Four months before Catherine
We are just leaving the studio when my mobile rings and Sam’s number flashes up, sending me into a spiral of panic.
I let the phone ring on to answer machine and then I go off on my own to the rose garden and sit down on a bench waiting for the message to come in, smiling with relief when I hear it.
‘Mama! It’s me. We miss you.
Call us!’
Daisy on Sam’s phone.
This I can handle. I love the way the kids sound much younger than they actually are whenever you hear them on the phone.
When I call back, she picks up all breathy and excited, sounding about five years old.
‘Where are you, Mama?’
The question I’ve dreaded.
‘Sitting in a beautiful rose garden at a friend’s house.
’
‘Which friend? Is it Liv?’
‘No, someone you haven’t met yet.
Liv is here too, of course.
’
My heart beats a little faster as I spin this version of the truth and quickly follow it with something else.
‘Tell me about your day. What have you been doing?’
They have been crabbing at Mevagissey, sitting on the harbour wall dangling lines studded with cubes of bacon.
Cornish pasties afterwards and ice creams from a shop that had thirty-two flavours.
I miss them suddenly, with a sharp, savage ache.
Their smooth, suntanned skin, their high voices, their black-soled summer feet.
Daisy’s laugh, surprisingly deep, a gin-soaked fishwife’s cackle, we always said.
Joe’s obsession with absurd random facts and talking-dog videos.
‘I miss you,’ I say.
‘Then come and see us, silly.’
‘But you’ll be home soon.
Only another day or two.
’
The conversation is over, apparently, for Daisy hands the phone to Sam and I have no preparation, none at all, just his voice on the other end of the line with its faintly northern intonation.
‘Hey.’
He sounds distant, from another lifetime almost. This man I am supposed to love.
There is so much to say that for a while, perhaps a whole minute, we say nothing.
I sit here on the stone bench, heart racing.
‘How are we going to work it all out?’ Sam asks eventually.
‘We’ll talk. When we get home, we’ll talk.
’
‘You must have been thinking about it.’
A wave of guilt breaks over me.
Of course I’ve been thinking about Sam, but not as much as I should have done.
For the past twenty-four hours I have been completely taken over by my love, lust, obsession – all three, probably – for you.
‘The truth is, I’m trying not to think about it too much.
But whatever we do and however we do it, we’ll make sure the kids are OK and that we’re OK, you and me.
As much as we can be.
’
‘Do you think you can forgive me?’
‘Oh Sam, I already have. I know why you did it. I understand. It’s not about that any more, not about Julia, I mean.
’
‘It never was, not really.’
‘No.’
Your name again, there between us, a ceaseless silent echo, just before we end the call.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ you ask when I come to find you a little later, but I shake my head.
What would be the point?
Neither of us wants to face reality when our time together is so short.
Neither of us wants to talk about the fact that I’m married with two children, and the thought of leaving them or forcing them to live without Sam is inconceivable.
The truth, the one we try our hardest to avoid, is that I married the wrong man.
But there was a reason for that.
In the afternoon you take me to Colton House for a late lunch.
I’m pretty interested to see this notorious shrine to decadence after the years of reading about it: the media frenzy in the papers when it opened; the outrage from those who don’t get through the censorious selection process, the gloating from those who do.
I’m not at all surprised that you are a member, a favourite tabloid bad boy not so long ago, the fucked-up posh kid everyone loved to write about.
‘So,’ I ask, ‘is Colton House really as horrible and pretentious as people say?’
You smile your usual smile.
‘Yes. You’ll love it.
’
Three or four times a week you’ll come here, you say, for a session with a personal trainer, to use the gym or the indoor pool and then breakfast with the papers.
Sometimes it’s an extended lunch with your friends or dinner in the private dining room for someone’s birthday.
‘Most days Jack or Harry will call and say, breakfast? Lunch? Bloody Mary? And even if they don’t, there’s always someone I know if I feel like company.
’
The temperature change is instant.
Do you feel it as I shoot my head around and stare out of the window at the speeding green, the curving, dipping landscape of your paradise?
