Four months before Catherine
I am in a fish tank, that’s what it feels like, submerged beneath a constant flow of water, barely able to comprehend the one-way assault of Celia’s relentless talk.
She has clung to me with a certain desperation, the outsider at the party, the girl no one wants to talk to, least of all her husband.
If it wasn’t for my preoccupation with my past – and the way it has been hurled unceremoniously into the heart of my present – I would be feeling more sorry for her.
Jack stands beside you, talking while you mix our drinks, telling you about some film venture he’s involved with, every phrase he utters weighted with self-belief.
‘They loved the treatment, now it’s just a question of getting the funding.
But I don’t see that being a problem with a project of this kind.
Everyone’s going to want a slice of it.
’
It occurs to me that perhaps you, with your limitless wealth, are his funding target.
I wonder if you realise?
And how much money you might have given him in the past.
When Jack moves over to the fireplace, you are left alone with Rachel, your heads bent towards each other, brown against blonde as you talk.
I can imagine your hands on her body, I can imagine her pretty lipsticked mouth brushing across your skin.
She is beautiful, in that carefully put-together way, with a glossiness, a sheen I could not even aspire to.
Everything about Rachel seems to shine: her hair, her skin, her jewellery, her top, a T-shirt made from bronze and khaki sequins, which would be drab on anyone else.
She is at ease in this life.
I watched as she greeted Mary with a hug, I saw her taking bowls out of a cupboard and filling them with olives from the fridge, pistachios from the larder, the house and its way of life as familiar as her own.
Alexa is the same. I see the way she crouches down beside your uncle’s vinyl collection, boxes and boxes of them, flipping through albums until she finds the perfect choice.
Blur’s ‘Girls perhaps you wouldn’t notice it if you weren’t as attuned to Jack’s dark side as I am.
Celia’s whirlwind ran out some time ago, I’m guessing.
She leans forward, voice lowered.
It’s as if she’s reading my mind.
‘If I’m honest, Jack doesn’t seem so interested in me and Freddie any more; all he really wants to do is spend his time with Lucian and Harry.
’
‘Not much has changed then. At university they were inseparable. They didn’t need anyone else.
’
‘He didn’t want a child, he did it for me.
He’s very good with Freddie, when he wants to be, but he can switch it on and off.
’
I think of Sam, a father at twenty-two, before he was ready, probably, but God how he rose to the challenge.
The thing about Sam is that he prefers fatherhood to anything else, not in a saccharine way – he just gets children, he likes being with them, it’s his escape, his chosen indulgence.
‘Lots of men are like that,’ I say, to make Celia feel better, although I’m not sure it’s true.
A generation ago, perhaps.
The fathers I know are exactly the same as the mothers, rising in the middle of the night to administer Calpol, changing nappies as a matter of course.
Why wouldn’t they be?
‘How long have you been married for?’ Celia’s question – unexpected, disarming – startles me.
‘Me? Oh. God. Thirteen years, fourteen in April.’
‘You must have been so young.’
‘Yes. We were both twenty one.’
‘And you’re not together now.
Do you mind me asking about it?
’
Do I? The thought of Sam and the children cloaks me in panic.
I am so far away from them, or that’s how it feels as I sit in the heart of this glittering world, where cocktails are drunk and sequins worn almost as a prerequisite on an otherwise random Thursday night.
Right now I crave my old life, my real life, quiet, measured, the opposite of this.
‘Sam and I are having a break from each other; we’re trying to work out what to do.
I’m not sure how we’ll handle it.
’
She leans forwards conspiratorially, voice lowered.
‘Jack says Lucian has been in love with you all these years. That he never got over you.’
‘Really? Jack said that?’
Celia smiles unexpectedly.
‘And obviously Jack likes to be Lucian’s number one at all times.
He doesn’t take competition well.
’
‘I remember,’ I say, though I want to push this knowledge away, the memory that must always come with it.
‘Lucian and Jack, they just, well, really love each other. It’s that three-people-in-the-marriage thing; sometimes I can take it, other times I can’t.
’
Harry arrives now brandishing a bottle of gold-coloured liquid, his free arm wrapped around his wife.
My heart lurches just to see him again.
The swooping vertigo of time travel, the sharp jab of the past. Harry standing in the doorway of my university flat, his voice loaded with emotion.
‘I’m asking you, please, to stay away from him.
’
You may have forgiven me for the way I abandoned you with a cruelty and coldness that shocked everyone at the time.
But that doesn’t account for your friends.
I was hated, despised, denigrated in certain quarters of university life for the rest of my time there.
The heartless girl who’d brought you to the brink of a breakdown, refusing to explain why I’d left, or to see you ever again.
I remember the rumours that reached me in those God-awful weeks after we’d broken up.
It was said you were drinking yourself to death, drinking right through the day and most of the night, vodka on waking, empty bottles of brandy that littered your bed.
Liv had found you alone and incoherent in the pub one night; the only words she could understand were my name and the tortured questioning over why I had left.
Even she found it hard to defend me back then.
‘You broke his heart,’ she said.
‘And then you ran off home without even trying to explain. All anyone wants to know is why and I don’t know what to tell them.
’
People spoke about your estranged mother, an adulterous drunk whom you blamed for your father’s suicide.
Suddenly you, who had been envied and feted, were a subject of pity and concern.
