Mine: ‘A powerful, emotive and sensitively written story about love and loss' Louise Jensen

by Clare Empson

  Jake picks up a box of matches and begins to light the candles.

  There are records everywhere – in boxes on the floor, in piles stacked up against the wall – and I watch him flipping through the first pile, taking his time to select one. Exile on Main St. I’ve played it so often on the turntable in my teenage bedroom, the soundtrack will always be imbued with memories of home.

  ‘They wrote this album in the south of France. And we’re going to do the same thing in Italy. We’ve rented a house in Fiesole, just outside Florence, for the summer.’

  Jake lights the last candle and comes to sit next to me on the sofa.

  ‘There’s a lot of pressure with this second album,’ he says. ‘The first one made it to number six; they’re expecting the next one to be even bigger. And it’s complicated because – well, you saw the show – our music is very varied, not one thing to define us, and that can be hard to sell.’

  He leans forward to kiss me.

  ‘Shall we have some wine? There’s a bottle in the fridge.’

  ‘Wine would be good,’ I say, feeling that I need it. I’m not much of a drinker – Rick can testify to my weak head – but it’s hard to ignore the undercut of nerves, my whole body clenched with … desire? Fear at what comes next?

  Jake returns with an opened bottle of Frascati and two glasses, which he places on a wooden coffee table covered in music magazines, including Sounds, with its arresting picture of him. This, more than anything, underlines the surreality of the situation. I’m about to sleep with a rock star; there on the table is the evidence.

  He sits next to me and kisses me again, more insistently this time, and I close my eyes, expecting more, but he draws away.

  ‘I think we both want the same thing. But any time you want to stop you just have to say. OK? I’m a lot older than you and you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.’

  ‘I want to do everything,’ I say, and Jake laughs.

  ‘Oh me too. All of it. Shall I tell you what I thought when I saw you at the Marquee for the first time? I thought you were the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen and that whatever happened that night I must make sure I talked to you. And then you disappeared. Not to say that the album cover project is a ruse, but I had to find you.’

  He sketches an outline of my features with his finger, stroking my eyelids, nose, mouth, chin.

  ‘You’re so lovely,’ he says, manoeuvring himself so that somehow we are both lying down on the sofa, Jake on top of me, his hips pressing against mine, bony and a little painful. But his touch is so light, hardly there, as he strokes a pathway from my neck to my chest, veering outwards, exactly, expertly sliding back and forth across my T-shirted breasts, as though he is touching my nipples. The T-shirt needs to go, that’s all. I sit up and begin to peel it off, but he stops me, taking hold of my hand.

  ‘Let’s take it slowly.’

  He presses his mouth lightly on top of my breasts, first one, then the other, then moves his hand inside my T-shirt, seeking each nipple in turn.

  ‘I’m not sure I want to take it slowly,’ I say, and though his face is buried against my chest, I know he is smiling.

  ‘You will want to, Alice Garland.’

  I love the way he says my name, all the time, almost every sentence. On his lips it seems to transcend into something else, something poetic, majestic. He lifts his head again and stays there, not touching, not kissing, but the way he looks at me, the gravity of his dark-eyed stare, is more intensely sexual than anything that has come before.

  ‘The waiting is the thing. The wanting is the thing. You’ll see.’

  Now

  Luke

  Adoptive parents often feel as if there’s a chapter missing from the instruction manual. They can’t understand the child’s anxiety and feelings of shame, don’t recognise the pervasive layer that runs right through them, the sense that ‘I am flawed’.

  Who Am I? The Adoptee’s Hidden Trauma by Joel Harris

  We are on our way to have lunch with my father. My real, actual father, who just happens to be the renowned artist Richard Fields. Fields the artist is public property. His paintings sell for millions and hang in the world’s most famous galleries – MOMA in New York, the Tate Modern, the Pompidou. We had to wait weeks to get tickets for last year’s exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. And yet little is known about the man himself, which is why Hannah is hoping to get an interview with him. He’s gay, apparently, though never seen out with a lover. Alice says he is married to his art. And to her, of course, a couple throughout all these years it would seem, just without the sex. Or the baby.

