Page 17 of Days You Were Mine

Samuel wakes up crying. It always astonishes me, the nought-to-sixty journey from comatose to full-blown rage, the few emotions he can express so stark and extreme.

‘I’ll warm up his milk,’ Hannah says, passing him to me and following Rick out into the kitchen. It’s impossible to talk or even think as Samuel arches his back and screams into my ear. I’m trying to console him, standing up, walking around, jiggling, shushing, but his rage, his hunger, clamour against my brain.

There is something in his cry that taps into a primal instinct in me, each wail provoking a wash of instant coldness. When we brought him home from the hospital the first day, he woke in the middle of the night raging with hunger. And while we, brand-new parents, switched on lights and found breastfeeding pillows and handed this tiny, red-faced, screaming package from one to the other like an unexploded bomb, there was an unstoppable flow of tears running down my face.

We got Hannah propped up against her pillows and the baby latched on and the lights switched off, and she reached out and took my hand in the darkness.

‘I had a feeling this was going to be difficult for you,’ she said, with the piercing insight that defines her.

Now, as Samuel gears up for full-force rage, Alice is across the room in seconds. ‘Shall I take him for you? I remember how distressing it is when your baby cries. The pitch of the cry is designed to provoke you. Biological programming or something like that. I used to hate it.’

She takes Samuel and sits down with him in her lap, and though he still continues to cry, Alice is right. From a distance, the sound is more tolerable.

He twists his head from side to side, opens his mouth and closes it again.

‘It’s coming, little bird,’ Alice says, and when Hannah reappears with a bottle, she offers to feed him.

‘You can drink your champagne and look at Rick’s paintings. I’m sure you never get a break.’

It’s such a touching gesture this, and also seeing Alice sitting there with our baby on her lap – my mother, in fact, with her grandson – fills me with unexpected joy.

Rick’s homosexuality is more apparent here in his private collection. Many of the paintings are of young men, one a reclining nude on a sofa draped in velvet that makes me think of Manet, an inverted Olympia perhaps, but Hannah says, ‘A tribute to Modigliani,’ and she would know. We are engrossed in the art, the privilege of being allowed to see the paintings Rick has kept for himself. It amuses me to watch Hannah and see the look of intensity in her eyes. I understand that in her head she is constructing a profile piece on Richard Fields, storing up one detail after another, the artist as you’ve never seen him before.

So it’s a shock when Rick comes out of the kitchen, cries, ‘Oh Alice!’ and drops a basket of bread all over the floor. ‘He’s identical,’ he says, his voice devastated.

‘I know. But, Rick, isn’t it wonderful?’

Approaching the sofa, stooping to collect the scattered bread, I feel as if Hannah and I are intruding on a private, interior conversation. When Rick turns to us, he has tears in his eyes and he uses his index fingers to prevent them from spilling out onto his cheeks.

‘Sorry to be emotional. You couldn’t possibly understand. But for me, it’s like déjà vu. It’s you, Luke. He is exactly the same as you. It’s like being taken back in time to see our baby again.’

‘Our baby’; the casualness with which he claims me as their own. I’m not sure whether to feel elated or destroyed.

‘I felt that too,’ Alice says. ‘It is a shock, the first time.’

Rick seems speechless for a good minute or two; he stares at Samuel, shaking his head. And it is left to Alice to expertly defuse the moment.

‘Look at that.’ She waves the empty bottle at us. ‘He’s such a good baby. Aren’t you, little bird, a very good baby? Is lunch ready? Need a hand?’

Lunch is a work of art in itself; how many dishes on the table? Six or seven at least. Salad studded with pomegranate and feta, bulgur wheat flecked with parsley and tomato, an earthenware pot of chicken tagine, little dishes of hummus and baba ganoush, strips of flatbread, a plate of caramelised squash. It is almost too beautiful to eat.

We sit opposite each other – Hannah and I on one side, Rick and Alice on the other – and from this vantage point I see how they are really the same as any couple. They pass each other dishes without asking for them and discuss the flavours – ‘More cumin this time?’ ‘I like it better with the feta, don’t you?’

Rick even calls her ‘my love’. ‘More champagne, my love?’ he says.

And soon, with Hannah’s talent for unobtrusive but expert questioning, they are talking about when they first met at the Slade.

‘There were only twelve students,’ Alice says. ‘And they were all brilliant, although Rick, of course, was the best by miles. It was absolutely terrifying. On our first day, Gordon King came into the studio with lots of balls of string and said, “Use the string, however you want,” and so we strung it up in a sort of complicated cat’s cradle right across the room. And the next day, it was a different tutor called Mick Moon, and he told us to dance in between the string and so we had to come up with a performance piece. It was excruciating.’

‘Alice, remember Josef, the life model?’

‘How can I forget? He was beautiful,’ Alice says. ‘I think we were both a bit in love with him.’

‘Alice was so talented. The star of our year.’

‘You were the one selling paintings to famous restaurants.’

‘And you were working on an album cover. We were all jealous of that.’

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