Us (16 page)

As the train rolled on to Brussels I reached for my own book, a dense but engaging history of World War II. The date was March '44, and plans were well under way for Operation Overlord. ‘Good God,' I said, and placed the book back down.

‘What is it now?' said Connie, somewhat impatient.

‘I just realised, a little in that direction is the Ardennes.'

‘What's special about the Ardennes?' said Albie.

‘The Ardennes,' I said, ‘is where your great-grandfather died. Here …'

I flicked towards the centre of the book and a map of the Ardennes Offensive. ‘We're about here. The battle was over there.' I indicated the red and blue arrows on the map, so unrepresentative of the flesh and blood to which they corresponded. ‘This was “the Bulge”, a last-ditch German counterattack against the US forces, a terrible battle, one of the worst, in the forest in the dead of winter. A sort of awful final convulsion. Germans and Americans mostly, but a thousand or so British got tangled up too, your great-grandfather among them. Bloody destruction, as bad as D-Day, just half an hour that way.' I pointed east. Albie peered out of the window as if looking for some evidence, pillars of smoke or Stukas screaming out of the sun, but saw only farmland, ripe and placid and serene. He shrugged, as if I was making this all up.

‘I have his campaign medals in my desk drawer. You used to ask to see them, Albie, when you were little. D'you remember? He's buried out there too, a little place called Hotton. My dad only went to the cemetery once, when he was a little boy. After he retired I offered to take him again – do you remember, Connie? – but he didn't want to get his passport renewed. I remember thinking how sad that was, only seeing your father's grave once. He said he didn't want to get sentimental about it.'

I had become unusually voluble and a little emotional, too. I'd never been particularly nostalgic about family history and had little knowledge of all but the lowest branches of the family tree, but wasn't this interesting? Our family heritage, our small role in history. Terence Petersen had fought in El Alamein, in Normandy too. As our only child, Albie would inherit his campaign medals. Shouldn't he at least acknowledge their significance and the sacrifice of his forebears? Yet Albie seemed primarily interested in checking the signal on his mobile phone. My own father, had I behaved like this, would have knocked it out of my hand.

‘Perhaps I should have gone there anyway,' I continued. ‘Perhaps we should all have gone. Got off at Brussels and hired a car. Why didn't I think of this before?'

‘We'll go some other time,' said Connie, who had closed her book now and was watching me with some concern. ‘Would anyone like some coffee?'

But I had heard the distant rumble of an argument and now wanted the storm to break. ‘Would you be interested in that, Egg? Would you want to come along?' I knew that he would not, but I wanted to hear him say it.

He shrugged. ‘Maybe.'

‘You don't seem very interested.'

He ruffled his hair with both hands. ‘It's history. I never knew anyone involved.'

‘Nor did I, but still …'

‘Waterloo is over there, the Somme is back in that direction; we probably had Petersens there, Moores too.'

‘It was
my
grandfather.'

‘But you said yourself, you never even knew him. I don't even remember granddad. I'm sorry, but I can't make an emotional connection to stuff that happened all that time ago.'

Emotional connection
, what an idiotic phrase. ‘It was only seventy years, Albie. Two generations ago there were Nazis in Paris and Amsterdam. Albie's a very Jewish-sounding name—'

‘Okay, this is a very gloomy conversation,' said Connie, unnaturally bright. ‘Who wants coffee?'

‘At the very least you could have been called up for service. Do you ever wonder what that would have been like? Standing terrified in a forest in Belgium in the dead of winter, like my grandfather? No wifi signal there, Albie!'

‘Can both of you lower your voices, please? And change the subject?'

I had merely raised my voice to be heard above the ambient noise of the train, it was Albie who was shouting. ‘Why are you making me out to be ignorant?' I know all this, I know what happened. I know, I'm just not… obsessed with the Second World War. I'm sorry, but I'm not. We've moved on.'

‘We? We?'

‘We've moved on, we don't see it everywhere. We don't look at a map and see these … arrows everywhere. That's okay, isn't it? Isn't that healthy? To move on and be European, instead of reading endless books about it and wallowing in it?'

