by Clare Empson
He places the paper down on the table in front of us.
It’s a pencil sketch of Samuel, or at least that’s what you would think; a close-up of him sleeping: long lashes, fine dark hair, the pronounced bow of his lips captured to perfection, his head resting on a small clenched fist. But at the top of the drawing, the year of my birth, 1973, and a name. Charlie.
‘It’s you,’ Hannah whispers, and I’m glad she has spoken because I’m not capable of it. I don’t look at Alice, I don’t look at anyone.
Rick uncaps his pen and signs the bottom of the drawing with a flourish. Richard Fields, the same curlicue signature, instantly recognisable to me from the print we have at home. He slides it towards me.
‘It’s for you, Luke,’ and my heart turns itself inside out.
I pick up the drawing – this tiny time bomb from my past – and clasp it against my chest. I shake my head, too blown apart to speak. But Rick understands, I can see that. He reaches out and squeezes my shoulder quickly.
‘It’s absolutely miraculous to have you back in our lives,’ he says.
Then
Alice
Sex with Jacob turns out to be a lesson in longing. And waiting. He wasn’t joking about that. The teasing, the painfully slow removal of each garment, the stroking of one part of my body, his touch so devastatingly effective that I no longer care about the noise I am making, and then, just when I think this is it, he begins all over again somewhere else. I didn’t know that the feeling of his lips pressed against the arch of my foot could trigger a short, sharp pathway of desperation that leads straight to my groin. Or that talking, non-stop in Jacob’s case, could drive me to the edge of insanity. He tells me what he’s going to do, he tells me what he likes.
‘I think this might be my favourite part,’ he says, before pressing his mouth very exactly beneath my hipbone, a light line of kisses from one side to the other.
I sit up and try to kiss him too.
But he pushes me down again, gently.
‘I’d like to do things to you as well.’
‘And you will. I’m looking forward to that.’
Always in his voice I hear the smile.
He turns me over and I wait, unseeing, for the feel of his lips, always longer than I want to wait, never where I expect them to be. He smoothes his palm over the curve of my bottom, follows it with the light flicker of his tongue.
‘This I like very much,’ he says.
He slides his fingers inside me, first one, then another, moving them backwards and forwards until I think I have reached the point of no return. My mind is empty, my body moves to its own rhythm, thrusting, pulling, wanting more. Yet just as I am about to tip over into orgasm, he stills his fingers and begins kissing my neck instead. And this goes on for more than an hour.
When we finally make love, I’m so riven by need I grip his shoulders tightly with my fingers and he laughs and says, ‘Ow, that hurts.’
And then neither of us is laughing; there’s just the feeling of him being inside me at last and the euphoria of being able to finally give in. Afterwards, we lie in stillness, hearts racing, and then Jake lifts his head from my chest and says, ‘Some business meeting,’ and my laughter verges on hysteria. Everything with him is magnified and I can’t quite work out why. There’s my inexperience, but I don’t think it’s that. I think Jake, somehow, is just more; he exists in high relief.
We sit up, both naked on his corduroy sofa, but after his leisurely exploration of my body, I feel no self-consciousness, none at all. Jake passes me a glass of wine and I take two big gulps, one after the other; I need the alcohol to calm me down.
He says, ‘I feel completely wired. What have you done to me, Alice? There’s no way I can go to sleep. Shall we smoke something?’
For the record, I’m the world’s worst pot smoker, though I try to persevere. I watch him crossing the room again, and this time he comes back with a sweet tin, the kind my father keeps in the glove compartment of the car, and a blue striped blanket, which he hands to me.
I wrap the blanket around myself and watch him work, opening up his tin to reveal Rizla papers, a lighter and a foil packet that contains grass. I’ve seen joints being built numerous times, but something about his skinny-fingered expertise connects with my brain and my heart and my groin. Already, only minutes later, I long to be in bed with him again.
