Four months before Lucian
I find out my mother has died while another excessive Friday rages all around me.
No easy time to receive news of this kind, but one in the morning, off your face on tequila, is an especially awkward fit.
I am numb from champagne, vodka and tonic and latterly three hefty shots of tequila, and perhaps this is why I cannot react to the news my sister gives me.
‘Lucian?’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Emma.’
Emma. Just hearing her name feels like a raincloud dispelling its contents from a great height.
‘Mummy died this afternoon. An unexpected heart attack; it was instant.’
The infantile use of ‘Mummy’ from a woman of forty.
This and other inappropriate thoughts punch at my brain and rob me of my power of speech until the pause on the other end of the line becomes impossible to ignore.
‘God,’ is all I come up with.
‘The funeral will be in London. Will you come?’
Through the tequila fug I register that no is not an option.
‘Yes, of course I’ll come.’
‘Lucian?’
‘Yes?’
‘I know we haven’t been in touch these past few years but I wanted to say …’
A silence that deepens.
I realise my sister is crying.
‘You’ll always be family.’
Emma hangs up and I stand immobilised, phone pressed to my ear, listening to the dial tone.
My mother’s death, my sister’s conciliation, it is almost too much to take in.
I threw tonight’s gathering to welcome Harry’s new wife into the fold.
Or at least that was the intention.
Truth is, few have ever managed to penetrate the closed circle of friends I tend to think of as family.
(With family like mine, you’re going to look for alternatives.) There’s Jack, whom I’ve known for most of my life, since boarding school at eight, through public school, university and the turbulent love-and-drugs fest that we called our twenties.
We met Harry at thirteen and eventually carted him off to Bristol University with us where we were joined by Rachel and Alexa.
By the time I return to the library, my friends are sitting completely upright on the ancient Chesterfields.
I feel the heat of their eyes as I announce my news through compressed, wooden lips.
‘My mother died this afternoon. A heart attack apparently.’
Jack and Rachel hurtle towards me and I find myself being squeezed from both sides, Rachel’s thick, blonde, tangerine-scented hair swiping across my face like a horse’s tail.
This is too much. I take a step backwards.
‘Guys, please. You know we didn’t get on.
I’m just a bit fazed, that’s all.’
We sit back down on the Chesterfields and everyone starts behaving like a caricature of themselves.
Rachel picks up the half-full tequila bottle, waves it at me and starts refilling the empty shot glasses.
Alexa walks over to the sound system and moments later the sweeping, funereal strains of Sigur Rós filter across the room.
She has a sixth sense for always picking the right tune; I often think she missed her vocation.
She’s a writer, a relatively successful one, but we should probably have pimped her out in Ibiza.
Harry knocks back his tequila shot caveman-style, no salt, no lemon, and his wife Ling, whom none of us knows, sits right on the edge of the sofa looking shell-shocked, which is pretty much how she’s looked all evening, dead mother or not.
‘Ding-dong, the witch is dead,’ says Jack, raising his shot glass to mine and squinting at me with fierce blue eyes.
My mother the witch.
Beautiful, frozen-hearted tormentor of men, literally unto death in the case of my father.
She was nice enough in my early years, but it was all about my father for me back then, trailing around the farm after him, mending fences, chopping down trees, learning to shoot rabbits with his shotgun.
That gun, a slam-dunk to the heart.
‘So. Are we going to the funeral?’
‘I guess so. But it’s not going to be pretty.
The last time I saw my mother and sisters was at my uncle’s funeral thirteen years ago.’
‘Which was anything but pretty.’
The one and only time I have seen Jack shocked was when my mother spat her venom amidst a room of half-drunk mourners because my uncle made me his sole heir.
I think the word ‘cunt’ may have been used, and more than once.
They are nothing like you’d expect, my family.
I look across the room at Ling, quietly elegant in her city clothes, and realise we have forgotten the real purpose of the evening.
I find myself watching her now and I see how often she glances at Harry, for reassurance or from incredulity, who knows?
She must be stunned by the extraordinary and unexpected turn her life has taken.
One moment working in a hotel in Bangkok, the next married to one of the richest men in England and shackled to his monstrous great house.
It’s past four when the party finally wraps up, Harry drunk-driving home, Alexa disappearing off upstairs to sleep in her favourite bedroom, Jack on his new fold-up bicycle, a tactical move on Celia’s part when her husband had stayed over one night too often.
That just leaves me and Rachel by the dying embers of the fire.
The fireplace is so big you can sit inside it, and that’s what we do right now.
Above the hearth there’s a huge great beam that came from an old merchant ship; it’s got the rusting hooks and nails to prove it.
There’s one nail that protrudes so far from the beam we call it the devil’s finger, and Alexa has wound purple fairy lights around it.
They flash on and off, on and off, annoying at first but I’m used to them now.
The library would look wrong without them.
‘One for the road?’ Rachel says, with us this is often a euphemism for something else.
