Then Alice
Then
Alice
Pregnancy is a time of intense romance for Jake and me. My second trimester, when I feel extraordinarily well, coincides with a period of successive power cuts, and we live by candlelight. Jake always has thirty or forty candles burning in the sitting room, stuffed into wine bottles with wicker casings or the battered candelabras he collects from Golborne Road. Now we bathe by candlelight too if there is enough hot water, and if there isn’t, we go to bed early and he reads to me, book in one hand, candle in the other, held close to his face like a Dickensian protagonist.
Sometimes he reads poetry – not Blake or Keats or Coleridge, but the lyrics of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, James Brown. There is one song in particular that he reads more than any other on these nights, Dylan’s ‘The Man in Me’. When you hear Dylan singing this song, it is elevated to something heartrending and insightful, the story of a woman who comprehends all the things her lover tries to hide; its message is not lost on me.
Night after night we stay in together, working or lying on the sofa listening to records. And I get used to it, this intense domesticity, a new grown-up-ness to our lives. Arriving home from college to the scent of something Jake is cooking for our supper: a Bolognese he has simmered for hours, lasagne to rival the one we loved in Siena, the fish stew, which means a trip to Billingsgate. He keeps a bowl filled with apples and oranges and encourages me to eat as many pieces of fruit as I can. He buys a baby book that details every stage of the first year of your child’s life, and while I have an extended bath, refilling it for as long as our hot water lasts, he will read out sections from it.
‘He’ll be laughing by the time he’s twelve weeks old.’ Or, ‘When he’s seven months he’ll be crawling and trying to pull himself up on the furniture.’
There is no question in Jake’s mind that we’re having a boy. I hope he won’t be disappointed if it turns out to be a girl.
As Christmas approaches I feel hurt that my mother still hasn’t tried to get in touch. My parents don’t know I am pregnant and I cannot face telling them, I can imagine my father’s rage and I won’t sully our happiness with it. Instead I send them a card I’ve made myself, a hand-painted winter scene, the kind of thing they like. Inside I write the most innocuous message I can manage.
Dear Mum and Dad, hope you have a good Christmas. Love from Alice.
But nothing comes back. They know my address; I had to give it to them so my post could be diverted here. It would have been easy for my mother to send a card in return. But she is in thrall to her husband’s diktat just as she always was and always will be. And my father never goes back on his word. He made me choose – Jake rather than them – and mostly I am glad that he did.
Naturally, Jake goes into overdrive with his Christmas preparations. We buy a tree and he lugs it home single-handedly, its tip trailing along the pavement. He won’t allow me to carry anything ‘because of the baby’, even though we’ve both read the books and have learned that essentially I am meant to carry on exactly as before. In Berwick Street market we find coloured lights and baubles and tinsel and we pile them on the tree so that hardly a single strand of spruce can be seen.
‘It’s a disco tree,’ Jake says when we turn the lights on for the first time and discover they flash on and off. ‘Very now. Very seventies.’
I’ve taken so much trouble over his presents for this, our first Christmas together. In the Record and Tape Exchange I find a Jimi Hendrix single, an original pressing of ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ from 1967, with ‘Highway Chile’ on the other side. It was expensive, which I’d expected; after Jimi’s death, his records quadrupled in price overnight. But worth it just to see Jake’s face when he opens it.
One lunchtime I take Rick to Liberty with me, an old-fashioned Christmas paradise with beautifully decorated trees on every level, themed in silver and white, the opposite of our cut-price disco extravaganza.
‘So what’s it going to be? Jewellery? Scarf? Shirt? Watch?’ Rick asks.
‘He has all of that. I’d like to give him something he can wear every day that reminds him of me. For when he’s away on tour.’
‘Why don’t you get him some aftershave?’
The lady at the fragrance counter is dismissive at first. Rick and I are dressed in our paint-spattered art-student clothes – lemon-yellow dungarees for him, a loose white top and flares for me – and she clearly thinks we have no money. But I have been saving my student grant with exactly this intention, to splash out on something perfect for my lover.
When I reach for a bottle of Eau Sauvage – price ￡7 – the woman seems more interested. Rick dabs it on his wrist and holds it out for me to smell.
‘Bloody gorgeous, isn’t it? I wish someone would give it to me. Maybe you could drop a hint to Tom.’
‘It’s not Jake, though. It’s too … I don’t know, suit and tie.’
The shop assistant laughs.
‘So what’s he like, your boyfriend?’
I get a little lost in my description.
‘Well, he’s tall and thin, with long dark hair and a romantic kind of face, angelic, a bit like a Botticelli painting.’
Rick is tittering, though the woman manages to keep a straight face.
‘He’s a musician, a singer and songwriter. He’s artistic. He wears shirts with bell sleeves and velvet suits and lots of scarves and jewellery.’
‘He might like a unisex fragrance?’
‘Nothing too feminine,’ I say.
‘But frankly nothing too masculine either,’ adds Rick, and this time the woman joins in with our laughter.
‘How about something Italian?’ she asks, and Rick and I, in unison, cry, ‘Perfect!’
‘He’s obsessed with Italy. We both are. We spent the summer outside Florence.’
She produces a beautiful turquoise bottle with a cobalt-blue lid.
‘This is Acqua di Parma, a cologne. Very fashionable in Italy and worn by women just as much as men.’
Rick and I inhale deeply.
