You Left Early

by Louisa Young

  And then the questions invite a litany describing appalling drunk behaviour, seen clearly now in sobriety and summarised, finally, thus: ‘All good things had to be better. Good conversation – more booze. Good sex – more booze. Good food – more booze. Good music – more booze. Good travel – more booze. All bad sad shocking things had to be either glamourised or suppressed by booze. The most-feared state? – Mundanity. Drink to find something out of nothing, or drink to achieve oblivion. Mundanity was a dent, an insult to my supremely interesting character. Balance, normality, routine, rhythm: they are what I insanely labelled as mundanity.’

  The early Romantics, the poetic, melancholic, tubercular ones, Chopin, Keats, Shelley, the Brontës, sought to rise above human mundanity by desiring, and desiring to desire, more than others do. Later Romantics became embittered and self-destructive; numbed, and tormented by their numbness. Robert and I were both susceptible to both of these. Both of us wanted more, suffered desperate ebbing and flowing, ended up numb.

  I can’t bear the idea that I was addicted to him. It seems so mean. Perhaps it is as futile to try to pin down what addiction is as to try to pin down what love is.

  The book asks him if his insanity tells him that things outside himself – drinking, for example – can make him whole. He responds: ‘Nothing outside myself can make me whole or solve my problems except for one thing. Love. Or the love is inside me. And I can inspire it in others.’

  And does he have ‘any fears about coming to believe’? He certainly had doubts. ‘I can often feel the desire of many of the people in the meetings to stay sober and their desire for me to stay sober too. It is certainly a power greater than myself, but surely this is humanitarian not spiritual? My other higher power is my dead father. He was immensely proud of me getting sober. The pride that touched me is still and always will be alive. But is this spiritual?’

  ‘In what do I believe?’

  ‘The power of nature and the power of music.’

  ‘Do I have problems accepting that there is a power or powers greater than myself?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can a power greater than myself help me to stay sober?’

  ‘It is doing,’ he wrote. ‘The most inspiring aspects of sobriety are enjoyment, and experiencing pain, sorrow, hardship as constructive things from which I can learn.’

  ‘What evidence do I have that a higher power is working?’

  ‘I am not drinking.’

  ‘What do I consider examples of sanity?’

  ‘The ability to look at people, listen, take time to respond in a cogent, respectful way.

  ‘Daily discipline and structure. Allowing structure to be flexible.

  ‘Having the self-discipline to suppress obsessions with eating too much, working too much and fucking too much (if only the chance were there) …’

  That pulled me up. Of course the chance was there. Or he was expressing a desire for sex with someone else? Had I had deceived myself in him again? Was trusting him insane of me? Do we all insist on believing the best about a lover, in the face of really quite incontrovertible evidence, because we so want a prince or princess to call our own? Do all lovers idealise each other in some personal and idiosyncratic way, then hate each other for not living up to the idealisation?

  It left me unsettled, wondering about my own self-delusory ways. Humans do love a delusion. We lie, because we prefer good news. Is love an insanity, like the ancient Romans thought? I don’t want to think that. I know it’s irrational – but reader, I loved him. The point is not to make him out as a wonderful human being. He clearly wasn’t – and was, like most of us. What makes a person special? Can we be unilaterally special? Or are we only special insofar as we are special to other, possibly deluded, people?

  I wonder what would I consider examples of my own insanity? What changes in my thinking and behaviour would have been necessary?

  Back to the orange notebook.

  ‘In what areas of my life do I need sanity now?’ persists the book. ‘Trying to find an equilibrium in my relationship with Louisa,’ he wrote. ‘One minute she is beautiful, voluptuous, talented, sexy, loving, funny and kind; the next she is ugly, fat, opinionated, pompous and affected.’

  Oh I know this wasn’t written for my eyes. And yes I frequently found him charmless and revolting. I breathe carefully and take comfort in the fact he says much the same about his music: ‘Certain passages of my music I think are wonderful then soon after the same passages seem to be below average. Basically, try to develop a more quasi-objective critique of my work.’ I slot myself into this sentence, in music’s place: ‘Certain passages of my girlfriend I think are wonderful then soon after the same passages seem to be below average. Basically, try to develop a more quasi-objective critique of my girlfriend.’

