Us

part one ENGLAND

Last summer, a short time before my son was due to leave home for college, my wife woke me in the middle of the night.

At first I thought she was shaking me because of burglars. Since moving to the country my wife had developed a tendency to jerk awake at every creak and groan and rustle. I’d try to reassure her. It’s the radiators, I’d say; it’s the joists contracting or expanding; it’s foxes. Yes, foxes taking the laptop, she’d say, foxes taking the keys to the car, and we’d lie and listen some more. There was always the ‘panic button’ by the side of our bed, but I could never imagine pressing it in case the alarm disturbed someone — say, a burglar for instance.

I am not a particularly courageous man, not physically imposing, but on this particular night I noted the time — a little after four — sighed, yawned and went downstairs. I stepped over our useless dog, padded from room to room, checked windows and doors then climbed the stairs once more.

‘Everything’s fine,’ I said. ‘Probably just air in the water pipes.’

‘What are you talking about?’ said Connie, sitting up now.

‘It’s fine. No sign of burglars.’

‘I didn’t say anything about burglars. I said I think our marriage has run its course. Douglas, I think I want to leave you.’

I sat for a moment on the edge of our bed.

‘Well at least it’s not burglars,’ I said, though neither of us smiled and we did not get back to sleep that night.

Our son Albie would be leaving the family home in October and all too soon afterwards so would my wife. The events seemed so closely linked that I couldn’t help thinking that if Albie had flunked his exams and been obliged to retake, we might have had another good year of marriage.

But before I say any more about this and the other events that took place during that particular summer, I should tell you a little about myself and paint some sort of ‘portrait in words’. It shouldn’t take long. My name is Douglas Petersen and I am fifty-four years old. You see that intriguing final ‘e’ in the Petersen? I’m told it’s the legacy of some Scandinavian heritage, some great-grandfather, though I have never been to and have no interesting stories to tell about Scandinavia. Traditionally, Scandinavians are a fair, handsome, hearty and uninhibited people and I am none of those things. I am English. My parents, both deceased now, raised me in Ipswich; my father a doctor, my mother a teacher of biology. ‘Douglas’ came from her nostalgic affection for Douglas Fairbanks, the Hollywood idol, so there’s another red herring right there. Attempts have been made over the years to refer to me as ‘Doug’ or ‘Dougie’ or ‘Doogie’. My sister, Karen, self-proclaimed possessor of the Petersen’s sole ‘big personality’, calls me ‘D’, ‘Big D’, ‘the D-ster’ or ‘Professor D’ — which, she says, would be my name in prison — but none of these have stuck and I remain Douglas. My middle name, incidentally, is Timothy, but it’s not a name that serves anyone particularly well. Douglas Timothy Petersen. I am, by training, a biochemist.

Appearance. My wife, when we first met and felt compelled to talk constantly about each other’s faces and personalities and what we loved about each other and all of that routine, once told me that I had a ‘perfectly fine face’ and, seeing my disappointment, quickly added that I had ‘really kind eyes’, whatever that meant. And it’s true, I have a perfectly fine face, eyes that may well be ‘kind’ but are also the brownest of browns, a reasonable-sized nose and the kind of smile that causes photographs to be thrown away. What can I add? Once, at a dinner party, the conversation turned to ‘who would play you in the film of your life?’ There was a lot of fun and laughter as comparisons were made to various film stars and television personalities. Connie, my wife, was likened to an obscure European actress, and while she protested — ‘she’s far too glamorous and beautiful’, etc. — I could tell that she was flattered. The game continued, but when it came to my turn a silence fell. Guests sipped their wine and tapped their chins. We all became aware of the background music. It seemed that I resembled no famous or distinctive person in the entire history of the world — meaning, I suppose, that I was either unique or the exact opposite. ‘Who wants cheese?’ said the host, and we moved quickly on to the relative merits of Corsica versus Sardinia, or something or other.

Anyway. I am fifty-four years old — did I say that? — and have one son, Albie, nicknamed ‘Egg’, to whom I am devoted but who sometimes regards me with a pure and concentrated disdain, filling me with so much sadness and regret that I can barely speak.

So it’s a small family, somewhat meagre, and I think we each of us feel sometimes that it is a little too small, and each wish there was someone else there to absorb some of the blows. Connie and I also had a daughter, Jane, but she died soon after she was born.

There is, I believe, a received notion that, up to a certain point, men get better-looking with age. If so, then I’m beginning my descent of that particular parabola. ‘Moisturise!’ Connie used to say when we first met, but I was no more likely to do this than tattoo my neck and consequently I now have the complexion of Jabba the Hutt. I’ve looked foolish in a T-shirt for some years now but, health-wise, I try to keep in shape. I eat carefully to avoid the fate of my father, who died of a heart attack earlier than seemed right. His heart ‘basically exploded’ said the doctor — with inappropriate relish, I felt — and consequently I jog sporadically and self-consciously, unsure of what to do with my hands. Put them behind my back, perhaps. I used to enjoy playing badminton with Connie, though she had a tendency to giggle and fool about, finding the game ‘a bit silly’. It’s a common prejudice. Badminton lacks the young-executive swagger of squash or the romance of tennis, but it remains the world’s most popular racket sport and its best practitioners are world-class athletes with killer instincts. ‘A shuttlecock can travel at up to 220 miles an hour,’ I’d tell Connie, as she stood doubled over at the net. ‘Stop. Laughing!’ ‘But it’s got feathers,’ she’d say, ‘and I feel embarrassed, swatting at this thing with feathers. It’s like we’re trying to kill this finch,’ and then she’d laugh again.

What else? For my fiftieth birthday Connie bought me a beautiful racing bike that I sometimes ride along the leafy lanes, noting nature’s symphony and imagining what a collision with an HGV would do to my body. For my fifty-first, it was running gear, for my fifty-second, an ear- and nasal-hair trimmer, an object that continues both to appal and fascinate me, snickering away deep in my skull like a tiny lawnmower. The subtext of all these gifts was the same: do not stay still, try not to grow old, don’t take anything for granted.

Nevertheless, there’s no denying it; I am now middle-aged. I sit to put on socks, make a noise when I stand and have developed an unnerving awareness of my prostate gland, like a walnut clenched between my buttocks. I had always been led to believe that ageing was a slow and gradual process, the creep of a glacier. Now I realise that it happens in a rush, like snow falling off a roof.

By contrast, my wife at fifty-two years old seems to me just as attractive as the day I first met her. If I were to say this out loud, she would say, ‘Douglas, that’s just a line. No one prefers wrinkles, no one prefers grey.’ To which I’d reply, ‘But none of this is a surprise. I’ve been expecting to watch you grow older ever since we met. Why should it trouble me? It’s the face itself that I love, not that face at twenty-eight or thirty-four or forty-three. It’s that face.’

Perhaps she would have liked to hear this but I had never got around to saying it out loud. I had always presumed there would be time and now, sitting on the edge of the bed at four a.m., no longer listening out for burglars, it seemed that it might be too late.

‘How long have you—?’

‘A while now.’

‘So when will you—?’

‘I don’t know. Not any time soon, not until after Albie’s left home. After the summer. Autumn, the new year?’

Finally: ‘Can I ask why?’

For the question, and the ultimate answer, to make sense, some context might be necessary. Instinctively, I feel my life could be divided into two distinct parts — Before Connie and After Connie, and before I turn in detail to what happened that summer, it might be useful to give an account of how we met. This is a love story, after all. Certainly love comes into it.

‘Lonely’ is a troubling word and not one to be tossed around lightly. It makes people uncomfortable, summoning up as it does all kinds of harsher adjectives, like ‘sad’ or ‘strange’. I have always been well liked, I think, always well regarded and respected, but having few enemies is not the same as having many friends, and there was no denying that I was, if not ‘lonely’, more solitary than I’d hoped to be at that time.

For most people, their twenties represent some kind of high-water mark of gregariousness, as they embark on adventures in the real world, find a career, lead active and exciting social lives, fall in love, splash around in sex and drugs. I was aware of this going on around me. I knew about the nightclubs and the gallery openings, the gigs and the demonstrations; I noted the hangovers, the same clothes worn to work on consecutive days, the kisses on the tube and the tears in the canteen, but I observed it all as if through reinforced glass. I’m thinking specifically of the late eighties, which, for all their hardship and turmoil, seemed like a rather exciting time. Walls were coming down, both literally and figuratively; the political faces were changing. I hesitate to call it a revolution or portray it as some new dawn — there were wars in Europe and the Middle East, riots and economic turmoil — but there was at least a sense of unpredictability, a sense of change. I remember reading a great deal about a Second Summer of Love in the colour supplements. Too young for the First, I was completing my PhD — on Protein-RNA interactions and protein folding during translation — throughout the Second. ‘The only acid in this house,’ I was fond of saying around the lab, ‘is deoxyribonucleic acid’ — a joke that never quite got the acclaim it deserved.

Still, as the decade drew to a close things were clearly happening, albeit elsewhere and to other people, and I quietly wondered if a change was due in my life, too, and how I might bring that about.

The Berlin Wall was still standing when I moved to Balham. Approaching thirty, I was a doctor of biochemistry living in a small, semi-furnished, heavily mortgaged flat off the High Road, consumed by work and negative equity. I spent weekdays and much of the weekends studying the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, for my first post-doc, specifically using mutagens in classical forward genetic screens. Those were exciting times in Drosophila studies, developing the tools to read and manipulate the genomes of organisms and, professionally if not personally, this was something of a golden period for me.

I rarely encounter a fruit fly now, outside of a bowl of fruit. These days I work in the private, commercial sector — ‘the evil corporation’, my son calls it — as Head of Research and Development, a rather grand title but one that means I no longer experience the freedom and excitement of fundamental science. These days my position is organisational, strategical, words like that. We fund university research in order to make the most of academic expertise, innovation and enthusiasm, but everything must be ‘translational’ now; there must be some practical application. I enjoy the work, am good at it and I still visit labs, but now I am employed to co-ordinate and manage younger people who do the work that I used to do. I am not some corporate monster; I am good at my job and it has brought success and security. But it doesn’t thrill me like it used to.

Because it was thrilling, to be working all those hours with a small group of committed, impassioned people. Science seemed exhilarating to me then, inspiring and essential. Twenty years on, those experiments on fruit flies would lead to medical innovations that we could never have imagined, but at the time we were motivated by pure curiosity, almost by a sense of play. It was just terrific fun, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that I loved my subject.

That’s not to say there wasn’t a great deal of mundane graft involved, too; computers were temperamental and rudimentary, barely more than unwieldy calculators and considerably less powerful than the phone in my pocket now, and data input was exhausting and laborious. And while the common fruit fly has a great deal in its favour as an experimental organism — fecundity, a short breeding cycle, distinctive morphology — it has little in the way of personality. We kept one as a pet in our lab’s insectory, in its own special jar with a tiny rug and doll’s house furniture, replacing it at the end of each life cycle. Though it’s tricky to sex a fruit fly, we called him/her Bruce. Allow this to stand as the archetypal example of Biochemist Humour.

Such small diversions were necessary because anaesthetising a population of Drosophila, then examining them one by one with a fine brush and a microscope, looking for tiny changes in eye pigmentation or wing shape, is frankly mind-numbing. It’s a little like embarking on an immense jigsaw. To begin with you think ‘this will be fun’ and you put on the radio and make a pot of tea, before realising that there are far too many pieces, nearly all of them sky.

Consequently I was far too tired to go to my sister’s party on that Friday night. And not just tired, I was wary too, for a number of good reasons.

I was wary of my sister’s cooking, which invariably consisted of a tubular pasta and economy cheese, charred black on the surface, with either tinned tuna or lardy mince lurking beneath the molten crust. I was wary because parties, and dinner parties in particular, had always seemed to be a pitiless form of gladiatorial combat, with laurel garlands bestowed to the most witty, successful and attractive, and the corpses of the defeated lying bleeding on the painted floorboards. The pressure to be one’s best self in such circumstances I found paralysing, and still do, yet my sister insisted on forcing me into the arena again and again.

‘You can’t stay at home for the rest of your life, D.’

‘I don’t stay at home, I’m hardly here …’

‘Sat in that misery hole, all by yourself.’

‘It’s not a … I’m perfectly happy by myself, Karen.’

‘You’re not happy! You’re not! How can you be happy, D? You’re not happy! You are not!’

And it was true that there was not a great deal of glee before that February night, little cause for fireworks or the punching of air. I liked my colleagues, they liked me, but for the most part, I would say goodbye to Security Steve on a Saturday afternoon then not speak until my lips parted with an audible pop on the Monday morning as I greeted him hello. ‘Good weekend, Douglas?’ he’d ask. ‘Oh, quiet, Steve, very quiet.’ Still, there was pleasure and satisfaction in my work, a pub quiz once a month, the pint with my colleagues on a Friday night, and if I did occasionally suspect something was missing, well — didn’t everyone?

Not my sister. In her mid-twenties Karen was promiscuous in her friendships and ran with what my parents referred to as ‘an arty crowd’: would-be actors, playwrights and poets, musicians, dancers, glamorous young people pursuing impractical careers, staying up late then meeting for long and emotional cups of tea during all hours of the working day. For my sister, life was one long group hug and it seemed to amuse her in some obscure way to parade me in front of her younger friends. She liked to say that I had skipped youth and leapt straight into middle age, that I had been forty-three in my mother’s womb, and it was true, I suppose, that I’d never got the hang of being young. In which case why was she so desperate for me to come along?

‘Because there’ll be girls there—’

‘Girls? Girls … Yes, I’ve heard talk of those.’

‘One girl in particular—’

‘I do know girls, Karen. I have met and spoken to girls.’

‘Not like this one. Trust me.’

I sighed. For whatever reason, ‘fixing me up with a girlfriend’ had become something of an obsession for Karen, and she pursued it with a beguiling mixture of condescension and coercion.

‘Do you want to be alone forever? Do you? Hm? Do you?’

‘I have no intention of being alone forever.’

‘So where are you going to meet someone, D? In your wardrobe? Under the sofa? Are you going to grow them in the lab?’

‘I really don’t want to have this conversation any more.’

‘I’m only saying it because I love you!’ Love was Karen’s alibi for all kinds of aggravating behaviour. ‘I’m laying a place for you at the table so if you don’t come, the whole evening’s ruined!’ And with that, she hung up the phone.

So that evening, in a tiny flat in Tooting, I was pushed by the shoulders into the tiny kitchen where sixteen people sat crammed around a flimsy trestle table designed for pasting wallpaper, one of my sister’s notorious pasta bakes smouldering in its centre like a meteorite, smelling of toasted cat food.

‘Everyone! This is my lovely brother, Douglas. Be nice to him, he’s shy!’ My sister liked nothing more than pointing at shy people and bellowing SHY! Hello, hi, hey there Douglas, said my competitors and I contorted myself onto a tiny folding chair between a handsome, hairy man in black tights and a striped vest, and an extremely attractive woman.

‘I’m Connie,’ she said.

‘Pleased to meet you, Connie,’ I said, scalpel sharp, and that was how I met my wife.

We sat in silence for a while. I contemplated asking if she’d pass the pasta but then I’d be obliged to eat it, so instead …

‘What do you do, Connie?’

‘Good question,’ she said, though it was not. ‘I suppose I’m an artist. That’s what I studied, anyway, but it always sounds a bit pretentious …’

‘Not at all,’ I replied, and thought, oh God, an artist. If she’d said ‘cellular biologist’ there’d have been no stopping me, but I rarely encountered such people and certainly never at my sister’s house. An artist. I didn’t hate art, not by any means, but I dislike knowing nothing about it.

‘So — watercolours or oils?’

She laughed. ‘It’s a little more complicated than that.’

‘Hey, I’m a kind of artist too!’ said the handsome man to my left, shouldering his way in. ‘A trapeze artist!’

I didn’t speak much after this. Jake, the fleecy man in vest and tights, was a circus performer who loved both his work and himself, and how could I possibly compete with a man who defied the laws of gravity for a living? Instead I sat quietly and watched her from the corner of my eye, making the following observations:

She had very good hair. Well cut, clean, shiny, an almost artificial black, points brushed forward over her ears (‘Points’ — is that right?) designed to frame her wonderful face. Describing hairstyles is not my forte, I lack the vocabulary, but there was something of the fifties film star to it, what my mother would call ‘a do’, yet it was modish and contemporary too. ‘Modish’ — listen to me! Anyway, I smelt the shampoo and her scent as I sat down, not because I snuffled around in the nape of her neck like a badger, I knew better than that, but because the table was really very small.

Connie listened. For my sister and her friends, ‘conversation’ really meant taking it in turns to speak, but Connie listened intently to our trapeze artist, her hand on her cheek, her little finger resting in the corner of her mouth. Self-contained, calm, she had a quality of quiet intelligence. The expression she wore was intent but not entirely uncritical or unamused, so that it was impossible to discern if she found something impressive or ridiculous, an attitude that she has maintained throughout the entire course of our marriage.

Though I thought her lovely, she was not the most attractive woman at the table. It is traditional, I know, when describing these first encounters with loved ones to suggest that they emitted some special glow; ‘her face lit up the room’ or ‘I could not look away’. In truth, I could and did look away and would say that, in conventional terms at least, she was perhaps the third most beautiful woman in the room. My sister, with her much vaunted ‘big personality’, liked to surround herself with extremely ‘cool’ people, but coolness and kindness rarely go together and the fact that these people were often truly appalling, cruel, pretentious or idiotic was, to my sister, a small price to pay for their reflected glamour. So while there were many attractive people there that night, I was very happy to be sitting next to Connie, even if she did not at first sight effervesce, incandesce, luminesce, etc.

She had a very appealing voice — low, dry, a little husky, with a noticeable London accent. She has lost this over the years, but in those days there was definitely a slight swallowing of the consonants. Usually this would be an indicator of social background, but not in my sister’s circle. One of her cock-er-ney friends spoke as if he ran a whelk stall despite his father being the Bishop of Bath and Wells. In Connie’s case, she asked sincere, intelligent questions, which nevertheless had an undertow of irony and amusement. ‘Are the clowns as funny in real life as they are on stage?’ — that kind of thing. Her voice had the instinctive cadence of a comedian and she had the gift of being funny without smiling, which I’ve always envied. On the rare occasions that I tell a joke in public, I grimace like a frightened chimpanzee, but Connie was, is, deadpan. ‘So,’ she asked, her face a mask, ‘when you’re flying through the air towards your partner, are you ever tempted, at the very, very last moment, to do this —’ and here she raised her thumb to her nose and wiggled her remaining fingers, and I thought this was just terrific.

She drank a great deal, refilling her glass before it was empty as if worried the wine might run out. The drink had no discernible effect except perhaps a certain intensity in conversation, as if it required concentration. Connie’s drinking seemed quite light-hearted, with a kind of drink-you-under-the-table swagger to it. She seemed like fun.

She was extremely stylish. Not expensively or ostentatiously dressed but there was something right about her. The fashion of the day placed great emphasis on ‘bagginess’, giving the impression that the guests around the table were toddlers wearing their parents’ T-shirts. Connie, in contrast, was neat and stylish in old clothes (which I have since learnt to call ‘vintage’) that were tailored and snug and emphasised her — I’m sorry, I apologise, but there really is no way around this — her ‘curves’. She was smart, original, both ahead of the crowd and as old-fashioned as a character in a black-and-white film. In contrast, the impression I set out to create, looking back, was no impression at all. My wardrobe at that time ran the gamut from taupe to grey, all the colours of the lichen world, and it’s a safe bet that chinos were involved. Anyway, the camouflage worked, because …

This woman on my right had absolutely no interest in me whatsoever.

And why should she? Jake the trapeze artist was a man who stared death in the face, while most nights I stared television in the face. And this wasn’t just any circus, it was punk circus, part of the new wave of circus, where chainsaws were juggled and oil drums were set on fire then beaten incessantly. Circus was now sexy; dancing elephants had been replaced by nude contortionists, ultra-violence and, explained Jake, ‘a kind of anarchic, post-apocalyptic Mad Max aesthetic’.

‘You mean the clowns don’t drive those cars where the wheels fall off?’ asked Connie, her face a stone.

‘No! Fuck that, man! These cars explode! We’re on Clapham Common next week — I’ll get you both tickets, you can come along.’

‘Oh, we’re not together,’ she said, a little too quickly. ‘We’ve just met.’

‘Ah!’ nodded Jake, as if to say ‘that makes sense’. There was a momentary pause and to fill the gap, I asked:

‘Tell me, do you find, as a trapeze artist, that it’s hard to get decent car insurance?’

The percentage varies, but some of the things I say make no sense to me at all. Perhaps I’d meant it as a joke. Perhaps I’d hoped to emulate Connie’s laconic tone through raised eyebrow and wry smile. If so, that hadn’t come across, because Connie was not laughing but pouring more wine.

‘No, because I don’t tell ’em,’ said Jake with a rebellious swagger, which was all very anarchic but good luck with any future claims, big guy. Having steered the conversation to insurance premiums, I now dolloped out the tuna pasta bake, scalding the back of Connie’s hands with fatty strands of molten Cheddar, hot as lava, and as she peeled them off Jake returned to his monologue, stretching across me for more booze. To the extent that I’d ever thought about trapeze artists, I’d always pictured slick, broad Burt Lancaster types, smooth and brilliantined and leotarded. Jake was a wild man, covered in luxuriant body hair the colour of a basketball but still undeniably handsome, strong-featured, a Celtic tattoo encircling his bicep, a tangle of wild red hair gathered into a bun with a greasy scrunchie. When he spoke — and he spoke a great deal — his eyes blazed at Connie, passing straight through me, and I was forced to accept that I was watching a blatant seduction. At a loss, I reached for the rudimentary salad. Doused liberally with malt vinegar and cooking oil, it was my sister’s rare culinary gift to make lettuce taste like a bag of chips.

‘That moment when you’re in mid-air,’ said Jake, stretching for the ceiling, ‘when you’re falling but almost flying, there’s nothing like that. You try to hold onto it, but it’s … transient. It’s like trying to hold on to an orgasm. Do you know that feeling?’

‘Know it?’ deadpanned Connie. ‘I’m doing it right now.’

This made me bark with laughter, which in turn attracted a scowl from Jake, and quickly I offered the acrid salad bowl. ‘Iceberg lettuce, anyone? Iceberg lettuce?’

The tuna pasta bake was forced down like so much hot clay and Jake’s monologue continued well into ‘afters’, an ironic sherry trifle topped with enough canned cream, Smarties and Jelly Tots to bring about the onset of type 2 diabetes. Connie and Jake were leaning across me now, pheromones misting the air between them, the erotic force field pushing my chair further and further away from the trestle table until I was practically in the hallway with the bicycles and the piles of Yellow Pages. At some point, Connie must have noticed this, because she turned to me and asked:

‘So, Daniel, what do you do?’

Daniel seemed close enough. ‘Well, I’m a scientist.’

‘Yes, your sister told me. She says you have a PhD. What field?’

‘Biochemistry, but at the moment I’m studying Drosophila, the fruit fly.’

‘Go on.’

‘Go on?’

‘Tell me more,’ she said. ‘Unless it’s top secret.’

‘No, it’s just people don’t usually ask for more. Well, how can I … okay, we’re using chemical agents to induce genetic mutation …’

Jake groaned audibly and I felt something brush my cheek as he reached for the wine. For some people, the word ‘scientist’ suggests either a wild-eyed lunatic or the white-coated lackey of some fanatical organisation, an extra in a Bond film. Clearly this was the way Jake felt.

‘Mutation?’ said Jake, indignantly. ‘Why would you mutate a fruit fly? Poor bastard, why not leave it be?’

‘Well, there’s nothing inherently unnatural about mutation. It’s just another word for evolu—’

‘I think it’s wrong to tamper with nature.’ He addressed the table now. ‘Pesticides, fungicides, I think they’re evil.’

As a hypothesis, this seemed unlikely. ‘I’m not sure a chemical compound can be evil in itself. It can be used irresponsibly or foolishly, and sadly that has sometimes been the—’

‘My mate, she’s got an allotment in Stoke Newington; it’s totally organic and her food is beautiful, absolutely beautiful …’

‘I’m sure. But I don’t think they have plagues of locusts in Stoke Newington, or annual drought, or a lack of soil nutrients—’

‘Carrots should taste of carrots,’ he shouted, a mystifying non sequitur.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t quite—’

‘Chemicals. It’s all these chemicals!’

Another non sequitur. ‘But … everything’s a chemical. The carrot itself is made of chemicals, this salad is chemical. This one in particular. You, Jake, you’re made up of chemicals.’

Jake looked affronted. ‘No I’m not!’ he said, and Connie laughed.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but you are. You’re six major elements, 65 per cent oxygen, 18 per cent carbon, 10 per cent—’

‘It’s because people try to grow strawberries in the desert. If we all ate local produce, naturally grown without all these chemicals—’

‘That sounds wonderful, but if your soil lacks essential nutrients, if your family’s starving because of aphids or fungus, then you might be grateful for some of those evil chemicals.’ I’m not sure what else I said. I was passionate about my work, felt that it was beneficial and worthwhile, and as well as idealism, jealousy might also have played a part. I’d drunk a little too much and after a long evening of being alternately patronised and ignored, I had not warmed to my rival, who was of the school that thought the solution to disease and hunger lay in longer and better rock concerts.

‘There’s easily enough food to feed the world, it’s just all in the wrong hands.’

‘Yes, but that’s not the fault of science! That’s politics, economics! Science isn’t responsible for drought or famine or disease, but those things are happening and that’s where scientific research comes in. It’s our responsibility to—’

‘To give us more DDT? More Thalidomide?’ This last blow seemed to please Jake hugely, and he broadcast a handsome grin to his audience, delighted that the misfortunes of others had provided him with a valuable debating point. Those were terrible tragedies, but I didn’t remember them being specifically my fault, or my colleagues’ — all of them responsible, humane, decent people, all ethically and socially aware. Besides, those instances were anomalies compared to all the extraordinary developments science had given us, and I had a very clear mental image of myself high, high in the shadows of the big top, sawing madly at a rope with a penknife.

‘What would happen,’ I wondered aloud, ‘if you fell from your trapeze, God forbid, and broke your legs and a massive infection set in? Because what I’d love to do, in those circumstances, Jake, what I’d love to do is stand by your bedside with the antibiotics and analgesics just out of reach and say, I know you’re in agony but I can’t give you these, I’m afraid, because, you know, these are chemicals, created by scientists and I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to amputate both your legs. Without anaesthetic!’

I wondered if perhaps I had overplayed my hand. In hoping to sound impassioned I had come across as unhinged. There had been malice in what I’d said, and no one likes malice at a dinner party, not open malice, and certainly not my sister, who was glaring at me with custard dripping from her serving spoon.

‘Well, Douglas, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,’ she said weakly. ‘More trifle?’

More distressingly, I was not acquitting myself well in front of Connie. Even though we’d spoken only briefly, I liked this woman very much and wanted to create a good impression. With some trepidation, I glanced to my right, where she remained with her chin in the palm of her hand, her face entirely impassive and unreadable and, to my mind, even lovelier than before as she took her hand from her face, placed it on my arm and smiled.

‘I’m so sorry, Douglas, I think I called you Daniel earlier.’

And that — well, that was like a light coming on.

I think our marriage has run its course, she said. I think I want to leave you.

But I’m aware of having gone off on a tangent and wallowing in happier times. Perhaps I’m casting too rosy a glow. I’m aware that couples tend to embellish ‘how we met’ folklore with all kinds of detail and significance. We shape and sentimentalise these first encounters into creation myths to reassure ourselves and our offspring that it was somehow ‘meant to be’, and with that in mind perhaps it’s best to pause there for the moment, and return to where we came in — specifically the night, a quarter-century later, when the same intelligent, amusing, attractive woman woke me to say that she thought she might be happier, that her future might be fuller, richer, that all things considered she might feel more ‘alive’ if she were no longer near me.

‘I try to imagine it, us alone here every evening without Albie. Because he’s maddening, I know, but he’s the reason why we’re here, still together …’

Was he the reason? The only reason?

‘… and I’m terrified by the idea of him leaving home, Douglas. I’m terrified by the thought of that … hole.’

What was the hole? Was I the hole?

‘Why should there be a hole? There won’t be a hole.’

‘Just the two of us, rattling around in this house …’

‘We won’t rattle around! We’ll do things. We’ll be busy, we’ll work, we’ll do things together — we’ll, we’ll fill the hole.’

‘I need a new start, some kind of change of scene.’

‘You want to move house? We’ll move house.’

‘It’s not about the house. It’s the idea of you and me in each other’s pockets forever more. It’s like … a Beckett play.’

I’d not seen a Beckett play, but presumed this was a bad thing. ‘Is it really so … horrific to you, Connie, the thought of you and I being alone together? Because I thought we had a good marriage …’

‘We did, we do. I’ve been very happy with you, Douglas, very, but the future—’

‘Then why would you want to throw that away?’

‘I just feel that as a unit, as husband and wife, we did it. We did our best, we can move on, our work is done.’

‘It was never work for me.’

‘Well, sometimes it was for me. Sometimes it felt like work. Now that Albie’s leaving, I want to feel this is the beginning of something new, not the beginning of the end.’

The beginning of the end. Was she still talking about me? She made me sound like some kind of apocalypse.

The conversation went on for some time, Connie elated at all this truth-telling, me reeling from it, incoherent, struggling to take it in. How long had she felt like this? Was she really so unhappy, so jaded? I understood her need to ‘rediscover herself’, but why couldn’t she rediscover herself with me around? Because, she said, she felt our work was done.

Our work was done. We had raised a son and he was … well, he was healthy. He seemed happy occasionally, when he thought no one was looking. He was popular at school and he had a certain charm, apparently. He was infuriating, of course, and always seemed to be more Connie’s son than mine; they’d always been closer, he’d always been on ‘her team’. Despite owing his existence to me, I suspected my son felt that his mother could have done better. Even so, was he really the sole purpose and product, the sole work, of twenty years of marriage?

‘I thought … it had never crossed my mind … I’d always imagined …’ Exhausted, I was having some trouble expressing myself. ‘I’d always been under the impression that we were together because we wanted to be together, and because we were happy most of the time. I’d thought that we loved each other. I’d thought … clearly I was mistaken, but I was looking forward to us growing old together. Me and you, growing old and dying together.’

Connie turned to me, her head on the pillow, and said, ‘Douglas, why would anyone in their right mind look forward to that?’

It was light outside now, a bright Tuesday in June. Soon we would rise wearily and shower and brush our teeth standing at the sink together, the cataclysm put on hold while we faced the banalities of the day. We’d eat breakfast, shout farewell to Albie, listen to the shuffle and groan that passed for his goodbye. We would hug briefly on the gravel drive—

‘I’m not packing any suitcases yet, Douglas. We’ll talk more.’

‘Okay. We’ll talk more.’

— then I would drive off to the office and Connie would head off to the train station and the 0822 to London where she worked three days a week. I would say hello to colleagues and laugh at their jokes, respond to emails, eat a light lunch of salmon and watercress with visiting professors, listen to reports of their progress, nod and nod and all the time:

I think our marriage has run its course. I think I want to leave you.

It was like trying to go about my business with an axe embedded in my skull.

I managed it, of course, because a public display of despair would have been unprofessional. It wasn’t until the final meeting of the day that my demeanour started to falter. I was fidgeting, perspiring, worrying at the keys in my pocket, and before the minutes of the meeting had even been approved I was standing and excusing myself, grabbing my phone, mumbling excuses and hurrying, stumbling towards the door, taking my chair some of the way with me.

Our offices and labs are built around a square laughably called The Piazza, ingeniously designed to receive no sunlight whatsoever. Hostile concrete benches sit on a scrappy lawn which is swampy and saturated in the winter, parched and dusty in the summer, and I paced back and forth across this desolate space in full view of my colleagues, one hand masking my mouth.

‘We’ll have to cancel the Grand Tour.’

Connie sighed. ‘Let’s see.’

‘We can’t go travelling around Europe with this hanging over us. Where’s the pleasure in that?’

‘I think we should still do it. For Albie’s sake.’

‘Well, as long as Albie’s happy!’

‘Douglas. Let’s talk about it when I get back from work. I must go now.’ Connie works in the education department of a large and famous London museum, liaising on outreach programmes to schools, collaborating with artists on devised work and other duties that I don’t quite understand, and I suddenly imagined her in hushed conversation with various colleagues, Roger or Alan or Chris, dapper little Chris with his waistcoat and his little spectacles. I finally told him, Chris. How did he take it? Not too well. Darling, you did the right thing. At last you can escape The Hole …

‘Connie, is there someone else?’

‘Oh, Douglas …’

‘Is that what this is all about? Are you leaving me for someone else?’

She sounded weary. ‘We’ll talk when we get home. Not in front of Albie, though.’

‘You have to tell me now, Connie!’

‘It’s not to do with anyone else.’

‘Is it Chris?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Little Chris, waistcoat Chris!’

She laughed, and I wondered: how is it possible for her to laugh when I have this axe protruding from my skull?

‘Douglas, you’ve met Chris. I’m not insane. There’s no one else, certainly not Chris. This is entirely about you and me.’

I wasn’t sure whether this made it better or worse.

The fact was I loved my wife to a degree that I found impossible to express, and so rarely did. While I didn’t dwell on the notion, I had presumed that we would end our lives together. Of course, this is a largely futile desire because, disasters notwithstanding, someone has to go first. There’s a famous artefact at Pompeii — we intended to see it on the Grand Tour we had planned for the summer — of two lovers embracing, ‘spooning’ I think is the term, their bodies nested like quotation marks as the boiling, poisonous cloud rolled down the slopes of Vesuvius and smothered them in hot ash. Not mummies or fossils as some people think, but a three-dimensional mould of the void left as they decayed. Of course there’s no way of knowing that the two figures were husband and wife; they could have been brother and sister, father and daughter, they might have been adulterers. But to my mind the image suggests only marriage; comfort, intimacy, shelter from the sulphurous storm. Not a very cheery advertisement for married life, but not a bad symbol either. The end was gruesome but at least they were together.

But volcanoes are a rarity in our part of Berkshire. If one of us had to go first, I had hoped in all sincerity that it would be me. I’m aware that this sounds morbid, but it seemed to be the right way round, the sensible way, because, well, my wife had brought me everything I had ever wanted, everything good and worthwhile, and we had been through so much together. To contemplate a life without her; I found it inconceivable. Literally so. I was not able to conceive of it.

And so I decided that it could not be allowed to happen.

part two FRANCE

Some guidelines for a successful ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe:

Energy! Never be ‘too tired’ or ‘not in the mood’.

Avoid conflict with Albie. Accept light-hearted joshing and do not retaliate with malice or bitter recriminations. Good humour at all times.

It is not necessary to be seen to be right about everything, even when that is the case.

Be open-minded and willing to try new things. For example, unusual foods from unhygienic kitchens, experimental art, unusual points of view, etc.

Be fun. Enjoy light-hearted banter with C and A.

