You Left Early

by Louisa Young

  ‘So you don’t know it.’

  I gave up.

  ‘If you listen to it,’ he said, ‘it’s all in there. It’s just a fucking catastrophe, but it doesn’t stop. It goes completely mad, but the theme keeps coming, but you know it’s all over, this fucking funeral march … the scherzo tries to cheer you up but you know it’s all bollocks, and the finale, Jesus, there’s these little scraps of Schubertian birdsong in a fucking catastrophic vortex, and the guy was dying, he was dead a month later, thirty-one years old, but this fucking skylark won’t stop, it won’t die … Syphilitic cunt …’

  I closed my eyes.

  ‘Darling,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t call me darling,’ he said. ‘You call everybody darling.’

  ‘There’s lots of people I love.’

  ‘Subtext, you don’t love me any more than you love all of them, whoever they might be. Subtext, you don’t love me that much. Which I quite understand, though you might be woman enough to admit it. You don’t love me, and I can’t blame you. ’

  ‘You know I love you.’

  He started laughing. ‘Without the piano, my modicum of talent as a decomposer, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Without those things you wouldn’t be you! You can’t just abolish part of you for some academic experiment in hating yourself …’

  He stared on out of the window. His head swung infinitesimally.

  After that he mostly talked about Bartók, Red Garland, Art Tatum, diminished sevenths, the circle of fifths, syphilis and the Tierce de Picardie. I went to bed. Later, he went out. Soon enough I was lying half asleep, grateful that we hadn’t shouted at each other, that he hadn’t stormed off at least, and wondering whether forgiveness was in fact something one couldn’t do by choice after all, and dismissing the grey nebulous thought that recovery was surely not meant to be like this. And he, presumably, was staring at the streaking lights of the traffic through the grime of the telephone box window, or sitting bony-arsed in a doorway, his fag-end burning his fingertips.

  *

  He said, again: ‘I am the wrong man.’

  ‘That’s for me to decide,’ I said. ‘And you’re not. You’re the right man. You’re funny, and handsome, and kind, and intelligent, and talented beyond belief, and you kiss like a dream, and you have that look in your eye …’

  ‘What look? A bit vulnerable?’

  ‘Yes, that too.’

  ‘Apparently girls like that. So I’m told.’

  ‘And I can talk to you, and when we have a conversation you pick it up again the next time we meet, as if you’ve been thinking about it, at least you used to—’

  ‘Well of course I’ve been thinking—’

  ‘Not everybody does that,’ I said, and he was bemused.

  *

  Rereading this, I think: ‘I may have written this before.’ I’m not sure. Alcoholism is repetitive. I wonder how many of my brain cells his alcoholism destroyed. And I see that alcoholism is profoundly selfish, and feeds off kindness.

  *

  ‘For example,’ said my agent, after reading a draft of How Do You Like Living Here?, ‘When he gets drunk before the concert, the big charity gala – we’re given no reason why he did that …’

  If there was a reason, I’d have given it. There being no reason is the point. Reason, as I had learned to my cost, has no sway, and serves only to torment those who cling to it in these irrational areas. Or – OK. He got drunk because he was an alcoholic.

  ‘… and we would have an opportunity to sympathise with him, because as things stand he’s not very sympathetic …’

  No, he’s not, is he?

  ‘And it seems to me the two women are basically the same woman …’

  Yes. Alcoholics turn every woman into that same woman – the Heartbroken Nag.

  ‘… and it’s just the story of a man’s decline, really … it’s pretty harrowing.’

  Yes, it’s pretty harrowing.

  ‘But you have that lush setting, Italy in the sixties, all that Venice and sunsets and cocktails, that’s all great …’

  That was the one bit of the novel that was made up.

  ‘The problem,’ said my agent. ‘is that you set up this question, here on page two, where the daughter is on the terrace, wondering whose fault it is – a lovely opening, by the way, and a very good question – but it’s clear, all the way through, that it’s his fault. There is no question, at any stage, that it’s anyone’s other than his fault.’

