Four months before Catherine
Harry’s kitchen is a 1950s time capsule – mustard-yellow cabinets, cast-iron pans dangling from hooks in the ceiling, a rusting Aga that looks about a hundred years old.
Ling is standing over the hob, stirring something in a wok, but she turns as I come into the room.
There’s warmth and familiarity in her smile; already it’s as if I’m an old friend.
‘Catherine!’ she says as we embrace.
‘I’m so glad you came.
’
The room smells of ginger, lemongrass and brave measures of Thai fish sauce.
There are glass bowls filled with prawns and chunks of beef marinating in amber-coloured liquid, the flesh flecked with specks of green and tiny pale half-moons of ginger.
Beside them on the counter are twenty or more jars and bottles and packets with red and yellow labels and the distinctive Thai lettering.
She picks up a jar and shows it to me.
‘This is red limestone paste; I was surprised to find it. Filip drove me to the Thai supermarket in Bristol this morning – I was so glad, I bought the whole shop.’
‘You must get homesick.’
‘It’s more that when I saw all these familiar bottles and jars and the crates of Thai vegetables and the huge fat bunches of herbs, I realised I could still eat all the things I love.
And that made me feel happy, not homesick.
I left my village six years ago, I’m used to living without my family.
’
I sit on a stool drinking my Bloody Mary, watching Ling as she tips beef into the wok and leans away from the hot, splashing fat.
‘Will they come and visit?’
‘I hope so.’
She hesitates for a moment.
‘We haven’t told anyone yet.
But we’re planning a wedding party.
Harry wants to fly my whole family over.
I keep telling him, there’s a lot of us.
You have no idea.’
‘You’ve certainly got the space.
’
Ling laughs.
‘Crazy, isn’t it?
And craziest of all is that it already feels normal.
My sister has started calling me Lady Muck.
Harry thinks it’s hilarious.
This morning he brought me coffee in bed and said: ‘Cup of coffee, Lady M?’
Ling somehow manages to roll her eyes and look enchanted at the same time.
‘Maybe I’ll start styling myself that way.
It has a good ring to it, no?
’
To me the dining room is hideous, with its patchwork of framed paintings on the ceiling (robust nudes, cherubs with tactfully placed wafting skeins of fabric, that sugar-coated, mock-Renaissance style), gilded candelabras, a long polished table with a fierce, mirror-like shine.
The room is panelled in dark oak on the bottom half and hung with rose-pink damask wallpaper on the top half, where several po-faced portraits also line the walls.
All that’s missing is a red cord to keep the National Trust hoi polloi out.
Rachel and Alexa lounge in their gilt-edged chairs, entirely comfortable in these ornate surroundings.
‘Is there an ashtray, darling?’ Rachel asks, lighting up as soon as she finds one, and it feels all wrong somehow, like smoking in a museum.
And after only a sip or two of wine she pulls a face.
‘It’s Riesling, isn’t it?
Can we have some rosé, Harry, it’s a bit too punchy for my hangover,’ and Harry pulls out his phone, sends a text and two minutes later, Filip is in the room carrying several bottles of pale pink rosé on a silver tray.
If you’re rich enough, it seems Colton House comes to you.
Lunch is wonderful, more delicious than anything I’ve eaten in a Thai restaurant, and it also puts Ling right in the centre of attention.
I see her slowly coming into focus to Alexa and Rachel, I see how she accepts it, this sudden beam of spotlight, without pride or shyness, just the same quiet confidence I noticed before.
She tells Rachel, because Rachel asks – probably the first time she’s asked Ling anything – about learning to cook in the village where she grew up.
‘We were taught by all the mothers and aunts and grandmothers in the village. But there was one woman, Apinya, who was a really clever cook. She grew her own herbs and spices and she always tried out new things, like beef with bitter chocolate or fish and orange soup, and even on the days when rice was all we had she would make something interesting, like spicy fritters with coriander salsa. I miss her food, I am always trying to remember it.’
‘It sounds such an idyllic way of life,’ says Alexa.
‘Why did you leave?’
‘I wouldn’t describe it as idyllic, exactly.
Everyone in my village is very poor, if you saw how we lived you’d be shocked,’ she says.
‘We have enough to eat when the crops are good but there’s never money for anything else.
It’s normal to go and work in the city so you can send money back to your family.
The room falls silent.
All of us, no doubt, pondering the stark difference between Ling’s childhood and her new life here, the equanimity with which she has accepted it.
Talk turns to your party, this time a roll call of guests; nearly all of them, it seems, from our shared past. I catch you watching me as the panic begins to descend and I wonder if you’re starting to understand.
Do you see why I always want to run rather than face the past, I always want to hide away?
Can you imagine what it is like to feel universally hated for one thing but to deserve that hatred for quite another?
‘Charlotte Lomax is coming,’ Alexa says, firebombing her name across the table.
