Us

by David Nicholls

There’s a saying, cited in popular song, that if you love someone you must set them free. Well, that’s just nonsense. If you love someone, you bind them to you with heavy metal chains.

Venice was my first experience of Italy, so where were the floury-handed mammas and tousle-headed rascals that I’d been led to expect? Instead this was a city of closed doors, its besieged citizens narrow-eyed and resentful – understandably so – of the endless waves of visitors even in winter, like house-guests who will not take the hint and go.

Thankfully the ‘Yes’ did come, though not until some months later. So while the question was ‘popped’ in the moonlight by the Grand Canal, it was answered at the delicatessen counter of the Sainsbury’s on Kilburn High Road.

Good God, I murmured to myself and instinctively took a photograph on my phone, the kind of desultory, mediocre photograph that is never seen by anyone and serves no purpose, and I thought of my son, and how, had a falling meteor lopped the top off the highest peak, he would still not have raised his camera.

We had been guests at so many weddings, Connie and I, that it had sometimes felt that we had been attending a three-year part-time course in wedding management.

‘Well done,’ he said, as if I’d passed my driving test.

There was an artificial precision to her voice that suggested she had been drinking, the vocal equivalent of walking in a straight line for a policeman.

Down the line, I heard her smile.

By the age of nine, every schoolchild in Denmark knows the English for ‘we’ve found another body, superintendent’. And pop songs, too – you’re bombarded from an early age, the same all over Scandinavia.’ She shrugged. ‘Absurd, really, that I speak better English than Swedish. But knowing me, knowing you, there is nothing we can do!’

He was a young man in scuffed shoes and an untucked shirt, with that rather unworldly air that musicians sometimes share with scientists and mathematicians.

Could there be a clearer indicator of the dizzying pace of technological change than the demise of the internet café? Once so space-age, so cutting-edge, portals to a world of knowledge and fantasy, until cheap wifi and the smart phone rendered them obsolete, and they became as quaint and anachronistic as the telegram office or the video rental outlet.

She looked fresh, healthy and tasteful, and yet I found myself instinctively wanting to do up an extra button, and I wondered if I might be the only man in the world to have dressed a woman with his eyes.

Caffeine, wine and a whirring mind kept me awake, much more so than any erotic fervour. In fact Freja was asleep on my shoulder within minutes, her breath smelling strongly of booze and an unfamiliar brand of toothpaste, and while she didn’t snore exactly, there was a certain amount of snuffling and gurgling and the crackle of something catching in her throat.

But the trouble with living in the moment is that the moment passes.

‘They should call it the “Queue-ffizi!” I’d quip as we strolled past the hordes of less canny, less forward-thinking tourists. ‘You pre-booked – great idea, Dad!’ Albie would say, and standing in front of Primavera once again, Connie would take my hand. ‘Thank you, Douglas!’ she’d say, and all my care and preparation would be vindicated.

He issued sympathy with the same reluctance that he prescribed antibiotics.

But perhaps it’s a delusion for each generation to think that they know better than their parents. If this were true, then parental wisdom would increase with time like the processing power of computer chips, refining over generations, and we’d now be living in some utopia of openness and understanding.

The inability to control a child’s recollections is a frustrating one. I know my own parents did their best to provide sun-dappled days of picnics and paddling pools, but mainly I remember advertising jingles, wet socks on radiators, inane TV theme tunes, arguments about wasted food.

But look, I told Albie, now they’ll last forever! Now they won’t smash! But he doesn’t want them to last forever, said Connie, consoling tearful Albie, he wants to smash them, that’s the point! That’s what’s creative about them. That destruction could be creative seemed like one of those things artists say, but I let the point go and went off to the lab, sour and frustrated, the pleasures of Lego quite lost to us now. The offending articles were stashed away in a high cupboard, the story materialising years later as an anecdote at dinner, signifying … what, exactly? A lack of imagination on my part, a lack of creativity, I suppose. Lack of fun. Oh yes, they remembered that.

‘Astrology! We even argued about astrology!’ ‘What exactly did he say?’ ‘He really went off on one – he said that it was bullshit to think planets could influence human characteristics and anyone who believed it was just dumb …’ ‘I’m so sorry to hear that,’ I said and proudly thought that’s my boy.

The great virtue of defeat, once accepted, is that it at least allows one to rest.

Anyone who has attempted to clean away large quantities of spilt glitter will know that it is a pernicious and vile substance, a kind of festive asbestos that clings to clothes and burrows into carpets, sticks to the skin and stays there, and now here were great snowdrifts of the awful stuff blowing across the table.

In the station café I found a corner near a socket and sucked up electricity and wifi like a swimmer coming up for air.

Few activities in life are more unpleasant to me than the task of deciding an amusing name for a quiz team.

I have always found beaches to be uniquely hostile environments. Greasy and gritty, too bright to read, too hot and uncomfortable to sleep, the lack of shade frankly alarming, the lack of decent public toilets, too – unless of course you count the sea, as all too many swimmers do.

There’s a kind of luxury in convalescence, and I was carried from place to place with great care and attention like an old vase.

Clearly the key to having a long and successful marriage would be to have a non-lethal heart attack every three months or so for the next forty years.

Fran left at last and we were alone in the house once more, experiencing that mixture of sadness and pleasure that accompanies return after a long time away; the pile of unopened mail, toast and tea, the sound of a radio, motes of dust in the air. On the hall table, a great pile of unread newspapers described events that we never knew had taken place.

This was what I found so hard at first, that Connie and Angelo’s story was so much better than my own. I imagine them telling it to people at the kind of parties that they go to now. ‘How did you two meet?’ the strangers ask, noting the intensity with which they cling to each other, how they still kiss and hold hands like lovers half their age, and they take it in turns to tell how they met thirty years ago, how they married other people but returned like comets on a long trajectory or some such silly-arsed nonsense ‘Oh,’ the listeners sigh, ‘what a lovely story, how romantic,’ and meanwhile all those intervening years, all that we went through together, our marriage, is contained within parentheses.

‘How is your flat?’ asked Connie, hoping for some reassurance, I suppose. ‘Is it comfortable? Have you met anyone? Are you happy there?’ Please say yes.

Afterwards we lay for a long time in that bare room, saying nothing, slept for a while in each other’s arms, then woke, got dressed and went downstairs to empty the kitchen cupboards.

while it was pleasing to see her come back to life, it was harsh to be revealed as the encumbrance to her spirits.