  And there it was again. Fault.

  That addiction is the addict’s responsibility, but it’s not their fault, is a significant part of the Twelve-Step approach, a way in which the addict can acknowledge that he is not in charge of everything. Step One: I admitted I am powerless. How can something be someone’s own fault, if they are powerless?

  Perhaps both that novel and this memoir represent me clinging desperately to something that protects me from my greatest fear – to whit, that if I allow myself to perceive what many others believe, that an alcoholic’s behaviour is entirely his/her own fault, and that when Robert repeatedly told me that I’d chosen the wrong man he was for once telling the truth, I will be swamped by an impossible toxic flood of emotion because he was in fact a bastard and I am, still, a fool.

  *

  That March I was to do an event at the Oxford (‘fucking Poxford’, he called it) Literary Festival. It was our birthday weekend, and I, still living in La La Land, thought we might make a nice weekend of it.

  Robert suggested a charming seventeenth-century place at the top of St Giles. He was hot and ill and wanted to lie down, but he came to my reading and was adorably proud, and when a youngster asked were any of the characters based on real people I was able to point Robert out as the original of Sergei the manky one-eared Rachmaninoff-obsessed cat with the heart of gold, and he miaowed at them. The next day was his birthday, and Mother’s Day as well. He slept late, then we ordered brunch in the restaurant among the daffodils and the good mothers of Oxford being taken out by their children. I was thinking Isn’t this lovely! in a terrible artificial voice, even in my head, and just as the classy cheeseburgers arrived he collapsed dramatically, on the floor: the sudden sharp roar that kicks it off, stiff, frothing, shaking, eyes rolling back. Now, though, I know what to do.

  An ambulance came, and while they were putting him on the stretcher a waiter gave me the bill, even though we hadn’t touched the food and Robert was being taken off in an ambulance. I paid it, and followed on to the John Radcliffe, and there I was in a corridor, waiting.

  The next day I read the bill and saw it had a Bloody Mary on it. Robert said the waiter made a mistake, he ordered a Virgin Mary, why, what was I trying to say? And I was thinking about fits coming when you don’t drink after a long period of heavy drinking, and about the benefit of the doubt, and to whose benefit was it.

  Two days later Robert got himself arrested. ‘A fight with someone dropping litter,’ he said. Ojay rang from the Office saying Robert was at the bus stop, covered in blood. Two friends were visiting: Osei’s widow, and a friend whose husband was having an affair. We had been talking about how in any group of women at any time there will be at least one whose marriage/relationship was a shambles because of what men do – die, have affairs, drink – and I was so embarrassed, sad, eroded, because they had been thinking I was the happy one.

  I dragged Robert home, physically, as his legs were giving way. The presence of my friends, their clear, calm eyes, their natural shock at this situation which to me seemed almost normal because of the long, slow decline that had led to it, made me get him an appointment with a neurologist. If he wasn’t drinking, as I still desperately wanted to believe, then he was clearly ill in some other way.

  At the beginning of April I went away to Italy and planted fruit trees. I could, looking back, feel bad about leaving him alone and going about my own life and business with Lola. I can think myself inside out with how things could, should, would or might have been
– but I was beginning to take on board that while it is foolish to provoke a crisis it is equally foolish to try to prevent a crisis which is determined to happen. This was very much against my nature. I always wanted to put things right.

  I said, as I went, don’t use the house while I’m away. I came back to find he’d stayed there all through my absence. There were empty vodka halves in peculiar places, left there, he said, after he’d invited Mark the neighbour in, and Mark had brought some friends. I neither liked nor trusted Mark the neighbour, a semi-violent and incomprehensible junkie whose only merit was that if your kid’s bike was nicked Mark could probably get it back for you. The idea that having Mark and his mates round to my house was the excuse that would get Robert off the hook was laughable. Mark coming round was neither true, nor any defence. The truth was, Robert was drinking and I was paralysed.

  I didn’t like thinking of my house as my house. My house, my bed, my life. I wanted it all to be ours. Me, Lola, him, harmonious.

