Page 5 of Pictures of Him

‘Ding-dong, the witch is dead,’ says Jack, raising his shot glass to mine and squinting at me with fierce blue eyes.

My mother the witch. Beautiful, frozen-hearted tormentor of men, literally unto death in the case of my father. She was nice enough in my early years, but it was all about my father for me back then, trailing around the farm after him, mending fences, chopping down trees, learning to shoot rabbits with his shotgun. That gun, a slam-dunk to the heart.

‘So. Are we going to the funeral?’

‘I guess so. But it’s not going to be pretty. The last time I saw my mother and sisters was at my uncle’s funeral thirteen years ago.’

‘Which was anything but pretty.’

The one and only time I have seen Jack shocked waswhen my mother spat her venom amidst a room of half-drunk mourners because my uncle made me his sole heir. I think the word ‘cunt’ may have been used, and more than once. They are nothing like you’d expect, my family.

I look across the room at Ling, quietly elegant in her city clothes, and realise we have forgotten the real purpose of the evening. I find myself watching her now and I see how often she glances at Harry, for reassurance or from incredulity, who knows? She must be stunned by the extraordinary and unexpected turn her life has taken. One moment working in a hotel in Bangkok, the next married to one of the richest men in England and shackled to his monstrous great house.

It’s past four when the party finally wraps up, Harry drunk-driving home, Alexa disappearing off upstairs to sleep in her favourite bedroom, Jack on his new fold-up bicycle, a tactical move on Celia’s part when her husband had stayed over one night too often.

That just leaves me and Rachel by the dying embers of the fire. The fireplace is so big you can sit inside it, and that’s what we do right now. Above the hearth there’s a huge great beam that came from an old merchant ship; it’s got the rusting hooks and nails to prove it. There’s one nail that protrudes so far from the beam we call it the devil’s finger, and Alexa has wound purple fairy lights around it. They flash on and off, on and off, annoying at first but I’m used to them now. The library would look wrong without them.

‘One for the road?’ Rachel says, with us this is often a euphemism for something else.

She looks beautiful in her emerald-green dress, with her bright hair and her carefully made-up face, and it wouldn’tbe the first time we’ve ended up together, far from it. But tonight my heart is bleak.

‘Rach,’ I say, shaking my head, ‘I kind of need to be on my own tonight. The Blue Room is made up for you, as always.’

‘I understand,’ she says with a sad little smile that almost makes me change my mind. We have our own set of rules, my friends and I, nothing textbook, but we do like to look after each other.

I take a full tumbler of brandy to bed, knowing I won’t sleep yet. It is almost five now and the morning’s half-light is peering around the thick velvet curtains. My bed has been turned down by Mary, my housekeeper, a fresh decanter of water and a clean glass laid out on the table, and the sight of it comforts me, these small, sweet, maternal gestures of concern. If I’d had a mother who was more like Mary and less like my own, well, who knows how things might have turned out?

I sit on the end of the bed looking around the room that was once my uncle’s and has changed very little since those days. The furniture in here is heavy and old and unapologetically masculine, though my uncle, it must be said, veered more towards the effeminate. My father’s elder brother, he was overtly gay from the age of eighteen, out and proud, which was unusual enough in the seventies. There was talk of disinheriting him, I believe, but it didn’t happen and the house under his ownership became a byword for debauchery, the hub for parties that might last a week. It’s certainly made my life easier with the locals: you mention the goings-on at Shute Park and no one bats an eyelid.

I use the vast, and vastly old-fashioned, mahogany wardrobe – I think the correct term is armoire – that once belonged to my uncle, now filled with a colour-coded array of my shirts, white and black at the front, blues, greens, pinks and yellows behind them. I have lined his bookshelves with my books and two of my paintings hang on the walls. There is one of the view from the hill that sits at the edge of my land; I’ve painted it hundreds of times but this version, a monochrome in varying shades of blue (I was trying, and mostly failing, to emulate Picasso), is still the one I like best. The other is a portrait of my father, copied from a photograph when I was nineteen. He’d been dead almost ten years by then but I still missed him, I still tried to reinvent the landscape of my dreams so that he was there in his holey cashmere jumper and his blue silk spotted scarf, chucking a box of freshly laid eggs onto the table and saying, ‘Let’s make omelettes, kiddo.’

Two parents, two singular emotions, love and hate; my upbringing was staunchly black and white.

It is properly morning now and sleep is nowhere close. I could get into bed and read the volume of Raymond Carver stories Alexa gave me for my birthday; I could pick up my sketchpad and draw something, anything, to keep myself from thinking about my mother. The thought that looms is the impossibility of forgiveness, that neither of us will ever be able to say sorry. We fell out spectacularly when I was sixteen and spoke infrequently ever afterwards. The final nail was my uncle disinheriting my mother and sisters – not just the big house, which she’d lusted after from the first day of her marriage, but every last coin to go with it. I’d have been more generous if I hadn’t hatedher so, if I hadn’t blamed her exclusively for my father’s death, a childlike response I clung onto for reasons I am only now beginning to understand. To think on all this is to concede the weight of regret, the great grey cloud that has been hovering mere inches away since my sister’s late-night phone call.

