Four months before Lucian
I am hung-over (parental funerals will do that), depressed (ditto), and from the look on Catherine’s face – horror-struck, no other word for it – it seems the whole thing has been a massive set-up.
Why am I putting myself through this when it’s clear that her feelings towards me haven’t changed, not one bit, in the last fifteen years.
Because I’m an idiot, that’s why.
She looks overwhelmingly beautiful and a little sad, just as I remember her.
I have stared at her drawing so many times, that sketch I made more familiar to me than anything else I have ever drawn, and now here she is, standing before me in the flesh.
Beautiful. Sad. Frightened.
She looks like she wants to run away.
‘Is it really so bad seeing me again?’ I ask, and she smiles suddenly and says, ‘The opposite of bad,’ and call me a bloody fool, but I just want this moment to go on for a little longer.
‘Coffee?’ I say, and she follows me into the bland white space of the Serpentine Café, and now all I really want is to look at her.
Over the years I’ve forgotten how dark her hair is, that deep black-brown, the colour of earth after rain; and her eyes wider and a little rounder I see now than I made them in the sketch but essentially the truly jaw-dropping feature of her lovely face.
I see her surreptitiously watching me and it makes me smile, to think of us both here transfixed by the ghosts of our past. How could it be any other way?
I am thinking of a night when we lay together on my bed listening to the Rolling Stones, Black and Blue , one of my favourite records.
When ‘Fool to Cry’ came on, I walked over to the window and lit a cigarette, blowing plumes of smoke into the damp night air.
The song always reminded me of my father and his desperate end, and though I said nothing, Catherine knew I was thinking of him.
‘You still miss him, don’t you?
’ she asked.
The astuteness of her question and the gentleness of her voice overwhelmed me, a dangerous sea of sorrow rising in my chest. I didn’t turn round to look at her when I told her about the way he’d died, a shotgun wound to the head, not a heart attack as I’d thought at the time.
Finally I spoke the words I had been too ashamed to say.
‘I feel somehow responsible that I wasn’t able to make his life worth living.
’
‘You were ten. It wasn’t your fault, you can’t think that.
It had nothing to do with you.
’
‘We were a team of two, my father and I, him and me against the world, or at least against my mother and my sisters and their little club for three. But he left me anyway.’
Catherine didn’t say anything, not then; she just walked over to the window, wrapping her arms around me from behind, face pressed into the space beneath my shoulder blades, waiting for me to turn.
But later, just as we were about to fall asleep, I remember her voice in the darkness.
‘I won’t ever leave you,’ she said.
But a few weeks later, that’s exactly what she did.
The question that is tattooed eternally beneath my skin rises up and out of me before I’m able to stop it.
‘Will you tell me what happened? Tell me why you left?’
It’s obvious that I am going to ask this question, that even after all this time I still need to know what went wrong.
The way she left me, just a note scrawled on my sketchpad, with no explanation – I’ve changed my mind.
I can’t do this. I can’t see you any more – her stark refusal to ever see or speak to me again, drove me mad, I think.
And I have lived in the shadow of that madness ever since.
But this Catherine, the one who claims to be different, this mother of an almost teenage boy, stands up so violently that her chair tips over and I see a real horror flash across her face.
‘I can’t talk about it,’ she says, and I think, my God, she’s actually going to run out on me again.
She is hiding something, I realise it instantly, and I wonder why it has taken me all these years to understand.
But what? What could possibly be so bad she wasn’t able to tell me at the time; what was it that made her refuse to ever see me again?
I’ve tormented myself with this question over the years, and now, looking at her stricken face, listening to her tortured voice, I realise that she has never told me the truth.
But I can’t push her any further; if I do, she’ll run and that’s the last thing I want.
We walk all the way round to the other side of the Serpentine without saying a word, while roller-bladers glide in between us and joggers pass and toddlers crouch beside the water to drop their torn scraps of bread.
We sit down on an empty bench and she looks at me and says, ‘I’ve thought of you every single day since I left,’ and I understand how hard it is for her to say those words, her version of an apology.
I understand that what she is really saying is please, can we start again?
So I’ll spend a little longer here, absorbing her loveliness, this girl who once shattered my heart.
The conversation becomes easier.
I ask about her children and she shows me photographs on her phone.
The little girl, Daisy, a miniature version of her mother except for her wild curly hair, is dangling upside down from the branch of a tree, an inverted gap-toothed smile.
‘She looks funny and brave,’ I say.
‘She is brave. Worryingly so sometimes. A risk-taker. The opposite of me.’
