‘A couple of years after I moved to Cambridge I was burgled. In my heart I was disappointed when I discovered that they hadn’t stolen Billy’s ring. It was lying on the floor in amongst a heap of other things, because the whole room had been turned over, drawers emptied and their contents picked through. I suppose the thieves decided that to try to fence a cheap ring like that would be more trouble than it was worth. So when I tidied up, it went back in the drawer again.
‘I got together with Nicole. I finished my PhD, we moved to London and got married. Obviously I told her about Billy and what had happened to him, but she had no real interest or curiosity about the subject so we never talked much about it subsequently. It remained a very private concern of my own. I began to think a lot about the idea of brothers. When I was around you, for example, you always talked a lot about your family, in particular about that brother of yours who’s a priest.’
‘Tom.’
‘Yes. Tom. Part of the problem with Billy and me had been that we were so different. I’d always thought when he was alive that we had nothing in common and that that was why we had never got on. I could see that your life and Tom’s were completely different and yet you were close. What was that like? I couldn’t begin to imagine. And then something happened that began to change everything. Tony was born.’
He fell silent at that. He drained his champagne and moved to pour more into his own glass and then mine. I realised that he’d waited years to find the right person and the right time and place to talk about all of this. I was careful to say nothing that might disturb the tenor of the moment. I sat quietly until he was ready to continue.
‘Although I had been looking forward to the baby being born, I had completely underestimated how I would feel towards him. I hadn’t known that it would be so powerful. I hadn’t realised that it was possible to love anyone with that degree of intensity, to care for them and for their well-being so much. But there was something about him that made all this even more peculiar. From the moment Tony was born, he looked like Billy. I can’t tell you the shock that was to me. It never occurred to me that that might happen, I just hadn’t thought about it. But he had Billy’s ears and his nose; within a few days he was smiling at us with that same cheeky grin of Billy’s. Here he was, a miniature version of the dead brother I’d never much cared for, and I’d have walked through fire for him.
‘I began to think about that ring at the back of the drawer. Still I couldn’t bear to look at it, but I thought about what it meant, above all I thought about that word “son”. It began to dawn on me that I wasn’t so special, that my parents had no doubt felt about Billy the way I felt about Tony. And then when I thought about what happened to Billy …’ His voice trailed away; he couldn’t bear to follow through and articulate the thought. After a moment he continued. ‘One really good thing that came out of it all was that Tony brought about a kind of reconciliation between me and my parents. They were also overwhelmed by the family resemblance that was there. It endeared Tony greatly to them, but I could also see that they loved him for his own sake. They were both getting on in years by then and not in great health, so they weren’t able to travel. I used to take Tony over to Belfast to visit them. That didn’t go down too well with Nicole. She didn’t much care for them, she thought they were vulgar and I didn’t have much of a defence there, because I’d also thought the same thing for years. I didn’t have too much time left with my family anyway. By the time Tony was three my mother had passed away, by the time he was five my father was also dead. My marriage was in serious trouble by then too, as you’ll recall. Tony can’t remember either of my parents, which is a pity, but I always remind him that they did spend time together. Just because you can’t remember something doesn’t mean that it never happened or it wasn’t important. Those early years are crucial, and for Tony my parents had a part in them. And that means a lot to me.’
He fell silent again, and as he sat there quietly thinking about all of this, I almost did something extraordinary, something that might have ruined the delicacy of the moment. I almost closed my hand gently over his hand, where it lay resting on the table. I had actually done this once to someone many years before: an actor, a timid bore, with whom I was having a drink after a rehearsal. Molly had been there too. I hadn’t been listening to what this man was saying; I was letting Molly carry the burden of the conversation. I’d been in love with Louis at the time. I was to meet him later that evening, and I’d been thinking about him while staring absently at the actor’s hand on the table, thinking about him with tenderness and a great physical longing. And then some kind of weird disassociation took over. I forgot that the man’s hand on the table before me didn’t belong to the man I was thinking about. I reached over and softly closed my hand over his.
As soon as I touched him I awoke to what I had done. The shock of its not being my lover’s hand went through me as unpleasantly as a bolt of electricity. I heard the man’s voice falter, but he went on talking. I could sense his fright. Still I didn’t draw my hand away. I looked at Molly. Her eyes had gone wide and round, like the eyes of some small exotic creature, a lemur or a meerkat. I could sense the hilarity under her astonishment. Please don’t laugh, I pleaded with her, in my mind and with my gaze. Whatever you do, please don’t laugh. I counted to ten and then I lifted my hand away slowly and carefully, like someone who has just finished building a house of cards. We all pretended that nothing untoward had happened. The actor said goodbye and left us a short while later. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much in all my life as I did with Molly after he’d gone.
This time was different. This time I would have meant it. And this time I had the sense to keep my hands to myself.
‘I hope you don’t mind me talking about all this,’ he said.
‘No, not at all.’
