Four months before Lucian
In times of crisis, I often turn to Jack.
He waits with me outside the church until we see the hearse arrive, and just behind it the funeral car that carries my sisters and their monstrous husbands.
They always hated me the most, the husbands, something to do with the fact that they slave in their City jobs Monday to Friday while I – my brother-in-law’s words, not mine – ‘arse about all day in your little Somerset empire’.
‘Primogeniture,’ I might have argued.
‘It’s what you get with families like ours.
’
But it seemed simpler to cut myself off.
Jack manages to take the edge right out of this first meeting.
Behind their backs he calls them the witches, but the truth is, he has always seemed to prefer my family to his own, dysfunctional or otherwise.
When he channels his charm, as he does now, wheeling my sisters into a long-lost embrace, older women in particular seem to melt.
By the time they get to me, both of them are smiling.
Joanna, shorter, plumper and always that little bit nicer, greets me with open arms.
‘Hello, stranger,’ she says.
There’s even a mild camaraderie between the three of us as we watch the pallbearers take their places behind the coffin, lifting it to their shoulders in one practised move.
Dead parents will do that.
The knee-jerk shock of a coffin will do that.
Momentarily we stand united in the face of this new truth, the woman who gave birth to us trapped within a shining wooden box.
As we process down the aisle, I search the pews for my friends and find them sitting together near the back of the church.
There’s Jack in his sharp black suit, Celia next to him in neat navy blue.
Alexa catches my eye as we pass.
She is wearing huge, glittery earrings and I love her for it, the disco element to the funeral.
We three siblings sit in the front pew, my mother’s coffin stationed unnervingly close, just to our left.
Try as I might to concentrate on the vicar’s words, I am tugged right down to the ghost train of memories I wish more than anything to avoid.
The gloom was all mine after my father died.
I wandered, desolate, through a house that seemed unfathomably celebratory.
My mother and sisters, always exclusive, were now permanently together, laughing and gossiping in the kitchen, while the contents of the ashtray rose higher and the empty wine bottles behind the bin grew into a glass army.
Food was generally an irrelevance: my teenage sisters were always on diets and my mother rarely ate, not that I saw anyway.
When my father was alive, he would peer into the fridge and fling eggs, cheese, ham and tomatoes onto the table.
‘What shall we make, kiddo?’
It was omelettes mostly, or toasted sandwiches, but he took the snack repertoire to the grave with him and after he died I lived on toast. I was bewildered by my loss, the senseless, raging pain.
The parasitic loneliness.
That’s when the pinching began, pinching and pinching, harder and harder, hidden away in my pale blue bedroom until a network of bruises had spread across my inner arms. It wasn’t a cry for help – far from it; all I’d ever wanted was to escape my mother’s notice.
More it was an addiction to physical pain, the delicious feeling of hurting yourself until your eyes stung and all other thoughts faded away to nothing.
I can remember that feeling even now.
I found out the truth about how my father died hours before I was due back at school.
My mother was with her friend Marianne, midway through another long lunch.
I could hear them talking, laughing, clinking glasses as I approached the kitchen: Salut!
– the toast Marianne always made whether they were on tea or vodka.
I was about to go in when I heard my name.
‘Darling,’ Marianne said as I loitered by the kitchen door.
‘I do think Lucian’s a bit of a worry.
He’s so thin and he seems, well, desperately unhappy.
’
‘Of course he’s unhappy.
He just lost his father.
’
I heard the metal click as my mother flicked open her Zippo.
I imagined her lipsticked mouth drawing in the smoke, eyes closed.
‘It’s dreadful for you all, I know.
But Henry and Lucian were so close.
I wondered if it might help him to talk to someone.
You know, a professional.
’
‘And what’s a shrink going to say to him?
’ The anger in my mother’s voice seared beneath the door.
‘“Your father killed himself, did he? How do you feel about that?”’
The shock realisation was as if someone was holding my head beneath a torrent of icy water.
Not a heart attack as I’d thought, but a choice.
He chose to leave me.
