Us

‘Because there’ll be girls there—’

‘Girls? Girls … Yes, I’ve heard talk of those.’

‘One girl in particular—’

‘I do know girls, Karen. I have met and spoken to girls.’

‘Not like this one. Trust me.’

I sighed. For whatever reason, ‘fixing me up with a girlfriend’ had become something of an obsession for Karen, and she pursued it with a beguiling mixture of condescension and coercion.

‘Do you want to be alone forever? Do you? Hm? Do you?’

‘I have no intention of being alone forever.’

‘So where are you going to meet someone, D? In your wardrobe? Under the sofa? Are you going to grow them in the lab?’

‘I really don’t want to have this conversation any more.’

‘I’m only saying it because I love you!’ Love was Karen’s alibi for all kinds of aggravating behaviour. ‘I’m laying a place for you at the table so if you don’t come, the whole evening’s ruined!’ And with that, she hung up the phone.

8. tuna pasta bake

So that evening, in a tiny flat in Tooting, I was pushed by the shoulders into the tiny kitchen where sixteen people sat crammed around a flimsy trestle table designed for pasting wallpaper, one of my sister’s notorious pasta bakes smouldering in its centre like a meteorite, smelling of toasted cat food.

‘Everyone! This is my lovely brother, Douglas. Be nice to him, he’s shy!’ My sister liked nothing more than pointing at shy people and bellowing SHY! Hello, hi, hey there Douglas, said my competitors and I contorted myself onto a tiny folding chair between a handsome, hairy man in black tights and a striped vest, and an extremely attractive woman.

‘I’m Connie,’ she said.

‘Pleased to meet you, Connie,’ I said, scalpel sharp, and that was how I met my wife.

We sat in silence for a while. I contemplated asking if she’d pass the pasta but then I’d be obliged to eat it, so instead …

‘What do you do, Connie?’

‘Good question,’ she said, though it was not. ‘I suppose I’m an artist. That’s what I studied, anyway, but it always sounds a bit pretentious …’

‘Not at all,’ I replied, and thought, oh God, an artist. If she’d said ‘cellular biologist’ there’d have been no stopping me, but I rarely encountered such people and certainly never at my sister’s house. An artist. I didn’t hate art, not by any means, but I dislike knowing nothing about it.

‘So — watercolours or oils?’

She laughed. ‘It’s a little more complicated than that.’

‘Hey, I’m a kind of artist too!’ said the handsome man to my left, shouldering his way in. ‘A trapeze artist!’

I didn’t speak much after this. Jake, the fleecy man in vest and tights, was a circus performer who loved both his work and himself, and how could I possibly compete with a man who defied the laws of gravity for a living? Instead I sat quietly and watched her from the corner of my eye, making the following observations:

9. seven things about her

She had very good hair. Well cut, clean, shiny, an almost artificial black, points brushed forward over her ears (‘Points’ — is that right?) designed to frame her wonderful face. Describing hairstyles is not my forte, I lack the vocabulary, but there was something of the fifties film star to it, what my mother would call ‘a do’, yet it was modish and contemporary too. ‘Modish’ — listen to me! Anyway, I smelt the shampoo and her scent as I sat down, not because I snuffled around in the nape of her neck like a badger, I knew better than that, but because the table was really very small.

Connie listened. For my sister and her friends, ‘conversation’ really meant taking it in turns to speak, but Connie listened intently to our trapeze artist, her hand on her cheek, her little finger resting in the corner of her mouth. Self-contained, calm, she had a quality of quiet intelligence. The expression she wore was intent but not entirely uncritical or unamused, so that it was impossible to discern if she found something impressive or ridiculous, an attitude that she has maintained throughout the entire course of our marriage.

Though I thought her lovely, she was not the most attractive woman at the table. It is traditional, I know, when describing these first encounters with loved ones to suggest that they emitted some special glow; ‘her face lit up the room’ or ‘I could not look away’. In truth, I could and did look away and would say that, in conventional terms at least, she was perhaps the third most beautiful woman in the room. My sister, with her much vaunted ‘big personality’, liked to surround herself with extremely ‘cool’ people, but coolness and kindness rarely go together and the fact that these people were often truly appalling, cruel, pretentious or idiotic was, to my sister, a small price to pay for their reflected glamour. So while there were many attractive people there that night, I was very happy to be sitting next to Connie, even if she did not at first sight effervesce, incandesce, luminesce, etc.