Page 3 of Pictures of Him

I know what he’s doing, of course. He’s giving me space, freedom to moon and mope and mourn the fact that we no longer live in London, my home town for thirty-four years, the place where my mother lived and died, that last point the most crucial in my mind.

The minute the door closes behind them, this is what I do. I go up to our bedroom, open the wardrobe door and from the very back, hidden behind a jungle of unworn boots, I retrieve a box full of letters, photographs and cuttings, my secret dossier on you. Today my hands close around a piece of lined A4, covered in your distinctive blue-biro scrawl. I know this letter so well that I could close my eyes and recite it to you right now. I know where there are commas and brackets and a missing full stop. I know where you double-cross your t’s and where you don’t; I could construct a perfect counterfeit if I wanted to.

You’re not coming back to me, are you? I used to tell myself that you would, but as the weeks pass, the time we were together begins to feel like a dream. Are you even real? I look for you in the streets, in every pub I go into, in the library, that funny little Portuguese café where we ate custard tarts and the old lady called you Audrey Hepburn (she was right, it’s your eyes). I can’t find you anywhere but somehow the sense of you never leaves me. The feel of your hair brushing across my face, the weight of your hand pressing into mine. I wake in the night and still hear your soft breathing next to me. You are gone and yet you’re always here.

This first letter – there are five – is the one I like best. I can read it and imagine that we are still that girl and boy, sitting in an empty café in Bristol on a pale, quiet Tuesday, a bit like this one. There was no one else there apart from a woman who sat at the table right next to us, hunched over her cup of tea. You offered her one of our custard tarts.

‘Will you have one of these?’ you said. ‘We bought too many.’

It wasn’t true, we’d only bought two, but neither of us had touched them; we were too busy holding hands and smiling at each other.

‘You’re very kind,’ she said, and when she turned to face us we saw that she was very old, her flesh a concertina of a thousand lines.

‘She’s Audrey Hepburn, isn’t she, your girl?’ she asked, and we laughed.

You said, ‘Yes, she is,’ not knowing if she was confused or really meant it, this old, old woman.

I can read this first letter and I can be you and me again and I don’t have to explain. I don’t have to say sorry, sorry, sorry, that endless echo that reverberates through my dreams. Instead I sit here, your letter in my hands, and for a little while, I can pretend. You and me in the café or on the beach, our rose-coloured beginning, no thought of the end.

The slammed front door signals the end of my world of dreams, the shoebox stashed hastily in the bottom of the wardrobe. I hear the rhythmic slapping of Daisy’s trainers running along the hallway, her yell from the bottom of the stairs: ‘Mum! We’re back!’ as if there could be any doubt. I meet them in the kitchen, newly painted by Sam and me, where the mid-afternoon sun bounces in sharp little daggers from the brand-new show-home whiteness – walls, ceiling, floor, fridge, cooker. Daisy unpacks a cake from a brown cardboard box and puts it on a large flowered plate that once belonged to my parents and Joe fetches mugs from the cupboard and Sam fills the kettle and catches my eye and says, ‘OK?’ and I nod because mostly I am.

‘Beach tomorrow,’ he says. ‘There’s a little wooden dinghy for sale at Lulworth Cove. I thought we’d go and see it.’

While I pour tea into mugs and Sam slices the cake and slides a piece onto each plate, he talks about where we’ll be able to sail the boat if we buy it and what colour we might like to paint it. He’s an expert at reinvention, my husband.

When the phone rings and it’s Liv on the other end, Sam walks to the fridge and pours me a glass of white wine.

‘Take it in the sitting room,’ he says, still hooked onthe mission to appease. ‘We’re going down to the stream. Take your time.’

He hopes that these impromptu phone/bar sessions will make up for the fact that I no longer live five minutes down the road from my closest friend, the girl I met on our first day of university and have spoken to pretty much every day since. Liv asks me what I’m doing, the same question, day after day, as if she expects by some miracle that our lives in the country will somehow have metamorphosed into something more interesting.

‘We’ve just had tea and cake,’ I tell her. ‘And Sam’s taken the kids down to the stream.’

‘Sounds like paradise,’ she says, but I catch the note of boredom in her voice and I imagine the afternoon taxis that rattle beneath her windows, the red buses slamming on brakes at the corner of her street to disgorge commuters and shoppers and tired, toddler-weary parents. I miss it, is what I think, as I listen for London to thrum down the telephone line.

‘Can I come and stay the weekend after next? I’ve just had an invitation to Lucian’s. You know that big summer party he always has?’

At the mention of your name, everything slows, as it always does, the air cools and momentarily I lose all sense of speech, words, meaning. And perhaps this is where it starts again, our story, after a fifteen-year interlude, with your name, startling, unexpected, surfing the distance between us.

‘Catherine?’

‘Yes, great, you can always stay, you know that.’

‘Are you OK with it? Me seeing him?’

Whenever Liv sees you she always asks me if I mind, waiting, I think, for me to tell her what she already knows. Yes, I mind, Liv. I mind with every particle of air that’s left in my lungs. I mind that you see him and I don’t. I mind that you’ve continued your friendship with him through all these years even though you suspect it crushes me. When I say nothing, she feeds me bits and pieces of information: ‘He’s having an exhibition in Bruton,’ she’ll say, or ‘He’s just bought a flat in Oxford Gardens.’ The rest I glean from the papers, which still love to write about you and your tight, impenetrable little circle of friends. There’s often something in the diary pages of theDaily Telegraphor theEvening Standard, a picture of you smoking outside a club or grasping a glass of champagne and the waist of a well-groomed blonde, eyeballing the camera with that mixture of defiance and disdain that hasn’t faded over the years. You never smile, and nor do the blondes.

I could tell Liv about my afternoon spent upstairs with your letters, dwelling as always on our ending, wishing I could twist it or colour it or rewind or fast-forward, wishing that I had Sam’s skill for reinvention, wishing, always wishing that I could have changed the outcome.

I know that I will spend the night of your party with a head full of poison, drugging myself to sleep probably and then waiting until morning for the carefully sanitised snippets Liv chooses to reveal.

‘He was lovely,’ she’ll say. ‘He asked after you,’ and my heartbeat will slow right down.

I won’t ask her what she said for I already know the answer. She’ll tell you I’m fine, that my kids are getting so big now, perhaps that I’ve moved to the West Country,to a village just twenty miles or so from yours. We share a county if nothing else.

She will be careful not to talk to me about Jack, whom I dread, or Rachel, who triggers the kind of bone-freezing jealousy I despise in other people. I wish everyone else would be as cautious and sensitive as Liv, but they’re not. They firebomb Jack’s name into the conversation – the starkness of blood scattered into snow – oblivious to the meltdown that takes place inside me. Even Sam does it sometimes.

‘Look, there’s that twat from university,’ he’ll say, holding up his newspaper and flashing your handsome, white-toothed friend at me.

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