by Clare Empson
Then
Alice
Had my father been watching the flat, waiting for Jake to leave, witness to our long-drawn-out goodbye on the doorstep as he headed off for the European tour? Did he see the way he crouched down to kiss my eight-months-pregnant belly – ‘Goodbye, baby, be good, don’t come out before I’m back’ – or our final kiss, which lasted longer than any I can ever remember?
The prospect of being apart is unbearable to both of us. Jake because he is obsessed with every aspect of this, my third trimester of pregnancy, the final countdown until our baby is born. Me because despite his efforts to hide it, I sense a creeping darkness in him, silences that last too long, a listlessness that is entirely out of character. Apart from the gig at St Moritz, he’s managed to stay away from alcohol. But I can’t help worrying about the damage he could do to himself without me to keep him stable.
‘Don’t let him drink,’ I begged Eddie the last time I saw him.
Eddie just shrugged.
‘I’ll do my best. You know what he’s like.’
When we finally part, I watch Jake walking off up Dean Street with a pit of fear in my stomach.
After he’s gone, I walk around our flat picking up things that belong to him. The half-finished book by his side of the bed – Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, Hunter S. Thompson’s vitriolic coverage of Nixon’s second win. Jake, Eddie, Tom, Rick and me – in fact everyone I know – are violently opposed to Nixon, to the continuation of the Vietnam War, its senseless wasting of life. Jake’s black army boots, discarded at right angles to one another, still seem to contain his essence. I’m staring at them, wondering if I should sketch them, when the doorbell rings. It takes a moment for me to register it. Another pressing of the bell, longer, more insistent.
As I walk towards the stairs, I pick up an apple from the fruit bowl – an unusual Snow Whitish red – and take a bite of it, thinking only of Jake and how much I already miss him. I fling open the front door, and there, hovering on the doorstep, black shirt and trousers, the off-duty-vicar garb he favours, is my father. The apple falls from my hand, bounces onto the doorstep and rolls to a stop at his feet.
‘Are you going to invite me in to the love nest?’ His mouth twists on the words.
I am eight months pregnant, no Jake or Rick to protect me, alone with this man who has cowed and persecuted me for most of my life. I don’t say no, I don’t slam the door in his face and double-lock it from the inside. I stand aside and let him into the dark corridor where once upon a time Jake kissed me so passionately that my sketchbook slammed to the floor.
He follows me upstairs and into our flat, door opening into the orange, red and purple room that has become my home.
‘Dear God,’ he says. ‘It’s even worse than I thought. Like some kind of bordello, I’d imagine.’
‘It’s called fashion, but it probably hasn’t reached Essex yet.’
‘If you can’t be civil, I’ll just come straight out with it. Sit down, Alice.’
‘I’d rather stand.’
‘In your condition?’ Again the twist of distaste. ‘I’ll cut to the chase, shall I? Your mother and I want you to have this child adopted so you can get on and finish your degree. After all, you’re doing rather well, aren’t you, according to the papers. There will be plenty of time for children with this musician of yours if that’s what you want. But you must not throw your life away. We won’t allow it. You’re not quite twenty and you have many opportunities ahead.’
‘Since when did you care about my opportunities? I thought I was a disappointment – academically and otherwise, according to you.’ I am clasping my stomach as I speak, for comfort, for reassurance, but aside from that, I feel calm. For the first time in my life I’m not afraid.
My father has his leather folder with him, a zipped thing he takes wherever he goes. I watch as he unzips it and brings out some kind of document.
‘Sure you won’t sit down?’ he says.
He is in his late forties – twenty-eight when I was born – but he looks much older. His hair has thinned since I last saw him, greased wisps combed over a naked pate, the lower half of his face dragged downwards, too much flesh around his chin.
‘No thanks.’
He hands over the papers.
