Page 91 of Days You Were Mine

Alice

The hundred pounds I earned for designing the Disciples album cover, the advance from my show at Robin’s gallery, means that Rick and I can survive the first few months of parenting.

Stick it in the bank or something, you might need it someday.How long ago was it that Jake spoke those words, as if he had seen the future, could picture me alone?

For the moment, there is a kind of freedom in this tiny seaside cottage of ours. The place belongs to Rick’s elderly great-aunt, who has been on the brink of death many times but is proving, at eighty-nine, to be a survivor. We’re glad of this, of course, but the situation sheds uncertainty over our future. The minute she dies, the house will be sold, its profits split between her nephews and nieces.

Now, though, Rick and I have it to ourselves, a pale-blue two-up, two-down in which to learn the roles of mother and father. Every day Rick surprises me with his aptitude for fathering, although why wouldn’t he make a good parent, with his unfaltering good humour and his huge, all-encompassing heart? It is because of Rick, I am sure, that Charlie begins to smile at a few weeks old. How could he fail to mirror back that daily injection of warmth?

Without saying anything, Rick also gives me the space togrieve, acres of it when I need it, constant companionship when I don’t. From the moment we arrived here in Southwold, I made a decision to hide my pain, to let it out only in private, at night when the rest of the world was asleep, or on my solitary walks along the beach. It was partly Mrs Taylor Murphy’s words about babies soaking up their environment ‘like a sponge’ and my determination that my son would not have his beginning marked by sadness, but also my need to find some light for myself. Just glimmers of it, just sometimes.

Midnight is my crying hour, and I look forward to the relief of being able to let out my grief and rage and guilt. I’ll hold Jake’s shirt to my face and inhale the scent of him, getting fainter each day, and I’ll whisper into the blackness, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ until I eventually become so exhausted I know I can fall asleep.

One night as I’m crouched weeping in the corner of the bedroom, the door opens and the room floods with light from the corridor.

‘Alice.’ Rick kneels beside me, taking hold of both my hands. ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’

And I tell him the thought that always comes at this hour.

‘It was my fault.’

‘I wondered when we’d come to that.’

‘Don’t bother telling me it’s not. I was there, I could have stopped it. I should have stayed with him.’

‘Suicide is never anyone else’s fault. How can it be? You might have prevented it. This time. But in the lifetime of someone with manic depression who had already tried to kill himself once? I’m not so sure.’

‘We’d have had more time. He would have met Charlie.’

‘And he would have been the most brilliant father. It’s so unfair.’

‘How can I carry on, Rick?’

‘You just have to, my love. Because you’ve got Charlie. And Charlie will always be a part of Jake. Do you know what I was really worried about? When you were having him adopted, I thought you’d have nothing to live for.’

That night Rick sleeps in the double bed with me, the baby sandwiched between us, holding my hand across his tiny back until I fall asleep.

And in the morning, when I wake to strong sunshine arcing in through the fine linen, the smell of coffee being brewed downstairs, the prospect of another day spent with my child, there is a kind of peace.

After a couple of weeks, I write a letter to my parents and Mrs Taylor Murphy, which Rick posts to Robin in London to avoid our secret location being exposed. I tell them I’m sorry, that I couldn’t separate from my son in the end. Babies are happiest with their natural parents, I say.

And it does seem to be true. Charlie has the sunniest of natures. Fed on demand instead of the cruelty of the regimented four-hour wait – how I hated hearing him cry just along the corridor; I could always pick him out from the other babies – he is content to lie in my arms gazing up at me for most of the day.

Rick gives him his first toy, an old-fashioned bear with eyes of amber glass, and he curls his tiny fist around its leg, holding fast. The bear goes everywhere with us: to the beach; to the cannons, where we picnic most days; on our daily pilgrimage to the shops in the high street.

I learn how to make clothes, sewing them by hand, first for Charlie and then for myself. I buy fabric from the brightly coloured bolts in the haberdashery shop on the high street and fashion dungarees and shorts and tops of orange, red and yellow.Sunshine colours for my boy. I make purple bell-bottoms for myself with flower badges stitched all the way along the outside seam, and when he sees them, Rick says, ‘You know, I think you could sell these.’

We are thinking of ways to make money. We drive to an art shop in Norwich and buy an easel, oil paints, sketchpads and canvases for Rick. He’s trying his hand at seascapes to sell to the local galleries, and being Rick, they are wonderful. But I can tell his heart is not in it. I try not to think about what he has given up for me and Charlie, his place at the Slade, his career at the Robin Armstrong Gallery. But it’s there all the time, a pulsing, low-level guilt.

In high summer, Southwold is transformed with crowds of holidaymakers, the beach segmented by windbreaks, a huge, colourful British mess, particularly when viewed from the pier, where Charlie and I love to go. There is a hall of mirrors right in the middle, and it is here that I first hear Charlie laugh. Every day I take him out of his pram and hold him up in front of each mirror in turn so that our bodies transmute: wide and short, tall and thin with elongated legs, or tiny as Lilliputians. I smile at him in each mirror and he always smiles back, ready to embrace the joke, and then, at eleven weeks, he laughs. Can I have heard properly? I make crazy faces at him in the mirror and he laughs again, louder this time, half gurgle, half belly laugh, a pure, sweet sound. Oh my beautiful boy. In this moment I am utterly happy.

I buy a tiny blow-up boat with a perfect baby-sized space in its centre. The first time I take Charlie swimming, he lies back and stares up at a sequence of flitting, Raphael-shaped clouds. He smiles, absorbed in his sky-gazing, and I tell him, ‘You are your father’s son.’ I look up too, memorising the exact colours, and I think that soon I will be ready to paint again, and whenI am, I will make huge sky pictures, in remembrance of my lost love.

In the evenings, Rick cooks supper for us. He has perfected the spaghetti vongole I craved from Florence, buying clams straight off the boats in the harbour and cooking the pasta to al dente perfection. Sometimes we share a bottle of wine, but most often we sit in front of the second-hand black and white television set we bought, laughing at the simple humour ofDad’s Army,Are you Being Served?andMan About the House. We sit on the sofa holding hands while our baby sleeps in his carrycot, and we joke that we are man and wife, just without the sex.

‘We’ll always have each other,’ Rick tells me when Charlie and I go up to bed. He says it every day, almost every hour, my dear, darling friend, as if by repeating it often enough he can simply erase my grief.

Now

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