‘Very much so.’ She reached behind her, searching for my hand, but the effort was too great and her arm dropped back.
‘You think Albie’s happy?’
‘Posing around Paris at his father’s expense? Of course he is. Remember it’s against his principles to show happiness.’
‘Where does he keep disappearing off to all the time?’
‘Maybe he has friends here.’
‘Which friends? He doesn’t have friends in France.’
‘Friends means something different now to what it meant in our day.’
‘In what way?’
‘Well, he goes online and writes, “hey, I’m in Paris” and someone else says, “I’m in Paris too!” or someone says, “my friend lives in Paris, you should meet up.” And so he does.’
‘Sounds terrifying.’
‘I know. All those new people, all that spontaneity.’
‘It was hard enough having a pen-pal.’
She rolled on to her front, latching on to something new. ‘Douglas, you had a pen-pal?’
‘Günther from Düsseldorf. He came to stay, but it wasn’t a success. Couldn’t eat my mother’s food. He was visibly wasting away, and I was terrified we’d get in trouble for sending back this malnourished child. In the end my father practically tied him to a chair until he’d eaten his liver and onions.’
‘Such golden memories you have. Did you get invited to Düsseldorf?’
‘No, strangely enough!’
‘You should find the address, track him down.’
‘Maybe I will. Did you have a pen-pal?’
‘French girl. Elodie. She wore an unnecessary bra and taught me how to roll cigarettes.’
‘So it was educational.’ Connie turned again, and closed her eyes.
‘It would be nice to bump into him, though,’ I said. ‘Every now and then.’
‘Günther?’
‘Our son.’
‘We’re seeing him tonight. I’ve fixed it. Now let me sleep.’
We dozed to the lulling sound of Russian hip-hop in which, interestingly, only the profanities remained in English, presumably so as to offend the widest possible international audience. In the late afternoon, sitting and yawning, Connie suggested we rent bicycles. Still a little drunk, we rode the municipal machines, unwieldy as wheelbarrows, along whichever street we liked the look of.
‘Where are we going?’
‘We’re deliberately getting lost!’ she shouted. ‘No guidebooks, no maps allowed.’
And despite being too foggy to ride a heavy bicycle on the wrong side of the road, I adopted a devil-may-care, freewheeling attitude, knees clipping wing mirrors, ignoring the waved fists of the taxi-drivers as I smiled, smiled, smiled.
The warm feelings continued into the evening. Connie had spotted an open-air cinema screen in an urban park not far from Place d’Italie and decided that we would go and watch a movie there. A stolen bedcover from the Good Times Hotel was our picnic blanket; there was rosé wine, bread and cheese, the evening was warm and clear. Even Albie seemed pleased to be there.
‘Will it be in French?’ he asked, as we established our base in front of the screen.
‘Albie, don’t worry, you’ll understand. Trust me.’
The film was called Les Quatre Cents Coups, or The 400 Blows, and I recommend it. My own taste in cinema tends towards the thriller or science-fiction/fantasy genres, but despite the lack of actual blows it was very entertaining. The film concerns the misadventures of an intelligent but irresponsible young man called Antoine who ends up in trouble with the law. His amiable father, who is being betrayed by the mother, loses patience with young Antoine, and the boy is sent to a sort of borstal. Escaping, he runs towards the sea — he has never seen the sea before — and then, well, the film just stops with the young man looking into the camera in a challenging, almost accusatory way.
In plot terms it was no Bourne Identity but I found myself enjoying it nonetheless. It was a film about poetry, rebellion, the elation and confusion of youth — not my youth necessarily, other people’s youth — and it had a profound effect on Albie, who was so engaged in the film that he temporarily forgot to drink excessively, and knelt erect with his hands placed on his thighs in a pose that I’d last seen on the gym mats at his primary school.
The sky darkened and the projection came into sharper focus, swallows darting across the screen like specks on the celluloid — or perhaps they were bats, or both — and Albie sat there, identifying violently with the character despite, I think it’s fair to say, having had a pretty stable childhood. Every now and then I turned to see his profile flashing white in the light of the monochrome screen, and I found myself feeling a terrific fondness for him, for both of them, for us, the Petersens, a little pulse of love and affection, a conviction that our marriage, our family, was not so bad, was better than most, and that we would survive.
Anyway, it was all very atmospheric and congenial and all too soon it was over. The final image froze, Antoine Doinel was giving us that look from the screen, and Albie was rubbing his cheeks with the heels of his hands as if cramming the tears back into his eyes.
‘That,’ he declared, ‘was the greatest fucking film I have ever seen in my life.’
‘Albie, is that language really necessary?’ I said.
‘And the photography was amazing!’
‘Yes, I liked the photography too,’ I chipped in hopefully, but Albie and his mother were deep in an embrace, Albie squeezing her as they both laughed, and then he was running off into the summer night and Connie and I, too drunk to risk the bicycles again, held hands and walked home through the 13th, the 5th, the 6th, the 7th, love’s young dream.
Despite my PhD, the intricate algorithm of what to do on a second date had entirely defeated me. Each restaurant seemed either too formal and ostentatious or too casual and downmarket. It was late February, so too cold for Hyde Park, and my usual preferred option, the cinema, wasn’t right either. We wouldn’t be able to talk at the cinema. I wouldn’t be able to see her.
We arranged to meet on the campus quad outside the laboratory where I was working on my post-doc. Since leaving art school, Connie had been employed four days a week at a commercial gallery in St James’s. She had railed against the place — the lousy art, the customers with more money than taste — but it enabled her to pay the rent while she worked on her own paintings in the small east London studio she shared with friends — a collective was the term they used — each of them waiting for their breakthrough. As a career plan, it all sounded hopelessly unstructured to me, but the St James gallery at least meant she could pay her rent and eat. In a stammering phone call, I had instructed her on the bus routes open to her, the precise workings of the 19, the 22, the 38. ‘Douglas, I grew up in London,’ she had told me, ‘I know how to catch the bus. I’ll see you at six thirty.’ By six twenty-two I was beneath the clock tower, staring at the latest Biochemist, eyes sliding across the page without gaining purchase, still staring at six forty, hearing her before I saw her; the tap-tap of high heels was not a common sound on this part of the campus.
In our digital age we now have the electronic means to summon up a face more or less at will. Back then faces were like phone numbers; you tried to memorise the important ones. But my mental snapshots of the previous weekend had begun to fade. Chaste and sober on a squally, gun-metal weekday, would I be disappointed?