Us Read online

  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.

  56. the comfort zone

  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.’

  57. je suis désolé mais je suis perdu

  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 g
lass 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

  –

  I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

  Isaac Newton

  58. an experiment on a bird in the air pump

  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.

  59. sunflowers

  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.

  60. pygmalion

  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.