‘I don't wallow, I—'

‘Well I'm sorry, Dad, but I'm not nostalgic for tank battles in the woods and I'm not going to pretend to care about things that don't mean anything to me.'

Don't mean anything? This was my father's father. My dad grew up without a dad. Perhaps Albie thought that this was a perfectly acceptable, even desirable, state of affairs but, still, to be so aloof and dismissive, it seemed … disloyal, unmanly. I love my son, I hope that is abundantly clear, but at that particular moment I found I wanted to bounce his head smartly off the window.

Instead I waited a moment, then said, ‘Well, frankly, I think that's a shitty attitude.' Which, in the silence that followed, seemed scarcely less violent.

Alternative points of view are more easily appreciated from a distance. Time allows us to zoom out and see things more objectively, less emotionally, and recalling the conversation it's clear that I overreacted. But despite being born some fifteen years after its end, the War overshadowed every aspect of my childhood: toys, comics, music, light entertainment, politics, it was in everything. Goodness knows how this must have felt to my parents, to have seen the traumas and terrors of their early youth re-enacted in situation comedies and playground games. Certainly, they didn't seem overly sensitive or scarred. Nazis were one of the few things that my father found amusing. If the thought of his father's loss upset him then he concealed it, as he concealed all strong feelings, anger aside.

My son, by contrast, was of a generation that no longer thought of countries in terms of Allied or Axis, or judged people on the basis of their grandparents' allegiances. Outside of first-person shoot-'em-ups, the War never crossed Albie's mind and maybe this
was
healthy. Maybe this was progress.

But it didn't feel like progress on the train. It seemed like disrespect, ignorance and complacency and I told him so, and in response he tossed his book onto the table, muttered beneath his breath, clambered over Connie into the aisle and away.

We waited for the other passengers to return to their newspapers. ‘Are you all right?' she said quietly, with the intonation of ‘are you mad?'

‘I'm perfectly fine, thank you.'

We travelled on in silence for two or three kilometres, before I said, ‘So clearly, that was all my fault.'

‘Not entirely. About eighty-twenty.'

‘No need to ask in whose favour.'

Another two kilometres slipped by. She picked up her book, though the pages didn't turn. Fields, warehouses, more fields, the backs of houses. I said, ‘By which I mean you might sometimes support me in these arguments.'

‘I do,' said Connie, ‘if you're right.'

‘I can't recall a single instance—'

‘Douglas, I'm neutral. I'm Switzerland.'

‘Really? Because it's clear to me where your allegiances—'

‘I don't have “allegiances”. It's not a war! Though Christ knows it feels like it sometimes.'

We passed through Brussels, though I could not now tell you much about it. In a park to the left I caught a glimpse of the Atomium, the stainless-steel structure built for the World's Fair, a fifties version of our present day and something I'd have liked to see. But I couldn't bear to mention it, and could only manage:

‘I found his attitude upsetting.'

‘Fine, I understand,' said Connie, her hand on my forearm now. ‘But he's young and you sound so …
pompous
, Douglas. You sound like some old duffer calling for National Service to be reintroduced. In fact, you know who you sound like? You sound like your dad!'

I'd not heard this before. I had never expected to hear it and I would need time to take it in, but Connie continued:

‘Why can you never let things go? You just pick and pick away at them, at Albie. I know not everything is easy at the moment, Christ knows it's not easy for me either, but you're up, you're down, you're manic, chattering away, or you're storming out. It's … hard, it's very hard.' In a lower voice. ‘That's why I'm asking again: are you feeling all right? You must be honest. Can you do this journey or shall we all go home?'

I found him as we entered Antwerp, sitting on a high stool in the buffet car eating a small tub of Pringles. His eyes, I noted, were a little red.

‘There you are!'

‘Here I am.'

‘I've walked all the way from Brussels! I thought you'd got off.'

‘Well, I'm here.'

‘Bit early in the day for Pringles, isn't it?'

Albie sighed, and I decided to let the point go. ‘It's an emotive subject, war.'

‘Yeah. I know.'

‘I think I lost my temper.'

He upended the tub into his mouth.

