Page 18 of Days You Were Mine

‘Really?’ I ask. ‘Which band?’

And Alice says, ‘No one you’d have heard of. They broke up after that album, career over.’

‘Enough about us,’ Rick says. ‘I want to hear about your childhood. I can’t tell you how often I thought of you and wondered how the adoption was working out. Hoped it was, prayed it was, but we had nothing to go on. You can’t imagine what that silence feels like. You make the decision to give up your child for adoption – and then you never hear anything about them again.’

‘There’s not much to tell. My parents were quite a bit olderthan me and my dad died a couple of years ago. I grew up in Yorkshire, in a village near Harrogate, and went to boarding school in Suffolk. My mother’ – always a word to snag upon – ‘is very different to me. She’s wonderfully kind and generous and she loves me a lot, but the truth is …’ I take a swig of champagne, Dutch courage for this surprising burst of honesty, ‘we are not interested in the same things. I’ve never felt she understood me and I don’t say that to complain. I think I’ve been a mystery to her and that makes me feel guilty. I was perfectly happy throughout my childhood, but I never felt like I fitted in. I was all wrong at school. I didn’t care about rugby or cricket or being in the school play or any of that stuff. And it was the same at home. It’s not that it didn’t work; just, I think, that we all wanted it to work better than it did.’

I catch Hannah’s eye and she reaches out to squeeze my arm. She understands how I’m feeling, relieved to admit the truth, guilty at what feels like a betrayal of my mother.

Rick says, ‘That makes sense to me. Can you take a child from one environment and expect them to fit perfectly into another, alien one? One they are not genetically programmed for?’

His comprehension is hard to bear. He understands it now. Why, why did neither of them understand it then? Alice talks with derision of the life she and I might have had, living in a council flat, surviving on benefits. But what I see, crave, long for, is the true connection between mother and son that has always been denied me.

Rick says, ‘The only thing Alice and I wanted to know was whether we had made the right decision for you.’

They are both looking at me now, intense dual stares that verge on pleading. I tell them what they need to hear.

‘It was a good childhood. I wanted for nothing.’

There’s orange polenta cake with crème fraiche for pudding and Persian coffee in tiny coloured cups – royal blue, dark pink, jade and lavender – painted gold on the inside. Everything Richard Fields owns a statement of immaculate taste.

Rick says, ‘Before you leave, I have something to show you,’ and I catch Alice’s tiny, barely perceptible nod, the silent communication between these ex-lovers who have spent a lifetime as best friends.

He goes over to a Chinese cabinet, another jaw-dropping possession, black lacquer covered with tiny birds in gilded cages, and comes back with a piece of paper in one hand and a pen in the other.

He places the paper down on the table in front of us.

It’s a pencil sketch of Samuel, or at least that’s what you would think; a close-up of him sleeping: long lashes, fine dark hair, the pronounced bow of his lips captured to perfection, his head resting on a small clenched fist. But at the top of the drawing, the year of my birth, 1973, and a name. Charlie.

‘It’s you,’ Hannah whispers, and I’m glad she has spoken because I’m not capable of it. I don’t look at Alice, I don’t look at anyone.

Rick uncaps his pen and signs the bottom of the drawing with a flourish.Richard Fields, the same curlicue signature, instantly recognisable to me from the print we have at home. He slides it towards me.

‘It’s for you, Luke,’ and my heart turns itself inside out.

I pick up the drawing – this tiny time bomb from my past – and clasp it against my chest. I shake my head, too blown apart to speak. But Rick understands, I can see that. He reaches out and squeezes my shoulder quickly.

‘It’s absolutely miraculous to have you back in our lives,’ he says.

Then

Alice

Sex with Jacob turns out to be a lesson in longing. And waiting. He wasn’t joking about that. The teasing, the painfully slow removal of each garment, the stroking of one part of my body, his touch so devastatingly effective that I no longer care about the noise I am making, and then, just when I think this is it, he begins all over again somewhere else. I didn’t know that the feeling of his lips pressed against the arch of my foot could trigger a short, sharp pathway of desperation that leads straight to my groin. Or that talking, non-stop in Jacob’s case, could drive me to the edge of insanity. He tells me what he’s going to do, he tells me what he likes.

‘I think this might be my favourite part,’ he says, before pressing his mouth very exactly beneath my hipbone, a light line of kisses from one side to the other.

I sit up and try to kiss him too.

But he pushes me down again, gently.

‘I’d like to do things to you as well.’

‘And you will. I’m looking forward to that.’

Always in his voice I hear the smile.

He turns me over and I wait, unseeing, for the feel of his lips, always longer than I want to wait, never where I expect them tobe. He smoothes his palm over the curve of my bottom, follows it with the light flicker of his tongue.

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