Page 34 of Pictures of Him

Even though I’ve read reviews of your most recent exhibition and tracked down several of your paintings on the internet, it has taken until this moment for me to realise how serious you are about your work. This is not a hobby but a career. I suppose I’ve been guilty of believing the media hype: the hedonistic rich boy hell-bent on pleasure at all costs. I have spent so many years recreating an image of you in my head that I have lost sight of who you really are.

The art is good, I think. Aside from the landscapes – four of them the same view from the hill, the cathedral picked out in a slightly depressing grey against a sky just like this morning’s, frozen as it turns from pink to orange – there are several woodcuts, the black silhouettes set on intensely coloured backgrounds of lime green and shocking pink. The one I like most shows a faceless girl with a fringed bobleaning against a bull, his horns outlined in orange as if on fire from the ball of sun behind him.

‘Who’s this?’ I ask, and you describe how the image came to you almost exactly as it is now, when you were watchingThe Minotaurat Covent Garden.

‘It doesn’t happen like that for me very often, but I got straight in the car and drove to Somerset and worked in my studio all night.’

There is no choice about your drawing me again; you just begin sharpening pencils and clipping paper to an easel and you tell me to sit down and relax however I like.

‘Are you going to keep the jumper on?’ you ask and I am sure we are both thinking of the parallels between then and now, me wearing your white shirt and kneeling up on your bed, not long before the night I left for ever. This time I am sitting on the floor, cross-legged, looking up at you, and I’m glad I’ve chosen this position, for it gives me the chance to study you properly. You are lost almost immediately, staring at me with a stern look in your eyes. So this is you, I think, as you streak pencil across the page, eyes narrowed, your hand moving in tiny tight vibrations as you shade something – my hair? My eyes? The navy of my jumper? There are so many questions I’d like to ask, but I know not to break your concentration and I also want to take this moment of looking for myself. When I am back at home, back in my real life, I will try to recall exactly this – the feeling of being regarded, again, at last, by the boy who has lived inside me for the past fifteen years.

Four months before: Lucian

The sketch is nearly finished. I am just shading the ends of her hair, trying to get right the way it kinks rather than curls, a slight curve that finishes the smooth, straight sheet of almost-blackness. I am wondering if I will turn the drawing into something else, an oil probably; I am thinking how the blackness would work well as a violet or blue, but then what would be the right colour for her skin? I am so lost in thought that at first I don’t notice Catherine has become bored and uncomfortable. She stretches her legs out in front of her, shifting her weight from one hip to the other. She sighs.

‘Get up and walk around if you like. I’ve almost finished.’

She moves around the studio, stopping to look at some canvases, bypassing others, not uttering a single word. I rarely invite anyone into my studio and I don’t like people to look unless they are going to look properly. The anodyne over-flattery, I hate that.

‘Oh wonderful, darling,’ Alexa says whenever she comes here, and it’s nice of her, of course it is, but it also means nothing. I prefer someone to say I like the way you’ve done the clouds but I don’t really get that tree, it feels toobrown, too blocky. Because that’s how it is for me too. Maybe I overemphasised the tree, maybe instead of hinting or suggesting, I sledgehammered it onto the canvas. Painting for me is like one long uninterrupted lesson even though I’m not sure I’m always learning very much or I’ll ever be entirely happy with even one piece of work. A while ago I realised that all I had to do was show up in the studio every day and that eventually I would get somewhere; there would be moments when it worked, when I felt at peace. And those moments of utter absorption, a self-contentment I cannot find any other way, well, it’s the only reason for doing it.

I am just about to call Catherine over to look at her drawing when she spies a stack of canvases in the corner. The one facing us is a slightly grotesque Bacon-esque nude, a male, full-frontal, intentionally anatomical and unforgiving.

‘He’s pretty full-on,’ she says, her first words in a while.

I tell her about the model in my life drawing class, an old guy who always seems to catch my eye when he’s rearranging his testicles.

‘Perhaps it’s love,’ she says, casually moving the canvas to one side. And there, hidden away behind Mr Testicles, is an oil painting of Rachel, her blonde hair messy, up-all-night smudges beneath her eyes, a cigarette trailing smoke off canvas.Smoking (Hot) Nudewe jokingly titled it at the time. So now Rachel is on the agenda. For a few seconds the air stills and I wait for Catherine to say something, but she doesn’t.

‘Do you mind?’

‘How can I mind?’

She still hasn’t turned around to look at me, and I detect a slight shakiness in her voice. She minds.

‘Catherine.’

I’m up and over to her corner of the studio in seconds.

‘Look at me.’

She smiles, shamefacedly, but I catch the sheen of tears.

‘Pathologically jealous,’ she says. ‘Sorry.’

‘Says the woman who is married with two children. Look. If there was a way for us to be together, to give it a chance at least, then that is what I’d want. I don’t need to question it, even after all this time apart. I’d want to give it a go. But you have two children, we know the obstacles. And if you go back to Sam, my life will carry on as it always has. And that involves Rachel, as a friend first and foremost. Really, there’s nothing to be jealous about.’

‘Does she know about us?’

‘I’ve been avoiding my friends. Like you wanted. They’re calling and texting me like crazy.’

‘I feel you should tell her at least.’

‘I will.’

We go back to looking at the painting.

Catherine says, ‘She looks beautiful but a little sad, which is how I always think of her somehow, I don’t know why.’

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