Page 35 of Pictures of Him

‘More than a little sad. She’s heartbroken but in denial. She just keeps going to the parties and taking the drugs and fighting her way through the hangovers and pretending that everything’s fine; more than fine, it’s great. But of course we all know it isn’t.’

I tell Catherine about Max, Rachel’s son, eleven now. I tell her about the day she lost custody, her sobbing on thefloor of my London flat, fat rivers of tears that left patches of wet on my Moroccan carpet. I tell her about Rachel’s five-minute rehab, her shock arrival at Soho House, martini glass in hand, when we’d just been discussing her detox.

Through all this Catherine listens, and when I’m finished, she says, ‘She’ll get there eventually, and when she does, she’ll be able to work it out with her son, make him understand. You can’t stop until you’re ready.’

‘I think he’s starting to come around,’ I tell her. ‘She’s meant to be seeing him sometime this week. I’m pretty sure it’s tomorrow.’

And it occurs to me that Catherine is the opposite of Jack’s wife, Celia, who cannot help leaking silent judgement whenever Max is mentioned. You see it in her eyes, her mouth, her shoulders. She can exude disapproval from the back of her head. It’s not that she’s unkind; more that she is so obsessed with her own small son and with mothering in general that Rachel’s ‘dysfunction’ – she actually called it that once – horrifies her.

We stand in front of nude Rachel – funny, really, how wildly personal and inappropriate this portrait seems when you begin to analyse it: her smooth, pale brown nipples, the deep beige shadows marking out the undercurve of her breasts, the neat strip of hair – seeing but not seeing, for Catherine is in a trance, the two of us caught on a staircase of memory.

I think we’d been together only a week or so, holed up in my bedroom for almost the whole of that time, in the Clifton townhouse I shared with Jack. He brought us a takeaway once, I remember, and apart from that we livedon tea and toast and bottles of very expensive wine my uncle had given me.

Rachel’s sharp, impatient knock on the door startled us, post- or pre-coital as we always were in those days and I threw Catherine one of my T-shirts and wrapped a towel around my waist. Rachel came in and stood by the door looking around the room – the rumpled bed, the tangle of Catherine’s clothes and mine on the floor, a litter of mugs on my desk – and her pretty face was tense with disapproval. We’d slept together after a drunken party the very first week of term – an unmemorable scuffle on the bathroom floor, as I recall – and never since, but I knew she was in love with me. Or thought she was at least.

‘Hi, Rach,’ I said. ‘You know Catherine, don’t you?’

It wasn’t the smoothest of introductions, not the best setting, the two of us half-naked on the bed, Rachel, even back then, too well dressed for a student, with her gold jewellery and her expensive clothes.

Catherine said, ‘Hi,’ but Rachel didn’t respond with even the most cursory of glances.

‘When are we going to see you?’ Her voice was plaintive. ‘Are you coming out with us tonight? There’s a party.’

‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘Unless Catherine wants to.’

I looked over at Catherine, but she had shrunk right into the corner, as if she could make herself invisible under Rachel’s disinterested gaze.

‘I’m going to have a quick coffee with Jack before I go to the library,’ Rachel said. ‘Coming?’

I tried to persuade Catherine to come with me as I threw on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans.

‘Rachel’s just a bit jealous of you, that’s all. She’ll love you once she gets to know you. They all will.’

But Catherine shook her head. ‘You go,’ she said. ‘I’m fine here.’

In the kitchen, Rachel and Jack were standing by the sink clearly talking about me, and I walked into a hostile atmosphere of things half said.

‘Sometimes you can be so unfriendly, Rach. You made Catherine feel really bad back there.’

‘I don’t think she’s the girl for you. Sorry, but I have to tell you.’

I looked at Jack who had annoyed me by saying nothing.

‘Presumably you disagree?’

‘Of course I like Catherine. You know I do. I think the point Rachel is trying to make is that we don’t really see you any more. It’s as if all you care about is her.’

The two of them, standing there, all po-faced and sanctimonious. Anger made me thoughtless; I didn’t care about Rachel and the pain of her unrequited love, or the way Jack had supported me through the hardship of my teens and now I was dismissing him like a jealous kid.

‘I guess neither of you know that feeling when all you want is to be left alone with someone. Can’t you just be civil to her, Rach? Is that really too much to ask?’

Up until that point we had formed a pretty tight group of five: Jack, Harry and I, who’d been friends since school, and the girls, Rachel and Alexa, a new addition, all of us addicted to good times at the exclusion of pretty much everything else. We had money and time and youth, I guess, and an unconscious desire to fritter it all. Rachel from the outset had insisted on exclusive friendship; shemanaged it with hernoli me tangerereserve and pinpoint put-downs and with the simple fact that she was basically more fun than anyone I’d ever met. If she wanted us to herself, she could have us, was my view. And then I met Catherine.

I feel ashamed now at the way I turned away from them, especially Rachel, whose eyes were vivid with tears. But I’d found love, after a decade of intense loneliness. Erotic love. I hadn’t known it could consume in this way, so that all I could think about, the only thoughts I had, were what we had just been doing to each other and what we might like to try next. That she was a virgin when she met me and yet had matched, sometimes even exceeded, the extent of my passion had tipped me over the edge. I was hooked on her, addicted, obsessed, and nothing and no one else mattered.

‘She didn’t like me, did she?’ Catherine asks, fifteen years later, as we stand here in front of beautiful, naked, thirty-something Rachel, and I know that, as usual, our thoughts are running side by side.

‘More, I think, she liked me too much.’

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