Four months before Lucian
I am a typical male in some ways.
Lava-hot sex, like we just had, Catherine sitting on me but with her back turned so that I could hear rather than see her contorted cries, so that I could feel rather than know that she was close, so close, and that when she did finally succumb (shouting my name in such an intensely sexual way, all I can think is how much I need to hear it again), after all these years of us both, probably, fantasising about this moment, then the walls would collapse and the ceiling would fall in and it would feel as though our whole lives had been leading to exactly this.
Afterwards, though, literally minutes afterwards, I’m back feeling confused and a little paranoid.
I ask Catherine to come away to Somerset with me, just for a day or even a few hours, and she reacts as if I’ve slapped her.
This lovely face of hers, one that I’ve drawn and worshipped and craved at times, is also more expressive than any I’ve ever seen.
And right now, what I’m getting is horror, unveiled, raw, exaggerated.
I sympathise with what’s happened to her and Sam, of course I do, although it would be fairly easy not to care too much.
She left me for him a long time ago, she broke my heart so dramatically, so effectively, it took a long time to recover.
We are so connected, she and I, physically, yes, to an extent where it’s almost impossible to look at Catherine without her clothes curling into flames, but also exactly as before, we talk without speaking, we know the same things, we feel the same things, we are in some unfathomable way like the same person.
Already I understand what it was that made it so hard to be apart last time.
We see each other, that’s it.
We see each other in a way that no one else does.
I convince Catherine to have lunch before we go our separate ways and when we arrive at the restaurant, a favourite of mine, she says, ‘I’m sorry I’ve been so on edge.
Please can we start again.
’
I want just as much as she does to forget the hell of our ending and the big question of why, why, why and the fact that we probably should always have been together and we never will be.
Of course I want to know what it was that drove her away, but I also feel relief at her suggestion of a reprieve.
Yes, we’ll go back to the beginning.
Yes we’ll pretend, we’ll be like any other couple in this tiny little restaurant, eating some of the best sushi you’ll find in London.
And while we eat, I’ll learn about her life, some of the gaps from all those years that are missing, and perhaps in this way I’ll be able to forgive her for the way she left me, and this time, when we say goodbye, we’ll both get the full stop we always needed.
She speaks quietly so that I have to strain a little to hear above the clatter of the restaurant, and occasionally I catch a slight inflection that I’d almost forgotten.
‘My father is Scottish,’ she says.
‘Not so you’d notice these days, just the odd word; if anything he sounds more American.
’
Catherine’s father lives in New York with a woman he married a year after her mother died.
I can tell she still hasn’t forgiven him.
‘What’s your stepmother like?
’ I ask, and her eyes flare with indignation.
‘Carol? She’s not my stepmother in anything but name.
I am an adult with my own family.
She just happens to be married to my father.
’
Right.
‘It must have been so hard on you when your mother died,’ I say, and she nods, a tiny, sharp little nod, and begins talking in a rigid, clipped voice.
If I didn’t know that she was holding back tears I’d think she was furious.
‘It happened so fast. Every time I said goodbye, I thought, is this it, am I going to see her again, and then, only a few months after her diagnosis, it was.’
‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you,’ I say, and Catherine says, ‘Don’t.
Please don’t.’
Catherine’s mother fell ill almost immediately after she and I split up, a grim coincidence that kept her hidden from view for the remainder of her time at Bristol.
And no one better placed than me to understand what early bereavement felt like.
Her eyes are full of tears.
‘I know that you would have helped me, that you wanted to.’
‘Sam was there for you. He was better at it than I would have been.’
Catherine sighs.
‘Sam’s made it his life’s work to try and get me to grieve, but I’m still not sure I’ve managed it.
I’m scared of pain, that’s the problem.
’
‘Aren’t we all.
’
There was a time in my life when I was so scared of it I wasn’t sure I could carry on.
‘What about your mother? It came out of the blue, didn’t it?
A heart attack, Liv said.
Do you mind me asking about it?
’
I look at this girl whom I have always loved and I decide to risk the truth.
‘I didn’t get on with her, you probably remember.
Now she’s dead I worry that guilt will get the better of me.
