towards us out of the trees, the hood of his anorak flown off, and grinning from ear to ear.
‘Look what I can do,’ he said proudly, briefly standing up in Bluebell’s stirrups before skidding to a halt.
‘That’s brilliant, Pat,’ I said. ‘But don’t go off like that again, okay? Always stay where we can see you.’
‘What’s wrong with Granddad?’ he said.
My father was leaning against a tree, clawing at his chest and gasping for air. The blood had drained from his face and there was something in his eyes that I had never seen before. It might have been fear.
‘I’ll be fine,’ he wheezed.
‘Granddad?’ Pat said.
‘Granddad’s fine,’ he said.
After a long, desperate minute he managed to get some air in his lungs. Still breathing hard, he laughed off the concern of his son and grandson.
‘Just getting old,’ he said. ‘Too old for a jog in the woods.’
And I thought that’s exactly what it was – old age catching up on a man whose body had endured so much in his youth. All my life those small pieces of shrapnel, jagged and black, had been squeezing out of his tough old body. Every summer we saw that giant starburst of a scar on his side. All that pain and punishment was bound to catch up on him sooner or later.
But I was wrong. It wasn’t the past calling. It was the future.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ my father told us. ‘I’m fine. Let’s go home.’
We walked back to his car through the lengthening shadows of that September afternoon, Pat riding his bike ahead of us, my old man humming, ‘You Make Me Feel So Young’, consoled and comforted by his personal Dean Martin, his own private Sinatra.
When you are deep into a relationship that you expect to last forever, it never crosses your mind that one day you will be taking your third shower of the day and getting ready to go out on a date.
Like getting your mum to do your washing or having to borrow money from your dad, you think that all those nervy bathroom rituals are way behind you.
You never dream that there will again come a time when you are as fanatical about your personal hygiene as a fifteen-year-old with a permanent erection. That you will once more find yourself standing in front of the mirror trying to do something with your hair. That you will be brushing teeth that are already perfectly clean. And that you will do all these things so you can sit in the dark for a couple of hours with a member of the opposite sex who you have only just met.
It’s scary. Dating is a young person’s game. You get out of practice. You might not be any good at it any more.
You use a different part of your brain for going out with someone you have just met than you use for going out with someone you are married to. You use different muscles. So perhaps it’s only natural that when you start using those muscles again, they can feel a little stiff.
Two grown-ups going through all those teenage mating rituals – trying to look nice, meeting at the arranged hour, knowing what it is time to do and what should wait a while and what should wait forever. It should be really difficult to get back into all that stuff after you have been with someone for years. But it didn’t feel difficult with Cyd.
She made it feel easy.
‘The first film we see together is really important,’ Cyd said. ‘I know we’re just friends and all, but our choice of movie tonight is really important.’
I tried to look as though I knew what she was talking about.
‘A lot of people on a first date, they try to play safe. They go for a big summer movie. You know, one of those films where New York gets destroyed by aliens or a tidal wave or a big monkey or something. They think that kind of movie guarantees a good time. But a big summer movie is not a good choice.’
‘It isn’t?’
She shook her head. ‘Nobody really has a good time at those movies apart from thirteen-year-old kids in Idaho. It’s the law of diminishing returns. When you’ve seen the Empire State Building blown up once, you don’t need to see it again.’
I was starting to get it. ‘You think the earth is going to move. But you end up yawning as the aliens zap the White House.’
‘If you choose a big summer movie, it shows you have really low expectations,’ she said, shooting me a look as I squeezed the MGF through the afternoon traffic clogging up around the Angel. ‘About everything. It means you think life is essentially just a bucket of stale popcorn and a carton of flat Diet Coke. And that’s the most that anyone can hope for.’
I tried to remember the first film I had seen with Gina. It had been something arty and Japanese at the Barbican. It was about depressed people.
‘Art-house movies are just as bad,’ Cyd said, reading my mind. ‘It means you are both pretending to be something that you’re probably not.’
‘And think of all those couples around the world whose first film was Titanic,’ I said. ‘All those budding relationships doomed before they had even really begun. Before they had even left port.’
She gave me a punch on the arm. ‘This is serious,’ she said. ‘I had a friend back home who got married to a guy who took her to see The Fly on their first date.’
‘And later he turned into a bug?’
‘As good as,’ she said. ‘He certainly changed. For the worse.’
‘So what do you want to see?’ I asked her.
‘Trust me?’ she said.
‘I trust you,’ I said.
She wanted to see one of those films that they put on television every Christmas. One of those films that I somehow imagined I had already seen a dozen times. But I don’t think I had ever really seen it at all.
I don’t know why they were showing It’s A Wonderful Life down at the NFT on the South Bank. It might have been a Frank Capra season or a James Stewart season. They might have had a restored, digitally-enhanced, freshly polished print. I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. That was the movie we went to see on our first night together. And at first it seemed like pretty grim stuff.
The special effects were from the steam age. Up in a starry sky that was clearly just a painted sheet of cardboard with a torch behind it, some angels – or rather, heavenly beings represented by pinpricks in the cardboard – were discussing George Bailey, pillar of his community, and his date with destiny.
As the action switched to a small American town and their merry little Christmas, I found myself yearning for aliens or a tidal wave or a big monkey to come along and destroy the lot. If Cyd’s theory about the omens of your first film were true, then we would be lucky to last the evening.
Then gradually, as all of James Stewart’s hopes and dreams began to recede, I found myself drawn into this story of a man who had lost sight of why he was alive.
The film was far tougher than I remembered it when it had been flickering in black and white in the background of my multicoloured childhood, sandwiched between Christmas Top of the Pops and my mum’s turkey sandwiches.
As his world starts to unravel, James Stewart abuses one of his children’s teachers on the phone and gets punched out by her husband in a bar. He bitterly resents the loving wife he gave up his dreams of travelling the world for. Most shocking of all, he is rotten to his children – an irritable, bad-tempered bully. But you know that it’s not because he doesn’t love them enough. It’s because he loves them so much.
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