Sitting here between my sisters two decades later, it occurs to me that they would have known exactly how my father died and that perhaps not telling ten-year-old me was an act of kindness.
I realise that my mother, who now lies metres away, as lost to me as he was, must have been hurt by his death, must have felt her role in it, and was perhaps, in some way, ashamed.
The wake has the surrealist tinge of a nightmare, a champagne-soaked party for four hundred in my mother’s thin, tall brown-brick four-storey.
I was last here at sixteen and I am knocked back by its familiarity, the permeation of Acqua di Parma and venom sprayed like blood into the soft furnishings.
My mother’s so-called friends, a conveyor belt of age-defying sexagenarians, queue up to greet me.
‘The black sheep returns,’ they crow, one after another, and it’s a while before I get to my friends, crammed into a shrunken circle in the farthest corner of the drawing room.
‘How’s it going?’ Jack asks, embracing me for the second time today.
‘Anyone called you a cunt yet?’
‘All right?’ asks Harry, gripping both my shoulders and looking into my eyes for a moment too long.
He is dressed in a black velvet suit and hand-made snakeskin shoes, like a 1970s pimp.
Alexa once told him it made him look like Keith Richards in his South of France heyday and he’s been wearing it on repeat ever since.
Beside him is Ling, in a narrow black dress and high shoes, dark hair coiled in plaits on top of her head.
She looks beautiful and somehow much older than her twenty three years.
‘I’m sorry about your mother, Lucian,’ she says in her quiet, formal voice.
I’m about to make my standard quip – better off without her – when a wave of regret rolls over me, here in my dead mother’s house, a place where I once lived too.
The memory comes, as it always must, of the last time I stood in this drawing room, painted lemon yellow back then.
My mother, drunk, wavering on heels, a fierce rage in that feted face: ‘How dare you blame his death on me? How dare you?’
And me, with the certitude of a sixteen-year-old: ‘Because you betrayed him. You cheated on him.’
She never forgave me; I never tried to understand.
‘Me too, Ling,’ I say instead.
‘I’m sorry too.’
Harry ensnares a passing waitress and takes two bottles of champagne.
‘Grieving son right here,’ he says, pointing at me by way of explanation.
He refills our glasses and there are moments of reprieve now, whole minutes that could almost pass for any other day.
The usual tensions are there – Alexa looking too pretty, too seductive in a dress that, now she has removed her jacket, turns out to be backless.
Celia, another pretty girl, but with a tendency to dress like her mother, tries so hard to blend in with us, and it is always the act of trying that sets her apart.
She is asking Alexa about her book, which the rest of us understand is the last thing Alexa wants to talk about.
‘It’s going fairly well,’ she says, trying – and partially succeeding – to keep the hostility out of her voice.
No writer I’ve ever met has wanted to discuss the writing process at a party.
‘But what’s your average day like?
’ Celia persists. ‘How much do you write? Do you have a minimum word count or something like that?’
‘Babe.’ Jack wraps his arm around Celia’s shoulder.
He kisses her cheek.
‘Alexa is freaking out. You’re reminding her of deadlines she’d rather forget.
’
He’s a master at distillation, Jack.
‘Sorry, Alexa,’ Celia says, and then she moves on to Ling.
I think with Celia it’s partly an incompetence at small talk and mostly her discomfiture amongst our friends.
‘Are you in touch with your family much?’ she asks Ling.
Rachel and Alexa have begun another conversation, but they abandon it to hear Ling’s answer.
All of us, I think, are fascinated to find out more about Ling.
‘We write letters and talk on the phone. But I haven’t seen their faces for a couple of years.
’
‘You could Skype them,’ Celia says.
‘Or FaceTime.’
Ling laughs.
‘The first thing Harry did was buy me a laptop so I could Skype them. I told him it will take another hundred years for Wi-Fi to reach our community. My family live in a rural farming village with little modernisation. Hardly any electricity, cooking over fires, washing clothes in the river.’ She shrugs.
‘I don’t expect you to understand.
If you were to visit my family, you would feel like you’d gone back in time.
