Four months before Lucian
I’m becoming an expert on pharmaceuticals.
Valium, twenty milligrams, not ten, will get Harry through the next couple of hours while he endures his wife’s funeral.
Alexa and I find the brightest thing in his wardrobe for him to wear, a pale pink shirt with grey trousers, and walk him down to the chapel, shuffling between us like a crippled octogenarian, eyes on the ground, which is a good thing because it means he misses the hard, inquisitive stares of all the people gathered by the entrance.
But I see them, I see the girls, friends of mine most of them, reaching up to whisper into the ears of their men, I see the men dragging contemplatively on their cigarettes then darting their eyes over for a quick butcher’s at Harry.
There are several photographers here too, cameras trained against their faces and a flurry of low-level digital clicks the minute we come into view.
Alexa says, ‘I’m going to tell them to fuck off.
It’s a funeral, for God’s sake.
They’re trespassing, aren’t they?
’
But Harry, who has looked up straight into the eye of the cameras, says in his drawn-out, drug-saturated voice, ‘Don’t bother, Lex.
’
A girl breaks from the crowd, smooth blonde hair, peacock-coloured dress and shoes, and I realise at the last moment that it’s Charlotte Lomax, the funeral repackaged as fashion opportunity.
‘Harry,’ she says, ‘I just wanted to say I am so—’
He raises a hand to silence her but keeps his stare downwards.
‘Thank you. I know you are.’
We are in front of the chapel now.
The crowd has separated, leaving us a direct path to the door, and there, waiting in a row, are Jack, Celia and Rachel.
Jack is wearing a new suit by the looks of things, cobalt blue, slim-fitting, Helmut Lang I’d imagine – my favourite designer and therefore his – and he’s wearing it with box-fresh white Adidas trainers.
Hate doesn’t have enough punch for the way you make me feel.
‘Harry, oh God, man,’ he says, rushing forward, sunglasses on.
He expertly manoeuvres Alexa out of the way and takes Harry’s other arm, so that the three of us are making our way to the front of the church, the girls in line behind us.
More clicks, more photographs, more papers sold on irrelevant crap, the vulture press doing what it does best.
I hear Alexa gasp and say, ‘Oh, the flowers,’ and I know she’s crying, which we had promised each other we wouldn’t do, but the flowers are tough to take.
I rang the Bristol florists we’d used for my party and asked them to fill the chapel with the brightest, most colourful things they had.
‘Nothing funereal, and not too weddingy either,’ I said.
I knew Harry wanted to replicate the wedding party Ling had planned, but I also knew that anything bridal would push him even further down into his private underworld of gloom.
Their response was to line up jam jars of gerberas along each windowsill in exactly the colours I’d asked for – hot pink, brilliant orange, acid yellow – and to tie festive little bunches from the end of every pew.
They do break your heart, these flowers, they do say Ling, Ling with her fondness for colour, her constant smile.
I am poleaxed by sadness for this young woman I had scarcely got to know.
There is no coffin here today; Ling will be buried next week if all goes to plan beside a favourite oak tree on Harry’s estate (utter minefield of red tape to get this sanctioned; I’m letting Andrew handle it).
So it’s the five of us up front, plus Ling’s sister, Amara, who has come from Hong Kong and plans to leave immediately after the funeral.
Harry offered to fly Ling’s parents over during a God-awful phone call with a Thai translator we’d found in Bristol, Harry’s gut-wrenching sobs punctuating a language that made no sense to either of us.
But they refused. Hardly surprising.
It was enough their eldest daughter was coming, they said.
I tried to talk to Amara when she arrived.
I told her how much I liked Ling.
How sorry I was she had died at my party, how I felt responsible.
It was a tragic accident, I said, and I wished so much it hadn’t happened.
But she could scarcely look at me, it seemed.
‘My sister was very happy in Bangkok. She loved that job,’ was all Amara would say, before she turned away.
Somehow Harry makes it through the service, and just before the end, Alexa and I escort him, one arm each, out of the chapel, through another photographic assault and back up to the house, where the scent of Thai cooking fills the air.
A sit-down lunch for fifty has been laid up in the orangery – white tablecloths, vivid flowers, that beautiful sloping view down to the cedar tree.
It is, I think, exactly what Harry wanted, what Ling had planned, albeit for an altogether different kind of gathering.
‘Let’s get a drink, for God’s sake, before everyone arrives.
’
Harry shakes his head.
‘No. I’m done in. I’m going back to bed.
’
‘Please stay,’ Alexa says.
‘I was going to sit next to you at lunch; you wouldn’t have to talk to anyone.
’
‘No.’ He half shouts it.
In grief, Harry, famous amongst us for his kindness, his politeness, is brusque to the point of brutality.
He walks off in his crumpled pink shirt and we let him go, Alexa and I, staring after him like troubled parents.
Just before he disappears out of sight, he turns and gives us a cursory wave.
‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘Both of you. I mean it.’
At lunch I’m sitting next to Rachel, beautiful in her favourite emerald-green dress and a good bottle in by the looks of things.
I wish I could forget as easily as her, but I’m wrecked by a vision of what this party should have been – Ling in a white wedding dress, Harry happier than any of us had ever seen him.
And as always, my head is also full of Catherine.
And Jack. For I cannot see her without also seeing him.
