You Left Early

by Louisa Young

  *

  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’, spo
ken 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.