Us (2 page)

Perhaps she would have liked to hear this but I had never got around to saying it out loud. I had always presumed there would be time and now, sitting on the edge of the bed at four a.m., no longer listening out for burglars, it seemed that it might be too late.

‘How long have you—?'

‘A while now.'

‘So when will you—?'

‘I don't know. Not any time soon, not until after Albie's left home. After the summer. Autumn, the new year?'

Finally: ‘Can I ask why?'

For the question, and the ultimate answer, to make sense, some context might be necessary. Instinctively, I feel my life could be divided into two distinct parts – Before Connie and After Connie, and before I turn in detail to what happened that summer, it might be useful to give an account of how we met. This is a love story, after all. Certainly love comes into it.

‘Lonely' is a troubling word and not one to be tossed around lightly. It makes people uncomfortable, summoning up as it does all kinds of harsher adjectives, like ‘sad' or ‘strange'. I have always been well liked, I think, always well regarded and respected, but having few enemies is not the same as having many friends, and there was no denying that I was, if not ‘lonely', more solitary than I'd hoped to be at that time.

For most people, their twenties represent some kind of high-water mark of gregariousness, as they embark on adventures in the real world, find a career, lead active and exciting social lives, fall in love, splash around in sex and drugs. I was aware of this going on around me. I knew about the nightclubs and the gallery openings, the gigs and the demonstrations; I noted the hangovers, the same clothes worn to work on consecutive days, the kisses on the tube and the tears in the canteen, but I observed it all as if through reinforced glass. I'm thinking specifically of the late eighties, which, for all their hardship and turmoil, seemed like a rather exciting time. Walls were coming down, both literally and figuratively; the political faces were changing. I hesitate to call it a revolution or portray it as some new dawn – there were wars in Europe and the Middle East, riots and economic turmoil – but there was at least a sense of unpredictability, a sense of change. I remember reading a great deal about a Second Summer of Love in the colour supplements. Too young for the First, I was completing my PhD – on Protein-RNA interactions and protein folding during translation – throughout the Second. ‘The only acid in
this
house,' I was fond of saying around the lab, ‘is deoxyribonucleic acid' – a joke that never quite got the acclaim it deserved.

Still, as the decade drew to a close things were clearly happening, albeit elsewhere and to other people, and I quietly wondered if a change was due in my life, too, and how I might bring that about.

The Berlin Wall was still standing when I moved to Balham. Approaching thirty, I was a doctor of biochemistry living in a small, semi-furnished, heavily mortgaged flat off the High Road, consumed by work and negative equity. I spent weekdays and much of the weekends studying the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, for my first post-doc, specifically using mutagens in classical forward genetic screens. Those were exciting times in Drosophila studies, developing the tools to read and manipulate the genomes of organisms and, professionally if not personally, this was something of a golden period for me.

I rarely encounter a fruit fly now, outside of a bowl of fruit. These days I work in the private, commercial sector – ‘the evil corporation', my son calls it – as Head of Research and Development, a rather grand title but one that means I no longer experience the freedom and excitement of fundamental science. These days my position is organisational, strategical, words like that. We fund university research in order to make the most of academic expertise, innovation and enthusiasm, but everything must be ‘translational' now; there must be some practical application. I enjoy the work, am good at it and I still visit labs, but now I am employed to co-ordinate and manage younger people who do the work that I used to do. I am not some corporate monster; I am good at my job and it has brought success and security. But it doesn't thrill me like it used to.

Because it
was
thrilling, to be working all those hours with a small group of committed, impassioned people. Science seemed exhilarating to me then, inspiring and essential. Twenty years on, those experiments on fruit flies would lead to medical innovations that we could never have imagined, but at the time we were motivated by pure curiosity, almost by a sense of play. It was just terrific
fun
, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that I loved my subject.

That's not to say there wasn't a great deal of mundane graft involved, too; computers were temperamental and rudimentary, barely more than unwieldy calculators and considerably less powerful than the phone in my pocket now, and data input was exhausting and laborious. And while the common fruit fly has a great deal in its favour as an experimental organism – fecundity, a short breeding cycle, distinctive morphology – it has little in the way of personality. We kept one as a pet in our lab's insectory, in its own special jar with a tiny rug and doll's house furniture, replacing it at the end of each life cycle. Though it's tricky to sex a fruit fly, we called him/her Bruce. Allow this to stand as the archetypal example of Biochemist Humour.