‘I may have given you the impression,’ he said, ‘that after Tony was born I began to come to terms with what had happened to Billy, but that wasn’t the case. Something else happened, years later, that brought it all to a head. Nicole and I had been living apart for about five years, so Tony would have been about ten by then. It happened in Paris. I had gone there for a month that summer, to do some research for the project that I was working on at the time; there were drawings there that I needed to see. I had taken a small apartment near the Observatory as a sub-let, but I didn’t know the person who owned it. It belonged to a friend of a colleague of mine, and the rental was arranged through him: a fine apartment, in one of the old Haussmann buildings, with high ceilings and lovely plasterwork. There was stained glass in the stairwell and one of those marvellous old lifts with a metal gate. You could see each of the floors pass as you creaked your way up and down. I was at the top of the building, and there were chestnut trees just beyond all the windows.
‘Not long after I got there, I realised that I didn’t know anybody in Paris. That is, I had a few contacts through my work, formal professional contacts: a man I had met at a conference in Rome some years earlier, a woman who worked in the Louvre whom I had helped when she came to London. Perfectly pleasant, good colleagues, but not people I knew well. It didn’t bother me in the slightest because I was extremely busy while I was there, and when I wasn’t working I was never at a loss for things to do. I wasn’t lonely. To be honest, it was a relief to be completely alone for a while, and there’s no better city for it than Paris. You get treated decently, you can sit alone in a café for hours and no one will think anything of it. From time to time I would fall into conversation with people, locals or people like myself who were just passing through. No,’ he said, as though I had contradicted him on this, although I had said nothing at all, ‘I was happy during those weeks, and had it not been for what then happened, it would have remained in my memory as a good time.
‘On the day in question,’ he went on, ‘I had wrapped up a particular piece of work around lunchtime and decided to take the rest of the day off. I had been in town just wandering about, reading in c
afés, looking in bookshops. It was late afternoon, early evening when it happened. I was tired and beginning to think about going back to the apartment. I had salad at home, and a chicken; I would buy some bread and wine. I was passing a baker’s and thought I’d get the bread there. I remember there was a café next door to the baker’s, with tables and chairs outside on the terrace, and I stood for a moment looking in through the window at all the cakes.’ For the first time since he started speaking he suddenly seemed hesitant and shy, as though what he was about to say embarrassed him. ‘Just before it happened, I was thinking about you.’ He laughed, but forced himself to follow through and say exactly what this meant. ‘I almost died, and if I had, you would have been the person I was thinking of as it happened. There were some of those typical French pâtisseries, you know, open flans with strawberries piled up on them, lemon pies and the like. There were apple pastries, with slices of fruit overlapping like slates on a roof, and all glazed; and they reminded me of you because you like apples more than anyone else I know. I thought of how my earliest memories of you have to do with apples, of how, when we were at Trinity, you used to carry your stuff around in a green cord bag and you always had apples in it. You often used to skip meals. A cup of coffee and cigarettes and a few apples, and that would be your lunch, do you remember? After looking at the cakes I changed my mind, and decided I’d buy the bread nearer home. I turned away from the baker’s window, took three steps past the café and then the bomb went off.
‘It was out of sync – it blew me off my feet, and only then did I hear the sound of the explosion. As I went down I hit my head on either a chair or the edge of a table. Either way it knocked me out, but just for a split second, and it probably saved me from worse harm, because I fell at an angle on my shoulder, and as a result didn’t hit my head on the pavement. I came to almost immediately, but I didn’t know where I was nor what the hell had happened. I was lying on the pavement looking up at the sky, and I could see the legs of the café chairs and the metal feet of the round tables just inches from where I lay. Looking in the other direction, I was at the bottom of a big tree, with a great circle of decorative cast iron over its roots. It was this that reminded me that I was in Paris. It wasn’t that I was comfortable there, far from it, but the energy required to get myself up off the ground seemed more than I was capable of at that moment. I wanted to stay there, but people were running past screaming, and someone almost kicked me in the head, so I hauled myself up and sat on one of the chairs. My trousers were torn but I felt OK, no pain, just sort of numb. My ears were really sore from the noise of the blast and I couldn’t hear properly. I suppose I was in shock, though I didn’t realise it at the time. As far as I was concerned I was just exhausted, like I hadn’t had a night’s sleep in a month and I wanted to stay sitting there. The emergency services seemed to kick in almost immediately. The place was swarming with policemen, there were ambulances, sirens, flashing lights all over the place. A helicopter came in to land near Notre-Dame, and I realised then how very near I’d been to the bomb itself.
‘I’d obviously heard bombs when I was growing up in Belfast, and I’d been caught up in things, scares and riots and stuff, but this was the closest call I’d ever had. And even as I was sitting there the irony of that struck me. My whole life had been a kind of flight from the north and everything that happened there. I’d studied hard so that I could become what I knew I needed to be. Life had brought me at last after so many years here to Paris, to look at some drawings, and I’d almost been killed in a bomb blast as a result, in a dispute that had nothing to do with me. Then I thought about Billy and how he had died, even though for years I had actively tried not to think of him. I rarely felt sorry or sad about him, just angry and disgusted at the waste of a life. And suddenly I felt the whole loss of him in a way I’d perhaps never allowed myself to feel it before. It was just awful. I couldn’t bear it. I stood up and walked away from the café, just to distract myself, just to be doing something.
