Page 17 of Pictures of Him

‘But what’s your average day like?’ Celia persists. ‘How much do you write? Do you have a minimum word count or something like that?’

‘Babe.’ Jack wraps his arm around Celia’s shoulder. He kisses her cheek. ‘Alexa is freaking out. You’re reminding her of deadlines she’d rather forget.’

He’s a master at distillation, Jack.

‘Sorry, Alexa,’ Celia says, and then she moves on to Ling.

I think with Celia it’s partly an incompetence at small talk and mostly her discomfiture amongst our friends.

‘Are you in touch with your family much?’ she asks Ling.

Rachel and Alexa have begun another conversation, but they abandon it to hear Ling’s answer. All of us, I think, are fascinated to find out more about Ling.

‘We write letters and talk on the phone. But I haven’t seen their faces for a couple of years.’

‘You could Skype them,’ Celia says. ‘Or FaceTime.’

Ling laughs. ‘The first thing Harry did was buy me a laptop so I could Skype them. I told him it will take another hundred years for Wi-Fi to reach our community. My family live in a rural farming village with little modernisation. Hardly any electricity, cooking over fires, washing clothes in the river.’ She shrugs. ‘I don’t expect you to understand.

If you were to visit my family, you would feel like you’d gone back in time. It’s a very poor part of Thailand and a simple life, but it was a lovely place to grow up. Peaceful, slow.’

I (??? check m/s p.75)I see the way Harry watches Ling, and it breaks me up a bit. There is no trying to hide his pride; it’s pouring out of him.

I remember the text he sent from Thailand when he first got to know her.

Smitten with a woman I’ve met out here. She is dazzling. And she seems to like me too. Trying not to blow it!

One of us has found love, at last.

I catch sight of my sister Emma on the other side of the room, dutiful eldest child, surrounded by an adoring posse of my mother’s friends. Joanna is talking to the vicar while her husband waits obediently beside her, one of those pitiful types who marry their mother and spend the next thirty years waiting for permission to fart. My eyes move from group to group and my heart jolts, painfully, when I recognise Catherine’s best friend. Why did no one tell me she was here? I’ve kept in touch with Liv over the years but never quite enough to dislodge the uncomfortable memory of the two of us in a pub in Bristol soon after Catherine and I had broken up. I was drunk, morose, possibly crying; she must have been desperate to get away.

‘Why did she leave me?’ I asked her. ‘Why does she love him more than me?’

I’ve never forgotten her response.

‘I don’t think she does,’ she said, eventually. ‘I don’t think she’ll ever love anyone the way she loved you.’

When Liv catches me looking, she waves and walks over to our side of the room, where she is engulfed immediately by my friends. Hugs and kisses and exclamations of regret all round – ‘It’s been too long!’

‘Amazing dress, Liv,’ says Jack, which it is. Liv iswearing a turquoise dress with a sticky-out skirt, a tiny cardigan draped around her shoulders. With her bright peroxide hair and her lightning-strike earrings, she looks like a futuristic prom queen, a rock-and-roll Sandra Dee. I’d like to photograph her and invert those colours in a portrait later, the dress electric blue, her hair a glowing Egon Schiele red.

Harry introduces Liv to Ling. ‘Meet my wife,’ he says, trying and failing to suppress the grin that sweeps across his face. ‘You got married?’ she says, miming shock, but she is effusive with her congratulations.

‘Let me see that ring,’ she says, and Ling holds out her finger with its diamond the size of a quail’s egg.

‘Bought in Bangkok. Rather obscene, isn’t it?’ says Harry, simultaneously refilling Liv’s glass.

Talk turns to my summer party, which I host every year without exactly knowing why. It has become a slightly ridiculous affair, each one focused around some new talking point: multicoloured sheep on the horizon one year – how silly was that – then a group of trapeze artists strung up in nets high above the dance floor, and this time a fleet of brightly painted rowing boats on the lake. I always send Liv an invitation, but she rarely comes, and I was surprised when she emailed last week to accept.

‘You must stay,’ I tell her now.

‘Actually I’ve arranged to stay with a friend who recently moved to Somerset. She’s in London with me at the moment.’

Her eyes are communicating something, I’m not sure what, though I suddenly have an idea of the subtext and my heart squeezes a little just contemplating it.

‘Come outside for a cigarette?’ I say, taking hold of herelbow and leading her through the crowds. We use a back exit through the kitchen, which my mother has clearly had interior-designed since my day: it’s all dark grey slate and chestnut wood, more downtown New York than Chelsea blue rinse. Once outside, we huddle beneath the cherry tree where I skulked and sulked and smoked illicit fags back in the day.

‘I hope you don’t think it’s strange me being here,’ Liv says. ‘I didn’t know your mother …’ She tails off, an apologetic shrug.

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