‘Hello.’
‘Where are you, Douglas?’
‘I seem to be outside the Rodin Museum.’
‘What on earth are you doing there?’
‘Seeing an exhibition.’
‘It’s one in the morning.’
‘I got a little lost, that’s all.’
‘I expected you to be waiting at the hotel.’
‘I’ll be back soon. Go to sleep.’
‘I can’t sleep without you here.’
‘Nor with me, it would seem.’
‘No. No, that’s right. It’s … a dilemma.’
A moment passed.
‘I got a little … het up. I apologise,’ I said.
‘No, I do. I know you and Albie like to wind each other up, but I shouldn’t join in.’
‘Let’s talk no more about it. Amsterdam tomorrow.’
‘Fresh start.’
‘Exactly. Fresh start.’
‘Well. Hurry back. There’s going to be a storm.’
‘I won’t be long. Try to get some—’
‘We do love you, you know. We don’t always show it, I’m aware of that. But we do.’
I took a deep breath. ‘Well. As I said, I’ll be back soon.’
‘Great. Hurry back.’
‘Bye.’
‘Bye.’
‘Bye.’
I sat for a moment, then hauled myself to my feet and quickened my pace, determined to beat the imminent rain. Amsterdam tomorrow. Perhaps Amsterdam would be different. Perhaps everything would go right in Amsterdam.
part three
THE LOW COUNTRIES
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
But oh, the joy of it, the joy and bliss and thrill of each consecutive day, so unlike anything I had experienced before. It was dizzying, really, to be in love at last. Because this was the first time, I knew that now. Everything else had been a misdiagnosis — infatuation, obsession perhaps, but an entirely different condition to this. This was bliss; this was transformative.
The transformation began even before our second date. I had for some time been living the wrong sort of life and my drab flat in Balham was a reflection of this. The bare magnolia walls, the flat-pack furniture, the dusty paper lightshades and 100-watt bulbs. A woman as cool as Connie Moore would not stand for this. It would all have to go, to be replaced by … well, I wasn’t entirely sure, but I had twenty-four hours to decide. And so the night before our date I left the lab early, took the bus to Trafalgar Square and went to the National Gallery gift shop to bulk-buy art.
I bought postcards of works by Titian and Van Gogh, Monet and Rembrandt, posters of Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières and da Vinci’s Virgin and Child. I bought reproductions of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and, by way of contrast, Joseph Wright of Derby’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, a rather ghoulish Enlightenment painting of a man suffocating a cockatoo, but one that neatly fused our interests in art and science. Sprinting up Regent Street to the department stores, I bought clip-frames and cushions — my very first cushions — and little rugs and throws (was that a term? Throws?) and decent wine glasses, new underwear and socks and, in a further fit of optimism, new bedding: plain and stylish rather than the graph-paper design my mother had bought me in the mid-eighties. In toiletries, I bought razors, lotions and balms. I bought scruffing lotion without knowing what scruffing was, I bought floss and mouthwash, soaps and gels that smelt of cinnamon, sandalwood, cedar and pine, a whole arboretum of scents. I spent a fortune and then took it all home in a cab — a black cab! — because there wasn’t room on the bus for the brand new me.
Back in Balham I spent the evening distributing this new me around the flat, contriving as far as possible to give the impression that this was how I had always lived. I scattered books and threw the throws. I arranged fresh fruit in my new fruit bowl, discarded the sad yucca and the desiccated succulents and replaced them with flowers — fresh cut flowers! Tulips, I think — and contrived a vase out of a 500 ml Pyrex conical flask that I had liberated from the laboratory … cheap and amusing, too! Now if — if — she ever set foot in my flat, she would mistake me for someone else entirely; a bachelor of quiet good taste and simple needs, self-contained and self-assured, a man of the world who owned Van Gogh prints and cushions and smelt of trees. In cinema comedies there’s sometimes a scene where the central character has to frantically assemble a disguise, and this evening had that air about it. If the wig was slightly askew, the moustache peeling away from the lip, the price tag still on the fruit bowl, if the disguise was ill-fitting and held in place by Velcro, well, I’d fix that when I could.
And sure enough, the inspection came the morning after the successful second date. Making tea, I watched through the door as Connie pulled on an old T-shirt — oh, God, the sight of that — took a fresh apple from the bowl, examined it and padded around the flat, the apple gripped between her teeth as she pulled out album sleeves, peered at the spines of books and cassettes and videotapes, examined the postcards tacked oh-so-casually to the new cork noticeboard, the framed prints on the wall.
‘There’s a picture here of a man suffocating a cockatoo.’
‘Joseph Wright of Derby!’ I shouted, as if this were a quiz. ‘An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump.’
‘And you really love Van Gogh!’ she shouted through to the kitchen.
Did I? Should I? Was that a good thing? Had I overdone the Van Gogh? I thought everyone liked Van Gogh, but did that make Van Gogh a bad thing? I pressed the moustache back on to my lip.
‘I love him,’ I called back. ‘Don’t you?’
‘I do. Not this one, though.’ Then, Connie, I will take it down. ‘And Billy Joel, too. There’s a lot of Billy Joel.’
‘The early albums are terrific!’ I yelped, but by the time I carried tea through — loose-leaf Earl Grey in simple white china, milk in a new jug — she had disappeared. Perhaps Sunflowers had caused her to leap out of the window. I heard the shower running and stood stupidly in the middle of the floor, tea cooling on a tray, for somewhere between eight and twelve minutes, wondering if I could go in, if I had earnt that right. Eventually she opened the door of the bathroom, winding a new towel around her, her hair wet, her face scrubbed plain. Or perhaps she’d scruffed. Either way, she was beautiful. ‘I’ve made you some tea,’ I said and held out the tea that I had made her.
‘You have more toiletries than almost any man I’ve ever met.’
‘Well, you know.’
‘You know the strangest thing about them? They’re all brand new.’
I had no answer to this, though thankfully it didn’t matter because we were kissing now, apple and mint on her breath.
‘Put the tray down, maybe?’