Try to relax. Don’t dwell on the future for now.

Be organised, but –

Maintain a sense of fun and spontaneity.

At all times be aware of Connie. Listen.

Try not to fight with Albie.

The holiday had been Connie’s idea. ‘A Grand Tour, to prepare you for the adult world, like in the eighteenth century.’

I didn’t know much about it either. Connie said that it was once traditional for young men of a certain class and age to embark on a cultural pilgrimage to the continent, following well-established routes and, with the help of local guides, taking in certain ancient sites and works of art before returning to Britain as sophisticated, civilised men of experience. In practice the culture was largely an excuse for drinking and whoring and getting ripped off, arriving home with pillaged artefacts, some bottles of the local booze and venereal disease.

‘So why don’t I just go to Ibiza?’ said Albie.

‘Trust me,’ said Connie, ‘this will be much, much more fun.’ We were sitting at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning — this was in happier times, before my wife’s announcement — my old Times Atlas opened on a map of Western Europe, and there was a kind of glee in Connie that I’d not seen for a while.

‘You have to remember this was all in the days before cheap mechanical reproduction, so the Grand Tour was their one chance to see all these masterpieces outside dodgy black-and-white engravings. All the great works of the ancient world and the Renaissance, Chartres Cathedral, the Duomo in Florence, St Mark’s Square, the Colosseum. You’d take fencing lessons, cross the Alps, explore the Roman Forum, look down into the crater of Vesuvius and walk the streets of Naples. And yes, you’d drink and whore and get into fights, but you’d come back a man.’

‘Ibiza it is, then,’ said Albie.

‘Come on, Egg! Play along,’ said Connie. Like an advancing general, she traced her finger across the pages of the atlas. ‘Look — we’ll start in Paris, do the obvious stops: the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Monets and the Rodins. We’ll train to Amsterdam, see Rembrandt at the Rijksmuseum, the Van Goghs, then find our way — no planes, no cars — across the Alps to Venice, because it’s Venice. Back through Padua for the Scrovegni Chapel; Vicenza for Palladio’s villas; Verona — Verona’s lovely — see The Last Supper in Milan; Florence, for the Botticelli in the Uffizi and, well, just for Florence — then Rome! Rome is beautiful. Stop off at Herculaneum and Pompeii and finish up in Naples. Of course, in an ideal world we’d jump back and do the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna, then Berlin, but we’ll have to see how your father’s holding up.’

I was emptying the dishwasher and confess to being distracted by the low level of rinse aid as well as the ruinous cost of all this travel. But she really did seem very excited by it all, and perhaps it would make a change from our recent family holidays, the three of us restless, bitten and sun-burnt in some expensive villa or fighting for our tiny share of the Mediterranean coast.

Albie remained sceptical. ‘So, basically I’m going inter-railing with my mum and dad.’

‘That’s right, you lucky boy,’ said Connie.

‘But if it’s meant to be this great rite of passage and you’re both there, doesn’t that sort of defeat the object?’

‘No, Egg, because you’re going to learn about art. If you were serious about painting in those days, this was your training, your university. Same thing now. You can sketch, take photos, suck it all in. If you want to do it for a living, you have to see these things—’

‘A lot of Old Masters, a lot of dead white Europeans.’

‘—even if it’s just so you’ve got something to kick against. Besides, Picasso’s a dead white European, and you love Picasso.’

‘Can we see Guernica? I’d love to see Guernica.’

‘Guernica’s in Madrid. We’ll do it another time.’

‘Or you could just give me the money and I’ll go alone!’

‘This way it’s educational,’ said Connie.

‘This way you get out of bed in the mornings,’ I said.

Albie groaned and laid his head on his arms, and Connie took to twisting her finger in the hair at the nape of his neck. They do this, Connie and Albie, grooming each other like primates. ‘We’ll have fun, too. I’ll make sure your father schedules some in.’

‘Every fourth day, is that too much?’ I returned to the machine. Not just rinse aid, salt too; it was burning through the stuff, and I wondered how I might recalibrate the settings.

‘You can still meet girls and get drunk,’ said Connie. ‘You’ll just have to do it with me and your father watching. And pointing.’

Albie sighed and rested his cheek on his fist. ‘Ryan and Tom are going backpacking in Colombia.’

‘And you can too! Next year.’

‘No he can’t,’ I shouted into the dishwasher. ‘Not Colombia.’

‘Shut up, Douglas! Egg, sweetheart, this will probably be the last summer holiday we’ll have together.’

I looked up, striking my head sharply on the edge of the kitchen unit. The last ever? Was it? Was it really?

‘After this, you’re on your own,’ said Connie. ‘But for now let’s try and have a nice time this summer, shall we? This one last time?’

Perhaps she’d been planning her escape, even then.

When my wife told me that she was going with the turning of the leaves, did my life come to an end? Did I fall to pieces or fail to make it through the days?

Of course there were further sleepless nights, further tears and accusations in the lead-up to the trip, but I had no time for a nervous breakdown. Also, Albie was completing his ‘studies’ in art and photography, returning exhausted from screen-printing or glazing a jug, and so we were discreet, walking our dog, an ageing Labrador called Mr Jones, some distance away from the house and hissing over his head in fields.

‘I can’t believe you’ve sprung this on me!’

‘I haven’t sprung it, I’ve been feeling this way for years.’

‘You haven’t said anything.’

‘I shouldn’t have to.’

‘Springing this on me, at this time …’

‘I’m sorry, I’ve tried to be as honest as I—’

‘I still think we should cancel the Grand Tour …’

‘Why do we have to?’

‘You still want to go? With this hanging over us?’

‘I think so—’

‘A funeral cortège, backpacking through Italy …’

‘It needn’t be like that. It could be fun.’

‘If you want to cancel the hotels you need to say now.’

‘I’ve just told you, I want us to go. Why don’t you ever listen to—?’

‘Because if you’re really trapped in such a living hell—’

‘Don’t be melodramatic, love, it doesn’t help.’

‘I don’t know why you suggested it if you didn’t want to—’

‘I did want to, I still do!’ She stopped and held my hand. ‘Let’s put the other decision on hold until the autumn. We’ll all go on the trip, we’ll have a fantastic time with Albie—’

‘And then we’ll come back and say goodbye? You won’t even have to bother unpacking, you could just chuck your suitcase in a taxi and head off …’

At which point she sighed and looped her arm through mine as if nothing were wrong. ‘Let’s see. Let’s see what happens.’ And we walked Mr Jones back to the house.

A route took shape: Paris, Amsterdam, Munich, Verona, Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples. Of course Connie had been to most of these places before, on an epic odyssey of smoking cannabis and kissing local boys, working as a waitress, a tour guide, an au pair in the years before she started art school. In the early days of our relationship, when my work and our puny finances permitted it, we would sometimes take cheap flights to European cities and Connie would spot a bench, a bar or café and lapse into a reverie about the time she and her friends spent a week sleeping on the beach in Crete, or the wild party she had been to in an abandoned factory outside Prague, or the un-named boy she’d fallen madly in love with in Lyon in ’84, the Citroën mechanic with his strong hands and broken nose and the smell of engine oil in his hair. I’d find a smile and change the subject, but clearly ‘well travelled’ meant something different to Connie. Been there, done him, that was our joke. Europe represented first love and sunsets, cheap red wine and breathless fumbling.

I’d had no such rite of passage, partly because of my father, a fierce patriot who raged against the whole world’s bloody-minded refusal to knuckle down, learn decent English and live like us. Anything that suggested ‘abroad’ made him suspicious: olive oil, the metric system, eating outdoors, yoghurt, mime, duvets, pleasure. His xenophobia was not limited to Europe; it was international and knew no borders. When my parents came to London to celebrate my PhD, I made the mistake of brandishing my cosmopolitanism by taking them to a Chinese restaurant in Tooting. Chiang Mai’s fulfilled my father’s key restaurant criteria in that it was unnervingly cheap and brutally over-lit (‘so you can see what you’re bloody well eating!’) yet I still recall the expression on his face when handed a pair of wooden chopsticks. He pointed them at the waiter, like a switchblade. ‘Knife and fork. Knife. And. Fork.’

Of course we argued about this. The Channel Tunnel, he said, was ‘like leaving your front door open’. What did he imagine might happen? I asked. A great, marauding horde of toreadors and trattoria waiters and onion-sellers pouring out into Folkestone, Kent? In fairness, my father had lost his own father in Belgium in 1944, and perhaps this provided some deep-seated justification for his hostility, but still, it was irrational in such a rational man. To my father, ‘abroad’ was a strange, unknowable place where the milk tasted odd and lasted an unnaturally long time.

So I was not well travelled; in fact I barely knew Europe until I met Connie. Wherever we went, she had been there before. Her European map was already dense with red pins signifying stolen rucksacks, missed flights, languorous kissing in ornamental parks, pregnancy scares, fresh oranges off the tree and ouzo for breakfast. On my very first visit to her flat I had glimpsed several photographs stuck to her fridge, new-wave Connie and her art-school friends with gelled perms, blowing kisses at the camera or smoking topless — topless! and with cigarettes! — on a balcony in Sicily.

My very first visit to her flat. I’m not even through the door yet. She’s still talking to Jake.

After my sister’s ironic sherry trifle had been disposed of we were all encouraged to swap places and ‘mingle’, Connie and Jake vacating their chairs at ejector-seat speed. ‘Mingling’, it transpired, involved continuing their conversation at a different part of the table, and I watched as the acrobat produced from somewhere, I don’t know where — from his tights, perhaps — a small plastic Ziploc bag of dusty sweets which he offered to Connie, who accepted with a nod, almost a shrug of resignation, before passing the bag to my sister and on around the table. They couldn’t have been very nice sweets, because everyone was grimacing and washing them down with water. Soon I found myself sitting between two actors on drugs, a position that, a number of peer-reviewed research papers have since confirmed, is precisely the worst place a biochemist can be. One of the actors had been performing excerpts from his one-person show, to my mind one person too many and when the Ziploc bag reached us, he broke off and, shook it underneath my nose. At the end of the table, I caught a glimpse of my sister nodding, nodding, eyes wide in encouragement.

‘No thanks,’ I said.

‘You don’t partake?’ said the actor, pouting. ‘You should! Have a cheeky half, it’s lovely.’

‘I’m sorry, but the only acid in my house is deoxyribonucleic—’

‘Hey, has anyone got any chewing gum?’

I left the table.

Karen intercepted me in her bedroom where I was searching through great piles of overcoats.

‘You’re going? It’s not even ten!’

‘I don’t really think it’s my “scene”, Karen.’

‘You don’t know until you try it.’ She was looking terrifically pleased with herself, my sister. Not quite brave enough to rebel in my parents’ presence, she enjoyed using me as their proxy. I was simply the nearest old square to hand. ‘Why are you so boring, D?’

‘Oh, I practise every night.’

‘It drives me crazy!’

‘Just as well I’m leaving, then.’ I had found my coat and was wrapping my scarf around my neck.

‘Stay and try it.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I don’t want to, pusher-man! Why are you so keen for me to do something that I don’t want to do?’

‘Because I think you should try things! It might reveal a new part of your personality.’

‘Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but this is it. This is everything, this is all there is.’

Karen placed her hand on my chest. ‘I think Connie likes you.’

‘Oh. Really.’

‘In fact she told me so.’

‘You are such a liar, Karen.’

‘She said she found you very interesting, even all that science stuff. She said it made a change to meet someone who was interested in something other than themselves.’

‘I can’t find my other glove. There’s a glove here somewhere …’

‘She said she found you very attractive.’

I laughed. ‘Then the drugs have kicked in.’

‘I know! I was as surprised as you.’

‘And what makes you think I like her?’

‘Your lolling tongue. Also, you’d be insane not to. Everyone loves Connie, she’s amazing.’

‘If you find my other glove, can you keep it for me please? It looks like … well, this one. Obviously.’

Karen blocked my way to the bedroom door, and began unwrapping the scarf from my neck. ‘Stay. Just for half an hour. The moment people start touching each other’s faces, then you can go.’

It did not take long for the 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylampthetamine to seep through the bedrock of tuna pasta bake. It was as if an invisible presence were wandering the room, tapping people on the head with a wand that turned them into idiots.

‘Let’s sit soft!’ commanded my sister, eyes goggling, and the guests moved from the kitchen. I put the Pyrex in to soak before being dragged into the tiny living room, which was decked out as a kind of shabby harem with pillows on the floor, candles recklessly tickling the bottom of curtains and the air grey with cigarette smoke. Carole King’s Tapestry was replaced by something with a tinny snare and choppy piano. The word ‘bass’ was rhymed with ‘face’ and soon the dancing began. One of Karen’s friends, I noticed, was topless under dungarees.

I was beginning to feel foolish. It was like waiting in a queue for a rollercoaster that I had no intention of riding. Why did I remain, leaning in a corner, making stilted conversation with a dramaturg? My motivation slouched on a beanbag, Jake curled up at her feet like an immense ginger cat. Karen was right; I had liked this girl immediately. I liked her obvious intelligence, the keen attention she directed at people. I liked the humour that played perpetually in the corner of her mouth and smudged eyes. And I found her attractive, of course — her face, her figure …

Well, these days, Connie’s figure is the subject of perpetual care and a recurring circular argument — I look awful, no you don’t, yes I do, you look wonderful — an endless rally that I can do nothing to break. She feels, has always felt, that she is too large. You look wonderful to me, I say. She shrugs this away. I look like a blurred photo of myself, she says, I no longer have cheekbones — as if this was what anyone wanted in a face: bones. The truth is I feel the same way about her now as I did back then, which is to say very strongly. We had so little in common and yet she seemed to me to have more wit and grace and life in her than anyone in that crowded room, or indeed my world at that time.

So I waited, and eventually she caught my eye and smiled wonderfully, and Jake’s eyes followed too. He growled and tried to take her wrist as she stood — a little unsteadily, I noticed. She removed his hand and crossed the room towards me.

I excused myself from the dramaturg.

‘You’re still here!’ she said in my ear.

‘Just for a while,’ I said in hers.

‘I wanted to apologise. We didn’t really get a chance to speak at dinner. Jake’s very interesting, but he doesn’t have much of a sense of humour. Or curiosity.’

‘No, I noticed.’

‘I liked it when you threatened to cut off his legs.’

‘Did I do that? I did, didn’t I?’

‘I was watching your face. You got very eloquent, very passionate. Of course I didn’t understand half of what you were saying. I’m completely remedial when it comes to science. I don’t know what revolves around what, or why the sky’s blue, or the difference between an atom and a molecule. It’s embarrassing, really. I took my niece to the seaside last summer and she asked me why the tide came in and out and I told her it was something to do with magnets.’

I laughed. ‘Well it’s one theory, I suppose.’

She put her hand on my arm. ‘Is it magnets? Please, please tell me it’s magnets!’

I was in the process of explaining the influence of the moon’s gravitational pull on large bodies of water, when she paused and put her hands on her chest and opened her eyes wide.

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I just got a bit of a rush. Are you feeling it yet?’

‘The drugs? Oh, I don’t really do that kind of thing.’

‘Very sensible. Very.’

We looked around the room. The drugs seemed to be having a devastating effect on people’s posture, with everyone hunching their shoulders and bobbing their heads in a sort of hyper-tense disco. My sister in particular was scrunched up like a squirrel, sucking her lips inwards in concentration as she shook tiny imaginary maracas.

‘Look at them,’ said Connie, shaking her head. ‘People always say take this, drink that, you’ll lose your inhibitions. What we need is something that’ll give them back. Here, try this, it’ll make you massively sensible. We’d all have a much better time. Imagine waking up and saying to yourself, “Christ, I was totally inhibited last night.”’

‘Actually, that’s exactly what I do say.’

She laughed, for the first time I think. ‘Lucky you! Sounds lovely.’ There was a brief moment where we did nothing but smile, then: ‘It’s very loud in here. I need some water. Can we go in the kitchen?’

I noticed Jake, his hooded eyes glaring territorially. ‘Actually, I was about to head off home.’

‘Douglas,’ she said over her shoulder, reaching out her hand, ‘you give in far too easily,’ and I wondered what she meant as I followed her through.

In the kitchen I battled with my desire to wipe down all the surfaces.

‘Your sister tells me you’re some kind of genius.’

‘Well, my sister has a low “genius” threshold. She says the same about practically everyone in that room.’

‘That’s different, though, isn’t it? That’s talent, and not even talent most of the time. Self-confidence, that’s what it is. When she says “genius” she just means they’ve got a really loud voice. You, you actually know things. Tell me again, about the fruit flies.’

I did my best to explain in layman’s terms, while she stood at the sink and drank water from a pint glass in one long gulp, then remained standing with her head thrown back, a good deal of water running the length of her neck.

‘… then we take the next generation of fruit flies and examine how the chemical agents have altered the … are you all right?’

Coming round, she blinked and shook her head a little. ‘Me? Yeah, I’m fine, I drank a little too much and now …’ She sighed and drew her hands down her face. ‘Christ, that was a bright idea! I’ve just broken up with someone, you see.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘No, it was the right thing to do, it was a terrible relationship, it’s just … it was four years, you know?’

‘A long time.’

‘Keep talking to me, won’t you? Don’t go away.’

I had no intention of going away. ‘So we look for changes in the fly’s pheno—’

‘You seeing someone, Douglas?’

‘Me? No, not at the moment, not for some time. Pressure of work,’ I said, as if this were the reason.

‘I knew you were single.’

‘Is it really so obvious?’

‘No, I mean your sister told me. I think she’s been trying to fix us up.’

‘Yes. Yes, I’m sorry about that.’

‘Don’t apologise. Not your fault. She’s convinced that I’d be good for you. Or was it the other way around? Either way, nothing’s going to happen.’

‘Oh.’ This struck me as unnecessarily blunt. ‘No, well, I suspected that.’

‘Sorry, sorry, not because of you — you seem really, really nice — just because, you know, rebound and everything. I’m a bit …’

A moment passed. ‘I presumed you were interested in—’

‘Jake? God, no!’

‘It seemed that way at dinner.’

‘Did it? I’m sorry, I wanted to talk to you but he just wouldn’t stop and — Jake? Really, not for me. Can you imagine that flying through the air towards you, like a great hennaed bear, arms outstretched. I’d keep my hands deep in my pockets, safety net or no safety net.’ She poured red wine into the pint glass then gulped it down as if it were lemon barley water. ‘If I wanted a self-absorbed egomaniac, I’d call my ex.’ She pointed an unsteady finger at me. ‘Don’t let me call my ex!’

‘I won’t.’

There was a pause, and she smiled. Lipstick had been replaced by the black stain of the wine, and her dark fringe was now sticky with sweat. Pupils dilated, her eyes were wonderful. She tugged at the front of her dress. ‘Is it hot in here, or is it me?’

‘It’s you,’ I said. I had been considering what it would feel like to kiss her, weighing this against what it would feel like to miss the last tube. The kiss felt possible, but it felt un-gentlemanly to take advantage of standards that had been chemically lowered. Which was clearly the case, because now she shivered and smiled and said:

‘Please don’t misinterpret this, Douglas, but would you mind coming over here and just … holding me?’

At which point a fiery ball of hair barrelled low into the kitchen, scooped her up and dangled her over his shoulder. ‘Are you hiding from me, little lady?’

‘Actually, can you put me down please, Jake?’

‘Scuttling away with Doctor Frankenstein …’ He was shifting her on his shoulder now, as if adjusting a roll of carpet. ‘Come and dance with me. Now!’

‘Stop it, please!’ She seemed embarrassed, upset, her face red.

‘Jake, I think you should put her—’

‘Here, watch this. Can you do this, Doctor Frankenstein?’ And with an ease that would have been admirable if Connie had been willing, he tossed her into the air and caught her on the palms of his hands, his elbows locked so that her head bounced against the lightshade. Her black dress had ridden up and with one hand she tugged it down, the smile on her face fixed and mirthless.

‘I said, put. Her. Down!’

I could hardly believe the voice was mine, or indeed the hand that was now at arm’s length, brandishing a plastic spatula flecked with tuna pasta bake. Jake glanced at the spatula, then at me, then laughed, rolled Connie down to the ground and with a dainty big-top skip, left the kitchen. ‘Prick-tease!’ was his parting shot.

‘I hope they take away your safety net!’ shouted Connie, tugging at her dress’s hem. ‘Conceited bastard.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Me? I’m fine. Thank you.’ I followed her glance. The rubber utensil was still in my hand. ‘What were you planning to do with that?’

‘If he didn’t put you down, I was going to make him eat something.’

She laughed, rotated her shoulders and put her hand to her neck as if assessing the damage. ‘I feel terrible, I have to go outside.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘In fact …’ She put her hand on my arm ‘… more than that, I have to go home.’

‘The tubes have stopped running.’

‘That’s all right, I’ll walk.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘Whitechapel.’

‘Whitechapel? That’s eight, ten miles away.’

‘S’all right, I’d like to. I’ve got a change of shoes. I’ll be fine, it’s just …’ She placed both hands on her chest. ‘I need to walk this off and if I’m by myself I’m going to … crash into something. Or someone.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ I said.

A moment passed. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’d like that.’

‘I should go and say goodbye.’

‘No.’ She took my hand. ‘Let’s make a French exit.’

‘What’s a French exit?’

‘It’s when you leave without saying goodbye.’

‘I’ve never heard that before.’

A French exit; no thank you for having me, no I’ve had a lovely time. To just walk away, cool and aloof. I wondered if I could.

The morning of departure we awoke at five thirty a.m. and said a fond goodbye to Mr Jones, who was to be cared for by our neighbours, Steph and Mark, for the month-long duration of the Grand Tour. We were always surprised by how much we missed Mr Jones. Even in canine terms he is basically an idiot, perpetually running into trees, falling into ditches, eating daffodils. A ‘sense of humour’, Connie calls it. Throw Mr Jones a stick and more likely than not he will return with a pair of discarded underpants. Monumentally flatulent, too — weapons-grade. But he is foolish, loyal and affectionate and Connie is entirely devoted to him.

‘Bye, old pal, we’ll send you a postcard,’ she cooed, nuzzling at his neck.

‘Don’t think there’s much point sending a postcard,’ I said. ‘He’ll only eat it.’

Connie sighed deeply. ‘I’m not really going to send him a postcard.’

‘No, no, I realised that.’ We had been wilfully misinterpreting each other’s jokes since Connie’s warning of departure. It hummed away beneath everything we did, however innocuous. Even saying goodbye to Mr Jones contained the question: who will get custody?

And so we roused Albie, for whom rising before eight a.m. was an infringement of his basic human rights, then took a taxi to Reading and crammed onto a commuter train to Paddington, Albie sleeping en route, or pretending to do so.

Despite my resolutions, we had argued the night before, in this instance about the acoustic guitar that Albie insisted on dragging across Europe — an absurd and impractical affectation, I thought — and there was the usual stomping up the stairs, Connie’s familiar sigh, her famous slow head-shake.

‘I’m worried he’s going to busk,’ I said.

‘So let him busk! There are worse things a seventeen-year-old can do.’

‘I’m worried that he’s going to do those, too.’

But it seemed the guitar was as essential as his passport. Needless to say it was I who bundled the case through the turnstiles at the Eurostar terminal, lugged it through security, crammed it into inadequate luggage space on the train as we took our seats where I began swabbing with napkins at the hot coffee now dripping from my wrist. There’s a particular grubbiness that comes with travel. You start showered and fresh in clean and comfortable clothes, upbeat and hopeful that this will be like travel in the movies; sunlight flaring on the windows, heads resting on shoulders, laughter and smiles with a lightly jazzy soundtrack. But in reality the grubbiness has set in before you’ve even cleared security; grime on your collar and cuffs, coffee breath, perspiration running down your back, the luggage too heavy, the distances too far, muddled currency in your pocket, the conversation self-conscious and abrupt, no stillness, no peace.

‘So — goodbye England!’ I said to fill the gap. ‘See you in four weeks!’

‘We’ve not left yet,’ said Albie, his first words to me for twelve hours, then produced his Nikon and started taking close-up photographs of the bottom of his shoe.

Albie is dark, like his mother; his hair black, tangled and long, dangling into his eyes and scratching at the corneas so that I constantly want to lean across to brush it out of the way. Eyes large and brown and wet — ‘soulful’ is a word that gets bandied about — the dark skin around them the colour of a bruise. He has a long nose, a full, dark mouth and is, by all accounts, an attractive young man. One of Connie’s female friends said that he looked like a murderous ruffian in a Caravaggio, a comparison that meant nothing to me until I looked it up. But clearly there is a demand out there for late-Renaissance muggers with scrappy facial hair and consumption, because girls seem drawn to him, feel they can ‘really talk’ to him, and I’ve long since given up keeping track of the Rinas and Ninas and Sophies and Sitas for whom surliness, irresponsibility and poor personal hygiene are such irresistible traits.

But he is cool, they say, he is deep; people are drawn to him and in this respect, as in all others, he is his mother’s son. He is ‘not a natural academic’, according to his college tutor, ‘but he has wonderful emotional intelligence’, a phrase that made my teeth snap together. Emotional intelligence, the perfect oxymoron! ‘How do they test emotional intelligence? What qualification does that lead to?’ I asked Connie as we drove home. ‘Perhaps there’s a multiple-choice element. They put you in a room with six people and you have to work out who to hug.’

‘It means he has empathy,’ she replied dryly. ‘It means he has some awareness of and interest in other people’s feelings.’

And so it seems the only thing that Albie has taken from my side of the family is my father’s skinny height, yet he seems embarrassed and resentful even of this, with his round shoulders and stooped, loping walk, arms dangling, as if unable to manage the weight of his hands. Oh, and smoking, he’s taken that from my father, too. In consideration of my views on the subject, he smokes in secret, though it’s not a secret that he holds precious, given the number of lighters and Rizla packets he leaves lying around, given the smell of it on his clothing and the burn marks on the window ledge of his filthy bedroom. ‘How did they get there, Albie?’ I said. ‘The swallows? Smoking swallows, with their Duty Free?’ at which point he laughed and kicked the door closed. Oh, and as well as the emphysema, cancer and heart disease that he is presumably nurturing in that narrow chest, he suffers from a malaise that requires at least twelve hours of sleep, and yet is singularly incapable of commencing these twelve hours before two a.m.

What else? He is fond of T-shirts with absurdly low-cut v-necks so that his sternum is constantly on display, and he has a habit of withdrawing his arms through the sleeves and jamming his hands into his armpits. He refuses to wear a coat, an absurd affectation, as if coats were somehow ‘square’ or un-cool, as if there were something ‘hip’ about hypothermia. What is he rebelling against? Warmth? Comfort? ‘Let it go’, says Connie, as he strides out into some gale with his rib-cage showing, ‘it won’t kill him’ — but it might, and if it doesn’t then the sheer frustration of it all will kill me. Take, for example, the state of his bedroom, a room so filthy that it is effectively a no-go zone, an immense Petri dish of furry toast crusts and lager tins and unthinkable socks that will one day have to be sealed off in concrete like Chernobyl, and this is not just laziness on his part — no, real effort has gone into a situation designed to cause the maximum upset. To me! Not to his mother, but to me, to me, so that it is no longer simply a bedroom, it is a massive act of spite.

And he’s a mumbler, a swallower of words. Despite spending the last six years in a perfectly nice part of Berkshire, he speaks in a bored cockney drawl because God forbid anyone should think his father has done well or worked hard, God forbid anyone should think that he’s comfortable and cared for and loved, loved equally by both of his parents even if he only seems to desire and require the attentions of one.

In short, my son makes me feel like his step-father.

I have had some experience of unrequited love in the past and that was no picnic, I can tell you. But the unrequited love of one’s only living offspring has its own particular slow acid burn.

But now the train had finally begun to move, and Albie had switched the fearless truth-telling eye of his camera lens from his untied laces to the walls of the tunnels under east London, because you can never have enough pictures of dirty concrete.

‘I hope you’re going to take lots of pictures of the Eiffel Tower, Egg,’ I said, in an affectionate, teasing tone. ‘Me and your mother standing in front with our thumbs up?’ We demonstrated. ‘Or — another tip — I can put my hand out flat like this, so it looks like I’m holding it …’

‘That’s not photography, that’s holiday snaps.’ It seemed the tendency to wilfully misinterpret jokes was contagious. Connie winked at me and squeezed my knee beneath the table.

My son was soon to study photography on a three-year course which we were financing and although my wife, who knew about these things, insisted that he had talent, an ‘eye’, the fact of it filled me with an anxiety that I fought daily to suppress. At one point he had been intending to study theatre — theatre! — and at least I had managed to nip that in the bud, but now it was photography, the latest of a long series of temporary passions — ‘street art’, skateboarding, DJ-ing, drumming — the abandoned detritus of which cluttered cellar, attic and garage, alongside the optimistic chemistry set that I had bought and he had tossed aside, the hopeful microscope that had never been unpacked, the dusty box that offered an opportunity to ‘Grow Your Own Crystals!’

But there was no denying his enthusiasm. Albie with a camera was something to see, crouching and contorting his long body into a question mark as if playing the role of ‘photographer’. Sometimes he fired off frames at arm’s length, in what I believe is called ‘gangster style’, sometimes on tiptoe, back arched like a toreador. Initially I made the mistake of standing and grinning when the camera was produced, but soon realised that he wouldn’t actually press the shutter until I’d stepped out of the frame. In fact, in all the thousands of shots that he had taken, many of them loving portraits of his mother — her eyes, her smile — alongside his usual repertoire of wet cardboard boxes and badgers hit by cars, etc., there was not a single photograph of me. Not of my face, anyway, just an extreme close-up of the back of my hand, black and white in heavy contrast, part of a college project that I later discovered was called ‘Waste/Decay’.

Albie’s passion for photography had been the cause of tension in other ways. I had a printer in my office, a top-of-the-range colour model whose features included glacial speed and shocking running costs. Consequently, I was more than a little annoyed to return from work one day and hear the printer grinding away. Irritably, I examined the top print of a sizeable pile of 8x10s. It seemed to be a high-contrast, minutely detailed black-and-white print of some kind of dark moss and only when I peered more closely did I realise that this was in fact a photograph of a naked female form, shot in profile so to speak. I dropped the photograph, then gingerly examined the shot beneath. In washed-out black and white, it might have passed for some sort of snowy mountain range, were it not for the pale dimpled nipple that crowned the peak. Meanwhile, a third image was rumbling its way out of the machine and from the section that was visible, there seemed every chance that buttocks were emerging.

I called Connie in. ‘Have you seen Albie?’

‘He’s in his room. Why?’

I held up the photographs and predictably, her response was to clasp her hand to her mouth and laugh. ‘Oh, Egg. What have you been up to?’

‘Why can’t he just photograph someone’s face for once?’

‘Because he’s a seventeen-year-old boy, Douglas. This is what they do.’

‘I didn’t. I photographed wildlife. Birds and squirrels and iron-age forts.’

‘Which is why you’re a biochemist and he’s a photographer.’

‘I wouldn’t mind so much, but does he have any idea how much the cartridges cost for this thing?’

Connie, meanwhile, was peering closely at the buttocks. ‘My money’s on Roxanne Sweet.’ She held the photograph to the light. ‘I think they’re rather good. Of course he’s pinched it all off Bill Brandt, but they’re not bad.’

‘Our son, the pornographer.’

‘It’s not pornography, it’s a nude study. If he was painting nudes at a life-drawing class you wouldn’t bat an eyelid.’ She pinned the print to my office wall. ‘Or at least I’d hope you wouldn’t. Who knows any more?’

Soon after, Albie announced his intention to devote his life to a hobby. Why, I asked Connie, could he not study a more practical subject and do the things he enjoyed at weekends and in the evenings, like the rest of us? Because that’s not how an arts-based course works, said Connie; he needs to be challenged, to develop his famous ‘eye’, learn to use his tools. But wouldn’t it be cheaper and quicker to just read the manual? I could understand if people still used darkrooms as I had as a young man, but all of that know-how was obsolete, and how could Albie hope to excel in a field where anyone with a phone and a laptop could be broadly proficient? It wasn’t even as if he wanted to be a photojournalist or a commercial photographer, taking pictures for newspapers or advertisements or catalogues. He didn’t want to photograph models or weddings, athletes, or lions chasing gazelles, photographs that people might pay for, he wanted to be an artist, to photograph burnt-out cars and bark, taking pictures at such angles that they didn’t look like anything at all. What would he actually do for three years, apart from smoke and sleep? And what professional job could he hope for at the end of it?

‘Photographer!’ said Connie. ‘He’s going to be a photographer.’

We were pacing around the kitchen, furiously tidying up, by which I mean tidying up, furious. Wine had been drunk and it was late, the end of a long, fraught argument that, as was his way, Albie had provoked then fled from. ‘Don’t you see?’ said Connie, hurling cutlery at the drawer. ‘Even if it’s hard, he has to try! If he loves it, we have to let him try. Why must you always have to stomp on his dreams?’

‘I’ve got nothing against his dreams as long as they’re attainable.’

‘But if they’re attainable then they’re not dreams!’

‘And that’s why it’s a waste of time!’ I said. ‘The problem with telling people that they can do anything they want to do is that it is objectively, factually inaccurate. Otherwise the whole world would just be ballet dancers and pop stars.’

‘He doesn’t want to be a pop star, he wants to take photographs.’

‘My point still stands. It is simply not true that you can achieve anything if you love it enough — it just isn’t. Life has limitations and the sooner he faces up to this fact then the better off he’ll be!’

Well, that’s what I said. I believed I had my son’s best interests at heart. That was why I was so vocal, because I wanted him to have a secure professional life, a good life. Listening up in his bedroom, no doubt he had caught all of my words and none of my intention.

Still, the argument was not my finest moment. I had become shrill and dogmatic but even so I was surprised to discover that Connie was now standing still, wrist pressed to her forehead.

‘When did it start, Douglas?’ she said, her voice low. ‘When did you start to drain the passion out of everything?’

‘So why did you become a scientist?’

‘Because I never really wanted to do anything else.’

‘But why … I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten the subject …?’

‘Biochemistry, that’s my PhD. Literally the chemistry of life. I wanted to know how we work; not just us, all living things.’

‘When was this?’

‘Eleven, twelve.’

Connie laughed. ‘I wanted to be a hairdresser.’

‘Well, my mum was a biology teacher, dad was a GP, so it was in the air.’

‘But you didn’t want to be a doctor?’

‘I thought about it, but I wasn’t sure about my bedside manner, and the great thing about biochemistry over medicine, my dad said, was that no one ever asked you to look up their bum.’

She laughed, which I found intensely gratifying. Clapham High Street late at night is not the most scenic of routes, and at a little after one in the morning it has its own perils, but I was enjoying talking to her — or talking at her because she was, she said, ‘too off her face’ to do much but listen. It was a bitterly cold night, and she clung to my arm, for warmth I supposed. She had swapped her high heels for clumpy trainers, and wore a wonderful old black coat with some kind of feathery collar, and I felt intensely proud and protective, and strangely invulnerable too, as we strode past the drunks and muggers, the hens and stags.