‘You’ll remember her, Catherine.
She used to hang around with us at the same time you did.
She’s married now, to Johnnie Wilson, that long-haired guy from the year above.
He was into the Grateful Dead back then, the hair, the headband, the whole thing.
’
Memories I don’t want, filling my brain, a slowly rising bath of self-hate.
Charlotte Lomax was probably the worst, a standard-issue Sloane with her shoulder-length blonde hair, velvet hairband and the solid-gold heart that nestled between her collarbones.
She was in love with you, so it was said, and when I left you she tried to fill the void.
It didn’t work; you were beyond help at that point.
Rumours on the ground said you were heading for a breakdown.
We may have shared a town but we never came face to face again.
I’d see you in the distance sometimes, ten seconds of looking while my heart beat faster, before I veered sharply in the opposite direction.
We were at a party together once, for a few minutes, though you didn’t realise it.
I’d thought it safe, traditional student fare and not your kind of thing at all, post-pub, bring a bottle, at someone’s flat in Bedminster, an unfashionable part of town back then.
A snarl-up of bicycles in the hall, cheap red wine from polystyrene cups, the atmosphere dense with smoke.
I was with Liv and we pushed our way through the crowds in search of more wine or faces we knew, and suddenly I froze, for there, standing together by the kitchen door, were the unmistakable backs of you and Alexa.
She turned at exactly that moment and gave me a strange half-smile, almost as though she had been expecting to see me, before taking your hand and leading you deeper into the room, my cue to leave.
I wasn’t so lucky with Charlotte Lomax.
It was right at the end of term and I’d almost made it through.
My bags were packed and I was leaving for home that night.
‘I’ve put your electric blanket on.
’ I can hear my mother’s voice even now; I can picture her changing my sheets and repositioning my teddy bears and unwrapping a scented candle, her one homage to my almost adult self.
I knew about the cancer by then, but we were in denial, the three of us, my mother, my father and me.
I was looking forward to that holiday at home with a fervid longing.
I planned to shadow my mother morning till night.
Just in case.
I’d gone to the library to pay off a fine, and perhaps because I was so focused on my trip home, I failed to spot Charlotte two people ahead of me in the queue.
I’d reached the counter and endured the librarian’s reprimand and ripped a cheque out of my Lloyds Bank chequebook when a voice called out to me: ‘Catherine Elliot.’
And there was Charlotte, glinting earrings, pale lipstick, a bright blue jumper that I’d slightly envied, I remember.
‘I don’t know how you can live with yourself.
’
Her voice was loud, too loud, and several other people in the queue turned to stare.
Did they know me? Or her?
Or you? Did every single person in the whole of this damned town know what I was really like, deep down, beneath the wholesome facade I’d tried to resurrect with Sam?
I couldn’t answer her, I couldn’t ask what she meant or try to defend myself or do anything other than stand there, by the front desk, paralysed by shame, rooted in fear.
Abandoning you, my public crime, was well documented, but this hinted at something more.
Was this it, the moment when the truth would finally come out?
All I knew, as my heart banged hard in my chest, was that Charlotte Lomax seemed to be reading my mind.
Living with myself was a near-impossibility to be navigated each day.
I woke to a nightmare and tried, inch by inch, moment by moment, and mostly with Sam’s help, to find myself a little warmth; just a glimmer of it was enough back then.
It seemed to me, as I stood dumbstruck in the library queue, that Jack had talked to Charlotte Lomax, that my secret was about to come out.
I thought of your heartbreak when you finally learned the truth, and hated myself a little more.
I’m so lost in the past that it takes a minute to register the silence around the table, to realise that everyone is looking at me, waiting for my answer.
‘Charlotte was never a fan of mine,’ I say.
‘Can’t say I’d really like to see her again.
’
‘But you’re coming to the party, aren’t you?
’ asks Alexa.
‘Probably not.’
Definitely not now that Charlotte’s name has been mentioned.
It’s unnerving, this sudden scrutiny, this temperature drop, as if a blanket of cool has swept into the room.
‘What’s the problem?
’ says Rachel, still in her sunglasses.
‘Why wouldn’t you come?
I thought you said your children were still in Cornwall.
’
Where to begin?
Not with the truth, certainly.
Not with the fact that I have spent so much of my life running from the past, I don’t know how to do anything else; I don’t know how to stop the running and the hiding and the lying.
And I see that you know this, as you sit there across the other side of the table, watching me.
There’s no smile, not even the ghost of one, but I see something in your eyes that I’ve not seen before.
You know. You are telling me you know.
Maybe not the how or the why, but you recognise my shame, and beneath it the disesteem that fuels and exhausts me in equal measure.
And it’s you in the end who answers Rachel.
‘Catherine has no reason to come to the party unless she wants to,’ you say, voice sharp, conversation over.