‘Have a look through these forms. I’ve taken the trouble to get in touch with a very good adoption agency, one with an excellent reputation. They have a couple in mind, respectable middle-class people from Yorkshire who would be perfect. So if you and your … lover decide you want to have the baby adopted, which in my mind—’
My scream, long and shrill, surprises me as much as him.
‘Get out! Get out of here.’
‘For goodness’ sake. Don’t overreact.’
‘How dare you? How fucking dare you?’
My father strikes me hard with the back of his hand, a sharp smack to my left cheek that lands just beneath my eye, the sound of flesh meeting flesh. I crumple to the floor. He hauls me up.
‘Foul-mouthed little … whore.’
Violent eyes too prominent for their sockets, skin an alcoholic purple. I have seen my father’s rages many times, but this is the first time he has hit me. And the strength of the blow, his choice of insult, reveals the depth of his hatred.
I turn away from him, throw myself down on the sofa, face buried in the cushions. My sorrow is acute.
‘Just go.’
When I force myself to look up again, he is still there, staring at me, a concentration of disgust gathered in his face.
‘You will leave,’ I tell him, ‘or I will call the police. You are not welcome here.’
I curve my hands around my stomach. I do not think the fall will have hurt my baby, but the surge of poison, the stress and anger coursing through my blood, what of that?
My father points at the papers before he leaves.
‘I’d advise you to look over these,’ he says, and I hold my breath until I hear the click of the front door closing behind him.
How many hours pass? One, two? I sit motionless on the sofa, too shocked, too downcast, to think of crying. I miss Jake with a savage ache, but I won’t tell him about my father’s visit. I will never share the things that might push him down. I feel I can guard him when we are together, I can watch over him with vigilance and make sure he is safe. But I have no control with him away on tour. All I can do is make sure each phone call we have is a good one, and he hangs up feeling positive, calm, reassured.
‘What’s wrong?’ Rick says when I call an hour or two later.
For a second or two I am too choked to speak.
‘My father came.’
‘What did the bastard say?’
Rick knows my father as a bully, not an abuser; I hadn’t realised that myself until today. Not that I care, not that it matters. I’m a little flattened by it, that’s all.
‘Can you come over?’
‘On my way.’
I haven’t bothered to look in the mirror, and when I open the front door, Rick takes a step back and yelps in surprise.
‘Alice! Your face!’ He screeches it and then he makes a sequence of noises I’ve never heard him make before, a gasping, wheezing sound that turns out to be Rick crying.
We sit on the sofa with a bowl of ice and water and a flannel that Rick presses against my swollen cheek, tears running down his face until I tell him, ‘This isn’t really helping, you know.’
‘You’re right, I’m sorry. But I hate the fact that he did this when Jake was away. He’ll kill your father when he finds out.’
‘He won’t find out. Rick, you have to promise me that. He couldn’t handle it.’
‘I think you underestimate him sometimes.’
‘Hardly. Are you forgetting how he disappeared on a bender for almost a week? He’s so fragile, I’m only st
arting to realise how much. I’m worried about him being away.’
‘You’ve got to stop stressing, it can’t be good for the baby.’
‘I just need him home.’
‘And he will be. Come on, let’s forget about your father. Stop worrying about Jake. Can’t we do something normal and everyday? Just you and me.’
I watch as he lights all the candles in the sitting room, the way Jake usually does, so that this orange and red space is filled with a calming night-time glow. He makes tea in the cream and gold pot I bought at Portobello Market and flips through the stack of records, selecting The Dark Side of the Moon, a perfect choice.
While we drink our tea, he flips through our book of baby names, reading out the most outlandish ones. Jake and I have already chosen our names: Charles for a boy, Charlotte for a girl, both shortened to Charlie. But I indulge Rick while he suggests Aristotle and Prospero, and Cassiopeia for a girl.
And soon I’m laughing, the horror of today almost forgotten as I sit drinking tea and laughing with my best friend and his pitch-perfect interpretation of ‘normal’.
The last time, as it turned out, that my life would ever be normal again.
