Us

part five VENICE AND THE VENETO

In Venice I proposed to Connie.

Not the most original scenario, I know. In fact, there was nothing much original in our trip that February, the third anniversary of our meeting. We entered the city by water taxi on a bright, crisp day, nestling in seats of burgundy leather as we bounced across the lagoon, then standing wind-whipped on deck as the city appeared and two thoughts battled in my head: was anything in the world more beautiful, and was anything in the world more expensive? This was my Venetian state of mind; awe versus anxiety, like browsing in a wonderful antiques shop where signs constantly remind you that breakages must be paid for.

And so we did what tourists do in Venice in the winter. We sheltered from the rain and when the sun came out drank bitter hot chocolate in chilly squares of quite staggering grace and beauty, and sipped Bellinis in dim, expensive bars, bracing ourselves for the bill. ‘It’s a tax on beauty,’ said Connie, doling out the notes. ‘If it were cheap here, nobody would ever leave.’

She knew the city well, of course. The trick in Venice, she said, is to see St Mark’s once, then bounce off it to the outer edges. The trick is to be spontaneous, curious, to get lost. Instinctively, I resisted the notion of getting lost. For accomplished and enthusiastic map-readers like myself, Venice offered untold challenges and I spent a great deal of time tracing our route until Connie snatched the map, lifted my chin with her finger and commanded that I look up for once and appreciate the beautiful gloom of the place.

This was what surprised me most about Venice: just how sombre it could be; all those tourists taking snaps and thinking about death. Venice was my first experience of Italy, so where were the floury-handed mammas and tousle-headed rascals that I’d been led to expect? Instead this was a city of closed doors, its besieged citizens narrow-eyed and resentful — understandably so — of the endless waves of visitors even in winter, like house-guests who will not take the hint and go. Even the festivals were gloomy; the Venetian idea of a good time was for everyone to dress up as skeletons. Perhaps it was a legacy of the plague, the silence or the shadows, the dark canals or the absence of green spaces, but walking the deserted alleys and rainswept esplanades, I found the melancholy quite overwhelming, yet also weirdly pleasurable. I don’t think I’ve ever been as simultaneously sad and happy in my life.

Perhaps this ambiguity did not make it the best spot to propose marriage. Too late for doubt, though; the engagement ring was packed, concealed in the finger of a glove, the restaurant table booked. We had spent a light-hearted morning on the cemetery island of San Michele, Connie posing in her overcoat and taking photographs of tombs, then marching arm in arm from Cannaregio to Dorsoduro, ducking into under-lit churches and gloomy courtyards along the way, and all the time I wondered: should I kneel when I ask her? Would that be amusing or embarrassing for us both? Would she prefer a simple ‘Will you marry me?’ The formal, period-drama feel of ‘Would you give me the honour of becoming my wife?’ The laid-back ‘Hey, let’s get married!’? We returned to the hotel, dressed up and strode out and had a wonderful dinner of tuna carpaccio and grilled fish, my hand travelling intermittently to the ring — antique silver, single diamond — in my suit jacket. ‘Indigestion?’ asked Connie. ‘Heartburn,’ I replied. There was beautiful gelato, some kind of almond digestifs and then out we walked, our heads spinning, into a crisp bright night. ‘Let’s stroll to La Salute!’ I suggested casually and there, with the great marble church flaring like magnesium in the moonlight and St Mark’s Square illuminated across the Grand Canal, I reached into my jacket, retrieved the ring and asked Connie, ‘Will you be my wife?’

Think how romantic it would have been if she’d said yes. Instead she laughed, swore, frowned, bit her lip, hugged me, swore, kissed me, laughed and swore and said ‘Can I think about it?’ Which was reasonable enough, I suppose. Few decisions are more life-altering. Even so, I couldn’t help wondering why it had come as such a surprise. Love led to marriage, and weren’t we in love?

Thankfully the ‘Yes’ did come, though not until some months later. So while the question was ‘popped’ in the moonlight by the Grand Canal, it was answered at the delicatessen counter of the Sainsbury’s on Kilburn High Road. Perhaps it was my choice of olives that swung it. Either way, there was much jubilation and relief over the cured meats and cheeses, and a tearful and emotional check-out.

Perhaps I should have taken Connie back there, to Kilburn Sainsbury’s. I’m sure we could have made it that far at least.

But I am leaping backwards and forwards simultaneously. I’m still in Germany where, after watching my wife walk away, I scrambled into a taxi, returned to Munich and the scrappy chaos of the Hauptbahnhof, dabbing at the touchscreen of a ticket machine and hurling myself onto the late-morning train across the Alps to Venice via Innsbruck, changing at Verona, with just a shoulder-bag and passport, quite the Jason Bourne.

The train compartment, too, was of the kind favoured by spies and assassins and that journey only got more exciting as the train left the suburbs, crossed a wide green plain towards the mountains then suddenly, within the space of a few hundred metres it seemed, we were in the Alps. As someone born and raised in Ipswich, I have never been complacent about mountains, and I found the Alps extraordinary. Peaks like hounds’ incisors, vertigo-inducing plunges, the kind of landscape that might have been imagined by a deity or an ambitious CGI-effects supervisor. Good God, I murmured to myself and instinctively took a photograph on my phone, the kind of desultory, mediocre photograph that is never seen by anyone and serves no purpose, and I thought of my son, and how, had a falling meteor lopped the top off the highest peak, he would still not have raised his camera.

After Innsbruck, the terrain became even more spectacular. It was by no means a wilderness — there were supermarkets, factories, petrol stations — but even in high summer there seemed to be something lunatic about people living and working in such a terrain, never mind building a railway through it. The train skirted another escarpment, the valley falling away beneath us to meadows of the same lime green as the model railway landscapes I’d built too far into my teens. I thought of Connie, of how she would be getting home soon, saying hello to Mr Jones, opening mail, throwing wide the windows to renew the air, breaking the seal on the empty, stale fridge, loading the washing machine, and I thought of how much I wished she could see all of this.

But awe is a hard emotion to sustain for hours on end and soon it all became rather boring. In the buffet, I ate a croissant with pastrami and mozzarella which, gastronomically speaking, covered all the bases. Back in my compartment I dozed, waking to find that Brenner had become Brennero. The church spires changed, the mountains softened into hills, pines gave way to endless vineyards. Germany and Austria were now far behind and I was in the Italian Alps and, before too long, in Verona.

A lovely city, russet brown and dusty rose and baking in the August afternoon. So keen was I to catch my quarry that I had only allowed myself a two-hour window here, stomping across beautiful piazzas and over mediaeval bridges, ticking them off the list — an appalling way to see a city, really, a betrayal of our original intent when planning the Grand Tour. No matter — there were more important things than culture now. I noted the fine Roman amphitheatre, third largest in the world — tick — saw the Torre dei Lamberti, the market on the Piazza delle Erbe, ornate Piazza dei Signori — tick, tick, tick. Marching along a marble-paved shopping street, I followed the crowd through an alleyway into a packed, cacophonous courtyard beneath a stone balcony — Juliet’s balcony, supposedly. It looked as if it had been glued to the wall, and sure enough my guidebook informed me with a sniff that it was only built in 1935, though given that Juliet was a fictional character, this seemed to be missing the point. ‘Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo!’ shouted wags from around the globe. In the heat of mid-afternoon the courtyard was a literal tourist trap, but I watched dutifully as perspiring visitors took it in turns to pose with a kitsch-y bronze statue of Shakespeare’s heroine, her right breast worn grey from a million hands. Fondling her breast brought good luck, apparently. A Japanese gentleman nudged my arm and mimed a camera, international sign language for ‘do you want me to take your picture?’, but I struggled to imagine that a photograph of me squeezing the breast of a bronze statue would be anything other than soul-crushing and so politely declined, pushing my way towards the exit, pausing only to read the graffiti’d wall, layer upon layer of Simone 4 Veronica, Olly + Kerstin, Marco e Carlotta. I could have added to it, I suppose: Connie and Douglas 4ever. Je t’aime, I read, ti amo, ik hou van je, the declarations so densely inscribed as to resemble a Jackson Pollock.

Jackson Pollock. ‘You see, Connie? I’m learning,’ I said out loud. ‘Ik hou van je.’

The only way to arrive in Venice is an early-morning water taxi across the lagoon. I arrived by train at night with the backpackers and the students who tumbled, thrilled and dazed, out of the strange and rather elegant railway station, a low-ceilinged marble slab like the kind of coffee table that you crack your shins on. I had found the city’s last remaining room in a remote, unpromising pensione in Castello and decided to walk that considerable distance, striding along the still-bustling Strada Nova, peering into youthful faces in case Albie was already here. Venice in high summer was a new experience for me and I noted the humid air and the brackish, ammonia smell of the canals before realising with some embarrassment that the stagnant odour was coming from me. Somewhere between Munich and Venice I had come to smell like a canal, and I resolved to address this in the comfort of my hotel room.

But for the first time my orienteering failed me, the fondamentas, rivas, salitas and salizzadas sending me in circles, and it wasn’t until after midnight that I arrived at the Pensione Bellini, a cramped and crumbling building in the shadow of the Arsenale.

There’s something furtive and indecent about arriving at a hotel after midnight, and the resentful and suspicious night manager directed me up many flights of stairs to an attic room the size of a double bed, containing a single bed. Through the thin wall I could hear the hotel’s boiler gurgle and then roar into life. I peered into the mirror in the glare of the bare bulb. The heat and humidity were Amazonian and rubbing the skin on my perspiring forehead produced a grey scurf like the debris from a pencil eraser, the accumulated grime of seven nations. I had not shaved since Paris, barely slept since Amsterdam, not changed my clothes since Munich. Verona’s sun had glazed my nose, and only my nose, to a flowerpot red, while the skin beneath my eyes was blue-grey with exhaustion. I looked haggard, there was no denying it, like a hostage about to record a video message. To Albie’s eyes I would look frankly alarming but I was too worn out to remedy this now, even to make the journey to the shared bathroom in the hall. Instead I scraped at my armpits with plastic soap and brown water from the tiny sink, rinsed my fusty clothes and lay them like seaweed on the window ledge, collapsed onto the sagging mattress and, to the roar and gurgle of hotel plumbing, fell instantly asleep.

Imagine, if you will, a scale model of Venice. Not a huge city by any means, not much larger than Reading, but more intricate and with clearer boundaries. Now imagine two figures, also to scale, turning left and right at random in that maze for twelve hours like mice in, well, a maze. The maze is not regular; wide streets and immense squares alternate with narrow alleys and bridges that act as funnels. Allowing for constant movement over, say, fourteen hours, what is the probability of the two figures coming within sight of each other?

I’m not a statistician, but instinctively I knew the chances were small. They were by no means inconceivable, however, and I would be aided by the fact that footfall in Venice tends to correspond to certain well-trodden paths, from the Ferrovia to St Mark’s, from St Mark’s to the Pescheria, to the Accademia, back to the Ferrovia. Much as we’d like to imagine ourselves free-spirited explorers, visitors walk around Venice in the same way that we walk around a supermarket, an airport or an art gallery, channelled by all kinds of factors, conscious and unconscious; should I walk down this dark, urine-stinking alley or towards that charming little bakery? Studies have been made of this sort of behaviour. We think we have independence and imagination, but we have no more freedom to roam than trams on rails.

So the labyrinth was smaller than it first appeared, and factor in the assumption that I was probably looking for two people, that they were unlikely to be constantly on the move and that the sound of an accordion would be hard to ignore, and I felt mildly confident that I could find them. In fact, I don’t mind admitting that I was rather excited about the project as I settled down to a two-star Italian breakfast of sponge cake, orange squash and the world’s hardest pineapple. My mission had an element of espionage to it, and I was enjoying planning my route with a water-soluble felt-tip pen on the very same laminated map that I’d brought along all those years ago, allowing me to annotate then wipe it clean at the end of each day.

‘That is a very good system you have there,’ said the room’s sole other occupant, a smiling woman, German, Scandinavian perhaps.

‘Thank you,’ I replied. I had barely opened my mouth in twenty-four hours and my own voice sounded unfamiliar.

‘If ever a city demanded a map, it’s this one,’ she said.

I smiled, not wishing to be rude. ‘It is important not to skimp on a good-quality map,’ I said, intriguingly.

She sipped her tea. ‘Do you know the city well?’

‘I’ve been here once before. More than twenty years ago now.’

‘It must have changed enormously since then,’ she said.

‘No, it’s pretty much the— oh, I see. Yes, beyond recognition! All these new buildings!’ It had been a good joke on her part, and I thought perhaps I could run with it, riff on the idea in some way. ‘In those days, the streets weren’t even flooded!’ was the best that I could do, but she looked confused, and so I slipped the much-scrutinised map, a stolen banana and a sachet of dried toast from the buffet into my bag and left. Oh yes, Cat, I was quite the outlaw now.

But first I would need to equip myself. As island-dwellers, Venetians face limited choices in menswear, but I bought three pairs of identical socks, three pairs of underwear, three T-shirts in pale blue, grey and white and, for evening wear, two button-down shirts and a thin jumper in case of a chill. To protect my vulnerable scalp from the sun, I bought a baseball cap, the most neutral I could find and the first I had ever owned, though perhaps it wouldn’t be necessary in the shady canyons of San Paolo and Santa Croce. Because I would be walking for most of the day, I bought some rather natty running shoes in moulded plastic, absurd outsized things that promised to mould themselves to my feet in a very space-age way. I bought some moistened toilet tissue and a single bottle of water that I would refill. Returning to the Pensione Bellini, I organised my purchases and caught sight of myself in the mirror once again.

Sleep had repaired some of the damage. I still had not shaved, and now sported the beginnings of a rather fetching beard, flecked with white and grey, the kind Hollywood actors grow when required to appear less handsome than they are. I rather liked it. I looked … unfamiliar. I put on my new sunglasses, pulled down the baseball cap and hit the canals.

Imagine time as a long strip of paper.

This is not the shape of time, of course. Time has no shape, being a dimension or conceivably a direction or vector, but imagine for the purposes of the metaphor that time can be represented as a long strip of paper, or a roll of celluloid, perhaps. And imagine that you are able to make two cuts in the strip, joining those ends to form a continuous loop. This strip of paper can be as long or as short as you wish, but that loop will roll forever.

For me, the first snip of the scissors is easily apparent and comes about halfway across London Bridge on the night I first met Connie Moore. But the second cut is harder, and is that not the case for everyone? The edges of unhappiness are usually a little more blurred and graded than those of joy. Nevertheless, I find my scissors hovering, hovering …

But not just yet. We aren’t even married yet.

We married, and that was fun. We had been guests at so many weddings, Connie and I, that it had sometimes felt that we had been attending a three-year part-time course in wedding management. Both of us were clear about what we didn’t want, and that was a fuss. We’d have a city wedding, registry office then a meal in our local Italian restaurant with close family and good friends. It would be small but stylish. Connie would be responsible for the guest list, the readings, the décor, the menu, music and entertainment. I would be responsible for turning up.

And making a speech, of course. In the run-up to the wedding, I went over the text again and again, putting more effort into that speech than almost any piece of prose since my PhD on protein-RNA interactions, though it’s arguable as to which contained the better jokes. Because I wanted everything down word for word in 14-point Arial, I had been obliged to transcribe my emotions several months before experiencing them. I predicted that she would be beautiful, that I would feel happy and proud — no, never happier, never more proud than when standing next to her, and certainly these predictions did come true. She was spectacular that day, dressed like an old-fashioned film star, in a rather tight-fitting low-cut black dress, an ironic antidote to traditional virginal white. In later years, she’d regret the choice. ‘What was I thinking?’ she would say. ‘I look like a prostitute in a Fellini film,’ but for the record I thought she looked wonderful. Certainly I was happy and proud, grateful and relieved. An underrated emotion, I think, relief. No one presents a bouquet with the words, ‘I’ve never been more relieved in my life’. But then I had never expected to marry at all, and to be marrying this woman …

During the short service, Connie’s friend Fran read a poem by T. S. Eliot which sounded very nice but which I would challenge anyone to put into good plain English, and my sister gave a fraught rendition of the Beatles’ ‘In My Life’ on an electric keyboard, smiling bravely through a torrent of tears and mucus that might have been appropriate had Connie and I recently perished in a plane crash, but which seemed so ghoulish in our presence that Connie got the giggles, then passed them on to me. To distract myself I stole a glimpse at my father, who sat with elbows on knees, pinching the bridge of his nose as if attempting to stem a nosebleed.

Then the ‘I do’s, the exchange of rings, the posing for photographs. I enjoyed it all, but weddings turn the bride and groom into performers and we were, I think, both a little self-conscious with each other that day, neither of us used to being the centre of attention. In the photographs I look sheepish, preoccupied, as if I’ve been shoved onto the stage from my place in the wings. We look happy, of course, and in love, however that manifests in photos, but one always hopes that wedding-day conversation between bride and groom will consist only of endearments, a perpetual ‘you complete me’, and there were taxis and seating plans and sound systems to organise, and of course the speeches too. My sister had volunteered, quite early on, to be my ‘best man’, and delivered a boastful speech that focused on how all our present and future happiness had been her idea, and how we could never possibly repay our vast debt and should not even try. Kemal, Connie’s step-father, made an amusing speech that returned, again and again, to my wife’s figure to uncomfortable effect, and then it was my turn.

I told some of the stories that I’ve related here, about our first meeting, about Jake the trapeze artist, about Connie saying yes at the delicatessen counter of Kilburn Sainsbury’s. I am not a natural raconteur but there was a decent amount of laughter, as well as some muttering and shushing from the table containing Connie’s art-school friends.

Because Angelo was there, did I mention that? In the months before the wedding, there had been some debate about his presence, but it would have seemed paranoid and conventional on my part to banish all her former boyfriends, not to mention that it would have halved the guest list. So here was good old Angelo, drinking heavily and providing, I imagined, a sardonic commentary on the event. To Angelo’s gang, I was clearly something of a Yoko Ono figure. Never mind. I focused my thoughts on my wife. ‘Wife’ — how strange that sounded. Would I ever get used to it? I brought the speech to a sentimental but sincere conclusion, kissed my wife — that word again — and raised a glass in her honour.

We danced to Ella Fitzgerald’s recording of ‘Night and Day’, Connie’s choice. My only specification had been that our first dance shouldn’t be anything too fast or wild, so we rotated slowly like a child’s mobile. It can’t have been much of a spectacle, because after the first few revolutions, Connie started to improvise ducks and spins that left us momentarily tangled, to laughter from the guests. Then we cut the cake, we circulated, and occasionally my eyes would scan the room over the shoulder of a colleague or an uncle, searching out Connie, and we’d smile or pull a face or just grin at each other. My wife. I had a wife.

My father, looking slighter since my mother’s death, left early. I had offered to find a hotel for the night, an indulgence that appalled him. Hotels, he thought, were for royalty and fools. ‘I have a perfectly good bed at home. I can’t sleep in strange beds anyway,’ he said. Now he was keen to catch the Ipswich train ‘in case your sister starts to sing again’. We laughed, and he placed one hand on my shoulder. ‘Well done,’ he said, as if I’d passed my driving test. ‘Thanks, Dad. Bye.’

‘Well done,’ was Angelo’s phrase too, as he maliciously embraced me then brushed the cigarette ash off my shoulder. ‘Well done, mate. You won. Treat her well, yeah? Connie’s a great girl. She’s golden.’ I agreed that she was golden, and thanked him. My sister, ever the keen-eyed critic of other people’s work, hung off my neck, drunk and emotional and gave me her feedback. ‘Great speech, D,’ she said, ‘but you forgot to tell Connie how gorgeous she is.’ Had I forgotten? I didn’t think I had. I thought I’d made it perfectly clear.

And then, a little after midnight, exhausted and wine-mouthed we were in a cab, heading to a smart hotel in Mayfair, our one concession to luxury. We didn’t make love that night, though I’m reassured that this is not uncommon among newly married couples. Instead we lay facing each other, champagne and toothpaste on our breath.

‘Hello, husband.’

‘Hello, wife.’

‘Feel different?’

‘Not particularly. You? Suddenly feel jaded? Trapped, confined? Oppressed?’

‘Let me see …’ She rotated her shoulders, flexed her wrists. ‘No, no I don’t think so. Early days, though.’

‘I love you.’

‘I love you too.’

Was it the happiest day of our lives? Probably not, if only because the truly happy days tend not to involve so much organisation, are rarely so public or so expensive. The happy ones sneak up, unexpected. But to me at least, it felt like the culmination of many happy days, and the first of many more. Everything was still the same and yet not quite the same, and in the moments before sleep I felt the kind of trepidation that I still feel the night before a long, complicated journey. Everything is in place, tickets, reservations and foreign currency, passports laid out on the table in the hall. If we are at our best at all times, or at least endeavour to be so, there is no reason why everyone shouldn’t have a wonderful time.

Still, what if something goes wrong along the way? What if the plane’s engines fail, or I lose control of the car? What if it rains?

Viewed from above, Venice resembles a broad-bodied fish with a gaping mouth, a bream or perch perhaps, with the Grand Canal as its intestinal tract. My route began at the fish’s tail, the eastern tip of the city, Castello, the old docks, long straight terraces of the loveliest workers’ houses in Europe. Then back along the northern shore, the dorsal fin, through Cannaregio, where the streets had a sunnier, almost coastal aspect. Through the Ghetto to the train station then down the main tourist drag, which felt like a drag, tourists queuing to squeeze over the Rialto Bridge. How many masks did one city need? I wondered, shuffling along another lightless shopping street, so that arriving in St Mark’s Square felt like coming up for air, so bright and immense that no crowd of tourists could fill it, though they were trying now. By the Grand Canal — the fish’s swim bladder, I suppose — I took a moment to rest. That morning I had seen adenoidal guitarists, ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ performed on the rims of wine glasses, a startlingly inept juggler whose routine consisted of dropping things, but fewer acts than I’d expected. Searching for the terms ‘busker’ and ‘Venice’ on my phone revealed that the city was considered hostile territory. The internet was alive with angry and resentful living statues who had been bustled into motion by assiduous polizia municipale. A permit was required, and I was sure Cat was too wild and free-spirited to submit to Italian bureaucracy. I would be searching for a guerrilla accordionist, someone who hit fast, hit hard and disappeared into the crowd. No time to rest, then. For energy I ate my bruised banana and pushed on, shuffling through the crowds towards the Fenice theatre, where a busker in Pierrot costume sang a warbling ‘La donna è mobile’. Tired now; it was too much, too many people. I burrowed south, hurrying past West African men selling handbags and on to Dorsoduro, the belly of the fish.

After all that ancient stone, there was something pleasingly light and temporary about the wooden Accademia Bridge, and I took a moment to look east to the entrance of the Grand Canal, taking in the view. A strange phrase that, ‘taking in’, implying as it does some sustenance or retention. While I could admire the elegance and proportion of the scene, I was primarily aware of the mass of tourism around me, and also of the extraordinary confidence of the Venetian architects in allowing their finest buildings to teeter at the water’s edge. What about damp? What about flooding? Wouldn’t it make sense to have a little lawn or garden as a sort of buffer zone between the house and all that water? But then it wouldn’t be Venice, said Connie’s voice in my head. Then it would be Staines.

I walked on and heard another voice. ‘How is that map working out for you?’ In foreign cities, I assume that anyone speaking to me wants money, and so I continued some way before turning and seeing the lady from the pensione’s breakfast room. I doubled back.

‘It’s serving me very well. You’re queuing for the Accademia?’ I asked, somewhat idiotically given that she was queuing for the Accademia.

‘Accademia,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Accademia, not Accademia. The desk clerk in the hotel corrected my pronunciation. First and third syllable. It’s Accademia. Like the nut.’

‘Sorry, which nut?’

‘The macadamia nut.’

‘No, you mean the macadamia nut!’ I said.

I’m not sure the written word captures the full splendour of this comeback. I was so pleased that I found myself making a little whining noise in the back of my throat, and the woman smiled at the first nut-pronunciation joke in human history. It seemed unlikely that either of us could top the remark, so, ‘Enjoy the gallery!’ I said. ‘See you at breakfast!’ she replied, and on I strode towards Campo Santa Margherita, where I gorged on a slab of pizza, greasy and delicious, and a litre of chilled sparkling water, then on, belching privately, to the exhaust fumes and bluster of Piazzale Roma in the fish’s mouth. Head to tail had taken me a little under three hours.

But it was the body of the fish, San Paolo and Santa Croce, that defeated me, the blind alleys and dog-legs and compass-defying switchbacks. My map was useless here, and finding myself alone in a cool, exquisite courtyard, my response was not ‘what grace, what beauty’ but ‘what a pointless waste of time’. After an hour of dispirited wandering, I struck south to the open promenade of the Zattere, the fish’s pelvic fin. On floating pontoons the tourists were eating gelati but I was behind schedule now, and in very low spirits by the time I approached La Salute, where I slumped on the marble steps near the spot where I had proposed to Connie on a winter’s night, twenty-two years ago. Now a young busker stood there, Albie’s age, singing an Oasis song, written before he was born, the words learnt phonetically and stripped of their consonants.

‘Un mayee, ure gonna be uh-un uh safe mee …’

I missed my wife and wondered how long she would remain so. I missed my son and despaired of ever finding him and bringing him home. I pressed the heels of my hands into the sockets of my eyes.

‘An afer awwww, ure my wunnerwaw.’

Then I picked up my backpack, caught the vaporetto back to the tip of the fish’s tail, did the same thing all over again, and then once more.

When I was a child, this is how I imagined married life to be.

The day after the wedding, you begin to walk hand in hand across this great wide plateau and in the distance ahead there are scattered obstacles, but there are also pleasures, little oases, if you like — the children that you will have and who will grow healthy, loving and strong, the grandchildren, Christmas mornings, holidays, financial security, success at work. Failures, too, but nothing that will kill you. So there are ups and downs, undulations on the plain, but for the most part you can see what’s coming up ahead and you walk towards it, the two of you hand in hand for thirty, forty, fifty years, until one of you slides over the edge and the other one follows soon after. Looking up from the viewpoint of a child, that was how marriage seemed.

Well I can tell you now that married life is not a plateau, not at all. There are ravines and great jagged peaks and hidden crevasses that send the both of you scrabbling into darkness. Then there are dull, parched stretches that you feel will never end, and much of the journey is in fraught silence, and sometimes you can’t see the other person at all, sometimes they drift off very far away from you, quite out of sight, and the journey is hard. It is just very, very, very hard.

Six months after our wedding, my wife had an affair.

I’m not sure how much I can say about the affair, because I wasn’t there. Infidelity is much easier to discuss from the participants’ point of view. They have the looks and smiles and secret touches, the beating hearts, the thrill and the guilt. The betrayed know nothing of this, we’re just fulfilling our responsibilities in happy ignorance until we stroll into the plate glass.

Neither can I offer an intriguingly tangled web of hints, clues and gradual realisations. There were no mysterious phone calls, no mislaid credit-card slips for restaurants that I’d never been to, no detective work on my part at all. I found out because Connie told me, and had she not confessed I would not have found out. She told me without preamble on a Saturday morning, resting her head against the cupboard because she didn’t know what to do.

‘What to do?’ I said.

‘What to do next.’

‘About what?’

‘About Angus.’

‘Angus?’

‘Angus, my friend, the guy at work.’

Apparently there was a guy at work — he was always a ‘guy’, which irritated me — an artist who had recently exhibited at the gallery where she now worked full time. Working late, they had drunk a little wine and kissed, and she had thought about that kiss a lot, and so had this Angus, this guy, and the following week they had gone to a hotel.

‘A hotel? I don’t understand, you’re here every night, you’re always here! When did you—’

‘One afternoon. Two weeks ago. Christ, Douglas, have you really suspected nothing? Have you really not seen the change?’

I had not. Perhaps I was unobservant, or insensitive, or complacent. We had not made love as frequently as before but that was hardly unusual. Wasn’t this marriage’s oldest joke? We were meant to be trying for a baby but if we had lost some of our initial zeal for that project, was that really a surprise? And yes, there had been moments where Connie had seemed a little distant, uncommunicative, distracted, times when we shuffled around the kitchen sink together like colleagues on a morning tea break, times when I fell asleep to the sound of her uneven breathing instead of asking what was wrong. But I was working very hard in those days, extremely hard, through the night sometimes in order to complete one project while securing funding for the next, and there were limitless demands on my time and my attention.

Well, she had my attention now. I am not an especially passionate man. Months, years go by without me raising my voice, and I think people sometimes misinterpret this as docility. But when I do lose my composure — well, a fitting analogy would be the difference between kinetic and potential energy, between the flow of a river and a dam that’s about to burst. Good God, the memory of that awful weekend; the shouting and the tears and the punched walls, the awful circular argument. Why had she done it? Was it because she loved him? No, not really. Did she still love me? Yes, of course she did. Then why? Was it because she loved him? No, not really and so on and so on late into the night. The neighbours complained, but not because of the dancing this time. By the second day the shock and rage had dissipated somewhat, and we were staggering from room to room, insensible and incoherent. We left the house and walked along the Regent’s Canal, somewhere new to be unhappy. Why had she done it? Was she bored? No, or only occasionally. Unhappy? No, or only sometimes. She sometimes wanted, she said, to feel younger, wanted something new. Change. Then did she want the marriage to continue? Yes, absolutely yes! Did she still want children? Yes! Children with me? Yes, more than anything. Then why had she …?

By Sunday night we were exhausted. Those two days were like some awful fever and I suppose we hoped, by the end of it, that the danger had passed. Nevertheless I insisted that Connie sleep elsewhere, dispatching her to Fran’s, because wasn’t this the convention? The suitcase, the waiting taxi? I did not want to see or hear from her until she’d made her choice.

But no sooner had the taxi pulled away than I wanted to run after it and wave it down. Because I had a terror that once banished, she might never return.

‘Did I wake you?’

‘A little bit.’

‘I don’t think you can wake someone a little bit, can you?’

‘I mean I was just dozing off. There’s a time difference, you know.’

‘Of one hour, Douglas! I’m sorry, do you want to go back to sleep?’

‘No, no, I want to talk to you.’ I levered myself further up the swampy bed. Eleven o’clock.

‘I know I wasn’t meant to call you, but—’

‘Connie, is there news?’

‘No news. I take it you’ve not found him yet.’

‘No, but I will.’

‘How do you know, Douglas?’

‘I have my methods.’

She sighed. ‘I’m still texting him once a day. Nothing melodramatic. Just “please call, we miss you”.’ There was an artificial precision to her voice that suggested she had been drinking, the vocal equivalent of walking in a straight line for a policeman. ‘I’ve told him we’re both in England. Not a word back, Douglas.’

‘That doesn’t mean he’s not okay. It just means that he’s still punishing me.’

‘Us, Douglas, both of us.’

‘You’ve done nothing wrong. It’s me.’ She did not contradict me. ‘If you do hear anything, don’t tell him I’m here. Ask him where he is but don’t say I’m looking.’

‘I’ve checked his email, his Facebook account too. Not a word.’

‘How can you check those? I thought he kept that private.’

Connie laughed. ‘Please, Douglas. I am his mother.’

‘Where are you now?’ I asked.

‘On the sofa. Trying to read.’

‘Anyone know you’re home?’

‘Only the neighbours. I’m lying low. How’s the hotel?’

‘A little bleak, a little damp. You remember that old fish tank that Albie refused to clean? It smells like that.’ Down the line, I heard her smile. ‘The mattress sort of sucks you in.’

‘What’s that noise?’

‘That’s the hotel boiler. It’s okay, it only happens whenever anyone runs a tap.’

‘Oh, Douglas, come home.’

‘I’m fine, really.’ A brief pause. ‘How’s our stupid dog?’

‘He’s not stupid, he’s complicated. And he’s fine. Happy I’m back.’

‘How’s the weather?’

‘Rainy. How is it in Venice?’

‘Hot. Humid.’

‘It’s funny, I can only ever think of Venice in the winter.’

‘Yes. Me too.’

‘I’m sorry not to be there.’

‘You could fly out?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I found our spot today. Where I proposed to you. You remember?’

‘It rings a bell.’

‘I didn’t seek it out. It wasn’t a pilgrimage, it was on my route.’

‘That’s fine. I’m sorry I wasn’t there with you.’

‘Yes, we could have laid a wreath.’

‘Douglas—’

‘I’m kidding. It’s, whadyacallit, dark humour.’ Some time passed. ‘You don’t regret it, do you?’

‘What?’

‘Saying yes.’

‘I don’t think I did say yes, did I?’

