Page 53 of Pictures of Him

‘You’re doing so well,’ he says. ‘You’re making so much improvement every day. Greg tells me the therapy sessions are really starting to help.’

Does he? Are they? Can it really help, this relentless churning up of the past, the daily guided walk into the heart of my pain?

I sense the slow build of these sessions and I know, of course, where they are leading. I know that sooner or later we will be taking a pickaxe to the door that has been closed – not just closed, but slammed shut, bolted and padlocked – for the past fifteen years. I understand the rules of this game. Death first, the easy one, let’s deal with that. And so Greg talks of my mother as if he knew her, as if he knew the way her hair – still deep brown with not one streak of grey when she died – remained resolutely flattened against her scalp no matter how much she blow-dried and backcombed and bouffanted, her word. ‘I give up,’ she’d say, slinging the hairdryer across the room. ‘Helmet head it is.’

Greg doesn’t know that she was beautiful but in that careless way, grabbing a blob of moisturiser on her way out of the house, smearing it into her cheeks on the drive to work, her only concession to glamour. She didn’t needmake-up or a bouffant. And she was always laughing, he doesn’t know that. He can’t hear her laugh like I can, a full-bodied, head-thrown-back guffaw that was at odds with her delicate appearance. He’s got me thinking about her, though, I’ll say that for him. And I have learned something new. It’s all right to let a little bit of her light back in; it doesn’t hurt as much as I’d always assumed it would.

‘You’ll be home soon, Mummy,’ says Daisy, interrupting my thoughts and leading me back to my family. ‘And we’ll make cakes and go to the beach and sail the boat and everything will be just the same. You’ll see.’

She wraps her arms around me, my beautiful little glass-half-full girl, squeezing hard, her cobra squeeze, as if she can force her optimism into me by osmosis.

Fifteen years earlier

You put onSticky Fingers, an album we’d listened to almost incessantly in our four months together. First song, ‘Brown Sugar’, my least favourite but the one that usually invoked your Jagger impression – a microphone-toting snake-hipped strut. You did it perfectly. Suddenly the three of us were dancing. My balance was off; it was more weaving than dancing, and propping myself against you the moment the track changed. And then it was ‘Wild Horses’, a song I loved so much, transported each time by the raw beauty of Mick Jagger’s voice and the sorrow of his words, and I was dancing alone now, no self-consciousness, none at all, as I swayed with my arms above my head and my eyes closed. This song had always been for us, we said, for nothing else could capture the strength of our passion. We were young and sentimental and so newly in love – nothing would ever drag us apart, we thought, not even wild horses.

I was lost in the music and the song and it took me a while to realise you were standing in front of me, trying to talk to me.

‘Catherine,’ you said. ‘Catherine.’

I opened my eyes. I stopped swaying.

‘What?’ I said, smiling.

But your face was serious.

‘I just got a call from my uncle. Didn’t you hear the phone?’

You told me he was upset, that he’d broken up with his lover again and you were worried about him. Or at least that’s what I imagine you told me, because the truth is I have no real recollection of this conversation.

And then you said you were going to go and see him, and this bit I do remember.

‘To make sure he doesn’t do something stupid.’

We had a sort of argument, I think. I was paranoid about drunk-driving and terrified of losing you when we’d only just found each other. Sometimes when you came home later than you said you would, held up in the pub, another drinking session with Jack and Harry, I’d lie in your bed dreading a knock on the door. I’d picture the accident, your body lying motionless on the side of the road, and I’d lie in the darkness brushing away silent tears until you came home and climbed into bed with me and made everything instantly great again.

I told you this sometimes.

‘Silly girl,’ you always said. ‘Why must you think the worst is going to happen?’

But that should have been obvious. My best was so good, so dizzyingly, euphorically, absurdly good, I knew I wouldn’t be able to live without it.

Four months before: Lucian

There are three crucial elements for a good party in my view – the people, the booze and the setting. Tonight we have a tried-and-tested guest list of three hundred, a committed crowd who always arrive with a fierce determination to get the best out of the night. No one will drive, everyone will drink and most of them will be wearing something brand new: girls in the full kaleidoscope of colours, a sea of red, pink, blue, green, silver and gold; men wearing suits, black, blue and white mostly, though there’s always the odd exhibitionist who likes to surprise in shocking pink. They will look their best and act their worst; there will be drunken break-ups and illicit love affairs, random couplings that really ought not to have happened, and an easy-going, Woodstock approach to drug-taking, anything and everything, anywhere and everywhere. Professional partiers, Colton House habitués and old university friends, some of them will even have travelled across continents to be here (Eliza and Georgina Kitson from Kenya, the Buxtons from Sydney, Jonathon and Lydia Maxwell from New York). The setting I lucked out with: two hundred acres of lake, woodland and rolling green lawns, a purpose-builtpool for midnight frolicking, a rose garden in full bloom for the romantically inclined.