  Still, seven compliments to five insults, that’s a win, isn’t it?

  No. I hate him, for a while.

  And then the book suggests that finding ourselves able to act sanely in a situation with which we were never able to deal successfully before is evidence of sanity, and wants to know if Robert has had experiences like that. ‘My father’s death,’ he wrote. ‘Shocking, unexpected. The death of a man who I loved dearly. And Louisa’s father’s death. My thoughts were: I’m sober now – I can help her. This was the first time I could help the wounded instead of poor wounded me, the victim, needing help from her.’

  And wasn’t it just. It had been transformative for me – what I needed from him, and he knew it. During that hard time of loss when Wayland died, having Robert at my side gave me a peace I would not otherwise have achieved, and an experience with Robert of love as it should be.

  ‘How is restoration a process?’ asks the book.

  ‘It is a life-long quest, the roots and the fertile soil of restoration,’ Robert replies. ‘Many aspects are storing for the first time: an exhilarating mental process.’ I am seeing the book now as a therapist; Robert lying on the couch, dimly lit.

  ‘How am I demonstrating open-mindedness in my life today?’ she asks (she’s a woman, certainly. Her voice has become slightly sing-song).

  ‘I listen and try to take in what is being said before responding,’ he says. ‘Not that often, I have to say, but it’s improving.’

  I want to interrupt. I was there on the end of the couch, diving in with such detail, analysing, overanalysing, trying to be with him. Was he saying he had never listened? That he responded without listening? I recalled the sessions at Clouds, when his ears first opened.

  Christ, this was exhausting.

  ‘Is there something that I am willing to do now that I was previously unwilling to do?’

  ‘Tell the truth. Bathe and shave. Communicate in a civilised fashion with my ex-wife. Develop a relationship with Louisa’s daughter. It’s happening, slowly. I’m making no direct amends yet but she can see that I’m making her mother happier, I invite her out occasionally and she knows that if she needs to discuss with me the damage I caused to her, I am ready.’

  Gosh. I wonder if she did know that.

  Much later, it was pointed out to me that Robert reserved a particular kind of wariness towards those who he saw as gatekeepers to the people whose love he needed: his wife, re his son; Kath, re John; Lola, re me.

  *

  Kath died in February 2010. The funeral was in the same church as John’s; the wake at the same hotel. Robert noted her good qualities from the funeral address: ‘Letter writing, very good at choosing presents, hostess, hospitable to a varied range of guests, always spoke her mind, ruthless honesty, dealing with two awkward Lockharts who to quote Robert were never wrong.’

  Friends of Robert from his AA meeting came; they and I looked at each other with that curious distant intimacy that comes with knowing you share a great deal, much of it embodied in the man there beside you, and yet you don’t know each other at all. We exchanged the AA smile. Later we sat with Kath’s sister Chris in a cafe, and Chris gave me a beautiful little ring of Kath
’s, with a tiny ruby, and I felt like family, bonded in with Kath and John just as they left. We went to where the rest of John’s ashes were buried with Auntie Sybil, and then up to Pat’s grave on the moor, and Robert stared at it and laid flowers. I’d said in the florist on the roundabout, we need flowers for three graves.

  That night Robert and I stayed at his childhood home. We sat on the floor and went through boxes of his old toys. We built his grey plastic castle, and read to each other from his Beano annuals, and packed up four galloping plastic horses from his Bonanza covered-wagon playset, to bring home. In the freezer we found lasagne that Kath had made, and we had that for supper, as if she had cooked for us. We slept in his boyhood bed.

  *

  ‘What fears are getting in the way of my trust?’

  ‘My increasing fantasies about being able to drink normally. Quite rare, but disturbing. My increasing desire for a drink – 2–3 times a week, almost always in bed after midnight. That the whole concept of trust is a pile of crap invented by pissheads for pissheads – the sardonic cynic still lurks in my darker areas.’

