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‘It’s not pornography, it’s a nude study. If he was painting nudes at a life-drawing class you wouldn’t bat an eyelid.’ She pinned the print to my office wall. ‘Or at least I’d hope you wouldn’t. Who knows any more?’

28. passion

Soon after, Albie announced his intention to devote his life to a hobby. Why, I asked Connie, could he not study a more practical subject and do the things he enjoyed at weekends and in the evenings, like the rest of us? Because that’s not how an arts-based course works, said Connie; he needs to be challenged, to develop his famous ‘eye’, learn to use his tools. But wouldn’t it be cheaper and quicker to just read the manual? I could understand if people still used darkrooms as I had as a young man, but all of that know-how was obsolete, and how could Albie hope to excel in a field where anyone with a phone and a laptop could be broadly proficient? It wasn’t even as if he wanted to be a photojournalist or a commercial photographer, taking pictures for newspapers or advertisements or catalogues. He didn’t want to photograph models or weddings, athletes, or lions chasing gazelles, photographs that people might pay for, he wanted to be an artist, to photograph burnt-out cars and bark, taking pictures at such angles that they didn’t look like anything at all. What would he actually do for three years, apart from smoke and sleep? And what professional job could he hope for at the end of it?

‘Photographer!’ said Connie. ‘He’s going to be a photographer.’

We were pacing around the kitchen, furiously tidying up, by which I mean tidying up, furious. Wine had been drunk and it was late, the end of a long, fraught argument that, as was his way, Albie had provoked then fled from. ‘Don’t you see?’ said Connie, hurling cutlery at the drawer. ‘Even if it’s hard, he has to try! If he loves it, we have to let him try. Why must you always have to stomp on his dreams?’

‘I’ve got nothing against his dreams as long as they’re attainable.’

‘But if they’re attainable then they’re not dreams!’

‘And that’s why it’s a waste of time!’ I said. ‘The problem with telling people that they can do anything they want to do is that it is objectively, factually inaccurate. Otherwise the whole world would just be ballet dancers and pop stars.’

‘He doesn’t want to be a pop star, he wants to take photographs.’

‘My point still stands. It is simply not true that you can achieve anything if you love it enough — it just isn’t. Life has limitations and the sooner he faces up to this fact then the better off he’ll be!’

Well, that’s what I said. I believed I had my son’s best interests at heart. That was why I was so vocal, because I wanted him to have a secure professional life, a good life. Listening up in his bedroom, no doubt he had caught all of my words and none of my intention.

Still, the argument was not my finest moment. I had become shrill and dogmatic but even so I was surprised to discover that Connie was now standing still, wrist pressed to her forehead.

‘When did it start, Douglas?’ she said, her voice low. ‘When did you start to drain the passion out of everything?’

29. world of wonder

‘So why did you become a scientist?’

‘Because I never really wanted to do anything else.’

‘But why … I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten the subject …?’

‘Biochemistry, that’s my PhD. Literally the chemistry of life. I wanted to know how we work; not just us, all living things.’

‘When was this?’

‘Eleven, twelve.’

Connie laughed. ‘I wanted to be a hairdresser.’

‘Well, my mum was a biology teacher, dad was a GP, so it was in the air.’

‘But you didn’t want to be a doctor?’

‘I thought about it, but I wasn’t sure about my bedside manner, and the great thing about biochemistry over medicine, my dad said, was that no one ever asked you to look up their bum.’

She laughed, which I found intensely gratifying. Clapham High Street late at night is not the most scenic of routes, and at a little after one in the morning it has its own perils, but I was enjoying talking to her — or talking at her because she was, she said, ‘too off her face’ to do much but listen. It was a bitterly cold night, and she clung to my arm, for warmth I supposed. She had swapped her high heels for clumpy trainers, and wore a wonderful old black coat with some kind of feathery collar, and I felt intensely proud and protective, and strangely invulnerable too, as we strode past the drunks and muggers, the hens and stags.

‘Am I being very boring?’

‘Not at all,’ she said, her eyelids heavy. ‘Keep talking.’

‘They used to buy me this magazine, World of Wonder or something it was called — my parents wouldn’t allow the other ones, the silly ones, Dandy or Whizzer and Chips or whatever, in the house. So I used to read this terribly dry, old-fashioned magazine and it was full of projects and diagrams and jolly things to do with vinegar and bicarbonate of soda, how to turn a lemon into a battery—’

‘You can do that?’

‘I have that power.’

‘You are a genius!’