Us полностью

I found him as we entered Antwerp, sitting on a high stool in the buffet car eating a small tub of Pringles. His eyes, I noted, were a little red.

‘There you are!’

‘Here I am.’

‘I’ve walked all the way from Brussels! I thought you’d got off.’

‘Well, I’m here.’

‘Bit early in the day for Pringles, isn’t it?’

Albie sighed, and I decided to let the point go. ‘It’s an emotive subject, war.’

‘Yeah. I know.’

‘I think I lost my temper.’

He upended the tub into his mouth.

‘Your mother thinks I should apologise.’

‘And you’ve got to do what Mum says.’

‘No, I want to. I want to apologise.’

‘S’okay. It’s done now.’ He licked his fingertip and started swabbing the bottom of the tub.

‘So are you coming back, Egg?’

‘In a bit.’

‘Okay. Okay. Excited about Amsterdam?’

He shrugged. ‘Can’t wait.’

‘No. Me neither. Me neither. Well …’ I placed a hand on his shoulder and took it off again. ‘See you in a bit.’

‘Dad?’

‘Albie?’

‘I would come with you, to the War Cemetery, if you really wanted. There’s just other places I’d rather go first.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ I looked around me for some way to cement the truce. ‘D’you want anything else to eat? They have those waffles. Or a Kinder Bueno?’

‘No, because I’m not six.’

‘No. Right,’ I said, and returned to my seat.

And that, pretty much, was everything that happened to us in Belgium.

I had visited before, once with Connie and on conferences too, so my experience was somewhat selective, but even so, Amsterdam’s reputation as a city of sin always seemed something of an anomaly to me, as if one were to discover the presence of an immense crack-den in the centre of Cheltenham Spa. Both faces of the city, genteel and disreputable, were in evidence as we rumbled our suitcases along the lanes that zigzagged west from the Centraal station towards Keizersgracht; fine, tall seventeenth-century townhouses, glimpses of interior-designed living rooms and copper-panned kitchens, a little gift shop selling notepads and candles, a bikini-clad prostitute on the early shift drinking tea from a mug in a pink light, a baker’s, a café filled with stoned skateboarders, a shop selling fixed-wheel bicycles. Amsterdam was the trendy dad of European cities; an architect, perhaps, barefoot and unshaven. Hey, guys, I told you, call me Tony! says Amsterdam to his kids, and pours everyone a beer.

We crossed the bridge at Herenstraat. ‘Our hotel is in the Grachtengordel, which we’re entering now. Grachtengordel, literally, the girdle of canals!’ I was a little out of breath but keen to maintain an educational element to our visit. ‘It looks wonderful on a map, this series of concentric circles like the growth rings on a tree trunk. Or horseshoes, nesting horseshoes …’ But Albie wasn’t listening; he was too distracted, eyes casting here and there.

‘My God, Albie,’ said Connie, ‘it’s a hipster’s paradise.’

We laughed at this, though I’d be hard-pressed to define a hipster, unless it referred to the pretty girls in large, unnecessary spectacles and vintage dresses, sitting high on rickety bicycles. Why do the youth of other cities always seem so attractive? Did the Dutch walk the streets of Guildford or Basingstoke and think, my God, just look at these people? Perhaps not, but Albie was certainly agog in Amsterdam. For all its grace and elegance, I suspected that Paris had been a little hard and severe for Albie. But here, here was a city that he could work with. The question, as in any trip to Amsterdam, was how long before sex and drugs raised their complicated heads?

A little under eight minutes, it transpired.

The hotel, which advertised itself as ‘boutique’ and had seemed perfectly pleasant on the website, had been decked out to resemble a top-of-the-range bordello. Our receptionist, an attractive and courteous transvestite, greeted us with the news that Connie and I had been upgraded to the honeymoon suite — the ‘irony suite’, I thought — and directed us down corridors lined variously with black silk, satin and PVC, past large-scale prints of a corseted dominatrix sitting astride a flustered panther, a pop-art tongue prodding a pair of cherries to no useful end and a concerned Japanese lady encumbered by a complex series of knotted ropes. ‘She,’ said Connie, ‘is going to get pins and needles.’

‘Dad,’ asked Albie, ‘have you booked us into a sex hotel?’ and they began to laugh convulsively as I fumbled with the key to our room — which, I noticed, was called the ‘Venus in Furs’ suite, while Albie was in ‘Delta of Venus’ next door.

‘It’s not a sex hotel, it’s “boutique”!’ I insisted.

‘Douglas,’ said Connie, tapping the print of the bound Japanese lady, ‘is that a half hitch or a bowline?’ I did not answer, though it was a bowline.