Us (8 page)

The biographies we give ourselves at such times are never neutral and the image she chose to present was of a rather solitary soul. She was not mawkish or self-pitying, not at all, but with the bravado gone, she seemed less confident, less self-assured, and I felt flattered by her honesty. I loved the conversation that we had that night, especially once she had stopped hallucinating. I had an infinite number of questions and would have been happy for her to recount her life in real time, would have been happy to walk on past Whitechapel and Limehouse into Essex and the estuary and on into the sea if she'd wanted to. And she was curious about me, too, something that I'd not experienced for some time. We talked about our parents and our siblings, our work and friends, our schools and childhoods, the implication being that we would need to know this information for the future.

Of course, after nearly a quarter of a century, the questions about our distant pasts have all been posed and we're left with ‘how was your day?' and ‘when will you be home?' and ‘have you put the bins out?' Our biographies involve each other so intrinsically now that we're both on nearly every page. We know the answers because we were there, and so curiosity becomes hard to maintain; replaced, I suppose, by nostalgia.

In planning our trip I had initially adopted a no-expense-spared attitude, until I calculated the full extent of this expense, at which point I adopted a comfortable-but-no-frills policy. It was this that brought us to the Hotel Bontemps, which may or may not translate as the Good Times Hotel, in the 7
th
arrondissement. Room 602 was clearly the result of a wager to determine the smallest space into which a double mattress can fit. Brassy and vulgar, the bed frame must have been assembled inside like a ship in a bottle. On closer examination, it also seemed our room was a repository for all of Europe's spare pubic hair.

‘All in all, I'd have preferred a chocolate on the pillow,' said Connie, swatting them away.

‘Perhaps it's fibres from the carpet,' I suggested hopefully.

‘It's everywhere! It's like the chambermaid's come in with a sack and
strewn
it.'

Suddenly weary, I fell backwards onto the bed, and Connie joined me, the covers crackling with static like a Van de Graaf Generator.

‘Why did we choose this place again?' said Connie.

‘You said it looked quirky on the website. The pictures made you laugh.'

‘Not so funny now. Oh God. Sorry.'

‘No, it's my fault. I should have looked harder.'

‘Not your fault, Douglas.'

‘I want everything to be
right.
'

‘It's fine. We'll ask them to come and clean again.'

‘What's French for pubic hair?'

‘I never learnt that. It never came up. Rarely.'

‘I'd say, “
Nettoyer tous les cheval intimes, s'il vous plaît
.”'

‘
Cheveux
.
Cheval
means horse.' She took my hand. ‘Oh well. We're not going to be here much.'

‘It's a place to sleep.'

‘Exactly. A place to sleep.'

I sat upright. ‘Perhaps we should get going.'

‘No, let's close our eyes. Here.'

She took my hand, rested her head on my shoulder, our legs dangling over the edge as if on a riverbank. ‘Douglas?'

‘Hm?'

‘You know the … conversation.'

‘You want to talk about that now?'

‘No, no, I was going to say, we're in Paris, it's a beautiful day, we're all together as a family. Let's not talk about it. Let's wait until after the holiday.'

‘Okay. Fine by me.'

And so the condemned man, presented with his final meal, is reminded that at least the cheesecake is delicious.

We dozed. Fifteen minutes later a text from my son in the adjoining room woke us to say that he intended to ‘do his own thing' until dinner. We sat up and stretched, brushed our teeth and left. At the reception desk, in French so riddled with errors, guesses and mispronunciation that it was almost a new language, I informed the desk clerk that I was destroyed but there were many strange horses in our salty bedroom, and we walked out into the Paris afternoon.

Connie was still laughing as we crossed from the 7
th
to the 6
th
on the sunny side of rue de Grenelle. ‘Where on earth did you learn it?'

‘I've sort of made it up myself. Why, what's wrong with it?'

‘The vocabulary, the accent, the syntax. You always get caught in these
est-ce que
loops. “It is that it is possible that it is that the taxi to the hotel for to take us?”'