‘Am I being very boring?’

‘Not at all,’ she said, her eyelids heavy. ‘Keep talking.’

‘They used to buy me this magazine, World of Wonder or something it was called — my parents wouldn’t allow the other ones, the silly ones, Dandy or Whizzer and Chips or whatever, in the house. So I used to read this terribly dry, old-fashioned magazine and it was full of projects and diagrams and jolly things to do with vinegar and bicarbonate of soda, how to turn a lemon into a battery—’

‘You can do that?’

‘I have that power.’

‘You are a genius!’

‘Thanks to World of Wonder. Fun facts! Did you know caesium has atomic number 55? That sort of thing. Of course at that age you’re just like this big sponge, so it all went in, but the bit I loved the best was this cartoon strip, “Lives of the Great Scientists”. There was one about Archimedes, I could draw it for you now: Archimedes in his bath, making the connection between volume and density, dancing naked down the street. Or Newton and his apple, or Marie Curie … I loved this idea of the sudden beautiful realisation. A light bulb going on, literally for Edison. One individual experiences this flash of insight and suddenly the world is altered fundamentally.’

I hadn’t spoken this much for years. I hoped, from Connie’s silence, that she was finding me fantastically interesting, but when I looked her eyes were rolled far back into her head.

‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m sorry. I’m just rushing my tits off.’

‘Oh. Okay. Should I stop talking?’

‘No, I love it. You’re bringing me down, but in a good way. Wow. Your eyes look massive, Douglas. They’re taking up your whole face.’

‘Okay. So … should I keep talking, then?’

‘Yes, please. I like listening to your voice. It’s like listening to the Shipping Forecast.’

‘Boring.’

‘Reassuring. Let’s keep walking. Tell me more.’

‘Anyway, these stories were nonsense for the most part, or hugely over-simplified. Most scientific progress is a slog, and more often than not it stems from a dialogue within a community, lots of people thinking along the same lines and inching forward, rather than these great bolts of lightning. Newton did see the apple fall, but he’d been thinking about gravity well before that. The same with Darwin, he didn’t wake up one day and think: natural selection! There’d been years and years of observation, discussion and debate. Good science is slow-moving, methodical, evidence-based. Method. Results. Conclusion. Like my old tutor used to say, “To assume makes an ass of u and me!’’’ Here, rather optimistically, I had hoped she might laugh, but she was staring open-mouthed at her wiggling fingertips. ‘Still, I was hooked. It seemed heroic, or at least the kind of heroism I might have access to. Normal boys aspired to be footballers or pop stars or soldiers, and I wanted to be a scientist, because wouldn’t it be incredible to have a moment like that? An entirely original idea. A cure, an insight into space and time, a water engine.’

‘Anything occurred to you?’

‘Not as yet.’

‘Well it’s still early days!’

‘Of course it was all a lot easier in the past. Much easier to make your mark when people still thought the sun revolved around the earth and there were four bodily humours. Not much chance of me making that kind of breakthrough now.’

‘Oh no!’ she said with real feeling. ‘That’s not true!’

‘’Fraid so. Science is a race, you’ve got to get there first. There’s no second prize. Look at Darwin — those ideas were in the air, but he was the first to get his paper published. The only way I could really make a mark now is to be transported back to, say, 1820. I’d jot down some pointers on evolutionary theory. I’d explain to the Royal College of Surgeons exactly why washing your hands is a good idea. I’d invent the combustion engine, the light bulb, the aeroplane, photography, penicillin. If I could get back to 1820, I’d be the greatest scientist the world has ever known, greater than Archimedes or Newton or Pasteur or Einstein. The only obstacle is being a hundred and seventy years too late.’

‘Clearly, what you need to do,’ she said, ‘is invent a time machine.’

‘Which is theoretically impossible.’

‘There you go again, being negative. If you can make a battery out of a lemon, how hard can it be? I’m sure you could do it.’

‘You hardly know me.’

‘But I can tell. I have a sense. Douglas, some day you are going to do something quite amazing.’

She was very far from sober, of course, but, if only for a moment, I thought she really did believe this of me. Even that it might be true.

And so we journeyed on, three of us now, in what I chose to take as a companionable silence, sneaking out of London through the back door and surfacing in dreary countryside, all pylons and motorways, a sudden glimpse of a river — the Medway? — crammed with holiday cruisers sulking in the overcast English summer, then more scrappy woodland then the motorway again. Soon enough the guard announced that we were about to enter the Channel Tunnel and the passengers looked obediently to their windows in the hope of seeing — what? Shoals of brightly coloured fish swimming past aquarium glass? A tunnel under the sea is never quite as visually splendid as one hopes, but it is no less an achievement for that. Who designed the Channel Tunnel? No one knows the name. There are no more Brunels or Stephensons, and tunnels, by their very nature, never get the attention of great bridges, but still this was a great feat. I voiced the thought aloud; how tunnels were underrated and it was miraculous, really, to imagine that great mass of rock and water over our heads and yet to feel safe.

‘I don’t feel safe,’ said Albie.

I sat back in my seat. Engineering — why hadn’t engineering interested my son?

Out into daylight, a militarised landscape of fences, concrete bunkers and escarpments, then the pleasant, uniform agricultural plain that stretches all the way to Paris. It is, of course, an illusion to imagine that the crossing of arbitrary boundaries on a map should correspond to variations in mood and temperament. A field is a field and a tree is a tree, but nevertheless this could only be France, and the air on the train took on a different quality, or seemed to, as French passengers emanated the satisfaction of returning home, and the rest of us the excitement of being officially ‘abroad’.

‘Here we are then! France!’

And even Albie couldn’t find anything to disagree with there.

I fell asleep, neck cricked, jaw clenched, skull vibrating against glass, then awoke in the early afternoon as we entered the suburbs of Paris, Albie visibly perking up at the sight of graffiti and urban grime. I handed out A4 polypropylene wallets containing itineraries for the North European leg of our trip; hotel addresses, phone numbers and train times; and a loose breakdown of events and activities. ‘A guideline, rather than a strict schedule.’

Albie turned the pages back and forth. ‘Why isn’t this laminated, Dad?’

‘Yes, why isn’t it laminated?’ said Connie.

‘Dad’s getting sloppy.’ My wife and son enjoyed heckling me. It gave them pleasure, so I smiled and played along, confident that they’d be grateful in the end.

Once off the train we felt revived, and I didn’t even mind the guitar case clunking against my knees, the coffee corrosion in my stomach and the edginess of that particular station. ‘Keep a close eye on your bags,’ I warned.

‘Any railway station, anywhere in the world,’ said Connie to Albie, ‘you can guarantee your father will tell you to keep a close eye on your bags.’

Then the sky outside the Gare du Nord opening up, bright and blue, to greet us.

‘Are you excited?’ I asked my son as he climbed into the taxi.

‘I’ve been to Paris before,’ he shrugged. Across the back of the seat, Connie caught my eye and winked and we set off, stopping and starting through the hard, unlovely kernel of the city towards the Seine, Connie and I sandwiching our son, hips pressed closer than we were used to, waiting for the commerce of the Grands Boulevards to give way to the dusty elegance of the Jardin des Tuileries, the lovely and ridiculous Louvre, the bridges across the Seine. Pont de la Concorde? Pont Royal? Unlike London, which has only two or perhaps three decent bridges, every crossing point of the Seine seems wonderful to me, clear views preserved on either side, and Connie and I peered greedily this way and that, following each other’s eyes while Albie looked down at his phone.

We crossed London Bridge a little after two forty-five in the morning. The City was rather different in those years, squatter and less brazen than today, a model village Wall Street and very much alien territory to someone who rarely travelled further east than Tottenham Court Road. Now the place was deserted as if in advance of some impending disaster, and we walked past Monument, down Fenchurch Street, voices clear in the night air, and told the stories that we choose to tell when people are new.

Connie had recovered her powers of speech and told me more about her large, messy family, her mother an ex-hippy, skittish and boozy and emotional, her biological father long absent now, leaving her nothing but his surname. Which was? Moore. Connie Moore — a terrific name, I thought, like a village in Ireland. Her step-father could not have been more different, a Cypriot businessman who ran a number of questionable kebab shops in Wood Green and Walthamstow, and she was now an anomaly in her family: the arty, smart one. ‘I have three half-Cypriot brothers, little bulldogs they are; they all work in the business, and they have no idea what I do. Same as my dad — he’ll be watching telly and he’ll see a view of the Dales, or we’ll be on holiday and he’ll see a sunset or an olive tree and he’ll say — she slipped into an accent, she has always been very good at accents — ‘“Connie, you see that? Draw that! Draw it, quick!” Or he tries to commission me. “Draw your mother, she’s a beautiful lady, do a painting. I’ll pay.” To Kemal, that’s the supreme achievement of the artist, to draw eyes that look in the same direction.’

‘Or hands.’

‘Exactly. Hands. If you can fit all the fingers on, you’re Titian.’

‘Can you draw hands?’

‘Nope. I love him, though — Kemal — and my brothers, too. They dote on my mum and she sucks it all up. But I don’t see me in any of them, or in her either.’

‘What about your father? Your biological—’

She shuddered. ‘He left home when I was nine. I’m not really allowed to mention him because it sets my mum off. He was very handsome, I know that. Very charming, a musician. Ran off to Europe. He’s … out there … somewhere.’ She gestured towards the east. ‘Don’t really care,’ she said, and shrugged. ‘Change the subject. Ask me something else.’

The biographies we give ourselves at such times are never neutral and the image she chose to present was of a rather solitary soul. She was not mawkish or self-pitying, not at all, but with the bravado gone, she seemed less confident, less self-assured, and I felt flattered by her honesty. I loved the conversation that we had that night, especially once she had stopped hallucinating. I had an infinite number of questions and would have been happy for her to recount her life in real time, would have been happy to walk on past Whitechapel and Limehouse into Essex and the estuary and on into the sea if she’d wanted to. And she was curious about me, too, something that I’d not experienced for some time. We talked about our parents and our siblings, our work and friends, our schools and childhoods, the implication being that we would need to know this information for the future.

Of course, after nearly a quarter of a century, the questions about our distant pasts have all been posed and we’re left with ‘how was your day?’ and ‘when will you be home?’ and ‘have you put the bins out?’ Our biographies involve each other so intrinsically now that we’re both on nearly every page. We know the answers because we were there, and so curiosity becomes hard to maintain; replaced, I suppose, by nostalgia.

In planning our trip I had initially adopted a no-expense-spared attitude, until I calculated the full extent of this expense, at which point I adopted a comfortable-but-no-frills policy. It was this that brought us to the Hotel Bontemps, which may or may not translate as the Good Times Hotel, in the 7th arrondissement. Room 602 was clearly the result of a wager to determine the smallest space into which a double mattress can fit. Brassy and vulgar, the bed frame must have been assembled inside like a ship in a bottle. On closer examination, it also seemed our room was a repository for all of Europe’s spare pubic hair.

‘All in all, I’d have preferred a chocolate on the pillow,’ said Connie, swatting them away.

‘Perhaps it’s fibres from the carpet,’ I suggested hopefully.

‘It’s everywhere! It’s like the chambermaid’s come in with a sack and strewn it.’

Suddenly weary, I fell backwards onto the bed, and Connie joined me, the covers crackling with static like a Van de Graaf Generator.

‘Why did we choose this place again?’ said Connie.

‘You said it looked quirky on the website. The pictures made you laugh.’

‘Not so funny now. Oh God. Sorry.’

‘No, it’s my fault. I should have looked harder.’

‘Not your fault, Douglas.’

‘I want everything to be right.’

‘It’s fine. We’ll ask them to come and clean again.’

‘What’s French for pubic hair?’

‘I never learnt that. It never came up. Rarely.’

‘I’d say, “Nettoyer tous les cheval intimes, s’il vous plaît.”’

‘Cheveux. Cheval means horse.’ She took my hand. ‘Oh well. We’re not going to be here much.’

‘It’s a place to sleep.’

‘Exactly. A place to sleep.’

I sat upright. ‘Perhaps we should get going.’

‘No, let’s close our eyes. Here.’

She took my hand, rested her head on my shoulder, our legs dangling over the edge as if on a riverbank. ‘Douglas?’

‘Hm?’

‘You know the … conversation.’

‘You want to talk about that now?’

‘No, no, I was going to say, we’re in Paris, it’s a beautiful day, we’re all together as a family. Let’s not talk about it. Let’s wait until after the holiday.’

‘Okay. Fine by me.’

And so the condemned man, presented with his final meal, is reminded that at least the cheesecake is delicious.

We dozed. Fifteen minutes later a text from my son in the adjoining room woke us to say that he intended to ‘do his own thing’ until dinner. We sat up and stretched, brushed our teeth and left. At the reception desk, in French so riddled with errors, guesses and mispronunciation that it was almost a new language, I informed the desk clerk that I was destroyed but there were many strange horses in our salty bedroom, and we walked out into the Paris afternoon.

Connie was still laughing as we crossed from the 7th to the 6th on the sunny side of rue de Grenelle. ‘Where on earth did you learn it?’

‘I’ve sort of made it up myself. Why, what’s wrong with it?’

‘The vocabulary, the accent, the syntax. You always get caught in these est-ce que loops. “It is that it is possible that it is that the taxi to the hotel for to take us?”’

‘Maybe if I’d studied it, like you …’

‘I didn’t study it! I learnt it from French people.’

‘From French boys. From nineteen-year-old French boys.’

‘Exactly. I learnt “not so fast” and “I like you but as a friend”. I learnt “can I have a cigarette?” and “I promise I will write to you”. Ton cœur brisé se réparera rapidement.’

‘Which means …?’

‘Your broken heart will soon mend.’

‘Useful.’

‘Useful when I was twenty-one. Not so much now,’ she said, and the remark lingered a moment as we reached St Germain.

When Connie and I first came here, in the days when we referred to ‘dirty weekends’ without irony, we were dizzy with Paris, drunk on the beauty of the city, drunk on being there together and also, more often than not, literally drunk. Paris was all so … Parisian. I was captivated by the wonderful wrongness of it all — the unfamiliar fonts, the brand names in the supermarket, the dimensions of the bricks and paving stones. Children, really quite small children, speaking fluent French! All that cheese and none of it Cheddar, and nuts in the salad. Look at the chairs in the Jardin du Luxembourg! So much more poised and elegant than the sag and slump of a deckchair. Baguettes! Or ‘French sticks’ as I called them then, to Connie’s amusement. We carried great armfuls of baguettes home on the plane, laughing as we crammed them into the overhead lockers.

But a branch of The Body Shop is much the same worldwide, and sometimes the Boulevard St Germain seems not that far from Oxford Street. Familiarity, globalisation, cheap travel, mere weariness had diluted our sense of foreign-ness. The city was more familiar than we wanted it to be and, as we walked in silence, it seemed some effort would be required to remind her of the fun we used to have, and could have in the future.

‘Pharmacies! What’s with all the pharmacies?’ I said, in my wry, observational tone. ‘How do they all survive? You’d think, from all the pharmacies, they’d be in a constant state of flu. We have phone shops, the French have pharmacies!’

Still she said nothing. Crossing a side street, I noted the gutters were flowing with fast-moving water, sandbags blocking strategic drains. I had always been impressed by this particular innovation in urban hygiene, seemingly unique to Paris. ‘It’s like they’re rinsing out this immense bath,’ I said.

‘Yes, you say that every time we come here. That thing about pharmacies too.’

Did I? I wasn’t aware of having said it before. ‘How many times have we been here now, d’you think?’

‘I don’t know. Five, six.’

‘D’you think you could name them all?’

Connie frowned at the thought. Both of our memories were deteriorating, and in recent years the effort required to recall a name or incident felt almost wearyingly physical, like clearing out an attic. Proper nouns were particularly elusive. Adverbs and adjectives would go next, until we were left with pronouns and imperative verbs. Eat! Walk! Sleep now! Eat! We passed a boulangerie.

‘Look — French sticks!’ I said, and nudged her. Connie looked blank. ‘When we first came to Paris I said, “let’s buy some French sticks” and you laughed and called me provincial. I said that’s what my mother used to call them. My dad thought they were barbaric. “It’s all crust!”’

‘That sounds like your father.’

‘The first time you and I came to Paris, we bought about twenty and carried them back on the plane.’

‘I remember. You told me off for nibbling at the ends.’

‘I’m sure I didn’t “tell you off”.’

‘You said that’s what makes them go stale.’

And we were silent again, turning north towards the Seine.

‘I wonder what Albie’s up to,’ said Connie.

‘He’s asleep, probably.’

‘Well that’s all right. He’s allowed.’

‘Either that or he’s trying to work out why there are no mouldy mugs on the windowsill. He’s probably there now, burning cigarette holes in the curtains. Room service! Bring me three banana skins and an overflowing ashtray …’

‘Douglas — this is precisely what we came here to avoid.’

‘I know. I know.’

And then she slowed and stopped. We were on rue Jacob, standing near a small, somewhat ramshackle hotel.

‘Look. It’s our hotel,’ she said, taking my arm.

‘You remember that.’

‘That trip, I do. Which room was it?’

‘Second floor, on the corner. The yellow curtains. There it is.’

Connie put her head on my shoulder. ‘Perhaps we should have gone back to that hotel instead.’

‘I thought about it. I thought it would have felt a little strange, with Albie there.’

‘No, he’d have liked it. You could have told him the story, he’s old enough now.’

It must have been eighteen years ago.

The anniversary of our daughter’s birth was fast approaching and, all too soon after, that other anniversary. I knew those days would be hard for Connie. Her grief, I had observed, tended to come in waves, and though the intervals between each crest were increasing, another storm was certainly due.

In my rather strained and bludgeoning way, I had been endeavouring to keep Connie buoyant with a kind of manic chirpiness; the perpetual warbling brightness of a morning DJ, endless loving phone calls from work, constant maudlin pawing and hugging and kisses on the top of her head. Tinny sentiment — Christ, no wonder she was blue — alternating with a private, secret wall-punching rage at the fact that I could do nothing to lift her spirits. Or indeed my own, because didn’t I have my own guilt and sadness?

Usually I might have expected her many loyal friends to step in where I had failed, but everywhere we looked babies and toddlers were being brandished, and we both found their proud display almost unbearable. In turn our presence seemed to make the new parents self-conscious and embarrassed. Connie had always been greatly loved, always popular and funny, but her unhappiness — people seemed affronted by it, especially when it quashed their own joy and pride. And so without any discussion we had withdrawn to our little world to sit quietly by ourselves. Walked, worked. Watched television in the evenings. Drank a little too much, perhaps, and for the wrong reason.

Of course, I had considered that another child might be the answer. Connie, I knew, longed to be pregnant again, and though we were fond and affectionate and, in some ways, closer that we’d been before, things were not easy. The stresses and strains of ‘trying for a baby’ have been rehearsed many, many times. In the shadow of what had happened — well, I won’t go into the details except to say that anger, guilt and grief are poor aphrodisiacs and our sex life, once perfectly happy, had taken on a rather dogged and dutiful air. It was not so much fun any more. Nothing was.

Paris, then. Perhaps Paris in the spring might be the answer. Hackneyed, I know, and I wince now to recall the lengths I went to in order to make that trip perfect; the first-class travel, the flowers and champagne ready in the hotel room, the chi-chi and expensive bistro I had reserved — all this in a largely pre-internet world where arranging such excursions involved PhD levels of research and nerve-shredding phone calls in a language that, as we’ve established, I neither spoke nor understood.

But the city was beautiful in early May, absurdly so, and we walked the streets in our best clothes and felt as if we were in a film. We spent the afternoon in the Rodin Museum, returned to the hotel and drank champagne while crammed into the tiny bathtub, then went woozily to dinner at a restaurant that I had previously reconnoitred, French but not cartoonishly so, tasteful, quiet. I don’t remember all that we said, but I do remember what we ate: a chicken with truffles under the skin that tasted like nothing we’d ever eaten before and wine, chosen purely by luck with a blind jabbing motion, that was so delicious as to be almost another drink entirely. Still in that corny film, we held hands across the table and then we went back to our hotel room on rue Jacob and made love.

Afterwards, on the edge of sleep, I was startled to notice that Connie was crying. The combination of sex and tears is a disconcerting one, and I asked, had I done something wrong?

‘There’s nothing to be sorry for,’ she said, and, turning, I could see that she was laughing too. ‘Quite the opposite.’

‘What’s funny?’

‘Douglas, I think we’ve done it. In fact, I know we have.’

‘Done what? What have we done?’

‘I’m pregnant. I know it.’

‘I know it too,’ I said, and we lay there and laughed.

Of course, I should point out that there was no way of ‘knowing’ this. In fact, at that precise moment, it probably wasn’t even true, as the gametes take some time to make contact and form the zygote. Connie’s ‘sense’ of conception was an example of ‘confirmation bias’ — a desire to favour the evidence that confirms what we wish to believe. Many women claim to ‘know’ for sure that they are pregnant after sex. When, as in most cases, it transpires that they’re not, they immediately forget their prior certainty. In the rare cases that they’re right, they see this as confirmation of some supernatural or sixth sense. Hence confirmation bias.

Nevertheless, two weeks later a pregnancy test confirmed what we both already ‘knew’, and thirty-seven weeks after that Albert Samuel Petersen was welcomed into our world and chased our blues away.

— For crying out loud, Albie!

— Why is it a problem?

— But why don’t you want to come with us?

— I want to do my own thing!

— But I’ve booked the table for three people!

— They won’t mind. Go with Mum. Stare into each other’s eyes, whatever.

— What will you do?

— Walk around, take photos. I might go and listen to some music.

— Well, shall we come with you?

— No, Dad, that is not a good idea. It’s the opposite of a good idea.

— But wasn’t the point, wasn’t the whole point of this trip that we spend some time together as a family?

— We spend loads of time together, every day!

— Not in Paris!

— How’s Paris different from home?

— Well, if I have to answer that … Do you have any idea how much this trip is costing?

— Actually, if you remember, I wanted to go to Ibiza.

— You’re not going to Ibiza.

— Okay, tell me how much this is costing, then. How much, tell me?

— It doesn’t matter how much.

— Well it obviously does, seeing as you keep bringing it up. Tell me how much, divide it by three, I can owe it to you.

— I don’t mind how much, I just wanted — we wanted to spend time as a family.

— You can see me tomorrow. Christ, Dad!

— Albie!

— I’ll see you in the morning.

— Fine. All right. See you in the morning. No lie-ins. Eight thirty sharp, or we’ll have to queue.

— Dad, I promise you, at no point during this holiday will I relax.

— Goodnight, Albie.

— Au revoir. A bientôt. And Dad?

— What?

— I’m going to need some money.

The restaurant where we’d eaten the famous chicken was closed for the annual exodus of the Parisians to the gîtes of the Loire, the Luberon, the Midi-Pyrénées. I’ve always had a grudging admiration for the chutzpah of this mass evacuation, a little like being invited to dinner only to find the hosts have gone out and left a tray of sandwiches. Instead we went to a local bistro that was so ‘Parisian’ that it resembled a set from a situation comedy; wine bottles barely visible under cascades of candle wax, canned Piaf, no inch of wall without a poster for Gauloises or Perrier.

‘Pour moi, je voudrais pâté et puis l’onglet et aussi l’épinard. Et ma femme voudrait le salade et le morue, s’il vous plaît.’

‘The beef, and the cod for madame. Certainly, sir.’ The waiter left.

‘When I speak in French, why does everyone reply in English?’

‘I think it’s because they suspect that you’re not a native French speaker.’

‘But how do they know?’

‘It’s a mystery to me,’ she laughed.

‘In the War, if I dropped behind enemy lines, how long before they cottoned on to the fact that I was English?’

‘I suspect before the parachute opened.’

‘Whereas you—’

‘I’d roam the country, undetected, blowing up bridges.’

‘Seducing young mechanics from the Citroën garage.’

She shook her head. ‘You have a distorted impression of my past. It wasn’t like that. Not entirely. And even when it was, it wasn’t much fun. I wasn’t very happy back then.’

‘So when did you become happy?’

‘Douglas,’ she said, taking my hand by the fingertips, ‘don’t fish.’

Thankfully we were now of an age where we no longer felt obliged to maintain a constant stream of conversation. In between courses, Connie read her novel and I consulted the guidebook to confirm the opening times and ticketing arrangements for the Louvre, and suggested some restaurants for the following day’s lunch and supper.

‘We could just walk out and find somewhere,’ she said. ‘We could be spontaneous.’ Connie disapproved of guidebooks, always had. ‘Why would you want to have the same experience as everyone else? Why join the herd?’ And it was true that there was a preponderance of English and American voices amongst the customers around us, a sense from the staff that they were giving us what we wanted and expected.

But the food, when it came, was fine, with that excessive use of butter and salt that makes restaurant cooking so delicious, and we drank a little more wine than we should have, and enough cognac for me to forget, temporarily, my wife’s desire to move on. In fact, we were positively light-hearted by the time we made it back to the tiny room and, with the mild surprise that tended to accompany the act these days, we made love.

Other people’s sex lives are a little like other people’s holidays: you’re glad that they had fun but you weren’t there and don’t necessarily want to see the photos. At our age too much detail leads to a certain amount of mental whistling and staring at shoes, and there’s also the problem of vocabulary. Scientific terms, though clinically accurate, don’t really convey the heady dark intensity, etc., etc. and I’d like to avoid simile or metaphor — valley, orchid, garden, that kind of thing. Certainly I have no intention of using a whole load of swear words. So I won’t go into detail, except to say that it worked out pretty well for all concerned, with that pleasant sense of self-satisfaction, as if we’d discovered that we were still capable of performing a forward roll. Afterwards we lay in a tangle of limbs.

‘A tangle of limbs’. Where did I get that from? Perhaps one of the novels that Connie encourages me to read. They fell asleep in a tangle of limbs. ‘Like a pair of honeymooners,’ said Connie, her face very close, laughing in that way she has, eyes wrinkling, grinning, and I was suddenly hit by a wave of unspeakable sadness.

‘This has always been all right, hasn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘This… side of our relationship.’

‘It has. You know that. Why?’

‘I just realised, one night we’re going to do this for the last time, that’s all.’

‘Oh, Douglas,’ she laughed and pressed her face into the pillow. ‘Well, that’s taken all the fun out of it.’

‘The thought just occurred to me.’

‘Douglas, everyone has that eventually.’

‘I know. But this’ll be a little sooner than anticipated.’

She kissed me, sliding her hand behind my neck in that way she has. ‘You don’t need to worry. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t quite the last time.’

‘Well that’s something, I suppose.’

‘I’ll tell you when it’s the last time. I’ll toll a bell. I’ll wear a shroud and we’ll play a slow funeral march.’ We kissed. ‘I promise, when it’s the last time, you will know.’

The first time we made love was a very different kettle of fish. Again, I won’t get into specifics, but if I had to use a single word to sum it up, the word would be ‘terrific’, and though Connie would undoubtedly find a better word, I like to think she would agree. Which might surprise people, I suppose. I don’t want to blow my own trumpet, but I’ve always been better at that kind of thing than others might expect. I’m keen, for one thing, and at that time I had also been playing a great deal of badminton, so was in pretty good shape. Also, it’s important to remember that Connie was still under the influence of certain artificial stimulants, and I’m prepared to accept that was also a factor. There was Chemistry between us, if you like. I once pointed out to Connie that she wouldn’t have taken me home if she’d been sober. Rather than deny it, she laughed. ‘You’re probably right,’ she said. ‘Another reason to Just Say No.’

We arrived at the unassuming terraced house behind Whitechapel Road just before four in the morning. Apparently this area has since become fashionable, and perhaps Connie and her friends planted that seed, but at the time this was uncharted territory for someone like me. We were a long way from the All Bar Ones and Pizza Expresses of Hammersmith, Putney and Battersea, the somewhat suburban boroughs where many of my friends and colleagues lived.

‘It’s mainly Bangladeshi, with a little bit of old East End. I love it. It’s what the city used to be, before the yuppies moved in.’ She opened the door. Was I meant to come in?

‘Well … I’d better be off, I suppose,’ I said with a shrug, and Connie laughed.

‘It’s nearly four!’

‘I thought I’d walk.’

‘Back to Balham? Don’t be daft, come in.’

‘There’ll be a night bus, I’m sure. If I can get to Trafalgar Square, I can change and get the N77 …’

‘For Christ’s sake, Douglas,’ she laughed. ‘For a PhD, you’re extremely dim.’

‘I didn’t want to assume anything.’

‘To assume,’ she said, ‘makes an ass of u and me.’ Then she leant forward, put her hand behind my neck and kissed me with some force. And that — that was terrific too.

The house was an organised mess. ‘Curated’ is the word Connie would use, with every inch of wall covered with reproductions, postcards, posters for bands and clubs, photographs and sketches. The furniture was what might be called ‘eclectic’: a church pew, school chairs, an immense pale leather G Plan sofa partially buried beneath discarded clothes, magazines, books, newspapers. I saw a violin, a bass guitar, a stuffed fox.

‘I’m having vodka!’ shouted Connie from the kitchen — I didn’t dare to wonder what the kitchen was like — ‘But there’s no ice. Would you like vodka?’

‘Just a small one,’ I replied. She entered with the drinks and I noticed that she had reapplied lipstick somewhere along the way, and that made my heart sing too.

‘As you can see, the cleaners have just been.’

I took my glass. ‘There’s fresh lime in this.’

‘I know! Sophisticated,’ she said, biting the slice. ‘Club Tropicana.’

‘Are any of these paintings yours?’

‘No, I keep those safely locked away.’

‘I’d love to see something. Your work.’

‘Maybe tomorrow.’

Tomorrow?

‘Where’s Fran?’ She had told me all about Fran, her housemate, who, like all housemates through the ages, was ‘completely mad’.

‘She’s at her boyfriend’s.’

‘Oh. Okay.’

‘It’s just you and me.’

‘Okay. And how are you feeling?’

‘A little better. I’m sorry for freaking out like that. I shouldn’t have taken that pill, it was a bad idea. But I appreciate you staying with me. I needed … a calming presence.’

‘And now?’

‘Now, now I feel … perfectly fine.’

We smiled. ‘So,’ I said, ‘am I sleeping in Fran’s bed?’

‘Good God, I bloody hope not.’ She took my hand and we kissed again. She tasted of lime and chewing gum. In fact the gum was still in her mouth, which would have thrown me at any other time.

‘Sorry, that is disgusting,’ she laughed, removing it, ‘us kicking that around in there.’

‘Don’t mind,’ I said.

She stuck the gum on the doorframe. I felt her hand on my back, found my hand on her thigh, on top of the dress then beneath it. I stopped to catch my breath. ‘I thought you said nothing was going to happen?’

‘I changed my mind. You changed it for me.’

‘Was it because of the lemon battery thing?’ I said, and she laughed while we kissed. Oh yes, I was quite the wisecracker.

‘My bedroom’s a disaster area,’ she said, breaking away. ‘Literally and figuratively.’

‘I don’t care,’ I said, and followed her upstairs.

Do I sound uncharacteristically suave in all of this? Do I sound aloof, nonchalant? The truth is that my heart felt like a fist trying to punch its way through my rib-cage — not from the excitement of it all, though it was thrilling, but from a sense that finally, finally something good was about to happen to me. I felt the proximity of change, and I had wanted more than anything for something in my life to change. Is it still possible to feel like that, I wonder? Or does it only happen to us once?

Cave paintings. Clay then bronze statues. Then for about 1,400 years, people painted nothing except bold but rudimentary pictures of either the Virgin Mary and Child or the Crucifixion. Some bright spark realised that things in the distance looked smaller and the pictures of the Virgin Mary and the Crucifixion improved hugely. Suddenly everyone was very good at hands and facial expression and now the statues were in marble. Fat cherubs started appearing, while elsewhere there was a craze for domestic interiors and women standing by windows doing needlework. Dead pheasants and bunches of grapes and lots of detail. Cherubs disappeared and instead there were fanciful, idealised landscapes, then portraits of aristocrats on horseback, then huge canvases of battles and shipwrecks. Then it was back to women lying on sofas or getting out of the bath, murkier this time, less detailed, then a great many wine bottles and apples, then ballet dancers. Paintings developed a certain splodginess — critical term — so that they barely resembled what they were meant to be. Someone signed a urinal, and it all went mad. Neat squares of primary colour were followed by great blocks of emulsion, then soup cans, then someone picked up a video camera, someone else poured concrete, and the whole thing became hopelessly fractured into a kind of confusing, anything-goes free for all.

Such was my understanding of the history of art — its ‘narrative’, I ought to call it — until I met my wife. It is barely more sophisticated now, though I’ve picked up a few things along the way, enough to get by, so that my art appreciation is almost on a par with my French. In the early days of our relationship Connie was quite evangelical and bought me several books, second-hand editions because we were in our happy-but-poor phase. Gombrich’s The Story of Art was one, The Shock of the New another, given specifically to stop me tutting at modern art. Well, in the first flush of love, if someone tells you to read something then you damn well read it, and they’re terrific books, both of them, though I’ve retained almost nothing of their contents. Perhaps I should have given Connie a basic primer in organic chemistry in return, but she never expressed an interest.

Still — and I’d hesitate to confess this to Connie, though I think she knows — I’ve always felt a little at a loss with art, as if a piece of me is missing, or was never there. I can appreciate draughtsmanship and deft choice of colour, I understand the social and historical context, but despite all my best efforts my responses seem to me fundamentally shallow. I don’t quite know what to say or, indeed, feel. In portraiture I look for people that I recognise — ‘Look, it’s Uncle Tony’ — or for the faces of film stars. The Madame Tussaud’s school of art appreciation. In realist works I look for detail; ‘Look at the eyelashes!’ I say, in idiotic admiration at the fineness of the brush. ‘Look at the reflection in his eye!’ In abstract art I look for colour — ‘I love the blue’ — as if the works of Rothko and Mondrian were little more than immense paint charts. I understand the superficial thrill of seeing the object in the flesh, so to speak; the sightseeing approach that lumps together the Grand Canyon, the Taj Mahal and the Sistine Chapel as items to tick off. I understand rarity and uniqueness, the ‘how much?’ school of criticism.

And of course I can see beauty. In my work, I see it all the time: the symmetrical cleavage of a fertilised frog egg, the stained stem cells of a zebrafish embryo or an electron micrograph of Arabidopsis, the thale cress flower; and I can see the same forms and patterns, the same pleasing proportion and symmetry in paintings. But are they the right paintings? Do I have taste? Am I missing something? It’s subjective, of course, and there are no right answers, but in a gallery I always have that feeling that the security guards are waiting to bundle me out of the door.