I also take the precaution of hiring in a slightly strange character called Andrew Martin to oversee things. His official job title is party planner, though you wouldn’t think it to meet him; ex-army and never seen without a shirt and tie, you’d have him down as a hedge-fund manager or a Lloyd’s broker, something in the City anyway. The thing about Andrew is that he’s really gifted at what he does, no request too bizarre, no detail uncovered; he is so thorough and obsessive that there is never anything left for me to do.

Six months ago he came down here with his paper-thin laptop and his Smythson notebooks and his three work phones and said, ‘Right, what’s our theme?’ And somehow or other we decided that this year it should be all about water – a nightclub down by the pool, a fleet of little rowing boats for the lake. As well as building a nightclub (an enormous team of workers and an afternoon’s work from start to finish), this year Andrew is also importing a miniature club, which will be stationed down at the lake. As far as I can gather it’s a sort of lamplit coffin-shaped box for thirty with a DJ inside and two bouncers on the door. Andrew is very excited about it. I don’t know anyone who gets job satisfaction the way he does (though you could argue that I don’t know many people with jobs full stop).

By the time I get up and go downstairs to make coffee, Operation Party is already in full swing. Mary has a team of cleaners with her today, hoovers blasting in all corners of the house, the air pungent with wax polish and bleach. The florist has arrived from Bristol, two hippy-looking girls (they even have flowers in their hair) are arranging ahuman-sized display of lilacs and blue-black roses in the hall and a local fruiterer is unloading crates of pomegranates, lemons, oranges and limes for the cocktails. From the kitchen window I see that one of the marquees has already gone up, and outside it a squad of empty spit roasts are lined up, a fearsome-looking tangle of spikes and hooks awaiting their pig carcasses. There must be thirty people on the lawn all fully engaged in party mode, lugging tables and unfolding chairs, shaking out tablecloths, arranging bunting, jam jars of flowers and bowls of fruit, manhandling hay bales into a neat semicircle around the fire pits.

You’d think that I might feel something, a fragment of anticipation, perhaps, or a stirring of excitement, looking out at all this activity, at all these people working to provide me with the ultimate gathering. But instead I am thinking of Catherine’s bag, already packed and stationed like an insult beside the bedroom door. I am reminded so much of last time. And yet I see no future for us, not really.

Last night after Rachel went to bed, Catherine, Alexa and I sat up in the kitchen talking. Somehow or other Alexa started asking Catherine about her children, and once she started talking, it seemed she couldn’t stop, it just poured out of her. The three of us spent a good half-hour trawling through all the photographs on her phone. There was Sam, the boyfriend who once inhabited my dreams, older now, hair cut short, a faint tinge of grey around his ears. We saw him playing chess with his son, the vivid glint of a swimming pool in the background, an idyllic sun-bleached Mediterranean scene, a pastiche of family life that must star in so many albums. In another shot he stood resting his hands, dad-style, on a garden spade,his small, pretty daughter waving her own pocket-sized trowel, before a neatly turned square of bitter brown earth. There he was again holding the girl in position at the descent of a zip wire, strong arms wrapped around her small body, dark heads pressed up close. A Cornish beach now, Sam crouching beside a disposable barbecue lined with half-cooked sausages, son and daughter beside him with identical white-toothed smiles.

What struck me most as we sifted through her catalogue of family life was the unity between Sam and his children, the very hands-on-ness of him, seemingly a ready-made entertainer primed to kick a ball or build a sand sculpture at a moment’s notice. The memory came of my own father teaching me to hunt rabbits with his shotgun, an heirloom I still treasure despite its bitter connotations. When I hold this gun, a Purdey that must be a hundred years old and handed down from father to son, much like the house and the land and the paintings, just its touch, the worn smoothness of its walnut body and the cool steel of the barrel, can transport me instantly to my tenth birthday. Dusk, just me and my dad on the summit of the hill, waiting for the nightly gathering of small game. What a blag that birthday was; somehow we’d managed to get rid of my mother and sisters and spent the day here at Shute with my uncle. Now in the early-evening gloom it was just the two of us, dressed like soldiers, lying on our bellies, eyes narrowed, waiting. I remember exactly how my heart began to race when the first family of rabbits scampered into view. I knew not to speak, barely to breathe, as I glared through the scope, looking, looking, waiting, waiting, slowly squeezing the trigger just as he had showed me,then pause and pull. Bang. My first ever kill, a straightforward headshot that made my father whoop.

‘Good for you, kiddo! Good for you.’

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