Page 29 of Pictures of Him

As we walk towards the kitchen, Mary asks you about the funeral.

‘Was it all right?’ Her voice is low and concerned.

‘Better than I thought. At least the wicked witches seemed happy to see me this time.’

Mary smiles, and I remember that she knows all your secrets, the tribulations of growing up with an adulterous mother, absent sisters and a suicidal father. You told me once that you cared more for Mary than you did for your own mother. You told me about the cakes she sent youback to school with, the food packages that arrived unheralded throughout the term. The one-sentence postcards just so you could have something in your pigeonhole.

We follow Mary into the kitchen, which has been redesigned since I was here last and looks as if it has jumped straight out of an interiors magazine, with walls of exposed brick, steel worktops and those fashionable pendant lamps. Now all I want is the space and freedom to look. I’d like to slow the film right down, gliding my finger against the reel so that I can take in every still, each room, each piece of furniture, photographs, paintings, the low leather sofa at the far end of the room. Full-length windows looking out across the lawn. A long oak table with a curve of today’s newspapers placed at one end. Most of all I’d like the invisibility to observe you leaning against the sink, talking to Mary while she fills the kettle and begins to lay a tray with cups and saucers.

I watch her handing you a stack of post and you chucking it back down on the little wooden table – ‘Thanks, Mary, I think I’ll look at it later’ – without even a cursory glance. So this is you, actually you, after all the years of trying to imagine your life, scrutinising those two-dimensional images and bland nothing-stories in the press and reconstructing all the gaps. I pictured long lunches by the swimming pool. Barbecues on the lawn. Boating on the lake. But I always came unstuck when I began imagining the friends, Rachel, your on–off lover, Harry and Alexa, who were my friends too once upon a time, and Jack, the full stop to my dreams.

The tea is good. Sitting on the sofa holding your hand is good. Being back here in this most wonderful houseis good. But when Mary calls out casually, ‘Will you be staying for the party, Catherine?’ an innocent enough question, my fear of confrontation swamps me, a toxic surge that makes me breathless.

I know all about your party as anyone with a fixation on the diary sections and society pages of newspapers and magazines would. I wasn’t always this way, almost obsessively interested in the foibles of the rich and famous, but it was the only means of finding out what you were up to. I wanted to know what you were doing and who you were doing it with, and more than anything I longed for the day when I might discover that Jack had dropped out of your life. But no, more often than not he was there, right beside you, in his shades, with his Colgate smile, still tightly gripping his position as best friend slash honorary brother. A couple of years ago Sam caught me reading a double-page spread about your annual summer party in theDaily Mail. Beautiful girls in shimmering drop-waisted dresses, men in wing collars and tails, those obligatory coupe champagne glasses. The theme must have been 1920s; the headline ran: ‘Somerset’s Not So Great Gatsby’ (the media have always portrayed you and your friends as hedonistic, good-for-nothing wastrels). Sam, I remember, leaned over my shoulder and said: ‘Come the revolution …’

Now I keep my voice light and even as I tell Mary, ‘I won’t be able to stay that long, sadly.’

But I see you watching me and it seems to me that you are beginning to understand.

Four months before: Lucian

If it is surreal for Catherine being back in the house where we were once at the pinnacle of this shared, derailing passion, then it is equally so for me to have her here. I wonder what my friends would think if they could see her here now? The girls would be all right, I think, or at least Alexa would. With Rachel it’s always a little complicated, particularly when other women are involved, especially when the woman is Catherine. I’m not at all sure Harry would understand, Harry who oversaw my collapse – I don’t exaggerate – about a week after she left. And Jack? Well, Jack is different. He’s more like a brother than a friend in many ways and he likes to come first.