‘Well, eventually you did. After I’d worn you down.’

‘I did. And I haven’t regretted it for a moment. Don’t let’s talk about it now. I only phoned to say I miss you.’

‘I’m glad. And now I must go to sleep.’

‘And Douglas? I appreciate what you’re doing. I think it’s a little mad, but it’s … admirable. I love you.’

‘Are we still saying that?’

‘Only if it’s true.’

‘Well then, I love you too.’

I did not fall asleep until six, then woke at seven to discover that my knee joints had ossified. My hips ached as if I’d been struck by a car, so it took me some time and a great deal of groaning and sighing to clamber from the sucking maw of my mattress and sit on the edge of the bed. I had sweated feverishly in the night, the bedding now damp enough to propagate cress, and I drained the bedside glass of water and stumbled, hunched, to the tiny sink to drink again and again. On examination, my feet were monstrous, as moist, pale and bony as a vacuum-packed pig’s trotter. Angry water-filled blisters had formed at heel and toe. Clearly it was absurd to think that I could walk the same circuit three times today, or even once. I would have to rethink my plans, find key thoroughfares and lie in wait. The Rialto, the Accademia Bridge, the western entrance to St Mark’s — surely Albie would funnel through there at some point. I stuck useless plasters to the worst of the corns and blisters, descended with a robot’s gait to the breakfast room, filled bowls with tinned peaches and dusty muesli and lowered myself carefully into a chair.

‘Ow … ow … ow.’

‘So, did you succeed?’ said the woman.

‘Succeed?’

‘In seeing all of Venice in one day?’

‘I think so. Which is why I can’t move my legs. How was the … Accademia? Did I say that right?’

‘Beautifully. I didn’t go in the end. Coach parties arrived before me and I hate peering over people’s shoulders. There were just too many tourists. Me included, of course.’

‘The tourist’s paradox: how to find somewhere that’s free of people exactly like us.’

‘Though of course, like every tourist, I think of myself as a traveller.’ We smiled at each other. ‘Perhaps I was naïve, but I really wasn’t prepared for the crowds.’

‘Yes, I’ve only ever been here in winter.’

‘Perhaps August was a mistake. Verona was the same.’

‘Very busy.’

‘You were in Verona too?’

‘Only for two hours. I was changing trains.’

She exhaled and shook her head. ‘I made the mistake of seeing Juliet’s balcony. I don’t think I’ve ever been more depressed in my life.’

‘Me too! I felt the same way.’

‘I practically wanted to hurl myself off it.’ I laughed and, encouraged, she leant forward. ‘You’re on the way to …?’

I’m looking for my estranged son.

‘I’m not sure yet. I’m … following my nose.’

We lapsed into silence for a moment. Then …

‘I feel foolish shouting across the room like this,’ she said. ‘Do you mind if I join you?’

‘Not in the least,’ I said, folding my map to make room.

I suppose this was why some people travelled, to meet new people, though this has always been a vexed area for me. Conversation, the gradual unveiling of oneself, one’s quirks and characteristics, opinions and beliefs; what a fraught and awkward business that is. Connie had always been the gregarious one, and I was inclined to let her meet new people on my behalf. But this woman was sitting diagonally opposite me now, and I had little alternative but to offer my hand.

‘I’m Douglas. As in the fir.’ A weak joke, I know, but one that might have special resonance for a Scandinavian.

‘My name is Freja, but I’m afraid I can’t think of a pun to go with that.’

‘How about Deep-fat Freja!’ I said in time to hear the voice inside my head scream, ‘No!’ We fell into a somewhat shocked silence and, in a panic, I was obliged to comment on her breakfast.

‘Cheese for breakfast — I’ve always thought that was a very European thing, cheese and salami.’

‘You don’t have that in England?’

‘No. To eat cheese at breakfast would be quite taboo. Likewise the cucumber and tomato have no place on our morning table.’ Good God. Talk normally, you bloody fool.

‘Though in fairness, you can hardly call this cheese.’ She dangled the pale, perspiring square between finger and thumb. ‘At home we have this same material tiling my bathroom floor.’

‘There appear to be chocolate chips in my muesli.’

‘The world has gone mad!’

‘It’s not the greatest hotel in Venice, is it?’

Freja laughed. ‘I thought it would be fun to travel on a budget, but roughing it is always more enjoyable in theory than in practice.’ Roughing it; she spoke very good English. ‘I was told my room had air-conditioning but it sounds like a helicopter landing. Yet without it I wake each morning and have to peel the wet sheets off me.’

There seemed to be something slightly lewd about this revelation, so I moved on. ‘Where are you from, Freja?’

‘Copenhagen.’

‘You speak wonderful English.’

‘Do I?’ she said, smiling.

‘You speak better English than my son!’ I said, the kind of pointless jibe that had brought me here in the first place.

‘Thank you. I wish I could pretend it was because I read a lot of Jane Austen, but mainly it comes from bad television. Cop shows, detectives. By the age of nine, every schoolchild in Denmark knows the English for ‘we’ve found another body, superintendent’. And pop songs, too — you’re bombarded from an early age, the same all over Scandinavia.’ She shrugged. ‘Absurd, really, that I speak better English than Swedish. But knowing me, knowing you, there is nothing we can do!’

‘I wish I could reply in Danish.’

‘Don’t feel too bad. We’ve long given up hoping that the world will take lessons.’

‘My wife enjoys very much your television programmes.’ It’ll be herring and Lego next, I thought, and wondered if it was a particularly British, no, English trait, to grab at clichés like this.

‘Our gift to the world.’ She smiled and pushed her chair back. ‘Douglas, against my better judgement I am going to get more of this disgusting fruit juice. Can I get you something? They have cake …’

‘No, thank you.’

I watched her go. My wife enjoys very much your television programmes. The mangled syntax was back, and why was I straining to mention Connie? Certainly I had no desire to deny her existence, but neither was there any reason to hang a ‘married’ sign around my neck — except, I suppose, from an awareness that Freja was a very attractive woman. Fifty or so, I guessed, with flattish features and a pleasant, healthy glow suggestive of black bread and swims in icy lakes. Clear skin, the veins close to the surface on her cheeks. Laughter lines around very blue eyes, dark hair that might well have been dyed — it was a slightly unreal dark brown, like Cherry Blossom shoe polish. She smiled over her shoulder and I found myself sitting straighter and running my tongue over my teeth.

‘So,’ she said on her return, ‘are you travelling alone?’

‘I am. For the moment. I’m hoping to meet up with my son in a day or two,’ I replied, which was true, if not quite the whole story. ‘You?’

‘Yes, I’m alone. I’ve just got divorced.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘It was best for both of us.’ She shrugged and laughed. ‘That’s what people say, isn’t it? Where is your wife? She’s not travelling with you?’

‘She’s back in England. She had to go home early. A family thing.’

‘And you didn’t want to go with her?’

Here my imagination failed me. ‘No. No.’

‘Do you like travelling alone?’

‘This is only my third day.’

‘For me it’s my second week.’

‘And how is it?’

She considered for a moment. ‘I thought Italy would cheer me up. I thought I would walk all day through little mediaeval streets and sit every night with a book in a little restaurant and eat a modest meal with one glass of wine before retiring to bed. It seemed so nice in my imagination. But usually I’m given the table by the bathrooms, the waiters keep asking if I’m expecting someone and I find myself fixing this very relaxed smile to let everyone know I’m all right.’ She demonstrated a tight grin that I recognised at once.

‘In Berlin I once went to the zoo by myself,’ I said. ‘That was a mistake.’

Freja laughed and put her hand to her mouth. ‘But why?’

‘I was on a conference, and I heard it was a great zoo, so …’

‘I’ve been to the theatre alone,’ said Freja. ‘The cinema I think is okay, but the theatre feels … awkward.’ We smiled at this and continued a light-hearted riff about places one should never go alone. Paintballing! A rollercoaster! Trampolining! The circus, we decided, was the worst. One ticket for the circus, please! No, just the one. One adult, yes. By the end we were quite hysterical. ‘I feel better,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘Now the table for one doesn’t seem so bad.’

‘Last night I was so exhausted I ate a sandwich in my room with my head out of the window, so there wouldn’t be crumbs.’

‘Congratulations!’ She handed me the sugar bowl with mock formality. ‘You win today’s international loneliness award.’

‘Thank you, thank you!’ I said, accepting the trophy and acknowledging the applause then, feeling a little foolish, placing the sugar bowl down. ‘And now I must go.’ I attempted to stand, groaning and steadying myself on the edge of the table. ‘Christ, I’m like some ancient old …’

‘Goodness, what have you done to yourself?’

‘I overdid it yesterday. I walked completely around Venice, three times.’

‘Why on earth would you do such a thing? Surely there’s no pleasure in that.’

‘Not after the first time, no.’

‘So why?’

‘I’m looking for … it’s a long story, I’d rather—’

‘I’m sorry, I’m prying.’

‘No, no, not at all. But I must get going.’

‘Well, if you need a break …’

I stopped and turned. ‘I don’t know how you feel about visiting art galleries on your own,’ she said, ‘but I prefer not to.’

‘Um …’

‘I’m going to the Accademia first thing this morning. It opens at eight thirty. It’s really not far. We can walk around very slowly, sit on benches. If you’d like.’

Might I find Albie there? Would he really be queuing at opening time for a museum of Venetian art? Unlikely, but would it really be so bad to devote an hour or so to the Grand Tour?

‘I’ll meet you back here in fifteen minutes.’

And so Freja and I walked out along the Riva degli Schiavoni, which was still cool and quiet in the morning sun, and I found myself hoping, perversely, that I would not bump into my son.

Freja and I liked the Accademia very much. There was a sense of the art belonging to a city that, on the evidence of many of the canvases, had barely changed in seven hundred years. Crisp and vivid Bellinis; exquisite, bright Carpaccios; and, in one room, an immense Veronese the size of an advertising hoarding, three great arches swarming with figures, twenty, thirty of them all distinctly individualised and dressed in anachronistic Venetian garb, with a biblically robed Christ at the centre, preparing to eat, somewhat unconventionally, what looked like a terrific leg of lamb.

‘The Feast in the House of Levi,’ said Freja, consulting the caption on the wall and stepping unwittingly into my trap.

‘That’s what Veronese ultimately called it, but in fact it was originally The Last Supper. The Inquisition didn’t like the picture, they thought it was irreverent — all these people, bustling around, Germans, children, dogs, black people. You see that cat, under the table by Christ’s feet? They thought it was blasphemous. So instead of painting out the animals and the dwarves, Veronese simply changed the title. Not a Last Supper, but The Feast in the House of Levi.’

Freja looked me up and down. I realise this is a cliché, but her eyes really did scan up then down. ‘You know a great deal about art,’ she said.

I shrugged modestly. ‘My wife’s the expert. I’ve just picked up a thing or two along the way.’ … from the internet, I should have said. My expertise lies entirely in looking things up, but I kept my counsel and strolled on, hands locked professorially behind my back.

‘So what do you do?’

‘I’m a scientist, a biochemist by training. Nothing to do with art, I’m afraid. You?’

‘A dentist, so to me biochemistry sounds fascinating. Dentistry is also not very artistic.’

‘But necessary!’

‘I suppose so, but there’s not much room for free expression.’

‘You have terrific teeth,’ I said, somewhat idiotically.

‘Well, I’ve learnt that as soon as you say you’re a dentist, people start peering into your mouth. I suppose they want to see if you practise what you preach.’

‘“Practise what you preach” — you see? Your English is incredible.’

‘You mean I know a lot of clichés?’

‘Not clichés. Idioms. You’re very idiomatic.’

‘So much praise!’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No, I don’t mind. Why would I mind?’

In the final gallery we found a terrific mural by Carpaccio, occupying a whole room and telling the legend of the life of St Ursula in comic-book form. If I knew anything about Renaissance art, it was that stories of saints rarely end well. In this case, the virtuous Ursula says goodbye to her betrothed and leaves Britain to go on a pilgrimage with 10,000 virgin followers, but they’re all beheaded by the Huns in Cologne. In one canvas, an arrow is fired point blank into Ursula’s chest, and I wondered what message could be drawn from that?

‘The moral is, don’t go to Cologne,’ said Freja.

‘I went to a conference in Cologne. I thought it was a charming city.’

‘But were any of you virgins?’

‘Well, we were all biochemists so, yes — almost certainly.’

She stepped closer to the canvas, tilting her head. ‘Poor St Ursula. Poor ten thousand virgins. Still, it’s a comfort, I suppose, to know that someone is having a worse holiday than you.’

For all the gore of the final frames, it was a wonderful painting, full of colour and life and strange, imaginary cities under cobalt blue skies, with that precise perspective that is so conspicuous in early-Renaissance art, as if they had all been issued with really terrific geometry sets. ‘I don’t want to sound conceited, but I’m pretty sure that, if I’d been around in the early Renaissance, I could have come up with the theory of perspective.’

‘Yes!’ said Freja, grabbing my forearm. ‘I’ve always wondered, why did no one pick up on that before? “Listen, everyone! I’ve just realised, when things are far away they appear smaller.”’

I laughed, then remembered my new guise as an art historian. ‘Of course it’s a little more complicated than that.’

‘Of course, of course.’

‘I love Carpaccio’s version of England.’

‘Yes,’ said Freja, ‘it just so happens to look exactly like Venice.’

‘I suppose, if you’d spent your life in Venice, you might very well expect everywhere to look like Venice.’

‘Why would you wish for anything else?’

And then we were out in the clean blue light of the morning, our surroundings seeming somehow refreshed and made vivid now that we had seen them on old canvases. Those strange top-heavy chimneys were still there, the same accentuated geometry of the buildings and fruit-bowl hues of pink and orange and peachy yellow, the forced perspective of the eastward view from the top of the Accademia Bridge. We took it in.

‘What a place,’ said Freja. ‘It shouldn’t be here, and yet here it is.’

‘There’s a nice café on Santa Margherita,’ I said. ‘If you’re not in a hurry.’

We headed west. Freja had been separated for two years, divorced for six months. ‘The usual story. It hardly bears repetition. He had an affair, and then I had a silly affair to punish him for his affair, and then he had another affair, like some ridiculous poker game. Except that he fell in love with his lover and I did not. To begin with it was awful, a catastrophe. Chaotic and shocking and sad. We had built this business together — we were in the same surgery every day — and all through the day there would be arguments and rows and accusations. Believe me, no one wants to see their dentist cry, not while they’re working. Can you imagine? Tears plopping into your mouth while this hysterical woman is wielding a drill. And of course the children were so furious with us both.’

‘How many children?’

‘Two, both girls. But they had already left home for university, so perhaps things could have been worse.’

‘And do you think that was a factor in the break-up?’ I said, adopting a casual tone.

‘That they’d left home?’

‘And that your work was somehow … complete?’

Freja shrugged. ‘For him, perhaps. Not for me. I loved our family, I was proud of us; it never occurred to me to think of it as work. My husband used to send me crazy, of course, but that was beside the point. The point was we were married and we would be together until we died.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘So it was awful to begin with, screaming and shouting and tears, and the girls went a little off the rails. But then you’re lying in the wreckage — to continue the metaphor — you’re lying in the wreckage and you reach down and feel for your legs, they’re still there, and both your arms and your skull is in one piece. You can see and hear and realise you can still stand up. And that’s what you do. You stand up and you catch your breath and you stagger away. I’m talking a lot. It is because I have said nothing but “grazie” and “a table for one” for the last three weeks.’

‘I don’t mind. Really.’

We were out of the dark alleys now, into Campo San Barnaba, the church front bright and elegant and unadorned.

‘I haven’t seen this square. I like it a lot,’ said Freja, and as her tour guide I felt rather proud.

‘You must see this,’ I said, the expert once again. On the bridge at the far side of the square, four white marble footprints were inlaid deep into the stonework. ‘It’s a fighting bridge. If you had a dispute with someone, you settled it here. A sort of public boxing ring. The footprints were where the fight started.’

‘You’re a real local historian, Douglas.’

‘I read the guidebooks. It sends my wife crazy. She’s always telling me to put the book away and look up. Look up!’

We placed our feet in the marble indentations. ‘Perhaps I should have brought my husband here,’ she said.

‘Do you get on now?’

‘As well as you can with someone you’ve hated. It is “amicable” — is that the word? Amicable,’ she said and raised her fists.

At the Caffè Rosso our coffees were extruded from an immense brass contraption that hissed and steamed like the boiler of a locomotive. We took them outside to the sunny terrace of that wonderful square, with its lopped-off campanile at the western end, snipped through cleanly as if by giant scissors.

‘What happened to the church tower?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Douglas, I thought you would have an interesting story. I thought you knew everything.’

‘I didn’t have time to look it up. Sorry.’

There was an expectant silence. Freja had confided in me, and it was my turn now to offer up some explanation as to why a dishevelled man in middle age was circling Venice in a teenager’s trainers. Instead I found my attention drawn to the young violinist who had begun to play across the square, mournful music in a minor key. Bach, I guessed. If I ever find a piece of music depressing beyond belief, I assume that it is Bach.

‘So, Douglas. You and your wife, are you together or separated?’

I lowered my coffee cup, opened and then closed my mouth.

‘I hope you don’t mind my asking,’ said Freja. ‘I have been boring you all this time about my life, I thought you might like an opportunity to bore me in return.’

‘That’s only fair. And I’d tell you if I knew. We’re in a … transitional state. By which I mean we’re physically apart, but still together. The process has not … we’re in flux. I’m not explaining this very well, am I?’

‘You mean you haven’t yet decided if you want to stay together.’

‘Oh, no. I’ve decided. She hasn’t.’

‘I see. At least I think I see. Do you mean that—?’

‘Freja, I hope you won’t mind, I realise you’ve been very open, and I’m not being coy. But my reason for being here, here in Venice, it’s more complicated than … it’s not entirely … what I mean is, I’d prefer to keep it to myself. Does that make sense?’

‘Of course. I apologise.’

‘No need. Please don’t.’

We listened to the violinist for a while as he performed elaborate trills and variations on the same repeating sequence of minor chords. He was a young man in scuffed shoes and an untucked shirt, with that rather unworldly air that musicians sometimes share with scientists and mathematicians. I wondered, perhaps Albie might have taken to the violin instead of the guitar. Perhaps we should have pushed him in that direction.

‘He’s very good,’ said Freja, ‘but I find this music far too sad,’ and I too felt saddened, and chastised. ‘It’s winter music,’ she added.

I’d like to apologise for my son. I had lost sight of my purpose and forgotten why I was here. I had become distracted by an absurd and irrelevant flirtation. All these sideways glances, these confidences, this pathetic affectation of culture and sophistication — I was making myself ridiculous. I should leave.

‘Of all the ones I’ve seen, I like this square the most,’ said Freja. ‘I’ve been trying to understand what makes it different and I think it’s the trees. In Venice I don’t miss the cars at all, but I do miss the colour green.’

‘I must go,’ I said, standing abruptly.

‘Oh. Oh, really?’

‘Yes, yes I have to, I’m behind schedule, I must … start walking.’

‘Perhaps I could walk with you.’

‘No, I really need to cover some ground. It’s hard to explain.’ My heart was racing suddenly; too much coffee perhaps, or fear. ‘The fact is, Freja, my son has gone missing. That makes it sound as if he’s been abducted; he hasn’t, he’s run away and I have a theory that he’s here in Venice and I have to find him. So …’

‘I see. That’s awful, I’m sorry, that must be a worry for you.’

‘It is. I apologise.’

‘Why do British people apologise for being in distress? It isn’t your fault.’

‘But it is! It is! That’s the whole bloody point!’ I was leafing through my wallet now, panic rising. ‘I’m sorry, I only have twenty euros.’

‘I’ll pay.’

‘No, I’d like to pay. Here, take it.’

‘Douglas, please sit down.’

‘No, no I must keep going—’

‘Two minutes will not make a difference.’

‘Here, take the twenty—’

‘Douglas, I’m leaving tomorrow morning.’

‘That’s fine, I don’t want any change, but I really must—’

‘Douglas, I said I’m leaving. Venice. I probably won’t see you again.’

‘Oh. I see. You are? I’m sorry, I …’ Perhaps I should have sat down at this point, but I continued to stand. ‘Well, it was very nice to meet you, Freja,’ I said and offered my hand.

‘And you,’ she said, taking it with little enthusiasm. ‘Good luck. I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for.’

But I was already running away.

We were different after the affair.

Not unhappy, but more formal, on our best behaviour. As Connie became quiet and withdrawn so I became overly attentive, like a waiter who constantly asks how you’re finding the food. How was your day? What would you like to do tonight, what shall we eat, what shall we watch? But pretending that nothing has changed is a change in itself. The fact remained that one of us had wronged, one of us had been wronged, and my determination to overlook this fact had turned me into a particularly unctuous and ingratiating parole officer.

There had been conditions for her return, a certain ‘laying down of the law’, but nothing too onerous or unreasonable. Of course, she would not see or speak to this ‘guy’ again. We would try to be more open and honest about our dissatisfactions and irritations. We would go out together more, talk more, be kinder to each other and, for my part, I would endeavour not to refer to the infidelity. It would not be forgotten — how could it be? But neither would it be wielded as a weapon or a negotiating tool, or a justification for infidelity on my part, a condition that I happily accepted.

More importantly we decided that we would commit wholeheartedly to the project of starting a family and, sure enough, within a few months of almost breaking up, I received a telephone call.

‘Have you had lunch yet?’ she asked, with affected casualness.

‘Not yet.’

‘Come and meet me in the park, by the Serpentine. We’ll have a picnic!’

Outside my window it was a blustery day in late October, hardly picnic weather. ‘All right. All right, I will,’ I said, and then I knew. I knew why she wanted to meet. I hung up and sat for some time at my desk, not moving, but laughing quietly to myself. We would be parents. I would be a father — a husband and a father. It felt like some wonderful promotion. I told my colleagues that I’d be late back.

In Hyde Park, I saw her some way off, standing by the Serpentine, hands in pockets, collar raised. The grin that she struggled to suppress confirmed my suspicions and as I approached I felt such … it’s a very broad term, ‘love’, so elastic in its definition as to be almost useless, but there is no other word, except perhaps adoration. Adoration would do too, at a push.

We kissed, briefly, casually. I had decided to play dumb. ‘So. This is a nice surprise.’

‘Let’s walk a little, shall we?’

‘I’ve not brought anything to eat.’

‘Me neither. Let’s just walk.’ We walked. ‘What time do you have to be back at the lab?’ she said.

‘No rush. Why?’

‘Because there’s something I wanted to tell you.’

‘That sounds intriguing …’ Perhaps I rubbed my chin, I can’t recall. I’ve never been obliged to choose between science and a career on the stage.

‘Douglas. I’m pregnant!’

And then there was no need to act, we just laughed, and hugged and kissed. She took my arm, and we walked around the Serpentine three, perhaps four times, talking, speculating, making plans until the day grew dark and the streetlamps came on. She would be a wonderful mother, I had no doubt, and I — well, I would do my best. The notion that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger is patently nonsense, but we had sailed close to disaster, my wife and I, and survived, and we were now about to embark on this next chapter with renewed zeal. We would not be apart again.

Some wag once remarked that married couples only have children so that they have something to talk about. A rather cynical view, I suppose, but it was certainly true that Connie’s pregnancy led to something of a renaissance in our marriage. The highs and lows of the process are so well documented in film and television that they are scarcely worth recounting here, except to confirm that, yes, there were bouts of morning sickness, insomnia, aching feet and tempestuous mood swings. There were comical food cravings and times when the sheer strain of carrying that ever-growing load drove Connie into tearful rages. In the face of the irrational demands and sudden furies, I adopted the persona of an attentive butler, thick-skinned, uncomplaining and able, cooking careful meals, organising visitors, making tea. It suited me.

And pregnancy suited Connie, too, as she swelled and bloomed in magnificent ways. The smoky parties, the late nights and hangovers were set aside with surprising ease, almost relief, and now she was rarely without a bag of desiccated fruit or some awful juice of a pondweed green. That’s not to say that she became pious or saintly about the condition. She was funny again, pretending irritation, fury sometimes at this new encumbrance. ‘Look what you’ve done to me! Look!’ We stayed at home now, hibernating through the winter into spring. Watched films and banal quiz shows. Lay on the sofa, reading. The spare room was finally acknowledged as the nursery and we equipped and decorated it in a defiantly unisex fashion, classical music playing on the stereo, proper grown-ups now. At night I pushed my thumbs into the hard soles of her aching feet. We were home-making, a dreary and pedestrian activity to anyone but us, and we were happy.

We returned to the hospital for our second scan with only a small amount of trepidation, just enough not to seem complacent. After all, we were healthy and responsible adults in a medically advanced country in the final years of the twentieth century. The chances of anything going wrong seemed vanishingly small and sure enough, there it was on the screen, a blurred comma of flesh and soft bone animated with those jerky movements suggestive of a stick puppet. Beautiful, we said. Objectively, of course, there is no such thing as a beautiful scan; it’s a bad photocopy of a vertebrate that looks, frankly, like something you might find in an underground lake. But does any parent find this not beautiful? There was the heart, the size of a raspberry, pulsing away; there were the fingers. Does any parent ever shrug and refuse the printout? We held hands and laughed.

But the ‘it’ was troubling. Would we like to know the sex? Yes please, we said, and squinted at the image I couldn’t see it myself, but apparently it was a girl. I would have a daughter, and although I had never expressed a preference, I must confess that I was secretly pleased. I had experienced, and was continuing to experience, the awkwardness of the father — son relationship, but didn’t all daughters love their dads and vice versa? Probably there was a certain amount of relief, too; wouldn’t our daughter look to Connie for advice and guidance? Wouldn’t she be the role model and soul-mate, as well as the butt of the biggest rows? They’d swap clothes and confide and when adolescence came around, the doors would slam in Connie’s face, not mine. As a father to a daughter, all I’d have to do was provide the lifts, the pocket money, the understanding ear and proud paternal hug at graduation. All I’d have to do was worry about her, and that was entirely within my abilities.

We took our smudged image home and stuck it on a pinboard, surrounded by Post-it notes with all the names we liked — or rather all the names Connie liked, my imagination balking at anything more esoteric than Emily, Charlotte, Jessica, Grace. Perversely, Connie settled on Jane, a name so ordinary that it was practically avant-garde. We rubbed the bump with oil. Connie stopped work and readied the house, I worked long hours on a new project, zebrafish now, and waited for the call.

And here, with some reluctance, I must return to that notion of time as a loop of celluloid. The first snip of the scissors came on London Bridge on the night I met my wife, but where was that second cut? While her affair had been traumatic, it would be worth reliving if only for the happiness of what came after, the winter and spring of her pregnancy during which our marriage once again made perfect sense.

But some things cannot be lived through twice and so, if asked, I think I’d like to make that other cut round about now please.

Could there be a clearer indicator of the dizzying pace of technological change than the demise of the internet café? Once so space-age, so cutting-edge, portals to a world of knowledge and fantasy, until cheap wifi and the smart phone rendered them obsolete, and they became as quaint and anachronistic as the telegram office or the video rental outlet.

In Venice, only one internet café remained, situated in a gloomy little parade of shops near a housing estate in Cannaregio. Exhausted and made lame by my second circuit of the city I took refuge in its cool, dark interior, squeezing past a wall of telephone booths where Indians and Pakistanis, Arabs and Africans chattered urgently, to the computer bays where the poor and desperate joined the scammers, the blackmailers and stalkers, all of us hunched and furtive on swivel chairs leaking yellow foam in the unhealthy glow of the screens. Explosions and laser-blasts could be heard to my left where a nine-year-old boy was hammering his keyboard as aliens disintegrated all around, while to my right an earnest young man stared intently at a page of dense Arabic script. I smiled hello and turned to my computer. The console and keyboard were ancient and filthy, the dirty cream of old Bakelite, but I was exhausted and almost out of credit on my tablet and so I sat there, grateful, in the room that smelt of wet cardboard and instant coffee, and took my quest online.

Doubts had begun to assail me. I knew from Albie’s call to the hotel that he and Cat had been heading this way, but what if they had changed their minds, or left already? In need of reassurance, I searched for

an alchemist, tossing ingredients into a cauldron in the vain hope of finding gold. I searched for

I saw things no man should ever see, but I did not see my son. Taking a more direct approach, I searched for Albie Petersen. Ever the contrarian, Albie was not a slave to social media and, besides, his accounts were locked. But his friends were not so cagey or discreet and I found that I could easily fill the screen with snaps of my son; at parties with a cigarette dangling blatantly from pouting lips, on stage with his terrible college band (I had been there but couldn’t bear to listen, had sneaked out to check the car was locked, had stayed in the car). Here he was as a Nazi in Cabaret (I was working late that week) and here with a girlfriend that I vaguely remembered, the one before the one before, a lovely quiet girl, heartbroken now I imagined, my son her first love. Here he was lounging on some riverbank on an overcast day in some previous summer, his body bony and pale and visibly goose-bumped, then, in a series of consecutive snaps, arms and legs wheeling as he let go of a rope swing and plummeted into the river. I laughed at this, my neighbour glancing from my face to the screen, which I changed quickly, double-clicking on some of Albie’s photographic work from an online exhibition: a dilapidated shed in an allotment, a close-up of tree bark, and a rather good portrait in high-contrast black and white of two elderly men on the same allotment, their faces extraordinarily gnarled and wrinkled, creased deeply like the bark, which was the point I suppose. I liked this one, and I resolved to tell him that I liked it if and when I found him.

I would never find him, I knew that now. The quest was absurd, a delusional attempt to salvage some dignity from this whole disastrous trip, to make amends for years of fumbling, mumbling incoherence. People travelling in Europe do not bump into each other, it’s just not possible. If he returned, and surely he would return eventually, he would do so in his own time. The image that I’d cherished, that I would carry him back to my wife like a fireman emerging from a burning building, was a vain and self-indulgent fantasy. The only reason I remained in Europe was because I was too scared and humiliated to go home and face the future. I closed the page of images of Albie.

The YouTube searches remained open underneath. I would try one more time. I typed in pompidou paris accordion cat street performer, flicked though screen after screen of beat-boxing flautists, Siamese cats on piano keyboards and depressing clips of living statues, and there in the bleak, uncharted depths of the fourth page of search results, was Cat in an unseasonable velvet top hat, playing ‘Psycho Killer’ on the forecourt of the Pompidou. ‘Yes!’ I said out loud.

I let the video play, the four hundred and eighty-sixth person to do so, and read the prose beneath.

Saw this gr8 busker wen in Paris. She great, she crazy buy her Cd Kat play rock accordion — styl!!!!!

Underneath, another contributor was in a more critical mood:

haha she sing like u speak English … i.e. wewy wewy painful where u lurn English dum boy hahaha

The debate continued in Socratic form for several exchanges. The video, I noted, was two years old. No matter. I had made a small breakthrough: Cat was a Kat.

Encouraged, I began my search again: kat accordion cover version, kat street performer and found her once again, sitting on a bed in a crowded, candlelit room. Melbourne, apparently. The video had been uploaded some six months before, had been viewed a modest forty-six times and consisted of a spirited rendition of ‘Hey Jude’, with the other party guests banging beer bottles together, playing the bongos, etc. The video was twenty-two minutes long and seemed unlikely to ‘go viral’. Had I been immortal I might have watched it all, but there was no need because in the description I found:

Our old friend Katherine ‘Kat’ Kilgour from Theatre Factory still singing the songs and doin’ her thang. Love u Kat Babe, Holly

Kat Kilgour. I had a surname, and not a Smith or Evans either. I searched again, striking a rich seam now, linking from one video to the next until I found what I’d been searching for.

In an Italianate square, in blazing sunlight, Kat and Albie perched on the steps of an ornate church, singing ‘Homeward Bound’, the old Simon and Garfunkel song. A strangely old-fashioned choice of song, as distant in time to my son as the Charleston was to me, but part of the very small cultural legacy that I had passed on to Albie. Connie had never cared for Simon and Garfunkel, thought them too middle-of-the-road, but as a small boy Albie had loved them, and on long car journeys we’d play the Greatest Hits, Albie and I singing along, much to Connie’s irritation. Had he suggested the song to Kat, or vice versa? Did he even think of it as something that he’d taken from me? Did he want to come home?

