Us

by David Nicholls

In short, my son makes me feel like his step-father. I have had some experience of unrequited love in the past and that was no picnic, I can tell you. But the unrequited love of one’s only living offspring has its own particular slow acid burn.

It seemed heroic, or at least the kind of heroism I might have access to. Normal boys aspired to be footballers or pop stars or soldiers, and I wanted to be a scientist, because wouldn’t it be incredible to have a moment like that? An entirely original idea. A cure, an insight into space and time, a water engine.’

Much easier to make your mark when people still thought the sun revolved around the earth and there were four bodily humours. Not much chance of me making that kind of breakthrough now.’

‘’Fraid so. Science is a race, you’ve got to get there first. There’s no second prize.

If I could get back to 1820, I’d be the greatest scientist the world has ever known, greater than Archimedes or Newton or Pasteur or Einstein. The only obstacle is being a hundred and seventy years too late.’

‘Clearly, what you need to do,’ she said, ‘is invent a time machine.’ ‘Which is theoretically impossible.’ ‘There you go again, being negative. If you can make a battery out of a lemon, how hard can it be? I’m sure you could do it.’ ‘You hardly know me.’ ‘But I can tell. I have a sense. Douglas, some day you are going to do something quite amazing.’ She was very far from sober, of course, but, if only for a moment, I thought she really did believe this of me. Even that it might be true.

Of course, after nearly a quarter of a century, the questions about our distant pasts have all been posed and we’re left with ‘how was your day?’ and ‘when will you be home?’ and ‘have you put the bins out?’ Our biographies involve each other so intrinsically now that we’re both on nearly every page. We know the answers because we were there, and so curiosity becomes hard to maintain; replaced, I suppose, by nostalgia.

In my rather strained and bludgeoning way, I had been endeavouring to keep Connie buoyant with a kind of manic chirpiness; the perpetual warbling brightness of a morning DJ, endless loving phone calls from work, constant maudlin pawing and hugging and kisses on the top of her head. Tinny sentiment – Christ, no wonder she was blue – alternating with a private, secret wall-punching rage at the fact that I could do nothing to lift her spirits. Or indeed my own, because didn’t I have my own guilt and sadness?

Connie had always been greatly loved, always popular and funny, but her unhappiness – people seemed affronted by it, especially when it quashed their own joy and pride.

Other people’s sex lives are a little like other people’s holidays: you’re glad that they had fun but you weren’t there and don’t necessarily want to see the photos.

Do I sound uncharacteristically suave in all of this? Do I sound aloof, nonchalant? The truth is that my heart felt like a fist trying to punch its way through my rib-cage – not from the excitement of it all, though it was thrilling, but from a sense that finally, finally something good was about to happen to me. I felt the proximity of change, and I had wanted more than anything for something in my life to change. Is it still possible to feel like that, I wonder? Or does it only happen to us once?

Cave paintings. Clay then bronze statues. Then for about 1,400 years, people painted nothing except bold but rudimentary pictures of either the Virgin Mary and Child or the Crucifixion. Some bright spark realised that things in the distance looked smaller and the pictures of the Virgin Mary and the Crucifixion improved hugely. Suddenly everyone was very good at hands and facial expression and now the statues were in marble. Fat cherubs started appearing, while elsewhere there was a craze for domestic interiors and women standing by windows doing needlework. Dead pheasants and bunches of grapes and lots of detail. Cherubs disappeared and instead there were fanciful, idealised landscapes, then portraits of aristocrats on horseback, then huge canvases of battles and shipwrecks. Then it was back to women lying on sofas or getting out of the bath, murkier this time, less detailed, then a great many wine bottles and apples, then ballet dancers. Paintings developed a certain splodginess – critical term – so that they barely resembled what they were meant to be. Someone signed a urinal, and it all went mad. Neat squares of primary colour were followed by great blocks of emulsion, then soup cans, then someone picked up a video camera, someone else poured concrete, and the whole thing became hopelessly fractured into a kind of confusing, anything-goes free for all.

My own cultural tastes were fairly unsophisticated but at least they were sincere, and how was I to tell the good kind of bad taste from the bad kind of bad taste? How did one listen to a piece of music ironically? How did one adjust one’s ears?

Was the vinyl imbued with different qualities, depending on who played it?

But oh, the joy of it, the joy and bliss and thrill of each consecutive day, so unlike anything I had experienced before. It was dizzying, really, to be in love at last. Because this was the first time, I knew that now. Everything else had been a misdiagnosis – infatuation, obsession perhaps, but an entirely different condition to this. This was bliss; this was transformative.

Alternative points of view are more easily appreciated from a distance. Time allows us to zoom out and see things more objectively, less emotionally, and recalling the conversation it’s clear that I overreacted.

Most people entering a relationship carry with them a dossier sub-divided into infatuations, flirtations, grand amours, first loves and sexual affairs.

The early days of any relationship are punctuated with a series of firsts – first sight, first words, first laugh, first kiss, first nudity, etc., with these shared landmarks becoming more widely spaced and innocuous as days turn to years, until eventually you’re left with first visit to a National Trust property or some such.

Two lost souls meeting, or some such nonsense. But in real life lost souls don’t meet, they just wander about

From now on there would be no more returns at three or four in the morning. Now we went to bed and woke together, stood at the sink and brushed our teeth, shaping the habits and tics, the gestures and dances of a life together, beginning the process by which things that are thrilling and new become familiar, scuffed and well loved.

