Yet there seemed to be no easy correlation between the awful grief I felt at her death and our closeness — or lack of it — in life, and it occurred to me that perhaps grief is as much regret for what we have never had as sorrow for what we have lost. As consolation, I had Connie now, who was a wonder throughout all of this, from that first emergency phone call through the arrangements and preparations, the funeral, the packing away of clothes, trips to the charity shop, the mournful administration of bank accounts and wills, the sale of a house now too big, the purchase of a little flat for Dad. Though Connie and my mother had never got on, had fought openly on more than one occasion, she recognised the irrelevance of this and was present and respectful; affectionate but not cloying or melodramatic or indulgent. A good nurse.
My mother was buried on a December morning, my parents’ house — now my father’s house — cold and dark when we returned and pushed the single beds together once again. Connie took off her funeral dress and we lay beneath the covers holding hands, knowing that there would be three more of these funerals along the way, four if her errant father ever resurfaced, and we would get through them together.
‘I hope you don’t die before me,’ I said, which was mawkish I know, but permissible in those circumstances.
‘I’ll do my best,’ she replied.
Anyway, the weeks passed, the sympathy and condolences were offered and accepted, the salty tingling sensation behind the eyes ceased and over time I lost that special status that the bereaved acquire, was returned to my civilian state and we continued on our way together.
Twenty years later, Connie’s step-father remains in good health, her natural father too for all we know. Shirley, Connie’s mother, shows every sign of being immortal, a living testament to the life-giving properties of tiny hand-rolled cigarettes and rum. Smoked and pickled, it appears she will go on forever and perhaps Connie won’t need me after all.
In Munich I got the hotel exactly right for once; a pleasant little family-run place near the Viktualienmarkt, comfortable, unpretentious, quaint but not kitsch. An elderly lady of the type that gets eaten by wolves was there to open the door for us.
‘What about our other guest? Mr Albie …?’
I felt Connie stiffen next to me.
‘Our son. He couldn’t make it, I’m afraid.’ Couldn’t stand it, couldn’t bear it. I’d like to apologise for my son …
‘I am sorry to hear that,’ said the lady, frowning sympatheti-cally. ‘And I am sorry that we cannot refund at such late notice.’
‘Danke schön,’ I said, though I don’t know why. Danke schön and auf Wiedersehen were the only words of German I knew, and so I was doomed to spend our time here thanking then leaving.
Even though official check-in was not for several hours we were shown to our room, which was pleasant in a Brothers Grimm way, over-filled with rustic Bavarian furniture of a kind I hoped Connie would like, old and rather sinister. But she hadn’t slept well on the train and so lay down on the immense bed, curling up her body in that girlish manner that she still has sometimes. ‘Very thin pillows in Germany,’ I observed, but she had closed her eyes so I sat in a rocking chair, poured some water and read up about Bruegel. The rim of the glass smelt rather musty, but apart from that, everything else was tip-top.
There are an awful lot of Brueg(h)els, a mystifying array of Jans and Pieters, Elders and Youngers, and matters are not helped by their lack of flair when it came to picking Christian names.
But of the dynasty, Bruegel the Elder — note the missing ‘h’ — is the original and best. There are only forty-five paintings or so in existence and one of the most famous is in the imposing Alte Pinakothek, which we visited that afternoon. There were plenty of pleasant Jans and Pieters along the way, vases of flowers and country fairs full of tiny detail, the kind of paintings that make fine jigsaws, but the Bruegel with no ‘h’ was something else entirely, hanging with little fanfare in an unprepossessing room. Das Schlaraffenland depicts a mythical ‘land of milk and honey’ — a roof tiled with pies, a fence made of sausages and, in the foreground, three bloated men: a soldier, a farmer and some sort of clerk or student, surrounded by half-eaten food, trouser flaps undone, too stuffed and bloated to work. It’s one of those ‘disturbing’ pictures — a live pig running around with a knife in its back, a boiled egg with little legs, that kind of thing — and I knew enough about art to spot an allegory when I saw one.
‘Eat smaller portions.’
‘I’m sorry?’ said Connie.
‘The meaning. If you live in a land where the roofs are made of pies, learn to pace yourself. He should have called it Carbs at Lunch.’
‘Douglas, I want to go home.’
‘What about the Museum of Modern Art?’
‘Not to the hotel. Home to England. I want to go back there now.’
‘Oh. Oh, I see.’ I kept my eyes fixed on the painting. ‘They’re dropping like flies!’
‘Shall we … shall we sit down somewhere?’
We walked into a larger room — crucifixions, Adam and Eve — and sat some way apart on a leather bench, the presence of the museum guard adding to the mood of a particularly difficult prison visit.
‘I know what you were hoping. You thought maybe if things went well, we might still have a future. You were hoping to change my mind, and I want you to know that I’d love to be able to change my mind too. I’d love to know for certain if I could be happy with you. But this isn’t making me happy, this trip. It’s … too hard, and it’s not a holiday if you feel chained to someone’s ankle. I need some space to think. I want to go home.’
I smiled through the most terrible disappointment. ‘You can’t abandon the Grand Tour, Connie!’
‘You can keep going if you want.’
‘I can’t go on without you. Where’s the fun in that?’
‘So come back with me.’
‘What will we tell people?’
‘Do we have to tell them anything?’
‘We’re back from holiday twelve days early because our son has run away! It’s humiliating.’
‘We’ll … pretend we got food poisoning, or some aunt died. We’ll say Albie went off to meet friends, do his own thing. Or we’ll stay at home and close the curtains, hide, pretend we’re still travelling.’
‘We won’t have any photographs of Venice or Rome …’
She laughed. ‘Never in the history of the human race has anyone asked to see those photos.’
‘I didn’t want them for other people. I wanted them for us.’
‘So … maybe we’ll tell people the truth.’
‘That you couldn’t stand another minute here with me.’
She slid along the bench and pressed her shoulder against mine. ‘That’s not the truth.’
‘What is, then?’
She shrugged. ‘The truth is that maybe this wasn’t the best time to be in each other’s pockets.’
‘It was your idea.’
‘It was, but that was before … I’m sorry — you’ve arranged it all, I appreciate the effort, but it’s also … well, an effort. It’s too much to take in. It’s too confusing.’