Page 96 of Days You Were Mine

We never talk about Jake, because I can’t. As the weeks pass, it has become impossible for me to even say his name out loud, and Rick doesn’t mention him either. It’s as if there is a block in my throat; I can carry on, just, so long as I never speak of him. Say his name, Jake, or the fateful wordshe died, and I will fall apart.

Alone in the blackness of night is when I think of him. I remember our most passionate moments: the first time we said we loved each other here in Southwold, that beautiful lunch in Italy when he asked me to marry him. The day he turned up at the Slade out of the blue asking to see a student named Alice. But most of all I love to recall those daily insignificances: the cappuccinos, the pizzas at Kettner’s, the ritualistic lighting of candles. I think of us buying groceries in the shop across the road, or choosing our Christmas tree, or sketching and songwriting in silent companionship. That’s where I go in my head at night, back to the days when taxis rattled beneath the sitting-room window, and the air was scented with chicken and patchouli, and Jake was still alive.

It is mid-October when a quiet comes over Rick, indistinct perhaps to anyone but me. But I know him and I can tell he is worried.

‘Something’s up,’ I say one night at the Anchor as we wait for our shared chicken chasseur to arrive.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Something’s wrong. Come on, we tell each other everything.’

‘We’ve only got a hundred pounds left. What will we do when it runs out?’

‘You’ll sell some paintings, won’t you? I’ll start making clothes.’

Our pipe dreams of the summer seem just that, fantasies we spun beneath the hot August sun.

‘I spoke to Robin a couple of days ago. I asked him if he’d buy some of my seascapes. He was … pretty harsh. He’s a businessman and sometimes we forget that. He said, “You know that pedestrian shit doesn’t interest me. And it doesn’t interest you either. Are you really going to wreck your career for a child that isn’t yours and a woman you don’t love.” But …’ He holds out a hand to stop me from speaking. ‘He is mine, isn’t he? In a way. And I do love you, Alice. In fact I’ve been thinking, why don’t we—’

I know what’s coming before he says it, and I reach out and put my palm across his mouth.

‘Don’t say it, you beautiful man. You don’t need to. Everything you’re doing right now is enough.’

I take his hand and kiss it, and he smiles.

‘All right,’ he says. ‘But you’re allowed to change your mind. The offer stands.’

If Rick and I were to marry, it would go some way to healing the rift with my parents, and also his, who still aren’t speaking to him after he confessed to his love affair with Tom. I’m still old-fashioned enough to think it would be a good thing for Charlie to have two married parents. But how could I marry anyone who wasn’t Jake? And how could I allow Rick to give up the chance of finding happiness with someone else? It’s a sacrifice I could never let him make.

The next day he takes three of his seascapes to a local gallery in town and they offer to buy two of them on the spot for five pounds each. They take fifty per cent as commission, and he comes home and throws a five-pound note onto the kitchen table.

He’s laughing as he says, ‘That’s what they think I’m worth round here,’ but I cannot bear it for him: Rick, the star of the Slade, whose self-portrait hangs in San Lorenzo, who had acareer lined up at Robin Armstrong if only he’d finished his degree and stuck with his edgy, instantly recognisable portraiture.

But we carry on, Rick, Charlie and I, as October turns into November, bringing with it a new chill and the prospect of a cold winter in our tiny damp cottage. I’m worrying too when we are down to our final fifty pounds, when the gallery says it has enough seascapes and perhaps Rick could try somewhere else. When Charlie gets his first cold, a nose that permanently runs, a cough that seems to get worse, not better. He doesn’t cry but nor does he laugh; he lies in my lap, listless and miserable.

The impromptu fish and chips, the suppers in the pub, are forgotten now as we ration ourselves to a weekly budget of ten pounds and eat baked potatoes and baked beans on rotation. At night I hold on to Charlie in the darkness, his tiny fist in mine, wrapping myself around him for warmth. I talk to Jake, tearless now, asking him, ‘What shall we do? What shall we do?’

And then one morning just before the end of November, the answer comes.

Now

Luke

Hysterical, frenzied, ferocious: I cannot find the right word for my passive, peace-loving girlfriend, destroyed, utterly, by the taking of her small son. When I walk into the kitchen, she screams at me, ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ and collapses, sobbing, into my mother’s arms.

‘Rick is on his way; he’s going to Alice’s house and studio first,’ Christina says, looking at me over Hannah’s head. ‘He pleaded with me not to call the police just yet, he’s confident he can find her.’

‘Are we sure it’s Alice?’

Hannah lifts her head to scream, ‘Of course it’s Alice. Who else had keys? Who else would do something like this? You said it yourself, she’s completely obsessed with Samuel. I just hope …’

She breaks off, weeping, and I put my arms around her.

‘Hannah?’

She looks up, face streaked with mascara tears.

‘This is the worst thing that could ever have happened, but we need to stay strong for Samuel. We need to think clearlyso we can find him. And we need to keep reminding ourselves how much Alice loves him. That’s a good thing, right?’

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