Pictures of Him: A Novel

Now

It’s my favourite nurse, the one who brushes my hair gently, taking care never to catch the bristles in a knot, and who dabs at my face with a warm flannel rather than the vicious wiping that some of the others indulge in. I could react. I never do.

She talks to me constantly as she works, lifting my upper lip so that she can scrub my teeth with delicate little circular motions, raising a glass of water to my mouth and telling me: ‘Take a big swig now, my darling, and swill it around.’

She calls me ‘beauty’ or ‘darling’, never Catherine. Sometimes I can focus on her words for a little while before the tug of dreams pulls me back to you.

‘Your family are coming today,’ she says.

My little girl will be patting my face with her small, soft hands, my boy standing silently by my chair, watching with his grave eyes. My husband will talk to me, telling me about his day with the note of self-consciousness that is always there. Who can blame him? Bloody embarrassing talking to a brick wall, day after day.

‘Hello, Catherine,’ he’ll say, always my name now.

Beauty. Catherine. Just labels that hold no meaning. I am whoever they want me to be. Mostly I sit still while the words whirl above me, dancing golden specks of dust caught in the sun.

‘Recovery’ – this word is said a lot. By Sam, who says it in a tense, passive-aggressive kind of way, and by the psychiatrist, whose pronouncement is more hazy, more hip-swinging, easy come, easy go. Who’s counting? he seems to say. Sam is, Sam is counting. He wants to know how much longer he has to wait: a week, a month, the rest of his life? How much longer before his wife comes back to him?

But I am drifting, drifting. I am a girl again, nineteen, almost twenty. I am loved, wholly, with a passion that has flooded my bones and my blood and my brain. There is only this, this warmth, this light, this fierce, pin-bright happiness. And it is so good to be here, if I can just hold it, just freeze it right at this moment.

‘I won’t ever leave you,’ I say, and you pull me tighter into your arms and we fall asleep that way, wrapped up like a parcel, and I won’t wake all night. But then I do wake and, just like that, the axis spins and everything changes.

The nurse is back. She has an accent, but I have yet to be able to concentrate long enough to work out where she’s from.

‘Here they are, beauty. Here’s your family come to see you. She’s lost in her world of dreams today, aren’t you, my darling? Talk to her, won’t you, she hears it all.’

Daisy is kneeling by my chair, her head in my lap. I feel Sam lift up my hands, first one, then the other, and place them on top of her tight dark curls. I feel Joe’s presence, standing as he always does just to the right of my chair. Joe doesn’t speak to me any more.

When he first came he would say, ‘Hello, Mum,’ the tersest of greetings, nothing more, and in those two, biting words all I could hear was my son’s quiet fury. I can’t help him, I can’t help anyone.

Sam is standing by the window, a blur of dark clothes, his tall, thin body blocking out half the light, obscuring the view of my tree. I’d like him to move. Just a couple of feet would make all the difference.

‘Talk to us, Catherine. Please. Show us that you can.’

I hear the desperation in Sam’s voice more than the actual words, and beneath it, several layers down, I can hear his frustration. He is the kindest man, Sam, he is here, after all, day after day, with no promise of my return, no date set for us to squeak our way across the hospital floors, out into the tarmac gloom of the car park and away from my lonely tree. But I also hear the words he will not say, the silent accusation of wilfulness, of selfishness.

‘So she could speak if she wanted to?’ he asks Greg, the psychiatrist, with his New Balance trainers and his side-parted hair.

‘Not exactly,’ Greg tells him. ‘Physically, yes, she’s capable of it, but she has lost the power of speech. It’s not something that can be reversed at will. We have to look at all the reasons why she’s stopped speaking. Most likely it’s an unconscious avoidance strategy. It’s her way of refusing to absorb intolerable information. Catherine shut down because she couldn’t cope with what happened at Shute Park that day. She can’t process the trauma of it, so instead she represses the memory. Not talking is her defence.’

