Then a motorway, suburbs and a great sprawling city very far from water. An airport terminal like the set of a science-fiction film and then out into the thick air of the Spanish afternoon and into a taxi, the motorway to the city half abandoned, passing unpopulated building sites and new apartment blocks, not a human being to be seen. Madrid was unexpected to me. I had no guidebooks or maps, no knowledge or expectations. A corner of Paris could only be Paris, likewise New York or Rome. Madrid was harder to pin down, the buildings that lined the wide avenues a curious mix of eighties office blocks, grand residential palaces, stylish apartment buildings, all compacted together. That European passion for pharmacies was much in evidence, and a great deal of the city seemed as seventies as a lava lamp, while other buildings were absurdly ornate and grand. If Connie had been with me, she’d have named that style. Baroque? Was that right? Neo-baroque?
‘What is this?’ I asked my taxi-driver, pointing to an intricately carved palace, the crystalline white of cake icing.
‘Post office,’ said the driver, and I tried to imagine anyone buying a book of stamps there. ‘Over there,’ he pointed through the trees of a formal park towards a peach-coloured neo-classical building (Connie, is that right? Neo-classical?) ‘this is the Prado. Very famous, very beautiful. Velázquez, Goya. You must go.’
‘I am,’ I said. ‘I’m meeting my son there tomorrow.’
In the summer before Albie started ‘big school’ we left the small, garden-less Kilburn flat where he’d grown up and moved to the country. I had tried hard to present the whole experience as ‘an adventure’, but Albie was unconvinced. Perhaps Connie was too, though at least she didn’t pout and whine and sulk like Albie. ‘I’ll be bored,’ he would say, declaring his intentions. ‘I’m leaving all my friends behind!’ he’d say. ‘You’ll make new ones,’ we’d reply, as if friends could be replaced like old shoes.
For Connie, too, the departure was proving something of a wrench. Evenings and weekends had been given over to ‘sorting things out’, which meant throwing stuff away with a ruthlessness that bordered on anger; old notebooks and diaries, photographs, art-school projects, artists’ materials.
‘What about these paints? Can’t you use these? Can’t Albie?’
‘No. That’s why I’m throwing them away.’
Or I’d find her drawings in the recycling bin beneath bottles and cans, shake off the mess and hold them up. ‘Why are you throwing this away? It’s lovely.’
‘It’s awful. I’m embarrassed by it.’
‘I love this picture. I remember it from when we met.’
‘It’s just nostalgia, Douglas. We’re never going to hang it up. It’s scrap paper, get rid of it.’
‘Well, can I keep it?’
She sighed. ‘Just keep it out of my sight.’ I took her sketches and drawings, pinned some up at work and put the rest in my filing cabinet.
Much of Albie’s childhood was discarded; some baby clothes, too, girls’ clothes that we’d bought for our daughter and kept carefully folded in the back of a drawer, not out of mawkish sentimentality nor as some strange totem, but for practical reasons. What if we had another child, a girl maybe? For a while we had tried, but not now. It was all a little too late for that now.
Never mind, because here was change, here was an adventure, and so the Saturday after Albie’s final term at junior school, the removal men came stomping up those stairs. Nearly fifteen years earlier, two young people had moved into that flat, all of our possessions easily contained in the back of a hired van. Now we were a family, with our own furniture and pictures in proper frames, bicycles and snorkels, guitars, a drum kit and an upright piano, dinner sets and cast-iron cookware and far too many possessions for what was effectively a student flat. The new owners were a young couple in their twenties, baby on the way. They seemed nice at the viewing. We left them a bottle of champagne in the centre of the wooden floor that we’d stripped and painted. While Albie waited in the car, Connie and I walked from room to room, closing the doors. There was no time to be sentimental with the removal van blocking the street outside.
‘You ready?’ I said.
‘I suppose so,’ she murmured, already descending the stairs.
I pulled the door shut and posted the keys through the letterbox.
All along the Westway I kept up my babble about it being an adventure, how spacious and grand the new house, new