Such small diversions were necessary because anaesthetising a population of Drosophila, then examining them one by one with a fine brush and a microscope, looking for tiny changes in eye pigmentation or wing shape, is frankly mind-numbing. It's a little like embarking on an immense jigsaw. To begin with you think ‘this will be fun' and you put on the radio and make a pot of tea, before realising that there are far too many pieces, nearly all of them sky.

Consequently I was far too tired to go to my sister's party on that Friday night. And not just tired, I was wary too, for a number of good reasons.

I was wary of my sister's cooking, which invariably consisted of a tubular pasta and economy cheese, charred black on the surface, with either tinned tuna or lardy mince lurking beneath the molten crust. I was wary because parties, and dinner parties in particular, had always seemed to be a pitiless form of gladiatorial combat, with laurel garlands bestowed to the most witty, successful and attractive, and the corpses of the defeated lying bleeding on the painted floorboards. The pressure to be one's best self in such circumstances I found paralysing, and still do, yet my sister insisted on forcing me into the arena again and again.

‘You can't stay at home for the rest of your life, D.'

‘I don't stay at home, I'm hardly here …'

‘Sat in that misery hole, all by yourself.'

‘It's not a … I'm perfectly happy by myself, Karen.'

‘You're not happy! You're not! How can you be happy, D? You're not happy! You are not!'

And it was true that there was not a great deal of glee before that February night, little cause for fireworks or the punching of air. I liked my colleagues, they liked me, but for the most part, I would say goodbye to Security Steve on a Saturday afternoon then not speak until my lips parted with an audible pop on the Monday morning as I greeted him hello. ‘Good weekend, Douglas?' he'd ask. ‘Oh, quiet, Steve, very quiet.' Still, there was pleasure and satisfaction in my work, a pub quiz once a month, the pint with my colleagues on a Friday night, and if I did occasionally suspect something was missing, well – didn't everyone?

Not my sister. In her mid-twenties Karen was promiscuous in her friendships and ran with what my parents referred to as ‘an arty crowd': would-be actors, playwrights and poets, musicians, dancers, glamorous young people pursuing impractical careers, staying up late then meeting for long and emotional cups of tea during all hours of the working day. For my sister, life was one long group hug and it seemed to amuse her in some obscure way to parade me in front of her younger friends. She liked to say that I had skipped youth and leapt straight into middle age, that I had been forty-three in my mother's womb, and it was true, I suppose, that I'd never got the hang of being young. In which case why was she so desperate for me to come along?

‘Because there'll be
girls
there—'

‘Girls? Girls … Yes, I've heard talk of those.'

‘One girl in particular—'

‘I do know girls, Karen. I have met and spoken to girls.'

‘Not like this one. Trust me.'

I sighed. For whatever reason, ‘fixing me up with a girlfriend' had become something of an obsession for Karen, and she pursued it with a beguiling mixture of condescension and coercion.

‘Do you want to be alone forever? Do you? Hm? Do you?'

‘I have no intention of being alone forever.'

‘So where are you going to meet someone, D? In your wardrobe? Under the sofa? Are you going to grow them in the lab?'

‘I really don't want to have this conversation any more.'

‘I'm only saying it because I
love
you!' Love was Karen's alibi for all kinds of aggravating behaviour. ‘I'm laying a place for you at the table so if you don't come, the whole evening's ruined!' And with that, she hung up the phone.

So that evening, in a tiny flat in Tooting, I was pushed by the shoulders into the tiny kitchen where sixteen people sat crammed around a flimsy trestle table designed for pasting wallpaper, one of my sister's notorious pasta bakes smouldering in its centre like a meteorite, smelling of toasted cat food.

‘Everyone! This is my lovely brother, Douglas. Be nice to him, he's shy!' My sister liked nothing more than pointing at shy people and bellowing SHY! Hello, hi, hey there Douglas, said my competitors and I contorted myself onto a tiny folding chair between a handsome, hairy man in black tights and a striped vest, and an extremely attractive woman.

‘I'm Connie,' she said.

‘Pleased to meet you, Connie,' I said, scalpel sharp, and that was how I met my wife.

We sat in silence for a while. I contemplated asking if she'd pass the pasta but then I'd be obliged to eat it, so instead …

‘What do you do, Connie?'

