Four months before Lucian
There are three crucial elements for a good party in my view – the people, the booze and the setting.
Tonight we have a tried-and-tested guest list of three hundred, a committed crowd who always arrive with a fierce determination to get the best out of the night.
No one will drive, everyone will drink and most of them will be wearing something brand new: girls in the full kaleidoscope of colours, a sea of red, pink, blue, green, silver and gold; men wearing suits, black, blue and white mostly, though there’s always the odd exhibitionist who likes to surprise in shocking pink.
They will look their best and act their worst; there will be drunken break-ups and illicit love affairs, random couplings that really ought not to have happened, and an easy-going, Woodstock approach to drug-taking, anything and everything, anywhere and everywhere.
Professional partiers, Colton House habitués and old university friends, some of them will even have travelled across continents to be here (Eliza and Georgina Kitson from Kenya, the Buxtons from Sydney, Jonathon and Lydia Maxwell from New York).
The setting I lucked out with: two hundred acres of lake, woodland and rolling green lawns, a purpose-built pool for midnight frolicking, a rose garden in full bloom for the romantically inclined.
I also take the precaution of hiring in a slightly strange character called Andrew Martin to oversee things.
His official job title is party planner, though you wouldn’t think it to meet him; ex-army and never seen without a shirt and tie, you’d have him down as a hedge-fund manager or a Lloyd’s broker, something in the City anyway.
The thing about Andrew is that he’s really gifted at what he does, no request too bizarre, no detail uncovered; he is so thorough and obsessive that there is never anything left for me to do.
Six months ago he came down here with his paper-thin laptop and his Smythson notebooks and his three work phones and said, ‘Right, what’s our theme?
’ And somehow or other we decided that this year it should be all about water – a nightclub down by the pool, a fleet of little rowing boats for the lake.
As well as building a nightclub (an enormous team of workers and an afternoon’s work from start to finish), this year Andrew is also importing a miniature club, which will be stationed down at the lake.
As far as I can gather it’s a sort of lamplit coffin-shaped box for thirty with a DJ inside and two bouncers on the door.
Andrew is very excited about it.
I don’t know anyone who gets job satisfaction the way he does (though you could argue that I don’t know many people with jobs full stop).
By the time I get up and go downstairs to make coffee, Operation Party is already in full swing.
Mary has a team of cleaners with her today, hoovers blasting in all corners of the house, the air pungent with wax polish and bleach.
The florist has arrived from Bristol, two hippy-looking girls (they even have flowers in their hair) are arranging a human-sized display of lilacs and blue-black roses in the hall and a local fruiterer is unloading crates of pomegranates, lemons, oranges and limes for the cocktails.
From the kitchen window I see that one of the marquees has already gone up, and outside it a squad of empty spit roasts are lined up, a fearsome-looking tangle of spikes and hooks awaiting their pig carcasses.
There must be thirty people on the lawn all fully engaged in party mode, lugging tables and unfolding chairs, shaking out tablecloths, arranging bunting, jam jars of flowers and bowls of fruit, manhandling hay bales into a neat semicircle around the fire pits.
You’d think that I might feel something, a fragment of anticipation, perhaps, or a stirring of excitement, looking out at all this activity, at all these people working to provide me with the ultimate gathering.
But instead I am thinking of Catherine’s bag, already packed and stationed like an insult beside the bedroom door.
I am reminded so much of last time.
And yet I see no future for us, not really.
Last night after Rachel went to bed, Catherine, Alexa and I sat up in the kitchen talking.
Somehow or other Alexa started asking Catherine about her children, and once she started talking, it seemed she couldn’t stop, it just poured out of her.
The three of us spent a good half-hour trawling through all the photographs on her phone.
There was Sam, the boyfriend who once inhabited my dreams, older now, hair cut short, a faint tinge of grey around his ears.
We saw him playing chess with his son, the vivid glint of a swimming pool in the background, an idyllic sun-bleached Mediterranean scene, a pastiche of family life that must star in so many albums. In another shot he stood resting his hands, dad-style, on a garden spade, his small, pretty daughter waving her own pocket-sized trowel, before a neatly turned square of bitter brown earth.
