by Clare Empson
‘Good luck,’ she says, kissing me goodbye at the door. ‘I know you’ll nail it.’
She looks irresistible in her black Joseph trouser suit and boots, her curly hair tamed temporarily, an unaccustomed stripe of lipstick on her lovely mouth.
‘Hannah?’ I say, and she turns around, door half open, light from the street pouring in.
‘You’re amazing,’ I say, and she laughs.
‘You’re a sentimental fool, and that’s what I like about you.’
I dress carefully for the meeting with Reborn in my dark-grey Kenzo suit with a white T-shirt and my Reeboks. I know Michael will be in a suit instead of his jeans, a ploy he uses both to impress and to disarm; I’ll do the same. My mother is in the kitchen with Samuel, preparing our supper while he sits beside her on the floor banging a saucepan with a wooden spoon. It’s been nice seeing the calm, unhurried way in which she parents a small child, so I can imagine myself at the same age. Always there’s the piercing that is Alice, the painful recall of her brilliance with our boy, but I tell myself it was complicated. It’s not over, just on ice, a fraught mother–son relationship that can be rebuilt at any time. And this is how I sleep at night.
The band arrive early, and they’ve dressed up for the occasion too, the boys in shirts, the girls in dresses. Steven Harris – thank you, God, spirit being or whoever you are – is away on business in LA. There are handshakes all round, no kisses or hugs, which underlines the sombreness of this meeting. But Michael is not the CEO of the biggest independent in the music business for nothing.
‘Great to have you here,’ he says, a small Mafioso figure in his black suit and shirt. ‘There’s breakfast in the meeting room; let’s get straight to it, shall we? And Janice?’ he adds to the receptionist as we pass. ‘Categorically no interruptions for the next two hours. Just take messages for us, please.’
The table is crammed with plates of croissants, pains au chocolat and Danish pastries. There’s a platter of beautifully chopped fruit: pineapples, peaches, a volcano of berries in its centre. None of this will be touched. Instead I pour everyone a coffee from the cafetière – pleased that my hands do not shake – and we begin.
I’ve been in this situation with Michael several times and I know that he doesn’t do small talk. He has zero tolerance for conversations about anything other than music.
‘I can’t tell you how glad we are that you are seriously considering signing to Spirit,’ he says. ‘You’ll know, of course, how passionate Luke is about your music, but the whole company, from distribution to the art department, is excited about your record. I know the decision will come down to money in the end and I wanted to assure you that we can come up with a significant deal.’
‘If I can jump straight in,’ Daniel says, ‘we’ve come to a decision.’
This is unexpected. My physiological response – heart banging, blood rushing – almost deafens me. I am straining to hear.
‘We’re going to sign to Spirit. We’re flattered by the interest from other labels, but you’re the best fit for us. We have a few conditions, though, and I’d like to set those out.’
My pulse is heart-attack fast as I listen to the band’s requirements – all of them reasonable – but I don’t really get beyond the first one.
‘We’d like Luke to A&R the record exclusively. We really feel he connects with what we’re doing in a way no one else has; in fact that’s the whole reason we want to sign to you.’
I catch Michael’s eye and he smiles at me, minimally; he always was the master of understatement. But I can’t help myself. I jump up from the table and start hugging the band, one by one.
‘This is incredible news,’ I say. ‘There is literally nothing I would like more than to get involved with the next record. I’ve got so many ideas.’
Over the next couple of hours, we brainstorm the new album – hands down my favourite part of this job – and I have a new suggestion for them. There’s a record player in the meeting room and I tell them I have something to play them. I feel a confusing mix of emotion taking Apparition out of my bag, knowing none of them will ever have heard it before. Proud, yes, but also wretched, sorrowful.
‘This band had short-lived success in the seventies,’ I say, flashing the album at them.
Bex says, ‘Oh my God, I love the cover. Is that an oil painting? Weird. I feel like I’ve seen that guy before; he looks familiar.’
‘Disciples were a rock band, but they sang ballads too, and the songwriting is sublime. There’s a track called “Cassiopeia” and you can hear the influences of the time; it sounds very seventies. But there’s also something about the song that stops you dead. And I’ve been trying to unpick what that is. Have a listen.’
I glance at their faces and I see that they are rapt, entranced, just as I was the first time I heard it. But mostly I’m communing with my dead father; I’m telling him, Jacob, I think we’ve got this. You and me together. Father and son.
‘Well done,’ Michael says, when we’ve seen the band off the premises a couple of hours later ‘This is totally down to you and your musical integrity. One of the reasons you’re so good at your job is because you understand about songwriting and you can talk to musicians about it. You’d be surprised how few A&R men actually can.’
I am sunning myself in this unfamiliar praise, deeply attuned to each word he speaks, trying to remember it exactly to tell Hannah later, when Janice calls out to me from reception.
‘Hey, Luke, you need to call home right away. Your mum rang a few times and also Hannah. They need to get hold of you.’
And right there my world fragments into a thousand tiny pieces.
I take my phone out of my pocket and see I have eleven missed calls, six from my mother, five from my girlfriend.