‘Your mother thinks I should apologise.'

‘And you've got to do what Mum says.'

‘No, I want to. I want to apologise.'

‘S'okay. It's done now.' He licked his fingertip and started swabbing the bottom of the tub.

‘So are you coming back, Egg?'

‘In a bit.'

‘Okay. Okay. Excited about Amsterdam?'

He shrugged. ‘Can't wait.'

‘No. Me neither. Me neither. Well …' I placed a hand on his shoulder and took it off again. ‘See you in a bit.'

‘Dad?'

‘Albie?'

‘I would come with you, to the War Cemetery, if you really wanted. There's just other places I'd rather go first.'

‘All right,' I said. ‘I'll bear that in mind.' I looked around me for some way to cement the truce. ‘D'you want anything else to eat? They have those waffles. Or a Kinder Bueno?'

‘No, because I'm not six.'

‘No. Right,' I said, and returned to my seat.

And that, pretty much, was everything that happened to us in Belgium.

I had visited before, once with Connie and on conferences too, so my experience was somewhat selective, but even so, Amsterdam's reputation as a city of sin always seemed something of an anomaly to me, as if one were to discover the presence of an immense crack-den in the centre of Cheltenham Spa. Both faces of the city, genteel and disreputable, were in evidence as we rumbled our suitcases along the lanes that zigzagged west from the Centraal station towards Keizersgracht; fine, tall seventeenth-century townhouses, glimpses of interior-designed living rooms and copper-panned kitchens, a little gift shop selling notepads and candles, a bikini-clad prostitute on the early shift drinking tea from a mug in a pink light, a baker's, a café filled with stoned skateboarders, a shop selling fixed-wheel bicycles. Amsterdam was the trendy dad of European cities; an architect, perhaps, barefoot and unshaven. Hey, guys, I told you, call me Tony! says Amsterdam to his kids, and pours everyone a beer.

We crossed the bridge at Herenstraat. ‘Our hotel is in the Grachtengordel, which we're entering now. Grachtengordel, literally, the girdle of canals!' I was a little out of breath but keen to maintain an educational element to our visit. ‘It looks wonderful on a map, this series of concentric circles like the growth rings on a tree trunk. Or horseshoes, nesting horseshoes …' But Albie wasn't listening; he was too distracted, eyes casting here and there.

‘My God, Albie,' said Connie, ‘it's a hipster's paradise.'

We laughed at this, though I'd be hard-pressed to define a hipster, unless it referred to the pretty girls in large, unnecessary spectacles and vintage dresses, sitting high on rickety bicycles. Why do the youth of other cities always seem so attractive? Did the Dutch walk the streets of Guildford or Basingstoke and think, my God, just
look
at these people? Perhaps not, but Albie was certainly agog in Amsterdam. For all its grace and elegance, I suspected that Paris had been a little hard and severe for Albie. But here, here was a city that he could work with. The question, as in any trip to Amsterdam, was how long before sex and drugs raised their complicated heads?

A little under eight minutes, it transpired.

The hotel, which advertised itself as ‘boutique' and had seemed perfectly pleasant on the website, had been decked out to resemble a top-of-the-range bordello. Our receptionist, an attractive and courteous transvestite, greeted us with the news that Connie and I had been upgraded to the honeymoon suite – the ‘irony suite', I thought – and directed us down corridors lined variously with black silk, satin and PVC, past large-scale prints of a corseted dominatrix sitting astride a flustered panther, a pop-art tongue prodding a pair of cherries to no useful end and a concerned Japanese lady encumbered by a complex series of knotted ropes. ‘She,' said Connie, ‘is going to get pins and needles.'

‘Dad,' asked Albie, ‘have you booked us into a sex hotel?' and they began to laugh convulsively as I fumbled with the key to our room – which, I noticed, was called the ‘Venus in Furs' suite, while Albie was in ‘Delta of Venus' next door.

‘It's not a sex hotel, it's “boutique”!' I insisted.

‘Douglas,' said Connie, tapping the print of the bound Japanese lady, ‘is that a half hitch or a bowline?' I did not answer, though it was a bowline.