‘Too loud!’ said the war-gaming boy to my left, and I realised that I had been singing along too. I apologised, pulled on a pair of greasy headphones and turned my attention back to the video, posted two days previously and viewed a modest three times. The description, while at least literate, provided no further assistance. ‘Saw these guys on our tour of Italy and talked to them afterwards. She’s called Kat Kilgour and she’s really talented!!!’ And what about Albie, hm? In truth the harmonies were experimental, the crowd small and indifferent. Still, I felt such pleasure in seeing him again. He looked well. Perhaps not ‘well’, exactly — skinny and hunched and none too fresh — but he looked exactly like a student backpacker should, and he was safe.

But where was he? I played the video once more, a detective looking for clues. The church, the café, the pigeons, the square, the tourists — it might have been anywhere in Italy. I freeze-framed, took screen grabs, zoomed in on Albie, his clothes, his face, looking for goodness knows what. I zoomed in on the faces of the few indifferent tourists, on the shop fronts and walls in case of street names, I let the video play and play again, grabbing shots at key moments until something drew my eye to a knot of people coming into frame in the final seconds, a man crouching at a café table to confer with a tourist, a striped T-shirt, a black hat with a ribbon.

A gondolier.

‘Yes! Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!’

Taking full advantage of my online anonymity, I left my comment — ‘You guys are excellent! The boy in particular! Please, please stay in Venice!’ — then emailed myself a link to the page and hurried back to the pensione, hobbling but in high spirits. Tomorrow was the day that our pre-paid reservation at the hotel came in to force. Lured by the offer of free residency in a nice hotel, chosen for its comfort, convenience and romance, might not Albie take the room? Connie had been calling him from our home in England. Clean sheets, a shower, no parents, a chance to impress his girlfriend with one of her beloved buffet breakfasts? I felt certain he would come. All I would need to do was take a seat at a pavement café nearby and wait. What I would say, other than sorry and come home, remained a mystery, but I would have got something right for once.

Pausing at reception, I wrote a note on the back of a flyer for The Vivaldi Experience.

Before I could reconsider, I handed it to the receptionist for the Danish lady travelling alone. Freja Kristensen? Grazie mille. Then I climbed the stairs stiffly and sat heavily on the bed. The treacherous running shoes were removed with a queasy sucking sound. Where was their promised comfort now? Despite my best efforts with bandages and plasters, my feet looked as if they’d been eaten by crabs. The blisters on the knuckles of my toes had burst, the new flesh rubbed raw, and on the soles of my feet dead skin hung down like tattered flags. Swelling rendered my other shoes, a pair of serviceable brown brogues, unwearable, and so I did my best to patch my wounds while I waited for my lady friend to call.

It was not a date, of course. We were merely two travellers taking temporary comfort in each other’s company. But I realised, unwrapping a new shirt and combing my hair, that I had not eaten a meal with a woman other than my wife for perhaps twenty years. It was all very strange and I resolved to be extremely casual about the whole business, selecting in advance a small, unpretentious trattoria that I had noticed on my hike around the city; pleasant but functional and not too cluttered with red candles or gypsy violins.

Freja, on the other hand, seemed to have gone to some effort. She was waiting in the lobby, subtly but effectively made up and wearing a rather snug skirt and the kind of off-white satin shirt that one might really only term a ‘blouse’. She looked fresh, healthy and tasteful, and yet I found myself instinctively wanting to do up an extra button, and I wondered if I might be the only man in the world to have dressed a woman with his eyes.

‘Hi,’ I said, pronouncing it ‘haaaiii,’ giving that difficult word a little Scandinavian twist to be more easily understood.

‘Good evening, Douglas.’

‘You look nice,’ I said, silken-tongued.

‘Thank you. I really do like those shoes. They’re very striking and bright!’

‘“Box-fresh” is the correct term, I believe.’

‘Have you been playing basketball?’

‘Actually, they were meant for walking, but they’ve attached themselves to my feet like some awful alien parasite and now they’re the only thing I can wear.’

‘I like them,’ she said, placing her hand lightly on my forearm. ‘You look very fly.’

‘My skateboard is parked outside.’ I took her arm and hobbled towards the door and out into the kind of warm, hazy evening which is sometimes labelled ‘sultry’.

We headed east through the sestiere of Castello, the tip of the tail, walking the back streets and enjoying the feeling of belonging that the serious traveller enjoys when the day-trippers have returned to their coaches and cruise ships.

‘You don’t even need a map any more.’

‘No, I’m almost a local.’

We emerged at the immense gates of the Arsenale, the walls crenellated like a toy fort. I’d read about this in the guidebook. ‘The great innovation of the Venetians was to mass-produce ships in kit form, standardising all the parts. It was here that the shipbuilders of Venice amazed Henry IV of France by building an entire galleon—’

‘—in the time it took him to eat his supper, and thus was the modern production line born,’ said Freja. ‘Except I think it was Henry III of France. We have the same guidebook.’

‘God, what an old bore I am,’ I said.

‘Not at all, I’m the same. I think it’s good to have a desire to educate. Perhaps it comes of having children. My husband, ex-husband and I, we used to drive our daughters to distraction, taking them to ruins and cemeteries and dusty old galleries. “Here is Ibsen’s grave, here is the Sistine Chapel … Look! Look! Look!” when all they really wanted to do was go to the beach and flirt with boys. Now they’re older they appreciate it, but at the time …’

‘That’s how we were meant to spend this summer. My wife and I were meant to be taking my son around all the great galleries of Europe.’

‘And instead?’

‘My son left a note and ran off with an accordionist. My wife is in England, thinking about leaving me.’

Freja laughed. ‘I’m sorry, but that is a very bad holiday.’

‘It has been both fun and harrowing.’

‘What’s left to go wrong, I wonder?’

‘Are there sharks in this lagoon?’

‘I shouldn’t laugh. I’m sorry. No wonder you were so upset. I’ll try not to add to your woes tonight.’ Here she took my arm and at that precise moment, as if she had activated an alarm, my telephone rang.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi there. Where are you?’

‘Oh, out walking, walking. As usual.’

‘No news, then.’

‘Not yet.’ To Freja I mouthed, Sorry, one minute, and indicated she should walk ahead. ‘But I’m closing in.’

‘What does that mean, closing in?’

‘It means I have a good lead. The net is tightening!’

‘You sound like a private detective.’

‘I’m wearing a mackintosh as we speak. I’m not.’

‘No. So — tell me, then.’

‘You’ll see.’

‘You’ve heard from him? You’ve spoken to him?’

‘You’ll find out.’

‘But why won’t you tell me?’

‘Trust me, I have material proof that he’s fit and well.’

‘Well, should I fly out to you?’

‘No! No, I’ve told you, I’ll bring him back.’

‘Because it’s been five days now, and I’d really like to know, Douglas.’

‘I’d prefer to tell you when it’s definite.’

There was a silence.

‘I think you should come home.’

‘I will when I’ve found him.’

‘Except you’re not really looking for him, are you?’

I felt an irrational moment of panic, absurdly turning my back on Freja, who was waiting patiently at the next bridge. ‘I am! I’m out looking now.’

‘That’s not what I mean. I mean you’re doing something else.’

Should we turn left or right? mimed Freja.

‘I’m about to get something to eat. Can I call you back?’ I said, and mouthed one minute.

‘Oh. Okay. I’d hoped we could talk, but if you’re too busy …’

‘I’m sitting at a table, the food’s about to arrive. Not the food, the menu — the menu’s about to arrive.’

‘You said you were walking.’

‘I was, and now I’m sitting at a table. I hate talking on phones in restaurants, it’s very rude. The waiter’s glaring at me.’ With this last detail I had overreached myself, because I could hear Connie frowning.

‘Where are you exactly?’

‘I’m in Castello, by the Arsenale. I’m sitting outside and the waiter’s standing over me. I can send you a photo if you like.’

There was a pause that seemed to last an age, a lowering of her voice. ‘I’m worried about you, Douglas. I think you might be—’

‘Got to go,’ I said and hung up. I’d never done this before, hung up on Connie. Then, to my amazement, I turned the phone off too, and limped quickly towards Freja.

‘I’m sorry about that. Connie, my wife.’

‘I thought, when the phone rang, you were going to leap into the canal.’

‘It startled me, that’s all. I need a drink. The restaurant’s just here.’ And we turned into a tiny campo. No carnival masks or postcards for sale here. Instead laundry hung between the buildings like celebratory bunting, televisions and radios played in first-floor rooms, and in the corner of the square was a small trattoria that, despite my best intentions, looked undeniably romantic.

‘What do you think?’

‘I think it looks perfect.’

We were seated outside in adjacent chairs, facing the square. The restaurant had no menu and instead we were brought glasses of prosecco by a small elderly man with suspiciously black hair, then small bowls of marinated squid and octopus and anchovies, sharp and oily and entirely delicious. As if to reassure each other of the platonic nature of the evening, Freja showed me pictures of her daughters on her telephone, two startlingly beautiful girls with very blue eyes, born a year apart, growing in montage form into straight-limbed, long-haired, white-teethed young women, the very embodiment of health and vigour, pictured against a varied background of windswept Atlantic beaches and Thai palm trees, the Sphinx, a glacier somewhere. With shrewd editing it might, I suppose, be possible to compile an upbeat slideshow of even the most grim and Dickensian of childhoods, but on the evidence of Freja’s photo album her daughters had been particularly blessed. They seemed like the kind of healthy, wholesome family who’d be happy to share the same toothbrush. Of course she was far too nice a woman to gloat, but I couldn’t help but be aware that while Freja was usually pictured in the embrace of her photogenic offspring, I could not recall a single photo of my son and me. Perhaps when he was a small child, but in the last eight, ten years? Never mind, here was a photograph of Anastasia Kristensen, swimming with dolphins; here was Babette Kristensen, volunteering in an African village. Here was our pasta, and more wine.

‘Anastasia is a documentary-maker now. Babette is an environmentalist. I’m very proud of them, as you can probably tell. I have an almost limitless capacity to bore people about them. I’ll stop now before you slump forward into your linguine.’

‘Not at all. They seem like lovely girls,’ I said.

‘They are,’ she replied, returning the phone to her bag. ‘Of course when they were younger they could be little bitches …’ She put her hand to her mouth. ‘I shouldn’t say that even if it’s true — but goodness, we fought! Thankfully those things get easier with time. One more …’ She produced her phone again. ‘I debated whether or not to show you this, you’ll understand why …’

And here was Babette, twenty years old, sitting naked in a hospital chair, a newborn baby girl the colour of an aubergine at her breast, her hair sticking to her forehead with sweat. ‘Yes, this year I actually became a grandmother. Can you believe it? I’m a mormor at fifty-two! Good God!’ She shook her head and reached for her glass.

‘Who is this here?’ To the left of the chair stood a lean, distinguished-looking man, a Roman senator, absurdly handsome despite the foolish grin and surgical frock.

‘That’s my ex-husband.’

‘He looks like a film star.’

‘And is all too well aware of the fact, I’m afraid.’

‘He has incredible eyes.’

‘My downfall.’

‘Wait — he was at the birth?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘He saw his grandchild … come out?’

‘Yes, yes, we both did.’

‘That’s very Scandinavian.’

Freja laughed and I peered once again. ‘He really is a very handsome man.’

‘That’s where my daughters get their looks.’

‘I’m not sure if that’s entirely true,’ I said obligingly, and Freja nudged me with her elbow. ‘Are they friendly with their father?’

‘Of course, they adore him. I repeatedly instruct them not to, but they insist on worshipping him.’

My son did not worship me, and that was fine. To be worshipped would have made me uncomfortable, likewise ‘adored’. But ‘friendly with’, I could have lived with that. ‘I always thought that daughters were more forgiving of their fathers,’ I said. ‘It always seems like an easier relationship than fathers and sons. I wonder why that is?’

‘I suppose it’s because you’re freed of the obligation of being a role model. Or at least the comparison is less direct. Whereas with a son …’

‘Perhaps. I’d never thought of that.’ Had Albie ever aspired to be like me? In what respect? If I thought long enough, perhaps I’d come up with something, but now Freja was pouring wine.

‘I feel the same about sons. I’d have loved a son. A handsome, rather old-fashioned boy who I could mould and dress up and then hate his girlfriends. Besides, you mustn’t idolise girls. If you had a daughter, that would bring its own problems too.’

‘I did have a daughter.’

‘You did?’

‘My wife and I. Our first child was a girl, Jane, but she died.’

‘When?’

‘Soon after she was born.’

A moment passed. Over the years I’ve noted that some people, when told we lost our baby, seem almost angry, as if we’ve played a trick on them. Others try to shrug it off, as if it doesn’t really count, but thankfully this is rare. For the most part people are thoughtful and kind and when the situation arises, as it sometimes does, I have a facial expression I produce, a smile of sorts — Connie has one too — to reassure people that we are okay, and I produced it now.

‘Douglas, I’m very sorry.’

‘It was a long time ago. More than twenty years now.’ My daughter would have been twenty this year.

‘No, but still — it’s the worst thing that can happen to a couple.’

‘I didn’t raise it to be dramatic, but Connie and I, we have a policy of never avoiding the subject either. We don’t want it to be a secret, or something taboo. We want to be … straightforward about it.’

‘I understand,’ said Freja, but her eyes were reddening.

‘Please, Freja, I don’t want to spoil the evening …’ No, not twenty, nineteen years old — just. She’d be about to start her second year at university.

‘No, but still—’

‘I don’t want to cast a gloomy spell.’ Medicine, or architecture, I’d imagined. Or perhaps she’d be an actress, or an artist. I wouldn’t mind …

‘So your son …’

‘Albie is our only child, but our second child.’

‘And is that why you’re here? Because of your son?’

‘That’s right.’

‘He’s gone missing?’

‘He’s run away.’

‘And he is …?’

‘Seventeen.’

‘Ah!’ She nodded, as if this explained everything. ‘Is he sensible?’

I laughed. ‘Not always. Rarely, in fact.’

‘Well he is seventeen, why should he be?’

‘I was very sensible at seventeen.’

Freja shook her head and laughed. ‘I was not. Are you particularly close?’

‘No. Quite the opposite. That’s why I’m here.’

‘Do you talk to each other?’

‘Not really. Do you? With your daughters?’

‘Of course. We talk about everything!’

‘With my son and I, it’s like a rather awkward chat show. Albie’s this surly young pop star who doesn’t want to be there. “So, how are things? What have you been up to? Any future plans?”’

‘But if you don’t talk to each other, that must be a worry.’

‘It is. It is.’

‘Perhaps we should change the subject. Except to say, I don’t mean to underdo — is that a word? Underrate, underestimate your concern, but if he has access to money and a phone for emergencies—’

‘He does—’

‘And he’s an adult, more or less. Why not just let him be?’

‘I promised my wife I’d find him.’

‘The wife you are separated from.’

‘Not yet,’ I said defensively. ‘We’re not separated yet. We’re just not in the same city. We are … geographically separated.’

‘I see.’

We sat quietly until our waiter had taken our plates away.

‘Also, we argued, my son and I. Things were said and I’d like to make amends. In person. Does that sound insane?’

‘Not at all. It sounds very noble. But if I had to apologise to my daughters for all the foolish things I’ve said to them, we would never talk about anything else. I think, as a parent, one has the right to make some mistakes, and to be forgiven for them. Don’t you agree?’

Certainly, I felt guilty about Jane. Irrationally so, of course, but then guilt is rarely rational. We were assured, over and over again, that there was nothing we could have done, that the sepsis that killed our daughter was not a result of behaviour or lifestyle, was not present in the womb. Although she was a little premature, there was every reason to believe that she was healthy and well at birth. Because anger was preferable to guilt, I had searched for blame; the prenatal care, the postnatal care, the staff. The word ‘sepsis’ suggested infection — was that someone’s fault? But it soon became clear that the staff were blameless — better than blameless, immaculate really — in their handling of the situation. It was one of those things that happens, they told us; very rarely, but it happens. Which was fine, but what were we meant to do with all that anger, all that guilt? Connie directed hers inwards. Was it the fault of some past behaviour, smoking or drinking, was it complacency on her part? She must have done something. Surely there couldn’t be a punishment as harsh as this without some crime? No, we had done nothing wrong and there was nothing we could have done. It was one of those things that happens. That was all.

There had been no sense of danger at the birth. That had all gone well, the experience traumatic but thrilling, too, both familiar and entirely new. Connie’s waters had broken in the night. At first neither of us could believe this — it was only the thirty-fourth week — but the sodden mattress was undeniable and we put our plan into action, driving to the hospital where we paced and waited, boredom alternating with elation and anxiety. The contractions began mid-morning and then things happened very quickly. Connie was as strong and ferocious as I knew she’d be, and by 11.58 a.m., Jane was with us, mewling and shouting, punching at the air with tiny fists, pedalling away, a shade over 4lbs but fierce; oh, she was a beauty, all the worry, anxiety and pain swept away by her perfection and the joy of it all. She was healthy and we could hold her as we’d hoped. There were photographs and private vows; I would do all I could to care for her and protect her from harm. Connie took her to her breast and though she didn’t feed at first, all seemed well. There’d be no need for an incubator, just a careful eye. We returned to the ward.

Through the afternoon I sat by the bed and watched them sleep, Connie pale, exhausted and quite beautiful. Goodness knows why it should have come as a surprise, but I’d been shocked and stunned by the violence of the delivery room, the blood and sweat, the complete absence of delicacy. Had I found myself in that situation I’d have opted not just for gas and air, but full general anaesthetic and six months’ convalescence. But nothing had ever come so naturally to Connie as giving birth, and I felt very proud. ‘You were incredible,’ I’d told her when she opened her eyes.

‘Did I swear?’ she said.

‘A lot. I mean, a lot.’

‘Good,’ she smiled.

‘But it all seemed so natural, too. You were like some … Viking washerwoman or something.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Are you pleased with her? She’s very small.’

‘She’s perfect. I’m delighted.’

‘Me too.’

They wanted to keep both Jane and Connie in overnight — nothing to worry about, so we didn’t worry. With some reluctance on Connie’s part, it was suggested that I should go home and prepare for mother and baby’s return and so I took that journey, surely one of the strangest journeys a man ever makes, back to the home that was exactly how we’d left it. There was something rather ritualistic about those few hours, preparation for something monumental, as if this would be the last time I’d ever be alone in my life. Moving in a daze, I washed up and tidied things away, stocked the fridge, organised the equipment just so. I fielded texts, made reassuring phone calls, mother and baby doing well. I made the bed with fresh sheets and when everything was in place, I spoke to Connie and went to sleep …

… and was woken by a call a little after four a.m., that awful hour. No need to panic — terrible words — but Baby Jane was a little listless. She was having some difficulty breathing and had been moved to a different ward. They had administered antibiotics and were confident this would help, but would I come to the hospital straight away? Best not to drive. I stumbled into clothes and out of the house, seizing on the conversation’s positive elements — no need to panic — but unable to forget the phrase ‘some difficulty breathing’, because what could be more fundamental than the need to breathe? ‘Breathe’ and ‘live’, weren’t they the same words? I ran down to Kilburn High Road, found a cab, hurled myself into it and out again, into the hospital, feet slapping on the floor as I ran to Connie’s ward, saw the curtains drawn around her bed, heard her cries and I knew. I pulled the curtain to one side, saw her curled in a ball, her back to me — oh, Connie — and I knew.

Next morning they took us to a private room and let us spend some time with Jane, though I’d rather not go into that. Somehow I was able to take some photographs, some hand- and footprints too. We were advised, though this might feel strange, that we might be pleased to have them in the future, and we were. We said our goodbyes then we were sent home, never more empty-handed.

And so, just as we had informed people of the successful birth, we set about withdrawing the good news. Word spread, of course, bad news moving faster than good, and before long friends and colleagues gathered around. All were kind, their condolences sincere and well intentioned and yet I found myself becoming surly and sharp when they employed absurd euphemisms for our daughter’s death. No, she had not ‘passed away’. ‘Passed over’, ‘passed on’, ‘departed’ were equally repellent to me, and neither had we ‘lost her’; we were all too aware of where she was. That she had ‘left us’ implied willingness on her part, ‘taken away’ implied some purpose or destination, and so I snapped at well-meaning friends and they apologised because what else could they do? Debate the point? Of course I regret my intolerance now, because the instinct to soften the language is a decent and humane one. The term the doctor had used was ‘collapse’. The collapse had come very quickly, he said, and I could comprehend that word. But if someone had told us that she had ‘gone to a better place’ then I might well have struck them. ‘Torn away’ — that might have fitted better. Torn or ripped away.

Anyway, my surliness was unpleasant and unreasonable and there was, I suspect, a sense that I was ‘not taking it well’. Grief is sometimes compared to numbness, though to begin with that was very far from our experience. Numbness would have been welcome. Instead we felt flayed, tormented, furious that the world was apparently carrying on. Connie in particular was prone to terrible rage, though for the most part she kept this private or directed it at me where it could do no harm.

‘People keep telling me I’m young,’ she said, in the calm after one such explosion. ‘They say that there’s plenty of time and we can have another baby. But I didn’t want another baby. I wanted this one.’

So we were not gracious, we were not wise. We did not learn anything. We were ugly and angry, red-eyed and snot-nosed and mad, and so we kept ourselves to ourselves. Friends wrote letters, which we read and were thankful for, and then threw away. What else were we to do? Put them on the mantelpiece, like Christmas cards? The overwrought emotionalism of some of Connie’s friends was particularly hard to bear. Shall we come and see you, they asked in tearful, hugging voices. No, we’re fine, we said, and resolved to let the phone ring on next time. We were dragged into the daylight for the funeral, a brief and tormenting affair — what stories could we tell, what fond anecdotes about a personality so unformed? — and it occurred to me once again that grief is as much about regret for what you’ve never had as sadness for what you’ve lost. Anyway, we got through it somehow. Connie’s mother was there, a few of her close friends, my sister. My father said he would come if I wanted him there, but I did not. We returned home immediately after the ceremony, took off our funeral clothes and went to bed, and for the next week or so that was where we stayed. We would lie around and sleep during the day, eat poor meals without tasting, watch television with our eyes fixed a little to the side. By then we were numb. I’ve never sleepwalked, so can’t confirm the similarity, but we sat and stood, walked and ate without really being alive.

Sometimes Connie would wake in the night in tears. The grief of someone we love is terrible to see but Connie’s sobbing was entirely animal and abandoned, and I wanted more than anything to make it stop. So I’d hold her until she fell asleep again, or we’d give up on sleep and watch the window together — it was summer, and the days were cruelly long — and during those dawn hours I would repeat a solemn promise.

Of course the promises we make at such times are all too often nonsense; the athlete swears that he will win this race and comes in eighth, the child promises to play the piano piece perfectly and fumbles in the first bar. Hadn’t I sworn, in the delivery room, that I would look after my daughter and make sure no harm ever came to her? My wife and I had exchanged vows that had been broken within six months. Be kinder, work harder, listen more, tidy up, do what’s right; perpetual resolutions that always crumble when exposed to the light of day, and what was the point of one more broken vow?

Nevertheless, I made the promise to myself. I swore that to the best of my ability I would look after her from now on. I would answer the phone and I would never hang up on her. I would do everything I could to make her happy and certainly I would never, never leave her. A good husband. I would be a good husband and I would not let her down.

Time passed. I returned to work and endured the sympathy, Connie stayed at home and sank into something that we hesitated to call ‘depression’, or perhaps it was simply grief. ‘Blue’ was our rather winsome euphemism: she was ‘feeling blue’. I’d call her from the lab, knowing she was there and knowing that she would not pick up. On the rare occasions that she did answer, her replies would be mumbled and monosyllabic, or irritable, or angry, and I would find myself wishing that she’d let the phone go on ringing. ‘You feeling blue?’ ‘Yes. A little blue.’ I’d try and carry on with work, sick with anxiety, sit silent and unhearing in departmental meetings, then at night I’d climb the stairs to the flat, hear the television playing far too loud and I would hesitate, key in hand. There were times, I must confess, when I contemplated turning around, walking back downstairs and out to … anywhere, really, other than that room.

But I never did. Instead I’d take a deep breath before opening the door to find her in old clothes, eyes red, lying on the sofa. Sometimes a bottle of wine would have been opened, sometimes emptied, or I would find that some mania had seized her and that she had embarked on a purifying task — painting all the cupboards yellow, clearing out the loft — the project abandoned halfway through. I’d repair the damage as best I could, cook food, something healthy, then join her on the sofa.

Here, I wish I could transcribe some speech I made to bring her out of this awful state, something about coming back to life or learning to live again. Perhaps it would have ended with a flourish — I could have thrown open the windows, perhaps, or found some inspiration in nature. Perhaps a good enough speech might have brought about some ‘closure’. I tried to compose it, many times, lying awake at night; poetical variations on banal ideas, about optimism or seizing the day, something about the seasons. But I am not a maker of speeches, I lack the eloquence and the imagination, and after twenty years we have not come close to experiencing anything as simple and neat as closure. Even if it were available, I’m not sure if closure is something we have ever craved. Stop remembering or caring? To what end?

But I did sit and wait with her through the great unhappiness. We returned to life eventually and our marriage as I think of it now began around that time. We straightened our backs and began to leave the house, to go to films and exhibitions together. Ate dinner afterwards, began to talk once more. We didn’t really laugh, not to begin with. It was enough to be able to answer the phone. Some of our more frivolous friends fell away during our seclusion, but that was all right. Other friends had started families of their own, and were wary of flaunting their good fortune. We understood, and we were happy to stay away. We would live a smaller, simpler life from now on.

Still finding herself unable to paint, Connie changed careers. The commercial gallery had never really pleased or satisfied her, and instead she began a part-time course in arts administration, which she loved. Alongside, she found work in the museum, learning the ropes of the education department, which she runs today with such success. In the autumn, a year after the day that we walked round and round the Serpentine, the two of us took a sleeper train once more to Skye, a place with no particular significance except that it was somewhere we both loved and somewhere we might have taken Jane. We woke early one morning, walked from our hotel to the shore in a steady rain, and scattered her ashes there.

The few photographs we had were placed in a drawer in our bedroom and looked at now and then. Each year we would acknowledge the anniversary of her arrival and departure, and continue to do so now. Occasionally Connie speculates on an imaginary future for our daughter — what she might have been like, her interests and talents. She does so without sentiment, mawkishness or tears. There’s almost an element of bravado in it — like holding her palm over a candle flame, she does it to show how strong she has become. But I have always disliked this speculation, at least out loud. I listen, but I keep such thoughts to myself.

The following May, in a hotel on rue Jacob in Paris, our son was conceived and eighteen years later, I went to find him and to bring him home.

Though I was unlikely to find him here, in a pleasant little restaurant in the back streets of Venice. In fact, I must confess, Albie had rather slipped my mind. I was having too nice a time, shoulder to shoulder with an attractive and flirtatious Dane, both of us a little drunk now and overwhelmed by the wonderful seafood pasta, cold white wine and fresh fish, displayed to us before and after grilling, something that has already made me feel irrationally guilty …

‘Why?’

‘Because they show you this beautiful silver thing from the sea and you turn it into a pile of bones, and the head stares up at you saying, “Look, look what you’ve done to me!’’’

‘Douglas, you are a very strange man.’

Then strawberries and some sweet, syrupy liqueur, then, with wild abandon, coffee. Coffee! At night-time on a weekday!

‘I’m going to have to walk this off, I think,’ said Freja.

‘A good idea.’ We paid the bill, quite reasonable for Venice, splitting it fifty-fifty. I lavishly tipped our waiter, who stood shaking our hands, nodding, nodding, standing on tiptoe to kiss Freja on the cheek, indicating in vociferous Italian that I was a very lucky man, very fortunato.

‘Now I think he’s saying I have a very beautiful wife.’

‘I’m sure you do, it’s just it is not me.’

‘I don’t know how to explain that.’

‘Perhaps it’s easier to let him think I am your wife,’ said Freja, and so that’s what we did.

We walked back to the fine wide street of Via Garibaldi, still busy with local families eating in the pavement restaurants, then turned into a tree-lined processional avenue between grand villas. We walked, and perhaps it was the wine or the beauty of the evening or the medicated plasters, but I was barely aware of the blisters on my toes or the torn skin on the soles of my feet. I told Freja about today’s breakthrough and my plan to lie in wait outside the hotel tomorrow.

‘And what if he doesn’t come?’

‘A free hotel in Venice without his mum and dad? I’m sure he’ll come.’

‘Okay, what if he does? What then?’

We walked on.

‘I’ll ask him to come for a drink. I’ll apologise. I’ll say we’ve missed him and that I hope things will be better in the future.’

But even as I announced the plan, I sensed its inherent implausibility. Who were these two characters, father and son, frankly discussing their emotions? We had barely had a relaxed conversation since ‘cow goes moo’ and now here we were chatting about feelings over beer. ‘Who knows, perhaps if we can patch things up I can get Connie to fly over, and we can carry on with the Grand Tour. There’s still Florence, Rome, Pompeii, Naples. He can bring his girlfriend along if he wants. If not, I’ll take him back to England.’

‘And if he doesn’t want to go back?’

‘Then I have a chloroformed handkerchief and some strong rope. I’ll rent a car and drive back with him in the boot.’ Freja laughed, I shrugged. ‘If he wants to travel on without us, that’s fine. At least we’ll know he’s safe and well.’

We were at the apex of a high bridge now, looking east towards the Lido. ‘I almost wish that I could wait with you, although I’m not sure how we would explain that to him.’

‘“Albie, meet my new friend Freja. Freja, this is Albie.”’

‘Yes, that might be tricky.’

‘It might.’

‘For no reason!’

‘No. For no reason,’ I said, though when I looked down, it seemed that she had taken my hand, and we walked like this back along the Riva degli Schiavoni.

‘And where are you heading tomorrow?’ I said.

‘I’m catching the train to Florence. I have tickets for the Uffizi the day after. Three nights in Rome, then Pompeii, Herculaneum, Capri, Naples. Almost the same route as you. Then in two weeks’ time I fly back to Copenhagen from Palermo.’

‘The holiday of a lifetime.’

She laughed. ‘I certainly hope I never have to do it again.’

‘Has it been that bad?’

‘No, no, no. I’ve seen wonderful, beautiful things. Look at this, now — it is extraordinary.’ We scanned the horizon, from the Lido to Giudecca where an illuminated ocean liner, as gargantuan as some intergalactic cruiser, set off for the Adriatic. ‘And the art and the buildings, the lakes and the mountains. Wonderful things I’ll never see again, but for the first time I’m seeing these things alone. I keep opening my mouth, and realising there’s no need. Of course, I tell myself it’s healthy and good for the soul, but I’m not sure yet that we’re meant to be alone. Humans, I mean. It feels too much like a test, like surviving in the wilderness. It’s a good experience to have, one is pleased to have succeeded, but it’s still not the best. I miss company. I miss my girls, and my granddaughter. I’ll be glad to get back home and to hold them.’ She exhaled suddenly, rolled her head and shoulders as if shrugging something off. ‘This is the most I’ve spoken in three weeks. It must be the wine! I hope you don’t mind.’

‘Not in the least.’ Soon we were back at the pensione, standing on the threshold, facing each other.

‘Today has been the best time of my trip, the gallery and then tonight. I’m sorry it has come so late for both of us.’

‘Me too.’

A moment passed.

‘I hope the ceiling doesn’t spin when I lie down,’ she said.

‘So do I.’

Another moment.

‘Well!’

‘Well …’

‘We both have an early start tomorrow. We should go to bed.’

‘Sadly so.’

I opened the door but Freja didn’t move, and I closed it again. She laughed, shook her head, then in a rush said:

‘I hate to use alcohol as an excuse for anything but I don’t know if I’d have said this sober and perhaps, given your situation, you don’t care for the idea, but I hate the thought of you in that awful little room, and if you wanted to join me, for tonight, in my room, nothing … amorous, not necessarily, just for warmth — well, not warmth, it’s too hot for warmth — for company, just a safe port, safe harbour, is that correct? Well, if you feel you could do that without guilt or anxiety, then I would be most delighted.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’d like that very much.’ And so that was what we did.

Well, that was a mistake.

Despite clinical exhaustion I did not sleep at all that night, though not for the reasons one might expect. Caffeine, wine and a whirring mind kept me awake, much more so than any erotic fervour. In fact Freja was asleep on my shoulder within minutes, her breath smelling strongly of booze and an unfamiliar brand of toothpaste, and while she didn’t snore exactly, there was a certain amount of snuffling and gurgling and the crackle of something catching in her throat. Modesty and self-consciousness required that we both wore T-shirts, which made us uncomfortably warm, and the pressure of even a single cotton sheet on my ruined feet kept me twitching and straining, and sure enough, as the hours ticked by, the undoubted pleasures of the evening shaded into discomfort, guilt and anxiety. With the best will in the world, it was hard to see how lying pinned beneath this woman would save my marriage, and I was acutely aware that in the pocket of my trousers, folded on the chair, my phone remained switched off. Had Connie called back? What if there was news? What if she needed me? Was she lying awake too? As the radio alarm ticked over from three to four a.m. I abandoned any hope of sleep, eased my shoulder from beneath Freja’s head and retrieved my phone.