’ I pat my chest. ‘It’s here, beneath everything.
I should have patched things up with her and I didn’t.
I should have shared my inheritance with her and I didn’t.
I should have forgiven her for her infidelity – perhaps I should have understood the reasons why she was unfaithful in the first place – but I didn’t.
’
‘You’re right, there’s usually a reason,’ Catherine says, with the astuteness I remember of old.
She looks sad as she says it, as though she has sympathy for my mother.
And perhaps she is right.
‘I didn’t find out about my mother’s affairs until a few years after my father died, but I knew she made him unhappy.
I was just waiting for a reason to blame her.
My uncle told me she’d had a sequence of lovers but that there was one around the time of my father’s death whom she seemed to have fallen in love with.
I don’t know if that’s true; whoever he was, they didn’t end up together.
But it gave me all the ammunition I needed.
I hated her for the way she’d cheated on him.
In my adolescent mind cheating became synonymous with suicide, simple as that.
’
Catherine sighs, a long, trembling sigh.
She seems a bit broken, hardly surprising.
I’m feeling pretty broken myself.
‘Did she ever love him?’
‘She must have done at the beginning, but they were completely different. Glamour was the thing that drove my mother, clothes, parties, the flattery of others. I think my father’s tastes were much too simple; she married the wrong guy basically.
Her greatest disappointment was not winding up in Shute Park.
If my father had lived, he would have inherited it instead of me, and that was her pipe dream, swanning around in the big house, holding huge parties.
She thought she was marrying the Great Gatsby only it didn’t turn out that way.
She never forgave me for living there instead of her and she didn’t visit.
Not once in the last thirteen years.
I could have tried harder to see her; the truth is I didn’t try at all.
Now I find myself wishing we’d made up.
’
‘I’m sorry,’ Catherine says, showing yet again that she understands.
There’s no point trying to put a positive gloss on the situation, as Rachel or Alexa might.
All that can be done is for me to find a way of accepting my regret.
I ask Catherine about her life, not just the big poster-sized events but the normal everyday, and as she talks, telling me of school runs and supermarket shops, of washing and ironing and cleaning and baking cakes for children’s play dates, I am struck by the contrast between this Catherine, thirty-four-year-old mother of two, and the girl I used to know.
‘I thought you were going to be a journalist,’ I say, and a shadow glides across her face but she carries on talking.
‘I became a mother very young. There wasn’t room for anything else.
’
I keep quiet because instinctively I know that Catherine is thinking about this and whether what she said is true.
‘Maybe I wasn’t brave enough.
You need a lot of confidence to work in the media.
Not just interviewing people and getting them to talk about things they don’t want to talk about.
But standing up for your ideas, making out you’re better than everybody else.
It’s a pretty aggressive profession, I’ve decided.
I’m not sure I was cut out for it.
’
‘You were so confident when I first met you. You knew exactly what you wanted, don’t you remember?
’
I leave the unasked question hanging in the air.
‘What happened to change you?’
Catherine smiles, but there’s no warmth in it.
‘I think that’s called being nineteen,’ she says.
Of course what happens throughout this lunch is that I’m looking as well as listening and I’m seeing the curve of her long, smooth neck and the jut of her clavicles and the way her necklace, a silver C on a long chain, stops just at her heart, and I’m thinking that if I was to press my lips there and work my way outwards, first left, then right, I would be able to kiss a direct line across to her pale pink nipples and they would harden quickly under my tongue.
Back at the flat, there’s sex again, slower this time.
I undress her, moving her hands away when she tries to reach up for my clothes, until she is entirely naked, and then I gently press her back against the wall and stand there looking at her while the cool, cold wall seeps into her flesh.
I want the luxury of it, just the looking and then the touching, and so I reach out with my fingers and draw slow, light circles on her neck and her shoulders and her collarbone.
And she is shaking but I know from the memory of last time that she’ll wait.
Hands first, that’s what I’m thinking, and then my mouth, and then my tongue.
I’ll hear her cry my name again.
And I’m focused on that.
Yet this second time around, the perfection that is Catherine and me naked together, the almost violence of our lovemaking, her passion more vehement even than mine, will make our parting difficult.
