‘We do love you, you know. We don’t always show it, I’m aware of that. But we do.’

I took a deep breath. ‘Well. As I said, I’ll be back soon.’

‘Great. Hurry back.’

‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’

I sat for a moment, then hauled myself to my feet and quickened my pace, determined to beat the imminent rain. Amsterdam tomorrow. Perhaps Amsterdam would be different. Perhaps everything would go right in Amsterdam.

part three

THE LOW COUNTRIES

58. an experiment on a bird in the air pump

But oh, the joy of it, the joy and bliss and thrill of each consecutive day, so unlike anything I had experienced before. It was dizzying, really, to be in love at last. Because this was the first time, I knew that now. Everything else had been a misdiagnosis — infatuation, obsession perhaps, but an entirely different condition to this. This was bliss; this was transformative.

The transformation began even before our second date. I had for some time been living the wrong sort of life and my drab flat in Balham was a reflection of this. The bare magnolia walls, the flat-pack furniture, the dusty paper lightshades and 100-watt bulbs. A woman as cool as Connie Moore would not stand for this. It would all have to go, to be replaced by … well, I wasn’t entirely sure, but I had twenty-four hours to decide. And so the night before our date I left the lab early, took the bus to Trafalgar Square and went to the National Gallery gift shop to bulk-buy art.

I bought postcards of works by Titian and Van Gogh, Monet and Rembrandt, posters of Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières and da Vinci’s Virgin and Child. I bought reproductions of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and, by way of contrast, Joseph Wright of Derby’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, a rather ghoulish Enlightenment painting of a man suffocating a cockatoo, but one that neatly fused our interests in art and science. Sprinting up Regent Street to the department stores, I bought clip-frames and cushions — my very first cushions — and little rugs and throws (was that a term? Throws?) and decent wine glasses, new underwear and socks and, in a further fit of optimism, new bedding: plain and stylish rather than the graph-paper design my mother had bought me in the mid-eighties. In toiletries, I bought razors, lotions and balms. I bought scruffing lotion without knowing what scruffing was, I bought floss and mouthwash, soaps and gels that smelt of cinnamon, sandalwood, cedar and pine, a whole arboretum of scents. I spent a fortune and then took it all home in a cab — a black cab! — because there wasn’t room on the bus for the brand new me.

Back in Balham I spent the evening distributing this new me around the flat, contriving as far as possible to give the impression that this was how I had always lived. I scattered books and threw the throws. I arranged fresh fruit in my new fruit bowl, discarded the sad yucca and the desiccated succulents and replaced them with flowers — fresh cut flowers! Tulips, I think — and contrived a vase out of a 500 ml Pyrex conical flask that I had liberated from the laboratory … cheap and amusing, too! Now if — if — she ever set foot in my flat, she would mistake me for someone else entirely; a bachelor of quiet good taste and simple needs, self-contained and self-assured, a man of the world who owned Van Gogh prints and cushions and smelt of trees. In cinema comedies there’s sometimes a scene where the central character has to frantically assemble a disguise, and this evening had that air about it. If the wig was slightly askew, the moustache peeling away from the lip, the price tag still on the fruit bowl, if the disguise was ill-fitting and held in place by Velcro, well, I’d fix that when I could.

59. sunflowers

And sure enough, the inspection came the morning after the successful second date. Making tea, I watched through the door as Connie pulled on an old T-shirt — oh, God, the sight of that — took a fresh apple from the bowl, examined it and padded around the flat, the apple gripped between her teeth as she pulled out album sleeves, peered at the spines of books and cassettes and videotapes, examined the postcards tacked oh-so-casually to the new cork noticeboard, the framed prints on the wall.

‘There’s a picture here of a man suffocating a cockatoo.’