Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Louisa Young 2018

Cover photographs © Margie Hurwich/Arcangel Images, © Shutterstock.com

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Louisa Young asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library

This book is a work of non-fiction based on the author’s experiences. In order to protect privacy, names, identifying characteristics and details have been changed.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008265205

Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008265199

Version: 2019-01-28

Praise for You Left Early

‘Rich and moving and beautifully written’

The Times

‘Spectacular. I can’t stop thinking about it. Louisa Young is a beautiful, beautiful writer . . . an unflinching honesty that feels like a great gift to the reader’

Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of The Last Act of Love

‘Beautiful . . . sobering . . . at heart, an old-fashioned love story’

Daily Mail

‘An extraordinarily candid bereavement memoir . . . As much as it’s an overwhelming love letter, Young’s book is also a sobering reminder of the devastating effects of alcoholism, not just on an individual’s life, but on everyone else around them’

Evening Standard

‘The most riveting, heartbreaking book I’ve ever read about addiction, but above all about the nature of love. Already one of my books of the year’

Linda Grant

‘As honest as the morning after and the best account of loving against all sense since Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater’

Patrick Gale

‘I’m still fucking crying. And it’s such a great work of art. I wish I’d read it before I worked as a drug and alcohol counsellor’

Philippa Perry

‘Oh my God, it’s so beautiful, and heartbreaking, and true’

Sam Baker, The Pool

‘An important book, one that demands we rethink a culture of blame around alcoholism’

Daily Express

‘I inhaled You Left Early like crystal meth from a red-hot pipe . . . a beautiful compelling book and a galloping read too’

Rachel Johnson

‘An extraordinarily powerful and moving work . . . [a] beautiful book which I devoured in two sittings. Amazing’

Emma Thompson

‘Brilliant: generous and clear-sighted and deeply poignant’

Reverend Richard Coles

‘I am upset, astonished, compelled, grateful. The sheer work of loving comes through . . . Quite brilliant’

Suzanne Moore

‘Anyone who has known a great love will get this book. Sexy and intellectual. I was very moved’

Monique Roffey

‘If the greatest act of devotion is to conjure the dead beloved in all their vivid, imperfect, mesmerising humanity, then Louisa Young’s book is a memorial to equal the Taj Mahal . . . Anyone who has ever loved an addict will recognise . . . what she has to say’

Rowan Pelling, iNews

‘Compulsively and painfully readable – beautifully written and enormously sad’

Lissa Evans, author of Crooked Heart

Dedication

For everyone who has found themselves here

Epigraph

Inversion of Intervals:

Major becomes Minor.

Perfect stays Perfect.

Augmented becomes Diminished.

from Robert Lockhart’s

music theory notebook

1969

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for You Left Early

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction: The Book You Hold in Your Hand

Part One 1959–2002

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Part Two 2003–05

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Part Three 2005–07

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Part Four 2007–09

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Part Five 2010–12

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Part Six 2012—

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Appendices

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Louisa Young

About the Publisher

Introduction
2017

The book you hold in your hand is a memoir by me, Louisa Young, a novelist, about Robert Lockhart, a pianist, composer and alcoholic, with whom I was half in love most of my adult life and totally in love the rest of it. It’s as much about me as about him, and is of necessity a difficult book to write. So why am I writing it? Why expose, so openly, chambers which are only usually displayed via the mirrors and windows with which novelists protect their privacy?

Because his life is a story worth telling.

Because our love story, while idiosyncratic, is universal.

Because alcoholism has such good taste in victims that the world is full of people half or totally in love with alcoholics – charismatic, infuriating, adorable, repellent, self-sabotaging, impossible alcoholics – and this is hard, lonely, baffling, and not talked about enough.

Because although there are a million and a half alcoholics in Britain, many people don’t really know what alcoholism is.

Because alcoholics also love.

Because I don’t want to write a novel about an alcoholic and a woman; I want to write specifically about that alcoholic, Robert, and this woman, me.

Because everything I have ever written has been indirectly about Robert, and the time has come for me to address him directly.

Because the last time I tried to address it directly I told him, and he said, ‘You won’t be able to finish this until I’m dead.’

Because I have realised that for me, quite the opposite: he won’t be properly dead until I’ve finished it.

Four months after he died, I wrote this:

It can’t be surprising that I can’t write now. All I can think about is Robert and death, so that is all I could write about, but I can’t. To write Robert would be to seal him. I, who can rationalise my life into any corner of the room and out again and rewrite my every reality in any version I like, and back, twice before lunch, I cannot pin that man to the specimen paper. I cannot claim to have all of him in view at one time. I cannot slip him into aspic, drown him in Perspex, formalise him – look, there he is in that frame, that’s how he was, that’s him. No, that is not him. He is an alive thing. His subtleties and frailties are living things. I cannot bind to myself or any other place the joy that he was. It makes no sense to me for him to be dead. And when it does make sense to me, as no doubt it must at some stage, then – well then he is even deader, because I will have accepted it. And I do not accept it. I do not want to accept it. I reject it. I say to death: Fuck off.

But I am a writer, and without writing I was bereft. And God knows I was bereft enough already. I have so much and yet these have been years of loss. Each loss lost me something else as well. Losing Robert lost me writing. I wanted to talk to him about it. Instead there I was, writing about not being able to write: If I write this book, am I preventing other versions? Will making this our conversation disbar me from remembering other things we said? Am I bruising my memories by handling them? If I file them, will I ever find them again? Will their bloom be intact?

I was always terrified of losing him; I lost him a hundred times and had him back. I wanted him back yet again. His nine lives, the nadirs he specialised in. I thought: he wouldn’t really be dead. It’s so unlike him.

This is my version. Anyone who knew him will have their own version. I understand that. I’ve done my best to balance open honesty about this illness with sensitivity.

Part One

Chapter One
Uxbridge Road, 1990s

Beirutsbridge Road, he called it. This neighbourhood! Between charming Holland Park and its neighbour Shepherd’s Bush there is a difference in life-expectancy of eight years. A six-foot woman pushing a buggy yells ‘I’ve got my child wiv me ’ave some fuckin’ respect’ at me for no reason I can imagine, unless it’s that I’m wearing only one blue paper flipflop following a pedicure-related broken-blue-paper-flipflop incident. Then a big West Indian man comes towards me, with a tiny Thai man trying to pat his – the big man’s – back and wipe something off his – the big man’s – front at the same time, both of them giggling. A scrawny pasty-faced undertaker in his frock coat walks by, swigging Diet Coke from a bottle. A tiny pregnant person who says she’s Greek but I’m not sure she is wants some money, so I give her some and direct her to the Greek church, but I don’t think she understands. An old Spanish man informs me that he’s seventy-one; I say Happy Birthday, he howls with laughter and says ‘Happy New Year!’ There are giant yellow tubes piled up all down the middle of the road. A barefoot man goes by on crutches, his feet swollen and dry and sad; he gives me a glance of barefoot complicity, but mine are bare out of vanity, not need. I wanted to get home, but I didn’t want the nail polish to smudge. It’s Dickensian. A barefoot man on crutches.

Always, walking down this road, heading west from the Tube station to the street where I have lived for twenty-five years, to the house where he had so often pitched up over the decades, and kind of lived with me for ten years, I look for Robert: leaning in the doorway of Paolo’s cafe, beaky nose, skinny legs, having a cigarette; coming out of Jay’s newsagent, hobbling across the road from the Nepalese restaurant popularly known as the Office, in the brown velvet-collared tweed coat I gave him after he left the dark blue one on the train to Wigan; or the old leather jacket, or the new old leather jacket, in his jazz-cat hat, hunched like a grey heron at the edge of the city street, being liminal, looking about him, in the rain, or the sunshine, perhaps sitting outside a cafe, newspaper, cigarettes, espresso, pencil, sketches of a melody in the margins of the sports section. In later days, glasses, and crutches, or the two ugly black walking sticks with ergonomic handles shaped like bones.

In his youth he was beautiful like an off-duty Bowie – skinny, pale, romantic-looking, naughty, with something fugitive about him; he was always about to leave. In maturity, a craggy battered face, Northern, a big bent nose, a small chin, no eyebrows to speak of, cheekbones, a broad brow, small scar to the left, brown to grey hair tending to the fine and fluffy unless smoothed back, from which it benefitted, plenty of it, usually either too long or too short, always badly cut, because I did it, because he wouldn’t go to the barber. Widow’s peak. A bashed pale mouth, thin lips, curled in some sardonic look often enough. Big flat English ears. Beardwise, kind of bald on one side, a bit goatee-ish on the other; a wiry moustache which could have been elegant with the slightest bit of care. The odd pockmark. Glasses – whoever’s, it didn’t matter much. A bit Ted Hughes, a bit Samuel Beckett. All crag and stoop. Eyes? Yes, he had eyes. They were blue, and much clearer than they had a right to be. I may come back to them. Right now they are staring at me from various photographs, and, writing this, I see him looking at me, and my tears come up again and I need to go and rail against horrid fortune which made him as he was and not just a tiny bit different.

I see him, sometimes, in the criss-crossing currents of people. But he is not there.

Chapter Two
Primrose Hill, Wigan, Oxford, Battersea, 1982

I know for a fact which balcony it was. It has grown mythical in my mind: the balcony on to which he invited me, where he first kissed me, though I can’t actually remember the first kiss. But I remember the thrill of him wanting me to go out there with him. First floor, overlooking the park, leaves – plane trees? A very London balcony, as seen on the first floors of many handsome white stucco London houses of the mid nineteenth century.

It was our mutual friend Emma’s party, in a first-floor sitting room with long windows. We were twenty-two, twenty-three, at the stage where you go to parties in flocks, losing and gaining companions in the course of the night. I recall it being crowded, glamorous, noisy. I recall my little thrill at the sight of him.

I’d met him before. The first time was on a staircase in an Oxford college in 1976. We were going in and he was coming out. (‘We’ was me, my childhood friend Tallulah and her calm, amiable law-student boyfriend Simon, who we were visiting, and whose new friend Robert was.) I, a born, bred and dedicated Londoner, had never met a Northerner before, never heard gravelly basso profundo Wigan profanities coming out of a skinny whiplash chips-and-lemonade body. An old cricket blazer of some kind hung off him; clearly not his. He had that romantic demeanour of consumptive turn-of-the-century sleeplessness and intense energy – what my father called ‘pale and interesting’ (I was more pink and interested). He was gorgeous, incandescent. And leaving. He may return. Please return was my only thought.

He did return. He was at an upright piano between two windows, playing – Chopin? Debussy? People piped down. Girls were leaning over him. With my usual instinct to avoid what was attracting me, I went to the other end of the room and stood looking cross with my back to the wall. Oh, I knew how to let a chap know I liked the cut of his jib. And I listened. As someone said years later, ‘It was different when Robert played.’ It was. He was mesmerising. And he knew it, and he used it, and he was not comfortable with it.

People talked about him. He’d won his place to read music at Magdalen from Wigan Comprehensive (formerly Wigan Grammar) at the age of sixteen. (I, a day older than him, had only just passed my O-levels.) By seventeen he was a demy, a half-Fellow – this is a form of scholarship for ‘poor scholars of good morals and dispositions fully equipped for study’. Previous incumbents included Oscar Wilde and Lawrence of Arabia. By his third year he was teaching the first years, and he graduated at nineteen with a double first, twice as good as the normal and tragically insubstantial single first, which was clearly not good enough for him. He’d got Ds in his two other A-levels, French and German, and had massive streaks of ignorance about everyday subjects. Two highly knowledgeable musicians recently – and separately mistook a tape of the young Robert playing for Arthur Rubinstein.

Child prodigy? Massive over-achiever? Cultural cliché? Chippy Northerner? Workaholic artist? All of the above?

‘There’s no fuckin’ frites on my épaule,’ he said.

There was a song he used to sing:

‘We’re dirty and we’re smelly,

We come from Scholes and Whelley,

We can’t afford a telly,

We’re Wigan Rugby League, diddley de dum OI OI.’

He would do it in broad Wigan – ‘We coom fro Scerls’n’Welli’ – or, for variety, in a posh, southern, actor-y manner: ‘We come from Scales, end Welleh, we carn’t, afford, a telleh …’ Alongside his exceptional ability on the piano, it made an amusingly ambiguous impression. No Brit is left untouched by the terrible four – class, geography, money, education – and there was an assumption among Oxbridge undergraduates at that time that Northern = working class. The niceties of ‘Rough’ v ‘Respectable’ working class, or respectable working class v lower middle class, were pretty irrelevant in that world. It all counted as Not Posh. Sometimes when posh people realised Robert wasn’t entirely working class they would say he pretended to be, and resent him for it, when in fact it had been their own presumption in the first place. Once, for a week, he made a conscious effort to get rid of his accent. Then he realised people noticed him because of it, and that as long as he could put up with the mockery it was actually an advantage. People whose class is unexpected can get away with things. They can be seen by the class they are arriving in as somehow superior, gifted with knowledge from the other side. It can work well for intelligent, socially mobile working-class boys: their strangeness confers a powerful status – which in turn contributes to the anxiety of the uprooted, those who by being socially mobile become psychologically divided.

In his uncomfortable, nervy move south and up, Robert did sacrifice pronouncing book to rhyme with fluke. In Wigan once, a cabbie taking him home from the station wouldn’t believe he was from there, saying ‘Ner, yer not’ as Robert, upset, insisted. Meanwhile in Oxford and London he remained the most Northern thing anyone had ever seen. He never rescinded his Northern passport, preached the gospel of rugby league daily (and interminably), and replaced bath-to-rhyme-with-hath not with bath-to-rhyme-with-hearth but with, every time he used the word, a piss-takingly long, self-aware and scornful barrrrth. He couldn’t use the word ‘dinner’ without either a sarcastic accent or a short monologue on why he wasn’t saying ‘tea’. People were often accused of mitherin’ and maulin’ him. Checking there was enough cash for an outing, he’d say ‘As geet caio?’, a usage so arcane I doubt there’s a Wiganer alive now who’d use it other than in nostalgia and irony. But then those two never quite sorted out their differences in Robert’s first-in-the-family-to-go-to-university heart.

His was not a childhood of clogs and tinned food – they had a piano, records, laminated recipe cards – but he was familiar with factory sirens and rough lads and the River Douglas – the Dougie – running a different colour on different days of the week because of the dyes. He loved Les Dawson and explained to me the source of his silent exaggerated mouthing: the ‘mee-maw’ that women working the mills would use to make themselves understood over the sound of the machinery. And he reserved a lifelong interest in people who, like him, made the risky, lonely leap of class: David Hockney, Alan Bennett, Jeanette Winterson, Keith Waterhouse, Victoria Wood, Dennis Potter. Especially if they were drinkers: Dudley Moore, Richard Burton, George Best, Gazza.

