Page 25 of Pictures of Him

Catherine sighs. ‘Sam’s made it his life’s work to try and get me to grieve, but I’m still not sure I’ve managed it. I’m scared of pain, that’s the problem.’

‘Aren’t we all.’

There was a time in my life when I was so scared of it I wasn’t sure I could carry on.

‘What aboutyourmother? It came out of the blue, didn’t it? A heart attack, Liv said. Do you mind me asking about it?’

I look at this girl whom I have always loved and I decide to risk the truth.

‘I didn’t get on with her, you probably remember. Now she’s dead I worry that guilt will get the better of me.’ I pat my chest. ‘It’s here, beneath everything. I should have patched things up with her and I didn’t. I should have shared my inheritance with her and I didn’t. I should have forgiven her for her infidelity – perhaps I should have understood the reasons why she was unfaithful in the first place – but I didn’t.’

‘You’re right, there’s usually a reason,’ Catherine says, with the astuteness I remember of old. She looks sad as she says it, as though she has sympathy for my mother. And perhaps she is right.

‘I didn’t find out about my mother’s affairs until a few years after my father died, but I knew she made him unhappy. I was just waiting for a reason to blame her. My uncle told me she’d had a sequence of lovers but that there was one around the time of my father’s death whom she seemed to have fallen in love with. I don’t know if that’s true; whoever he was, they didn’t end up together. But it gave me all the ammunition I needed. I hated her for theway she’d cheated on him. In my adolescent mind cheating became synonymous with suicide, simple as that.’

Catherine sighs, a long, trembling sigh. She seems a bit broken, hardly surprising. I’m feeling pretty broken myself.

‘Did she ever love him?’

‘She must have done at the beginning, but they were completely different. Glamour was the thing that drove my mother, clothes, parties, the flattery of others. I think my father’s tastes were much too simple; she married the wrong guy basically. Her greatest disappointment was not winding up in Shute Park. If my father had lived, he would have inherited it instead of me, and that was her pipe dream, swanning around in the big house, holding huge parties. She thought she was marrying the Great Gatsby only it didn’t turn out that way. She never forgave me for living there instead of her and she didn’t visit. Not once in the last thirteen years. I could have tried harder to see her; the truth is I didn’t try at all. Now I find myself wishing we’d made up.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Catherine says, showing yet again that she understands. There’s no point trying to put a positive gloss on the situation, as Rachel or Alexa might. All that can be done is for me to find a way of accepting my regret.

I ask Catherine about her life, not just the big poster-sized events but the normal everyday, and as she talks, telling me of school runs and supermarket shops, of washing and ironing and cleaning and baking cakes for children’s play dates, I am struck by the contrast between this Catherine, thirty-four-year-old mother of two, and the girl I used to know.

‘I thought you were going to be a journalist,’ I say, anda shadow glides across her face but she carries on talking.

‘I became a mother very young. There wasn’t room for anything else.’

I keep quiet because instinctively I know that Catherine is thinking about this and whether what she said is true.

‘Maybe I wasn’t brave enough. You need a lot of confidence to work in the media. Not just interviewing people and getting them to talk about things they don’t want to talk about. But standing up for your ideas, making out you’re better than everybody else. It’s a pretty aggressive profession, I’ve decided. I’m not sure I was cut out for it.’

‘You were so confident when I first met you. You knew exactly what you wanted, don’t you remember?’

I leave the unasked question hanging in the air. ‘What happened to change you?’

Catherine smiles, but there’s no warmth in it.

‘I think that’s called being nineteen,’ she says.

Of course what happens throughout this lunch is that I’m looking as well as listening and I’m seeing the curve of her long, smooth neck and the jut of her clavicles and the way her necklace, a silver C on a long chain, stops just at her heart, and I’m thinking that if I was to press my lips there and work my way outwards, first left, then right, I would be able to kiss a direct line across to her pale pink nipples and they would harden quickly under my tongue.

Back at the flat, there’s sex again, slower this time. I undress her, moving her hands away when she tries to reach up for my clothes, until she is entirely naked, and then I gently press her back against the wall and stand there looking at her while the cool, cold wall seeps into her flesh. I want the luxury of it, just the looking andthen the touching, and so I reach out with my fingers and draw slow, light circles on her neck and her shoulders and her collarbone. And she is shaking but I know from the memory of last time that she’ll wait. Hands first, that’s what I’m thinking, and then my mouth, and then my tongue. I’ll hear her cry my name again. And I’m focused on that.

Yet this second time around, the perfection that is Catherine and me naked together, the almost violence of our lovemaking, her passion more vehement even than mine, will make our parting difficult. We don’t talk on the drive to Liv’s house but I’m pretty sure her thoughts are the same as mine. All this longing finally realised; how is it possible that we can leave it here? I’m waiting for Catherine to speak, to say something, anything that might make sense of what has happened between us today, but of course, she doesn’t. Silence is her security blanket and she swathes herself in it.

Catherine lets us into Liv’s house, a Victorian terrace in Clapham, which is stark white inside but with flashes of brilliant colour: a trio of lemon-yellow vases, a shocking-pink sofa, floor tiles an acid-house orange. We find Liv at the kitchen table in her gym clothes, laptop opened up in front of her.

‘Well,’ she says, standing up, grinning, as we walk in. ‘This looks interesting.’

Catherine and Liv embrace and behind the hug Liv catches my eye, a question mark. So-so, I convey back with a sideways nod, almost imperceptible but I see her reading it.

‘I’ve asked Catherine if she’ll come down to Somersetwith me. Just for a day or even a few hours, but she’s not keen.’

‘Tea?’ says Liv, releasing Catherine.

Her gym clothes are a bit like the house – a bright yellow Adidas vest, purple leggings with flowers splashed all over them, lime-green and purple trainers. I feel a rush of affection for Liv. There is something so unfailingly optimistic about her, and the effect she has on Catherine is instantaneous. She’s laughing as she takes mugs out of a cupboard and fills a jug with milk from the fridge. She tells Liv about the Japanese restaurant where we had lunch but obviously omits the finer details of our day (sex before, sex afterwards, all of it mind-blowing, the kind of sex you’d happily die on). Liv knows, though, I can see her watching us as we drink our tea, watching, thinking, what now, what now? I’m wondering the same thing.

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