She looks beautiful in her emerald-green dress, with her bright hair and her carefully made-up face, and it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve ended up together, far from it.
But tonight my heart is bleak.
‘Rach,’ I say, shaking my head, ‘I kind of need to be on my own tonight. The Blue Room is made up for you, as always.’
‘I understand,’ she says with a sad little smile that almost makes me change my mind.
We have our own set of rules, my friends and I, nothing textbook, but we do like to look after each other.
I take a full tumbler of brandy to bed, knowing I won’t sleep yet.
It is almost five now and the morning’s half-light is peering around the thick velvet curtains.
My bed has been turned down by Mary, my housekeeper, a fresh decanter of water and a clean glass laid out on the table, and the sight of it comforts me, these small, sweet, maternal gestures of concern.
If I’d had a mother who was more like Mary and less like my own, well, who knows how things might have turned out?
I sit on the end of the bed looking around the room that was once my uncle’s and has changed very little since those days.
The furniture in here is heavy and old and unapologetically masculine, though my uncle, it must be said, veered more towards the effeminate.
My father’s elder brother, he was overtly gay from the age of eighteen, out and proud, which was unusual enough in the seventies.
There was talk of disinheriting him, I believe, but it didn’t happen and the house under his ownership became a byword for debauchery, the hub for parties that might last a week.
It’s certainly made my life easier with the locals: you mention the goings-on at Shute Park and no one bats an eyelid.
I use the vast, and vastly old-fashioned, mahogany wardrobe – I think the correct term is armoire – that once belonged to my uncle, now filled with a colour-coded array of my shirts, white and black at the front, blues, greens, pinks and yellows behind them.
I have lined his bookshelves with my books and two of my paintings hang on the walls.
There is one of the view from the hill that sits at the edge of my land; I’ve painted it hundreds of times but this version, a monochrome in varying shades of blue (I was trying, and mostly failing, to emulate Picasso), is still the one I like best. The other is a portrait of my father, copied from a photograph when I was nineteen.
He’d been dead almost ten years by then but I still missed him, I still tried to reinvent the landscape of my dreams so that he was there in his holey cashmere jumper and his blue silk spotted scarf, chucking a box of freshly laid eggs onto the table and saying, ‘Let’s make omelettes, kiddo.’
Two parents, two singular emotions, love and hate; my upbringing was staunchly black and white.
It is properly morning now and sleep is nowhere close.
I could get into bed and read the volume of Raymond Carver stories Alexa gave me for my birthday; I could pick up my sketchpad and draw something, anything, to keep myself from thinking about my mother.
The thought that looms is the impossibility of forgiveness, that neither of us will ever be able to say sorry.
We fell out spectacularly when I was sixteen and spoke infrequently ever afterwards.
The final nail was my uncle disinheriting my mother and sisters – not just the big house, which she’d lusted after from the first day of her marriage, but every last coin to go with it.
I’d have been more generous if I hadn’t hated her so, if I hadn’t blamed her exclusively for my father’s death, a childlike response I clung onto for reasons I am only now beginning to understand.
To think on all this is to concede the weight of regret, the great grey cloud that has been hovering mere inches away since my sister’s late-night phone call.
In the end, I do the only thing guaranteed to quell the demons and flip me back into the light: I walk over to the armoire, open the top drawer and take out an old pencil drawing of the girl I once loved.
It was a long time before I could look at this portrait, hastily drawn yet somehow perfectly capturing the blend of innocence and eroticism that marked our all-too-brief months together.
The relationship finished in tatters, a cold and heartless ending that tore my heart in two and was worse than anything I’d ever suffered at the hands of my mother.
I never understood how someone as sweet and lovely and guileless as her – and I know to this day I was right about that – could have abandoned me so carelessly.
I spent months examining all the things I might possibly have done wrong – was I too rich, too arrogant, just too goddamn obtuse?
But none of this made sense, not after the way we’d got beneath each other’s skin and heart and soul.
So I settled for the only explanation that there was: she loved the other guy more.
Nowadays I can look at her picture almost objectively.
I managed to get her eyes right.
I think that’s why I like it so much.
Those incredible dark screen-siren eyes, a classical other-worldly beauty, the kind that makes you stop and stare.
I wonder where she is now, if she’s sleeping curled up against her husband, her feet pressing against his, her breathing soft and shallow.
Has she cut her hair, does she look older, are there wrinkles on that beautiful face?
I’ve looked for her online from time to time, but there’s never anything there, no Facebook or Instagram accounts, no presence at post-university parties.
I still see her friend Liv and I know that she understands my yearning for knowledge of Catherine.
Readily she passes on information, usually about her children, a girl and a boy.
She never mentions the husband, the man she left me for, though his name, unspoken, hovers between us.
I retreat into my bed, propping up the sketch against Raymond Carver, held in Catherine’s solemn gaze until at last my eyelids begin to close.