Page 8 of Pictures of Him

‘Are you OK?’

Harry knows, better than anyone, my capacity for falling apart. We are bound together in our two decades of friendship by the lows as much as the highs, and in my case, a spectacularly bad one.

‘Fine,’ I say automatically, though I wonder as I put down the phone if this is the case. My mother has died, almost a quarter century after my father, making me officially the thing I have felt all along – an orphan. Somehow fine doesn’t quite cover it.

Eastcott Grange, Harry’s house, is just five miles down the road from my own. It’s a great grey pile of a house, an early Victorian manor rebuilt after a fire destroyed the original and handed down through the generations gift-wrapped in tweed. It is a total misfit in Somerset, cider-soaked land of druids, apples and cheese, with rolling green hills and houses the colour of clotted cream. I sometimes think that the grim-faced austerity of Harry’s home, prison chic at best, is partly to blame for his incompetence with women. Repression, architectural and otherwise, were his touchstones growing up.

Filip opens the door and across the hall – marble floors, Romanesque statues, the whole ostentatious shebang – comes the sound of Harry playing the grand piano. I love it when he plays; upbeat ragtime is his speciality and it never fails to fill me with unexpected optimism. The sound of the piano, the reassuring presence of my friends – inthese moments, I feel a sort of contentment.

We find Harry and Ling in the drawing room, sharing the piano stool. She is laughing up at him as he knocks out ‘Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie’, a nod to his classical upbringing, though with a fag hanging from his mouth, eyes squinting to avoid the smoke and the lock of hair that falls into his face, there’s little left of the boy I once knew.

‘Don’t stop, don’t stop!’ cries Alexa and I know that she is feeling the same as me, a kind of thrill at catching Harry and his new wife engaged in a moment of behind-doors joy. There is something about Harry, the definitive big-hearted, broad-shouldered friend, that has always made me crave his happiness above my own.

‘Drinks,’ he says, getting up from the piano and walking over to the cabinet where two jugs of reddish-brown liquid stand ready.

He passes around tall glasses of Bloody Mary, pausing to kiss Ling on the cheek when he reaches her; a man obsessed. I am a little obsessed with her myself, quite frankly, this young woman we have known less than twenty four hours. I notice the quiet confidence with which she greets us, quick hugs rather than kisses. ‘It’s good to see you again,’ she says in her perfect English.

I find I’m watching Ling as we take our drinks over to the sofas. I see how she sits next to Harry with her bare feet tucked up beneath his thighs, how he clasps her foot for a second – nails painted shocking pink – and I catch the half-laugh that passes between them.

‘Any news on the funeral?’ asks Harry. ‘Or is it too soon?’

‘Actually it’s all sorted. You know my sister, nothing if not efficient. St Luke’s next Friday, then back to Flood Street afterwards.’

‘Obviously we’ll all come,’ says Rachel. ‘Safety in numbers. How bad can it be?’

‘You’d be surprised. Though my mother loved a party, so who knows?’

Harry looks over and smiles, a reference for only me. I can still remember his shock at my mother’s morning screwdriver. His home life was immensely straight; short on love, same as mine, but regimented, upright. The first time he came to stay – he can only have been thirteen or fourteen – he picked up her orange juice by mistake and spat his mouthful of scarcely diluted vodka all over the kitchen floor.

‘How are you finding life at Eastcott?’ I ask Ling.

‘Obviously it’s very different to anything I’ve ever known, but …’ she breaks off to laugh, ‘actually I love it.’

Rachel and Alexa, like me, are fascinated by Ling today. Last night, with all the boozing and the drama of my mother’s unexpected death, we missed our chance to talk to her properly. They were married in Bangkok with a couple of strangers as witnesses; I think we’re all feeling a little excluded by that.

‘Where did you grow up, Ling?’ asks Rachel.

‘In a village in northern Thailand, about an hour from Chiang Mai. It takes a whole day to get to Bangkok.’

‘Which is where you were living when you and Harry met?’

‘Yes, I was working at the hotel Harry stayed in.’

‘She’s being modest,’ Harry says. ‘She was pretty much running the whole show.’

Ling laughs and rolls her eyes.

‘Ridiculous man,’ she pats his hand affectionately. To us, she says: ‘I was the receptionist.’

‘I tell you, one snap of her fingers and people came running. Me included.’

Harry’s phone pings with an incoming text.

‘That’s Ania,’ he says, ‘asking if we want lunch.’

‘Definitely,’ says Alexa. ‘Carb-heavy, please. I need to eat my way out of this hangover.’

Ling unwinds herself from the sofa and stands up.

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