My wife and son have few such insecurities. Certainly they weren’t on display in the Italian gallery of the Louvre, where Albie and Connie were playing that game of seeing who could stare at a painting the longest. In this case it was a fresco by Botticelli, cracked and faded and a lovely thing, but was there really so much to see? I waited while they drank it all in, the brush strokes, the interplay of light and dark, all the things I’d missed. Eventually there was movement, and we strolled on past endless varieties of crucifixions and nativities, assorted martyrs whipped or pierced with arrows, a nonchalant saint with a sword embedded in his head, a scene of Mary — it’s usually Mary — recoiling from an angel that had left a vapour trail behind him. ‘Braccesco, apparently,’ I said. ‘Jet-powered angel!’ as if it meant something, and we moved on.

We passed a terrific battle scene by someone called Uccello, soldiers clustered together into a black porcupine, the cracks and tears on the canvas adding to its grandeur in a strange kind of way. Then in the grand central corridor my eye was drawn to a portrait of a bearded man whose face, on closer inspection, was composed of apples, mushrooms, grapes, a pumpkin, his nose a fat ripe pear. ‘L’Automne by Arcimboldo. Look, Albie, his face is made up of fruit and vegetables!’

‘Kitsch,’ said Albie, presenting with his eyes the award for Most Banal Remark Ever Made in an Art Gallery. Perhaps this was why those museum audio-guides had become so popular; a reassuring voice in your ear, telling you what to think and feel. Look to your left, take note, please observe; how terrific it would be to carry that voice with you always, out of the museum and throughout all of life.

We moved on. There was a lovely fuzzy da Vinci, as if seen through smeary spectacles, of two women cooing over baby Jesus, but this didn’t seem to interest Connie and Albie, and I couldn’t help but notice that the more famous and familiar a work of art, the less time they spent looking at it. Certainly they had no interest in the Mona Lisa, the Hard Rock Cafe of Renaissance art, hanging regally between signs that warned of pickpockets in an immense, high-ceilinged room while other neglected canvases glared. Even early in the day a crowd had gathered, and were posing with that particular ‘can’t believe it!’ smile that people have when their arm is around a celebrity’s shoulder. ‘Albie! Albie, can you take a photo of me and your mum …’ I said, but they’d already snubbed the Giaconda in favour of a small canvas on the other side of the Mona Lisa’s wall — a murky Titian, in the shadows both literally and figuratively, of two large, naked women giving a recorder concert. They stared and stared and I wondered, what was I meant to take from this? What were they seeing? Once again I was struck by the power of great art to make me feel excluded.

Back in the main corridor, Albie paused before a little portrait by Piero della Francesca, then produced a small, expensive leather-bound sketchbook and began copying it in charcoal, and my heart sank. There may well be a scientific paper to be written on why walking in an art gallery is so much more exhausting than, say, climbing Helvellyn. My guess is that it is something to do with the energy required to hold muscles in tension, combined with the mental exertion of wondering what to say. Whatever the reason, I sank exhausted onto the leather couch and watched Connie instead, the way her skirt stretched across her bottom, the movement of her hands, her neck as she raised her eyes to a canvas. That was art, right there. That was beauty.

She looked at me, smiled and crossed the room, touched her cheek against mine. ‘Tired, old man? That’ll be last night.’

‘Too much art. I wish I knew which ones to look at.’

‘Thumbs up, thumbs down?’

‘I wish they’d just point out the good ones.’

‘Maybe the “good ones” aren’t the same for everyone.’

‘I never know what to say.’

‘You don’t have to say anything. Just respond. Feel.’

She pulled me to my feet and we hiked on through this vast, regal storeroom, past ancient glass, marble and bronze, into the French nineteenth century.

Sexual nostalgia is a vice best indulged in private, but suffice to say that our first weekend together was quite an eye-opener. Those February days were dark and squally and we were reluctant to leave the little house in Whitechapel. Certainly there was no question of my going to the lab on Saturday, and instead we slept, watched films and talked, hurrying out at night to pick up Indian takeaway from a restaurant where Connie was well known and greeted by the entire staff, who showered us with complimentary poppadums and those little tubs of raw onion that no one really wants.

‘And who is this handsome young man?’ asked the head waiter.

‘He’s my hostage,’ said Connie. ‘He keeps trying to make a run for it, but I won’t let him get away.’

‘It’s true,’ I said, then, while she ordered, wrote ‘Help me!’ on a napkin and held it up, and they all laughed, Connie too, and I felt immense warmth and affection, and also a little envy, for the vibrancy of someone else’s life.

Sunday morning had a melancholy air, like the last day of a wonderful holiday, and we stepped out to the corner shop for newspapers and bacon, then sought refuge in her bed. Of course it wasn’t all sex, sex, sex, though largely it was. There was conversation, too, and Connie played me her favourite records, and she slept a great deal, at seemingly random times of day and night, and in those hours I would extricate myself from the mess of blankets, bedspreads and quilts, and explore.

The bedroom was murky and under-lit, the skirting boards concealed behind hundreds of books: volumes of fine art, vintage Rupert annuals, classic novels and reference works. Her clothes hung on a bare rail — no wardrobe — an arrangement that struck me as almost unspeakably cool, and I secretly longed to work my way through the rail, insisting that she try things on. There were portfolios containing her pictures, too, and although she had banned me from examining these, I untied the ribbons and took a look while she slept.

They were portraits, mainly, some stylised with facial features slightly askew, some more realistic, the contours drawn on to the skin with fine ink lines, like a three-dimensional graph. Eyes downcast, faces turned towards the floor. Her work was more accessible than I had expected, conventional even, and though I found them rather gloomy, I liked them very, very much. But then I’d have liked a shopping list as long as it was her shopping list.

Downstairs, the living room was stylishly ramshackle and scrappy, as if a great deal of thought had gone into the huge pile of children’s board games, the Chinese restaurant sign, the ancient filing cabinets and seventies bric-a-brac. Mustard thick-pile carpet gave way to the sticky tiles of the kitchen, dominated by an immense jukebox containing the same mystifying mix of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste: obscure electronic and punk bands muddled in with seventies novelty records, songs by Frank Zappa, Tom Waits and Talking Heads alongside ABBA and AC/DC and the Jackson 5.

Clearly I was out of my depth. Irony, was that the difference? My own cultural tastes were fairly unsophisticated but at least they were sincere, and how was I to tell the good kind of bad taste from the bad kind of bad taste? How did one listen to a piece of music ironically? How did one adjust one’s ears? An ABBA album in my hands would be a source of derision, in Connie’s a sign of cool, and yet it was still the same verse-chorus-verse. Was the vinyl imbued with different qualities, depending on who played it? I had, for instance, been a long-time advocate of the music of Billy Joel, particularly his early- to middle-period albums, and this had been the cause of some mockery from the hipper, edgier biochemists. Bland, they called him, middle-of-the-road and safe. Yet here on Connie’s jukebox was Barry Manilow, a far less sophisticated artist. What did Connie do to ‘Mandy’ that somehow rendered it ‘cool’?

The same applied to décor. The paraphernalia that gave Connie and her flatmate art-school credibility — the medical school skeleton, parts of mannequins, the stuffed animals — would have made me look like a serial killer. I dreaded the day that Connie would see my Balham flat — the flat-pack furniture and bare magnolia walls, the comatose yucca plant, the all-too-prominent television. Yet I also dreaded the idea that she might not make it that far.

Of course, she’d be mortified to be reminded of all this. Ironic bad taste is harder to pull off in a comfortable family home, where a phone that looks like a lobster is unlikely to raise much of a smile. That baton has been passed to Albie, forever on the lookout for interesting road signs or the disembodied heads of dolls.

What they both still share, though, is a fetish for postcards. Albie has plastered his bedroom with them, like very expensive wallpaper, and so we dutifully found ourselves in the Louvre gift shop, both of them compiling great stacks of cartes postales. I tried to join in the game, selecting a card from the racks, The Raft of the Medusa by Géricault, a painting that I’d enjoyed seeing in the flesh, so to speak, because of its fantastic drama. It hung in ‘Large French Paintings’, alongside canvases the size of a family home, depicting battles in the ancient world, cities in flame, the coronation of Napoleon, the retreat from Moscow; the Ridley Scott school of art, full of effects, strong lighting and a cast of thousands. The three of us had stood before the immense Medusa; ‘I wonder how long it took to paint …’ and ‘Look at this man here. He’s in trouble!’ and ‘I wonder how we’d manage in that situation?’ were my observations. I showed the postcard to Albie, the power of the image somewhat diminished at 4x6 inches, and he shrugged and gave me his pile of chosen cards, and Connie’s too, and off I went to pay for them.

In Whitechapel, postcards covered the whole of the kitchen wall, two or three thick at some points, jumbled in with Polaroids of her art-school friends. There were a lot of punk-ish girls posing with cigarettes, but I was also struck by the number of handsome young men on display, usually with Connie or Fran draped adoringly around them, pouting and blowing kisses. Men in army fatigues or paint-stained overalls; men with eccentric facial hair; intimidating, unsmiling men, and one in particular, a shaven-headed thug with very blue eyes, a cigarette dangling from his mouth and a bottle of beer in his hand. An action-movie mercenary staring at the camera while Connie clung to him or kissed the top of his stubbled head or pressed her cheek to his; impossible to ignore the infatuation in her, awful to see it too.

‘I should probably take those down,’ she said, behind me.

‘Is that …?’

‘That’s Angelo. My ex.’ Angelo. Even his name was a blow. How could a Douglas compete with an Angelo? ‘He’s very handsome.’

‘He is. He’s also not important to me any more. Like I said, I’m going to take them down.’ With a little tug she tore the most prominent photo from the wall and placed it in the pocket of her dressing gown. Not in the bin, but in her breast pocket, next to — well, her breast.

There was a moment’s silence. We had made it to Sunday afternoon, a time of the week that always threatens to tip over into an almost unbearable gloom, and I wanted very much to leave on a positive note. ‘Perhaps I’d better go.’

‘The hostage is escaping.’

‘If I make a run for it, will you stop me?’

‘I don’t know. Do you want to be stopped?’

‘I wouldn’t mind.’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Then let’s go back to bed.’

Excruciating, isn’t it? But that was how we spoke to each other once upon a time. It was a new voice for me. Something had changed and I had no doubt, as I finally stumbled from the house on Sunday night, aching and comically dishevelled, heading back to Balham on empty trains, that I was in love with Connie Moore.

This was by no means a cause for celebration. It had sometimes puzzled me why falling in love should be regarded as some wondrous event, accompanied by soaring strings, when it so often ended in humiliation, despair or acts of awful cruelty. Given my past experience, the theme from Jaws would have been more fitting, the violins from Psycho.

Of course I had been involved in two or three ‘serious’ relationships, each lasting slightly longer than the shelf-life of a half-dozen eggs, but while there had been moments of happiness and affection, no hearts had been set aflame as yet. And yes, I had ‘dated’ too, a series of unsuccessful job interviews for a post I didn’t really want, the meetings largely taking place in cinemas because there would be less obligation to speak. Often I was home by a quarter to ten, queasy from a large bag of Maltesers. Love and desire played little part in these dates. Embarrassment and self-consciousness were the key emotions, discomfort increasing exponentially at each encounter until one or other of us cracked and blurted out a standard-form ‘let’s be friends’, after which we’d part, sometimes at a brisk run. As to romantic love, the real thing, I had been stricken once before, but reminiscing about Liza Godwin was like expecting the Titanic’s captain to fondly recall the iceberg.

We met on our first day at university, where she was studying modern languages, and were immediately great friends, inseparable, right up until I committed the error of making a pass at a sherry party that had got out of hand. She responded to my attempted kiss by ducking, quite low, bending from the knees and hurrying away, like someone avoiding the blades of a helicopter. This cooled our friendship and soon I was resorting to notes and letters posted under the door of her room in our halls of residence. Once a mutual pleasure, our proximity became so problematic to Liza that she moved to different accommodation, and I would telephone her there, late at night, not entirely sober, because what could be more charming and devil-may-care, what could melt a woman’s heart like a deranged phone call after midnight?

To her credit, Liza remained sympathetic and understanding of my feelings, right up until the point where several members of the rugby team suggested that I might consider ‘backing off’ for a while. Their intervention removed all ambiguity and, in the battle between love and violence, violence won. I never spoke to Liza Godwin again. Still, I’m afraid I took it all very badly. I hesitate to use the word ‘overdose’. A disregard for the safety guidelines would be more accurate. The aspirins were soluble and the volume of water required to dissolve, I think, five of them, was considerable and meant that I woke up with a desperate need for the bathroom and a perfectly clear head. Looking back, it all seems very uncharacteristic; embarrassing, too, my one moment of adolescent melodrama. What was I hoping to achieve? It was hardly a ‘cry for help’; I would have been embarrassed to make that much noise. ‘A cough for help’, perhaps that was what it was. A clearing of the throat.

So there was good reason to fear a recurrence of a condition whose symptoms were insomnia, dizziness and confusion followed by depression and a broken heart. As the Northern Line train rattled into Balham, the doubts were already crowding in. It wasn’t even as if Connie’s decision had been the product of a rational mind, and the passion she had felt at three a.m. seemed unlikely to survive until the following Thursday, our second date, when we would be sober and self-conscious. Then there was Angelo to contend with, lurking even now in the pocket of her dressing gown nearest to her breast. Nothing could be taken for granted. Winning Connie Moore, keeping Connie Moore would be a challenge that would continue right up until an afternoon in Paris …

… where we slept off our lunch in the Jardin du Luxembourg, a park so elegant and groomed that I always half expect to be asked to remove my shoes. Lying on the grass is only permitted in a cramped strip at its southern end, sunbathers clinging to it as if to the hull of an overturned cruise ship. Our mouths were sticky from red wine and salty duck and we took it in turns to quench our thirsts with briny sparkling water that had long since ceased to sparkle.

‘How do French people do it?’

‘Do what?’ Connie’s head was resting on the pillow of my stomach.

‘Drink wine at lunchtime. I feel like I’ve been anaesthetised.’

‘I don’t know if they do any more. I think that’s just us tourists.’

To our left, four Italian language students were hunched over Chinese takeaway in plastic trays, the syrup and vinegar smell hanging in the hot, still air. To our right, three skinny Russian boys were listening to Slavic hip-hop on the speaker of their mobile phone, running their hands over their shaved heads and intermittently howling like wolves.

‘City of Proust,’ sighed Connie, ‘the city of Truffaut and Piaf.’

‘You are having a nice time, aren’t you?’

‘Very much so.’ She reached behind her, searching for my hand, but the effort was too great and her arm dropped back.

‘You think Albie’s happy?’

‘Posing around Paris at his father’s expense? Of course he is. Remember it’s against his principles to show happiness.’

‘Where does he keep disappearing off to all the time?’

‘Maybe he has friends here.’

‘Which friends? He doesn’t have friends in France.’

‘Friends means something different now to what it meant in our day.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well, he goes online and writes, “hey, I’m in Paris” and someone else says, “I’m in Paris too!” or someone says, “my friend lives in Paris, you should meet up.” And so he does.’

‘Sounds terrifying.’

‘I know. All those new people, all that spontaneity.’

‘It was hard enough having a pen-pal.’

She rolled on to her front, latching on to something new. ‘Douglas, you had a pen-pal?’

‘Günther from Düsseldorf. He came to stay, but it wasn’t a success. Couldn’t eat my mother’s food. He was visibly wasting away, and I was terrified we’d get in trouble for sending back this malnourished child. In the end my father practically tied him to a chair until he’d eaten his liver and onions.’

‘Such golden memories you have. Did you get invited to Düsseldorf?’

‘No, strangely enough!’

‘You should find the address, track him down.’

‘Maybe I will. Did you have a pen-pal?’

‘French girl. Elodie. She wore an unnecessary bra and taught me how to roll cigarettes.’

‘So it was educational.’ Connie turned again, and closed her eyes.

‘It would be nice to bump into him, though,’ I said. ‘Every now and then.’

‘Günther?’

‘Our son.’

‘We’re seeing him tonight. I’ve fixed it. Now let me sleep.’

We dozed to the lulling sound of Russian hip-hop in which, interestingly, only the profanities remained in English, presumably so as to offend the widest possible international audience. In the late afternoon, sitting and yawning, Connie suggested we rent bicycles. Still a little drunk, we rode the municipal machines, unwieldy as wheelbarrows, along whichever street we liked the look of.

‘Where are we going?’

‘We’re deliberately getting lost!’ she shouted. ‘No guidebooks, no maps allowed.’

And despite being too foggy to ride a heavy bicycle on the wrong side of the road, I adopted a devil-may-care, freewheeling attitude, knees clipping wing mirrors, ignoring the waved fists of the taxi-drivers as I smiled, smiled, smiled.

The warm feelings continued into the evening. Connie had spotted an open-air cinema screen in an urban park not far from Place d’Italie and decided that we would go and watch a movie there. A stolen bedcover from the Good Times Hotel was our picnic blanket; there was rosé wine, bread and cheese, the evening was warm and clear. Even Albie seemed pleased to be there.

‘Will it be in French?’ he asked, as we established our base in front of the screen.

‘Albie, don’t worry, you’ll understand. Trust me.’

The film was called Les Quatre Cents Coups, or The 400 Blows, and I recommend it. My own taste in cinema tends towards the thriller or science-fiction/fantasy genres, but despite the lack of actual blows it was very entertaining. The film concerns the misadventures of an intelligent but irresponsible young man called Antoine who ends up in trouble with the law. His amiable father, who is being betrayed by the mother, loses patience with young Antoine, and the boy is sent to a sort of borstal. Escaping, he runs towards the sea — he has never seen the sea before — and then, well, the film just stops with the young man looking into the camera in a challenging, almost accusatory way.

In plot terms it was no Bourne Identity but I found myself enjoying it nonetheless. It was a film about poetry, rebellion, the elation and confusion of youth — not my youth necessarily, other people’s youth — and it had a profound effect on Albie, who was so engaged in the film that he temporarily forgot to drink excessively, and knelt erect with his hands placed on his thighs in a pose that I’d last seen on the gym mats at his primary school.

The sky darkened and the projection came into sharper focus, swallows darting across the screen like specks on the celluloid — or perhaps they were bats, or both — and Albie sat there, identifying violently with the character despite, I think it’s fair to say, having had a pretty stable childhood. Every now and then I turned to see his profile flashing white in the light of the monochrome screen, and I found myself feeling a terrific fondness for him, for both of them, for us, the Petersens, a little pulse of love and affection, a conviction that our marriage, our family, was not so bad, was better than most, and that we would survive.

Anyway, it was all very atmospheric and congenial and all too soon it was over. The final image froze, Antoine Doinel was giving us that look from the screen, and Albie was rubbing his cheeks with the heels of his hands as if cramming the tears back into his eyes.

‘That,’ he declared, ‘was the greatest fucking film I have ever seen in my life.’

‘Albie, is that language really necessary?’ I said.

‘And the photography was amazing!’

‘Yes, I liked the photography too,’ I chipped in hopefully, but Albie and his mother were deep in an embrace, Albie squeezing her as they both laughed, and then he was running off into the summer night and Connie and I, too drunk to risk the bicycles again, held hands and walked home through the 13th, the 5th, the 6th, the 7th, love’s young dream.

Despite my PhD, the intricate algorithm of what to do on a second date had entirely defeated me. Each restaurant seemed either too formal and ostentatious or too casual and downmarket. It was late February, so too cold for Hyde Park, and my usual preferred option, the cinema, wasn’t right either. We wouldn’t be able to talk at the cinema. I wouldn’t be able to see her.

We arranged to meet on the campus quad outside the laboratory where I was working on my post-doc. Since leaving art school, Connie had been employed four days a week at a commercial gallery in St James’s. She had railed against the place — the lousy art, the customers with more money than taste — but it enabled her to pay the rent while she worked on her own paintings in the small east London studio she shared with friends — a collective was the term they used — each of them waiting for their breakthrough. As a career plan, it all sounded hopelessly unstructured to me, but the St James gallery at least meant she could pay her rent and eat. In a stammering phone call, I had instructed her on the bus routes open to her, the precise workings of the 19, the 22, the 38. ‘Douglas, I grew up in London,’ she had told me, ‘I know how to catch the bus. I’ll see you at six thirty.’ By six twenty-two I was beneath the clock tower, staring at the latest Biochemist, eyes sliding across the page without gaining purchase, still staring at six forty, hearing her before I saw her; the tap-tap of high heels was not a common sound on this part of the campus.

In our digital age we now have the electronic means to summon up a face more or less at will. Back then faces were like phone numbers; you tried to memorise the important ones. But my mental snapshots of the previous weekend had begun to fade. Chaste and sober on a squally, gun-metal weekday, would I be disappointed?

Not a chance. The reality, when I saw her, far exceeded my memories: the wonderful face framed by the raised collar of a long black overcoat; some sort of old-fashioned dress beneath it, rust red; carefully made-up; dark eyes, lips to match her dress. The scampi platter at the Rat and Parrot had ceased to be an option.

We kissed a little awkwardly, an earlobe for me, hair for her. ‘You look very glamorous.’

‘This? Oh, I have to wear this for work,’ she said, as if to say this isn’t meant for you; eight seconds gone and already a botched kiss, an imagined slight. The evening stretched before us like a tightrope across some vast canyon. To mark the importance of the occasion, I was wearing my best jacket, raffish chocolate brown corduroy, and a knitted tie, dark plum. Her hand travelled to the knot and adjusted it.

‘Very nice. Good God, you actually have a pen in your top pocket.’

‘As a scientist, I have to. It’s my uniform.’

She smiled. ‘Is this where you work?’

‘Over there, in the lab.’

‘And the fruit flies?’

‘They’re inside. Do you want to come and see?’

‘Am I allowed? I always assumed all labs were top secret.’

‘Only in films.’

She grabbed my arms with both hands. ‘Then I have to see the fruit flies!’

She stared at the clouds of flies, her face close to the muslin, quite bewitched. It was as if I’d taken her to the unicorn enclosure.

‘Why fruit flies? Why not ants or beetles or stick insects?’

Whether her interest was genuine, exaggerated or feigned, I couldn’t say. Perhaps she viewed the insectory as some kind of art installation; I know such things exist. Whatever the reason, ‘why fruit flies?’ was the kind of question that I longed to hear, and I explained about the fast breeding, the low upkeep, the conspicuous phenotypes.

‘Which are …?’

‘Observable characteristics, traits, manifestations of the genotype and the environment. In fruit flies, shorter wings, eye pigmentation, changes in the genital architecture.’

‘“Genital architecture”. That’s the name of my band.’

‘It means that you can see indications of mutation in a very short time. Fruit flies are evolution in action. That’s why we love them.’

‘Evolution in action. And what do you do when you want to examine their genital architecture? Please, please don’t tell me you kill them all?’

‘Usually we knock them unconscious.’

‘With tiny truncheons?’

‘With carbon dioxide. Then after a while they stumble back onto their feet and get on with having sex.’

‘My typical weekend.’

A moment passed.

‘So can I keep one? I want …’ She pressed a finger to the glass ‘… that one there.’

‘They’re not goldfish at the fairground. They’re tools of science.’

‘But look — they really like me!’

‘Perhaps it’s because you smell of old bananas!’ Another moment passed. ‘You don’t smell of old bananas. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said you smelt of old bananas.’

She looked over her shoulder and smiled, and I introduced her to Bruce, our pet fruit fly, to show that it was not only the art-school crowd who knew how to have a good time.

The tour continued. I showed her the cold room, where we remarked on how cold it was, and the 37-degree room.

‘Why 37 degrees?’

‘Because it’s the temperature inside the human body. This is what it feels like to be inside someone.’

‘Sexy,’ said Connie, deadpan, and we moved on. I showed her dry ice, I showed her the centrifuge in action. Through a microscope we looked at cross sections of the tongue of a rat that had been infected with parasitic worms. Oh yes, it was quite a date, and I began to note the amused faces of my colleagues working late as usual, mouths open, eyebrows raised at this lovely woman peering into flasks and test tubes. I gave her some Petri dishes, to mix her paints in.

When she’d seen enough we went, at her suggestion, to a tiny Eastern European restaurant that I had walked past many times without ever imagining I might enter. Faded, dimly lit, it was like stepping into a sepia photograph. A hunched and ancient waiter took our coats and showed us to a booth. At Connie’s suggestion, we drank vodka from small, thick glasses, then ate velvety soup a shade of burgundy, delicious dense dumplings and pancakes and syrupy red wine and sat side by side in the corner of the almost empty room, and soon we were fuzzy-headed and happy and even almost at ease. Rain outside, steam on the windows, an electric-bar fire blazing; it was wonderful.

‘You know what I envy about science? The certainty. You don’t have to worry about taste or fashion, or wait for inspiration or for your luck to change. There’s a … methodology — is that a science word? Anyway, the point is you can just work hard, chisel away and eventually you’ll get it right.’

‘Except it’s not quite as easy as that. Besides, you work hard.’

She shrugged and waved her hand. ‘Well, I used to.’

‘I saw some of your pictures. I thought they were amazing.’

She frowned. ‘When did you see them?’

‘Last weekend. While you were asleep. They were beautiful.’

‘Then they were probably my flatmate’s.’

‘No, they were yours. Hers I didn’t like at all.’

‘Fran is very successful. She sells a lot.’

‘Well, I don’t know why.’

‘She’s very talented, and she’s my friend.’

‘Of course, but I still loved yours. I thought they were very …’ I searched for some artistic term. ‘Beautiful. I mean, I don’t really know much about art—’

‘But you know what you like?’

‘Exactly. Also, you can draw terrific hands.’

She smiled, looked at her own hand, splayed the fingers and then placed it over mine. ‘Let’s not talk about art. Or fruit flies.’

‘Okay.’

‘How about last weekend instead? What happened, I mean.’

‘Fine,’ I said and thought, here it is, the bolt gun. ‘What did you want to say?’

‘I don’t know. Or rather, I thought I did.’

‘Go on.’

She hesitated. ‘You go first.’

I thought a moment. ‘Okay. It’s very simple. I had an amazing time. I loved meeting you. It was fun. I’d like to do it again.’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s all.’ It was by no means all, but I didn’t want to alarm her. ‘You?’

‘I thought … I thought the same. I had a happy time, unusually. You were very sweet. No, that’s wrong, I don’t mean that, I mean you were thoughtful and interesting and I liked sleeping with you too. Very much. It was fun. Your sister was right — you were what I needed.’

I had found myself in this situation often enough to recognise the imminent arrival of a ‘but’ …

‘But I don’t have a very good track record with relationships. I don’t associate them with happiness, certainly not the last one.’

‘Angelo?’

‘Exactly. Angelo. He wasn’t very nice to me and he’s made me … I suppose, I want to be … cautious. I want to proceed with caution.’

‘But you want to proceed?’

‘With caution.’

‘With caution. Which means?’

She considered for a moment, biting her lip, then leant forward. ‘Which means that if we got the bill right now and went outside, if we found a taxi and went home to your bed, then I’d be very happy.’

Then she kissed me.

…

…

…

…

…

‘Waiter!’

The party started at a time you might reasonably expect most parties to stop, the usual treble and bass boom-tsk of electronic music soon replaced by a low-frequency oom-pah oom-pah with a distinctive comb-and-paper buzz.

‘Is that … an accordion?’

‘Uh-huh,’ mumbled Connie.

‘Albie doesn’t play the accordion.’

‘Then he has an accordionist in his room.’

‘Oh, good grief.’

Now the asthmatic chug resolved into four familiar stabbing minor chords, played in rotation, accompanied by much foot-stomping and thigh-slapping percussion, provided by my son.

‘What is this song? I know this song.’

‘I think it’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.’

‘It’s what?’

‘Listen!’

And sure enough, it was.

When — if — I thought of accordionists, the word suggested an olive-skinned male wearing a Breton top. But here, Nirvana’s howl to youthful alienation was bellowed by a primal female voice, a kind of soulful town crier, with Albie now accompanying her on percussive guitar, his chord changes always just a little way behind.

‘I think they call it jamming,’ I said.

‘As in jamming your fingers in your ears,’ said Connie.

Resigning myself to a long night, I turned on the light and reached for my book, a history of World War II, while Connie sandwiched her head between two foam pillows and assumed a horizontal brace position. The accordion, like the bagpipes, is part of the select group of instruments that people are paid to stop playing, but for the next forty-five minutes my son’s mysterious guest pushed at the musical limits of the squeezebox, regaling much of the fifth, sixth and seventh floors of the Good Times Hotel with, amongst others, a boisterous ‘Satisfaction’, a sprightly ‘Losing My Religion’ and a version of ‘Purple Rain’ so long and repetitive that it seemed to stretch the very fabric of time. ‘We are enjoying the concert, Albie,’ I texted, ‘but it’s a little late’. I pressed send and waited for the message to be received.

I heard the bleep of a text arriving on the other side of the wall. A pause, and then ‘Moondance’ sung by emphysemic wasps.

‘Perhaps he didn’t read my text.’

‘Hm.’

‘Perhaps I should call reception and complain. What’s French for “remove the accordionist from room 603”?’

‘Hm.’

‘Seems a bit disloyal, though, complaining about my own son.’

‘Hasn’t stopped you in the past.’

‘Or shall I just knock on the—?’

‘Douglas, I don’t care what you do as long as you stop talking!’

‘Hey! I’m not the one with the accordion!’

‘Sometimes I think an accordion would be preferable.’

‘What does that mean?!’

‘It doesn’t mean— It’s two thirty, just …’

And then the noise stopped.

‘Thank you, God!’ said Connie. ‘Now, let’s go to sleep.’

But the irritation lingered and we lay beneath its cloud, contemplating other nights we had spent like this, dwelling on a moment’s unkindness, impatience or thoughtlessness. I think our marriage has run its course. I think I want to leave you.

And then a jolt, like a bass drum behind our heads, followed by the particular, insistent thump-thump-thump of a headboard banging against a wall.

‘They’re jamming,’ I said.

‘Oh, Albie.’ Connie laughed, her forearm across her eyes. ‘That’s just perfect.’

We met the beguiling musician the next morning in the hotel’s gloomy basement breakfast room. Uncharacteristically for Albie, they were up before us, though it was hard to see the girl’s face at first, clamped as it was to Albie with the tenacity of a lamprey eel. I cleared my throat, and they peeled apart.

‘Hello! You must be Douglas and Connie! Christ, look at you, Connie, you’re gorgeous! No wonder your son is so hot, you’re a be-auty.’ Her voice was gravelly, Antipodean. She took my hand. ‘And you’re a very beautiful man too, Dougie! Ha! We were just having some breakfast, the breakfast here is a-mazing. And it’s all free!’

‘Well, not exactly free …’

‘Here — let me move Steve out of the way.’ Steve, it seemed, was the name of her accordion. Steve had his very own chair, where he sat toothily grinning. ‘Come on, Steve, let poor Mr Petersen sit down, he looks wasted.’

‘We enjoyed your concert last night.’

‘Aw, thank you!’ She smiled, then used her fingers to arrange her features into a clown’s sad face. ‘Or did you not really mean that?’

‘You play very well,’ said Connie. ‘We’d have enjoyed it more before midnight.’

‘Oh no! I’m so sorry. No wonder you look fucked, Mr Petersen. You’ll have to come and see me play at a reasonable hour.’

‘You’re actually playing a concert?’ said Connie, with a hint of incredulity.

‘Well, concert’s a big word. Only outside the Pompidou.’

‘You’re a busker?’

‘I prefer “street performer”, but yes!’

I don’t think my face fell, I tried not to let it, but it’s true that I was wary of any activity prefixed with the word ‘street’. Street art, street food, street theatre, in all cases ‘street’ preceding something better carried on indoors.

‘She does an amazing “Purple Rain”,’ mumbled Albie, who was slumped diagonally across the banquette like the victim of a vampire.

‘Oh we know, Albie, we know,’ said Connie, regarding the accordionist through narrowed eyes. The girl, meanwhile, was scooping the contents of many tiny jars of jam into a croissant. ‘I hate these little jars, don’t you? So shitty for the environment. And so frustrating!’ she said before cramming her entire tongue into one.

‘I’m sorry, we didn’t quite get your—’

‘Cat. As in the hat!’ She patted the black velour bowler that she wore at the back of her head.

‘And are you Australian, Cat?’

Albie tutted. ‘She’s from New Zealand!’

‘Same thing!’ She gave a loud bark of a laugh. ‘You guys better get some breakfast in you, before I eat it all. Race you!’

Over the years, at conferences and seminars, I’ve had some experience of the breakfast buffet system and have noticed that when confronted with a table of ostensibly ‘free’ food, some people behave with moderation and some as if they’ve never tasted bacon before. Cat was of the group that believes that ‘eat as much as you like’ is a gauntlet thrown down. She stood at the juice dispenser, pouring a glass then downing it, pouring a glass then downing it; juice-hanging, I call it and I wondered, why not just open the tap and lie beneath it? I smiled at the waiter who shook his head slowly in return, and it occurred to me that if management made the connection between last night’s accordion workout and the woman now piling a great mound of strawberries and grapefruit segments into her bowl, then we might be in very real trouble.

We shuffled along the counter. ‘So what brings you to the Eternal City, Cat?’

‘Paris isn’t the Eternal City,’ said Connie. ‘The Eternal City is Rome.’

‘And it’s not eternal,’ said Albie, ‘it just feels like it.’

Cat laughed and wiped juice from her mouth. ‘I don’t live here, I’m just passing through. I’ve been bumming round Europe ever since college, living here, living there. Today it’s Paris, tomorrow Prague, Palermo, Amsterdam — who knows!’

‘Yes, we’re the same,’ I said.

‘Except we have a laminated itinerary,’ said Connie, examining the empty grapefruit container.

‘It’s not laminated. What I mean is, we’re going to Amsterdam tomorrow.’

‘Lucky you! I love the ’Dam, though I always end up doing something I regret, if you know what I mean. Party town!’ She was filling a second plate now, balancing it on her forearm like a pro and focusing on proteins and carbohydrates. Lifting the visor on the bacon tray, she inhaled the meaty vapour with eyes closed. ‘I’m a strict vegetarian with the exception of cured meats,’ she said, loading dripping coils of the stuff onto a plate already overflowing with cheese, smoked salmon, brioche, croissants …

‘That’s certainly quite a breakfast you’ve got there!’ I said, smile fixed.

‘I know! Albie and me’ve worked up quite an appetite,’ and she gave a low, dirty laugh and snapped at his buttock with the bacon tongs while Albie grinned sheepishly at his plate. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘most of this is for later on.’

That, to my mind, was crossing a line. The buffet was not a picnic-making facility nor a come-one-come-all larder. I had resolved to be nice to Albie’s new friends and their eccentricities, but this was theft, plain and simple, and when a banana followed a jar of honey into the capacious pockets of her velvet shorts I felt that I could restrain myself no more.

‘Don’t you think maybe you should put some of that back, Cat?’ I said, light-heartedly.

‘Beg pardon?’

‘The fruit, the jars of honey. You only need one, two at the most.’

‘Dad!’ said Albie. ‘I can’t believe you’d say that!’

‘Well, I just think it’s a bit excessive …’

‘Awk-ward!’ trilled Cat in an operatic falsetto.

‘She’s not eating it all now.’

