Now Luke
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 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; she 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. 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. Or so I have been repeatedly told.
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 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.’
‘Yes I do. You’re worried that Samuel loves Alice more than you. And I’m telling you that’s crazy. Babies don’t have thoughts at this stage in their lives. They don’t remember one day to the next.’
‘How can you say that when you’re so fucked up about the first months of your life?’
I step backwards, a physical defence; the wash of shock makes me cold and alert. I can hardly look at her, this woman I love.
Hannah starts crying again.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.’
Samuel, marooned and motionless in his pram, begins to wail, and Hannah wiggles the handle, distractedly, demonically.
‘We used to be so happy,’ she says.
‘We still are, aren’t we?’ I cannot stand any threat to my existence, surely she knows that. I’m an adoptee, I’m addicted to the status quo.
I watch as she bends down to take Samuel out of the pram, unclipping his straps, kissing his face. The minute he’s propped against her, he stops crying. Isn’t that proof enough?
‘See? See how he loves you? Shall we walk up to the common? We can talk as we go.’
Hannah looks at me now, her focus absolute.
‘I really hope you fully comprehend what just happened,’ she says, and there is a coldness to her voice I don’t like. ‘Alice needs to go. Alice needs to be sacked or whatever it is you do when it turns out that your birth mother ’ – nasty, hostile emphasis of the words – ‘has been stealing your son.’
‘Hardly stealing, H. But she’s definitely weird around him. I tried to tell you.’
‘Why didn’t I listen to you? Why didn’t I see it? What kind of woman pretends another woman’s child is her baby?’
‘And dressing him up in my old clothes. The whole thing is strange. She seems to have zero interest in me, her actual son; her entire focus is on him.’
‘Do you think she’s dangerous?’
‘Of course not.’
I’m relieved Hannah has finally come around to my way of thinking, but she’s making leaps here that are bordering on the extreme.
‘I really hope you’re getting the magnitude of this. Should I spell it out for you? I want that woman out of my life.’