After eighteen months together we sold my Balham flat, scraped our savings into a pile, somehow acquired a joint mortgage and bought a place that would feel like ours. North of the river this time, a top-floor flat in Kilburn, larger, lighter, better for parties — not criteria that had ever troubled me before — with a small but pleasant spare room. The purpose of this room was vague. Perhaps people could stay over, or perhaps Connie could start painting again — she had not painted for a while, despite my encouragement, but had given up her share of the studio and was working full time in the St James gallery. Artists, she said, had a few years after college in which to make an impression and she felt this hadn’t happened. She still sold paintings, but less frequently, and she did not replace them with new work. Well, never mind, perhaps now she would have the space she needed. ‘And this …’ said Connie to Fran, swinging open the door, ‘is the nursery!’ and they both laughed for some time.
We pulled up the carpets there too, and threw a housewarming party, the first party I had ever thrown. My friends from the lab eyed her friends from the arts like rival gangs at a teenage disco, but there were cocktails, and one of Connie’s musician friends DJ-ed and soon there was dancing — dancing, in my own home! — the two clans emulsifying after a vigorous shake. At midnight the neighbours came up to complain. Connie pressed drinks into their hands and told them to change out of their pyjamas and soon they were dancing too. ‘You see this?’ said my sister Karen, drunk and self-satisfied, her arms tight around the necks of Connie and me. ‘This was my idea!’ She squeezed a little tighter. ‘Just imagine, D, if you’d stayed at home that night. Imagine!’
When the last guest had finally left we made strong coffee and stood at the sink washing glasses together in the late-summer dawn, the windows wide open onto the roofs of north-west London. Begrudgingly, I had to admit there was a great deal to thank my sister for. Though not my field, I was familiar with the notion of alternative realities, but was not used to occupying the one I liked the best.
So much changed during those years that it became impossible to conceal the truth from my parents, and so one Easter we drove east. Connie was an undeservedly confident driver and owned a battle-scarred old Volvo with moss growing in the window frames and a forest floor of crisp packets, cracked cassette cases and old A-to-Zs. She drove with a kind of belligerent sloppiness, changing the music more often than she changed gear, so that tensions were already quite high as we pulled up outside my family home, Victorian red-brick, lawn neat, gravel raked.
I had met Connie’s family many times. It was impossible not to, given their closeness, and generally we got on very well. Her half-brothers would gather around me at family events, calling me ‘Professor’ and urging me to visit various north-east London takeaways, insisting, ‘Anything you want, on the house.’ Kemal, her step-father, thought me ‘a true gent’, and a far better proposition than the hooligans she usually brought home. Only Shirley, Connie’s mother, remained sceptical. ‘How’s Angelo?’ she would ask. ‘What’s Angelo up to? Have you seen Angelo?’ ‘It’s because Angelo used to flirt with her,’ Connie explained. It was never suggested that I should flirt, too.
Arriving at my parents’, I wondered whether Connie might flirt with my father and perhaps draw him out of his spiked shell. Was that worth a try? Curtains twitched as we pulled up. My father’s hand raised at the window, my mother at the front door. Hello, would you mind taking your shoes off?
Connie was completely charming, of course, but I’d always been led to believe that one talked to parents in the same polite, over-enunciated tone used for customs officials and police officers, conversation kept within tight parameters. What a lovely home, we’ve brought you some flowers, no more wine for me! Connie, however, made a great show of not altering her tone at all, simply talking to them like normal people.
