Four months before Lucian
The sketch is nearly finished.
I am just shading the ends of her hair, trying to get right the way it kinks rather than curls, a slight curve that finishes the smooth, straight sheet of almost-blackness.
I am wondering if I will turn the drawing into something else, an oil probably; I am thinking how the blackness would work well as a violet or blue, but then what would be the right colour for her skin?
I am so lost in thought that at first I don’t notice Catherine has become bored and uncomfortable.
She stretches her legs out in front of her, shifting her weight from one hip to the other.
She sighs.
‘Get up and walk around if you like. I’ve almost finished.
’
She moves around the studio, stopping to look at some canvases, bypassing others, not uttering a single word.
I rarely invite anyone into my studio and I don’t like people to look unless they are going to look properly.
The anodyne over-flattery, I hate that.
‘Oh wonderful, darling,’ Alexa says whenever she comes here, and it’s nice of her, of course it is, but it also means nothing.
I prefer someone to say I like the way you’ve done the clouds but I don’t really get that tree, it feels too brown, too blocky.
Because that’s how it is for me too.
Maybe I overemphasised the tree, maybe instead of hinting or suggesting, I sledgehammered it onto the canvas.
Painting for me is like one long uninterrupted lesson even though I’m not sure I’m always learning very much or I’ll ever be entirely happy with even one piece of work.
A while ago I realised that all I had to do was show up in the studio every day and that eventually I would get somewhere; there would be moments when it worked, when I felt at peace.
And those moments of utter absorption, a self-contentment I cannot find any other way, well, it’s the only reason for doing it.
I am just about to call Catherine over to look at her drawing when she spies a stack of canvases in the corner.
The one facing us is a slightly grotesque Bacon-esque nude, a male, full-frontal, intentionally anatomical and unforgiving.
‘He’s pretty full-on,’ she says, her first words in a while.
I tell her about the model in my life drawing class, an old guy who always seems to catch my eye when he’s rearranging his testicles.
‘Perhaps it’s love,’ she says, casually moving the canvas to one side.
And there, hidden away behind Mr Testicles, is an oil painting of Rachel, her blonde hair messy, up-all-night smudges beneath her eyes, a cigarette trailing smoke off canvas.
Smoking (Hot) Nude we jokingly titled it at the time.
So now Rachel is on the agenda.
For a few seconds the air stills and I wait for Catherine to say something, but she doesn’t.
‘Do you mind?’
‘How can I mind?’
She still hasn’t turned around to look at me, and I detect a slight shakiness in her voice.
She minds.
‘Catherine.’
I’m up and over to her corner of the studio in seconds.
‘Look at me.’
She smiles, shamefacedly, but I catch the sheen of tears.
‘Pathologically jealous,’ she says.
‘Sorry.’
‘Says the woman who is married with two children. Look. If there was a way for us to be together, to give it a chance at least, then that is what I’d want.
I don’t need to question it, even after all this time apart.
I’d want to give it a go.
But you have two children, we know the obstacles.
And if you go back to Sam, my life will carry on as it always has.
And that involves Rachel, as a friend first and foremost. Really, there’s nothing to be jealous about.
’
‘Does she know about us?’
‘I’ve been avoiding my friends.
Like you wanted. They’re calling and texting me like crazy.
’
‘I feel you should tell her at least.’
‘I will.’
We go back to looking at the painting.
Catherine says, ‘She looks beautiful but a little sad, which is how I always think of her somehow, I don’t know why.
’
‘More than a little sad. She’s heartbroken but in denial.
She just keeps going to the parties and taking the drugs and fighting her way through the hangovers and pretending that everything’s fine; more than fine, it’s great.
But of course we all know it isn’t.
’
I tell Catherine about Max, Rachel’s son, eleven now.
I tell her about the day she lost custody, her sobbing on the floor of my London flat, fat rivers of tears that left patches of wet on my Moroccan carpet.
I tell her about Rachel’s five-minute rehab, her shock arrival at Soho House, martini glass in hand, when we’d just been discussing her detox.
Through all this Catherine listens, and when I’m finished, she says, ‘She’ll get there eventually, and when she does, she’ll be able to work it out with her son, make him understand.
You can’t stop until you’re ready.
’
‘I think he’s starting to come around,’ I tell her.
‘She’s meant to be seeing him sometime this week.
I’m pretty sure it’s tomorrow.
’
And it occurs to me that Catherine is the opposite of Jack’s wife, Celia, who cannot help leaking silent judgement whenever Max is mentioned.
You see it in her eyes, her mouth, her shoulders.
She can exude disapproval from the back of her head.
It’s not that she’s unkind; more that she is so obsessed with her own small son and with mothering in general that Rachel’s ‘dysfunction’ – she actually called it that once – horrifies her.
We stand in front of nude Rachel – funny, really, how wildly personal and inappropriate this portrait seems when you begin to analyse it: her smooth, pale brown nipples, the deep beige shadows marking out the undercurve of her breasts, the neat strip of hair – seeing but not seeing, for Catherine is in a trance, the two of us caught on a staircase of memory.
