Us

  ‘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.

  30. tunnels and bridges

  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.

  31. on london bridge

  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.

  32. many strange horses in our salty bedroom

  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.

  33. à la recherche du temps perdu

  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.’

  34. the hotel on rue jacob

  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.