Four months before Lucian
If it is surreal for Catherine being back in the house where we were once at the pinnacle of this shared, derailing passion, then it is equally so for me to have her here.
I wonder what my friends would think if they could see her here now?
The girls would be all right, I think, or at least Alexa would.
With Rachel it’s always a little complicated, particularly when other women are involved, especially when the woman is Catherine.
I’m not at all sure Harry would understand, Harry who oversaw my collapse – I don’t exaggerate – about a week after she left.
And Jack? Well, Jack is different.
He’s more like a brother than a friend in many ways and he likes to come first.
When Catherine and I were together, all those years ago, I sometimes wondered if he was jealous.
She was astonishing to look at though she didn’t seem to realise it, the kind of face that demands a silver screen: huge dark eyes, a perfect nose, long but slim, elegant, and then her lips, of course, which were full enough to make most men’s blood pump faster.
I thought that perhaps Jack was jealous of how hard I’d fallen in love, for Catherine and I, after our faltering start, were never apart.
And I also wondered if he was a little bit in love with her himself.
I wouldn’t have blamed him.
There we were, the two of us, noodling around in our Clifton townhouse, and all of a sudden Audrey Hepburn moved in and claimed me as her own.
So it is probably just as well I have promised Catherine we’ll be alone here, that I will keep my friends at bay.
I’m ignoring countless texts and phone messages, a typically charmless email from Jack, subject heading: WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU , YOU FUCKER?
??
Meanwhile I get a real kick out of the way Catherine reacts to seeing the house again.
‘It’s the loveliest house,’ she says.
‘I thought I might have over-romanticised it in my memory. But I haven’t.
It’s even better than I remembered.
’
Most people who come to Shute Park are either too used to it or too entitled themselves to express much enthusiasm for its grandeur.
Even after all this time living here alone, though, the house still blows me away.
I can remember coming here when I was very young and standing in front of it with my father and uncle, counting the white shuttered windows that ran across the breadth of its facade (eighteen in each tier, the same at the back).
‘This could be yours one day,’ my uncle said.
‘But it will be your father’s first.’
‘What about when you have children?’ I’d asked, and my father and uncle laughed.
‘That’s looking increasingly unlikely,’ my father said.
He was ahead of his time, my uncle, unapologetically parading his young, flamboyantly dressed lovers (there was a time when they all seemed to look like Adam Ant) through our small, uptight village and hosting wild gatherings that might last for days.
Shute Park under his heritage was never out of the papers.
He was hated and abhorred by the Daily Mail , another thing to be proud of, and by my mother, who decided (around the time he named me his sole heir) that he was the embodiment of evil.
He died of lung cancer when I was twenty-one, and I still miss him.
When my uncle was alive I’d come over from Bristol with my friends most weekends, fuelling mad twelve-hour drinking sessions from his open-door-cellar policy, beginning with champagne and the palest of French rosés and finishing some time after dawn with brandy and sodas, his favourite, lying on the sofas in the library listening to the Rolling Stones.
My taste in music was crystallised in those days; I’ve been working my way through his extensive collection of the greats – Dylan, Cohen, Van Morrison – ever since.
He was a weird fish in many ways but he was my father’s brother and my sole supporter, and thirteen years on, I’m still half hoping that he will reappear; that his death, and my legacy, was just another of his twisted jokes.
As we move through the house, now scented with the smell of a roasting chicken, it seems that Catherine is looking for evidence of how I live.
She dismisses the drawing room, a dreadful place of swagged curtains and brown furniture and far too much pink, as soon as she sees it and laughs at the incongruous Francis Bacon on the wall.
But the library with its battered Chesterfield sofas, drink-splashed sideboard and boxes full of vinyl she seizes upon.
‘I remember this room,’ she says, and I’m sure, like me, she’s picturing a long night of hard drinking with my uncle, him and Alexa taking turns to play DJ, Catherine, Jack and me lying on the floor, playing a half-hearted game of Jenga.
