Four months before Catherine
Liv is staying in the Pink Room, a rose-themed bedroom that is almost absurdly feminine and bears his uncle’s decorating traits, I’d say.
The walls are papered in a pattern of dark red roses, the dressing table wears a pale pink skirt; even the bedspreads are pink, vintage and flower-sprigged.
Needless to say, she loves it.
Neither of us says a word while she unpacks her suitcase, hanging up a gold dress (for her) on the wardrobe door and a navy-blue one (for me) on top of it.
Once Mary has arrived with a tea tray – silver teapot, china cups that are paper-thin, gilt handles – we sit opposite each other on the twin beds.
‘You know Harry called me earlier today. Asked me to persuade you to stay tonight. He sounded kind of angsty about it.’
‘Harry wants us to have the same happy ending as him and Ling. But obviously that’s not possible.
’
‘Because of Sam and the kids?’
‘Of course. What else?’
‘You love Lucian. I know you do.’
I nod but cannot speak.
There is a real pain in my chest, actual pain, not metaphorical, like the murmurs of a heart attack.
‘I think it’s the same for him.
’
‘Oh Liv, I think so too. We can’t talk about it, not yet, but it’s there between us all the time.
Neither of us was expecting a second chance.
’
‘But that’s exactly it, don’t you see?
This is your second chance, and by leaving now, you’re running away again.
You’re doing the same thing you did all those years ago.
’
‘Hardly the same, Liv. I’m married with kids.
’
Liv looks at me and says nothing, but it’s all there written in her face.
I know exactly what she’s thinking.
She thinks – or rather she suspects – I’m hiding something.
And of course she is right.
The real reason for my desertion of you was quickly shrouded by news of my mother’s terminal illness.
‘Stage four, darling,’ a new language for me to learn.
In those paralysing months between her life and her death, there was room for nothing else.
Now Liv leans forward.
She takes my hand.
‘Don’t you think it was strange that Harry rang me today?
There was something in his voice, a sort of urgency.
He seemed genuinely worried about you leaving and how it would affect Lucian.
’
‘He’s always been protective of Lucian.
You know how close they are.
’
I am pulled, unwillingly, right back into the heart of a memory that still fills me with shame all these years later.
Harry on the doorstep of our Bristol house, pounding the door in an aggressive, un-Harry-like way.
He knew I was in, knew too that I wasn’t going to answer.
‘Catherine, I know you’re in there …
Catherine, please. This won’t take long.
’
I opened the door with unwashed hair and mid-afternoon pyjamas, physical manifestations of my private heartbreak.
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I told him, affecting a defiance I didn’t feel.
‘Actually,’ Harry said, ‘nor do I. I just want to ask something of you. I want you to promise you’ll never go anywhere near him again.
Promise me you’ll leave him alone.
’
Leave him alone.
Such hostile words. And so deserved.
But for a reason Harry would never have guessed at.
The wariness of your friends, the unnerving proximity of Jack and this horrifying secret we share: I have many reasons for not wanting to stay tonight.
But I cannot explain any of this to Liv without telling her the truth about why I left you, and I couldn’t bear to do that, couldn’t bear for Liv to see me the way I see myself.
‘Can I tell you something?’ Liv says.
‘I’ve made a point of staying in touch with Lucian all these years because of you.
I always knew how much you regretted leaving him.
And how much you missed him.
Don’t run away again, Catherine.
Don’t do that to him.
Or yourself. You’ve got a chance, you should take it.
’
‘What about Sam?’ I say.
‘What about Joe and Daisy? I can’t just walk out on them.
’
But already I am thinking that I will tell Sam the truth.
I’ll tell him that I love you.
I’ll tell him I don’t know how to live without you.
When I come downstairs an hour later wearing the dark blue dress, you look confused for a moment, then a slow smile, an upwards one, works its way across your face until you are grinning broadly, then laughing.
I feel this great flood of emotion punching me in the chest.
‘You’re staying?
’ you ask, and I run down the last few steps of the staircase, straight into your arms, and you lift me up as if I’m a child.
‘Looks like it,’ I tell you, and then we’re kissing, a kiss that goes on and on, much longer than it should, with Liv right behind us and the bar staff pretending not to watch.
‘I’m so glad,’ you tell me, still holding me off the ground, and I say, ‘Me too, me too.’ And as always, your thoughts are running with mine, because you whisper, ‘I couldn’t bear you to leave,’ and I tell you, ‘I’m not leaving,’ and although we both know I’m only talking about one night, it feels like something has been decided.
It’s a different thing having Liv by my side, and for the first hour of the party we stand together, marvelling at the excess.
