Page 83 of Pictures of Him

The front door opens and Joe and Sam come through it – Daisy is at a friend’s house, I hadn’t forgotten – and it doesn’t really matter that they find me like this, because I have tipped over the edge, there’s nowhere else to go. I need to be caught and Sam knows this, with his firm, clipped ‘Joe, go into the kitchen and start your homework. I need to help Mum.’

And then he’s kneeling on the floor beside me, picking up newspaper cuttings that have turned yellow with age, and a photo of you in your university bedroom, bare-chested and smiling at me in a way that must hurt.

‘Jesus Christ, Catherine.’ Those are his first words, but there’s no anger, just sadness. ‘This …’ his hands are full of you, cuttings, photos, letters, ‘is madness.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. I do say that. To Sam I have always been able to say sorry.

‘You should have told me. Catherine, you should have said.’

I didn’t tell him, because I couldn’t. I had no words. My punishment for what had happened was never telling the truth. My punishment was a life lived in silence.

This is what silence does to you. It poisons you with a slow and suffocating creep, you and those around you, husband, children, the lover you may not have. It burns from the inside out with the chill of liquid nitrogen. It steals not just your thoughts and words but your feelings too, so you are left like a wooden block trying to impersonate appropriate emotion. You can switch it on like an electric light, but you won’t fool anyone. You try anyway; everyday becomes like your own private street theatre as you learn the roles of wife, then mother, and act your way right through them. When you allow silence in, when you keep a secret, not just keep it but hold it under as I do, pushing down with both hands, then you also feed the shame that surrounds it. And shame is deadly. It makes a mute of you, it chokes down your unsayable truth and wraps you in a firewall of hidden anger. And this is your life.

‘Why did you leave him when you loved him so much? Why would you have done that? I don’t understand.’

‘I left him,’ I say, ‘because of Jack.’

Four months before: Lucian

I am expecting to feel nervous when Jack arrives, but as I watch him getting out of his shiny black Jeep, with his bright hair and his expectant smile, I am filled with quiet, deadly anger. We embrace by the front door, the back-slapping hug of old, though now it sickens me, and Jack inhales the air.

‘Something smells incredible. Don’t tell me it’s …’

‘Yep. Mary made the pie.’

‘Mate, this is so nice of you. I’ve been feeling a bit low the last few days without Celia and Freddie. I could do with cheering up.’

He follows me into the library, fire now properly ablaze and chucking out heat into the room. He sees the two empty bottles by the fireplace, my uncle’s decanter filled to the top with his favourite wine.

‘Look at that! This is a treat, a real treat.’

We sit opposite each other, a Chesterfield each, in front of the fire that is already far too hot. Jack pours our wine – always the perfect host in my house – and updates me on his sad little life, no nearer to a settlement with Celia, fast running out of cash. ‘You only have to ask, you knowthat’ – words like sawdust, an adder tensing, waiting, retracting.

I watch Jack swallowing down the first few sips of his wine.

‘God, that’s good.’

Sticky Fingersis on the sound system. Not a coincidence; the soundtrack of rape. There are ten tracks on the album; ‘Wild Horses’ is the third one in, seven and a bit minutes before we get to it – I counted – and when it starts, when Catherine appears, young and so very beautiful, dancing with her arms held above her head, the last time either of us was truly happy, there is no more time.

I stand up, because it’s easier this way.

‘I know what you did.’

Jack looks up at me, confused by the gravity of my voice.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Catherine. I’m talking about Catherine. And what you did to her.’

He does look a little scared then, just for a moment, before he’s on his feet apologising.

‘Mate,’ he says, ‘I am so sorry. We were so drunk. We didn’t mean it to happen, it just did.’

This ‘we’ is the only ignition I need.

‘You raped her. You raped her when she was asleep.’

‘I did not! Who told you that? Catherine? That’s a fucking lie. Catherine was drunk, we both were. But she wanted it just as much as I did.’

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