‘Maybe if I'd studied it, like you …'

‘I didn't study it! I learnt it from French people.'

‘From French boys. From nineteen-year-old French boys.'

‘Exactly. I learnt “not so fast” and “I like you but as a friend”. I learnt “can I have a cigarette?” and “I promise I will write to you”.
Ton cœur brisé se réparera rapidement.
'

‘Which means …?'

‘Your broken heart will soon mend.'

‘Useful.'

‘Useful when I was twenty-one. Not so much now,' she said, and the remark lingered a moment as we reached St Germain.

When Connie and I first came here, in the days when we referred to ‘dirty weekends' without irony, we were dizzy with Paris, drunk on the beauty of the city, drunk on being there together and also, more often than not, literally drunk. Paris was all so … Parisian. I was captivated by the wonderful wrongness of it all – the unfamiliar fonts, the brand names in the supermarket, the dimensions of the bricks and paving stones. Children, really quite small children, speaking fluent French! All that cheese and none of it Cheddar, and nuts in the salad. Look at the chairs in the Jardin du Luxembourg! So much more poised and elegant than the sag and slump of a deckchair. Baguettes! Or ‘French sticks' as I called them then, to Connie's amusement. We carried great armfuls of baguettes home on the plane, laughing as we crammed them into the overhead lockers.

But a branch of The Body Shop is much the same worldwide, and sometimes the Boulevard St Germain seems not that far from Oxford Street. Familiarity, globalisation, cheap travel, mere weariness had diluted our sense of foreign-ness. The city was more familiar than we wanted it to be and, as we walked in silence, it seemed some effort would be required to remind her of the fun we used to have, and could have in the future.

‘Pharmacies! What's with all the pharmacies?' I said, in my wry, observational tone. ‘How do they all survive? You'd think, from all the pharmacies, they'd be in a constant state of flu. We have phone shops, the French have pharmacies!'

Still she said nothing. Crossing a side street, I noted the gutters were flowing with fast-moving water, sandbags blocking strategic drains. I had always been impressed by this particular innovation in urban hygiene, seemingly unique to Paris. ‘It's like they're rinsing out this immense bath,' I said.

‘Yes, you say that every time we come here. That thing about pharmacies too.'

Did I? I wasn't aware of having said it before. ‘How many times have we been here now, d'you think?'

‘I don't know. Five, six.'

‘D'you think you could name them all?'

Connie frowned at the thought. Both of our memories were deteriorating, and in recent years the effort required to recall a name or incident felt almost wearyingly physical, like clearing out an attic. Proper nouns were particularly elusive. Adverbs and adjectives would go next, until we were left with pronouns and imperative verbs. Eat! Walk! Sleep now! Eat! We passed a
boulangerie
.

‘Look – French sticks!' I said, and nudged her. Connie looked blank. ‘When we first came to Paris I said, “let's buy some French sticks” and you laughed and called me provincial. I said that's what my mother used to call them. My dad thought they were barbaric. “It's all crust!”'

‘That sounds like your father.'

‘The first time you and I came to Paris, we bought about twenty and carried them back on the plane.'

‘I remember. You told me off for nibbling at the ends.'

‘I'm sure I didn't “tell you off”.'

‘You said that's what makes them go stale.'

And we were silent again, turning north towards the Seine.

‘I wonder what Albie's up to,' said Connie.

‘He's asleep, probably.'

‘Well that's all right. He's allowed.'

‘Either that or he's trying to work out why there are no mouldy mugs on the windowsill. He's probably there now, burning cigarette holes in the curtains. Room service! Bring me three banana skins and an overflowing ashtray …'

‘Douglas – this is precisely what we came here to avoid.'

‘I know. I know.'

And then she slowed and stopped. We were on rue Jacob, standing near a small, somewhat ramshackle hotel.

‘Look. It's our hotel,' she said, taking my arm.

‘You remember that.'

‘That trip, I do. Which room was it?'

‘Second floor, on the corner. The yellow curtains. There it is.'

Connie put her head on my shoulder. ‘Perhaps we should have gone back to that hotel instead.'