‘Wonderful, smells like ferns,’ Rick says, ‘and lemons and cedar trees.’
‘It’s exactly right for him,’ I say, opening my purse to find the right amount of cash.
We wake up late on Christmas morning (no church, another luxury) and Jake insists on bringing me breakfast in bed: cappuccinos in polystyrene cups and fat slices of panettone from Bar Italia, which stays open every day of the year.
‘On the house with Luigi’s love,’ he says, getting in beside me.
He lifts the blankets and inches down to kiss my stomach.
‘Happy Christmas to you, baby,’ he says.
He counts up the months on his fingers.
‘Next Christmas you’ll be six months old. Imagine that. I wonder if we’ll still be here in this flat.’
‘We’ll never leave Soho, surely?’
‘Never. I can promise you that. Unless we move to Italy.’
It is a perfect day, just the two of us. While a chicken is roasting, we listen to classical music, Brahms first, his violin concerto, and then Vivaldi’s Gloria . It reminds me of my father for a moment – anything choral and churchy always does – but I push away the image of my parents sitting down to a turkey alone. My father hogging an expensive bottle of wine, my mother cowering as he pours his third, fourth, fifth glass and the spectre of incandescence rears its head.
‘What were your Christmases like as a kid?’ I ask, without thinking, and beside me Jake goes still.
‘Well, that depends on where I was. Sometimes it was just me and my mum on our own and that was fine. But usually we were at my grandparents’ farm and quite often my mum left me there alone. She liked to get the sun at Christmas if she could afford it; she went to Spain, Morocco, the Canary Islands.’
I can sense the change in his breathing, and my own heart begins to pulse in return. I reach for his hand.
‘I’m never going to ask you to talk about things you don’t want to talk about.’
‘I know that.’
‘But sometimes I think it might help you to exorcise the past. And I would listen. I love you. And I want to help.’
‘All right,’ he says, and he gets up and walks over to our tree with its twinkling, flashing lights and its baubles the colours of Quality Street. He picks out a package, flat, square and wrapped in shiny red paper.
I read the tag: For you, Alice, with all my love.
Inside there’s a framed photograph, an instant bullet to the heart. It is a school portrait of Jake aged nine or ten, a beautiful boy with short hair and solemn eyes. He is wearing a grey V-necked jumper, a white shirt and red and grey striped tie, and the thing that strikes me most about this picture, this textbook, cheesy school picture, is his refusal to smile.
‘I found this photo and thought you might like it. I know you’re curious about when I was a kid.’ He leans forward to kiss my face.
‘I love it. You’re so handsome,’ I say, looking at the photo. ‘But you don’t look very happy.’
‘Well I wasn’t.’
He gets up from the sofa and starts pacing around our tiny sitting room. I can hear the breaths he is taking, deep and longer than usual. My heart clenches in empathetic distress.
‘My grandfather was into punishment. I think we can safely say he was a sadist. There were the regular beatings – he broke my ribs once – and there was the locking me out of the house in the middle of winter. I slept – or rather didn’t sleep – in the car. But the thing that made me miserable was the way he talked about me, as if I was disgusting, the lowest form of species, corrupt, sinful, all of that. I was illegitimate, you see, which made me flawed and unlovable, beyond redemption. When I was young, it was difficult not to believe him. Sometimes it still is. Sometimes his is the only voice I can hear.’
I am crying as I stand up and walk over to him.
‘Is that why you …?’ I leave the rest unsaid.
‘Yes. He made me feel worthless. That life wasn’t worth living. And it’s hard to shake that feeling sometimes.’
‘Oh Jake, I can’t bear it for you.’
My arms are wrapped around him, my face pressed against his chest. I hate the factualness of his voice. When he states these feelings, it’s as if he believes they are true. For the past year I’ve longed to understand his demons; I’ve thought, na?vely, that I could help him overcome them. Now I am beginning to understand how deep-rooted his self-loathing is; I’m not sure the baby and I will be enough to fix it.
‘Please don’t cry. I hate you being upset. Can we talk about something else now?’
‘Why didn’t your mother help?’
‘I suppose she was a bit frightened of my grandfather; she must have known how violent he could be. But I think she was so committed to her quest for freedom, she didn’t care about anything else. And then she met someone and she wanted to start over. And that meant leaving me behind. I just wish she’d had me adopted. I used to dream about it sometimes, this wonderful older couple turning up to take me away. I’d imagine their house, an old ramshackle farmhouse with a huge garden and lots of animals, ponies and dogs and cats.’
‘You honestly think it would have been better to be adopted?’
‘Of course it would. It was just me on my own dealing with my grandfather’s rages, and this went on for years, all the way through my childhood. But you know what that’s like. An only child, with no other siblings to take the edge off.’
‘Sometimes I think I hate my mother more than my father, for not standing up to him. Never trying to protect me.’
‘We are exactly the same, you and I. But it’s the thing that brought us together. You and me, that’s the silver lining.’
When Jake goes out to baste the chicken and check on his roast potatoes, I sit back down on the sofa, the framed photograph balanced on my knees. It gives me a feeling of vertigo, this picture, not just the past, his past, the past that up until now he has kept hidden, hermetically sealed inside him. I also feel, as I stare and stare at ten-year-old Jake, that I am looking into the future and in some bizarre sense I am time-travelling forward to meet our unborn child.