Greg blinds Sam with some medical terminology, describing the dissociative disorder that is supposedly afflicting me; he even alludes to Freud.

‘In the nineteenth century this kind of behaviour was much more common, especially in women. You might have heard of the hysterics?’ he says, upbeat and conversational, like he’s at a dinner party. I feel rather than see Sam’s resentment. ‘Often those afflicted might experience numbness or fits or amnesia. In Catherine’s case she is unable to speak; to her it’s literally as if her vocal cords have been frozen. We call it elective mutism.’

Later on it’s Greg who squats down beside my chair, knees cracking, and gives me an idea, something to work with, something that will allow me to spend more time with you.

‘I think I know where you are in your head,’ he says, and I feel the insistence of his eyes even though I’m looking out at the garden, focused on my tree. ‘You’re stuck there, aren’t you? Right at the end. And I wonder if it might help to go back to the beginning, to put everything that happened in some kind of order. I know it’s hard, Catherine, but you do need to get it straight in your mind.’

You could think of it as a story, he tells me in a soft, lulling voice, the kind I always used when the children had nightmares. Think of someone you can tell it to, he says, and this bit is easy.

It’s our story, yours and mine, and so, of course, I will tell it to you.

Fifteen years earlier

Do we start with once upon a time; is that how we’ll do it, my love? Once there was a girl who knew nothing of love or lust or the peculiar sense of freedom you bestowed upon her. She had arrived at university with her brand new Samsonite suitcase and her matching Cath Kidston bedding, an only child, indulged, adored, who’d existed in a helium-pumped triumvirate for all of her eighteen years. She began to make friends, one of them her future husband, as the story goes. Everything came easily: a fellow English student who metamorphosed seamlessly into a best friend, a position on the student newspaper, a trio of A grades that exempted her from exams. Six weeks into her second year, just as the trees were beginning to show off with their golds and crimsons and banana yellows, a boy blew into her tutorial, unexpectedly, earth-shatteringly. The boy was you.

There were five or six of us in the tutorial that day in a circle of shabby, mismatched armchairs, listening to Professor Hardman describe Milton’s portrayal of Satan as a military hero. He had a flat, soporific voice, this professor, and the blue-white skin of the exhumed, and he spoke with his eyes closed, one hand cradling his left breast as if he suspected an imminent heart attack.

The door flew open and you came through it wearing yesterday’s crumpled clothes and with your hair standing on end, though nothing could hide your beauty. Every single student in the room knew your name.

‘Ah, Mr Wilkes. Good of you to join us. Perhaps you’d like to sit next to Miss Elliot,’ the professor pointed to the empty chair next to me, ‘and then you can start reading for us.’

Your voice was deep and beautiful and you read with the preternatural self-assurance that always seems to belong to your kind. Professor Hardman closed his eyes again as he listened to your unhalting description of Satan, and it was a full five minutes before he raised his hand and said, ‘Beautifully read, thank you. But what do these opening pages tell us about Satan?’

I could feel the rest of the group collectively willing you to stutter or stumble or come out with the same kind of vague inanities that they would produce under pressure, but instead you said you found Milton’s portrayal of Satan as a hero unconvincing. You outlined his flawed descriptions of the devil in Book IV and V, which showed that, unlike the rest of us, you’d read the entire poem and made your own judgement on it. In the moment’s silence that followed, I knew that the whole room hated you, for your looks, your confidence, your rumoured wealth and now for this display of fierce, unfettered intelligence. But even then, right at the beginning, I felt the first tug of admiration.

Afterwards we filed out of the tutorial, across the courtyard and onto the street to the satisfaction of seeing a traffic warden writing out a ticket for the pale blue Austin-Healey we all knew to be yours.

‘Oh shit,’ you said, and then you grabbed hold of my arm. ‘Will you wait here for a second while I deal with this. Please? There’s something I wanted to ask you.’

Your eyes, the first time I looked properly into them, were jade-coloured, pale and piercing at the same time.