There he was again holding the girl in position at the descent of a zip wire, strong arms wrapped around her small body, dark heads pressed up close.
A Cornish beach now, Sam crouching beside a disposable barbecue lined with half-cooked sausages, son and daughter beside him with identical white-toothed smiles.
What struck me most as we sifted through her catalogue of family life was the unity between Sam and his children, the very hands-on-ness of him, seemingly a ready-made entertainer primed to kick a ball or build a sand sculpture at a moment’s notice.
The memory came of my own father teaching me to hunt rabbits with his shotgun, an heirloom I still treasure despite its bitter connotations.
When I hold this gun, a Purdey that must be a hundred years old and handed down from father to son, much like the house and the land and the paintings, just its touch, the worn smoothness of its walnut body and the cool steel of the barrel, can transport me instantly to my tenth birthday.
Dusk, just me and my dad on the summit of the hill, waiting for the nightly gathering of small game.
What a blag that birthday was; somehow we’d managed to get rid of my mother and sisters and spent the day here at Shute with my uncle.
Now in the early-evening gloom it was just the two of us, dressed like soldiers, lying on our bellies, eyes narrowed, waiting.
I remember exactly how my heart began to race when the first family of rabbits scampered into view.
I knew not to speak, barely to breathe, as I glared through the scope, looking, looking, waiting, waiting, slowly squeezing the trigger just as he had showed me, then pause and pull.
Bang. My first ever kill, a straightforward headshot that made my father whoop.
‘Good for you, kiddo! Good for you.’
I looked at these photos of Sam, similar age to my father probably, and I could imagine him guiding his children with that same blend of gentle instruction and encouragement.
And I knew in that instant that Catherine would never be able to leave them, nor am I sure I’d even want her to.
What, give those sweet-looking kids of hers a slice of the hell that was my last decade of childhood?
And Alexa must have seen this too because she said, ‘You’re really missing them, aren’t you?
’ and Catherine nodded, speechless, clicking her children’s faces off the screen of her phone as if any more looking would tear her apart.
I’m not sure either of us slept much, and there was one time, pre-dawn, when I could tell she was awake and I knew that she was imprinting it all on her senses, the feel, the sound of these nights together, just as I was.
‘You know what it is I love about you?’
I spoke without asking if she was awake and she laughed in the darkness.
‘Go on,’ she said, reaching out a hand to touch my thigh.
I began to list her qualities, joking to begin with, but once I’d started, the list grew longer and longer.
Silly things first.
‘I like the way you throw your clothes all over the floor. I can’t bear that whole folding-up and hanging over the back of a chair thing.
’
‘It’s you who normally throws my clothes over the floor.
’
She smoothed her palm from my thigh to my groin and then stopped, a semicolon to what would happen next.
‘I’m still listening,’ she said, and I could hear her smile.
‘I like the way you’re honest about my paintings.
If you don’t like something then you say so.
I feel as though I can talk about them with you, I don’t get that with many people.
‘And I love how you are with Rachel, not judging her, trying to help her, even though she’s been pretty awful to you.
You take responsibility for things, like you did with Rachel yesterday.
It’s made me realise the rest of us need to grow up.
We’re pathetic really, the way we cling onto the past.’
‘Why are you telling me all this?’
And here I paused, afraid to go on but unable to stop.
‘Because I don’t think you like yourself very much any more.
You used to, once upon a time, but you’ve changed.
’
I knew she was crying in the darkness, her face turned away because she didn’t want me to know.
‘I’ve always thought I needed Sam to make me feel better,’ she said, and I understood what she was really telling me.
She’d made a mistake and it had changed the whole course of our lives, hers and mine.
It feels like a day of lasts.
Last time we’ll eat breakfast together, side by side on stools sitting up at the island, Mary’s home-made granola and rocket-fuel espressos.
