Page 9 of Pictures of Him

‘Why don’t I go and talk to her and see what there is,’ she says. ‘Maybe pasta would be good?’

I know we’re all watching Ling leave the room and marvelling at her calm, unhurried confidence as she goes off to instruct the housekeeper after only one week of living here.

‘You were right, Harry. She’s wonderful,’ Rachel says.

Harry’s face lights with joy.

‘Isn’t she? I know you were all worried it happened too fast but, the truth is, I couldn’t bear the thought of coming home without her.’

He turns to me.

‘Come down to the pool for a second? I’m thinking of putting in a new one and wanted to ask your advice.’

Of course we get to the swimming pool, which seems rather basic and old-fashioned now I look at it, with its bright turquoise tiles and white plastic steps, and Harry turns his back on it straight away.

‘You know you could do something really amazing here,’ I say.

Harry pulls out his cigarettes and offers me one.

‘Sod the pool,’ he says. ‘It’s you I want to talk about. I want to make sure you’re all right.’

This is a reference to my father’s untimely death; no need to spell out what he’s thinking. He died when I was ten, three years before Harry and I met. Harry knows, though, how I locked my grief inside myself, just a little savage pinching of my wrists when the pain became too much – self-harming you’d call it now. He also knows what can happen when my grief is allowed out. There was a time, one we choose never to discuss, when my life spun out of control. I lost my way, let’s leave it at that.

I rest one hand on his shoulder.

‘This is not going to affect me in the same way. I promise you.’

‘All right,’ he says, and we stand beside his archaic pool finishing our cigarettes in silence.

As is often the case in our friendship, it’s the things we don’t say that sound loudest. Harry, I fear, would have done anything for me to get the ending I wanted. She might be very much in the past, by fifteen years or more, but at times like this, Catherine has never felt more in my present.

Fifteen years earlier

You weren’t expecting me to come, I saw that in the flash of hastily concealed surprise as you leant against your blue car.

You opened the passenger door for me and I laughed at your old-fashioned chivalry.

The drive to this mysterious destination of yours took more than an hour. I remember looking out of the window, listening to the background wash of the Rolling Stones, your all-time favourite band if you had to choose, you said, while the sweeping plains of the Quantock Hills faded into the high hedgerows and narrow lanes of south Devon.

‘Are you abducting me?’

You smiled that peculiar downturned smile, each corner of your mouth tugged south, the face of an inverted clown.

‘I haven’t decided yet. Let’s see how lunch goes.’

We fell into silence. I was thinking about Sam, thinking how he’d hate to see me sitting next to you in the low-slung car. Everything you stood for, Sam stood against, a simple equation of fundamental opposites. Sam’s blood-red politics had been handed down from father to sonlike a genetic injection; one of the few things they always agreed on was their utter derision for anyone of privilege.

Finally you brought the car to a stop in a small gravelled car park looking out across the sea. I can still picture my first sighting of the Beach House, a battered old hut with peeling blue paint stationed right above South Milton Sands. But then you opened the door to the restaurant and it was as if we’d stepped inside your drawing; nothing before or since could capture the romance of that moment. It was identical: the wooden walls of a ski chalet dotted with film posters, the red and white checked tablecloths, the jam jars filled with flowers. Outside the day was cold and grey, but inside the hut it was perfect, a fire burned in the hearth and there were candles on every table. Nowhere in the world could have been better suited to a drawn-out secret lunch.

There was no one else there apart from a mother and daughter who were leaving as we arrived. It occurs to me now that perhaps the restaurant was closing, but you knew the owner and he took your grandiose ‘We’ll try everything’ at face value, bringing oysters, crab, whitebait and grilled sole, a leisurely sequence of dishes that lasted for hours and remains the best seafood I’ve eaten until this day. There was a bottle of cold yellow wine and you filled our glasses almost to the brim, just like the drawing.Ours?

I’d been secretly observing you throughout the drive, little sideways glances that took in your long, slim fingers on the steering wheel, the frayed wrist of your navy jumper. Now you were opposite me, front on, lit up by candles, and there was nothing to do but look. What was it about your face, I wondered, that made you more beautiful to me than anyone I’d ever seen?

You saw me looking and smiled.

‘I didn’t think you’d come. What made you change your mind?’

‘The drawing.’

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