You Left Early

by Louisa Young

  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 br
ightly 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 sta
llion’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.