Page 22 of Pictures of Him

I think, yes, that’s true. You hid away in a small-time life. You weren’t prepared to take a risk on me. The photograph of the boy, Joe, and his father stops me in my tracks. They are playing cards and drinking from matching blue-and-white-striped mugs. I remember Sam, the husband, as I look at this older version in the photograph. I’d hide in the shadows sometimes and watch the two of them walking through town, his arm slung around her shoulders, her long dark hair swinging against her back. I used to wonder what it was about him that made her love him more.

‘He looks nice,’ I say, and I know she understands I mean Sam, not the boy, when she says, ‘He is nice.’

‘How did it go so wrong?’

Catherine doesn’t answer to begin with, but once she starts speaking she seems unable to stop, words and phrasesand broken sentences that tumble over one another and amaze me with their content.

‘It’s my fault, really, all of it.’

When I begin to protest, she waves me silent with an impatient hand.

‘You see, I shouldn’t have married him and we both knew that. Because even though he tried so hard to convince me, to convince both of us, that we were meant to be together, somehow it could never quite match up to you and me. And it killed Sam, trying to prove it was him I loved and knowing, really, that it wasn’t. I mean, I did love him, I still do, we’ve had two kids together, we’ve been married for almost thirteen years, but it wasn’t the same and it never could be. And I’ve thought about you so much, every day, sometimes it felt like almost every moment. It was torture, really, thinking and wondering and remembering with no hope of ever seeing you again. I used to will myself never to mention your name, but sometimes Sam would see something about you in the papers and he’d show me and I’d have to try so hard to act normal, like it didn’t matter, like you didn’t matter, when deep down we both knew you did. That’s why he went off with Julia in the end, I’m sure of it, and I can’t blame him. I pushed him into it.’

She is crying now but I daren’t interrupt or reach out to take her hand or do anything to stop her, for every word she speaks is a revelation. I cannot believe it. It cannot be true. The way she left me was so heartless, so final, as if she hated me, as if I’d done something wrong. And here she is telling me the exact opposite is true, that she’s thoughtabout me, yearned for me, longed for me just as I have always longed for her. It changes everything.

‘I married Sam,’ Catherine says, ‘because he loved me. And because he helped me so much when my mother died. All I wanted back then was to hide away and bury myself where no one could find me. I tried so hard to forget you, but of course I couldn’t. You remember how we loved each other, understood each other, how we used to communicate without talking? Mind-reading, we said. As though we were living inside each other. How could I ever forget that?’

I’m nodding at her because these are the things that made our break-up so impossible for me to accept. One moment I was understood by this girl, by this woman who is now sitting next to me, in a way I’d never been understood before; the next moment she was gone. My despair was overwhelming.

‘I thought you’d forgotten about me,’ I say, and she rolls her eyes.

‘Forgotten about you? There’s barely a day when I haven’t looked for you. It’s been like a curse. Every town or village or shop or restaurant I go into, I think, “I wonder if he’s here.” Every time I’m on the internet I find myself looking for pictures of you. And you’re always there; I couldn’t get away from you even if I wanted to.’

‘I don’t understand. If you loved me so much, why did you leave?’

I think she is close to telling me the truth; in her seconds of hesitation, I see her weighing it up: what would happen if I told him the real reason after all this time? I’m staring at her lovely face and I see something like fear flash through those dark eyes.

‘What was it, Catherine? Did something happen?’ My voice is low.

But Catherine sighs and shakes her head.

‘Is it enough to tell you I made a terrible mistake and I’ve regretted it ever since? Every single day.’

I’m not even sure who reaches for who, but she is in my arms, her hair brushing my face, our mouths pressing together. We are kissing, kissing, and quickly it becomes fierce, and I know she’s still crying because I feel the wet of her tears on my cheek. She pulls away.

‘This is madness. No good can come of it. But I need you …’

She’s in my arms again, and this time the kissing is all wrong in a public place. We need to stop, we have to stop …

‘Can we go?’ Catherine says.

We walk, clamped together, from the park, a long walk, past joggers and schoolchildren and elderly couples, none of whom I really see, onto Queen’s Gate, where I flag down a taxi almost instantly and we sit inside, not talking, not touching, while smart white stuccoed London flashes past, until we reach my street, my flat. We step through the front door into overwhelming whiteness, and in the sudden grave quiet we are drawn together, free at last to hold each other, skin on skin, mouth against mouth, bodies that burn like molten flames.

Fifteen years earlier

Your house was empty; your friends were all at the party. We were alone, luxuriously so, and I knew, as my heartbeat ripped through me, what would happen next.

‘This is the bottle I was talking about,’ you said, flashing the label at me. Puligny-Montrachet, lyrical-sounding words I’d never heard before. You poured two glasses and said, ‘Shall we take them to my room? In case the others come back?’

It didn’t feel like a seduction scene, sitting next to you on your double bed, not even when you took my glass from my hand and set it down on the floor. When you undressed me, piece by piece, both of us looking into the mirror, my body started shaking even before you’d touched me. You carried me back to the bed and laid me down, your mouth moving dangerously slowly across my body; you took off your own clothes, still kissing me, and then there was only the feeling of you finally naked in my arms. There was something I needed to say but it was too late, too late, and though I didn’t mean to, I tensed and cried out as you pushed inside me. You froze instantly.

‘God, Catherine, why didn’t you tell me?’

We stayed there, completely still, just looking at each other. Neither of us had any words.

‘Don’t stop,’ I whispered eventually, and I began to move against you very slowly, and soon the pain shifted into something more bearable, better than that, and all the time you gazed down at me with an expression I can still recall exactly, a look of utmost intensity, a seriousness that made me burn. I began to move faster, pulling you into me, grabbing your hips and urging you to keep going, keep going until this newly delicious, dragging, pulling sensation reached some kind of conclusion.

‘You should have said something,’ you told me afterwards, as I lay in your arms, waiting for my heartbeat to slow down.

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