Page 50 of Pictures of Him

My next shot coming straight on the heels of the first was smooth and effortless, and by the third, I didn’t need the salt or lime either.

Here are some things I didn’t realise about quick, fast-paced inebriation. Laughter so physical and all-encompassing I was poleaxed by it, literally at times unable to stand, instead sinking to my knees, arms wrapped around my ribcage. Laughter that hurt. Inhibitions? What were they? After my fourth tequila, I was dancing alone,in love with the music and probably myself, the two of you watching me from the sofa. You smiling, Jack just watching. The bottle slowly emptying.

Four months before: Lucian

I’ve been coming to Eastcott Grange since I was thirteen years old, but today I’m struck by its grandeur, this twenty-three-bedroom Victorian palace, a boxy, pillared thing that was built to impress. It still amazes me that the architects were able to use traditional blue lias stone from Somerset and mullion windows and many other celebrated features and still conjure up something quite so ugly. It’s an enormous great beast of a place, open to the public for four months of the year (usually when Harry is wintering in Thailand), with twenty thousand acres, a formal shoot, ornamental gardens, a forest, even a maze.

‘Seriously?’ says Catherine as we park up in front of the house. ‘This place is ridiculous.’

She is grinning widely, buoyed by disbelief, and I’m happy to see it, happy that she’s here with me full stop. We have a day left together, a day and a half at the most, and I am trying my hardest to guard against the emptiness I am certain to feel when she’s gone.

Harry opens the door himself, which is a surprise; normally it’s Filip, his butler. The first thing he does is reach for Rachel and wrestle her into a hug (she’s at the monosyllabic,buttoned-up stage of guilt, coupled with a monumental hangover; she didn’t say a word on the way over).

‘Gather you didn’t make it to London after all. Sorry, Rach.’ His voice is so kind, I worry she’ll start crying.

‘Bloody Marys are what we need,’ I say.

We walk through the Great Hall, Alexa’s wedges clattering across the black and white marble floor, Catherine gasping at the sheer insanity of this room: Doric columns, statues of Roman nobles standing fifteen feet tall on their pedestals. I always think there’s a feeling of Dubai here: oodles of money spent recreating a pseudo basilica that no one spends any time in. Why would you? I may be biased, but I think my own ancestors got it right with Shute House. Yes, it’s too big, certainly for someone like me, a man with no dependants, but it has a feeling of warmth and friendliness about it despite the size, and I always feel, whenever I return there, that it is my refuge. I’ve stayed at Eastcott so many times, throughout the schoolboy years and our early twenties, through the inherent stiffness that came with Harry’s parents being in residence and the more debauched decades of our late twenties and thirties. But in all that time, a good twenty years now, the place has never once felt like a home.

Two jugs of Bloody Mary are ready and waiting for us in the red drawing room, another stately, unappealing room, all tapestry wall hangings and brittle-thin furniture. Harry hands each of us a glass and then asks Catherine if she’ll come with him to find Ling in the kitchen.

‘She’s really happy you’re here,’ he says. ‘Why don’t the rest of you take your drinks through to the birdcage?’

This is the one place at Eastcott I absolutely love, anorangery that was added to the house in the 1930s and is shaped exactly like a birdcage – or perhaps it’s more of a wedding cake; an oval room anyway – with a domed glass roof. It looks out over the cedar lawn, which is just as it sounds: home to a four-hundred-year-old cedar tree, where Harry and I used to smoke forbidden roll-ups back in the day, a green sheet of sloping smoothness that drops gently to a ha-ha just glimpsed on the horizon.

The three of us sit in pastel-coloured Lloyd Loom chairs, drinks in hand, staring out at this indecent slice of rolling green England. Rachel is pristine with blow-dried hair and a freshly ironed white shirt, sunglasses worn inside the only clue that all is not as it seems. She’s a past master at the immaculate appearance, her shield against pain, blame and judgement. If I look all right then I am all right, the mantra she hides behind.

Alexa says, ‘Funny how it’s Catherine Harry has taken off to see Ling. Not one of us. Should we be insulted?’

‘I think they spent quite a long time talking last night,’ I say.

There’s a beat of silence before Rachel says, ‘And do we think she’s actually going to leave her husband? Or is she going to vanish for another fifteen years?’

I offer a casual shrug, but of course the girls know me too well for this. Harry and Jack managed to conceal my shameful quest for obliteration, but Alexa and Rachel watched me unravel, the weeks of dangerous drinking (alcohol abuse the common denominator in my circle), the heart that refused to mend.

‘I honestly have no idea,’ I say eventually, for this is the truth.

‘She hides in that marriage, if you ask me,’ says Alexa. ‘It’s pretty obvious that she has always loved you.’

‘The question is, what is it she’s hiding from?’ Rachel says.

‘Sometimes I think it’s my money she can’t stand. And our lifestyle. Too debauched. Too degenerate. Too messed up.’

‘Rubbish,’ says Rachel. ‘Everyone loves what your money can buy, even if they pretend otherwise.’

‘Catherine’s not like that,’ I say. ‘She doesn’t care about money. Look who she married.’

Rachel laughs and Alexa says, ‘Bit below the belt, darling,’ but both of them are missing my point. I used to be so jealous of the man Catherine married. I used to measure myself against him, wholesomeness versus decadence, political passion versus political lethargy, a hard-won education versus the silver spoon. My self-esteem, never particularly buoyant, pretty much imploded when Catherine went back to Sam.

Alexa says, ‘If you knew why she left you last time, you wouldn’t be going round in circles like this. It’s ridiculous.’

‘She got cold feet, that’s what happened. And then her mother was ill and she turned to Sam. The rest is history.’

‘Er, sorry,’ Rachel says, ‘but that doesn’t explain the way she left you at the time, bolting when you’d gone off to see your uncle, leaving you that nothing of a note and then refusing to see you or ever explain what had gone wrong. There must have been a trigger for it.’

‘Only that she panicked and couldn’t handle the intensity of it all, though the way she left was so cold and out of character, it never really made any sense to me. I’ve triedasking her about it, of course I have, but she freezes every time.’

Alexa shunts her chair closer to mine and rests a hand on my arm, gold bangles dropping down to her wrist.

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