‘It’s a little more complicated than that, Douglas,’ Connie told me. ‘We’re feeling our way. We’re … seeing what happens. He says he’s changed, but no one changes that much, do they? Even if they want to.’ I agreed; no, they did not. ‘Anyway, I wanted to tell you. I thought you ought to know straight away. I like to think you’ll tell me too. If and when you meet someone. Which I hope you will.’
The occasion was our lunch in London in June, one of the regular meetings we had promised to have when negotiating our separation. We are not divorced and may not be for some time, though I suppose that will happen some day. For the moment, technically, we are still husband and wife. Technically. ‘I’m not in any hurry to change that. Are you?’ she’d said. No, I was not in any hurry.
The restaurant was in Soho, Spanish-themed for old times’ sake, and so fashionable that we had to queue for some time to get in. Queuing, it seems, is also fashionable now. You’re meant to feel honoured, and grateful for your seat, and I wonder how long it will be before they ask you to wash up, too. Anyway, we drank wine while waiting in the queue, took our seats — benches, in fact — between couples much younger than us, and it was all very civilised, very pleasant. Anyone watching would have thought that we were a long-time married couple, enjoying our day in the city, which I suppose is more or less what we were; comfortable, familiar, touching across the table, the difference being that soon Connie would be returning to her basement in Kennington and I’d be on the train back to Oxford.
‘How is your flat?’ asked Connie, hoping for some reassurance, I suppose. ‘Is it comfortable? Have you met anyone? Are you happy there?’ Please say yes.
I had moved to a small but comfortable garden flat on the outskirts of Oxford. Our old family home would be too large and depressing for me to live in on my own. Neither did I relish the prospect of spending my evenings showing prospective buyers around the attractive kitchen, the many light and spacious bedrooms, perfect for a growing family. So a flat was rented while we waited for the house to sell. Conscious of my father’s experience, I had made sure that the place was welcoming and cheerful. There was a spare room for when Albie came to stay, a small garden, river walks and friends nearby. Work was forty-five minutes away. There were moments — wet weekday nights or three p.m. on a Sunday afternoon — when an awful sadness overtook the place, finding its way into the corners of each room like some sort of creeping gas, and I would have to pack Mr Jones in the car and go for a brisk walk, but for the most part I was happy enough. Reduced to essentials, it transpired that I needed fewer possessions than I’d thought, and I liked the order and simplicity of this life. Like Darwin’s cabin on the Beagle, everything was in its place. I worked late. I cooked simple, health-conscious meals. Watched whatever I wanted on television. I exercised. Read. I walked Mr Jones and ran the dishwasher just twice a week.
On the first warm day of the year, Connie had driven a hired van from London to the family house (‘Can you manage?’ ‘Of course I can manage.’ ‘Should I get the train to London and drive the van?’ ‘Douglas — I can manage!’) and we spent that long Easter weekend disentangling our mingled lives. We had invited Albie along, too, promising him that it would not be a grim and acrimonious affair, that there would be almost a carnival atmosphere! But he said that he was busy, photographing the back of people’s heads or something, I expect. When I phoned to ask what we should do with all his stuff, his old artwork, his childhood toys, he said, ‘Burn it. Burn it all.’ Connie and I laughed about this a great deal. We donned rubber gloves to clear his room and, finding a stinking old trainer or an ancient pair of pants, we’d chant, ‘Burn it! Burn it all!’
We didn’t actually burn anything, that would have felt a little melodramatic, but nevertheless that Easter weekend had the air of a rather melancholy ritual. Five piles were made in separate rooms; one for Connie, one for myself, to dump, to sell, to give to charity, and it was interesting to note how easily everything we owned fell into one of those categories. We did our best to keep the mood upbeat. Connie had made a compilation of new music that she’d discovered — she was listening to music again — and on Saturday we drank wine and ate simple food that did not require many pans. There were chocolate eggs on Sunday morning and later that afternoon, smudge-faced from the dust and cobwebs in the attic, Connie and I went to bed and made love for the last time. I won’t say much except to mention that thankfully there was nothing sombre about it. In fact, there was a certain amount of laughter, and warmth and affection. Fondness, I suppose. Afterwards we lay for a long time in that bare room, saying nothing, slept for a while in each other’s arms, then woke, got dressed and went downstairs to empty the kitchen cupboards.
At other times that weekend had the quality of an archaeological dig, the relics getting dustier and shabbier as we sifted further back. Most items were easy to allocate. Connie and I had always had different tastes and although they had converged to an extent over the years, there was rarely any question of what was mine and what was hers. In the early days of our relationship we had bombarded each other with gifts of favourite books and music — or rather Connie had bombarded me — and it seemed churlish now to snatch those items back. And so I kept the John Coltrane CDs and the Kafka short stories, the Baudelaire poems and the Jacques Brel on vinyl, even though I have no record player and would not play it if I did. I was happy to keep them all, because they were the making of us. On the front page of Rimbaud’s poetry I found ‘Happy Valentine’s Day, you wonderful man. I love you very much, signed???’ I showed it to Connie.
‘Did you send this?’
She laughed and shook her head. ‘Not me.’
I placed the book in my pile, knowing that I would never read it and never throw it away.
Only a few items presented a dilemma. In an old 35mm film canister — artefact of ancient times — we found ten or twelve little yellow chips of ivory. Albie’s milk teeth, the ones he hadn’t swallowed or lost in the playground. In truth, they were unpleasant, slightly macabre objects, something you might wrinkle your nose at in the Egyptian rooms of a museum, but throwing them away didn’t seem right either. Should we take six each? It was all slightly ridiculous, haggling over milk teeth. ‘You have them,’ I said. So Connie got the milk teeth.
But the photographs were a predicament. We had the negatives, of course, but, even more than the VHS tapes and the audiocassettes, photographic negatives seem like the relics of an ancient civilisation and we threw most of them away. The slim wallet of photos of our daughter went to Connie, and she assured me that she would make good copies for me as soon as she could, a promise she has since fulfilled. With all the other, pre-digital photos, we sat on the floor and dealt them into piles like playing cards, discarding the dull and out of focus, making a stack of the best, the ones that we would both like copies of. Here we were at all those endless parties and weddings, thumbs up in the rain on the Isle of Skye, here was Venice in the rain again, here was Albie on his mother’s breast. The process was agonisingly slow, each photo leading us down another avenue of nostalgia. Whatever happened to so-and-so? God, d’you remember that car? Here I was, putting up shelves in the Kilburn flat, smooth-cheeked and impossibly young, and here was Connie on our wedding day.
‘That awful dress — what was I thinking of?’