And me? Well, I was universally abhorred for bringing about your downfall.
Despite my trepidation, I can’t help feeling curious at this first sighting of Ling, the young woman who has captured Harry’s heart.
She is pretty and slight, the top of her head resting at Harry’s shoulder, long hair which almost reaches her waist. What I notice, in the seconds before Ling and Harry reach me, is how they cling to one another in that slightly frantic way of new love.
The incessant touching, the reluctance to be parted for even one moment.
I remember it well.
When Harry smiles and says: ‘Catherine, I’m so happy to see you again,’ I remember how much I liked him, how much I wanted him to like me.
At the time, losing his approval felt like the harshest blow.
He puts a hand on each of my shoulders and looks into my eyes.
‘It’s been too long.
This should have happened sooner.
’
It feels intense, this, a sort of apology, a smoothing-over of our chequered past.
‘Yes, it should,’ I say, forcing myself to smile back at him.
He keeps hold of Ling’s hand as he tells me about their nought-to-sixty love affair.
‘We were married within four weeks of meeting each other,’ he says.
‘Lots of red tape but we got it sorted.’
‘Harry loves to bribe people,’ Ling says, laughing at him.
‘He’s very good at it.
’
‘I was determined not to come home without you, that’s all.
’
There are minutes of relief now, if you can call it that, when Harry goes off to join you and Jack by the fire, leaving Ling, Celia and me, the outsiders, alone on the sofas.
I watch them in their separate corners – Rachel and Alexa conferring in their expressive silent-movie language, Lucian, Harry and Jack laughing and smoking by the fire – and it seems to me that they are connected as if by an invisible string.
There is so much I want to ask Ling who sits beside me, still and composed, seemingly with no need to fill these first moments of silence.
I want to know what it’s like being married to Harry, thirty-something aristocrat with his legendary twenty-three-bedroom house.
What’s it like living in Somerset, land of fields and sheep and druids, after her existence in one of the most frenetic places in the world.
How was it leaving her family, when does she think she’ll see them again, will they come here, have they even met Harry yet?
But somehow all these questions feel too intrusive and I struggle to find the right thing to say.
In the end it’s Celia who breaks the ice.
‘Tell us how you met Harry, Ling.’
‘You know he was a guest in my hotel, right?’
She breaks off to laugh.
‘When I say ‘my hotel’, I mean I was on the front desk.
And one day Harry walked in, Panama hat, great big baggy shorts, face glowing like a lobster from sunburn.
’
‘And without thinking, I said, ‘English?
’ And he laughed and pointed to his scarlet face and said: ‘How on earth did you guess?’
We got talking and we just sort of clicked.
’
‘Did your parents mind you leaving Thailand?’ I ask.
‘They’re used to me making rash decisions.
I left home at fifteen to find a job in Bangkok.
Started out as a maid in the same hotel and worked my way up.
I was lucky, the owners are good people, they treated me like family, even gave me a room for a while.
When I told my mother I was marrying a man I’d known only a few weeks, she laughed and said, ‘Why does that not surprise me?’
‘But who you were marrying, wasn’t that a shock to her?
’ Celia says.
It’s something I’ve been wondering myself but didn’t like to ask.
‘I didn’t know what I was walking into back then.
Only that Harry lived alone, somewhere in the South West, which meant nothing to me.
On the plane to England he said, “there’s something I should probably tell you”.
And I thought, here we go, here comes the dark past. He’s killed a man.
He’s got some weird sexual fetish.
But he said: “My house is embarrassingly large. It might be a bit of a shock.” And when we drew up at the Grange, we both started laughing and couldn’t stop.
And eventually I said: “I’ll try to put up with it.”’
I’m so entranced by the story of Harry and Ling it comes as a shock when Jack’s voice cuts across our conversation, clear and strong, a statement of intent.
‘I haven’t had a chance to talk to Catherine yet.
’
Yet. In his words – a surface pleasantry – I hear a smile that is meant just for me.
I know what it would be like to look into those bright blue eyes; I know exactly what I would find in them.
Something must be showing in my face because Ling reaches out and places her hand on my arm.
On her wedding finger is the biggest, brightest diamond.
‘Catherine,’ she says, ‘would you mind showing me Lucian’s swimming pool before it gets too dark?
Harry is going to put in a new pool and he wanted me to have a look at it.
’
Outside, away from everyone, even you, for a moment I have the urge to cry.
And Ling sees this, I think.
She says, ‘You don’t like Jack, do you?
’
I look at her, surprised.
‘Is it that obvious?’
She shrugs.
‘When he came over, I saw how tense you were. That’s why I suggested coming out here.
’
‘Thank you.’
‘I’ve only met Harry’s friends a few times and I always have the feeling they’d rather be on their own.
’
‘When Lucian and I were together it took a long time for them to accept me. And when we broke up I hurt him very badly and they hated me for it. Even Harry who doesn’t hate anyone.
’
‘We’ve all done things we’re ashamed of,’ Ling says.
‘No one ever knows the whole story.’
We have reached your beautiful swimming pool now and we stand in front of it staring at the smooth sheet of water, which looks almost emerald green in the evening light.
I can see why Harry refused to leave Thailand without Ling.
There is something about her that is instantly calming, and as we stand together in the darkening night, my fear of five minutes ago begins to dissipate.