‘I’m not packing any suitcases yet, Douglas. We’ll talk more.’
‘Okay. We’ll talk more.’
— then I would drive off to the office and Connie would head off to the train station and the 0822 to London where she worked three days a week. I would say hello to colleagues and laugh at their jokes, respond to emails, eat a light lunch of salmon and watercress with visiting professors, listen to reports of their progress, nod and nod and all the time:
I think our marriage has run its course. I think I want to leave you.
It was like trying to go about my business with an axe embedded in my skull.
I managed it, of course, because a public display of despair would have been unprofessional. It wasn’t until the final meeting of the day that my demeanour started to falter. I was fidgeting, perspiring, worrying at the keys in my pocket, and before the minutes of the meeting had even been approved I was standing and excusing myself, grabbing my phone, mumbling excuses and hurrying, stumbling towards the door, taking my chair some of the way with me.
Our offices and labs are built around a square laughably called The Piazza, ingeniously designed to receive no sunlight whatsoever. Hostile concrete benches sit on a scrappy lawn which is swampy and saturated in the winter, parched and dusty in the summer, and I paced back and forth across this desolate space in full view of my colleagues, one hand masking my mouth.
‘We’ll have to cancel the Grand Tour.’
Connie sighed. ‘Let’s see.’
‘We can’t go travelling around Europe with this hanging over us. Where’s the pleasure in that?’
‘I think we should still do it. For Albie’s sake.’
‘Well, as long as Albie’s happy!’
‘Douglas. Let’s talk about it when I get back from work. I must go now.’ Connie works in the education department of a large and famous London museum, liaising on outreach programmes to schools, collaborating with artists on devised work and other duties that I don’t quite understand, and I suddenly imagined her in hushed conversation with various colleagues, Roger or Alan or Chris, dapper little Chris with his waistcoat and his little spectacles. I finally told him, Chris. How did he take it? Not too well. Darling, you did the right thing. At last you can escape The Hole …
‘Connie, is there someone else?’
‘Oh, Douglas …’
‘Is that what this is all about? Are you leaving me for someone else?’
She sounded weary. ‘We’ll talk when we get home. Not in front of Albie, though.’
‘You have to tell me now, Connie!’
‘It’s not to do with anyone else.’
‘Is it Chris?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Little Chris, waistcoat Chris!’
She laughed, and I wondered: how is it possible for her to laugh when I have this axe protruding from my skull?
‘Douglas, you’ve met Chris. I’m not insane. There’s no one else, certainly not Chris. This is entirely about you and me.’
I wasn’t sure whether this made it better or worse.
The fact was I loved my wife to a degree that I found impossible to express, and so rarely did. While I didn’t dwell on the notion, I had presumed that we would end our lives together. Of course, this is a largely futile desire because, disasters notwithstanding, someone has to go first. There’s a famous artefact at Pompeii — we intended to see it on the Grand Tour we had planned for the summer — of two lovers embracing, ‘spooning’ I think is the term, their bodies nested like quotation marks as the boiling, poisonous cloud rolled down the slopes of Vesuvius and smothered them in hot ash. Not mummies or fossils as some people think, but a three-dimensional mould of the void left as they decayed. Of course there’s no way of knowing that the two figures were husband and wife; they could have been brother and sister, father and daughter, they might have been adulterers. But to my mind the image suggests only marriage; comfort, intimacy, shelter from the sulphurous storm. Not a very cheery advertisement for married life, but not a bad symbol either. The end was gruesome but at least they were together.
But volcanoes are a rarity in our part of Berkshire. If one of us had to go first, I had hoped in all sincerity that it would be me. I’m aware that this sounds morbid, but it seemed to be the right way round, the sensible way, because, well, my wife had brought me everything I had ever wanted, everything good and worthwhile, and we had been through so much together. To contemplate a life without her; I found it inconceivable. Literally so. I was not able to conceive of it.
And so I decided that it could not be allowed to happen.
part two
FRANCE
‘And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be — and whenever I look up there will be you.’
Her countenance fell, and she was silent awhile.
Some guidelines for a successful ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe:
Energy! Never be ‘too tired’ or ‘not in the mood’.
Avoid conflict with Albie. Accept light-hearted joshing and do not retaliate with malice or bitter recriminations. Good humour at all times.
It is not necessary to be seen to be right about everything, even when that is the case.
Be open-minded and willing to try new things. For example, unusual foods from unhygienic kitchens, experimental art, unusual points of view, etc.
Be fun. Enjoy light-hearted banter with C and A.
Try to relax. Don’t dwell on the future for now.
Be organised, but –
Maintain a sense of fun and spontaneity.
At all times be aware of Connie. Listen.
Try not to fight with Albie.
The holiday had been Connie’s idea. ‘A Grand Tour, to prepare you for the adult world, like in the eighteenth century.’
I didn’t know much about it either. Connie said that it was once traditional for young men of a certain class and age to embark on a cultural pilgrimage to the continent, following well-established routes and, with the help of local guides, taking in certain ancient sites and works of art before returning to Britain as sophisticated, civilised men of experience. In practice the culture was largely an excuse for drinking and whoring and getting ripped off, arriving home with pillaged artefacts, some bottles of the local booze and venereal disease.
‘So why don’t I just go to Ibiza?’ said Albie.
‘Trust me,’ said Connie, ‘this will be much, much more fun.’ We were sitting at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning — this was in happier times, before my wife’s announcement — my old Times Atlas opened on a map of Western Europe, and there was a kind of glee in Connie that I’d not seen for a while.
‘You have to remember this was all in the days before cheap mechanical reproduction, so the Grand Tour was their one chance to see all these masterpieces outside dodgy black-and-white engravings. All the great works of the ancient world and the Renaissance, Chartres Cathedral, the Duomo in Florence, St Mark’s Square, the Colosseum. You’d take fencing lessons, cross the Alps, explore the Roman Forum, look down into the crater of Vesuvius and walk the streets of Naples. And yes, you’d drink and whore and get into fights, but you’d come back a man.’