Page 19 of Pictures of Him

You leant down, elbows on the table, face close to mine, voice loud and clear. We hadn’t even touched at this point, but the close proximity of you was doing dangerous things to my stomach, my chest, my groin.

‘I don’t want to play games with you,’ you said, shockingly forthright in front of the student journalists, who were gazing openly at this exchange.

‘Nor do I.’

You looked at me for a moment, then stood back up.

‘We’re going to a party later. Will you come?’

I shook my head. The prospect of a night with your friends was intolerable.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘No you won’t come to the party? Or no you don’t want to spend the evening with me?’

‘The party,’ I managed to say. Full sentences and regular breathing were beyond my grasp right then.

This time a rare full-strength smile that reached up to your eyes.

‘In that case,’ you said, ‘I have a bottle of very good wine at home that has your name on it.’

Four months before: Catherine

I am meeting Liv at the Serpentine Café in Hyde Park, always one of our favourite places back in the day. We would meet here on a Sunday morning, recounting tales of the night before over weak cappuccinos, while the health nuts ran by in their neon Lycra. Now she’s the girl in Lycra, insisting on a trip to the gym before she meets me. She exercises in a kind of religious fervour these days, half-marathons at the weekend, 6 a.m. trips to the swimming pool.

This has always been my favourite park. I love it for the green-and-white-striped deckchairs, for the blow-dried Kensington mummies buttoning up their toddlers and the roller-bladers who whizz around the lake, insolently weaving in and out of walkers, too confident and too fast to care about rebuttal. I love it for the trees – oaks, chestnuts and planes, sycamores and limes, a whole colour chart of greens and yellow, with sudden bursts of cherry and crab-apple pink in springtime. When I was young, my parents used to bring me here, in my own buttoned-up navy-blue coat. We’d walk hand in hand, the three of us, to the lake, where we’d feed the ducks with crusts of bread my father had saved up during the week.

Our children loved it here too, shifting between the paddling pool and sandpit at the top of the Lido to the little playground by the barracks. Standing against the wire netting, transfixed, as a troop of guardsmen galloped by on their way to Buckingham Palace, an everyday occurrence if you timed it right. Joe and Daisy are everywhere as I cross the park today and I long to talk to them, but they are in Cornwall now, surfing or crabbing or mackerel fishing or perhaps parked up in a sand dune with one of their grandmother’s mammoth picnics.

‘Call the kids whenever you want,’ Sam told me last night, as though all of a sudden I was the one in the wrong. ‘But you are right, we need space to think. Let’s not talk for a bit.’

When I think of the alternative – Sam holed up in some shitty two-bedroom flat in Frome, the kids going off to stay with him every other weekend – all I want is to run back to him and lock the doors behind us. I chose Sam – or rather, I chose to go back to Sam, after you – and I taught myself to love him with an intensity that could not be challenged. I’ve hidden within our marriage for thirteen years. And though I continue to look for you online and in the papers (as bad as Julia, in my own way, with my closet stalking), I do it to reassure myself that you are happy, or perhaps some less trite approximation of that word, and that I did the right thing in leaving you and not forcing you to choose between me and your oldest friend. The choice I made was stark and uncompromising, just like the two worlds that you and Sam inhabit: one veined with danger, it seems to me, the other as white and blameless as a glass of milk.

As I approach the café, I see no sign of Liv. There’s a couple with a baby in a high chair, the mother holding out torn bits of croissant, which the baby grabs and drops to the floor. Two girls are talking intensely while their coffees cool, untouched, in front of them, and right by the entrance three cyclists swig from bottles of Evian. I am about to sit down at a table when I notice, on the perimeter of my vision, a tall man leaning up against the wooden fence that circuits the lake. My whole body lurches with the instant, feverish blood rush of recognition. My instinct is to run, but it is too late, too late. You turn, see me and wave, a casual, non-committal wave that reminds me of our beginning. I am frozen here looking at you, the real you, not just the two-dimensional photographs that have become your replacement over the years.

The shock must be written on my face, because as soon as you are close enough, you say, ‘Liv didn’t tell you, did she?’

‘She knows I wouldn’t have come.’

And those are my first words to you in fifteen years. I watch you incline your head. A look of resignation flits across your face.

‘I didn’t mean that as it sounds.’

‘Is it really so bad seeing me again?’

‘The opposite of bad.’

You smile then, the same trademark smirk, corners down.

‘What about a coffee, at least?’

I want to, oh I want to, but I am so afraid of the questions you might ask. I hold out both of my hands and we inspect them shaking.

‘Not sure I can hold a cup.’

‘Come on, I’ll carry it for you.’

I follow you into the café, where we queue side by side for our coffees. You are wearing a denim shirt, black jeans and a pair of once-white Converse. With your back to me, I can look at your hands, long, slim, tanned fingers, nails cut short. And your hair, which still curls over the collar of your shirt. How long have we got? I want to look at you properly, to examine your face for any change: day-old stubble almost as thick as a beard, new lines around your eyes. Our thoughts must be running in parallel, for you turn to me and say, ‘You look exactly the same.’

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