by Louisa Young
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 p
layed 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 L
ondon 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?’