At Oxford, with people he didn’t know well, who all seemed to sound like the BBC and wear Eton ties, he felt he had to assert himself to be noticed. He didn’t like to be ignored. He wanted to experience everything at once, to lead a life as intense as it could be, to go to bed with as many women as possible, see everything, do everything. ‘It’s what you do in these sorts of moods that gets you a bad reputation,’ he said to a friend who wrote a profile of him for a student magazine. ‘And when I’m in one of them I really revel in my reputation.’ But he also wanted an introverted life, writing music, reading, with a real relationship, warm and secure and emotional. Then, he said, he despised his other self for sleeping anywhere, and putting up a huge facade. He was really a romantic. ‘Just one note,’ he said, ‘a particular chord, can give me an incredible sense of, well, it can’t be nostalgia, because it’s not for anything in the past. I suppose it’s more like nostalgia for another world …’

Robert was very popular. His legends abounded: the time his tutor popped in to see him, and a naked girl was playing his piano. The occasion when a scorned admirer – male – dropped an empty champagne bottle from a high window, just missing Robert’s head – Robert was convinced it was a murder attempt. The pissing in the sink so often it had to be removed, whereupon he just pissed out of the window. The Dean of Music calling in to wake him every day around noon. The dancing naked on the lawns; the streak across the river during an Eights Week boat race, pursued by loud-hailing patrol boats. And, as a female friend said years later: ‘He slept with everyone except me and Benazir Bhutto.’

People mooned over him. I’m not bloody mooning over you, I thought. So proud! I longed to moon over him. I was SO romantic, and the only thing I was more so than romantic was proud. And of course I found him SO romantic, and so of course, because I was seventeen, He Must Never Know. Also, I was narked about him being two years ahead of me academically, though a day younger, and fully state-educated where I was only half, which to my mind gave him a cracking moral advantage. I went from a posh Lefty West London home – ‘don’t say pardon, say what’ – to a state primary – ‘don’t say what, say pardon’ – and then to the kind of highly academic girls’ private school which told us that we were better than everybody else. Some of my coevals took this as read, and are currently running the world; those who knew it not to be true tended to slump to the polar opposite and believe themselves to be worse than everybody else, and certainly Not Good Enough, hence the prevalence of drugs and eating disorders among pupils at those places; or, in my case, a mildly dysmorphic conviction of my own fatness, and cider. I grew up drenched in all that should have made me feel at home when I went to university at Cambridge, from accents to architecture, yet found myself bemused, class- and location-wise. Three thick card invitations in the same envelope, to a ‘dinner party’, a ‘dance’ and a ‘house party’, all from names I didn’t recognise, on the same night, at different addresses, in Hampshire where I had never been – what was this? I quietly asked a country-gentry type I knew. He sneered at me, for ‘faux naivety’ and ‘inverted snobbery’, for, as he saw it, pretending not to know. But I didn’t know. In London, at nineteen, dinner was a doner kebab on the night bus; if you stayed over after a party it was because you fell asleep on someone’s sofa. Being sneered at by someone who considered himself my social superior was … educative.

*

At Emma’s, I remember a long sofa against the wall; sitting on it with him being, as we later called it, Lockharted – being tested and chauved (a Wigan verb, meaning to wind someone up), regaled and assaulted with a barrage of combative and contrary wit, filthy flirtation and intense, wilfully polysyllabic musical erudition which made strong men weak and weak girls melt – and some people, of course, sidle off in bemusement and/or disgust. Gesualdo’s duel, Schubert’s syphilis, my bra strap, Bill Evans, more wine, Red Garland, Singapore laksa, Argerich’s rubato … He was a centre towards which things spun. So when you’re on the sofa with him, the focus of him, getting all of it, the intensity, immediacy, challenging, drinking, smoking, the you – here – now. I want yer – there was a tendency to go ‘Whoa!’ and fall into the tidal wave.

Seeing myself as fat and not what boys wanted, I drank too much and had had my heart severely broken at university. I wasn’t stupid, but I was dismally blind when it came to reading men’s intentions towards me: I got into situations. It was still, just, the era of ‘men’ and ‘girls’. I did agency work (security guard, catering, tea-lady in a parking meter factory) and lived in a squat and wanted to be a writer but I had nothing to say on paper and I knew it. I was frustrated and not good at going after what I wanted. I knew exactly how lucky I was, and I suffered the paralysis which can affect intelligent posh girls, saying to them ‘You have been given so much; you with your education and your stable family and your prosperity and your accent, seriously, you’re asking for more?’ I thought to be loved you just lived your life until someone turned up and loved you. I did actually think, like Shakespeare’s Helena, that we cannot fight for love, as men may do; we should be woo’d, and were not made to woo. It didn’t occur to me to go out and get them. Quite often I stayed in bed reading because it was easier. Looking back at me, I might say I was depressed. Emotions were extreme.

That night, he made me laugh so much. The cutting through the crap – he wouldn’t just cut to the chase, he would cut to three chases at once, going too far too fast in all directions and assuming that everyone else wanted to go there too. Which I did. He seemed to carry a kind of truth within him, an honesty beyond that of less intense people. This he never lost. Anyway, we went on to the balcony, and later we went back in a cab to the cheerful little house I lived in. A cab! I was the posh one, but I couldn’t afford cabs. We stopped on the way at a kebab shop on Queenstown Road, and Robert kept the taxi waiting. There was a group of skinheads at the back: Ben Shermans, Doc Martens, overhead strip lighting. They made Robert nervous, but it was me they laughed at, with my very long hair – ‘Oi, skin’ead!’ they yelled at me.

I remember that the wall between my bedroom and the back room was half dismantled; I’d taken down the plasterboard and the strips of lath, leaving only the wooden struts, which I used as a kind of tiny unsatisfactory shelving system. I had a single bed. I remember he was very thin, and the sex was revelatory.

He left the next afternoon, and vanished off the face of my earth. I remember I was hurt and mortified. For months. I did not understand – and still don’t – how a brilliant night with someone could possibly not lead to wanting another brilliant night with them, and another, and another. Seriously, why? I didn’t understand how you could do all that together, and then – nothing. It made me a fool and him a bastard. I hated being a fool and I hated him being a bastard.

Many years later, we discussed it. He said, ‘You could have rung me. You’re a feminist.’ But girls didn’t ring men in those days. Even educated feminist London girls. Politics was all very well, fear of rejection was something else. And there were none of the modern alternatives – a Facebook friending or a witty little tagged snap on Instagram of something of mutual interest. The telephone was all you had. Or a letter, but Christ, a letter! The permanence! No, it was the telephone or nothing, and that meant the possibility of having to talk to his mother, or his flatmate, or, if you did get hold of him, of the embarrassed silence. Boys, of course, had to face this great compounding pyramid of potential embarrassment all the time. (There was a sub-clause whereby if a girl was more attractive than the man she was allowed to ring, as long as she was prepared to take the risk that as the man was less attractive, he might be over-awed, or as we called it, ‘scared of you’. But this never worked in practice, because then as now most girls thought themselves unattractive, and even if they didn’t they weren’t allowed to admit it, for fear of being labelled ‘full of herself’. No, ringing a man you fancied meant you were desperate.)

We – girls – well, I – believed that the boys knew what they were doing. I believed they had thought about it, and were doing it on purpose. I assumed they had all the power. By assuming that, I actually gave them all the power. I didn’t learn that for another twenty-odd years. I wish I had rung him. Everything might have been different. But no. I sentenced myself to a ludicrous punishment: burn with desire, and keep quiet about it.

‘What would you have done if I’d rung you?’ I asked.

‘I’d’ve loved it,’ he said. ‘I’d’ve been flattered.’

‘But why didn’t you ring me?’

‘Because I was a little twat.’

*

Many years later, in Primrose Hill with Emma, she pointed out the flat where she used to live. It was on a different street. It didn’t look out over Primrose Hill. It had no balcony.

I pointed out the balcony I remembered, a few streets away. She had never been in that building.

But I remember. There had been a brightly patterned rug hanging on the wall on the left as you went in; reds and oranges.

‘Hm.’ She looked doubtful. Neither of us knew if we remembered or not.

And then in November 2015, poking around in my own past for structure for this book, I found this. (The previous entry ended: ‘I’m going celibate’.)

From my notebook: 20 December 1982:

Friday night to a party full of precious hunch-shouldered Oxford boys working on modern TV channels.

‘Oh goody,’ Emma cries, ‘my pianist has arrived. Such a shame we don’t have a piano.’

‘Who is your pianist?’ I enquire.

‘Oh he’s wonderful, he comes from Wigan and he’s …’ Rob Lockhart, of course. Who was being his usual sweet dirty charming self, uttering his usual friendly lascivious greetings. ‘One of these days someone is going to take you seriously,’ I say.

‘I wish you would,’ he replies.

‘OK, I do.’

‘What, now?’ he says.

‘Perhaps a little later,’ I suggest.

‘Excellent!’ he says.

And so we check up on each other periodically and then run off up Primrose Hill in the frost and kiss in a most fourteen-year-old haze of clothes and cold and party smells. He slips one shoulder out of my clothes and kisses my throat, and we run down the hill and into a taxi and take the piss out of each other all the way to the Queenstown Road.

‘I’ve changed my mind,’ he says. ‘You see I went off the pill last week and I’ve got my period.’ (True of me, but not of him.) ‘And I’ve just broken up with someone and I’m still very depressed about it …’ We bought kebabs and chocolate among the skinheads. ‘But could you bear to wake up to this face on the pillow tomorrow morning, or will it be just one of the worst figments of your hangover?’ And all through, the feeling that we don’t have to do anything, we’re just mucking about together.

At home he played and I sang Cole Porter, drank tea, I went to the loo, he hopped into bed. I grew a little shy as we sobered up, towards three. ‘Are you going to sit there and read me a bedtime story and then creep off somewhere else?’ he asked. Nope.

I rang Tallulah today as I felt she ought to know. ‘Well one of us had to before he lost his looks,’ she said. ‘Was he good?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought he would be.’

He was. It was. Complete and revitalising and full and bloody nice. Literally, actually – ‘I’ve bled all over everything, oh dear,’ I say.

‘Sooner you than me,’ he says. ‘You’re meant to. I don’t mind if you don’t.’

In the morning he said, ‘Well, what do you reckon to the face then – weedy, anaemic, pathetic …’

The house, including Claude looking for socks, Rory looking for Kevin, Kevin looking for gas fittings to build the bathroom with, came and went about their business. We got up around five, knowing that as a one-night-stand we couldn’t push it to the second night, but could make the first last as long as possible. He slept very very deep, very long, very quiet. Hardworking boy. Talking about music, first and last. ‘What’s the point of music? I’ll tell yer. Order from chaos. You don’t know where you’re being taken. But when you get there, it’s all all right. Of course it’s not so effective if there’s not an interesting route taken, enough chaos on the way, and that’s why Mozart is so fucking dull, it’s all order, nothing but fucking order …’ And food. ‘I’ll take you there,’ he says, of a Thai restaurant. I quite wish he would. I quite want more, of course, but

i) I’m celibate

ii) I don’t want a boyfriend I want love

iii) If I did it wouldn’t be Lockhart

iv) You don’t get love from one-night stands

v) (iii) and (iv) vice versa.

So we parted on the corner with a friendly peck and a see-ya, and that’s it. It has cheered me up no end, so much I did two dance classes on Sunday.’

The notebook continues with seeing my friend off to Hong Kong, having breakfast in bed with my housemates Claude and Berny, band rehearsal, washing the sheets, a long talk with Tallulah where she says that he wasn’t actually planned as the father of my kids but that evidently a good time was had by all. ‘I have the obvious leaning towards Lockhart but the head says no’ – and then: ‘Lockhart called to say don’t cash the cheque yet and he’ll be in touch when he’s back from Christmas in Wigan’.

He called?

All that resentment about not ringing was about nothing? What, I somehow made that up?

And then, a few weeks into the New Year: ‘Tonight I had dinner with Lockhart. Nice. We took a taxi to Queensway because he is so thin that he couldn’t take the cold.’

I had been totally maligning him as a discourteous Lothario, for decades. He was a courteous Lothario, and by this evidence so was I. In this contemporary account I am giving every impression of not particularly wanting to continue our liaison. I have rewritten history. Hmm. Thank you, memory.

And I’m wondering – why was there a cheque? My mind leaps in to assist: perhaps the cabbie wouldn’t have taken a cheque, so I paid cash and Robert, insisting on paying the fare, gave me a cheque. That makes sense. It must have been that.

Dangerous phrases, ‘that makes sense. It must have been that’. Armed with those phrases a passing thought can march off into the back of your head and set up in its pomp as memory, as truth even, claiming through the passing years all the rights and privileges of those titles, to which it is not, actually, entitled. It can permeate a person’s overall idea of what their life has been.

So, practically the only thing my memory got right was that it was Emma’s party, it was Primrose Hill, there was a taxi and skinheads. I’m really sorry not to have looked at the notebook for thirty-five years, not to have had the chance to read it to him, and have that ‘I wasn’t a bastard! You weren’t a fool!’ conversation, in which he would have got to say it was all my fault. How he would have laughed.

And then I think again. Well. When, exactly, did I rewrite this history? Was I, perhaps, lying to my notebook, with all that cavalier one-night-stand stuff? Was that my pride? The ‘I know he won’t want me so I’ll not want him first’ approach?

I have no idea. But yes, of course that is possible. Probable, even.

Perhaps it was after the dinner that he didn’t ring.

And now I’m rewriting it all over again; anecdotalising, shifting perspectives on long ago, making excuses, looking for reasons, searching for meaning, wishing.

They say you don’t remember what people said, or what they did, but you remember how they made you feel. I would adjust that a little. You remember that they made you feel.

*

There’s his phone number in the back of a notebook: 720 5399. But I didn’t see him for a few years. Tallulah broke up with Simon and moved to New York; I was half in love with loads of other people.

There’s another party I do remember: Oscar Moore’s, in a snooker club in King’s Cross: very dim and low-ceilinged, smoky and so forth as things were then. Robert was wearing a Wigan Rugby League rosette: cherry red, though I was not familiar with the term then. In a move of pure attention-seeking, I stole it off him. He was quite drunk in a cheerful way and didn’t really notice, until he saw that I had it pinned to the back pocket of my jeans, whereupon he chased me all round the room demanding to know why I had never told him of my passion for rugby league, and Wigan in particular, with not the foggiest that it was his rosette I was sporting, and that I was trying, with considerable lack of either clarity or effect, to express thereby my deep attraction to him.

Anyway, he left, with a group of others, and I stood on a rainy corner in King’s Cross with the rosette. I think that’s what happened.

