Page 80 of Pictures of Him

Night after night Jack sat with me, drinking our way through bottles of whisky, trying to solve the mystery of her leaving, and worse, her refusal to see me ever again. What could I possibly have done wrong? Never once did he falter; no matter how drunk we got, his story stayed the same. Catherine had gone to bed the minute I left; he hadn’t seen her again.

My desire for knowledge of the man I thought I knew better than anyone has become intense, a borderline illness, or perhaps a fully fledged one. There is nothing in my life but this.

Now

I’m better, everyone tells me so. I’m still not talking, but they are starting to think I soon will. There’s the same roll call of visitors: Sam almost every day, the children two or three times a week, Liv at the weekend. My father came and I felt bad for him, getting the silent treatment after his sleepless night on the red-eye. He sat in the visitors’ chair, talking to me in that loud, self-conscious voice they all used in the beginning, and after a while his conversation ran out. I knew without looking that his lips would be pressed together, brow creased: his not-crying face. I knew he’d be thinking of my mother, of my sweet, nice, unchequered childhood; he’d be wondering how, after such a glorious beginning, we’d got to here. I’m wondering the same thing myself.

The second time he came, he brought my favourite childhood book with him and began to read. He started on page one, Cassandra sitting in the kitchen sink using the last of the daylight to begin her journal. I’d read this book in the weeks after my mother died, over and over, so that not just sentences but whole pages of text were imprinted on my mind. They are still there; I can anticipate eachword, each stretch of dialogue before it comes. And I see the drawings, of course, no need to look. Those wonderful detailed pen-and-ink drawings that remind me of you. He reads the whole book to me before he leaves, four or five hours at a time, and halfway through, I reach out to take his hand; I feel a sort of peace.

I’m still waiting for you to visit; just a minute or two of looking would be enough. And knowing that you had forgiven me, of course. The big one. Sam, with his expert knowledge of his wife, knows how I long for this forgiveness. I think he believes it’s the cure-all, the thing that would kick-start me into talking. If he could frogmarch you here and have you deliver it, gun held against your head until you spat out the words, then he would.

Of course he’s passed all this on to Greg, and our therapy sessions now focus exclusively on that fateful night with Jack. It’s comical, really, how I sit here like a wooden block while he tries to therapise me back into blind drunkenness.

‘You’d had four or five shots of tequila,’ he says, ‘and you were dancing.’

He mentions your name, my love; he does this a lot.

‘Lucian was watching you from the sofa,’ he says. ‘And Jack was next to him, watching you too.’

He pauses for effect so that I can feel Jack’s eyes upon me; I must allow their particular blue to burn right through my consciousness. He describes you leaving me, going off to see your uncle; he asks me to feel the sensation of being left alone with Jack, for the first time.

‘Perhaps you felt a little turned on by him watching you. There’s nothing wrong in that. Everyone likes to be admired, especially when we’re young.’

‘Perhaps,’ he says, after another powerful moment of silence, ‘it was you who made the first move?’

Like I say, he’s a good psychiatrist. He knows his stuff. He knows how to get results. It may have taken time, but he has achieved exactly what he wants. My mind filled with nothing but those images I spent so many years trying to avoid. No more running. No more hiding. Time to face my past head-on.

Four months before: Catherine

Liv is here for the weekend, and it feels like a celebration. She is godmother to both children – how could I have given her to one and not the other? – and we spend the first hours of her visit around the kitchen table, drinking tea and inspecting the things she has brought. She is an expert present buyer; she knows what the kids want before they know it themselves. For Joe a vinyl record player – she waves away our concern: ‘It cost nothing, don’t panic’ – and several of her own perfectly chosen LPs,Scary Monsters,Parklifeand(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?. It makes me wince a little to see those album covers on our kitchen table, to remember the impromptu parties from our past, fuelled on vodka and her infinite record collection. For Daisy, there’s a trio of intensely coloured notebooks, turquoise, electric pink, and orange, and a glittery new pencil case tightly packed with felt tips, another spot-on present. Daisy zips and unzips the pencil case for a few moments, examining the contents with a satisfied smile, then retires into a corner of the kitchen, lost to us for the rest of the night. Her pleasure heartachingly simple.

Once the kids are in bed, we open Liv’s expensive Italianwine and skate across the safest topics. Liv asks Sam about his job and he tells her funny stories about his new friends in the science department who to me are still a blur of names I struggle to remember. I tell her about the local school, country mothers versus town ones (less make-up, dirtier cars), the three of us treading carefully to avoid all paths that might lead to you.

The next morning, Sam is taking the kids sailing.

‘Last sail of the year,’ he tells us, which brings an inadvertent stab of sorrow. End of summer, official end to the season of you.

I’ve told Liv very little about our ending, just that it was over and you didn’t want to see me again. Now, though, with the door closing behind my family and a fresh pot of coffee on the table between us, the moment for small talk has dissipated.

‘What happened?’ Liv asks.

Outside we can hear the car doors slamming, one, two, three, the engine starting up, the car sliding away.

Even now, when it no longer matters, when nothing matters, it’s hard to say the actual words. There are whole seconds here and I’m clinging onto them, these last moments before Liv understands who I really am.

‘I told him the truth about why I left. I told him I slept with Jack.’

I keep my eyes on Liv’s face, watching for horror, but instead I find confusion and doubt. She doesn’t believe I’m capable of such a thing.

‘How? How could that have happened? You wouldn’t do that, I know you wouldn’t.’

I’m trying these days to own these feelings of shame, toconquer them, even. I’m trying to admit – first to you, now to Liv and also to myself – that I once was a person who became so hopelessly drunk she committed an act of betrayal. A person who slept with your best friend. Someone who did the one thing you could never forgive.

‘We were drinking tequila, we were drunk. I was so out of it that most of the evening is a blur. Lucian went off to his uncle’s house, only I don’t remember him going.’

‘Are you sure? Didn’t he tell you he was leaving?’

‘I knew that he was worried about his uncle and I didn’t want him to drive. I thought he was too drunk and I was scared he might have an accident. The next thing I know, I’m in Lucian’s bed having sex with Jack. I don’t know how we got there. I don’t remember how it started. To begin with I thought it was Lucian.’

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