You Left Early: A True Story of Love and Alcohol

‘Normal,’ he said.

‘I know you’re quite a peculiar person,’ I said. ‘That’s fine. You can be peculiar. But don’t be rude and don’t be unkind.’

‘Unkind!’

‘I was worried about you. When you didn’t come back. You don’t drink if you stay here. You don’t stay here if you drink. Simple choice.’

He grunted.

‘And no, I’m not making your risotto for you.’

‘It’s not for me. It’s for you.’

Left to myself, I’d have had four apples for dinner, and no washing up.

‘It’s for both of us,’ he said.

He’s trying to help, I thought.

The risotto was delicious.

It was me who cleared up.

He had a bath. He called me in; standing with the towel round his waist, wet hair pushed back, shaving, the bathroom half flooded. He’d aged. The snakey young torso had metamorphosed into a bit of an egg on legs. He was oblivious to the decline.

‘You know that bit I never reach under my chin and it always pisses you off,’ he said – a memory from many years ago, which staggered me. ‘You do it,’ he said. ‘Do it the way you like it. Oh, whoops, unfortunate double entendre,’ he said. ‘Sorry, darling.’

Later he said, ‘Let me sleep in your bed tonight at least.’

‘No no no,’ I said.

‘But I’m so sad and lonely,’ he said.

‘Jesus Christ,’ I said, ‘just shut up, would you.’

He rather fixatedly bought a white suit, and lived in the back room for a few months. He was booked to start a home detox the day he got the divorce papers. I watched him carefully, delicately, wondering.

Often when I think about how things might have been, I search in a kind of orgy of ungratifiable hindsight for the many occasions when I could have said, ‘Don’t do that. Come with me instead.’ I was thinking of saying it now. But before he was strong enough to be told it, towards the end of that summer, he headed off with Anna who I’d met in Peru, a fine woman, and one who wasn’t saying, ‘You can stay here if you’re sober and you’re serious about recovery.’ And that became another year.

When Anna lost patience with him, he rolled up again from time to time, the white suit forgotten, the T-shirts grubby again. Antipodean Cath, another ex-girlfriend (or old girlfriend – what’s the precise difference here? An ex-girlfriend is someone you were meant to be faithful to and broke up with; an old girlfriend is someone you used to sleep with on an informal arrangement, and may yet do so again, who knows?) had given him tickets to something at the Albert Hall – Carmen, I think. Did I want to go? Sure. Afterwards we went to a Lebanese cafe on Gloucester Road. On the way there I tripped on a kerb in my heels while we were getting into a taxi and he made some cheap crack to the driver about me being drunk.

I hadn’t been drunk since 1992. I had a vision of a headline about something terrible happening to a child, and the subhead saying ‘The Mother Was Drunk’, and that I could not abide. God I was angry.

At the Lebanese place we sat in the window. I can see him now, ordering imam bayildi and some huge kebab, arguing. In the end he seemed to understand that for me being so drunk you fall over is shameful and undignified, and that though I liked drinking I was not and never would be a woman who fell down drunk in the street, and, also, he was an absolute hypocrite to throw that at me, and try to make a fool of me to the cab driver. In other words, I was well up on my high horse, and after a while I had stirred myself into such a tottering tower of outrage that I was able to say: ‘The point is, actually, that you have to not drink.’

He said, ‘Christ, why does everyone keep saying this?’

I said, ‘Because it’s true.’

He didn’t drink that evening. He drummed his fingers and smoked.

Back at my house later, he said, ‘What, so, I should break up with Anna and be with you?’

I said, ‘She thinks you’re broken up anyway.’

And I did say, that night: ‘If you want to do this, and if the love of a good woman is going to help you with it, then yes, I’m on.’

This was a massive thing for me to say. Why had I never said it before? Because I wanted it to be his idea. Because I was embarrassed to describe myself as a good woman. Because I assumed he’d say no, or mock me, say, What, you! As if!

Where did it come from, this disbelief in myself? Why do women apologise all the time? Where do we mislay our strength and faith? I was unbeatable when I was eight – Queen of the World. Now I hardly knew how to love or be loved. I wish to God I’d picked him up five, ten, twenty years earlier.

A few days later I had a sudden, very strong urge to be with him. Physical. An absolute magnetic pull. I’d been out for dinner, and coming back up the Uxbridge Road I glanced through the windows of his regular hang-outs – the Office, the Thai – and then followed the invisible urge into Bush Hall, formerly the Carlton Snooker Club, where we’d wasted so much time back in the day. He was there at a round table, a cold open beer in front of him.

‘Ah there you are,’ he said. ‘This is for you’ – and he held it out to me. The familiar greeting, made more poignant by the not-drinking campaign that had been started.

‘How are you?’ I asked.

‘Miserable, fucked up, insecure, immature, motherless, neurotic, troubled, tragic, raging,’ he said. ‘All the usual.’

‘You’re drinking too much,’ I said.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘But not in front of you. And I’m going to stop.’

‘Are you?’

He’d just moved flat, and wanted me to see it. It was just after our birthdays, nineteen years after our first night together. It was our third first kiss, suddenly and completely irresistible. I don’t remember this one either. I just remember being on the floor with him, with a cliff-jumping, home-coming sense of this, this, this is who I love, and being unbelievably happy.

He said, ‘So are we going out together now?’

I said, ‘Our being together is for if you want to stop drinking.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. That’s what I want.’

I said to myself, Oh God.

After that I ran away to the country. He left most of a Liszt Sonata as a message, upset, inchoate and incoherent. I stood on a prehistoric earthwork high on the Marlborough Downs, Liszt and the wind competing in my ears. He rang at seven in the morning and said: ‘I’ve been awake all night, come and see me.’ He rang at three in the afternoon and said: ‘I’m in Le Suquet, I’ve ordered lobster, are you coming?’ He rang at nine when I was in the bath, and wouldn’t get off the phone so I was standing in my towel, dripping and getting cold. He rang at two in the morning and said: ‘What are you wearing? Take it off.’ A stranger rang, saying ‘Hello? Is that Miss Louisa? Mr Robert is here; he would like to talk to you please.’ He rang at tea-time and said: ‘I am aware this is a little odd but I love you and we need to talk about this.’

I love you?

I stared out at swaying piles of wet roses and sodden lawns, tunnels and frothy mounds of cow parsley blocking off all but the sky, heavy branches drooping down to moss and frogs, and I thought about it. There are things you are honour-bound to honour, above and beyond your common sense. Now, you say you love me, I thought – and started laughing at my inadvertent quote from ‘Cry Me a River’, alarming some crows, who rose in an upward swoop, chorusing doom. It had always been incredibly easy to describe my relationship with Robert in lyrics. Every damn Motown song. Plenty of country and western. A rather embarrassing amount of Rod Stewart. Robert said we were more like enharmonics. Did I know enharmonics?

‘Yes, I know the word.’

‘What is it then?’

‘It’s when the same note has two different names and roles, depending which scale you’re thinking about: hence it might be D flat in one key, but in another it’s C sharp.’

‘It’s a good image that, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘How it can look and sound exactly the same, but it can mean, and be, something else entirely. The last note of one scale could be the first note of a completely different scale.’