Page 13 of Days You Were Mine

But then she moves away to look out at our little garden with its tiny bed in full bloom: irises, freesias, delphiniums (my other mother’s handiwork; she’s a fanatical gardener).

‘What a place you have here,’ she says, and does Hannah notice the way Alice’s voice shakes, her fight for composure? Her examination of the garden, I understand, is simply a decoy while she gets herself back together.

And yet with the presence of Hannah and Samuel, the relaxed setting of our own home, this lunch is the antithesis of our first one.

The food is perfect. Roasts are my speciality and I’ve really put my back into this one. The pork is scented with fennel seeds and cloves, the potatoes are hot, exploding little mouthfuls of crunchy sweetness.

And within minutes it seems Alice and Hannah are like old friends. They have art in common and a shared passion for Rodin. Alice tells us she still goes to the V&A at least once a month to sketch a Rodin nude.

They talk of the Young British Artists, Hirst, Emin, the Chapman brothers, and Charles Saatchi’sSensationshow a few years back, which Hannah loved and Alice hated.

‘I can’t stand this trend for fleeting, button-pushing art. The portrait of Myra Hindley was shocking. And? What are you left with? So Marc Quinn filled a head with blood. Cheap, disposable emotion, nothing particularly thought-provoking or enduring, to my mind.’

When Alice tells us about her and Richard’s time at the Slade, I find myself mesmerised.

‘There was a restaurant everyone went to at the time – everyone famous, that is, not poor students like us. San Lorenzo, you might have heard of it? Well, they bought one of Rick’s self-portraits and hung it in the restaurant, and after that, collectors and galleries were sniffing around him, even in our first year. That doesn’t happen very often. Rick was the real deal right from day one.’

Hannah says, ‘We literally couldn’t believe it when we found out he was Luke’s father. He’s a god as far as I’m concerned.’

‘You must meet him. He’s keen to get to know Luke, but we thought it was a good idea for us to meet first.’

‘What happened with you and Rick? Do you mind me asking?’ Hannah says.

‘You probably know he’s gay?’

‘So how …?’

‘It was much harder to be gay back then. There was a lot of homophobia around. And Rick was still confused about his sexuality.’

She breaks off to sigh.

The thing you need to know is that both of us wanted to keep you, and we tried so hard to make it happen. But my father was very insistent on your being adopted.’

‘If you and Rick wanted to keep me, surely it was none of his business?’

‘You’d have to meet my father to understand, and that’s never going to happen. I haven’t seen him since you were born.’

‘How awful,’ Hannah says.

‘My father went behind my back to bring in the adoption agency. I’ll never forgive him for that. He refused to give me any financial support and the only way for us to survive was for Rick to drop out of college and get a job. And in the endI couldn’t let him make that sacrifice. He had to finish at the Slade. He needed to become Richard Fields. And we’d have been so poor, you and I, living in council housing and relying on social security handouts. I didn’t want that for you, Luke. I’m sorry.’

Alice seems exhausted after this admission, exhausted and a little broken. Hannah, who has been feeding Samuel, instinctively hands him to her. I see Alice’s reluctance as the baby is settled in her lap; fractional, just the slightest hesitation, but I catch it. And I also register the seconds of pain that flash through her eyes.

‘Goodness,’ she says. ‘The weight of him. The feel of him.’ She sniffs his head. ‘That wonderful baby smell. What is it, milk, soap? There’s a sweetness, isn’t there? I’d quite forgotten.’

She is wearing a long necklace of black beads, and Samuel, nestled against her chest, grabs hold of it in his fist and pulls.

‘Oh you cheeky thing,’ Alice says, pulling a puppet show of facial expressions, eyes wide, mouth in a round, exaggerated ‘O’. And Samuel laughs, for the first time in his life, a deep-bellied chuckle that neither of us has ever heard before.

‘Oh Alice,’ Hannah cries, ‘you made him laugh.’

And Alice does it again, no trace of self-consciousness as she performs for our son, eyes open, eyes shut; a simplistic version of peekaboo that triggers another outburst of giggles.

‘You are such a sweet boy.’ She presses her lips against Samuel’s scalp.

There is this great big dent in my heart, no other way to say it. Once upon a time, Alice would have pulled faces for me too.

Perhaps in the silence that follows we are all thinking the same thing.

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