Us полностью

I had hoped the three of us would spend our last day in Paris together, but Connie felt tired and insisted, rather snappily, that she’d like just one minute to herself if that was all right, just one single minute if that wasn’t against the law. With just each other for company, my son and I had a tendency to panic, but we steeled ourselves and set out for the Musée d’Orsay.

The weather had turned, the city humid beneath low, dense cloud. ‘Storm later,’ I said.

Nothing from Albie.

‘We liked Cat,’ I said.

‘Dad, you don’t have to pretend, because I don’t care.’

‘We did, we did! We thought she was very interesting. Challenging.’ A short distance, silence, then:

‘D’you think you’ll stay in touch?’

Albie wrinkled his nose. We had not spent a great deal of time discussing affairs of the heart, my son and I. There were friends — Connie’s friends, mainly — who had conversations of startling frankness with their children, constantly hunkering down on baggy sofas to confer on relationships, sex, drugs, emotional and mental health, taking every available opportunity to parade around naked, because isn’t that what teenage kids really want? Evidence of time’s decay brandished at eye-level? While I found this approach smug and contrived, I also accepted that there was room for improvement on my part, a certain reticence that I should do my best to overcome. The nearest my own father came to ‘opening up’ about relationships was a selection of National Health leaflets on sexually transmitted diseases that he left fanned out on my pillow, a parting gift before I left for university and all the information I would ever need on the workings of the human heart. My mother changed the television channel every time two people kissed. Both had passed through the permissive 1960s untouched. It might as well have been the 1860s. How my sister and I ever came to be, I’ve frankly no idea.

But wasn’t emotional openness something I’d intended to work on? Perhaps this was an opportunity to chat about the turmoil of these teenage years, and in turn I could confide some of the ups and downs of married life. With this in mind, I took a short detour to rue Jacob, the hotel where Connie and I had stayed eighteen years ago, and I paused and held Albie’s arm.

‘You see this hotel?’

‘Yes.’

‘That window, up there? Corner of the second floor, the one with the yellow curtains?’

‘What about it?’

I placed my hand on his shoulder. ‘That, Albert Samuel Petersen, is the bedroom where you were conceived!’

Perhaps it was too much too soon. I’d hoped that there might be something rather poetic about it, seeing the exact place where sperm and egg had fused and he had blinked into existence. Part of me thought that he might find it amusing, imagining his parents as their younger selves, so different from our current, less carefree incarnations. I’d hoped that he might even be touched by my nostalgia for his creation in an act of love that, in my memory at least, had been freighted with emotion and care.

Perhaps I hadn’t thought it through.

‘What?’

‘Right there. In that room. That is where you came to be.’

His face shrivelled into a mask of disgust. ‘Now there’s an image I will never get out of my head.’

‘Well, how else do you think it happened, Albie?’

‘I know it happened, I just don’t want to be forced to think about it!’

‘I thought you’d like to know. I thought that you’d be …’

He began to walk on. ‘Why are you being like this?’

‘Like what?’

‘Saying all this stuff. It’s very weird, Dad.’

‘It’s not weird, it’s a friendly conversation.’

‘We’re not friends. You’re my father.’

‘That doesn’t mean … adults, then. We’re both adults now, I thought we could talk like adults too.’

‘Yeah, well thanks for oversharing, Dad.’

We walked on and I considered the concept of ‘oversharing’, and what undersharing might be, and whether it was ever possible to settle on something in between.

Soon we were at the Musée d’Orsay, standing in the extraordinary concourse of the old converted train station. ‘Look at that incredible clock!’ I said, in my awed voice. Albie, too cool for awe, walked on and began to take in the paintings. I like the Impressionists, which I know is not a particularly fashionable line to take, but Albie was making a great show of his indifference, as if it were me who’d painted the poplar trees, the young girls seated at the piano.

Then suddenly we found something more to his taste: L’Origine du Monde by Gustave Courbet. The style and techniques were the same that you might see applied to ballet dancers or a bowl of fruit, but here the subject was the splayed legs of a woman, her face beyond the frame. It was a disconcerting picture, explicit and unflinching, and I did not love it. Generally speaking I dislike being shocked. Not because I’m a prude, but because it all seems so juvenile and easily achieved. ‘Where do they get their ideas?’ I said, glancing at it and moving on.