I couldn’t hear what you said, but I watched in amazement as the traffic warden listened to your defence, a slow smile spreading across her face. As you walked back towards me, she ripped the parking ticket in two.

‘Next time I won’t be so kind,’ she called, and you waved your thanks, though your eyes never left my face.

‘Do you always get your way?’ I said.

‘I try to. Talking of which, I’m taking you for lunch. Right now. Mystery location, prepare to be amazed.’

‘Sorry, I can’t.’

I began to turn away, but you caught hold of my arm again.

‘What’s wrong? Why are you being so …’ you struggled for the word, then found it, ‘stand-offish?’ You were so surprised, I couldn’t help smiling. I doubted girls turned down your invitations to lunch very often.

‘People to see, places to go, work to do. The usual.’

‘Oh come on, you can spare an hour or two for lunch, surely?’

‘The thing is, I’ve just started seeing someone.’

I felt foolish saying it and my cheeks flamed. But you just laughed.

‘Well I don’t know what you had in mind, but I was only thinking of lunch. Some seafood, maybe a glass of wine. Where’s the harm in that?’

I stood there immobilised, wanting to go but knowing I shouldn’t. Thinking of Sam but wanting to be with you, the shape of my future if only I’d known it.

‘Not today,’ I said, as if I was refusing dusters from a door-to-door salesman.

You’d read my internal struggle, I saw that with your final smile before you walked back to the pale blue car.

‘Let’s try again tomorrow then,’ you said.

Four months before: Catherine

Our first summer in the country has been dry and hot, each morning the sky relentlessly blue, the earth so thirsty you can almost hear it panting. Sam tells me we chose the perfect time to escape, with the whole of the long summer holiday free to explore the hills and beaches and crackling, dried-up woods of our new habitat.

‘We have each other and the kids and now we have this beautiful wreck of a house. What more could you want?’ he says whenever I worry about the sudden, dramatic slashing of our regular income. ‘My new job starts in September, and until then we’ve always got your money to fall back on.’

My money, compensation for losing my mother to breast cancer fourteen years ago and my father to a new wife in New York. He’s living the dolce vita just like us, except his dream involves sushi and high art and a woman who wears matching silk underwear.

We left London in a rush, six weeks from Sam handing his notice in at his reliable, well-paid prep school job to the removal vans rattling up in front of the ramshackle Hansel and Gretel cottage in Somerset.

‘It’s pretty, I’ll give you that,’ I said the first time I saw the place, with the wisteria curling decoratively around its rusty front gate and an explosion of roses, red, pink and white, across its front.

I thought it looked like a child’s drawing of a house with its mismatched roofs, one thatch, two tiled, all at different heights, its windows of varying sizes, peeling stable doors and thick, fur-like covering of ivy. We made an offer there and then, and when the surveyor’s report came back revealing wall-to-wall damp and poor insulation, we bought it anyway.

‘We’re going off to Frome to buy paint,’ Sam says, kissing me and herding the children at the same time. ‘We’ll get a cake from that shop you like.’

I know what he’s doing, of course. He’s giving me space, freedom to moon and mope and mourn the fact that we no longer live in London, my home town for thirty-four years, the place where my mother lived and died, that last point the most crucial in my mind.

The minute the door closes behind them, this is what I do. I go up to our bedroom, open the wardrobe door and from the very back, hidden behind a jungle of unworn boots, I retrieve a box full of letters, photographs and cuttings, my secret dossier on you. Today my hands close around a piece of lined A4, covered in your distinctive blue-biro scrawl. I know this letter so well that I could close my eyes and recite it to you right now. I know where there are commas and brackets and a missing full stop. I know where you double-cross your t’s and where you don’t; I could construct a perfect counterfeit if I wanted to.

You’re not coming back to me, are you? I used to tell myself that you would, but as the weeks pass, the time we were together begins to feel like a dream. Are you even real? I look for you in the streets, in every pub I go into, in the library, that funny little Portuguese café where we ate custard tarts and the old lady called you Audrey Hepburn (she was right, it’s your eyes). I can’t find you anywhere but somehow the sense of you never leaves me. The feel of your hair brushing across my face, the weight of your hand pressing into mine. I wake in the night and still hear your soft breathing next to me. You are gone and yet you’re always here.

