The pub was hazy and dark. People still smoked indoors then and it gave everything an ethereal glow, at least until we smelled our hair and clothes in the morning. Simon and I were at a corner table. The jukebox was playing something old, country music from decades before: the pub was too London, too achingly cool, for pop music. We were deep in conversation, hands wrapped round our pint glasses, our feet touching under the table.
‘Rich!’ Simon half-stood and shouted across the bar. ‘All right?’
The man he’d shouted to came over. I knew straightaway. I knew before he sat down, before he spoke. It was something utterly primal.
Richard had straight dark hair, and the deepest brownest eyes I’d ever seen. I see those same eyes every day now, and the same perfect white teeth in an enormous and constant smile. Leo’s hair is as poker straight, as charcoal-black.
I remember moving my foot away from Simon’s: an unconscious gesture. I wasn’t that girl. I was young – new to this city, to being a grown-up. What I knew I was about to do was so out of character, so unlike me.
‘Rich, this is Cate, my girlfriend.’
Rich put his hand out and shook mine. I looked into his eyes and knew that he felt exactly the same way.
I’ve always believed in honesty – there are a few, unusual and unfortunate, exceptions but I’ve lived most of my life by the principle that it’s easier to tell the truth than lie – whatever the situation. I told Simon that night, as soon as we got in. I told him gently, and I told him long before Rich and I ever kissed, ever spoke about spending the rest of our lives together, about bringing another, much-wanted, tiny human into the world.
Simon and Richard stayed best friends: they widened their closeness to include me, and Simon has been an amazing godfather to Leo – going far beyond the reach of duty, especially in the final, traumatic, years with Richard, years I couldn’t have navigated without him.
All of that is four years behind us now. Simon is in New Zealand, doing research. Leo and I are headed out into the Great Unknown, whatever that might bring.
I don’t know where Richard is. And that, more than anything, is the hardest part.
My thoughts of Richard are so complicated, so impossible to separate out from one another. I try not to be bitter – my mother used to say that bitterness is like drinking poison and waiting for your enemy to die – and I try not to dwell between the twin despairs of ‘why me?’ and ‘it’s not fair’. No one set out for any of this to happen: not me; not Richard; and most of all, not Leo. And Leo has to stay the most important thing. I’m strict about wallowing and I’m strict about remaining positive – but sometimes I struggle.
All through our marriage, Richard was my best friend, and an amazing father. He knocked himself out trying to provide for us, trying to make us the perfect family: but so much of the time, he just couldn’t make that work.
I was overwhelmed by the shuddering loneliness of living with someone with chronic depression. It’s hard to stay sympathetic and sad and angry all at the same time, torn between meeting the needs of both the people you love. I held my breath for so long trying not to let Richard’s illness impact on Leo, trying not to let Leo’s day-to-day demands take too much of a strain on Richard. I once imagined there was nothing worse than being in charge all the time, the press-ganged pilot who navigated Richard’s anxieties and worries and got him back onto even ground.
But then Richard killed himself and the sheer joy of being with him, the summer warmth of caring for someone, the human softness of his body, it all came flooding back. A spotlight of pain projected my loss in vivid relief: still does. I live with a Richard-sized hole in my life: almost a physical thing in the room we slept in; in the places we took Leo to; in the kitchen every day when I finish work. He isn’t here and I don’t know where he is.
All I know is how much I loved him.
Chapter Two
The gravel drive crunches a song of despair under the wheels of my car, each pop a painful reminder that we’re inching towards this life we didn’t ask for, and away from everything we ever had.
In the passenger seat, Leo has kept up a steady stream of ‘Are we there yet?’ punctuated only by a dirge of his friends’ names repeated over and over to the tune of a horrible television advert. I’m trying not to shout at him, trying not to be an even worse parent than I already am. The strain of keeping quiet shows in my knuckles, wrapped tight white around the wheel.
‘Are we there yet?’ asks Leo, one more time.
This time, with my heart in my mouth, I have to answer, ‘Yes.’
‘Eric? And Sadie? And Ollie? And Dean?’ He’s being deliberately obnoxious, believing that he can winkle a promise out of me if he’s sufficiently irritating; a chafing grain of sand that could grow, if Leo tries long enough, into, ‘Yes, all your friends are here, they’re going to jump out and shout surprise and we’ll both go back to our real lives.’ Lives we both, in most ways, loved. And that’s the most bitter thing about love; you can’t understand it, measure it – not all its edges and intricacies – until it’s gone and the clear print of its negative self is left behind.
Evidence of the house is everywhere, though the house itself is still out of sight: a faded sign on the main road pointed us down a lane that became a gated tunnel of green leaves – hopeful spatters of lime-coloured light landing on the bonnet of the car. There were stone pillars either side of what must have once been a magnificent gateway, bridges in the classical Greek style that have long since lost the fountains that played over them or the ponds they led into. A quarter of a mile or so down the lane, it peters out into this long tree-lined drive, the sound of gravel, and the uneasy feeling of regret.
Each side of the drive, aspen trees wave us on. They are so overgrown that their tops mingle with each other, forming a hedge high in the air. Their trunks are straight and bleak.
‘Are we there yet?’ says Leo.
‘I said we are.’ I want to stop the car – delay the inevitable – but the removal men in the van behind us are paid by the hour.
‘There’s no house.’ Leo is sinking further down in his seat, scrunching his shoulders up and his head down, working up to full a meltdown.
I know how he feels. We’ve been driving for seven hours, stuck in traffic for five of those, inching south down the M25 and grudgingly moving forward on the M20. I’m a Londoner. I belong in a place full of chattering people, of smells, sounds and tastes of multiculture, of dozens of nosy, self-absorbed villages strung together into one huge city. Leo had everything he needed in London. A club for every afternoon of the week while I finished work, sports teams and music lessons, art group and dancing. I had neighbours to step in and take him swimming if I was stuck, friends who could watch him at the drop of a hat if I wanted to go to the pictures or lie in a park and watch the clouds overhead by myself.
When people move, they say they’re swapping something for something else: the bustle of the city for the bucolic countryside, the chill winter breezes of the seaside for the shores of southern Spain. Leo and I don’t have the luxury of a swap. What we had has gone.
‘I want to see Dean.’
‘Dean’s in London. Can you see the house yet?’