Us (4 page)

It was like trying to go about my business with an axe embedded in my skull.

I managed it, of course, because a public display of despair would have been unprofessional. It wasn't until the final meeting of the day that my demeanour started to falter. I was fidgeting, perspiring, worrying at the keys in my pocket, and before the minutes of the meeting had even been approved I was standing and excusing myself, grabbing my phone, mumbling excuses and hurrying, stumbling towards the door, taking my chair some of the way with me.

Our offices and labs are built around a square laughably called The Piazza, ingeniously designed to receive no sunlight whatsoever. Hostile concrete benches sit on a scrappy lawn which is swampy and saturated in the winter, parched and dusty in the summer, and I paced back and forth across this desolate space in full view of my colleagues, one hand masking my mouth.

‘We'll have to cancel the Grand Tour.'

Connie sighed. ‘Let's see.'

‘We can't go travelling around Europe with this hanging over us. Where's the pleasure in that?'

‘I think we should still do it. For Albie's sake.'

‘Well, as long as Albie's happy!'

‘Douglas. Let's talk about it when I get back from work. I must go now.' Connie works in the education department of a large and famous London museum, liaising on outreach programmes to schools, collaborating with artists on devised work and other duties that I don't quite understand, and I suddenly imagined her in hushed conversation with various colleagues, Roger or Alan or Chris, dapper little Chris with his waistcoat and his little spectacles.
I finally told him, Chris. How did he take it? Not too well. Darling, you did the right thing. At last you can escape The Hole …

‘Connie, is there someone else?'

‘Oh, Douglas …'

‘Is that what this is all about? Are you leaving me for someone else?'

She sounded weary. ‘We'll talk when we get home. Not in front of Albie, though.'

‘You have to tell me now, Connie!'

‘It's not to do with anyone else.'

‘Is it Chris?'

‘I'm sorry?'

‘Little Chris, waistcoat Chris!'

She laughed, and I wondered: how is it possible for her to laugh when I have this axe protruding from my skull?

‘Douglas, you've met Chris. I'm not insane. There's no one else, certainly not Chris. This is entirely about you and me.'

I wasn't sure whether this made it better or worse.

The fact was I loved my wife to a degree that I found impossible to express, and so rarely did. While I didn't dwell on the notion, I had presumed that we would end our lives together. Of course, this is a largely futile desire because, disasters notwithstanding, someone has to go first. There's a famous artefact at Pompeii – we intended to see it on the Grand Tour we had planned for the summer – of two lovers embracing, ‘spooning' I think is the term, their bodies nested like quotation marks as the boiling, poisonous cloud rolled down the slopes of Vesuvius and smothered them in hot ash. Not mummies or fossils as some people think, but a three-dimensional mould of the void left as they decayed. Of course there's no way of knowing that the two figures were husband and wife; they could have been brother and sister, father and daughter, they might have been adulterers. But to my mind the image suggests only marriage; comfort, intimacy, shelter from the sulphurous storm. Not a very cheery advertisement for married life, but not a bad symbol either. The end was gruesome but at least they were together.

But volcanoes are a rarity in our part of Berkshire. If one of us had to go first, I had hoped in all sincerity that it would be me. I'm aware that this sounds morbid, but it seemed to be the right way round, the sensible way, because, well, my wife had brought me everything I had ever wanted, everything good and worthwhile, and we had been through so much together. To contemplate a life without her; I found it inconceivable. Literally so. I was not able to conceive of it.

And so I decided that it could not be allowed to happen.

–

‘And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be – and whenever I look up there will be you.'

Her countenance fell, and she was silent awhile.

Thomas Hardy,
Far From the Madding Crowd

Some guidelines for a successful ‘Grand Tour' of Europe:

1. Energy! Never be ‘too tired' or ‘not in the mood'.
   
2. Avoid conflict with Albie. Accept light-hearted joshing and do not retaliate with malice or bitter recriminations. Good humour at all times.
   
3. It is not necessary to be seen to be right about everything, even when that is the case.
   
4. Be open-minded and willing to try new things. For example, unusual foods from unhygienic kitchens, experimental art, unusual points of view, etc.
   
