Mine: ‘A powerful, emotive and sensitively written story about love and loss' Louise Jensen Read online

  Dedication

  To Cindy and John, with love

  Clare Empson

  Contents

  Dedication

  Luke

  Alice

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  Alice

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  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  Also by Clare Empson

  Copyright

  Adoption can damage a child’s sense of identity. It brings with it a rash of existential questions that remain unanswered. Who am I? Why am I here? Why did my mother give me away?

  Who Am I? The Adoptee’s Hidden Trauma by Joel Harris

  Now

  Luke

  London, 2000

  The woman standing in front of me, shy, hesitant, an exact mirror to my own awkwardness, is so unexpectedly beautiful that for a moment I have no words.

  ‘Hello, Alice,’ I manage to say.

  ‘Luke.’

  She speaks my name as if she is trying out a new language. I reach out my hand, but Alice ignores it and pulls me into a quick, fierce embrace instead. We sit opposite each other at a table laid up with knives and forks, glasses, a pitcher of water.

  ‘Water?’ I offer, and when I pick up the jug, I see my hands are shaking.

  ‘Wine,’ Alice says, and this first smile, revealing teeth whiter than my own and grooves around her eyes that hint at her real age, lodges itself somewhere near my heart.

  With the wine ordered and menus on the way there is nothing to do but look at each other. Alice sent recent photographs of herself along with her introductory letter, so her beauty should not have come as such a shock, not like this. But she is clearly struggling with my appearance too.

  ‘You look so like your father, I’m completely … stunned.’

  ‘Richard Fields? He’s my girlfriend’s favourite artist. We just couldn’t believe it.’

  There is something in Alice’s face here, a lightning flash of pain or sorrow, but she steels herself to carry on.

  ‘What made you decide to find me?’

  I turn over different beginnings in my mind. The years on the rugby pitches looking at the touchline and wondering if my real mother was one of the women gathered there: the blonde in the fur coat, the lady with the ponytail. And later, the years spent locked in my bedroom, curled up in fury after another row with my parents, consoling myself with the thought that at least my actual mother, the person I truly belonged to, was someone different. And then once I’d met Hannah, the endless questioning. ‘Don’t you want to meet her?’ ‘Don’t you want to know what she’s like?’

  It’s true that my girlfriend’s persistent fascination with my real parentage was a driving force behind this sudden reunion. But the real reason – my tiny brown-eyed, long-lashed boy – lies draped in his mother’s arms several miles away.

  ‘I think it was the day Samuel was born.’

  ‘That would do it,’ Alice says.

  I watch her swallowing back tears, but I feel no guilt. She had a baby and gave him away. I’m a father myself now and I will never understand it.

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Three months.’

  Alice places a hand against her heart as if she’s compressing a wound.

  ‘Oh,’ she says, though the ‘oh’ is really a gasp of pain. ‘I think this is going to be even harder than I thought.’

  We look at each other, this woman and I, both wanting to run but trapped by the glass and cutlery-lined beechwood table between us, by the polite convention of going through with our hastily arranged (leisurely repented?) lunch.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Alice says with a brief, businesslike smile, as though she’s shrugging herself into the position of adult, of parent. ‘If we take it slowly, we’ll be fine. Let’s start with the easy stuff. Tell me about your girlfriend.’

  I met Hannah at the opening of a mutual friend, Ben, who has had the balls to dedicate his life to painting, subsisting on government handouts, sleeping on sofas and working right through the night to produce edgy, instantly recognisable portraits that have been compared, strangely enough, to Richard Fields. Hannah was filing a piece about him for her paper and I watched her walking around the gallery with her notepad, pausing in front of each painting before she scribbled down her thoughts. I wondered what she was writing. Who she was. Whether she was single. I liked the way her curly dark hair fell across her face, obscuring her eyes. She pushed it back, tucked a thick strand behind her ear, but moments later it broke free again.

  When she started talking to Ben, dressed in an unfamiliar suit with his dirty white trainers, I decided to head over and say hello. A moment’s awkwardness while I waited for Ben to finish speaking.

  ‘There’s never been any question in my mind that I’d do anything but paint. It might have been nice to earn lots of money doing something else, but that wasn’t an option. I’d never let anything get in the way of my painting.’

  He looked up and saw me.

  ‘God. Don’t just stand there listening to me being a dick.’

  Our friendship goes back to prep school; two misfits in a blur of dull entitlement.

  ‘This is Hannah,’ he said. ‘She works for The Times. She does have a proper job.’

  ‘What about you?’ Hannah asked me. ‘Artist or proper job?’

  ‘Oh, I prefer to feed off other people’s talent.’

