Page 75 of Pictures of Him

‘Harry, oh God, man,’ he says, rushing forward, sunglasses on. He expertly manoeuvres Alexa out of the way and takes Harry’s other arm, so that the three of us are making our way to the front of the church, the girls in line behind us. More clicks, more photographs, more papers sold on irrelevant crap, the vulture press doing what it does best.

I hear Alexa gasp and say, ‘Oh, the flowers,’ and I know she’s crying, which we had promised each other we wouldn’t do, but the flowers are tough to take. I rang the Bristol florists we’d used for my party and asked them to fill the chapel with the brightest, most colourful things they had.

‘Nothing funereal, and not too weddingy either,’ I said.

I knew Harry wanted to replicate the wedding party Ling had planned, but I also knew that anything bridal would push him even further down into his private underworld of gloom. Their response was to line up jam jars of gerberas along each windowsill in exactly the colours I’d asked for – hot pink, brilliant orange, acid yellow – and to tie festive little bunches from the end of every pew. They do break your heart, these flowers, they do say Ling, Ling with her fondness for colour, her constant smile. I am poleaxed by sadness for this young woman I had scarcely got to know.

There is no coffin here today; Ling will be buried next week if all goes to plan beside a favourite oak tree on Harry’s estate (utter minefield of red tape to get this sanctioned; I’m letting Andrew handle it). So it’s the five of us up front, plus Ling’s sister, Amara, who has come from Hong Kong and plans to leave immediately after the funeral. Harry offered to fly Ling’s parents over during a God-awful phone call with a Thai translator we’d found in Bristol, Harry’s gut-wrenching sobs punctuating a language that made no sense to either of us. But they refused. Hardly surprising. It was enough their eldest daughter was coming, they said.

I tried to talk to Amara when she arrived. I told her how much I liked Ling. How sorry I was she had died at my party, how I felt responsible. It was a tragic accident, I said, and I wished so much it hadn’t happened.

But she could scarcely look at me, it seemed.

‘My sister was very happy in Bangkok. She loved that job,’ was all Amara would say, before she turned away.

Somehow Harry makes it through the service, and just before the end, Alexa and I escort him, one arm each, out of the chapel, through another photographic assault and back up to the house, where the scent of Thai cooking fills the air. A sit-down lunch for fifty has been laid up in the orangery – white tablecloths, vivid flowers, that beautiful sloping view down to the cedar tree. It is, I think, exactly what Harry wanted, what Ling had planned, albeit for an altogether different kind of gathering.

‘Let’s get a drink, for God’s sake, before everyone arrives.’

Harry shakes his head. ‘No. I’m done in. I’m going back to bed.’

‘Please stay,’ Alexa says. ‘I was going to sit next to you at lunch; you wouldn’t have to talk to anyone.’

‘No.’ He half shouts it.

In grief, Harry, famous amongst us for his kindness, his politeness, is brusque to the point of brutality. He walks off in his crumpled pink shirt and we let him go, Alexa and I, staring after him like troubled parents. Just before he disappears out of sight, he turns and gives us a cursory wave.

‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘Both of you. I mean it.’

At lunch I’m sitting next to Rachel, beautiful in her favourite emerald-green dress and a good bottle in by the looks of things. I wish I could forget as easily as her, but I’m wrecked by a vision of what this party should have been – Ling in a white wedding dress, Harry happier than any of us had ever seen him. And as always, my head is also full of Catherine. And Jack. For I cannot see her without also seeing him. I cannot remember the velocity of her passion, one touch enough to make her explode, it seemed, or the way we tore each other apart, without thinking: she did that with him too. Jack knows the mind-bending eroticism that is being in bed with Catherine, and how I hate him for that.

‘So it’s over with Catherine? For good, do you think?’ Rachel has always been able to read my thoughts.

I top up both of our glasses with Harry’s palest pink wine.

‘Yes, it’s over. I should have listened to you and Alexa; I was an idiot to go back there.’

‘No surprise that you did. You never really got over her.’

‘You warned me about her and I didn’t listen. You tried to tell me what she was like.’

Rachel looks at me, astonished.

‘I thought Catherine was an angel, according to you? She just married the wrong guy.’

I shrug, attempting indifference, and take a deep slug of my Côtes de Provence medicine. It is so shocking – literally I feel I am in shock – to have fallen in love with Catherine all over again and then to have been smashed up against this brick wall of hate, hurt and the impossibility of forgiveness.

Rachel touches my wrist. Cool brown hand with her rings of gold and her nails painted pink.

‘Lucian?’

I remember now as she looks at me, all booze-exacerbated earnestness, that Rachel’s eyes seem to change colour when she gets serious. I’m sure it’s not the case, but as I return her gaze, I register how her eyes are now a classic navy blue. I tried to tell her about this once, how I could mix a whole palette of blues from the different shades of her eyes, and she just laughed. Now, though, there’s no laughter. Just Rachel’s worried gaze.

‘Promise me you won’t fall apart like last time.’ She touches my wine glass lightly. ‘Lay off this stuff, OK?’

It’s rich coming from her, an addict, but I get the warning. My own potential alcoholism pulses through my veins, the son of my dipso mother after all, preferred poison Pouilly-Fumé by the caseload. She drank without contrition frommorning till night, champagne for breakfast if she wanted, the after-hours malt whisky that turned her into a monster. I see myself doing the same thing, only my passion is more vodka-based. And there’s a small but insistent voice in my head that I try hard to ignore. This is too much, the voice says. You’re drinking too much. When are you going to stop? I tell myself I’ll stop the moment it’s no longer fun.

When Catherine left me last time, it wasn’t fun. There was the discovery of her note, scribbled in some careless juxtaposition on the facing page of my sketchbook next to the drawing I’d made of her a few days before: I’ve changed my mind. I can’t do this. I can’t see you any more.

---