‘I thought about it. I thought it would have felt a little strange, with Albie there.'

‘No, he'd have liked it. You could have told him the story, he's old enough now.'

It must have been eighteen years ago.

The anniversary of our daughter's birth was fast approaching and, all too soon after, that other anniversary. I knew those days would be hard for Connie. Her grief, I had observed, tended to come in waves, and though the intervals between each crest were increasing, another storm was certainly due.

In my rather strained and bludgeoning way, I had been endeavouring to keep Connie buoyant with a kind of manic chirpiness; the perpetual warbling brightness of a morning DJ, endless loving phone calls from work, constant maudlin pawing and hugging and kisses on the top of her head. Tinny sentiment – Christ, no wonder she was blue – alternating with a private, secret wall-punching rage at the fact that I could do nothing to lift her spirits. Or indeed my own, because didn't I have my own guilt and sadness?

Usually I might have expected her many loyal friends to step in where I had failed, but everywhere we looked babies and toddlers were being brandished, and we both found their proud display almost unbearable. In turn our presence seemed to make the new parents self-conscious and embarrassed. Connie had always been greatly loved, always popular and funny, but her unhappiness – people seemed affronted by it, especially when it quashed their own joy and pride. And so without any discussion we had withdrawn to our little world to sit quietly by ourselves. Walked, worked. Watched television in the evenings. Drank a little too much, perhaps, and for the wrong reason.

Of course, I had considered that another child might be the answer. Connie, I knew, longed to be pregnant again, and though we were fond and affectionate and, in some ways, closer that we'd been before, things were not easy. The stresses and strains of ‘trying for a baby' have been rehearsed many, many times. In the shadow of what had happened – well, I won't go into the details except to say that anger, guilt and grief are poor aphrodisiacs and our sex life, once perfectly happy, had taken on a rather dogged and dutiful air. It was not so much fun any more. Nothing was.

Paris, then. Perhaps Paris in the spring might be the answer. Hackneyed, I know, and I wince now to recall the lengths I went to in order to make that trip perfect; the first-class travel, the flowers and champagne ready in the hotel room, the chi-chi and expensive bistro I had reserved – all this in a largely pre-internet world where arranging such excursions involved PhD levels of research and nerve-shredding phone calls in a language that, as we've established, I neither spoke nor understood.

But the city was beautiful in early May, absurdly so, and we walked the streets in our best clothes and felt as if we were in a film. We spent the afternoon in the Rodin Museum, returned to the hotel and drank champagne while crammed into the tiny bathtub, then went woozily to dinner at a restaurant that I had previously reconnoitred, French but not cartoonishly so, tasteful, quiet. I don't remember all that we said, but I do remember what we ate: a chicken with truffles under the skin that tasted like nothing we'd ever eaten before and wine, chosen purely by luck with a blind jabbing motion, that was so delicious as to be almost another drink entirely. Still in that corny film, we held hands across the table and then we went back to our hotel room on rue Jacob and made love.

Afterwards, on the edge of sleep, I was startled to notice that Connie was crying. The combination of sex and tears is a disconcerting one, and I asked, had I done something wrong?

‘There's nothing to be sorry for,' she said, and, turning, I could see that she was laughing too. ‘Quite the opposite.'

‘What's funny?'

‘Douglas, I think we've done it. In fact, I know we have.'

‘Done what? What have we done?'

‘I'm pregnant. I know it.'

‘I know it too,' I said, and we lay there and laughed.

Of course, I should point out that there was no way of ‘knowing' this. In fact, at that precise moment, it probably wasn't even true, as the gametes take some time to make contact and form the zygote. Connie's ‘sense' of conception was an example of ‘confirmation bias' – a desire to favour the evidence that confirms what we wish to believe. Many women claim to ‘know' for sure that they are pregnant after sex. When, as in most cases, it transpires that they're not, they immediately forget their prior certainty. In the rare cases that they're right, they see this as confirmation of some supernatural or sixth sense. Hence confirmation bias.