You Left Early: A True Story of Love and Alcohol

Many years later, in Primrose Hill with Emma, she pointed out the flat where she used to live. It was on a different street. It didn’t look out over Primrose Hill. It had no balcony.

I pointed out the balcony I remembered, a few streets away. She had never been in that building.

But I remember. There had been a brightly patterned rug hanging on the wall on the left as you went in; reds and oranges.

‘Hm.’ She looked doubtful. Neither of us knew if we remembered or not.

And then in November 2015, poking around in my own past for structure for this book, I found this. (The previous entry ended: ‘I’m going celibate’.)

From my notebook: 20 December 1982:

Friday night to a party full of precious hunch-shouldered Oxford boys working on modern TV channels.

‘Oh goody,’ Emma cries, ‘my pianist has arrived. Such a shame we don’t have a piano.’

‘Who is your pianist?’ I enquire.

‘Oh he’s wonderful, he comes from Wigan and he’s …’ Rob Lockhart, of course. Who was being his usual sweet dirty charming self, uttering his usual friendly lascivious greetings. ‘One of these days someone is going to take you seriously,’ I say.

‘I wish you would,’ he replies.

‘OK, I do.’

‘What, now?’ he says.

‘Perhaps a little later,’ I suggest.

‘Excellent!’ he says.

And so we check up on each other periodically and then run off up Primrose Hill in the frost and kiss in a most fourteen-year-old haze of clothes and cold and party smells. He slips one shoulder out of my clothes and kisses my throat, and we run down the hill and into a taxi and take the piss out of each other all the way to the Queenstown Road.

‘I’ve changed my mind,’ he says. ‘You see I went off the pill last week and I’ve got my period.’ (True of me, but not of him.) ‘And I’ve just broken up with someone and I’m still very depressed about it …’ We bought kebabs and chocolate among the skinheads. ‘But could you bear to wake up to this face on the pillow tomorrow morning, or will it be just one of the worst figments of your hangover?’ And all through, the feeling that we don’t have to do anything, we’re just mucking about together.

At home he played and I sang Cole Porter, drank tea, I went to the loo, he hopped into bed. I grew a little shy as we sobered up, towards three. ‘Are you going to sit there and read me a bedtime story and then creep off somewhere else?’ he asked. Nope.

I rang Tallulah today as I felt she ought to know. ‘Well one of us had to before he lost his looks,’ she said. ‘Was he good?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought he would be.’

He was. It was. Complete and revitalising and full and bloody nice. Literally, actually – ‘I’ve bled all over everything, oh dear,’ I say.

‘Sooner you than me,’ he says. ‘You’re meant to. I don’t mind if you don’t.’

In the morning he said, ‘Well, what do you reckon to the face then – weedy, anaemic, pathetic …’

The house, including Claude looking for socks, Rory looking for Kevin, Kevin looking for gas fittings to build the bathroom with, came and went about their business. We got up around five, knowing that as a one-night-stand we couldn’t push it to the second night, but could make the first last as long as possible. He slept very very deep, very long, very quiet. Hardworking boy. Talking about music, first and last. ‘What’s the point of music? I’ll tell yer. Order from chaos. You don’t know where you’re being taken. But when you get there, it’s all all right. Of course it’s not so effective if there’s not an interesting route taken, enough chaos on the way, and that’s why Mozart is so fucking dull, it’s all order, nothing but fucking order …’ And food. ‘I’ll take you there,’ he says, of a Thai restaurant. I quite wish he would. I quite want more, of course, but

i) I’m celibate

ii) I don’t want a boyfriend I want love

iii) If I did it wouldn’t be Lockhart

iv) You don’t get love from one-night stands

v) (iii) and (iv) vice versa.

So we parted on the corner with a friendly peck and a see-ya, and that’s it. It has cheered me up no end, so much I did two dance classes on Sunday.’

The notebook continues with seeing my friend off to Hong Kong, having breakfast in bed with my housemates Claude and Berny, band rehearsal, washing the sheets, a long talk with Tallulah where she says that he wasn’t actually planned as the father of my kids but that evidently a good time was had by all. ‘I have the obvious leaning towards Lockhart but the head says no’ – and then: ‘Lockhart called to say don’t cash the cheque yet and he’ll be in touch when he’s back from Christmas in Wigan’.

He called?

All that resentment about not ringing was about nothing? What, I somehow made that up?

And then, a few weeks into the New Year: ‘Tonight I had dinner with Lockhart. Nice. We took a taxi to Queensway because he is so thin that he couldn’t take the cold.’

I had been totally maligning him as a discourteous Lothario, for decades. He was a courteous Lothario, and by this evidence so was I. In this contemporary account I am giving every impression of not particularly wanting to continue our liaison. I have rewritten history. Hmm. Thank you, memory.

And I’m wondering – why was there a cheque? My mind leaps in to assist: perhaps the cabbie wouldn’t have taken a cheque, so I paid cash and Robert, insisting on paying the fare, gave me a cheque. That makes sense. It must have been that.

Dangerous phrases, ‘that makes sense. It must have been that’. Armed with those phrases a passing thought can march off into the back of your head and set up in its pomp as memory, as truth even, claiming through the passing years all the rights and privileges of those titles, to which it is not, actually, entitled. It can permeate a person’s overall idea of what their life has been.

So, practically the only thing my memory got right was that it was Emma’s party, it was Primrose Hill, there was a taxi and skinheads. I’m really sorry not to have looked at the notebook for thirty-five years, not to have had the chance to read it to him, and have that ‘I wasn’t a bastard! You weren’t a fool!’ conversation, in which he would have got to say it was all my fault. How he would have laughed.

And then I think again. Well. When, exactly, did I rewrite this history? Was I, perhaps, lying to my notebook, with all that cavalier one-night-stand stuff? Was that my pride? The ‘I know he won’t want me so I’ll not want him first’ approach?

I have no idea. But yes, of course that is possible. Probable, even.

Perhaps it was after the dinner that he didn’t ring.

And now I’m rewriting it all over again; anecdotalising, shifting perspectives on long ago, making excuses, looking for reasons, searching for meaning, wishing.

They say you don’t remember what people said, or what they did, but you remember how they made you feel. I would adjust that a little. You remember that they made you feel.

*

There’s his phone number in the back of a notebook: 720 5399. But I didn’t see him for a few years. Tallulah broke up with Simon and moved to New York; I was half in love with loads of other people.

There’s another party I do remember: Oscar Moore’s, in a snooker club in King’s Cross: very dim and low-ceilinged, smoky and so forth as things were then. Robert was wearing a Wigan Rugby League rosette: cherry red, though I was not familiar with the term then. In a move of pure attention-seeking, I stole it off him. He was quite drunk in a cheerful way and didn’t really notice, until he saw that I had it pinned to the back pocket of my jeans, whereupon he chased me all round the room demanding to know why I had never told him of my passion for rugby league, and Wigan in particular, with not the foggiest that it was his rosette I was sporting, and that I was trying, with considerable lack of either clarity or effect, to express thereby my deep attraction to him.

Anyway, he left, with a group of others, and I stood on a rainy corner in King’s Cross with the rosette. I think that’s what happened.

Chapter Three (#ulink_e7baef08-532d-5305-acfe-7ee18b6e3469)

London and Wigan, 1970s