Fifteen years earlier
You and Jack had a dinner party, a grown-up one supposedly, though it certainly didn’t end that way.
You had pushed together a couple of tables, covered them with white linen cloths; there were flowers and candles and cute little cellophane wraps of Belgian truffles.
Your uncle sent a case of expensive wine.
Alexa arrived and scattered little gold stars across the table.
She was wearing a bright pink dress, a tiny thing, and her skin even in the height of winter was smooth and golden.
You had gone to so much trouble.
Oysters from the fishmonger, a beef casserole you’d paid someone to make, chocolate tarts ordered at crazy expense from Fortnum you were, you often told me, closer than most siblings.
But he was bigger than that.
If you and he ever went off to the pub, he made sure to invite me along, and when you and your friends visited your uncle’s house one weekend – I’d refused to come, battling an essay crisis, secretly glad of a little time alone – he had tried hard to make me change my mind.
Alexa, who, like me, stayed over most nights, had also become a good friend.
But there was resistance to our relationship, mainly from Rachel and her girlfriends.
Charlotte Lomax in particular, another manicured blonde, loved to voice her dislike.
‘Everyone knows she’s in love with Lucian,’ Liv said whenever Charlotte’s spitefulness rattled me.
I wasn’t surprised that Rachel and Charlotte were fighting for your attention that night.
You were wearing one of your father’s old suits with a black T-shirt and trainers, the first time I’d ever seen you in something formal, and you looked almost shockingly handsome.
Jack did too, of course, the undisputed university pin-up.
He was wearing an identical vintage suit (his taste, I always thought, was an exact replica of yours) with a white shirt and narrow black tie and he was at his most charming, bringing Alexa and me glasses of champagne to drink while we changed, loitering on the edge of the bath talking to us while we jostled for space in front of the mirror.
You and Jack were good at parties, even back then.
There were twelve of us, high on champagne cocktails and just the luxury of the thing; it was the absolute antithesis of any student party I’d ever been to, no cut-price Valpolicella, no pasta bake, no one passed out in the bathroom.
I hoped we would be sitting next to each other.
Privately I’d had a little fantasy about you sliding your hand beneath the tablecloth and working your way up my bare thighs – if I’d told you that, you would have changed the table plan instantly.
But instead I was sitting between Jack and Harry, while you had Rachel and Charlotte, your vixen adorers, slugging it out to left and right.
They left no room for anyone else, your attention monopolised right through the casserole and the chocolate tart and even when the plates were cleared away (by paid, uninvited students from the same year; no one but you and Jack would have had the audacity), you remained a tight little cluster of three.
Most people were smoking and drinking glasses of Vin Santo, which your uncle had sent along with the wine.
Harry, whom I’d found it hardest to get to know (‘It’s nothing personal,’ you told me whenever I mentioned this.
‘He’s never been able to talk to girls’), was opening up to me about his home life.
It sounded like something out of a Grimms’ fairy tale.
A huge house that was so cold in winter he had to wear socks and two jumpers to bed.
A nanny who had been passed down through three generations.
‘She’s in her nineties now.
I used to have to tie her shoelaces because she was too stiff to bend down.
I think she slept through most of my childhood.
’
A father who drove a horse and trap to town when he lost his licence for drink-driving.
A mother who used to read the Racing Post cover to cover several times through, a dressing gown over her clothes to keep warm.
I told Harry it reminded me of Cold Comfort Farm , all those eccentric characters living together in a damp old house.
‘Nothing so interesting, I’m afraid.
They’re fantastically dull, my parents.
They only care about grouse and salmon.
And their animals. They love their dogs and their horses.
That’s about it. No other interests.
No more topics. Dinners are so boring and so bloody long.
The only good times are when Lucian or Jack come to stay.
’
I began to understand that night what bound you so tightly to your friends – both you and Harry had parents who had disappointed you, your teenage years characterised by a lack of love.
Once you’d cut yourself off from your mother and sisters you lived between Jack’s parents’ house and your uncle’s during the school holidays.
The three of you, I saw now, had formed your own family, only recently allowing Alexa and Rachel to join the clique.
No wonder you were going to such lengths to have me accepted.
Someone had brought a bottle of tequila with them and it was travelling the length of the table with accompanying chunks of lemon and a little silver dish of salt.
When the bottle reached Jack, he poured out a shot and handed it to me.
‘No thanks.’
Jack shook his head slowly from side to side.
When he grinned, all I could see were his perfect straight white teeth.
Film-star teeth that had cost a fortune; you told me he’d blown an entire legacy fixing them.
My stomach lurched a little when he smiled at me, at his most irresistible.
‘No?’ He put his head on one side.
‘But I think you mean yes?’
‘I tried it once, it tastes like paint stripper.’
Jack folded his arms. Another wide, tooth-flashing smile.
‘I’m wait-ing.’
It was a challenge and we gazed at each other, his bright eyes boring into mine.
I remember thinking how Jack used his poster-boy good looks like some girls use their beauty to get whatever they want.
Poor Alexa, was what I thought as I knocked back the tequila shot with a grimace.
He was flirting with me openly, no matter that his girlfriend and my boyfriend were seated around the same table.
The party began to get wilder.
Alexa put on some music and most of us started dancing.
I was a little drunk by now, and when you came up behind me, wrapping your arms around my waist and kissing my neck, I thought I’d never felt happier.
I turned around and whispered into your ear, the words that were permanently in my head but I hadn’t yet been brave enough to say.
‘I. Love. You.’
You looked at me with such delight, your whole face transformed by pleased surprise.
‘Me too,’ you said, whispering back into my ear.
‘Catherine Elliot, me too.’