Page 4 of Pictures of Him

‘Catherine?’

From the shifting, quieter cadence of her voice, I know what she’s going to say.

‘You know you can talk to me, don’t you?’

Liv has never let go of the idea that you and I should have stayed together, probably because I could never bring myself to tell her the reasons why we fell apart. Even on the morning of my wedding she tried to make me change my mind.

‘It’s far too late for that,’ I told her and I asked for a few moments alone.

I tried and tried to summon an image of Sam freshly shaved and handsome in a morning suit. But all I could see was you. Where were you? I wondered. You’d inherited Shute Park, your great big house, by then and I pictured you sitting by the lake, clutching a bottle of whisky, thinking about our beginning, remembering that lunch, that cold winter’s day on the beach. Self-indulgent? I’d say so.You were probably still asleep, wrapped around one of the picture-book blondes. But at least I had my dreams.

Four months before: Lucian

I find out my mother has died while another excessive Friday rages all around me. No easy time to receive news of this kind, but one in the morning, off your face on tequila, is an especially awkward fit. I am numb from champagne, vodka and tonic and latterly three hefty shots of tequila, and perhaps this is why I cannot react to the news my sister gives me.

‘Lucian?’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s Emma.’

Emma. Just hearing her name feels like a raincloud dispelling its contents from a great height.

‘Mummy died this afternoon. An unexpected heart attack; it was instant.’

The infantile use of ‘Mummy’ from a woman of forty. This and other inappropriate thoughts punch at my brain and rob me of my power of speech until the pause on the other end of the line becomes impossible to ignore.

‘God,’ is all I come up with.

‘The funeral will be in London. Will you come?’

Through the tequila fug I register that no is not an option.

‘Yes, of course I’ll come.’

‘Lucian?’

‘Yes?’

‘I know we haven’t been in touch these past few years but I wanted to say …’

A silence that deepens. I realise my sister is crying.

‘You’ll always be family.’

Emma hangs up and I stand immobilised, phone pressed to my ear, listening to the dial tone. My mother’s death, my sister’s conciliation, it is almost too much to take in.

I threw tonight’s gathering to welcome Harry’s new wife into the fold. Or at least that was the intention. Truth is, few have ever managed to penetrate the closed circle of friends I tend to think of as family. (With family like mine, you’re going to look for alternatives.) There’s Jack, whom I’ve known for most of my life, since boarding school at eight, through public school, university and the turbulent love-and-drugs fest that we called our twenties. We met Harry at thirteen and eventually carted him off to Bristol University with us where we were joined by Rachel and Alexa.

By the time I return to the library, my friends are sitting completely upright on the ancient Chesterfields. I feel the heat of their eyes as I announce my news through compressed, wooden lips.

‘My mother died this afternoon. A heart attack apparently.’

Jack and Rachel hurtle towards me and I find myself being squeezed from both sides, Rachel’s thick, blonde, tangerine-scented hair swiping across my face like a horse’s tail. This is too much. I take a step backwards.

‘Guys, please. You know we didn’t get on. I’m just a bit fazed, that’s all.’

We sit back down on the Chesterfields and everyone starts behaving like a caricature of themselves. Rachel picks up the half-full tequila bottle, waves it at me and starts refilling the empty shot glasses. Alexa walks over to the sound system and moments later the sweeping, funereal strains of Sigur Rós filter across the room. She has a sixth sense for always picking the right tune; I often think she missed her vocation. She’s a writer, a relatively successful one, but we should probably have pimped her out in Ibiza. Harry knocks back his tequila shot caveman-style, no salt, no lemon, and his wife Ling, whom none of us knows, sits right on the edge of the sofa looking shell-shocked, which is pretty much how she’s looked all evening, dead mother or not.

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