But I still listen to Mozart, alone in my car rather than high up in the gods with Connie at my side. Selected highlights, greatest hits. I have a fine in-car stereo system, top-of-the-range, but still the music is barely audible above the roar of the air-conditioning and rush hour on the A34. Over-familiar, the music has become a kind of audio-Valium, background music rather than something I listen to actively and attentively. A gin and tonic after a long day. A shame, I think, because while each note remains the same, I used to hear them differently. It used to sound better.
But wasn’t this exciting? A new day and new beginnings in a brand new part of the world? The train from Paris would take us to Amsterdam in a little over three hours, hopscotching over Brussels, Antwerp and Rotterdam. Connie pointed out that we’d be bypassing Bruegels and Mondrians, a notorious altarpiece in Ghent, the picturesque city of Bruges, but the Rijksmuseum lay ahead and I was still entranced by European train travel, the ability to board a train in Paris and get off in Zurich, Cologne or Barcelona.
‘Miraculous, really, isn’t it? Croissant for breakfast, cheese toastie for lunch,’ I said, boarding the 0916 at the Gare du Nord.
‘Goodbye, Paris! Or should that be au revoir?’ I said, as the train pulled out into the sunlight.
‘According to the map on my phone, we are in Belgium … now!’ I said, as we crossed the border.
It’s a terrible habit but a silence in a contained space makes me anxious, and so I tug and tug at the conversation as if struggling to start a lawnmower.
‘My first time in Belgium! Hello, Belgium,’ I said, tugging away, yank, yank, yank.
‘The wifi on this train is useless,’ said Albie, but I smiled and looked out of the window. I had decided to shake off last night’s ennui and enjoy myself by sheer effort of will.
My high spirits were in contrast to the landscape, which was, for the most part, industrialised farmland interspersed with neat little towns, the church spires like push-pins punctuating the map. Last night’s storm had kept me awake and I was still a little queasy from the beer, but the swelling in my eye had eased and soon we’d be in Amsterdam, a city that I’d always thought of as civilised and, unlike Paris, easygoing. Perhaps some of that ‘laid-back’ quality would rub off on us. I reclined my seat. ‘I love this rolling stock,’ I said. ‘Why is continental rolling stock so much more comfortable?’
‘You’re full of fascinating observations,’ said Connie, laying down her novel with a sigh. ‘Why are you so full of beans?’
‘I’m excited, that’s all. Travelling through Belgium with my family. It’s exciting to me.’
‘Well, read your book,’ she said, ‘or we’ll push you off the train.’ They returned to their novels. Connie was reading something called A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter. On the cover, a hunched naked woman bathed at an impractical sink in black and white, while the back cover description claimed the novel was ‘sensual and evocative, a tour-de-force of erotic realism’. ‘Erotic realism’ sounded like a contradiction in terms to me, but it boded well for the hotel in Amsterdam. Albie, meanwhile, was reading L’Etranger by Albert Camus, which in English was the title of Billy Joel’s fifth studio album, though I doubted the two were connected. The book was a gift from Connie, who had presented Albie with a selection of novels in translation by European authors, many of whom had consecutive Ws, Zs and Vs in their names. It was an intimidating reading list, I thought, and Albie clearly felt so too, as he was making heavy work of L’Etranger. Even so, with regard to fiction, he was still a better student than I.
In the early days of our relationship, on a trip to Greece I think it was, I neglected to take a book on to the plane. It was not a mistake I would make again.
‘What are you going to do for two hours?’
‘I’ve got some journals, work stuff. I’ve got the guidebook.’
‘But you haven’t got a novel to read?’
‘I’ve just never really been that bothered about fiction,’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘I’ve always wondered who those freaks are who don’t read novels. And it’s you! Freak.’ She smiled through all this, but I still sensed an incremental slip, a loosening of my grip on her affections, as if I’d casually confessed to some racial bigotry. Can I really love a man who doesn’t see the point of made-up stories, a man who would rather find out about the real world around him? Since then I’ve learnt never to sit down on any form of public transport without a book of some sort in my hand. If it’s a novel, then chances are it will have been provided by Connie, and will have won some award but won’t be too complicated. The literary equivalent, I suppose, of my father’s ‘a good beat, a good tune’.
And I do read a great deal of non-fiction, which has always seemed to me a better use of words than the made-up conversations of people who have never existed. Academic papers aside, I read the more advanced popular-science and economics books and, like many men of my generation, I enjoy military history, my ‘Fascism-on-the-march books’, as Connie calls them. I’m not sure why we should be drawn to this material. Perhaps it’s because we like to imagine ourselves in the cataclysmic situations that our fathers and grandfathers faced, to imagine how we’d behave when tested, whether we would show our true colours and what they would be. Follow or lead, resist or collaborate? I expressed this theory to Connie once and she laughed and said that I was a textbook collaborator. ‘Delighted to meet you, Herr Gruppenführer!’ she had said, rubbing her hands together obsequiously. ‘If there’s anything you need …’ and then she laughed some more. Connie knew me better than anyone alive, but I did feel strongly that she had misjudged me in this respect. It might not be immediately apparent, but I was Resistance through and through. I just hadn’t had a chance to prove it yet.
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.’