This first letter – there are five – is the one I like best. I can read it and imagine that we are still that girl and boy, sitting in an empty café in Bristol on a pale, quiet Tuesday, a bit like this one. There was no one else there apart from a woman who sat at the table right next to us, hunched over her cup of tea. You offered her one of our custard tarts.

‘Will you have one of these?’ you said. ‘We bought too many.’

It wasn’t true, we’d only bought two, but neither of us had touched them; we were too busy holding hands and smiling at each other.

‘You’re very kind,’ she said, and when she turned to face us we saw that she was very old, her flesh a concertina of a thousand lines.

‘She’s Audrey Hepburn, isn’t she, your girl?’ she asked, and we laughed.

You said, ‘Yes, she is,’ not knowing if she was confused or really meant it, this old, old woman.

I can read this first letter and I can be you and me again and I don’t have to explain. I don’t have to say sorry, sorry, sorry, that endless echo that reverberates through my dreams. Instead I sit here, your letter in my hands, and for a little while, I can pretend. You and me in the café or on the beach, our rose-coloured beginning, no thought of the end.

The slammed front door signals the end of my world of dreams, the shoebox stashed hastily in the bottom of the wardrobe. I hear the rhythmic slapping of Daisy’s trainers running along the hallway, her yell from the bottom of the stairs: ‘Mum! We’re back!’ as if there could be any doubt. I meet them in the kitchen, newly painted by Sam and me, where the mid-afternoon sun bounces in sharp little daggers from the brand-new show-home whiteness – walls, ceiling, floor, fridge, cooker. Daisy unpacks a cake from a brown cardboard box and puts it on a large flowered plate that once belonged to my parents and Joe fetches mugs from the cupboard and Sam fills the kettle and catches my eye and says, ‘OK?’ and I nod because mostly I am.

‘Beach tomorrow,’ he says. ‘There’s a little wooden dinghy for sale at Lulworth Cove. I thought we’d go and see it.’

While I pour tea into mugs and Sam slices the cake and slides a piece onto each plate, he talks about where we’ll be able to sail the boat if we buy it and what colour we might like to paint it. He’s an expert at reinvention, my husband.

When the phone rings and it’s Liv on the other end, Sam walks to the fridge and pours me a glass of white wine.

‘Take it in the sitting room,’ he says, still hooked on the mission to appease. ‘We’re going down to the stream. Take your time.’

He hopes that these impromptu phone/bar sessions will make up for the fact that I no longer live five minutes down the road from my closest friend, the girl I met on our first day of university and have spoken to pretty much every day since. Liv asks me what I’m doing, the same question, day after day, as if she expects by some miracle that our lives in the country will somehow have metamorphosed into something more interesting.

‘We’ve just had tea and cake,’ I tell her. ‘And Sam’s taken the kids down to the stream.’

‘Sounds like paradise,’ she says, but I catch the note of boredom in her voice and I imagine the afternoon taxis that rattle beneath her windows, the red buses slamming on brakes at the corner of her street to disgorge commuters and shoppers and tired, toddler-weary parents. I miss it, is what I think, as I listen for London to thrum down the telephone line.

‘Can I come and stay the weekend after next? I’ve just had an invitation to Lucian’s. You know that big summer party he always has?’

At the mention of your name, everything slows, as it always does, the air cools and momentarily I lose all sense of speech, words, meaning. And perhaps this is where it starts again, our story, after a fifteen-year interlude, with your name, startling, unexpected, surfing the distance between us.

‘Catherine?’

‘Yes, great, you can always stay, you know that.’

‘Are you OK with it? Me seeing him?’