Chapter Three
London and Wigan, 1970s

A grand piano’s feet take up only a tiny area: three indentations in the carpet, each the size of a conker, cradling a brass ball clad in a brass foreskin attached at an unlikely angle, like a stallion’s ankle, to a rising pillar of polished hardwood. Very small, to hold so much weight, and cover so much area: a superior crate the shape of Africa, hollow yet full. With the solid wing raised it shows the heartstrings within, laid in green felt across swirls of miniature golden architecture, and the internal teeth, the hammers coming up from below, sharks from the darkness to bite and bump the strings; dampers above swooping down to see them off every time.

Robert’s Bechstein, as long as Rachmaninoff was tall, his father’s before him, lives with me now. (I smile as I write that. To Robert, saying a thing ‘lived’ somewhere was an unforgivable anthropomorphic poncey fuckin’ southern bourgeois affectation.) Underneath it are boxes and suitcases containing the entire history of Robert’s family. It has been my job to poke around in them, sorting things out. I find a brown paper-covered booklet, costing 30p, 15p if sold on Saturday only: the programme of the Wigan and District Competitive Music Festival, 1972, affiliated to the British Federation of Music Festivals, of which Her Majesty the Queen is patron. It smells of coal-dust and rain, and opens with a message from the mayor, who with the mayoress hopes to see the festival well supported. It lists the patrons, the areas which count as ‘local’ – Abram, Aspull, Billinge, Ince, Orrell, Standish, Skelmersdale, Holland, Chorley. Perhaps it is in fact these place names which smell of coal-dust and rain. It lists the scale of marks (for piano: accuracy of notes and time, technique, fluency, pace, touch, expression, interpretation); the trophies and medals available and who they are in memory of, the general regulations, appreciations, thanks, and the policy for receiving suggestions. There are ninety-nine classes, with up to twenty-five entrants in each. Choirs, recorder solo, folksong, violin, instrumental ensemble, organ, sight-reading, girls’ vocal duet. Thirty-six ten- and eleven-year-olds play ‘Ship Ahoy!’ by Arthur Pickles on the piano.

In Pianoforte Solo (ages thirteen–fifteen), Robert Lockhart, turned thirteen a week earlier, plays Debussy’s 2nd Arabesque, and comes first with 91 points. He wins £1.65, and a stiff certificate with a gold, red and green coat of arms. The following night he comes back to hear Pianoforte Solo (open), and marks what he hears. His marks are a little harsher than the adjudicators’ and his observations, in tiny blue biro, are precise. Betty Wilson was slightly too temperamental in her Dohnányi; Richard Eastham lost all movement in his La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin. Alison Cratchley’s rubato was not up to scratch, though otherwise her Bartók was superb. ‘Not delicate,’ he writes. ‘Dotted notes not clear’; and ‘Too much Chopin style for Bach’.

I have Robert’s little red Letts diary for 1969, when he was ten: lists of rugby players in pencil, and a few entries in splatty blue fountain pen: ‘Grandpa just out of bed been ill. Grandma in bed now.’ ‘Play with train practise putting hippy wig on.’ I have photographs: tiny 1960s black-and-white ones with scalloped edges, carrying all the freight of the out-of-focus faded technology of the past. There he is: a fat baby in incredibly tidy clothes with smocking across the front, chortling. With an ice cream, in Blackpool. Aged about seven on Coniston Avenue in Wigan, with a cricket bat and knobbly knees under baggy shorts. Hurtling towards a finishing line, when he was the second fastest boy in Wigan. With his four plastic horses hitched up to the Bonanza covered-wagon playset. There at the piano with his father, John.

‘My parents, John and Pat, were deemed to be a glamorous couple in their lower middle class (for want of a better term) milieu,’ Robert wrote, much later, in his rehab papers. ‘He a travelling salesman with a souped-up Ford Anglia, she a hairdresser.’ John, charismatic, grumpy, lovable and extremely musical, developed a form of agoraphobia which rendered him incapable of leaving his home town. If he drove ten miles from the town centre he would start shaking, and have to turn around. It happened once during an outing to Manchester to see a special railway yard, for which permission had had to be sought. Robert and his friends were very excited to go, but by the time they got to Longsight Depot John had what we would now call a panic attack; Robert was embarrassed, his pals in the car didn’t know what to say.

John had been a choirboy at Wigan Parish Church and knew everybody in the town. He was once seen weeping in uniform – National Service – at Wigan Casino, in the early fifties, out of unrequited love. As a young man he’d made a record in Norman Leather’s record-yourself studio. ‘Johnny Lockhart’ plays a jazzy, elegant piano and sings in a lustrous baritone the smooth Eddie Fisher song ‘When I Was Young’. He must have recorded it for Pat; they married in 1954, the year after the song came out: elegant, beautiful, a satin dress, a dress suit. It’s from another world, a Terence Davies world of face-powder and Ford Anglias, a Northern world that I never knew, with a lingering G at the end of my own surname, Young, a way I never heard it pronounced before I met Robert. It’s the voice of a man I knew and loved. Not that we pronounced the word love the same either.

John, young, looked like Alain Delon in a raincoat, on a bridge; older, like Michael Caine in the heavy glasses. He stopped drinking overnight in his early forties, but smoked tremendously. Robert called him the Owl of Ormskirk, because of the specs on the very tip of his big nose, always just about to fall off. Or, Pop Lockers. Pat, Robert’s mother, had the maiden name North which was already funny because she was from the South. She was blonde and pretty and ran a hairdressing salon in their front room in Coniston Avenue, where Robert was dandled by the ladies, played at their stocking-clad, high-heeled 1960s feet, listening as they chatted, absorbing their affection and glamour. Later Pat worked on the beauty counter at Boots. ‘Not quite Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, but never mind,’ Robert observed. I never met Pat; cancer got her before I made it north. Robert could be dismissive about her, which made me want to talk to her all the more. It must have been quite something being the woman in a household made up of John and Robert. They all played the piano, but Pat, who was not a bad player either, never got near it because Robert or John was always on it.

‘I was a relatively happy child,’ Robert wrote, ‘successful academically and at sport, plenty friends … I didn’t think it odd that my dad often got home from “work” at ten p.m. ’

John had a girlfriend called Lily Glinka, an anorexic Russian secretary who was afraid of the wind. John took her out on to Southport Sands to try to cure her. Later there was another, Jenny, who loved horses. Robert knew about these things. He and John always talked. And he was woken by the arguments in his parents’ bedroom late into the night. His mother was protective but eventually she too ‘succumbed to an affair’.

Robert was twelve or thirteen when the family fell apart. John lost his job. He came up to Robert’s room and said, ‘Are you staying with her or coming with me?’ So Robert got up out of bed, put some things in a bag and went with John on their bicycles to John’s mother Granny Annie’s house. There they shared a single bed. Robert was horrified by John’s toenails, which looked to him like nicotine-stained elephant tusks. He and his mother became ‘somewhat estranged’. He said it was not because he loved her less, just that he had more in common with his father. Then Pat’s boyfriend died, of diabetes. The trauma ping-pong started, as Robert shuttled from one unhappy home to the other.

John was playing Tchaikovsky in a public place – a hotel? – one evening, and a woman called Kath Griffin sat next to him, saying, ‘I prefer the slow movement’. It turned out all she knew about classical music was that she preferred the slow movements, but that wasn’t an impediment.

I say all this. I don’t know if it’s true. It’s hard enough getting sense out of your own memories, let alone somebody else’s. Robert told me his versions. His parents fighting one Christmas because John had given Pat a bottle of Elizabeth Arden Blue Grass which wasn’t what she liked, it was what Lily Glinka liked. Another Christmas when Robert was in the back of the car and he threw up on Granny Annie – or her best hat? – having drunk half a bottle of repulsive sweet sherry because he didn’t want to go to Kath’s family – or indeed his mother’s place, but he hadn’t been invited. Pat had met another man. John married Kath, Pat married Mike. Robert was in no mood to like step-parents, but acknowledged later that it must have been ‘very difficult … to deal with a precocious, wilful teenager’.

He had made the under-13s 100-metre and triple jump teams and went to the Royal Northern College of Music junior school in Manchester on Saturday mornings. This coincided with an influx of ‘rough lads who beat the shit out of us supposedly posh grammar-school boys’. He escaped punishment despite being a prime target as a classical pianist – ‘automatically a puffter’ – because he had played for Wigan Rugby League schoolboys, which even at that age was ‘a sport for hard lads’. He loved rugby league with a passion all his life, but because he was studying the piano, due to the high risk of breaking fingers, he had to stop. He had obsessions, often masochistic: ‘I would force myself to practise a difficult passage 100 times, having to start again from scratch if a mistake was made. By the 99th rendition, I’d have hot sweats, shaky legs. I assumed I was doing this to harden myself against concert nerves – to develop the ability to switch into robotic. It worked, sort of – but it made arguably the most beautiful language – both to “speak” and to listen to – awkward, dry, an academic, technical exercise.’ And, ‘having to hold my hand under a boiling hot tap for ten minutes. If not, my mother would die. She did. Admittedly not until eight years after I stopped the habit.’ I still wonder what, of the things young children are diagnosed with now, Robert might have been diagnosed with when he was small: Asperger’s? Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder? He thought so. Depression? Certainly. Autistic spectrum?

I asked Robert’s cousin Diane, who’s a few years older than Robert, what he was like when he was little. She said, ‘Always on the naughty stool’, with a smile.

So there in the north, the boy Robert is beside his father on the yellow brocade duet stool; or on it alone, perfecting his left-hand trills, making certain his Fille aux Cheveux de Lin maintains its structure and momentum.

Meanwhile in the south, though I had lessons for years, I had no talent and did no work. I remember locking myself in the loo in a futile attempt not to have to go to a piano lesson. Even now I read music like a six-year-old, counting up and down the notes, naming them under my breath. Robert was repeatedly amazed by the fact that I am, as he put it, ‘illiterate’. It was not that I didn’t love the piano. I adored it. I spent hours beneath my dad’s Blüthner while he played. My companions there were a French horn in its battered leather case lined in blue velvet; an old silver trombone, ditto; a curious stringed thing our grandfather brought from Iraq in the 1920s in a heavy wooden box with a price label in Arabic inside the lid; a schoolchild’s violin with a soft lemony cloth and a little round of rosin; my brother’s trumpet, yellow and bright compared to the older horns, and a moth-eaten concertina in an octagonal box like a gothic chapter-house. Usually I was eating almonds and sultanas from my jeans pocket, and reading. I couldn’t put my book down even for a moment (Narnia, Moomins, Swallows and Amazons, the myths of Greece and Rome – it wouldn’t cross my mind to put the book down. I used to read walking down the street, and bump into nothing) and it was tricky for me to get my hand into my pocket when piled in among instruments, so sometimes I’d kick the pedal column. My father, Wayland, who would be playing Bach, or Schubert ländlers: ‘Homage to the fair ladies of Vienna’, didn’t mind. Our double stool is the kind that opens, full of children’s music books and collections of carols published in the 1950s. It is covered in worn petit point done by my grandmother. Over that is a sheepskin, put there to cover the wear in the petit point, now worn itself. On that, Wayland, who I loved more than life. The music came down through the belly of the piano. It sounds quite different under there. He was careful not to play too loud. For decades I didn’t know he did that. Across the room my mother would sit on a sofa in a pool of light, reading about defence policy and sea-use planning.

Before the Second World War, before he went into the Navy, Wayland studied music at Cambridge. When he went back to university after the war, he switched to history. His youthful compositions are still in that petit point piano seat. Instead of being a composer, his first dream, he became a journalist, a writer, and ultimately a politician, a Labour member of the House of Lords. My mother, Liz (Oxford and the Wrens) was his partner in politics, his backroom intellectual powerhouse. Their subjects were foreign policy, conservation, peace, the sea, the environment. Wayland’s mother was a sculptor, Captain Scott of the Antarctic’s widow.

These are the composers Wayland rated: Bach. Then Mozart, who added characters, then Beethoven, who became one great huge character, then Brahms and Schubert, who were just beautifully lyrical. Wagner? ‘A bicycle pump,’ he said. I liked Chopin and César Franck and Verdi: I knew they weren’t officially as good as the ones Wayland liked, but I could run around to them and be fleeing through the forest, hiding from bears, clambering mountains, rescuing and being rescued, riding unlikely beasts. I thumped and pirouetted up and down the sitting room (I did ballet classes – the plump one in a class of music-box fairies). Nobody minded the thumping but if I wriggled too much when sitting near my mother she would say: ‘You’re making me seasick.’ Liz’s mother drowned at the age of twenty-nine; six-year-old Liz, playing with her in Lake Geneva, was rescued. This shaped everything, but that is another story.

I’m seeing myself here aged about seven, when my parents were about forty. My brother and sisters are older than me. In the way of elder siblings, they went out more, and further, and in a different way: Beatles concerts, boarding schools, festivals, university, California, Afghanistan. Later, I had a baby sister. Robert always rather yearned for a sister – he thought if he had one he could look after her. He wondered if he could borrow one of mine, I had so many.

The Blüthner had been in that room for forty years, and was there another forty afterwards. My nephew has it now. My family was large, individually adventurous, but overall, steady.

Robert came on a school trip to London when he was eleven, and stayed in a hotel in Lancaster Gate – a hundred yards from where I lived. (He went on another school trip a few years later, an exchange to Amiens. He ran away to Paris and got into trouble.) We might have passed on the pavement as I set off for school, and he crocodiled off to the Tube station to go to the Planetarium. We were born one day apart at different ends of the country, but you could get a direct train from where I was born – Euston in London – to where he was, in Wigan. We were both conceived on holiday. One day a year – my birthday – I was his older woman.

The first time he came to my childhood home, he didn’t come in. It was 1978: after our encounter in Oxford, before Primrose Hill. I was recently back from my post-school year off adventures in India with a small array of revolting digestive illnesses, and had to spend the traditional few weeks in the Hospital for Tropical Diseases at St Pancras, and some time at home recuperating. Tallulah came to visit.

‘I can’t stay long, the boys are in the car.’

Which boys?

‘Simon and Robert.’

My bedroom was on the ground floor. I thought of the yellow line outside, and Simon’s little Renault 4, the only car owned by anyone we knew of our age.

Which Robert?

‘Lockhart.’

‘Oh, they can come in,’ I say, nonchalantly.

‘You’re not well enough,’ she said.

‘I am well enough,’ I said.

‘No you’re not.’

‘Yes I am.’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

She didn’t bring them in. This occasion was one of the moments when the slippery crystal polyhedron of missed opportunities slips sideways and could, just might, have landed on a different surface. Robert didn’t know the details at the time, but later it became for him a moment when we might have got together. ‘You’d have been irresistible,’ he’d say. ‘In bed, all skinny from your illness, too knackered to give me any grief – we could have got together then. We’d have got married – and you’d have divorced me, of course, but then we’d’ve got married again and been happy and I never would’ve become an alcoholic …’ Our non-existent children were to be named after composers: Claudette, Frederica, Cesar and Sergei, for Debussy, Chopin, Franck and Rachmaninoff. Much as he loved Satie and Ravel, we drew the line at Eric and Maurice.