Last chance to see her naked under the waterfall shower, to press my mouth against her neck, her breasts, the soft skin on the undersides of her arms. Last time I’ll turn her away from me, pressing her against the wall, pressing myself inside her, my hands holding her just beneath her ribcage, warm water that drenches us, those desperate cries that I am addicted to.
Last wrapping up of her in a big white towel, another one turbaned around her head; last time to laugh at how childlike she is, with her stuck-together Bambi eyelashes.
My head is full of the words I won’t say to her.
Don’t go. Please stay.
I’m going to be lost without you.
Instead we begin a sombre tour of my house and land, with its gathering momentum of inappropriate festivity, trailing from the hall to the pool to the lake, hand in hand, like the battle-wounded.
Catherine hasn’t seen the lake since her last visit fifteen years ago, and now it is completely transformed, a whole school of rowing boats, pink, yellow and green, strung together and bobbing up and down beside the jetty, which has been painted sky blue.
Andrew’s take on Montauk and Martha’s Vineyard, I suppose, over-the-top but very effective.
All the way around the perimeter of the lake hundreds of dark pink and orange Chinese lanterns have been strung up high on gold-sprayed wooden poles.
‘It’s magical, it looks just like a dream,’ Catherine tells Andrew.
‘You’re so clever.’
His face, usually serious, eases into a grin.
I’m not surprised. I noticed how he looked at Catherine when they were introduced, one glance and then another, harder, longer, his incredulity at her supernatural beauty clear to see.
I’d forgotten the effect she has on people, the standard double-take, as if a goddess has dropped down from space.
‘The light down here will be gorgeous,’ Andrew says.
‘Just LED bulbs in the lanterns, very soft and romantic. We’ll have some flares too, just to make it a bit easier for people to see.
’
We examine the miniature nightclub, styled like a 1920s speakeasy, all fringed lamps and leopard-print bar stools and a tiny underlit dance floor.
To me it feels a little claustrophobic (and entirely pointless), but Catherine loves it.
Andrew shows us where he is stationing his burger and slider truck, ‘very Louisiana’, and a small semicircular platform for a female string quartet.
We sit on the jetty, the three of us, legs dangling, while I smoke a cigarette and Andrew checks his phone.
It is peaceful here; aside from the hill, it’s probably my favourite place on the estate, always deserted apart from a month or two in the autumn when the locals come to fish.
As we sit here in silence, I realise I am dreading the onslaught of tonight’s mayhem: girls in bright dresses fluttering like moths in Andrew’s soft lighting, laughter bouncing out across the water, the ceaseless popping of champagne corks.
In other years I’ve looked forward to these parties; now I’d swap it all for another day alone with Catherine.
I watch as she leans over the jetty and dips her fingers in the water.
‘Not bad,’ she says.
‘Warmer than I remember.’
‘It’s never really warm enough for swimming.
We must have been mad.
’
‘We were.’
She smiles at me, at the shared memory, apparition of our past.
‘We’ve got some gorgeous blankets arriving later,’ Andrew says, looking up from his phone.
‘Candy-coloured stripes. Got to keep everyone warm when they’re out on the boats.
’
‘You’ve thought of everything,’ Catherine says, her voice wistful.
‘It’s going to be amazing.
’
Andrew puts down his phone on the jetty and looks up at her.
‘You are coming, aren’t you?
’
Catherine doesn’t meet my eyes.
‘I’m afraid not, it’s a bit complicated.
’
We limp through a lunch that Mary has left out in the kitchen, Alexa, Rachel, Catherine and I.
Rachel is grimly silent and warding off any attempts at conversation about Max.
Today after a night’s sleep she has woken to the full repercussions of yesterday’s catastrophic blowout.
Hugo is refusing to take her calls, Max has left her pleading texts unanswered; there is nothing for her to do except travel through the pain, which she attempts to anaesthetise with rosé, the only one to drink wine at lunch, cradling her glass between her palms, taking regular sips as if it is medicine, which for her, for all of us, I suppose it is.
