Page 31 of Pictures of Him

‘From the age of about six, but I thought my father would inherit it first. I never imagined he would die so young.’

Catherine reaches across the table for my hand.

‘You once told me you felt responsible for his death. Do you remember?’

I nod as the memory of that night sears between us, the night she promised she would never leave.

‘Do you still feel like that?’

‘No, I don’t think so. I was ten, how could it possibly have been my fault? I just wish it hadn’t taken me all this time to realise it probably wasn’t my mother’s fault either. I’ve always been so black and white about infidelity. To me it’s the lowest crime. You’re attracted to someone else? Then you break up and move on. I’ve spent my whole life hating my mother for betraying my father. But I’ve come to realise there must have been two sides. Maybe he wasn’tso easy to live with. Maybe that’s why she looked to other people to make her feel good. You can’t go round blaming everyone else. Ultimately it was his fault and no one else’s.’

Catherine is watching me with an expression of unutterable sadness and I assume she is thinking of ten-year-old me, the victim of parental suicide. Or perhaps she is thinking of her own mother, dead at forty-six, yet another bizarre parallel between the two of us. I want to say something to chase away the gloom, but before I can speak, she says, ‘You see that’s exactly what I feel. You always have to take responsibility when things happen, the bad as well as the good.’

And though I know she’s probably thinking about Sam and his affair and the possibility of them separating, there is something about her voice and her eyes, which are sorrowful and somehow haunting, that jars me and reminds me of the past. We keep coming back here, no matter how much we both try to avoid it. This secret of hers, whatever it is, right now, it feels so close I could almost touch it.

Fifteen years earlier

You and Jack had a dinner party, a grown-up one supposedly, though it certainly didn’t end that way. You had pushed together a couple of tables, covered them with white linen cloths; there were flowers and candles and cute little cellophane wraps of Belgian truffles. Your uncle sent a case of expensive wine. Alexa arrived and scattered little gold stars across the table. She was wearing a bright pink dress, a tiny thing, and her skin even in the height of winter was smooth and golden.

You had gone to so much trouble. Oysters from the fishmonger, a beef casserole you’d paid someone to make, chocolate tarts ordered at crazy expense from Fortnum & Mason. It was your idea to have the dinner party and I understood why you were doing it. We’d been together for a few months by then and this was your way of telling your closest friends I was here to stay.

Jack, who saw me on a daily basis, went out of his way to be nice to me. He might have been jealous – after all, until I came along, he was without question your number one; you were, you often told me, closer than most siblings. But he was bigger than that. If you and he ever went off to thepub, he made sure to invite me along, and when you and your friends visited your uncle’s house one weekend – I’d refused to come, battling an essay crisis, secretly glad of a little time alone – he had tried hard to make me change my mind. Alexa, who, like me, stayed over most nights, had also become a good friend. But there was resistance to our relationship, mainly from Rachel and her girlfriends. Charlotte Lomax in particular, another manicured blonde, loved to voice her dislike.

‘Everyone knows she’s in love with Lucian,’ Liv said whenever Charlotte’s spitefulness rattled me.

I wasn’t surprised that Rachel and Charlotte were fighting for your attention that night. You were wearing one of your father’s old suits with a black T-shirt and trainers, the first time I’d ever seen you in something formal, and you looked almost shockingly handsome. Jack did too, of course, the undisputed university pin-up. He was wearing an identical vintage suit (his taste, I always thought, was an exact replica of yours) with a white shirt and narrow black tie and he was at his most charming, bringing Alexa and me glasses of champagne to drink while we changed, loitering on the edge of the bath talking to us while we jostled for space in front of the mirror.

You and Jack were good at parties, even back then. There were twelve of us, high on champagne cocktails and just the luxury of the thing; it was the absolute antithesis of any student party I’d ever been to, no cut-price Valpolicella, no pasta bake, no one passed out in the bathroom.

I hoped we would be sitting next to each other. Privately I’d had a little fantasy about you sliding your hand beneath the tablecloth and working your way up my bare thighs– if I’d told you that, you would have changed the table plan instantly. But instead I was sitting between Jack and Harry, while you had Rachel and Charlotte, your vixen adorers, slugging it out to left and right. They left no room for anyone else, your attention monopolised right through the casserole and the chocolate tart and even when the plates were cleared away (by paid, uninvited students from the same year; no one but you and Jack would have had the audacity), you remained a tight little cluster of three.

Most people were smoking and drinking glasses of Vin Santo, which your uncle had sent along with the wine. Harry, whom I’d found it hardest to get to know (‘It’s nothing personal,’ you told me whenever I mentioned this. ‘He’s never been able to talk to girls’), was opening up to me about his home life. It sounded like something out of a Grimms’ fairy tale. A huge house that was so cold in winter he had to wear socks and two jumpers to bed. A nanny who had been passed down through three generations.

‘She’s in her nineties now. I used to have to tie her shoelaces because she was too stiff to bend down. I think she slept through most of my childhood.’

A father who drove a horse and trap to town when he lost his licence for drink-driving. A mother who used to read theRacing Postcover to cover several times through, a dressing gown over her clothes to keep warm.

I told Harry it reminded me ofCold Comfort Farm, all those eccentric characters living together in a damp old house.

‘Nothing so interesting, I’m afraid. They’re fantastically dull, my parents. They only care about grouse and salmon. And their animals. They love their dogs and their horses.That’s about it. No other interests. No more topics. Dinners are so boring and so bloody long. The only good times are when Lucian or Jack come to stay.’

I began to understand that night what bound you so tightly to your friends – both you and Harry had parents who had disappointed you, your teenage years characterised by a lack of love. Once you’d cut yourself off from your mother and sisters you lived between Jack’s parents’ house and your uncle’s during the school holidays. The three of you, I saw now, had formed your own family, only recently allowing Alexa and Rachel to join the clique. No wonder you were going to such lengths to have me accepted.

Someone had brought a bottle of tequila with them and it was travelling the length of the table with accompanying chunks of lemon and a little silver dish of salt. When the bottle reached Jack, he poured out a shot and handed it to me.

‘No thanks.’

Jack shook his head slowly from side to side. When he grinned, all I could see were his perfect straight white teeth. Film-star teeth that had cost a fortune; you told me he’d blown an entire legacy fixing them. My stomach lurched a little when he smiled at me, at his most irresistible.

‘No?’ He put his head on one side. ‘But I think you mean yes?’

‘I tried it once, it tastes like paint stripper.’

Jack folded his arms. Another wide, tooth-flashing smile.

‘I’m wait-ing.’

It was a challenge and we gazed at each other, his bright eyes boring into mine. I remember thinking how Jack usedhis poster-boy good looks like some girls use their beauty to get whatever they want. Poor Alexa, was what I thought as I knocked back the tequila shot with a grimace. He was flirting with me openly, no matter that his girlfriend and my boyfriend were seated around the same table.

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