There must be almost as many waiters as guests, girls and boys clearly picked for their looks as much as their waiting skills, dressed in tight-fitting black shirts and black jeans.
They rush through the crowd in mock-professional haste and come up to each guest in turn: ‘What can I get you to drink, a glass of champagne or something from the bar?’ We choose champagne, and when Liv exclaims at the taste, I tell her it’s vintage Pol Roger, your favourite.
‘Get you,’ she says, eyebrows raised.
‘Jack’s arrived,’ she tells me a moment later.
‘His wife is with him.’
His overaffectionate greeting locks me down inside as if even my cells recoil at the memory – his lips pressed to my cheek, the smell of his aftershave instantly recognisable after all this time.
I force myself to look properly this time; I tell myself to be calm.
See the narrow grey tailored suit, Savile Row, I’d imagine.
The black shirt, revealing itself to be silk on closer inspection.
Sunglasses worn inside masking those blue eyes.
Bright hair, camera-ready smile, his handsomeness a weapon, one that felled Celia, Alexa, even me.
Celia is dressed like some kind of eighties throwback in a rose-coloured strapless ball gown, very Diana, very Dallas .
Actually she looks great, and, like Ling, she greets me as though we are already old friends.
And I think, as we embrace, that this is what outsiders do, huddling together on the fringes.
None of us – Celia, Ling or I – will ever be fully accepted in your clique of five.
The party is a master class in entitlement.
At the poolside bar, we sit side by side on two stools, just watching.
‘Look at the clothes,’ Liv says.
‘Look at the hair. Look at the jewellery. Everyone here is beautiful and that’s because they have money and time and they know where to go to achieve it.
’
‘It’s true. The rich are different,’ she says a moment later.
‘Have you heard anyone say thank you yet?’
At our station by the bar we spend a few minutes monitoring a sequence of high-maintenance beauties ordering complicated cocktails we’ve never heard of, with not a please or thank you between them.
‘Two island margaritas and an old-fashioned.’
Mostly they take their exotic drinks without making eye contact with the barman or breaking conversation with their friends.
We watch as you come into the bar, almost absurdly handsome in your dark suit and white shirt; we see how the crowd pulls apart to make room for you, a celebrity in their midst. You catch my eye and smile, but your progress is slow, drawn into conversation with at least four groups of people before you reach us.
‘Finally,’ you say, putting an arm around my shoulder.
‘Why does everyone feel they have to talk to me? Could I have a martini, please,’ you say to the barman, and Liv catches my eye and smiles.
‘And what would you both like?’
You tell us dinner is being served on the lawn and that Harry and Ling are holding a table for us, ‘Big enough for everyone,’ you say, which instantly sets me on edge.
In your everyone, I see only Jack.
The marquee is more beautiful than any I’ve ever seen.
Long wooden tables and benches run all the way around its perimeter, simple and almost homely in effect except for the fact that they are ablaze with what must be hundreds of candles, burning from tall brass candelabras and low-level coloured glass holders.
Each place setting has two tall-stemmed wine glasses for white and red, a champagne flute, a jewel-coloured water tumbler and a gold-patterned side plate.
For every table there’s a gold-lacquered vase, at exactly the right height, filled with dark blue and cream roses.
I am sitting between you and Harry and opposite Ling, a position of relative safety, though Jack, Rachel and Charlotte Lomax and her husband are a couple of places further down, easily within earshot.
Charlotte, all smooth brown skin in a backless floor-length dress, dives straight in.
‘Catherine! I’d heard you were here.
Probably the last person on earth I’d ever have expected to find at one of Lucian’s parties.
Do you remember Johnnie?
’
Johnnie’s arm is patted indifferently but her eyes remain focused on me.
Yes, Charlotte, I remember him, the long-haired Golf GTI driver who used to gamble his student loan away at the casino in the first week of term and brag about it loudly in the pub afterwards.
‘How’s your husband?
’ Charlotte asks, with a voice full of unexpressed laughter.
She doesn’t wait for my reply but leans in and whispers something to Jack.
I turn away to find Ling watching me.
She is wearing a dress of lemon yellow silk, her dark hair tied to one side and fanning out across one shoulder.
She leans in, speaks softly.
‘It will get easier, the more you see them. No one has the right to judge you.’
I’m staggered by her comprehension.
This girl, whom I’ve known only a handful of days, seems able to look right into the core of me.
‘Ling,’ I say, in a quiet voice.
‘You know, don’t you?
You’ve worked it out.
’
I would like to explain.
I’d like her to understand that this horrible dark secret I’ve carried inside me for fifteen years, has eroded my character, my life, it’s stolen away the best parts of me.
