The Hand That First Held Mine

Content Warning: This section references traumatic childbirth and the traumatic loss of a parent.

“She blinks. She has never heard anyone speak like this before. Sharpish, fix, print deadline, nightmare upon nightmare, grateful slave. She would like to ask him to say it all again. Then part of the speech filters through to her. ‘It’s not my baby,’ she snaps. ‘It’s nothing to do with me. It’s my mother’s.’”

When Lexie first meets Innes, it is his language—the sharp, staccato language of the career that she will eventually excel in—that captivates her. This foreshadows both her relationship with writing and her love affair with Innes. Following on the heels of this captivation is her rejection of the mother role, even though it is that role that will define her more even than her work or her relationship.

“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.