Page 24 of Pictures of Him

‘Hang on,’ he’d say, stopping Rachel or Alexa in their tracks. ‘Catherine doesn’t know who we’re talking about. Back up a bit.’

Other times he’d make a great show of giving me the chair closest to the fire, the right amount of ice in my drink, the first helping of a shared takeaway. He was overtly charming but not in a sickening way, and anyway, there was always the sharp undercut of his humour to balance things out. It felt lucky being his friend, like you’d been chosen.

And yet the thought of seeing him again now, fifteen years later, fills me with a dread I cannot explain.

‘Look,’ you say, irritated though you are trying not to show it, ‘it was just a thought, forget I mentioned it.’

You throw back your side of the duvet and stand up. Beautiful body, slim and tanned and toned; your muscle definition reminds me of a classical Greek statue, the kind I’ve shown Joe and Daisy, the pair of them sniggering, in the British Museum.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To make some coffee. Stay there, I’ll bring it back to bed.’

It feels strangely intimate watching you dress in your discarded clothes, underwear, then jeans, then shirt, as though I haven’t earned the right, so I roll onto my side and look at the books on your bedside table instead.The Long Firmby Jake Arnott. I remember Sam reading it once when we were on holiday in France. On top of the Arnott is a bright blue book calledThe Art of Mindfulness. How surprising.

‘You meditate?’

You swivel around and see me examining your books.

‘Oh,’ the twist of a smile, ‘that one’s not mine.’

As the door closes behind you, I am wondering who the mindfulness book belongs to, Rachel or someone else, and the sudden, sharp tug of jealousy makes me giddy. I am in danger of the past catching up with me. Rachel, Alexa, Harry and Jack, your unchanging circle of friends: the prospect of seeing them is impossible. It cannot happen. It must not happen. If I go off to Somerset with you – and how I yearn to be able to do that, even for a few hours – then sooner or later you’ll find out exactly what kind of person I am.

Four months before: Lucian

I am a typical male in some ways. Lava-hot sex, like we just had, Catherine sitting on me but with her back turned so that I could hear rather than see her contorted cries, so that I could feel rather than know that she was close, so close, and that when she did finally succumb (shouting my name in such an intensely sexual way, all I can think is how much I need to hear it again), after all these years of us both, probably, fantasising about this moment, then the walls would collapse and the ceiling would fall in and it would feel as though our whole lives had been leading to exactly this. Afterwards, though, literally minutes afterwards, I’m back feeling confused and a little paranoid. I ask Catherine to come away to Somerset with me, just for a day or even a few hours, and she reacts as if I’ve slapped her. This lovely face of hers, one that I’ve drawn and worshipped and craved at times, is also more expressive than any I’ve ever seen. And right now, what I’m getting is horror, unveiled, raw, exaggerated. I sympathise with what’s happened to her and Sam, of course I do, although it would be fairly easy not to care too much. She left me forhim a long time ago, she broke my heart so dramatically, so effectively, it took a long time to recover.

We are so connected, she and I, physically, yes, to an extent where it’s almost impossible to look at Catherine without her clothes curling into flames, but also exactly as before, we talk without speaking, we know the same things, we feel the same things, we are in some unfathomable way like the same person. Already I understand what it was that made it so hard to be apart last time. We see each other, that’s it. We see each other in a way that no one else does.

I convince Catherine to have lunch before we go our separate ways and when we arrive at the restaurant, a favourite of mine, she says, ‘I’m sorry I’ve been so on edge. Please can we start again.’

I want just as much as she does to forget the hell of our ending and the big question of why, why, why and the fact that we probably should always have been together and we never will be. Of course I want to know what it was that drove her away, but I also feel relief at her suggestion of a reprieve. Yes, we’ll go back to the beginning. Yes we’ll pretend, we’ll be like any other couple in this tiny little restaurant, eating some of the best sushi you’ll find in London. And while we eat, I’ll learn about her life, some of the gaps from all those years that are missing, and perhaps in this way I’ll be able to forgive her for the way she left me, and this time, when we say goodbye, we’ll both get the full stop we always needed.

She speaks quietly so that I have to strain a little to hear above the clatter of the restaurant, and occasionally I catch a slight inflection that I’d almost forgotten.

‘My father is Scottish,’ she says. ‘Not so you’d notice these days, just the odd word; if anything he sounds more American.’

Catherine’s father lives in New York with a woman he married a year after her mother died. I can tell she still hasn’t forgiven him.

‘What’s your stepmother like?’ I ask, and her eyes flare with indignation.

‘Carol? She’s not my stepmother in anything but name. I am an adult with my own family. She just happens to be married to my father.’

Right.

‘It must have been so hard on you when your mother died,’ I say, and she nods, a tiny, sharp little nod, and begins talking in a rigid, clipped voice. If I didn’t know that she was holding back tears I’d think she was furious.

‘It happened so fast. Every time I said goodbye, I thought, is this it, am I going to see her again, and then, only a few months after her diagnosis, it was.’

‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you,’ I say, and Catherine says, ‘Don’t. Please don’t.’

Catherine’s mother fell ill almost immediately after she and I split up, a grim coincidence that kept her hidden from view for the remainder of her time at Bristol. And no one better placed than me to understand what early bereavement felt like.

Her eyes are full of tears.

‘I know that you would have helped me, that you wanted to.’

‘Sam was there for you. He was better at it than I would have been.’

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