Page 13 of Pictures of Him

‘The witches, the friends, the uncles, the aunts. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen them.’

A girl we know comes out, clutching a packet of Silk Cut.

‘Hi,’ she says, with an extra smile for Jack. ‘Your baby’s screaming his head off, by the way!’

‘Thanks for that,’ Jack says, and the girl laughs and helooks her in the eye for a moment too long. Not smiling, just looking. He’d help himself if he could; she’s his type exactly.

We walk back into the bar to the sound of Freddie yelling – who knew a small child could make this much noise? – while Celia jiggles him over her shoulder, looking frantic.

‘He’s tired,’ she says. ‘I’ve got to get him back. You stay.’

There’s something in her voice, a flatness, a hint of frustration, but Jack ignores it.

‘Well, if you’re sure?’ he says, scarcely looking at his wife as he reaches for the bottle of wine. It’s Alexa who taps his wrist and, when he looks up at her, mouths, ‘You should go,’ nodding her head over at Celia. I watch my friend’s face through its swift passage of emotion: disappointment remoulded to resignation.

‘You know what, babe? Why don’t I come with you,’ he says. ‘I’ll make us something for lunch if you like.’

The transformation is instant. Celia is already grinning as she passes Freddie to Jack, who immediately begins a sort of jazz-hands motion with his sunglasses, up and down, up and down. Within seconds the baby is laughing but with a few outraged sobs in between as if he’s furious to find himself so easily amused.

‘Wow, that was intense,’ says Rachel when Jack and Celia have left in a swirl of car seats and changing bags.

‘He’s pretty good at it, though, isn’t he?’ says Alexa. ‘He’s a brilliant dad.’ Her voice is completely level as she says it, but I know that we all – Rachel, Harry and I – pick out her regret. She still loves him; I understand why.

‘Shall we order some food?’ I ask, and Alexa says no, she’s going to drive back to London.

‘I’ve given myself this completely unnecessary deadline, I’ll be writing all night like an essay crisis.’

Alexa is on her third historical novel. She writes romances set in eighteenth-century England, a sort of Jane Austen with balls. If you had asked me at university to pick a career for Alexa, this would have been the last thing I’d have chosen, but she’s good at it; her books are selling well.

The party breaks up. Harry and Ling are still in honeymoon mode, clearly preferring their own company to ours, the dissolute friends.

It’s Ling, not Harry, who turns down my invitation to lunch.

‘Not this time, thank you,’ she says, her manner frank and easy. ‘Harry and I are still brand new. We have a lot of catching up to do.’

And off they go, arm in arm, along the cobbled path, laughing together as they walk away.

That just leaves me and Rachel back at Shute Park for the final countdown to the funeral. We sit in the kitchen for a while, chatting to Mary and eating omelettes she makes for us. I’m glad Rachel has stayed; it helps me to hide from the demons.

‘Are you sure it’s OK for you to take all this time off??’

She waves a dismissive hand. ‘Of course it’s OK. What is this job of mine, anyway?’

In the loosest possible way Rachel works in PR. Her main employer is a peripatetic art gallery for whom she fires off press invitations and wears her beautiful dresses to openings in places like Weston-super-Mare. She’s funny about it.

‘I travel a lot for work,’ she’ll tell someone we’ve met at a party. ‘Loughborough last week. Tomorrow Melton Mowbray.’

‘Let’s drink a really good bottle of wine. You put some music on.’

In the cellar, I think of Jack, briefly, and how much he would like to be here. He loves my uncle’s cellar, which is fanatically well organised and stocked with an absurdly large wine collection. For people who care about such things (I can’t say I’m one of them), apparently it’s one of the best cellars in the country.

I choose a Meursault, Rachel’s favourite, a premier cru from 2007, and make my way back to the library, completely unprepared for her choice of music. ‘Wild Horses’. Not just the album –Sticky Fingers– but the song. I can never hear it without thinking of Catherine, without seeing her, so young and so beautiful, dancing with her eyes closed and her arms held high above her head. The last time we were together.

The change in me is instant, and of course Rachel sees it.

‘Oh Lucian,’ she says, and when I sit down next to her on the sofa I see that her eyes are full of tears. ‘You’ve never managed to get over her, have you?’

Fifteen years earlier

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