‘Which is exactly my point, Albie.’

‘No, fair enough, fair point — here, here …’ And Cat began tossing jars and fruit and croissants back on to the table willy-nilly.

‘No, no, take what you’ve got, I just think maybe don’t put stuff in your pockets—’

‘See what I mean, Cat?’ said Albie, gesturing towards me with an open hand.

‘Albie …’

‘I told you, this is what he’s like!’

‘Albie! Enough. Sit.’ This was Connie, with her sternest face. Albie knew well enough not to argue, and we returned to the table, took our seats and listened to Cat …

… how she loved New Zealand, how beautiful it was but how she’d grown up in a boring suburb of Auckland, so dull and middle-class, mile upon mile of identical houses. Nothing ever happened there — or rather, things did happen there, terrible things, but no one ever talked about them, they just closed their eyes and carried on with their dull, conventional, boring lives and waited for death.

‘Sounds like where we live,’ said Albie.

Connie sighed. ‘I challenge you, Albie, to name one terrible thing that’s happened to you in your whole life. Just one. Cat, poor Albie here is scarred because we didn’t let him have Coco Pops back in 2004.’

‘You don’t know everything about me, Mum!’

‘Well, I do as a matter of fact.’

‘No, you don’t!’ Albie protested, looking betrayed. ‘And since when were you this great defender of home, Mum? You said you hated it too.’

Had she? Connie, moving on, said, ‘Cat, my son is posturing for your benefit. Carry on. You were saying.’

Cat was ramming salami inside a baguette with a dirty thumb. ‘Anyway, my dad, who’s a complete and utter bastard, insisted that I study engineering at the uni, which was a complete waste of time …’

Albie was grinning at me but I declined to meet his eye and poured more coffee. ‘Well, not a complete waste of time,’ I said.

‘It is if you hate it. I wanted to experience things, see things.’

‘So what did you study instead?’

‘Ventriloquism.’ She held a marmalade jar to her ear and a small voice said, help me! help me! ‘That got me into puppetry and improv and I joined this street theatre group, operating these giant marionettes, and we just hit the road, travelled all over Europe, had a wild time until they all wimped out and went home to their little jobs and little houses and dull, predictable little lives. So I carried on, travelling solo. Love it! Haven’t seen my parents now for four years.’

‘Oh Cat, that’s terrible,’ said Connie.

‘It’s not terrible! It’s been amazing for me. No roots, no rent, meeting the most incredible people. I can live wherever I want now. Except Portugal. I’m not allowed into Portugal, for reasons which I am not at liberty to divulge …’

‘But what about your parents?’

‘I send my mum postcards. I phone her twice a year, Christmas and birthday. She knows I’m fine.’

‘Hers or yours?’ said Connie.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You said you phone her Christmas and birthday. D’you phone her on her birthday or your birthday?’

The question seemed to puzzle Cat. ‘My birthday, of course,’ she said, and Connie nodded.

‘And your father?’ I asked.

‘My father can go screw himself,’ she said proudly, popping the bread into her mouth, and I noted how Albie could barely contain his admiration.

‘That seems a little harsh.’

‘Not if you met him. If you met him, it’s a grrr-eat review!’ She laughed her laugh again, the kind you see in films to denote madness and the waiter’s stare got a little harder. Despite my best efforts, I was finding it difficult to warm to Cat. She was somewhat older than Albie, which made me feel absurdly defensive of him, and her skin had a chafed look, as if it had been scoured with some sort of abrasive — my son’s face, presumably. There were panda smudges around her eyes and a red smear around her mouth, again attributable to my son, and high arched eyebrows that seemed drawn on. What did she remind me of? When I first arrived at university I attended a fancy-dress screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show with the aforementioned Liza Godwin, which remains one of the most wearying evenings of enforced wackiness that I have ever writhed through in my life. The things I did for love! I am not a religious man but I vividly remember sitting in my seat wearing a pair of Liza Godwin’s torn tights, with a lipsticked rictus grin on my face, praying, please, God, if you do exist, let me not do ‘The Time Warp’ again.

And yes, there was something of that Rocky Horror quality to Cat, and perhaps this appealed to our son, his hand on the small of her back, her fingers exploring the torn knees of his jeans. It was all rather disturbing, and I must confess a certain relief when she said:

‘Okay, you good people, it was a pleasure to encounter you. You’ve got a fine young man here!’ She slapped his thigh for emphasis.

‘Yes, we’re aware of that,’ said Connie.

‘Enjoy the sights! Young man, escort me to the door — I don’t want the buffet police to wrestle me to the floor and strip-search me!’ There was a guffaw and the scrape of a chair as she hoisted the accordion called Steve from his seat and squashed her bowler hat down on to her curls. A high trill from Steve, and they were gone.

We sat in the kind of silence that follows a collision, until Connie said, ‘Never trust a woman in a bowler hat.’

We laughed, enjoying the sweet marital pleasure of shared dislike. ‘“Mum, Dad, I’d like you to meet the woman I intend to marry.”’

‘Douglas, don’t even joke about it.’

‘Well I liked her.’

‘Is that why you told her to put her breakfast back?’ giggled Connie.

‘Was that too much, d’you think?’

‘For once, Douglas, I say no.’

‘So what do you think he sees in her? I think it’s the laugh.’

‘I don’t think it’s just the laugh. I think sex might have something to do with it too. Oh, Albie,’ she sighed, and a look of awful sadness came across her face. ‘Douglas,’ she said, her head on my shoulder, ‘our boy’s all grown-up now.’

I had hoped the three of us would spend our last day in Paris together, but Connie felt tired and insisted, rather snappily, that she’d like just one minute to herself if that was all right, just one single minute if that wasn’t against the law. With just each other for company, my son and I had a tendency to panic, but we steeled ourselves and set out for the Musée d’Orsay.

The weather had turned, the city humid beneath low, dense cloud. ‘Storm later,’ I said.

Nothing from Albie.

‘We liked Cat,’ I said.

‘Dad, you don’t have to pretend, because I don’t care.’

‘We did, we did! We thought she was very interesting. Challenging.’ A short distance, silence, then:

‘D’you think you’ll stay in touch?’

Albie wrinkled his nose. We had not spent a great deal of time discussing affairs of the heart, my son and I. There were friends — Connie’s friends, mainly — who had conversations of startling frankness with their children, constantly hunkering down on baggy sofas to confer on relationships, sex, drugs, emotional and mental health, taking every available opportunity to parade around naked, because isn’t that what teenage kids really want? Evidence of time’s decay brandished at eye-level? While I found this approach smug and contrived, I also accepted that there was room for improvement on my part, a certain reticence that I should do my best to overcome. The nearest my own father came to ‘opening up’ about relationships was a selection of National Health leaflets on sexually transmitted diseases that he left fanned out on my pillow, a parting gift before I left for university and all the information I would ever need on the workings of the human heart. My mother changed the television channel every time two people kissed. Both had passed through the permissive 1960s untouched. It might as well have been the 1860s. How my sister and I ever came to be, I’ve frankly no idea.

But wasn’t emotional openness something I’d intended to work on? Perhaps this was an opportunity to chat about the turmoil of these teenage years, and in turn I could confide some of the ups and downs of married life. With this in mind, I took a short detour to rue Jacob, the hotel where Connie and I had stayed eighteen years ago, and I paused and held Albie’s arm.

‘You see this hotel?’

‘Yes.’

‘That window, up there? Corner of the second floor, the one with the yellow curtains?’

‘What about it?’

I placed my hand on his shoulder. ‘That, Albert Samuel Petersen, is the bedroom where you were conceived!’

Perhaps it was too much too soon. I’d hoped that there might be something rather poetic about it, seeing the exact place where sperm and egg had fused and he had blinked into existence. Part of me thought that he might find it amusing, imagining his parents as their younger selves, so different from our current, less carefree incarnations. I’d hoped that he might even be touched by my nostalgia for his creation in an act of love that, in my memory at least, had been freighted with emotion and care.

Perhaps I hadn’t thought it through.

‘What?’

‘Right there. In that room. That is where you came to be.’

His face shrivelled into a mask of disgust. ‘Now there’s an image I will never get out of my head.’

‘Well, how else do you think it happened, Albie?’

‘I know it happened, I just don’t want to be forced to think about it!’

‘I thought you’d like to know. I thought that you’d be …’

He began to walk on. ‘Why are you being like this?’

‘Like what?’

‘Saying all this stuff. It’s very weird, Dad.’

‘It’s not weird, it’s a friendly conversation.’

‘We’re not friends. You’re my father.’

‘That doesn’t mean … adults, then. We’re both adults now, I thought we could talk like adults too.’

‘Yeah, well thanks for oversharing, Dad.’

We walked on and I considered the concept of ‘oversharing’, and what undersharing might be, and whether it was ever possible to settle on something in between.

Soon we were at the Musée d’Orsay, standing in the extraordinary concourse of the old converted train station. ‘Look at that incredible clock!’ I said, in my awed voice. Albie, too cool for awe, walked on and began to take in the paintings. I like the Impressionists, which I know is not a particularly fashionable line to take, but Albie was making a great show of his indifference, as if it were me who’d painted the poplar trees, the young girls seated at the piano.

Then suddenly we found something more to his taste: L’Origine du Monde by Gustave Courbet. The style and techniques were the same that you might see applied to ballet dancers or a bowl of fruit, but here the subject was the splayed legs of a woman, her face beyond the frame. It was a disconcerting picture, explicit and unflinching, and I did not love it. Generally speaking I dislike being shocked. Not because I’m a prude, but because it all seems so juvenile and easily achieved. ‘Where do they get their ideas?’ I said, glancing at it and moving on.

But Albie clearly wasn’t going to miss an opportunity to make me uncomfortable, and he stopped and stared and stared. Determined not to seem priggish, I doubled back and returned to his side.

‘Now that is oversharing!’ I said.

Nothing.

‘It’s quite confrontational, isn’t it?’ I said. Albie sniffed and tilted his head, as if that made a difference. ‘Amazing to think it was painted in 1866.’

‘Why? You think naked women were different back then?’ He was walking up and peering at the canvas now, so close that I thought the security guard might intervene.

‘No, I just mean that we tend to think of the past as inherently conservative. It’s interesting to note that outrage is not a late-twentieth-century invention.’ This was good, I thought. It sounded like the kind of thing Connie might say, but Albie only scowled.

‘I don’t think it’s outrageous. I think it’s beautiful.’

‘Me too,’ I said, though without conviction. ‘Great picture. Terrific.’ I latched on to the caption once again. ‘The Origins of the World.’ When I’m nervous I tend to read things out — captions, signage, often more than once. ‘The Origins of the World. Witty title,’ and I expelled air sharply through my nose to show just how damned hysterical I found it. ‘I wonder what the model thought of it. I wonder if she came round to look at the canvas and said, “Gustave, it’s like looking in a mirror!”’

But Albie had already produced his sketchbook from his bag, because it wasn’t enough to stare at this anonymous woman’s private parts, clearly he was going to have to sketch them, too.

‘Meet you in the gift shop,’ I said, and left him there, madly cross-hatching and shading in.

Then, on our final night in Paris we all went to a Vietnamese restaurant, but I had to leave early because I was injured by my soup.

I have always had a poor record with heavily spiced food, believing, not unreasonably, that if a substance burns my fingers I shouldn’t put it in my stomach. Of course Albie loves fiery food, thinking that it reflects his tempestuous personality or politics or something. As for Connie, her mood had improved a little since the great breakfast-buffet farrago, but she was wearying of bistros. ‘I swear, if I see another duck leg, I shall scream.’ Albie suggested Vietnamese, and wasn’t I meant to be trying new things and leaving my so-called ‘comfort zone’? So at Albie’s suggestion we set off in our wobbly convoy of bicycles to a Vietnamese restaurant in Montparnasse.

‘“Authentiquement épicé”!’ Albie read approvingly in the menu. ‘Which basically means “bloody hot”!’

I ordered some sort of beef soup, specifying ‘pas trop chaud, s’il vous plaît’, but the bowl, when it arrived, was so heavily dosed with small vicious red chillis that I wondered if perhaps it was some sort of practical joke. Perhaps Albie had put them up to it, perhaps the chefs’ faces were pressed to the little round window, chuckling away. Either way I was having to drink a great deal of beer to cool my palate.

‘Too much for you, Dad?’ he grinned.

‘Just a little.’ I ordered one more beer.

‘You see?’ grinned Connie. ‘Anything that isn’t boiled meat in gravy …’

‘That’s not true, Connie, you know it’s not,’ I said, a little snappily perhaps. ‘As a matter of fact, it’s delicious.’

And then it wasn’t delicious anymore. I had been attempting to avoid the chillies by sieving the soup through my teeth, but something must have slipped through, because my mouth was suddenly ablaze. I drained the beer and, in slamming the glass down, flipped the large ceramic spoon from the broth, catapulting a ladleful into my right eye. So heavily dosed with lime juice and chilli was this broth that I was momentarily blinded, scrabbling around the table for a napkin, grabbing one that had been discarded by Albie and was smeared with the chilli sauce from his spare ribs, which I then proceeded to rub into the affected eye and, somehow, the unaffected eye too. If he hadn’t been laughing no doubt Albie would have warned me, but tears were pouring down my face now, and Albie and Connie’s amusement had turned to embarrassment and concern as I stumbled blindly to the bathroom, bumping into several diners, stumbling through a beaded curtain into first the ladies’ — desolé! desolé! — then the gentlemen’s toilets and finally locating the world’s smallest and most impractical handbasin, into which I attempted to squeeze my head, scraping my forehead with the tap and pouring first scalding hot, then cold water into my eye. I stood there, spine twisted, with the water jetting uncomfortably onto my eyeball, then into my mouth which was now mercifully numb, with a chemical throb that recalled the removal of an impacted molar some years ago.

I stayed like this for some time.

Eventually I stood and examined my reflection, my shirt soaked and clinging to my chest, my forehead bleeding, my tongue swollen and lips apparently rouged, my right eye sealed tight. I peeled the lid back, the sclera heavily veined and the colour of tomato soup. Peering at the ceiling, I noted that some sort of scratch, like a hair on a camera lens, had appeared at the edge of my vision, dancing around and out of sight as I attempted to examine it further. A scar. This, I thought, is why we have comfort zones, because they are comfortable. What can possibly be gained by leaving them?

As I returned to the table, Albie and Connie regarded me with the solemn faces that precede bouts of hilarity. When the laughter broke, I attempted to join in, because I wanted to be fun rather than a figure of it. I had prepared a line to this end: ‘You see? This is why we wear protective goggles in the lab,’ I said, though the joke didn’t really land.

‘You look as if you’ve been tied to a chair and beaten,’ said Connie.

‘I’m fine. Fine!’ I said, smiling, smiling as I pushed the bowl away. ‘Here, you have it.’

‘I think the food here is amazing.’

‘Well, I’m pleased,’ I said, ‘but personally I prefer food that doesn’t actually injure you.’

Connie sighed. ‘It hasn’t injured you, Douglas.’

‘It has! It has actually scarred my cornea. From now on every time I look at a plain white surface I’ll see that soup.’ This set them off again, and suddenly I’d had enough. Wasn’t I trying? Wasn’t I doing my best, making an effort? I drained a beer, my third or fourth I think, scraping my chair as I stood to go.

‘Actually, I’m going to walk back to the hotel.’

‘Douglas,’ said Connie, her hand on my arm, ‘don’t be like that.’

‘No, you’ll be far happier by yourselves. Here …’ I was tugging money from my wallet now, belligerently tossing notes on to the table in a way that I’d seen in films. ‘That ought to cover it. Amsterdam train’s at nine fifteen, so early start. Please don’t be late.’

‘Douglas, sit down, wait for us, please—’

‘I need some fresh air. Goodnight. Goodnight. I’ll find my own way home.’

I got lost, of course. The sinister black slab of the Montparnasse Tower was behind, then in front of me, to my left and right, hopping around, and now the back streets had opened out into an avenue, wide and dull and unpopulated, an elegant dual carriageway that would lead me eventually to the Périphérique. I was walking towards a motorway, soaked through with beer, soup, water and sweat, drunk and blinded in one eye, neither loveable nor full of love, full of nothing but irritation and frustration and self-pity, and lost, quite lost, in this idiotic city. City of Light. City of Bloody, Bloody Light.

I had not dared to dwell on the idea, but when we’d set out I had imagined that this trip might in some way repair our relationship, perhaps even lead to a change of heart on Connie’s part. I think I want to leave you, she’d said, and didn’t ‘think’ imply some doubt, the possibility of persuasion? Perhaps the newness of our surroundings would recall when we were new to each other. But it was absurd to think a city could make a difference, absurd to think oil paintings and marble statues and stained glass could make that change. Place had nothing to do with it.

Now I saw the great gilded dome of Les Invalides against the purple sky, the searchlights on the Eiffel Tower swooping as if hunting down a fugitive. The air had taken on that charged quality that precedes a summer storm and I realised I was still some distance from the hotel. They’d be in bed now, quite happily asleep, my family. The family I was about to lose, if I’d not lost them already, and I trudged on down that long, dull deserted avenue, wondering why it was inevitable that my plans should fail.

I turned right at the Musée Rodin. Through a gap in the wall, a sculpture of five men stood in a huddle, wailing and moaning in various attitudes of despair, and this seemed like an apt spot to rest. I settled on the kerb. My phone was ringing — Connie, of course. I considered not answering but I’ve never been able to ignore Connie’s call.

‘Hello.’

‘Where are you, Douglas?’

‘I seem to be outside the Rodin Museum.’

‘What on earth are you doing there?’

‘Seeing an exhibition.’

‘It’s one in the morning.’

‘I got a little lost, that’s all.’

‘I expected you to be waiting at the hotel.’

‘I’ll be back soon. Go to sleep.’

‘I can’t sleep without you here.’

‘Nor with me, it would seem.’

‘No. No, that’s right. It’s … a dilemma.’

A moment passed.

‘I got a little … het up. I apologise,’ I said.

‘No, I do. I know you and Albie like to wind each other up, but I shouldn’t join in.’

‘Let’s talk no more about it. Amsterdam tomorrow.’

‘Fresh start.’

‘Exactly. Fresh start.’

‘Well. Hurry back. There’s going to be a storm.’

‘I won’t be long. Try to get some—’

‘We do love you, you know. We don’t always show it, I’m aware of that. But we do.’

I took a deep breath. ‘Well. As I said, I’ll be back soon.’

‘Great. Hurry back.’

‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’

I sat for a moment, then hauled myself to my feet and quickened my pace, determined to beat the imminent rain. Amsterdam tomorrow. Perhaps Amsterdam would be different. Perhaps everything would go right in Amsterdam.

part three THE LOW COUNTRIES

But oh, the joy of it, the joy and bliss and thrill of each consecutive day, so unlike anything I had experienced before. It was dizzying, really, to be in love at last. Because this was the first time, I knew that now. Everything else had been a misdiagnosis — infatuation, obsession perhaps, but an entirely different condition to this. This was bliss; this was transformative.

The transformation began even before our second date. I had for some time been living the wrong sort of life and my drab flat in Balham was a reflection of this. The bare magnolia walls, the flat-pack furniture, the dusty paper lightshades and 100-watt bulbs. A woman as cool as Connie Moore would not stand for this. It would all have to go, to be replaced by … well, I wasn’t entirely sure, but I had twenty-four hours to decide. And so the night before our date I left the lab early, took the bus to Trafalgar Square and went to the National Gallery gift shop to bulk-buy art.

I bought postcards of works by Titian and Van Gogh, Monet and Rembrandt, posters of Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières and da Vinci’s Virgin and Child. I bought reproductions of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and, by way of contrast, Joseph Wright of Derby’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, a rather ghoulish Enlightenment painting of a man suffocating a cockatoo, but one that neatly fused our interests in art and science. Sprinting up Regent Street to the department stores, I bought clip-frames and cushions — my very first cushions — and little rugs and throws (was that a term? Throws?) and decent wine glasses, new underwear and socks and, in a further fit of optimism, new bedding: plain and stylish rather than the graph-paper design my mother had bought me in the mid-eighties. In toiletries, I bought razors, lotions and balms. I bought scruffing lotion without knowing what scruffing was, I bought floss and mouthwash, soaps and gels that smelt of cinnamon, sandalwood, cedar and pine, a whole arboretum of scents. I spent a fortune and then took it all home in a cab — a black cab! — because there wasn’t room on the bus for the brand new me.

Back in Balham I spent the evening distributing this new me around the flat, contriving as far as possible to give the impression that this was how I had always lived. I scattered books and threw the throws. I arranged fresh fruit in my new fruit bowl, discarded the sad yucca and the desiccated succulents and replaced them with flowers — fresh cut flowers! Tulips, I think — and contrived a vase out of a 500 ml Pyrex conical flask that I had liberated from the laboratory … cheap and amusing, too! Now if — if — she ever set foot in my flat, she would mistake me for someone else entirely; a bachelor of quiet good taste and simple needs, self-contained and self-assured, a man of the world who owned Van Gogh prints and cushions and smelt of trees. In cinema comedies there’s sometimes a scene where the central character has to frantically assemble a disguise, and this evening had that air about it. If the wig was slightly askew, the moustache peeling away from the lip, the price tag still on the fruit bowl, if the disguise was ill-fitting and held in place by Velcro, well, I’d fix that when I could.

And sure enough, the inspection came the morning after the successful second date. Making tea, I watched through the door as Connie pulled on an old T-shirt — oh, God, the sight of that — took a fresh apple from the bowl, examined it and padded around the flat, the apple gripped between her teeth as she pulled out album sleeves, peered at the spines of books and cassettes and videotapes, examined the postcards tacked oh-so-casually to the new cork noticeboard, the framed prints on the wall.

‘There’s a picture here of a man suffocating a cockatoo.’

‘Joseph Wright of Derby!’ I shouted, as if this were a quiz. ‘An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump.’

‘And you really love Van Gogh!’ she shouted through to the kitchen.

Did I? Should I? Was that a good thing? Had I overdone the Van Gogh? I thought everyone liked Van Gogh, but did that make Van Gogh a bad thing? I pressed the moustache back on to my lip.

‘I love him,’ I called back. ‘Don’t you?’

‘I do. Not this one, though.’ Then, Connie, I will take it down. ‘And Billy Joel, too. There’s a lot of Billy Joel.’

‘The early albums are terrific!’ I yelped, but by the time I carried tea through — loose-leaf Earl Grey in simple white china, milk in a new jug — she had disappeared. Perhaps Sunflowers had caused her to leap out of the window. I heard the shower running and stood stupidly in the middle of the floor, tea cooling on a tray, for somewhere between eight and twelve minutes, wondering if I could go in, if I had earnt that right. Eventually she opened the door of the bathroom, winding a new towel around her, her hair wet, her face scrubbed plain. Or perhaps she’d scruffed. Either way, she was beautiful. ‘I’ve made you some tea,’ I said and held out the tea that I had made her.

‘You have more toiletries than almost any man I’ve ever met.’

‘Well, you know.’

‘You know the strangest thing about them? They’re all brand new.’

I had no answer to this, though thankfully it didn’t matter because we were kissing now, apple and mint on her breath.

‘Put the tray down, maybe?’

‘Good idea,’ I said, and we fell back on to the sofa. ‘It’s not so terrible here, is it?’

‘No, I like it. I like the order. It’s so clean! In my flat you can’t cross the room without stepping on an old kebab or someone’s face. But here’s so … neat.’

‘So I’ve passed the inspection?’

‘For the moment,’ she said. ‘There’s always room for improvement.’

Which is exactly what she set out to do.

I’m inclined to think that, after a certain age, our tastes, instincts and inclinations harden like concrete. But I was young or at least younger then, and more willing and malleable, and with Connie, I was happy Plasticine.

Over the following weeks, then months, she began a thorough process of cultural education in the art galleries, theatres and cinemas of London. Connie had not been considered ‘academic’ enough to go to university and occasionally seemed insecure about this fact, though goodness knows what she thought she’d been missing. Certainly, where culture was concerned, she had a twenty-seven-year head start on me. Art, film, fiction, music; she seemed to have seen and read and listened to pretty much everything, with the passion and clear, uncluttered mind of the autodidact.

Music, for instance. My father liked British light classical and traditional jazz, and the soundtrack to my childhood was ‘The Dam Busters March’, then ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ then ‘The Dam Busters March’ again. He liked a ‘good beat’, a ‘good tune’ and on Saturday afternoons would sit and guard the stereo, album cover in one hand, cigarette in the other, tapping his toe erratically and staring into the eyes of Acker Bilk. Watching him enjoy music was like seeing him wear a paper hat at Christmas; it looked uncomfortable. I wished he’d take it off. As for my mother, her proud boast was that she could do without music entirely. They were the last people in Britain to be genuinely horrified by the Beatles. Listening to Wings’ Greatest Hits at a reasonable volume was the closest I came to punkish rebellion.

Connie, on the other hand, was uncomfortable in a room without music. Her father, the vanished Mr Moore, had been a musician, and had left behind only his collection of LPs; old blues albums, reggae, baroque cello, birdsong recordings, Stax and Motown, Brahms symphonies, bebop and doo-wop, Connie would play them to me at every opportunity. She used songs rather like some people — Connie, for instance — used alcohol or drugs; to manipulate her emotions, raise her spirits or inspire. In Whitechapel she would pour immense cocktails, put on some obscure, ancient crackling disc and nod and dance and sing and I’d be enthusiastic too, or enthusiastically feign it. Someone once defined music as organised sound, and much of this sound seemed very badly organised indeed. If I asked, ‘Who is this singing?’ she’d turn to me open-mouthed.

‘You don’t know this?’

‘I don’t.’

‘How can you not know this track, Douglas?’ They were ‘tracks’, not songs.

‘That’s why I’m asking!’

‘What have you been doing all your life, what have you been listening to?’

‘I told you, I’ve never really been that into music.’

‘But how can you not like music? That’s the same as not liking food! Or sex!’

‘I do like it, I just don’t know as much as you.’

‘You know,’ she would say, kissing me, ‘you are extremely lucky that I came along.’

And I was. I was extremely lucky.

My cultural education was not confined to music, but extended all the way to contemporary dance, a form that I found entirely impenetrable, entirely opaque. There seemed to be no language for it. What was I meant to say? ‘I liked the way they threw themselves against the wall’?

‘It’s not about what you liked and didn’t like,’ Connie would reply, ‘it’s about what it made you feel.’ More often than not, it made me feel foolish and conventional. The same applied to theatre, which had always seemed to me like a funereal form of television; since the time of the Greeks, had anyone ever left a play saying, ‘I just wished it were longer!’ Clearly I’d been going to the wrong shows. We saw plays in tiny rooms above pubs and promenaded around vast warehouses, saw a blood-soaked Midsummer Night’s Dream set in an abattoir, a pornographic Private Lives, and I was never bored. How could I be? It was a rare night in the theatre that didn’t involve someone brandishing a dildo, and over time I became inured, or at least learnt to disguise my shock, because if this was a cultural education, it was also a form of audition. I wanted to like what Connie liked because I wanted Connie to like me. So things were no longer ‘wacky’. Now they were ‘avant-garde’.

In fairness, I enjoyed a great many of the cultural events, particularly the movies (‘films’ we called them now), which were very different to the escapist fare I had previously favoured, and rarely featured interstellar drive, a serial killer on the loose or bombs counting down to zero. Now we went to the cinema to read. Little independent cinemas that sold coffee and carrot cake and showed foreign films about cruelty, poverty and grief; occasional nudity, frequent brutality. Why, I wondered, did people seek out portrayals of the very experiences that, in real life, would send them mad with despair? Shouldn’t art be an escape, a laugh, a comfort, a thrill? No, said Connie, exposure brought understanding. Only by confronting the worst traumas of life could you comprehend them and face them down, and off we’d trot to watch another play about man’s inhumanity to man. On which subject, we also went to gigs — it amused Connie to hear me say the word ‘gig’ — and I’d do my best to jump around and make some noise when told to do so.

The opera, too. Connie had a friend who worked at the opera — of course she did — and we’d get cheap tickets to see Verdi, Puccini, Handel, Mozart. I loved those evenings, often more than Connie, and if the director had transposed the action of Così fan tutte to a Wolverhampton dole office, I could still close my eyes, reach for her hand and listen to that wonderfully organised sound.

Do I sound like a philistine? Unsophisticated and uncouth? Perhaps I was, but for every gritty four-hour film about Gulag life, there was another that was stylish, intelligent and affecting in ways that were rarely found in the multiplex. Even the dance was beautiful in its way, and I was grateful. My wife educated me; a common phenomenon, I think, and one that is rarely or only begrudgingly acknowledged by the husbands that I know. As a scientist, I had sometimes been sceptical and resentful of the great claims made for The Arts — widened horizons, broadened minds, freed imagination — but if culture was improving then yes, I was improved. And yes, I know, Hitler loved the opera too, but I still felt strongly that my life had been altered in some indefinable way. I hesitate to use the word ‘soul’. Certainly life felt richer, but was this due to contemporary dance or the person by my side?

I’m troubled by the past tense. Connie was, Connie once, Connie used to. In the early days of our relationship, we made a vow: we would never be too tired to go out, we would always ‘make an effort’, but this was one of those solemn vows we were destined to break. Perhaps there were simply fewer things she wanted to show me, but we gradually became less adventurous after we married, after we left London, after we became parents. Inevitably, I suppose; you can’t go on dates for twenty-four years, it’s not practical. And who would want to go to a gig now? What would we eat, where would we sit, what would we do with our hands? We could always do something else instead. Go to Paris, go to Amsterdam.

But I still listen to Mozart, alone in my car rather than high up in the gods with Connie at my side. Selected highlights, greatest hits. I have a fine in-car stereo system, top-of-the-range, but still the music is barely audible above the roar of the air-conditioning and rush hour on the A34. Over-familiar, the music has become a kind of audio-Valium, background music rather than something I listen to actively and attentively. A gin and tonic after a long day. A shame, I think, because while each note remains the same, I used to hear them differently. It used to sound better.

But wasn’t this exciting? A new day and new beginnings in a brand new part of the world? The train from Paris would take us to Amsterdam in a little over three hours, hopscotching over Brussels, Antwerp and Rotterdam. Connie pointed out that we’d be bypassing Bruegels and Mondrians, a notorious altarpiece in Ghent, the picturesque city of Bruges, but the Rijksmuseum lay ahead and I was still entranced by European train travel, the ability to board a train in Paris and get off in Zurich, Cologne or Barcelona.

‘Miraculous, really, isn’t it? Croissant for breakfast, cheese toastie for lunch,’ I said, boarding the 0916 at the Gare du Nord.

‘Goodbye, Paris! Or should that be au revoir?’ I said, as the train pulled out into the sunlight.

‘According to the map on my phone, we are in Belgium … now!’ I said, as we crossed the border.

It’s a terrible habit but a silence in a contained space makes me anxious, and so I tug and tug at the conversation as if struggling to start a lawnmower.

‘My first time in Belgium! Hello, Belgium,’ I said, tugging away, yank, yank, yank.

‘The wifi on this train is useless,’ said Albie, but I smiled and looked out of the window. I had decided to shake off last night’s ennui and enjoy myself by sheer effort of will.

My high spirits were in contrast to the landscape, which was, for the most part, industrialised farmland interspersed with neat little towns, the church spires like push-pins punctuating the map. Last night’s storm had kept me awake and I was still a little queasy from the beer, but the swelling in my eye had eased and soon we’d be in Amsterdam, a city that I’d always thought of as civilised and, unlike Paris, easygoing. Perhaps some of that ‘laid-back’ quality would rub off on us. I reclined my seat. ‘I love this rolling stock,’ I said. ‘Why is continental rolling stock so much more comfortable?’

‘You’re full of fascinating observations,’ said Connie, laying down her novel with a sigh. ‘Why are you so full of beans?’

‘I’m excited, that’s all. Travelling through Belgium with my family. It’s exciting to me.’

‘Well, read your book,’ she said, ‘or we’ll push you off the train.’ They returned to their novels. Connie was reading something called A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter. On the cover, a hunched naked woman bathed at an impractical sink in black and white, while the back cover description claimed the novel was ‘sensual and evocative, a tour-de-force of erotic realism’. ‘Erotic realism’ sounded like a contradiction in terms to me, but it boded well for the hotel in Amsterdam. Albie, meanwhile, was reading L’Etranger by Albert Camus, which in English was the title of Billy Joel’s fifth studio album, though I doubted the two were connected. The book was a gift from Connie, who had presented Albie with a selection of novels in translation by European authors, many of whom had consecutive Ws, Zs and Vs in their names. It was an intimidating reading list, I thought, and Albie clearly felt so too, as he was making heavy work of L’Etranger. Even so, with regard to fiction, he was still a better student than I.

In the early days of our relationship, on a trip to Greece I think it was, I neglected to take a book on to the plane. It was not a mistake I would make again.

‘What are you going to do for two hours?’

‘I’ve got some journals, work stuff. I’ve got the guidebook.’

‘But you haven’t got a novel to read?’

‘I’ve just never really been that bothered about fiction,’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘I’ve always wondered who those freaks are who don’t read novels. And it’s you! Freak.’ She smiled through all this, but I still sensed an incremental slip, a loosening of my grip on her affections, as if I’d casually confessed to some racial bigotry. Can I really love a man who doesn’t see the point of made-up stories, a man who would rather find out about the real world around him? Since then I’ve learnt never to sit down on any form of public transport without a book of some sort in my hand. If it’s a novel, then chances are it will have been provided by Connie, and will have won some award but won’t be too complicated. The literary equivalent, I suppose, of my father’s ‘a good beat, a good tune’.

And I do read a great deal of non-fiction, which has always seemed to me a better use of words than the made-up conversations of people who have never existed. Academic papers aside, I read the more advanced popular-science and economics books and, like many men of my generation, I enjoy military history, my ‘Fascism-on-the-march books’, as Connie calls them. I’m not sure why we should be drawn to this material. Perhaps it’s because we like to imagine ourselves in the cataclysmic situations that our fathers and grandfathers faced, to imagine how we’d behave when tested, whether we would show our true colours and what they would be. Follow or lead, resist or collaborate? I expressed this theory to Connie once and she laughed and said that I was a textbook collaborator. ‘Delighted to meet you, Herr Gruppenführer!’ she had said, rubbing her hands together obsequiously. ‘If there’s anything you need …’ and then she laughed some more. Connie knew me better than anyone alive, but I did feel strongly that she had misjudged me in this respect. It might not be immediately apparent, but I was Resistance through and through. I just hadn’t had a chance to prove it yet.

As the train rolled on to Brussels I reached for my own book, a dense but engaging history of World War II. The date was March ’44, and plans were well under way for Operation Overlord. ‘Good God,’ I said, and placed the book back down.

‘What is it now?’ said Connie, somewhat impatient.

‘I just realised, a little in that direction is the Ardennes.’

‘What’s special about the Ardennes?’ said Albie.

