Page 11 of Pictures of Him

Oh, the boring predictability of it all, the wretched cliché of our lives. A messed-up marriage at thirty-four, an infidelity, a stalker for a lover, our own bunny boiler to add into the mix. Worst of all is the sickness I feel, not at Sam or Julia, but at myself. For deep down I always knew this would happen, and when it did, I knew it would be my fault.

I am thinking of one night on our honeymoon (two weeks in a villa in Antibes, a present from my father) when Sam drank too much brandy after dinner. We were in one of those white-tableclothed, over-waitered restaurants, where two men in tails watched our every move. All of a sudden, Sam started crying, Sam who had never shed a single tear in the four years I’d known him, not even when my mother died.

‘God, what’s wrong?’ I asked him.

‘I’m not sure it’s me you really love,’ he said, his voice thick and brandy-soaked. No mention of your name; there never is. He told me he’d found a photograph of him and me, taken during our final year at university. We were sitting around a table, a birthday party for someone or other, and everyone was laughing or smiling except me.

‘You looked so sad,’ he said. ‘And yet we’d only been back together a few months by then. If it really was me you wanted, why were you so sad?’

‘My mother was dying, Sam,’ I said, unnecessarily. He of all people understood the fallout from that.

‘Obviously I know that. But the look on your face, I don’t think it was to do with her. It’s your eyes. They looked haunted in that picture. They still do sometimes.’

My memory of that particular photo is hazy, but I can just imagine the way my eyes might have burned, not with sorrow but with shame and regret. After I left you, a car wreck of guilt and self-hatred, Sam took me back and made it his life’s ambition to rebuild me piece by piece. I wouldn’t have survived without him. I needed his goodness to sustain me, I needed to feed on his high opinion of me, and more than either of these, I needed him to keep me safe. It was selfish in the extreme, but he allowed me to do it, he allowed me to build a cocoon around us, hiding away in his rooms, lost to the outside world. We lived that way, absurdly insular, for a whole year, and after university, we got married straight away and started on our perfect, pared down, cardboard-cut-out life. But underneath it all, right at the heart of things, there was always you.

I realise now, as I steel myself for the conversation thatmust happen on the other side of this bathroom door, that Sam has been dealing with the spectre of you for just as many years as I have.

I find him sitting on the foot of the bed, head in hands. He looks up at me.

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘I know you are.’ I sit down next to him. ‘Christ, Sam, she’s in love with you. Julia is the reason you made us leave London, isn’t she?’

‘I thought we could start again and I could pretend it had never happened. But that wasn’t enough for Julia; she refused to accept it was over. Of course I ignored her phone calls. I just wanted her to go away.’

‘Really just once?’

‘Yes. I’m an idiot.’

‘I don’t understand it. Why her?’

‘I was pretty drunk. And angry with you. It was during one of our non-talking phases, when you seemed to spend all your time moping in the bedroom. You know how I hated that; I felt so cut off from you. I know it’s because of your mum, but you just disappear sometimes, you don’t deal with things. I’m not blaming you, I hate myself for what I’ve done, but I was lonely and Julia was right there. She made me feel good about myself. She wanted me, really wanted me, and that felt so different, like you were when I first knew you, right at the beginning, before …’ He falters here and your name drapes itself through the atmosphere, but he manages to carry on. ‘But then she became obsessed. She started following me around at school, at weekends. I was in Sainsbury’s with you once choosing wine and I saw her standing just metres away,watching. It’s why we had to move. I couldn’t take it any more.’

‘You’re the one person I’ve always trusted. You know that, you know how much I’ve needed you.’

My voice is cracking, and Sam reaches out a hand towards me but I ignore it. We sit for a minute or so in silence. I am thinking it was always going to come to this. I am thinking that the strain of living up to you is what killed our marriage, killed Sam, at any rate. I am thinking that Sam, poor unfaithful Sam, is not really to blame.

‘We’ve been through so much, you and I. Two kids. Your mum …’ He tails off, no need to say more. She died when I was still reeling from the travesty of losing you. Rapid-fire breast cancer, ten months from diagnosis to a funeral for three hundred at our local Blackheath church. Sam married me pretty soon afterwards, a tiny wedding in that same damned church, a gesture of such limitless kindness I cannot quite believe we have got to here.

‘Look,’ he says. ‘We’re going to Cornwall tomorrow; my parents will take the kids off and you and I can talk.’

‘I can’t come to Cornwall now. How can you even think that? I can’t stay with your parents, not with this between us.’

‘But they’ll be so disappointed if we don’t go. The kids too.’

‘Oh God, Sam, I don’t know what we should do. I didn’t know this was going to happen. But maybe we need time apart to think.’

‘What are you saying? It was a mistake, it will never happen again. We don’t need to do anything except try to forget it ever happened.’

This time it’s me that extends my hand, and Sam grabs at it and there we are, flesh against flesh, as we’ve been so many times before, except now it feels different.

‘You and I, we’re so good at burying our heads in the sand. But now this has happened and we have to ask ourselves questions. Like are we happy together, really, deep down? You slept with someone else, Sam. And you did it because you were unhappy with me.’

‘Christ, why did that witch have to turn up here? Why is she trying to wreck our lives?’

‘Because she’s in love with you. Is that so hard to believe?’

‘You loved me once.’

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