Us (39 page)

Then into Florence's rush hour, and an altercation with a staff member about the return of my property, conducted in over-enunciated English.
How can I pay charge for overnight storage when wallet is in bag? Return my property and I pay! The sign above says ‘
assistenza alla clientela
'. I am
clientela
– why you not assist me?
Oh yes, I was quite the bad-ass now, quite the bad-ass.

By 0920 I was in possession of my passport, my wallet, my phone charger, my tablet. I hugged them to me, whole again. In the station café I found a corner near a socket and sucked up electricity and wifi like a swimmer coming up for air. No Iberia flights to Madrid from Firenze or Pisa, but a 1235 flight from Bologna. Where was Bologna? Depressingly it seemed that the Apennines stood between that flight and me. But wait – thirty-seven minutes, the timetable said. What kind of miraculous train was this? I could make it with time to spare. I purchased my Madrid flight online, a window seat, hand baggage only, and boarded the Bologna train. In the toilet I coated myself with deodorant stick as if papering a wall. I brushed my teeth, and have never enjoyed the sensation more.

The trick to crossing the Apennines was to burrow beneath them. Much of the journey took place in a remarkably long tunnel, emerging now and then into light as if curtains had been hurled open to a view of wooded mountainside against bright sky, then whisked shut again. Almost too soon we were in Bologna, one of those cites where the airport is disconcertingly close to the centre, so that you might comfortably walk there with your shopping. But I had learnt my lesson in Florence and took a taxi. My guidebook sang the city's praises, but the taxi skirted the old town on the northern ring road and what I saw was squat, modern and pleasant, with a fragment of an ancient wall in the centre of a roundabout then the dull warehouses of the airport. Never mind, we'd come here again another time. For the moment, I was happy to find myself in the terminal and checked in with an hour and fifteen minutes to spare. Air travel had never seemed so glamorous, so thrillingly efficient, so full of hope.

We took off on time and I craned to look out of the window like a child. Everything was sharp and clear, the air pure, no hint of cloud, and I noted how new this experience was for humankind, the ability to see the earth laid out like this, and how complacent we were about it. Why were people reading magazines when there was all of this to see? Here were the mountains that I'd burrowed beneath just two hours before, there was Corsica, crisply outlined, a mossy green on blue. Then the Mediterranean was left behind and the desert plain unrolled; a desert in Europe. Spain seemed vast to me. No wonder they had once filmed Westerns there. What did it look like at ground level, I wondered, and would I ever find out? Now that I knew my journey was almost complete, the ability to travel seemed exciting again. I was not sure that I wanted to go home, even if I could.

Then a motorway, suburbs and a great sprawling city very far from water. An airport terminal like the set of a science-fiction film and then out into the thick air of the Spanish afternoon and into a taxi, the motorway to the city half abandoned, passing unpopulated building sites and new apartment blocks, not a human being to be seen. Madrid was unexpected to me. I had no guidebooks or maps, no knowledge or expectations. A corner of Paris could only be Paris, likewise New York or Rome. Madrid was harder to pin down, the buildings that lined the wide avenues a curious mix of eighties office blocks, grand residential palaces, stylish apartment buildings, all compacted together. That European passion for pharmacies was much in evidence, and a great deal of the city seemed as seventies as a lava lamp, while other buildings were absurdly ornate and grand. If Connie had been with me, she'd have named that style. Baroque? Was that right? Neo-baroque?

‘What is this?' I asked my taxi-driver, pointing to an intricately carved palace, the crystalline white of cake icing.

‘Post office,' said the driver, and I tried to imagine anyone buying a book of stamps there. ‘Over there,' he pointed through the trees of a formal park towards a peach-coloured neo-classical building (Connie, is that right? Neo-classical?) ‘this is the Prado. Very famous, very beautiful. Velázquez, Goya. You must go.'

‘I am,' I said. ‘I'm meeting my son there tomorrow.'