Catherine loves the flashing lights – new since her day – that Alexa draped around the nail above the fireplace and gasps at the extent of the tequila collection on the sideboard.
Bottles of the stuff, and not your standard student Jose Cuervo either.
I learned to drink tequila properly when I was in Mexico, painting by day and sipping the purest white spirits by night.
One hundred per cent agave is what you want, pricey stuff but it often comes in exquisite bottles.
Catherine picks up my favourite one, which is shaped like a skull; I brought it back on the aeroplane wrapped up in a cashmere scarf.
‘Quite a tequila habit you’ve got.
’ Her voice is off and I’m not sure why.
‘This stuff is pure indulgence,’ I say, starting to tell her about it.
‘To be sipped very slowly, room temperature—’ but she cuts me off.
‘I never drink it.’
She doesn’t seem overly impressed with my uncle’s cellar either, though there are thousands of bottles, different grapes and vintages all neatly ordered in their custom-made sliding oak drawers.
Burgundy and Bordeaux, mostly, though he flirted with New World in his later years.
‘How can you possibly get through all this?’ Catherine asks.
I shrug. ‘I can’t.’
‘So what will you do with it?’
‘I don’t know.
I haven’t given it any thought.
’
She opens her arms to take in the cellar.
‘All this money. It just seems … bottomless.’ She shakes her head; I sense her disapproval.
‘My great-grandparents made a fortune in the stock market and tied it all up very carefully. I know I’m lucky.
You’re making me feel like I should apologise.
’
She breaks into a smile.
‘Sorry.’
‘You were reminding me of that feisty student journalist.’
‘Too many years absorbing Sam’s indignation.
Self-made wealth is fine, obviously; he has a pathological hatred of inherited.
Just ignore me.’
We embrace between the 2007 Rully and the 2008 Saint-Bris.
‘Any preferences?’ I say, and she shakes her head.
‘You choose. I won’t drink much.
’
I select a Gevrey-Chambertin from 2001 for sentimental reasons that I keep to myself (the year we first met).
Mary has laid up a table for us in the small Chinese drawing room and she has really gone to town.
Candles burning everywhere – there must be at least twenty or thirty across the mantelpiece, in the alcoves and on either side of the fireplace – champagne cooling in an ice bucket and the table heavy with glass and silver.
Frankly, I am thinking, she’s slightly overdone it – there’s a sense of a soft-porn seduction scene, or is that just me?
– but Catherine cries, ‘Oh Mary, this is so so beautiful,’ and Mary looks thrilled.
That’s my housekeeper hooked again, and Catherine has been here less than an hour.
Mary has brought in the roast chicken, hands down my favourite thing to eat; we have a glass of cold champagne and the Chambertin warming by the fire.
Opposite me, in some weird twist of fate, is the woman I’ve loved like an illness for most of my adult life.
It’s hard to believe she’s here.
We used to say that we swapped thoughts, that they crossed somewhere in mid air, and it’s still exactly the same, for Catherine leans forward and says, ‘I keep thinking how I should be in bits because of what’s happening with me and Sam.
I should be feeling so guilty.
And instead I feel, I don’t know, just elated.
To be with you again.
To be back here, even for a short while.
Is that so wrong of me?
’
I think we both know her husband would say yes, very wrong, but I’m not him and I’m also not about to chase that smile from her face.
When Catherine smiles, it’s really something, I’d like to whip out my phone and record it, then work on a portrait later.
Smiling Catherine. You don’t see it very often.
It reminds me of the sketch I made of her, the one where she’s dressed in one of my shirts, mouth curved into a knowing smile.
It was one of the last days we would spend together, as it turned out, a time of such euphoric intensity that I really believed I’d come to know her better than I knew anyone.
We talked almost ceaselessly during our waking hours, all the time, whenever we weren’t making love.
Incredible to think I was Catherine’s first lover, for in the space of a few months the sex had become fast-tracked and experimental; to think of it right now – the things we did, the things she did – would be to implode.
