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Now

Luke

We live in a four-bedroomed Victorian terrace in Clapham, bought with a legacy from my father. None of our friends live in a house like this, but then our friends still have both parents intact; my father died from spleen cancer two years ago, a hard, horrible ending that left my mother and me alone. Ours has always been the tricky relationship, and now we no longer have my father’s childish jokes and penchant for expensive wine to take the edge off. When my mother discovered Hannah was pregnant after only three months of our being together, she begged us not to ‘make this mistake’.

‘Don’t put so much pressure on your relationship when you hardly know each other. I’ll pay for you to go to a private clinic; it’s all so easy these days.’

Recommending abortion to an adopted person – well, the irony is writ pretty large. Don’t make the same mistake your mother made. There’s that. And then the rather devastating underpinning: kill this embryo, scrape away this nucleus, before it has a chance to wreck your life. Don’t get me wrong, choosing to have a child with Hannah was no mercy mission, a debt repaid for the life I was given (I was born in 1973; abortion was front-street and fully available by then). Simply that the prospect of beginning a life with this cloudy-haired girl, with her pink Cornish cheeks and the optimism that precedes her into every room, was an adrenaline shot to the heart. And I wanted a child, this child, in a way I’d never wanted anything before.

This afternoon, arriving home after my momentous lunch, the front door is wrenched open even before I have my key in the lock, as if my girlfriend has simply been waiting the other side of it.

‘Oh my God,’ she says, grabbing my hand and pulling me into the house. ‘How. Are. You?’

The way Hannah cares about me, her concern, her interest, sometimes I feel I can never get enough of it. I try to be nonchalant, never to show how much I crave the full beam of her attention. But inside I’m just like a child. Look at me, Hannah. Look at me.

‘I’m good, I think,’ I say, kissing her. ‘Where’s the baby?’

‘He’s asleep. Come on, he won’t wake for a while and I want to hear everything .’

Sitting across the table from Hannah, holding hands, I feel the first small rush of elation. I’ve found my real mother. I like her. I like having her in my life.

‘Start at the beginning. What does she look like?’

How to describe another beautiful woman to your girlfriend? With honesty, I decide.

‘She’s tall and dark and sort of amazing-looking. People were staring at her. It was like having lunch with Helena Christensen. And before you ask, no, I do not fancy my own mother.’

Instantly, Hannah is laughing.

‘I’m not surprised she’s beautiful,’ she says, getting up from her side of the table and walking round to mine. She presses her lips to my mouth; a quick pinch to my inner thigh and my groin fires in response.

‘Shouldn’t we be making the most of him being asleep?’

I slide both hands inside her T-shirt, inch by inch moving up her belly towards her breasts.

‘Oh God,’ she says.

What I love about Hannah is that our passion is equally matched. One expert touch and she’ll drop everything, the burn between us mutual and instantaneous. Harder with a baby, of course, especially when that baby sleeps sandwiched between you at night.

She pushes my hands away.

‘Later,’ she says. ‘I need to hear about Alice.’

I tell her the few details my birth mother shared about her life. She lives in Chiswick, she’s single with no other children, she’s an artist. She paints portraits of pets for rich old ladies.

‘What about Richard?’

Hannah is a diehard Fields fan. We have a print of one of his most famous paintings – The Exhibitionist – on the wall opposite. It’s a portrait of a show-off dancing for her enraptured parents. She’s overweight and dressed in a sequinned purple leotard and top hat; you can tell she isn’t very good by the gawkish positioning of her limbs.

‘She and Richard are still best friends. They talk every day, see each other most weeks. She didn’t tell me much about them being together; I got the impression it was just a fling. He’s gay, after all.’

‘Do you think he might be up for an interview?’ Hannah has the grace to laugh as she says it.

At the Sunday Times Culture section where Hannah works, there is an unwritten hit list of ultimate but almost impossible-to-get interviewees. Richard Fields is at the top of that list and Hannah has been trying to get a profile piece with him for years.

‘You’re a hard and ruthless woman. Doesn’t my twenty-seven-year heartache mean anything to you?’

‘Your heartache is the perfect in. Surely he wants to meet his son? You’ve a lot of catching-up to do.’

‘I get the feeling it’s just me and Alice for now. She didn’t mention Rick much. That’s what she calls him, not Richard.’

‘Can I meet her?’ Hannah grabs hold of my hands. She kisses one, then the other. Her excitement is so different to mine: pure, uncomplicated. She sees Alice as the plot twist in my story, the beginnings of a mystery solved. ‘We could ask her for lunch. She can meet Samuel. Her grandson.’

‘It might be too soon for her,’ I say, thinking it’s definitely too soon for me.

‘Did she tell you what happened? Why she couldn’t keep you?’

‘Not really. I got the feeling it was too painful for her to talk about. I guess he – Richard – didn’t want to go through with it. They weren’t in love or anything.’

Hannah smiles and reaches for my hand. The parallels in our stories – albeit twenty-seven years apart – are uncannily similar. Except that we chose to have the baby, to keep the baby, to treasure the baby. I’m sad suddenly for Alice and for myself, for the life we were never allowed to have.

I remember so well the day Hannah turned up on my doorstep, red-faced from crying. Instantly, I feared the worst. Here it comes, the ending I project over and over. Rejection that burrs in my veins no matter how hard I try to ignore it.

But it was the exact opposite of what I thought.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she said, and it was all I could do not to laugh, for those seemed like perfect, shimmering words to me. I wondered why she was crying.

‘Is that so bad?’ I asked her, and she stared at me, confused, for just one moment before her face slid into a grin that cracked my heart in two and we springboarded into a future neither of us had anticipated.