Page 1 of Days You Were Mine

Now

Luke

London, 2000

The woman standing in front of me, shy, hesitant, an exact mirror to my own awkwardness, is so unexpectedly beautiful that for a moment I have no words.

‘Hello, Alice,’ I manage to say.

‘Luke.’

She speaks my name as if she is trying out a new language. I reach out my hand, but Alice ignores it and pulls me into a quick, fierce embrace instead. We sit opposite each other at a table laid up with knives and forks, glasses, a pitcher of water.

‘Water?’ I offer, and when I pick up the jug, I see my hands are shaking.

‘Wine,’ Alice says, and this first smile, revealing teeth whiter than my own and grooves around her eyes that hint at her real age, lodges itself somewhere near my heart.

With the wine ordered and menus on the way there is nothing to do but look at each other. Alice sent recent photographs of herself along with her introductory letter, so her beauty should not have come as such a shock, not like this. But she is clearly struggling with my appearance too.

‘You look so like your father, I’m completely … stunned.’

‘Richard Fields? He’s my girlfriend’s favourite artist. We just couldn’t believe it.’

There is something in Alice’s face here, a lightning flash of pain or sorrow, but she steels herself to carry on.

‘What made you decide to find me?’

I turn over different beginnings in my mind. The years on the rugby pitches looking at the touchline and wondering if my real mother was one of the women gathered there: the blonde in the fur coat, the lady with the ponytail. And later, the years spent locked in my bedroom, curled up in fury after another row with my parents, consoling myself with the thought that at least my actual mother, the person I truly belonged to, was someone different. And then once I’d met Hannah, the endless questioning. ‘Don’t you want to meet her?’ ‘Don’t you want to know what she’s like?’

It’s true that my girlfriend’s persistent fascination with my real parentage was a driving force behind this sudden reunion. But the real reason – my tiny brown-eyed, long-lashed boy – lies draped in his mother’s arms several miles away.

‘I think it was the day Samuel was born.’

‘That would do it,’ Alice says.

I watch her swallowing back tears, but I feel no guilt. She had a baby and gave him away. I’m a father myself now and I will never understand it.

‘How old is he?’

‘Three months.’

Alice places a hand against her heart as if she’s compressing a wound.

‘Oh,’ she says, though the ‘oh’ is really a gasp of pain. ‘I think this is going to be even harder than I thought.’

We look at each other, this woman and I, both wanting to run but trapped by the glass and cutlery-lined beechwood tablebetween us, by the polite convention of going through with our hastily arranged (leisurely repented?) lunch.

‘It’s all right,’ Alice says with a brief, businesslike smile, as though she’s shrugging herself into the position of adult, of parent. ‘If we take it slowly, we’ll be fine. Let’s start with the easy stuff. Tell me about your girlfriend.’

I met Hannah at the opening of a mutual friend, Ben, who has had the balls to dedicate his life to painting, subsisting on government handouts, sleeping on sofas and working right through the night to produce edgy, instantly recognisable portraits that have been compared, strangely enough, to Richard Fields. Hannah was filing a piece about him for her paper and I watched her walking around the gallery with her notepad, pausing in front of each painting before she scribbled down her thoughts. I wondered what she was writing. Who she was. Whether she was single. I liked the way her curly dark hair fell across her face, obscuring her eyes. She pushed it back, tucked a thick strand behind her ear, but moments later it broke free again.

When she started talking to Ben, dressed in an unfamiliar suit with his dirty white trainers, I decided to head over and say hello. A moment’s awkwardness while I waited for Ben to finish speaking.

‘There’s never been any question in my mind that I’d do anything but paint. It might have been nice to earn lots of money doing something else, but that wasn’t an option. I’d never let anything get in the way of my painting.’

He looked up and saw me.

‘God. Don’t just stand there listening to me being a dick.’

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