Page 54 of Days You Were Mine

The seconds before I speak feel paralysing, but Sarah doesn’t seem to notice.

‘She’s a friend,’ I say, and Hannah jumps in with, ‘Do you fancy meeting for a coffee on one of my days off?’

‘I’d love to,’ Sarah says, fishing her mobile out of her bag to exchange numbers.

As soon as they’ve made a plan to meet, Hannah scoops Samuel out of the swing and we say goodbye.

‘See you next week.’

‘Bye, Hannah. Bye, Luke. Bye, CHAR-LIE.’ Sarah laughs, pleased with herself. ‘I remembered his name without you telling me.’

‘Oh, actually, he’s Samuel,’ Hannah says, voice casual, as though this small slip-up means nothing, as though it isn’t the first solid evidence of what I have suspected all along.

Then

Alice

Pregnancy is a time of intense romance for Jake and me. My second trimester, when I feel extraordinarily well, coincides with a period of successive power cuts, and we live by candlelight. Jake always has thirty or forty candles burning in the sitting room, stuffed into wine bottles with wicker casings or the battered candelabras he collects from Golborne Road. Now we bathe by candlelight too if there is enough hot water, and if there isn’t, we go to bed early and he reads to me, book in one hand, candle in the other, held close to his face like a Dickensian protagonist.

Sometimes he reads poetry – not Blake or Keats or Coleridge, but the lyrics of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, James Brown. There is one song in particular that he reads more than any other on these nights, Dylan’s ‘The Man in Me’. When you hear Dylan singing this song, it is elevated to something heartrending and insightful, the story of a woman who comprehends all the things her lover tries to hide; its message is not lost on me.

Night after night we stay in together, working or lying on the sofa listening to records. And I get used to it, this intense domesticity, a new grown-up-ness to our lives. Arriving home from college to the scent of something Jake is cooking for oursupper: a Bolognese he has simmered for hours, lasagne to rival the one we loved in Siena, the fish stew, which means a trip to Billingsgate. He keeps a bowl filled with apples and oranges and encourages me to eat as many pieces of fruit as I can. He buys a baby book that details every stage of the first year of your child’s life, and while I have an extended bath, refilling it for as long as our hot water lasts, he will read out sections from it.

‘He’ll be laughing by the time he’s twelve weeks old.’ Or, ‘When he’s seven months he’ll be crawling and trying to pull himself up on the furniture.’

There is no question in Jake’s mind that we’re having a boy. I hope he won’t be disappointed if it turns out to be a girl.

As Christmas approaches I feel hurt that my mother still hasn’t tried to get in touch. My parents don’t know I am pregnant and I cannot face telling them, I can imagine my father’s rage and I won’t sully our happiness with it. Instead I send them a card I’ve made myself, a hand-painted winter scene, the kind of thing they like. Inside I write the most innocuous message I can manage.

Dear Mum and Dad, hope you have a good Christmas. Love from Alice.

But nothing comes back. They know my address; I had to give it to them so my post could be diverted here. It would have been easy for my mother to send a card in return. But she is in thrall to her husband’s diktat just as she always was and always will be. And my father never goes back on his word. He made me choose – Jake rather than them – and mostly I am glad that he did.

Naturally, Jake goes into overdrive with his Christmas preparations. We buy a tree and he lugs it home single-handedly, its tip trailing along the pavement. He won’t allow me to carryanything ‘because of the baby’, even though we’ve both read the books and have learned that essentially I am meant to carry on exactly as before. In Berwick Street market we find coloured lights and baubles and tinsel and we pile them on the tree so that hardly a single strand of spruce can be seen.

‘It’s a disco tree,’ Jake says when we turn the lights on for the first time and discover they flash on and off. ‘Very now. Very seventies.’

I’ve taken so much trouble over his presents for this, our first Christmas together. In the Record and Tape Exchange I find a Jimi Hendrix single, an original pressing of ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ from 1967, with ‘Highway Chile’ on the other side. It was expensive, which I’d expected; after Jimi’s death, his records quadrupled in price overnight. But worth it just to see Jake’s face when he opens it.

One lunchtime I take Rick to Liberty with me, an old-fashioned Christmas paradise with beautifully decorated trees on every level, themed in silver and white, the opposite of our cut-price disco extravaganza.

‘So what’s it going to be? Jewellery? Scarf? Shirt? Watch?’ Rick asks.

‘He has all of that. I’d like to give him something he can wear every day that reminds him of me. For when he’s away on tour.’

‘Why don’t you get him some aftershave?’

The lady at the fragrance counter is dismissive at first. Rick and I are dressed in our paint-spattered art-student clothes – lemon-yellow dungarees for him, a loose white top and flares for me – and she clearly thinks we have no money. But I have been saving my student grant with exactly this intention, to splash out on something perfect for my lover.

When I reach for a bottle of Eau Sauvage – price £7 – thewoman seems more interested. Rick dabs it on his wrist and holds it out for me to smell.

‘Bloody gorgeous, isn’t it? I wish someone would give it to me. Maybe you could drop a hint to Tom.’

‘It’s not Jake, though. It’s too … I don’t know, suit and tie.’

The shop assistant laughs.

‘So what’s he like, your boyfriend?’

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