Page 77 of Pictures of Him

‘If you’re not going to tell her, then I am. She has a right to know.’

And here the disagreement implodes into a full-blown row.

‘Like hell you will! She’s my wife and we will do things the way her psychiatrist tells us to do them. Do you understand, Liv? Do you understand?’

Sam is shouting and Liv is probably crying, but I turn away from them and close off their sound. The information I wanted is not going to come today. Soon Sam and Liv will go and I will be alone again. I’ll stare out through a gap in the curtains at the night-time sky, navy blue with bursts of sizzling white, just like one of Daisy’s drawings.

Fifteen years earlier

It was astonishing how we managed to avoid each other in our final year, pinned apart by the same desire. Wherever you were likely to be, I wasn’t, and I guess it was the same for you. Even the English department became a safe zone, as you spent all your time at home working on your art. There were occasional glimpses, of course – you and Rachel seen through the window of Foyles bookshop, you and Jack driving along Woodland Road in your pale blue car, a few seconds of looking before I turned away.

We didn’t share the same friends – yours, for obvious reasons, had dropped me; mine and Sam’s thought your crowd, with their loud public-school voices and their bottomless bank accounts, were a joke. Different parties (if I ever went to them), different pubs (if I ever went to them); you kept your house in Clifton, while Sam, Liv and I rented in St Paul’s.

So there was just the one, devastating confrontation with Jack a week or so before finals. How long did it last – a minute, maybe two before Sam rescued me, taking my elbow and leading me away. And yet in that time, with that smile, knowing, intimate, challenging, he deftly tookme right back into the heart of our night together so that I could remember the penetration of him, not you, his hands in a press-up position either side of my head. Memories I refused to examine hammering against my brain.

‘Are you OK?’ Sam said, catching sight of my face a moment later.

Just a shake of my head was enough for him to put down his glass of wine and take me home. No need to ask me what was wrong; I’d just lost a parent. I had, as they say, the mother of all excuses.

Four months before: Catherine

Two infidelities don’t make a right. But it helps, no question. We’re in total agreement on one thing at least: Sam must not mention Julia, I don’t mention you, and so long as that happens, we can pretend we have picked up our marriage where we left off, just the two of us and our kids, bobbing about in our felted cocoon. It works in a way, this enforced optimism, celebratory dinners night after night, weekend trips planned with a relentlessness and enthusiasm that is exhausting for us all.

Occasionally I’ll catch Sam looking at me and I recognise the hurt in his eyes and know that he’s thinking of the day I first came back, when you were right there, imprinted on me, flesh on flesh, bones on bones, breath, taste, tongue, skin that still held your scent of cigarettes and lemons. But mostly we are fine because Sam is also a veteran of faking it. The fable of Catherine and Sam: we can shrug ourselves back into it, and if it seems a little more stretched, a less comfortable fit than before, then we know, from years of experience, that soon it will become like a second skin and we’ll both start believing it.

I keep as busy as I can. I’ve bought myself a pair ofAsics trainers and I go out running every day, further and further each time. I was no athlete at school, but now I can run for miles, trying to outpace the demons in my head. Fifteen years after it happened, I’m finally facing up to the memory of that night with Jack. I’m forcing myself back into your bed, to that treacherous embrace that makes me cry out at times. I find that I can run and cry at the same time, and if I do it early enough in the day, then my face will recover by the time my family are back home. I keep to the fields and woods, where I see no one apart from the occasional lone dog walker, and I can flash past them, a blur of sweat and tears and acid-yellow trainers that make me think of Ling. Alone in the heart of the woods I’ll call your name. I miss you, I’ll say to the forest of oaks, or most often: Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. No matter how many times I say it, it will never be enough. I yearn if not for your forgiveness then for some sign that at least you understand. I made a mistake, a catastrophic one, but not because I didn’t love you.

We take our first trip out onPandora, the beautiful blue and white dinghy we bought only three weeks ago, though so much has happened since then it feels as if that day belongs to someone else.

‘Watch out for the boom.’

