Page 74 of Pictures of Him

I’m waiting for Harry to tell me what Ling wanted,though I can’t imagine in the short time they knew each other that they would have got around to making funeral plans.

‘It needs to be a lunch party. Forty or fifty people at the most. Thai food. Colour everywhere, flowers, candles, whatever. You do understand?’

And finally I get the magnitude of what Harry is asking. He wants me to organise a wedding party for his dead wife.

Four months before: Catherine

A veneer of domesticity has returned, fraudulent but vital, on this, the last day before the start of the new school year. Sam sits at the kitchen table, science books spread in front of him, making notes in his spiky, spindly schoolboy writing onto a chequered pad. He wants to be in the garden with Joe, testing out the new football goal that arrived in a forest of cardboard in an Amazon delivery yesterday. Or planting out autumn bulbs with Daisy, gardening her latest obsession, she the girl of serial fetishes.

The children are marking out their last day of freedom hour by hour: Joe, iPod on, mooning about at the bottom of the garden, dreaming of salvation, or perhaps just football; Daisy beginning and abandoning projects with feverish indecision – an insect hospital created out of twigs and leaves, one floor built, the other left dangling as if the builders had packed up and left, a new story begun in her holographic notebook, enthusiastically titled ‘The Girl in the Blue Dress’ but petering out after just one paragraph. And me? Well, I’m just trying to fit myself back into this life of mine, trying to convince myself it can still work, trying, always trying, not to think about you.

Sam doesn’t mention your name again, though it’s harder than ever to avoid it, for your party and Ling’s death has been all over the papers. I’m not surprised; it has all the credentials for a great human-interest story: the hapless aristo, one of the wealthiest men in Britain apparently, the glitzy party, the rags-to-riches good fortune and ultimate downfall of a poverty-stricken village girl from Thailand. The papers love a good death. There’s a photo of Ling, grainy and indistinct, probably sent in from someone’s phone. I recognise the small white teeth, the flop of her dark fringe, the high collar of her yellow dress, but otherwise there is nothing of the girl I knew. ‘Tragic Ending for Toff’s Thai Bride’ cries the heading in theSun. Ling is called ‘poor and illiterate’; I remember her eloquence in describing her life, the gift for storytelling that made it sound not deprived but magical. It makes me think that every story in every paper is founded on virtually nothing: a few bare facts, a journalist’s hunch and empathy, or lack of it. There’s a photo of you here, the one they often trot out, six or seven years old now, I would think. Your hair is shorter, your face, to my newly trained eye a little rounder, and you are staring away from the camera, your chin jutted at an angle that makes you look the way they want you to look: arrogant, disdainful, indisputably handsome.

It feels in some ways as if nothing has changed. I am back here again, absorbing your photos like an illness, bearing your silence as my penance. For although I texted you yesterday to ask about Harry and to tell you I’m sorry,have always been sorry, will be sorry, I’m sure, for the rest of my life, you haven’t responded. I’m not surprised. I knew the severity of the crime when it happened; I’ll never forgive myself for it either.

Last night, after the children were in bed, Sam made a deal with me.

‘All right,’ he said, filling up both our glasses with wine as we sat once again at the kitchen table. ‘Let’s try one more time. But you’ve got to promise me something. No more mooning about the past. You have to draw a line under what’s happened. He’s over for you’ – never your name, never that – ‘and Julia is over for me. Let’s not talk about them, let’s lock them away and concentrate on what we have: each other and the kids.’

I can do this, that’s what I tell myself, hour by hour, even while I’m secretly hoping for a text or a phone call from you, just something, anything that might alleviate our brutal end.

‘I couldn’t have forgiven you’ – the last words you spoke to me, forever gouged into my brain. But all there is from you is silence, and I understand why. Now you know the truth, there is nothing left to say. I need to find my own way of letting you go.

The uniforms are laid out on the end of their beds, pencil cases filled, shiny new shoes by the front door. There’s an hour before supper and my family are all in the garden, and I stand at the bedroom window, watching. Daisy is back at the ant hospital, cross-legged but leaning forward, placing each twig with pinpoint precision. I can only see her small, narrow back in its turquoise T-shirt, the cloudburst of knotted hair, hell for me in the bathroom later. When theywere small, we loved to photograph the children like this; somehow, the unposed, unaware rear view always seemed to best capture the innocence of early childhood.