The glare of a screen at four in the morning is a more effective stimulant than any espresso and within moments I was entirely alert. There were no messages, no texts or emails. Seeking reassurance, with a sentimental desire to see my son’s face animated and smiling, I opened the link to the video of them singing ‘Homeward Bound’ in that unknown Venetian square. Their performance was more appealing with the sound muted, and I even noted a foolish longing look between them that I’d missed before. ‘Maybe you should let them go,’ Freja had said. ‘Let him be.’

Impossible. I typed in kat kilgour once again, followed one or two dead ends and then, on an image-sharing website, found a virtual, visual diary of her travels. Photographs, many, many photographs. Here were Kat and Albie on the Rialto Bridge, pouting, cheeks pressed together, offering up their foreheads to the phone’s fish-eye lens in that pose that has become standard these days. Here was a moody shot of Albie, posturing with his cheek against the neck of his guitar in moody black and white, the caption ‘lover and friend, Albie Petersen’ and a poorly punctuated commentary beneath from KK’s friends and fans — gorgeous!!! back off bitch hes mine, two thumbs up, bring him to sydney, hes easy on the eye damn gurl he beautiful — my strange pride battling with bemusement at this brazen new world that Albie occupied, where ratings were accorded to everything, including the sexual attractiveness of strangers, and where no opinion went unexpressed. No inhibitions, no repression. I would! said one remark. That’s all, just I would! What had happened to loaded conversations and drunken, whispered confidences in back-street trattorias? Good God, I thought, how might I have fared in a world where people were free to say what they felt?

And now here was Albie in a bed somewhere, his bony torso exposed, cigarette dangling like a French film star, and more comments of a personal nature. I could, I thought, have added one of my own without fear of discovery; chipped in with ‘smoking is NOT cool’ and pasted in a jpeg of a diseased lung, but instead I moved on, skimming past a photo of Kat sleeping on a railway platform, and now standing in front of the Tower of Pisa, pushing it back into alignment and I laughed, actually laughed at the thought of Albie succumbing to the temptation of that picture before catching myself and thinking –

The Tower of Pisa. That’s not right.

The Tower of Pisa is not in Venice. It’s in … well, it’s in Pisa.

I looked at the photograph’s date. Today — yesterday. I swore at the f-ing Tower of f-ing Pisa — and put my hand to my mouth.

I flicked back to the previous photograph, Kat on the train platform. The sign above the bench — Bologna. The caption:

Venice u killed us man. 2 many tourists. On the road again!

I swore louder this time, causing Freja to shift and mumble in her sleep. I felt the panic rise in my chest. Stay calm. Perhaps it was a day trip! Where was Pisa exactly? A traveller’s guide to Italy sat on the top of Freja’s packed case. Bologna sat in the centre of Italy’s thigh, but Pisa was in … Tuscany? I was not just in the wrong city, I was on the wrong coast.

I skimmed forward to the Pisa photos, Albie looking surly and bored on the long promenade of the Arno, head resting awkwardly on his guitar case. Albie on a downer. keep moving on, moving on. sometimes travelling is hard, man. bone-tired. need a place where we can lay our heads. So come back to Reading then, you silly boy! Next, a night-time shot, a photo of Albie arguing with a carabinieri, Albie’s face caught in a sneer, the officer’s eyes shaded beneath his cap. ‘That’s a policeman, Albie!’ I wanted to shout. ‘Don’t argue with a policeman!’ Moved on by fascists was all that Kat could say on the subject. What would the next photo bring? Albie bleeding from a truncheon blow? No, a stray cat drinking from the cap of a water bottle. Night night kitty, said the caption. Siena tomorrow!

Tomorrow. That meant today, this morning, in Siena. The current time was eight minutes past four. Gathering my trousers up in my arms, dangling the evil shoes from my fingertips, I tiptoed to the door.

Sunrise found the city abandoned. I hurried through silent streets and squares, encountering not a single soul until the Strada Nuova, where the office cleaners, the hotel workers and waiters on the early shift stumbled along, heads down, inured to the rosy light, the beauty of this place. My one thought now was to leave.

I caught the first train to Florence with three minutes to spare, scalding my hand with the two double espressos that I’d deemed essential to this journey, along with some kind of pastry, greasy as a bag of chips. I wiped my hands on a tiny napkin that disintegrated immediately, then we were out into the startling daylight, the train sliding gingerly along the causeway that connects Venice umbilically to the mainland. To my left, the strangest sight: cars.

The mainland suburbs of Venice were scrappy and dull and I set my alarm for two hours hence, and closed my eyes in the hope of sleep. But the four ill-considered shots of espresso put paid to this ambition and I found the words of my note to Freja running around my head. She would be waking now, finding the note beneath the door, reading it and feeling — what? Embarrassment? Regret? Irritation? Amusement at my misreading of events? Would she give a wry, wise smile as she placed it in the folds of her guidebook, or tear it smartly in two? Perhaps I should have said goodbye in person after all. A thought occurred.

Unlike with Albie, I knew exactly where Freja would be today. In two hours’ time she would be sitting on this very train, looking out at parched suburban gardens, industrial estates and generic office blocks and, like me, regretting that second bottle of wine, and I might easily wait for her at the station in Florence, perhaps with a small gift of flowers. We could exchange a few words and an email address — ‘let’s keep in touch, just as friends’ — and I could still make it to Siena by the afternoon.

Or, more fantastically, I might abandon my quest completely and stay with her for as long as that lasted. Hurl my phone from the train window into the lagoon, leave Albie to his fate, let my wife do what she wanted. Hadn’t Connie always been the instinctive, passionate one? And hadn’t I earnt the right, after all these years of diligence and reliability, to one last fit of selfish spontaneity?

But the trouble with living in the moment is that the moment passes. Impulse and spontaneity take no account of the longer term, of responsibilities and obligations, debts to be paid, promises to fulfil. I had lost sight of the people I cared for, and it was vital now that I turn my attention once again to the task in hand, rescuing my son and winning back my wife.

And so I decided to forget about Freja Kristensen, and continue with my journey.

part six TUSCANY

Thirty-six minutes. This was the time I had allowed to see the jewel of the Renaissance and still safely make my connection on to Siena. A challenge, I realised, but it would be fun, too, a chance to clear my head of Venice and the night before, and so I hopped from the train and deposited my bag in the deposito bagagli, a piece of Italian that sounded, frankly, made up. I set the alarm on my phone and strode out into the petroleum haze of the station square, past the shabby tourist shops and snack bars, the dubious hostels, multiple pharmacies and Bureaux de Change — who still needs a Bureau de Change, I wondered, in this age of the international cashpoint card? Never mind that, at the end of the street I glimpsed a sliver of the famous Duomo, startling in its scale and intricacy even at a distance, but there was no time, no time, eight minutes on the clock already, and so with one eye on the tourist information map, I strode to the right, past phone shops and stalls selling tacky leather goods under graceful arches, zigzagging to a great square — the Piazza della Signoria, my map told me — dominated by a crenellated fortress, the kind a child might make from a cardboard box and, to the right, a cluster of immense statues like the pieces from some deranged game of chess; gods, lions and dragons, warriors with raised swords and severed heads, another naked soldier dying extravagantly in his comrade’s arms, screaming women, a naked, psychotic man with a truncheon clubbing a centaur to death and, watching over all of this surreal ultra-violence with fey distaste, Michelangelo’s David. Fifteen minutes gone now, and my guidebook had informed me that this was only a reproduction so I noted the disproportionate size of the hands and walked on towards the Uffizi Gallery. It was not yet ten in the morning and already an immense queue of people stretched beneath the colonnade, fanning themselves with hotel maps while living statues of, incomprehensibly, the Statue of Liberty and an Egyptian pharaoh, stood on crates beneath the marble images of Giotto, Donatello and Pisano. Nineteen minutes gone, and now here was a woman in a pink body-stocking and a long blonde wig, balanced upon a papier-mâché clamshell for the amusement of the weary queue while tantalisingly, in the elegant galleries above our heads, was the real thing, hanging alongside Uccellos and Caravaggios and da Vincis, Titian’s famous Venus of Urbino and three — three! — Rembrandt self-portraits. Connie had been here to the Uffizi as a student, had talked yearningly about returning — a little jewel, she said, very cool and beautiful — and like a smart traveller, I had pre-booked tickets for four days hence, and it occurred to me, as the timer showed nineteen minutes, that if this afternoon’s reunion with Albie went well, we might still make our booking! Perhaps my son and I could travel around some Tuscan hill towns then rendezvous with Connie right here. ‘They should call it the “Queue-ffizi!” I’d quip as we strolled past the hordes of less canny, less forward-thinking tourists. ‘You pre-booked — great idea, Dad!’ Albie would say, and standing in front of Primavera once again, Connie would take my hand. ‘Thank you, Douglas!’ she’d say, and all my care and preparation would be vindicated. No time to daydream, though — twenty minutes had gone now. I strode towards the river, hoping for a glimpse of the Ponte Vecchio, but now the alarm was sounding on my phone, meaning that I had fourteen minutes to return to the station and for the moment I would have to settle for seeing only the queue for the Uffizi, one thin slice of the great Duomo, an artificial David, a living statue Venus. Seen in twenty-two minutes, Florence was a Botticelli fridge magnet in a tan leather handbag, but never mind, we’d be back as a family. I retraced my steps and at twenty-nine minutes the station was in sight again. Breathless, sleep-deprived, perspiring quite heavily, I resolved to stop alternating strong coffee with alcohol and to rest on the Siena train, settling smugly into my seat on the 1010 with a comfortable three minutes to spare. I listened to the train announcement. Montelupo-Capraia, Empoli, Castelfiorentino, San Gimignano; even the names were picturesque. I would be in Siena by 1138, about the time that Albie would be getting out of bed. I closed my eyes, reclined my seat as far as it would go — the pleasures of European rolling stock! — and watched the outskirts of the city go by, feeling my eyelids growing heavy then realising, with a start, that I had left all of my belongings in the left-luggage office of Santa Maria Novella station.

I had no change of clothes or footwear. I had no money, save the notes and coins in my pocket, twenty-three euros and eighty cents. No passport, no guidebook, no toothbrush nor razor, tablet or phone charger. I had my phone, of course, but because I had not slept in my own room last night the power stood at 18 per cent, and now suddenly here was a whole series of texts that Connie had sent, arriving all at once like a hail of stones:

where are you? why did you hang up on me?

you sounded strange I’m worried about you D. please call

I’m not angry I’m worried. First egg now you.

I’m coming out to find you. please just tell me where you are. tell me you are safe.

please let me know you are safe and well.

I pressed reply then hesitated, no longer quite sure if I was.

Understandably, the months leading up to the due date were anxious, with Connie prone to all kinds of irrational fears about her health and her abilities. I did my best to reassure her that all would be well this time. Connie was determined, strong, able, brave; who could be better at this? But our confidence, our complacency had been cruelly exposed before and so we were cautious to the point of paranoia. Vitamins, oils and tonics, an organic diet, meditation, yoga — all played their part. Most of it was mumbo-jumbo, of course, based on the fallacious conviction that we — she — had done something wrong the last time, but it eased Connie’s mind so I kept quiet. Still, there was less of the boisterous good humour of the first pregnancy. Imagine carrying a glass, full to the brim, around for thirty-six weeks without spilling a drop. Caution, care, a contrived and fragile serenity. A certain sadness, too.

But it’s hard to stay sad or serene in the sweaty, bloody mess of that shocking business of birth. The first contractions came at two in the morning, the first but not the last time Albie would wake us at that hour. ‘Tell me that it’s going to be all right,’ Connie demanded as we paced the delivery room, her fingernails digging deep into my palm. ‘Of course it is,’ I said, because what else could I say?

But it was all right, it was. For there to be another catastrophe would have been too cruel, and Albie came easily, almost before we knew it (though Connie may take a different view on this). By nine a.m. I was father to a son, and of course he was beautiful too. Even purple-faced and smeared with that nameless gunk, he was lovely — strong-featured, with his mother’s black, black hair. As the frightening colour of his skin faded, as his features settled into repose and his curious eyes opened, a new word suggested itself: handsome. A handsome boy, as handsome as his sister had been beautiful. I held him through the morning while Connie slept, sitting up in a vinyl chair beside her bed, winter sun on his face and, God, I loved him. Had my own father held me like this? He was of the generation that had been encouraged to read magazines and smoke in the waiting room, offspring only presented to them when the mess and gore of birth had been swabbed away. I was old enough to recall my sister being brought home from hospital and the awkwardness with which he’d held her, how reluctant he had seemed, shifting his cigarette from one hand to another, keen to pass her on. Extraordinary to think he was a medical man, too; someone who should have handled flesh and blood with ease, especially his own. Well, I would not be like that, I decided. I would maintain an easy, relaxed demeanour around my son — good God, ‘my son’, I had a son — and we would be such good friends.

We transported him home with neurotic care, almost literally wrapped in cotton wool. The visitors who had come to sympathise now came to celebrate and we accepted the cards and gifts and congratulations, with their hint of consolation, with good grace. We listened to his crying in the night with weary relief. Connie’s mother moved in to lend a hand, and my sister became a constant presence, regressing to coos and gurgles and knitting awful little cardigans, and I did what I was required to do, keeping the kettle on a rolling boil, tidying, cleaning and shopping, slipping once more into that persona of the endlessly capable butler, taking my turn to rise in the night and have Albie scream into my ear. I gave myself instructions. Remain positive, enthusiastic, loving and full of care. Keep a watchful eye and make sure no harm comes to either of them. More resolutions.

When Albie was sturdy enough, we drove below the speed limit to the small flat my father had moved to after my mother’s death, pleasant enough when he’d arrived but now dark and rather bleak, with an ashtray smell and nothing in the fridge. Boxes remained unpacked, pictures were not yet hung, and it felt like a storeroom for a former life rather than a home for the future. Having retired early from his surgery, my father spent his days reading thrillers or watching old black-and-white movies in the afternoon, subsisting on instant coffee and cigarettes and occasional plates of baby-ish food — scrambled eggs, baked beans, packet soups; as a GP, he had always led by instruction rather than example.

He had never been a particularly vigorous man, but as soon as he opened the door it was clear he was not thriving alone. His teeth were furred and his skin pale and unevenly shaved with wiry hair sprouting on his cheeks, from his ears and the tip of his nose. For the first time in my life I was aware of being taller than him. Of course he smiled at his grandchild, cooed and remarked on the size of Albie’s fingernails, his hair and eyes. ‘He looks like you, Connie, thank God!’ he said and laughed, but he was not at ease. He held his grandson as if assessing his weight, then passed him back and there it was again; the wariness, the discomfort.

But then he was never a natural candidate for the caring professions. As a GP, he tended to view all but the most serious of ailments as signs of carelessness or neglect, and I think he frightened many of his patients into good health. I remember once, on a family holiday to Anglesey, scraping my shin against a piece of corrugated iron, looking down and seeing the skin hanging there, perfectly white, like waxy paper in the moment before the blood began to flow, and I remember my father sighing at the sight, as if I’d taken the paintwork off the family car. The fact that it had been an accident was irrelevant. If I hadn’t been playing, it wouldn’t have happened. He issued sympathy with the same reluctance that he prescribed antibiotics.

I did not feel hard done by. My father was exactly as I expected dads to be: a professional man, able and confident and somewhat withdrawn, but serious about his obligations to provide materially for his family. Dads had favourite armchairs in which they sat like starship captains, issuing orders and receiving cups of tea and shouting at the news without fear of contradiction. Dads controlled the television, the telephone and thermostat, they decided mealtimes, bedtimes, holidays. Raised in an anarcho-socialist republic, Connie and her family were always bellowing and bawling at each other about music and politics, sex and digestion, but my own father and I never had anything that you might call an intimate conversation and I’m not entirely sure I ever wanted one. He taught me how to use a slide-rule and how to change a bicycle inner tube, but he was no more likely to embrace me than to break into a tap-dance.

That was a long, uncomfortable afternoon we spent with my father. I had such strutting pride in the new family we had made. Look, I wanted to say, look, I have found this wonderful woman, or she has found me. We have experienced things, terrible things, but here we are holding hands, right here on your sofa. Look at the way I carry my son, the way I change nappies with confidence and ease! No offence, I am profoundly grateful, but I am not like you.

Oh, the smugness and complacency of the new parent! See how good we are! Let us show you how it should be done! I’m sure my parents had wanted to teach their own parents similar lessons, and so on back into history and forward, too; I’m sure that some day Albie will be keen to settle some scores and give me some pointers as to where we — I — went wrong. But perhaps it’s a delusion for each generation to think that they know better than their parents. If this were true, then parental wisdom would increase with time like the processing power of computer chips, refining over generations, and we’d now be living in some utopia of openness and understanding.

‘Well, we’d best be going,’ I told my dad that evening, refusing his offer of a night in the spare room, which was crammed with cardboard boxes, a single bulb overhead. ‘I’ll turn the radiator on,’ he offered as an incentive. ‘No, it’s a long drive back,’ I said, though we all knew that it wasn’t. Perhaps I imagined this to ease my conscience, but he seemed relieved and turned the news back on before we left. Goodbye, Dad! Goodbye! Albie, give Granddad a wave! Goodbye, we’ll see you soon!

My father died six weeks later. Of course I have no belief in an afterlife, least of all the one depicted in newspaper cartoons, but if he was looking down from some cloud on to the Siena train, he might, I suppose, be allowed one of his old favourite remarks:

You see? You see? Not so bloody clever now!

I fell into something of a low.

It was not merely the loss of my belongings — they were, after all, perfectly safe and retrievable — but my increasing loss of control. It had been some time since I’d spoken to Connie. I missed hearing her voice but did not quite trust my own. I was sure Siena would mark some kind of turning point, and I would speak to her when there was good news. But if there was no good news, how could I go home?

At Empoli, I was joined at my table by a little boy in a striped vest, three years old, perhaps, travelling with his grandparents who were large and jovial, full of proud smiles as they watched the boy lay out the contents of a small bag of sweets, twelve artificially coloured jellies, four red, eight blue, sprinkled with the tartaric acid that causes them to fizz on the tongue. He counted them, then counted them again. He divided them into rows and columns, three by four, two by six, showing that instinctive pleasure in play that seems to disappear as soon as we call it mathematics. He licked the tip of his finger and dabbed at the sweet-sharp sugar that had become detached, making a great show of choosing which sweet to eat first. I watched him quite openly, perhaps a little too openly for this day and age. He was aware of giving a performance and when he finally settled on a red sweet, popped it into his mouth and puckered his lips at the tartness of it, I laughed and we both laughed together, his grandparents too, nodding, smiling.

He said something to me in burbling Italian. ‘Inglese,’ I replied, ‘no parlo Italiano,’ and he nodded as if this made sense and slid a blue sweet towards me, arm fully extended, and the gesture seemed so generous and so familiar that I thought, Oh God, it’s Albie. It’s exactly how Albie used to be.

Because he really was a charming little boy, like a kid from a comic, full of benign mischief. There were difficult days, of course, particularly in the early months. Croup! He caught croup, a disease designed by nature specifically to terrify parents, and there were further panics to come, over mysterious rashes or inexplicable tears, our nerves perpetually jangled from lack of sleep. But we bore all of this gladly and with only the occasional loss of composure, because hadn’t we yearned for this disruption in our lives? I returned to work, half regretful, half grateful for some respite, then came home and did my bit to bathe and feed him, and the days and weeks and months went by.

At some point around this time, he must have begun acquiring first memories. I hope so, anyway, because it’s hard to imagine a child who was more adored and cared for by parents who, for the most part, got on incredibly well. The inability to control a child’s recollections is a frustrating one. I know my own parents did their best to provide sun-dappled days of picnics and paddling pools, but mainly I remember advertising jingles, wet socks on radiators, inane TV theme tunes, arguments about wasted food. With my own son, there were times when I definitely thought ‘remember this’ — Albie toppling through the high grass of a summer meadow, the three of us lolling in bed on a winter Sunday or dancing around the kitchen to some silly song — wishing there was some way to press ‘record’, because the three of us were, for the most part, pretty good together, a family at last.

We were sharing a bath one night, at a time when we did such things, Albie lying between his mother’s legs, head resting on her belly, and I made an observation that, while all of us might sometimes covet other people’s lives, their careers, their spouses (I coveted no one’s spouse, but knew from experience that others coveted mine), it was extremely rare — unheard of, even, and certainly taboo — to prefer someone else’s children to your own. Everyone thinks their own child is delightful, yet not all children are delightful, so why are parents unaffected by that? What is the reason for this fixed and unshakeable bond: neurological, sociological, genetic? Perhaps, I suggested, we’re hard-wired to love our own children over others as a kind of survival mechanism, for the propagation of the species.

Connie frowned. ‘You mean the love you feel for your child is not real, it’s just science.’

‘Not at all. It’s real because it’s science! The way you feel about friends or lovers or even siblings is dependent and conditional on their behaviour. With your children, that’s irrelevant. It doesn’t matter what they do. People with bratty kids don’t love them less, do they?’

‘No, they teach them not to be bratty.’

‘And that’s the difference — they stick with them and even if they don’t succeed, even if they stay brats, they’d still give their life for them.’

‘Albie’s not bratty.’

‘No, he’s lovely. But everybody thinks their own children are lovely, even when they’re not.’

‘And they shouldn’t?’

‘Of course they should! But that’s what people mean by “unconditional love”.’

‘Which apparently you think is a bad thing?’

‘No—’

‘Or an illusion, a “behavioural instinct”.’

‘No, I’m just … thinking aloud.’

We both went silent for a while. The bath was cooling now but getting out would have felt like conceding a point.

‘What a stupid thing to say in front of Albie!’

I laughed. ‘He’s eighteen months old! He doesn’t understand.’

‘And I suppose you know that, too.’

‘I was thinking aloud, that’s all.’

‘The eminent child psychologist,’ she said, rising suddenly from the bath, Albie in her arms.

‘I was thinking out loud! It was just a theory.’

‘Well I don’t need a theory, Douglas,’ she said, wrapping him in a towel and bundling him away. My wife has always had a gift for effective exit lines. I lay alone in the bath for some time, feeling the water grow more tepid around me. She’s tired, I thought, it’s nothing, and sure enough the debate was forgotten almost instantly by everyone except me.

At least I presume she has forgotten it.

But from the beginning there was never any doubt that she was better at it all, so much more competent, kind and patient, never bored in that dull old playground, never reaching for a newspaper, happy to watch the twentieth, twenty-first, twenty-second trip down the slide. Is there anything duller than pushing a swing? Yet she never seemed resentful — or only occasionally — of the hours and days and weeks that he consumed, the attention he demanded, the irrational tears, the trail of destruction and spilt paint and mashed carrot that he left behind, never repulsed or angered by the vomit that stained our new sofa, the poo that found its way into the cracks between the floorboards and is still there now, I expect, at some molecular level. As Albie got older, his devotion to his mother became more and more blatant and extreme. In early years this circumstance is so commonplace as to be barely worth acknowledging. Strain as he might, even the most fervent father lacks the ability to breast-feed, and the paternal bonding would come later, wouldn’t it, over chemistry sets and model planes, camping trips and driving lessons? He would beat me at badminton and in return I’d show him how to make a battery out of a lemon. In the meantime, there seemed little to do, except wait patiently for the day we became close.

But increasingly I seemed to have a particular gift for upsetting him, standing awkwardly while he wriggled and writhed in my arms, waiting for Connie to relieve me. Without her there, we were both on edge. The journey from baby to toddler will involve a certain number of mishaps, but something about her absence made him tumble and trip so that even now there are scars and dents that Connie can point to and attribute to me. There, that’s the coffee-table incident; that’s the fall from the tree; that’s the ceiling-fan affair. And always, always, his arms would stretch towards his mother on her return because he knew he would be safe.

All my best intentions seemed to backfire, and even my loving nicknames didn’t stick. Connie invented Egg, as in Albie/albumen/egg white/Egg, a pleasing name that seemed to fit. Noting the somewhat simian way he clung to his mother’s hip, I made a play for ‘Monkey’ but it didn’t take, and I abandoned it after a week or two. Then there was the incident with the Lego, an episode that has since passed into Petersen folklore as an illustration of … I don’t quite know what, because my behaviour always seemed entirely reasonable to me. Needless to say I was raised on Lego, which was a rather more rigorous and austere toy in my day but nevertheless something of a secret vice for me; that satisfying click, the symmetry, the neat tessellations. Maths, engineering, design — they were all there disguised as play, and so I looked forward to the day when Albie and I could sit shoulder to shoulder in front of a tea-tray, open the cellophane bag, turn to page one and build!

Yet Albie’s technique just wasn’t there. He seemed incapable of following the simplest instructions, happy instead to jam different-coloured pieces together at random, to chew the pieces so that they became unusable, gum them up with Plasticine, drop them behind the radiator, throw them at the wall. If I constructed something on his behalf — a police station say, or an elaborate spaceship — he would smash the toy to pieces within minutes and make instead some nameless, formless thing to shove down the back of the sofa. Set after set expired this way, a perfectly good toy turned into detritus for the vacuum cleaner.

One night, motivated entirely by a desire to give my son something lasting and permanent to play with, I waited until he and Connie were in bed, poured myself a large Scotch, mixed together some Araldite adhesive in a jam-jar lid, laid the instructions before me and carefully glued together a pirate ship, a troll castle and an ambulance. Now, instead of a box of expensive shingle, here were three terrific, long-lasting toys. I displayed them on the kitchen table and went to bed, anticipating much acclaim.

The tears and wailing that woke me the next morning were therefore something of a disappointment, and certainly quite out of proportion to my crimes. But look, I told Albie, now they’ll last forever! Now they won’t smash! But he doesn’t want them to last forever, said Connie, consoling tearful Albie, he wants to smash them, that’s the point! That’s what’s creative about them. That destruction could be creative seemed like one of those things artists say, but I let the point go and went off to the lab, sour and frustrated, the pleasures of Lego quite lost to us now. The offending articles were stashed away in a high cupboard, the story materialising years later as an anecdote at dinner, signifying … what, exactly? A lack of imagination on my part, a lack of creativity, I suppose. Lack of fun. Oh yes, they remembered that.

Anyway, the anecdote always seemed to get a big laugh, and as a father I have learnt to develop a thick skin and appreciate jokes at my expense. Nobody would ever have dared to laugh at my own father and this is progress, I suppose, of a sort.

Certainly the boy on the Siena train found me engaging enough and by the time we arrived at my destination we were firm friends, nodding away at each other, nodding, nodding. I was grateful for the sweet he offered me and would gladly have gorged on all of them, because who knew when I would eat again? But we were pulling into Siena. Ciao, ciao! Say goodbye to the nice crazy man. I shook the sticky fingers of the boy’s hand and stepped out into the brutal heat of a Tuscan noon.

The bus that shuttled into the old town was packed and I was aware of how smugly unencumbered I felt amidst the backpacks and suitcases, as free and light as a recently escaped lunatic. Now we were passing through a mediaeval gate, now disembarking, the suitcases rumbling behind me as I hurried ahead, through another gate and then, without any expectation, out into the bright light of an immense piazza, a fan divided into nine slim wedges like a peacock’s tail or a tin of Scottish shortbread, radiating from an immense Gothic palace, the whole scene baked a terracotta red. Quite, quite overwhelming, and heartening too, because Siena was a walled town, compact and self-contained, and if Venice was a maze, this was a shoebox. The Piazza del Campo was inescapable, with a clear focal point at its base. Like ants beneath a magnifying glass, it would be impossible for Kat and Albie to avoid passing before me. Optimistic, alert, I chose a spot on the herringboned bricks about halfway down the slope, pulled my baseball cap down over my eyes and promptly fell asleep.

I woke a little after three and swore so extravagantly that the tourists turned to stare. How could I have been so stupid? Struggling to my feet, I found that I could barely stand. In my exhaustion, my head had lolled to one side and the right side of my face and neck had the familiar tightness that precedes sunburn. I stumbled, then sat once again on the hot bricks. Three hours! Three hours in which I felt almost certain they had passed me by. I had a perfect image of Albie stepping over me, collapsed here like some drunk. My mouth was dry while my clothes dripped with perspiration — I had left a damp patch on the ground where the bricks had drawn the remaining moisture from my body — and my head throbbed with what surely must be sunstroke. Water, I must have water. I tried to stand again, resting on my toes a moment then staggering up the sides of the sun-baked terracotta bowl, like Lawrence of Arabia clambering up a dune.

In a kiosk at the edge of the square I paid an extortionate amount of money for two bottles of water, draining one and half of the other before stopping to take in my reflection in the mirrored wall. A vertical line divided the crimson half of my face and neck from the white, while across my forehead the shade of the baseball cap had created an equator. My face had been stencilled by the sun into something resembling the Danish flag. I touched the skin — the tenderness told me there was worse to come — and laughed, the kind of laughter that precedes great sobbing tears, and stepped out into the heat.

I felt faint, nauseous, irrational. Returning to the cauldron of the piazza was inconceivable, but there was no hotel room to lie down in and only twelve euros in my pocket, not even enough to get me back to Florence where my wallet and passport were even now accumulating fines. Instead I staggered through the crowds, water bottle in my hand, dizzy and deranged, clinging to the shade like a vampire, with scarcely a rational thought in my head, until the street opened up into a courtyard, the ornate candy-striped façade of the Duomo rising up vertically. A sudden clamour of bells from the campanile raised every eye to the sky and then, even louder than the church bells, I heard the celestial sound of Kat Kilgour playing ‘Beat It’ on her accordion.

I waited until the final chords before I stepped forward and threw my arms around her. ‘Kat Kilgour!’ I said, through cracked lips. ‘I am so, so pleased to see you!’

‘Jeez, Mr Petersen,’ she said, recoiling a little. ‘You look completely f***** up.’

Yes, it was an emotional reunion on my part, but I still wish the police hadn’t got involved.

I’m loath to throw around terms like ‘brutality’. It was all a misunderstanding, or perhaps an overreaction on their part, and mine too. If I’d been more level-headed I’d have handled the situation differently. Nevertheless …

‘Kat, you have no idea what I’ve been through.’

I was undeniably pleased to see her, a great deal more than she was pleased to see me, because she was already launching into her next number, an anthemic ‘Sweet Child of Mine’. It’s a demanding vocal so I waited patiently until the instrumental, then:

‘Kat, I need to see Albie. Is he with you?’

‘Can’t talk, Mr P.—’

‘No, quite, but I need to know if he’s all right. Maybe later?’

‘Can’t talk, Mr P.—’

‘Oh. Okay. Okay. I’m sorry, you’re playing your solo, but if I could just know where—’

‘He’s not here.’

‘But nearby? Yes? Yes?’ She began the next verse, and it seemed only fair that I should drop my coins into her bowler hat. ‘If you could just point me in the right direction?’ A five, a ten euro note followed, the last of my cash all gone. I began to search my pockets for more coins. ‘Kat, I’ll leave you alone, but I’ve travelled a very long way and …’

The song ended, but she embarked immediately on ‘Riders on the Storm’, and if she started that then she might never stop.

‘Kat, I am actually paying you to stop playing!’ I shouted, and here I put my hand into the bellows of the accordion, which was too much, I concede now. Certainly, Kat’s response was violent, the song abandoned, a finger jabbed in my face.

‘Do NOT touch, Mr P.! If your son wants to hide from you, then it’s none of your business—’

‘Well, it sort of is—’

‘I know all too well what it’s like to live with an oppressive, overbearing father—’

‘Oppressive? I’m not oppressive.’

‘… and even if your son’s not my favourite person at the moment, I would never split on him. Never!’

‘Not your favourite … why, have you argued?’

‘I think that’s a fair assessment.’

‘Have you … have you split up?’

‘Yes, we’ve split up! Try to conceal your glee, Mr P.’

‘When?’

‘Last night, if you must know.’

‘So, so where is he? Where did he go? Kat, please tell me …’ And here I put my hand on her arm, which was also a mistake.

