Page 66 of Pictures of Him

You do look at me just before you leave the room.

‘You were right not to tell me,’ you say in that same flat, cold voice. ‘I couldn’t have forgiven you.’

Now

‘Let’s talk about shame,’ says Greg, in the calm, measured voice that accompanies much of my day. Greg talking, me listening, or at least that’s the ambition. More and more now I find that I do listen.

‘It is one of the most powerfully destructive emotions we have. If it festers over a long period of time then it can become akin to a mental illness. When you feel extreme shame over a particular incident – in your case the night with Jack, the night with Ling – what can happen is that is you begin to flagellate yourself, not just for the event but for the person you believe you are: vile, loathsome, irrevocably flawed. This thing you did, this mistake you made, becomes grossly magnified, distorted, twisted. This is when shame is at its most dangerous. This is when shame becomes self-hate.’

Violent word, violent emotion. I know all about self-hate.

I gaze back at Greg, I offer him a small nod. I think how he must have assimilated all the gory details Sam has passed onto him – the loss of you, the death of my mother, the sex with Jack – and diagnosed one combustible personalidentity. He’s bang on, of course. The way I’ve hated myself is like an illness, a form of self-torture. And why wouldn’t I? That night with Jack – fateful, tormenting, a crossroads I must travel over and over again without ever changing the outcome – destroyed two lives, yours and mine. One bad decision, a lifetime of regret.

Greg tells me that those who feel this extreme shame are wont to disappear, to retreat, to hide away. There have been many studies on it, apparently; he quotes a few. Greg always does his homework.

‘You began this retreat, this withdrawal many years ago,’ he tells me. ‘And it’s my belief that your shame and your unfulfilled quest for forgiveness led to you shutting down entirely. The minute you start talking about your shame, the moment you out it – do you understand me – then it begins to diminish. Can you understand this, Catherine? It’s vital for your recovery.’

I want to look away but I force myself to concentrate on Greg’s face, on his concerned eyes, the colour somewhere between grey and blue. Shame is an illness. I am sick with shame. To conquer it I must begin talking again.

Four months before: Lucian

The place is crawling with police, a brutish juxtaposition against the pastel-coloured idealism of last night. The sky-blue jetty is an insult. The pink and green boats turn my stomach. The lanterns that flip and turn over in the morning wind seem to jeer and screech and those yellow shoes, marooned on the bank, are a vicious, acid-bright reminder that Ling is dead.

I am down by the lake with Andrew, drinking coffee from a Thermos that Mary has brought for us, waiting for the divers to arrive.

As I shake out yet another cigarette from the packet, Andrew says, ‘Think I could have one?’

‘I didn’t know you smoked.’

‘Not for years.’

We smoke in silence and stand together, looking out at the lake.

‘Harry asked to be woken when the divers get here. Don’t know if it will be possible.’

Harry was knocked out, literally, by some rock-and-roll doctor Andrew called in, who sedated him like a horse. It took four men to carry him up to bed, with Alexa stationedbeside him on an all-night vigil just in case he wakes.

‘And anyway isn’t it better for him not to see? She’s been underwater for five or six hours.’

‘I don’t think we can make that decision, Lucian.’

For Harry, of all people, to have lost his wife on my watch, on my land and after all those years of aloneness is too much. I don’t know that I will ever be able to forgive myself.

‘Why don’t you go and see if he’s awake?’ Andrew says. ‘I can deal with the divers.’

He wants to spare me everything if he can. I watch as he joins a cluster of policemen on the jetty, a pale-faced, broken man, sick from his cigarette, in a crumpled, up-all-night suit. It’s true I don’t want to see Ling dragged from the water in her effervescent yellow. And I don’t want Harry to see her either. The question mark over her death, the agonising, unexplained vanishing, is impossible to comprehend. But one thing I know is that the sight of her dead body will destroy him.

In the blue bedroom, the one where Alexa normally sleeps, Harry is passed out, still wrapped in blankets (we had to cut his wet clothes from him in the end), Alexa curled up beside him in her silver dress, one slim brown arm draped across the mountain of his chest. I wonder if this was how he and Ling used to sleep. It occurs to me that I never once saw them in bed together, never sat on the edge of their bed drinking coffee and discussing the night before the way you do with your oldest friends. It would have happened, sooner or later, but there just wasn’t time.

Alexa opens her eyes, registers me and her face collapses.Instantly she’s crying, silently, though, just long black rivulets of tears, last night’s mascara working its way slowly down her face. I sit down beside her on the edge of the bed and she levers up and wraps her arms around my neck, face pressed into my heart.

‘I can’t bear it for him,’ she whispers, and I feel the vibration of her words against my sweater.

‘Nor can I.’

My phone dings with an arriving text and we both shoot our heads round to check on Harry, but he’s out for the count. I take my phone out of my pocket. It’s from Andrew.

‘Shit,’ I say. ‘The divers are down at the lake. We should wake him.’

---