Hannah picks up on the first ring, which is in itself enough to terrify. Why isn’t she at work?
‘For God’s sake,’ she says, but she is crying too hard to finish the rest of the sentence.
‘Christ, what’s happened? Is Samuel hurt? Hannah?’
‘He’s … gone.’
The sound that Hannah is making is horrible; not crying, more of a demented wail, the howl of a mother whose child has died.
‘Gone? What does that mean? Who has gone? Samuel?’
My mother comes on the phone, also crying, and this, more than anything else, acts as a trigger warning. My mother is not a woman who cries.
‘Someone has taken Samuel from his cot. It happened when I was in the garden. I didn’t have the walkie-talkie thing, but the back door was open and I always hear him.’
‘Alice.’
‘It must be. She still had keys, didn’t she? No one else could have got in. And also he would have recognised her, so it wouldn’t have been a shock. I’m so sorry. Luke? Are you there?’
Am I? Not really. I am bent double, arms round my ribcage, searching, searching for my breath.
Alice has stolen my baby. And somehow, somewhere down deep inside me, I always knew this was going to happen.
Then
Alice
In September, the tourists leave and we have this sedate seaside town back to ourselves. The weather is beautifully warm and we spend most days at the beach, Rick painting, with his easel set up on the sand, Charlie and I playing with shells and pebbles and dipping our feet into the sea.
He laughs at the cold water, never cries. Not when a seagull flies almost into his face as he dozes on the rug. Not when a fat elderly Labrador comes over to investigate and lands a long rivulet of drool on his face.
He is such a genial baby that we often take him out in the evening, wrapped up in a little woollen coat I knitted for him in rainbow stripes. Sometimes we walk up to the pier, stopping for fish and chips at our favourite stall, then spending the coins we save all week in the slot machines. Charlie’s favourite is the moving shelf of penni
es; he watches transfixed, waiting for the coins to clatter onto the shelf below, surprising people with his wild, uproarious giggle when they do.
The nights are beginning to darken, but there’s still enough light for our favourite walk to Walberswick, across the marshes and past the water tower, Southwold’s famous beacon of ugliness. We’ll always stop for a half of cider at the Anchor and share something to eat if we’re feeling rich enough.
We never talk about Jake, because I can’t. As the weeks pass, it has become impossible for me to even say his name out loud, and Rick doesn’t mention him either. It’s as if there is a block in my throat; I can carry on, just, so long as I never speak of him. Say his name, Jake, or the fateful words he died, and I will fall apart.
Alone in the blackness of night is when I think of him. I remember our most passionate moments: the first time we said we loved each other here in Southwold, that beautiful lunch in Italy when he asked me to marry him. The day he turned up at the Slade out of the blue asking to see a student named Alice. But most of all I love to recall those daily insignificances: the cappuccinos, the pizzas at Kettner’s, the ritualistic lighting of candles. I think of us buying groceries in the shop across the road, or choosing our Christmas tree, or sketching and songwriting in silent companionship. That’s where I go in my head at night, back to the days when taxis rattled beneath the sitting-room window, and the air was scented with chicken and patchouli, and Jake was still alive.
It is mid-October when a quiet comes over Rick, indistinct perhaps to anyone but me. But I know him and I can tell he is worried.
‘Something’s up,’ I say one night at the Anchor as we wait for our shared chicken chasseur to arrive.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Something’s wrong. Come on, we tell each other everything.’
‘We’ve only got a hundred pounds left. What will we do when it runs out?’
‘You’ll sell some paintings, won’t you? I’ll start making clothes.’
Our pipe dreams of the summer seem just that, fantasies we spun beneath the hot August sun.
‘I spoke to Robin a couple of days ago. I asked him if he’d buy some of my seascapes. He was … pretty harsh. He’s a businessman and sometimes we forget that. He said, “You know that pedestrian shit doesn’t interest me. And it doesn’t interest you either. Are you really going to wreck your career for a child that isn’t yours and a woman you don’t love.” But …’ He holds out a hand to stop me from speaking. ‘He is mine, isn’t he? In a way. And I do love you, Alice. In fact I’ve been thinking, why don’t we—’
I know what’s coming before he says it, and I reach out and put my palm across his mouth.
‘Don’t say it, you beautiful man. You don’t need to. Everything you’re doing right now is enough.’
I take his hand and kiss it, and he smiles.
‘All right,’ he says. ‘But you’re allowed to change your mind. The offer stands.’
If Rick and I were to marry, it would go some way to healing the rift with my parents, and also his, who still aren’t speaking to him after he confessed to his love affair with Tom. I’m still old-fashioned enough to think it would be a good thing for Charlie to have two married parents. But how could I marry anyone who wasn’t Jake? And how could I allow Rick to give up the chance of finding happiness with someone else? It’s a sacrifice I could never let him make.
The next day he takes three of his seascapes to a local gallery in town and they offer to buy two of them on the spot for five pounds each. They take fifty per cent as commission, and he comes home and throws a five-pound note onto the kitchen table.
