Page 64 of Pictures of Him

Something happens to Catherine. She calls Ling’s name in a normal voice the first time, then instantly she’s screaming it.

‘Ling! LING! LIIIING!’ Her panic is abrupt and infectious. ‘Where is she? Where is she?’

Both of us shout her name as we drag ourselves up into the boat, so cold suddenly, me rowing towards Harry and Ling, Catherine leaning right over the edge in her sodden dress, water streaming from her hair. Ling! Ling! Ling! It’s all my brain knows. Searching the darkness for a glimpse of yellow.

‘Why can’t we see her? Why isn’t she answering? She can’t have gone far.’

Here at its heart, the lake seems vast and uncertain. And so dark, it’s almost impossible to see. Half-remembered facts punch my brain. When you swim at night your bodytemperature drops quickly. Drowning can happen in an instant, silently, without warning.

Harry is roaring Ling’s name; in his voice, the fading of hope.

‘We’ll find her, Harry. We’ll find her. You take the oars,’ I tell Catherine as I drop back over the side into the water.

I’m so cold now as I plunge beneath the surface – heart pumping at the thought of the weeds, a childhood fear reignited. I open my eyes in the murk but I see nothing but a flash of beige just ahead of me, Harry’s hand turned a luminous white. There is no girl in a yellow dress. I go deeper and deeper, kicking hard, so cold I cannot breathe. I’m up again and down again – my brain pounding only this refrain: Ling, Ling – looking and looking for yellow, but I can’t see her, I can’t see anything.

When I next come up, Catherine is beside me in the water. She’s calling Ling’s name, over and over, her voice rasping, raw.

‘Keep looking,’ she says. ‘Find her, please, please find her.’

I push myself beneath the surface again, but this time I’m weighted by hopelessness. We’re not going to find her.

I re-emerge to the sound of Harry’s cries, a howling more animal than human that reverberates through the night. I hear Andrew’s voice in a boat nearby.

‘Lucian, you have to get out of there. All of you, you must come out of the water.’

I watch him leaning out to pull Catherine into his boat, gathering her up as if she’s a child. She seems oblivious to him, deranged by sadness.

‘Oh no, Ling, oh no,’ she says, as if Ling is still sitting next to her in the boat, still talking, still alive.

Four months before: Catherine

We are rowed back to shore by Andrew, three of us, not four. Wrapped in candy-striped blankets, shaking with cold, with shock. Harry is no longer wailing but his grim-faced silence is harder to bear. You sit next to him, your hand on his shoulder, staring at the shoreline. No one talks, there is nothing to say. The facts are too harsh to be spoken.

Ling is dead. No matter how many times I tell myself this, I cannot take it in. It feels like moments ago that she was sitting beside me in this boat, sharing a bottle of champagne, talking about her wedding party. Only yesterday, as she stood cooking her beautiful food in Harry’s kitchen, I was marvelling at the way her life had turned out: one moment working in a busy Bangkok hotel, the next replanted in one of the most indulgent lifestyles in England. Less than an hour ago I was thinking that in just a few days Ling seemed to understand me better than almost anyone. I loved her and I barely knew her.

‘We’ve got to go back,’ I say, ‘we’ve got to keep looking,’ but Andrew shakes his head and so do you.

Andrew says, ‘We’re searching the edges of the lake. If she’s there, we’ll find her.’

Harry’s head drops forward until it’s almost touching his knees. He sobs, just once.

‘Harry,’ you say. ‘Harry.’

In the distance but growing closer every minute is the sound of a siren. Andrew has told us the police and ambulances are on their way; I know we are all thinking the same thing. What’s the point?

My recklessness, yours, Harry’s, Ling’s, it’s all I can think of. Me, who never takes risks, who never gets drunk, who fully understands the perils of swimming at night, especially when people have been drinking. What happened, Ling? Did you get cramp, were you too cold, did your body just stop working? Did you slide beneath the water’s surface, did you call out to us and we couldn’t hear?

‘Can you all move back?’ Andrew calls as Jack leans over the edge of the jetty to grab our mooring rope. ‘Can everyone leave the lake now, please.’

He is never more in control than in the face of this accident, this fatality, although occasionally he betrays himself with a glimpse of stabbing guilt.

‘I should have had a first-aid team on standby,’ he told me, voice hushed, as we rowed to shore. ‘I should have considered something like this might happen.’

So Andrew feels responsible too.

Harry, stumbling in his blanket, is swamped by Rachel and Alexa and a couple of green-suited paramedics, who lead him away to an ambulance parked just outside the entrance to the lake. Already Andrew is dealing with the police.

‘You and Lucian need to go up to the house and getchanged,’ he says. ‘Now, Catherine.’ He half shouts it. He has realised, I think, that shouting is the only way to penetrate our shock.

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