Page 7 of Pictures of Him

By the time we get home it’s almost seven and the kids are tired and cross when I make them go upstairs to shower before supper.

‘I’ll put some pasta on,’ Sam says, disappearing into the kitchen, and when the doorbell rings I go to answer it with no thought or preconception in my head at all.

I find Julia Wright, a teacher friend of Sam’s, in the porch of our funny tumbledown cottage, and for a moment I’m so surprised that I don’t think to ask her in. She came to our house in London once; she brought Smarties for the kids.

‘Smarties,’ Joe said in disgust at the time, ‘like we’re babies.’

‘Julia,’ I say, ‘what a nice surprise,’ though my heart sinks as she follows me through the hallway, walls lined with our smug happy-days gallery of family photographs: Sam, tall and heart-stoppingly young in a morning suit, laughing down at his bride; Joe and Daisy in their matching car seats, marooned in the middle of a festival; then at school in cobalt-blue sweatshirts, Joe with a forced, serial-killer grin, Daisy with her hair scraped tight into unfamiliarbunches. How depressing, our mellow Wednesday evening will be ruined by interaction with a stranger. I picture the bottles of wine we’ll have to drink, the adult supper we’ll have to cook, the absence of television and papers and an early night.

‘We were just cooking pasta for the kids,’ I say, leading her into the bright white kitchen, and then I see Sam’s face as he turns around from the hob and catches sight of Julia, and my heart catapults and crash-lands on the floor. What can I tell you about those first scorching moments while he semaphores his shame, while our world begins its slow and agonising landslide?

‘Sam?’ I say, uncertain for a second or two, but that is all. I can read the horror in the blackness of his eyes and the miserable slope of his mouth. No words are needed; his guilt is rushing from every pore. In a heartbeat I’ve understood it all.

Julia says, ‘Hi, Sam,’ but neither of us reacts.

Sam is staring at me with his dark eyes, the children’s eyes, and he looks so, so sad and I find that I am shaking uncontrollably. This is it, the end or the beginning, I’m not sure which, but I’d do anything to turn back the clock and freeze it on five minutes ago.

I whisper, ‘How could you?’ and Sam sort of howls, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ and Julia, who by now is beginning to understand the dark exchange of information that has taken place between husband and wife takes a step closer to Sam and, in a tone of familiarity that makes me want to roar like a caged wild animal, says, ‘I’ve tried calling you so many times but you never call back. How could you treat me like that?’

‘What do you want?’ I scream it, oblivious to the children upstairs, who can probably hear me through the thin cottage floorboards. Iamthe wild animal now.

But Julia ignores me and speaks to Sam instead.

‘Can’t you understand why I’m here, Sam?’ Her voice is unbearable, soft, knowing. ‘Can’t you understand why I couldn’t leave it, why I couldn’t stand it to be over?’

But Sam is still watching me, a look of utmost sadness printed on his face, printed on my soul, the final moments of our before as the dial flips to after.

Four months before: Lucian

Rachel is in the kitchen eating kedgeree and staring at her phone.

‘Morning, darling. Well, technically it’s the afternoon. I just got a text from Max. He wants to meet up! I’m so happy.’

Ah yes. Max. The kid. We co-parented for a few years, my friends and I, albeit in our rather haphazard, unconventional way, then Rachel lost custody when he was seven. It broke her, of course, though she never admits it, but I see the tiny etchings of regret around her eyes and I worry that one day they will remould her face into a full-blown mask of despair. She left her husband, Hugo, hedge-funder party boy turned teetotal marathon runner, when the baby was just two. Drugs drew them together and blew them apart a few years later. Hugo is a reborn puritanical: kale smoothies, hot yoga, the whole thing; Rachel a shoo-in for rehab. I paid for her to go once, three thousand notes just for her to walk through the door, not that the money matters. She discharged herself three days later, turning up at Soho House where it was someone or other’s birthday, responding to our shocked expressionswith typical flamboyance: ‘My name is Rachel and I’mnota drug addict.’

I look at her now. ‘Rach, I knew he’d come round in the end,’ I say.

I put my arm around her and she leans her head on my shoulder and this is how Alexa finds us when she wanders into the kitchen with wild-woman hair and big panda rings under her eyes.

‘What’s going on? Why the love fest?’

‘Max texted me this morning. He wants to meet.’

‘Amazing! Of course he wants to see you. You’re his mother.’

She slides onto the bar stool next to Rachel, kisses her cheek and begins heaping a plate with kedgeree.

The phone rings.

‘Bound to be Jack,’ says Alexa with the undercut of hopefulness that is always there. She and Jack were a couple right the way through university, unless you count the blood-bitter spats, his incessant flirting, her reckless revenge, the splits and reunions, which became almost pedestrian to those of us who lived through them. Three years ago, on a break from Alexa, Jack met Celia and a line was drawn under the history of histrionics. I do wonder, though; I see the way Alexa looks at Jack sometimes and I fear that she still loves him.

But it’s not Jack on the phone, it’s Harry inviting us over for Bloody Marys.

‘Thought they might be in order,’ he said. ‘Filip is making a batch up right now.’

Filip is Harry’s Polish butler, who looks after the estatewith his wife and their two grown-up sons. His Bloody Marys are immense.

Harry hesitates, a weighted silence while he chooses his words.

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