In the summer before Albie started ‘big school' we left the small, garden-less Kilburn flat where he'd grown up and moved to the country. I had tried hard to present the whole experience as ‘an adventure', but Albie was unconvinced. Perhaps Connie was too, though at least she didn't pout and whine and sulk like Albie. ‘I'll be bored,' he would say, declaring his intentions. ‘I'm leaving all my friends behind!' he'd say. ‘You'll make new ones,' we'd reply, as if friends could be replaced like old shoes.

For Connie, too, the departure was proving something of a wrench. Evenings and weekends had been given over to ‘sorting things out', which meant throwing stuff away with a ruthlessness that bordered on anger; old notebooks and diaries, photographs, art-school projects, artists' materials.

‘What about these paints? Can't you use these? Can't Albie?'

‘No. That's why I'm throwing them away.'

Or I'd find her drawings in the recycling bin beneath bottles and cans, shake off the mess and hold them up. ‘Why are you throwing this away? It's lovely.'

‘It's awful. I'm embarrassed by it.'

‘I love this picture. I remember it from when we met.'

‘It's just nostalgia, Douglas. We're never going to hang it up. It's scrap paper, get rid of it.'

‘Well, can I keep it?'

She sighed. ‘Just keep it out of my sight.' I took her sketches and drawings, pinned some up at work and put the rest in my filing cabinet.

Much of Albie's childhood was discarded; some baby clothes, too, girls' clothes that we'd bought for our daughter and kept carefully folded in the back of a drawer, not out of mawkish sentimentality nor as some strange totem, but for practical reasons. What if we had another child, a girl maybe? For a while we had tried, but not now. It was all a little too late for that now.

Never mind, because here was change, here was an adventure, and so the Saturday after Albie's final term at junior school, the removal men came stomping up those stairs. Nearly fifteen years earlier, two young people had moved into that flat, all of our possessions easily contained in the back of a hired van. Now we were a family, with our own furniture and pictures in proper frames, bicycles and snorkels, guitars, a drum kit and an upright piano, dinner sets and cast-iron cookware and far too many possessions for what was effectively a student flat. The new owners were a young couple in their twenties, baby on the way. They seemed nice at the viewing. We left them a bottle of champagne in the centre of the wooden floor that we'd stripped and painted. While Albie waited in the car, Connie and I walked from room to room, closing the doors. There was no time to be sentimental with the removal van blocking the street outside.

‘You ready?' I said.

‘I suppose so,' she murmured, already descending the stairs.

I pulled the door shut and posted the keys through the letterbox.

All along the Westway I kept up my babble about it being an adventure, how spacious and grand the new house, new
home
, would be, how nice it would be to have a garden in the summer. It would feel like undoing a belt after a large meal – finally, a chance to breathe! Albie and Connie remained silent. Along with the keys and the instructions for the boiler, we had left something intangible behind. We had been extraordinarily happy in that little flat, and also sadder than we had ever thought possible. Whatever lay ahead, it couldn't match those extremes.

We drove west under overcast skies. The city faded into suburbs, then industrial estates and fir plantations and before long we left the motorway, bounced off the outskirts of Reading, down lanes past fields of wheat and rape; pleasant countryside, though not quite the remote and picturesque idyll I recalled from visits with the estate agent. There seemed to be an awful lot of pylons, a lot of high hedges, cars passing by in quick succession, lorries too. Never mind. We followed the removal van into a gravel drive, our gravel drive, the house early twentieth century, mock-Tudor beams, the largest in the village! There was an excellent state school nearby, my desk was just twenty minutes' drive away, there were great rail links. An hour from London by road, too, on a good day. If you listened you could hear the M40! There was work to do, of course, just enough to fill our weekends, but we could be happy here, no doubt about it. On the front drive – with room for three more cars! – I draped my arms around my wife and son like a figure-skating coach. Look, in the trees – magpies, crows! We stood for a moment, then they broke free.