Boom, jib, port, starboard – it’s funny how all these words trip from Sam’s tongue. I always think of sailing as belonging to the hairclipped, frosted-lipsticked girls I once knew, the ones who sailed at Bembridge and rode at Belsay, but Sam disproves the point perfectly. He learned to sail on a lake just outside Salford, he can ride Western-style, and shoot and play tennis. He can do all the thingsyou do, only he does them in his own way and with the spiky undercut of humour that is his trademark.

The sailing is a success and our weekends are mapped out for as long as the weather holds. We celebrate at a pub on the way home with cider for us and bottles of Coke for the children. We sit in the garden and Sam picks up his phone and takes a snap of me and the kids, drinks held high, cheers! I think how this must be the first picture since. Since you. Since Ling. Since everything. Joe says, like he’s reading my mind, ‘I’ll take a photo of you and Mum,’ and now Sam is by my side, arm balanced across my shoulders, casual on the surface though to both of us it is anything but. For there has been no physicality, none whatsoever, in this resolute reconstruction of the norm. We sleep in the same bed, clothed and clinging to our edges, a great big gap down the middle, room for both children if only they’d come in and save us from ourselves. I feel the pressure of Sam’s arm, the warmth of his skin resting against my neck, and I know that it is only a matter of time.

The first time we have sex – how many days later, six, maybe seven? – I do everything I can to still my breathing and switch off my brain. I try to be mindful, to focus on the sensation of Sam’s fingers beginning their slow and expert trail across my skin. I try not to look for the scent of cigarettes and lemons or the nobble of cartilage just beneath your ribcage (it’s my sternum, you told me when my fingers first found it all those years ago; it’s my identity mark). But afterwards, afterwards, oh God, the despair is tidal, I will not survive it. I lie encased in Sam’s arms, staring up at the ceiling, waiting and waiting for therhythmic flow of his breathing to convince me that he is asleep. I ease myself from his grip and I throw on his discarded T-shirt (Sam’s smell: Right Guard deodorant and soap and the faintest whiff of male sweat) and walk out of the room in my bare feet, burglar-quiet, even though Sam is so deeply asleep he has begun to snore, and that is another sign that he’s happy. And this is what I do. I stand on the landing, staring up at the trapdoor that leads to our attic, missing your box of letters and photos and cuttings, my secret compendium on you, missing you, all that is left of you, even though I’m trying so hard to be someone else, a good mother, a better wife.

This is just the first time, I tell myself, as I stand in the darkness breathing through the pain.

Four months before: Lucian

In a surprising, worm-turning twist, Celia has left Jack. She packed up the baby and the car while he was in London, and by the time he got home, they had gone, clothes, toys, everything. She had written him a note that was devastating in its finality.

I don’t want to be with you any more. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and I won’t change my mind. I’m leaving you and going back to live with my parents.

I meet him for lunch at Colton House, where I try not to express – or even feel – glee at this unexpected outcome. Jack’s indignation is hard to take, this the man who continued to sleep with Alexa throughout his marriage, the man who once stole the girl I loved and who sits opposite me now, eating lamb cutlets and drinking wine that I will undoubtedly pay for.

Jack always orders the same thing as me in restaurants even when, like today, I make a last-minute change – lamb instead of steak. It used to be our standard joke – ‘I’ll have what he’s having’ – and I found it touching the way he wanted to emulate my taste. Now, though, thereis something claustrophobic in his shadowy, mirror-like perma-presence. Doesn’t he have any opinions of his own?

‘Celia won’t take my calls,’ he tells me as we drink our way through a very good red. ‘She’s even changed her mobile number and I can never get past her Rottweiler of a mother. I drove all the way to Warwickshire and you know what happened when I got there? Her mother wouldn’t let me see Celia or even Freddie, my own son, for God’s sake. She said I’d be hearing from their lawyers and until then I shouldn’t waste my time trying to contact Celia. She said, “It’s over, Jack, you need to accept it” – like, I mean, can’t we even talk about trying again? Isn’t it actually up to me and Celia?’

‘Maybe there’s an upside. What about Alexa?’

You’ve been busy screwing her right through your marriage, after all.

I hate his laugh.

‘What about Alexa? Been there, done that. This isn’t you and Catherine we’re talking about, clinging onto some skewed vision of the past. Talking of which, she’s gone a bit quiet. I suppose she’s run back to the husband and that’s the end of it?’

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