  In the missing years – twenty-seven of them – I have always been focused on my longing to know more about the woman who carried me in her womb and who must, I figured, have felt some connection to unborn me. Now I am about to come face to face with my biological father, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. Do I want a relationship with him, this man who supposedly nurtured me through the first weeks of life? If you’d asked me this before I knew my father was Richard Fields, I suspect I wouldn’t have cared too much either way. Now it’s impossible to get beyond the fact that my flesh-and-blood father has two whole pages dedicated to him in Who’s Who.

  Richard lives in a converted warehouse on the edge of Smithfield Market, its walls painted blue-black like the old factory buildings in downtown New York. I press the bell. While we wait for him to answer, Hannah says, ‘I’m nervous,’ and I nod my agreement.

  But it’s Alice who opens the door, in a white shirt and dark jeans, her feet bare, toenails painted a surprising cobalt blue. Again, that strange, tilting feeling just to see her.

  ‘Hello, little family,’ she says, instantly putting us at ease.

  We follow her along a dark corridor, navy walls hung with Richard’s distinctive portraits. If I were to describe them, I’d say they combined the wide-eyed psychological intensity of Lucian Freud with the angularity of Francis Bacon, the crudeness of Beryl Cook.

  The corridor leads into an open-plan space painted entirely white – walls, floor, ceiling – and here at the other end of the room is Richard, coming towards us gripping a bottle of champagne by its neck. He is taller than I thought and almost boyish-looking with his blonde hair and tanned, handsome face. I feel suddenly, excruciatingly shy and I force myself to meet his gaze while my stomach lurches with unease. But Richard puts down the bottle and opens his arms wide.

  ‘Surely this is one of those moments when we have to hug?’ he says, and his smile is so warm and friendly I feel myself beginning to relax.

  ‘My goodness,’ he says once he has released me. ‘Let me look at you. Do you know, I’m embarrassed to tell you this, but I once tried to draw you as an adult, or rather how I imagined you would look as an adult. A bit like a police photofit. It was terrible and I see now that I got it completely wrong. You’re far more handsome. You look … well, you look just like … your mother.’

  For him, like me, it’s clearly a difficult word.

  ‘Wait till Samuel wakes up,’ Alice says. ‘He’s exactly like Luke, you will be amazed.’

  Samuel is in his papoose, face buried in Hannah’s chest, only his fine covering of dark hair visible.

  ‘Let’s get stuck into this champagne,’ Rick says, leading the way to a pair of sofas at the far end of the room.

  I notice a tremor in his hands as he eases the cork from the bottle, and I am glad. I think perhaps he feels the same as me. It is entirely overwhelming meeting him, on two counts. First, most incontrovertibly, for the fact that he is my real, actual father. But also his fame. I’ve never met anyone as well known as Richard Fields; it’s a shock just to see him up close.

  A word about the apartment, quite the coolest, most lavish space I have ever been in – what you’d expect from a famous artist, only more so. The walls are hung with paintings – not j
ust the portraits he is known for, but abstract landscapes too, with his well-documented fetishising of colour: hills in burnt orange, trees that are neither purple nor silver but somewhere between the two. Above our heads is a chandelier, a waterfall of glass baubles suspended from thin wires. Even the sofas, low, leather and segmented to make up two corners, feel like they belong in a design museum.

  Rick walks over to the record player and puts on Blood on the Tracks, my favourite Bob Dylan album if I had to choose. We talk about music and they marvel at the fact that we like all the same bands.

  For the first ten minutes or so I’m happy to sit back and watch. Hannah is used to talking to artists, and the three of them run through a précis of the biggest names, some of whom – Freud and Hockney – Richard actually knows. They are engrossed in their world and it is the perfect foil for my observation. Surreptitiously, I’m looking at Richard whenever I can. I’m noticing his physique, slim and fine-boned like mine, though he is a good few inches shorter than I am. His blondeness, his fair skin, his blue eyes are all his own; there’s no doubt that I take after Alice. Personality-wise, he’s funny, warm and absurdly talented. I’d be happy to inherit any of that.

