And so we journeyed on, three of us now, in what I chose to take as a companionable silence, sneaking out of London through the back door and surfacing in dreary countryside, all pylons and motorways, a sudden glimpse of a river — the Medway? — crammed with holiday cruisers sulking in the overcast English summer, then more scrappy woodland then the motorway again. Soon enough the guard announced that we were about to enter the Channel Tunnel and the passengers looked obediently to their windows in the hope of seeing — what? Shoals of brightly coloured fish swimming past aquarium glass? A tunnel under the sea is never quite as visually splendid as one hopes, but it is no less an achievement for that. Who designed the Channel Tunnel? No one knows the name. There are no more Brunels or Stephensons, and tunnels, by their very nature, never get the attention of great bridges, but still this was a great feat. I voiced the thought aloud; how tunnels were underrated and it was miraculous, really, to imagine that great mass of rock and water over our heads and yet to feel safe.
‘I don’t feel safe,’ said Albie.
I sat back in my seat. Engineering — why hadn’t engineering interested my son?
Out into daylight, a militarised landscape of fences, concrete bunkers and escarpments, then the pleasant, uniform agricultural plain that stretches all the way to Paris. It is, of course, an illusion to imagine that the crossing of arbitrary boundaries on a map should correspond to variations in mood and temperament. A field is a field and a tree is a tree, but nevertheless this could only be France, and the air on the train took on a different quality, or seemed to, as French passengers emanated the satisfaction of returning home, and the rest of us the excitement of being officially ‘abroad’.
‘Here we are then! France!’
And even Albie couldn’t find anything to disagree with there.
I fell asleep, neck cricked, jaw clenched, skull vibrating against glass, then awoke in the early afternoon as we entered the suburbs of Paris, Albie visibly perking up at the sight of graffiti and urban grime. I handed out A4 polypropylene wallets containing itineraries for the North European leg of our trip; hotel addresses, phone numbers and train times; and a loose breakdown of events and activities. ‘A guideline, rather than a strict schedule.’
Albie turned the pages back and forth. ‘Why isn’t this laminated, Dad?’
‘Yes, why isn’t it laminated?’ said Connie.
‘Dad’s getting sloppy.’ My wife and son enjoyed heckling me. It gave them pleasure, so I smiled and played along, confident that they’d be grateful in the end.
Once off the train we felt revived, and I didn’t even mind the guitar case clunking against my knees, the coffee corrosion in my stomach and the edginess of that particular station. ‘Keep a close eye on your bags,’ I warned.
‘Any railway station, anywhere in the world,’ said Connie to Albie, ‘you can guarantee your father will tell you to keep a close eye on your bags.’
Then the sky outside the Gare du Nord opening up, bright and blue, to greet us.
‘Are you excited?’ I asked my son as he climbed into the taxi.
‘I’ve been to Paris before,’ he shrugged. Across the back of the seat, Connie caught my eye and winked and we set off, stopping and starting through the hard, unlovely kernel of the city towards the Seine, Connie and I sandwiching our son, hips pressed closer than we were used to, waiting for the commerce of the Grands Boulevards to give way to the dusty elegance of the Jardin des Tuileries, the lovely and ridiculous Louvre, the bridges across the Seine. Pont de la Concorde? Pont Royal? Unlike London, which has only two or perhaps three decent bridges, every crossing point of the Seine seems wonderful to me, clear views preserved on either side, and Connie and I peered greedily this way and that, following each other’s eyes while Albie looked down at his phone.
We crossed London Bridge a little after two forty-five in the morning. The City was rather different in those years, squatter and less brazen than today, a model village Wall Street and very much alien territory to someone who rarely travelled further east than Tottenham Court Road. Now the place was deserted as if in advance of some impending disaster, and we walked past Monument, down Fenchurch Street, voices clear in the night air, and told the stories that we choose to tell when people are new.
