Page 3 of Days You Were Mine

‘So that’s her,’ she says, without looking up.

And now I understand. My adoptive father means nothing to Alice. It’s all about the woman who replaced her.

‘How does she feel about you seeing me? Your … mother?’

I hear how the word hurts her.

‘She doesn’t know. I haven’t told her. I probably could, but …’

How to explain my mother’s froideur around the circumstances of my birth. She told me I was adopted when I was eight, just before I went away to school.

‘Why did she give me away?’ I asked.

It is, after all, the only question.

‘She was a young girl who got pregnant by mistake and she needed to get on with the rest of her life.’

‘Do you think she ever wonders about me?’

‘She doesn’t need to wonder about you. She knows you are happy, that you have a wonderful life, one she could never have given you. She knows you are lucky.’

Lucky, so lucky, the mantra of my childhood.

I cannot bring myself to share this detail with Alice, who seems nothing like the casual, carefree girl my mother described as she sits all broken-looking, surrounded by my childhood photographs.

‘Luke?’ she says, and it still sounds as if she’s testing out my name, as if she expects me to be called something else. Charlie. The name she gave me.

‘I won’t ever try to be a mother to you. That would be foolish.Shall we settle for friends?’

She picks up her wine glass and waits for me to do the same. We clink glasses, this beautiful forty-seven-year old woman and I, two strangers in a restaurant, connected by a past I have yet to understand.

Then

Alice

London, 1972

The hard slap of a magazine dropped from above makes me look up.

‘Thisis what sex looks like.’

The voice, strangely gravelled for a non-smoking nineteen-year-old, belongs to Rick. The face and torso now displayed beside my pseudo-Cubist still life is Jacob Earl, the dark-eyed, high-cheekboned singer of Disciples. He’s on the front page ofSoundsmagazine, black shirt unbuttoned, chest gleaming, objectified just like a Page Three girl.

‘Gig at the Marquee tonight. We’re going,’ Rick says, glaring down at my canvas. ‘Think the apple might work better in blue?’

He says it lightly, to be helpful, but with each new and perfect intuition I feel the familiar drifting to self-doubt. Am I as good as everyone else? Do I truly deserve my place here, one of only twelve students accepted on the fine arts degree at the Slade, renowned as the best art school in the country?

Rick is the kind of artist (slash sculptor, ceramicist, embroiderer; he can excel in any medium) who doesn’t really need to be here. He’s alreadyit, the tutors’ darling, the art school’s mascot, the collector’s early hunch. Last week he sold a self-portrait– his whole face rendered in vertical stripes of green – to a man who turned out to be the owner of San Lorenzo. I can imagine Mick and Bianca eating their gazpacho while Rick gazes down at them with his sharp blue eyes.

This afternoon’s session, printmaking with Gordon King, is the one I dread the most. A former pop artist (he distanced himself from the movement some years ago and now speaks about it only with distaste), his work sells for thousands of pounds and hangs in the permanent collection of the Whitechapel Art Gallery. He swept into the Slade four years ago and turned its printmaking department on its head. It is said that he can make or break a career, and three of his protégés now sell on Cork Street.

Rick is his favourite; he can stand beside him eulogising his colour choices for a full five minutes.

‘Gather round, people. See these pinks and greens and browns. See how the cherry blossom gorgeousness is offset by sludgy olive and shit brown? This is colour calibration at its best.’

Today I am working on a lithograph of a favourite tree and I am hopeful that all the nights I’ve spent frying my brain reading about tonality and chromaticism might finally pay off. Once I’ve drawn the outline of my tree (a mesmerising, strangely humanised oak) onto a block of limestone, I’m going to wash over it in a restricted palette of yellow, red, black and white. I’ve been practising for this moment all week, mixing up little tubes of paint in my student bedroom until I came up with three perfect shades of skin. Soon the tree’s branches will become flesh-coloured limbs, the thick round trunk a torso, its ribs defined by hand. I’m going to call itMetamorphosis 1, a pleasingly Kafkaesque title and the first in a series of tree people.

But Gordon doesn’t wait to see this transformation.

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