Page 59 of Pictures of Him

‘Don’t you think it was strange that Harry rang me today? There was something in his voice, a sort of urgency. He seemed genuinely worried about you leaving and how it would affect Lucian.’

‘He’s always been protective of Lucian. You know how close they are.’

I am pulled, unwillingly, right back into the heart of a memory that still fills me with shame all these years later. Harry on the doorstep of our Bristol house, pounding the door in an aggressive, un-Harry-like way. He knew I was in, knew too that I wasn’t going to answer.

‘Catherine, I know you’re in there … Catherine, please. This won’t take long.’

I opened the door with unwashed hair and mid-afternoon pyjamas, physical manifestations of my private heartbreak.

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I told him, affecting a defiance I didn’t feel.

‘Actually,’ Harry said, ‘nor do I. I just want to ask something of you. I want you to promise you’ll never go anywhere near him again. Promise me you’ll leave him alone.’

Leave him alone. Such hostile words. And so deserved. But for a reason Harry would never have guessed at.

The wariness of your friends, the unnerving proximity of Jack and this horrifying secret we share: I have many reasons for not wanting to stay tonight. But I cannot explain any of this to Liv without telling her the truth about why I left you, and I couldn’t bear to do that, couldn’t bear for Liv to see me the way I see myself.

‘Can I tell you something?’ Liv says. ‘I’ve made a point of staying in touch with Lucian all these years because of you. I always knew how much you regretted leaving him. And how much you missed him. Don’t run away again, Catherine. Don’t do that to him. Or yourself. You’ve got a chance, you should take it.’

‘What about Sam?’ I say. ‘What about Joe and Daisy? I can’t just walk out on them.’

But already I am thinking that I will tell Sam the truth. I’ll tell him that I love you. I’ll tell him I don’t know how to live without you.

When I come downstairs an hour later wearing the darkblue dress, you look confused for a moment, then a slow smile, an upwards one, works its way across your face until you are grinning broadly, then laughing. I feel this great flood of emotion punching me in the chest.

‘You’re staying?’ you ask, and I run down the last few steps of the staircase, straight into your arms, and you lift me up as if I’m a child.

‘Looks like it,’ I tell you, and then we’re kissing, a kiss that goes on and on, much longer than it should, with Liv right behind us and the bar staff pretending not to watch.

‘I’m so glad,’ you tell me, still holding me off the ground, and I say, ‘Me too, me too.’ And as always, your thoughts are running with mine, because you whisper, ‘I couldn’t bear you to leave,’ and I tell you, ‘I’m not leaving,’ and although we both know I’m only talking about one night, it feels like something has been decided.

It’s a different thing having Liv by my side, and for the first hour of the party we stand together, marvelling at the excess. There must be almost as many waiters as guests, girls and boys clearly picked for their looks as much as their waiting skills, dressed in tight-fitting black shirts and black jeans. They rush through the crowd in mock-professional haste and come up to each guest in turn: ‘What can I get you to drink, a glass of champagne or something from the bar?’ We choose champagne, and when Liv exclaims at the taste, I tell her it’s vintage Pol Roger, your favourite.

‘Get you,’ she says, eyebrows raised. ‘Jack’s arrived,’ she tells me a moment later. ‘His wife is with him.’

His overaffectionate greeting locks me down inside as if even my cells recoil at the memory – his lips pressed to my cheek, the smell of his aftershave instantly recognisableafter all this time. I force myself to look properly this time; I tell myself to be calm. See the narrow grey tailored suit, Savile Row, I’d imagine. The black shirt, revealing itself to be silk on closer inspection. Sunglasses worn inside masking those blue eyes. Bright hair, camera-ready smile, his handsomeness a weapon, one that felled Celia, Alexa, even me.

Celia is dressed like some kind of eighties throwback in a rose-coloured strapless ball gown, very Diana, veryDallas. Actually she looks great, and, like Ling, she greets me as though we are already old friends. And I think, as we embrace, that this is what outsiders do, huddling together on the fringes. None of us – Celia, Ling or I – will ever be fully accepted in your clique of five.

The party is a master class in entitlement. At the poolside bar, we sit side by side on two stools, just watching.

‘Look at the clothes,’ Liv says. ‘Look at the hair. Look at the jewellery. Everyone here is beautiful and that’s because they have money and time and they know where to go to achieve it.’

‘It’s true. The rich are different,’ she says a moment later. ‘Have you heard anyone say thank you yet?’

At our station by the bar we spend a few minutes monitoring a sequence of high-maintenance beauties ordering complicated cocktails we’ve never heard of, with not a please or thank you between them.

‘Two island margaritas and an old-fashioned.’

Mostly they take their exotic drinks without making eye contact with the barman or breaking conversation with their friends.

We watch as you come into the bar, almost absurdlyhandsome in your dark suit and white shirt; we see how the crowd pulls apart to make room for you, a celebrity in their midst. You catch my eye and smile, but your progress is slow, drawn into conversation with at least four groups of people before you reach us.

‘Finally,’ you say, putting an arm around my shoulder. ‘Why does everyone feel they have to talk to me? Could I have a martini, please,’ you say to the barman, and Liv catches my eye and smiles. ‘And what would you both like?’

You tell us dinner is being served on the lawn and that Harry and Ling are holding a table for us, ‘Big enough for everyone,’ you say, which instantly sets me on edge. In your everyone, I see only Jack.

The marquee is more beautiful than any I’ve ever seen. Long wooden tables and benches run all the way around its perimeter, simple and almost homely in effect except for the fact that they are ablaze with what must be hundreds of candles, burning from tall brass candelabras and low-level coloured glass holders. Each place setting has two tall-stemmed wine glasses for white and red, a champagne flute, a jewel-coloured water tumbler and a gold-patterned side plate. For every table there’s a gold-lacquered vase, at exactly the right height, filled with dark blue and cream roses. I am sitting between you and Harry and opposite Ling, a position of relative safety, though Jack, Rachel and Charlotte Lomax and her husband are a couple of places further down, easily within earshot. Charlotte, all smooth brown skin in a backless floor-length dress, dives straight in.

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