I cannot remember the velocity of her passion, one touch enough to make her explode, it seemed, or the way we tore each other apart, without thinking: she did that with him too.
Jack knows the mind-bending eroticism that is being in bed with Catherine, and how I hate him for that.
‘So it’s over with Catherine?
For good, do you think?
’ Rachel has always been able to read my thoughts.
I top up both of our glasses with Harry’s palest pink wine.
‘Yes, it’s over. I should have listened to you and Alexa; I was an idiot to go back there.
’
‘No surprise that you did. You never really got over her.’
‘You warned me about her and I didn’t listen.
You tried to tell me what she was like.
’
Rachel looks at me, astonished.
‘I thought Catherine was an angel, according to you? She just married the wrong guy.’
I shrug, attempting indifference, and take a deep slug of my C?tes de Provence medicine.
It is so shocking – literally I feel I am in shock – to have fallen in love with Catherine all over again and then to have been smashed up against this brick wall of hate, hurt and the impossibility of forgiveness.
Rachel touches my wrist. Cool brown hand with her rings of gold and her nails painted pink.
‘Lucian?’
I remember now as she looks at me, all booze-exacerbated earnestness, that Rachel’s eyes seem to change colour when she gets serious.
I’m sure it’s not the case, but as I return her gaze, I register how her eyes are now a classic navy blue.
I tried to tell her about this once, how I could mix a whole palette of blues from the different shades of her eyes, and she just laughed.
Now, though, there’s no laughter.
Just Rachel’s worried gaze.
‘Promise me you won’t fall apart like last time.
’ She touches my wine glass lightly.
‘Lay off this stuff, OK?’
It’s rich coming from her, an addict, but I get the warning.
My own potential alcoholism pulses through my veins, the son of my dipso mother after all, preferred poison Pouilly-Fumé by the caseload.
She drank without contrition from morning till night, champagne for breakfast if she wanted, the after-hours malt whisky that turned her into a monster.
I see myself doing the same thing, only my passion is more vodka-based.
And there’s a small but insistent voice in my head that I try hard to ignore.
This is too much, the voice says.
You’re drinking too much.
When are you going to stop?
I tell myself I’ll stop the moment it’s no longer fun.
When Catherine left me last time, it wasn’t fun.
There was the discovery of her note, scribbled in some careless juxtaposition on the facing page of my sketchbook next to the drawing I’d made of her a few days before: I’ve changed my mind.
I can’t do this. I can’t see you any more.
There was the rampaging through town, stalking her, then when that got me nowhere, stalking her flatmate Liv, the next best thing.
‘She’s gone home,’ Liv told me.
‘She doesn’t want to be in a relationship; I’m sorry, but she’s asked that you leave her alone.
’
Did Liv know the truth?
I wonder now. Has she always known?
This little bullet of hate that lodges within my chest could zap anyone who knew and didn’t tell me.
It wasn’t just the fact of Catherine leaving that tore me apart.
I know that it was also a delayed reaction to my father’s death, to my visceral terror of abandonment, of aloneness.
My response was to try to obliterate myself, first with alcohol, then with pills.
But that was all a long time ago, and it’s laughable, really, that Rachel and I are sitting here discussing my drinking rather than hers.
‘I’ll make a deal with you, Rach.
How about you and I quit together?
How about you give the coke a rest for a while too?
’
As expected, her eyes fill with tears and she shoots her head away from me.
‘Don’t turn this one on me, Lucian.
’
Today is not the day for either of us to address our demons, and after lunch we join the rest of the guests on the cedar lawn, with our own personal bottle of wine to finish.
Celia comes up to say her goodbyes, and I can tell instantly that something is wrong.
It will be Jack, of course, ignoring her, or flirting with Alexa, or perhaps just the same crushing disregard I witnessed at their house.
‘Celia, are you all right? I hope you don’t mind me asking, it’s just the other day …
’
‘No, not really,’ she says, voice unsteady.
‘But I can’t talk about it.
’
Tears are imminent, this much I know, and I motion to her to sit down next to us.
‘Sit with us for a few minutes. Please.’
She shakes her head quickly and starts to walk away.
‘You’ve always been very kind to me, Lucian,’ she says.
Celia can have been gone no more than a minute or two when Jack and Charlotte Lomax come around the corner and sit down next to us.
Now that I know the real Jack, the one he’s been so careful to hide, the one who fucks other people’s girlfriends and cheats on his wife, I find myself wondering if these two have been having an affair.
Why stop at Alexa? Or Catherine?
‘Pass the wine, mate,’ Jack says, and I refill their glasses with the remains of our bottle.
‘Plenty more where that came from,’ says Rachel, stumbling to her feet.
The three of us watch her tacking across the lawn, a little too much to the left, a little too much to the right.
‘What a dreadful day,’ Charlotte says.
‘Poor Harry.’
‘How’s he doing now?
’ Jack asks.
I tell them that Ania and Filip are stationed like surrogate parents outside his bedroom door.
He’s not eating, he’s not sleeping, it’s a struggle to make him drink water.
There’s a sharp little moment of silence where neither of them seems to be able to find anything to say.
I could help them, but I don’t.
I find that I’m enjoying the mild discomfort of my oldest friend, watching him absorb the heat of my reticence.
Does he see it, this gradual, careful retraction of mine?
A leisurely snipping away of the ties that once bound us together.
I’m not sure who I am any more; I just know that I have changed.