He lights the joint, an elongated, tightly packed three-skin, inhales deeply and passes it to me.
‘This is probably the moment to warn you that I’m a lightweight.’
‘It’s very mild, you’ll be fine.’
I take several long, deep tokes, hearing the little seeds of grass crackle and pop, the tip of the joint burning vivid orange with flecks of yellow. I hold the smoke down in my lungs for a few seconds and exhale in a pleasing, dragon-like plume. I’ve kept going with the smoking thing because everyone does it and I want to fit in. I want my university years here in London to be the thing I dreamed of in my teenage bedroom, this vibrant, free-spirited, technicolour world where everything is possible.
‘What are you thinking about?’
‘How much I want to be in bed with you,’ I say, surprising myself, though Jacob smiles.
‘So now you can read my mind?’
He stubs out the joint in the ashtray, stands up and leans down to scoop me up into his arms, carrying me across his sitting room like a threshold bride.
Now
Luke
If Hannah and I were ever to get married, Ben would be my best man. I’ve told him this countless times and he finds it hilarious that I am forecasting a wedding in which my girlfriend apparently has no interest.
‘Don’t be such a groomzilla,’ he said last time I raised it. ‘You don’t need a church service and a piece of paper. You and Hannah are the real thing.’
Tonight we’re meeting Ben and his girlfriend Elizabeth at Kensington Place. Favourite restaurant and favourite people. I could not be looking forward to it more.
Hannah is wearing a black dress from pre-pregnancy days, with tiny straps and multicoloured zigzags across the front. Her wild hair is pulled back in a velvet scrunchy and twisted up into a knot; she is wearing gold hoop earrings and dark lipstick. She is so beautiful, it seems to me she could trigger a cardiac arrest. I tell her this as we pass through the restaurant’s revolving doors, and she laughs.
‘I can’t decide whether you’re good for my ego or appalling. I might become horribly conceited if you carry on like this.’
Ben and Elizabeth are sitting at the back of the restaurant, side by side on a red leather banquette. He half rises when he sees us and raises his fist in a comrade salute, an old prep-school joke we haven’t managed to shake.
Ben, like Hannah, comes from tactile parentage, and he grasps us into a three-way hug that goes on for too long. He enjoys my discomfort; it makes him laugh to see me squirm.
It’s six weeks since we’ve seen each other, and there are vital topics to discuss. Most pressingly, what’s it like having found my real parents?
‘I can’t believe you haven’t met them yet,’ I say casually, shrugging on this suit of normalcy to see if it will fit. Me, son of Richard Fields and Alice Garland. He’s my dad, didn’t you know?
But I will never fool Ben.
‘And how many times have you seen them exactly? Twice?’
‘Alice three times, Rick once.’
‘I can’t get my head round it,’ Elizabeth says. ‘I have two prints of his in my sitting room at home. It’s like finding out you’re related to Van Gogh.’
We all laugh at this, and when the waiter comes over with menus, Ben orders a bottle of champagne.
‘You’ve found your real parents. This is big. This is huge. We should be celebrating.’
Ben knows better than anyone how much I’ve fantasised about this reun
ion over the years. He was the only one at school who knew I was adopted – I followed my mother’s advice and kept the facts of my birth tightly wrapped in secrecy. There was one year when we shared a room, and after lights-out the conversation invariably went the same way. In darkness I could run with the fantasy. Was she a musician or an actress, this beautiful, loving girl who had fought hard to keep me? Did she live in London or Paris or Rome? Did she think of me every day as I thought of her? Turns out I wasn’t so far from the truth.
When the waiter comes back, we order without looking at the menu. Chicken and goat’s cheese mousse to start for all four of us, followed by scallops for the girls, calves’ liver for me and Ben. When you’ve found your favourite restaurant serving your favourite food, why would you bother to change?
Ben wants to know every detail we can remember from the lunch with Rick. At art school, he was dubbed ‘the new Richard Fields’ on account of his gritty, overexaggerated portraiture. To say that Rick is his hero is missing the point. In his head, Ben is Richard Fields.
