Page 20 of Days You Were Mine

‘I can’t get my head round it,’ Elizabeth says. ‘I have two prints of his in my sitting room at home. It’s like finding out you’re related to Van Gogh.’

We all laugh at this, and when the waiter comes over with menus, Ben orders a bottle of champagne.

‘You’ve found your real parents. This is big. This is huge. We should be celebrating.’

Ben knows better than anyone how much I’ve fantasised about this reunion over the years. He was the only one at school who knew I was adopted – I followed my mother’s advice and kept the facts of my birth tightly wrapped in secrecy. There was one year when we shared a room, and after lights-out the conversation invariably went the same way. In darkness I could run with the fantasy. Was she a musician or an actress, this beautiful, loving girl who had fought hard to keep me? Did she live in London or Paris or Rome? Did she think of me every day as I thought of her? Turns out I wasn’t so far from the truth.

When the waiter comes back, we order without looking at the menu. Chicken and goat’s cheese mousse to start for all four of us, followed by scallops for the girls, calves’ liver for me and Ben. When you’ve found your favourite restaurant serving your favourite food, why would you bother to change?

Ben wants to know every detail we can remember from the lunch with Rick. At art school, he was dubbed ‘the new Richard Fields’ on account of his gritty, overexaggerated portraiture. To say that Rick is his hero is missing the point. In his head, BenisRichard Fields.

‘Everything he owns is exquisite,’ Hannah says. ‘Even the sofas are a work of art. And he’s an incredible cook.’

Elizabeth says, ‘And can you see them as a couple? Back in the day?’

‘They still are in a way, aren’t they?’ Hannah looks at me. ‘It was like we were a couple and they were a couple. If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.’

‘So why did they break up?’

Elizabeth is a child psychologist, and gentle persistence is her defining trait. The number of times she has pushed me through a conversation I haven’t wanted to have.

‘Pretty obvious, isn’t it? He’s gay. I imagine it just took him a while to come out.’

‘But they could have kept you, couldn’t they? Couldn’t Richard, Rick, have supported Alice? Couldn’t he have left art school and gone out on his own? He had the talent.’

Ben intervenes as I knew he would. He picks up the bottle of champagne and pours the rest of it into our glasses, painstakingly divided so we all end up with the same amount.

‘Elizabeth,’ he says. ‘My love, my darling. You are trampling on our friend’s feelings with six-inch platform boots. He needs time to get used to it. Don’t grill him.’

‘Sorry, Luke,’ Elizabeth says, blowing me a kiss. ‘You can always tell me to shut up, you know that.’

Over dinner, Ben tells us about his latest portrait: a forty-something hedge fund manager, commissioned by his wife.

‘The really gratifying thing is that they collect art. Weird, outré stuff they buy from graduate shows. And they’ve encouraged me to go to town on his absurdities. He has what I would call …’ Ben breaks off to laugh, ‘an excessively strong nose. And I’ve exaggerated it to become the focal point. And he loves fishing, so we’ve got him in his waders with a Picassoesque trout in the background.’

‘This is what I miss,’ Hannah says. ‘I’m dreading leaving Samuel, but I cannot wait to start writing again, interviewing artists, going to shows.’

‘Have you found an au pair yet?’ Elizabeth asks.

‘Not yet. The ones we like are always too expensive.’

The reality, the one we try to avoid, is that we can’t really afford for Hannah to go back to work. She’s going down to three days a week, which means her salary is virtually halved, and every childcare option we’ve looked at, including a nursery where the babies slept, ten to a room like an orphanage (Hannah cried when we left), would eat up all her income. We discuss the should-she-shouldn’t-she quandary endlessly. And we have decided that she should go back to this job she loves, arts correspondent on a national newspaper at only twenty-seven. If she doesn’t return, someone else will be parked up at her desk in a nanosecond. And although she tears herself apart each night, talking, thinking, fretting about leaving Samuel, we tell ourselves she has at least to try it. But she’ll effectively be working for free, just a hundred pounds or so left over at the end of each month.

‘If only my mum lived closer,’ Hannah says. ‘Or yours.’

There is a weighted silence while the unmentioned mother –the other mother– hovers in the air between us.

‘We don’t really know Alice yet,’ I say, ‘and also, she works. She’s an artist too.’

‘Not a bad idea, though,’ Hannah says, kissing my cheek. ‘We’ve got three mothers between us; maybe they could job-share.’

We are paying the bill and ordering cabs to take us home when my phone pings with an arriving text. Alice.

‘There you go,’ I say, flashing the phone at my friends, pleased, as if I needed to prove her existence. ‘She wants us to meet up with her and Rick on Sunday,’ I tell Hannah.

‘Great, invite them for lunch. It’s our turn.’

And then, catching the look of wistfulness on Ben’s face, she says, ‘Why don’t you both come too? You’re Luke’s best friend, it’s time they met you.’

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