Page 33 of Pictures of Him

Four months before: Catherine

Am I still dreaming? I feel as though I must be, waking at first light, my naked body pressed up close to yours, the man I have spent most of my adult life mourning and regretting. I lie in the half-darkness, registering the unfamiliar shapes of the room’s old-fashioned furniture. The armoire – not a wardrobe apparently, nothing so pedestrian here – with its moulded top that curls up at both ends like a waxed moustache. The bookshelves, which run right across one wall and are crammed with an unlikely mix, half yours, half your uncle’s: art books, a complete set of Dickens that look like they’ve never been opened, several Stephen Kings – ‘I read them when I can’t sleep,’ you told me – various pictorial odes to the male form including a devastatingly graphic Robert Mapplethorpe.

I love this new, updated knowledge of you: your house, your habits, your daily life. I love opening up the armoire and seeing the neat rows of pressed shirts (so many white ones, it reminds me with a stab of my mother). I like seeing your toothbrush (electric) in the chrome tooth mug and your shampoo in the shower (lime and basil; so that’s where the citrus smell comes from). I have spent so manyyears craving information about you, and gleaning only the smallest, most unsatisfactory snippets from the papers, that being here in your house feels like a sensory overload. I listen to the steady flow of your breathing and feel a little rush of contentment. I’m glad I am awake, I wish I didn’t have to sleep at all, that I could inhabit each moment of the day and night and store it up, but for what? For when I am back in the cottage with my sad little box of letters and memories? How can that ever be possible again?

You reach out and put a warm hand on my thigh.

‘You’re awake.’

It was always like this when we were first together, the two of us so tuned into one another that we even shared our sleeping rhythms. I remember waking to you kissing me and slowly making love in that magical, trance-like way so that afterwards I was never quite sure if I’d been dreaming or if it had really happened. You roll over and wrap your arms around me and I feel your lips brushing against the back of my neck. You run a palm slowly from my neck down to my chest to my stomach, where it rests, lightly, a few inches above my groin. Always with you the instant flicker of lust. You shift position so that you are lying exactly on top of me, leaning up on one elbow, tracing the outline of my face with your forefinger, touching my chin, my nose, my eyes.

‘It’s very early,’ I whisper.

‘Let’s not waste any more time sleeping,’ you whisper back. You are kissing me, your tongue flicking lightly against mine, and your hand has worked its way between my legs and I can feel the hardness of you pressing against the top of my thighs. Hands, fingers, tongue; I know whatcomes next and there is nothing to do except melt and burn.

An hour later and we are on your hill, sharing coffee from a stainless-steel Thermos. It is a little cold and I am huddled into an old blue jumper of yours, which I have stretched over my knees to keep warm. We have caught the last moments of sunrise, a burning deep orange sky with the great grey mass of Wells Cathedral and the Glastonbury Tor set against it. From up here you can see how the county is all curves, a backdrop of hills – the Mendips, the Quantocks and Blackdown: you point them out one by one. It makes me think of a giant nude Rubens woman lying on her side, and when I tell you this, you laugh.

‘All I can see now is breasts and hips and a pot belly.’

You tell me that you come up here most days to take photographs on your phone.

‘You’d think I might get bored of the view, but I never do. The mood changes completely depending on the light and the weather; I think that’s why I paint it so often. And it’s only really by making lots of versions of the same thing that I can get at the essence of it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But I come up here all the time anyway, whether I’m thinking about painting or not. When I’m here, I know I could never leave Somerset.’

‘But surely you couldn’t leave Shute Park even if you wanted to? You couldn’t sell it, could you?’

‘The estate is meant to stay in the family, passed down from father to son. But it turns out neither my uncle or I have been very good at breeding. Different reasons, obviously.’

‘Why didn’t you marry?’ The question is out before I can stop it.

‘I’ve no idea. Never fancied it, I suppose. Why did you marry Sam?’

My stomach dips at the mention of his name.

‘I think because he made me feel safe.’

‘And I didn’t?’

I have fallen into a trap of my own making. No, I wasn’t safe with you, but not for reasons you could imagine. I cannot look at you now; I feel sick and ashamed and bone-cold suddenly, winter-cold. I needed Sam for his black-and-white morality, his high opinion of me. But how can I tell you such things without revealing the truth about why I left?

I force myself to breathe slowly, quietly, in and out, in and out.

‘Catherine?’

I’m in a state, you can tell.

‘It wasn’t that. It wasn’t that you didn’t make me feel safe.’

‘Then what was it?’

The blackness is there just on the perimeter of my vision. If I concentrate, if I keep calm, I can push it away.

‘I felt I didn’t deserve you.’

Again the words seem to rush from me almost before I’m sure I want to utter them. You see the truth in this, I know you do, because you stand up and wrap your arms around me and I rest my head against your chest, inhaling your citrusy smell.

‘Silly girl,’ you say, while we watch the colours of the skyfade from orange to palest pink. ‘How could you possibly think that?’

We spend the rest of the morning in your studio, an old flint cattle shed surrounded on three sides by a purpose-built glass and steel box. Inside, the light is so fierce it is almost too much, and the walls and floor have been painted a dazzling white. It is completely bare, this studio, stripped down to the essentials and nothing more – a workbench covered with tubes of paint and sketchpads, a holder filled with pencils, a butler’s sink with a jug of soaking brushes, its interior still spattered with specks of rust and cobalt blue. There are canvases stacked everywhere: in piles on the floor, propped against the walls five or six deep, and in one corner a whole tower of blank ones that lean threateningly like an installation.

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