5. Be fun. Enjoy light-hearted banter with C and A.
   
6. Try to relax. Don't dwell on the future for now.
   
7. Be organised, but –
   
8. Maintain a sense of fun and spontaneity.
   
9. At all times be aware of Connie. Listen.
   
10. Try not to fight with Albie.
    

The holiday had been Connie's idea. ‘A Grand Tour, to prepare you for the adult world, like in the eighteenth century.'

I didn't know much about it either. Connie said that it was once traditional for young men of a certain class and age to embark on a cultural pilgrimage to the continent, following well-established routes and, with the help of local guides, taking in certain ancient sites and works of art before returning to Britain as sophisticated, civilised men of experience. In practice the culture was largely an excuse for drinking and whoring and getting ripped off, arriving home with pillaged artefacts, some bottles of the local booze and venereal disease.

‘So why don't I just go to Ibiza?' said Albie.

‘Trust me,' said Connie, ‘this will be much, much more fun.' We were sitting at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning – this was in happier times, before my wife's announcement – my old
Times
Atlas
opened on a map of Western Europe, and there was a kind of glee in Connie that I'd not seen for a while.

‘You have to remember this was all in the days before cheap mechanical reproduction, so the Grand Tour was their one chance to see all these masterpieces outside dodgy black-and-white engravings. All the great works of the ancient world and the Renaissance, Chartres Cathedral, the Duomo in Florence, St Mark's Square, the Colosseum. You'd take fencing lessons, cross the Alps, explore the Roman Forum, look down into the crater of Vesuvius and walk the streets of Naples. And yes, you'd drink and whore and get into fights, but you'd come back a
man
.'

‘Ibiza it is, then,' said Albie.

‘Come on, Egg! Play along,' said Connie. Like an advancing general, she traced her finger across the pages of the atlas. ‘Look – we'll start in Paris, do the obvious stops: the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay, the Monets and the Rodins. We'll train to Amsterdam, see Rembrandt at the Rijksmuseum, the Van Goghs, then find our way – no planes, no cars – across the Alps to Venice, because it's Venice. Back through Padua for the Scrovegni Chapel; Vicenza for Palladio's villas; Verona – Verona's lovely – see
The Last Supper
in Milan; Florence, for the Botticelli in the Uffizi and, well, just for Florence – then Rome! Rome is beautiful. Stop off at Herculaneum and Pompeii and finish up in Naples. Of course, in an ideal world we'd jump back and do the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna, then Berlin, but we'll have to see how your father's holding up.'

I was emptying the dishwasher and confess to being distracted by the low level of rinse aid as well as the ruinous cost of all this travel. But she really did seem very excited by it all, and perhaps it would make a change from our recent family holidays, the three of us restless, bitten and sun-burnt in some expensive villa or fighting for our tiny share of the Mediterranean coast.

Albie remained sceptical. ‘So, basically I'm going inter-railing with my mum and dad.'

‘That's right, you lucky boy,' said Connie.

‘But if it's meant to be this great rite of passage and you're both there, doesn't that sort of defeat the object?'

‘No, Egg, because you're going to learn about art. If you were serious about painting in those days, this was your training, your university. Same thing now. You can sketch, take photos, suck it all in. If you want to do it for a living, you have to see these things—'

‘A lot of Old Masters, a lot of dead white Europeans.'

‘—even if it's just so you've got something to kick against. Besides, Picasso's a dead white European, and you love Picasso.'

‘Can we see
Guernica
? I'd love to see
Guernica
.'

‘
Guernica
's in Madrid. We'll do it another time.'

‘Or you could just give me the money and I'll go alone!'

‘This way it's
educational
,' said Connie.

‘This way you get out of bed in the mornings,' I said.

Albie groaned and laid his head on his arms, and Connie took to twisting her finger in the hair at the nape of his neck. They do this, Connie and Albie, grooming each other like primates. ‘We'll have fun, too. I'll make sure your father schedules some in.'

‘Every fourth day, is that too much?' I returned to the machine. Not just rinse aid, salt too; it was burning through the stuff, and I wondered how I might recalibrate the settings.