  That gave impetus to a string of appointments, made, missed, and finally, kept: 31 May, brain scan.

  *

  I had my own appointments. I was seeing a counsellor regularly by this time, an icy-haired six foot four Viking of immense tenderness and wisdom, who I got free on the NHS because my boyfriend was an alcoholic. I made him cry once. He said, ‘Louisa, why is it so hard for you?’ in such a sweet way, with tears in his eyes – though it occurs to me now the question should have been ‘Louisa, why is it taking you so bloody long?’ I told Robert, and he said, ‘He’s in love with you.’ But he was just sympathetic. He sent me to a family support group, to which I only went once, because this was not about family. Family was my daughter and her father, which remained a healthy, affectionate set-up. This was about a lover, and that seemed to me very different. I felt that with Robert not being Lola’s father, and not actually living with us, and her father being very present and a good and lovely dad, the trouble was between me and Robert, and therefore still not really anything to do with these people with alcoholic relatives. Also, on that one visit, I received a gift of such magnitude that I had to take it away and think about it. A father and son started talking about how much they had both wanted to murder their wife/mother, and how they had first discussed how they would do it. They laughed about this. Others in the circle laughed too.

  ‘Weedkiller in the tea!’ the man said. ‘Not very imaginative.’

  ‘I was going to push her downstairs,’ the son said.

  I had been going to push Robert down the stairs. No one would have ever known. With his bad ankle and his unsteadiness it could easily have been an accident. I had mulled over the possible permutations with an Agatha-Christie-like eye for detail.

  Is fantasising about killing the person we love so much an aspect of the family illness?

  It is powerlessness. I was desperate for something to go on: proof, reassurance, comfort, reconciliation, reparation. He could not give me anything. Certainly not any of those. The situation could not function, because it was based on a big fat lie. The constant and ferocious grinding of reality against pretence makes progress, stasis, decline, breath, everything, impossible. It is untenable. So all kinds of absurdities, wickednesses and lunacies offer themselves. Many years later, Robert wrote, of this period: ‘Louisa put up with it’. No, my love, that was not what I was doing.

  The imbalance in our living arrangements had come to represent other imbalances which to a reasonable person were unreasonable and to an addict were vital. I said, flush with reasonableness: ‘Well, if I can’t come to your flat, after all these years, you can’t come to my house. How about that? You have keys to mine. Give me keys to yours.’ And he gave me back his keys to mine.

  *

  On the kitchen table I found one of his questionnaires:

  Questions to Help You Find Alternatives to Anxious Predictions

  What am I predicting will happen?

  What is the evidence to support what I am predicting?

  What is the evidence against what I am predicting?

  What might be an alternative view on the situation?

  What evidence do I have from the past that would be helpful now?

  What is the worst that can happen?

  What is the best that can happen?

  Realistically, what is most likely to happen?

  If the worst does happen, what could be done about it?

  If someone I cared about had the same worry, what advice would I give them?

  What are the costs and benefits of worrying about this? Divide 100 points between the costs and benefits (i.e. 40–60, 30–70, etc.)

  I applied it to me, and I applied it to him, and then I took the line Churchill took with Hitler over the invasion of Poland in 1939: if he didn’t do what was necessary (withdraw from Poland/demonstrate sobriety), within a set timescale, then we would be over. If he couldn’t demonstrate sobriety to me within six months, I would no longer be his girlfriend.

  But Robert was not Hitler. I was not Churchill. I was in love with him – not just with what he used to be or could be or what I wanted him to be, but with the actual him, battered and snarling inside the sticky web of his addiction.

  His response was to lock himself away. He said I’d banned him, and refused to see me. He rang me most days, sometimes chatty and amiable as if nothing was wrong; sometimes a vitriolic slug in a puddle, miserable, vicious, drunk and hurt, rank and hissing, immobilised, interminable. I would put the phone down, and go and do something else; he’d still be there half an hour later, talking to the ether.