  Samuel wakes up crying. It always astonishes me, the nought-to-sixty journey from comatose to full-blown rage, the few emotions he can express so stark and extreme.

  ‘I’ll warm up his milk,’ Hannah says, passing him to me and following Rick out into the kitchen. It’s impossible to talk or even think as Samuel arches his back and screams into my ear. I’m trying to console him, standing up, walking around, jiggling, shushing, but his rage, his hunger, clamour against my brain.

  There is something in his cry that taps into a primal instinct in me, each wail provoking a wash of instant coldness. When we brought him home from the hospital the first day, he woke in the middle of the night raging with hunger. And while we, brand-new parents, switched on lights and found breastfeeding pillows and handed this tiny, red-faced, screaming package from one to the other like an unexploded bomb, there was an unstoppable flow of tears running down my face.

  We got Hannah propped up against her pillows and the baby latched on and the lights switched off, and she reached out and took my hand in the darkness.

  ‘I had a feeling this was going to be difficult for you,’ she said, with the piercing insight that defines her.

  Now, as Samuel gears up for full-force rage, Alice is across the room in seconds. ‘Shall I take him for you? I remember how distressing it is when your baby cries. The pitch of the cry is designed to provoke you. Biological programming or something like that. I used to hate it.’

  She takes Samuel and sits down with him in her lap, and though he still continues to cry, Alice is right. From a distance, the sound is more tolerable.

  He twists his head from side to side, opens his mouth and closes it again.

  ‘It’s coming, little bird,’ Alice says, and when Hannah reappears with a bottle, she offers to feed him.

  ‘You can drink your champagne and look at Rick’s paintings. I’m sure you never get a break.’

  It’s such a touching gesture this, and also seeing Alice sitting there with our baby on her lap – my mother, in fact, with her grandson – fills me with unexpected joy.

  Rick’s homosexuality is more apparent here in his private collection. Many of the paintings are of young men, one a reclining nude on a sofa draped in velvet that makes me think of Manet, an inverted Olympia perhaps, but Hannah says, ‘A tribute to Modigliani,’ and she would know. We are engrossed in the art, the privilege of being allowed to see the paintings Rick has kept for himself. It amuses me to watch Hannah and see the look of intensity in her eyes. I understand that in her head she is constructing a profile piece on Richard Fields, storing up one detail after another, the artist as you’ve never seen him before.

  So it’s a shock when Rick comes out of the kitchen, cries, ‘Oh Alice!’ and drops a basket of bread all over the floor. ‘He’s identical,’ he says, his voice devastated.

  ‘I know. But, Rick, isn’t it wonderful?’

  Approaching the sofa, stooping to collect the scattered bread, I feel as if Hannah and I are intruding on a private, interior conversation. When Rick turns to us, he has tears in his eyes and he uses his index fingers to prevent them from spilling out onto his cheeks.

  ‘Sorry to be emotional. You couldn’t possibly understand. But for me, it’s like déjà vu. It’s you, Luke. He is exactly the same as you. It’s like being taken back in time to see our baby again.’

  ‘Our baby’; the casualness with which he claims me as their own. I’m not sure whether to feel elated or destroyed.

  ‘I felt that too,’ Alice says. ‘It is a shock, the first time.’

  Rick seems speechless for a good minute or two; he stares at Samuel, shaking his head. And it is left to Alice to expertly defuse the moment.

  ‘Look at that.’ She waves the empty bottle at us. ‘He’s such a good baby. Aren’t you, little bird, a very good baby? Is lunch ready? Need a hand?’

  Lunch is a work of art in itself; how many dishes on the table? Six or seven at least. Salad studded with pomegranate and feta, bulgur wheat flecked with parsley and tomato, an earthenware pot of chicken tagine, little dishes of hummus and baba ganoush, strips of flatbread, a plate of caramelised squash. It is almost too beautiful to eat.

