Four months before Lucian
Rachel is in the kitchen eating kedgeree and staring at her phone.
‘Morning, darling. Well, technically it’s the afternoon.
I just got a text from Max.
He wants to meet up!
I’m so happy.’
Ah yes.
Max. The kid. We co-parented for a few years, my friends and I, albeit in our rather haphazard, unconventional way, then Rachel lost custody when he was seven.
It broke her, of course, though she never admits it, but I see the tiny etchings of regret around her eyes and I worry that one day they will remould her face into a full-blown mask of despair.
She left her husband, Hugo, hedge-funder party boy turned teetotal marathon runner, when the baby was just two.
Drugs drew them together and blew them apart a few years later.
Hugo is a reborn puritanical: kale smoothies, hot yoga, the whole thing; Rachel a shoo-in for rehab.
I paid for her to go once, three thousand notes just for her to walk through the door, not that the money matters.
She discharged herself three days later, turning up at Soho House where it was someone or other’s birthday, responding to our shocked expressions with typical flamboyance: ‘My name is Rachel and I’m not a drug addict.’
I look at her now.
‘Rach, I knew he’d come round in the end,’ I say.
I put my arm around her and she leans her head on my shoulder and this is how Alexa finds us when she wanders into the kitchen with wild-woman hair and big panda rings under her eyes.
‘What’s going on? Why the love fest?’
‘Max texted me this morning. He wants to meet.’
‘Amazing! Of course he wants to see you. You’re his mother.’
She slides onto the bar stool next to Rachel, kisses her cheek and begins heaping a plate with kedgeree.
The phone rings.
‘Bound to be Jack,’ says Alexa with the undercut of hopefulness that is always there.
She and Jack were a couple right the way through university, unless you count the blood-bitter spats, his incessant flirting, her reckless revenge, the splits and reunions, which became almost pedestrian to those of us who lived through them.
Three years ago, on a break from Alexa, Jack met Celia and a line was drawn under the history of histrionics.
I do wonder, though; I see the way Alexa looks at Jack sometimes and I fear that she still loves him.
But it’s not Jack on the phone, it’s Harry inviting us over for Bloody Marys.
‘Thought they might be in order,’ he said.
‘Filip is making a batch up right now.’
Filip is Harry’s Polish butler, who looks after the estate with his wife and their two grown-up sons.
His Bloody Marys are immense.
Harry hesitates, a weighted silence while he chooses his words.
‘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 – in these 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.
‘Why don’t I go and talk to her and see what there is,’ she says.
‘Maybe pasta would be good?’
I know we’re all watching Ling leave the room and marvelling at her calm, unhurried confidence as she goes off to instruct the housekeeper after only one week of living here.
‘You were right, Harry. She’s wonderful,’ Rachel says.
Harry’s face lights with joy.
‘Isn’t she? I know you were all worried it happened too fast but, the truth is, I couldn’t bear the thought of coming home without her.’
He turns to me.
‘Come down to the pool for a second? I’m thinking of putting in a new one and wanted to ask your advice.’
Of course we get to the swimming pool, which seems rather basic and old-fashioned now I look at it, with its bright turquoise tiles and white plastic steps, and Harry turns his back on it straight away.
‘You know you could do something really amazing here,’ I say.
Harry pulls out his cigarettes and offers me one.
‘Sod the pool,’ he says.
‘It’s you I want to talk about.
I want to make sure you’re all right.’
This is a reference to my father’s untimely death; no need to spell out what he’s thinking.
He died when I was ten, three years before Harry and I met.
Harry knows, though, how I locked my grief inside myself, just a little savage pinching of my wrists when the pain became too much – self-harming you’d call it now.
He also knows what can happen when my grief is allowed out.
There was a time, one we choose never to discuss, when my life spun out of control.
I lost my way, let’s leave it at that.
I rest one hand on his shoulder.
‘This is not going to affect me in the same way. I promise you.’
‘All right,’ he says, and we stand beside his archaic pool finishing our cigarettes in silence.
As is often the case in our friendship, it’s the things we don’t say that sound loudest. Harry, I fear, would have done anything for me to get the ending I wanted.
She might be very much in the past, by fifteen years or more, but at times like this, Catherine has never felt more in my present.