the doctor hadn’t been where he was supposed to be but taking a nap in a different room down the corridor. That they had tried to resuscitate him but failed. That she wasn’t there, that she didn’t know, that she couldn’t be with him and never would be again.”

Innes’s death is a major trauma for Lexie and also foreshadows her own fate. Innes dies from a lung infection, in effect drowning as Lexie will drown in the sea. O’Farrell’s repetition of “that” in this passage protracts the moment of Innes’s death, the effects of which similarly extend throughout Lexie’s life.

“She sets off, slinging her bag further up her shoulder. The world, even from behind her dark glasses, looks bright, the sun giving everyone walking down Piccadilly a fiery corona, as if they were all angels, as if they are all here in the afterlife, walking about London on a fine May afternoon.”

What initially appears to be a lyric description of Piccadilly in London transforms in Lexie’s point of view to a foreshadowing of her own death. The language of light and angels suggests that although Lexie dies, a part of her continues on, walking in brightness near her son.

“She is folding and unfolding it when she is struck by a thought. Or, rather a sensation. She realises that she wants her mother. It is such a visceral, unbidden feeling that it makes her almost laugh.”

Elina feels the other side of motherhood—the desperate desire for her mother, which is described similarly to her craving for her son. The similarity ties the love of a mother to the love of a child and is an example of motherhood’s universality.

“The shock of motherhood, for Lexie, is not the sleeplessness, the troughs of exhaustion, the shrinkage of life, how your existence becomes limited to the streets around where you live, but the onslaught of domestic tasks: the washing and the folding and the drying. Performing these makes her almost weep with furious boredom and she more than once hurls an armful of laundry at the wall. She eyes other mothers when she passes them in the street and they look so poised, so together, with their handbags hooked over the pram handles and their neatly embroidered sheets tucked in around their babies with hospital corners. But what about the washing, she wants to say, don’t you loathe the drying and the folding?”

This description of Lexie’s primary frustration with motherhood highlights the universality of motherhood. The language suggests both that motherhood is exhausting and challenging and that other mothers often hide that universal experience. Thirty-five years later, Elina also experiences the exhaustion and the overwhelming number of domestic tasks.

“Should she mention the nights spent awake, the number of times she must wash her hands in a day, the endless drying and folding of tiny clothes, the packing and unpacking of bags containing clothes, nappies, wipes, the scar across her abdomen, crooked and leering, the utter loneliness of it all, the hours she spends kneeling on the floor, a rattle or a bell or a fabric block in her hands, that she sometimes gets the urge the stop older women in the street and say, how did you do it, how did you live through it? Or she could mention that she had been unprepared for this fierce spring in her, this feeling that isn’t covered by the world ‘love’, which is far too small for it, that sometimes she thinks she might faint with the urgency of her feeling for him, that sometimes she misses him desperately even when he is right there, that it’s like a form of madness, of possession, that often she has to creep into the room when he has fallen asleep just to look at him to check, to whisper to him.”

Elina’s thoughts echo the earlier description of Lexie’s experience, underscoring the universality of motherhood; the novel suggests that all new mothers, though separated by time and background, have a few things in common, including a deep sense of responsibility that never wanes. The long, run-on sentences that list a new mother’s many preoccupations stylistically mirror the overwhelming experience.

“She is here, in Ted’s mother’s dressing room, zipped into Ted’s mother’s dress, in the same room as a Jackson Pollock, which has been shoved behind some furniture like a piece of carboot-sale tat, talking about a possibly priceless art collection as if it’s an array of homemade doilies.”

Elina, as an artist, sees the true value of the art that Margot has claimed from Lexie and Innes. This connects Elina to Lexie and further separates Margot from Innes, Lexie, Elina, and (by extension) Ted. The division relates to the intrinsic value of art: Where Elina and the others see priceless treasures, Margot sees “a piece of carboot-sale tat” whose only value comes from defeating Lexie.

“Felix feels a weakening in his chest. He did have her here, come to think about it, while Lex was away in Ireland. His flat was having plumbing work done. But he hadn’t meant to. And, frankly, it’s unlike Lexie to be threatened by a girl like that.”

This passage reveals both that Felix is oblivious to Margot’s machinations and that Lexie’s rage when she throws Felix out isn’t about his womanizing. Felix “hadn’t meant” to bring another woman into Lexie’s home; it’s as though he has no power over his own actions while Lexie is in full control of hers. Further, Lexie isn’t likely “to be threatened by a girl” because she’s confident in her independence—with the one exception of Margot.

“‘The thing is,’ Ted interrupts, still staring at the ceiling, ‘none of it adds up. I just know that everyone’s been lying. About everything. I see that now. And I don’t know where to turn, who to ask because everything is deception, and I can’t trust anyone. Do you see?’”

Ted’s question recalls the motif of voyeurism—all the instances of characters “gazing” out of windows, through hedges, at art works, and at one another leads to the question, “Do you see?” This looking and gazing has all been in service of trying to see from another perspective, which the point of view shifts throughout the novel underscore.

“She fought like a crazed thing. She fought to live, she fought to come back. She has always wanted to tell him this, in some way. She tried. She would like to say to him, Theo, I tried. I fought because I didn’t see how I could leave you. but I lost. What she would have given to win? She could not say.”

Although Lexie has fought for herself, for her work, and for Innes, her ultimate drive to fight comes from her love for Theo. Her motherhood is her defining identity, more powerful and more primal even than the will to survive. There is also a suggestion that Lexie’s love for Theo, her desire for him to know that she tried with everything she had, is a force that even trauma can’t block forever.

“Margot straightens up. She is no good at this. She doesn’t know much about children. She clenches her hands together over her apron. She is not going to cry, she is not, she is not. But she cannot stop herself recalling the feel of that ominous hot slide, down low, in the place that it’s not nice to name, the startling jewel-red of it, and how much there always is, so much of it, an unbelievable amount, more than she would ever have thought her body could contain.”

The visceral description of Margot’s experiences with multiple miscarriages allows Margot to be more than simply an antagonist to Lexie, Elina, and Ted. It is reminiscent of the imagery used to describe Elina’s traumatic birth and thus connects Margot to Elina. It also suggests trauma’s relationship to memory; Margot “cannot stop herself recalling” the experience of miscarriage, just as Elina and Ted cannot stop their memories of trauma once they begin to surface.

“In the drawing room, Margot is sitting in a chair near the window. She doesn’t know this but it is the chair Ferdinanda used to favour for doing her embroidery: a Georgian nursing chair, armless, with a low seat and dainty, fluted legs. It has since been re-covered, by Gloria, in a rather unbecoming tomato-red velvet. It sits, by chance, very close to the place Ferdinanda used to have it—angled toward the window, toward the light.”

Three mothers have used this chair. Although Margot is not descended from Ferdinanda, this passage connects them in their placement of the chair and therefore again complicates Margot’s apparent role of antagonist.