You Left Early: A True Story of Love and Alcohol

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 (#ulink_83e5fb85-a885-5a46-be70-a8b5cb18dcb6)

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 London 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?’

‘Oh, that,’ he said.

That week we met every day. Why couldn’t he just be honest about what was going on, given that I never gave him a hard time about anything except drink and lying?

He said: ‘I lie to myself all the time. How can I be honest with you?’

I said: ‘Exactly.’ And, ‘Are you honest with her?’

I had a sense of him then, as a grenade with the pin out. But I was very angry. I told him, we can’t break up because we’re not together, but whatever we have going on, whatever all this has been, it’s over.

Swift and I had it all worked out. He wanted to carry on being his old self with a new person who didn’t know him well, when what he needed was to become a new him.

*

I wrote three novels about an English belly dancer in love with Cairo. Something of Robert crept into the policeman character. The first, Baby Love, was listed for the Orange Prize; I went to the party and spent it with Nina Sequin-Smythe. We picked up Claire Rayner, the agony aunt, and talked about Robert all evening.

I spent time in Cairo, researching. Julio was around. I didn’t see much of Robert, though he’d pitch up sometimes when he was lonely, and I would be polite.

*

In June 1997 I dreamed I had to cut my foot off. It was an epic dream, full of adventure and difficulty in labyrinthine mansions with hanging bridges and invisible enemies. I was sitting panting on a low ledge, having escaped something, and had to cut my foot off. I used a bread knife. Then Lola had a drama, and when that was done we sighed with relief – then remembered the foot. It was sitting there on its own, waxy, yellowish, but not bloody, its surface at the ankle healed over into a slightly flaccid stump.

‘But what about your leg!’ she cried. We turned our attention to my bereft ankle, only to find that it had grown another foot, a perfectly good one. I wriggled the toes, and turned it this way and that, and it was fine. Healthy, plump, pink and operative. I was wearing the black sandals that I had bought to go to Greece with Robert.

We looked back at the forlorn, dismembered foot. We were sorry for it, and picked it up to cuddle it. ‘What should we do with it?’ I wondered.

‘Take it to your mum,’ Lola said.

The next morning I told Lola about the dream. She was fascinated. ‘I know who made you cut it off,’ she said, rather importantly. ‘It was a robber.’

‘Robert?’ I said.

‘Not Robert. Robber. But Robert is a robber,’ she said.

Well of course, to the infant, Robert was a robber. Stole the mother’s time and affections, stole into her mother’s bed, stole peace of mind, stole sleep, stole the heart from the mother and the mother from the child.

‘Why’s Robert a robber?’ I asked.

‘Oh you know,’ she said, going back to her colouring book.

I told my friends about the dream, and what she had said. One suggested a Viking burial – put the foot on a model ship and set fire to it, launched out on the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. Or put it away in a box? No, it would moulder, and smell.

They all knew that Robert was getting married.

Yeah, he was getting married.

I knew the foot was the love I still carried for Robert. I wondered why I was denigrating it. Because I had denigrated it all along. If I could make it small enough and non enough, then it wasn’t even happening, and then no one could mock me for loving such an unfaithful man (There was nothing to be faithful to! It wasn’t like that!) and I wouldn’t be sad when it ended.

The foot floated around behind me all day, as if tied by a string. Of course I was glad not to marry him. The night he came to tell me he was engaged he drank half a bottle of gin, neat, and smoked up a storm; he put on John Coltrane and talked rubbish of the highest order. He was holding my feet, and clutching at me; and the ex-lover in me was saying get off, get off, and the friend was thinking, Jesus. It was a bravura presentation of pre-wedding nerves. I got him as far as the door three times but he stood facing me, still talking, and I couldn’t shut the door in his face. Three times he came back in the house. I said no. Please, he said. No. Please. He leaned against the kitchen door, propped up, his head back, looking about seventeen.

‘You deserve,’ he said, ‘to love and be loved on a regular basis.’ I thought, So do you. Go on. Do it.

The next day I was due to sit for a painter friend who was trying to do an oil-sketch portrait every day for six weeks. I thought I looked OK, despite having cried all night. He painted me wild-haired, bleak-eyed, mad.

‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘How could you tell?’

‘It’s my job,’ he said kindly.

I thought: ‘Some men look at women, and understand us.’

Robert used to. But he’d lost it. He was losing himself. I’d lost him.

*

I went round to my mother’s and told her about the dream and the foot.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘you can leave it with me if that would help.’