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.
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 early- 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.
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.