He’s laughing as he says, ‘That’s what they think I’m worth round here,’ but I cannot bear it for him: Rick, the star of the Slade, whose self-portrait hangs in San Lorenzo, who had a career lined up at Robin Armstrong if only he’d finished his degree and stuck with his edgy, instantly recognisable portraiture.
But we carry on, Rick, Charlie and I, as October turns into November, bringing with it a new chill and the prospect of a cold winter in our tiny damp cottage. I’m worrying too when we are down to our final fifty pounds, when the gallery says it has enough seascapes and perhaps Rick could try somewhere else. When Charlie gets his first cold, a nose that permanently runs, a cough that seems to get worse, not better. He doesn’t cry but nor does he laugh; he lies in my lap, listless and miserable.
The impromptu fish and chips, the suppers in the pub, are forgotten now as we ration ourselves to a weekly budget of ten pounds and eat baked potatoes and baked beans on rotation. At night I hold on to Charlie in the darkness, his tiny fist in mine, wrapping myself around him for warmth. I talk to Jacob, tearless now, asking him, ‘What shall we do? What shall we do?’
And then one morning just before the end of November, the answer comes.
Now
Luke
Hysterical, frenzied, ferocious: I cannot find the right word for my passive, peace-loving girlfriend, destroyed, utterly, by the taking of her small son. When I walk into the kitchen, she screams at me, ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ and collapses, sobbing, into my mother’s arms.
‘The police have just left,’ Christina says, looking at me over Hannah’s head. ‘And Rick is on his way; he’s going to Alice’s house and studio first.’
‘The police? Already? Christ. What did they say?’
‘They’re taking it seriously, thank God. Classifying it as an abduction even though she’s a member of the family. Biologically, anyway.’
‘Are we sure it’s Alice?’
Hannah lifts her head to scream, ‘Of course it’s Alice. Who else had keys? Who else would do something like this? You said it yourself, she’s completely obsessed with Samuel. I just hope …’
She breaks off, weeping, and I put my arms around her.
‘Hannah?’
She looks up, face streaked with mascara tears.
‘This is the worst thing that could ever have happened, but we need to stay strong for Samuel. We need to think clearly so we can find him. And we need to keep reminding ourselves how much Alice loves him. That’s a good thing, right?’
Samuel is everywhere in this room – the clean bottles on the draining board, the bouncy blue chair he is now too big for, the hand-painted fruit bowl, irregularly stamped with his tiny newborn feet. We laughed so much that day, dipping his naked feet into pots of paint, the look of haughty disgust that spread across his face when flesh met gloopy cold.
‘When did you notice he’d gone missing?’
My mother puts her hand to her forehead as if checking for fever.
‘I always put him down for his morning nap at ten thirty, and I wake him at around eleven fifteen. I never let him sleep more than forty-five minutes. But it was such a beautiful day, I thought I’d get on with some gardening. And when I went to get him up …’ her voice catches, ‘he was gone. I tried to ring you, but the receptionist wouldn’t interrupt your meeting. So then I rang Hannah and the police.’
I look at my watch; it’s already 1.30. He could have been missing for almost three hours.
Hannah cries, ‘Luke, they could be anywhere by now. On a plane, boat, train. How will we ever find him? What are we going to do?’
‘I will find him,’ I say. ‘Trust me, Hannah. We need to be out looking for them. Did you try the café, the playground?’
‘I rang Stefano at the deli, but he hasn’t seen Alice for weeks. Sarah and all her mum friends are searching the park and the library and the high street. But it’s pointless, they won’t be anywhere obvious.’
‘We have to think why Alice would have done this. Is it vengeance? To give us a fright? Or is she actually thinking she can steal him?’
‘Do you think she’s capable of that?’ my mother asks. ‘She seemed a very reasonable sort of person to me.’
‘Dressing our baby up i
n weird clothes so he looked like Luke? Hardly reasonable.’
‘But not dangerous,’ my mother says. ‘That’s what we need to hang on to.’
There’s a knock at the door, short and aggressive. All three of us jump.
‘Police,’ my mother says.
‘I’ll go.’
I need to grasp back some control from this horrifying situation, and I throw open the door expecting two policemen, but instead I find Rick, still in his painting clothes, smears of colour on his cheeks, his hands, his hair.
‘Christ, Luke, I’m sorry.’
He opens his arms and we embrace, and now, for the first time, I am able to cry, unexpected tears that run down my face. I am unselfconscious here in the arms of a man I briefly thought was my father, a man who still holds all the clues.
When we part, he says, ‘I’ve checked Alice’s flat and studio and, of course, I’ve rung her mobile countless times. I also did a whistle-stop tour of all the places that mattered to her. Soho basically. Bar Italia. Kettner’s. The French House. No one has seen her.’
We go through to the kitchen, where Rick apologises to my mother and hugs Hannah, who, like me, finds herself weeping in his arms.
‘It’s definitely Alice, isn’t it?’ she asks, and he nods.
‘I’m sure it is. She’s been increasingly unwell these last months, and since you guys fell out, she’s sort of lost it a bit. All she could talk about was Samuel and how she wanted to say goodbye to him properly. The thing is, in some strange way, I think she’s reliving what happened with you all those years ago. She has tipped over into fantasy.’