‘Get off me!’ she shouted, and I began to sense the hostility of the small crowd who had so enjoyed ‘Sweet Child of Mine’. ‘I’ve told you, it is none of your business what Albie does and … oh, jeez.’ She looked over my shoulder. ‘Here we go again.’

It seemed our discussion had attracted the attention of two carabinieri, large, handsome men in pale blue short-sleeve shirts heading straight towards us. Kat knelt down and began hurriedly cramming her takings into the tight pockets of her cut-off jeans.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll talk to them.’

‘It’s not you they’re interested in, it’s me.’

And sure enough, the police went straight for Kat, one on each side, speaking rapidly in urgent voices. A crowd was gathering around us now, and I heard mention of permits, of local regulations, Kat talking over them in a weary and impertinent tone — exactly the wrong tone, I thought, to adopt when speaking to armed officers. ‘Yeah, I know, I need a permit … No, I don’t have one, as you well know … Fine, okay, you’ve made your point, I’ll pack up and be gone …’ She bundled her accordion like a child to her chest and attempted to put her head down and slip away, but the larger of the policemen, broad, bullet-headed, placed one hand on her shoulder and reached for a notepad. ‘How can I pay a fine if you won’t let me earn any—? No, I will not empty my pockets! No! Get stuffed, you bastards! Get your hands off me!’ And now the crowd was parting as the policemen marched Kat towards the car that would take her away, and with her all clues to Albie’s whereabouts.

‘No!’ I said. ‘No, no, no, no, you can’t do this!’ and I hurried after them.

I wish I could pretend that gallantry prompted me to intervene, rather than self-interest, but Kat was my last hope, my only link to Albie, and so I found myself squeezing between the policemen, placing my hand on an arm, trying to loosen the grip — not aggressively, I thought, but coaxingly. To an outsider, this might have resembled a scuffle, and it’s true that I was not calm. ‘Stay out of it, Mr P.!’ shouted Kat over her shoulder, but I was attached now. ‘That isn’t necessary!’ I was shouting. ‘You’re overreacting! No necessary, no overreact!’ I was tugging on the larger policeman’s forearm, noticing by the by that, like many bald men, he had extremely hairy arms and also a very elborate watch, four little dials on its face, like scuba divers wear and I wondered, as he spun me around and slipped and tightened one of those plastic ties around my wrists, the kind I use at home to tidy the cables behind the TV, if he went diving at weekends.

As a child I had sometimes wondered how I might fare in the prison environment. It was a concern that followed me into adulthood, and I came to the conclusion: not well. Of course, the situation was unlikely ever to arise. True, I had recently stolen a packet of Soft Mints from the newsagents in Munich airport, but surely this was beyond the jurisdiction of Italy’s legal system, and besides, the evidence was long gone. So I felt reasonably calm as I sat at the desk of Siena’s main police station. What, after all, was my crime?

Nevertheless, I seemed to cause quite a stir. Who was this mystery man? What kind of tourist has no passport or driving licence, no wallet, no money or keys or hotel reservations? Lack of ID, it seemed, marked me down as some sort of desperate character, which was accurate, though not in the way they imagined. I explained that all would be clear if I could just borrow some money and pop back to Firenze, and that I’d then be happy to pay any fine, my own and Kat’s too, but no one seemed willing to offer up the fare and neither was I permitted to leave. A connection had been made between Kat and myself. Despite my protests, they insisted on calling her my girlfriend. I can only imagine how Kat must have felt about that.

Gradually, the desk staff lost interest, directing me to a chair in the waiting room and leaving me there. Kat was somewhere in the offices behind the desk and it seemed my punishment would be to wait for her, to wait and wait for hours on end, on hard plastic chairs, as a parade of tourists — legitimate tourists with even tans and passports — came in to report lost luggage, wallets, cameras, in order that they could claim insurance. Of course I would wait — what choice did I have? At least I was out of the sun.

But it was early evening by the time they finally reunited me with my ‘girlfriend’, demanding that she also take a seat and wait. Kat was unwilling at first to acknowledge my presence, but finally:

‘Nice trainers, Mr P.’

‘Thank you.’

‘What happened to your face?’

‘Hm? Oh, this. I fell asleep in the sun.’

‘Looks sore.’

‘It is. It is.’

‘Did you tell them about me stealing that croissant from the breakfast buffet?’

I held my hands out to the side, palms upwards. ‘Hey, I’m no stoolie,’ I said, quite the comedian.

She smiled. ‘You shouldn’t have got involved back there.’

‘They did overreact a little, I thought.’

‘Occupational hazard. You’re meant to have a permit, but it’s a bureaucratic nightmare. Also, they know me here, I’m a bit of a repeat offender, so …’

‘I was scared they were going to take you away.’

‘Very noble of you, I’m sure.’

‘I was thinking of myself, really.’

‘You mustn’t take this the wrong way, Mr P., but you don’t smell too good.’

‘No. No, I’m aware of that. I’d keep your distance if I were you.’

She smiled and moved one chair closer. ‘I still can’t tell you where he is.’

‘But can you at least tell me he’s okay?’

‘Define “okay”. He’s a very troubled boy, your Albie.’

‘Yes, clearly.’

‘He’s quite … dark.’

‘I know that—’

‘Very angry. Very, very angry. He has a lot of issues. A lot. With you, I mean. He talks about you a lot.’

‘Does he?’

‘And not in a good way.’

‘Well, that’s why I’m here. I wanted to make amends, Kat, for the scene … well, you were there.’

‘That was cold, Mr P., really cold.’

‘I’m aware of that. Which is why I need to see him.’

‘It’s not as easy as that; it goes a lot further back.’

‘I’m sure it does.’

She narrowed her eyes at me. ‘Did you really glue all his Lego bricks together?’

‘Some. Not all, just some.’

‘Did you tell him he was stupid?’

‘Good God, no! Is that what he told you? That’s not true.’

‘He says he disappoints you.’

‘And that’s not true either—’

‘That he feels like you’re disappointed in him—’

‘Absolutely not true!’

‘He says you and Mrs P. might be splitting up.’

I was not able to deny this.

‘Well, that … might be true, it’s … up in the air. Did his mother tell him that?’

‘He said there wasn’t any need, you haven’t got on for years. But yeah. Yeah, Mrs P. did tell him that.’

I felt a contraction in my chest. ‘That we were splitting up, or that we might be?’

‘That you might be.’

‘Good, good—’

‘But Albie thinks you will.’

‘Oh.’

After a while, I managed: ‘Well, relationships are never easy.’

My observation was a platitude at best, yet it seemed to strike Kat as a remarkable insight. ‘You can say that again!’ she said and started to cry and I found myself placing an arm around her shoulder while the officer at the desk looked on sympathetically. ‘I really loved him, Mr P.’

‘I’m sorry, Kat—’

‘But we were arguing all the time.’ She sniffed, laughed. ‘He’s a moody little bugger, isn’t he?’

‘He can be at times. What did you argue about?’

‘Everything! Politics, sex—’

‘O-kay—’

‘Astrology! We even argued about astrology!’

‘What exactly did he say?’

‘He really went off on one — he said that it was bullshit to think planets could influence human characteristics and anyone who believed it was just dumb …’

‘I’m so sorry to hear that,’ I said and proudly thought that’s my boy.

‘He said I was too old for him. I’m only twenty-six, for God’s sake! He said I was smothering him, he wanted some time by himself.’

Her head was on my shoulder now, my arm around her, and I consoled her for some time before making my move. ‘Maybe, Kat, if I talked to him, I could put a word in?’

‘What’s the point, Mr P.? What’s the bloody point?’

‘Nevertheless, if you could just give me the name of the hotel?’

‘He’s not in a hotel.’

‘A hostel, then.’

‘He’s not in a hostel, either.’

‘So where is he, Kat?’

Kat sniffed and cleared her throat. Her nose was running and, rather unusually I thought, she wiped it on my bare arm, leaving a trail of tears and mucus that I could see glinting in the overhead light.

‘Spain.’

‘Spain?’

‘Madrid.’

‘Albie’s in Madrid?’

‘He said he’d had enough of churches, he wanted to see Guernica. There was a cheap flight, he’ll be long gone by now.’

‘Where is he in Madrid, Kat?’

‘I have absolutely no idea.’

Albie was gone. This was neither right nor just, I thought. Because surely, surely you have to succeed, if you give everything you have?

But it seemed that this was not the case and I realised in that moment that I’d lost not just my son, but probably my wife too, and then it was Kat’s turn to console me as I fell entirely to pieces.

I spent the night in a jail cell, though not in a bad way.

Perhaps my breaking down had something to do with it, but after hours of inactivity the staff now sprang into action and I was led away from Kat and taken to a back room where, once I’d calmed down, it was made clear through complicated mime that there would be no formal charges against me. But where would I go? As it was nearly midnight and I had no passport or money, I was shown to a cell by the desk sergeant with the slightly apologetic air of a hotel manager who really has nothing better left. The small windowless room smelt of a lemony disinfectant, reassuring in this context, with a mattress in blue vinyl that was deliciously cool to the touch. The stainless steel toilet had no seat and was closer to the bed than was ideal, and I was wary of the pillow, too. Prison pillows are different from other pillows. But perhaps if I wrapped it in my shirt and tried not to use the toilet, I’d be okay. After all, I had paid upwards of one hundred and forty euros for less comfortable rooms than this and the alternative, sleeping rough on the streets of Siena, held little appeal. So I accepted the bargain happily, on the proviso that the cell door be left ajar.

‘Porta aperta, sì?’

‘Sì, porta aperta.’

And then I was alone.

The great virtue of defeat, once accepted, is that it at least allows one to rest. Hope had kept me awake for too long, and now, untroubled by the fantasy of a happy ending, I was finally able to fall into a sleep that was remarkable for the total absence of dreams.

‘I don’t think our son likes me very much,’ I said to Connie one night in bed.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Douglas. What makes you say that?’

‘I don’t know. The way he cries when you leave the room. Oh, also, he tells me.’

She laughed, and drew closer. ‘He’s going through a mummy phase. All boys, girls too, have it. In a few years’ time you’ll be his idol, you’ll see.’

And so I waited to become his idol.

He started school, and was happy there I think, though often he’d be in bed when I got back from work. If he was asleep, I’d go and watch him, brush his hair back and kiss his forehead. I loved that smell on him, freshly bathed, Pears soap and strawberry toothpaste. If he was awake:

‘Do you want me to read tonight?’

‘No, I want Mummy to read.’

‘Are you sure? Because I’d really like to read to—’

‘Mummy! MUMMY!’

‘Okay, I’ll get Mummy,’ I’d say, then on closing the door, ‘You know you shouldn’t go to bed with wet hair, Albie. You’ll catch flu.’ I’d say this, even though the science on the issue was dubious to say the least. Still I couldn’t help myself, any more than, on holidays, I could resist telling him not to swim immediately after eating in case of cramps. What was it about water against skin that caused the intestines to suddenly spasm and contract? Why should that be? Didn’t matter — it was one of those phrases on the list.

Because throughout my childhood and teenage years I had been compiling a list of banal and irritating remarks that I swore I would never, ever make when I was a parent. All children make this list, and all lists are unique, though no doubt there is considerable overlap. Don’t touch that, it’s dirty! Write your thank-you letters, or no more presents! How can you waste food when people are starving? All through Albie’s childhood, out they tumbled. No more biscuits, you’ll spoil your appetite! Tidy your room! It is WAY past your bedtime! Do NOT come downstairs again! Yes, you do have to have the lights off! What on earth are you afraid of? Don’t cry! You’re acting like a baby. I told you, stop crying. Do. Not. Cry!

‘Can I ask you a question?’

‘Go on.’

‘At work, how many people do you know who can’t tie their shoelaces?’

‘None.’

‘And how many adults do you know who can’t use a knife or don’t eat any vegetables at all?’

‘Connie—’

‘Or who talk about poo and wee at dinner, or leave the lids off felt-tips, or are afraid of the dark?’

‘I realise the point you’re making but—’

‘So can we just assume that Albie will learn these things and that the time you spend constantly getting at him, which is all the time, is not well spent?’

‘The point you’re making doesn’t stand.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s not about teaching him how to tie his laces or to eat broccoli or talk sensibly. It’s about doing things properly; teaching him application, perseverance and discipline.’

‘Discipline!’

‘I’m teaching him that not everything in this life is easy or fun.’

‘Yes,’ Connie sighed and shook her head. ‘You certainly are.’

Was I an authoritarian? Certainly less so than my own father, and never unreasonably so. Connie was of the school that thought a certain degree of cheekiness, irreverence, rebellion — the crayon on the wall, the unwanted cauliflower hidden in the shoe — should be treated with an indulgent nod, a wink, a ruffling of the hair. I wasn’t like that, it was not in my nature or upbringing, and neither was I of the school that thought praise should be unearnt, or that ‘I love you’ should be tossed around with wild abandon, just another way of saying ‘goodnight’ or ‘well done’ or ‘see you later’, a clearing of the throat. I did love my son, of course I did, but not when he tried to set fire to things, not when he refused to do his maths homework, not when he spilt apple juice into my laptop, not when he whined because I’d turned off the TV. He would thank me in the long run, and if I did overstep the mark sometimes, if I did lose my temper, snarl when I should have forced a smile then, well, I was very, very tired.

I was commuting by then, eating breakfast before sunrise and fighting against the tide of in-comers at Paddington as I travelled to my work as a project manager based in the research labs just outside Reading. A tube, a train, another train, a walk; then, at night-time, the same journey in reverse. Exhausting, brutal, that working day, and yet I had only myself to blame.

I had left academia. Shortly after Albie started school, I had been offered a new job in the private sector, working for a multinational that you will have heard of, on the news or in documentaries, a huge global company with diverse interests in the world of pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals, a company that had, at times, in the past, perhaps not placed ethical considerations at the heart of its strategy.

But now here was this job proposal, brought to me by an old colleague with a tan and a sharp suit, and here was my family in a perfectly pleasant flat but with no savings, no pension and a hefty mortgage. Before Albie arrived I’d been employed on a series of short-term projects on reasonable but unspectacular pay and this had been enough for the cinema tickets and vodka and tonics that made up the greater part of our household budget. I had a fellowship now, with students working for me, and there seemed every chance that in a few years, I’d become a professor. But now, with nursery fees and endless new shoes, with Connie on a part-time salary from the museum, money was considerably tighter. There were other frustrations, too: long-term insecurity, administrative demands, the endless pressure to publish in ‘high-impact’ journals, the undignified scramble for funding. When I began to study science I had presumed, naïvely I suppose, that politicians would be falling over themselves to further human knowledge. Surely any government, irrespective of its political hue, could see that innovation in science and technology led to wealth and prosperity? True, not all research had an immediate commercial application, it was not all obviously ‘translational’, but who knew where a line of thought might lead? So many of the great breakthroughs had first been glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, and surely anything that added to the sum of human knowledge was valuable? More than valuable — essential.

Not if our funding was anything to go by. Increasingly we found ourselves scrabbling around for enough money to pay our research assistants the lowest possible wage. Apparently the nation’s future lay not in innovation and development but in global finance and telesales, in the entertainment industry and coffee shops. Britain would lead the world in frothing milk and making period dramas.

And now here was this large multinational company, with its security and pension scheme and its salary commensurate to my achievements and qualifications, its well-equipped labs and the brightest, best graduates, and here was my family too. I felt — is this common among new fathers, I wonder? — a new-found obligation to provide, which all sounds very atavistic and primitive but there it is. Of course, I couldn’t make the decision independently. Connie and I talked many nights until late. She had heard of my potential employers, had noted their name in the press and on the news, and while she never used the phrase out loud, it played on her lips: sell-out. Her response to big business was instinctive and emotional and, I thought, naïve, and in turn I rationalised the issues: surely it was only by working for a large organisation that you could make a meaningful change, and wasn’t it better to be inside than out? Was profit really such a dirty word? And what about the financial security, the extra money? What about another room, a garden of our own, or a house near a much, much better school, outside London maybe? A studio for Connie — she could paint again! What about school fees?

Connie bridled. ‘I don’t want those things—’

‘Not now, perhaps—’

‘And don’t pretend you’re doing it for us!’

‘But I am; if I accepted, I would be, to an extent …’

‘The bottom line is I don’t think you should make a decision based on money, that’s all.’

Which is a noble sentiment, and a very Connie thing to say, Connie the nurturing artist. But substitute that chilly word ‘money’ for ‘security’ or ‘safety’, substitute ‘money’ for ‘comfort’ or ‘peace of mind’ or ‘well-being’, ‘a good education’ or ‘travel’ or simply ‘a happy family’. Often — not always, but often — didn’t they equate to the same thing?

‘No,’ said Connie. ‘Not at all.’

‘So what would you have me do? If it was up to you?’

‘It isn’t up to me. It’s your job, your career—’

‘But if it was up to you?’

‘I wouldn’t take the job. You’ll lose your freedom. You’ll be working for accountants, not for yourself. If you’re not making money for them, they’ll cut you off and you’ll hate that, and it won’t be fun. There’ll be no joy in it. Find something better paid or more secure by all means, but I wouldn’t take this job.’

I took the job.

She did not berate me for it, or very rarely, though Albie certainly would in years to come. But neither was she sympathetic if I struggled in at eight or nine or ten at night, and there was no doubt in my mind that I had slipped somewhat in her estimation. An awful feeling, that; sliding down the scree, scrabbling at the dust but unable to get a grip. That shine, the idealism I suppose, that had caught Connie’s attention on the night we met, had faded. It couldn’t last but still, I regretted its passing. Connie had always said I was at my most attractive when I talked about my work. ‘The lights come on,’ she had said. Now I’d have to find another way to make that happen.

A little before seven a.m. I was woken by a warder bearing an excellent cup of coffee. I had eaten nothing since the jelly sweet that I’d taken from the boy on the Siena train, and though the thick black liquid burned my mouth and made my stomach spasm, it was delicious. I sat on the edge of the cell bench, sipped from the plastic cup, rubbed my eyes and forced myself to acknowledge the full, all-encompassing hopelessness of my situation.

Grimly, I sketched out my retreat to London. I would walk down the hill to Siena station, find out the cost of a single ticket to Florence, and plead with the clerk — in English? — to take my wristwatch and phone as security for the train ticket. That accomplished, I’d retrieve my property in Florence, withdraw cash, return to Siena to buy back my watch and phone, then try and catch the next plane to London from Pisa. It was a dull and dispiriting plan, requiring some leniency on the part of the Italian Rail Service, but the alternative — phoning Connie and asking her to wire some money — was unacceptable. What did that mean, anyway, ‘wiring money’? It was one of those things that people only did in films.

I switched on my telephone. Battery power stood at 2 per cent. Without considering what I would say, I decided to call home. I pictured Connie’s phone on top of her pile of books, her sleeping figure, recalled the comforting scent of the sheets, and I imagined how things might have been had all gone to plan. Imagined the sound of a car on the driveway, Connie going to the window, seeing Albie and me stepping out of the taxi, Albie smiling a little shame-facedly, raising his hand to the bedroom window, me joining him, my arm around his shoulder. I imagined the tears of gratitude in Connie’s eyes as she ran for the door. I had returned him safe and sound as I had promised. ‘You found him! In all of Europe! Douglas, how did you do it? You clever, brilliant man—’

Back in the real world, Connie picked up. ‘Hello?’

‘Darling, it’s me—’

‘It’s six in the morning, Douglas!’

‘I know, I’m sorry, but the phone’s about to die, and I wanted to tell you—’

I heard the rustle of sheets as she sat up in bed. ‘Douglas, have you found him? Is he safe?’

‘I lost him. I almost had him, almost, almost, but I lost him.’

A sigh. ‘Oh, Douglas.’

‘You mustn’t worry, he’s perfectly safe and well, I know that—’

‘How can you know that?’

‘I found Kat.’

‘How on earth did you—?’

‘It’s a long story. My phone’s about to run out. Anyway, I’m sorry, I failed.’

‘Douglas, you didn’t “fail”.’

‘Well, I didn’t achieve my result, so yes, I did fail.’

‘But at least we know he’s safe. Where are you now? Are there people with you? Are you safe, are you well?’

‘I’m in a hotel, in Siena.’ I tapped the stainless-steel toilet with my toe. ‘It’s very nice.’

‘Do you want me to come out?’

‘No, no, I want to come home.’

‘Good idea. Come home, Douglas. We’ll wait for him together here.’

‘I’ll be back tonight, tomorrow at the latest.’

‘I’ll be waiting. And Douglas? At least you tried. I’m grateful—’

‘Go back to sleep.’

‘And when you come home—’

A bleep, and the phone died. I fastened my watch, placed the phone in my pocket, folded my blanket neatly on the bench and left my cell, closing the door behind me.

It was a bright, cool summer morning, fresh and clean. The police station lay in the modern outskirts of the town, beneath the city walls. I was about to walk down the hill towards the station when I heard music, the theme from The Godfather, played on the accordion.

Perched impertinently on the bonnet of a police car was Kat.

‘Hey,’ she said, offering her fist to bump. I obliged.

‘Hello, Kat. What are you doing here?’

‘Waiting for you. How was your first night behind bars?’

‘Better than some hotels I’ve stayed in. I regret the tattoo, though.’

‘What tattoo did you get, Mr P.?’

‘Just gang-related stuff. Big dragon.’

‘Your tan’s evened out. On your face. You look less like a road sign.’

‘Well, that’s something, I suppose.’ She smiled and time passed. ‘Well, Kat, I should get going. Nice to meet—’

‘Have you tried texting him, Mr P.?’

‘Of course, and calling too. He said he’d ignore them all and he has.’

‘Then send him one he can’t ignore. Here, hold Steve.’ Kat slid off the bonnet, handed me accordion-Steve then reached into her pocket and produced her mobile phone, tapping on it with her head down. ‘I shouldn’t do this. It’s a betrayal of trust, Mr P., and I feel bad. Plus there’s the cost to my personal dignity and integrity. But given that you’ve come this far …’

‘What are you writing, Kat?’

‘… and “send”! There. All done. Take a look.’

She held her phone out to me, and I read:

‘There you go,’ said Kat. ‘I’m delivering him to you.’

‘Good God,’ I exclaimed. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘No thanks required.’

‘But … but doesn’t the message sort of imply …?’

‘… that he’s knocked me up? You do want him to be there, don’t you?’

‘Well, yes, but—’

She took the phone from my hands. ‘I can always tell him I was kidding …’

‘No, no, no, I think … let it be. But tomorrow morning? Can I get to Madrid for tomorrow?’

‘You can if you run.’

I laughed, bundled the wheezing accordion back into her arms and with a certain wariness — we were neither of us daisy-fresh — embraced Kat, and began to trot across the car park before halting and turning back.

‘Kat, I realise I’m pushing my luck, but the money I gave you yesterday — could I get it back? My wallet is in Florence, you see …’

She shook her head slowly and sighed, crouched and reached into her backpack.

‘And maybe if I could borrow twenty, maybe thirty euros more? And your bank details, so I can return the money …’

I confess I made this offer in the expectation of her declining, but she took some time to write out her account numbers, including IBAN and SWIFT codes. I promised to make good my debts as soon as I returned, and then I was off, running down the hill, running, running, running towards Spain.

part seven MADRID

Time being what it is, we got older. We thickened and sagged in ways that would have seemed implausible, comical even, to our younger selves, just as our son, before our eyes, began to elongate. We accumulated things; vast quantities of moulded plastic, picture books, scooters, tricycles, bicycles, shoes and clothes and coats and paraphernalia that no longer served a purpose but which we couldn’t quite throw away. Connie and I entered our forties in quick succession, and though we suspected we’d never need a bottle steriliser or rocking horse again, we found we couldn’t quite discard them, and now there was a piano, too, now a train set, a castle, a tangled box kite.

My new salary meant that the fridge seemed fuller, the wine tasted better and we bought a bigger car, took Albie on trips abroad and came back to the same small flat we’d bought together before we were married, cramped and tatty now. We ought to move house, we knew it, but the effort required was beyond me. Five years of commuting against the tide had begun to take their toll, and I was perpetually tired, perpetually stressed and bad-tempered, so that my nightly homecoming brought no pleasure to either Albie or Connie, or indeed myself.

Take, for example, the famous Glitter Wars that scarred the December of Albie’s ninth year. Albie and Connie had been making Christmas cards at the kitchen table, heads close together in that way they had, Phil Spector’s Christmas Album playing, the kind of home-spun artsy-craftsy activity that occupied their evenings while I struggled to stay awake on the 1957 into Paddington, self-medicating with a warm gin and tonic from the station buffet then another from the trolley, hurrying through the rain to a flat that felt too small and entering to no greeting, no loving kiss or filial hug, just a scene of utter disarray; music blaring, tissue-paper and cotton wool everywhere, poster paint daubed all over the table. Here were my son and wife in their own little self-contained world, laughing at a self-contained joke, and here was Albie shaking glitter onto PVA glue and the table, too, and the floor and onto his pyjamas. Anyone who has attempted to clean away large quantities of spilt glitter will know that it is a pernicious and vile substance, a kind of festive asbestos that clings to clothes and burrows into carpets, sticks to the skin and stays there, and now here were great snowdrifts of the awful stuff blowing across the table.

‘What the hell is going on in here!’ I said, I shouted. They noticed me now.

‘We’re making Christmas cards!’ said Connie, still smiling. ‘Look! Isn’t this a beauty?’ She held up one of Albie’s efforts and a shower of gold and silver cascaded to the floor. ‘Your son is an artist!’

‘Look! Look what you’re doing. It’s going everywhere! For Christ’s sake, Connie,’ and I threw down my briefcase and went to the sink to dampen a cloth. ‘Would it kill you to put newspaper down first?’

‘It’s glitter, Douglas,’ she said, forcing a laugh. ‘Because it’s Christmas?’

‘And I’ll be picking it out of my food and brushing it off my clothes until July! Look at this paint! Paint and glue on the table. Is it washable? No, stupid question, of course, it isn’t—’ I stopped scrubbing, threw the cloth down. ‘Look! Look, it’s on my hands!’ I held them up to the light, to show how brightly they sparkled. ‘I’ve got to go into meetings like this. I have to do presentations! Look! How is anyone supposed to take me seriously when I’m covered in this bloody …’ My son was staring at the table now, his brow creased, lips protruding. Here you are, my darling boy — some memories for you.

‘Egg, can you go next door please?’ said Connie.

He shifted off his seat. ‘Sorry, Dad.’

‘I like your Christmas card!’ I said to his back, but it was too late now. Connie and I were left alone.

‘Well, you can really suck the joy out of pretty much anything these days, can’t you?’ said Connie.

But I was not quite ready to apologise yet and the battle that followed, erupting in skirmishes over the remaining days and weeks leading up to Christmas, was too painful and unpleasant to recount in great detail here. The glitter, as predicted, found its way into clothes and hair and the grain of the kitchen furniture; its sparkle would catch my eye as I ate a solitary breakfast in the dark, and the silences, the sniping and bickering continued until Christmas.

If my own mother ever caught me pulling faces, pouting or sneering, she would tell me: if the wind changes direction, you’ll stay that way. I was sceptical at the time, but as the years passed I was not so sure. My everyday face, the one I wore at rest or when alone, had set and hardened, and wasn’t one I cared for much any more.

The day itself was always spent at Connie’s parents, a noisy, boisterous and boozy affair, the tiny terraced house packed with a mind-boggling number of nephews and nieces, aunts and uncles, both Cypriots and Londoners and combinations of the two, the children ever-multiplying, everyone laughing and joking and arguing in a smoky room with the TV on. Later, there’d be ridiculous dancing, four generations trampling walnut shells and Quality Street underfoot. Once upon a time these Christmas Days had seemed like a refreshing change from the rather chilly and restrained affair I was used to from childhood, but since the loss of my parents the event had taken on a melancholy air for me. I was the stranger here, an elderly orphan, an appendix to someone else’s family, and the discord between my wife and me served only to heighten my gloom. There was work at home in my briefcase — perhaps I could sneak off early and do that? No, only lemonade for me. No, thank you, I don’t smoke. And no, thank you, I do not wish to conga.

Of course Albie loved it there, sipping creamy cocktails when no one was looking, flirting with his cousins, dancing on his uncles’ shoulders, and so I sat and watched and waited. We returned home after midnight, Albie falling asleep in the backseat, and I carried him up to our top-floor flat — the last year I’d be able to do this — and fell backwards on to our bed. The three of us lay together, too exhausted to undress, my son’s breath hot and sweet on my cheek.

‘Are you unhappy?’ said Connie.

‘No. No, just a little blue.’ That silly word again.

‘Maybe we need to make a change.’

‘What kind of change?’ I asked.

‘Perhaps a change of scene. So that you’re not tired all the time.’

‘Leave London, you mean?’

‘If that’s what it’s going to take. Maybe find a house in the country somewhere, so you can drive to work. Somewhere with a good state school nearby. What d’you think?’

What did I think? In truth, I didn’t love the city any more. It didn’t belong to us in the same way. I did not like explaining to Albie why there were bunches of flowers tied to the railings, or instructing him to avoid the vomit on the way to the shops on Saturday morning. I was bored of road works and building sites — when would they ever finish the place? Why couldn’t they leave it alone? When I returned at night, the city seemed an unnerving and aggressive place; I could feel my grip tightening on the handle of my briefcase as I left the tube, keys clenched in my other fist. Every siren, every terrorist threat seemed more urgent and more personal. And yes, there was all the great art, the wonderful theatre, but when had Connie last been to the theatre?

Perhaps the countryside was the answer. Sentimental, perhaps, but wouldn’t it be great for Albie to know the names of birds other than magpies and pigeons? When I was a child, on walks my mother would habitually name all the grasses, flowers, birds and trees we passed — Quercus robur, the oak, Troglodytes troglodytes, the wren. These were my warmest memories of her, and even now I can recall the binomial for all the common British birds, though I’ve yet to be asked. But Albie’s knowledge of nature came from trips to the city farm, his sense of the seasons from changes in the central heating. Perhaps exposure to nature would make him less sullen, moody and resentful towards me. I imagined him racing off on a bicycle with fishing net and spotter’s guide, all rosy-cheeked and tousle-haired, then returning at dusk, a jam-jar full of sticklebacks sloshing on the handlebars, the kind of childhood I’d longed for. A biologist in the making; not hard science, but a start.

It was much more difficult to imagine Connie outside London. She had been born here, studied and worked here. We had fallen in love and been married here, raised Albie here. London exhausted and maddened me, but Connie carried the city around with her; pubs and bars and restaurants, theatre foyers, city parks, the top deck of the 22, the 55, the 38. She was not averse to the countryside, but even in a Cornish cove or on a Yorkshire moor, it seemed as if she might lift an arm and hail a cab.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘Sorry, I’m just trying to imagine you in a field on a wet Tuesday in February.’

‘Yeah, me too.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Not easy, is it?’

‘What about your work?’

‘I’ll commute for a change. Stay over at Fran’s if I have to. We’ll sort that bit out. The main thing is d’you think you could be happy there?’

I didn’t answer, and she continued:

‘I think you would be. Happier, I mean, or less stressed. Which means that we all would be. In the long run.’ Albie shifted in his sleep and curled towards his mother. ‘I’d like you to be happy again. And if that means a new life in a new town … village …’

‘Okay. Let’s think about it.’

‘Okay.’

‘I love you, Connie. You do know that.’

‘I do. Happy Christmas, my darling.’

‘Happy Christmas to you.’

Madrid in August; the dry heat and dust of it. Flying over the great plains of central Spain that afternoon, peering down, I had never felt so far from the sea.

After the chaos of the last few days, the journey to Spain had been blissfully smooth, the 0732 train from Siena bringing me to Florence in a little under ninety minutes, the journey slow but pleasant past great vineyards and zone industriale, the pleasure heightened by the excellent sandwich that I gorged on like some kind of caveman, followed by, in quick succession, a banana, an apple, a wonderful orange, the juice dribbling down my chin. Unshaven and not yet bathed, I suspect there was something a little feral about me, hunched in a corner seat, sticky-faced. Certainly the commuters who joined at Empoli regarded me with wariness. I returned their stares. What did I care? Like some newly freed jailbird, I was out and back on the streets, and I slid down in my seat to dream of hot baths, new razor blades, clean white sheets, etc.

Then into Florence’s rush hour, and an altercation with a staff member about the return of my property, conducted in over-enunciated English. How can I pay charge for overnight storage when wallet is in bag? Return my property and I pay! The sign above says ‘assistenza alla clientela’. I am clientela — why you not assist me? Oh yes, I was quite the bad-ass now, quite the bad-ass.

