Four months before Catherine
I’d forgotten how Shute Park appears quite suddenly after a bend in the drive.
You turn a corner and there it is in front of you, this magnificent vanilla-coloured building, a miniature palace with its turrets on either side.
It is absurdly grand and quite the loveliest house I have ever seen.
‘It’s so beautiful,’ I say, and you look over at me, smiling.
‘As you remembered it?’ and I nod, too full of the moment to speak, for the spectres of you and me are everywhere now.
Fifteen years earlier, driving from Bristol in Jack’s knackered old Golf, him and Alexa in the front, you and me in the back, the four of us swigging from a bottle of champagne.
My heart beating wildly as we climbed the steps to the front door, you squeezing my hand before we went inside.
‘Don’t worry about my uncle.
He’ll love you. And anything goes, there’s no judgement.
’
Just behind the house I can see the lawn where we lay on a rug with Mary’s lemonade and the weekend papers.
Glinting in the distance is the lake where we swam, the four of us floating on our backs, the archetypal ‘before’ shot, a Polaroid to happier times.
The house is beautifully symmetrical in that staunchly Georgian way, three rows of windows running across it in perfect graduation, small at the top, then medium, then longer ones across the bottom.
Exactly in the centre of the facade is a triangular roof; it reminds me of the doll’s houses that Daisy and I used to love in the Museum of Childhood, the ones with a panel that pulls away to reveal an ornate Louis XIV interior with tiny little rooms full of spindly gilt furniture.
I am dumbfounded all over again by the wonderfulness of your life.
The thought fills my mind that if we had stayed together all these years then this house might also have been mine.
We would have had a family together by now, a little row of Lucians and Catherines racing around all this grandeur.
Do you think it too?
I wonder, as I catch you watching for my reaction.
In the entrance hall, which smells just as houses of this kind should – cool air, seasoned wood, an inherent dampness passed down through the ages – we examine the family paintings.
There is your grandfather, moustachioed in a tweed three-piece, all set to go out and butcher a skyload of pheasants; your grandmother with curlered hair, dark lipstick and a choker of thick cream pearls.
You stop at the portrait of your father, painted a year or so before he died, you tell me.
I remember this painting well; I remember searching it for traces of the boy I loved and noting the eyes, an emphatic green the same as yours and the mid-brown hair with its tendency to curl out at the ends.
What strikes me, though, is how in the fifteen years since we last saw each other, you have become identical to this painting.
You are your father.
I wonder if you see it too.
‘He’s so handsome,’ I tell you.
‘A cross between Jeff Buckley and Mick Jagger. Same mouth. And hair.’
‘He’d have been happy with that.
’
I don’t tell you that you look the same but even more so, even more beautiful to me.
I am re-mastering the art of understatement.
Always with you in a world of women who were ready to drop at your feet, I wanted to be the one who held back.
We have moved on to a painting of your uncle which I haven’t seen before, very Liberace in a voluminous silk shirt, martini glass held in a hand that glints with rings, when Mary appears from nowhere, shoes clipping across the parquet floor.
‘There you are,’ she says to Lucian, and then she realises who I am.
‘Catherine! My goodness, what a surprise.’
‘Mary, it’s so nice to see you again.
’
I offer my hand but she pulls me into an unexpected hug and I find myself fighting against a sudden punch of emotion.
As we walk towards the kitchen, Mary asks you about the funeral.
‘Was it all right?’ Her voice is low and concerned.
‘Better than I thought. At least the wicked witches seemed happy to see me this time.’
Mary smiles, and I remember that she knows all your secrets, the tribulations of growing up with an adulterous mother, absent sisters and a suicidal father.
You told me once that you cared more for Mary than you did for your own mother.
You told me about the cakes she sent you back to school with, the food packages that arrived unheralded throughout the term.
The one-sentence postcards just so you could have something in your pigeonhole.
We follow Mary into the kitchen, which has been redesigned since I was here last and looks as if it has jumped straight out of an interiors magazine, with walls of exposed brick, steel worktops and those fashionable pendant lamps.
Now all I want is the space and freedom to look.
I’d like to slow the film right down, gliding my finger against the reel so that I can take in every still, each room, each piece of furniture, photographs, paintings, the low leather sofa at the far end of the room.
Full-length windows looking out across the lawn.
A long oak table with a curve of today’s newspapers placed at one end.
Most of all I’d like the invisibility to observe you leaning against the sink, talking to Mary while she fills the kettle and begins to lay a tray with cups and saucers.
I watch her handing you a stack of post and you chucking it back down on the little wooden table – ‘Thanks, Mary, I think I’ll look at it later’ – without even a cursory glance.
So this is you, actually you, after all the years of trying to imagine your life, scrutinising those two-dimensional images and bland nothing-stories in the press and reconstructing all the gaps.
I pictured long lunches by the swimming pool.
Barbecues on the lawn.
Boating on the lake.
But I always came unstuck when I began imagining the friends, Rachel, your on–off lover, Harry and Alexa, who were my friends too once upon a time, and Jack, the full stop to my dreams.
The tea is good.
Sitting on the sofa holding your hand is good.
Being back here in this most wonderful house is good.
But when Mary calls out casually, ‘Will you be staying for the party, Catherine?’ an innocent enough question, my fear of confrontation swamps me, a toxic surge that makes me breathless.
I know all about your party as anyone with a fixation on the diary sections and society pages of newspapers and magazines would.
I wasn’t always this way, almost obsessively interested in the foibles of the rich and famous, but it was the only means of finding out what you were up to.
I wanted to know what you were doing and who you were doing it with, and more than anything I longed for the day when I might discover that Jack had dropped out of your life.
But no, more often than not he was there, right beside you, in his shades, with his Colgate smile, still tightly gripping his position as best friend slash honorary brother.
A couple of years ago Sam caught me reading a double-page spread about your annual summer party in the Daily Mail .
Beautiful girls in shimmering drop-waisted dresses, men in wing collars and tails, those obligatory coupe champagne glasses.
The theme must have been 1920s; the headline ran: ‘Somerset’s Not So Great Gatsby’ (the media have always portrayed you and your friends as hedonistic, good-for-nothing wastrels).
Sam, I remember, leaned over my shoulder and said: ‘Come the revolution …’
Now I keep my voice light and even as I tell Mary, ‘I won’t be able to stay that long, sadly.
’
But I see you watching me and it seems to me that you are beginning to understand.