Whenever Liv sees you she always asks me if I mind, waiting, I think, for me to tell her what she already knows. Yes, I mind, Liv. I mind with every particle of air that’s left in my lungs. I mind that you see him and I don’t. I mind that you’ve continued your friendship with him through all these years even though you suspect it crushes me. When I say nothing, she feeds me bits and pieces of information: ‘He’s having an exhibition in Bruton,’ she’ll say, or ‘He’s just bought a flat in Oxford Gardens.’ The rest I glean from the papers, which still love to write about you and your tight, impenetrable little circle of friends. There’s often something in the diary pages of the Daily Telegraph or the Evening Standard, a picture of you smoking outside a club or grasping a glass of champagne and the waist of a well-groomed blonde, eyeballing the camera with that mixture of defiance and disdain that hasn’t faded over the years. You never smile, and nor do the blondes.

I could tell Liv about my afternoon spent upstairs with your letters, dwelling as always on our ending, wishing I could twist it or colour it or rewind or fast-forward, wishing that I had Sam’s skill for reinvention, wishing, always wishing that I could have changed the outcome.

I know that I will spend the night of your party with a head full of poison, drugging myself to sleep probably and then waiting until morning for the carefully sanitised snippets Liv chooses to reveal.

‘He was lovely,’ she’ll say. ‘He asked after you,’ and my heartbeat will slow right down.

I won’t ask her what she said for I already know the answer. She’ll tell you I’m fine, that my kids are getting so big now, perhaps that I’ve moved to the West Country, to a village just twenty miles or so from yours. We share a county if nothing else.

She will be careful not to talk to me about Jack, whom I dread, or Rachel, who triggers the kind of bone-freezing jealousy I despise in other people. I wish everyone else would be as cautious and sensitive as Liv, but they’re not. They firebomb Jack’s name into the conversation – the starkness of blood scattered into snow – oblivious to the meltdown that takes place inside me. Even Sam does it sometimes.

‘Look, there’s that twat from university,’ he’ll say, holding up his newspaper and flashing your handsome, white-toothed friend at me.

‘Catherine?’

From the shifting, quieter cadence of her voice, I know what she’s going to say.

‘You know you can talk to me, don’t you?’

Liv has never let go of the idea that you and I should have stayed together, probably because I could never bring myself to tell her the reasons why we fell apart. Even on the morning of my wedding she tried to make me change my mind.

‘It’s far too late for that,’ I told her and I asked for a few moments alone.

I tried and tried to summon an image of Sam freshly shaved and handsome in a morning suit. But all I could see was you. Where were you? I wondered. You’d inherited Shute Park, your great big house, by then and I pictured you sitting by the lake, clutching a bottle of whisky, thinking about our beginning, remembering that lunch, that cold winter’s day on the beach. Self-indulgent? I’d say so. You were probably still asleep, wrapped around one of the picture-book blondes. But at least I had my dreams.

Four months before: Lucian

I find out my mother has died while another excessive Friday rages all around me. No easy time to receive news of this kind, but one in the morning, off your face on tequila, is an especially awkward fit. I am numb from champagne, vodka and tonic and latterly three hefty shots of tequila, and perhaps this is why I cannot react to the news my sister gives me.

‘Lucian?’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s Emma.’

Emma. Just hearing her name feels like a raincloud dispelling its contents from a great height.

‘Mummy died this afternoon. An unexpected heart attack; it was instant.’

The infantile use of ‘Mummy’ from a woman of forty. This and other inappropriate thoughts punch at my brain and rob me of my power of speech until the pause on the other end of the line becomes impossible to ignore.

‘God,’ is all I come up with.

‘The funeral will be in London. Will you come?’

Through the tequila fug I register that no is not an option.

‘Yes, of course I’ll come.’

‘Lucian?’

‘Yes?’

‘I know we haven’t been in touch these past few years but I wanted to say …’

A silence that deepens. I realise my sister is crying.

‘You’ll always be family.’

Emma hangs up and I stand immobilised, phone pressed to my ear, listening to the dial tone. My mother’s death, my sister’s conciliation, it is almost too much to take in.

