Page 39 of Pictures of Him

‘But you’ll be home soon. Only another day or two.’

The conversation is over, apparently, for Daisy hands the phone to Sam and I have no preparation, none at all, just his voice on the other end of the line with its faintly northern intonation.

‘Hey.’

He sounds distant, from another lifetime almost. This man I am supposed to love. There is so much to say that for a while, perhaps a whole minute, we say nothing. I sit here on the stone bench, heart racing.

‘How are we going to work it all out?’ Sam asks eventually.

‘We’ll talk. When we get home, we’ll talk.’

‘You must have been thinking about it.’

A wave of guilt breaks over me. Of course I’ve been thinking about Sam, but not as much as I should have done. For the past twenty-four hours I have been completely taken over by my love, lust, obsession – all three, probably – for you.

‘The truth is, I’m trying not to think about it too much.But whatever we do and however we do it, we’ll make sure the kids are OK and that we’re OK, you and me. As much as we can be.’

‘Do you think you can forgive me?’

‘Oh Sam, I already have. I know why you did it. I understand. It’s not about that any more, not about Julia, I mean.’

‘It never was, not really.’

‘No.’

Your name again, there between us, a ceaseless silent echo, just before we end the call.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ you ask when I come to find you a little later, but I shake my head.

What would be the point? Neither of us wants to face reality when our time together is so short. Neither of us wants to talk about the fact that I’m married with two children, and the thought of leaving them or forcing them to live without Sam is inconceivable. The truth, the one we try our hardest to avoid, is that I married the wrong man. But there was a reason for that.

In the afternoon you take me to Colton House for a late lunch. I’m pretty interested to see this notorious shrine to decadence after the years of reading about it: the media frenzy in the papers when it opened; the outrage from those who don’t get through the censorious selection process, the gloating from those who do. I’m not at all surprised that you are a member, a favourite tabloid bad boy not so long ago, the fucked-up posh kid everyone loved to write about.

‘So,’ I ask, ‘is Colton House really as horrible and pretentious as people say?’

You smile your usual smile.

‘Yes. You’ll love it.’

Three or four times a week you’ll come here, you say, for a session with a personal trainer, to use the gym or the indoor pool and then breakfast with the papers. Sometimes it’s an extended lunch with your friends or dinner in the private dining room for someone’s birthday.

‘Most days Jack or Harry will call and say, breakfast? Lunch? Bloody Mary? And even if they don’t, there’s always someone I know if I feel like company.’

The temperature change is instant. Do you feel it as I shoot my head around and stare out of the window at the speeding green, the curving, dipping landscape of your paradise? Always it will be like this, those names enough to choke me. Jack, especially Jack; every time I hear his name I am taken back to a place where I don’t want to go. Instead I try to focus on the landscape, the hedgerows already burgeoning with red and purple, forced by summer’s extended heat into a new season. I catch glimpses of rosehips, sloes, blackberries, and I can think, more calmly now, of my daughter, who loves little more than a blackberry-picking expedition, filling her Tupperware box with the blackest, ripest berries, which I would then turn into a crumble (or quite often into the bin a few days later). With each of my children, especially when they were small, there was something so touchingly optimistic about gathering fruit, trailing scooters or tricycles as we worked our way along the hedgerows; those were moments of pure innocence for me, regained, relived, utterly absorbed.

Your phone pings with a sequence of arriving texts, one after the other, and eventually you pick it up from the side pocket and drop it onto my lap.

‘Switch it off for me, would you?’

‘Someone’s keen to get hold of you,’ I say, and as I click the little button on the side of the phone, I catch sight of the message on the screen.

CATHERINE?!! Surely some kind of joke? Rx

‘Nice text from Rachel,’ I say, and my throat seems to close over just mentioning her name. Over the years, I have known about you and Rachel; you couldn’t not have seen the pictures, the two of you staring out from some glitzy backdrop or other, champagne glass in hand, you a few inches taller than her, both bored and unsmiling, as if willing the photo to be over so that you could return to your superior private world. But it was the nude portrait that really undid me, reinforcing the fact of your togetherness in a way I simply wasn’t prepared for. Her nakedness, of course, your knowledge of her body, the way she looks out at you with the faintest smile, a lover’s joke.

You, I realise it now, are the kind of painter who can effortlessly portray emotion and mood; it separates you from all those amateurs who can render a perfect poppy-stippled cornfield with their A-level brushstrokes and still leave you thinking, so what? I remember staring at an oil painting of your favourite view, and quite apart from the landmarks, the hills, the cathedral, the tor, it felt as if I could actually touch the weather; there’s a sense of grimness as the light begins to fade, but also your melancholy as you painted it. With the painting of Rachel, it wasn’t so much the nudity – breasts, bush, nothing spared – but the visceral sense of sex, good sex, probably fantastic sex, that actually killed me. I know all too well how good that sex would have been.

‘I sent Rachel a text,’ you say now. ‘The news is out, they are all going crazy. You can probably imagine.’

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