Regret and guilt have made her vicious today and it seems that Catherine will be her target.
It’s my fault, I guess, for telling the girls that I plan to drive Catherine home after lunch.
I see the look that comes into Rachel’s eyes, a vulture assessing her game, and I know what comes next.
‘I thought your family weren’t expecting you until tomorrow?
’
‘That’s true. They’re not.
’
‘So basically there’s no reason why you shouldn’t stay tonight.
’
Her s’s are thick and slurred so that basically comes out with a distinct ‘sh’.
I’m rooting for Catherine, proud of the way she takes a sip of her water and returns Rachel’s gaze, calm on the outside at least.
‘There are plenty of reasons,’ she says.
‘Such as?’
But Catherine doesn’t answer.
I’m about to change the subject when Rachel says, ‘Is it something to do with Jack? I noticed you avoiding each other yesterday.’
And there’s this horrifying pause when Catherine’s face starts to crumple and we all witness her battle to keep herself from crying.
‘Catherine doesn’t have to explain herself to you, Rachel,’ I say as calmly as I can.
Furious with her, but also shocked by Catherine’s expression.
She looks … defeated, I guess.
‘True,’ says Rachel.
‘But maybe she could explain herself to you. She’s never done a very good job of that, has she?
Are you just going to run out on him again, is that what’s going to happen?
You do know, don’t you, how much you hurt him last time?
’
‘For God’s sake, Rach, stop being so bloody horrible.
This has nothing to do with you and me.
’ Alexa, who abhors any kind of confrontation, says this with a tremor in her voice.
She reaches forward and tips an inch of wine into her glass.
‘Well I happen to think it does. He’s our friend, isn’t he?
We want him to be happy, don’t we?
The thing I don’t get, Lucian,’ and here Rachel’s voice begins to crack, ‘is why when you could have anyone, the only person you seem to care about is the one who doesn’t want you back.
Although I suppose I, of all people, should understand what that feels like.
’
Alexa says, ‘Oh darling. You’re just tired and overemotional; it’s been a hellish couple of days.
’
But Catherine moves her chair away from the table and stands up.
‘You know, Lucian is right. I really don’t need to explain myself to you.
But I’m sorry for the pain you’re in today and I get why you’re lashing out at me.
I’m an easy target. But you’re wrong if you think I don’t care about Lucian.
There hasn’t been a single day in the last fifteen years when I haven’t thought about him, when I haven’t wished things had turned out differently.
But they didn’t. And there’s nothing we can do to change that.
’
She leaves the room without looking back and I feel sure that she’s crying.
‘Thanks for that,’ I say to Rachel.
‘Well done.’
Rachel buries her face in her hands.
Party-ready we are not.
When Catherine walks down the staircase with her bag a little while later, I do take a moment to look, seeing, perhaps for the last time, that extraordinary beauty of hers, which gives me a feeling of vertigo, a sort of head-spinning blood rush and the knowledge that with her, looking will never be enough.
‘Ready?’ I say as she reaches me, all hair and dark eyes and a small, sad smile, and then in a moment of near-comedy I open the front door and Liv bursts through it, colliding with us and the six-foot flower tower.
‘Where on earth do you think you’re going?
’ Liv says, looking from me to Catherine and at the overnight bag in my hands.
‘I’ve driven like a maniac to get here.
’
‘I’m taking Catherine home.
’
‘You’re not really going home, are you?
’ Liv asks, looking only at Catherine.
‘You’re not going to leave me here on my own, surely?
’
And Catherine starts to cry, half collapsing into Liv’s arms.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, tears turning to laughter.
‘How embarrassing. It’s just that it’s such a relief to see you.
’
‘Look.’ I seize the moment.
‘Why don’t you go upstairs with Liv and show her where she’s sleeping.
I’ll ask Mary to bring you some tea.
’
‘All right.’
Catherine is smiling as she links her arm through Liv’s, and I notice, with a little surge of hopefulness, that as the two of them make their way up the staircase, the overnight bag goes with them.