Page 2 of Pictures of Him

‘Ah, Mr Wilkes. Good of you to join us. Perhaps you’d like to sit next to Miss Elliot,’ the professor pointed to the empty chair next to me, ‘and then you can start reading for us.’

Your voice was deep and beautiful and you read with the preternatural self-assurance that always seems to belong to your kind. Professor Hardman closed his eyes again as he listened to your unhalting description of Satan, and it was a full five minutes before he raised his hand and said, ‘Beautifully read, thank you. But what do these opening pages tell us about Satan?’

I could feel the rest of the group collectively willing you to stutter or stumble or come out with the same kind of vague inanities that they would produce under pressure, but instead you said you found Milton’s portrayal of Satan as a hero unconvincing. You outlined his flawed descriptions of the devil in Book IV and V, which showed that, unlike the rest of us, you’d read the entire poem and made your own judgement on it. In the moment’s silence that followed, I knew that the whole room hated you, for your looks, your confidence, your rumoured wealth and now for this display of fierce, unfettered intelligence. But even then, right at the beginning, I felt the first tug of admiration.

Afterwards we filed out of the tutorial, across the courtyard and onto the street to the satisfaction of seeing atraffic warden writing out a ticket for the pale blue Austin-Healey we all knew to be yours.

‘Oh shit,’ you said, and then you grabbed hold of my arm. ‘Will you wait here for a second while I deal with this. Please? There’s something I wanted to ask you.’

Your eyes, the first time I looked properly into them, were jade-coloured, pale and piercing at the same time.

I couldn’t hear what you said, but I watched in amazement as the traffic warden listened to your defence, a slow smile spreading across her face. As you walked back towards me, she ripped the parking ticket in two.

‘Next time I won’t be so kind,’ she called, and you waved your thanks, though your eyes never left my face.

‘Do you always get your way?’ I said.

‘I try to. Talking of which, I’m taking you for lunch. Right now. Mystery location, prepare to be amazed.’

‘Sorry, I can’t.’

I began to turn away, but you caught hold of my arm again.

‘What’s wrong? Why are you being so …’ you struggled for the word, then found it, ‘stand-offish?’ You were so surprised, I couldn’t help smiling. I doubted girls turned down your invitations to lunch very often.

‘People to see, places to go, work to do. The usual.’

‘Oh come on, you can spare an hour or two for lunch, surely?’

‘The thing is, I’ve just started seeing someone.’

I felt foolish saying it and my cheeks flamed. But you just laughed.

‘Well I don’t know what you had in mind, but I wasonly thinking of lunch. Some seafood, maybe a glass of wine. Where’s the harm in that?’

I stood there immobilised, wanting to go but knowing I shouldn’t. Thinking of Sam but wanting to be with you, the shape of my future if only I’d known it.

‘Not today,’ I said, as if I was refusing dusters from a door-to-door salesman.

You’d read my internal struggle, I saw that with your final smile before you walked back to the pale blue car.

‘Let’s try again tomorrow then,’ you said.

Four months before: Catherine

Our first summer in the country has been dry and hot, each morning the sky relentlessly blue, the earth so thirsty you can almost hear it panting. Sam tells me we chose the perfect time to escape, with the whole of the long summer holiday free to explore the hills and beaches and crackling, dried-up woods of our new habitat.

‘We have each other and the kids and now we have this beautiful wreck of a house. What more could you want?’ he says whenever I worry about the sudden, dramatic slashing of our regular income. ‘My new job starts in September, and until then we’ve always got your money to fall back on.’

My money, compensation for losing my mother to breast cancer fourteen years ago and my father to a new wife in New York. He’s living thedolce vitajust like us, except his dream involves sushi and high art and a woman who wears matching silk underwear.

We left London in a rush, six weeks from Sam handing his notice in at his reliable, well-paid prep school job to the removal vans rattling up in front of the ramshackle Hansel and Gretel cottage in Somerset.

‘It’s pretty, I’ll give you that,’ I said the first time I saw the place, with the wisteria curling decoratively around its rusty front gate and an explosion of roses, red, pink and white, across its front.

I thought it looked like a child’s drawing of a house with its mismatched roofs, one thatch, two tiled, all at different heights, its windows of varying sizes, peeling stable doors and thick, fur-like covering of ivy. We made an offer there and then, and when the surveyor’s report came back revealing wall-to-wall damp and poor insulation, we bought it anyway.

‘We’re going off to Frome to buy paint,’ Sam says, kissing me and herding the children at the same time. ‘We’ll get a cake from that shop you like.’

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