This was shortly before Connie and I began to co-habit and my nostalgia for that first spring and summer remains undimmed. We saw each other every day, but kept separate flats, separate family and friends and social lives. There were those cultural excursions, of course, but if Connie felt the need to ‘have a late one’ with her art-school pals, or go to a nightclub where things might ‘get messy’, whatever that meant, then I would suggest she go alone. She rarely fought to persuade me. Sometimes I found myself wishing that she’d fight a little harder, but I did not protest. Once the party was over she’d always come and see me at two or three or four in the morning. She had a key by then — what a happy day that was, cutting that key for her — and she’d let herself in and climb wordlessly into my bed, body warm, make-up smeared, breath smelling strongly of wine and toothpaste and ‘social’ cigarettes, and she would fold herself into me. Sometimes we would make love, at other times she would twitch and fidget and sweat, a restlessness that I put down to alcohol or some kind of drug use, though I knew better than to preach or pry. If she could not sleep we would talk a little, with Connie doing her best to sound sober.
‘Good party?’
‘The usual. You didn’t miss anything.’
‘Who was there?’
‘People. Go back to sleep.’
‘Was Angelo there?’
‘Don’t think so. He might have been, somewhere. We didn’t talk very much.’
Which didn’t make sense, if you thought about it.
‘And do you still love him?’
Of course I refrained from asking this latter question, despite it being foremost in my mind, because I valued sleep too much. Most people entering a relationship carry with them a dossier sub-divided into infatuations, flirtations, grand amours, first loves and sexual affairs. Compared to my sheet of lined A4, Connie possessed a three-drawered filing cabinet of the things, but I had no desire to flick through the faces. After all, she was here, wasn’t she? At two and three and four in the morning, all through that wonderful first spring, that glorious first summer.
But there was no escaping Angelo. She had once believed, she said, that they were soul-mates, until it transpired that he had many other soul-mates dotted around London. Quite apart from the flagrant infidelity, his other offences were legion. He had undermined her confidence, jeered at her work, made remarks about her looks, her weight, screamed at her in public places, thrown things, even stolen money from her. There had been a mercifully brief allusion to him being ‘a bit dark in the bedroom’ and certainly there had been physical fights, which shocked and angered me, though she insisted she had ‘given as good as she got’. He was a drinker, an addict, unreliable, belligerent, childishly provocative, rude. ‘Intense’, she said. In short, he was everything that I was not. So what possible appeal could he hold for her now? All that was student stuff, she said. Besides, Angelo had a new girlfriend anyway, beautiful and cool and they had so many friends in common, they were bound to bump into each other, weren’t they? No real harm done, nothing to worry about. I would meet him too, some day soon.
And so it came to pass, at the wedding of Genevieve and Tyler, one of those ferociously unconventional affairs — the bride and groom entering the reception on a motorbike, I recall and, for their first dance, pogo-ing wildly to French punk. No white marquee for Genevieve and Tyler. The party was held in a soon-to-be-demolished prosthetic limb factory on the Blackwall Tunnel Approach, and was a good deal edgier and more nihilistic than the weddings I’d been used to. I’d never seen quite so many angular people in one industrial space before, all under thirty — no jolly aunts in hats here — all enjoying a buffet of ironic kebabs. I’d taken a gamble on a new corduroy suit, and the heavy fabric on a warm September day, combined with a certain self-consciousness on my part, was causing me to perspire to a quite startling degree. Beneath the jacket, dark circles of sweat had formed. My contortions beneath the hand-dryer had had little effect, and so now I stood perspiring as I watched Connie talk to beautiful people.
I think I can honestly say that I’ve never met a biochemist that I didn’t like. My friends and colleagues might not have been particularly glamorous but they were open, generous, funny, kind, modest. Welcoming. Connie’s clan was a different proposition. Noisy, cynical, overly concerned with the appearance of things, and on the few occasions I had visited her shared studio — a garage, really, in Hackney — or went to private views, I had felt awkward and excluded, loitering at the edge like a dog tied up outside a shop. I had wanted to be involved in Connie’s work, to show interest and enthusiasm because she really was a wonderful painter. But being with her artist friends drew attention to differences that I was keen to play down.
