Now Luke
Now
Luke
The power of the internet continues to astonish me. Less than six months ago, I typed my birth mother’s name into a search engine and ping! a match came back with an artist named Alice Garland living in Chiswick. After several days and several drafts, I sent her a letter to introduce myself and tentatively enquire about the two of us meeting. And the rest is history. Except, of course, that it isn’t. For the dream I had when I wrote that letter is not reaching fruition in the way I expected. My real, natural mother might come to my house three days a week, but I know little more of her than I did when I first typed her name into Google.
Today in the office I find myself googling my birth mother again. Richard Fields and Alice Garland, I’ll try that. There’s a picture of the two of them – my real live parents, still hard to take in – at the opening of Rick’s retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery. I stare at them, Rick in a checked three-piece suit, Alice wearing a slim-fitting black dress, her hair up and exposing her neck, which is almost unfeasibly long and swanlike. She must have been so beautiful when she was young.
I find a small article about her that I haven’t seen before, in a local magazine called Chiswick Life . There’s a picture taken in her studio, Alice wearing a paint-spattered shirt and sitting in front of a comical portrait of a pug, exaggerated squinty eyes and rolls of fat on its tiny-toy body.
A quote from her makes me laugh: ‘This pug has a lion-sized character, the resilience and determination of a giant.’ Inside I know she’s amusing herself; outside she’s pitching for more business from her clientele of pooch-obsessed old ladies.
When I type in Alice Garland, the Slade 1973 , nothing comes up. I realise there are no press articles from that time on Google; if I wanted to find out more I would have to go somewhere like the British Library and sift through reams of microfiche. Or I could ask Hannah to look up Alice and Richard in the cuttings library at The Times . But what would I say? Hannah, I’m beginning to think my birth mother is not exactly who we think she is; can’t put my finger on it, just a feeling I have.
Samuel is bathed and ready for bed by the time I get home, and dressed in something I don’t recognise. Instead of his usual white sleepsuit, a pair of pyjamas, navy with ladybirds on them, sweet though not exactly to mine and Hannah’s taste.
‘You bought him some pyjamas, Alice,’ I say, scooping him up from his sheepskin rug. He’s sitting up now, though Alice has him propped against a beanbag just in case. ‘How kind of you.’
‘Oh, I made them, actually. I thought I might have forgotten how, but it came back straight away.’
‘You made these? I’m so impressed.’
Alice laughs, pleased. ‘Well, I’m glad you like them. I could make him other things if you wanted. Dungarees? I used to make those for you …’ Her voice fades, but I press ahead, keen to glean something from the past we briefly shared.
‘You dressed me in dungarees? I’d love to see some photos. Do you have any?’
‘I don’t think so. I’ll have a look.’
‘Really? No photos from that time? How long was it we were together? A month? Six weeks?’
I hate myself for the way I press her, but she leaves me no alternative. Surely it can’t go on, this reluctance of hers to discuss our past?
‘That’s right,’ she says. ‘It felt like barely any time at all.’
She gives me a sad smile and then turns away to pick up her handbag, and I curse myself for reminding her.
‘The fish pie is ready to go into the oven. It will take around forty-five minutes. What time will Hannah be back?’
Hannah is working late again but she promised to be home in time for supper.
‘Around eight, I think,’ I say.
‘Well, have a good evening and I’ll see you tomorrow. Goodnight, little bird.’
She blows Samuel a kiss as she leaves the room, and I succumb to the now familiar dip of disillusionment.
The fish pie is perfectly brown by the time Hannah arrives, and I’ve laid the table with napkins, candles, a bottle of white wine.
‘Thought we ought to celebrate your success,’ I say, pouring her a glass.
Hannah serves the pie, a gorgeous yellowy mess studded with prawns and chunks of salmon. We’ve eaten it several times before and it’s become our favourite.
‘God, that’s good,’ she says. ‘We are so lucky with Alice.’
We have a variant of this conversation most nights and I usually agree, but now I allow a little of my bleakness out.
‘Lucky in one way, I guess. But in another way this whole thing is starting to do my head in. I don’t feel I’m getting to know her at all.’
Hannah looks up at me in surprise, mid-mouthful, fork frozen in the air. She puts it back down untouched.
‘How do you mean? I thought you liked her. I thought we felt the same.’
‘Of course I like her. But I don’t know her. And wasn’t that the whole point? Mother and son being reunited. Spending time together. Forming some kind of bond. The only bond being formed here is between Alice and Samuel.’
I take a big drink of wine. I’ve said more than I meant to. But Hannah is looking at me with concern. She gets up from her side of the table and comes around to mine.
‘Budge up.’ She squeezes in next to me on the bench. ‘Poor baby,’ she says, reaching up to kiss the side of my face. ‘This is harder on you than we realised, isn’t it?’
I can’t rely on my voice just yet, so I have another swig of wine and allow Hannah to do the talking.
‘You do know, don’t you, that this is ridiculous. But completely understandable .’ Firm emphasis on the words. ‘The thing is, Alice has to form a bond with Samuel just by the fact of being his carer. If she didn’t, we would be bloody worried. In fact, we’d have to sack her.’
She pauses, expecting me to laugh, but I can’t.
‘Luke, it’s going to take time for you and Alice to have the kind of relationship you want. In a way, I think there’s too much hurt on both sides. Yours at the fact that she gave you up, hers at the fact that she had to and she still feels guilty about it. And when you feel guilty, you get defensive, you put up barriers. It’s going to take time to break those barriers down, but that’s all right. Time is something we have. You’re young and so is Alice; she’s not even fifty. You’ve got years and years to get to know each other.’
‘You know me. Always wanting to rush things.’
‘The thing is, you’re actually quite lucky. So few people get the chance to form a relationship with their parents as an adult; they have all the baggage of childhood, all those disappointments and rows that get in the way. You and Alice have a clean slate.’
And, for the first time ever, I think: Hannah doesn’t get it. The baggage is what I want. The history is what I crave. I’d like to pick up that clean slate and dash it to the ground, little fragments of black scattered across our immaculate, Alice-swept, Alice-washed oak floor.