Page 40 of Pictures of Him

‘But I haven’t even told Sam.’

‘It’s all right, I’ve asked them to keep it quiet. They won’t say a word.’

They. Does that mean you also told Jack? The last time I saw him was at a party in my final year. My mother had died a few months before; I was in so much pain and I didn’t know what to do with it. I locked it away and tried to impersonate the girl I’d once been; I don’t think I managed very well. It was rare for me to go out, but for once, just a few weeks before exams, Sam had insisted.

‘Come on, a last fling before finals.’

Jack caught me alone, waiting for Sam to come back from the bar. I stood frozen in the headlamp of his gaze. Big, overdramatic kisses on my cheeks, rapturous greeting.

‘It amazes me that we share the same university town and yet I never see you,’ he said, as though bumping into me was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

I said nothing while my heart pulsed the drama of my mind. It didn’t last more than thirty seconds. Sam came back with two glasses of wine, took my elbow and led me away without even bothering to acknowledge Jack.

‘Catherine?’

Your voice nudges me from bleakness.

‘You’re worrying about things that aren’t going to happen. We’re not going to see Jack or Rachel or Harry. I’ve promised you that. And we don’t have much time left. Don’t you think we should just enjoy it?’

‘I’m sorry.’

You smile as if it doesn’t matter, as if we can step overmy demons and pretend we’re the people we once were. And I tell myself to try harder.

Colton House is every bit as impressive as the papers would have you believe. You arrive via a long, tree-lined drive to the house, with its famous Georgian exterior of honey-coloured stone. It’s a beautiful building, a Jane Austen dream, but in comparison to your place it’s nothing, that’s the funny thing about it. The bar has been raised so high I feel almost disappointed.

On the way to the main house we pass the swimming pool – a long, slim, infinity-edged affair filled with shrieking children and surrounded by tanned, toned mothers reading magazines or chatting idly to friends: another day of the summer holidays ticked off with glorious ease. Oh, it’s a different life, this one, no catching a bus to the germ-filled leisure centre, no trailing ten deep round the V&A, no squeezing onto the only square of sand available as far as the eye can see. Even so, I’d rather be us, I think, but then I remember – there is no us, not really, not any more. There’s my children, my boy and girl, mackerel-fishing or rock-pooling or any of the other impeccably chosen, wholesome activities their father has organised, and there’s me, strolling towards this infamous headquarters of elitism, byword for excess, for everything that Sam most despises, on the arm of my secret lover. I hate myself for my deception, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

We’re greeted by a tall man wearing the kind of intensely fashionable high-maintenance beard that Sam loves to hate.

‘Matt, this is Catherine,’ you say, introducing me, and we follow him through the bar – windows looking out acrossparkland scattered with deer, two well-known musicians drinking beer at a circular bar – and out onto the terrace to a table that has been laid for two. The fabulousness of this place, I’m getting it now.

Most of the tables out here are full with holidaying families, teenagers glued to smartphones, parents slightly tipsy on their almost-empty rosé, a trio of men talking over beer and discarded laptops, a young couple, sharing pre- or post-coital oysters – do you notice as I do, for they are the ghosts of you and me back in the day. There’s a pretty dark-eyed mother and her friend, working their way through a bottle of champagne while her small daughter plays with a puzzle, and a loud table of mixed ages and genders, all of them smoking and drinking, unanimously dressed in black. It feels like the ultimate hideaway, quietly luxurious in that every single detail, from the blue linen daybeds to the smoked-glass ice buckets, has clearly been agonised over, and discreet in the sense that staff appear just when you want them and disappear when you don’t. Even at this hour there’s an air of wrongdoing, of rule-breaking, a hedonism that has been hammered into the joists. Anything might happen here, you feel, anything at all, and it wouldn’t matter because no one would breathe a word.

Matt is back with a bottle of champagne, which he opens expertly and pours into two glasses.

‘Fruits de mer?’ he asks, disappearing again before you can answer. When you see me looking at the champagne, you tell me it’s vintage Pol Roger and Matt knows to bring it without being asked. You tell me this without a glimmer of irony, and the disparity between us suddenly seems vast.This life you lead is what I’m thinking. This fabulously indulgent life. What can it be like to have everything you want, all of the time? Is it enough?

One of the reasons why I followed you through the years, with my bloodhound instinct for a new feature or diary piece, my feverish late-night searches online, was that I wanted to know if you were happy. I’d made my choice, or rather I’d had it forced upon me, and there was no going back; no amount of rubbing out or colouring in could change that. But had I done the right thing for you? I wondered, as the years passed and the dust settled and the wound grew if not less, then less obvious. Were you and Rachel happy, the way you and I once were? I’d ask myself as I pored over some new photograph, drinking in her professionally blow-dried hair, her beautiful unsmiling face. But of course the photographs could never answer that, just as my catalogue of family life, the endless mobile phone snaps, the videos and scrapbooks I make for Sam each Christmas, doesn’t tell the full backstory either.

An ease falls across our afternoon. There’s good warmth in the sun, the champagne is perfectly cold and the seafood is even better than our first lunch in that salt-streaked blue hut. While we eat, you tell me about Harry and Ling, the only girl ever to have made an impression on him.

‘It was instant, a love at first sight thing, for Harry, anyway. Ling took a bit convincing, I think. But they were married within a month.’

‘Doesn’t that worry you? How can you know someone properly in a month?’

‘I was worried until I met her. Then I understood. She’s exactly right for him. She’s smart and funny and he’s much happier with her around. And they seem to be besotted with each other.’

You tell me about Harry’s twenties, ‘a loveless and pretty lonely decade, I’d guess on reflection, though none of us realised it at the time. It wasn’t that girls weren’t interested in him and his great big house and his title, because they were, but something, somewhere stopped him. Repression, I guess. This winter he decided to go travelling. He wanted to do it properly, so he bought himself a backpack and flew to Malaysia. He travelled through Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, the hippy trail. And he sounded so energized and full of life whenever he called up; the trip really changed him. Thailand was the last stop, where he met Ling. He sent me a text. “I got married today.” I asked him why he decided to marry her and he said, “I knew I couldn’t be without her. And luckily, she felt the same.’

‘So it’s a proper love story,’ I say, and you smile your funny smile and I know you’re thinking about us, about our love story and the parallel universe we once inhabited so briefly.

I’m trying to keep myself away from that crossroads, the wrong turning I could never get back from. When you and I were together I was happier and more alive than ever before or since. Anything seemed possible and then, suddenly, nothing. My world literally shrank overnight.

I begin to tell you about my children, trying, I think, to anchor myself back into my real world.

‘Joe seems pretty serious when you first meet him,’ I tell you. ‘I was still grief-stricken when he was born, and his babyhood was quiet; we didn’t mix much. But he’s funny, he can do these pitch-perfect impersonations within minutes of meeting someone. He’d have you straight away, voice, mannerisms, everything. Whereas Daisy is his complete opposite. She’s incredibly confident and self-assured. She always speaks her mind, whether you like it or not.’

You reach for my hand.

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