In the end, I do the only thing guaranteed to quell the demons and flip me back into the light: I walk over to the armoire, open the top drawer and take out an old pencil drawing of the girl I once loved. It was a long time before I could look at this portrait, hastily drawn yet somehow perfectly capturing the blend of innocence and eroticism that marked our all-too-brief months together. The relationship finished in tatters, a cold and heartless ending that tore my heart in two and was worse than anything I’d ever suffered at the hands of my mother. I never understood how someone as sweet and lovely and guileless as her – and I know to this day I was right about that – could have abandoned me so carelessly. I spent months examining all the things I might possibly have done wrong – was I too rich, too arrogant, just too goddamn obtuse? But none of this made sense, not after the way we’d got beneath each other’s skin and heart and soul. So I settled for the only explanation that there was: she loved the other guy more.

Nowadays I can look at her picture almost objectively. I managed to get her eyes right. I think that’s why I like it so much. Those incredible dark screen-siren eyes, a classical other-worldly beauty, the kind that makes you stop and stare. I wonder where she is now, if she’s sleeping curled up against her husband, her feet pressing against his, her breathing soft and shallow. Has she cut her hair, does shelook older, are there wrinkles on that beautiful face? I’ve looked for her online from time to time, but there’s never anything there, no Facebook or Instagram accounts, no presence at post-university parties. I still see her friend Liv and I know that she understands my yearning for knowledge of Catherine. Readily she passes on information, usually about her children, a girl and a boy. She never mentions the husband, the man she left me for, though his name, unspoken, hovers between us.

I retreat into my bed, propping up the sketch against Raymond Carver, held in Catherine’s solemn gaze until at last my eyelids begin to close.

Fifteen years earlier

You began leaving notes in the library cubicle where I worked. I’d go off to look for a book and when I came back I’d find a folded piece of paper on my desk, emblazoned with your spiky blue scrawl.Lunch?

I wondered how you had found out exactly where I was, my preferred spot in the library, away from the second-floor socialites and the back-and-forth traffic by the loos. I wondered if you were hidden in another cubicle close by, watching me open your note with your arms folded and that downturned smile. How was I meant to find you even if I was considering having lunch with you – which, I told myself, I absolutely wasn’t. There was Sam to consider, after all, and I knew your kind, the decadent, excessive crowd you ran with; I knew to steer clear. But still each new note made my heart beat a little faster.Is today the day?read one.Do you like oysters?asked another.

Without acknowledging it to myself, I was spending a little longer getting dressed these days, casting aside one jumper in favour of another, bothering with make-up, intensive brushing of hair.

The next Milton tutorial came and went, but the chairnext to mine remained empty; the hour, the Professor’s weak voice, the decoding of Book IV, were interminable. I was desolate walking back to the library, desolate. Get a grip, I told myself, you have a boyfriend. Well, almost, an almost boyfriend. Sam and I had been taking our time, friends first but always with that suggestion of something more, smiles meant only for me, his dark-eyed gaze watching me when he thought I wasn’t looking. Finally at the beginning of our second year a moonlit walk around the harbour, where we’d tentatively held hands, and then, a few nights ago, our first kiss. He was all I thought of during my first year at university, this tall, football-mad, star-gazing scientist, until you crashed into my medieval English tutorial and tipped my world on its head.

There was an edge of magic in the way the next note materialised, while I was working, studying my Milton text, head bent over my books. I must have been concentrating hard for I saw and heard nothing; gradually I became aware of another foreign piece of paper in the corner of my desk. This one was different. I opened it up to find a pencil drawing so detailed and atmospheric I gasped in the formal hush of the library. A restaurant, one with walls made of wood like a ski chalet and tables covered with gingham cloths. Jam jars of flowers so accurately drawn I knew they were gerberas, I could picture the intensity of their petals, cerise or tangerine orange, I thought. One of the tables had a bottle of wine and two glasses filled almost to the rim, and beside it you had written,Ours?And just that simple pronoun filled me with an illicit blood rush. At the bottom of the drawing, an instruction:I’ll be outside the library at one o’clock.Your blue script was familiar tome now; I recognised the loops at the top and bottom of your l’s, the curlicue y, the aesthetic, I understood, of an artist’s handwriting. This drawing of yours had given me an unexpected insight; it had propelled me forwards into a place of less resistance.

There was an oversized white clock on the wall and I glanced up at it. Ten to one. The world tilted with possibility as I watched the minute hand click through its passage of time, looking down at the intricate sketch – posters on the walls I saw now, miniature forks with all four prongs in place – and back up again at the countdown to my future.

At exactly one o’clock, I picked up my books and left my desk.

Now

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