Page 54 of Pictures of Him

I looked at these photos of Sam, similar age to my father probably, and I could imagine him guiding his children with that same blend of gentle instruction and encouragement. And I knew in that instant that Catherine would never be able to leave them, nor am I sure I’d even want her to. What, give those sweet-looking kids of hers a slice of the hell that was my last decade of childhood? And Alexa must have seen this too because she said, ‘You’re really missing them, aren’t you?’ and Catherine nodded, speechless, clicking her children’s faces off the screen of her phone as if any more looking would tear her apart.

I’m not sure either of us slept much, and there was one time, pre-dawn, when I could tell she was awake and I knew that she was imprinting it all on her senses, the feel, the sound of these nights together, just as I was.

‘You know what it is I love about you?’

I spoke without asking if she was awake and she laughed in the darkness.

‘Go on,’ she said, reaching out a hand to touch my thigh.

I began to list her qualities, joking to begin with, but once I’d started, the list grew longer and longer. Silly things first.

‘I like the way you throw your clothes all over the floor. I can’t bear that whole folding-up and hanging over the back of a chair thing.’

‘It’s you who normally throws my clothes over the floor.’

She smoothed her palm from my thigh to my groin and then stopped, a semicolon to what would happen next.

‘I’m still listening,’ she said, and I could hear her smile.

‘I like the way you’re honest about my paintings. If you don’t like something then you say so. I feel as though I can talk about them with you, I don’t get that with many people.

‘And I love how you are with Rachel, not judging her, trying to help her, even though she’s been pretty awful to you. You take responsibility for things, like you did with Rachel yesterday. It’s made me realise the rest of us need to grow up. We’re pathetic really, the way we cling onto the past.’

‘Why are you telling me all this?’

And here I paused, afraid to go on but unable to stop.

‘Because I don’t think you like yourself very much any more. You used to, once upon a time, but you’ve changed.’

I knew she was crying in the darkness, her face turned away because she didn’t want me to know.

‘I’ve always thought I needed Sam to make me feel better,’ she said, and I understood what she was really telling me. She’d made a mistake and it had changed the whole course of our lives, hers and mine.

It feels like a day of lasts. Last time we’ll eat breakfast together, side by side on stools sitting up at the island, Mary’s home-made granola and rocket-fuel espressos. Last chance to see her naked under the waterfall shower, to press my mouth against her neck, her breasts, the soft skin on the undersides of her arms. Last time I’ll turn her away from me, pressing her against the wall, pressing myself inside her, my hands holding her just beneath her ribcage, warm water that drenches us, those desperate cries that I am addicted to. Last wrapping up of her in a big whitetowel, another one turbaned around her head; last time to laugh at how childlike she is, with her stuck-together Bambi eyelashes.

My head is full of the words I won’t say to her. Don’t go. Please stay. I’m going to be lost without you.

Instead we begin a sombre tour of my house and land, with its gathering momentum of inappropriate festivity, trailing from the hall to the pool to the lake, hand in hand, like the battle-wounded. Catherine hasn’t seen the lake since her last visit fifteen years ago, and now it is completely transformed, a whole school of rowing boats, pink, yellow and green, strung together and bobbing up and down beside the jetty, which has been painted sky blue. Andrew’s take on Montauk and Martha’s Vineyard, I suppose, over-the-top but very effective. All the way around the perimeter of the lake hundreds of dark pink and orange Chinese lanterns have been strung up high on gold-sprayed wooden poles.

‘It’s magical, it looks just like a dream,’ Catherine tells Andrew. ‘You’re so clever.’

His face, usually serious, eases into a grin. I’m not surprised. I noticed how he looked at Catherine when they were introduced, one glance and then another, harder, longer, his incredulity at her supernatural beauty clear to see. I’d forgotten the effect she has on people, the standard double-take, as if a goddess has dropped down from space.

‘The light down here will be gorgeous,’ Andrew says. ‘Just LED bulbs in the lanterns, very soft and romantic. We’ll have some flares too, just to make it a bit easier for people to see.’

We examine the miniature nightclub, styled like a 1920sspeakeasy, all fringed lamps and leopard-print bar stools and a tiny underlit dance floor. To me it feels a little claustrophobic (and entirely pointless), but Catherine loves it. Andrew shows us where he is stationing his burger and slider truck, ‘very Louisiana’, and a small semicircular platform for a female string quartet.

We sit on the jetty, the three of us, legs dangling, while I smoke a cigarette and Andrew checks his phone. It is peaceful here; aside from the hill, it’s probably my favourite place on the estate, always deserted apart from a month or two in the autumn when the locals come to fish. As we sit here in silence, I realise I am dreading the onslaught of tonight’s mayhem: girls in bright dresses fluttering like moths in Andrew’s soft lighting, laughter bouncing out across the water, the ceaseless popping of champagne corks. In other years I’ve looked forward to these parties; now I’d swap it all for another day alone with Catherine.

I watch as she leans over the jetty and dips her fingers in the water.

‘Not bad,’ she says. ‘Warmer than I remember.’

‘It’s never really warm enough for swimming. We must have been mad.’

‘We were.’

She smiles at me, at the shared memory, apparition of our past.

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