Page 62 of Pictures of Him

‘No, Liv, I won’t talk to him. It’s over, I’ve changed my mind and now we both need to move on.’

I spent two weeks at home in the end, shadowing my mother from room to room, to the supermarket, for painfully slow walks around the park. Her back was very bad at that time and we were at the chiropractor’s every other day. I used to sit on the other side of the screen, listening to her low, suppressed moans, those deep gasps of pain that didn’t seem right. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with my own tragedy, perhaps I would have guessed at hers.

Just before the fortnight was up, my parents went to the surgery to pick up the results of a recent X-ray. Afterwards I would imagine their walk along the high street – past the butcher where we bought fillet steak for birthdays and our Christmas turkey, past the greengrocer, who held back purple sprouting broccoli for my father, and the florist where my mother bought her peonies – as their last moments of innocence. I was at the kitchen table when they came back, Elizabeth Gaskell’sNorth and Southopen in front of me. From the minute they walked in I knewsomething was wrong. My father was all bitter and brisk, as if he was fighting back tears (a trait I’ve inherited); my mother couldn’t look at me. How do you tell your nineteen-year-old daughter, your treasured only child, that you are dying? So I collapsed, and the loss of you, the horrifying infidelity with Jack, became a little chip of ugliness on the infinity of pain.

My mother insisted on taking me back to the station herself, her last drive as it turned out.

‘Making mistakes is part of growing up,’ she said as we stood waiting for my train. ‘It’s not such a big deal. The important thing is to learn from it and move on. Promise me you’ll do that.’

‘You know, don’t you? You know what I did.’

My mother paused. We were so close, she and I, always able to communicate without words. She would have read my silence and interpreted my guilt. Not the who or the how, but the act of betrayal, she must have understood that.

‘What I know is that you are a good person. And you’ve stopped believing in yourself.’

‘Oh,’ I said, and could manage no more. Sometimes my mother’s comprehension was a dagger in my chest.

I’ll never forget the look we shared before the whistle blew and the carriage door was slammed shut. A few hard seconds of gazing into one another’s eyes, a silent information swap, no words needed.

She saw the change in me and I saw the sorrow in her.

Now

The tree is pretty in sugar-almond pink and I suppose it should lift my mood along with the jam jar of wild flowers – foxgloves, bluebells, clover – that Daisy brought yesterday.

‘There are daisies all over our lawn now,’ she said, and she held out a long, long chain she’d made for me to inspect. I did turn to look at it, I did try to force my mouth into an approximation of a smile, but still she hesitated before coming close enough to hang it around my neck. And it hurt to see that hesitation and to know that I’d caused it, along with Joe’s anger and Sam’s despair. My children have learned to manage without me, without this silent shell who adds nothing to their lives. And who can blame them?

When Daisy was small, we used to walk up to the common most days, and when spring arrived we’d solemnly inspect the grass for the first signs of buttercups and daisies. She loved the fact that she was named after this prolific wild flower, although I’m not sure she was really; it was just the name we liked most at the time. And as she grew, it suited her more and more, with her wild andgenerous nature, the girl who loves to dangle upside down from trees and wade barefoot in the world’s coldest stream.

My family visit me most days now, preparing me, I think, for my departure, which is coming very soon. Sam gives me information updates in the bright, breezy voice he always uses, dropping in psychiatric terminology as if he’s discussing the weekly shop. Spinach, eggs, milk. Trauma, psychosis, mutism.

‘We’ll need some help to begin with because we don’t know how it will be for you fitting back into normal life with your mutism. So Liv is going to take some time off and then my mum is coming.’

He pauses here and I think how the old Sam and I would have laughed at this. His mother and me, confined together in a house, day after day? No way, I would have said. Over my dead body. But when you are still alive, breathing, eating, sleeping, only acting like you’re dead, no touching, no talking, decisions like this are forced upon you. You make one choice at the expense of many others, it seems to me. It’s a strange kind of freedom in this glass house of mine.

For now Sam seems to shy away from the exact moment of ‘trauma’, but he cites other events that led up to it, even the one I dread the most. He is careful and kind when he mentions Jack’s name; he will hold my hand, squeezing it hard, though I never respond. He tells me that they will be bringing up what happened with Jack in my next cognitive therapy session; he asks me if I’d like him to be there.