Now
Luke
It begins as a perfect Saturday. We sleep late, all three of us, or rather the late that is 8.30 and not 6 a.m., woken by Samuel, who rolls over and pokes his feet into my stomach. When I open my eyes, he is staring at me intently. I grin, a nought-to-thirty-second response when faced with this joy-giving human being, and he does his uproarious laugh, which is how Hannah wakes.
‘Hello, laughing boy,’ she says, kissing him.
She reaches for my hand and pulls it up to her mouth.
‘It’s Saturday,’ she says. ‘Two whole days of just being us.’
‘Breakfast in bed?’ I say. ‘For three?’
We get the weekend papers delivered, so I carry up a tray laden with tea and toast and the Saturday Times, a warm bottle of milk for Samuel. I open our curtains and the early-autumn sun spears in through the window, a Star Wars beam of gold.
We prop him up against the pillows and he reaches out for his bottle, snatching it rudely and shoving it into his mouth, a daily gesture we still find amusing. He guzzles with that fixated gaze of his, as if we starve him and this is his first bottle of milk in days.
‘Tea?’ Hannah says, kneeling up in my Cult T-shirt and looking heart-achingly lovely with her flushed, healthy skin, her smile, her wild bedhead hair.
‘Hannah?’ I say, full of the moment, and she looks at me, still smiling.
There are so many impulsive things I might say. ‘Marry me’ pops into my head on a regular basis, but Hannah has her own unswerving beliefs on that score. Marriage is more likely to lead to a break-up, she says, though she has no statistics to back this up. It’s just her hunch, her distrust of anything official; she, always, the Cornish hippy at heart.
I settle for ‘I couldn’t love you more,’ and she laughs and blows me a kiss.
‘Ditto, you ridiculous man. Luke?’
Her hesitation is enough; I know what she is going to say.
‘Are you feeling OK?’
I shrug. ‘Yes and no.’
Last night, when I recounted the shocking revelation that Rick isn’t my father, Hannah burst into tears. I think she is beginning to realise that I might have been right about Alice all along, and for once she is on my side, not hers.
‘But it’s the weekend,’ I say, accepting my mug of tea. ‘Let’s have a break from talking about Alice.’
We drink our tea reading Hannah’s review of a new play at the Donmar Warehouse; second reading for me, twentieth for her as she checks for any last-minute subbing catastrophes, that inveterate ability to exchange lyricism for flat, joyless accuracy.
When Samuel finishes his bottle, he flings it across the bed like a despot.
‘Looks like breakfast is over,’ Hannah says.
We plan our day while we shower, dress and pack up the despot’s essentials – more milk, a miniature pot of frozen puréed pear, the plastic set of keys he loves, his cross-eyed bear. Coffee first at the North St Deli, which has a little garden in the back, then a walk around the common, stopping off at the playground for half an hour or so on the swings. We’ll buy lamb steaks from the butcher for dinner and a bottle of our favourite wine from Oddbins, and by the time we get home, Samuel will have fallen asleep and we’ll allow him to snooze in the buggy while we nip upstairs for a little siesta ourselves.
The thought of this siesta, which might last an hour and a half if we’re lucky, permission for the kind of slow, elongated sex of before, gives both of us a glow. I press my lips against the inside of Hannah’s wrist and she exhales in that way she has, telling me everything I need to know. I like the silent, shared programming of sex; it has its own eroticism. No, we can’t fall into bed whenever we want to, leaving theatres and catching cabs on nothing more than a shared glance or a whispered desire as in the old days. But we can look forward to it for several hours, allowing the moment between us to build and build.
Hand in hand we walk through our neighbourhood, where our long summer of heat has forced the trees into a premature burn of red and gold, with the occasional shock of canary yellow. When Samuel is older, he’ll leap in the air to catch a falling leaf, and we’ll tell him to make a wish. In Larkhall Rise, we admire, as always, the tall grandeur of the four terraced houses, each one three storeys with a generous slash of garden at the back. We notice how the last one, the shabbiest, which we had earmarked for our future, has a For Sale sign, and we forecast how there will soon be a couple of bankers in it, Farrow & Balling their front door, and putting out planters with miniatures trees like a couple of full stops.
