Page 68 of Pictures of Him

‘It’s impossible for us to know exactly what happened. She’d been drinking, so she probably didn’t realise how cold she was until it was too late. Your muscles are the first part of your body to lose heat, which means your legs and arms sometimes stop working. You’re trying to swim but you find you can’t. Suddenly you don’t have the power to swim even a short distance.’

‘Why didn’t she shout out to us? She can’t have been far away.’

‘Often people make no sound at all as they drown. They’re trying to save all their oxygen to keep breathing.’

‘How long? How long would it have taken?’ Harry said, and the pathologist looked away for a second.

‘Almost instant,’ he said.

Harry wanted to be left alone with Ling, and though Alexa and I tried to stay with him, he shouted at us to get away, dropping to his knees by the stretcher.

We turned our backs on him, though it made little difference. Even now his shock and heartache at the sight of his dead wife is imprinted on my mind, devastating and ineradicable. I’m worried for Harry, worried where this is going to end. Desperation is something I know. What is there for Harry without Ling? Or for me without Catherine?

Now with her name comes the image of Jack. Jack and Catherine. Oh, I can see it, in perfect, graphic clarity. Her young, pale naked body sitting astride him, his hands reaching up for her nipples, her dark eyes flashing ecstasy, the piercing lechery of his blue ones. They could not have picked a better way to destroy me. I’m not surprised they decided not to tell me. I wouldn’t have forgiven them, then or now.

Jack and Celia’s house, just a mile down the road from my own, is like a second home. Or rather, it used to be. They did that clever thing of buying a beautiful old farmhouse, pale grey stone, leaded windows, thatchedroof, and ripping it to shreds inside. So now they have a house that to all intents they have built themselves, only it doesn’t look that way. On any other day I would have loved arriving to their immaculate lime-green lawn, the air sweet with the full-blown scent of late-summer roses, a handful of birds surfing the thermals in small, lazy circles. But now I have only two thoughts. Harry has lost his wife. And Jack betrayed me.

Celia hurries across the lawn to meet me, Freddie in her arms.

‘God, you haven’t been to bed yet, have you? I’m sorry we left when we did, just Freddie—’

I bat away her apology. As if that could matter.

‘Do you know what happened?’

‘She got into difficulty somehow, might have been cramp or maybe her muscles seizing up because she was cold. That happens a lot, apparently, especially when you’re drunk. We were probably swimming for a while, longer than we realised. And then once she hit the bottom she might have got trapped in the weeds and couldn’t get back up again. We’ll never know.’

‘That’s horrific.’

‘I knew about the weeds. I should have known something like this could happen. If I hadn’t been drunk, I would have stopped her.’

‘Lucian, this is not your fault.’

I shrug, knowing there is no point having this conversation.

‘How’s my godson?’ I say, an effort at normalcy as we walk towards the house.

When Jack and Celia asked me to be godfather, I almost said no.

‘You are joking?’ I think was my first response, but it turned out they weren’t.

‘He took another step this morning,’ Celia says. ‘If you can call it that.’

She is unapologetically Sloaney today: blonde hair held back by a silk scarf, pale pink shirt, navy three-quarter-length trousers; all that’s missing is the pearls. But my heart aches a little to see her. Celia, with her unappreciated domestic skills and her firm but fair efficiency, is exactly what I need right now.

In the kitchen, a huge barn-like room with floor-to-ceiling windows across one side, Jack lies on a giant overstuffed sofa, hand clutched round the neck of a beer bottle, TV remote balanced on his stomach. He’s watching the Grand Prix, and the furious buzzing – like bees on amphetamines, I always think – slices through my brain.

‘Jesus, man, what’s happening? Are you alright?’ he says when he sees me, though he doesn’t bother to get off the sofa.

I tell him what I know. That Harry has gone home, refusing to have Alexa or Rachel or me staying with him, for tonight at least. That we’ve got Andrew’s doctor on standby with a sackload of meds and the plan is to sedate him through the next twenty-four hours. That Ling got into problems in the lake probably because she was cold.

‘She might have had an undiagnosed heart problem. I guess we’ll find out.’

‘Right.’ Jack shrugs and clicks his eyes back to thescreen, draining the contents of his bottle and setting it down on the floor.

‘Turn the fucking television off.’

Jack looks up in surprise, but he picks up the remote and silences the screen.

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