Always it will be like this, those names enough to choke me.
Jack, especially Jack; every time I hear his name I am taken back to a place where I don’t want to go.
Instead I try to focus on the landscape, the hedgerows already burgeoning with red and purple, forced by summer’s extended heat into a new season.
I catch glimpses of rosehips, sloes, blackberries, and I can think, more calmly now, of my daughter, who loves little more than a blackberry-picking expedition, filling her Tupperware box with the blackest, ripest berries, which I would then turn into a crumble (or quite often into the bin a few days later).
With each of my children, especially when they were small, there was something so touchingly optimistic about gathering fruit, trailing scooters or tricycles as we worked our way along the hedgerows; those were moments of pure innocence for me, regained, relived, utterly absorbed.
Your phone pings with a sequence of arriving texts, one after the other, and eventually you pick it up from the side pocket and drop it onto my lap.
‘Switch it off for me, would you?’
‘Someone’s keen to get hold of you,’ I say, and as I click the little button on the side of the phone, I catch sight of the message on the screen.
CATHERINE?!! Surely some kind of joke?
Rx
‘Nice text from Rachel,’ I say, and my throat seems to close over just mentioning her name.
Over the years, I have known about you and Rachel; you couldn’t not have seen the pictures, the two of you staring out from some glitzy backdrop or other, champagne glass in hand, you a few inches taller than her, both bored and unsmiling, as if willing the photo to be over so that you could return to your superior private world.
But it was the nude portrait that really undid me, reinforcing the fact of your togetherness in a way I simply wasn’t prepared for.
Her nakedness, of course, your knowledge of her body, the way she looks out at you with the faintest smile, a lover’s joke.
You, I realise it now, are the kind of painter who can effortlessly portray emotion and mood; it separates you from all those amateurs who can render a perfect poppy-stippled cornfield with their A-level brushstrokes and still leave you thinking, so what?
I remember staring at an oil painting of your favourite view, and quite apart from the landmarks, the hills, the cathedral, the tor, it felt as if I could actually touch the weather; there’s a sense of grimness as the light begins to fade, but also your melancholy as you painted it.
With the painting of Rachel, it wasn’t so much the nudity – breasts, bush, nothing spared – but the visceral sense of sex, good sex, probably fantastic sex, that actually killed me.
I know all too well how good that sex would have been.
‘I sent Rachel a text,’ you say now.
‘The news is out, they are all going crazy. You can probably imagine.’
‘But I haven’t even told Sam.
’
‘It’s all right, I’ve asked them to keep it quiet.
They won’t say a word.
’
They. Does that mean you also told Jack?
The last time I saw him was at a party in my final year.
My mother had died a few months before; I was in so much pain and I didn’t know what to do with it.
I locked it away and tried to impersonate the girl I’d once been; I don’t think I managed very well.
It was rare for me to go out, but for once, just a few weeks before exams, Sam had insisted.
‘Come on, a last fling before finals.’
Jack caught me alone, waiting for Sam to come back from the bar.
I stood frozen in the headlamp of his gaze.
Big, overdramatic kisses on my cheeks, rapturous greeting.
‘It amazes me that we share the same university town and yet I never see you,’ he said, as though bumping into me was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
I said nothing while my heart pulsed the drama of my mind.
It didn’t last more than thirty seconds.
Sam came back with two glasses of wine, took my elbow and led me away without even bothering to acknowledge Jack.
‘Catherine?’
Your voice nudges me from bleakness.
‘You’re worrying about things that aren’t going to happen.
We’re not going to see Jack or Rachel or Harry.
I’ve promised you that.
And we don’t have much time left.
Don’t you think we should just enjoy it?
’
‘I’m sorry.’
You smile as if it doesn’t matter, as if we can step over my demons and pretend we’re the people we once were.
And I tell myself to try harder.
Colton House is every bit as impressive as the papers would have you believe.
You arrive via a long, tree-lined drive to the house, with its famous Georgian exterior of honey-coloured stone.
It’s a beautiful building, a Jane Austen dream, but in comparison to your place it’s nothing, that’s the funny thing about it.
