Chapter 22: The Hand and the Wrist
He said, “You forgot the brandy.”
I said I would bring it.
He said, “No. Down there.” And he pointed at the floor, at the boards, and he was smiling, and there were people standing three feet away.
I said, “I'll bring the brandy.”
Then he reached out and took hold of the front of my dress at the collarbone.
My left hand closed over his wrist and held it there, and I turned in under his arm and took his weight across my hips and threw him.
He landed flat on his back on the oak with his arm still in my hand, because a hand kept on the sleeve is the thing that stops the head going down.
He got up.
That is the whole of it, and it took about two seconds, and I have described it perhaps forty times since, to people establishing whether those two seconds were the same event as a street in September twelve years earlier.
They were not.
I want to put the reason here, plainly, because it is the only thing in this book I am certain of.
Twelve years ago I let go.
I threw a man on a cambered pavement and I let go of his sleeve at the moment of the throw, because that is what you do in a contest when you want the score and the mat is doing the catching for you.
The pavement did not catch him.
I was not holding him.
He went down at the angle the ground gave him and the ground had a kerb in it.
On Christmas night, in a dining room, on quarter-sawn oak with no give in it anywhere, I did not let go.
I kept the wrist.
I kept it through the turn, through the lift, through the descent, and I did not release it until his shoulders were flat and his head had not moved.
A body will not put its own head down if the arm is held.
It cannot.
The arm is a tether and the shoulder follows the tether and the head follows the shoulder.
That is a thing a man taught eleven children in a village hall in 1994, and it is the only thing I have ever done that was worth anything.
He got up on his own, in about four seconds, in front of his mother and nineteen others.
He was not hurt.
There was no blood, no mark, no limp, and he stood up and pulled his jacket straight and did not say a word.
He was in the hall on his phone eleven minutes later, standing up, walking about.
And I put the coffee tray down on the sideboard, because I was still holding it, on the left forearm, and it was still level, and nothing on it had moved.
That is the detail I would like remembered.
Thirty-one pieces of silver, four kilos, and the sugar bowl did not go over.
Then I stood still in the middle of that room with my hands behind my back.
I did that without thinking about it and it is the single most useful thing I did all night, and I learned it at twenty-two years old from a solicitor with a bad cold.
Hands behind the back.
It looks like insolence.
It cannot be described as anything else.
Nobody in that room could later say she raised her hands, she squared up, she came at him, because I stood in the middle of a Christmas dinner with my hands locked behind me and I did not move again.
Twenty-two people.
Somebody's glass went over on the second table.
Somebody said, Christ.
The rector said, Now then.
Frances Price was on her feet, all the way this time, and she said, quite loudly, “He grabbed her.”
Julian did not move at all.
He was three metres away with his hand on the back of a chair and he did not move at all.
Margot got up.
She did not look at Damon and she did not look at the floor and she did not ask anybody what had happened, which is the fact that mattered nine months later and which nobody thought about for nine months.
She looked at me for about a second and a half.
It was the first time in three years she had looked directly at me at that distance, and there was nothing in it that I could read, and I have tried.
Then she reached past the arrangement to the place where her telephone had been lying all evening, for the photographs.
Somebody said, Margot, don't.
I do not know who said it.
It was a woman's voice and it was not Frances Price.
Margot picked the telephone up.
The room was still standing.
Nobody had sat down.
Twenty-two people on their feet around a table with the pudding plates still on it.
She dialled three digits.