By 0920 I was in possession of my passport, my wallet, my phone charger, my tablet. I hugged them to me, whole again. In the station café I found a corner near a socket and sucked up electricity and wifi like a swimmer coming up for air. No Iberia flights to Madrid from Firenze or Pisa, but a 1235 flight from Bologna. Where was Bologna? Depressingly it seemed that the Apennines stood between that flight and me. But wait — thirty-seven minutes, the timetable said. What kind of miraculous train was this? I could make it with time to spare. I purchased my Madrid flight online, a window seat, hand baggage only, and boarded the Bologna train. In the toilet I coated myself with deodorant stick as if papering a wall. I brushed my teeth, and have never enjoyed the sensation more.

The trick to crossing the Apennines was to burrow beneath them. Much of the journey took place in a remarkably long tunnel, emerging now and then into light as if curtains had been hurled open to a view of wooded mountainside against bright sky, then whisked shut again. Almost too soon we were in Bologna, one of those cites where the airport is disconcertingly close to the centre, so that you might comfortably walk there with your shopping. But I had learnt my lesson in Florence and took a taxi. My guidebook sang the city’s praises, but the taxi skirted the old town on the northern ring road and what I saw was squat, modern and pleasant, with a fragment of an ancient wall in the centre of a roundabout then the dull warehouses of the airport. Never mind, we’d come here again another time. For the moment, I was happy to find myself in the terminal and checked in with an hour and fifteen minutes to spare. Air travel had never seemed so glamorous, so thrillingly efficient, so full of hope.

We took off on time and I craned to look out of the window like a child. Everything was sharp and clear, the air pure, no hint of cloud, and I noted how new this experience was for humankind, the ability to see the earth laid out like this, and how complacent we were about it. Why were people reading magazines when there was all of this to see? Here were the mountains that I’d burrowed beneath just two hours before, there was Corsica, crisply outlined, a mossy green on blue. Then the Mediterranean was left behind and the desert plain unrolled; a desert in Europe. Spain seemed vast to me. No wonder they had once filmed Westerns there. What did it look like at ground level, I wondered, and would I ever find out? Now that I knew my journey was almost complete, the ability to travel seemed exciting again. I was not sure that I wanted to go home, even if I could.

Then a motorway, suburbs and a great sprawling city very far from water. An airport terminal like the set of a science-fiction film and then out into the thick air of the Spanish afternoon and into a taxi, the motorway to the city half abandoned, passing unpopulated building sites and new apartment blocks, not a human being to be seen. Madrid was unexpected to me. I had no guidebooks or maps, no knowledge or expectations. A corner of Paris could only be Paris, likewise New York or Rome. Madrid was harder to pin down, the buildings that lined the wide avenues a curious mix of eighties office blocks, grand residential palaces, stylish apartment buildings, all compacted together. That European passion for pharmacies was much in evidence, and a great deal of the city seemed as seventies as a lava lamp, while other buildings were absurdly ornate and grand. If Connie had been with me, she’d have named that style. Baroque? Was that right? Neo-baroque?

‘What is this?’ I asked my taxi-driver, pointing to an intricately carved palace, the crystalline white of cake icing.

‘Post office,’ said the driver, and I tried to imagine anyone buying a book of stamps there. ‘Over there,’ he pointed through the trees of a formal park towards a peach-coloured neo-classical building (Connie, is that right? Neo-classical?) ‘this is the Prado. Very famous, very beautiful. Velázquez, Goya. You must go.’

‘I am,’ I said. ‘I’m meeting my son there tomorrow.’

In the summer before Albie started ‘big school’ we left the small, garden-less Kilburn flat where he’d grown up and moved to the country. I had tried hard to present the whole experience as ‘an adventure’, but Albie was unconvinced. Perhaps Connie was too, though at least she didn’t pout and whine and sulk like Albie. ‘I’ll be bored,’ he would say, declaring his intentions. ‘I’m leaving all my friends behind!’ he’d say. ‘You’ll make new ones,’ we’d reply, as if friends could be replaced like old shoes.

For Connie, too, the departure was proving something of a wrench. Evenings and weekends had been given over to ‘sorting things out’, which meant throwing stuff away with a ruthlessness that bordered on anger; old notebooks and diaries, photographs, art-school projects, artists’ materials.

‘What about these paints? Can’t you use these? Can’t Albie?’

‘No. That’s why I’m throwing them away.’

Or I’d find her drawings in the recycling bin beneath bottles and cans, shake off the mess and hold them up. ‘Why are you throwing this away? It’s lovely.’

‘It’s awful. I’m embarrassed by it.’

‘I love this picture. I remember it from when we met.’

‘It’s just nostalgia, Douglas. We’re never going to hang it up. It’s scrap paper, get rid of it.’

‘Well, can I keep it?’

She sighed. ‘Just keep it out of my sight.’ I took her sketches and drawings, pinned some up at work and put the rest in my filing cabinet.

Much of Albie’s childhood was discarded; some baby clothes, too, girls’ clothes that we’d bought for our daughter and kept carefully folded in the back of a drawer, not out of mawkish sentimentality nor as some strange totem, but for practical reasons. What if we had another child, a girl maybe? For a while we had tried, but not now. It was all a little too late for that now.

Never mind, because here was change, here was an adventure, and so the Saturday after Albie’s final term at junior school, the removal men came stomping up those stairs. Nearly fifteen years earlier, two young people had moved into that flat, all of our possessions easily contained in the back of a hired van. Now we were a family, with our own furniture and pictures in proper frames, bicycles and snorkels, guitars, a drum kit and an upright piano, dinner sets and cast-iron cookware and far too many possessions for what was effectively a student flat. The new owners were a young couple in their twenties, baby on the way. They seemed nice at the viewing. We left them a bottle of champagne in the centre of the wooden floor that we’d stripped and painted. While Albie waited in the car, Connie and I walked from room to room, closing the doors. There was no time to be sentimental with the removal van blocking the street outside.

‘You ready?’ I said.

‘I suppose so,’ she murmured, already descending the stairs.

I pulled the door shut and posted the keys through the letterbox.

All along the Westway I kept up my babble about it being an adventure, how spacious and grand the new house, new home, would be, how nice it would be to have a garden in the summer. It would feel like undoing a belt after a large meal — finally, a chance to breathe! Albie and Connie remained silent. Along with the keys and the instructions for the boiler, we had left something intangible behind. We had been extraordinarily happy in that little flat, and also sadder than we had ever thought possible. Whatever lay ahead, it couldn’t match those extremes.

We drove west under overcast skies. The city faded into suburbs, then industrial estates and fir plantations and before long we left the motorway, bounced off the outskirts of Reading, down lanes past fields of wheat and rape; pleasant countryside, though not quite the remote and picturesque idyll I recalled from visits with the estate agent. There seemed to be an awful lot of pylons, a lot of high hedges, cars passing by in quick succession, lorries too. Never mind. We followed the removal van into a gravel drive, our gravel drive, the house early twentieth century, mock-Tudor beams, the largest in the village! There was an excellent state school nearby, my desk was just twenty minutes’ drive away, there were great rail links. An hour from London by road, too, on a good day. If you listened you could hear the M40! There was work to do, of course, just enough to fill our weekends, but we could be happy here, no doubt about it. On the front drive — with room for three more cars! — I draped my arms around my wife and son like a figure-skating coach. Look, in the trees — magpies, crows! We stood for a moment, then they broke free.

In the large family kitchen — flagstones, an Aga — I popped a bottle of champagne, pulled glasses from their newspaper and poured out an inch for Egg, and the three of us toasted new beginnings. But after we had placed the boxes in each room and the removal men had left, it became clear that a miscalculation had been made. Try as we might, the three of us could never fill this place. There weren’t enough pictures for the walls or books for the shelves. Even with Albie’s drum kit and guitar, we couldn’t make enough noise to make these high rooms seem occupied. I had intended the house to symbolise prosperity and maturity, a haven of rural calm with good rail links to the chaos of the city. But it felt — and would always feel, I suppose — like a half-empty doll’s house with not quite enough dolls.

Later that evening, I found Connie standing silently in a small gabled bedroom at the top of the house. The wallpaper was old-fashioned, flowered and marked with doodles, little biro-ed ants and felt-tip butterflies drawn on to the stems and petals of the roses. I knew Connie well enough to guess her thoughts, though we chose not to acknowledge them out loud.

‘I thought this room could be your studio. Lovely light! You could paint again. Yes?’

She rested her head on my shoulder but said nothing.

We bought a dog.

I did not tell Connie of my whereabouts. In Siena, I had told her to expect me home the following day, and wouldn’t it be better to phone her with Albie by my side? I’m not at Heathrow, I’m in Madrid! It’s a long story. Wait a minute, I have someone here to speak to you … That was the plan, and so I was absurdly cheerful and optimistic that night, my mood lifted by the lavish hotel suite — a suite! Two rooms! — that I had booked on a whim and at a surprisingly reasonable price. At the marble and gold reception desk there seemed to be some doubt that this rather shabby, worn-out solitary guest could afford such decadence. No luggage? Were there any other guests with me? No, I was all alone, but there was a sofa-bed for Albie. Only if he wanted it, of course.

The room — no, the suite — was all white marble and cream leather, a dream of modern living from 1973. Closing the door, I set about repairing the damage of the last few days. I eased my partially sunburnt self into the cool onyx bath, washed my hair, shaved, and dressed the wounds on my feet. I put on the last of my clean clothes and sent the others to be laundered. In the shopping streets below I found a department store and bought a new shirt, a tie, some trousers and, back in my room, laid them out on a chair as if preparing for a job interview. So giddy and excited was I that I broke the central guiding principle of my life and took vodka and tonic from the mini-bar then, dizzy with decadence, the peanuts too, and like some modern-day Caligula sat on the balcony and watched the traffic on the Gran Vía fourteen floors below. At the junction ahead of me stood a fine modern building, a rounded wedge — art deco, Connie, is that right? — with a huge neon sign on its top floor, and as evening fell I caught the moment when the neon sputtered into life, exclaiming Schweppes! against a rainbow background, so that the street resembled a milder, more laid-back Times Square.

The Spaniards, I knew, had a reputation for late dining and I contemplated taking a ‘disco nap’, as Albie would put it, then setting out to explore. But the bed was so large and comfortable, the sheets cool and white and of such a high thread count, that I found myself lowering the mechanical shutters and settling down at nine fifteen. Plenty of time for tapas tomorrow, when I’d see my son again. I fell asleep, lulled by the most wonderful, unshakeable faith in the future.

There has never been a shortage of topics to keep me awake at night, but as a teenager I was especially haunted by the prospect of nuclear war. The public information films intended to educate and reassure the populace sent everyone, us children in particular, into a frenzy of morbid fantasy and I was convinced that at some point, whether in Washington, Peking or Moscow, a button would be pressed — I imagined an actual button, large and red, like the stop button on an escalator — and soon my mother and father and I would be hunting for mutant rats in the smouldering remains of Ipswich city centre. There’d be no more ‘don’t touch that, it’s dirty’ in the post-apocalyptic Petersen family cave. The only question would be: do we eat Douglas or Karen first? So worried was I by this prospect that, unusually, I confessed my night terrors to my father. ‘Well, if it does happen, you won’t have time to do anything about it. Three minutes of panic and then you’ll be crispy bacon!’ he reassured me. Given three minutes’ warning, what would we say to one another, my family and I? I imagined my father rushing to turn off the central heating.

Rightly or wrongly, that specific fear has faded. But the anxiety has not passed and now the face that I imagine in that future wasteland is not my own, but Albie’s.

Over the years I have read many, many books about the future, my ‘we’re all doomed’ books, as Connie liked to call them. ‘All the books you read are either about how grim the past was or how gruesome the future will be. It might not be that way, Douglas. Things might turn out all right.’ But these were well-researched, plausible studies, their conclusions highly persuasive, and I could become quite voluble on the subject.

Take, for instance, the fate of the middle-class, into which Albie and I were born and to which Connie now belongs, albeit with some protest. In book after book I read that the middle-class are doomed. Globalisation and technology have already cut a swathe through previously secure professions, and 3D printing technology will soon wipe out the last of the manufacturing industries. The internet won’t replace those jobs, and what place for the middle-classes if twelve people can run a giant corporation? I’m no communist firebrand, but even the most rabid free-marketeer would concede that market-forces capitalism, instead of spreading wealth and security throughout the population, has grotesquely magnified the gulf between rich and poor, forcing a global workforce into dangerous, unregulated, insecure low-paid labour while rewarding only a tiny elite of businessmen and technocrats. So-called ‘secure’ professions seem less and less so; first it was the miners and the ship- and steel-workers, soon it will be the bank clerks, the librarians, the teachers, the shop-owners, the supermarket check-out staff. The scientists might survive if it’s the right type of science, but where do all the taxi-drivers in the world go when the taxis drive themselves? How do they feed their children or heat their homes and what happens when frustration turns to anger? Throw in terrorism, the seemingly insoluble problem of religious fundamentalism, the rise of the extreme right-wing, under-employed youth and the under-pensioned elderly, fragile and corrupt banking systems, the inadequacy of the health and care systems to cope with vast numbers of the sick and old, the environmental repercussions of unprecedented factory-farming, the battle for finite resources of food, water, gas and oil, the changing course of the Gulf Stream, destruction of the biosphere and the statistical probability of a global pandemic, and there really is no reason why anyone should sleep soundly ever again.

By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, overcrowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to barely be remarked upon. Meanwhile, in literally gilded towers miles above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepreneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept cocktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.

‘So what you’re saying,’ said Connie, looking up from her novel, ‘is that the future, basically, is going to be a bit like Mad Max?’

‘Not exactly. But it might have elements of that.’

‘So Mad Max, it’s like a documentary, really—’

‘All I mean is the future world might not be as hospitable as the one that you and I grew up in. That dream of progress is dead. Our parents imagined holiday camps on the moon. We … we have to get used to a different notion of the future.’

‘And you want Albie to choose his GCSEs based on this Mad Max-like vision of the future.’

‘Don’t tease me. I want him to do subjects that are useful and practical; I want him to do something that will get him a job.’

‘You want him to be up in the gilded tower. You want him to have a robot butler.’

‘I want him to be successful,’ I said. ‘Is that a strange ambition for my son?’

‘Our son.’

‘Our son.’

At that time, Albie was not doing well. Instead of providing a sense of calm, the countryside enraged him. He showed no interest in learning the binomial names for the common British birds, and the frogspawn I procured for him held no appeal. He missed his friends, the cinema, the top deck of buses; he missed eating chips on the swings in the playground. But wasn’t the countryside one wonderful giant playground? Apparently not. Albie went for walks with great reluctance, glaring at warblers, kicking the heads off flowers as he passed. If he could have burnt the countryside down, he would have. At school his grades were consistently poor, as were reports of his behaviour. He did not work, he did not concentrate, sometimes he didn’t even turn up. Connie, though concerned, took all this in her stride, but I was angered and shocked by it. I had not expected obedience to be genetic but neither had I anticipated these calls from the headmaster’s office, these letters home. My own son took me by surprise. He was not what I had expected, was not like me at all. Most hurtfully of all, he seemed to take a perverse pride in this.

I didn’t lose my temper, or only every now and then, and I was not disappointed by him, only by his behaviour, a semantic distinction that was probably lost on a thirteen-year-old boy. He was smart, sharp, he had a good brain, he just required some structure and application. I assessed the key areas requiring attention, took the matter in hand, and despite my fatigue I’d spend evenings and weekends with him at the kitchen table, working through chemistry, physics and mathematics in what I hoped was a supportive fatherly manner, Connie hovering nearby like a boxing referee.

‘How can you not do long division, Albie? It’s pretty basic stuff.’

‘I can do it, just not in the same way.’

‘So you write down four and you carry the three over.’

‘That’s the bit we don’t do any more, the carrying-the-three bit.’

‘But that is long division. That’s what long division is!’

‘Not now it isn’t. They do it differently.’

‘There’s only one way to divide, Albie, and this is it.’

‘It isn’t!’

‘So show me! Show me some other magical way to divide …’

The pen would hover on the paper then be tossed across the table. ‘Why can’t we just use a calculator?’

I’m not proud to say that a number of those evenings of supportive coaching ended in raised voices and red eyes; the majority of them, perhaps. On one occasion he even punched a hole in his bedroom wall. Not a supporting wall, of course, just a plasterboard partition, but I was shocked nonetheless, especially when I paused to consider that he must have been imagining my face.

But I would not give up on him, I was sure of that. Each night we’d work, then argue. I’d patch things up as best I could and then lie in bed, kept awake by a vision of a boy of Albie’s age, Chinese or South Korean, sitting up late and working away at his algebra, his organic chemistry, his computer code; this boy against whom my own son would some day compete for his livelihood.

My son’s faltering progress corresponded with a further cooling in our relationship. The little physical rapport we’d once shared, the tickling, the holding of hands, melted away with our growing self-consciousness, and I was surprised how much I missed it, especially the holding hands. I’d never been much of a wrestler, always too anxious about cracked skulls and sprained wrists, but now even a simple arm around the shoulder was shrugged away with a wince or a grunt. Bedroom and bathroom doors were locked and now instead of telling my son to go to bed at the weekend, I began to say goodnight and to leave the two of them downstairs on the sofa, Albie’s head in Connie’s lap or vice versa. Goodnight, everyone! I said goodnight! Goodnight! Goodnight!

I had been bracing myself for Albie’s adolescence, but its arrival felt like the outbreak of a long-simmering civil war. We argued frequently. One example will be enough. I was making the case for why science and maths might make better qualifications than drama and art. A banal discussion, I know, the kind that every family has, but Connie was away in London, which made the topic dangerous.

‘My point is this,’ I said. ‘Put an average member of the general public in a room with paintbrushes or a camera, give them a stage or a pen and paper and they’ll achieve something. It might be inept or ugly or untutored, or it might show potential, or it might even reveal some hidden talent but everyone, anyone can knock up a painting or a poem or photo or whatever. Put someone in a room with a centrifuge, a selection of lab equipment, some chemicals and they’ll produce nothing, nothing worthwhile whatsoever, just … mud pies. That’s because science is methodical, it demands rigour, application and study. It’s more difficult. It just is. It is.’

‘So — what, you think, because you’re a scientist, you’re smarter than other people?’

‘In my field, yes! And so I should be! That’s what I studied for, that’s why I stayed up late for ten years. To be good at it.’

‘So if I drop a subject I hate and don’t understand, you’ll think less of me?’

‘I’ll think you didn’t persevere. I’ll think you gave up too soon.’

‘You’ll think I took the easy option?’

‘Maybe—’

‘Bit of a coward—’

‘I didn’t say that. Why are you twisting words like—?’

‘For doing what I’m good at, rather than what you’re good at?’

‘No, for doing what’s easy instead of what’s hard. It’s good to be challenged, to have your mind stretched.’

‘So what I can do, anyone can do? There’s nothing special about it.’

‘There might be, but that doesn’t mean you’ll earn a living. Success comes to those who work hard and stick at things that are difficult. And I want you to be a success.’

‘Like you?’

He said this with something of a sneer, and I felt a little twist of anger. ‘The future is … well, it’s terrifying, Albie, you have no idea, and I want you to be well prepared for it. I want you to have skills and information that will enable you to thrive and succeed and be happy in the future. And I’m afraid that spending all day colouring in does not count.’

‘So, to summarise,’ he said, blinking quickly now, ‘what you’re saying, basically, is that I should be shit-scared—’

‘Albie!’

‘And base my decisions on fear, because basically I’ve got no talent.’

‘No, you may well have a talent, but it’s a talent that is shared by millions of other people. Millions! That’s all.’

And perhaps that was a poor choice of words. Perhaps this example does not present me in the best light, I would concede that. But as to the accusation that I wanted him to be something he was not? Well, yes, of course I did. Because what is a parent for if not to shape their child?

Connie and I also argued. Raising Albie accentuated the differences between us, differences that had seemed merely entertaining in the carefree days before parenthood. She was, to my mind, absurdly informal and laissez-faire. To take an analogy from botany, she imagined a child as an unopened flower; a parent had a responsibility to provide light and water, but also to stand back and watch. ‘He can do anything he wants,’ she said, ‘as long as he’s happy and cool.’ In contrast, I saw no reason why the flower should not be bracketed to a bamboo stick, pruned, exposed to artificial light; if it made for a stronger, more resilient plant, why not? Of course Connie cajoled and encouraged him and made him do his homework, but still she felt that his natural qualities and talents would make themselves known unaided. I did not believe in natural talents. For me, nothing had ever come naturally, not even science. I had been obliged to work hard, often with my parents standing at either shoulder, and saw no reason why Albie shouldn’t too.

And Albie could be maddening, quite maddening; self-pitying, irresponsible, lazy, and was I really so oppressive and joyless, so short-tempered and ill-humoured? I’d meet other boys’ dads at school events, sports days and fundraising barbecues, note their avuncular ease, their joshing tone, like football managers coaxing a promising young player. I’d watch them for clues.

Albie’s best friend Ryan’s father was a farm-worker, handsome, stubbled, frequently topless for no good reason, always smelling of beer and engine oil. Mike was a widower, bringing up Ryan in a shabby bungalow at the edge of the village, and Albie became infatuated with this pair, would go there after school to play violent video games in a house where the curtains were perpetually closed and the weekly shop came from the petrol station. I went to pick Albie up one night, edging past the caravan, the dismantled cars and motorbikes and barking dogs to find Mike with his shirt off, sitting in a deckchair and smoking something other than tobacco.

‘Hello, Mike! Any sign of Albie?’

He raised a can in greeting. ‘Last I saw he was on the roof.’

‘Okay. On the roof?’

‘Up there. They’re doing target practice.’

‘Oh. Okay. They have a gun?’

‘Only my old air rifle.’

On cue I felt movement in the air near my ear as a pellet pinged off the cement mixer and ricocheted into the unmown grass. I looked up in time to see Albie’s grinning face disappearing behind the guttering. ‘What can I say?’ said Mike. ‘Boys’ll be boys.’

Ryan’s house became a kind of paradise that summer, Ryan’s dad a kind of god. He let them drive the van, climb towering trees, go night-fishing; he’d drive them to quarries, the two of them bouncing around in an open-bed truck, and hurl them off high rocks into the black water. The rustier and sharper an object, the more exposed the wires and blades, the more suitable a toy for the boys to play with. They welded! He let them weld! Mike never sat Ryan down to patiently explain the periodic table; there were no ‘school nights’ in Mike’s domain. Oh no, life with Mike was just one long burning mattress. ‘I think Albie’s spending too much time at Ryan’s,’ I said, after one more revision session disintegrated into tears, bribes and acrimony. ‘We can’t ban him,’ said Connie. ‘Forbidding it will just make it more appealing.’ This was a notion that I found alien. When my father forbade something, it became forbidden, not appealing.

Sometimes Mike would drop Albie home at some ungodly hour and he and Connie would stand in the front garden talking, talking. ‘He’s very charming,’ she’d say, flushing slightly on her return. ‘He’s sparky, he’s got a twinkle. I think it’s admirable, the way he brings up Ryan on his own.’

Admirable! What was admirable about letting your kid run wild, with no thought to his future? What about my work, the years of late-night study that had been required to get me there? Albie had no desire to come and see the lab and meet my colleagues. If anything, he had a vague contempt for it, part of a growing ‘political’ consciousness that he refused to debate with me. ‘What does Ryan’s dad do, exactly?’ I’d ask. Albie didn’t know, but he knew about the girls, scarcely more than teenagers, that Ryan’s dad brought back from the pub. He knew about the roll of banknotes that Mike kept, squeezed into the pocket of his greasy jeans.

A showdown was inevitable, and it came at the school’s annual Parents’ and Teachers’ Quiz, part of the never-ending jamboree of social events to raise funds for a new theatre (because it’s always a new theatre that’s needed, or a pottery kiln or a piano, never a new centrifuge or fume cupboard).

I like to think I’m not too bad at quizzes. I know things, facts, equations — it’s the way my mind works, always has been, and not just science, either. As a teenager I was entranced by the Guinness Book of Records, and memorised great chunks of it. Temperature of the sun, speed of the cheetah, length of a diplodocus, these facts were my party trick, though they rarely came up at parties. Never mind, because while some knowledge had faded, certain key elements — highest mountains, deepest oceans, speeds of light and sound, pi to many places, flags of the world — were as indelible as tattoos. Connie would be there to cover art and culture, and I think that the Petersens felt quietly confident as we entered the sports hall.

‘Sorry, no spouses on the same team!’ said Mrs Whitehead, who had told me that very week that Albie lacked basic numeracy skills. ‘Oi! Connie! Over here!’ shouted Mike, resplendent in a boiler suit unzipped to the navel and I noted how, suddenly giddy, Connie practically skipped across the hall to join his team. Albie went to sit with Ryan on the benches, and I cast around for a prospective team, settling on a shuffling band of lone parents loitering by the door as if about to bolt. Not the most prepossessing group of contestants, but never mind. I raised my hand to Albie and allowed myself to imagine the conversation in class the next day. ‘Your dad was on fire last night!’ ‘He carried that team. Your dad, he knows his stuff!’ I understand, perhaps more than anyone, that intelligence is not the quality a son most values in a father — Mike, as far as I could tell, was as stupid as a wall — but it would do no harm for Albie to see me win at something, and in a public forum too. We were offered bottled beers and a selection of snacks and took our place at our trestle table.

Few activities in life are more unpleasant to me than the task of deciding an amusing name for a quiz team. I have undergone surgical procedures that were less painful. Why couldn’t we be ‘red’ or ‘blue’ or ‘green’ team? After long deliberation it was decided, for reasons I can’t bring myself to recall, that we would be the Kranium Krusherz and that I would be captain or, presumably, kaptain. Mike and Connie’s team were called Mobiles at the Ready, which got a laugh but made me anxious, because that kind of anarchy is just intolerable to me. I pushed it out of my mind and thought about deepest lakes, longest rivers, highest peaks. A whistle of feedback and we began.

Of course the quiz was a travesty of what I understand by ‘general knowledge’. The music questions were skewed heavily towards the current pop scene, the sports questions almost entirely towards football, the news and current affairs were trivial and tabloid in nature, there was nothing at all on science or geography, inventions or mental arithmetic. We did what we could but Mike’s team, the aforementioned Mobiles at the Ready, were a tight little huddle of whispers and giggles, Mike and Connie head to head at its centre. ‘Yes!’ they hissed to each other. ‘Well done! Write it down!’ It seemed that Mike was not as dim as I’d imagined, at least with regard to song lyrics and celebrity tattoos, and Connie’s hand gripped his forearm tight. ‘Yes, Mike, yes! You’re brilliant!’

Elsewhere other teams were cheating in a supposedly light-hearted way — you could hear the tap-tap-tap of tiny keyboards, phones bleeping in their pockets, and as the evening progressed my indignation increased, magnified by the effect of the bottles of beer we were encouraged to buy in aid of the theatre fund. Our chances dwindled. I slumped in my stackable chair.

‘And now,’ said the quizmaster, ‘our penultimate round, flags of the world!’

Finally! I sat up straight. While the other teams scratched their heads I ticked them all off and showed both thumbs to Albie, who was distracted and didn’t see me. Then, I couldn’t quite believe it, name the rivers, name the lakes! I rallied our team, the correct answers accumulated, and it was time for marking.

We swapped papers with Mike and Connie’s team and I watched as they laughed and jeered at our answers on pop music. In turn, I shook my head at their suggestions for the flags. Venezuela? Oh, Mike, I’m sorry, no. I remained rigorously fair in our marking, but in general the process was sloppy and ill-conceived. Was it one point for a bonus, or two? Eventually our team’s papers were returned with a smug grin from Mike, and immediately I noticed several errors. Clearly there had been some spiteful marking down, points lost for writing USSR instead of Russia, when in fact USSR was the more accurate answer. Too late, though, because our scores had been noted and now the results were being announced.

Sixth, fifth, fourth, third. In second place — the Kranium Krusherz. Mike and Connie’s team had beaten us by two points. I watched Mike and Connie embrace to cheers and applause, and on the benches, too, Ryan and Albie were clenching their fists and whooping in that simian way.

But I remained concerned. One point for each bonus question, when we had given them two? Nothing for the USSR? Mentally I calculated our correct score, calculated it again. There was no denying, we’d been cheated of victory, and I felt I had no choice but to cross to the quizmaster and make the case for a recount.

For a while, audience and contestants seemed confused. Was the evening over? Not quite yet, not until I’d consulted with Albie’s head of year, Mr O’Connell, pointing out the discrepancies in the marking.

Mr O’Connell placed his hand over the microphone. ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’

‘Yes. I think so. Yes.’

By now the hall had taken on the grim and solemn air of a war crimes tribunal. I’d hoped my intervention would be taken in the light-hearted spirit I’d intended, but parents were shaking their heads and pulling on their coats, and still the recount continued until, after what seemed an age, justice prevailed and it was announced to the half-empty hall that our Kranium Krusherz had lived up to their name and won by half a point!

I looked to my son. He did not cheer. He did not punch the air. He sat on the bench gripping his hair with his hands while Ryan draped an arm around his shoulder. In silence, my fellow Krusherz divided up the spoils, £10 worth of vouchers to spend at the local garden centre, and we walked out to the school car park.

‘Congratulations, Doug,’ said Mike, standing by his Transit van with a grin. ‘You showed us who’s boss!’ Then to my son, with a hateful wink: ‘Your dad, he’s practically a genius!’ In times of old, we’d have just gone at each other with clubs and rocks. Perhaps that would have been better.

Anyway, the three of us drove home in silence. ‘For as long as I’m alive I never, ever want to talk about this evening again,’ said Connie quietly as she unlocked the front door. And Albie? He went upstairs to his room without a word, contemplating, I suppose, just how very clever his father was. ‘Goodnight, son. See you tomorrow!’ Standing at the bottom of the stairs, I watched him go and thought, not for the first or the last time, what an awful feeling it is to reach out for something and find your hand is grasping, grasping at the air.

Sweating, shaking, I woke with a start. The blackout blinds had done their job all too well and I was locked in a black box at the bottom of the ocean. I fumbled for the switch at the side of the bed and the metal shutters juddered apart, letting in a blinding morning sun bright enough for midday. I squinted at my watch — a little before seven. Madrid. I was in Madrid, on my way to see my son. Plenty of time to make the rendezvous. I lay back in bed to let my heart rate normalise, but the damp sheets had gone cold and so I padded to the window, saw the blue sky, the early-morning traffic on the Gran Vía, the bright new day. I showered at length and got dressed in my brand new clothes.

At breakfast, I ate a great deal of delicious ham and clumpy scrambled eggs and read the news back home on my tablet, missing the old sense of isolation that foreign travel used to bring. ‘Abroad’ seemed so much further away then, isolated from the British media, but here it was, all online, the usual mixture of rage, gossip, corruption, violence and bad weather. Good God, no wonder Albie had run away. Wary of souring my mood, I researched a little about Madrid instead, looking up the Wikipedia entry on Picasso’s Guernica in case Albie and I made it there later. The steps of the Prado at eleven. Still not yet eight. I decided to go for a walk.

I rather liked Madrid; grandly ornamental in places, noisily, messily commercial in others, scruffy and unpretentious, like a fine old building covered in stickers and graffiti; no wonder Albie had headed here. Perhaps I was mistaken, but there was a sense that ordinary people lived here, right in the centre of the city, a possibility long lost to the citizens of London or Paris. Although I only had the hotel’s complimentary map to guide me, I had covered some ground by nine forty-five, at which point I made my way to the Prado.

Like shoppers at the January sales, a small group of tourists was already waiting for the doors to open, visibly excited at the prospect of all that art, and I joined the queue and tried not to worry. ‘What will you say when you see him?’ I had been suppressing Freja’s question, yet I remained fuzzy-headed about the answer, with only a jumble of apologies and justifications in mind. Along with self-reproach, resentment lurked too, that the holiday — potentially our last holiday — had been hijacked by Albie’s disappearance. Not a word from him, not one word! Did he want us to worry? Clearly he did, but would it really have hurt him to pick up the phone? Did he really care so little for our peace of mind? The voice in my head was becoming increasingly indignant, and it was vital that I stay calm and conciliatory. In an attempt to find some repose, I shuffled into the Prado to settle a question that had been troubling me for some time.

‘Is it Prah-do or Pray-doh?’ I asked the lady at the ticket desk. I’d been alternating the two in my head, and was pleased to confirm that it was the former. ‘Prah-do,’ I said to myself, trying it out. ‘Prah-do. Prah-do.’