Tallulah doesn’t like this story, because it suggests he would only have wanted me then because I was thin and brown. I don’t see it that way. At her fiftieth birthday party, we formally forgave her for not bringing him in to see me. She said, ‘Actually, you do make rather a good couple’, and I felt it as a blessing. I thrilled like a seventeen-year-old to see our names written together on the invitation, even when we were well middle-aged. Public acknowledgement of coupledom. I was never the marrying kind and anyway Louisa Lockhart would be a terrible name – I can see Louisa Lockhart in a third-rate novel, scurrying over the storm-lashed moors, sodden shawl clutched round her after the Young Master done her wrong. Or writing light erotica. Or being an eighteenth-century fishing boat.

According to my diary, I went to his twenty-first birthday party, on 27 March 1980. ‘Jolly flirt with L’, I wrote in my diary. I have no memory of it whatsoever. And there is his name on the list for my twenty-first birthday party, a few days later. All the names are crossed out, in an ‘invitation sent’ or ‘def coming’ way, in a single straight line. His is crossed out in a cloud-formation zigzag of circling pencil, which continues into an arrow pointing to the top of the page. I remember that I cooked dinner for about ten people and then everyone else came afterwards. I made a veal thing where you rolled it up with an omelette inside, and ham, so when you sliced it it was striped pink and yellow, and I added lots of parsley so it could be green as well, deckchair stripes like my favourite trousers of that period. And a pile of meringues and cream. I had friends old and new from different areas of my disparate twenty-one-year-old life, and none of the dinner people, my nearest and dearest at the time, knew each other. I remember we had two bands – Sore Throat and The Arials – and Sore Throat’s roadie took all his clothes off and chased round the house trying to apologise to me for being naked, and Shane McSweeney hid the clothes up a tree. But I can’t remember if Robert came. So I can’t have loved him much then. The following year, only one sighting: ‘… in the foyer of the Wigmore Hall, listening to the pleasant strains of the first half of the programme, and the whispers and rustlings of the latecomers and ushers. The second half is Rob Lockhart …’

I had recently graduated, and was working as a lowest-of-the-low on the making of Britannia Hospital, the third of Lindsay Anderson’s trilogy of films which started with If … and O Lucky Man! It was filmed in the still-active mental hospital at Friern Barnet, where actors and mental patients mixed perhaps more than had been planned. One chap followed me about to give me ginger cake in a brown paper bag. I had a weakness for talented men with beautiful accents: Glaswegian Robbie Coltrane who slid across the floor of the cast bar on his knees and collided with my bum, which he bit; another of the actors, Welsh Bob Pugh, who read me Gerard Manley ’Opkins and played Van Morrison songs on the piano; history professor Norman Stone (also Glaswegian) who had taught me at Cambridge. I’d had it, forever, with Cambridge, with posh English chaps, dinner jackets, repression, arrogance, misogyny and fear faintly concealed behind perfect manners. The establishment. I was moving into my squat, busking, working as a barmaid, running round with deep-sea divers, Jamaican musicians, despatch riders; saving for New York, wanting to work in films, anything, anyone, but not that Chelsea banker quacking entitled educated ignorant money-making narrow-minded posh ungrateful world … It was in that mood that I ran into Robert at Emma’s party.

*

Tallulah came back from New York in 1986, and moved in with my friend Swift. We all, in our late twenties, became pals again. We were working hard. I got a mortgage on a one-room flat; I was a freelance journalist now, travelling the world for Marie Claire, correcting the spelling on The Sunday Times, riding motorcycles for Bike magazine, doing columns in the Guardian. Tallulah was running a publishing house. Swift was moving from magazines into the literary end of film. Robert had meanwhile come to London to study piano as a postgraduate, teach at Oxford, and play cocktail jazz in wine-bars to support himself as well as concerts on Radio 3, at Wigmore Hall and the South Bank. He had a girlfriend: kind, pretty, mickey-taking Lisette, who everybody liked. And his mother died. ‘Seeing her dying,’ he wrote, ‘aged 52, looking aged 80, deaf, blind, incontinent, was probably the most disturbing moment of my life.’ He retired from professional piano around then, unsure if it was because of his mother’s death or not, and started writing music for radio and TV, theatre, films and advertising. He was a musical director at the National Theatre, he triumphed in the West End and New York. He had his little thespian habits and nicknames: Serena McKellen for fellow Wiganer Sir Ian McKellen; Pierre Vestibule for Peter Hall; Pierre Ruisseau for Peter Brook. In 1986 he did the musical arrangements for a production of Arthur Miller’s The American Clock, and was extremely excited after meeting the author – mostly because of shaking his hand, and Marilyn Monroe. ‘I know where it’s been,’ he said, staring lovingly and disbelievingly at his own hand that had shaken the hand that had made love to the goddess. There was big pressure and scary deadlines, but he didn’t have to be on stage, and could therefore drink. That world brimmed with drink.

Being Terence Davies’ music director, on The Long Day Closes (1988) and Distant Voices, Still Lives (1992) and The Neon Bible (1995) drew him back to the North, and to his father. He had to conduct a choir of Liverpool schoolboys, singing in Latin. When he corrected their pronunciation one of them said to him, ‘Sir, sir, are you Latin?’ Oh the joy. As a Wiganer – or Cocchiite, he preferred, because it was both Latin and rude – he liked nothing better than mocking Liverpudlians (unless it was mocking people from Skelmersdale, or his default position in the south, épater-ing les fuckin’ bourgeois). He orchestrated the gorgeous version of ‘Love Is a Many Splendored Thing’, in the scene where they’re all in the cinema, crying. Years later I sat in the cinema, crying. I looked at those 1950s Northern people, so beautifully turned out, quoting lines from The Philadelphia Story, and thought, is that where he’s from?

When he told me how he had fallen out of someone called Nina’s window, I thought he and Lisette must have broken up (which they did several times) and felt, God help me, a little pang of jealousy. I wanted him to be falling out of my window, or at least trying to climb in it – and it wouldn’t have been nearly so perilous, as I was on the ground floor with a window directly on to the street, Jesus, there’d have been no risk at all, he certainly wouldn’t have impaled his arse on the railings.

*

His past is in boxes under his piano in my sitting room, for me to deal with, to rationalise or romanticise (which sometimes seem to be the same thing); to put in order, any order that can pass as orderly, so that thereafter it can be put away. I am in charge of his sheet music, his music manuscripts, his CDs, his cassettes, his dad’s LPs, his rehab papers, medical notes, autopsy report, boots, books, love letters from his girlfriends, letters to them that he never sent. ‘Dear Buttock’, he wrote, in 1981; ‘Dear Rectangle’. They break my heart. The older ones from Manchester and Nottingham, biro and lined paper; fountain pens and Basildon Bond like a granny, then brown Rotring ink and cartoon sunsets, speech bubbles coming from the picture of the queen on the stamp, or the cherub on the front. Postcards from Siena and San Gimignano, airmails from Ohio and California. Letters starting, ‘I’ve just put down the phone from our conversation but I can’t bear not to be talking to you still …’ Letters which stop and start over days: ‘I’m on the train now; sorry about the writing … I’m home now, it’s so cold … Just scribbling this at the bus stop …’ Funny letters, love letters. Haunting letters: ‘WHERE IS YOUR WARM BODY NOW?’ A lipstick kiss. A postcard showing a naked lady from behind, waist down, long legs in high heels crossed at the ankle to make a very elongated heart-shape, and on the back, in thick black felt pen: ROBERT JE VOUS ATTENDS AVEC IMPATIENCE. Incomprehensible letters: ‘Arms and legs! Arms and legs!’ And: ‘… I have written endless letters to you, but have abandoned all due to distress and muddle. There isn’t much to say anyway, other than what a fantastic and unforgettable adventure we had, despite our differences … If love isn’t worth fighting for it was probably not love in the first place but a mutual passion driven by intensity (of a volatile nature). Because to me love is about understanding and security as well as the sex and excitement which always features in the beginning …’

One from him, giving his phone number as 999. A photo of a girl with a teddy bear, aged about twenty, and on the back written: ‘Only one of these is your girlfriend’: she’s a film star now. Several have filled me with jealousy appropriate to the age I was at the time they were written: But I knew you then, why didn’t you want me? wept the ghost of me aged seventeen.

I don’t want to read them. They’re not mine. Yet here I am in charge of them, which is a damned odd sort of victory over time and the ghosts of love rivals who have long been living other lives.

And there’s something addressed to me: a printed invitation to a production of Woyzeck, which as it is in ‘the Newman Rooms’ and gives the date ‘Tues–Sat 4th Week’ must be to do with Oxford, which exists in its own chronological universe. I do look at that and think –1978? 1979? What if I’d gone?

I could identify about 80 per cent of the letters’ senders. I recognise their handwriting; I know the stories, the places, the timings. Tough, sympathetic curly-haired Beth who was my pal at school; Emma who I knew a bit at Cambridge; Jackie the violinist. I put them back in the boxes. All that love, all that youth. I take them out again. Put them back again.

It adds up to a chaotic record of a life which might have been lived differently; a map across which he might have traced a different, better, route. A map I was going to have to look at.

And, for a while, it was like getting a dose of him, after he was gone.

Chapter Four
West London, Late summer, 1990

I am invited for dinner at Robert’s flat; the top half of a Victorian house in Shepherd’s Bush. He has cooked – late, delicious, pans all over everywhere, as usual. Everyone is clever and funny and affectionate, relaxed verging on chaotic, and it turns into one of those magical evenings. There’s a string of fairy lights around the kitchen window frame; we drink lots of cheap wine sitting at the wooden table. Robert plays – Liszt, Debussy’s La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin, which has become my song, as I have cheveux de lin – on his new piano, a Yamaha Boston, black and very sleek. I am surprised by the piano. He doesn’t usually like new things. I don’t like his new carpet either. It’s purple and shiny – the kind you think you’d get electric shocks from. Lisette goes to bed early – perhaps midnight? – as she has work in the morning, and we all agree this is a terrible waste. I’m actually thinking ‘how can she bear to?’

As the small hours start to get bigger again people fall away and it ends up with Robert, me and Alastair – a very tall, handsome builder, nicknamed Truncheon for his apparently prodigious dong – lying about smoking and talking rubbish. Nobody in Lockhart-land was allowed their actual name. I was FCB – Flat-Chested Brunette (which I am not). Patrick (who is tall) was The Giraffe. The other Patrick, large of chin with a regal manner, was the ‘Crown Jowls’. His adored Jackie, middle name Ruth, a very kind, ferociously talented and focused red-haired violinist, was known as ‘Ruthless’. His best friend Graham from Wigan was a simple ‘GFW’. Martha Argerich, the pianist he most admired, was ‘That gap-toothed Jewish Argentine Lesbian’, spoken in tones of awe and wonder. The soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was Betty Blackhead. Phil, who has a mole on his forehead and played Subbuteo, was Centre Forewart. One woman who always got up to dance, no matter the circumstances, was Pan’s Person. An employer called Charles, who didn’t always pay reliably, was Cheque-bounce Charlie. A Wigan pub, the Swan and Railway, could be the Cygne et Chemin de Fer, the Duck and Tram, the Albatross and Cyclepath. An acquaintance who was born without feet, on an occasion of infidelity became ‘Foot-Free and Fancy Loose’. Only composers were allowed their real names – their first names, usually used thus, while listening to their music: ‘Maurice, you fucker …’ with a shake of the head and a smile of delight, at some particularly beautiful turn of musical phrase. When I told him about the church that Satie set up in Paris – the Metropolitan Church of Christ Conductor – he was just so happy. ‘Eric,’ he said, with such fondness in his voice. ‘Oh, Eric, you bastard.’ That Debussy changed his name from Achille-Claude Debussy to Claude-Achille Debussy was a source of perpetual and unresolved fascination.

Mostly that night we are listening to Chopin.

‘I hate them,’ Robert says. ‘Arseholes. They know nothing.’

‘Who?’ we enquire.

‘Those arseholes.’

‘What arseholes?’ we say, concerned.

‘Critics.’

‘Who? Where?’ We think he must be referring to something in the paper, or recent. Certainly neither Truncheon nor I have said a word against Chopin. We don’t want Robert thinking we are against Chopin.

It becomes apparent that nobody has called Chopin second rate for some years, when somebody, it wasn’t apparent who, did.

It comes up that I have never knowingly heard Puccini’s opera La Bohème. Robert is appalled by this state of affairs, and cannot let it continue. He rumbles about in a pile of cassettes, throwing unwanted ones aside till he finds it, and puts it on. We are to listen to it. It is essential. We refill our glasses and subside, swoonily.

‘The thing is,’ he says, lounging back in a zigzag of skinny torso and crossed legs on the sofa – ‘there is no orgasm. Listen – all build up, and build up – but no orgasm.’

Soon enough Rodolfo – it’s José Carreras singing – is catching hold of Mimi’s hand on the floor, because they have dropped the key in the dark, and telling her in his heartbreaking bravura romantic tenor that it doesn’t matter because they have the moon, and he’s a poet, he writes, he lives! I am blown away like Cher in Moonstruck: the singing, the beauty, the emotion – I’m lying on my back on the horrid new carpet in a state of considerable ecstatic delight – the piling up of the music, oh my God, this is SO BEAUTIFUL—

‘No orgasm!’ Robert cries. ‘See? The bastard’s doing it again!’

‘SHUT UP,’ shout Truncheon and I. We’re busy being blown away. Mimi is responding, telling Rodolfo who she is: ‘Mi chiamano Mimi, ma il mio nome è Lucia’ – they call me Mimi, but my name is Lucia – how she embroiders roses and lilies in her little white room under the rooftops, where she lives alone and the first kiss of April is hers, how sweet is the scent of a flower—

And then just when she is reaching the peak of this gorgeous spiralling climactic moment, Robert shouts, ‘There! Did you hear it?’

‘WHAT!?’ we snap, wrenched from our reveries.

‘Talk about no orgasms,’ Truncheon says. ‘You keep pulling out.’ But Robert is up again and over to the stereo, rewinding the tape, fag between his teeth. Replay. Mimi – Barbara Hendricks – takes up her magnificent song again, in mid-bar, heading for, whatever he says about orgasms, some kind of climax—

‘Wait …’ he says. ‘It’s coming …’

‘Foglia a foglia la spio!’ she sings. ‘Cosi gentile il profumo d’un fior—’

‘THERE!’ he shouts.

‘What?’ Truncheon and I cry. ‘For God’s sake, man.’

‘Oh fuck sake,’ he grumbles. ‘You’ve no fucking idea …’ Rewind, again. ‘Pay attention,’ he says. ‘Sit up.’ He presses play. ‘OK,’ he says, ‘now – listen – OK – OK – NOW!’

