Page 28 of Pictures of Him

You dropped a few coins into the donation box and selected a skinny white candle, looking back at me questioningly as you lit it and placed it in the holder, as though you were indulging in some bizarre pagan ritual.

We sat down in a pew to look at the candles for a while and I wondered what you were thinking. I thought about the thousands of other candles burning across the city, the millions and billions of them flickering at the same time around the world, a kind of collective energy keeping alive the memory of all those dead souls. I told you this as we waited outside the church for a cab to take us back to the airport. Death was unknown to me then and my vision of it was purely romantic.

‘You’re the only person who has ever understood me,’you said, after a moment. Your voice sounded thin and still, I thought, a little devastated.

Apart from my father, you could have said. But you didn’t need to.

Now

I would have no idea how much time passes in here if Sam didn’t mention it almost every time he visits.

‘It’s been four months, Greg,’ he says, just about holding back the ‘fucking’, though I sense the gap and supply the word myself. Four fucking months.

‘The slower we go, the faster we’ll get there,’ Greg says, or some such platitude, dripping petrol onto the fire of Sam’s indignation.

Sam wants results. He wants me locked up in trauma therapy sessions twenty-four seven. It’s not that he wants me to suffer – the opposite is true; just that he wants his wife back. He wants his old life where he had a lover and his children had a mother. He’s chasing that.

Sam’s also become an expert in dissociation disorder, and as we know, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. He has been told that there are three proven moments of my dissociation – the day I left you (the first time), the night my mother died and my final visit to Shute Park, where I splintered off from my reality so drastically that I have not spoken or connected to anyone else ever since.

I’ve had this dramatic response explained countlesstimes and Sam has the details down off pat, a user-friendly diagnosis that he trots out to anyone who’ll listen (Alexa most recently; I recognised the jangle of her jewellery even before she sat next to me in the visitor chair, crying and then apologising about crying for what felt like for ever before she jangled off again).

Sam likes to compare my dissociation to the freeze response in animals; this is how he’s explained it to the children too. In times of extreme trauma, dissociation helps protect the mind, he says; it offers an escape when it seems like there is no escape. The problem is when the dissociation becomes permanent, as it has with me, so that it seems I have no memory of events and little or no connection to the people I’m supposed to know best. Throw mutism into the mix and you have a hellish, complex condition that has baffled my psychiatrist and infuriated my husband.

In our trauma therapy sessions – one person talking (Greg), one person listening or not listening (me) – there has been a great deal of emphasis on creating my safe place. Since I don’t speak, my safe place has been selected for me and it’s our cottage, the pretty little Hansel and Gretel house with ivy-strewn walls and the long, straggling garden with a stream at the bottom. Greg becomes really quite lyrical when describing the cottage, although I imagine he’s only seen photos; he talks about the glint of minnows in the stream and the way the early-morning light slices into the kitchen, creating pools of warmth on the oak table. He asks me to imagine sitting at that table watching Daisy making one of her grand-scale felt-tip drawings, looking out of the window to see Sam workingin the garden. It’s true these were once treasured points of familiarity and reassurance for me, the old me. It’s just that in my head I have a different safe place. In my head I am always with you.

Four months before: Catherine

I’d forgotten how Shute Park appears quite suddenly after a bend in the drive. You turn a corner and there it is in front of you, this magnificent vanilla-coloured building, a miniature palace with its turrets on either side. It is absurdly grand and quite the loveliest house I have ever seen.

‘It’s so beautiful,’ I say, and you look over at me, smiling.

‘As you remembered it?’ and I nod, too full of the moment to speak, for the spectres of you and me are everywhere now. Fifteen years earlier, driving from Bristol in Jack’s knackered old Golf, him and Alexa in the front, you and me in the back, the four of us swigging from a bottle of champagne. My heart beating wildly as we climbed the steps to the front door, you squeezing my hand before we went inside.

‘Don’t worry about my uncle. He’ll love you. And anything goes, there’s no judgement.’

Just behind the house I can see the lawn where we lay on a rug with Mary’s lemonade and the weekend papers. Glinting in the distance is the lake where we swam, the four of us floating on our backs, the archetypal ‘before’ shot, a Polaroid to happier times.

The house is beautifully symmetrical in that staunchly Georgian way, three rows of windows running across it in perfect graduation, small at the top, then medium, then longer ones across the bottom. Exactly in the centre of the facade is a triangular roof; it reminds me of the doll’s houses that Daisy and I used to love in the Museum of Childhood, the ones with a panel that pulls away to reveal an ornate Louis XIV interior with tiny little rooms full of spindly gilt furniture.

I am dumbfounded all over again by the wonderfulness of your life.

The thought fills my mind that if we had stayed together all these years then this house might also have been mine. We would have had a family together by now, a little row of Lucians and Catherines racing around all this grandeur. Do you think it too? I wonder, as I catch you watching for my reaction.

In the entrance hall, which smells just as houses of this kind should – cool air, seasoned wood, an inherent dampness passed down through the ages – we examine the family paintings. There is your grandfather, moustachioed in a tweed three-piece, all set to go out and butcher a skyload of pheasants; your grandmother with curlered hair, dark lipstick and a choker of thick cream pearls. You stop at the portrait of your father, painted a year or so before he died, you tell me. I remember this painting well; I remember searching it for traces of the boy I loved and noting the eyes, an emphatic green the same as yours and the mid-brown hair with its tendency to curl out at the ends. What strikes me, though, is how in the fifteen years since we last saw each other, you have become identical tothis painting. You are your father. I wonder if you see it too.

‘He’s so handsome,’ I tell you. ‘A cross between Jeff Buckley and Mick Jagger. Same mouth. And hair.’

‘He’d have been happy with that.’

I don’t tell you that you look the same but even more so, even more beautiful to me. I am re-mastering the art of understatement. Always with you in a world of women who were ready to drop at your feet, I wanted to be the one who held back. We have moved on to a painting of your uncle which I haven’t seen before, very Liberace in a voluminous silk shirt, martini glass held in a hand that glints with rings, when Mary appears from nowhere, shoes clipping across the parquet floor.

‘There you are,’ she says to Lucian, and then she realises who I am.

‘Catherine! My goodness, what a surprise.’

‘Mary, it’s so nice to see you again.’

I offer my hand but she pulls me into an unexpected hug and I find myself fighting against a sudden punch of emotion.

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