It was the middle of the afternoon when I picked up my sketchpad and decided to draw her, just as she was, naked in the middle of our lived-in bed.
‘Not like this, surely?’ she’d said, suddenly prudish.
‘How can you possibly mind after everything we’ve just been doing?
’
‘Imagine if it fell into the wrong hands,’ she said, snatching up my white shirt, and that’s how I drew her, kneeling up on my bed, the shirt falling almost to her knees.
I rather liked the way she looked in it; I liked the sense of possession, the wearing of my things.
She’s hardly altered, this woman who sits on the other side of the table, lit by Mary’s candles, this flesh-and-blood Catherine.
‘I still have that sketch of you,’ I tell her, and instantly the smile fades.
‘I remember,’ she says.
‘We … broke up soon afterwards.’
Broke up, is that what you call it?
Desertion and abandonment are closer to the truth.
‘Do I look very different?’
I shake my head.
‘Exactly the same,’ I say, but it strikes me, as she asks this, that the real difference between then and now is in her eyes.
I captured our euphoria in that sketch; I think that’s why I like it so much.
The woman opposite me, same huge, expressive dark eyes, cannot mask her sadness.
There’s a sense tonight that we’re filling in the gaps, a decade and a half of them.
We swap histories, edited versions, with careful revisions.
She tries to keep Sam out of the conversation, I manage to avoid name-checking my friends, both of us trying to answer the unasked question, the only question: how did your life turn out without me in it?
She wants to know all about the house, what it’s like to live alone here.
The truth is, I’m hardly ever on my own.
Jack comes over most days to play tennis, swim or shoot, Harry is only a few minutes down the road and the girls come down at weekends and whenever they’re not working (which is most of the time in Rachel’s case).
But I’m not about to tell her that.
‘I’m good at being on my own.
’
I wonder as I say this if it’s true.
I can spend hours, whole days, whole nights, down at my studio, and when I’m painting I can forget everything else.
But there are nights when Jack is forced to stay at home with Celia, when Harry is in Bangkok or nowadays with Ling, and the girls are in London, when a listlessness comes over me.
I drink too much, I smoke a lot, I listen to music, I pass the time, but it feels exactly like that, a mapping-out of hours.
‘Did you always know you’d inherit this place?
’
‘From the age of about six, but I thought my father would inherit it first. I never imagined he would die so young.’
Catherine reaches across the table for my hand.
‘You once told me you felt responsible for his death. Do you remember?’
I nod as the memory of that night sears between us, the night she promised she would never leave.
‘Do you still feel like that?’
‘No, I don’t think so.
I was ten, how could it possibly have been my fault?
I just wish it hadn’t taken me all this time to realise it probably wasn’t my mother’s fault either.
I’ve always been so black and white about infidelity.
To me it’s the lowest crime.
You’re attracted to someone else?
Then you break up and move on.
I’ve spent my whole life hating my mother for betraying my father.
But I’ve come to realise there must have been two sides.
Maybe he wasn’t so easy to live with.
Maybe that’s why she looked to other people to make her feel good.
You can’t go round blaming everyone else.
Ultimately it was his fault and no one else’s.
’
Catherine is watching me with an expression of unutterable sadness and I assume she is thinking of ten-year-old me, the victim of parental suicide.
Or perhaps she is thinking of her own mother, dead at forty-six, yet another bizarre parallel between the two of us.
I want to say something to chase away the gloom, but before I can speak, she says, ‘You see that’s exactly what I feel.
You always have to take responsibility when things happen, the bad as well as the good.
’
And though I know she’s probably thinking about Sam and his affair and the possibility of them separating, there is something about her voice and her eyes, which are sorrowful and somehow haunting, that jars me and reminds me of the past. We keep coming back here, no matter how much we both try to avoid it.
This secret of hers, whatever it is, right now, it feels so close I could almost touch it.