What? We are genuinely uncomprehending, and bewildered. What is he hearing that we are not hearing? What is he so desperate to share?

‘Dear God,’ he says. ‘Fuckin’ hellfire. I don’t know. Fuckin’ southern philistines … What you just heard three times is no less than the finest use of the triangle in Western Civilisation.’

We listen again. It was impossible to determine, if you didn’t know what you were looking for. Once you knew it was there, it was sublime.

Towards dawn Robert declares that we must all go to Barn Elms Reservoirs, not far away, by the river. I have a brief Bruce Springsteen moment – though to be honest there was little chance of anybody’s body being tan and wet down at that reservoir in the middle of the night …

I was at that time a biker, riding a Harley Davidson 1200 Sportster, its left foot-peg welded into place with a metal plate by a rural blacksmith after an unfortunate incident on an Italian backroad earlier in the year. Robert normally would not go near it – he didn’t drive, would hire a moped on a Greek holiday if he had to, but thought the taxi the only civilised form of transport. Motorbikes were to him alien beasts, totally incomprehensible. Nevertheless – I think because he realises he’ll get to put his arms round my waist – he decides he will ride pillion. I have a spare helmet with me, which he puts on, but he won’t change from what he is wearing, so when we are pulled over by the police on Shepherd’s Bush Roundabout ten minutes later (in convoy with Truncheon in his Morris Clubman) Robert is barefoot in a pink towelling dressing gown given to him by Dustin Hoffman as cast and crew gift at the end of the West End run of Peter Hall’s production of The Merchant of Venice, with something to that effect embroidered on the back. It is an unlikely set of biker’s colours.

The police car circles up behind us, makes itself known, and pulls us over.

Where are we going? they wonder.

‘Barn Elms,’ I say.

Why?

I am at a loss. Well – I know why I am going. Because Robert wanted to go. But that probably isn’t the answer they want.

Behind me, Robert is struggling with the visor. ‘It’s the migration season,’ he says, from the depths of the helmet.

The officer looks unconvinced.

‘We’re hopin’ to see a black-tailed godwit.’

I assume Robert is joking and bite my lip. But the copper accepts the explanation.

‘Oh, all right,’ he says. ‘Take it easy’, and waves us on.

Robert isn’t joking. He does want to see a black-tailed godwit. That is in fact the purpose of the expedition. When we get down there to the broad damp common, bordered with thick undergrowth, wet and fragrant, and after a degree of ornithological patience no black-tailed godwit is forthcoming, he decides instead to educate us in the ways of rugby league, so we run up and down alongside the reservoir, throwing the crash helmets backwards to each other as the mist rises.

In the end, after a greasy spoon breakfast, we go back, and go to bed – well, Robert goes to bed, Lisette goes to work, and Truncheon and I fall asleep on the sofa. That afternoon when we wake, Robert wants to know if it is true about the legendary penis.

‘I don’t know,’ I say.

He is bemused. ‘What do you mean?’ he asks. ‘You must know.’

He is quite bewildered – amazed – by the news that Truncheon and I shared a sofa without any sexual goings-on. It seems impossible to him.

Why? we ask. People often don’t engage in sexual goings-on.

‘It’s such a waste!’ he cries, in the end. ‘I mean, look at you! The pair of you!’

Chapter Five
London, Washington, Henderson Tennessee, 1990

In May 1990 Swift (Baroness Alacrity; Alassitude when asleep) married David (Flussie) by the golden pagoda in Battersea Park. She wore a tiny top hat; he a riverboat gambler coat. Lisette and Robert danced. This is the only time I ever saw him on a dance-floor. She was wearing a red dress. Later she was dancing with someone else, and he said: ‘Look at her, isn’t she lovely?’ Later still he was conducting some kind of athletics competition in the shrubbery. Later still, a bunch of us filled a minicab with the wedding flowers – armfuls of fresh bouncy lilac – and went back to my flat. Robert fell asleep in my bed and was narked when I turfed him out so I could get in there with the best man. Tallulah married that year as well; but I had my Harley and purported not to care, in slightly too bravura a fashion, that my two best friends had achieved this state of romantic glory – as I saw it – whereas my most recent triumphs were getting off with a nineteen-year-old, and refusing a freebie offered by a Leeds gigolo I was interviewing for Marie Claire. And then Robert and Lisette broke up, and that changed things.

*

I was at my grandfather’s house in Wiltshire, a place of moss, wellingtons and woodsmoke, with Swift and David. I had a cold, and had retired to bed. Robert arrived by taxi from Chichester (some eighty miles) where he was a musical director at the Festival. (I knew him for thirty-four years and I never saw him on London Transport. He’d take cabs from London to Wigan, until he was on his sticks, when his pride made him take the train. Another time he came by cab to Wiltshire from London, and we offered the driver a cup of tea and the bathroom. He had arrived from Afghanistan three months before, and had not been outside London. At the sight of the Marlborough Downs, he had tears in his eyes. He said he would bring his wife and children to live here because it was the most beautiful green.)

Robert didn’t like people going to bed without him, and when Swift and David retired at around 2 a.m., he appeared in my bare bedroom, lonely. ‘I’m being good,’ he said, ‘and quiet.’ So I woke up. After a bit he went downstairs and came back up carrying the Dulcitone, singlehanded. A Dulcitone is the size and shape of a child’s coffin, on four spindly legs. My grandfather had acquired it to fit on a boat. Its mechanism is made of tuning forks, and it sounds like the arthritic ghost of a music box.

‘No, no, don’t help,’ he said. ‘You’re ill. It’s a treat for you.’ He set it up by my sickbed, with a candle on the one side and his glass of whatever it was on the other, and he played for me: Ravel’s ‘Pavane for a Dead Infanta’, La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin, a nocturne or two, and other pieces appropriate to a sick blonde, including excerpts from the Fauré requiem, and a small lecture on why Mozart is crap: ‘It’s these highly symmetrical structures which appeal to people who like their lives to be very ordered – he puts his mannered and predictable material into a preconceived structure – first movement sonata form, relying far too much on the tonic/dominant axis – you know, C to G – structurally and harmonically – it’s all SQUARE – there’s an announcement of what’s coming up, and a pompous phrase saying something’s finished – he never allows his material to grow organically because the sheer SQUARENESS cannot accommodate organic growth. Inflexibility appeals to a certain type of person, class even. OK he wrote some truly great music – Don Giovanni, the Requiem – the late concerti slow movements, that intimate interplay between the piano and the orchestra – listen to Murray Perahia – and the clarinet development in the slow movement of the quintet – but why is every boring note of every boring piece adored by these boring people? I’ll tell you – Fear. Security and predictability gets those smiles of approval because it makes them feel comfortable and secure, i.e. fuckin’ smug …’

The next day he brought the Dulcitone into the garden, and taught me a bit of Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, a duet for ten-year-olds which I could just manage, sitting in the sun on the lawn. In the evening we were in front of the fire: his tormented genius, his broken heart and me, him telling me how Brahms was raised in a brothel, what he’d cook me for lunch the next day (scallop salad with coriander and ginger, or salmon with sorrel sauce, or lamb and black-eyed peas) and watching me fix the fire, which I’m rather good at. ‘Fuckin’ hellfire,’ he said, getting enthusiastic. He took the bellows from me and held them nose into the fire, and let the top drop very slowly down, a slow breath to the embers. And again. And again, not quite so slowly. A tiny flame rose, and he slowed down, then sped up, and a little more, making faces at me while performing a tumultuous and deep-rooted fake orgasm, on the bellows. The fire blazed like merry hell. Then he honoured me with his Schubertian theory of the death of genius: ‘So, has there been any uncontested genius in any field since 1945? No there hasn’t – and not just because genius needs to be proven by time – no, it’s because, listen, since penicillin, nobody has syphilis any more. Well, they do, but not tertiary syphilis, which is when the angels start serenading you, or if you’re Schumann stood in a river it’s Schubert, and then your wife puts you in the loony bin and runs off with fuckin’ Brahms – so, putting the interests of art above the interests of health, and bearing in mind that it’s not just Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, Scriabin, Donizetti, Delius, Smetana, Scott Joplin, Wolf, Ivor Gurney and Henry the Eighth but also Toulouse Lautrec, Van Gogh, Maupassant, Flaubert, Rochester, Monet, Oscar Wilde … and probably a few others … is the loss of syphilis actually a benefit to civilisation? Or does the truly dedicated artiste in fact have a creative fuckin’ responsibility to acquire the poxy disease, so as to honour his muse? What d’you think?’

Then he burnt our socks, because they were wet, before getting hold of my foot so as to demonstrate his ideal blowjob on it.

I was very afraid of the effect he had on me. I could never remember, when he was kissing me, what I knew fifteen minutes before, and the following morning: i.e., why I didn’t want to sleep with him. I told him this; he stroked my head. I burst into tears and wouldn’t have him. Looking at him, I saw my enemy. I saw what I could lose myself in; what could take me from myself, enthrall and imprison me, keep me from my own free life. I feared it, and I desired it.

The following morning I went and curled up with my book on the end of his single spare-room bed, and that was that really. Sex to oblivion, and that night he dragged me out barefooted on to the frosty lawn, and there was a shooting star.

That weekend became the mainstay of the opening (or the middle, or the end) of the novel I tried to write about him. ‘He’s much gentler out of town,’ I wrote. ‘He points out fieldfares. His mother has died. Lisette has left him. He’s given up performing, and won’t compose except for money. I believe he thinks that because geniuses are tormented, and because he is not as much a genius as Debussy, he must therefore torment himself. We his all-knowing friends think he should take his talent back to his heart and face its responsibilities. We believe that he is frightened to do so. We think this is the root of his sadness, the demon which he seems to be trying to drown. He wonders why everybody is always doing down his fucking work, which we are not, we respect his hard work and success, but we know that he wants and needs something else. He knows this too. We all find this hard to talk about. It is easy to be simplistic.’

None of us blamed Lisette for leaving him. We all knew that he drank twice his share in half the time. She said, he didn’t know why he loved her; that it was just because she was pretty, and there. That wasn’t enough for her. And every now and then some other girl was pretty, and there. He provoked emotion: envy, lust, admiration, resentment – many people felt seduced by him. But how enviable is it to live constantly surrounded by those emotions? How could he possibly satisfy them all? They were there and often the easiest way out was just to give people what they so wanted. How was he to know what they meant by wanting that? It wasn’t just girls. If there was food he’d eat it; if there was drink he’d drink it. Everything existed to be flirted with or consumed. His considerable self-discipline was occupied elsewhere.

Lisette also said, ‘It’s amazing how boring he is when you’re not in love with him.’ I flinched at the truth in this: drunk, he could be boring.

On the Monday night I gave him a lift back to London and said, not for the first time, that I didn’t think we should. But I did think we would. He and Lisette having broken up, that line of defence was gone, and I was stuck with my own dichotomy: I wanted what I did not want. And he said things like, ‘You don’t want a boyfriend who drinks and smokes all the time and keeps you up all night.’ Not unless he loves me, I thought. I didn’t say it.

*

A few days after we came back, I went to the US to write some articles: Washington, Williamsburg Virginia, Nashville, San Diego to a Swingers’ Convention – a repellent episode full of repellent men trailing their surrendered wives round arid ballrooms full of stands selling fluffy handcuffs and writing-paper with pictures of sex positions on it in mauve. Crossing the parking lot, I was invited to an orgy; in the spirit of journalistic integrity I thought I ought to go, but the sight, among the many bodies writhing on nylon sheets in an executive suite, of a fungus-coloured middle-aged dentist patting the hair of a woman with pink plastic beads dangling on a clip from her clitoris who was sucking him off while being unconvincingly fucked from behind by what could have been his twin – this tad of humanity so revolted me that for the first and last time in my life as a journalist I made my excuses and left. My old school-friend Boots (male – from the boys’ school I went to after I deserted the horrid girls’ school) came down from LA and we went to Tijuana together and decided, in a jokey and merry mood of exasperation with the world, that to get married would be a splendid idea, but fortunately we couldn’t find the wedding chapel. And then I went north! To Alaska, to interview single men who advertised themselves for love in a special magazine, full-page shots of them in their plaid shirts with their dogs and pick-up trucks and hopeful expressions, and sometimes a bit of pipeline or a chainsaw. I slept in a log cabin with antlers above the door; I had blueberry pancakes for breakfast and spent a day on a horse in the wilderness, and it really was wild – there were no fences and the sky was huge and the air was sweet. I sang ‘Don’t Fence Me In’, and have never had a happier day. Back at the hotel in Washington I picked up one of the foot-long dark and white chocolate grand pianos with the lid up full of chocolate-dipped strawberries that they used as the little chocolate on the pillow. They packed it for me beautifully, and I brought it as hand baggage home across the Atlantic to Robert. He was not nearly appreciative enough, and left it at my flat.

We were not boyfriend and girlfriend – as I told everybody who asked, or assumed. I had seen enough of him as a boyfriend to accept the truth of what he said: ‘You don’t want a boyfriend like me. You just want a shag. That’s all right, it’s a common mistake. But I’m very easy, you can have me without, you know, signing up.’ However, we were talking, all the time; making each other laugh, a lot; sleeping together, kind of regularly; he worried and annoyed me, much of the time. But we weren’t going out together, oh no.

I wrote: ‘He professes “virtue”. Climbs into bed with me long after I’m asleep, and I murmur “Is it six o’clock then?” because it had been the night before, and he says “No, one thirty. I’m learning. Civilised.” I love the way he says “civilised” – you can almost see what he calls mono-lateral northern erectile nostril – but I don’t know if he really thinks civilised has anything to do with it. It. The big business of letting Robert live, opening the shutters on Robert’s soul and flooding him with sunlight. Emptying out the ashtrays of his heart. It’s all starting to look wrong but he remains our designated roué.’

He said he had tried not drinking.

‘How long?’ I said.

‘Three days,’ he said, ‘Staring at a bottle of Poire William and drinking only beer.’ He believed that counted. He thought it proved he had a balanced attitude. Robert wouldn’t know a balanced attitude if it kicked him.

He said he didn’t feel well. I said, ‘Do your nails no longer fit your fingers and does your flesh feel like over-ripe fruit?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ ‘It’s a hangover,’ I said. ‘You coming to the pub?’ he said.

He read things I was writing, and picked up on aspects that nobody else did. I wrote: ‘He is wrapped in a veil of misconception, a curious blindness rent with insight but cut off from us and his true self. Anyway, he’s gone off to Wigan with his drink and his fags and his weldschmerz, if that’s what I mean, and if that’s how you spell it.’

What an utter fool I was. But everyone knows the romantic hero has to be flawed – how else can the heroine save him? And even if you are quite convinced that’s not what you’re doing, you probably are. Even knowing you are can’t protect you. My rational history-graduate self says knowledge should protect you. My hindsight, meanwhile, quotes from O Brother Where Art Thou?: ‘It’s a fool looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart’.