I threw tonight’s gathering to welcome Harry’s new wife into the fold. Or at least that was the intention. Truth is, few have ever managed to penetrate the closed circle of friends I tend to think of as family. (With family like mine, you’re going to look for alternatives.) There’s Jack, whom I’ve known for most of my life, since boarding school at eight, through public school, university and the turbulent love-and-drugs fest that we called our twenties. We met Harry at thirteen and eventually carted him off to Bristol University with us where we were joined by Rachel and Alexa.

By the time I return to the library, my friends are sitting completely upright on the ancient Chesterfields. I feel the heat of their eyes as I announce my news through compressed, wooden lips.

‘My mother died this afternoon. A heart attack apparently.’

Jack and Rachel hurtle towards me and I find myself being squeezed from both sides, Rachel’s thick, blonde, tangerine-scented hair swiping across my face like a horse’s tail. This is too much. I take a step backwards.

‘Guys, please. You know we didn’t get on. I’m just a bit fazed, that’s all.’

We sit back down on the Chesterfields and everyone starts behaving like a caricature of themselves. Rachel picks up the half-full tequila bottle, waves it at me and starts refilling the empty shot glasses. Alexa walks over to the sound system and moments later the sweeping, funereal strains of Sigur Rós filter across the room. She has a sixth sense for always picking the right tune; I often think she missed her vocation. She’s a writer, a relatively successful one, but we should probably have pimped her out in Ibiza. Harry knocks back his tequila shot caveman-style, no salt, no lemon, and his wife Ling, whom none of us knows, sits right on the edge of the sofa looking shell-shocked, which is pretty much how she’s looked all evening, dead mother or not.

‘Ding-dong, the witch is dead,’ says Jack, raising his shot glass to mine and squinting at me with fierce blue eyes.

My mother the witch. Beautiful, frozen-hearted tormentor of men, literally unto death in the case of my father. She was nice enough in my early years, but it was all about my father for me back then, trailing around the farm after him, mending fences, chopping down trees, learning to shoot rabbits with his shotgun. That gun, a slam-dunk to the heart.

‘So. Are we going to the funeral?’

‘I guess so. But it’s not going to be pretty. The last time I saw my mother and sisters was at my uncle’s funeral thirteen years ago.’

‘Which was anything but pretty.’

The one and only time I have seen Jack shocked was when my mother spat her venom amidst a room of half-drunk mourners because my uncle made me his sole heir. I think the word ‘cunt’ may have been used, and more than once. They are nothing like you’d expect, my family.

I look across the room at Ling, quietly elegant in her city clothes, and realise we have forgotten the real purpose of the evening. I find myself watching her now and I see how often she glances at Harry, for reassurance or from incredulity, who knows? She must be stunned by the extraordinary and unexpected turn her life has taken. One moment working in a hotel in Bangkok, the next married to one of the richest men in England and shackled to his monstrous great house.

It’s past four when the party finally wraps up, Harry drunk-driving home, Alexa disappearing off upstairs to sleep in her favourite bedroom, Jack on his new fold-up bicycle, a tactical move on Celia’s part when her husband had stayed over one night too often.

That just leaves me and Rachel by the dying embers of the fire. The fireplace is so big you can sit inside it, and that’s what we do right now. Above the hearth there’s a huge great beam that came from an old merchant ship; it’s got the rusting hooks and nails to prove it. There’s one nail that protrudes so far from the beam we call it the devil’s finger, and Alexa has wound purple fairy lights around it. They flash on and off, on and off, annoying at first but I’m used to them now. The library would look wrong without them.

‘One for the road?’ Rachel says, with us this is often a euphemism for something else.

She looks beautiful in her emerald-green dress, with her bright hair and her carefully made-up face, and it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve ended up together, far from it. But tonight my heart is bleak.

‘Rach,’ I say, shaking my head, ‘I kind of need to be on my own tonight. The Blue Room is made up for you, as always.’

‘I understand,’ she says with a sad