Back in the main corridor, Albie paused before a little portrait by Piero della Francesca, then produced a small, expensive leather-bound sketchbook and began copying it in charcoal, and my heart sank. There may well be a scientific paper to be written on why walking in an art gallery is so much more exhausting than, say, climbing Helvellyn. My guess is that it is something to do with the energy required to hold muscles in tension, combined with the mental exertion of wondering what to say. Whatever the reason, I sank exhausted onto the leather couch and watched Connie instead, the way her skirt stretched across her bottom, the movement of her hands, her neck as she raised her eyes to a canvas. That was art, right there. That was beauty.
She looked at me, smiled and crossed the room, touched her cheek against mine. ‘Tired, old man? That’ll be last night.’
‘Too much art. I wish I knew which ones to look at.’
‘Thumbs up, thumbs down?’
‘I wish they’d just point out the good ones.’
‘Maybe the “good ones” aren’t the same for everyone.’
‘I never know what to say.’
‘You don’t have to say anything. Just respond. Feel.’
She pulled me to my feet and we hiked on through this vast, regal storeroom, past ancient glass, marble and bronze, into the French nineteenth century.
Sexual nostalgia is a vice best indulged in private, but suffice to say that our first weekend together was quite an eye-opener. Those February days were dark and squally and we were reluctant to leave the little house in Whitechapel. Certainly there was no question of my going to the lab on Saturday, and instead we slept, watched films and talked, hurrying out at night to pick up Indian takeaway from a restaurant where Connie was well known and greeted by the entire staff, who showered us with complimentary poppadums and those little tubs of raw onion that no one really wants.
‘And who is this handsome young man?’ asked the head waiter.
‘He’s my hostage,’ said Connie. ‘He keeps trying to make a run for it, but I won’t let him get away.’
‘It’s true,’ I said, then, while she ordered, wrote ‘Help me!’ on a napkin and held it up, and they all laughed, Connie too, and I felt immense warmth and affection, and also a little envy, for the vibrancy of someone else’s life.
Sunday morning had a melancholy air, like the last day of a wonderful holiday, and we stepped out to the corner shop for newspapers and bacon, then sought refuge in her bed. Of course it wasn’t all sex, sex, sex, though largely it was. There was conversation, too, and Connie played me her favourite records, and she slept a great deal, at seemingly random times of day and night, and in those hours I would extricate myself from the mess of blankets, bedspreads and quilts, and explore.
The bedroom was murky and under-lit, the skirting boards concealed behind hundreds of books: volumes of fine art, vintage
They were portraits, mainly, some stylised with facial features slightly askew, some more realistic, the contours drawn on to the skin with fine ink lines, like a three-dimensional graph. Eyes downcast, faces turned towards the floor. Her work was more accessible than I had expected, conventional even, and though I found them rather gloomy, I liked them very, very much. But then I’d have liked a shopping list as long as it was her shopping list.
Downstairs, the living room was stylishly ramshackle and scrappy, as if a great deal of thought had gone into the huge pile of children’s board games, the Chinese restaurant sign, the ancient filing cabinets and seventies bric-a-brac. Mustard thick-pile carpet gave way to the sticky tiles of the kitchen, dominated by an immense jukebox containing the same mystifying mix of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste: obscure electronic and punk bands muddled in with seventies novelty records, songs by Frank Zappa, Tom Waits and Talking Heads alongside ABBA and AC/DC and the Jackson 5.