  Three weeks in, he told me he was in a deep, deep depression. I wasn’t allowed in; he wouldn’t come out. How many reasons are there why an alcoholic locks himself away, all alone?

  In his Recovery papers, he describes this as ‘Louisa threw me out’.

  That summer, both my parents were in hospital.

  *

  Robert had not read the novel. He was willing to read it, he said. He professed to want to read it, but so far he had not, and as long as he remained locked up in his flat, chances are he wouldn’t. Feeling bad about having shown it to my agent when Robert had not seen it, I offered to post it. Robert said no, it might get lost.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said, down the phone, old-fashioned receiver tucked between ear and shoulder, half an hour into a long conversation. ‘I can always print out another one.’

  ‘You know I don’t open my post,’ he said.

  This was going nowhere.

  ‘You can’t write it till I die,’ Robert said, with some bolshy pride. ‘You don’t know how it’s going to end so you can’t construct it.’

  ‘I don’t want you to die,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not going to,’ he said.

  ‘Yes you are,’ I said. ‘We all do.’

  ‘Not yet,’ he said.

  When is ‘yet’, anyway?

  I opened a new document and called it Structure. I stared at it, then saved it and went to make a cup of tea. It is still empty. Even now, every now and again, I open it, to laugh.

  *

  He saw nobody. He had no friends – he’d gone silent, or scared them off. Everybody still loved him as far as they knew, but he was one great big Piss Off personified. The aggression had long ago overtaken the wit, the obsessions and intrusions became unbearable. Nobody was around to see the naughty golden boy, our little genius, our sharp-tongued, foul-mouthed Orpheus, slide away, over the limits, from designated wunderkind to world-class fuck-up.

  I only saw him twice in those six months. In August, he and I went together to the funeral of a sweet neighbour, a hardcore drinker and smoker, lung cancer. The second time, in the street, I was driving, near his flat. Looking out for him? Perhaps. He tried to run away from me when he saw the car. I parked and followed him. ‘I haven’t seen you for so long,’ I said, and he said, ‘I’m not fit to be seen.’ He tried to get away, and when he couldn’t he turned his face into a privet hedge, as an ostrich turns to
sand. I hugged him and told him I wanted him well, I loved him. I persuaded him to come home, made him bathe, tried to make him eat, took his dirty clothes and gave him clean ones. But then he left the house, saying: ‘I’m going back to my private world now’. It was twenty years since he’d told me, in the street, that he was dead.

  *

  My piano, sitting in my house, seemed utterly pointless.

  ‘I can’t bear it,’ I told him, ‘taking up the whole bloody room, just lying there like … like …’

  ‘Like my coffin?’ he said, and yes, that was what I hadn’t said.

  ‘Don’t get rid of it,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to die.’

  *

  He said, ‘I’ve done nothing, have I?’

  I said, ‘You’ve sat and watched as I drift off into the distance.’

  ‘Are you in the distance?’ he said.

  ‘Further every day,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t go,’ he said.

  ‘I’m doing nothing,’ I said. ‘For years I’ve been chucking balls into your court, every ball in the world is in your court, I have invented balls, pulled them out of thin air, in order to have something to throw into your court and give you another chance to do something …’

  ‘I’ve done nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Oh you’ve done so much.’

  ‘I can’t walk,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘I haven’t eaten for a week,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘If I can prove to you – if I can get better – can I get you back?’ he said.

  Was I leaving him to make him try harder? Was I leaving him because it was killing me? Because it was killing him? Because I had become part of the problem?

  ‘I’m not leaving you,’ I said. ‘I’ve just stopped trying to keep you.’

  I felt as if I had been pressing my hands to the edge of a doorway for years, and now I had stepped out of the doorway, and my hands flew up of their own accord, free.

  *

  I gave Robert a print-out tied with a piece of string, with a card (Van Gogh’s ‘Almond Blossom’, 1890) saying that it wasn’t finished, but I wanted him to see it, to understand my side, to see how I saw his side, to recognise that there simply shouldn’t be sides. I didn’t expect him to read it.