‘They know you’re not ready to talk, Catherine,’ he says. ‘It’s more that they want to help you find ways of lessening your anxiety when you think about it.’

More bloody breathing techniques, I suppose. There’s only one thing that could help and that is the chance to say sorry. And if I couldn’t find the words then I’d beam them to you from my eyes and you would understand; you’d catch the letters as they fell through the air. It’s all right, you’d say. I forgive you, you’d say. Let’s start again. When all you have is your dreams, why can’t you recreate the perfect end?

Four months before: Lucian

There is always a moment when I remember why it is I go to the trouble of hosting this party year after year, three hundred hard-drinking guests trudging through my house and gardens, dropping cigarette butts and smashing glasses and spilling wine onto carpets (not that I care, but Mary does). Tonight the moment comes as I’m walking to the lake with Catherine. Harry and Ling are slightly ahead, hand in hand, a good foot of height between them, her dress an exotic yellow against his summer lightweight beige. They talk incessantly of their planned wedding party and the joy in Harry’s voice, after all the years of loneliness, is gratifying; it lifts me up. I don’t know anyone who deserves it more than him. (Apart from me, and I have my own fervent hopes on that score.) Until a few hours ago I really believed that Catherine would disappear back into her old life and I’d never see her again. And although I’d promised myself I wouldn’t fall in love with her, I’ve failed, hopelessly, at that. Tonight, though, there’s a shift in her, I see it, I feel it, and I’m daring to hope that perhaps we will end up together, against the odds and after all this time. I’m not sure what Liv said to Catherine whenthey went upstairs, but whatever it was, it worked. So I am buoyed by Harry’s happiness and the projection of my own and by the sight of my guests wandering down to the pool or the lake in technicoloured groups, men carrying jackets, girls holding their shoes, laughter drifting out across the evening breeze. This is when I love the party most, the formality of dinner (such as it is) behind us, just the freedom of pure, selfish enjoyment ahead.

We hear the music long before we reach the lake, another of Andrew’s genius touches, for the sound of Vivaldi or Mozart or Bach or whatever his all-girl string quartet is playing is instantly transporting, as if we’re entering another world. And when we arrive at the lake, I see that everything Andrew planned has come together spectacularly well. In his extra-soft lighting, just Chinese lanterns strung up high around the perimeter of the lake, the moon dominates, turning all his pastel colours luminescent. The sky-blue jetty, the pink, yellow and green boats glow in its sharp silver light and the surface of the lake shines, a dimpled sheet of glass. The string quartet are now playing Handel’s Water Music (Andrew does love a theme) and the banks of the lake are dotted with guests, sitting on blankets, drinking champagne. No one seems to be in a hurry to go out on the boats. There’s a queue of people waiting for two bouncers to admit them to the miniature nightclub, another crowd gathered around Andrew’s champagne bar, styled like an old-fashioned Punch and Judy booth in candy-coloured stripes. Friends call out and try to draw us into conversation, but without saying so, the four of us are determined to be on our own. I think it’s the shared feeling of secret celebration – Ling and Harry’sforthcoming party, the possibility that Catherine and I might have some kind of future.

‘Let’s go out on the lake,’ I say.

Harry picks up champagne and glasses while I help Ling and Catherine into the first boat. There are a few girls and boys waiting on the jetty, dressed thematically in shorts and nautical stripes. They hand us blankets and hold the boat steady while we step down into it, though they cannot prevent its sudden dramatic tilt when Harry, all sixteen stone of him, steps aboard. Ling and Catherine sit together in the bow, their blue and yellow dresses a perfect complement, while Harry and I each take up an oar. Once upon a time we used to do this together at school, rowing the only sport we could ever be bothered to pursue. We were in the upper eights for a while until parties, booze and girls (for me anyway) took over.

‘Like riding a bicycle,’ says Harry as we glide effortlessly towards the centre of the lake. We reminisce about our brief rowing career, the cold, unforgivably early starts on the Thames, the muscle-bound, non-drinking jockiness of the other six.

‘It’s a miracle we lasted as long as we did,’ Harry says.

There are a few other boats coming onto the lake now, though unlike us they stick close to the bank, and their lanterns glow from the edges of the night like fireflies.

‘Let’s rest here for a while,’ Harry says, balancing his oar across the boat. ‘Pass up the booze, girls.’

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