Page 30 of Pictures of Him

‘So what will you do with it?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t given it any thought.’

She opens her arms to take in the cellar.

‘All this money. It just seems … bottomless.’ She shakes her head; I sense her disapproval.

‘My great-grandparents made a fortune in the stock market and tied it all up very carefully. I know I’m lucky. You’re making me feel like I should apologise.’

She breaks into a smile. ‘Sorry.’

‘You were reminding me of that feisty student journalist.’

‘Too many years absorbing Sam’s indignation. Self-made wealth is fine, obviously; he has a pathological hatred of inherited. Just ignore me.’

We embrace between the 2007 Rully and the 2008 Saint-Bris.

‘Any preferences?’ I say, and she shakes her head.

‘You choose. I won’t drink much.’

I select a Gevrey-Chambertin from 2001 for sentimental reasons that I keep to myself (the year we first met).

Mary has laid up a table for us in the small Chinese drawing room and she has really gone to town. Candles burning everywhere – there must be at least twenty or thirty across the mantelpiece, in the alcoves and on either side of the fireplace – champagne cooling in an ice bucket and the table heavy with glass and silver. Frankly, I am thinking, she’s slightly overdone it – there’s a sense of a soft-porn seduction scene, or is that just me? – but Catherine cries, ‘Oh Mary, this is so so beautiful,’ and Mary looks thrilled. That’s my housekeeper hooked again, and Catherine has been here less than an hour.

Mary has brought in the roast chicken, hands down my favourite thing to eat; we have a glass of cold champagne and the Chambertin warming by the fire. Opposite me, in some weird twist of fate, is the woman I’ve loved like anillness for most of my adult life. It’s hard to believe she’s here.

We used to say that we swapped thoughts, that they crossed somewhere in mid air, and it’s still exactly the same, for Catherine leans forward and says, ‘I keep thinking how I should be in bits because of what’s happening with me and Sam. I should be feeling so guilty. And instead I feel, I don’t know, just elated. To be with you again. To be back here, even for a short while. Is that so wrong of me?’

I think we both know her husband would say yes, very wrong, but I’m not him and I’m also not about to chase that smile from her face. When Catherine smiles, it’s really something, I’d like to whip out my phone and record it, then work on a portrait later. Smiling Catherine. You don’t see it very often.

It reminds me of the sketch I made of her, the one where she’s dressed in one of my shirts, mouth curved into a knowing smile. It was one of the last days we would spend together, as it turned out, a time of such euphoric intensity that I really believed I’d come to know her better than I knew anyone. We talked almost ceaselessly during our waking hours, all the time, whenever we weren’t making love. Incredible to think I was Catherine’s first lover, for in the space of a few months the sex had become fast-tracked and experimental; to think of it right now – the things we did, the things she did – would be to implode. It was the middle of the afternoon when I picked up my sketchpad and decided to draw her, just as she was, naked in the middle of our lived-in bed.

‘Not like this, surely?’ she’d said, suddenly prudish.

‘How can you possibly mind after everything we’ve just been doing?’

‘Imagine if it fell into the wrong hands,’ she said, snatching up my white shirt, and that’s how I drew her, kneeling up on my bed, the shirt falling almost to her knees. I rather liked the way she looked in it; I liked the sense of possession, the wearing of my things. She’s hardly altered, this woman who sits on the other side of the table, lit by Mary’s candles, this flesh-and-blood Catherine.

‘I still have that sketch of you,’ I tell her, and instantly the smile fades.

‘I remember,’ she says. ‘We … broke up soon afterwards.’

Broke up, is that what you call it? Desertion and abandonment are closer to the truth.

‘Do I look very different?’

I shake my head. ‘Exactly the same,’ I say, but it strikes me, as she asks this, that the real difference between then and now is in her eyes. I captured our euphoria in that sketch; I think that’s why I like it so much. The woman opposite me, same huge, expressive dark eyes, cannot mask her sadness.

There’s a sense tonight that we’re filling in the gaps, a decade and a half of them. We swap histories, edited versions, with careful revisions. She tries to keep Sam out of the conversation, I manage to avoid name-checking my friends, both of us trying to answer the unasked question, the only question: how did your life turn out without me in it?

She wants to know all about the house, what it’s like to live alone here. The truth is, I’m hardly ever on my own. Jack comes over most days to play tennis, swim or shoot,Harry is only a few minutes down the road and the girls come down at weekends and whenever they’re not working (which is most of the time in Rachel’s case). But I’m not about to tell her that.

‘I’m good at being on my own.’

I wonder as I say this if it’s true. I can spend hours, whole days, whole nights, down at my studio, and when I’m painting I can forget everything else. But there are nights when Jack is forced to stay at home with Celia, when Harry is in Bangkok or nowadays with Ling, and the girls are in London, when a listlessness comes over me. I drink too much, I smoke a lot, I listen to music, I pass the time, but it feels exactly like that, a mapping-out of hours.

‘Did you always know you’d inherit this place?’

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