‘The Ardennes,’ I said, ‘is where your great-grandfather died. Here …’

I flicked towards the centre of the book and a map of the Ardennes Offensive. ‘We’re about here. The battle was over there.’ I indicated the red and blue arrows on the map, so unrepresentative of the flesh and blood to which they corresponded. ‘This was “the Bulge”, a last-ditch German counterattack against the US forces, a terrible battle, one of the worst, in the forest in the dead of winter. A sort of awful final convulsion. Germans and Americans mostly, but a thousand or so British got tangled up too, your great-grandfather among them. Bloody destruction, as bad as D-Day, just half an hour that way.’ I pointed east. Albie peered out of the window as if looking for some evidence, pillars of smoke or Stukas screaming out of the sun, but saw only farmland, ripe and placid and serene. He shrugged, as if I was making this all up.

‘I have his campaign medals in my desk drawer. You used to ask to see them, Albie, when you were little. D’you remember? He’s buried out there too, a little place called Hotton. My dad only went to the cemetery once, when he was a little boy. After he retired I offered to take him again — do you remember, Connie? — but he didn’t want to get his passport renewed. I remember thinking how sad that was, only seeing your father’s grave once. He said he didn’t want to get sentimental about it.’

I had become unusually voluble and a little emotional, too. I’d never been particularly nostalgic about family history and had little knowledge of all but the lowest branches of the family tree, but wasn’t this interesting? Our family heritage, our small role in history. Terence Petersen had fought in El Alamein, in Normandy too. As our only child, Albie would inherit his campaign medals. Shouldn’t he at least acknowledge their significance and the sacrifice of his forebears? Yet Albie seemed primarily interested in checking the signal on his mobile phone. My own father, had I behaved like this, would have knocked it out of my hand.

‘Perhaps I should have gone there anyway,’ I continued. ‘Perhaps we should all have gone. Got off at Brussels and hired a car. Why didn’t I think of this before?’

‘We’ll go some other time,’ said Connie, who had closed her book now and was watching me with some concern. ‘Would anyone like some coffee?’

But I had heard the distant rumble of an argument and now wanted the storm to break. ‘Would you be interested in that, Egg? Would you want to come along?’ I knew that he would not, but I wanted to hear him say it.

He shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

‘You don’t seem very interested.’

He ruffled his hair with both hands. ‘It’s history. I never knew anyone involved.’

‘Nor did I, but still …’

‘Waterloo is over there, the Somme is back in that direction; we probably had Petersens there, Moores too.’

‘It was my grandfather.’

‘But you said yourself, you never even knew him. I don’t even remember granddad. I’m sorry, but I can’t make an emotional connection to stuff that happened all that time ago.’

Emotional connection, what an idiotic phrase. ‘It was only seventy years, Albie. Two generations ago there were Nazis in Paris and Amsterdam. Albie’s a very Jewish-sounding name—’

‘Okay, this is a very gloomy conversation,’ said Connie, unnaturally bright. ‘Who wants coffee?’

‘At the very least you could have been called up for service. Do you ever wonder what that would have been like? Standing terrified in a forest in Belgium in the dead of winter, like my grandfather? No wifi signal there, Albie!’

‘Can both of you lower your voices, please? And change the subject?’

I had merely raised my voice to be heard above the ambient noise of the train, it was Albie who was shouting. ‘Why are you making me out to be ignorant?’ I know all this, I know what happened. I know, I’m just not… obsessed with the Second World War. I’m sorry, but I’m not. We’ve moved on.’

‘We? We?’

‘We’ve moved on, we don’t see it everywhere. We don’t look at a map and see these … arrows everywhere. That’s okay, isn’t it? Isn’t that healthy? To move on and be European, instead of reading endless books about it and wallowing in it?’

‘I don’t wallow, I—’

‘Well I’m sorry, Dad, but I’m not nostalgic for tank battles in the woods and I’m not going to pretend to care about things that don’t mean anything to me.’

Don’t mean anything? This was my father’s father. My dad grew up without a dad. Perhaps Albie thought that this was a perfectly acceptable, even desirable, state of affairs but, still, to be so aloof and dismissive, it seemed … disloyal, unmanly. I love my son, I hope that is abundantly clear, but at that particular moment I found I wanted to bounce his head smartly off the window.

Instead I waited a moment, then said, ‘Well, frankly, I think that’s a shitty attitude.’ Which, in the silence that followed, seemed scarcely less violent.

Alternative points of view are more easily appreciated from a distance. Time allows us to zoom out and see things more objectively, less emotionally, and recalling the conversation it’s clear that I overreacted. But despite being born some fifteen years after its end, the War overshadowed every aspect of my childhood: toys, comics, music, light entertainment, politics, it was in everything. Goodness knows how this must have felt to my parents, to have seen the traumas and terrors of their early youth re-enacted in situation comedies and playground games. Certainly, they didn’t seem overly sensitive or scarred. Nazis were one of the few things that my father found amusing. If the thought of his father’s loss upset him then he concealed it, as he concealed all strong feelings, anger aside.

My son, by contrast, was of a generation that no longer thought of countries in terms of Allied or Axis, or judged people on the basis of their grandparents’ allegiances. Outside of first-person shoot-’em-ups, the War never crossed Albie’s mind and maybe this was healthy. Maybe this was progress.

But it didn’t feel like progress on the train. It seemed like disrespect, ignorance and complacency and I told him so, and in response he tossed his book onto the table, muttered beneath his breath, clambered over Connie into the aisle and away.

We waited for the other passengers to return to their newspapers. ‘Are you all right?’ she said quietly, with the intonation of ‘are you mad?’

‘I’m perfectly fine, thank you.’

We travelled on in silence for two or three kilometres, before I said, ‘So clearly, that was all my fault.’

‘Not entirely. About eighty-twenty.’

‘No need to ask in whose favour.’

Another two kilometres slipped by. She picked up her book, though the pages didn’t turn. Fields, warehouses, more fields, the backs of houses. I said, ‘By which I mean you might sometimes support me in these arguments.’

‘I do,’ said Connie, ‘if you’re right.’

‘I can’t recall a single instance—’

‘Douglas, I’m neutral. I’m Switzerland.’

‘Really? Because it’s clear to me where your allegiances—’

‘I don’t have “allegiances”. It’s not a war! Though Christ knows it feels like it sometimes.’

We passed through Brussels, though I could not now tell you much about it. In a park to the left I caught a glimpse of the Atomium, the stainless-steel structure built for the World’s Fair, a fifties version of our present day and something I’d have liked to see. But I couldn’t bear to mention it, and could only manage:

‘I found his attitude upsetting.’

‘Fine, I understand,’ said Connie, her hand on my forearm now. ‘But he’s young and you sound so … pompous, Douglas. You sound like some old duffer calling for National Service to be reintroduced. In fact, you know who you sound like? You sound like your dad!’

I’d not heard this before. I had never expected to hear it and I would need time to take it in, but Connie continued:

‘Why can you never let things go? You just pick and pick away at them, at Albie. I know not everything is easy at the moment, Christ knows it’s not easy for me either, but you’re up, you’re down, you’re manic, chattering away, or you’re storming out. It’s … hard, it’s very hard.’ In a lower voice. ‘That’s why I’m asking again: are you feeling all right? You must be honest. Can you do this journey or shall we all go home?’

I found him as we entered Antwerp, sitting on a high stool in the buffet car eating a small tub of Pringles. His eyes, I noted, were a little red.

‘There you are!’

‘Here I am.’

‘I’ve walked all the way from Brussels! I thought you’d got off.’

‘Well, I’m here.’

‘Bit early in the day for Pringles, isn’t it?’

Albie sighed, and I decided to let the point go. ‘It’s an emotive subject, war.’

‘Yeah. I know.’

‘I think I lost my temper.’

He upended the tub into his mouth.

‘Your mother thinks I should apologise.’

‘And you’ve got to do what Mum says.’

‘No, I want to. I want to apologise.’

‘S’okay. It’s done now.’ He licked his fingertip and started swabbing the bottom of the tub.

‘So are you coming back, Egg?’

‘In a bit.’

‘Okay. Okay. Excited about Amsterdam?’

He shrugged. ‘Can’t wait.’

‘No. Me neither. Me neither. Well …’ I placed a hand on his shoulder and took it off again. ‘See you in a bit.’

‘Dad?’

‘Albie?’

‘I would come with you, to the War Cemetery, if you really wanted. There’s just other places I’d rather go first.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ I looked around me for some way to cement the truce. ‘D’you want anything else to eat? They have those waffles. Or a Kinder Bueno?’

‘No, because I’m not six.’

‘No. Right,’ I said, and returned to my seat.

And that, pretty much, was everything that happened to us in Belgium.

I had visited before, once with Connie and on conferences too, so my experience was somewhat selective, but even so, Amsterdam’s reputation as a city of sin always seemed something of an anomaly to me, as if one were to discover the presence of an immense crack-den in the centre of Cheltenham Spa. Both faces of the city, genteel and disreputable, were in evidence as we rumbled our suitcases along the lanes that zigzagged west from the Centraal station towards Keizersgracht; fine, tall seventeenth-century townhouses, glimpses of interior-designed living rooms and copper-panned kitchens, a little gift shop selling notepads and candles, a bikini-clad prostitute on the early shift drinking tea from a mug in a pink light, a baker’s, a café filled with stoned skateboarders, a shop selling fixed-wheel bicycles. Amsterdam was the trendy dad of European cities; an architect, perhaps, barefoot and unshaven. Hey, guys, I told you, call me Tony! says Amsterdam to his kids, and pours everyone a beer.

We crossed the bridge at Herenstraat. ‘Our hotel is in the Grachtengordel, which we’re entering now. Grachtengordel, literally, the girdle of canals!’ I was a little out of breath but keen to maintain an educational element to our visit. ‘It looks wonderful on a map, this series of concentric circles like the growth rings on a tree trunk. Or horseshoes, nesting horseshoes …’ But Albie wasn’t listening; he was too distracted, eyes casting here and there.

‘My God, Albie,’ said Connie, ‘it’s a hipster’s paradise.’

We laughed at this, though I’d be hard-pressed to define a hipster, unless it referred to the pretty girls in large, unnecessary spectacles and vintage dresses, sitting high on rickety bicycles. Why do the youth of other cities always seem so attractive? Did the Dutch walk the streets of Guildford or Basingstoke and think, my God, just look at these people? Perhaps not, but Albie was certainly agog in Amsterdam. For all its grace and elegance, I suspected that Paris had been a little hard and severe for Albie. But here, here was a city that he could work with. The question, as in any trip to Amsterdam, was how long before sex and drugs raised their complicated heads?

A little under eight minutes, it transpired.

The hotel, which advertised itself as ‘boutique’ and had seemed perfectly pleasant on the website, had been decked out to resemble a top-of-the-range bordello. Our receptionist, an attractive and courteous transvestite, greeted us with the news that Connie and I had been upgraded to the honeymoon suite — the ‘irony suite’, I thought — and directed us down corridors lined variously with black silk, satin and PVC, past large-scale prints of a corseted dominatrix sitting astride a flustered panther, a pop-art tongue prodding a pair of cherries to no useful end and a concerned Japanese lady encumbered by a complex series of knotted ropes. ‘She,’ said Connie, ‘is going to get pins and needles.’

‘Dad,’ asked Albie, ‘have you booked us into a sex hotel?’ and they began to laugh convulsively as I fumbled with the key to our room — which, I noticed, was called the ‘Venus in Furs’ suite, while Albie was in ‘Delta of Venus’ next door.

‘It’s not a sex hotel, it’s “boutique”!’ I insisted.

‘Douglas,’ said Connie, tapping the print of the bound Japanese lady, ‘is that a half hitch or a bowline?’ I did not answer, though it was a bowline.

The honeymoon suite was the colour of a kidney. It smelt of lilies and some kind of citrus disinfectant and was dominated by an immense four-poster from which the canopy was missing, leading me to wonder what function the posts served, since they had no structural purpose. Black sheets, hot-pink bolsters, purple cushions and crimson pillows were piled in the absurd Himalayan ranges that now seem to be de rigueur, but in this case were presumably there to create a kind of pornographic soft-play area. In stark contrast to all the mahogany and velvet, a huge off-white Bakelite contraption stood adjacent to the bed on a raised dais, like the kind of specialised bath you’d find in an old people’s home.

‘What is that?’ said Connie, still giggling.

‘Our very own Jacuzzi!’ I pressed one of the worn buttons on the control panel and the tub was lit from below by pink and green lights. Another button and the thing began to churn and grind like a hovercraft. ‘Just like our honeymoon,’ I shouted over the roar.

Connie was quite hysterical now, as was Albie, entering through the adjoining door to laugh at our room. ‘You can really pick a hotel, Dad.’

I was feeling defensive. I had made the booking, and the hotel was meant to be a treat, but I did my best to remain good-humoured. ‘How’s your room, Egg? Dare I ask?’

‘It’s like sleeping in a vagina.’

‘Albie! Please …’

‘There’s a massive picture of lesbians kissing over my bed. They’re freaking me out.’

‘We have this masterpiece,’ and Connie indicated a large tinted canvas of a spiky-haired lady fellating some fluorescent tube lighting. ‘I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.’

‘She’s going to get a shock, licking that,’ I said.

‘Isn’t it outrageous?’ said Connie. ‘So seedy. I feel like I want to wipe everything down with a damp J-cloth.’

‘Look,’ I said. ‘Tea-making facilities.’

‘Kinky. I wonder what the breakfast buffet’s going to be like?’ said Albie.

‘Oysters,’ said Connie, ‘and great trays of cocaine.’

‘Well, I like it,’ I said. ‘It’s boutique!’ and I did my best to laugh along.

When everyone had calmed down, we stepped out to a pleasant café in the Noordermarkt, and sat in the square beneath the handsome church there. We ate cheese toasties and drank small glasses of delicious beer, trying out our Dutch accents, an accent like no other in the world. ‘It’s a little bit cockney, a little bit sing-song,’ said Connie. ‘And the “S”s have a “sh” sound to them. ‘“Sho — welcome to our shex hotel. If you require anything — handcuffsh, a courshe of penischillin …”’

‘No one talks like that,’ I said, though it wasn’t bad.

‘Nonshenshe. It’sh perfect.’

‘You sound like Sean Connery.’

‘Because, Egg, that’s exactly how it sounds — it’s a Germanic cockney Sean Connery.’ And perhaps it was the beer at lunchtime, or the sun on our faces, or the charm of that particular corner, but it was as if the Petersens had decided that we liked Amsterdam very much, that it would suit us very well, after all, as a family.

Until then I really only knew the city in winter, in the rain. It had been raining on our first trip here, in November, nine months or so after we had first met, yet still very much during our prolonged probationary period. Connie had been endeavouring to incorporate me into her social life, with the caution usually reserved for releasing zoo animals into the wild. As part of the programme, we had gone to Amsterdam with Genevieve and Tyler, two friends from her college who had recently married. As artists, I’d presumed they’d be keen to see the Rembrandts and Vermeers, but they seemed much more interested in nodding their heads in various coffeehouses. Smoking cannabis held little appeal for me. I did my bit, but one puff of Purple Haze — or Cherry Bomb or Laughing Buddha — instilled a degree of anxiety and paranoia that was remarkable even for me. Certainly I felt no desire to giggle as the blood drained from my face and the dread took hold. I decided to leave them to it, and spent a solitary afternoon in the Anne Frank House instead.

This was shortly before Connie and I began to co-habit and my nostalgia for that first spring and summer remains undimmed. We saw each other every day, but kept separate flats, separate family and friends and social lives. There were those cultural excursions, of course, but if Connie felt the need to ‘have a late one’ with her art-school pals, or go to a nightclub where things might ‘get messy’, whatever that meant, then I would suggest she go alone. She rarely fought to persuade me. Sometimes I found myself wishing that she’d fight a little harder, but I did not protest. Once the party was over she’d always come and see me at two or three or four in the morning. She had a key by then — what a happy day that was, cutting that key for her — and she’d let herself in and climb wordlessly into my bed, body warm, make-up smeared, breath smelling strongly of wine and toothpaste and ‘social’ cigarettes, and she would fold herself into me. Sometimes we would make love, at other times she would twitch and fidget and sweat, a restlessness that I put down to alcohol or some kind of drug use, though I knew better than to preach or pry. If she could not sleep we would talk a little, with Connie doing her best to sound sober.

‘Good party?’

‘The usual. You didn’t miss anything.’

‘Who was there?’

‘People. Go back to sleep.’

‘Was Angelo there?’

‘Don’t think so. He might have been, somewhere. We didn’t talk very much.’

Which didn’t make sense, if you thought about it.

‘And do you still love him?’

Of course I refrained from asking this latter question, despite it being foremost in my mind, because I valued sleep too much. Most people entering a relationship carry with them a dossier sub-divided into infatuations, flirtations, grand amours, first loves and sexual affairs. Compared to my sheet of lined A4, Connie possessed a three-drawered filing cabinet of the things, but I had no desire to flick through the faces. After all, she was here, wasn’t she? At two and three and four in the morning, all through that wonderful first spring, that glorious first summer.

But there was no escaping Angelo. She had once believed, she said, that they were soul-mates, until it transpired that he had many other soul-mates dotted around London. Quite apart from the flagrant infidelity, his other offences were legion. He had undermined her confidence, jeered at her work, made remarks about her looks, her weight, screamed at her in public places, thrown things, even stolen money from her. There had been a mercifully brief allusion to him being ‘a bit dark in the bedroom’ and certainly there had been physical fights, which shocked and angered me, though she insisted she had ‘given as good as she got’. He was a drinker, an addict, unreliable, belligerent, childishly provocative, rude. ‘Intense’, she said. In short, he was everything that I was not. So what possible appeal could he hold for her now? All that was student stuff, she said. Besides, Angelo had a new girlfriend anyway, beautiful and cool and they had so many friends in common, they were bound to bump into each other, weren’t they? No real harm done, nothing to worry about. I would meet him too, some day soon.

And so it came to pass, at the wedding of Genevieve and Tyler, one of those ferociously unconventional affairs — the bride and groom entering the reception on a motorbike, I recall and, for their first dance, pogo-ing wildly to French punk. No white marquee for Genevieve and Tyler. The party was held in a soon-to-be-demolished prosthetic limb factory on the Blackwall Tunnel Approach, and was a good deal edgier and more nihilistic than the weddings I’d been used to. I’d never seen quite so many angular people in one industrial space before, all under thirty — no jolly aunts in hats here — all enjoying a buffet of ironic kebabs. I’d taken a gamble on a new corduroy suit, and the heavy fabric on a warm September day, combined with a certain self-consciousness on my part, was causing me to perspire to a quite startling degree. Beneath the jacket, dark circles of sweat had formed. My contortions beneath the hand-dryer had had little effect, and so now I stood perspiring as I watched Connie talk to beautiful people.

I think I can honestly say that I’ve never met a biochemist that I didn’t like. My friends and colleagues might not have been particularly glamorous but they were open, generous, funny, kind, modest. Welcoming. Connie’s clan was a different proposition. Noisy, cynical, overly concerned with the appearance of things, and on the few occasions I had visited her shared studio — a garage, really, in Hackney — or went to private views, I had felt awkward and excluded, loitering at the edge like a dog tied up outside a shop. I had wanted to be involved in Connie’s work, to show interest and enthusiasm because she really was a wonderful painter. But being with her artist friends drew attention to differences that I was keen to play down.

They weren’t all monsters, of course. Artists are an eccentric temperamental bunch, with habits that would earn them short shrift in most labs, but that’s to be expected. Some of them were, and remain, good friends, and several of them did make an effort at social events. But as soon as conversation turned to ‘what are you working on?’ they would suddenly need to ‘go for a wee’. And so I stood there at the wedding, the human diuretic, in a puddle of malarial sweat.

‘Look at you, man! You need a salt tablet,’ said Fran, Connie’s old housemate. I was unsure of Fran’s true feelings for me, and remain so even now that she is Albie’s godmother. She has always had the particular gift of hugging and shoving away at the same time, like repelling magnets pushed together. Here she stepped back and brushed her cigarette ash off my arm. ‘Why don’t you take this off?’

‘I can’t now.’

She started tugging at the jacket buttons. ‘Come on, take it off!’

‘I can’t, my shirt’s too wet.’

‘Ah, I get it.’ She placed a finger on my sternum and leant all her weight on it. ‘You, my friend, are caught in a vicious circle.’

‘Exactly. It’s a vicious circle.’

‘Ahhhh,’ she said, rubbing my arm. ‘Connie’s lovely, lovely, funny, lovely boyfriend. You make her so happy, don’t you, Dougie? You look after her, you do, you really do. And she deserves it, after all the bullshit she’s been through!’

‘Where is she, by the way?’

‘She’s over by the DJ, talking to Angelo.’

And there he was, leaning over her, his arms braced on either side as if preventing her escape. In fairness, she didn’t seem too keen to leave, laughing as she was, touching her hair, her face. I picked up two bottles of beer and approached. In honour of this very special day, Angelo had ironed his mechanic’s overalls and shaved his head, and he ran both hands over his scalp as he followed Connie’s look and watched me approach.

‘Angelo, this is Douglas.’

‘Wotcha, Douglas.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Angelo.’ Keen to avoid awkwardness or rancour, I had decided to adopt an amiable, amused demeanour, pointedly relaxed, but he took both my hands, which were encumbered with beer bottles, and pulled me close. Angelo was my height but distinctly broader, his eyes unblinking, very blue, a little crazed — the much-vaunted ‘intensity’, I suppose, turning our conversation into a staring competition.

‘What’s up, my friend? Are you nervous?’ he said as I looked away.

‘No, not at all. Why would I be?’

‘Because you’re sweating like a bastard.’

‘Yes, I know. It’s this jacket. Bad choice, I’m afraid.’

He was holding my lapels now. ‘Corduroy. From the French, “cord du roi”, cloth of the king.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Well, I’ve taught you something. A noble fabric, very regal. And it’s always good to hear your trousers when you walk, so people know you’re coming. Means you can’t sneak up on people and BOO.’

I jumped and he laughed. ‘Angelo,’ said Connie. I was aware of being bested by this man, and of hating him with a venom that I found new and invigorating.

‘Clearly Connie’s a lucky lady,’ he continued. ‘Lucky to be shot of yours truly, at least. I presume she’s mentioned me.’

‘No. No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so.’

Angelo grinned and reached for the knot of my tie. ‘Here, you’re coming undone.’

‘Angelo, leave it, please,’ said Connie, a hand on his arm. Angelo stepped back and laughed.

‘Well, we should hang out, yeah? The four of us. That’s my girlfriend, over there, Su-Lin,’ and he indicated a girl out on the factory floor, dancing in her bra and a deerstalker hat. ‘Here …’ and he mopped my forehead with a greasy napkin, tucked it in my top pocket and loped off, howling.

‘He’s really drunk,’ said Connie. ‘He gets a bit manic when he’s drunk.’

‘Well I liked him. I liked him a lot.’

‘Douglas …’

‘I like the way he doesn’t blink, it’s very attractive.’

‘Don’t start, please.’

‘What?’

‘The rutting-stag thing. He was a big part of my life, a long, long time ago. The important word is was, he was — past tense. He was what I needed at that time in my life.’

‘And what do you need at this time in your life?’

‘I’m not even going to answer that.’ She took my hand. ‘Come on. Let’s go up to the roof and dry you out.’

The early days of any relationship are punctuated with a series of firsts — first sight, first words, first laugh, first kiss, first nudity, etc., with these shared landmarks becoming more widely spaced and innocuous as days turn to years, until eventually you’re left with first visit to a National Trust property or some such.

We had our first major argument that night, a significant landmark in any relationship, but upsetting nonetheless because everything up to that point had been, well, bliss. I’ve made that point, I think. Just bliss.

As usual, Connie had been drinking — we had both been drinking — and was dancing now with no clear intention of ever stopping. She was always an exceptional dancer, did I mention that? Self-contained, rather aloof. She had a particular face when she danced, intent and inward-looking. Lips parted, eyelids heavy. Frankly, there was something rather sensual about it. At a family wedding, I was once told by my sister that I danced like someone wrestling with a bout of diarrhoea, clenched and anxious, and so I had chosen not to light up any dance-floors since. Instead I leant against the wall and ran through a mental list of all the things I wished I’d said to Angelo. He was still there, of course, dancing with a champagne bottle in his hand and Su-Lin riding on his back.

It was time for me to go home. I crossed the floor to Connie.

‘I think I might head home,’ I shouted, over the clanging music.

She steadied herself with her hand on my forearm. ‘Okay,’ she said. Her make-up was smeared, her hair sticking to her forehead, dark patches on her dress.

‘D’you want to come with me?’

‘No,’ she said, and pressed her cheek to mine. ‘You go.’

And I should have gone, right then, and waited for her at home. Instead …

‘You know, just one time, you might at least try to persuade me.’

She looked puzzled. ‘Okay. Stay. Please.’

‘I don’t want to stay. I’m not talking to anyone. I’m bored. I want to go.’

She shrugged. ‘So go. I don’t see what the problem is.’

I shook my head and began to walk away. She followed. ‘Douglas, if you don’t tell me what’s wrong, I’ll have to guess.’

‘Sometimes I think you’re happier when I’m not around.’

‘How can you say that! That’s not true.’

‘So why do we never go out with your friends?’

‘We’re here, aren’t we?’

‘But not together. You bring me here then walk away.’

‘You’re the one who wants to leave!’

‘But you’re not exactly desperate for me to stay.’

‘Douglas, you’re an individual. Go if you want, we’re not joined at the hip.’

‘Because God forbid we should be that close!’

She tried to laugh. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand — are you angry because I’m having fun? Is it because Angelo’s here? Don’t walk away, explain it.’

We were in a concrete stairwell now, storming down the flights past furtive guests kissing or smoking or doing goodness knows what. ‘Why do you never introduce me to your friends?’

‘I do! Don’t I?’

‘Not if you can help it. When we do go out it’s just you and me.’

‘Okay then, because you wouldn’t enjoy it. You don’t want to go clubbing or stay up all night, you’re too worried about work so I don’t invite you.’

‘You think I’d spoil the fun.’

‘I think you wouldn’t have fun, which means I wouldn’t have fun.’

‘I think there’s another reason.’

‘Go on then.’

‘I think you’re embarrassed by me sometimes.’

‘Douglas, that’s ridiculous. I love you, why would I be embarrassed by you? Don’t I come home to you every night?’

‘When there’s no one else around.’

‘And isn’t that better? Just the two of us? Don’t you love that? Because I do! I fucking treasure it, and I thought you did too.’

‘I do! I do.’

We found ourselves out on the street, a wasteland really, the buildings in various stages of demolition. On the roof of the factory above us, there was laughter and music. Faces peered down. Perhaps Angelo was watching us too, down here amongst the breezeblocks and paving slabs, our argument losing its momentum and starting to seem foolish.

‘Do you want me to come round later?’ she said.

‘No. Not tonight.’

‘So do you want me to come right now?’

‘No, you have your fun. I’m sorry if I got in your way.’

‘Douglas …’

I began to walk away. The sky was darkening. Summer was over, autumn on the way. It was the last good day of the year and I felt, for the first time since we had met, the old inexpressible sadness of life without her.

‘Douglas?’

I turned.

‘You’re going the wrong way. The train’s in that direction.’

She was right, but I was too proud to go back past her and it was only as I wandered through the rubble, clambering over fences pursued by Alsatians, hugging the crash barriers of dual carriageways as lorries stormed by, hopelessly lost, that I realised our first argument had masked another first.

She had told me that she loved me.

It was the first time anyone had said the words without some qualifying clause. Had I imagined it? I didn’t think so. No, it had definitely been there. I might have clicked my heels with joy, the first person to have done so on the Blackwall Tunnel Approach, but I had bodged the moment, so tangled up in petulance and self-pity, so befuddled with jealousy and alcohol that I’d not even bothered to acknowledge it. I stopped and looked about me, trying to get my bearings, then began to walk back the way I’d come.

For such a large building, the factory was proving quite elusive and after half an hour of wandering through the wasteland, I’d begun to think that I would be too late, that the reception would be over. Just as I was about to give up and find the nearest tube, I saw three bursts of light in the night sky, the sound booming after. Fireworks, a rocket exploding over the factory like a rescue flare. I turned and ran towards it.

They were playing ironic slow songs now; it was ‘Three Times a Lady’ as I walked in, if I recall. Connie was sitting alone on the opposite side of the dance-floor, elbows on her knees. I walked towards her and saw her smile then frown in quick succession, and before she could speak I said:

‘I’m sorry. I’m an idiot.’

‘You are, sometimes.’

‘And I apologise. I’m trying not to be.’

‘Try harder,’ she said, then stood and our arms were around each other. ‘How could you think those things, Douglas?’

‘I don’t know, I get … nervous. You’re not going anywhere, are you?’

‘I wasn’t planning to, no.’

We kissed, and after a while I said, ‘You too, by the way.’

‘You too what?’

‘I love you too.’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’m glad that’s settled.’

The following January, some eleven months after we had met, I drove Connie in a hired van from Whitechapel to Balham, checking the rear-view mirror as if looking for pursuers, with the hope and the intention that she would never leave my side again.

We passed an uneventful night in our honeymoon suite. On our return from an early supper in a Jordaan café, I filled up the Jacuzzi in the hope that Connie might join me. ‘Let’s fire this baby up!’ I said, and clambered in. But the sensation was rather like being thrown into the propellers of the Portsmouth to Cherbourg ferry, and the noise disturbed Connie, who had got into bed early to read.

‘Care to join me?’ I bellowed coquettishly.

‘No, you have fun,’ she said.

‘I’m setting it to turbo!’ The roar of jet engines. ‘IT’S VERY RELAXING!’

‘Douglas, turn it off! I’m trying to read,’ snapped Connie and returned to her book. Despite the pleasant day, we had not quite shaken off the scene on the train and I reflected, not for the first time, how our arguments seemed to have a longer half-life these days. Like colds and hangovers, they took an age to shake off and the reconciliation, if it came at all, didn’t have quite the same decisiveness that it once had. I climbed from the infernal machine, we set about jettisoning the great piles of velvet pillows and silk cushions, and closed our eyes. The next day was the Rijksmuseum, and I would need my wits about me.

For a feeling of true righteousness and invulnerability, there’s nothing quite like riding a bicycle in Amsterdam. The traditional power relationship with the car is reversed and you’re part of a tribe of overwhelming numbers, sitting high in the peloton, looking down on the bonnets of those foolish or weak enough to drive. Here people cycled with a reckless swagger, talking on the phone, eating breakfast, and on a bright, beautiful August day, our bicycles purring and rattling down Herengracht to the Golden Corner, there seemed no better place to be.

To the right, the Rijksmuseum. There is, I suppose, no set template for a national museum, but even so, I was struck by — not its plainness, but its lack of pretension. No columns or white marble, no Classical aspirations, none of the Louvre’s palatial splendour but a kind of municipal functionality; a fine train station or an ambitious town hall.

Inside, the central atrium was immense and luminous and I felt — we all felt, I think — a renewed enthusiasm for the Tour. Even Albie, red-eyed and smoky-smelling from last night’s unspecified adventure, was enlivened by it all. ‘S’nice,’ he said exultantly, and we strode on to the galleries.

That was a good morning. At occasional moments, Connie even took my hand, a gesture that I associate with either youth or senility, but which here seemed to signify that I was forgiven. We went from room to room with the same glacial slowness I’d experienced at the Louvre, but I didn’t mind this time. As well as art, there was an immense model galleon the size of a family car, glass cases full of ferocious weapons and, in the Gallery of Honour, the most extraordinary room of paintings. I am, as I think I mentioned, no art critic, but what was striking about Dutch art was how familiar and domestic it all felt. No Greek or Roman gods here, no crucifixions or Madonnas. Kitchens, back gardens, alleyways, piano practice, letters written and received, oysters that seemed wet to the touch, milk captured in mid-flow so accurately that you could almost taste it. Yet there was nothing banal or drab about any of it. There was pride, joy even, in the everyday scenes and portraits of real personalities, flawed and vain, muddled and silly. Pudgy and coarse-featured, the older Rembrandt was not a handsome man and in Self-portrait as the Apostle Paul, he looked frankly knackered, eyebrows raised and ruined face crumpled with a weariness that I recognised all too well. Recognition was not something I had felt in front of the saints, gods and monsters of the Louvre, splendid though they were. This was great art and the postcard bill was going to be immense.

In an imposing dark blue room the three of us sat, elbow to elbow, in front of The Night Watch, which, my guidebook said, was probably the fourth most famous painting in the world. ‘What do you think are the top three?’ I asked, but no one wanted to play that game, so I looked at the painting instead. There was a lot going on. It had, as my father would say, a good beat, a good tune, and I pointed out all the little details — the funny expressions, the jokes, the gun going off accidentally — that I’d picked up from the guidebook, in case Albie missed them. ‘Did you know,’ I said, ‘that Rembrandt never gave it that name? The scene isn’t really happening at night. The old varnish darkened and made it gloomy. Hence The Night Watch.’

‘You’re full of interesting facts,’ said Connie.

‘Did you know the painting contains a self-portrait of Rembrandt? He’s right at the back, peeking over that man’s shoulder.’

‘Why not put the guidebook down now, Douglas?’

‘If I had one criticism to make of it—’

‘Oh. This’ll be good,’ said Albie. ‘Dad’s got notes.’

‘If I had one criticism it would be the little girl in gold.’ In a shaft of light, a little to the left of centre, a girl of eight or nine is beautifully dressed in exquisite robes with, somewhat anomalously, a chicken tied to her belt. ‘I’d say, “Rembrandt, listen, I love the painting, but you might want to take one more look at the little girl with the chicken. She looks really, really old. She’s got the face of a fifty-year-old woman, it’s quite disconcerting and it draws attention from the centre of the—”’

‘That’s Saskia.’

‘Who’s Saskia?’ said Albie.

‘Rembrandt’s wife. He used her as the female model for lots of his paintings. He was devoted to her. So they say.’

‘Oh. Really?’ There had been nothing about this in the guidebook. ‘D’you think she thought it a bit strange?’

‘Maybe. Perhaps she would have liked it, her husband imagining her youth, before he met her. Anyway, she probably never saw it. She died while he was painting it.’

This all seemed very unlikely to me. ‘So, either he painted it while she was dying …’

‘Or he painted her face from memory.’

‘His older wife dressed as a young girl.’

‘In loving memory of her. As a tribute, after she’d gone.’

And I didn’t quite know what to make of this, except perhaps to note that artists in general really are very strange.

We didn’t leave the museum until early afternoon, exhausted but inspired and with our schedule still in good shape. Sitting in the Museumplein, I identified several local lunch options, but Albie seemed engaged in some electronic conversation, giggling over the screen of his phone for reasons that became clear as I felt two fingers jab into my spine.

‘Don’t move, Petersen! Buffet police! We have reason to suspect you’re carrying a concealed pain au chocolat.’