We don’t talk on the drive to Liv’s house but I’m pretty sure her thoughts are the same as mine.
All this longing finally realised; how is it possible that we can leave it here?
I’m waiting for Catherine to speak, to say something, anything that might make sense of what has happened between us today, but of course, she doesn’t.
Silence is her security blanket and she swathes herself in it.
Catherine lets us into Liv’s house, a Victorian terrace in Clapham, which is stark white inside but with flashes of brilliant colour: a trio of lemon-yellow vases, a shocking-pink sofa, floor tiles an acid-house orange.
We find Liv at the kitchen table in her gym clothes, laptop opened up in front of her.
‘Well,’ she says, standing up, grinning, as we walk in.
‘This looks interesting.’
Catherine and Liv embrace and behind the hug Liv catches my eye, a question mark.
So-so, I convey back with a sideways nod, almost imperceptible but I see her reading it.
‘I’ve asked Catherine if she’ll come down to Somerset with me.
Just for a day or even a few hours, but she’s not keen.
’
‘Tea?’ says Liv, releasing Catherine.
Her gym clothes are a bit like the house – a bright yellow Adidas vest, purple leggings with flowers splashed all over them, lime-green and purple trainers.
I feel a rush of affection for Liv.
There is something so unfailingly optimistic about her, and the effect she has on Catherine is instantaneous.
She’s laughing as she takes mugs out of a cupboard and fills a jug with milk from the fridge.
She tells Liv about the Japanese restaurant where we had lunch but obviously omits the finer details of our day (sex before, sex afterwards, all of it mind-blowing, the kind of sex you’d happily die on).
Liv knows, though, I can see her watching us as we drink our tea, watching, thinking, what now, what now?
I’m wondering the same thing.
‘Have you spoken to Sam?’ she asks.
‘Not since this morning. In fact he’s asked me not to call.
For a few days at least, he thinks we need a complete break to work out what we’re going to do.
’
‘True enough.’
‘They’re in Cornwall anyway.
The kids are happy.’
‘Well, that’s a good thing.
Doesn’t mean they don’t miss you.
’
I watch the interplay between these two old friends who talk in subtext, and it reminds me of Rachel and Alexa.
Perhaps all girlfriends are this way; perhaps Jack, Harry and I are too, beneath the posturing and sarcasm and the refusal to take anything seriously; perhaps this is the real backbone of friendship, the two-tier conversations, say one thing, mean another, a private language strictly for the initiated.
Liv says, ‘I don’t see what harm it would do going to Lucian’s for a while.
You’d be on your own, wouldn’t you?
Or would all your friends be there?
’
I catch the look that passes between them.
So it’s the thought of my friends that bothers her.
‘Jack and Harry do live close by. The girls are in London; they come down at weekends. But you wouldn’t need to see anyone while we’re there, if that’s what’s worrying you.
’
‘Yes, it’s worrying me,’ she says, and then tries to qualify.
‘I don’t really know what’s happening with me and Sam.
It would be awkward to try and explain.
’
‘Look, the last thing I’m going to do is force you to come away with me.
But at least let me tell you what it would be like.
We’d have the whole place to ourselves, just Mary there during the day and a few gardeners whom I literally never see.
We could do whatever we wanted.
We could swim, we could go down to the lake, like we did before.
Do you remember?’
‘I remember it was wonderful,’ she says.
‘One of the happiest weekends of my life.’
‘Do it, Catherine!’ says Liv, and she reaches forwards and takes both her hands.
‘Chances like this hardly ever come along. No one needs to know that you’re there.
’
Catherine says, ‘What about the children? What will I tell them? I can’t lie.
’
‘You won’t need to tell them anything.
They won’t ask where you are, why would they?
’
‘It’s much worse than anything Sam has done,’ Catherine says, and Liv just nods.
‘I know.’
Catherine turns to me.
‘Can you really promise me that we’re not going to run into your friends?
I couldn’t face that right now.
’
‘It’s a deal. No friends.
Just the two of us, I promise.
’
‘All right,’ she says, ‘I’ll come.
Just for a bit.’ She puts one hand to her chest and I imagine her heart there beneath it, pulsing, pulsing.