I think, yes, that’s true.
You hid away in a small-time life.
You weren’t prepared to take a risk on me.
The photograph of the boy, Joe, and his father stops me in my tracks.
They are playing cards and drinking from matching blue-and-white-striped mugs.
I remember Sam, the husband, as I look at this older version in the photograph.
I’d hide in the shadows sometimes and watch the two of them walking through town, his arm slung around her shoulders, her long dark hair swinging against her back.
I used to wonder what it was about him that made her love him more.
‘He looks nice,’ I say, and I know she understands I mean Sam, not the boy, when she says, ‘He is nice.’
‘How did it go so wrong?’
Catherine doesn’t answer to begin with, but once she starts speaking she seems unable to stop, words and phrases and broken sentences that tumble over one another and amaze me with their content.
‘It’s my fault, really, all of it.
’
When I begin to protest, she waves me silent with an impatient hand.
‘You see, I shouldn’t have married him and we both knew that.
Because even though he tried so hard to convince me, to convince both of us, that we were meant to be together, somehow it could never quite match up to you and me.
And it killed Sam, trying to prove it was him I loved and knowing, really, that it wasn’t.
I mean, I did love him, I still do, we’ve had two kids together, we’ve been married for almost thirteen years, but it wasn’t the same and it never could be.
And I’ve thought about you so much, every day, sometimes it felt like almost every moment.
It was torture, really, thinking and wondering and remembering with no hope of ever seeing you again.
I used to will myself never to mention your name, but sometimes Sam would see something about you in the papers and he’d show me and I’d have to try so hard to act normal, like it didn’t matter, like you didn’t matter, when deep down we both knew you did.
That’s why he went off with Julia in the end, I’m sure of it, and I can’t blame him.
I pushed him into it.
’
She is crying now but I daren’t interrupt or reach out to take her hand or do anything to stop her, for every word she speaks is a revelation.
I cannot believe it.
It cannot be true. The way she left me was so heartless, so final, as if she hated me, as if I’d done something wrong.
And here she is telling me the exact opposite is true, that she’s thought about me, yearned for me, longed for me just as I have always longed for her.
It changes everything.
‘I married Sam,’ Catherine says, ‘because he loved me. And because he helped me so much when my mother died. All I wanted back then was to hide away and bury myself where no one could find me. I tried so hard to forget you, but of course I couldn’t.
You remember how we loved each other, understood each other, how we used to communicate without talking?
Mind-reading, we said.
As though we were living inside each other.
How could I ever forget that?
’
I’m nodding at her because these are the things that made our break-up so impossible for me to accept.
One moment I was understood by this girl, by this woman who is now sitting next to me, in a way I’d never been understood before; the next moment she was gone.
My despair was overwhelming.
‘I thought you’d forgotten about me,’ I say, and she rolls her eyes.
‘Forgotten about you? There’s barely a day when I haven’t looked for you.
It’s been like a curse.
Every town or village or shop or restaurant I go into, I think, “I wonder if he’s here.” Every time I’m on the internet I find myself looking for pictures of you.
And you’re always there; I couldn’t get away from you even if I wanted to.
’
‘I don’t understand.
If you loved me so much, why did you leave?
’
I think she is close to telling me the truth; in her seconds of hesitation, I see her weighing it up: what would happen if I told him the real reason after all this time?
I’m staring at her lovely face and I see something like fear flash through those dark eyes.
‘What was it, Catherine? Did something happen?’ My voice is low.
But Catherine sighs and shakes her head.
‘Is it enough to tell you I made a terrible mistake and I’ve regretted it ever since?
Every single day.’
I’m not even sure who reaches for who, but she is in my arms, her hair brushing my face, our mouths pressing together.
We are kissing, kissing, and quickly it becomes fierce, and I know she’s still crying because I feel the wet of her tears on my cheek.
She pulls away.
‘This is madness. No good can come of it. But I need you …’
She’s in my arms again, and this time the kissing is all wrong in a public place.
We need to stop, we have to stop …
‘Can we go?’ Catherine says.
We walk, clamped together, from the park, a long walk, past joggers and schoolchildren and elderly couples, none of whom I really see, onto Queen’s Gate, where I flag down a taxi almost instantly and we sit inside, not talking, not touching, while smart white stuccoed London flashes past, until we reach my street, my flat.
We step through the front door into overwhelming whiteness, and in the sudden grave quiet we are drawn together, free at last to hold each other, skin on skin, mouth against mouth, bodies that burn like molten flames.