When Catherine and I were together, all those years ago, I sometimes wondered if he was jealous. She was astonishing to look at though she didn’t seem to realise it, the kind of face that demands a silver screen: huge dark eyes, a perfect nose, long but slim, elegant, and then her lips, of course, which were full enough to make most men’s blood pump faster. I thought that perhaps Jack was jealous of how hard I’d fallen in love, for Catherine and I, after our faltering start, were never apart. And I also wonderedif he was a little bit in love with her himself. I wouldn’t have blamed him. There we were, the two of us, noodling around in our Clifton townhouse, and all of a sudden Audrey Hepburn moved in and claimed me as her own. So it is probably just as well I have promised Catherine we’ll be alone here, that I will keep my friends at bay. I’m ignoring countless texts and phone messages, a typically charmless email from Jack, subject heading:WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU,YOU FUCKER???

Meanwhile I get a real kick out of the way Catherine reacts to seeing the house again.

‘It’s the loveliest house,’ she says. ‘I thought I might have over-romanticised it in my memory. But I haven’t. It’s even better than I remembered.’

Most people who come to Shute Park are either too used to it or too entitled themselves to express much enthusiasm for its grandeur. Even after all this time living here alone, though, the house still blows me away. I can remember coming here when I was very young and standing in front of it with my father and uncle, counting the white shuttered windows that ran across the breadth of its facade (eighteen in each tier, the same at the back).

‘This could be yours one day,’ my uncle said. ‘But it will be your father’s first.’

‘What about when you have children?’ I’d asked, and my father and uncle laughed.

‘That’s looking increasingly unlikely,’ my father said.

He was ahead of his time, my uncle, unapologetically parading his young, flamboyantly dressed lovers (there was a time when they all seemed to look like Adam Ant) through our small, uptight village and hosting wild gatheringsthat might last for days. Shute Park under his heritage was never out of the papers. He was hated and abhorred by theDaily Mail, another thing to be proud of, and by my mother, who decided (around the time he named me his sole heir) that he was the embodiment of evil. He died of lung cancer when I was twenty-one, and I still miss him.

When my uncle was alive I’d come over from Bristol with my friends most weekends, fuelling mad twelve-hour drinking sessions from his open-door-cellar policy, beginning with champagne and the palest of French rosés and finishing some time after dawn with brandy and sodas, his favourite, lying on the sofas in the library listening to the Rolling Stones. My taste in music was crystallised in those days; I’ve been working my way through his extensive collection of the greats – Dylan, Cohen, Van Morrison – ever since. He was a weird fish in many ways but he was my father’s brother and my sole supporter, and thirteen years on, I’m still half hoping that he will reappear; that his death, and my legacy, was just another of his twisted jokes.

As we move through the house, now scented with the smell of a roasting chicken, it seems that Catherine is looking for evidence of how I live. She dismisses the drawing room, a dreadful place of swagged curtains and brown furniture and far too much pink, as soon as she sees it and laughs at the incongruous Francis Bacon on the wall. But the library with its battered Chesterfield sofas, drink-splashed sideboard and boxes full of vinyl she seizes upon.

‘I remember this room,’ she says, and I’m sure, like me, she’s picturing a long night of hard drinking with myuncle, him and Alexa taking turns to play DJ, Catherine, Jack and me lying on the floor, playing a half-hearted game of Jenga.

Catherine loves the flashing lights – new since her day – that Alexa draped around the nail above the fireplace and gasps at the extent of the tequila collection on the sideboard. Bottles of the stuff, and not your standard student Jose Cuervo either. I learned to drink tequila properly when I was in Mexico, painting by day and sipping the purest white spirits by night. One hundred per cent agave is what you want, pricey stuff but it often comes in exquisite bottles. Catherine picks up my favourite one, which is shaped like a skull; I brought it back on the aeroplane wrapped up in a cashmere scarf.

‘Quite a tequila habit you’ve got.’ Her voice is off and I’m not sure why.

‘This stuff is pure indulgence,’ I say, starting to tell her about it. ‘To be sipped very slowly, room temperature—’ but she cuts me off.

‘I never drink it.’

She doesn’t seem overly impressed with my uncle’s cellar either, though there are thousands of bottles, different grapes and vintages all neatly ordered in their custom-made sliding oak drawers. Burgundy and Bordeaux, mostly, though he flirted with New World in his later years.

‘How can you possibly get through all this?’ Catherine asks.

I shrug. ‘I can’t.’

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