Sam and Joe are walking down to the stream, matching shorts and matching walks, both with their necks tilted a little to the right. They are where they most like to be, a world for two, one that requires little effort, nothing so mundane as small talk. They might mention the football, Man U a shared passion, or whatever project they’re about to begin, but it won’t feel like talking. Sometimes I watch them playing cards or chess or watching a YouTube video or just drinking a mug of tea, side by side at the kitchen table, and I envy them that contented silence. I’ve never really had that insularity for two, though I had it with you, didn’t I, just for a moment?

There is time now to open up the shoebox, to rifle through its contents, shiny pieces of paper ripped from magazines, rough, yellowing pages of newspaper, letters written on sheets of lined A4. The letter I can’t usually bear to read looms out at me, and I pick it up and hold it between my hands, vision blurred but that doesn’t matter, for I know every word.

How could I have got it so wrong, tell me that? I believed everything you said in the café that day, I thought that you and I were the same, we thought the same, we felt the same. You gave yourself to me and I gave myself to you and that was it, that’s what we said, a done deal, no going back, why would we want to?

You could have written this letter to me yesterday, its message of hurt and reproach exactly the same except thatnow you know why you got it wrong. Now you know what I’m capable of and that girl you idolised is as lost to you as she is to me.

You have made your choice and I have made mine. I know what I have to do as I stand cradling the shoebox in my arms in the middle of my bedroom, holding all that’s left of you, it seems to me. The box has to go. I could walk it down to the recycling centre at the end of the village and tip all that paper, years of cuttings, crumpled and worn, into the mouth of the big green metal box along with everyone else’s Sunday magazines and slashed Inland Revenue envelopes. Or perhaps I could start a bonfire when Sam and the children are at school, your photographs and letters left to burn amidst the autumn leaves. No, I couldn’t bear that.

In my mind’s eye I’m running through all the secret places in this house of ours: the cupboard underneath the stairs, the cellar, which is so damp its walls never quite dry out, the attic that neither Sam nor I have set foot in since the day we moved. Once my decision is made, I act quickly, pulling down the little ladder into the loft and stashing the shoebox in between all the other unpacked boxes, all those things we hang onto and yet will never use: the old-fashioned glass chandelier that hasn’t looked right in any of our homes, my wedding tiara, several pairs of my mother’s Gucci shoes, which have always been a size too big for me and are not going to change.

After it’s done, I scan the upstairs window to make sure my family are still in the garden, then go downstairs to begin supper. The box is out of sight. The box is out of mind. This is progress. That’s what I tell myself.

Four months before: Lucian

I’m becoming an expert on pharmaceuticals. Valium, twenty milligrams, not ten, will get Harry through the next couple of hours while he endures his wife’s funeral. Alexa and I find the brightest thing in his wardrobe for him to wear, a pale pink shirt with grey trousers, and walk him down to the chapel, shuffling between us like a crippled octogenarian, eyes on the ground, which is a good thing because it means he misses the hard, inquisitive stares of all the people gathered by the entrance. But I see them, I see the girls, friends of mine most of them, reaching up to whisper into the ears of their men, I see the men dragging contemplatively on their cigarettes then darting their eyes over for a quick butcher’s at Harry. There are several photographers here too, cameras trained against their faces and a flurry of low-level digital clicks the minute we come into view.

Alexa says, ‘I’m going to tell them to fuck off. It’s a funeral, for God’s sake. They’re trespassing, aren’t they?’

But Harry, who has looked up straight into the eye of the cameras, says in his drawn-out, drug-saturated voice, ‘Don’t bother, Lex.’

A girl breaks from the crowd, smooth blonde hair, peacock-coloured dress and shoes, and I realise at the last moment that it’s Charlotte Lomax, the funeral repackaged as fashion opportunity.

‘Harry,’ she says, ‘I just wanted to say I am so—’

He raises a hand to silence her but keeps his stare downwards.

‘Thank you. I know you are.’

We are in front of the chapel now. The crowd has separated, leaving us a direct path to the door, and there, waiting in a row, are Jack, Celia and Rachel. Jack is wearing a new suit by the looks of things, cobalt blue, slim-fitting, Helmut Lang I’d imagine – my favourite designer and therefore his – and he’s wearing it with box-fresh white Adidas trainers.

Hate doesn’t have enough punch for the way you make me feel.

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