Us Page 8

  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.

  41. art appreciation

  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 earl
y- 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.

  42. cartes postales

  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.

  43. postcards

  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.’

  44. romantic comedy behaviour

  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 …

  45. pelouse interdite

  … 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 sh
oes. 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.