Immediately, I could tell this museum was something special. Here was Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, a picture that I’d been enthralled by as a child for its lunatic detail. In the flesh, it was as much an object as a painting, a large wooden box that unfolded to reveal the painting and called to mind the gatefold album sleeves of certain progressive rock bands that I’d enjoyed in the 1970s. Here, on the left panel, were Adam and Eve, so vivid and sharp that they might have been painted yesterday, and here was heaven, populated by innumerable nude figures, pot-bellied like children, clambering over giant strawberries or riding on the backs of finches, and here was hell on the right, perverse and nightmarish, lit by bonfires on which those same tiny pot-bellied figures were the fuel. A sword embedded in a neck, a feather quill between disembodied ears, a sinister giant, fused with a pig, fused with a tree. A non-academic word, I know, but it was ‘trippy’, the kind of thrillingly horrible picture that a teenage boy would love and I hoped that, once he’d accepted my apology, Albie and I would return this way and absorb all the psychedelic detail.

No time now. I headed upstairs past El Grecos and Riberas to a spectacular room, a startling collection of portraits of moustachioed aristocrats, the Hapsburgs painted by Velázquez. One face recurred throughout, lantern-jawed and moist-lipped, here as a self-conscious, pink-cheeked teenage prince in brand new armour, here dressed absurdly as a fancy-dress hunter, now a sad, spaniel-faced monarch in late middle age. I wondered how he’d responded to the paintings, if Philip IV had squirmed the way we all do when we catch sight of our true likeness. ‘I wonder, Signor Diego, if there’s any way to make my chin a little smaller?’

These portraits were extraordinary enough, but dominating the whole room was a painting the like of which I’d never seen before, of a small girl, perhaps four or five years old, encased in a stiff satin dress as wide as a table at the hips, very strange on a child. Las Meninas, it was called, which means The Maids of Honour, and sure enough the princess was surrounded by courtiers, a nun, a finely dressed female dwarf and a small boy, or perhaps he was another dwarf, prodding a dog with his foot. To the left, a painter with a comically Spanish moustache — a likeness, I supposed, of Velázquez himself — stood in front of a huge canvas, facing out as if he was painting not the little girl but the viewer, specifically me, Douglas Timothy Petersen, the illusion so convincing that I wanted to crane around the canvas to see what he’d made of my nose. A mirror on the back wall showed two other figures, the girl’s parents I guessed, Mariana and Philip IV, the large-chinned gentleman on the wall to my left. Despite being distant and blurred, it seemed that they were the true subject of the artist’s portrait, but nevertheless the artist, the little girl, the female dwarf all seemed to stare out of the painting at me with such level intensity that I began to feel rather self-conscious, and confused, too, as to how a painting could have so many subjects: the little princess, the ladies in waiting, the artist, the royal couple, and me. It was as disorientating as the moment when you step between two mirrors and see infinite versions of yourself stretching into, well, infinity. Clearly there was ‘a lot going on’ in this painting too, and I’d return with Albie soon.

I returned to the central atrium, ducking in and out of rooms, glimpsing wonderful things. I would have returned to the front steps and waited there, had I not seen a sign for something called the Black Paintings, which sounded intriguing in a rather Hammer-horror kind of way.

The canvases in question were in a gloomy room in the basement of the gallery, as if they were some dark family secret, and one glimpse at them revealed why. They weren’t even canvases, but murals painted directly on to the walls of a house by Goya and clearly the work of a deeply disturbed man. In one, a grinning woman raised a knife ready to hack off someone’s head, in another a circle of grotesque women sat around Satan, manifested in the form of a monstrous goat. Up to their knees in some filthy bog, two men stood smashing at each other’s bloodied heads with cudgels. A drowning dog’s sad-eyed head peeked out of quicksand. Even the innocent scenarios — women laughing, two old men eating soup — seemed crammed with fear and spite, but the worst was still to come. In some sort of cave a mad giant tore at the flesh of a corpse with his teeth. The picture was called Saturn Devouring His Son, though this god was nothing like the handsome figures I’d seen in France and Italy. He seemed deranged, his body old, sagging and grey, with a look of such terrible self-loathing in his horrible black eyes …

I heard a ringing in my ears, felt a tightening in my chest and a sensation of such dread and anxiety that I was forced to hurry from the room, wishing that I had never seen the painting, that it had remained on the walls of some remote, derelict house. I am not a superstitious man, but there was something of the occult about the pictures. With only ten minutes to go before my rendezvous, I felt I needed some sort of antidote and I hurried back upstairs, along the gallery’s main corridor, looking left and right for a calm spot in which to rest and gather my thoughts. On my right was the Velázquez room and I thought that I might sit for a moment in front of the small girl in Las Meninas, to clear my head.

But the gallery had become a great deal busier since I’d first arrived, and the picture was now concealed behind a party of tourists. Nevertheless I sat and attempted to regain my composure, pressing my fingers against my eyes so that it took me a moment to sense a presence, look up and see my son standing right in front of me, saying those words that every father longs to hear.

‘Jesus Christ, Dad, why can’t you just leave me alone?’

‘Hello, Albie. It’s me!’

‘I can see that, Dad.’

‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere. It’s good to see you. I—’

‘Where’s Kat?’

‘Kat’s not coming, Albie.’

‘She’s not coming? She sent me a text.’

‘Yes, I was there.’

‘Why isn’t she coming?’

‘Well, Albie, to be honest, she was never coming.’

‘I don’t understand. She tricked me?’

‘No, she didn’t trick you—’

‘What, you tricked me?’

‘Not tricked, she helped, Kat helped. Me find you.’

‘But I didn’t want you to find me.’

‘No, I realise that. But your mother was worried and I wanted to—’

‘If I’d wanted you to find me, I’d have told you where I was.’

‘Nevertheless, we’ve been worried about you, your mother and I—’

‘But the text message, I thought … I thought that Kat was pregnant!’

‘Yes, you might have got that impression …’

‘I thought I was going to be a dad!’

‘Yes, that was sort of implied. Sorry about that.’

‘Do you know what that feels like?’

‘I do, as a matter of fact.’

‘I’m seventeen! I’ve been going nuts!’

‘Yes, I can see how that might have come as a bit of a shock.’

‘Was that your idea?’

‘No!’

‘Whose fucking idea was it, then, Dad?’

‘Hey, Albie, that’s enough!’ People were staring now, the museum guard poised to approach. ‘Maybe we should go somewhere else …’

It seemed Albie had already thought of this because he was loping off at quite some speed, head down against the tide of tourists who were suddenly flooding the atrium. I did my best to follow, throwing out ‘scusi’s and ‘por favor’s until we were outside, the light unnaturally bright now, the heat quite shocking as we tumbled down the steps and headed for the tree-lined avenue that skirts the museum.

‘It would really be a lot easier to explain if we could sit down.’

‘What’s to explain? I wanted to be alone to think and you wouldn’t allow it.’

‘We were worried!’

‘You were worried because you don’t trust me. You’ve never trusted me—’

‘We simply wanted to know where you were and that you were safe, that’s not unusual. Would you prefer we didn’t care?’

‘You always say that, Dad! Right after you’ve been screaming and shouting at me and jabbing your finger, it’s always because we care! “We care!” you say while you’re pressing the pillow down on my face!’

‘There’s no need to be melodramatic, Albie! When have I ever …? Albie …’ He was pretty nimble on his feet, and I was having difficulty speaking now. ‘Please, can we … this would be a whole lot easier if we could …’ I stopped, hands on my knees, hoping that he would not disappear. I glanced up, and he was there, kicking at the path with his heel.

‘I wanted … to apologise … for what I said in Amsterdam …’

‘What did you say in Amsterdam, Dad?’ he asked, and I realised my son had no intention of making it easy for me.

‘I’m sure you can remember, Albie.’

‘But just to make sure …’

Perspiration was dripping from my forehead onto the footpath. I saw the drops hit the ground, counted them, one, two, three. ‘I said I was … embarrassed by you. And I wanted to say that I’m not. I think your behaviour was over the top, I think there was no need to start a fight, but I didn’t express myself very well and I wanted to apologise. In person. For that. And for other times when I may have overreacted. I’ve been under a lot of strain recently … at work and, well, at home too and … Anyway. No excuses. I’m sorry.’ I straightened up. ‘Do you accept my apology?’

‘No.’

‘I see. May I ask why?’

‘Because I don’t think you should apologise for what you really think.’

‘What do I really think, Albie?’

‘That I am an embarrassment.’

‘How can you say that, Albie? I care about you very, very much. I’m sorry if that’s not always been clear, but surely you can see—’

‘Everything you do, Dad, everything you say to me, there’s this … contempt, this constant stream of dislike and irritation—’

‘Is there? I don’t think there is—’

‘Belittling me and criticising me—’

‘Oh, Albie, that’s not true. You’re my boy, my dear boy—’

‘Christ, it’s like I’m not even your favourite child!’

‘What do you mean, Albie?’

He inhaled sharply through his nose, his features bunching up, the face he used to make as a small boy when trying not to cry. ‘I’ve seen the photos you’ve got stashed away. I’ve seen you and Mum look at them longingly.’

‘They’re not stashed away, Albie. We’ve shown them to you.’

‘And don’t you think that’s weird?’

‘Not at all! Not in the least. We’ve always been honest about your sister. She isn’t some secret — that would be awful. We loved Jane when she was born, and then we loved you too, just as much.’

‘Except she never fucked up, did she? She never embarrassed you in public or fucked up at school. She got to be perfect, whereas me, your stupid fucked-up son—’

And here I must admit I laughed. Not maliciously, but at the melodrama of it all, the adolescent self-pity. ‘Albie, come on, you’re just feeling sorry for yourself—’

‘Don’t laugh at me! Don’t! Can’t you see, everything you do shows how stupid you think I am!’

‘I don’t think you’re stupid—’

‘You’ve told me I am! You’ve told me! To my face.’

‘Have I?’

‘Yeah, you have, Dad! You have!’

And I suppose I might have told him that, maybe once or twice.

I closed my eyes. I suddenly felt very tired and very sad and very far away from home. The futility of this whole expedition seemed suddenly overwhelming. I had told myself that it was not too late, that there was still time to make amends for the raised voices and bared teeth, the indifference and thoughtless remarks. I had regrets, certainly, about things I’d said, things I’d done, but behind it all there had always been … wasn’t it obvious that there had always been …

I sat heavily on a stone bench. An old man on a bench.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Albie.

‘I am. I’m fine. I’m just … very, very tired. It’s been a very long journey.’

He came to stand in front of me. ‘What are you wearing on your feet?’

I stuck a foot out, turned it from side to side. ‘You like them?’

‘You look ridiculous.’

‘Yes, I’m aware of that. Albie, Egg, will you sit a minute? Just a minute, then you can go.’ He looked left, then right, already planning his escape. ‘I won’t follow you this time. I swear.’

He sat down.

‘I don’t know what I can say to you, Albie. I had hoped the words would just come, but I don’t seem to have made a very good job of expressing myself. I hope you know I have regrets, things I shouldn’t have said. Or things I should have said but didn’t, which is often worse. I hope you have some regrets too. You haven’t always made it easy for us, Albie.’

He hunched his shoulders. ‘No. I know.’

‘The state of your room, it’s as if you do it deliberately to annoy me.’

‘I do,’ he said, and laughed. ‘Still. You can have it back now.’

‘You’re still going to college then? In October?’

‘Are you going to talk me out of it?’

‘Of course not. If that’s what you want to do with your life—’

‘Well I am.’

‘Good. Good. I’m pleased you’re going. I mean not pleased you’re leaving home, but pleased—’

‘I get it.’

‘Your mother’s terrified of what it will be like without you.’

‘I know.’

‘So much so that she’s thinking about leaving too. Leaving me. But you’ve always been close, so I expect you knew that.’

‘I did.’

‘She told you?’

He shrugged. ‘I sort of guessed.’

‘Do you mind?’

He shrugged again. ‘She doesn’t seem very happy.’

‘No, she doesn’t, does she? She doesn’t. Well, I’ve been trying to address that. I had hoped that we’d have fun together this summer, our last summer, all of us together. I’d hoped to change her mind. Perhaps I tried too hard. I’ll find out soon enough. Anyway. I’m sorry for what I said to you. It’s not what I believe. Whatever I might have said, I’m very proud of you, though I might not show it, and I know that you’ll do great things in the future. You’re my boy, and I’d hate for you to go off into the world without knowing that we will miss you and will want you to be safe and happy and that we love you. Not just your mum, you know how much your mother loves you. But me too. I love you too, Albie. There. I think that’s really what I came to say. So now you can go. Do whatever you want, as long as it’s safe. I won’t follow you any more. I’ll just sit here for a while. Sit here and rest.’

Later that afternoon, we went to see Guernica. We had both calmed down by then and while still not quite at ease — would we ever be at ease? — we were at least more comfortable in our silence. As we walked around the Museo Reina Sofia, I stole little sideways glances. He was, as far as I could tell, wearing the same clothes that he’d worn in Amsterdam: the stained T-shirt that showed his bony chest, jeans that cried out for a belt, sandals on his blackened feet. His vestigial beard was scraggy and unhygienic, hair lank and unwashed and he seemed very thin. In other words, nothing much had changed, and I was pleased.

We found ourselves in front of Guernica. I found the picture very striking, much larger than I expected and moving in a way that I had not associated with more abstract works (goodness, Connie, listen to me!). I would have liked to take in the picture quietly, but I allowed Albie to talk me through the historical context and significance of the work, insights he had clearly garnered from the same Wikipedia entry that I had read at breakfast. I watched him as he spoke. He talked a great deal, pointing out things that were obvious to anyone with even a passing knowledge of art. Wanting to educate me, I suppose. In fact he was rather boring on the subject, but I kept quiet and took comfort in that old saying about fallen apples and their distance from trees.

In a commuter café opposite the Atocha station we had churros con chocolate. The overhead lights blazed off the zinc tabletops, greasy discarded napkins littered the floor. It seemed entirely the wrong time of day and year to be eating deep-fried extruded batter dipped in thick hot chocolate, but it was pleasant to be out of the midday sun’s atomic heat. Albie assured me that this was what everyone did here and, despite the café being empty, I chose not to contradict him.

‘Where are you staying?’

‘I’m in this hostel.’

‘What’s it like?’

He shrugged. ‘It’s a hostel.’

‘I’ve never stayed in a hostel.’

‘What, a seasoned inter-railer like you?’

‘What’s it like?’

He laughed. ‘It’s grim. Hostile. It’s a hostile hostel.’

‘I have a suite in a hotel on the Gran Vía.’

‘A suite? What are you, some oligarch?’

‘I know. It’s all very sumptuous.’

‘I hope you’re not drinking from the mini-bar, Dad.’

‘Albie, I’m not mad. Anyway, the point is there’s a spare room that might be more comfortable. A fold-out sofa-bed. While you decide where you want to go next.’

He paused to concentrate on wiping the sugar from his stubble beard. ‘Are you not eating your churros?’

I pushed the plate towards him. ‘How do you eat so much and stay so skinny?’

He rolled his bony shoulders and posted another doughnut into his mouth. ‘Nervous energy, I s’pose.’

‘Yes, I know something about that.’

We fetched his things and returned to the hotel late in the afternoon, and I lay on the bed while Albie showered for an absurdly long time. I had not checked my phone for twenty-four hours, and with some dread I turned it on to find a selection of texts from Connie, the impatience spiralling into irritation.

When are you home? Can’t wait to see you.

Information please. Are you alive?

Are you back today, tomorrow, ever?

Frantic here. Douglas, please just call.

There was a voicemail, too, from my sister, and I played it back with the phone some distance from my ear.

‘Why aren’t you answering your phone? You always answer your phone. Douglas, it’s Karen. What the hell is going on? Connie’s frantic. She says you’re wandering round Europe looking for Albie. She made me swear I wouldn’t tell you this but she thinks you’ve had some sort of nervous breakdown. Or a mid-life crisis. Or both!’ Karen sighed and I smiled. ‘Give it up, Douglas. Albie will come home when he wants to. Anyway, call me. Do it, D. That’s an order!’

Albie was standing in the doorway, wrapped in the hotel dressing gown, demonstrating that unique ability he has to shower for twenty minutes and still look dirty.

‘Can I borrow your razor to shave?’

‘Please do.’

‘Who was on the phone?’

‘Your Auntie Karen.’

‘I thought I heard shouting.’

‘I’m going to call your mother, Albie. Will you speak to her?’

‘’Course.’

‘Now?’

He hesitated a moment. ‘Okay.’

I dialled immediately and waited. ‘Hello?’ said Connie.

‘Hello, darling.’

‘Douglas, you’re meant to be home! I was expecting you this morning. Are you at the airport?’

‘No, no, I didn’t catch the plane.’

‘You’re still in Italy?’

‘Actually, I’m in Madrid.’

‘What are you doing in …?’ She paused, gathered herself and continued in the kind of voice used to persuade people down off ledges. ‘Douglas, we agreed it was time to come home …’ I tried not to laugh.

‘Connie? Connie, can you hold on for one moment? I’ve got someone here who wants to speak to you.’

I held the phone out. Albie hesitated then took it from my hand. ‘Hola,’ he said, and closed the door.

I picked up a Spanish magazine with that exact same title, and stared at pictures of unfamiliar celebrities. I looked through the magazine once, twice. Connie and Albie spoke for so long that my sense of triumph was tempered by a growing anxiety about the cost of the call, and I thought about interrupting the conversation and asking Connie to call us back. But as I looked through the gap in the door to the other room, I noticed that Albie was somewhat red-eyed, which would mean that Connie was crying too and so not in the mood to discuss international call rates. I also noted that, true to form, Albie had managed to use all eight of the hotel towels, large and small, and to distribute them around the room, including one on a lampshade where it might easily burst into flames. Deep breath. Let it pass. Let the burning towels pass. I looked through the magazine a third time, and then a hand poked through the bedroom door and waggled the phone at me.

‘Pick up the towels, please, Egg,’ I said, taking the phone.

‘“You treat this place like a hotel!”’ said Albie, and closed the door.

I waited a moment then put the phone to my ear. ‘Hello?’

Silence.

‘Hello, Connie?’

I could hear her breathing.

…

…

‘Connie, are you there?’

‘Clever man,’ she said, and hung up the phone.

I do not know what Connie said to Albie in that call, but later, much later, as we ordered more drinks in a taberna in Madrid’s gay district at some ungodly hour in the morning, I tentatively raised the subject of future plans. The bar was dark, wood-panelled, packed with noisy and attractive madrileños drinking — was it sherry? vermouth? — with Serrano ham and anchovies and oily chorizo.

‘This is delicious!’ I shouted, wiping grease off my chin. ‘But I’m worried that they don’t eat enough vegetables. As a nation, I mean.’

‘I’m leaving tomorrow!’ Albie shouted back. ‘For Barcelona! First thing!’

I tried to hide my disappointment. In truth, I had not entirely abandoned the idea of Connie joining us and us all returning to the Grand Tour, perhaps retracing our steps to Florence. Our hotel reservations were still in place, and those tickets for the Uffizi …

‘Oh. Okay. That’s a shame. I thought we’d go back to—’

‘You could come with me!’

The room really was very noisy and I asked him to repeat himself. He put his mouth to my ear:

‘D’you want to come with me?’

‘Where?’

‘To Barcelona. Just for a night or two.’

‘I’ve never been to Barcelona.’

‘No, that’s why I asked.’

‘Barcelona?’

‘It’s on the sea.’

‘I know where Barcelona is, Egg.’

‘I thought it would be good to swim in the sea.’

‘I’d like that.’

‘You can even-up your tan. Colour in your left side.’

‘Does that still show?’

‘A little.’

I laughed.

‘Okay. Okay! We’ll go. We’ll swim in the sea.’

part eight BARCELONA

It was with some relief that I discovered Barcelona had almost no art galleries at all.

That wasn’t quite true, of course. There was a Picasso Museum and a Miró Museum and perhaps I should dip a toe into the world of abstract, non-representational art after so many Old Masters. But there was no single monolithic institution like the Louvre or Prado and so no pressure. Instead Barcelona offered us an opportunity to ‘hang out’. For a day or so. We’d hang out. Just … hang out.

This was the extent of Albie’s itinerary, and he had already showed admirable organisational ability in getting us to Madrid’s Atocha station in time for the nine thirty train. Quite a sight, the Atocha station, more like a botanical garden hothouse than a conventional transport hub, with a vast jungle of tropical plants filling the central atrium, and I would have appreciated it more had I not been suffering from the most appalling hangover of my life.

Our night in Chueca had turned into what Albie referred to as a ‘big one’. We had stayed in that particular bar for many hours, sitting on high stools, eating wonderful food from the edge of my comfort zone; fishy pastes, squid, chopped octopus and fried hot green peppers, all of it very salty and dehydrating, which caused us to drink even more vermouth — I’d developed quite a taste for vermouth — which in turn allowed us to chat happily with strangers about Spain, the recession and the euro, Angela Merkel and the legacy of Franco, all the usual bar-room chat. Albie, amicably drunk, kept introducing me to strangers as ‘my dad, the famous scientist’ and then drifting off elsewhere, but everyone was very friendly and it was refreshing to have actual conversations with people of another nation, rather than just buying tickets or ordering food. Anyway, the evening went very well — so well, in fact, that we stepped from the bar into a hazy dawn, birds singing in the Plaza de Chueca. I associated dawn with anxiety and insomnia, but the partygoers and clubbers we passed on their way home all seemed in high spirits. ¡Buenos Días! ¡Hola! It was all very open and friendly, and we decided that we liked Madrid, and Chueca in particular, very much. It was only some months later, when Albie announced to Connie and me that he was gay and in a serious relationship with a fellow student, that I realised this night out had been his first heavy hint. I had missed it at the time. I’d just thought he was being terrifically sociable.

Four hours later we were hurrying across the station concourse, nausea rising, the taste of vermouth and paprika stale in my mouth. Albie’s constitution being stronger than mine, he took my elbow and helped me onto the train. Once out of Madrid we passed through the same terrain that I had flown across two days before, but I only glimpsed it through fluttering eyelids, sleeping all the way to the coast, waking to find that Albie had already booked a twin room in a large modern hotel right on the beach. ‘I’ve put it on your card. Hope you don’t mind.’ I did not mind.

The hotel was one of those up-to-date establishments that have barely changed since 2003 — modular furniture in beige leather, large-screen TVs and a great deal of bamboo.

‘Well. This is all very smart!’ I said, taking the left-hand bed.

‘You’re sure you don’t want your own room?’

‘In case you cramp my style? I think we’ll be okay.’ I stepped out onto the balcony: a view of the Mediterranean and, across a four-lane road, a beach that seemed as densely packed as any city shopping street.

‘So would you like to get something to eat, Dad? Or shall we go straight to the beach?’ He really was being extremely accommodating, unnaturally so, and I put this down to his telephone conversation with Connie the previous day. Look after your old dad. Be nice to him for a day or so, then send him home, that kind of thing. He was acting under strict instructions, and it would not last, but for the moment I decided to enjoy this new companionability. We were neither of us being our usual selves, and perhaps this was for the best. I rolled up my trouser legs, grabbed a towel from the bathroom and, in the hotel lobby’s gift shop, I purchased some trunks from the limited range, peach-toned Speedos two sizes too small, and we set out for the beach.

I have always found beaches to be uniquely hostile environments. Greasy and gritty, too bright to read, too hot and uncomfortable to sleep, the lack of shade frankly alarming, the lack of decent public toilets, too — unless of course you count the sea, as all too many swimmers do. On a crowded beach, even the bluest ocean takes on the quality of a stranger’s bathwater, and this really was a very crowded beach, the concrete and fumes and cranes overhead giving it the quality of an unusually lax building site. Young Barcelona was handsome, muscular, cocky and deeply tanned, and there were bare breasts, too, though both Albie and I made a very big deal about not making this a big deal. ‘It’s nothing like Walberswick, is it?’ I observed, all nonchalant as a group of barely-dressed girls settled nearby, and we both agreed that it was nothing like Walberswick.

The mutant trainers had been abandoned in Madrid and I was singularly lacking in beachwear, so I untied the laces of my brogues and performed the contortions required to pull on the offensive trunks beneath a towel, a fiddly procedure that recalled tying up the end of a balloon, then lay somewhat self-consciously on the hot sand. For all his enthusiasm for the sea, Albie seemed reluctant to swim, but the afternoon heat was like a salamander grill. I was becoming aware of my scalp’s vulnerability and when I could not bear it any longer, I sat, up sprayed my head with sunblock and said, ‘Egg, can I borrow your goggles?’

The water near the shore was cloudy with suntan lotion, greasy as the sink after a Sunday roast and dense with people standing still, bemused, hands on hips, as if trying to recall where they’d put their keys. Fish darted between our shins, but this close to the shore they were drab and unhealthy looking, scavengers feeding off God knows what. I waded out further, and as the coastal shelf deepened, the water cleared and turned a startling blue and I began to enjoy myself once more. I settled Albie’s goggles on my eyes and dived, and immediately the last of the previous night’s vermouth was washed away. I am a strong and confident swimmer and before long I was pretty much on my own, looking back towards the city, its radio towers and cranes and cable cars, and the hazy hills beyond. How strange to have stumbled, clambered and barged all over Europe and only now to have reached the ocean. From here Barcelona looked fine, handsome and modern, and I looked forward to exploring it with my son. Somewhere in that mass of bodies on the beach he was safe and well. The journey had reached its natural end and in two or three days’ time, I’d return to Connie and make my case, whatever that was. Don’t worry about it now. I closed my eyes, rolled onto my back and turned my face to the afternoon sun.

What happened next remains something of a blur, though I distinctly recall the shock of the first sting on the bridge of my foot, an extraordinarily painful sensation like being slashed with a blade. The cause should have been obvious, but my first idea was that I’d kicked against broken glass and it was only when I immersed my head in the water, saw the sand far, far below and all around me the pink and blue clouds of jellyfish — a swarm, there really was no other word — that I realised the trouble I was in. I tried to steady my breath and reassure myself that, if I took my time, it should be perfectly possible to pick my way through these mines and reach the shore. But had there really been so many? I inhaled, and sank beneath the water once again, and blurted out the air. It was as if I were the first witness to some alien invasion, a beach landing, and here I was far, far behind enemy lines, an impression underscored by a sharp pain in the small of my back like the blow of a whip. I reached around, felt something as soft as sodden paper tissue and then the sting of the whip once more, on my wrist this time. Bobbing up, I examined the wound, which was already raised in a lurid pink, the outline of the tentacles quite clearly branded on the skin. I swore and tried not to move but my stillness caused me to dip underwater once again, vertically, like a fisherman’s float, inhaling when I should have exhaled as I saw another of the vile creatures just inches from my face as if deliberately intimidating me. Absurdly, I punched it because nothing hurts a jellyfish more, nothing affronts their sense of dignity, than an underwater punch in the face. Escaping a sting, I pushed backwards and steadied myself, staying afloat by swirling my hands and feet in little circles. I scanned the surface of the ocean. The nearest swimmer was some fifty yards away, and as I watched he too yelped with pain and began to pound towards the shore, and I was alone.

I opened my mouth to shout. Perhaps I should call for help, but that word, ‘help’, stuck in my throat. It suddenly seemed like such a silly word. ‘Help!’ Who really cried for help? What a cliché! And what was ‘help’ in Spanish, anyway — or should it be Catalan? Would ‘aidez-moi!’ be any good? Did French people, drowning, feel silly shouting ‘aidez-moi!’ and even if someone was close enough to hear, how could they possibly help me, surrounded as I was? They would have to hoist me out by helicopter, a great gelatinous mass of these monsters dangling from my pale legs. ‘Sorry!’, that’s what I should shout. ‘Sorry! Sorry for being so bloody foolish!’

I looked to the shore, trying to find Albie there, but I was too far away, bobbing uselessly, the pain in my foot and back and arm refusing to fade and now I was underwater again, eyes squeezed tight this time, no longer wanting to know what was around me, and now another blow of the whip, on my shoulder this time and I thought, oh God, I’m going to die here, I’m going to drown, pass out with the toxic shock of innumerable stings and slip below the surface. I was sure that I’d die, surer than I’ve ever been, and then I laughed to myself, because it would be such a ridiculous death — would make the British papers, probably — and then I remembered my swimwear, uncomfortably close to flesh tone, and a 30-inch waist when they really should have been 34, 36 even, and I thought, please God, don’t let them find my dead body in these 30-inch bathers; I don’t want Connie to identify me in these children’s bathers. Yes, that’s my husband, but the bathers, they belong to someone else. Perhaps they’d have to bury me in them. ‘Oh, Christ,’ I said out loud, and laughed again, a spluttering laugh through a mouthful of seawater. ‘Oh, Christ, Connie, I’m sorry.’ Quite consciously I conjured up an image of her face, the one I always think of, taken from a photograph, which sounds sentimental I know, but I think we are allowed to be sentimental at such times. So there it is. I thought of Connie, Albie too, our little family, I took another breath and swam with all my might towards the shore, attempting as best I could to skim across the surface of the water.

My exit from the ocean was even less elegant than my entrance, as I staggered ashore like some shipwreck victim, hunched on all fours in the shallows in the midst of someone’s volleyball game. In my panic I had misjudged my direction and had come to land one hundred yards or so from Albie, and there was no one there to help me to my feet or ask what was wrong. So while I knelt and caught my breath, the volleyball game resumed over my head.

When finally I felt that I could walk, I began to search for Albie. The sun was brutally hot as if focused through a magnifying glass. At least the water had been cooling; out in the open I felt grilled. Even the movement of air across the stings was painful, and neither was I alone in my distress. Now word had spread along the beach and I heard the word ‘medusa, medusa’ follow me as I searched for Albie once more.

I found him eventually, sound asleep.

‘Albie! Albie, wake up.’

‘Da-ad!’ he growled, shielding his eyes against the light. ‘What’s up?’

‘I got jumped. By some jellyfish.’

He sat up. ‘In the water?’

‘No, on the land. They took my keys and wallet.’

‘You’re shaking.’

‘Because it hurts, Albie, it really, really hurts.’

When he saw my discomfort, Albie sprang into action, immediately lunging for his phone and Googling ‘jellyfish sting’ while I sheltered beneath a towel, wincing at its contact with the stings.

‘I’m not going to have to wee on you, am I? Because that’d just be too Freudian and weird. That’s fifty years of therapy, right there.’

‘I think the urine thing is a myth.’

He referred to his phone. ‘It is! It is a myth! In fact, it says here you’ve got to just pick off any tentacles and stinging sacs and take a lot of painkillers. Where are you going?’

I pulled on my shirt wincing, an awful nausea creeping up on me. ‘I’m going to lie down in the room. I have some paracetamol in my bag.’

‘Okay, I’ll come with you.’

‘No, you stay here.’

‘I want to—’

‘Seriously, Albie, you have a nice time. I’m only going to sleep it off. Don’t swim. And what SP factor are you using, by the way?’

‘Factor eight.’

‘You’re insane. Look where the sun is! You need SPF30 at least.’

‘Dad, I think I’m old enough to decide—’

‘Here …’ I tossed him the lotion. ‘Don’t forget the tops of your ears. I’ll see you back at the hotel.’ With shoes and trousers in my hand, arms held out to the side, I picked my way through the crowd and stumbled back to the hotel.

I was inappropriately dressed for the crowded lobby, but did not care. By the time I reached my room, the nausea had increased, though the pain had eased somewhat and would soon seem almost negligible in comparison with the series of heart attacks that hit me in quick succession, like blows against my sternum from some mighty sledgehammer, the first swiping me to the floor and knocking all the breath from my body.

There’s an old twist in the horror stories that I secretly enjoyed as a child, where it’s revealed that the central character has been dead all along. I’ve seen this twist in films, too, and, quite apart from the assumptions it makes about consciousness and the afterlife, it has always struck me as a cheap trick. So I should say straight away that I did not die, nor was I invited to walk towards any white light.

The fact is, my son saved my life. Whether through guilt or concern, he had been unable to relax on the beach and so had followed on a few minutes behind, entering the room to find my feet protruding from between the two single beds. The pain had spread through my chest, into my arms, neck and jaw, and I was breathing with some difficulty, panicking too because, until Egg arrived, I saw no possibility of rescue and was obliged simply to lie there on the hardwood floor, pinned down as if by some immense old wardrobe, contemplating the ball of fluff beneath the bed, my son’s discarded socks and trainers and towels just beyond and then, miraculously, my son’s blessed filthy feet in the doorway.