  ‘Have I sought help from a power greater than myself?’

  ‘Yes. People who care for me, indeed the majority of AA members, don’t want me to have a drink. And, when my girlfriend was shockingly aggressive and critical and unnecessarily so. Deep breaths and first line of the serenity prayer. I apologised. I thought, even knew, that I was not out of order. But so what. In her eyes I was.’

  His offence had been wanting to chat about the menopause with a mutual male friend, and using me and my body – which wasn’t anyway menopausal – as a rather graphic example. I didn’t feel that the physical intimacy he had as my boyfriend was something for him to use in public chat. But shockingly aggressive? In the grand scheme of things I really don’t think so – I was asking him not to embarrass me. But to tender, newly unanaesthetised Robert? Evidently. An unfortunate aspect of all this was that he remained more sensitive to his own issues, and to those of other addicts, than to those of others in general. He had become more patient: ‘There are usually good reasons for why someone behaves like a cunt,’ as he observed. He once made me chase a drunken down-and-out man down Queensway in order to give him a note he had scribbled, with his phone number and an offer of support. I loved that he wanted to do this. But I was still waiting for him to do something, anything, for me. It was too difficult for him. Again, he did not like me being upset about anything to do with him. It scared him, because I was always the strong one, and that brought back guilt, which made him want to drink. All of which, simply, meant I had to suppress the considerable concerns and fears and anger and above all the massive desire for reassurance that I was carrying. He couldn’t handle it. So, in general, I held them in. How could he ‘know’ that he was not ‘out of order’? He hurt my feelings and embarrassed me. Fact. And, right or wrong, I did feel that if a ledger had been kept from the very beginning, I was so stratospherically in credit that perhaps now a tiny bit of the benefit of the doubt might have come my way. But the addict in recovery remains vulnerable, sensitive and self-obsessed. Those who love an addict basically have to put up with it. Even at the expense of their own feelings. It is an emotionally expensive kind of love.

  Charlotte, my friend in Italy, asked me recently if I would have gone through with it, if I’d known in advance. Ah, but only by going through it do we find out. And, at risk of repeating myself: that is why I am writing this book: I can tell how it was for me. And, a bit, he can tell you how it was for him.

  Here is the end of Robert’s step work, on the penultimate page of Step Two, with this ironic heading:

  MOVING ON

  – just what John advised him to do, years before.

  *

  I was very glad to finish transcribing the papers. Rereading them in this impersonal font, I take a more distanced look. And I see more clearly how addiction at every stage, whether it is active (i.e. the sufferer is using their drug or drinking the alcohol) or in recovery, is of its nature a most self-absorbed condition. There is something in the idea that in AA the obsession is transferred: all the energy that previously went into drinking now goes into actively not drinking. Doing the Steps, as Robert observed, is not an exercise you tick off; meetings are not something you can ever go to enough of. It is a way of life, serious and demanding in unexpected ways. I looked ahead in the Step Working Guide to the further ten and a half steps and questions. It takes time, courage and emotional graft to make the ‘searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves’ required by Step Four, to answer the eighty-two questions involved. Step Eight asks for a ‘list of all persons we have harmed’, and the willingness to make amends to them all. I don’t know if I could do that. I’m bloody delighted that I don’t have to.

  Life in recovery is a thousand times better, because the alcoholic is no longer killing himself, no longer locked away incommunicado, and no longer a drunken arsehole. But it would be folly for the one who loves the alcoholic to think this new stage will make everything OK. The alcoholic does not just become a non-alcoholic when they get sober.

  When addiction has its hands on the controls, it is never going to steer its person towards healing, because healing threatens the addiction’s existence. The addict has to wrest control of the vehicle, the brain and body, from that dark pilot and then shout it down, over and over, till it is a heap in the corner. Every time the addiction even shivers the addict has to shout it down again. And when addiction is down the addict has to keep it there, by constant vigilance – while also steering the vehicle safely and also beginning to learn how to deal with the ancient fears, damages, sorrows and angers which admitted the addiction in the first place. Just because you’ve got the beast in a corner now doesn’t mean your initial issues are dealt with. And meanwhile, everyday life still has to be maintained. It’s quite a multitask.