*

Robert made a recording with Steve Parr, his mate/recording engineer/producer, of the Dmitri Tiomkin song ‘Wild Is the Wind’, famous for versions by Nina Simone and David Bowie. On it, Robert sings like Tom Waits, plays the piano like Red Garland, and undermines the whole thing with fart noises and stupid bleeps. It opens with the sound of a match striking and a cigarette being lit, ice cubes clinking into a glass, and closes with the sound of two hands clapping. It is a precise portrait of him: musically sublime, funny, seductive, naughty, self-sabotaging, vulgar, beautiful, ridiculous.

My memory is that Robert sent a cassette of it to a girl he was flirting with who took it as a love declaration; it caused some confusion. My memory is, I was sad he hadn’t sent it to me. But you know, we weren’t going out together. It would have been during one of our off periods. Steve’s memory is that late one evening, after they had finished recording Robert’s piano overdubs for a film soundtrack, they were about to drop into the Lily Langtry when Robert asked if he could run in to the studio and record something extra. The piano was still set up and Steve had some sound effects running live in the S1000 sampler. He popped in a tape and hit record; Robert started to play and sing. It was all very ad hoc and they only did one take. ‘And then,’ Steve told me, ‘if I remember correctly he asked me to run off a cassette so that he could give it to you.’

I like this incorrect memory very much. I could have this one for myself – look, I have a witness that says it wasn’t for her, it was for me. Perhaps I remembered incorrectly! Perhaps it was for me! Certainly, it is for me now: the tenderness with which he sings; the slight echo of laughter as you-hoo-hoo kiss me, the fart noises bubbling up when he hears the sound of mandolins; the clink of the ice cubes as he wonders whether we know we’re life itself.

Tiomkin was second only to Bernard Hermann in Robert’s pantheon of film composers. He revelled in tales of the great Russians and Germans who went to Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s; Schoenberg writing his Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene without there actually being any film; and on being complimented on his ‘lovely music’ snarling ‘I don’t write lovely music’. And Stravinsky – or was it Shostakovich? Or Schoenberg again? – could be all of them – who when invited to write a score wrote it and sent it in, and when told no, he needed to see the film and write the music to go with it, suggested that the director cut the film to go with the music.

Steve emailed ‘Wild Is the Wind’ to me in 2012, with the message ‘I know he wanted you to have this. No one who didn’t know him can understand what we have lost.’

*

In London Robert’s regime was to work all night, sleep till 3 p.m., wake up and get a cab to his preferred curry house. It was beautiful to see him working. It remained unchanged all his life: manuscript paper, pencil, sharpener, rubber, pack of fags, lighter, ashtray. Seven items denoting concentration. Initial work could be done anywhere – in the margin of the newspaper often – the five lines of the stave sketched, the phrase or chord that struck him jotted down over a coffee (double/triple/quadruple espresso, lots of sugar, several cigarettes, a brandy or calvados or two) in the sun somewhere, on a paper napkin over lunch, in a pub. But for concentration he preferred an actual table, and silence. In his flat, this was regularly assaulted by his neighbours’ building work. Hence his frequent presence in my house, or in Wiltshire. I can see the curve of his back now. His terrible posture.

‘Don’t you need a piano?’ I asked. He was working on the soundtrack for Distant Voices, Still Lives: full orchestra, serried ranks of gorgeous strings, muted brass, moody woodwind, crashing percussion, the whole shebang. No, he didn’t need a piano. He needed to Sellotape leaf after leaf of music manuscript into a great accordion of folds, and to rule and label the staves and the bars and the keys and the time-signature for every part of the orchestra. Then he needed to write down all the music that was in his head, individual parts, a line for each instrument, twenty or thirty parts. Occasionally he’d go and check something on the Dulcitone – that least dulcet of instruments, its tuning forks well out of tune after seventy years in a Wiltshire cottage – but otherwise the orchestra flowed direct from his mind to the paper. When Daniel Barenboim was on Desert Island Discs, he said he’d rather take the scores than any recordings of music, because when he read the scores he could recall and enjoy every performance he’d ever heard.

I am a puddle of admiration for this kind of capacity. This admiration makes it difficult for me to talk about Robert’s music. I fall at the first hurdle: I love it. I loved things he said were crap; I was bedazzled by his skill, by the ease with which he created pure beauty, by the delicacy with which he could shift a mood, by his versatility. He’d produce a piece of cracking 1920s flapper jazz; a haunting scrap of electronica with chanting sopranos; a lush nineteenth-century orchestral waltz; a fair imitation of 1959 Miles Davis; a driving hard rock piece with electric guitars; a sprightly yet somehow corrupt carousel melody; something feral and Celtic that seemed to be made entirely of cloud and a girl’s voice, a hackneyed 1980s-style TV crime theme. ‘They want hackneyed,’ he said. ‘I give them what they want.’ De-composing, he’d call it. But even if he tried, he couldn’t write bad music. Everything had something in it which stopped you, or moved you. God knows he was articulate in English but music was his first language. It was a language I could understand but not myself speak, though I devoutly wished I could. It meant, to me, blood and love and beauty. It meant my father at home.

And then I was sent to interview Johnny Cash, at home in Tennessee. At that time, he was almost a has-been; his rebirth as Patriarch of Americana was many years in the future. We got talking about the evils of the world. I mentioned a song he recorded, ‘Here Comes that Rainbow Again’ by Kris Kristofferson. It’s a small drama, based on an intensely touching scene from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

‘You know that book?’ Johnny said, his face lighting up.

‘I love that book,’ I said. ‘And you know that book!’

‘I was that book.’ He smiled at me. It was like being smiled at by Monument Valley, or the Hoover Dam.

‘You like that song?’ he said, and pulled over his guitar. He tuned up, and played, and sang – all my favourites, all afternoon, in that shadowy room with the sun hot outside, and it was one of the finest afternoons I’ve ever spent, and definitely the worst interview I’ve ever done. We hardly talked, because this music was his way of communicating. He did say one thing I remember: ‘You have to be what you are. Whatever you are, you gotta be it.’

I came away realising that I didn’t want to be a journalist any more. Although it was journalism that had given me this extraordinary day, I didn’t want to be the person oohing and aahing on paper about Kris Kristofferson, John Steinbeck and Johnny Cash. I wanted to be the person writing and making the stuff that makes people ooh and ahh. Cash loving Kristofferson’s song; Kristofferson loving the way Cash sang it, both of them loving Steinbeck’s book. I wanted to be one of them. I might as well admit it.

Somebody took a photo with my camera of Johnny Cash and me in the low spring sun. He has his arm round my waist. He picked me a daffodil from his front garden, gave me a kiss, and then I went home to start trying to be what I was: someone who wanted to create. I had the daffodil on my desk while I wrote my first book, a biography of my father’s mother, Kathleen, the sculptor. I still have it – a little dried-up papery ghost of a thing, reminding me that that’s what integrity means: being what you are. It’s somewhere in a pile of significant flowers (a rose from a May Ball, jasmine and marigold from the Taj Mahal, a tuber-rose from Graz, a tuft of the last cotton Tammy Wynette ever picked). I kept it in a bowl by my bed, until Robert set fire to it – rather unsuccessfully – with a cigarette end.

Chapter Six
London, Wiltshire, Paris, 1992–3

Well, I was only half in love with him, and just as well, as I had every reason to tell myself. Imagine the chaos if I had been fully in love with him! He was trouble. Not nothing but trouble – he was plenty else, but all that just added to the trouble. And anyway, I had other fish to fry.

In early summer 1992, I found I was pregnant, and not by Robert. This was a massive surprise, a great adventure, and, strictly, another story. Briefly, it was the only night Louis (kind, handsome, self-contained, Ghanaian) and I spent together, and, as the agony aunts warn the teenagers, it is possible to get pregnant without actually having sex. He and I both knew that we had done nothing that would normally result in conception. Tell that to most people though (they did ask …) and eyebrows screech into hairlines because all of a sudden everyone knows much more than me about what I got up to in bed on a particular occasion. Also, I had been told I would find it hard to conceive, for medical reasons. It was rather surreal. But there it was. Piss-on-a-stick proof.

I told Robert on the day of the pregnancy test. He, who never wanted to be left out of anything, was very keen that the baby should be his. I would have had to be three months pregnant already, which I wasn’t, but he was not interested in details, unless they were musical. I told him about Louis. ‘It’ll be an entertaining nine months,’ Robert said, ‘waiting to see if it’s white or black. I’ll babysit! There’s going to be a massive rallying round.’ It had a curious effect on him: he developed a kind of want/don’t want attitude. He was very keen to help. I went to Wiltshire to be with my sisters; he wanted to come. It was May and lush, with six little children for me to look at in a new light. Robert cooked, played Frisbee with my nephews, played Debussy on the Dulcitone, and reduced one sister to near hysteria by smoking while brushing his teeth. He understood that we couldn’t sleep together any more – found it absurd on one level, but understood. His presence was a massive comfort to me. We all lay about on lawns in the sun and I revealed my secret to my nephew Joe.

From my notebook:

Joe (4): Louisa’s going to have a baby

Louis (8): No she’s not

Sisters (43 and 39): !

Joe: But you’re not married

Louis: Yeah you need a sperm

Joe: Where will you get a sperm from?

Louis: Will you get it from a sperm bank?

Me: I’ve already got one

Louis: Where did you get it! Did you sex? Who with?

Sisters: !!

Theo (6): Person with a baby in her tummy, how did it get there?

Louis: You were being naughty!

Joe: Is your baby already in you?

Louis: It’s a joke

Sisters: Is it?

Me: No

Louis: ‘Well you’ll need to know what children want so I’ll tell you – sweets and wrestling stickers and a wrestling magazine

Joe: What’s its daddy called?

Me: Louis, like Louis

Louis: Isn’t Robert its daddy?

Me: Nope.

Robert: (shaking with silent laughter)

Joe: Is it going to see its daddy if you’re not married?

Me: Yes I hope so

All childish faces crease in horror. Hope so?

Me: Yes! Yes of course!

Louis: Is he going to sleep all the time like Tom?

Tom (a baby): snuffle

Me: Not when he’s bigger

Lily (2½, coming to sit beside me, very quietly): I’m glad you’ve got a baby in your tummy

Sisters and Alice (12): (unbridled delight)

Robert had told me how some months ago he had declared love to someone and been heartbroken because she rejected him. And that a glamorous Middle Eastern woman, a single mother who was engaged to a man she didn’t love, had become obsessed with him and now the fiancé wanted to kill him. I dropped him off at the BBC just as ‘Papa Was a Rolling Stone’ finished on the car radio. That night I was suddenly, irrationally and oddly joyously certain that the baby was Robert’s, though I knew perfectly well it couldn’t be. I sat by an open window with Tallulah and she told me all the ways in which Louis was perfect.

The next day I had a painful conversation with Robert. I found myself being snide, protective, defensive. He was upset, I was upset – chucking out what I half wanted in order to protect myself against wanting it more and it not wanting me. I explained that if he helped me I’d come to rely on his help. ‘Look, shall I come over?’ he said, and I said no, I’d want you to come and stay and be here. And of course I wouldn’t really. He’d just be smoking, drinking, requiring instructions, taking no responsibility. That phrase want/don’t want applied to us both. I cried a lot, after I’d hung up.

Two days later I sat Louis down, gave him a vodka, and told him. He straightened his shoulders, looked me in the eye, and said, ‘Well it must be mine then.’ I knew in that movement that everything was going to be OK, and I was right. Everything I wrote in my notebook about him at the time – he’s sunny, he’s private, he’s reliable, he’s mysterious – turned out to be true. I was unbelievably lucky in who I got accidentally pregnant with. We both were.

The following day I had the first scan: there it was, a tiny little thing having a kip. An ammonite, a croissant, a coracle. Eight weeks, they said. Louis had rung to give me all his phone numbers and ask if he could come to the next scan. Sometimes you can feel reassurance running through your veins.

I had to drop a tape off at Robert’s. He answered the door shirtless, and for a strange moment there on the steps in the London sun it was as exactly as if we were in love. I told him about the scan, and the dates.

‘So there’s no chance it’s Lockhartian in origin?’ he said sadly.

‘No.’

‘Have you told Louis?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you’ve fucked him now?’

‘No!’

‘Fuckin’ hellfire, why not?’

‘Because I don’t love him,’ I said.

*

My father was in hospital having heart surgery again, which terrified us all. (‘News like yours would give him another heart attack,’ Robert said.) My sister-in-law was about to give birth. My Harley had been stolen, and the insurance cheque arrived the week I found out I was pregnant – well there’s a message from Fate. No more leathers for me, for the duration. Everyone expressed their fears and concerns about my situation in the best and worst ways: I have never had so much advice in my life. I should marry him, I should have an abortion, I should be aware I’ll never make any money now, my career is over, no one will want to marry me, Louis will be sad if he thinks I’m waiting for someone better, we should live together, if I won’t move in with him I should move in with Robert. Shotguns were polished, voices were raised, true natures revealed. Relatives arrived from Ghana. My dad said to Louis, ‘I suppose I should take you into the library for a chat about your intentions, but I don’t have a library. How about the dining room?’ Louis and I sat in the middle of all this getting to know each other, saying to each other: ‘It’s going to be fine.’ To everybody else, we said: ‘One thing at a time, you know.’ The phrase ‘no, we’re just good parents’ emerged. ‘Semi-detached’ was another. We went around together, happy, fond, pregnant, proud, planning to stick by each other, but we weren’t a couple, nor planning to be.

My old friend Cynthia, the perfect embodiment of Jewish humour, was over from New York. She sat us down. ‘Could you have made it weirder if you tried?’ she asked.

‘He could have been gay?’ I suggested.

‘No, that would have been easier. No jealousy,’ she said.

‘OK, one-legged?’

Louis offered to cut his leg off.

Cynthia pointed out, later, that I couldn’t fall in love with Louis if I wasn’t sleeping with him.

It was so confusing for others that we had to make it clear for ourselves, and we did.

I didn’t stop to think of it being confusing for Robert. I wrote down a conversation we had in my notebook:

Robert: ‘There’s love between us, and we fancy each other.’

Louisa: ‘So why aren’t we going out together?’

R: ‘I was just wondering that.’

L: ‘Well, it’s because you love another’ (the one who had rejected him)

R: ‘I gangrene another – you said so.’

L: ‘Yeah, you gangrene lots of things.’

Silence

R: ‘Well we kept that moment of melodrama up for a good ten seconds.’