‘Everything he owns is wildly beautiful,’ Hannah says. ‘Even the sofas are a work of art. And he’s an incredible cook.’
Elizabeth says, ‘And can you see them as a couple? Back in the day?’
‘They still are in a way, aren’t they?’ Hannah looks at me. ‘It was like we were a couple and they were a couple. If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.’
‘So why did they break up?’
Elizabeth is a child psychologist, and gentle persistence is her defining trait. The number of times she has pushed me through a conversation I haven’t wanted to have.
‘Pretty obvious, isn’t it? He’s gay. I imagine it just took him a while to come out.’
‘But they could have kept you, couldn’t they? Couldn’t Richard, Rick, have supported Alice? Couldn’t he have left art school and gone out on his own? He had the talent.’
Ben intervenes as I knew he would. He picks up the bottle of champagne and pours the rest of it into our glasses, painstakingly divided so we all end up with the same amount.
‘Elizabeth,’ he says. ‘My love, my darling. You are trampling on our friend’s feelings with six-inch platform boots. He needs time to get used to it. Don’t grill him.’
‘Sorry, Luke,’ Elizabeth says, blowing me a kiss. ‘You can always tell me to shut up, you know that.’
Over dinner, Ben tells us about his latest portrait: a forty-something hedge fund manager, commissioned by his wife.
‘The really gratifying thing is that they collect art. Weird, outré stuff they buy from graduate shows. And they’ve encouraged me to go to town on his absurdities. He has what I would call …’ Ben breaks off to laugh, ‘an excessively strong nose. And I’ve exaggerated it to become the focal point. And he loves fishing, so we’ve got him in his waders with a Picassoesque trout in the background.’
‘This is what I miss,’ Hannah says. ‘I’m dreading leaving Samuel, but I cannot wait to start writing again, interviewing artists, going to shows.’
‘Have you found an au pair yet?’ Elizabeth asks.
‘Not yet. The ones we like are always too expensive.’
The reality, the one we try to avoid, is that we can’t really afford for Hannah to go back to work. She’s going down to three days a week, which means her salary is virtually halved, and every childcare option we’ve looked at, including a nursery where the babies slept lined up in cots like a Romanian orphanage (Hannah cried when we left), would eat up all her income. We discuss the should-she-shouldn’t-she quandary endlessly. And we have decided that she should go back to this job she loves, arts correspondent on a national newspaper at only twenty-seven. If she doesn’t return, someone else will be parked up at her desk in a nanosecond. And although she tears herself apart each night, talking, thinking, fretting about leaving Samuel, we tell ourselves she has at least to try it. But she’ll effectively be working for free, just a hundred pounds or so left over at the end of each month.
‘If only my mum lived closer,’ Hannah says. ‘Or yours.’
There is a weighted silence while the unmentioned mother – the other mother – hovers in the air between us.
‘We don’t really know Alice yet,’ I say, ‘and also, she works. She’s an artist too.’
‘Not a bad idea, though,’ Hannah says, kissing my cheek. ‘We’ve got three mothers between us; maybe they could job-share.’
We are paying the bill and ordering cabs to take us home when my phone pings with an arriving text. Alice.
‘There you go,’ I say, flashing the phone at my friends, pleased, as if I needed to prove her existence. ‘She wants us to meet up with her and Rick on Sunday,’ I tell Hannah.
‘Great, invite them for lunch. It’s our turn.’
And then, catching the look of wistfulness on Ben’s face, she says, ‘Why don’t you both come too? You’re Luke’s best friend, it’s time they met you.’
Then
Alice
I slide into class ten minutes late, wearing the jeans of yesterday with a blue striped shirt Jake has lent me, which Rick notices immediately. He makes his eyes enormous and hisses, ‘Alice Garland, have you been collecting scalps?’
