Page 12 of Pictures of Him

‘I still do.’

But always you more. He knows it and I know it and right now that seems more important than anything, including this love affair with Julia that has blown into our lives with the velocity of a Force 10 gale.

Four months before: Lucian

We’re gathered at Colton House marking another limbo day before my mother’s funeral. A word about this den of iniquity, better known as a private members’ club that was so cool, urban and emphatically un-country it caused a media furore when it opened ten years ago and has drawn a steady stream of musicians, media personalities and cocaine-addled aristos ever since. People either love or hate Colton. To join, you must fill out an elitist ten-page application form that is known to enrage. Do you know the right people and wear the right clothes, do you have enough cash in your bank account, and talking of cash, who do you bank with, we do hope it’s Hoare’s.

‘How lovely, a club just for knobs,’ Rachel once said, though she didn’t complain when her own membership was rushed through the approval committee. Jack is on the board, needless to say. Everywhere we go, people want a piece of him. He has his own personal army of fans: not just Alexa with her scarcely disguised heartbreak, or Celia, who still wears her infatuation like a teenage hot flush, or me, Harry and Rachel, who always feel at our best when Jack’s around. It’s the maître d’ at Colton, the bar staff, thepostman we share (‘He makes you feel ten feet tall, doesn’t he?’). But it’s our friendship, mine and his, which goes back the furthest.

We met on my first day at prep school, one of those prestigious behemoth places once attended by members of the royal family (my mother’s sole selection criteria), and for the occasion my parents and I had arrived in my grandfather’s car, this big black fuck-off beast, not quite with an ambassadorial flag but almost. My mother was dressed for a drinks party, very high scarlet heels, I remember, with some kind of trailing dress, and she had made us more than an hour late. Even then, at the age of eight, I understood for her the significance of the arrival, how she craved attention whilst effortlessly eschewing it. Out of the car like a visiting princess, all eyes upon her – that’s everyone: all the mothers (especially the mothers), all the fathers (especially the fathers), the headmaster flapping down the grey stone steps in his Big Bird gown, the teachers, the boys. I knew and didn’t mind that my first day at boarding school was a theatrical event; what I was worried about was how I was going to say goodbye to my father without breaking down. On the journey my mother had offered advice.

‘Absolutely no tears or hugs. Handshakes only, if you want to fit in. You want to be like the other boys, don’t you?’

When it came to it, of course, I’d put out my hand and my father said, ‘To hell with that,’ scooped me up, face pressed against his scratchy wool jacket and said so everyone could hear it, ‘Anyone does anything to you that’s not nice, then you call home, OK, and I’ll come and get you.’

He was like that, my father, he didn’t give a damn what anyone else thought.

A boy my size, the brightest blonde hair, the sweetest of smiles, came right up to us as we said goodbye.

‘I’ll look after him,’ he told my parents. ‘I’ve been here a term, I know how it works.’

That, of course, was Jack, and from that day on we became almost interchangeable. We wore the same clothes (rather, he borrowed mine, sometimes putting on a shirt or pair of trousers I’d discarded the day before). We played the same games – backgammon, black jack, pontoon. I learned to shoot, he learned to shoot. We fished, we swam, we partnered each other in tennis. As we grew older we chose the same university and shared a house throughout our three years, each day and night, each weekend spent together, drinking the same wine, listening to the same music, sharing food, clothes, my bank account. Was I him or was he me? It didn’t much seem to matter.

When he arrives now, holding the hand of his blonde toddler, who is taking his first tottering steps, you see the heads turn. And you see Celia, following closely behind, noticing them. There’s nothing smug about Celia, I think she counts each star-struck gaze as a potential threat. She weathers the storm of her showstopper husband but she never seems entirely happy with it.

The problem is that Jack is knockout handsome – Rachel’s description – funny with it and he dresses like a rock star, today wearing shades, a white shirt fresh from its packaging and a leather jacket from Christian Dior.