Later he was talking about friends having sex. I said, you’re not my friend, and he was hurt. I explained: that he was my friend of course, but not only: he was my lover and always would be. He told me a friend had said he should marry me; I agreed, but didn’t mention that I of course shouldn’t marry him. He said, again – Jesus, doesn’t it get repetitive? – ‘Anyway you don’t want to go out with an alcoholic.’ And again, it wasn’t about who I wanted to go out with, it’s about who I wanted him to be – or rather, not to be. I didn’t want him to be an alcoholic (not that either of us knew what alcoholic actually meant). I didn’t want him smoking sixty fags a day. I wanted him to stop drinking himself stupid and smoking himself dead. I described Dad’s bypasses to him blow by blow and told him about the writer Dee Wells having half her leg amputated because of smoking. ‘But why?’ he asked, and I explained about the blood system, and clots, atherosclerosis and nicotine, the hardening of arteries, the risk of embolism.

Ten days later we had another argument, explained by a letter I wrote from Paris but didn’t post:

30.6.92

Dear Robert

Here I am on the steps of Chopin’s tomb, so of course you cross my mind.

Yes I hope we are on speaking terms. Foolish not to be. But when at one a.m. a fellow has a choice between being with a woman who is crazy about him or going for another drink, and he chooses to go for another drink, the woman would be foolish not to hear what she is being told. And when he defends himself by saying ‘But this is how I am’ she would be foolish not to defend herself against him. When I invite you in it is because my feelings for you are uppermost in my heart. When I hold you off it is because your lack of feelings for me are uppermost in my mind. Meanwhile I have a pregnancy to look after and a life to try to make sense of after it has been turned upside down and I have to go to bed early and no doubt alone. None of this means I don’t wish you well.

xx L

Back in London his messages went from ‘Give us a call’ to ‘Still not in … hm’ to ‘Lou, please ring me, I hope you’re OK’ to ‘Give me a fucking call’. In the end we spoke. He thought I was giving him an ultimatum. I said yes I was, but it wasn’t about our relationship, it was about him. It was, Grow Up.

There now. Was that a moment? The polyhedron of missed opportunities flashes me another possibility as it whirls slowly by. He saw an ultimatum. What if I’d let him define his own ultimatum, and respond to it as he wished? What then?

A month’s silence followed. Then he was there at a party: for the first three hours I avoided him, but he needed to talk me through Ravel’s string quartet in F, quoting Debussy and Stravinsky (‘bespectacled little gay Russian dwarf’ – was that sardonic or reverent?). I was to notice the pizzicato in the basses. Later he curled up asleep around a candle in the garden. We shared a cab, stopped for a curry. I got to bed at 1.45; he wanted to sleep on my sofa. I pointed out it is cruel to want to sleep on the sofa of a woman who is crazy about you. I said, what if I sneak out in the middle of the night and make passionate love to you in your sleep? He had the grace to leave. I felt that his needs were so big in his eyes that he saw no others. I thought I knew his feelings. But I thought I knew everything, and if I didn’t I’d decide, just to keep things under control. Now I’m not so sure. I gave him the chocolate piano again. I said, take it away, any way I dispose of it will be too symbolic. I was four months pregnant, and my embryo was growing eyelashes.

There was a screening of an unforgiving, bleak, heartbreaking documentary he had scored, The Execution Protocol, about death row. Robert’s music pierced through it; a blade of cold light, desperation in the sound of a muted trumpet. I wanted to drink a whisky afterwards, but couldn’t. I gave it to him. Robert’s music has always, whatever else is going on, had the capacity to unravel me, or to rebuild me, or both at once.

The following week we had lunch. He picked me up, and kissed me, and took me to Alastair Little’s where he told me how gorgeous I was and got a stiffy during the fish soup and changed the subject eighteen times a minute. He said, ‘What are you going to live on?’, offered me money ‘you know, if you need some’, and started referring to me as ‘my wife and child’. He wanted to kick off the child’s musical education, and sang to it. We went to hear Katya Kabanova at Sadler’s Wells. He argued with the doorman, fed me early enough (‘by ten thirty or I will scream, it’s not princessy, it’s physical’) and came home with me. He wouldn’t let me go to bed; wouldn’t leave me alone. He was drinking neat Campari and mauling me (in the Northern sense of not leaving someone alone); then holding me. I cried. He mocked me for crying – or I felt he did – and I cursed him. He said, ‘What did I do?’ At 4 a.m. he was still banging on about Jánaček’s atonality and smoking in my bedroom. I left him there passed out when I went to work four hours later, and came back at the end of the day to find a tune written on the back of an envelope, dedicated and directed to me, a little swoopy arrow pointing to my address on the front. And an apology. ‘I’m sorry I upset you. I don’t know what I said but I’m sorry.’

I spent half my time wanting to know where I stood, and the other half running away from it.

Meanwhile Louis came to baby preparation classes with me and pretended to have contractions. I’d met his slow-moving, smiling mother – she was a midwife! – and she’d come to dinner with my parents. The first thing she said to me, in her deep, honeyed Ghanaian voice, was, ‘A baby is a blessing from God. How are you feeling, my darling?’ The new nephew was born and christened; Louis came, and wore a suit. Everybody was in love with Louis by now, except for me.

And then one day Robert had a new girlfriend. He called her Lacrimosa Clark because she wept easily, and also Clarkapart, because she was short like Napoleon Bonaparte, which developed into Wellaparte, because her profile was like the Duke of Wellington’s. When I heard, I cried so hard that Baroness Alacrity sent me flowers at work. My colleagues assumed they were from Robert, cheering me up about whatever it was I was so sad about. What a great guy, they said.

*

My daughter – let’s call her Lola – was born in the evening. She was the most strange and glorious little thing that ever existed. It took forty-eight hours, two inductions and an emergency caesarean. Did I care? Did I hell. I was listening to La Bohème, eating satsumas and translating the libretto for the nurses, as if they were interested, high as a satellite on gas and air. Louis was wearing surgical greens and talking Twi with the midwives. The babe was finally pulled out to the strains of Aretha Franklin singing ‘Dr Feelgood’, and I was fully, fully in love (apart from during the two-hour attack of post-natal depression three days later, when I decided to send her back, as clearly I would never be good enough for her).

Robert came to visit the next morning. He pulled the pleated curtains shut behind him and said ‘Fancy a fuck?’ Then he sat and held her and got that look of amazement, and said, ‘She’s not that black. She could be mine?’

I moved house. I didn’t want my baby to live in a one-room flat. I extended the mortgage and got a place in Shepherd’s Bush, natural home of those who can no longer afford Notting Hill. Home also of Louis. And of Robert. The new place had a little garden to put the pram in. That’s what babies need.

Robert really liked her. I hadn’t expected that. I’d assumed that as a roué he would find babies dull, but far from it. He thought she was just great, called her ‘your pulchritudinous semi-negritudinous offspring’ and would attempt to come and sit smoking in the bathroom with us while I washed her, saying useful things like ‘She’ll need a nappy now, won’t she? Don’t babies need a nappy?’ It became apparent that he was to be my disreputable friend still, companion of nights off, keeper of misbehaviour and preserver of my wild young soul now that I was a clean and decent mother. He and Louis took to each other, and Louis was honoured with a nickname: Enigmus Africanus. Louis babysat when I went out with Robert; Robert babysat when I went out with Louis. But more often, in practice, it meant that when I finally collapsed with exhaustion after a long day’s mothering followed by him keeping me up all hours, he would go and talk to her. One dawn I found him lounging in a chair with an unlit fag and his feet up on the cot, explaining counterpoint. She was fast asleep.

Chapter Seven
London, 1994

I bought piano #3, a weird little square late nineteenth-century thing, in a junk shop for £15. It looked like no piano I had ever seen: much smaller than an upright, more like a low-level cabinet made of walnut or cherry. Inside the strings were rusted and it had moss growing on the swollen dampers. I thought of restoring it somehow, but one visit from Art put paid to that. Art is a soft-spoken, shaven-headed, polo-necked LA jazzer who learnt to tune pianos as apprentice to the ancient blind Jewish man who tuned the instruments in Hugh Hefner’s bunny mansion. His patience is considerable, but it was clear the little piano was, musically speaking, going nowhere. Meanwhile Robert tried to play ‘La Cathédrale Engloutie’ on it, in honour of its internal dampness, and burnt a hole in the top with a neglected cigarette. (This sort of thing happened frequently. I’ve seen him with three on the go.) In the end I gave it to a theatrical props company. It would look good at the back of someone’s parlour in a period drama. Why did I buy it in the first place? Because it was pretty, and £15, and, because I didn’t like having Robert around without a piano for him to play. When he was at the piano, I was happy. And because a proper home, one with a baby in it, needed a piano. Clearly, a Dad thing.

Robert’s work took him to Dublin, so I was able to get some kip. He’d broken up with Lacrimosa Clark. There was an Irish friend, Emer, who he brought round to meet me, which was unusual. She was, like every girlfriend of his I ever met, clever, funny, gorgeous, self-deprecating, warm-hearted, hardworking and very worried about him. They are an excellent array of women. Some – Jackie, Nina (nicknamed Sequin-Smythe, for her double-barrelled surname) whose window he fell out of, Beth from school, Antipodean Cath – have become, or always were, good friends of mine. I met Lacrimosa Clark years later. We spent the whole evening saying to each other ‘I so see what he saw in you’. She said she’d never met anyone since who uses words like ‘detritus’ and ‘homo-sapient’ but could only get three-letter words on the Scrabble board; that she adored Rob but wasn’t an intellectual match for him, that he would be up all night composing and muttering about directors who pissed him off – all of them – and occasionally bursting into the room (usually naked) to holler ‘you know NOTHING about fucking Chopin’ – ‘and sadly he was right’. She told me she had been jealous of how moved he was by my daughter’s birth. Something in me likes the same women he does.

*

I went to Peru, where I chummed up with Centre Forewart’s sister Anna. I was writing the biography of my grandmother. Robert and I spent New Year’s Day up to our elbows in Szechuan crab at Poons in Whiteley’s. He bought me a pair of pink velvet Indian pyjamas for a late Christmas present, only his credit card failed and the shop assistant was instructed to chop it up, physically, with scissors, so I paid instead. John Schlesinger’s Cold Comfort Farm, for which Robert had written the soundtrack, was on at the cinema there. His name was on the poster.

On Thursday nights Lola went to her father’s, and it became a habit to spend Thursday evenings with Robert. We went to concerts, watched videos of what he was writing the score for so I could explain the plot to him, played pool at the Carlton Club on the corner of my street. This was a late Victorian dance hall, one of four built by an Irish navvy magnate, one for each of his four daughters, in the north, south, east and west of London. Only this western one survives. (For some years now it has been the music venue Bush Hall.) The ceiling was high and dim, the lights low, the plasterwork ornamental and the company mainly off-duty police. You could order a cheese toastie via the little phone on the wall beside each vast green baize table. Andy who ran it played golf and lived on milk because of his ulcers; he would never let a lady pay for a drink, and gave both me and my child lifetime membership. At least, he never let me pay for membership and he always let her pop in for a pee if during potty training she was taken short up the road.

Phone numbers Robert uses are in the back of my diaries from these years; his gas and electricity bills fall from between their leaves. He came round three or four times a week; brought me food, took me to lunch. One pub he liked was just round the corner from Lola’s nursery school. There had been builders next door to his house for a year now. During those noisy days he would work or sleep in my quiet house, only going home to work all night. He didn’t sleep with me though. No, he wasn’t my boyfriend. But he came and went as he pleased.

For a year or two I was seeing an Argentine musician, Julio, when he came from Rome for his concerts and recording. I recall a morning: Julio was there because we had spent the night together. Louis was there because I was going to work, and he had come to look after the baby. And Robert turned up, wild-eyed and hair on end, up-all-night-with-a-deadline written all over him, looking for coffee and company. I recall a knife with which I had been buttering toast flying out of my hand in a great curve across the kitchen, and the three of them looking at it, and me, and each other, each knowing who the other two were, laughing in their various ways, and the baby thumping on the tray of her high-chair.

I felt safe in those days. Louis was great; family life was steady, my friend Clare was living in the back bedroom, Julio was a pleasure; Robert was a friend. I had finished the biography, it was to be published; I was writing a novel. I got rid of the tragic little mossy mouldy piano. If there was to be a piano for Robert to play at my house it should be a decent one. He helped me choose it: a little Pleyel boudoir grand with red felt inside and gleaming gold-painted beams, a right showgirl of a piano, with its curly music-stand and tooled legs.

In March we had a joint birthday party; I did all the work but he turned up on time, sober, in a clean shirt with clean hair, champagne and a CD player for my present. He played three complete nocturnes, didn’t try to get off with any of my friends and left – not the last to go – at one thirty. He said he got me the CD player because he needed something decent to listen to music on at my house. Then Emer was about, and I hardly saw him.

*

The birth-related gap ended like this. I’m not pretending to remember what we said, or rewriting. I wrote this down at the time.

I saw Robert tonight leaning on a cherry tree – the wrong man for this clean, child-speckled street. The angles of his body were wrong, leaning and twisted, and he was grubby. He was staring at the sky and for a moment I nearly walked past him, not looking at him as you don’t look at those men, in case they look back, but then he muttered ‘Fuck of a fucking moon’ – and I realised it was him. Unshaven. Smell of vodka and fags. He stared at me and there was something bovine in his look: guarded, resentful, passive, out-of-focus.

‘Robert?’ I said. He frightened me.

‘I’m dead,’ he replied. ‘I’m dead, don’t talk to me,’ and he turned and tried to walk down the street.

I called his name and followed him, and went round in front of him, walking backwards, talking to him, and he tried to dodge me, but he was unsteady and ended up propped against a wall, leaning in to its old red bricks, his face hidden. ‘Go away,’ he said. ‘I’m dead.’

‘The bollocks you’re dead,’ I said. ‘You’re dead drunk.’

‘Not drunk,’ he said.

I thought: It’s my golden boy. This is terrible.

‘Robert,’ I said.

He gave a lurch, and straightened up.

‘You can’t be out here like this. Come home.’

He looked me in the face. His head was doing the drunk head’s dance of minuscule movements.

‘Not now,’ he said, quite clearly. ‘I’ll come round later.’

He flung himself off the wall and down the road, scrabbling in his pocket for a cigarette. His feet seemed magnetised to the ground, heavy. He paused a moment to light the cigarette. His shoulders were hunched over and he had too many clothes on for the golden evening. Pianist posture, I thought, and I wanted to run after him.

He turned up the next day, clean, shaved, fragrant, bearing a bunch of tatty corner-shop chrysanthemums.

‘God you’re gorgeous,’ he said. ‘You are extremely bloody pulchritudinous. You’ve improved. Well done,’ he said, looking round. ‘Sorry about yesterday. I wasn’t drunk actually but there’s this rather evil weed about. I made the mistake of having a drag or two of a friend’s and it completely did me in …’

‘You said you were dead,’ I observed.

‘Well I’m not,’ he said, slightly pettishly. ‘Can I come in? How are you?’

