Page 101 of Days You Were Mine

Still nothing.

‘I’m Charlie, Alice. I’m your baby. I grew up.’

She does look at me then and I watch the comprehension flooding her face, the fear that follows it.

‘Forgive me,’ she says, head bowed.

I hesitate, not wanting to break the spell.

But then Alice turns Samuel around to face me and he shouts in joyful recognition. She makes as if to pass him to me but I shake my head, grab his tiny fist in my hand instead.

From somewhere deep inside I understand Alice cannot go through it again, the handing over of her child on a wind-blown Suffolk beach.

I sit next to them on the damp sand, make clown faces for Samuel the way Alice taught us, rewarded with his instant chuckle.

I feel the cool salt wind on my cheeks, listen for the rhythmic lull of waves breaking on the sand. A sound from now and then, a fragment of deep connection to my past if I can just hold onto it for a moment longer.

‘Let’s sit awhile, Alice,’ I say.

Epilogue

Samuel is sitting on a rug in the middle of the floor surrounded by gifts he has no interest in, and a wasteland of scrunched up balls of wrapping paper he adores. He turned one today.

‘Next year,’ Hannah says, ‘we should just wrap up some empty boxes and give him those instead.’

We kept his birthday party small – my mother, Hannah and me, Rick and Alice. We’re not ready to invite anyone else into our strange patchwork family, two mothers and a father who both is and isn’t one. We are still feeling our way and it is only thanks to Christina that we have managed it at all.

It was Christina who persuaded Hannah to give Alice another chance. My adoption, she said, had broken something in all of us – me, Alice and her. We were none of us to blame for what happened, not really, but what we could do was try to make things right. In other words,shall we start again?

I think her efforts to help Alice mend switched something on in Christina. It’s easy to forget she was once a woman lost in the past too, mourning a child that never lived.

The Alice that has come here today is very different from the one we first met. She laughs easily, she asks us questions, sometimes she’ll even share details about my past. And she’s painting again, not pet portraits or those odd pictures of Samuel, but vast great skyscapes which Rick says are brilliant and extraordinary, although we haven’t been allowed to see them yet.

Hannah has disappeared from the kitchen and my heartbeat quickens when she comes back into the room, carrying a large rectangle wrapped in sheets of bright pink paper.

‘Alice?’ she says and am I the only one to detect the slight nervousness in Hannah’s voice?

Alice has been standing over by the French doors chatting to my mother and she turns around with an enquiring smile.

‘I know we’re celebrating Samuel today. But Luke and I have something for you too. You can probably guess from the shape that it’s a painting.’

‘Intriguing,’ Alice says, still smiling, no idea of what lies within.

‘I managed to track down the collector who bought it from Robin Armstrong and when I told him our story, he said the painting had given him years of pleasure and he’d like you to have it.’

I’m trying not to look as Alice tears the pink paper and unveils the picture: a young woman cradling the head of her lover in her lap. Jake’s asleep, or at least faking it, eyes closed, lips slightly parted, his long dark hair pooling on the grass beneath him. Alice is leaning against a terracotta wall and wearing a forest-green dress with thin straps, one falls from her shoulder. Bold, jump-out colours, it’s a glorious painting. But it’s Alice you really notice. She’s not smiling; instead she looks out in utter contentment, her smooth, almost babyish face lit up by an internal joy.

‘Oh,’ is all Alice says.

No one else says anything, the room in utter silence as we watch Alice gaze at a painting she made long ago.

She stoops down and reaches out to press her palm against Jake’s painted cheek.

‘There you are,’ she says, so quietly I only just catch it.

I glance at Hannah and she grimaces. Is it too much? Did we make a mistake?

But when Alice turns around moments later, her face is serene.

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