I think we’d been together only a week or so, holed up in my bedroom for almost the whole of that time, in the Clifton townhouse I shared with Jack.
He brought us a takeaway once, I remember, and apart from that we lived on tea and toast and bottles of very expensive wine my uncle had given me.
Rachel’s sharp, impatient knock on the door startled us, post- or pre-coital as we always were in those days and I threw Catherine one of my T-shirts and wrapped a towel around my waist. Rachel came in and stood by the door looking around the room – the rumpled bed, the tangle of Catherine’s clothes and mine on the floor, a litter of mugs on my desk – and her pretty face was tense with disapproval.
We’d slept together after a drunken party the very first week of term – an unmemorable scuffle on the bathroom floor, as I recall – and never since, but I knew she was in love with me.
Or thought she was at least.
‘Hi, Rach,’ I said.
‘You know Catherine, don’t you?
’
It wasn’t the smoothest of introductions, not the best setting, the two of us half-naked on the bed, Rachel, even back then, too well dressed for a student, with her gold jewellery and her expensive clothes.
Catherine said, ‘Hi,’ but Rachel didn’t respond with even the most cursory of glances.
‘When are we going to see you?’ Her voice was plaintive.
‘Are you coming out with us tonight? There’s a party.
’
‘I doubt it,’ I said.
‘Unless Catherine wants to.’
I looked over at Catherine, but she had shrunk right into the corner, as if she could make herself invisible under Rachel’s disinterested gaze.
‘I’m going to have a quick coffee with Jack before I go to the library,’ Rachel said.
‘Coming?’
I tried to persuade Catherine to come with me as I threw on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans.
‘Rachel’s just a bit jealous of you, that’s all.
She’ll love you once she gets to know you.
They all will.’
But Catherine shook her head.
‘You go,’ she said. ‘I’m fine here.
’
In the kitchen, Rachel and Jack were standing by the sink clearly talking about me, and I walked into a hostile atmosphere of things half said.
‘Sometimes you can be so unfriendly, Rach. You made Catherine feel really bad back there.’
‘I don’t think she’s the girl for you.
Sorry, but I have to tell you.
’
I looked at Jack who had annoyed me by saying nothing.
‘Presumably you disagree?’
‘Of course I like Catherine. You know I do. I think the point Rachel is trying to make is that we don’t really see you any more.
It’s as if all you care about is her.
’
The two of them, standing there, all po-faced and sanctimonious.
Anger made me thoughtless; I didn’t care about Rachel and the pain of her unrequited love, or the way Jack had supported me through the hardship of my teens and now I was dismissing him like a jealous kid.
‘I guess neither of you know that feeling when all you want is to be left alone with someone. Can’t you just be civil to her, Rach?
Is that really too much to ask?
’
Up until that point we had formed a pretty tight group of five: Jack, Harry and I, who’d been friends since school, and the girls, Rachel and Alexa, a new addition, all of us addicted to good times at the exclusion of pretty much everything else.
We had money and time and youth, I guess, and an unconscious desire to fritter it all.
Rachel from the outset had insisted on exclusive friendship; she managed it with her noli me tangere reserve and pinpoint put-downs and with the simple fact that she was basically more fun than anyone I’d ever met.
If she wanted us to herself, she could have us, was my view.
And then I met Catherine.
I feel ashamed now at the way I turned away from them, especially Rachel, whose eyes were vivid with tears.
But I’d found love, after a decade of intense loneliness.
Erotic love. I hadn’t known it could consume in this way, so that all I could think about, the only thoughts I had, were what we had just been doing to each other and what we might like to try next.
That she was a virgin when she met me and yet had matched, sometimes even exceeded, the extent of my passion had tipped me over the edge.
I was hooked on her, addicted, obsessed, and nothing and no one else mattered.
‘She didn’t like me, did she?
’ Catherine asks, fifteen years later, as we stand here in front of beautiful, naked, thirty-something Rachel, and I know that, as usual, our thoughts are running side by side.
‘More, I think, she liked me too much.’
‘And now? Does she still like you too much?’
She does and she doesn’t, is what I think.
Sometimes I know that Rachel’s obsession with me – there, I’ve admitted it – is really just another rung of her drug addiction.
She thinks she loves me but the truth is it’s the idea of me and perhaps my unavailability that she loves, in the same way she craves hedonism and rule-breaking.
Drugs are an empty experience ultimately, and every time she wakes, or rather fails to sleep, through the slicing grittiness of dawn, she knows that.
Loving me is an escape, a front, a screen to hide behind, and it’s exactly the same with her coke habit.
An out-of-control, drug-addicted life is easier to deal with than the harsh issues that lie beneath it: perhaps that she doesn’t feel capable of being a mother, perhaps that she doesn’t like herself enough to warrant the love of someone else.
But enough of the cod psychology.
Like Catherine says, Rachel has got further to fall.
‘She thinks she still loves me, though believe me, it’s not based on anything real.
’ We stare at each other for a long moment, and then I turn Rachel’s portrait to the wall and we kiss.