‘I’m all right,’ I said. ‘You should’ve said you were coming, I’d’ve …’

‘I did,’ he said. ‘I told you.’

‘You didn’t say when, I’m worki—’

‘I didn’t know when,’ he said, ‘so how could I tell you?’

He walked through into the sitting room, shaking out a cigarette, heading for the piano. He trailed his fingers across the keyboard, and said, ‘Bet it’s out of tune.’ His hands landed lightly as blossom falling on to a lake, and the notes rippled out. After a dozen bars he stopped and looked at me, expectantly.

‘Don’t stop,’ I said.

‘Yes but this is where you come in,’ he explained.

‘Me?’ I said. ‘I don’t believe I do.’

‘Yes,’ he said, and played the last few bars again, counting over them, ‘two three’, with an exaggerated movement with his head, and a big encouraging smile.

I looked at him blankly.

‘I’ll do it,’ he said. Played the few bars again, and then at the point in question began to sing: ‘Votre âme est un paysage choisi …’ He smiled up at me.

‘I can’t sing that, Robert.’

‘Course you can. Can’t you? You have to. This is the most beautiful song. Fauré. You know it. It’s not easy, I know. How about this one? “Après un Rêve”?’ He played a few bars.

‘Robert, I don’t know them. I’ve no voice. Don’t be such a dork.’

‘Dork,’ he said, and smiled. ‘That’s nice. Dork. I’ve not heard that in years. What do you want to sing then?’

‘I don’t want to sing. I …’

‘Have you had lunch?’ he said. ‘Come to lunch.’

I hadn’t had lunch.

We went and ate fish and drank two bottles of Pouilly-Fumé and were very attractive to each other in the afternoon sun. We went home to my house and did things we hadn’t done in a while, with the window open and the scent of the wisteria wafting in on the breeze.

So, unannounced, undeclared, unofficial, it became, again, kind of, me and Robert. On and off. Friends and lovers. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Sometimes he’d go away for a week or two. We weren’t going out together. It went on for a couple of years, and became domestic. Robert and Louis would watch the rugby together. My lodger Clare’s mother came to visit, and Clare wondered if I could ask Robert to tone down his language. I felt not, as he was, kind of, part of the household.

‘Where’s Robert going?’ Lola asks.

‘He’s going to Wigan,’ I say.

‘No, to the off licence,’ she says. She’s three.

My notebook tells me, ‘Robert was a pig’. Perhaps it was this, also written down at the time:

‘Darling,’ he calls from the other room. ‘Come in here and listen to this. It’s Bill Evans.’ I like Bill Evans and am grateful to Robert for having introduced me to his work. However I have a headache. A thumper.

‘No, sweetheart, I’m going to bed.’

‘Come and listen – just this one.’

‘No, I’ve a headache, I’m going upstairs.’

‘Oh come on, don’t be a spoilsport.’

Is it sport for him to try to make me listen to jazz when my head is thumping?

I start up the stairs, wondering where the paracetamol are.

‘Come on!’ he yells cheerfully. ‘I’ll start it again.’

I turn back down the stairs, and poke my head through the doorway. I don’t want to shout. I don’t like shouting, emotionally or physically. He’s sitting on the floor by the stereo; volume turned up loud.

‘I have a headache and I’m going to bed,’ I say clearly.

‘Ah, come on, Lou – just the first track …’

Wouldn’t a nice lover say ‘Oh, darling’ and turn it down, and try to find a painkiller?

‘No, sit down,’ he says. ‘You have to hear the sax on this …’

‘I’ve said it three times!’ I shout. ‘I HAVE A HEADACHE AND I’M GOING TO BED. What do you mean, “No”? It’s not “no”. It’s true – whether you like it or not. Why are you insisting – I don’t want to! I’m not your toy for you to play with whenever you feel like it! Jesus Christ will you leave me alone!’

He stares at me in amazement. Why am I shouting at him? ‘Barrage!’ he says, mildly.

I stomp out. Upstairs. Painkillers. Into bed, teeth beginning to ache now, pulling the duvet tight. The music comes up from the room below. When it finishes, he starts practising his jazz decorations, his Red Garland twirls. Very bloody restful. Perhaps, I think, rather than fighting about it, I should move my bed to the back room.

I’m too hot, in my red and gold Chinese pyjamas. I’m damned if I’m going to take them off. He’ll come up at three and murmur in my ear: ‘It’s a civilised hour – not dawn yet’ and be all over me. How I used to laugh at that – before I had to get up in the morning. Why doesn’t he notice that there are all kinds of times when children are absent or sleeping and I am awake and available? Why does he come to me when I am murderously, suicidally desperate for sleep as only a mother of young can be? She has asthma and eczema. She doesn’t sleep well. Since her birth I have never had an undisturbed night.

He comes up at three, making no attempt to be quiet. ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘I see you’ve got your Mongolian don’t-fuck-me trousers on. OK. Message received.’ He goes down again to the front doorstep, his counter-asthmatic smoking spot, rattling the door I locked earlier. After a moment or two I smell tobacco smoke.

I don’t know what time it is when he comes up again. I roll away from him as he whispers in my ear how much he loves, how he adores me, how I have the best arse on the planet, how he longs to insert his …

At that I laugh.

‘Insert?’ I say. ‘Insert?’

‘Yeah,’ he says, sensing advantage, and I am laughing, and have had a few hours’ kip, and after all it’s not as if I’d have to do anything.

My daughter wakes at six, and I go to her, accepting without complaint from the child what is so hard to take from the man: your time is not your own, woman. We go down to the kitchen, her bouncing with early morning child glee, me banging into walls with exhaustion. I put her in her high chair with a pile of slices of peeled apple, and fall asleep with my head on the kitchen table.

When I get in from work he’s at the piano in sunglasses with a towel round his waist. He’s just got up. ‘I love your bed,’ he says. ‘I slept really well.’

Chapter Eight
London, Greece, Accra, Cairo, 1995–97

He wanted a holiday, a change, something new. He had been working incredibly hard and drinking to match. He was going to go to Australia. But first we went to Greece together, for ten days. I had to be back in time for the publication of my first ever book.

I remember: Buying a Femidom at Heathrow, and finding it hilarious. The tall stone towers of the Mani. Kardamili, Vathia. Being woken by a nuthatch, and Robert almost weeping with joy about it. Swimming. Tiny domed ruined churches, their frescoes open to the sky. Playing pool, drinking Amstel, him getting annoyed at a fisherman eyeing me up. Him getting brown, putting on some weight, playing with a lobster outside a taverna, making me photograph cats to send to his stepmother, putting jasmine behind his ear and making a peace sign, looking so much better every day. Us at a peaceful, solitary bay, an all-day lunch, so quiet, so beautiful, and two hideously loud military planes flew over incredibly fast and the noise of it was such a shock I burst into tears, and Robert looked at me strangely and said, ‘I didn’t know you had it in you’, and I said ‘What?’ and he said, ‘Such sensitivity’. Me reading Louis de Bernières endlessly on the beach while Robert slept. Me pouring the remains of a bottle of Ouzo out of the window at Vathia so Robert wouldn’t drink it. Me wanting to go to bed, with him, on our last night, and him wanting to stay up drinking alone. Us having a terrible fight about that; me unable to sleep unless we made up, and him refusing to make up. Me reading again all my last morning, on the beach, thinking I bet Louis de Bernières would be a nice boyfriend. Robert finally bothering to get up around lunchtime, saying, ‘I’m sorry, I get prickly when I feel attacked.’ Me saying, ‘Yeah, don’t you just.’ Me leaving; suntanned Robert framed in bougainvillea against the whitewashed wall. Me pursued as far as Kalamata airport by a lunatic pervert trying to drive my car off the road.

And as it turned out, Robert’s ex, Lisette, arrived the next day, with her hired car, her camera to take photos of cats for Kath, etc. I didn’t know that till much later. He said, ‘Oh yeah, it was just an idea, I didn’t know she was actually going to come.’ She said, ‘Bollocks, I had my ticket and everything.’ But at least she wasn’t sleeping with him. I remembered her comment from long before: ‘I was pretty and I was there.’

But I was in London publishing my book: A Great Task of Happiness: the Life of Kathleen Scott. I went on Woman’s Hour. I got nice reviews. A book and a baby. Thirty-four years old. Yes.

In the meantime, a friend of mine, Charlotte, had moved to Italy. Her family had bought a ruin and she was planting vineyards to make wine. I had spent time with her there and another life, an Italian life, had started to develop. (That too was a Dad thing. Wayland was the Observer correspondent in Rome in the 1950s and I had never got over the fact that though I was conceived in Italy I had never, unlike my big sisters, lived there. Such injustice.) I went to Charlotte’s, and Robert was in Australia; then Louis, Lola and I went to Ghana for a family wedding. By the time Robert and I were both back in London it was October. I was missing him badly, and he was avoiding me. I knew why. The entire grapevine, including my own housemate who shared an office with the woman in question, knew why, and told me. He didn’t. In the end I told him.

‘Isn’t there anything you want to tell me?’

‘No,’ he said, looking puzzled and innocent.

‘Not about Victoria, the woman who works in the same office as Clare, who you met at Nina’s party, and who you’ve been seeing for three months, and who’s generally regarded to be your girlfriend?’

‘Oh, that,’ he said.

That week we met every day. Why couldn’t he just be honest about what was going on, given that I never gave him a hard time about anything except drink and lying?

He said: ‘I lie to myself all the time. How can I be honest with you?’

I said: ‘Exactly.’ And, ‘Are you honest with her?’

I had a sense of him then, as a grenade with the pin out. But I was very angry. I told him, we can’t break up because we’re not together, but whatever we have going on, whatever all this has been, it’s over.

Swift and I had it all worked out. He wanted to carry on being his old self with a new person who didn’t know him well, when what he needed was to become a new him.

*

I wrote three novels about an English belly dancer in love with Cairo. Something of Robert crept into the policeman character. The first, Baby Love, was listed for the Orange Prize; I went to the party and spent it with Nina Sequin-Smythe. We picked up Claire Rayner, the agony aunt, and talked about Robert all evening.

I spent time in Cairo, researching. Julio was around. I didn’t see much of Robert, though he’d pitch up sometimes when he was lonely, and I would be polite.

*

In June 1997 I dreamed I had to cut my foot off. It was an epic dream, full of adventure and difficulty in labyrinthine mansions with hanging bridges and invisible enemies. I was sitting panting on a low ledge, having escaped something, and had to cut my foot off. I used a bread knife. Then Lola had a drama, and when that was done we sighed with relief – then remembered the foot. It was sitting there on its own, waxy, yellowish, but not bloody, its surface at the ankle healed over into a slightly flaccid stump.

‘But what about your leg!’ she cried. We turned our attention to my bereft ankle, only to find that it had grown another foot, a perfectly good one. I wriggled the toes, and turned it this way and that, and it was fine. Healthy, plump, pink and operative. I was wearing the black sandals that I had bought to go to Greece with Robert.

We looked back at the forlorn, dismembered foot. We were sorry for it, and picked it up to cuddle it. ‘What should we do with it?’ I wondered.

‘Take it to your mum,’ Lola said.

The next morning I told Lola about the dream. She was fascinated. ‘I know who made you cut it off,’ she said, rather importantly. ‘It was a robber.’

‘Robert?’ I said.

‘Not Robert. Robber. But Robert is a robber,’ she said.

Well of course, to the infant, Robert was a robber. Stole the mother’s time and affections, stole into her mother’s bed, stole peace of mind, stole sleep, stole the heart from the mother and the mother from the child.

‘Why’s Robert a robber?’ I asked.

‘Oh you know,’ she said, going back to her colouring book.

I told my friends about the dream, and what she had said. One suggested a Viking burial – put the foot on a model ship and set fire to it, launched out on the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. Or put it away in a box? No, it would moulder, and smell.

They all knew that Robert was getting married.

Yeah, he was getting married.

I knew the foot was the love I still carried for Robert. I wondered why I was denigrating it. Because I had denigrated it all along. If I could make it small enough and non enough, then it wasn’t even happening, and then no one could mock me for loving such an unfaithful man (There was nothing to be faithful to! It wasn’t like that!) and I wouldn’t be sad when it ended.

The foot floated around behind me all day, as if tied by a string. Of course I was glad not to marry him. The night he came to tell me he was engaged he drank half a bottle of gin, neat, and smoked up a storm; he put on John Coltrane and talked rubbish of the highest order. He was holding my feet, and clutching at me; and the ex-lover in me was saying get off, get off, and the friend was thinking, Jesus. It was a bravura presentation of pre-wedding nerves. I got him as far as the door three times but he stood facing me, still talking, and I couldn’t shut the door in his face. Three times he came back in the house. I said no. Please, he said. No. Please. He leaned against the kitchen door, propped up, his head back, looking about seventeen.

‘You deserve,’ he said, ‘to love and be loved on a regular basis.’ I thought, So do you. Go on. Do it.

The next day I was due to sit for a painter friend who was trying to do an oil-sketch portrait every day for six weeks. I thought I looked OK, despite having cried all night. He painted me wild-haired, bleak-eyed, mad.

‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘How could you tell?’

‘It’s my job,’ he said kindly.

I thought: ‘Some men look at women, and understand us.’

Robert used to. But he’d lost it. He was losing himself. I’d lost him.

*

I went round to my mother’s and told her about the dream and the foot.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘you can leave it with me if that would help.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I think it would.’

That evening my father rang. ‘Your mother told me about the foot,’ he said. ‘We’re looking after it. We thought we might plant it in the garden, see if it might grow?’

The child thought that was a good idea. ‘It could grow a tree with little new feet on it. Then we’d have lots of feet if we needed them.’

*

The wedding was in August. He invited me the night before; I didn’t go. The wedding albums are under the piano. I don’t look at them. I’ve been told it started well and they were happy. At the time, of course he didn’t confide in me. He was busy elsewhere.

I went to dinner once. Robert showed me round: his music room, his family grandfather clock in the hall. I felt like a pair of sticks walking, dry and pointless and about to snap. In 1998 their son was born. Robert brought him over sometimes, in his buggy. He adored his child; absolutely adored him. He’d be jiggling the buggy with his foot, chatting and joking with him while trying to smoke in the opposite direction. He was working hard and, the times I did see him, drinking a lot. His wife always looked great.

Once I went into our local Nepalese restaurant to pick up a takeaway. It was known as the Office, for the time Robert spent working in there – and there he was, working, at a back table. I hadn’t seen him for perhaps a year or more. He looked up, gestured to a beer on the table, and said: ‘You took yer time. That’s for you—’

If I don’t say much about the marriage, I mean no disrespect – quite the contrary. I’m not ignoring it, denigrating it, or writing it out of history. But I wasn’t there. I don’t know about it, and it’s not my business. They married; they had a child. This story jumps three years while they are doing that.

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