Page 73 of Pictures of Him

This morning his butler called and asked us to come: me, Rachel and Alexa. None of us speaks during the fifteen-minute journey, but I understand that the girls feel just as I do as we stand waiting outside the front door, Rachelbrushing tears from her eyes with the heels of her hands. The last time I stood here, Catherine was by my side, but to think of her now is to falter, and I need superhuman strength for this first meeting with Harry.

Filip opens the door and his face, paler than I’ve ever seen, is a mirror of our own. He has been looking after Harry for at least five years, and like Mary with me, he sees the inner workings of Harry’s life, not just the veneer he chooses to present to us, his friends. The moment we’re through the door, Filip says to Rachel and Alexa, ‘I’m sorry to say this, but Harry has changed his mind. He wants to see Lucian on his own.’

Alexa says, ‘Of course, whatever he wants. How is he?’ and Filip just shakes his head.

Walking up the stairs, same dark blue carpet that dates back to his parents’ day, I am reminded of all the years I stayed here throughout my teens. The house still smells of wax polish and leather books, but now there’s an undercut of Polish cooking too, those little deep-fried dumplings that Harry loves. Little else has changed. Grim portraits on the walls; the giant and characteristically ugly brass and crystal chandelier that presents itself, a statement of poor taste, on the first floor. Would Ling have changed the house, given time? Would she have introduced light and warmth into its stark, stately interior, or even the unthinkable, persuaded Harry to sell and move into somewhere more habitable, somewhere more like Jack and Celia’s farmhouse? Again, again, the sharp needle of hate.

I am breathing hard and a little too quickly as I turn the door handle to Harry’s room. I’m not sure what to expect, but I find him in complete darkness, the thickvelvet curtains drawn against the sun-bright afternoon.

‘Harry, it’s me. Can I open the curtains, just a fraction? It’s hard to see.’

‘I’ll turn the light on.’

He clicks on his bedside lamp and floods the room with a depressing night-time glow, and now I see everything: Ling’s clothes folded up on an armchair, her hairbrush on the dressing table and beside it a photograph of the two of them in a tuk-tuk in Bangkok, Ling with her radiant full-beam smile. Harry is lying on the bed dressed for winter: cords, shirt, jumper, thick woollen socks.

I am not sure where to sit. The chair is the obvious place, but now that I’ve seen Ling’s clothes, I’m worried about touching or displacing them, so I perch uneasily on the edge of the bed instead. I’m trying in my mind to form the right words – not how are you, never that, but something that shows I understand, at least a little bit. I think of something Catherine told me, less than a week ago though it feels as distant as the fragment of a remembered dream: ‘Until you’ve lost someone you love, you don’t know what it’s like. You think you do, but you don’t. The absence of that person is everywhere, you can’t escape it.’

The irony of those words, for that is exactly how I feel about her now. She is nowhere and everywhere and utterly, irrevocably transformed.

‘I’m so sorry, Harry. I know how hard this is for you.’

Harry nods and turns his face away from me.

‘You loved her so much.’

He nods again; there’s some sort of gasp, that’s all. In the silence I look around the room and see only Ling. Thetrainers she wore the first time I met her are stationed neatly at the foot of the bed. Her phone in its bright yellow casing lies on the bedside table. It hurts to see that phone. I imagine Harry scrolling through her messages and photos looking for something, anything that might bring her back to him for a moment. When Catherine and I broke up all those years ago, Harry barely left my side. I thought it would drive me mad, his over-enquiring concern, his constant presence when rage and self-pity and alcohol were the only accomplices I wanted. But it was his acute anxiety, a hunch that saw him tearing across town in the middle of the night, that saved my life. And here I am, in a gloomy lamplit room, wondering how I can save his.

‘I’m going to get you through this. We’ll take it hour by hour. Minute by minute.’

‘Not sure I can get through it. Not sure I want to. What’s the point?’

This is not the moment for a debate on existentialism, especially when I have my own snakepit of anxiety on that score. Love helps, if you can find it, but not when it’s snatched away from you like Harry’s. Like mine. My fury hardens when I think of the real reason for Catherine’s desertion. I am filled with hate.

Harry sighs, a long, yogic expelling of air.

‘I was careless with Ling and now she’s gone. She would have been better off if she’d stayed in Bangkok, if she’d never met me.’

‘You can’t say that. Ling loved you, Harry. None of this is your fault.’

‘You don’t think so?’

Harry looks at me properly for the first time. It’s hard tomeet his gaze. The truth is, I think we were all to blame; I think the five of us have been cruising towards a fatality of this kind for a long time. Rachel lost her kid a while back – why wasn’t that our wake-up call? And why did I let her blow her chance to reconnect with Max, the one thing, the only thing, deep down, that she cares about? Another disaster and we just allowed it to happen. And why did none of us, even Harry, consider that we had a duty to Ling, who had no experience of our reckless world with its impenetrable rules? For years we never needed anyone else, we thought we were safe in our unreachable bubble, we thought there was a code of honour in a life lived without judgement or counsel; seems to me now the exact opposite is true. Carelessness is what defined us in the end.

‘Lucian, I need to ask you something. A favour.’

‘Anything.’

‘Ling’s funeral. I can’t do it. I thought I could, but every time I start to think about it, I realise I can’t. I can’t think about coffins or flowers or music or prayers.’

‘You’d like me to organise it?’

‘Will you?’

We stare at each other, Harry and I, friends for how many years now – is it actually twenty? I realise looking at him that he has aged a decade or more in the three days since Ling’s death. He always looked older than the rest of us, with his prematurely balding head, but right now he could pass for fifty.

‘Of course I’ll do it, I’ll do everything.’

‘It needs to be exactly as she wanted.’

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