‘Cat! Well, what a surprise!’ said Connie, a little tightly. ‘Albie, you trickster.’ Albie was grinning in an unlovable way, delighted at the playing out of his brilliant little joke.

‘I followed you — all the way from Paris! Hope I didn’t freak you out there, Mr P., it’s just Albie told me where you were and I couldn’t resist. Come here, you beautiful boy!’ and here she grabbed our son’s face with both hands and gave him a smacking kiss that echoed across the park. ‘How’s the ’Dam? Are you having a wild time? Isn’t it an amazing city?’

‘We’re having a very nice time, thank you—’

‘Yeah, Albie told me you’ve checked him in to some kinky knocking-shop. Sounds hysterical.’

‘It’s not kinky,’ I said patiently, ‘it’s boutique.’

‘So what have you done, where have you been, what are you going to do? Tell me everything!’

‘The flower market, cycling around the canals. We’re going to the Van Gogh Museum tomorrow, and a canal cruise if we have time.’

‘That’s all the pretty-pretty tourist stuff — you need to see the other Amsterdam. We should all hang out! What are you doing right now?’

I felt, instinctively, that my itinerary was under threat. ‘Actually, we’re going to the Anne Frank House, then the Rembrandt House Museum.’

‘Well, we don’t have to,’ said Connie. ‘We can go tomorrow.’

‘Why don’t you guys go without us?’ said Albie, hopefully. Clearly the idea of the four of us ‘hanging out’ was as unlikely and awkward to Albie as it was to me. ‘Me and Cat want to go and explore.’

‘I really want to take you to the Anne Frank House, Albie. I think you should see it.’

‘I’m too tired to do much more, Douglas,’ said Connie treacherously. ‘Perhaps we should go tomorrow morning?’

‘No! No, it’s the Van Gogh Museum tomorrow. We’re leaving in the afternoon.’

‘Wouldn’t you rather see the real Amsterdam?’

No, Cat, dammit, no! I had no desire to see the real Amsterdam. We had reality back in Berkshire, that’s not why we were here; we had no interest in the way things really were. A perfectly co-ordinated schedule of sightseeing was unravelling before my eyes. ‘If we don’t go to the Anne Frank House today, the whole plan falls apart.’ I felt myself getting shrill.

‘Let us at least grab some lunch and chill out though, yeah? I’ve got a bike, and I know this amazing vegetarian buffet in De Pijp …’

Chickpeas like little balls of limestone. Some kind of bland, spongy curd cheese. Spinach like the algae on a Chinese beach, cold okra like a bucket of slugs. Necrotic avocado, sandy couscous, flaccid courgettes in a green-grey water sauce made from water. Kidney beans! Just plain cold kidney beans, exquisitely emptied from the can.

‘Isn’t it incredible? Who needs meat!’ said Cat who, the last time I saw her, had been stuffing her rucksack with bacon like some crazed taxidermist.

‘We ate a lot of meat in Paris. A lot,’ said Connie, shifting allegiance in the most audacious way.

‘I hope you didn’t eat foie gras,’ warned Cat, one finger pointed in my face.

‘No, just duck, steak, duck, pâté, duck, steak …’

‘And it was all delicious, I thought.’

‘Dad won’t eat anything unless it’s got a face.’

‘I don’t think I heard anyone complain at the time.’

‘It’s very hard to get top-notch veggies in Paris. Kind of bungs you up after a while, though, doesn’t it?’ said Cat, puffing out her cheeks. ‘Especially with all those baguettes. At least this bread has got some goodness in it.’ The bread was rubbery and dense like window putty, and sprinkled with the contents of the baker’s dustpan. ‘I’m going in again! Who’s coming for more delicious veggies?’ and off Cat and Albie hopped to the buffet bar, where the tea-lights beneath silver hoppers kept the food pleasingly tepid.

I returned to my plate with a sigh. ‘There is nothing here that, if you threw it against a wall, wouldn’t stick and slide down very slowly.’

‘Except the bread,’ laughed Connie.

‘The bread would ricochet off and take out an eye.’

‘Well, you did say you wanted to try new things.’

‘I only want to try new things that I know I’m going to like,’ I said, and Connie laughed. ‘Does she only ever eat from buffets, I wonder?’

‘Leave her alone. I like her.’

‘Really? You’ve changed your tune.’

‘She’s fine when she calms down. And look at them. It’s sweet.’ Over at the buffet, they stood shoulder to shoulder, trying to choose between norovirus and listeria. ‘Young love. Were we once like that, Douglas, I wonder?’

‘It’s three fifteen. If we’re going to get to the Anne Frank House we need to go now.’

‘Douglas, can we leave it be? Even the Gestapo didn’t want to get there this much.’

‘Connie!’

‘We’re spending time with Albie, doing what he wants to do. Isn’t that what you wanted?’

And so we polished off our watery curd, paid and mounted our bikes and spent the afternoon touring the outer rings of Amsterdam, Cat pointing out the amazing little bars, the squats where she’d stayed, the skateboard parks and huge estates and street markets. In truth much of it was perfectly nice and it was interesting, I suppose, to see where the Moroccan population lived, the Surinamese and the Turks. But as we looped back towards the centre, another destination became clear.

‘And this,’ said Cat, ‘is my favourite coffee shop!’

It was inevitable, I suppose. Ever since we’d arrived in Amsterdam, Albie had been glancing sideways at these places in the same way that he once regarded toy shops. Now, standing outside the Nice Café, he was looking at the ground, grinning.

‘It’s a really blissful, vibey little place, dead friendly,’ reassured Cat. ‘I know the bud-tender, he’ll look after us.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so, Cat.’

‘Come on, Mr P. When in Rome …’

‘No, thank you. It’s really not for me.’

‘How do you know if you’ve never tried it?’ said Albie, the exact rationale I once used to get him to eat cabbage.

‘I have tried it; of course I’ve tried it, Albie. I was young once!’

‘I think I missed that bit,’ said Connie.

‘When I was with you, Connie, as a matter of fact, and Genevieve and Tyler. I pulled a massive whitey, if you recall.’

‘“Massive whitey”,’ sniggered Albie.

‘Mr P., you dark horse. Why not give it another go?’

‘No, thank you, Cat.’

‘Okay, Dad’s out,’ said Albie, barely bothering to hide his relief.

‘How about you, Mrs P.?’ said Cat, and all eyes turned to Connie.

‘Mum?’ said Albie.

Connie weighed up her options.

‘Okay,’ she said, ‘sounds good,’ and off she went to park her bicycle.

At various points during Albie’s teenage years I had found myself in these situations, confronting the kind of ‘life dilemma’ that pads out the weekend newspapers. What is the correct parental response to shoplifting, the unsuitable friend picked up at the playground, the smell of alcohol or tobacco on teenage breath, the money disappearing from the dresser, the esoteric search history on the family computer? How much water in the wine? Should a girlfriend be allowed to stay the night, what is the policy on locked doors, on bad language, bad behaviour, bad diet? In recent years these dilemmas had come thick and fast and I had found them quite bewildering. Why had we not been issued with a clear set of guidelines? Had I caused my own parents all this ethical writhing? I was sure I had not. The most illicit act of my teenage years was to sometimes watch ITV. Yet here we were again, the latest instalment of this perpetual radio phone-in. I stood alongside Connie as she chained her bike. ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’

‘Quite sure, thank you, Douglas.’

‘And you really think you should be encouraging him?’

‘I’m not encouraging him, I’m just not being a hypocrite about it. Look at him! He’s with a girl in Amsterdam, he’s a teenager. Frankly, I’d be more worried if he didn’t want to do it.’

‘You don’t have to sanction it, though.’

‘How am I sanctioning it, Douglas?’

‘By joining in!’

‘I’m keeping a gentle eye on him. Also, as a matter of fact, I quite fancy a smoke.’

‘You do? Really?’

‘Is that really so strange? Really, Douglas?’

Cat and Albie were watching us now. ‘Fine. Fine. But if he drops out to become a bud-tender, then it’s your responsibility.’

‘He won’t become a bud-tender.’

‘I’m going to leave you to it.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘I think you’ll have more fun without me.’

‘Okay,’ she shrugged, ‘we’ll see you later,’ and I thought, once more, you know, just one time, you might at least try to persuade me.

We walked back to the expectant party. ‘I’m leaving, your mother is staying.’

Albie pulled his fist down and hissed, ‘Yessssss!’ at this best of all possible outcomes.

‘Just don’t eat the space cookies,’ I said. ‘There’s no way to control the dosage.’

‘Truth. Sound counsel, Mr P.,’ said Cat, patting my arm. ‘Words to live by.’

‘I’ll see you back at the hotel, for supper maybe,’ said Connie, pressing a cheek against mine, and off they went to the Nice Café.

I was certainly in no mood for the Anne Frank House now. Without Albie there seemed little point, and while the Rembrandt House Museum was atmospheric and informative, particularly on the extraordinary technical demands and innovations of seventeenth-century engraving, I found myself distracted and ill at ease.

Because it was all very jolly, wasn’t it, all very cool, sitting around and getting stoned all afternoon with your mum? What a lark, what memories to share! But I wanted my son to have ambition, I wanted him to have drive and energy and a fine, fierce mind. I wanted him to look out into the world with curiosity and intelligence, not with the awful solipsism and silliness of the stoned. Irrespective of the medical risks, the memory loss and apathy and psychosis, the possibility of addiction or exposure to hard drugs, what was this idiotic obsession with chilling out? I wasn’t aware of having been relaxed at any time in my entire life; that was just the way things were, and was it really so bad? To be taut as a wire, on the ball, conscious of the dangers around you — wasn’t that to be admired?

Such were my thoughts as I bicycled back and forth along the city’s eastern canals, which were more utilitarian, less picturesque than those in the Grachtengordel. Oh, no doubt they were all having a fine time, self-lobotomising in the Nice Café. No doubt they were flopping about on beanbags in that idiotic fug, eating banana bread and giggling at the colour blue or mocking that funny old square and his fear of new experiences. But why couldn’t they recognise my reservation for what it was; not narrow-mindedness, not conservatism or caution but care, a huge amount of care, an ocean of it. I disapproved because I cared. Why wasn’t that apparent?

I found myself falling out of love with Amsterdam. For a start, there were far too many bicycles. The whole thing had got completely out of hand, the bridges and streets and lampposts choked with them like they were some alien weed. Many of them were decrepit anyway and I began to fantasise how, if I were mayor of Amsterdam, I would instigate a cull of the bloody things; a strict one person, one bike policy. Anything abandoned, anything not roadworthy to be removed with bolt-cutters if necessary and melted down. In fact, in my sour frame of mind I began to get quite carried away with the idea. I’d take them all on, the cyclists of Amsterdam, with their inadequate lighting and one-handed riding, their high saddles and sanctimonious air. I’d be like Caligula, ruthless, fearless. I’d build a bonfire. Yes, melt down the bikes, the bloody, bloody bikes!

I found myself in the red light district.

I don’t wish to sound defensive about the fact, but there was a Chinese restaurant that I was eager to return to. Connie and I had been there many years ago and I had it in mind to eat a whole Peking duck as revenge for all that okra. It was early evening, still warm and bright, and there was a sort of happy hour vibe as stags and hens, self-conscious couples and a gang of bikers overflowed from bars onto the bridge that crossed the canal. The ladies in the red-curtained booths waved and smiled at me like old friends as I tried to find a place to park my bicycle in the absurdly congested tangle of scrap iron and rubber, and found myself surrounded by the wretched things, untangling pedals from chains and handlebars from brake cables, kicking down my bike stand, contorting between the frames to lock the thing. Then, as I stood and extricated myself, I tapped the bicycle to my left with my hip, just a little nudge and, in a kind of strange, almost hallucinatory slow-motion, watched as the tiny movement sent the bicycle crashing into the next, then the next, then the next, then the next, a chain reaction passing from bike to bike like an ingenious and ambitious domino run, kinetic energy building through four, five, six bikes before it reached the huddle of vintage motorcycles. There were four of them, immaculate, polished things, parked just outside the bar where their owners were drinking, so that they’d be safe. So that they would come to no harm.

There was a loud scraping noise as the brake handle of the last bicycle slashed its mark deep into the shiny red petrol tank of the first motorbike, then the crash as they too tumbled to the ground, one, two, three, four, then silence. Very strange, to hear silence in a crowded city street. Eerie, almost, though it didn’t last for long. Someone laughed. ‘Oh, shit,’ said someone else. From the bikers’ bar — I noted here that it was called ‘Valhalla’ — there came a roar as a group of immense red-faced men pushed through the crowd towards the beloved bikes that now lay, wheels spinning, in a pile of polished chrome.

All of this took a matter of perhaps ten seconds, and absurdly I wondered if I might still be able to walk away. After all, it wasn’t exactly my fault. It was gravity, it was the bike, it was a chain reaction, nothing to do with me. Perhaps if I just walked away, perhaps if I whistled as I walked, as in a cartoon, no one would notice.

But I was standing alone at the precise centre of a great circle of destruction, and soon the men were barrelling towards me, the four of them like the fingers in a fist, hatred in their eyes. The Dutch accent didn’t seem so affable now, it seemed harsh and guttural as they quickly formed a circle around me, hands gripping my shoulder as if steadying me for a punch that I knew would surely come. The man with his nose touching mine was blond as a Viking, with a face like a cheap cut of meat, missing teeth — never a good sign — and beer on his breath. ‘No speak Dutch,’ I repeated idiotically, ‘no speak Dutch,’ on the basis that bad English is more easily understood than the good kind. But it’s possible to spot swearing in almost any language and now four other hands were grabbing my arms, walking me — carrying me — through the crowd that had now gathered to watch the sport. Three motorcycles were hauled upright and inspected, but the nearest bike lay on its side in a way that seemed suggestive of a dying horse, the owner crouching beside the beloved creature, keening quietly, rubbing his thumb over the horrible scar on the highly polished fuel tank. Unusually for a Dutchman, he seemed to speak fairly limited English, because the only words I could pick up were ‘You pay, you pay,’ then, as he grew in linguistic confidence, ‘you pay big’.

‘I didn’t do it!’

‘Your bike did it.’

‘Not my bike. My bike over there,’ and I gestured across the devastation to where my bike stood, immaculately vertical. There was, I suppose, an interesting debate to be had here about causality and the notion of ‘fault’, intention and chance, but it might save time if I simply reached for my wallet. I had never re-sprayed a motorcycle. How much might that cost?

I began negotiations. ‘I can give you … eighty euros.’ This made them laugh in an unpleasant way, and an immense paw took my wallet and started searching through the folds and pouches. ‘Excuse me — could you give that back?’

‘No, my friend,’ said the blond man. ‘We are going to the bank!’

‘Give him back his money!’ said a voice to one side, and looking over my shoulder I saw that a woman was pushing her way through the crowd, a large black woman with improbably blonde hair, tying her dressing gown over what appeared to be some sort of white fishnet body-stocking. ‘Here,’ she said, snatching my wallet and returning it to me, ‘this is yours. You hold this until I say.’

There was, at this point, a certain amount of shouting in Dutch, the woman jabbing her finger into the lead biker’s chest — her nails were extravagantly long, curved and painted — then throwing her shoulders back and pushing her chest towards him, using it as one might a riot shield, while pointing at me and gesturing up and down. She shouted something, causing the crowd to laugh and the biker to shrug defensively, then suddenly she changed her tone and tack, flirting with the man instead, her arms draped over his shoulders. He laughed and pinched his nose in thought. Looked me up and down. I seemed to be the subject of some sort of negotiation.

‘How much in your wallet?’ said the lady who, I surmised from the body-stocking, was either a prostitute or very outgoing. Would she be coming to the bank too? Perhaps she wasn’t my ally after all. Perhaps they were all going to rob me and toss me in the canal. ‘About two hundred and fifty euros,’ I said, defensively.

‘Give me one hundred fifty.’ She beckoned with two fingers of her hand. I hesitated, and she spoke fast and low. ‘Give it to me and you might live.’

I handed over the money, which she packed into a tight ball and stuffed into the biker’s fist. Then, before he’d had a chance to count it, she took my arm and pushed her way through the crowd towards a flight of stairs. Behind us, the bikers were protesting loudly: ‘You pay more! More!’ But the lady gestured dismissively, hissed something about the police, and I was bustled up the steps of the townhouse, through a red-lit doorway.

My saviour’s name was Regina — though that may have been a pseudonym — and she was terrifically nice.

‘What is your name, my new friend?’

‘Paul,’ I said, then with an awful inevitability, ‘Newman. I’m Paul Newman.’ I’m not sure where my pseudonym came from. It lacked the ring of plausibility, and probably wasn’t even necessary. After all, I hadn’t done anything wrong. But too late; for the time being I was Paul Newman.

‘Hello, Paul Newman. Come …’

I took a seat on a sort of vinyl platform. The bedroom, if bedroom is the right word, contained a sink and a rudimentary shower and was lit in a deep red, and I thought for a moment what a terrific place it would be for developing photographs. A cheap fan blew ineffectually, a kettle sat in the corner. There was a microwave, and a powerful smell of some chemical approximation of coconut. ‘I watched the whole thing from the window. You are a very unlucky man, Paul Newman,’ she said, and laughed. ‘They were big guys. I think they might have killed you, or at least emptied your bank.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘I told him to claim on insurance. He has insurance, that is what insurance is for! You are shaking.’ She illustrated with juddering hands. ‘Would you like some tea?’

‘Tea would be lovely. Thank you.’ While we waited for the kettle to boil I became very aware of her bare bottom, which was large, dimpled and never more than half a metre from my face. I turned to the window onto the street, intrigued to see the booth from this point of view, and noted that she had exactly the same swivelling office chair that I’d once had in my lab, though I didn’t point this out. Instead I turned to the TV.

‘Ah, I see that you have Downton Abbey here too!’

Regina shrugged. ‘You want to watch something else?’ she said, and indicated a small pile of pornographic DVDs.

‘No, no. Downton’s fine.’ Without asking, she stirred two sugars into the tea and passed me my mug, and I noticed that my hands were indeed shaking. I used my left palm as a saucer. At a loss for conversation, I asked, ‘So — have you been working here long?’

Regina told me that she had been doing this for six or seven years. Her parents were Nigerian, but she had been born in Amsterdam and had started working here through a friend. The winter was depressing and it was hard to pay the rent on the little booth without the tourists around, but she had some regular customers that she could rely on. Summer, on the other hand, was too busy, too much, and she shook her head woefully. ‘Stag nights!’ she said, and wagged a finger at me as if I had been organising them all. Apparently a lot of men required drink to get their courage up, then found themselves unable to perform. ‘They still have to pay, of course!’ she said, pointing a finger with some menace and I laughed and nodded and agreed that this was only fair. I asked if she knew her colleagues and she said they were mainly friendly, though some girls had been tricked into coming here from Russia and Eastern Europe, and this made Regina sad and angry. ‘They think they’re going to be dancers, can you believe that? Dancers! Like the world needs all these dancers!’

After a moment, she said, ‘What do you do, Paul Newman?’

‘Insurance,’ I said, giddy on my whimsical flight of fancy. ‘I’m on holiday here with my wife and son.’

‘I have a son too,’ she said.

‘Mine’s seventeen.’

‘Mine’s only five.’

‘Five is a lovely age,’ I said, which I’ve always thought an idiotic remark. When do ages stop being ‘lovely’? ‘Five’s lovely, but fifty-four’s a bastard’ — that should be the follow-up. Anyway, Regina’s five-year-old son, it transpired, lived in Antwerp with his grandparents because she didn’t want any of them seeing her at work, and at this point the little room took on a sombre air and we sat in silence for a minute or so, watching events below stairs at Downton and contemplating the anxieties of parenthood.

But all in all, it was an interesting and informative conversation, not one I’d expected to have that evening and I did feel we’d made some sort of connection. But I was also aware of eating into her time and also that she was practically naked, and so I stood and reached for my wallet.

‘Regina, you’ve been really kind, but we’ve been talking for a while so I really want to pay you something …’

‘Okay,’ she shrugged. ‘It’s fifty for complete service.’

‘Oh, no. No, no, no. I don’t need a complete service.’

‘Okay, Paul Newman, you tell me what you do need?’

‘I don’t need anything! I’m here with my family.’

She shrugged again, and took the mug from my hand. ‘Everyone has a family.’

‘No, we’re here for the Rijksmuseum.’

‘Yes,’ she laughed, ‘I hear that a lot.’

‘My wife’s off with my son. The only reason I’m here at all is because I was looking for a Chinese restaurant.’ This made her laugh even more. ‘Please, don’t laugh at me, Regina, it’s true. I was just looking for somewhere to … I just wanted to find …’ And I imagine that at this point some kind of delayed shock kicked in, combined with the stresses and strains of the last few days, because for some reason I seemed to be crying in absurd, jagged gasps, hunched over on the vinyl bench, one hand pressed across my eyes, like a mask.

I wish I could report here that Regina told me to put my money away and held me to her warm, soft breast and soothed my brow, the kind of thing that would happen in an arty film or novel. Two lost souls meeting, or some such nonsense. But in real life lost souls don’t meet, they just wander about and I think, in all honesty, she was as embarrassed as I was. A nervous breakdown in a red-lit booth was a breach in etiquette, and there was a palpable briskness as Regina took the remaining hundred euros, stood and opened the door.

‘Goodbye, Paul Newman,’ she said, her hand on my shoulder. ‘Go and find your family.’

In the Mellow Times Café they played Bob Marley’s Greatest Hits, which even I would have rejected as a little obvious. My bud-tender, a tall boy called Tomas with a patchy beard and a flute-y, lisping voice, asked me what I wanted, and I asked for something that would simultaneously calm me down and cheer me up, not too strong; did such a brand exist? Seemingly it did; he gave me something called Pineapple Gold and, like a good GP, advised me not to combine it with alcohol, though it was too late for that advice as I had already been to several bars.

Back in the honeymoon suite, I pulled out my phone and noted a series of texts from Connie that I imagined represented a spiral of lunacy:

Where are you?

Call me!!!

It fun here!! Join us

come have fun

u ok hun?

funny old man callme!!!

love you loads

But even that last message failed to cheer me. ‘I love you’ is an interesting phrase, in that apparently small alterations — taking away the ‘I’, adding a word like ‘lots’ or ‘loads’ — render it meaningless. I opened the windows wide, set the Jacuzzi to massage, placed my ‘gear’ in a saucer on the edge and climbed in.

I wish I could report some psychedelic odyssey. Instead, I felt the same sense of overheated melancholy that I usually associate with three p.m. on Boxing Day. Good God, did people really go to prison for this? My head hummed with the unpleasant throbbing one feels in a bath that’s too hot, a sensation amplified by the fact that I was in a bath that was too hot, bubbling and churning like some terrible casserole. The drug was failing to bring about the amnesia I craved. I was, if anything, even more painfully aware of the failure of my best hopes. Despite my efforts, or perhaps because of them, the Petersens were stumbling. If there had been two of us, or four of us, perhaps there might have been some balance. But together we had the grace of a three-legged dog, hobbling from place to place.

By now I was feeling rather ill. The bedroom smelt like a burning spice rack and it was a non-smoking room, too, adding to my paranoia. My heart was beating far too fast and I became convinced that it would pop like my father’s and I would expire like a rock star, on the floor of an Amsterdam sex hotel after three beers and two puffs of a very mild joint. One hand on my chest, still soaking wet, I stumbled into our absurd bed and waited beneath damp sheets for Connie to come home.

She returned at three a.m., just as she had that first summer. It had been my firm intention to sulk but she was dopily affectionate, settling her head on my shoulder. Her hair smelt smoky, there was an unfamiliar spirit on her breath and a slight, not unpleasant smell of sweat.

‘Oh my God,’ she murmured. ‘What a night.’

‘Was it fun?’

‘In a teenage kind of way. We went to see bands! Did you get my texts? We missed you. Where were you?’

‘I met a prostitute. Called Regina. Then I OD’ed in the Jacuzzi.’

She laughed. ‘Oh, is that right?’

‘Where’s Albie?’

‘He’s next door. I think he brought some friends back.’ And sure enough, through the door of our adjoining rooms could be heard the sound of laughter, and an accordion playing ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’.

From now on there would be no more returns at three or four in the morning. Now we went to bed and woke together, stood at the sink and brushed our teeth, shaping the habits and tics, the gestures and dances of a life together, beginning the process by which things that are thrilling and new become familiar, scuffed and well loved. Specifically …

Connie always dozes when the alarm goes off whereas I am already awake. Connie puts her bra on before any of her other clothes, I work on the lower half then proceed upwards. Connie likes a manual toothbrush, I swear by electric. Connie talks on the phone for hours, I am brief and to the point. Connie carves a roast chicken like a surgeon, I make excellent stews. Connie is late for flights, whereas I like to be there the requisite two hours before departure, because why would they ask if they didn’t mean it? Connie has a facility for mimicry and dancing, I do not. Connie dislikes mugs but rarely uses a saucer with a teacup, habitually burns toast, hates having her ears touched or whispered into, licks jam off her knife, chews ice-cubes and sometimes, shockingly to me, eats raw bacon off the chopping board. Connie likes gritty award-winning dramas, old musicals and berating politicians on the news. I like documentaries about extreme weather conditions. She dislikes tulips and roses, cauliflower and swede, and eats tomatoes as if they were apples, wiping the juice from her chin with her thumb. She paints her toenails in front of the TV on Sunday nights, each leg raised in turn in a wonderful way, sheds a startling amount of hair into the plughole yet never removes it, has a terrifying dent in her scalp which she calls her ‘metal plate’ from a childhood mishap on a diving board, a surprising number of black fillings in her teeth, a raised mole on her left shoulder, two piercings in each ear. She leaves a certain smell on her pillow, prefers red wine to white, thinks chocolate is overrated, and has an infinite capacity for sleep, could sleep standing up if she chose. We made these discoveries each day, then stood and undressed on opposite sides of the bed in which we made love 90, then 80, then 70 per cent of our nights. We witnessed all the petty maladies, the stomach upsets and chest infections, the gnarled toenails, the ingrowing hairs, boils and rashes that took the gleam off the person we had first presented. No matter, no panic, these things happen, and instead we shopped for food together, pushing the trolley a little self-consciously at first, trying on this domesticity. We had what we ironically referred to as our ‘drinks cabinet’ and brought back lurid liqueurs when we travelled abroad. We argued over tea, Connie favouring fragrant, vaguely medicinal brews over regular tea-bags. We argued once again when she destroyed my fridge by defrosting the freezer section with a screwdriver, then again about the efficacy of Chinese medicine, and once more about furniture, as my perfectly decent sofa-bed was removed and replaced with Connie’s smoky, baggy velvet affair. My fitted carpets, chosen for their hard-wearing neutrality — ‘office carpets’, she called them — were torn up. We painted the floorboards together, as young couples must.

There were other changes, too. Connie was, in those days, ferociously untidy. She isn’t like that now and I suppose it’s one of the ways in which I’ve managed to change her, but in those days she used to leave a trail of pen lids, sweet-wrappers, hair slides and grips and pins, elastic bands, pieces of costume jewellery, the backs of earrings, packets of tissues, a single piece of gum wrapped in foil, small change from around the world. It was not unusual for her to reach into the pocket of a capacious coat for keys and to pull out a small wrench, a stolen ashtray, a desiccated apple-core or the stone of a mango. Books were left face down on the toilet cistern, discarded clothes were pushed into a corner like fallen leaves. She liked to ‘leave dishes to soak’, an act of self-deception that I’ve always abhorred.

But, for the most part, I didn’t mind. Light travels differently in a room that contains another person; it reflects and refracts so that even when she was silent or sleeping I knew that she was there. I loved the evidence of her past presence, and the promise of her return, the way she changed the smell of that gloomy little flat. I had been unhappy there, but that was in the past. It felt like being cured of some debilitating disease, and I was jubilant. ‘Domestic bliss’ — the pairing of those words made perfect sense to me. I don’t mean to strike an inappropriate note, but few things have ever made me happier in my life than the sight of Connie’s underwear drying on my radiator.

London changed, too. The city that had always seemed somewhat mean and grey, ineptly conceived, impractical and dour, became renewed. Connie was a Londoner and knew it like a cabbie. Street markets and drinking dens, Chinese, Turkish, Thai shops and restaurants and greasy spoons. It was like discovering that the somewhat dreary house in which you’ve grown up has one hundred further rooms, each leading off the other, each full of strangeness or beauty or noise. The city where I lived made sense because Connie Moore was in it.

After eighteen months together we sold my Balham flat, scraped our savings into a pile, somehow acquired a joint mortgage and bought a place that would feel like ours. North of the river this time, a top-floor flat in Kilburn, larger, lighter, better for parties — not criteria that had ever troubled me before — with a small but pleasant spare room. The purpose of this room was vague. Perhaps people could stay over, or perhaps Connie could start painting again — she had not painted for a while, despite my encouragement, but had given up her share of the studio and was working full time in the St James gallery. Artists, she said, had a few years after college in which to make an impression and she felt this hadn’t happened. She still sold paintings, but less frequently, and she did not replace them with new work. Well, never mind, perhaps now she would have the space she needed. ‘And this …’ said Connie to Fran, swinging open the door, ‘is the nursery!’ and they both laughed for some time.

We pulled up the carpets there too, and threw a housewarming party, the first party I had ever thrown. My friends from the lab eyed her friends from the arts like rival gangs at a teenage disco, but there were cocktails, and one of Connie’s musician friends DJ-ed and soon there was dancing — dancing, in my own home! — the two clans emulsifying after a vigorous shake. At midnight the neighbours came up to complain. Connie pressed drinks into their hands and told them to change out of their pyjamas and soon they were dancing too. ‘You see this?’ said my sister Karen, drunk and self-satisfied, her arms tight around the necks of Connie and me. ‘This was my idea!’ She squeezed a little tighter. ‘Just imagine, D, if you’d stayed at home that night. Imagine!’

When the last guest had finally left we made strong coffee and stood at the sink washing glasses together in the late-summer dawn, the windows wide open onto the roofs of north-west London. Begrudgingly, I had to admit there was a great deal to thank my sister for. Though not my field, I was familiar with the notion of alternative realities, but was not used to occupying the one I liked the best.

So much changed during those years that it became impossible to conceal the truth from my parents, and so one Easter we drove east. Connie was an undeservedly confident driver and owned a battle-scarred old Volvo with moss growing in the window frames and a forest floor of crisp packets, cracked cassette cases and old A-to-Zs. She drove with a kind of belligerent sloppiness, changing the music more often than she changed gear, so that tensions were already quite high as we pulled up outside my family home, Victorian red-brick, lawn neat, gravel raked.

I had met Connie’s family many times. It was impossible not to, given their closeness, and generally we got on very well. Her half-brothers would gather around me at family events, calling me ‘Professor’ and urging me to visit various north-east London takeaways, insisting, ‘Anything you want, on the house.’ Kemal, her step-father, thought me ‘a true gent’, and a far better proposition than the hooligans she usually brought home. Only Shirley, Connie’s mother, remained sceptical. ‘How’s Angelo?’ she would ask. ‘What’s Angelo up to? Have you seen Angelo?’ ‘It’s because Angelo used to flirt with her,’ Connie explained. It was never suggested that I should flirt, too.

Arriving at my parents’, I wondered whether Connie might flirt with my father and perhaps draw him out of his spiked shell. Was that worth a try? Curtains twitched as we pulled up. My father’s hand raised at the window, my mother at the front door. Hello, would you mind taking your shoes off?

Connie was completely charming, of course, but I’d always been led to believe that one talked to parents in the same polite, over-enunciated tone used for customs officials and police officers, conversation kept within tight parameters. What a lovely home, we’ve brought you some flowers, no more wine for me! Connie, however, made a great show of not altering her tone at all, simply talking to them like normal people.

But they weren’t normal people, they were my parents. Connie was charming and bright, but my father smelt the artiness on her and it made him anxious. My mother was bemused. Who was this attractive, glamorous, outspoken creature, holding hands with her son? ‘She’s very vivacious,’ she whispered as the kettle boiled. It was as if I’d turned up wearing an immense fur coat. Separate rooms would have been too draconian, but despite there being a perfectly good double bed, we were shown into the spare room with two singles, my mother holding open the door as if to say, ‘Here it is, your den of filth and shame.’ Connie was never one to shy away from a fight, and I imagined my parents in the dining room below, staring at the ceiling, cigarettes suspended halfway to their mouths at the sound of Connie and me pushing the beds together, giggling. Teenage rebellion, at the age of thirty-three.

The revolution continued at dinner. Despite smoking like a pair of burning tyres, my parents were rather reserved about alcohol and kept their sparse selection of ancient bottles in the garden shed with the spiders. Sherry was for trifles; brandy was for shock. Alcohol loosened inhibitions, and inhibitions were worn tight here. When it became clear that my parents were not going to open the bottle we had brought with us, that it would join the miniature of whisky and the curdled advocaat at the end of the garden, Connie made a great show of ‘popping out for some more wine’, returning in the car with two bottles and, it transpired later, a small bottle of vodka concealed in her coat.

I wish I could say the alcohol made things go with a swing. Over a dinner of fatty pork, talk somehow turned to immigration policy because, famously, nothing brings people together like the subject of immigration. We had all been drinking now, Connie and my father in particular, and my mother had asked a question about the relative racial mix of Kilburn in comparison with Balham. Were there still a lot of Irish there, as opposed to West Indians or Pakistanis? The implication being, I suppose, that the Irish were in some way ‘not so bad’. Connie had replied, in moderate tones, that there were all kinds of communities there, that often when people said Pakistani they meant Bangladeshi, which was like confusing Italy with Spain, and that the racial mix was part of the excitement and pleasure of living in London. But did she feel safe at night? asked my father.

It is probably not necessary to transcribe the argument that followed. In their defence, my parents’ views were widely held, but they were expressed with inappropriate anger, my father’s curled finger tapping an invisible window pane with every spurious ‘fact!’, and soon Connie was shouting, ‘My step-father is Turkish Cypriot, should he go home? My half-brothers, they’re half English, half Cypriot. What about my mum, she’s English, Irish, French, but she’s married to one of them — should she have to go, too?’

‘Maybe we should change the subject?’ I suggested.

‘No, we will not!’ said Connie emphatically. ‘Why do you always want to change the subject?’

And so we went on. The insinuation on Connie’s part — perhaps she even stated it outright — was that my parents were provincial bigots. The contention on my parents’ part was that Connie was ‘not in the real world’, that she was not waiting for a council house with her three kids, that she was unlikely to lose her job in some swanky art gallery to somebody who had just got off the boat from Poland. ‘You don’t get the boat from Poland,’ said Connie, petulantly, ‘you fly.’

There was a pause, and we all looked at our congealed dinner.

‘You’re very quiet,’ said my mother, in hurt tones.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I agree with Connie.’

For the most part I did agree with Connie. But if Connie had been arguing for a moon made entirely of cheese, I would have agreed with her too. I was going to be on her side from now on, and my parents saw this, and were saddened by it, I think. But what choice did I have? In a fight you side with the people you love. That is just how it is.

