Page 49 of Pictures of Him

She’s balled up on the sofa with her back to us.

‘No.’

‘Want me to text Hugo? And your boss?’

‘Wait a minute,’ I say, but you just shake your head.

‘No point delaying; much better to let them know. Trust me.’

Rachel turns her head away, too shattered to respond, while you go off in search of your phone. As you leave the room you say to her, in the soothing tones of a consoling parent, ‘We’ll go over and have lunch with Harry and Ling. That will help take your mind off it.’

What you’re doing is making Rachel feel better about the calamity that is about to unfold, the entirely selfish, entirely unnecessary wounding of her son. How could you get it so wrong? How can you not understand?

I feel close to tears as I walk across the room to draw back the curtains and let in the light. I open one of the French doors and step out into the garden and breathe in the late-summer sweetness. I am thinking of my own son, imagining him waking up in his grandparents’ house, next to his sister in their matching twin beds. I am thinking of their dark heads and of the different ways they sleep:Daisy on her back with her arms flung out, Joe scrunched up beneath the covers entirely hidden so that sometimes I’d have to check he was there.

Rachel is your best friend, but I can’t help feeling you’ve let her down. You seem to accept her alcoholism without thinking you have a responsibility to help her change. You seem defeated by it; you’ve given up. I think about my friendship with Liv, the way we’ve always told each other the hardest truths. When I left you, she stood by me, yes, but she was unequivocal about what she saw as my cold-hearted rejection.

‘You don’t just walk out on people when it gets tough, not without an explanation. You don’t just throw someone away when you don’t want them any more.’

She knew, though, from the devastation I couldn’t hide, that there was something I wasn’t telling her, and that in leaving you I had effectively destroyed my own life.

I don’t hear you come out into the garden, and when I feel your arms wrap around me, I give a little shriek of surprise.

‘I know you’re upset with me,’ you say, turning me around to face you. ‘But believe me, we’ve been here so many times.’

‘I just think we could have got her there, one way or another. I can’t bear his disappointment. Or hers.’

‘Rachel is an addict.’ I hear how much that word hurts you. ‘But she’s not ready to recover. Not yet. She’s a grown-up, Catherine. We can’t make her do something she doesn’t want to do. All we can do is support her choices.’

Thing is, I’m not so sure it is support. I think thetechnical term is enablement. You all wrap her up in this gilded, lawless world of yours and make a celebration of her choices: friends before family, freedom not commitment, self-indulgence but never self-sacrifice.

Fifteen years earlier

Jack had given me a bottle of tequila for my birthday, which was your drink and his, never mine (a gift to himself, in other words), and so I hadn’t got around to opening it. I’d had a shot of Jose Cuervo once and thought it filthy, the kind of thing my parents used to unblock drains. And the tequila Jack had forced me to drink at your dinner party hadn’t impressed me either. I was strictly a wine or vodka girl back then, in the days when I still liked to drink.

‘The thing about tequila, Catherine,’ said Jack, as the three of us sat in your kitchen looking at the unopened bottle, ‘is that you have to persevere. It’s like learning to drive.’

He cracked the seal and placed it back down on the table with a smile that was irresistible.

‘Look and learn, baby,’ he said. ‘Look and learn.’

This tequila was pale gold and it was being served with quarters of lime, not lemon, and the obligatory saucer of salt. Jack went first, knocking back his shot glass as if it was water, then you, and finally the glass was handed to me.

‘It’s too full,’ I said, stalling. ‘It will make me gag.’

The truth was, I hated being out of control. I had serious brakes. I could drink just enough to feel happily intoxicated and then stop, cruising through the rest of the night on my semi-high. I didn’t chase obliteration like so many of my fellow students, and with you, more than anything, I wanted to feel present and awake. Perhaps, even then, I knew we didn’t have much longer; I’d sensed in some way our brutal end. But here I was on a regular Wednesday night, the exact day scorched into my mind, with the two of you smiling encouragingly as if I was a four-year-old child.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘What the hell.’

I licked salt off the back of my hand and tipped the drink down my throat, quickly sucking the lime you’d handed to me.

‘Not so bad, was it?’ Jack said, and actually he was right.

‘It’s almost delicious,’ I said, surprised.

‘That’s because yourbirthday present,’ ironic emphasising of words, ‘cost me a fortune. And it’s your duty to share it with us.’

I allowed Jack his little half-truth. I knew that you would have paid for the tequila the way you paid for everything.

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