We are in Gordon King’s class, which is unfortunate because my mind is fried, my face raw from this morning’s intense kissing, my groin aching, not unpleasantly, from a full night of lovemaking.
I fetch the lithograph of the oak I made in the last session and begin to mix paint, four specific colours: titanium white, yellow ochre, cadmium red and ivory black. This restricted palette, made famous by the Swedish painter Gustav Zorn, gives me all the scope I need for the microscopic metamorphosis from bark to flesh, or rather, a hue that can be perceived as both. There is an art to getting the right shades to effect the transformation, almost a kind of wizardry. I know exactly what is needed and begin with the gradual reduction of black and yellow ochre; I will use the resulting greens and browns for the first wash of colour.
Just looking at these tones of bark can transport me back to the old oak tree in the field behind my house, with a hollow big enough for me to hide in. I might make a version with the hollow painted on afterwards, symbolic of the emptiness inside my tree. Not much of a leap to remember the first time I hid within the oak, aged twelve, the day my first full report arrived home from boarding school. A rash of B minuses and the occasional C (plus D for needlework, which I claimed privately as a triumph).
My father called me into his study.
‘Well, hello, Miss Average,’ he said as I walked through the door.
The words held an edge of jokiness that didn’t meet his tone. I realised in the next fifteen minutes as he railed against weakness and mediocrity that trying to please him would never be enough. I was a different girl when I left his study, with the whole of the long, lonely summer holiday ahead. I knew my father didn’t love me, couldn’t love me, wouldn’t love me, and from that moment on, my childhood became simply something to get through.
I am absorbed in my preparation, and Gordon’s voice, his presence right in front of me, comes as a shock.
‘What is this, Alice?’
His voice is quiet, and I know, from a whole childhood of experience, that a quiet, measured voice can be the most vicious.
‘It’s a tree,’ I say; not to be facetious, more as a preparation for what comes next, for the groundswell of indignation that will accompany my defence.
I am a woman who paints trees, humanised ones. I am being paid a hundred pounds to capture the likenesses of a band who are being talked about as the new Rolling Stones.
‘If you’d been on time, you would have heard what I said at the beginning of class. If your idea isn’t working, then start again with a fresh approach. Don’t waste your time and mine with repetition of a weak concept.’
‘Gordon, if you wo
uld hear me out, I’d like to explain why I’m painting trees and what it is I’m trying to convey.’
He nods his assent, his sharp-featured face tensed into acute irritation.
I tell him about the series of people trees, caught at the exact moment of metamorphosis. I talk about why I’ve chosen the Zorn palette, to find not just skin tone but the exact shade for bark, lichen and moss. I tell him that when I look at certain trees, I can see character and emotion, traits and flaws displayed in the gnarl and twist of the branches; I see gender, history, triumph and disappointment.
‘Very well, Alice. Since you’re so passionate about it, carry on.’
His voice is neutral, unexpressive, hard to read. But I am instantly buoyed by his change of heart, the first time he has ever listened to me.
I am immersed in my work and the next hour and a half flashes past, no thought for anything except the personality of my tree. Strong, bold, confident. The way I am feeling today, as if I am wearing Jake’s self-assurance along with his shirt.
At the end of class, Gordon leans against the edge of his desk and waits for us to listen.
‘In art, intellect is everything. Passion is everything. Curiosity is everything. If you have an intrigue, the essence of something you can dig and scrape away at until it becomes an actual concept, then pursue it. That curiosity and passion is the whole reason you are here.’
Across the other side of the room, Rick catches my eye and winks. Victory to you, tree girl, the wink says.
Our second ‘business meeting’ takes place in the Coach and Horses, a chance to get to know the band, Jake says, and so I bring Rick along for moral support.
The pub is crowded, but they’re easy to spot, gathered in a corner, their own little pocket of black. Jake has his back to me, so it’s Eddie who sees us first.
‘The art students are here,’ he says.