  The person who loves the alcoholic needs to get on board with the world of recovery. I went to meetings – AA open meetings with Robert, as well as Al-Anon meetings. I read the literature. I talked to friends also in recovery, and to the people who love them. It is something of a full-time job. But it brings understanding, without which love is empty, a self-indulgent fantasy. And isn’t love, anyway, always, a full-time job?

  Part Five

  2010–12

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Paris, London, Spring 2010

  There’s a photograph of him, taken on the Paris Métro in the 1980s, huddled up in his overcoat, wearing a balaclava Kath had knitted for him. He’s grinning evilly up at the photographer, his friend Richard, who, Robert said, ‘named this item Mutilé de Guerre’, after the signs they used to have reserving seats on the Métro for wounded soldiers. I had it above my desk as I wrote about my soldier, Riley, who lost his jaw in the trenches. Next to it was a photo of Robert’s great-grandfather Jack Ainsworth, in uniform, and another, of Jack’s grave in France.

  Robert was a very commendable cripple; patient, generous, helpful in letting others know how to treat him, utterly without self-pity, determined. And he was a fine recovering alcoholic: straight, open, devoted. Yes, he could have given up smoking, and done some exercise. But he had been sober three years. The future was thinkable about. The music he’d been writing, what happens when Lola leaves home. Fantasies about a place outside Wigan, on the moors, or by the sea. We liked the look of our future. It seemed ours. I had another book out (Halo, a children’s novel set in Ancient Greece) and I had a real, aware human man to love, a relief and a pleasure beyond words. In many ways he was like a fifteen-year-old, learning things as if for the first time. ‘All that time you lot spent learning to be normal,’ he said, ‘I was perfecting my left-hand trills.’ Now, he was working towards balance. After he left Camden, despite his disabilities in walking and piano playing, and despite us having been triply bereaved within a year, there was a real spring of the soul. We joked about Steps Eight and Nine, and what amends exactly he’d make to me, when he came to it
. Sobriety and gratitude, sex and proximity, worked their magic. It’s not called making love for nothing. Him living half in Wigan, half in London, worked very well, for both us: mutually independent. Happy. Normal. Slightly dazed by the quiet miracle of there not being much wrong.

  It’s difficult to recognise when a damaged person is unwell in a new way. But in 2010 he was not well enough. He’d had a sore throat all winter. He was tired. He’d seen five GPs over the past two months. ‘Pharyngitis,’ said the first. Then, ‘It’ll go away of its own accord.’ In March we were in Italy, me working on My Dear I Wanted to Tell You; Robert writing music in my old ankle-length white fake-fur coat, stern-eyed. The doctor in Grosseto said he needed tests: go and see the doctor in London. All of us were sad and unnerved because my friend Charlotte’s beloved Great Dane, Messalina, was sick; her breath stank and she was exhausted, and the vet sat in the courtyard looking miserable, saying she wasn’t sick enough yet to put down. The Icelandic volcano delayed our departure, over and over. We drove back across the Alps in a friend’s white van full of mozzarella and tomatoes.

  The GP says, but you were referred to Charing Cross. Robert hadn’t had a letter. He didn’t realise he’d been referred. She looks down his throat. She says, ‘You could go to the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear. They have a clinic today. I’ll make a call. Two o’clock?’

  We could have gone six weeks ago. Robert says, ‘There’s no point thinking about what we could have done.’ Undertone: he could have given up smoking. He could have got into rehab earlier. Alongside that, the GPs could have seen what they were looking at: his history, and so on. He ticks many boxes.

  There is no point. Here is now.

  An overworked young doctor who introduces himself as Mishi jumps up and down to get things. Two students and a nurse stand by, a Greek chorus at the beginning of our drama. I was about to put, our tragedy. But we know better than to assume. Robert and his many lives.