‘Good question,' she said, though it was not. ‘I suppose I'm an artist. That's what I studied, anyway, but it always sounds a bit pretentious …'

‘Not at all,' I replied, and thought,
oh God, an artist
. If she'd said ‘cellular biologist' there'd have been no stopping me, but I rarely encountered such people and certainly never at my sister's house. An
artist
. I didn't hate art, not by any means, but I dislike knowing nothing about it.

‘So – watercolours or oils?'

She laughed. ‘It's a little more complicated than that.'

‘Hey, I'm a kind of artist too!' said the handsome man to my left, shouldering his way in. ‘A
trapeze
artist!'

I didn't speak much after this. Jake, the fleecy man in vest and tights, was a circus performer who loved both his work and himself, and how could I possibly compete with a man who defied the laws of gravity for a living? Instead I sat quietly and watched her from the corner of my eye, making the following observations:

1. She had very good hair. Well cut, clean, shiny, an almost artificial black, points brushed forward over her ears (‘Points' – is that right?) designed to frame her wonderful face. Describing hairstyles is not my forte, I lack the vocabulary, but there was something of the fifties film star to it, what my mother would call ‘a do', yet it was modish and contemporary too. ‘Modish' – listen to me! Anyway, I smelt the shampoo and her scent as I sat down, not because I snuffled around in the nape of her neck like a badger, I knew better than that, but because the table was really very small.
   
2. Connie listened. For my sister and her friends, ‘conversation' really meant taking it in turns to speak, but Connie listened intently to our trapeze artist, her hand on her cheek, her little finger resting in the corner of her mouth. Self-contained, calm, she had a quality of quiet intelligence. The expression she wore was intent but not entirely uncritical or unamused, so that it was impossible to discern if she found something impressive or ridiculous, an attitude that she has maintained throughout the entire course of our marriage.
   
3. Though I thought her lovely, she was not the most attractive woman at the table. It is traditional, I know, when describing these first encounters with loved ones to suggest that they emitted some special glow; ‘her face lit up the room' or ‘I could not look away'. In truth, I could and did look away and would say that, in conventional terms at least, she was perhaps the third most beautiful woman in the room. My sister, with her much vaunted ‘big personality', liked to surround herself with extremely ‘cool' people, but coolness and kindness rarely go together and the fact that these people were often truly appalling, cruel, pretentious or idiotic was, to my sister, a small price to pay for their reflected glamour. So while there were many attractive people there that night, I was very happy to be sitting next to Connie, even if she did not at first sight effervesce, incandesce, luminesce, etc.
   
4. She had a very appealing voice – low, dry, a little husky, with a noticeable London accent. She has lost this over the years, but in those days there was definitely a slight swallowing of the consonants. Usually this would be an indicator of social background, but not in my sister's circle. One of her cock-er-ney friends spoke as if he ran a whelk stall despite his father being the Bishop of Bath and Wells. In Connie's case, she asked sincere, intelligent questions, which nevertheless had an undertow of irony and amusement. ‘Are the clowns as funny in real life as they are on stage?' – that kind of thing. Her voice had the instinctive cadence of a comedian and she had the gift of being funny without smiling, which I've always envied. On the rare occasions that I tell a joke in public, I grimace like a frightened chimpanzee, but Connie was, is, deadpan. ‘So,' she asked, her face a mask, ‘when you're flying through the air towards your partner, are you ever tempted, at the very, very last moment, to do this –' and here she raised her thumb to her nose and wiggled her remaining fingers, and I thought this was just terrific.
   
5. She drank a great deal, refilling her glass before it was empty as if worried the wine might run out. The drink had no discernible effect except perhaps a certain intensity in conversation, as if it required concentration. Connie's drinking seemed quite light-hearted, with a kind of drink-you-under-the-table swagger to it. She seemed like fun.
   
6. She was extremely stylish. Not expensively or ostentatiously dressed but there was something
   right
   about her. The fashion of the day placed great emphasis on ‘bagginess', giving the impression that the guests around the table were toddlers wearing their parents' T-shirts. Connie, in contrast, was neat and stylish in old clothes (which I have since learnt to call ‘vintage') that were tailored and snug and emphasised her – I'm sorry, I apologise, but there really is no way around this – her ‘curves'. She was smart, original, both ahead of the crowd and as old-fashioned as a character in a black-and-white film. In contrast, the impression I set out to create, looking back, was no impression at all. My wardrobe at that time ran the gamut from taupe to grey, all the colours of the lichen world, and it's a safe bet that chinos were involved. Anyway, the camouflage worked, because …
   
7. This woman on my right had absolutely no interest in me whatsoever.