The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell Page A

and white and, as Ted is stepping backwards to sit down on a bench, he is wondering how scientists can possibly know this.
     
    He is stepping back. Three or four steps. Towards a bench he knows is there. He recalls this later. Because although he is sure of what he is and what he is doing – a father of a young baby, out for a walk – he cannot be entirely sure that he isn’t a child, standing at the window of his yellow-curtained bedroom, listening to the surprising sound of his mother arguing with someone who has come to the door. Ted stands at his window, gripping the fabric of the curtain, looking down into the street, where a man is stepping backwards, three or four steps, off the pavement and into the street, and the man is looking up at the house, scanning the windows, his hand shading his eyes, and when he sees Ted, he waves. There is something frantic, urgent, in the way he waves. As if the man has an important message for him, as if he is beckoning him down to the street.
     
    Ted lands on the bench with a thud. The recollection is gone. The image of the man walking backwards outside his house is gone. Ted looks at the silver pram handle, where the sun is glancing off it in sharp rays; he looks at the grass, the long swaths of it still glistening; he looks at the ponds at the bottom of the hill, and as he looks he is aware that there is a space at the centre of his vision. The periphery is clear but he cannot see the very thing he looks at, as if a hole has been burnt in the centre of a lens, as if he is looking through a shattered windscreen, and he realises that he is having one of the visual disturbances he used to suffer from as a child. A ‘bizzy’, his mother used to call them. This hasn’t happened for years, and the old familiarity of it almost makes him laugh. The crackling, fiery bonfire that flares in front of his eyes, illuminating whatever he looks at, the prickling sensation down his left arm. He can’t remember the last time this happened – when he was twelve, perhaps, thirteen? Ted knows it will pass, that it means nothing, that it’s just a neurological blip, a momentary confusion of pathways. But he keeps a firm hold of the pram handle, as if to ground himself. He is tempted to ring his mother and say, guess what? I’m having a bizzy. Bizzies once united him and his mother. She watched him, eagle-like, and if he so much as closed his eyes, she would be there beside him, saying, ‘What is it? What’s wrong? Is it happening again?’ She took Ted to doctors, optometrists, consultants. She tracked down specialist after specialist with detective zeal. He had examinations, scans, referrals, X-rays, and after each of these appointments – which meant a day off school for Ted – he and his mother would go for tea. So instead of maths or chemistry or history, he would be sitting in Claridge’s or the Savoy, eating sandwiches and cream cakes as his mother poured the milk. The doctors could find nothing wrong with him, they told his mother. It’s just one of those things. He’ll probably grow out of it. And meanwhile his mother wrote notes to the school, excusing Ted from games, from rugby, from swimming lessons. Ted told his father once that it was like seeing angels, like watching sunlight on moving water. His father had fidgeted in his chair, asked him if he wanted to bowl a few cricket balls. He didn’t go in for fanciful talk.
     
    Just as Ted knew it would, the refracting blaze at the centre of his vision breaks slowly into pieces and these pieces float to the edges of what he sees and then, finally, vanish. And Ted is back to the way he was, a man sitting on a bench, holding on to a pram. The baby is stirring in his wrappings, a hand flailing out, curled fingers brushing against the sketches done by his mother. Ted, taking this as a sign from the baby, stands and starts to push him back down the hill.
     
     
     
     
    Elina is in the garden. Daytime. The sun horizontal above her,