Us полностью

Anyway, it was all very atmospheric and congenial and all too soon it was over. The final image froze, Antoine Doinel was giving us that look from the screen, and Albie was rubbing his cheeks with the heels of his hands as if cramming the tears back into his eyes.

‘That,’ he declared, ‘was the greatest fucking film I have ever seen in my life.’

‘Albie, is that language really necessary?’ I said.

‘And the photography was amazing!’

‘Yes, I liked the photography too,’ I chipped in hopefully, but Albie and his mother were deep in an embrace, Albie squeezing her as they both laughed, and then he was running off into the summer night and Connie and I, too drunk to risk the bicycles again, held hands and walked home through the 13th, the 5th, the 6th, the 7th, love’s young dream.

Despite my PhD, the intricate algorithm of what to do on a second date had entirely defeated me. Each restaurant seemed either too formal and ostentatious or too casual and downmarket. It was late February, so too cold for Hyde Park, and my usual preferred option, the cinema, wasn’t right either. We wouldn’t be able to talk at the cinema. I wouldn’t be able to see her.

We arranged to meet on the campus quad outside the laboratory where I was working on my post-doc. Since leaving art school, Connie had been employed four days a week at a commercial gallery in St James’s. She had railed against the place — the lousy art, the customers with more money than taste — but it enabled her to pay the rent while she worked on her own paintings in the small east London studio she shared with friends — a collective was the term they used — each of them waiting for their breakthrough. As a career plan, it all sounded hopelessly unstructured to me, but the St James gallery at least meant she could pay her rent and eat. In a stammering phone call, I had instructed her on the bus routes open to her, the precise workings of the 19, the 22, the 38. ‘Douglas, I grew up in London,’ she had told me, ‘I know how to catch the bus. I’ll see you at six thirty.’ By six twenty-two I was beneath the clock tower, staring at the latest Biochemist, eyes sliding across the page without gaining purchase, still staring at six forty, hearing her before I saw her; the tap-tap of high heels was not a common sound on this part of the campus.

In our digital age we now have the electronic means to summon up a face more or less at will. Back then faces were like phone numbers; you tried to memorise the important ones. But my mental snapshots of the previous weekend had begun to fade. Chaste and sober on a squally, gun-metal weekday, would I be disappointed?

Not a chance. The reality, when I saw her, far exceeded my memories: the wonderful face framed by the raised collar of a long black overcoat; some sort of old-fashioned dress beneath it, rust red; carefully made-up; dark eyes, lips to match her dress. The scampi platter at the Rat and Parrot had ceased to be an option.

We kissed a little awkwardly, an earlobe for me, hair for her. ‘You look very glamorous.’

‘This? Oh, I have to wear this for work,’ she said, as if to say this isn’t meant for you; eight seconds gone and already a botched kiss, an imagined slight. The evening stretched before us like a tightrope across some vast canyon. To mark the importance of the occasion, I was wearing my best jacket, raffish chocolate brown corduroy, and a knitted tie, dark plum. Her hand travelled to the knot and adjusted it.

‘Very nice. Good God, you actually have a pen in your top pocket.’

‘As a scientist, I have to. It’s my uniform.’

She smiled. ‘Is this where you work?’

‘Over there, in the lab.’

‘And the fruit flies?’

‘They’re inside. Do you want to come and see?’

‘Am I allowed? I always assumed all labs were top secret.’

‘Only in films.’

She grabbed my arms with both hands. ‘Then I have to see the fruit flies!’

She stared at the clouds of flies, her face close to the muslin, quite bewitched. It was as if I’d taken her to the unicorn enclosure.

‘Why fruit flies? Why not ants or beetles or stick insects?’

Whether her interest was genuine, exaggerated or feigned, I couldn’t say. Perhaps she viewed the insectory as some kind of art installation; I know such things exist. Whatever the reason, ‘why fruit flies?’ was the kind of question that I longed to hear, and I explained about the fast breeding, the low upkeep, the conspicuous phenotypes.

‘Which are …?’

‘Observable characteristics, traits, manifestations of the genotype and the environment. In fruit flies, shorter wings, eye pigmentation, changes in the genital architecture.’

‘“Genital architecture”. That’s the name of my band.’

‘It means that you can see indications of mutation in a very short time. Fruit flies are evolution in action. That’s why we love them.’

‘Evolution in action. And what do you do when you want to examine their genital architecture? Please, please don’t tell me you kill them all?’