In the large family kitchen – flagstones, an Aga – I popped a bottle of champagne, pulled glasses from their newspaper and poured out an inch for Egg, and the three of us toasted new beginnings. But after we had placed the boxes in each room and the removal men had left, it became clear that a miscalculation had been made. Try as we might, the three of us could never fill this place. There weren't enough pictures for the walls or books for the shelves. Even with Albie's drum kit and guitar, we couldn't make enough noise to make these high rooms seem occupied. I had intended the house to symbolise prosperity and maturity, a haven of rural calm with good rail links to the chaos of the city. But it felt – and would always feel, I suppose – like a half-empty doll's house with not quite enough dolls.

Later that evening, I found Connie standing silently in a small gabled bedroom at the top of the house. The wallpaper was old-fashioned, flowered and marked with doodles, little biro-ed ants and felt-tip butterflies drawn on to the stems and petals of the roses. I knew Connie well enough to guess her thoughts, though we chose not to acknowledge them out loud.

‘I thought this room could be your studio. Lovely light! You could paint again. Yes?'

She rested her head on my shoulder but said nothing.

We bought a dog.

I did not tell Connie of my whereabouts. In Siena, I had told her to expect me home the following day, and wouldn't it be better to phone her with Albie by my side?
I'm not at Heathrow, I'm in Madrid! It's a long story. Wait a minute, I have someone here to speak to you …
That was the plan, and so I was absurdly cheerful and optimistic that night, my mood lifted by the lavish hotel suite – a suite! Two rooms! – that I had booked on a whim and at a surprisingly reasonable price. At the marble and gold reception desk there seemed to be some doubt that this rather shabby, worn-out solitary guest could afford such decadence. No luggage? Were there any other guests with me? No, I was all alone, but there was a sofa-bed for Albie. Only if he wanted it, of course.

The room – no, the
suite –
was all white marble and cream leather, a dream of modern living from 1973. Closing the door, I set about repairing the damage of the last few days. I eased my partially sunburnt self into the cool onyx bath, washed my hair, shaved, and dressed the wounds on my feet. I put on the last of my clean clothes and sent the others to be laundered. In the shopping streets below I found a department store and bought a new shirt, a tie, some trousers and, back in my room, laid them out on a chair as if preparing for a job interview. So giddy and excited was I that I broke the central guiding principle of my life and took vodka and tonic from the mini-bar then, dizzy with decadence, the peanuts too, and like some modern-day Caligula sat on the balcony and watched the traffic on the Gran Vía fourteen floors below. At the junction ahead of me stood a fine modern building, a rounded wedge – art deco, Connie, is that right? – with a huge neon sign on its top floor, and as evening fell I caught the moment when the neon sputtered into life, exclaiming
Schweppes!
against a rainbow background, so that the street resembled a milder, more laid-back Times Square.

The Spaniards, I knew, had a reputation for late dining and I contemplated taking a ‘disco nap', as Albie would put it, then setting out to explore. But the bed was so large and comfortable, the sheets cool and white and of such a high thread count, that I found myself lowering the mechanical shutters and settling down at nine fifteen. Plenty of time for tapas tomorrow, when I'd see my son again. I fell asleep, lulled by the most wonderful, unshakeable faith in the future.

There has never been a shortage of topics to keep me awake at night, but as a teenager I was especially haunted by the prospect of nuclear war. The public information films intended to educate and reassure the populace sent everyone, us children in particular, into a frenzy of morbid fantasy and I was convinced that at some point, whether in Washington, Peking or Moscow, a button would be pressed – I imagined an actual button, large and red, like the stop button on an escalator – and soon my mother and father and I would be hunting for mutant rats in the smouldering remains of Ipswich city centre. There'd be no more ‘don't touch that, it's dirty' in the post-apocalyptic Petersen family cave. The only question would be: do we eat Douglas or Karen first? So worried was I by this prospect that, unusually, I confessed my night terrors to my father. ‘Well, if it does happen, you won't have time to do anything about it. Three minutes of panic and then you'll be crispy bacon!' he reassured me. Given three minutes' warning, what would we say to one another, my family and I? I imagined my father rushing to turn off the central heating.

Rightly or wrongly, that specific fear has faded. But the anxiety has not passed and now the face that I imagine in that future wasteland is not my own, but Albie's.