45 pages • 1 hour read
The Hand That First Held Mine
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 15-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 15 Summary
Several years have passed since Innes’s death. Lexie is in Piccadilly with Felix trying to keep up with her. Felix and Lexie met in Florence when he asked her for directions. Like Lexie, Felix is a journalist, but he’s a television reporter and in love with the spotlight, the drama, and the fame. She is more interested in the stories, especially about art. They have an argumentative and on-again, off-again relationship. Now, she responds to Felix’s request to accompany him to Paris by telling him she doesn’t have time and marching off down Piccadilly, avoiding Soho.
Part 2, Chapter 16 Summary
Elina rushes around the house, getting everything ready to take Jonah out. However, Jonah falls asleep in her arms, so she must stay home. As she holds Jonah, she finds a piece of paper Ted dropped. On it is a list of clues from his memories, though Elina does not recognize what they are. As she tries to decode the list, she suddenly desires her mother. Elina calls her mother and tries to ask to come visit, but her brother is already there, and it becomes clear that Elina can’t come.
In the middle of the night, Elina wakes up suddenly. Jonah is crying, and she sees to him, changes his diaper, and nurses him. She dreams of being back at home in Finland with Jonah. Ted wakes up suddenly, sitting straight up. He had a nightmare that Elina wasn’t Elina.
Part 2, Chapter 17 Summary
Lexie is in Paris in her own room. When Felix knocks, she is struck by a memory of Innes and doesn’t answer the door. Two weeks later she and Felix go to the opening of Laurence’s new gallery. Felix entertains his fans while Lexie talks with Laurence and Daphne. They ask about Felix, and Lexie says he suits her for the moment because he doesn’t ask her questions about herself.
The narrative shifts back in time to Gloria evicting Lexie on the night Innes died. Laurence came to her rescue and helped her pack. Gloria and Margot arrived while Lexie waited in the cab. Laurence hurried out of the building, and Gloria yelled at him to stop. In his arms he had Innes’s paintings wrapped in blankets—the paintings that Innes cared for only slightly less than he cared for Lexie. Laurence jumped in the taxi and asked the driver to go quickly. The taxi took off, and Margot ran alongside it, staring directly and wordlessly at Lexie.
Lexie found a basement apartment, where she wallowed in her grief. However, Daphne snapped her out of her depression and set her up in a new job. She was eventually promoted to staff writer, and her career was steady and successful. Occasionally she received vaguely threatening letters from Margot about the paintings.
After she and Felix have been in an off-again cycle of their relationship, she goes to see him. They have lunch, and she tells him that she’s pregnant and is keeping the baby. He tries to convince her to marry him, but she refuses. When they leave the restaurant, they are approached by a young woman—Margot. Felix signs an autograph for her, and Lexie makes Felix promise to stay away from her.
Lexie goes into labor at eight months pregnant. She calls a taxi to the hospital. The nurses’ primary concern is to determine who the father is and get him to get to the hospital; they call Lexie “Mrs. Sinclair” despite her insistence that she is unmarried and doesn’t want Felix there for the birth. She refuses to get into bed while she’s delivering, swears with the labor pains, and eventually gives birth to Theodore on the floor. Felix arrives at the hospital and tries to convince Lexie to move in with him. Finally, she screams at him to stop and says she’ll never live with him.
Lexie checks herself out of the hospital early and brings her baby home. After the initial adjustment to having a baby, she continues working. She enlists her neighbor Mrs. Gallo to babysit when she has to go to meetings or interviews. She then returns to the office full time while Theo stays with Mrs. Gallo.
As Theo grows bigger, Lexie decides she needs a bigger place to live. After talking to Laurence, she sells a painting from Innes’s collection to buy half of a house in Dartmouth Park. She struggles with this and refuses to sell Innes’s most valuable painting—a Jackson Pollock—because it was Innes’s favorite. The new house gives Lexie and Theo stability, but she is still bothered by the sale of the painting. She writes an article on motherhood to distract her. Their lives continue, with Felix as an occasional visitor.
Part 2, Chapter 18 Summary
Ted is pulling weeds and clearing out the garden when another memory intrudes on his focus. This time it is a memory of playing with a rake in the garden. His father was sitting in a deck chair talking to a woman in a red dress. Elina comes out and calls for his help, pulling him out of his reverie. They argue. Jonah cries, and Elina picks him up and goes inside.
