Page 15 of Pictures of Him

‘It was only a matter of time before this happened,’ Liv says eventually. ‘You’ve often said so yourself.’

‘I know, but that doesn’t make it any easier.’

We are circling each other, the way close friends do, biding our time, waiting for the right moment to spring. Liv wants to dive back into my past, I see it, I feel it; I want to run as fast as I can in the opposite direction.

I met Liv on my first day at university, wafting around the freshers’ fair in a Victorian nightie and big clumpy boots, a paper flower stuck in her hair. We got talking as we queued up for the Debating Society.

‘You don’t have to do any debating,’ the society secretary had innate selling skills, ‘and we always serve cocktails.’

We both paid our five-pound joining fee and neither of us attended a single debate in three years, but the conversation we struck up in that queue has lasted almost half my lifetime.

The atmosphere changes when Liv reaches down for her handbag and places it on the table between us. She extracts a ripped piece of paper, a newspaper cutting by thelooks of things, and slides it across the table towards me.

‘Have you seen this?’

I know just from the look on her face – expectant? nervous? – that it’s got something to do with you.

‘What is it?’ I say, scanning the Births, Marriage and Deaths column fromThe Times. For a moment I can’t see what I’m looking for; it’s just a blur of celebrations, engagements, marriages, and new births with names like Otto Atticus and Hebe Summer, never anything normal, never Sarah or Elizabeth or James. And then suddenly a surname, in block capitals, springs out at me as if it’s lit up by flames.

WILKES: Serena Elizabeth, died peacefully at home on 1 August, aged 60. Much loved mother of Emma, Joanna and Lucian.

‘Lucian’s mother,’ I say after a pause. ‘He didn’t get on with her, I remember.’

‘They haven’t seen each other for years. But he’ll be at the funeral, I would think. It’s on Friday.’

‘No, Liv.’ I don’t need her to spell out what she’s thinking.

‘Why not? I’m going and you could come with me. I think it’s time.’

Heart racing, mouth dry, I look again at the announcement. An open service, to be held at St Luke’s Church, Chelsea, at 3 p.m. on Friday 7 August. I push the newspaper cutting away from me as if it’s infected. There are so many reasons why I can’t go to this funeral, not least the fact that I have never met your mother. I haven’t seen you for fifteen years, have no idea whether you ever forgave me for the way I left you, suddenly, harshly, without anyexplanation. And then there are all your friends, who hated me for breaking your heart.

‘Jack and Harry will be there.’

‘Yes, but so will I. We can face them together. It won’t be as bad as you think.’

‘Why are you going, anyway? You don’t know Lucian all that well; isn’t it a bit weird for you to turn up? You never met his mother.’

Dread has made me vicious. Dread, fear, self-hate, call it what you will. What I’d like most right now is for Liv to promise she’ll stop seeing you, stop reminding me constantly of this ache, this loss, this absence of you. I know that my reaction to the past twenty-four hours of emotional chaos has been muted and strange. If anything, dealing with the fallout from Sam’s unexpected betrayal, I felt half dead inside. But not now. Now the sorrow is instant and overwhelming; it’s like being shaken violently awake.

‘For Christ’s sake, Liv. Please don’t ask me to think about Lucian. Or Jack. Or Harry. Not on top of everything else.’

My voice is much too loud in this place full of toddlers and buggies and mothers with freshly highlighted hair. My tears, which fall without warning, an embarrassment.

‘Catherine.’

Liv extends a hand across the table but it’s too late. Now that I’ve started crying, I won’t be able to stop. Crying for you, crying for me, for Sam and the kids. Crying for the crossroads, bleak and damned, that must rear up over and over again, haunting me with my choice.

Four months before: Lucian

In times of crisis, I often turn to Jack. He waits with me outside the church until we see the hearse arrive, and just behind it the funeral car that carries my sisters and their monstrous husbands. They always hated me the most, the husbands, something to do with the fact that they slave in their City jobs Monday to Friday while I – my brother-in-law’s words, not mine – ‘arse about all day in your little Somerset empire’.

‘Primogeniture,’ I might have argued. ‘It’s what you get with families like ours.’

But it seemed simpler to cut myself off.

Jack manages to take the edge right out of this first meeting. Behind their backs he calls them the witches, but the truth is, he has always seemed to prefer my family to his own, dysfunctional or otherwise. When he channels his charm, as he does now, wheeling my sisters into a long-lost embrace, older women in particular seem to melt. By the time they get to me, both of them are smiling. Joanna, shorter, plumper and always that little bit nicer, greets me with open arms.

‘Hello, stranger,’ she says.

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