It’s a very poor part of Thailand and a simple life, but it was a lovely place to grow up.
Peaceful, slow.’
I (??
? check m/s p.75)I see the way Harry watches Ling, and it breaks me up a bit.
There is no trying to hide his pride; it’s pouring out of him.
I remember the text he sent from Thailand when he first got to know her.
Smitten with a woman I’ve met out here.
She is dazzling. And she seems to like me too.
Trying not to blow it!
One of us has found love, at last.
I catch sight of my sister Emma on the other side of the room, dutiful eldest child, surrounded by an adoring posse of my mother’s friends.
Joanna is talking to the vicar while her husband waits obediently beside her, one of those pitiful types who marry their mother and spend the next thirty years waiting for permission to fart.
My eyes move from group to group and my heart jolts, painfully, when I recognise Catherine’s best friend.
Why did no one tell me she was here?
I’ve kept in touch with Liv over the years but never quite enough to dislodge the uncomfortable memory of the two of us in a pub in Bristol soon after Catherine and I had broken up.
I was drunk, morose, possibly crying; she must have been desperate to get away.
‘Why did she leave me?’ I asked her.
‘Why does she love him more than me?’
I’ve never forgotten her response.
‘I don’t think she does,’ she said, eventually.
‘I don’t think she’ll ever love anyone the way she loved you.
’
When Liv catches me looking, she waves and walks over to our side of the room, where she is engulfed immediately by my friends.
Hugs and kisses and exclamations of regret all round – ‘It’s been too long!
’
‘Amazing dress, Liv,’ says Jack, which it is.
Liv is wearing a turquoise dress with a sticky-out skirt, a tiny cardigan draped around her shoulders.
With her bright peroxide hair and her lightning-strike earrings, she looks like a futuristic prom queen, a rock-and-roll Sandra Dee.
I’d like to photograph her and invert those colours in a portrait later, the dress electric blue, her hair a glowing Egon Schiele red.
Harry introduces Liv to Ling.
‘Meet my wife,’ he says, trying and failing to suppress the grin that sweeps across his face.
‘You got married?’ she says, miming shock, but she is effusive with her congratulations.
‘Let me see that ring,’ she says, and Ling holds out her finger with its diamond the size of a quail’s egg.
‘Bought in Bangkok. Rather obscene, isn’t it?
’ says Harry, simultaneously refilling Liv’s glass.
Talk turns to my summer party, which I host every year without exactly knowing why.
It has become a slightly ridiculous affair, each one focused around some new talking point: multicoloured sheep on the horizon one year – how silly was that – then a group of trapeze artists strung up in nets high above the dance floor, and this time a fleet of brightly painted rowing boats on the lake.
I always send Liv an invitation, but she rarely comes, and I was surprised when she emailed last week to accept.
‘You must stay,’ I tell her now.
‘Actually I’ve arranged to stay with a friend who recently moved to Somerset.
She’s in London with me at the moment.
’
Her eyes are communicating something, I’m not sure what, though I suddenly have an idea of the subtext and my heart squeezes a little just contemplating it.
‘Come outside for a cigarette?’ I say, taking hold of her elbow and leading her through the crowds.
We use a back exit through the kitchen, which my mother has clearly had interior-designed since my day: it’s all dark grey slate and chestnut wood, more downtown New York than Chelsea blue rinse.
Once outside, we huddle beneath the cherry tree where I skulked and sulked and smoked illicit fags back in the day.
‘I hope you don’t think it’s strange me being here,’ Liv says.
‘I didn’t know your mother …
’ She tails off, an apologetic shrug.
‘It’s great that you came.
I appreciate it. The more friendly faces the better.
’
Liv and I stand beneath the tree looking at each other while I light a cigarette and exhale the first jet of smoke.
I am going to ask her about Catherine.
I know it, she knows it, and the question sits between us, letters forming in the ether.
‘How is she?’ I say eventually, and Liv nods, once, twice, before she answers.
‘I’m so sorry to do this to you, Lucian, especially at your mother’s funeral.
But that’s the reason I’m here. ’