The bar has been raised so high I feel almost disappointed.
On the way to the main house we pass the swimming pool – a long, slim, infinity-edged affair filled with shrieking children and surrounded by tanned, toned mothers reading magazines or chatting idly to friends: another day of the summer holidays ticked off with glorious ease.
Oh, it’s a different life, this one, no catching a bus to the germ-filled leisure centre, no trailing ten deep round the V no amount of rubbing out or colouring in could change that.
But had I done the right thing for you?
I wondered, as the years passed and the dust settled and the wound grew if not less, then less obvious.
Were you and Rachel happy, the way you and I once were?
I’d ask myself as I pored over some new photograph, drinking in her professionally blow-dried hair, her beautiful unsmiling face.
But of course the photographs could never answer that, just as my catalogue of family life, the endless mobile phone snaps, the videos and scrapbooks I make for Sam each Christmas, doesn’t tell the full backstory either.
An ease falls across our afternoon.
There’s good warmth in the sun, the champagne is perfectly cold and the seafood is even better than our first lunch in that salt-streaked blue hut.
While we eat, you tell me about Harry and Ling, the only girl ever to have made an impression on him.
‘It was instant, a love at first sight thing, for Harry, anyway. Ling took a bit convincing, I think. But they were married within a month.’
‘Doesn’t that worry you?
How can you know someone properly in a month?
’
‘I was worried until I met her. Then I understood. She’s exactly right for him.
She’s smart and funny and he’s much happier with her around.
And they seem to be besotted with each other.
’
You tell me about Harry’s twenties, ‘a loveless and pretty lonely decade, I’d guess on reflection, though none of us realised it at the time.
It wasn’t that girls weren’t interested in him and his great big house and his title, because they were, but something, somewhere stopped him.
Repression, I guess.
This winter he decided to go travelling.
He wanted to do it properly, so he bought himself a backpack and flew to Malaysia.
He travelled through Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, the hippy trail.
And he sounded so energized and full of life whenever he called up; the trip really changed him.
Thailand was the last stop, where he met Ling.
He sent me a text. “I got married today.” I asked him why he decided to marry her and he said, “I knew I couldn’t be without her. And luckily, she felt the same.’
‘So it’s a proper love story,’ I say, and you smile your funny smile and I know you’re thinking about us, about our love story and the parallel universe we once inhabited so briefly.
I’m trying to keep myself away from that crossroads, the wrong turning I could never get back from. When you and I were together I was happier and more alive than ever before or since. Anything seemed possible and then, suddenly, nothing. My world literally shrank overnight.
I begin to tell you about my children, trying, I think, to anchor myself back into my real world.
‘Joe seems pretty serious when you first meet him,’ I tell you. ‘I was still grief-stricken when he was born, and his babyhood was quiet; we didn’t mix much. But he’s funny, he can do these pitch-perfect impersonations within minutes of meeting someone. He’d have you straight away, voice, mannerisms, everything. Whereas Daisy is his complete opposite. She’s incredibly confident and self-assured. She always speaks her mind, whether you like it or not.’
You reach for my hand.
‘You were like that when I knew you,’ you say, but your voice is kind; there’s no judgement. I know the question you want to ask: what happened to change you? And I also know that you’re not going to ask it.
‘Are you ready to go?’
You press your thumb into the centre of my palm and now I know exactly what’s in your mind. You’re thinking of this morning, remembering how it was me who took control this time, teasing you, making you wait, until you could no longer bear it. I want to do that again, I want to make you feel the way I feel, desperate, erotically possessed, so much so that I might just rip off all my clothes and lie down here in the middle of the terrace, pulling you down on top of me. The thought of it is making me smile, and you say, ‘What?’ as you reach into your jeans pocket for your wallet, although your own smile tells me that you’ve probably guessed. Our eyes are fixed on each other, the corners of your mouth turning upwards this time, when a shadow falls across the table and a voice – loud, look-at-me, public school remodelled as estuary – cuts right across the last fifteen years and plunges me into gloom.