Page 25 of Days You Were Mine

‘What about your work, Alice?’ Rick says.

‘Huh. Painting pooches for rich old ladies? I can do it in my sleep. You know I can.’

‘I’m not sure it’s such a great idea. You did say you wanted to take things slowly.’

Elizabeth says, ‘But isn’t there something so lovely about the idea of Alice looking after her son’s son. Sort of full circle.’

A silence falls on the table again. Alice presses her lips against Samuel’s scalp, lightly, once.

‘It must have been so hard on you having to give Luke up,’ Elizabeth says, and I glance at Alice quickly. I recognise the fight for composure. It’s a battle I’m going through myself.

‘You have no idea.’

The pain in her face is almost shocking to see. I love Elizabeth, but for someone with a career dependent on her people skills, she can be immensely tactless.

Alice has made a hammock of her arms; Samuel is lyingacross them, feet and head balanced on her elbows. When she strokes his cheek, he smiles at her, full beam, irresistible.

‘It’s tempting, little bird, isn’t it?’ she says, and Hannah leaps up from the table.

‘Luke, wouldn’t that be the perfect solution? Let’s have tea and some of Elizabeth’s delicious cake,’ she says, just stopping herself, it seems to me, from adding ‘to celebrate’.

Then

Alice

Jake is cooking for Tom, Eddie, Rick and me, and he has thrown himself into it with his usual vigour and intensity. Not for him the standard student fare of spaghetti Bolognese or macaroni cheese. We are having bouillabaisse, made from fish bought at Billingsgate Market this morning (he left the flat at six to get there before it closed), and tomatoes cooked in his oven for hours until they collapsed into a sweet, garlicky mess.

He has made a rouille to go with it, and a green salad dressed with olive oil bought from the chemist, with day-old panini donated by Luigi, grilled and rubbed with cut cloves of garlic.

‘Where did you learn to cook like this?’ I ask him as I lay the table with additional knives and forks bought hastily from a junk shop near college.

‘Books,’ he says. ‘I found an old Elizabeth David cookbook and I used to read it at night when I couldn’t sleep. I’ve been collecting second-hand recipe books ever since.’

I want to ask him why he couldn’t sleep, but we are so brand new, he and I, and his face closes up whenever he talks about his childhood, so I allow the moment to slide.

Rick arrives first, a relief for me, with a bottle of wine wrapped in a twist of white tissue paper on which he has drawn felt-tipped stars and crescent moons interspersed with smileyfaces. He is wearing purple corduroy bell-bottoms and a white peasant top, bought, he told me, in a boutique in Neal Street selling exclusively female fashion.

‘Let me tell you,’ he said, ‘I was not the only male browsing the rails. And they were not shopping for their girlfriends.’

‘Wow,’ he says now, looking around Jake’s burgundy, orange and purple sitting room. ‘This place is cool. The vibe of a strip joint, if you know what I mean.’

Eddie and Tom arrive and we all squash around the tiny kitchen table with our tumblers of Mateus Rosé. Jake and I have been together for almost three weeks, and I know he is holding this dinner so I can get to know the band.

‘We’re family to each other,’ he told me. ‘Especially me and Eddie. The two of us grew up in the same town. There’s nothing we don’t know about each other.’

I forced myself to ask Jake about Eddie then.

‘Why is he so distant with me? It’s as if he doesn’t like me.’

‘How could anyone not like you?’ Jake said. ‘It’s just that he’s protective of me. He knew my family – especially my wicked grandfather …’ he laughed as he said this, but I caught the sudden darkness in his eyes, a film of gloom, ‘and he’s been looking out for me ever since.’

I can tell Jake has relayed some of this conversation to Eddie, because there’s a noticeable difference in the way he treats me tonight, asking me questions about college and home.

‘Alice’s father is a prize jerk by all accounts,’ Jake says.

‘Oh yeah, the wannabe vicar. Isn’t he a churchwarden or something, Alice?’ Rick asks.

‘A canon. He gets to dole out communion on Sundays. He loves that. And sometimes he gives the sermon – and if he doesn’t, he gives it to my mother and me at the lunch table. Hedid a whole sermon about Soho that he called Soho-dom and Gomorrah.’

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