We made these discoveries each day, then stood and undressed on opposite sides of the bed in which we made love 90, then 80, then 70 per cent of our nights. We witnessed all the petty maladies, the stomach upsets and chest infections, the gnarled toenails, the ingrowing hairs, boils and rashes that took the gleam off the person we had first presented.

Light travels differently in a room that contains another person; it reflects and refracts so that even when she was silent or sleeping I knew that she was there. I loved the evidence of her past presence, and the promise of her return, the way she changed the smell of that gloomy little flat. I had been unhappy there, but that was in the past. It felt like being cured of some debilitating disease, and I was jubilant. ‘Domestic bliss’ – the pairing of those words made perfect sense to me.

‘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.

Grief manifested itself as fury then indignation, as if there had been an administrative error, as if someone somewhere had fouled up and got the order of things wrong and he would have to pay the price by continuing to live on, alone. Men, alone; it just wasn’t right.

perhaps grief is as much regret for what we have never had as sorrow for what we have lost.

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 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.

after all, who wants to fall in love with their own reflection?

What else? I think I offered my wife a way out of a lifestyle she could no longer sustain.

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.

I found the melancholy quite overwhelming, yet also weirdly pleasurable. I don’t think I’ve ever been as simultaneously sad and happy in my life. Perhaps this ambiguity did not make it the best spot to propose marriage.

The edges of unhappiness are usually a little more blurred and graded than those of joy.

Was it the happiest day of our lives? Probably not, if only because the truly happy days tend not to involve so much organisation, are rarely so public or so expensive. The happy ones sneak up, unexpected. But to me at least, it felt like the culmination of many happy days, and the first of many more. Everything was still the same and yet not quite the same, and in the moments before sleep I felt the kind of trepidation that I still feel the night before a long, complicated journey.

If we are at our best at all times, or at least endeavour to be so, there is no reason why everyone shouldn’t have a wonderful time.

Well I can tell you now that married life is not a plateau, not at all. There are ravines and great jagged peaks and hidden crevasses that send the both of you scrabbling into darkness. Then there are dull, parched stretches that you feel will never end, and much of the journey is in fraught silence, and sometimes you can’t see the other person at all, sometimes they drift off very far away from you, quite out of sight, and the journey is hard. It is just very, very, very hard.

Infidelity is much easier to discuss from the participants’ point of view. They have the looks and smiles and secret touches, the beating hearts, the thrill and the guilt. The betrayed know nothing of this, we’re just fulfilling our responsibilities in happy ignorance until we stroll into the plate glass.

But pretending that nothing has changed is a change in itself.

The notion that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger is patently nonsense, but we had sailed close to disaster, my wife and I, and survived, and we were now about to embark on this next chapter with renewed zeal. We would not be apart again.

Some wag once remarked that married couples only have children so that they have something to talk about.

But some things cannot be lived through twice and so, if asked, I think I’d like to make that other cut round about now please.

Surely there couldn’t be a punishment as harsh as this without some crime? No,

Word spread, of course, bad news moving faster than good, and before long friends and colleagues gathered around. All were kind, their condolences sincere and well intentioned and yet I found myself becoming surly and sharp when they employed absurd euphemisms for our daughter’s death. No, she had not ‘passed away’. ‘Passed over’, ‘passed on’, ‘departed’ were equally repellent to me, and neither had we ‘lost her’; we were all too aware of where she was. That she had ‘left us’ implied willingness on her part, ‘taken away’ implied some purpose or destination, and so I snapped at well-meaning friends and they apologised because what else could they do? Debate the point? Of course I regret my intolerance now, because the instinct to soften the language is a decent and humane one. The term the doctor had used was ‘collapse’. The collapse had come very quickly, he said, and I could comprehend that word. But if someone had told us that she had ‘gone to a better place’ then I might well have struck them. ‘Torn away’ – that might have fitted better. Torn or ripped away.

Grief is sometimes compared to numbness, though to begin with that was very far from our experience. Numbness would have been welcome. Instead we felt flayed, tormented, furious that the world was apparently carrying on.

grief is as much about regret for what you’ve never had as sadness for what you’ve lost.

Of course the promises we make at such times are all too often nonsense;

Be kinder, work harder, listen more, tidy up, do what’s right; perpetual resolutions that always crumble when exposed to the light of day, and what was the point of one more broken vow?

Here, I wish I could transcribe some speech I made to bring her out of this awful state, something about coming back to life or learning to live again. Perhaps it would have ended with a flourish – I could have thrown open the windows, perhaps, or found some inspiration in nature. Perhaps a good enough speech might have brought about some ‘closure’. I tried to compose it, many times, lying awake at night; poetical variations on banal ideas, about optimism or seizing the day, something about the seasons. But I am not a maker of speeches, I lack the eloquence and the imagination, and after twenty years we have not come close to experiencing anything as simple and neat as closure. Even if it were available, I’m not sure if closure is something we have ever craved. Stop remembering or caring? To what end?

And hadn’t I earnt the right, after all these years of diligence and reliability, to one last fit of selfish spontaneity?

But the trouble with living in the moment is that the moment passes. Impulse and spontaneity take no account of the longer term, of responsibilities and obligations, debts to be paid, promises to fulfil.

I had lost sight of the people I cared for, and it was vital now that I turn my attention onc...