Page 14 of Pictures of Him

After lunch we sat next to the fire finishing our wine and I told you about my dream of being a journalist. It was more than a dream, really; I’d been working towards it since I was twelve years old, writing for the school magazine and the local parish newsletter, and the thing I was most proud of, a string of articles that had been accepted by theIndependentabout life as a London teenager. I’d joined the university newspaper in my first week, and secretly hoped to be editing it in my final year. Then a graduate trainee scheme at theTimesor theGuardian, a stint in the newsroom, after which I’d become an arts correspondent, all working towards my ultimate goal of editing one of the weekend supplements by the time I was thirty.

‘You’ve got it all worked out. None of my friends have a clue what they’ll do. We don’t even talk about it.’

Privately I thought that might be because your friends were the kind who didn’t need to think about it, the kind for whom money actually did grow on trees.

You were reluctant to talk about your painting at first. I asked if you wanted to become a professional artist, and you waved your hand dismissively.

‘I’ll never be good enough.’

It was the first time I’d seen a chink in that smooth public-school armour of yours, a glimpse of insecurity.

‘You are. More than good enough if that drawing is anything to go by.’

‘I’m better when I commit the time, by which I mean all day and all night. Painting isn’t something you can fit round a life. You have to do it non-stop if you really want to get somewhere.’

‘What kind of things do you paint?’

‘It varies. Landscapes mostly, but recently I’ve started doing portraits.’

That’s when you told me about a portrait you’d made of your father, working from an old photograph.

‘It was like bringing him back to life for a bit,’ you said. ‘His eyes, his smile. Suddenly I could remember exactly. And not just from the photograph.’

I registered how your voice changed whenever you spoke about him, quietening, softening. I thought about asking you how he’d died but I didn’t have the courage, not then.

‘I’d like to draw you. Will you let me?’

I shook my head. ‘Maybe one day.’

‘Why not now?’

I shrugged. I was still trying to resist you at that point, my own private tug of war. The start of a longing that would never cease. You smiled your minimal quarter-smile.

‘You’re not making any of this very easy for me, are you?’

Four months before: Catherine

Saying goodbye to the children almost broke me. I didn’t want them to pick up on the tension between us so I’d cobbled together an excuse about Liv needing me to go and stay.

‘She’s feeling a bit low. I’m going up to London to look after her,’ I said while the children looked at me in disbelief.

‘You’re missing our holiday?’

How I hated to see Daisy’s quick tears.

‘Liv needs me, darling,’ I said, holding her hard little body against my own. ‘And you’ll be fine with Dad and Grandma and Grandpa, you know you will. It’s only a few days.’

It doesn’t feel good lying to your children, but the truth is so much worse. Your father has been unfaithful to me; that woman who came to our house yesterday, the one who gave you Smarties, the one who wears halter necks and dark-coloured lipstick, was his lover.

When Sam dropped me off at the station – a wordless journey, no hand-holding on the gearstick – he pleaded with me to change my mind. We stood waiting for thetrain to draw in to the platform, my overnight bag at my feet, staring at each other while I turned over the possibility of going to Cornwall, pretending to his parents that everything was fine. But Julia was there, right there, my husband pressing her against the wall, the two of them locked together in their treacherous embrace. He tells me it meant nothing; I think the opposite is true. We can’t undo it and we can’t bury it either. How can we not examine the fact that Sam was so unhappy he chose to sleep with someone else? Or that it’s me who makes him miserable, me with my endless obsession over you? If he and I are to make it work then somehow I must close the book on you. No more cuttings. No more letters. The end of my dreams.

Liv meets me off the train at Clapham Junction and carries my bag to a nearby café while I talk. She expresses all the right emotions, incredulity and bewilderment at the unexpected turn of events, Sam’s shocking infidelity, Julia’s arrival on our doorstep, but it is her silences that say the most. Always with Liv there’s the spectre of you.

‘I think he still cares about you,’ she told me after you’d both been at a wedding together not so long ago.

‘I doubt it,’ I said, ending the conversation before it could begin.

But I can see the thoughts running through Liv’s mind as we sit in this blue-and-white-themed café with our Lapsang Souchong and carrot cake, which neither of us eat. Sooner or later she won’t be able to stop herself mentioning your name. So I don’t tell her that right now what I would like most is to be lying on the beach on a sunny August afternoon, watching Sam and Joe diving from the platform into the sea, or kneeling on the sandto make one of the seaweed and shell pictures that Daisy loves – a mermaid with green broken-bottle eyes and a flat grey nose and a perfect row of white pebble teeth. I’d like to be sitting in my kitchen watching Sam flipping pancakes, his Sunday-morning party piece, while I work my way through our chipped brown teapot and Daisy sits next to me drawing or reading or playing with her gypsy caravan full of little grey rabbits. I chose Sam because he made me feel safe, this tall, strong, football-mad boy with his unbreakable, shatterproof morality. How can it have gone so wrong?

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