Page 44 of Pictures of Him

‘Jack says Lucian has been in love with you all these years. That he never got over you.’

‘Really? Jack said that?’

Celia smiles unexpectedly. ‘And obviously Jack likes to be Lucian’s number one at all times. He doesn’t take competition well.’

‘I remember,’ I say, though I want to push this knowledge away, the memory that must always come with it.

‘Lucian and Jack, they just, well, really love each other. It’s that three-people-in-the-marriage thing; sometimes I can take it, other times I can’t.’

Harry arrives now brandishing a bottle of gold-colouredliquid, his free arm wrapped around his wife. My heart lurches just to see him again. The swooping vertigo of time travel, the sharp jab of the past. Harry standing in the doorway of my university flat, his voice loaded with emotion.

‘I’m asking you, please, to stay away from him.’

You may have forgiven me for the way I abandoned you with a cruelty and coldness that shocked everyone at the time. But that doesn’t account for your friends. I was hated, despised, denigrated in certain quarters of university life for the rest of my time there. The heartless girl who’d brought you to the brink of a breakdown, refusing to explain why I’d left, or to see you ever again. I remember the rumours that reached me in those God-awful weeks after we’d broken up. It was said you were drinking yourself to death, drinking right through the day and most of the night, vodka on waking, empty bottles of brandy that littered your bed. Liv had found you alone and incoherent in the pub one night; the only words she could understand were my name and the tortured questioning over why I had left. Even she found it hard to defend me back then.

‘You broke his heart,’ she said. ‘And then you ran off home without even trying to explain. All anyone wants to know is why and I don’t know what to tell them.’

People spoke about your estranged mother, an adulterous drunk whom you blamed for your father’s suicide. Suddenly you, who had been envied and feted, were a subject of pity and concern. And me? Well, I was universally abhorred for bringing about your downfall.

Despite my trepidation, I can’t help feeling curious at this first sighting of Ling, the young woman who has captured Harry’s heart. She is pretty and slight, the top of her head resting at Harry’s shoulder, long hair which almost reaches her waist. What I notice, in the seconds before Ling and Harry reach me, is how they cling to one another in that slightly frantic way of new love. The incessant touching, the reluctance to be parted for even one moment. I remember it well.

When Harry smiles and says: ‘Catherine, I’m so happy to see you again,’ I remember how much I liked him, how much I wanted him to like me. At the time, losing his approval felt like the harshest blow.

He puts a hand on each of my shoulders and looks into my eyes.

‘It’s been too long. This should have happened sooner.’

It feels intense, this, a sort of apology, a smoothing-over of our chequered past.

‘Yes, it should,’ I say, forcing myself to smile back at him.

He keeps hold of Ling’s hand as he tells me about their nought-to-sixty love affair.

‘We were married within four weeks of meeting each other,’ he says. ‘Lots of red tape but we got it sorted.’

‘Harry loves to bribe people,’ Ling says, laughing at him. ‘He’s very good at it.’

‘I was determined not to come home without you, that’s all.’

There are minutes of relief now, if you can call it that, when Harry goes off to join you and Jack by the fire, leaving Ling, Celia and me, the outsiders, alone on the sofas. I watch them in their separate corners – Rachel andAlexa conferring in their expressive silent-movie language, Lucian, Harry and Jack laughing and smoking by the fire – and it seems to me that they are connected as if by an invisible string.

There is so much I want to ask Ling who sits beside me, still and composed, seemingly with no need to fill these first moments of silence.

I want to know what it’s like being married to Harry, thirty-something aristocrat with his legendary twenty-three-bedroom house. What’s it like living in Somerset, land of fields and sheep and druids, after her existence in one of the most frenetic places in the world. How was it leaving her family, when does she think she’ll see them again, will they come here, have they even met Harry yet? But somehow all these questions feel too intrusive and I struggle to find the right thing to say. In the end it’s Celia who breaks the ice.

‘Tell us how you met Harry, Ling.’

‘You know he was a guest in my hotel, right?’

She breaks off to laugh.

‘When I say ‘my hotel’, I mean I was on the front desk. And one day Harry walked in, Panama hat, great big baggy shorts, face glowing like a lobster from sunburn.’

‘And without thinking, I said, ‘English?’ And he laughed and pointed to his scarlet face and said: ‘How on earth did you guess?’

We got talking and we just sort of clicked.’

‘Did your parents mind you leaving Thailand?’ I ask.

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