Tree of Pearls. Louisa Young

      It’s Harry.

      He had slept with Janie, drunk, six years ago, under the impression she was me, apparently. Well after he and I broke up. She and I are (were?) very alike, physically. She’d been in his bed when he got home. Well, yes.

      He wasn’t altogether a surprise. He’d told me it might be him. In fact he was something of a relief, given the other contenders – Eddie Bates (one of her regulars); a pimp-cum-policeman called Ben Cooper … but even so, yes. My old love is my child’s father. Exactly.

      So all we had to do now was learn how to do it. How to have a father in our lives at all, our lives that had been just us for five years. In our flat. In our daily routines. In our priorities. He was keen, in a fairly tactful way, to do the right thing. The prospect was, quite frankly, terrifying.

      But there he was, and he was Harry. Decent, responsible, handsome, funny, long tall Harry. DI Makins. Who I’d known so long. Since he was louche, disreputable, handsome, funny long tall Harry, wideboy biker. The one I used to fight with all the time. The one with my name tattooed on his long, rope-muscled, milk-white right arm.

      Is any of this clear? To me it is. This is just the story of my life. I am so accustomed to melodramatic absurdity by now that I forget how strange it must sound to other people. One fruit of it, though, is that I am reluctant to take things at face value; reluctant to believe that every little thing is going to be all right, unless I personally make sure of it. Which is one reason why I am so interested in whether I can just let Harry be Dad in his own way. Trust him, is I think what I am talking about. Not so much whether he is trustworthy as whether I am capable of trust.

      The other question, of course, was Harry and me.

      Twice, since we parted, he has offered.

      Twelve years ago, in that bar in Soho, I’d said: ‘Yes, and then not for a month.’

      A year and a half ago after our last bout of chaos, I’d said no.

      Two weeks ago I managed maybe.

      ‘OK,’ he said, his face quite steady, untroubled. ‘OK.’ And ordered a curry instead. And the moment had passed.

      I wasn’t even sure it had happened at all.

      Waiting for the curry to come he went and looked at Lily as she slept. Then when the silver-foil boxes were laid out on the kitchen table, we sat opposite each other to eat and I just stared at him. Letting it sink in. Lily’s father.

      ‘What do we do now then?’ he said. ‘If not fuck?’

      For a moment I thought I was getting a second chance, but I wasn’t. He was just being … humorous. Cheerful. Open. Sarky.

      It’s not that I turn him down because he’s not sexy. Sometimes, when we were together, I used to have to have words with girls who would become irrational in his presence. It was the combination of the cheekbones and the louche cockiness that did it. The cheekbones are, if anything, better, older; the cynical trickster boy has retreated though, in the face of something, as a grown man, which – well, he thinks it’s to do with Gary Cooper. Which side you are on. He decided, at some stage during the time when we weren’t seeing each other, that the villain’s black hat was all very well but he preferred a kind of lonesome maverick white hat. It suits him.

      ‘We … oh god,’ I said.

      You’d think after my adventures I could deal with all sorts of things, but sitting at my kitchen table eating a prawn dhansak with this man I’d known a third of my life was proving to be too much.

      He leant across the table and put his cool and gnarled hand on my temple, saying, ‘Sorry, darling. Impossible question.’ His ‘darling’ is more cabbie than Harvey Nichols. Harry’s not posh. He’s from Acton.

      ‘We eat,’ he said. ‘Let’s just eat.’

      So we ate. Then we watched telly. For a while I shot him little sideways looks, to see if he’d changed in the course of the evening. Father of the child. Here and present. Sticking around, one way or another. He had changed, actually. He looked happier.

      Then I fell asleep. Later he put me to bed, barefoot but clothed.

      Lily came into my bed in the small hours, the child who for five years had been mine and now, suddenly, was his. She talks in her sleep; tonight she wanted me to help her because there were too many bananas. I murmured, ‘Of course I will, honey,’ and she rolled over and wrapped her arms round my neck and put her feet between my knees, and then woke up complaining that my hair was tickling her nose.

      I couldn’t get back to sleep. I disentangled myself from my five-year-old octopus of love and wandered into the kitchen. There was Harry asleep on the sofa, all six foot four of him, oddly folded and sprawled, his arms crossed across his chest like an Egyptian mummy clutching his flail. His face was impassive, showing his age. He manages – even his face – to be both scrawny and muscular at the same time. What’s the word? Lean. He has those lines that cowboys have, the deep ones around the mouth, the ones that women take to indicate humour, natural intelligence and the ability to make a woman feel good. Of course he has those qualities too.

      We have no streetlights up here, but by the light from the hall I could see, just visible where the sleeve of his ancient t-shirt ended, part of the curling tattooed wave that broke under the prow of the fully rigged HMS Victory on his left bicep, with the guiding compass-point star above it and the name in a furling banner beneath. Every eldest Makins son had had the Victory on his bicep since an early-eighteenth-century Harry Makins had served on board, as powder monkey or something, no one could quite remember what. Harry’s dad had wanted to break the tradition, and forbade all his sons from having any tattoos at all. Harry, with his historical loyalties and his rebellious nature, had celebrated his eighteenth birthday with Victory on his left arm and his twenty-first with the opening line of The Rights of Man like a bracelet round his right. For his twenty-eighth I had given him a tattoo of his choice. He had said he wanted a rose as he was getting soft, but he wouldn’t let me come with him to the parlour and he had come out with my name, damn him, in a curled tattooed banner wrapped around his arm beneath the bracelet of Thomas Paine.

      I looked at him for a while as he slept. I used to kiss him, I thought. And shook my head violently, and went back to the child.

      *

      Lily, god bless her, took it entirely in her stride. As daddies are the men that live with children, so if Harry is her daddy of course he would be there for breakfast. Her logic is simple.

      Mine isn’t. The reality of sitting round the breakfast table with them shook me about. Will she want him here for breakfast every day? My sole purpose in life is to look after her, to love her and save her from fear and shock, of which she had quite enough at her birth. She is innocence walking, and I am her minder. I make good. That’s my purpose. I make good for Lily. But for all the time Harry and I have had to wonder about how Harry As Dad, Us With Dad would be – before deciding to do the DNA test, since waiting for the results – for some things there is no possibility of preparation. We can’t know. We have no role models. No instructions. No guidance. Even less than people usually do. But this morning we have a masquerade of domesticity. (I put from my mind an image of a version of man woman child that was briefly here a few weeks before: Sa’id, Lily and I. Sitting about the breakfast table during the tiny moment when it seemed that anything could happen, and be all right.)

      Now, here is Harry, having to go to work.

      He had woken early and calling my name.

      ‘I’m here,’ I called, trying to call quietly not to wake her just as I realized she wasn’t in with me. I got up and went through to the kitchen.

      Lily was there beside the sofa, blinking and smiling, with her curls all ruffled up and her eyes gleaming. She didn’t even look at me. ‘Dada,’ she said, in the sweetest little voice.

      ‘Oh god, hello,’ he said, with his hair all ruffled up too and confused amazement in his normally so steady