Us Read online

  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.

  61. contemporary dance forum

  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.

  62. new beginnings in belgium

  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.

  63. aspects of the novel

  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.

  64. the ardennes offensive

  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.

  65. switzerland

  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.