But before I can say anymore, she glances at Jack and shakes her head quickly, her meaning clear.
‘Let’s have fun tonight, Catherine.
You and me.’
‘Deal.’
Either side of the table, two waiters start refilling our glasses in perfect synchronicity, as if to emphasise the point.
‘They leave us no choice,’ I say taking two hefty gulps of champage.
Ling laughs and raises her glass to me, swallows half its contents.
‘Oof,’ she slams it back down on table.
‘The bubbles went right up my nose.’
She has two spots of high colour in her cheeks, matching circles the size of a ten pence piece.
‘I haven’t felt this drunk since I was fifteen,’ Ling says.
‘What happened then?’
‘My sister and I went round stealing everyone’s drinks at my cousin’s wedding.
No one noticed until Amara vomited all over the bride.
’
‘The Lady Muck sister?’
Ling nods.
‘She lives in Hong Kong. Nannies for an English family – two boys who have taught her all the rude words in the Oxford Dictionary. I miss her.’
‘She’ll come over for the wedding, won’t she?
’
Harry, overhearing this, cuts in.
‘Hang on, you told Catherine?’
He turns to you.
‘Secret’s out, apparently.
Ling and I are going to have a proper wedding.
A blessing in the chapel and a big lunch afterwards.
Will you be my best man?
’
I love watching your face.
How it changes as you take in what Harry has said, the light that rushes into it.
‘I’d be honoured.’
You reach across me to grip his hand.
And then both of you are laughing, a private moment of shared happiness.
‘You will be able to come, Catherine, won’t you?
’ Ling says, and I say, ‘Of course I will.’
‘Does that mean we have a chance?’ you ask, low-voiced.
And I tell you, ‘I don’t see how we can be apart again,’ which is the truth.
News of Ling and Harry’s wedding starts to spread along the table and you jump up, demanding more champagne from a passing waitress.
There are hugs, kisses, congratulations all round, and by the time I’m halfway down this glass, I realise I’m too drunk.
I don’t like it. I don’t like the slow erosion of clarity, a melting in my brain, a fluidity in my body, sensations that can trigger the harsh adrenalin of recall.
Memories I don’t want clamouring for recognition.
When I want to forget – need to forget – I can do that, though it takes practice, a sort of mindfulness where I focus on the smallest details around me.
You’re talking to Liv and you don’t notice me getting up from the table.
‘Back in a minute,’ I tell Ling, and I step outside the tent, forcing myself to register the exact colour of the night as the last of the light disappears – midnight blue, I’d call it, though you would know the correct shade.
The strip of carpet leading from the garden into the marquee is an ironic red, flashbulb-ready, another of Andrew’s jokes.
And it seems obvious, predestined, that at exactly this moment, when I stand inhaling the night air, Jack returns to the tent alone, so that it is just him and me face to face, no Celia, no Liv, no Harry or Ling or you to take the edge off the intensity of this meeting.
‘Catherine.’
He chucks a glowing cigarette onto the red carpet, crushes it with his foot.
His beautiful dark grey suit is spookily similar to the one you’re wearing, you his perennial benchmark.
Still copying you, I think, still impersonating you all these years later.
Perhaps I should pity him the way I pitied him once before, this boy who would go to any lengths to get your attention, to be just like you.
But my head is full of the last time we were together, me standing in the kitchen doorway, Jack by the kettle, the slow and steady collapsing of my world.
The shame I always feel is there, but beneath it anger too.
Jack made sure I could never see you again.
I think, like his father, he has a fatal tendency to overreact.
Why couldn’t Jack have been the one to leave; why did it have to be me?
Why did he let me get so drunk?
Why didn’t he have the sense to stop, to know that the two of us together was something that would break you?
‘You haven’t told him, have you?
’ Jack says, eventually.
His voice is softer than usual; he’s hard to read.
I shake my head.
‘If you had, I’d know by now.
If you had, he’d probably kill me.
’ He laughs. ‘Well, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration.
’
It’s hard for me to look at Jack without the memories rushing back in.
They’re unshaped, half formed, the way drunken memories often are, but his body is clear, those sharp blue eyes in the darkness, teeth that shone, his arms taut as he held himself above me.
When you have a memory you wish to avoid, it’s easy to float away from it, easy to disconnect.
No, no, you say, I’m not dealing with this.
I did it when my mother died.
So my father tells me.
‘ Catherine?’
I do hear Jack’s voice, I do understand that he’s trying to talk to me.
But I have no words.
Not for him. And after a while, perhaps a minute, perhaps a little longer, I watch as he walks away.