Page 45 of Pictures of Him

‘They’re used to me making rash decisions. I left home at fifteen to find a job in Bangkok. Started out as a maid in the same hotel and worked my way up. I was lucky, the owners are good people, they treated me like family, even gave me a room for a while. When I told my mother I was marrying a man I’d known only a few weeks, she laughed and said, ‘Why does that not surprise me?’

‘Butwhoyou were marrying, wasn’t that a shock to her?’ Celia says.

It’s something I’ve been wondering myself but didn’t like to ask.

‘I didn’t know what I was walking into back then. Only that Harry lived alone, somewhere in the South West, which meant nothing to me. On the plane to England he said, “there’s something I should probably tell you”. And I thought, here we go, here comes the dark past. He’s killed a man. He’s got some weird sexual fetish. But he said: “My house is embarrassingly large. It might be a bit of a shock.” And when we drew up at the Grange, we both started laughing and couldn’t stop. And eventually I said: “I’ll try to put up with it.”’

I’m so entranced by the story of Harry and Ling it comes as a shock when Jack’s voice cuts across our conversation, clear and strong, a statement of intent.

‘I haven’t had a chance to talk to Catherine yet.’

Yet. In his words – a surface pleasantry – I hear a smile that is meant just for me. I know what it would be like to look into those bright blue eyes; I know exactly what I would find in them.

Something must be showing in my face because Ling reaches out and places her hand on my arm. On her wedding finger is the biggest, brightest diamond.

‘Catherine,’ she says, ‘would you mind showing me Lucian’s swimming pool before it gets too dark? Harry is going to put in a new pool and he wanted me to have a look at it.’

Outside, away from everyone, even you, for a moment I have the urge to cry. And Ling sees this, I think.

She says, ‘You don’t like Jack, do you?’

I look at her, surprised. ‘Is it that obvious?’

She shrugs. ‘When he came over, I saw how tense you were. That’s why I suggested coming out here.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I’ve only met Harry’s friends a few times and I always have the feeling they’d rather be on their own.’

‘When Lucian and I were together it took a long time for them to accept me. And when we broke up I hurt him very badly and they hated me for it. Even Harry who doesn’t hate anyone.’

‘We’ve all done things we’re ashamed of,’ Ling says. ‘No one ever knows the whole story.’

We have reached your beautiful swimming pool now and we stand in front of it staring at the smooth sheet ofwater, which looks almost emerald green in the evening light.

I can see why Harry refused to leave Thailand without Ling. There is something about her that is instantly calming, and as we stand together in the darkening night, my fear of five minutes ago begins to dissipate.

Four months before: Lucian

While Ling and Catherine are out of the room, Harry corners me over by the sideboard, where I’m mixing more drinks.

‘You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?’ His face is passive, but I know him so well.

‘Yes. You’re going to warn me about getting involved with Catherine.’

‘Words to that effect.’

My friends know how drastically I fell apart when Catherine abandoned me – over-the-top expression, but that’s how it felt at the time. I didn’t simply fall apart. I took an overdose. It wasn’t just the misery of our break-up; there was more to it than that. Let’s call it a decade of childhood heartache, my father’s suicide, my mother’s lack of interest, a pervasive loneliness that had followed me through school and the first year of university, and that, despite the almost claustrophobic circle of friends, constantly threatened to overwhelm me. I’d bolted this stuff down inside myself and then Catherine came along, and the only way I can describe it is that it felt like I’d been travelling my whole life to meet her. She cured me, that’swhat I thought, in my hopelessly naïve twenty-year-old mind; she released me from the bitterness of my past, from that boy brutalising his wrists in his bedroom, from the raging sixteen-year-old who left home without any clear idea of where to go. When she disappeared, literally vanishing without a backwards glance, the darkness crashed over me.

I tried to find her, of course, staking out her flat until her best friend Liv took pity on me.

‘She’s gone home,’ she said. ‘You could try her there.’

Her parents were kind but they wouldn’t let me speak to Catherine.

‘She doesn’t want to speak to you. And she doesn’t want to be in a relationship with you any more,’ her father said, on my third and final phone call. ‘I’m sorry, but there it is. I’m going to ask you to leave her alone now.’

Leave her alone. I wasn’t sure I could. What, never again talk to the girl who had finally made sense of my life? Never touch her again, never kiss the soft skin on the inside of her thighs, never hold her hand as I fell asleep? Never surprise her with breakfast when she woke? Never draw her, never undress her, never watch her eyes darken or hear her half-gasp as I pressed myself inside her?

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