Page 39 of Days You Were Mine

‘That’s fine.’

‘You’re so wonderful with the baby. He clearly adores you. Do you have your own children?’

Inside I’m howling like a wounded dog. No. Please, no. I try to meet Alice’s eyes; the sorrow I am expecting to find there will be my punishment. But Alice doesn’t look at me.

‘Sorry to rush, Christina,’ she says, ignoring the question. ‘But I must get going. I have to go and see someone and I’m already late. Have a nice evening, I’ll see myself out.’

My mother crosses the room for one of her air kisses – ‘Darling, hello’ – and I hear the click of the front door with a plunge of sadness.

‘Do you know, I had the strangest feeling that I’d met Alice before. Of course, that’s impossible, isn’t it? She’s nothing like I expected. How did you did find her? Was it through the agency?’

Communication is impossible, throttled as I am by panic, by guilt, a tide of self-loathing that rises from my chest to my neck to my brain.

‘Mum, I’m just going to check on Samuel. You know we don’t put him in his cot.’

‘All right, darling.’ My mother laughs. ‘Though he’s absolutely fine. The painting trip was lovely, thanks for asking.’

We painted Samuel’s bedroom one weekend shortly before he was born, back in the days when Alice was no more than a figment of my imagination. We chose a vivid lemon yellow – neither of us favours those generic saccharine pastels meant for babies – with lime green for the woodwork and a little second-hand chest of drawers that we painted orange. We bought an armchair and a reading lamp for Hannah, who planned to catch up on novels while the baby slept – a concept that now seems hilariously naïve. In the first weeks after Samuel was born, she barely had time to brush her hair, let alone cross Tolstoy off her list.

I peer over the cot at my beautiful sleeping boy, who has one arm flung out, the other curved around a soft toy I don’t recognise. I don’t know what makes me look twice at this teddy, an old-fashioned one with sewn-on glass eyes, the kind Hannah has forbidden as a potential hazard. I retrieve it carefully from Samuel’s grasp and sit down in the chair, bear balanced on myknee. Its fur feels rough and matted beneath my fingers. On an impulse, I press it to my face and inhale. The mustiness of age, and behind it something faint, but it’s there, a sharp, citrusy smell I recognise. Alice’s perfume. It must have belonged to her.

And then, slowly, devastatingly, the truth of this bear’s origin smacks me between the eyes.

Then

Alice

Emancipation from my parents is at once exhilarating and terrifying. I have stood up to my father for the first time in my life, and although I cry throughout most of the journey home, Jake driving with one hand on the steering wheel, the other clamped around my own, beneath the tears is the fierce thrust of pride. I am not like my mother and I never will be.

‘Actually this is all very hip,’ Jake says, emphasising the word, because he always knows how to make me laugh. ‘We are living through the decade of liberation, and you, Alice Garland, are at the coalface.’

I move my belongings – two paltry black bin liners of clothes and books and about a hundred sketchpads – out of my student lodgings into Jake’s flat. My bottles of shampoo and conditioner line his bath, my clothes in two drawers he has cleared out for me.

‘Let’s buy you things to make this place feel more like yours,’ he says on the first night, as we lie naked and entwined on his brown corduroy sofa, surrounded by candlelight.

‘Everything I need is right here,’ I say, smoothing my hand across the S of his body, his thigh curving into his hip, the dip of flesh beneath his ribcage.

But Jake shakes his head.

‘I’m serious. I want this flat to feel as much yours as mine.’

He takes me to Nice Irma’s Floating Carpet to stock up on wine-coloured beanbags, joss sticks, a rug of swirling brown and orange, a wall hanging of a bejewelled Shiva.

He loves to surprise me with gifts, small things to begin with: an orange jug he has filled with sunflowers, a pair of striped woolly socks he bought at the market because my feet are always so cold, second-hand copies ofA Room with a ViewandThe Leopardin preparation for our trip to Italy.

Then one afternoon I come back to a little wooden desk in the corner of the sitting room, the kind we used to have at school, with a lid and a hole for the inkwell. Jake has filled it with my sketchpads and watercolours, my pencils in a holder made from a baked beans can rewrapped in bright blue paper. It’s so touching, this gesture, that unexpectedly I find myself crying, and he pulls me into his arms, his face anxious.

‘It’s meant to make you happy.’

‘I am happy,’ I say, crying even more, though I’m laughing too.

‘I’m your family now. And you are mine. We don’t need anyone else.’

Now our evenings are spent working, me drawing at the little desk, Jake on the sofa or the floor, picking out chords on his guitar, writing lyrics in his notebook. If he’s songwriting we work in silence, the focus of one motivating the other so that often it will be one or two in the morning before we stop.

We’ll go to bed exhausted and fall asleep straight away, but then I’ll wake again a few hours later and realise I’m alone. I’ll stumble through to the sitting room and Jake is always there, surrounded by candlelight, hunched over his guitar. Once I stood in the doorway watching, and the expression on his face shocked me; I knew I was witnessing something private,something he always tries to hide. I crept away and went back to bed, but it was impossible to forget the pain I’d seen, pain and something even more menacing. To me, standing there, it looked like hatred or despair.

With his music, at least, Jake’s self-belief is unfaltering. He never has any doubt about whether he has what it takes to succeed.

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