  We sit opposite each other – Hannah and I on one side, Rick and Alice on the other – and from this vantage point I see how they are really the same as any couple. They pass each other dishes without asking for them and discuss the flavours – ‘More cumin this time?’ ‘I like it better with the feta, don’t you?’

  Rick even calls her ‘my love’. ‘More champagne, my love?’ he says.

  And soon, with Hannah’s talent for unobtrusive but expert questioning, they are talking about when they first met at the Slade.

  ‘There were only twelve students,’ Alice says. ‘And they were all brilliant, although Rick, of course, was the best by miles. It was absolutely terrifying. On our first day, Gordon King came into the studio with lots of balls of string and said, “Use the string, however you want,” and so we strung it up in a sort of complicated cat’s cradle right across the room. And the next day, it was a different tutor called Mick Moon, and he told us to dance in between the string and so we had to come up with a performance piece. It was excruciating.’

  ‘Alice, remember Josef, the life model?’

  ‘How can I forget? He was beautiful,’ Alice says. ‘I think we were both a bit in love with him.’

  ‘Alice was so talented. The star of our year.’

  ‘You were the one selling paintings to famous restaurants.’

  ‘And you were working on an album cover. We were all jealous of that.’

  ‘Really?’ I ask. ‘Which band?’

  And Alice says, ‘No one you’d have heard of. They broke up after that album, career over.’

  ‘Enough about us,’ Rick says. ‘I want to hear about your childhood. I can’t tell you how often I thought of you and wondered how the adoption was working out. Hoped it was, prayed it was, but we had nothing to go on. You can’t imagine what that silence feels like. You make the decision to give up your child for adoption – and then you never hear anything about them again.’

  ‘There’s not much to tell. My parents were quite a bit older than me and my dad died a couple of years ago. I grew up in Yorkshire, in a village near Harrogate, and went to boarding school in Suffolk. My mother’ – always a word to snag upon – ‘is very different to me. She’s wonderfully kind and generous and she loves me a lot, but the truth is …’ I take a swig of champagne, Dutch courage for this surprising burst of honesty, ‘we are not interested in the same things. I’ve never felt she understood me and I don’t say that to complain. I think I’ve been a mystery to her and that makes me feel guilty. I was perfectly happy
throughout my childhood, but I never felt like I fitted in. I was all wrong at school. I didn’t care about rugby or cricket or being in the school play or any of that stuff. And it was the same at home. It’s not that it didn’t work; just, I think, that we all wanted it to work better than it did.’

  I catch Hannah’s eye and she reaches out to squeeze my arm. She understands how I’m feeling, relieved to admit the truth, guilty at what feels like a betrayal of my mother.

  Rick says, ‘That makes sense to me. Can you take a child from one environment and expect them to fit perfectly into another, alien one? One they are not genetically programmed for?’

  His comprehension is hard to bear. He understands it now. Why, why did neither of them understand it then? Alice talks with derision of the life she and I might have had, living in a council flat, surviving on benefits. But what I see, crave, long for, is the true connection between mother and son that has always been denied me.

  Rick says, ‘The only thing Alice and I wanted to know was whether we had made the right decision for you.’

  They are both looking at me now, intense dual stares that verge on pleading. I tell them what they need to hear.

  ‘It was a good childhood. I wanted for nothing.’

  There’s orange polenta cake with crème fraiche for pudding and Persian coffee in tiny coloured cups – royal blue, dark pink, jade and lavender – painted gold on the inside. Everything Richard Fields owns a statement of immaculate taste.

  Rick says, ‘Before you leave, I have something to show you,’ and I catch Alice’s tiny, barely perceptible nod, the silent communication between these ex-lovers who have spent a lifetime as best friends.

  He goes over to a Chinese cabinet, another jaw-dropping possession, black lacquer covered with tiny birds in gilded cages, and comes back with a piece of paper in one hand and a pen in the other.