Arriving at my parents’, I wondered whether Connie might flirt with my father and perhaps draw him out of his spiked shell. Was that worth a try? Curtains twitched as we pulled up. My father’s hand raised at the window, my mother at the front door. Hello, would you mind taking your shoes off?
Connie was completely charming, of course, but I’d always been led to believe that one talked to parents in the same polite, over-enunciated tone used for customs officials and police officers, conversation kept within tight parameters. What a lovely home, we’ve brought you some flowers, no more wine for me! Connie, however, made a great show of not altering her tone at all, simply talking to them like normal people.
But they weren’t normal people, they were my parents. Connie was charming and bright, but my father smelt the artiness on her and it made him anxious. My mother was bemused. Who was this attractive, glamorous, outspoken creature, holding hands with her son? ‘She’s very vivacious,’ she whispered as the kettle boiled. It was as if I’d turned up wearing an immense fur coat. Separate rooms would have been too draconian, but despite there being a perfectly good double bed, we were shown into the spare room with two singles, my mother holding open the door as if to say, ‘Here it is, your den of filth and shame.’ Connie was never one to shy away from a fight, and I imagined my parents in the dining room below, staring at the ceiling, cigarettes suspended halfway to their mouths at the sound of Connie and me pushing the beds together, giggling. Teenage rebellion, at the age of thirty-three.
The revolution continued at dinner. Despite smoking like a pair of burning tyres, my parents were rather reserved about alcohol and kept their sparse selection of ancient bottles in the garden shed with the spiders. Sherry was for trifles; brandy was for shock. Alcohol loosened inhibitions, and inhibitions were worn tight here. When it became clear that my parents were not going to open the bottle we had brought with us, that it would join the miniature of whisky and the curdled advocaat at the end of the garden, Connie made a great show of ‘popping out for some more wine’, returning in the car with two bottles and, it transpired later, a small bottle of vodka concealed in her coat.
I wish I could say the alcohol made things go with a swing. Over a dinner of fatty pork, talk somehow turned to immigration policy because, famously, nothing brings people together like the subject of immigration. We had all been drinking now, Connie and my father in particular, and my mother had asked a question about the relative racial mix of Kilburn in comparison with Balham. Were there still a lot of Irish there, as opposed to West Indians or Pakistanis? The implication being, I suppose, that the Irish were in some way ‘not so bad’. Connie had replied, in moderate tones, that there were all kinds of communities there, that often when people said Pakistani they meant Bangladeshi, which was like confusing Italy with Spain, and that the racial mix was part of the excitement and pleasure of living in London. But did she feel safe at night? asked my father.
It is probably not necessary to transcribe the argument that followed. In their defence, my parents’ views were widely held, but they were expressed with inappropriate anger, my father’s curled finger tapping an invisible window pane with every spurious ‘fact!’, and soon Connie was shouting, ‘My step-father is Turkish Cypriot, should he go home? My half-brothers, they’re half English, half Cypriot. What about my mum, she’s English, Irish, French, but she’s married to one of them — should she have to go, too?’
‘Maybe we should change the subject?’ I suggested.
‘No, we will not!’ said Connie emphatically. ‘Why do you always want to change the subject?’
And so we went on. The insinuation on Connie’s part — perhaps she even stated it outright — was that my parents were provincial bigots. The contention on my parents’ part was that Connie was ‘not in the real world’, that she was not waiting for a council house with her three kids, that she was unlikely to lose her job in some swanky art gallery to somebody who had just got off the boat from Poland. ‘You don’t get the boat from Poland,’ said Connie, petulantly, ‘you fly.’
There was a pause, and we all looked at our congealed dinner.
‘You’re very quiet,’ said my mother, in hurt tones.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I agree with Connie.’
For the most part I did agree with Connie. But if Connie had been arguing for a moon made entirely of cheese, I would have agreed with her too. I was going to be on her side from now on, and my parents saw this, and were saddened by it, I think. But what choice did I have? In a fight you side with the people you love. That is just how it is.
The three gentlemen at breakfast were large and self-confident: a Dutchman, an American and a Russian. They were well-dressed, teak-tanned, expense-account men, reeking of cologne, the kind of men who let other people shave them, the kind of men you find on yachts. With their immense wristwatches, they were a different breed, and our party of four seemed rather grey and muted in comparison. Connie and I had slept badly, Cat and Albie not at all, and they were still drunk or stoned or some combination of the two. If they reeked of beer and spirits, I reeked of disapproval. A reckoning was due between Albie and me. There had been complaints from the hotel staff about last night’s party, and I was waiting for an opportunity to announce that no, I would not be paying for the contents of the mini-bar and no, I was not happy that we had missed the best part of our final morning in Amsterdam due to hangovers. And so the seven of us sat in the gloomy subterranean breakfast room, at tables too close together, consuming acrid coffee and the kind of croissants that come in cellophane wrappers while the businessmen boomed away.
‘People talk about manufacturing costs,’ the handsome American was saying, ‘and we’re not stupid, we see that as a factor, but where’s the benefit if we’re left with a shitty product?’ He was no older than thirty, blue-chinned, muscular beneath a tailored shirt. ‘Our current manufacturers, we’re sending 10 to 15 per cent back as faulty or under par.’
‘It is a false economy,’ said the nodding Dutchman, slighter and less confident, some sort of middle-man or facilitator. Perhaps there was a business conference in town, a trade fair of some kind.
‘Precisely. A false economy. What you offer us, and this is why we’re pursuing this so hard, is consistency, efficiency, transportation links …’
‘Reliability …’ said the Russian.
‘It is a win-win situation,’ said the Dutchman, who seemed to have a business idiom for every circumstance. They continued in that rather brash tone, and I attempted to bring our own conversation back to check-out times, the storage of luggage, the importance of intelligent packing. We were heading to Munich by sleeper train that evening, then across the Alps to Verona, Vicenza, Padua and Venice, a journey that had seemed rich with romance when I had made the reservations, but now seemed fraught with danger.
Yet Albie and Cat seemed transfixed by the men to our right, exchanging eye-rolls and little shakes of the head and derisive little huffs and tuts at all this talk of timescales and profit margins and brands. ‘Take this model …’ said the American, and a glossy brochure made its way across the table, close enough for us to see.