‘Dad? What are you playing at?’

‘Come here, please, Albie.’

He clambered over the bed, looking down at me crammed unhappily against the bedside table, and I explained what I thought had happened. He did not Google ‘heart attack’. Instead he picked up the phone and called reception, adopting a sensible and clear tone that I had not heard before; admirably calm, just how I’d have done things. When he was sure that help was on its way, he stood astride me, wriggling his hands into my armpits and attempting to bring me into a sitting position. But I was wedged securely, too weak to assist, and so instead he squeezed in beside me on the floor between the beds and held my hand while we waited.

‘You see?’ he said, after a while. ‘I told you those trunks were too tight.’

I winced. ‘Don’t make me laugh, Albie.’

‘Are you in pain?’

‘Yes. Yes, I am.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Aspirin would help.’

‘Do we have any?’

‘We have paracetamol.’

‘Will that help, Dad?’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘Okay. Let’s just lie still, then.’

Some time passed, perhaps three, four minutes, and though I tried to remain calm I could not help considering that my own father had probably found himself in this position too, alone in that flat without anyone to lie there or make silly jokes. Without anyone? Without me. ‘His heart basically exploded,’ the doctor had said with inappropriate relish. I felt another spasm in my chest and winced.

‘You okay?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Keep breathing, Dad.’

‘I intend to.’

Time passed, but barely.

‘What happens if you lose consciousness?’

‘Perhaps we should talk about something else, Egg.’

‘Sorry.’

‘If I lose consciousness, that will be cardiac arrest. You’ll have to do CPR.’

‘The kiss-of-life thing?’

‘I think so.’

‘Oh, Christ. Don’t lose consciousness, will you?’

‘I’m trying hard not to.’

‘Good.’

‘Do you know how to do CPR, Egg?’

‘No. I’ll Google it. Perhaps I should do that now.’

I laughed again. If anything was going to kill me, it would be the sight of Albie desperately reading up on CPR. ‘No. Just lie here with me. I’m going to be fine. This is all going to be fine.’ Albie exhaled slowly, squeezed my hand and rubbed my knuckles with his thumb. A shame, I thought, to regain this intimacy at such a cost.

‘Albie—’

‘Dad, you shouldn’t really talk, you know.’

‘I know—’

‘It’s all going to be fine.’

‘I know, but if I’m not fine. If I’m not …’

Some people, I imagine, would have welcomed this opportunity to make some definitive, final statement to the world, and various formulations ran through my head. But they all seemed rather fraught and melodramatic, and so instead we lay there, still and silent, wedged between the beds, holding hands and waiting for the ambulance to arrive.

I can’t speak highly enough of the Spanish health system. The paramedics were no-nonsense and rather ‘macho’ in a reassuring way, and I was scooped up in their hairy arms and taken a short distance to the local hospital where, after tests and X-rays and the administering of blood-thinning medication, it was explained by a Dr Yolanda Jimenez, in good, clear English, that I would be subject to an operation. Immediately I imagined the buzzing of surgical saws and my rib-cage being cracked open like a lobster shell, but the doctor explained that the procedure would be much more localised than that. A tube would be inserted into my thigh under local anaesthetic, passing, somewhat improbably, all the way up into my heart, allowing the artery to be widened and a stent to be left in its place. I pictured pipe-cleaners, dental floss, an unravelled wire coat hanger. The operation would take place the next morning.

‘Well, that doesn’t sound so bad,’ I said cheerily after the doctor had left. In truth, I did not relish the prospect of a catheter being inserted into my thigh and probing its way past my internal organs, but I did not want Albie to worry. ‘If they go too far, presumably it comes out of my ear!’ I said and he forced a smile.

Albie returned to the hotel to bring me a change of clothes. The obscene trunks were discarded and we were transferred to a ward to spend the night. I wish I could report some unique Barcelona atmosphere, with everyone promenading down the corridors and eating octopus off cocktail sticks until dawn. It was as anxious and depressing as any hospital ward in the world, but with the oaths, groans and sobbing cries in a different accent. Albie, who had never been inside a hospital since his birth, looked shaken. ‘Dad, if this is all some elaborate ruse to stop me smoking, then it’s worked.’

‘Well, that’s something, I suppose. Albie, you can leave me here if you want.’

‘What, and go and party?’

‘At least go back to the hotel. You can’t sleep in a chair.’

‘I’ll go later. Now we need to phone Mum.’

‘I know.’

‘Do you want to do it, or shall I?’

‘I’ll talk to her, then pass her on to you.’

So I called her and next day, by the time the procedure was complete and I was waking from a sedative-assisted sleep, my wife was by my side.

Connie lay, somewhat awkwardly, half on, half off the hospital bed, her fantastic face close to mine.

‘How are you?’

‘I’m fine! A little sore, a little bruised.’

‘I thought it was keyhole surgery.’

‘More Chubb than Yale.’

‘Are you in pain? Shall I get off you?’

‘No, no, I like having you here. Don’t move. I’m sorry if I stink.’ I had not bathed properly since the Mediterranean and was painfully aware of staleness of both breath and body.

‘Christ, I don’t care. Shows you’re alive. How was the …?’

‘A little uncomfortable. A pressure in the chest, as if someone’s got their finger inside you somehow—’

‘Bloody hell, Douglas!’

‘I’m fine. I’m sorry you had to come all this way.’

‘Well, I was thinking maybe just let it go, let him go through surgery by himself, but there was nothing on TV, so — here I am.’ Her hand was on my cheek now. ‘Look at this crazy beard. You look like you’ve been shipwrecked or something.’

‘I’ve missed you.’

‘Oh God, I’ve missed you too.’ She was crying now, and perhaps I was too. ‘Let’s do exactly this same holiday next year, shall we?’

‘Exactly like this. Don’t change a thing. I want it to be exactly like this every year.’

‘Holiday of a lifetime.’

‘Holiday of a lifetime.’

After the angiogram, and with the angioplasty considered a success, it was decided that the heart attack was ‘not serious’. It had certainly felt serious enough as I’d lain sprawled on the floor between those beds, but I did not quibble because the good news was that I could leave the hospital after one more night and, with the correct medication, would be allowed on a plane back to England in ten days or so.

Taking control with admirable efficiency, Connie and Albie found an apartment. This would be more comfortable and less claustrophobic than a hotel and so we filled in medical forms, scheduled various tests, and then took a taxi to Eixample, a bourgeois residential area full of rather grand apartment blocks. Ours was a pleasant, quiet, book-lined place on the first floor — not too many stairs — the home of an absent academic, with a balcony at the rear and places to walk nearby. There were Gaudí buildings and restaurants, the Sagrada Família was seven blocks away; all very civilised and ruinously expensive, too, but, perhaps for the first time in my life, I was able to point out the value of comprehensive travel insurance. We would not worry about expense. It was important that I did not worry about anything at all.

There’s a kind of luxury in convalescence, and I was carried from place to place with great care and attention like an old vase. Albie in particular was terrifically attentive and interested as if, up until now, he’d thought mortality was a myth. Some months later I discovered that my admission into hospital had been the subject of a series of verité-style photographs; stark, black-and-white high-contrast images of my gawping face while sleeping, extreme close-ups of the various heart monitors affixed to my chest, the cannula piercing my skin. To the teenager all disasters are a rite of passage, but I was happy, at long last, to have provided him with some inspiration. At least he had some photos of me now.

Once it became clear that I would not be dying any time soon, Albie lost interest. Connie and I encouraged him to leave us on our own and his relief was palpable. His college friends were meeting up in Ibiza before heading off in all kinds of directions, and he flew out to join them, with a store of dramatic stories to tell. Perhaps he embellished the truth; perhaps he’d administered CPR. Perhaps a part of him wondered how it might have felt if I hadn’t pulled through, who knows. The crisis had been mine, but I was happy for him to receive his share of attention and acclaim. I was proud of him.

What happened to Albie in Ibiza that summer I will never know, which is exactly how it should be. He contacted us daily to assure us of his safety and his happiness, which was all we asked, and for the moment my dear wife and I were alone once more.

Perhaps it sounds perverse, but I count my convalescence in Barcelona as among the happiest times of our marriage.

I would sleep late, with no thought of an alarm clock, while Connie sat on the balcony, with oranges and tea reading a book. When we were ready we would take a walk, perhaps down to La Boqueria, the food market that we both loved, where I would drink fruit juice but no coffee, no booze. There was much talk of my having to adopt a Mediterranean diet from now on, a gruesome notion in Berkshire but no chore whatsoever while we were here. We bought bread, olives and fruit from our favourite stalls and walked on.

The Ramblas was a little too touristic for us residents, so usually we would strike left or right into the back streets of Raval or the Gothic Quarter, taking frequent breaks in cafés. In a little English-language bookshop in Gràcia, Connie had found a copy of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and a history of the Spanish Civil War, and we would sit in the shade to read and drink fresh orange juice. In the late afternoon we’d doze, then in courtyard restaurants we’d eat early in the evening like the other tourists, resisting with some regret the chorizo, the fried squid, the cold beer, then walk slowly, very slowly, home to bed and rest.

One morning we took a taxi to the Joan Miró Foundation high above the city, which sent Connie into paroxysms but left me unsure and feeling that I still had some way to go as far as abstract art was concerned. Then a wonderful cable car from the Parc de Montjuïc to the sea, high over the harbour, over cranes and swimming pools, warehouses and motorways, over the decks of ocean liners and container ships. You see over there? There’s the Sagrada Família, and there’s the hotel where I held hands with my son and thought that I would die. The cable car lowered us gently from the mountain to the sea, and this was how my time in Barcelona felt; as if I’d been lifted up and carried with great care and affection. It was almost like early childhood, and therefore could not last forever. At some point my head would strike the door jamb, and I’d be jerked back into the real world and the consequences of my condition; the anxieties, the tests and procedures, the implications for my lifestyle and career.

But for the time being Connie and I were as harmonious and content and interested in each other, as in love, for want of a better phrase, as we had ever been. Clearly the key to having a long and successful marriage would be to have a non-lethal heart attack every three months or so for the next forty years. If I could only pull off that trick, then we might just be all right.

One night, lying in the large, cool bed I asked:

‘Do you think we can have sex again at some point? I mean without me clutching at my chest and dropping dead on top of you?’

‘Actually, I looked that up.’

‘You did?’

‘I did. They recommend four weeks, but I think it’s okay as long as I do all the work and you don’t get excited.’

‘No change there then.’

She laughed, which pleased me hugely.

‘I think we’ll be all right, don’t you?’ I said.

‘That’s what I thought too,’ said Connie, and we were. We were all right.

After a week or so, we were quite the Barcelonese, if that is the word; no maps, no guidebooks, no more itineraries. We even picked up a few words of Catalan. ¡Bona tarda! ¡Si us plau!Every few days we’d make our way to the hospital and sit comfortably in Spanish waiting rooms until finally I was given the all-clear and passed back into the care of the National Health Service. It was safe for me to travel. We could go home.

‘Well. That’s good news,’ I said.

‘Isn’t it?’ said Connie.

Nevertheless, it was with some reluctance that we packed our bags and I watched uselessly as Connie carried the suitcases to the taxi. We held hands in the cab and looked out of either window. We held hands on the plane, too, Connie’s index finger along my wrist as if surreptitiously checking my pulse. The effort of achieving an entirely stress-free journey produced its own anxieties, and we neither of us spoke much. I took the window seat, my forehead resting on the glass.

The sun was shining down on all of Europe that day, and I looked out over Spain and the Mediterranean and then France’s great green centre. England rolled around to meet us; the white cliffs, the motorways, the orderly fields of corn and wheat and oilseed rape, the dull English towns with their ring roads and superstores, their high streets and roundabouts. At Heathrow we were greeted by Fran, who was full of jokes and uncharacteristic concern, and we were driven home to our door. ‘You okay getting out of the car?’ ‘You okay getting up the stairs?’ ‘You allowed a cup of coffee?’ This attentiveness soon became quite maddening, the guiding hand on the elbow, the tilt of the head and caring tone of voice, like a terrible glimpse of a geriatric life that I’d assumed was thirty or more years away, and I resolved to do everything within my power to get well. No, more than well, to become healthier and stronger than I’d been before, something that I have gone some way to achieving in the year that has passed since then. The doctors are very pleased with me now. I ride my bicycle down country lanes. I play a kind of badminton with friends, always doubles, though with less of the ferocity of old. I jog sporadically and self-consciously, unsure of what to do with my hands. The prognosis is good.

But I’m leaping ahead. I made a fuss of Mr Jones and submitted to having my face licked. I watched uselessly as Connie carried the cases upstairs. I helped unpack, restoring everything to its usual place — the toothbrush to its holder, the passport to its drawer. Fran left at last and we were alone in the house once more, experiencing that mixture of sadness and pleasure that accompanies return after a long time away; the pile of unopened mail, toast and tea, the sound of a radio, motes of dust in the air. On the hall table, a great pile of unread newspapers described events that we never knew had taken place.

‘You forgot to cancel the papers,’ I said, filling the recycling bin in one go.

‘I had other things on my mind!’ said Connie, with some irritation. ‘I thought you were dying. Remember?’

We took Mr Jones out for a walk, the usual route, up the hill and back. It was cooler than August had any right to be. There was a suggestion of autumn in the air, that hint of a change in season acting as a tap upon my shoulder. ‘I wish I’d brought a coat,’ I said as we walked slowly, arm in arm along the lane.

‘Do you want me to go back for it?’

‘Connie, I don’t want you to—’

‘I’ll run back. Won’t take me a minute …’

‘I don’t think you should leave me.’

I spoke for some time about all we had been through. I had been thinking a great deal about where things had gone wrong, and how they might change in the future. Perhaps we might move back to London, or at least find a little place there, and spend the weekends in the city. Move to a smaller house, in the proper countryside. Go out more. Travel further afield. We talked about fresh starts and we talked about our shared past, nearly twenty-five years of it, about our daughter and our son, how we had got through all of that together and how close it had made us. Inseparable, I said, because I found the idea of life without her quite unthinkable, unthinkable in the truest sense; I could not picture a future without her by my side, and I passionately believed that we could and would be happier together than apart. I wanted us to grow old together. The idea of doing so alone, and of dying alone, it was — well, that word again — it was unthinkable, and not just unthinkable, monstrous, frightening. I’d had a glimpse of it and had felt such terror. ‘So I don’t think you should leave. Things will be better. There are only good things ahead of us from now on, and I will make you happy again, I swear.’

Despite the chill of the evening, we lay down in the long grass on the side of the hill. Connie kissed me, and laid her head on my shoulder and we stayed like this for quite some time, the sound of the M40 a little way off. ‘We’ll see,’ she said after a while. ‘There’s no rush. We’ll see. Let’s wait and see how things turn out.’

When we’d set out on our journey I had vowed that I would win her back. But it seemed that I could not fulfil my vow and despite, or perhaps because of my best efforts, I could not make her happy again, or as happy as she wanted to be. The following January, two weeks shy of twenty-five years together, we embraced and said goodbye and began our lives apart.

part nine ENGLAND, AGAIN

Here is the same story as you might have heard it, told from alternative points of view.

A young boy grows up with a mother whom he idolises and a father he can barely believe is his own. They argue a great deal, and when not arguing they are often silent. While good-intentioned, the father lacks imagination, emotional intelligence or empathy or some such stuff. Consequently the parents’ marriage is full of tension and unspoken resentment, and the boy longs to escape. Like many teenagers, he is a little pretentious and irresponsible, and is keen to get on with life and find out who he really is. But first he must endure a long, dull holiday walking around various dusty old museums, watching his parents bickering, then making peace, then bickering again. He meets a girl, a rebel who has run away from home, and who shares his views on Art! Politics! Life! When his father insults him publicly, the boy runs away with the girl, ignoring his parents’ anxious calls and living on the money they make from busking. But the adventure sours. The girl has feelings for him that he is unable to reciprocate despite his best efforts. A question he has carried in the back of his mind for years now demands to be answered and so he flees to a city where he knows no one and asks: just who the hell am I? His father, guilt-ridden, tracks him down. An uneasy truce is established, and made firm when he manages to save his father’s life — actually save his life — in a Barcelona hotel room. Having completed this rite of passage, the charismatic, complex and unconventional young man leaves his grateful parents and sets off on his own. Who knows what adventures will come his way on this road through, etc., etc., etc.

I believe such stories are called coming-of-age stories. I can see the appeal of that mixture of idealism, cynicism, narcissism and self-righteousness, with some sex and drugs thrown in. It’s not really my thing, perhaps because I’ve never understood that ‘who am I?’ question. Even as a teenager I always knew who I was, even if I didn’t much care for the answer. But I can see that Albie’s concerns were somewhat greater than my own. I can see how that story might have been of interest to some.

If not, how about this one?

A young artist — beautiful, witty, a little insecure — leads a wild and irresponsible life with her temperamental but talented boyfriend. They argue violently and break up for the last time and soon after, at a party, she meets another man, a scientist this time, passably attractive, a little conventional perhaps, but nice enough, and they begin a relationship. This man is reliable, intelligent and clearly adores her, and they fall in love. But when he asks her to marry him she hesitates. What about her work, what about the passion and unpredictability of her earlier life? Pushing these doubts aside, she says yes. They marry and for a while they are happy. But their first child dies and their second child is a source of tension. Questions arise in her mind. What about her ambitions as a painter? What about her old life? Her husband is loyal and decent and loves her very much, but her days are now provincial and dull and when the time is right, she summons up all her courage, wakes him in the night and announces her intention to leave. He is heartbroken, of course, and his heartbreak causes her some sadness too. Life alone is difficult for both of them. He asks her to return and she is tempted.

But despite its occasional loneliness there is something thrilling about her new life in a little London flat, about starting to paint again. She resists her husband’s pleas. He gets to keep the dog. She is fifty-two years old, uncertain of the future but happy to be alone.

But then — and here comes the late twist — one night at an old friend’s party in London she meets her former lover. He is not the wild, arrogant artist that he used to be. Now he makes an erratic living as a car mechanic, living out on the North Yorkshire moors, still painting brilliantly in his spare time but chastened by his past, the boozing and sleeping around, and full of regret and humility.

But despite the paunch and thinning hair, the artist is still handsome and charismatic. The mutual attraction is still there, even with her thicker waist, the grey in her hair. That same night they fall into bed with each other and, soon after, fall back in love. The woman finds happiness again, and just in time.

This was what I found so hard at first, that Connie and Angelo’s story was so much better than my own. I imagine them telling it to people at the kind of parties that they go to now. ‘How did you two meet?’ the strangers ask, noting the intensity with which they cling to each other, how they still kiss and hold hands like lovers half their age, and they take it in turns to tell how they met thirty years ago, how they married other people but returned like comets on a long trajectory or some such silly-arsed nonsense ‘Oh,’ the listeners sigh, ‘what a lovely story, how romantic,’ and meanwhile all those intervening years, all that we went through together, our marriage, is contained within parentheses.

‘It’s a little more complicated than that, Douglas,’ Connie told me. ‘We’re feeling our way. We’re … seeing what happens. He says he’s changed, but no one changes that much, do they? Even if they want to.’ I agreed; no, they did not. ‘Anyway, I wanted to tell you. I thought you ought to know straight away. I like to think you’ll tell me too. If and when you meet someone. Which I hope you will.’

The occasion was our lunch in London in June, one of the regular meetings we had promised to have when negotiating our separation. We are not divorced and may not be for some time, though I suppose that will happen some day. For the moment, technically, we are still husband and wife. Technically. ‘I’m not in any hurry to change that. Are you?’ she’d said. No, I was not in any hurry.

The restaurant was in Soho, Spanish-themed for old times’ sake, and so fashionable that we had to queue for some time to get in. Queuing, it seems, is also fashionable now. You’re meant to feel honoured, and grateful for your seat, and I wonder how long it will be before they ask you to wash up, too. Anyway, we drank wine while waiting in the queue, took our seats — benches, in fact — between couples much younger than us, and it was all very civilised, very pleasant. Anyone watching would have thought that we were a long-time married couple, enjoying our day in the city, which I suppose is more or less what we were; comfortable, familiar, touching across the table, the difference being that soon Connie would be returning to her basement in Kennington and I’d be on the train back to Oxford.

‘How is your flat?’ asked Connie, hoping for some reassurance, I suppose. ‘Is it comfortable? Have you met anyone? Are you happy there?’ Please say yes.

I had moved to a small but comfortable garden flat on the outskirts of Oxford. Our old family home would be too large and depressing for me to live in on my own. Neither did I relish the prospect of spending my evenings showing prospective buyers around the attractive kitchen, the many light and spacious bedrooms, perfect for a growing family. So a flat was rented while we waited for the house to sell. Conscious of my father’s experience, I had made sure that the place was welcoming and cheerful. There was a spare room for when Albie came to stay, a small garden, river walks and friends nearby. Work was forty-five minutes away. There were moments — wet weekday nights or three p.m. on a Sunday afternoon — when an awful sadness overtook the place, finding its way into the corners of each room like some sort of creeping gas, and I would have to pack Mr Jones in the car and go for a brisk walk, but for the most part I was happy enough. Reduced to essentials, it transpired that I needed fewer possessions than I’d thought, and I liked the order and simplicity of this life. Like Darwin’s cabin on the Beagle, everything was in its place. I worked late. I cooked simple, health-conscious meals. Watched whatever I wanted on television. I exercised. Read. I walked Mr Jones and ran the dishwasher just twice a week.

On the first warm day of the year, Connie had driven a hired van from London to the family house (‘Can you manage?’ ‘Of course I can manage.’ ‘Should I get the train to London and drive the van?’ ‘Douglas — I can manage!’) and we spent that long Easter weekend disentangling our mingled lives. We had invited Albie along, too, promising him that it would not be a grim and acrimonious affair, that there would be almost a carnival atmosphere! But he said that he was busy, photographing the back of people’s heads or something, I expect. When I phoned to ask what we should do with all his stuff, his old artwork, his childhood toys, he said, ‘Burn it. Burn it all.’ Connie and I laughed about this a great deal. We donned rubber gloves to clear his room and, finding a stinking old trainer or an ancient pair of pants, we’d chant, ‘Burn it! Burn it all!’

We didn’t actually burn anything, that would have felt a little melodramatic, but nevertheless that Easter weekend had the air of a rather melancholy ritual. Five piles were made in separate rooms; one for Connie, one for myself, to dump, to sell, to give to charity, and it was interesting to note how easily everything we owned fell into one of those categories. We did our best to keep the mood upbeat. Connie had made a compilation of new music that she’d discovered — she was listening to music again — and on Saturday we drank wine and ate simple food that did not require many pans. There were chocolate eggs on Sunday morning and later that afternoon, smudge-faced from the dust and cobwebs in the attic, Connie and I went to bed and made love for the last time. I won’t say much except to mention that thankfully there was nothing sombre about it. In fact, there was a certain amount of laughter, and warmth and affection. Fondness, I suppose. Afterwards we lay for a long time in that bare room, saying nothing, slept for a while in each other’s arms, then woke, got dressed and went downstairs to empty the kitchen cupboards.

At other times that weekend had the quality of an archaeological dig, the relics getting dustier and shabbier as we sifted further back. Most items were easy to allocate. Connie and I had always had different tastes and although they had converged to an extent over the years, there was rarely any question of what was mine and what was hers. In the early days of our relationship we had bombarded each other with gifts of favourite books and music — or rather Connie had bombarded me — and it seemed churlish now to snatch those items back. And so I kept the John Coltrane CDs and the Kafka short stories, the Baudelaire poems and the Jacques Brel on vinyl, even though I have no record player and would not play it if I did. I was happy to keep them all, because they were the making of us. On the front page of Rimbaud’s poetry I found ‘Happy Valentine’s Day, you wonderful man. I love you very much, signed???’ I showed it to Connie.

‘Did you send this?’

She laughed and shook her head. ‘Not me.’

I placed the book in my pile, knowing that I would never read it and never throw it away.

Only a few items presented a dilemma. In an old 35mm film canister — artefact of ancient times — we found ten or twelve little yellow chips of ivory. Albie’s milk teeth, the ones he hadn’t swallowed or lost in the playground. In truth, they were unpleasant, slightly macabre objects, something you might wrinkle your nose at in the Egyptian rooms of a museum, but throwing them away didn’t seem right either. Should we take six each? It was all slightly ridiculous, haggling over milk teeth. ‘You have them,’ I said. So Connie got the milk teeth.

But the photographs were a predicament. We had the negatives, of course, but, even more than the VHS tapes and the audiocassettes, photographic negatives seem like the relics of an ancient civilisation and we threw most of them away. The slim wallet of photos of our daughter went to Connie, and she assured me that she would make good copies for me as soon as she could, a promise she has since fulfilled. With all the other, pre-digital photos, we sat on the floor and dealt them into piles like playing cards, discarding the dull and out of focus, making a stack of the best, the ones that we would both like copies of. Here we were at all those endless parties and weddings, thumbs up in the rain on the Isle of Skye, here was Venice in the rain again, here was Albie on his mother’s breast. The process was agonisingly slow, each photo leading us down another avenue of nostalgia. Whatever happened to so-and-so? God, d’you remember that car? Here I was, putting up shelves in the Kilburn flat, smooth-cheeked and impossibly young, and here was Connie on our wedding day.

‘That awful dress — what was I thinking of?’

‘I think you look wonderful.’

‘Look at you in that suit. Very nineties.’

‘You do want copies of these, don’t you?’

‘Of course I do!’

Here was Albie learning to swim on other holidays, here blowing out candles at two, three, four and five. Here he was in a hammock curled up on my chest, asleep. Here were Christmas mornings, school sports days and happier Easters than this one. After a while I found it all too much. From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions — fear, desire, anger — serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is permanently lost, and I felt its futility now. Rather sourly, I tossed the remaining photos onto the floor, swore and told her she could keep them all. She mumbled something about making copies, and put them in the ‘Connie’ pile. I slept in a separate room that night.

Bank Holiday Mondays are depressing at the best of times, and the following day was bleak and sour. By lunchtime Connie had loaded up the Transit van. It was barely half full.

‘Do you want me to drive you back?’

‘I can drive.’

‘The motorway will be horrible. I can drive with you and catch the train tonight.’

‘Douglas, I’ll be fine. I’ll see you in London. Next week. I’ll choose a restaurant.’ We had a deal. Lunch, once a month. No exceptions. Like a therapist or a social worker, she was very strict about these meetings. She wanted to keep an eye on me, I suppose.

‘Drive carefully. Use the wing mirrors.’

‘I will.’

A moment passed.

‘I found that hard,’ I said.

‘Me too. But it could have been much harder, Douglas.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Nothing got smashed against the wall, nothing got torn in two.’

‘No.’

‘Thank you, Douglas.’

‘What for?’

‘For not hating me.’

In truth there had been times when I had hated her, in the wrenching and tearing of the previous months, but not then. We kissed goodbye and after she had gone, crunching through the gears on the drive, I went back into the house once more to rinse the mugs, pack the kettle, turn off the gas and water. I loaded up the boot and backseat of my car then walked from room to room, closed the windows and doors for the last time, and noted how empty an empty house can feel. For all the difficulties we had faced there, I had never wanted us to leave and yet here I was closing the front door and posting the keys through the letterbox. There was no reason for me to return, and this felt like defeat and so I felt ashamed.

But the lunches in London in April and May were pleasant and light-hearted enough. I had said that life without her by my side was inconceivable and now I was being coaxed into conceiving of a future where we might be friends. Patently, she was happy to be back in the city. The flat in Kennington was tiny, but she didn’t mind. She was seeing friends, going to exhibitions, even painting again, and I had to admit that this new life suited her. There was a glow about her, a spark, a quick wit and a vague disreputability that recalled the Connie I’d first met, and this made me both happy and a little sad, because while it was pleasing to see her come back to life, it was harsh to be revealed as the encumbrance to her spirits. So we strove to be cheerful and amicable, and succeeded for the most part, at least until our lunch in June, when she told me about Angelo.

‘Was there any overlap? Tell me.’

‘No—’

‘You’d not been in touch at all?’

‘Not until three weeks ago.’

‘You swear?’

‘Is this really the most important thing?’

‘If he’s the reason our marriage ended, then yes!’

‘He isn’t the reason, you know that.’

‘Well he must be feeling pretty pleased with himself, I expect.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, because he won after all!’

‘Fuck off, Douglas!’

‘Connie!’

‘Well, really, how dare you! I’m not some fucking trophy for you and Angelo to tussle over. And he hasn’t “won” me, either! We’re seeing each other. We’re taking things slowly. I thought you had the right to know—’

But I was standing now, searching for my wallet.

‘Don’t storm out! Don’t be melodramatic, please.’

‘Connie, I can understand why you’d want this break-up to be pain-free, but it isn’t. All right? You can’t … rip something apart like this and expect not to cause any pain.’

‘You’re really walking out?’

‘Yes, I am, yes.’

‘Well, sit down for a minute. We’ll get the bill and I’ll walk out with you.’

‘I don’t want you to walk out with—’

‘If we’re going to storm out, then we’ll storm out together.’

I sat down. In silence we split the bill then walked from Soho back towards Paddington, both of us grim-faced and silent until, on Marylebone High Street, she suddenly took my arm. ‘You remember when I had that fling?’

‘With the guy at work?’

‘Angus.’

‘Angus. Christ, you’re not seeing him as well, are you?’

‘Don’t make me push you in front of a car, Douglas. That man, he was an idiot, that’s not the point. The point is when you threw me out — quite right too — and gave me that ultimatum, I thought about it for a long, long time. I was dizzy with the fact of being someone’s wife. I’d never thought I’d be anyone’s wife and I wondered, should I go back? Was it a mistake to get married?’

‘Well, clearly it was!’

‘No it was not! Don’t you see?’ She was angry now, holding on to both my arms and forcing me to face her. ‘It was not a mistake! That’s the whole point. It was not! I have never thought that it was a mistake, never ever, and I have never regretted it since and I never will. Meeting you and marrying you, that was by far the best thing I ever did. You rescued me, and more than once, because when Jane died I wanted to die too, and the only reason I didn’t was because you were there. You. You are a wonderful man, Douglas, you are, and you have no idea how much I love you and loved being married to you. You made me laugh and taught me things and you made me happy, and now you’ll be my wonderful, brilliant ex-husband. We have a wonderful son who is exactly as maddening and absurd as an eighteen-year-old boy should be, and he’s our son, ours, mine and yours now. And the fact that you and I didn’t last forever, well, you have to stop thinking of that as failure or defeat. It feels awful now, I know, but this is not the end of your world, Douglas. It is not. It is not.’

Well, it was all very emotional, more emotional than a public conversation should be in my opinion, so we stepped into a bar and spent the afternoon there, laughing and crying in turn. Much, much later we parted, friends again, and exchanged various affectionate texts on the journey back. I arrived home a little after nine p.m., the flat cool and quiet, Mr Jones waiting for me at the door. He would need a walk but I suddenly felt very weary and, still wearing my coat, without even turning on the lights, I sat heavily on the sofa.

I took in the familiar possessions in the unfamiliar room, the pictures and posters that I’d not yet got around to hanging, the fading light at the window, the carpet I would not have chosen, the blank TV, too prominent by far.

After several minutes of silence, the telephone rang, the landline, a sound so unusual that it startled me, and I felt strangely nervous about answering.

‘Hello?’

‘Dad?’

‘Albie, you frightened me.’

‘It’s only just gone nine.’

‘No, I mean the landline, I’m not used to it.’

‘I thought you preferred it to the mobile?’

‘I do, it’s just, well, I’m not used to it.’

‘So — d’you want me to call the mobile?’

‘No, this is good. Is anything wrong?’

‘No, nothing’s wrong, I just wanted a chat, s’all.’

He has spoken to his mother, I thought. She has told him, ‘Phone your dad.’ ‘Well, how are you? How’s college?’

‘S’cool.’

‘What are you working on?’

And he told me about his projects in great, incomprehensible detail, with that blameless egotism he has — all answers, no questions — and we had a perfectly nice conversation, clocking in at a mighty eleven and a half minutes, a new international world record for a phone call between father and son. While we spoke I warmed up last night’s rather good soup, then I said goodbye to Albie and ate it standing up. I took Mr Jones for a walk.

Then, closing the door, finding myself quite cheerful and content, and noting that I was still not remotely sleepy, I did something that I’d been privately contemplating for some time. I sat at my computer, opened a new window and I typed the following words …