‘What we need,’ he tells the waiter who has rushed over, ‘is something to blow our minds. What would yourecommend? I’m thinking a Margaux or a Montrachet? Red or white, girls?’

He turns to Celia and kisses her cheek.

‘You’ll drive back, babe, won’t you?’

She laughs. ‘Back to Lucian’s later and leave you with your bicycle, you mean?’

Jack shrugs. ‘Extenuating circumstances. Dead mother and all.’

The truth is, I’m never sure how easily this new domesticity sits with Jack. He makes a great show of it, high-profile nappy changing, the changing bag casually slung over his Helmut Lang suit. But he manages to spend almost as much time in my house as he does in his own.

Interesting dynamic at Colton today. Ling and Harry are rather appropriately sharing what I think is called a love seat, one of those half-sized sofas, Rachel and I are next to each other on one side of the table, Jack sits between Alexa and Celia on the other side, a pictorial representation of the foibles and transgressions that thrum beneath the existence of our tight-knit circle. I look across at Ling and wonder how much Harry has told her about us. Does she know, for example, about me and Rachel and our on–off affair, which began at university and still reignites at least once a year for three days of frenetic sex before one or other of us calls it off? Or that Alexa is probably still in love with Jack, and when Celia is not around, the way they flirt and look and laugh, you might think the marriage belonged to them.

Today, though, Jack is in domestic god mode. There’s an extended game of peekaboo with Freddie, who sits on his knee: sunglasses up, sunglasses down, each perfectly timedreappearance triggering an adoring chuckle from his baby. He changes his facial expressions – surprised, exhausted, deranged – and the baby laughs even louder. He’s good at the dad thing and you feel the eyes upon him: not just Celia, Alexa and Rachel, but half the women in the room who gaze at this blonde-haired performer.

‘Here, I’ll take him,’ Celia says eventually. ‘I know you’re desperate to go and have a cigarette with Lucian.’

Rachel, Harry and Alexa have just come back from the smoking area so Jack and I go out alone. The moment we’re outside, we hug. It started as a joke, this over-the-top back-slapping man hug, but it sort of stuck. Brotherly love, I guess you’d call it.

‘You freaked about the funeral?’ Jack asks.

‘Yes and no.’

While we light up, I contemplate telling Jack how I really feel. That my mother’s passing has ignited in me a primal, Munch-like howl of regret. That I can never say sorry, never make peace, never know what it is like to be on good terms with her (we fell out a few years after my father died and spoke little ever since).

But I cannot tell him these things because he has always hated her for not loving me enough. It was Jack I turned to when I left home at sixteen without any clear idea of where I should go. It was him and his parents who invited me to stay for all the remaining school holidays (I split my time between their house and my uncle’s), rustling up another stocking on Christmas Day, an extra egg at Easter, even if I was growing too old for these things. Jack’s family lived in a knackered old farmhouse and his father was always in and out of jobs, new dreams swamping old ones. They’dgiven up everything to send him to Eton and then they ran out of money. I’m not sure he thanks them for it, growing up amongst the super-privileged without any dosh himself is at the root of all his insecurity, I’d say. He once said to me, all flashing blue eyes, ‘I’ve got to be rich,’ and I made the mistake of laughing at his earnestness and the note of fervour in his voice.

‘It’s all right for you,’ he’d said, the only time he’s thrown the money back in my face. But what he didn’t understand was that I’d have swapped it all for parents like his. Their consistency, their kindness – it amazed me. There was never a day when Jack and I weren’t woken up for bacon sandwiches and a heart-busting walk up a vertical hill; at night, cards were played around the kitchen table with a kind of religiosity. And the food, my God, I’ve never been one to place much importance on eating, but Jack’s mother could really cook. She used to produce pine-nut-crusted lamb from their clapped-out Aga, broken door wedged shut with a chair; potatoes that tasted like they’d been roasted in caramel.

‘Worried about the witches?’ Jack asks, grinding his cigarette underfoot. Ever since I left home, he has always referred to my mother and sisters as the Three Witches. We were studyingMacbethat the time.

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