By the time we reach the deli it’s almost eleven o’clock and my head is beginning to ache a little without its early-morning injection of coffee.
We never come to the North St Deli, although our friends rave about it. Hannah is a sucker for the vintage china, loose-leaf tea and chocolate eclairs of the French Café on the high street. So it’s a surprise when the owner rushes forwards to greet us.
‘Ciao,’ he says. ‘You’ve brought my favourite baby. I don’t normally see him at the weekend.’
We’re both smiling, ready to explain, when the man crouches down to Samuel’s level.
‘Ciao, Charlie, where’s your beautiful mamma today?’
The moment stills, the air freezes; there are whole seconds before either of us reacts.
‘Did you call him Charlie?’ Hannah says, and her voice is harsh and un-Hannah-ish.
‘Yes, it’s Charlie, I know him very well.’
The man stands up and holds out a hand for us to shake.
‘I’m Stefano,’ he says. ‘His mamma Alice is a friend of mine; she comes here every day.’
What to do with this information? My beautiful trusting girl: I see first shock, then horror flashing into her eyes as she registers the full repercussions of this.
I say, ‘Alice is his au pair. I’m not sure why she’s allowed you to think she’s his mother.’ My voice doesn’t sound much like me either, gruff, macho, unfriendly. In any other circumstances I’d be ashamed of our rudeness.
‘There is some mistake?’ says Stefano, confused but wary. ‘Would you like some coffee? Some cake? We have a lovely little garden in the back.’
‘Yes,’ Hannah says, ‘we know about the garden, thank you. And I’m sorry, but I’m finding this information a little hard to get my head round. So just to be clear, Alice, your friend, our au pair, comes in here with our son, Samuel, but she says he is hers? She pretends, in fact, to be his mother?’
Stefano looks crestfallen and trapped in the face of Hannah’s cold interrogation.
‘I’m sorry.’ He shrugs. ‘I don’t know what else to say.’
Hannah shakes her head; sh
e seems to have run out of words. She bends down to the buggy, where Samuel is sitting wide-eyed and oblivious. She puts her hand against his cheek, just for a second, a heartbreaking gesture that says just the one word: mine. Then she stalks out of the café.
A few doors down, beside the entrance to the new gym we both belong to and never attend, she slows to a stop, hands to her face, curved over the pushchair, weeping. Guilt, shame, sadness, fear; the whirlpool is full as I put my arms around her, wondering, dreading, which bit of this terrifying new development she hates the most. It’s a good minute before she can speak, and when she does, she says not the thing I’m expecting – ‘How dare she? How. Bloody. Dare. She?’ – but something else.
‘Samuel thinks Alice is his mum.’
I’m so surprised, I almost laugh. Samuel is eight months old. His thoughts are centred on food and sleep; he doesn’t yet have the cognitive power to assess who is and who isn’t his actual mother. Does he?
But Hannah’s outburst is far from over.
‘I should never have gone back to work, it was so selfish of me. I love him more than anything and yet I’ve allowed a complete stranger to look after him day after day just so I could carry on with my stupid fucking career. When your mother, your actual mother, the woman who brought you up for the first eighteen years of your life, was generous enough to offer us financial support if I stayed at home to look after him like any normal, caring woman would, given the choice. And I’ve wanted to, oh you don’t know how much I’ve wanted to be with him, but I put my job first. And now this has happened and it’s all my fault.’
‘How could it possibly be your fault? Samuel is too young to understand about things like that. He loves you. He knows you’re his mum.’
I’m trying to hold on to her, but she shoves me away.
‘You don’t get it, do you? You don’t understand what this is about.’
