‘We won’t get any money back, everything’s pre-booked.’
‘Maybe money’s not the most important thing at the moment, Douglas.’
‘Fine. Fine, I’ll look into flights.’
‘There’s a plane to Heathrow at ten fifteen tomorrow. We’ll be home by lunchtime.’
And so passed our last day in Europe together.
We walked the remaining rooms of the gallery but, without Albie to educate, the Grand Tour seemed redundant now. Our eyes skimmed over Dürers, Raphaels and Rembrandts, but nothing registered and there was nothing to say. Before long we returned to the hotel and while Connie packed and read, I walked the streets.
Munich was a strange combination of grandly ceremonial and boisterously beery, like a drunken general, and we might all have had fun here together, I suppose, on a balmy August night. Instead I went alone to a vast beer hall near the Viktualienmarkt where, to the accompaniment of a Bavarian brass band, I tried to raise my spirits by ordering a lager the size of a torso and a roasted ham hock. As with much in life, the first taste was delicious, but soon the meat took on the quality of a gruesome anatomy lesson as I became aware of the muscle groups, the sinews, bone and cartilage. I pushed the thing away, defeated, drained the pail of beer and stumbled back to our hotel bed where I awoke a little after two in the morning, smelling of ham, a half-crazed desiccated husk …
… because what had I given Connie, after all? The benefits for me were clear, but throughout our time together I had seen the question flicker across the faces of friends and waiters, family and taxi-drivers: what’s in it for her? What does she see that so many others have missed?
It was a question that I was unwilling to ask her myself, in case she frowned and had no answer. I believed — because she had told me so — that I offered her some kind of alternative to the men she had known before. I was not vain, bad-tempered, unreliable, temperamental, I had no drug or alcohol issues, I would not steal from her or cheat on her, I was not married, bisexual or manic-depressive. In short, I lacked all the qualities that, from her teens into her late twenties, she had found irresistible. I was unlikely to suggest that we smoke crack, and though this seemed to me a fairly basic, entry-level requirement in a partner, it was at least one I could fulfil. Point one in my favour: I was not a psychopath.
It was also clear to everyone that I loved her to a quite ridiculous degree, though devotion is not always an appealing characteristic, as I knew from experience. Then there was our sex life, which, as I have mentioned, I think was always more than satisfactory.
She had always been interested in my work. Despite its frustrations, I retained my belief in scientific endeavour and I think she admired me for this. Connie always said I was at my most attractive when I talked about my work, and she’d encourage me to describe it long after she’d ceased to comprehend the subject matter. ‘The lights come on,’ she said. As the nature of my employment changed those lights flickered somewhat, but initially she valued the many differences between us — art and science, sensibility and sense — because after all, who wants to fall in love with their own reflection?
More practically, I was practical; adept at basic plumbing and carpentry and even electrical wiring, and only once was I thrown across the kitchen. I could walk into a room and spot a load-bearing wall; I was a meticulous and thorough decorator, always sugar-soaping, rubbing down, always rinsing out my brushes. As our finances melded, I was diligent and thorough in ensuring everything was in place: pensions, ISAs, insurance. I planned our holidays with military care, maintained the car, bled the radiators, reset the clocks in spring and autumn. While there was breath in my body, she would never lack sufficient AA batteries. Perhaps these achievements sound drab and pedestrian, but they were in stark contrast to the flaky, self-absorbed aesthetes she had known before. There was a sort of mild masculinity to it all that, for Connie, was both new and comforting.
More thrillingly, I was extremely reliable in a crisis — changing a tyre on the hard shoulder of the M3 at night and in the rain, aiding an epileptic on the Northern Line while others sat and gawped; everyday heroism of a very minor sort. Walking on the street I always took care to be nearest to the kerb and though she laughed at this, she liked it too. Being with me, said Connie, was like carrying a large, old-fashioned fire extinguisher around with her at all times, and I took satisfaction in this.
What else? I think I offered my wife a way out of a lifestyle she could no longer sustain. The Connie Moore I’d met had been a party girl, always dancing on tables, and I think I offered her a hand down to the floor. She gave up the notion of making a living as an artist, for a while at least, and took to working in the gallery full time. It must have been hard, I suppose, promoting the work of others rather than producing her own, but her talent would still be there, she could always go back to it once we were settled, once her style of painting came back into fashion. In the meantime we still had fun, terrific fun, and there were dinners with friends and many late nights. But there were fewer hangovers, fewer dawn regrets, fewer mystery bruises. I was the safest of harbours, but I do want to emphasise that I could be fun, too. Not in a large group perhaps, but when the pressure was off, when it was just the two of us, I don’t think there was anywhere we’d rather have been.
A great deal of stress is placed on the importance of humour in the modern relationship. Everything will be all right, we are led to believe, as long as you can make each other laugh, rendering a successful marriage as, in effect, fifty years of improv. To someone who felt in need of fresh new material, as I did during that long, dehydrated night of the soul, this was a cause for concern. I had always enjoyed making Connie laugh, it was satisfying and reassuring because laughter, I suppose, relies on surprise and it’s good to surprise. But like a fading athlete, my response times had slowed and now it was not unusual for me to find the perfect witty comeback to remarks made several years ago. Consequently I had been resorting to old tricks, old stories, and I sometimes felt that Connie had spent the first three years laughing at my jokes and the next twenty-one sighing at them. Somewhere along the way I had mislaid my sense of humour and was now only capable of puns, which are not the same thing at all. ‘I fear the wurst!’ The joke had occurred to me in the beer hall, and I wondered if I might use it over breakfast. I would offer her a pale sausage, and when she refused I’d say, ‘The trouble with you, Connie, is that you always fear the wurst!’ It was a good joke, though perhaps not enough in itself to save our marriage.
Yet undeniably there had once been a time when I made Connie laugh constantly, and when I became a father I had hoped to develop this amusing persona further. I pictured myself as a kind of Roald Dahl figure, eccentric and wise, conjuring up characters and stories out of air, our children dangling off me, their faces bright with laughter, delight and love. I never quite achieved this, I don’t know why; perhaps it was because of what happened to our daughter. Certainly that changed me, changed both of us. Life seemed a little heavier after that.
Anyway, I don’t think Albie ever appreciated my lighter side. I did my best but my manner was queasy and self-conscious, like a children’s entertainer who knows his act is failing. I could remove the top of my thumb and put it back again but unless a child is particularly witless, this material wears pretty thin. And Albie had never been witless. When I put on funny voices to read a story, he became visibly embarrassed. In fact, when I thought about it, it was hard to recall if I had ever made my son laugh through something other than personal injury, and I sometimes wished Connie would tell him, ‘You might not appreciate this, Egg, but once upon a time your father used to make me laugh so much, so much, we’d talk all night and laugh until we cried. Once upon a time.’