  ‘Luke’s an A&R man,’ Ben said, with the note of pride that is always there when he tells people about my job. ‘He was running his own record label at twenty-five.’

  ‘Now you’ve made me sound like a dick,’ I said, and Hannah laughed.

  Ben’s parents came over then and we were swept up in a plan to go out for dinner.

  ‘There’s a lovely little Italian around the corner, we’ve booked a couple of tables,’ Ben’s father said, and Ben hissed, low-voiced, ‘Don’t worry, they’re paying.’

  I liked Ben’s parents, they were good, kind p
eople who invited me on holiday to France with them every year, but without saying anything Hannah and I dropped back, slowing our pace until soon we lost sight of Ben’s entourage altogether.

  ‘We’re right next to Chinatown,’ Hannah said, and I didn’t hesitate. Within minutes we were sitting opposite each other in a booth in one of my favourite restaurants.

  I liked her impeccable rolling of pancakes: two slivers of spring onion laid head to toe alongside a neat stripe of hoisin sauce, modest slices of duck that she took time to select, no fat, no skin. While we ate, she told me about growing up in north Cornwall in a house by the sea.

  ‘Our house is on the path to the beach. When the tide’s coming in you can be swimming in the sea in three minutes flat. We used to time it. I was surfing by the age of eight. And when I was older I spent every summer working as a lifeguard.’

  She told me about warm nights spent on the beach, sleeping out in the open, first with her parents, then with friends. They’d gather mussels and cook them over a campfire, drinking hot chocolate from a thermos.

  ‘On Midsummer’s Eve the whole village goes down to the beach and builds a big bonfire. People bring food and tell stories and everyone is there, young and old. I miss it sometimes. When I’m late for work and shoving my way onto the Tube without bothering to apologise, I wonder what the hell has happened to me.’

  She laughed as she said this, but all I could think was: you’re perfect. That’s what’s happened to you. I’ve always been greedy for information about other people’s families, but I’d never felt like this, as if not just my mind but my whole body was attuned to every word she spoke.

  ‘You’re very good at not talking about yourself,’ Hannah said. ‘You ask a lot of questions.’

  ‘That’s because I’ve nothing to tell. I had a nice, safe, comfortable childhood in Yorkshire with parents who were quite a bit older. I’m an only child. They adopted me when I was just a few weeks old.’

  ‘You’re adopted?’ Hannah said, now vehemently interested, a reaction I find peculiarly female. Men basically don’t give a shit how you came into the world. ‘I love a mystery,’ she said.

  And that was the first time she asked me about my birth mother.

  ‘So this is Hannah?’

  Alice has laid out the photographs I brought with me like a hand of solitaire and she examines them one by one. She’s looking at my favourite photo of Hannah. In it, she’s behind the wheel of a tiny little phut-phut boat we hired on a whim one afternoon in Falmouth. It had a top speed of about ten miles an hour, this boat, and Hannah, who has a powerboat licence, who surfs and sails and could probably skipper a hundred-foot yacht if you asked her to, found it hilarious. She’s laughing so hard in this picture you can see both rows of teeth, her eyes are scrunched and her head is tipped right back. It makes my heart ache a little just to look at her and to remember that most perfect afternoon. Just this – I would be lost without her.

  ‘She looks like a good person to have on your side.’

  Alice’s astuteness is a chest thump to the heart. As though this woman, this stranger, who once carried me in her womb, is still so connected to me she can read my innermost thoughts.

  ‘That’s me on my seventh birthday,’ I say, pointing to an image of me and three other friends holding sausages on sticks ready to cook on the barbecue. My birthday falls in May and I can still remember the scorch from that day. We had home-made lemonade that was too bitter for my friends and a cake in the shape of the Tardis.

  ‘And here I am at school playing rugby.’ I point to the adjacent photo.

  ‘You went to boarding school? How old?’

  ‘Eight.’

  ‘That’s far too young,’ Alice says, before softening it, ‘in my opinion.’

  I wonder if I should tell her about the tearful departures, the utter desolation of the Sunday-night drive back to school. The first time my parents dropped me off I was too shocked and excited to cry much. The second time I knew what was coming and I clung to the car door handle and ran halfway down the drive with them before my father accelerated away.

  I’d hesitated before including the photograph of Christmas lunch, me aged twelve, sitting at the table with my parents and grandparents. My father is standing up to carve the turkey, my mother is handing me a plate crammed with meat and vegetables. We are all wearing paper crowns and there is cracker debris scattered across the table. When I look at this photo, I think: quiet, lonely, bored. To me it is glaringly obvious that I didn’t fit in. But Alice sees something different. She sees the way my mother is smiling at me as she hands me my plate. She sees tenderness. Familiarity. Ownership.

  ‘So that’s her,’ she says, without looking up.