‘You can still meet girls and get drunk,' said Connie. ‘You'll just have to do it with me and your father watching. And pointing.'

Albie sighed and rested his cheek on his fist. ‘Ryan and Tom are going backpacking in Colombia.'

‘And you can too! Next year.'

‘No he can't,' I shouted into the dishwasher. ‘Not Colombia.'

‘Shut up, Douglas! Egg, sweetheart, this will probably be the last summer holiday we'll have together.'

I looked up, striking my head sharply on the edge of the kitchen unit. The last ever? Was it? Was it really?

‘After this, you're on your own,' said Connie. ‘But for now let's try and have a nice time this summer, shall we? This one last time?'

Perhaps she'd been planning her escape, even then.

When my wife told me that she was going with the turning of the leaves, did my life come to an end? Did I fall to pieces or fail to make it through the days?

Of course there were further sleepless nights, further tears and accusations in the lead-up to the trip, but I had no time for a nervous breakdown. Also, Albie was completing his ‘studies' in art and photography, returning exhausted from screen-printing or glazing a jug, and so we were discreet, walking our dog, an ageing Labrador called Mr Jones, some distance away from the house and hissing over his head in fields.

‘I can't believe you've sprung this on me!'

‘I haven't
sprung
it, I've been feeling this way for years.'

‘You haven't said anything.'

‘I shouldn't have to.'

‘Springing this on me, at this time …'

‘I'm sorry, I've tried to be as honest as I—'

‘I still think we should cancel the Grand Tour …'

‘Why do we have to?'

‘You still want to go? With this hanging over us?'

‘I think so—'

‘A funeral cortège, backpacking through Italy …'

‘It needn't be like that. It could be fun.'

‘If you want to cancel the hotels you need to say now.'

‘I've just told you, I want us to go. Why don't you ever listen to—?'

‘Because if you're really trapped in such a living hell—'

‘Don't be melodramatic, love, it doesn't help.'

‘I don't know why you suggested it if you didn't want to—'

‘I did want to, I still do!' She stopped and held my hand. ‘Let's put the other decision on hold until the autumn. We'll all go on the trip, we'll have a fantastic time with Albie—'

‘And then we'll come back and say goodbye? You won't even have to bother unpacking, you could just chuck your suitcase in a taxi and head off …'

At which point she sighed and looped her arm through mine as if nothing were wrong. ‘Let's see. Let's see what happens.' And we walked Mr Jones back to the house.

A route took shape: Paris, Amsterdam, Munich, Verona, Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples. Of course Connie had been to most of these places before, on an epic odyssey of smoking cannabis and kissing local boys, working as a waitress, a tour guide, an au pair in the years before she started art school. In the early days of our relationship, when my work and our puny finances permitted it, we would sometimes take cheap flights to European cities and Connie would spot a bench, a bar or café and lapse into a reverie about the time she and her friends spent a week sleeping on the beach in Crete, or the wild party she had been to in an abandoned factory outside Prague, or the un-named boy she'd fallen madly in love with in Lyon in '84, the Citroën mechanic with his strong hands and broken nose and the smell of engine oil in his hair. I'd find a smile and change the subject, but clearly ‘well travelled' meant something different to Connie. Been there, done him, that was our joke. Europe represented first love and sunsets, cheap red wine and breathless fumbling.

I'd had no such rite of passage, partly because of my father, a fierce patriot who raged against the whole world's bloody-minded refusal to knuckle down, learn decent English and live like us. Anything that suggested ‘abroad' made him suspicious: olive oil, the metric system, eating outdoors, yoghurt, mime, duvets, pleasure. His xenophobia was not limited to Europe; it was international and knew no borders. When my parents came to London to celebrate my PhD, I made the mistake of brandishing my cosmopolitanism by taking them to a Chinese restaurant in Tooting. Chiang Mai's fulfilled my father's key restaurant criteria in that it was unnervingly cheap and brutally over-lit (‘so you can see what you're bloody well eating!') yet I still recall the expression on his face when handed a pair of wooden chopsticks. He pointed them at the waiter, like a switchblade. ‘Knife and fork. Knife. And. Fork.'