After the fight, Elina and Ted go to lunch at Ted’s parents’ house. Jonah has a dirty diaper, and Elina takes him to the bathroom to change him. Changing Jonah is a disaster, and he poops all over the floor and Elina’s clothes. Ted comes in and helps her clean up but asks to stay for a bit longer, suggesting Elina borrow Margot’s clothes. Elina is in Margot’s dressing room changing into Margot’s dress when she discovers some paintings shoved behind the dressing table. She investigates the paintings; seeing Pollock’s signature, she tries to tell Margot how valuable the paintings are. Margot evades and changes the subject. She also insists Elina call her by her first name. This is the first time in the novel that Ted’s mother is identified as Margot.
Part 2, Chapters 15-18 Analysis
The narrative returns to present tense as Lexie finds a new life and a new identity in the wake of Innes’s death—a stylistic choice that highlights Lexie’s dynamism and capacity for reinvention. Though she mourns Innes, Lexie establishes herself as a journalist with her own perspective and style. Lexie post-Innes is content with her work and occasional liaisons, believing that her life will remain essentially static. Her commitment to her own autonomy has only deepened after the loss of Innes, and she has no aspirations to become a wife and mother. Her relationship with Felix works (to the extent that it does) because other than the two times he proposes marriage, he respects her independence and asks nothing of her beyond her presence. Her pregnancy, however, comes with additional societal pressure to marry; that she continues to refuse to do so indicates her deep independence. She gives birth alone by choice, she lives with only Theo by choice, and she even brings Theo with her to work by choice. Moreover, she does not seek refuge from social scrutiny by indulging others’ misconceptions. She insists at the hospital that she is a “Miss” rather than a “Mrs.”; when she later meets Robert Lowe, she again notes that she is not married to Felix. Her honesty on this point underscores that her singleness is a principled choice to be her own person.
With the birth of her son, however, Lexie can no longer live exclusively for herself. This is what Felix anticipates when he comments that Lexie doesn’t seem the “maternal type,” but the novel suggests that the mother-child bond is a special kind of relationship where the normal rules do not apply. Returning home after giving birth, Lexie reflects that “she went to the hospital as one person and she comes back as two” (235). The phrasing suggests that Lexie and Theo are at once distinct individuals and a single whole. Lexie experiences her son as an extension of her own identity, which explains why she can relatively easily incorporate him into her routines: “When Theo sleeps at night she goes to her desk to finish whatever she hasn’t managed to get through that day. She sometimes thinks that the sound of typewriter keys must be, to Theo, a kind of lullaby” (237). This passage echoes the moment when Ted glimpses Jonah with Elina as she works in her studio, developing The Universality of Motherhood.
The paintings that Laurence retrieves from Innes’s apartment for Lexie are instruments of The Transformative Power of Art. In this case, the paintings symbolize Innes’s love for Lexie, which lasts beyond his death (as his desire to make a will indicates he wanted it to). Legally, those paintings belong to Gloria and Margot as the next-of-kin. However, the paintings were Innes’s passion, so they become for Lexie a symbol of the relationship they shared. They also allow Lexie to maintain her independence—a benefit that makes material art’s ability to transform people’s lives. Lexie’s realization that she needs a bigger house could have led her to acquiesce to Felix’s proposals. It is Laurence again who rescues Lexie, convincing her to sell a painting to buy her home. Because of Innes’s eye appreciation for art, which is also the foundation of his appreciation for Lexie, he affects Lexie’s life positively even after his death.
The paintings and their value also link Elina and Ted’s timeline to Lexie’s. Elina’s discovery of the paintings in Margot’s dressing room reveals the connection between “Ted’s mother” and Innes. Elina is an artist and as such immediately recognizes the value of the paintings. Her reaction is similar to that of Lexie, Innes, or Laurence, but she cannot make Margot recognize the larger value of the paintings. For Margot, the paintings are only the symbol of how she finally triumphed over Lexie. Margot never wanted the paintings or shared Innes’s love or understanding of art, so she never understood or valued the paintings for what they were.
Unlock all 45 pages of this Study Guide
Plus, gain access to 9,100+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Maggie O'Farrell