The three gentlemen at breakfast were large and self-confident: a Dutchman, an American and a Russian. They were well-dressed, teak-tanned, expense-account men, reeking of cologne, the kind of men who let other people shave them, the kind of men you find on yachts. With their immense wristwatches, they were a different breed, and our party of four seemed rather grey and muted in comparison. Connie and I had slept badly, Cat and Albie not at all, and they were still drunk or stoned or some combination of the two. If they reeked of beer and spirits, I reeked of disapproval. A reckoning was due between Albie and me. There had been complaints from the hotel staff about last night’s party, and I was waiting for an opportunity to announce that no, I would not be paying for the contents of the mini-bar and no, I was not happy that we had missed the best part of our final morning in Amsterdam due to hangovers. And so the seven of us sat in the gloomy subterranean breakfast room, at tables too close together, consuming acrid coffee and the kind of croissants that come in cellophane wrappers while the businessmen boomed away.

‘People talk about manufacturing costs,’ the handsome American was saying, ‘and we’re not stupid, we see that as a factor, but where’s the benefit if we’re left with a shitty product?’ He was no older than thirty, blue-chinned, muscular beneath a tailored shirt. ‘Our current manufacturers, we’re sending 10 to 15 per cent back as faulty or under par.’

‘It is a false economy,’ said the nodding Dutchman, slighter and less confident, some sort of middle-man or facilitator. Perhaps there was a business conference in town, a trade fair of some kind.

‘Precisely. A false economy. What you offer us, and this is why we’re pursuing this so hard, is consistency, efficiency, transportation links …’

‘Reliability …’ said the Russian.

‘It is a win-win situation,’ said the Dutchman, who seemed to have a business idiom for every circumstance. They continued in that rather brash tone, and I attempted to bring our own conversation back to check-out times, the storage of luggage, the importance of intelligent packing. We were heading to Munich by sleeper train that evening, then across the Alps to Verona, Vicenza, Padua and Venice, a journey that had seemed rich with romance when I had made the reservations, but now seemed fraught with danger.

Yet Albie and Cat seemed transfixed by the men to our right, exchanging eye-rolls and little shakes of the head and derisive little huffs and tuts at all this talk of timescales and profit margins and brands. ‘Take this model …’ said the American, and a glossy brochure made its way across the table, close enough for us to see.

The brochure illustrated a gun, some sort of assault rifle, and it was one of many glossy documents among the coffee cups. We were close enough to reach across and grab one, and for a moment I thought Albie might do just that. Here was the gun in loving close-up, here was the gun dismantled, cradled in a mercenary’s arms. I’m no expert on combat weapons, but it looked like rather an absurd object to me. Embellished with telescopic sights and spare magazine clips and jumper-snagging bayonets, it looked like the kind of gun a teenage boy would draw — a space rifle. Indeed, there was discussion about the specialised leisure and hunting sectors, the accessories they’d buy, the gadgets and gizmos. That’s interesting, I thought, they’re weapons manufacturers, and I drank the last of my coffee. ‘Well, Cat,’ I said, ‘I’m afraid it’s time to say goodbye!’

But nobody was listening to me. They were too busy staring, doing their best to radiate disapproval. Cat was craning her neck towards them, shoulders thrown back, eyes wide, street-theatre style. Bad enough that these men were capitalists, but to be discussing such a trade in public, in daylight, in voices loud enough to make our coffee cups shake?

‘Well, the museum opens at ten!’ I said, and began to stand.

‘You are here on holiday?’ said the Dutchman, unable to ignore the stares.

‘Just two days, unfortunately!’ I said, neutrally enough I thought. ‘Come on, everyone. We’ve still got to check out.’

And now Albie pushed his chair noisily away, stood and planted both hands firmly on their table. ‘The bathroom’s over there,’ he said, in a clearer voice than I was used to hearing.

The American adjusted his shoulders. ‘And why would we need the bathroom, son?’

‘To wash all that blood off your hands,’ said Albie, and then several things happened at once, not all of them entirely clear to me. I recall that the American stood, placing one hand behind Albie’s neck, pressing his face towards the open palm of his other hand, saying, ‘Where? Show me the blood, son! Where?’ I saw Connie hanging off the American’s arm, calling him an arsehole, attempting to pull his hand away, a coffee cup spilling, the Dutchman gesturing at me angrily — why couldn’t you mind your own business? — the waiter crossing quickly, amused and then alarmed, the big Russian laughing at it all until Cat stood too, took a glass of orange juice and poured it onto a brochure, then another, then another, until it began to pool on the glossy pages and then cascade into the Russian’s lap and he too stood, revealing his great size just like in a slapstick comedy, at which Cat started to laugh herself, a theatrical cackling, quite maddening, which caused the Russian to start calling her a stupid bitch, a stupid mad bitch, all of which made her laugh even more.

At least that is what I recall. It was not quite a brawl, no punches were thrown, it was more a tangle of reaches and grabs, jeers and sneers, ugly in the extreme and pointless too, I felt. As to my own behaviour, I had intended to play the role of peacemaker, disentangling arms and appealing for calm. That was my intention, to calm the situation, and at some point I wrapped my arms around Albie, holding him back but incidentally allowing the American to shove his shoulder — not hard, just a demeaning little jab. I held on to Albie tight, pulling him away, doing my best to separate the parties and proceed with the day that I had planned for my family. As I say, it was all a blur. What was undeniable, though, because everyone remembered it afterwards, was that at some point I had dragged Albie away and used the words:

‘I’d like to apologise for my son.’

Albie did not come to the Van Gogh Museum. Connie nearly didn’t make it either, so sullen and angry was she that morning, riding her bike with head-down fury, barely bothering with hand signals.

We stood in front of Sunflowers, one of several versions Van Gogh painted, and I was reminded of the print I’d had on my wall. ‘Do you remember? In the Balham flat? I bought it to impress you.’ But she was not in the mood for nostalgia, and all my other observations about the thickness of the paint on the canvas and the rich palette of colours made not a mark on the impenetrable shell of my wife’s contempt. She was even too angry to buy postcards. So much for the soothing power of great art.

Sure enough, the explosion came as we stepped outside.

‘You know what you should have done? When that guy went for Albie? You should have punched him in the nose, not held Albie’s arms so he could hit him.’

‘He didn’t hit him, it was a little shove.’

‘Makes no difference.’

‘Albie started it! He was being obnoxious, he was showing off.’

‘Makes no difference, Douglas.’

‘You think that would have helped? That guy would have knocked me flat! Would that have helped the situation, me getting beaten up in front of everyone? Is that what you’d have preferred?’

‘Yes! Yes, that man would have broken your nose and split your lip and I’d have wanted to kiss you, Douglas, because you’d have stood up to someone for the sake of your son! Instead, you simper away: “We’re having a lovely time here, just two days unfortunately”.’

‘It was a fatuous argument in the first place! Good God, what are you, nine years old? So they make guns! You don’t think we need guns? The police, the army? You don’t think someone has to manufacture them? It’s the politics of primary school to shout abuse at people going about their lawful business, even if you disapprove …’

‘Douglas, you have an incredible capacity for missing the point. Will you listen to me, just for once? The debate does not matter. It’s not about the issues. Albie might have been naïve or ridiculous or pompous or all of those things, but you apologised. You said you were embarrassed by him. You took the side of a bunch of arms-dealers! Bloody bastard arms-dealers against your son — our son — and that was wrong, it was the wrong thing to do, because in a fight you side with the people you love. That’s just how it is.’

86. daydreams of near disaster

When I first began to feel my son slipping away from me — I think perhaps he was nine or ten when I first felt the wriggling of his fingers in my manic grip — I found myself indulging in a particular fantasy. I’m aware that it sounds perverse, but what I hoped for at that time was some accident, some near disaster, so that I could be as heroic as the occasion demanded, and show the strength of my devotion.

In the Everglades of Florida, Albie is bitten by a snake that finds its way into his shoe, and I suck the venom from his filthy heel. Hiking in Snowdonia a sudden storm descends, Albie slips and breaks his ankle and I carry him through fog and rain to safety. A freak wave sweeps Albie off the Cobb at Lyme Regis and, without hesitation, without even thinking about taking my car keys and phone and placing them somewhere safe, I leap into the pounding surf, dive and dive again beneath the grey waters until I find him and carry him to the shore. It transpires that Albie needs a kidney. My kidney is a perfect match — be my guest, please. Take two! If ever he were in danger, I had no doubt about my instinctive courage and loyalty.

Yet put me in a little breakfast room in an Amsterdam hotel …

I would apologise, that’s what I’d do. I would take him somewhere quiet and explain, that I was tired, that I had not slept all night, and perhaps he had not noticed but there were certain tensions between his mother and me and that consequently I was a little on edge, but that I loved him hugely and couldn’t we now move on, both literally and figuratively? The train to Munich was in two hours. We’d be in Italy in two days’ time.

But when I returned to the hotel, I found Connie leaning on the reception desk, the heels of her hands pressed to teary eyes. Without looking up, she slid the letter towards me, written in Albie’s scrawling hand on the back page of my itinerary.

part four GERMANY

We had taken a sleeper train once before, to Inverness then on to a cycling holiday in Skye, the autumn of our second year.

The trip had been a birthday surprise; meet me at such and such a time, bring your passport and a swimming costume, the kind of larky spree that was new to me. If Connie was disappointed to discover that she would need neither passport nor swimming costume then she didn’t show it, and we laughed a lot, I recall, in the tiny couchette of the train from Euston. In the films of my childhood, sleeper trains were shorthand for a kind of suave sauciness. In reality, like saunas and Jacuzzis, sleeping compartments are not nearly the sensual playground we’re led to believe and this is another way in which fiction lies to us. The real experience can easily be simulated by paying two hundred pounds to make love in a locked wardrobe on the back of a fast-moving flatbed truck. Nevertheless, we persevered despite a great deal of giggling and cramp, and somewhere between Preston and Carlisle there was a mishap with birth control.

This was something about which we’d always been quite fastidious, and while neither of us panicked, we both were forced to contemplate the theoretical notion of parenthood, of how that might feel, what it might look like. We thought about it as we cycled across a squally Skye, we thought about it while lying whisky-breath’d in soft, strange beds in various B&Bs, we thought about it while peering at Ordnance Survey maps in search of shelter from the latest downpour. We even joked about it, that if it was a girl we would call her Carlisle, if it was a boy, Preston, and we found the idea … unhorrific. ‘Pregnancy scare’ is the traditional phrase and yet we weren’t scared in the least, and this, too, felt like another milestone.

On our return journey to London, we squeezed into a bunk the size of a large cot and Connie revealed that she was not pregnant after all.

‘Well, that’s good news,’ I said. Then, ‘Is it?’

She exhaled, then turned and lay with her hand across her forehead. ‘I don’t know. I think it is. It always was in the past. I actually feel a little disappointed, to be honest.’

‘Me too,’ I said, and we lay in silence for a while in our shared berth, taking in the implications of this.

‘That doesn’t mean we should start trying, full on. Not yet.’

‘No, but if it happens …’

‘Exactly. If it happens — are you okay?’

‘Just cramp.’ In truth I could no longer feel my legs, but didn’t want to move away just yet.

‘For what it’s worth …’ she said.

‘Go on.’

‘For what it’s worth, I think we’d be quite good at it. Being parents, I mean.’

‘Yes, so do I,’ I said. ‘So do I.’

And I returned to my own bunk, sure in the knowledge that she was at least half right.

We didn’t speak much on the sleeper train to Munich. We lay very still, stacked on shelves, in off-white cubicles of moulded plastic, wipe-clean, with ample sockets for recharging appliances. It was all very smooth and functional, but the hum of the air-conditioning and the blackness outside the window contributed to the impression that we were new inmates in some intergalactic prison cell.

We could have flown to Italy, of course, but I wanted us — the three of us — to at least touch on Germany and Austria, and wouldn’t it be more fun, more romantic, to be a red dot sliding across that great land-locked central mass? Playing cards and drinking wine in our reasonably priced pre-booked couchette while Albie strummed his guitar and read Camus next door, then waking refreshed in Munich, a city new to all of us. There were Raphaels and Dürers at the Alte Pinakothek, Monets and Cézannes at the Neue, there was a famous Bruegel, a Turner — Connie loved Turner. We would go to the beer gardens with Albie, sit in the August sun and feel light-headed with lager and meat. Munich was going to be wonderful.

But now Albie was gone, lost in Europe with a lunatic accordionist, and we two stumbled on in a daze of concern on her part, and guilt on mine. While Connie lay on the top bunk pretending to read, I stared out of the window.

‘He’ll probably have a much better time without us,’ I said, not for the first time. Not for the first time, there was no reply. ‘Perhaps I should call him anyway.’

‘What for?’

‘I’ve told you. To apologise, chat. To check he’s all right.’

‘Let’s just … let’s just leave it be, Douglas. Yes?’ She switched off her light and the train moved on. Somewhere out there lay Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Wuppertal and Cologne, the German industrial heartland, the mighty Rhine, but all I could see were the lights on the Autobahn.

My mother died shortly after our return from Skye, the first time a grave had opened up in my road of life. Another landmark, I suppose.

It seemed that she suffered a stroke while sitting quietly at her desk during a biology class, and it took her ever-obedient pupils some time to respond and raise the alarm. My father rushed to the hospital only to discover that a further stroke had killed her while she lay on a trolley awaiting diagnosis. I arrived two hours later and watched as he responded with quite startling rage; at the bloody pupils who had remained stupidly in their seats, at the bloody teachers and hospital staff, at whoever was meant to be in charge of this whole life and death business. My mother’s death was ‘bloody stupid’, he said — she had been two bloody years away from retirement! Grief manifested itself as fury then indignation, as if there had been an administrative error, as if someone somewhere had fouled up and got the order of things wrong and he would have to pay the price by continuing to live on, alone. Men, alone; it just wasn’t right.

I also grieved, and to a degree that surprised me, because it would be a distortion to claim that my mother and I were particularly close or affectionate. There had been moments, of course. She had always been a great nature-lover, and she’d soften in the country, become hearty and good-humoured, identifying the trees and birds with little trace of her classroom manner, offering me her arm, telling stories. Back at home, though, she was a reserved and rather conservative woman. Observing other mothers at the school gates, I wondered why she wasn’t warmer, brighter, a corrective to my father’s sternness. But then perhaps that was their secret. Perhaps they were a perfect match, like a pair of drumsticks.

Yet there seemed to be no easy correlation between the awful grief I felt at her death and our closeness — or lack of it — in life, and it occurred to me that perhaps grief is as much regret for what we have never had as sorrow for what we have lost. As consolation, I had Connie now, who was a wonder throughout all of this, from that first emergency phone call through the arrangements and preparations, the funeral, the packing away of clothes, trips to the charity shop, the mournful administration of bank accounts and wills, the sale of a house now too big, the purchase of a little flat for Dad. Though Connie and my mother had never got on, had fought openly on more than one occasion, she recognised the irrelevance of this and was present and respectful; affectionate but not cloying or melodramatic or indulgent. A good nurse.

My mother was buried on a December morning, my parents’ house — now my father’s house — cold and dark when we returned and pushed the single beds together once again. Connie took off her funeral dress and we lay beneath the covers holding hands, knowing that there would be three more of these funerals along the way, four if her errant father ever resurfaced, and we would get through them together.

‘I hope you don’t die before me,’ I said, which was mawkish I know, but permissible in those circumstances.

‘I’ll do my best,’ she replied.

Anyway, the weeks passed, the sympathy and condolences were offered and accepted, the salty tingling sensation behind the eyes ceased and over time I lost that special status that the bereaved acquire, was returned to my civilian state and we continued on our way together.

Twenty years later, Connie’s step-father remains in good health, her natural father too for all we know. Shirley, Connie’s mother, shows every sign of being immortal, a living testament to the life-giving properties of tiny hand-rolled cigarettes and rum. Smoked and pickled, it appears she will go on forever and perhaps Connie won’t need me after all.

In Munich I got the hotel exactly right for once; a pleasant little family-run place near the Viktualienmarkt, comfortable, unpretentious, quaint but not kitsch. An elderly lady of the type that gets eaten by wolves was there to open the door for us.

‘What about our other guest? Mr Albie …?’

I felt Connie stiffen next to me.

‘Our son. He couldn’t make it, I’m afraid.’ Couldn’t stand it, couldn’t bear it. I’d like to apologise for my son …

‘I am sorry to hear that,’ said the lady, frowning sympatheti-cally. ‘And I am sorry that we cannot refund at such late notice.’

‘Danke schön,’ I said, though I don’t know why. Danke schön and auf Wiedersehen were the only words of German I knew, and so I was doomed to spend our time here thanking then leaving.

Even though official check-in was not for several hours we were shown to our room, which was pleasant in a Brothers Grimm way, over-filled with rustic Bavarian furniture of a kind I hoped Connie would like, old and rather sinister. But she hadn’t slept well on the train and so lay down on the immense bed, curling up her body in that girlish manner that she still has sometimes. ‘Very thin pillows in Germany,’ I observed, but she had closed her eyes so I sat in a rocking chair, poured some water and read up about Bruegel. The rim of the glass smelt rather musty, but apart from that, everything else was tip-top.

There are an awful lot of Brueg(h)els, a mystifying array of Jans and Pieters, Elders and Youngers, and matters are not helped by their lack of flair when it came to picking Christian names.

But of the dynasty, Bruegel the Elder — note the missing ‘h’ — is the original and best. There are only forty-five paintings or so in existence and one of the most famous is in the imposing Alte Pinakothek, which we visited that afternoon. There were plenty of pleasant Jans and Pieters along the way, vases of flowers and country fairs full of tiny detail, the kind of paintings that make fine jigsaws, but the Bruegel with no ‘h’ was something else entirely, hanging with little fanfare in an unprepossessing room. Das Schlaraffenland depicts a mythical ‘land of milk and honey’ — a roof tiled with pies, a fence made of sausages and, in the foreground, three bloated men: a soldier, a farmer and some sort of clerk or student, surrounded by half-eaten food, trouser flaps undone, too stuffed and bloated to work. It’s one of those ‘disturbing’ pictures — a live pig running around with a knife in its back, a boiled egg with little legs, that kind of thing — and I knew enough about art to spot an allegory when I saw one.

‘Eat smaller portions.’

‘I’m sorry?’ said Connie.

‘The meaning. If you live in a land where the roofs are made of pies, learn to pace yourself. He should have called it Carbs at Lunch.’

‘Douglas, I want to go home.’

‘What about the Museum of Modern Art?’

‘Not to the hotel. Home to England. I want to go back there now.’

‘Oh. Oh, I see.’ I kept my eyes fixed on the painting. ‘They’re dropping like flies!’

‘Shall we … shall we sit down somewhere?’

We walked into a larger room — crucifixions, Adam and Eve — and sat some way apart on a leather bench, the presence of the museum guard adding to the mood of a particularly difficult prison visit.

‘I know what you were hoping. You thought maybe if things went well, we might still have a future. You were hoping to change my mind, and I want you to know that I’d love to be able to change my mind too. I’d love to know for certain if I could be happy with you. But this isn’t making me happy, this trip. It’s … too hard, and it’s not a holiday if you feel chained to someone’s ankle. I need some space to think. I want to go home.’

I smiled through the most terrible disappointment. ‘You can’t abandon the Grand Tour, Connie!’

‘You can keep going if you want.’

‘I can’t go on without you. Where’s the fun in that?’

‘So come back with me.’

‘What will we tell people?’

‘Do we have to tell them anything?’

‘We’re back from holiday twelve days early because our son has run away! It’s humiliating.’

‘We’ll … pretend we got food poisoning, or some aunt died. We’ll say Albie went off to meet friends, do his own thing. Or we’ll stay at home and close the curtains, hide, pretend we’re still travelling.’

‘We won’t have any photographs of Venice or Rome …’

She laughed. ‘Never in the history of the human race has anyone asked to see those photos.’

‘I didn’t want them for other people. I wanted them for us.’

‘So … maybe we’ll tell people the truth.’

‘That you couldn’t stand another minute here with me.’

She slid along the bench and pressed her shoulder against mine. ‘That’s not the truth.’

‘What is, then?’

She shrugged. ‘The truth is that maybe this wasn’t the best time to be in each other’s pockets.’

‘It was your idea.’

‘It was, but that was before … I’m sorry — you’ve arranged it all, I appreciate the effort, but it’s also … well, an effort. It’s too much to take in. It’s too confusing.’

‘We won’t get any money back, everything’s pre-booked.’

‘Maybe money’s not the most important thing at the moment, Douglas.’

‘Fine. Fine, I’ll look into flights.’

‘There’s a plane to Heathrow at ten fifteen tomorrow. We’ll be home by lunchtime.’

And so passed our last day in Europe together.

We walked the remaining rooms of the gallery but, without Albie to educate, the Grand Tour seemed redundant now. Our eyes skimmed over Dürers, Raphaels and Rembrandts, but nothing registered and there was nothing to say. Before long we returned to the hotel and while Connie packed and read, I walked the streets.

Munich was a strange combination of grandly ceremonial and boisterously beery, like a drunken general, and we might all have had fun here together, I suppose, on a balmy August night. Instead I went alone to a vast beer hall near the Viktualienmarkt where, to the accompaniment of a Bavarian brass band, I tried to raise my spirits by ordering a lager the size of a torso and a roasted ham hock. As with much in life, the first taste was delicious, but soon the meat took on the quality of a gruesome anatomy lesson as I became aware of the muscle groups, the sinews, bone and cartilage. I pushed the thing away, defeated, drained the pail of beer and stumbled back to our hotel bed where I awoke a little after two in the morning, smelling of ham, a half-crazed desiccated husk …

… because what had I given Connie, after all? The benefits for me were clear, but throughout our time together I had seen the question flicker across the faces of friends and waiters, family and taxi-drivers: what’s in it for her? What does she see that so many others have missed?

It was a question that I was unwilling to ask her myself, in case she frowned and had no answer. I believed — because she had told me so — that I offered her some kind of alternative to the men she had known before. I was not vain, bad-tempered, unreliable, temperamental, I had no drug or alcohol issues, I would not steal from her or cheat on her, I was not married, bisexual or manic-depressive. In short, I lacked all the qualities that, from her teens into her late twenties, she had found irresistible. I was unlikely to suggest that we smoke crack, and though this seemed to me a fairly basic, entry-level requirement in a partner, it was at least one I could fulfil. Point one in my favour: I was not a psychopath.

It was also clear to everyone that I loved her to a quite ridiculous degree, though devotion is not always an appealing characteristic, as I knew from experience. Then there was our sex life, which, as I have mentioned, I think was always more than satisfactory.

She had always been interested in my work. Despite its frustrations, I retained my belief in scientific endeavour and I think she admired me for this. Connie always said I was at my most attractive when I talked about my work, and she’d encourage me to describe it long after she’d ceased to comprehend the subject matter. ‘The lights come on,’ she said. As the nature of my employment changed those lights flickered somewhat, but initially she valued the many differences between us — art and science, sensibility and sense — because after all, who wants to fall in love with their own reflection?

More practically, I was practical; adept at basic plumbing and carpentry and even electrical wiring, and only once was I thrown across the kitchen. I could walk into a room and spot a load-bearing wall; I was a meticulous and thorough decorator, always sugar-soaping, rubbing down, always rinsing out my brushes. As our finances melded, I was diligent and thorough in ensuring everything was in place: pensions, ISAs, insurance. I planned our holidays with military care, maintained the car, bled the radiators, reset the clocks in spring and autumn. While there was breath in my body, she would never lack sufficient AA batteries. Perhaps these achievements sound drab and pedestrian, but they were in stark contrast to the flaky, self-absorbed aesthetes she had known before. There was a sort of mild masculinity to it all that, for Connie, was both new and comforting.

More thrillingly, I was extremely reliable in a crisis — changing a tyre on the hard shoulder of the M3 at night and in the rain, aiding an epileptic on the Northern Line while others sat and gawped; everyday heroism of a very minor sort. Walking on the street I always took care to be nearest to the kerb and though she laughed at this, she liked it too. Being with me, said Connie, was like carrying a large, old-fashioned fire extinguisher around with her at all times, and I took satisfaction in this.

What else? I think I offered my wife a way out of a lifestyle she could no longer sustain. The Connie Moore I’d met had been a party girl, always dancing on tables, and I think I offered her a hand down to the floor. She gave up the notion of making a living as an artist, for a while at least, and took to working in the gallery full time. It must have been hard, I suppose, promoting the work of others rather than producing her own, but her talent would still be there, she could always go back to it once we were settled, once her style of painting came back into fashion. In the meantime we still had fun, terrific fun, and there were dinners with friends and many late nights. But there were fewer hangovers, fewer dawn regrets, fewer mystery bruises. I was the safest of harbours, but I do want to emphasise that I could be fun, too. Not in a large group perhaps, but when the pressure was off, when it was just the two of us, I don’t think there was anywhere we’d rather have been.

A great deal of stress is placed on the importance of humour in the modern relationship. Everything will be all right, we are led to believe, as long as you can make each other laugh, rendering a successful marriage as, in effect, fifty years of improv. To someone who felt in need of fresh new material, as I did during that long, dehydrated night of the soul, this was a cause for concern. I had always enjoyed making Connie laugh, it was satisfying and reassuring because laughter, I suppose, relies on surprise and it’s good to surprise. But like a fading athlete, my response times had slowed and now it was not unusual for me to find the perfect witty comeback to remarks made several years ago. Consequently I had been resorting to old tricks, old stories, and I sometimes felt that Connie had spent the first three years laughing at my jokes and the next twenty-one sighing at them. Somewhere along the way I had mislaid my sense of humour and was now only capable of puns, which are not the same thing at all. ‘I fear the wurst!’ The joke had occurred to me in the beer hall, and I wondered if I might use it over breakfast. I would offer her a pale sausage, and when she refused I’d say, ‘The trouble with you, Connie, is that you always fear the wurst!’ It was a good joke, though perhaps not enough in itself to save our marriage.

Yet undeniably there had once been a time when I made Connie laugh constantly, and when I became a father I had hoped to develop this amusing persona further. I pictured myself as a kind of Roald Dahl figure, eccentric and wise, conjuring up characters and stories out of air, our children dangling off me, their faces bright with laughter, delight and love. I never quite achieved this, I don’t know why; perhaps it was because of what happened to our daughter. Certainly that changed me, changed both of us. Life seemed a little heavier after that.

Anyway, I don’t think Albie ever appreciated my lighter side. I did my best but my manner was queasy and self-conscious, like a children’s entertainer who knows his act is failing. I could remove the top of my thumb and put it back again but unless a child is particularly witless, this material wears pretty thin. And Albie had never been witless. When I put on funny voices to read a story, he became visibly embarrassed. In fact, when I thought about it, it was hard to recall if I had ever made my son laugh through something other than personal injury, and I sometimes wished Connie would tell him, ‘You might not appreciate this, Egg, but once upon a time your father used to make me laugh so much, so much, we’d talk all night and laugh until we cried. Once upon a time.’

Now, I feared the wurst.

Sadly we left before breakfast and took an early taxi through the sleeping city to Munich Airport, about which there is little to say. Picture an airport.

I dreaded England. Like a failed football team returning from some nine-nil humiliation, we sat in the departure lounge, quite unable to speak or even raise our eyes. I’d like to apologise for my son. Forever I would carry with me the sight of his face, the shock and shame, as if I had slapped him, which in a way I had. And it was here, I suppose, that the football team analogy broke down. We weren’t a team. I was the goalie who had let in all nine goals.

Would I go back to the office nearly two weeks early? What would they say? Would they sense it? This man’s holiday was so bad that it destroyed his family! They fled, actually fled; one in Holland, one in Germany. Even if I didn’t go to work, even if Connie and I stayed at home with the curtains drawn, we would be tormented by the absence of Albie. As I remarked more than once, he might be having a perfectly civilised time. He had a passport, a phone, access to money, Camus and a highly sexed girlfriend; in some ways it was an enviable situation. But without knowing for sure, with those words still between us, it was impossible not to squirm with anxiety. Apologise for my son. Was he in some crack-den in Berlin? Drunk on a branch line in the Czech Republic, stoned in a squat in Rotterdam, beaten up in an alley in Madrid? Would he return in September, October, Christmas, at all? What about college? Would he abandon the education he had fought for, albeit rather feebly? What if Europe simply … swallowed him up?

I could no longer sit still. ‘I’m going to go for a stroll,’ I said.

‘Now?’

‘There’s plenty of time.’

‘I’ll see you at the gate,’ she shrugged. ‘Take your bag.’

There’s a certain optimism in going for a walk in airports. What on earth do we expect to find — something new and enchanting? I strolled off to see what a German newsagents looked like and, having discovered that it looked like a British newsagents, was about to purchase some Soft Mints with the last of my loose euros when my phone rang.

I scrabbled in my pocket. Perhaps it was Albie. The display indicated a +39 number — Spain, Italy?

‘Signor Petersen?’

‘Oui, c’est moi,’ I said, disorientated.

‘Buongiorno, I’m calling from the Pensione Albertini, about your reservation?’

‘Ja, ja,’ I said, jamming a finger into my other ear.

‘I have done my best, but I’m afraid that I cannot bring your reservation forward at such short notice. My apologies.’

‘My reservation?’

‘Your change of plans. You are now arriving in Venice tomorrow night?’

‘No, no, not at all. Not for three, four days yet.’ That was our plan, a train across the Alps then one night each in Verona, Vicenza, Padua then on to Venice. ‘When did he, I mean I, when did I call?’

‘Perhaps fifteen minutes ago.’

‘By telephone?’

Pause for the lunatic. ‘Sì…’

‘My reservation was for one single and one double room. Which did I ask to rearrange?’

‘The double room.’

‘For tomorrow?’

‘Sì, tomorrow. But we spoke about this just fifteen minutes —’

‘Did I by any chance say where I was calling from?’

‘I don’t understand …’

‘And you’re sure it was a Signor Petersen?’

‘Sì.’

Albie! It must have been Albie calling, tampering with my itinerary, trying to use our hotel reservation to save money. They were on their way to Venice after all.

‘Well, grazie mille for trying.’

‘So we will in fact see you in Venice in four days’ time as we had previously arranged?’

‘Sì, sì, sì. In four days.’

‘Splendid.’

‘You’ve been very helpful. Auf Wiedersehen! Ciao!’

I was some way from the newsagents now, the Soft Mints warming in my grip, unpaid for. A fugitive! I checked the departure board. Boarding commencing. Checked my pockets. Phone, passport, wallet, all I would need. In my hand luggage, a phone charger, a book, a tablet computer and a history of the Second World War. I stepped back onto the concourse, saw Connie, saw some stairs leading to a raised balcony above the lounge. I climbed the stairs and watched her, unseen.

I watched her for fifteen minutes as departure time approached, eating my way through the contraband Soft Mints, a real bandito. I watched her quite, quite full of love, despite her palpable irritation and impatience at my absence, and I came to a decision.

I would not lose my wife and son.

If the notion was unacceptable to me, I would not accept it. I would not return to England now and spend our last summer slowly dismantling our home, watching Connie separating herself from me, dividing us in two and making plans for a future that did not include me. I refused to live in a house where everything I saw or touched — Mr Jones the dog, the bedside radio, the pictures on the wall, the cups from which we drank our morning tea — would soon be allocated, mine or hers. We had been through too much together, and it was not acceptable, and neither was it acceptable to have my son wandering the continent in the belief that I was ashamed of him. It could not, would not be allowed to happen.

I finished the stolen mints. There’s a saying, cited in popular song, that if you love someone you must set them free. Well, that’s just nonsense. If you love someone, you bind them to you with heavy metal chains.

Connie was standing now, anxiously looking for me, left and right, no doubt thinking, this is strange, this isn’t like him at all, always there two hours before departure, laptop in a separate tray, liquids and gels in a Ziploc bag. Well, not any more, my love! The new me dialled her number, watched as she groped in her handbag, found the phone, glared at the screen, picked up …

‘Douglas, where the hell are you? The gate is closing in five—’

‘I’m not catching the flight.’

‘Where are you, Douglas?’

‘I’m in a taxi. In fact I’ve already left the airport. I’m not going back to England.’

‘Douglas, don’t be ridiculous, they’re calling our names—’

‘Then get on the plane without me. Make sure you tell them I’m not coming, I don’t want to inconvenience anyone.’

‘I’m not getting on the plane without you, that’s insane.’

‘Listen to me, Connie, please? I can’t come back until I’ve put things right. I’m going to find Albie first, and apologise face to face, and then I’m going to bring him home.’

‘Douglas, you have no idea where he is!’

‘Then I’ll find him.’

‘How can you find him? He could be anywhere in Europe by now, anywhere in the world …’

‘I’ll find a way. I’m a scientist, remember? Method. Results. Conclusion.’

I watched her now as she lowered herself back into the seat. ‘Douglas, if you’re doing this to … prove something … to me … well, it’s very touching, but it’s not really the point.’

‘I love you, Connie.’

She spanned her forehead with her hand. ‘I love you too, Douglas, but you’re tired, you’ve been under a lot of strain, and I don’t think you’re thinking straight …’

‘Please don’t try and talk me out of this. I’m going to go on alone.’

A moment passed, and she stood. ‘Are you sure that’s what you want?’

‘I am.’

‘What will I tell people?’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Will you at least call me?’

‘When I’ve found him. Not before.’

‘Can I talk you out of this?’

‘No, you can’t.’

‘All right. All right, if that’s what you want.’

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to carry the suitcase. Get taxis, won’t you?’

‘But what will you wear?’

‘I’ve got my wallet and my toothbrush. I’ll buy myself clothes along the way.’

Her head lolled backwards; in distress, perhaps, at the thought of me buying my own clothes. ‘Okay. If you’re sure. Buy nice things. Look after yourself.’ She put her hand to her eyes. ‘Don’t fall to pieces, will you?’

‘I won’t. Connie, I’m sorry we won’t see Venice together again.’

‘I’m sorry too.’

‘I’ll send postcards, though.’

‘Please do.’

‘Kiss Mr Jones for me. Or shake his paw.’

‘I will.’

‘Don’t let him sleep on the bed.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’

‘Seriously, because if he gets into the habit—’

‘Douglas. I won’t.’

‘I love you, Connie. Did I say that?’

‘You mentioned it in passing.’

‘I’m sorry if I’ve let you down.’

‘Douglas, you have never—’

‘I won’t let you down again.’

She said nothing.

‘You’d better catch your flight now,’ I said.

‘Yes. I’d better. Gate …?’

‘Gate 17.’

‘Gate 17.’ She shouldered her bag and began to walk.

‘You’ve forgotten your book,’ I said. ‘It’s on the chair.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, picked it up, then hesitated a moment. It didn’t take her long to search me out on the balcony above. She raised her hand and I raised mine back.

‘I’ll see you when I see you,’ I said.

But she had already hung up. I watched Connie walk away and then I set off to save my son, whether he needed it or not.