‘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.