Page 7 of Days You Were Mine

Hannah smiles and reaches for my hand. The parallels in our stories – albeit twenty-seven years apart – are uncannily similar. Except that we chose to have the baby, to keep the baby, to treasure the baby. I’m sad suddenly for Alice and for myself, for the life we were never allowed to have.

I remember so well the day Hannah turned up on my doorstep, red-faced from crying. Instantly, I feared the worst. Here it comes, the ending I project over and over. Rejection that burrs in my veins no matter how hard I try to ignore it.

But it was the exact opposite of what I thought.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she said, and it was all I could do not to laugh, for those seemed like perfect, shimmering words to me. I wondered why she was crying.

‘Is that so bad?’ I asked her, and she stared at me, confused, for just one moment before her face slid into a grin that cracked my heart in two and we springboarded into a future neither of us had anticipated.

Then

Alice

I love the life drawing class, it’s the highlight of my week. I love Josef, the Spanish model, who sits huddled in his blue dressing gown, waiting for the lecture to finish and the drawing to begin. I love Rita Miller, the life tutor, who speaks so passionately at the beginning of each class and always fills me with renewed confidence for my time here. Gordon King takes me down, Rita Miller builds me back up, week after week. And I also love the fact that within thirty seconds of seeing Josef stark naked, I am able to scrutinise and measure his genitals as if sketching an arrangement of fruit.

Every week Rita tries to teach us about observation.

‘Beginners think freedom is the greatest thing,’ she says. ‘But most beginners don’t have any freedom because they are in bondage to their limitations. Before you can be spontaneous, first you must learn to see and have a command of the language that enables you to express what you are seeing.’

She flicks her hand towards the small platform at the front of the class.

‘Josef, I think we’re ready for you.’

The life model removes his dressing gown and folds it carefully on the chair before ascending the platform. He drapes himself over a green hessian screen, notes of a crucified Jesusthere, a posture that has clearly been pre-designed by Rita. Head turned to the side and tilted down, each arm stretched out, wrists limp, hands dangling. He is rather Jesus-like, with his sculptured face, and his thin, impeccably defined body. Flat stomach, those strong, muscular thighs, hands with long fingers, curved now into the position of claws.

‘Think about what you see,’ Rita says. ‘Think. Not gawp. I’m not talking about folds of skin or the underlay of bones.’ She points to Josef with a flourish and he gazes back dispassionately. ‘What we’re looking for are those links and underlying patterns, those insights and sensitivities that at first seem hidden. Without observation you have no content.’

When I look at Josef, I imagine his backstory. A young man who was tempted away from a traditional life in provincial Spain by the wild hedonism of seventies London, a place where sex shops and pornography cinemas and strip shows and prostitutes line the grimy, litter-strewn streets and marijuana is smoked like cigarettes (right now there will be four or five students on the roof of the Slade sharing a joint). Perhaps he is gay. Or he’s ardently heterosexual, here for his promised sexual revolution, in a city where women – drunk, stoned women – dance topless at parties and engage in acts of defiant promiscuity. Perhaps, though, he is neither of these things. Perhaps I just have sex on the brain.

True to say I went to bed and woke up thinking about Jacob, the beautiful singer with his pencil-thin cheekbones, and the poetry of his songs. Never before has music affected me in this way. Yes, I collect the albums of the day – T. Rex, The Doors, The Rolling Stones (Sticky Fingers, released last year, played so often the grooves of the record have stretched and turned a whitish-grey). But something happened to me as I stood in that densely packed, smoke-saturated room watching Jacob singof endings and premature goodbyes. I think it’s that I comprehended – physically, rather than intellectually – the unity of sound and voice, the notes of each instrument, as though my entire physiology was absorbing it. And still it was more than that. The words Jacob had written, the words he sang, he believed in them, he knew them to be good. Self-assurance was the drug that drew me to him.

Now when I gaze at Josef I want to import these new sensations from last night, a feeling of longing, lust, envy, admiration. While I draw Josef’s eyes – haunting and mesmeric they seem to me now – I hear Jacob singing his lament to a girl named Sarah.

The sketch turns out to be the best thing I’ve ever done. This time when the students are told to gather round, it is my drawing they come to see.

‘Observation is fed by the imagination,’ Rita says. ‘What Alice has done wonderfully here is capture a sense of character that she can only have imagined. See the look of sadness in Josef’s eyes? A sort of yearning, wouldn’t you say?’

After class there seems to be some kind of commotion on the ground floor. The high-pitched voice of Muriel Ashcroft, the Slade’s receptionist, shrieks up towards us as Rick and I walk down the spiral staircase.

‘I’m sorry, but if you don’t have an appointment then I really must ask you to leave.’

‘But I’m here to talk to two of your students about a potential commission.’

‘Which students?’

‘A girl and a guy; the girl was called Alice.’

‘But which Alice? We have two.’

‘Oh well, this Alice is very – how shall I put it? She’s a girl that stands out.’

Rick and I arrive on the ground floor and Jacob Earl is standingthere, his whole face breaking into a smile as soon as he sees me. There is no time to prepare, and this first sighting causes another chemical reaction: bones, cells, blood, heart clamouring and craving beneath my skin. And I find that I’m grinning back at him, stupidly I should imagine. If I could freeze one moment in my life, perhaps it would be this.

‘There you are. This is my Alice,’ Jacob says to Muriel, who is looking really quite flustered in the presence of this beautiful man. Perhaps she’s human after all.

And how that ‘my’ sounds on his lips …

‘Very well,’ Muriel says. ‘Perhaps you’d like to take your “business meeting” outside?’

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