  And now I understand. My adoptive father means nothing to Alice. It’s all about the woman who replaced her.

  ‘How does she feel about you seeing me? Your … mother?’

  I hear how the word hurts her.

  ‘She doesn’t know. I haven’t told her. I probably could, but …’

  How to explain my mother’s froideur around the circumstances of my birth. She told me I was adopted when I was eight, just before I went away to school.

  ‘Why did she give me away?’ I asked.

  It is, after all, the only question.

  ‘She was a young girl who got pregnant by mistake and she needed to get on with the rest of her life.’

  ‘Do you think she ever wonders about me?’

  ‘She doesn’t need to wonder about you. She knows you are happy, that you have a wonderful life, one she could never have given you. She knows you are lucky.’

  Lucky, so lucky, the mantra of my childhood.

  I cannot bring myself to share this detail with Alice, who seems nothing like the casual, carefree girl my mother described as she sits all broken-looking, surrounded by my childhood photographs.

  ‘Luke?’ she says, and it still sounds as if she’s testing out my name, as if she expects me to be called something else. Charlie. The name she gave me.

  ‘I won’t ever try to be a mother to you. That would be foolish. Shall we settle for friends?’

  She picks up her wine glass and waits for me to do the same. We clink glasses, this beautiful forty-seven-year old woman and I, two strangers in a restaurant, connected by a past I have yet to understand.

  Then

  Alice

  London, 1972

  The hard slap of a magazine dropped from above makes me look up.

  ‘This is what sex looks like.’

  The voice, strangely gravelled for a non-smoking nineteen-year-old, belongs to Rick. The face and torso now displayed beside my pseudo-Cubist still life is Jacob Earl, the dark-eyed, high-cheekboned singer of Disciples. He’s on the front page of Sounds magazine, black shirt unbuttoned, chest gleaming, objectified just like a Page Three girl.

  ‘Gig at the Marquee tonight. We’re going,’ Rick says, glaring down at my canvas. ‘Think the apple might work better in blue?’

  He says it lightly, to be helpful, but with each new and perfect intuition I feel the familiar drifting to self-doubt. Am I as good as everyone else? Do I truly deserve my place here, one of only twelve students accepted on the fine arts degree at the Slade, renowned as the best art school in the country?

  Rick is the kind of artist (slash sculptor, ceramicist, embroiderer; he can excel in any medium) who doesn’t really need to be here. He’s already it, the tutors’ darling, the art school’s mascot, the collector’s early hunch. Last week he sold a self-portrait – his whole face rendered in vertical stripes of green – to a man who turned out to be the owner of San Lorenzo. I can imagine Mick and Bianca eating their gazpacho while Rick gazes down at them with his sharp blue eyes.

  This afternoon’s session, printmaking with Gordon King, is the one I dread the most. A former pop artist (he distanced himself from the movem
ent some years ago and now speaks about it only with distaste), his work sells for thousands of pounds and hangs in the permanent collection of the Whitechapel Art Gallery. He swept into the Slade four years ago and turned its printmaking department on its head. It is said that he can make or break a career, and three of his protégés now sell on Cork Street.

  Rick is his favourite; he can stand beside him eulogising his colour choices for a full five minutes.

  ‘Gather round, people. See these pinks and greens and browns. See how the cherry blossom gorgeousness is offset by sludgy olive and shit brown? This is colour calibration at its best.’

  Today I am working on a lithograph of a favourite tree and I am hopeful that all the nights I’ve spent frying my brain reading about tonality and chromaticism might finally pay off. Once I’ve drawn the outline of my tree (a mesmerising, strangely humanised oak) onto a block of limestone, I’m going to wash over it in a restricted palette of yellow, red, black and white. I’ve been practising for this moment all week, mixing up little tubes of paint in my student bedroom until I came up with three perfect shades of skin. Soon the tree’s branches will become flesh-coloured limbs, the thick round trunk a torso, its ribs defined by hand. I’m going to call it Metamorphosis 1, a pleasingly Kafkaesque title and the first in a series of tree people.

  But Gordon doesn’t wait to see this transformation.

  ‘Surely not another tree?’ he says, arms folded, mouth tight, hovering beside me. ‘What is it with you and trees?’

  And something crumples inside me. Instead of standing up to him, as I do every day in my mind, I say, ‘I don’t know. I just like them.’

  ‘Well, I like ice cream, but I don’t paint it every bloody day. Move on now. We need to see some development. This is sub-A-level standard.’

  In the pub, Rick feeds me gin and tonic and holds my hand while I cry.

  ‘I shouldn’t be on this course, I’m going to drop out.’

  We have the same conversation every week, always after Gordon King’s class.

  ‘What is it with you and trees?’