‘I was beginning to feel really stiff and sore, like I’d been beaten up. My head hurt. A lot of time seemed to have passed since the bomb exploded, but I realise now that it can only have been a matter of minutes. There were people around who were screaming and crying, but most were like me, silent and dazed, wandering around not knowing where they were going. There was a sense of calm that was more eerie and weird than the screaming. I saw a woman who was kneeling beside a man, cradling him in her arms, soothing him, and then I saw that all of his left arm, from the elbow down, had been blown off. I turned away and I saw another man who was also sitting on the ground. He said something to me urgently, and although I speak pretty good French I didn’t understand what he was saying. He repeated it, and then he touched his temple with his fingers and pointed at me. I also touched my right temple, and then I realised what he had been trying to tell me, for when I looked at my hand it was drenched in blood. I must have cut my head when I hit the chair on the way down, and although my shirt and jacket were soaked I hadn’t even noticed. My hand was dripping blood,’ he said again. ‘I looked as if I’d murdered someone.’ He gave a rather dry ironic laugh. ‘This will amuse you. When I saw the blood my first reaction, quite honestly, was that I had never before seen such a fabulous colour. I could be bleeding to death and all I can think about is how extraordinarily beautiful my blood is. It was like the colour of life itself; I couldn’t get over it. The man who had pointed it out to me pulled a tablecloth off a café table and handed it to me. He was talking to me in French, and I remember I kept thanking him in Italian, but I didn’t realise it until much later that night.
‘So now what was I to do? With hindsight, remembering how confused and disoriented I was, I’m surprised at how clearly I was then able to think. I knew that the hospitals would be in a state of emergency, and that I didn’t want to go there. I was wounded but not, I hoped, too badly. If I hung around I would be forced to get into an ambulance, so I decided to make myself scarce. The traffic was already completely snarled up, and I reckoned that the métro, at least in that part of town, would immediately have been closed down. As I say, I’m surprised at how clearly I was able to think and reason. I decided I would walk home. The man who had handed me the tablecloth tried to stop me walking away. I think he wanted me to go to the hospital, but that just strengthened my resolve. I pulled away from him and disappeared into the crowds.
‘I don’t know how long it took me to walk home, and I don’t know how I did it. Out of the whole thing, that’s the only part that’s a bit hazy in my memory. People were staring at me. A man approached, he wanted to help me but I pushed him away and told him to leave me alone. I had only one thought now, to get back to the apartment. There was no one around when I got there, and I was glad of that, no one saw me enter the building. When I went into the actual apartment and saw myself in the hall mirror I got a shock, because I don’t think I’d quite realised until then the state I was in. At least I’d stopped bleeding, it was dried and crusted on my face.
‘My first thought then was to call Tony, but as I reached for the receiver the phone rang. It was Nicole, and I could hear someone sobbing in the background. “There’s just been a news flash,” she said. “It appears there’s been a bomb attack in Paris. Because you’re there, Tony’s got it into his head that you’ve been killed.”
“Let me speak to him,” I said. Nicole went off the line, and I could overhear her saying to Tony, “Didn’t I tell you that you were being stupid? Didn’t I tell you there was nothing to worry about?”’ Andrew took a deep breath. ‘In spite of all we’ve been through, I still esteem Nicole and I respect her as Tony’s mother. And so it pains me to have to say this, but sometimes she can be rather cold.’ I nodded sympathetically but had the sense not to endorse this.
‘The poor child, when he came to the phone he was crying so much he could hardly speak. I told him I was fine. I lied and said I’d been at home all day, just to reassure him. He kept saying, “I’m sorry, Daddy, I’
m sorry,” shame I suppose for crying, for being, as Nicole said, stupid. It was hard for me to hold back, but I was aware that if I let myself become upset and emotional he’d know I wasn’t telling the truth about the bombing. “It wasn’t silly of you to worry about me,” I said. “It was loving and kind.” To get off the line I told him there was something in the kitchen I needed to attend to, and promised to ring him again the following day.
‘It was only when I came off the phone that I realised what a state I was in. Tony had managed to blurt out that he’d heard on the news people had died in the bombing. I’d feared as much, but it rattled me to have it confirmed. I suppose I did begin to realise that I’d had something of a narrow escape, and how incredible that would have been, to come from where I come from and to end up maimed or killed here. Then I looked in a mirror again and noticed that I was still a total mess.
‘Never was I so glad for a few creature comforts. The person who lived in the apartment had left the bathroom pretty much as it was, with all kinds of toiletries and things, and I’d scrupulously not touched so much as a cotton wool bud. Now I just raided the cabinet. There was everything I needed, gauze, cotton, antiseptic, the lot. There was a box of some kind of salts, and I helped myself to that, ran a hot bath and poured it in. By that stage everything was really hurting.’
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