You Left Early: A True Story of Love and Alcohol

Robert: ‘There’s love between us, and we fancy each other.’

Louisa: ‘So why aren’t we going out together?’

R: ‘I was just wondering that.’

L: ‘Well, it’s because you love another’ (the one who had rejected him)

R: ‘I gangrene another – you said so.’

L: ‘Yeah, you gangrene lots of things.’

Silence

R: ‘Well we kept that moment of melodrama up for a good ten seconds.’

Later he was talking about friends having sex. I said, you’re not my friend, and he was hurt. I explained: that he was my friend of course, but not only: he was my lover and always would be. He told me a friend had said he should marry me; I agreed, but didn’t mention that I of course shouldn’t marry him. He said, again – Jesus, doesn’t it get repetitive? – ‘Anyway you don’t want to go out with an alcoholic.’ And again, it wasn’t about who I wanted to go out with, it’s about who I wanted him to be – or rather, not to be. I didn’t want him to be an alcoholic (not that either of us knew what alcoholic actually meant). I didn’t want him smoking sixty fags a day. I wanted him to stop drinking himself stupid and smoking himself dead. I described Dad’s bypasses to him blow by blow and told him about the writer Dee Wells having half her leg amputated because of smoking. ‘But why?’ he asked, and I explained about the blood system, and clots, atherosclerosis and nicotine, the hardening of arteries, the risk of embolism.

Ten days later we had another argument, explained by a letter I wrote from Paris but didn’t post:

30.6.92

Dear Robert

Here I am on the steps of Chopin’s tomb, so of course you cross my mind.

Yes I hope we are on speaking terms. Foolish not to be. But when at one a.m. a fellow has a choice between being with a woman who is crazy about him or going for another drink, and he chooses to go for another drink, the woman would be foolish not to hear what she is being told. And when he defends himself by saying ‘But this is how I am’ she would be foolish not to defend herself against him. When I invite you in it is because my feelings for you are uppermost in my heart. When I hold you off it is because your lack of feelings for me are uppermost in my mind. Meanwhile I have a pregnancy to look after and a life to try to make sense of after it has been turned upside down and I have to go to bed early and no doubt alone. None of this means I don’t wish you well.

xx L

Back in London his messages went from ‘Give us a call’ to ‘Still not in … hm’ to ‘Lou, please ring me, I hope you’re OK’ to ‘Give me a fucking call’. In the end we spoke. He thought I was giving him an ultimatum. I said yes I was, but it wasn’t about our relationship, it was about him. It was, Grow Up.

There now. Was that a moment? The polyhedron of missed opportunities flashes me another possibility as it whirls slowly by. He saw an ultimatum. What if I’d let him define his own ultimatum, and respond to it as he wished? What then?

A month’s silence followed. Then he was there at a party: for the first three hours I avoided him, but he needed to talk me through Ravel’s string quartet in F, quoting Debussy and Stravinsky (‘bespectacled little gay Russian dwarf’ – was that sardonic or reverent?). I was to notice the pizzicato in the basses. Later he curled up asleep around a candle in the garden. We shared a cab, stopped for a curry. I got to bed at 1.45; he wanted to sleep on my sofa. I pointed out it is cruel to want to sleep on the sofa of a woman who is crazy about you. I said, what if I sneak out in the middle of the night and make passionate love to you in your sleep? He had the grace to leave. I felt that his needs were so big in his eyes that he saw no others. I thought I knew his feelings. But I thought I knew everything, and if I didn’t I’d decide, just to keep things under control. Now I’m not so sure. I gave him the chocolate piano again. I said, take it away, any way I dispose of it will be too symbolic. I was four months pregnant, and my embryo was growing eyelashes.

There was a screening of an unforgiving, bleak, heartbreaking documentary he had scored, The Execution Protocol, about death row. Robert’s music pierced through it; a blade of cold light, desperation in the sound of a muted trumpet. I wanted to drink a whisky afterwards, but couldn’t. I gave it to him. Robert’s music has always, whatever else is going on, had the capacity to unravel me, or to rebuild me, or both at once.

The following week we had lunch. He picked me up, and kissed me, and took me to Alastair Little’s where he told me how gorgeous I was and got a stiffy during the fish soup and changed the subject eighteen times a minute. He said, ‘What are you going to live on?’, offered me money ‘you know, if you need some’, and started referring to me as ‘my wife and child’. He wanted to kick off the child’s musical education, and sang to it. We went to hear Katya Kabanova at Sadler’s Wells. He argued with the doorman, fed me early enough (‘by ten thirty or I will scream, it’s not princessy, it’s physical’) and came home with me. He wouldn’t let me go to bed; wouldn’t leave me alone. He was drinking neat Campari and mauling me (in the Northern sense of not leaving someone alone); then holding me. I cried. He mocked me for crying – or I felt he did – and I cursed him. He said, ‘What did I do?’ At 4 a.m. he was still banging on about Jánaček’s atonality and smoking in my bedroom. I left him there passed out when I went to work four hours later, and came back at the end of the day to find a tune written on the back of an envelope, dedicated and directed to me, a little swoopy arrow pointing to my address on the front. And an apology. ‘I’m sorry I upset you. I don’t know what I said but I’m sorry.’

I spent half my time wanting to know where I stood, and the other half running away from it.

Meanwhile Louis came to baby preparation classes with me and pretended to have contractions. I’d met his slow-moving, smiling mother – she was a midwife! – and she’d come to dinner with my parents. The first thing she said to me, in her deep, honeyed Ghanaian voice, was, ‘A baby is a blessing from God. How are you feeling, my darling?’ The new nephew was born and christened; Louis came, and wore a suit. Everybody was in love with Louis by now, except for me.

And then one day Robert had a new girlfriend. He called her Lacrimosa Clark because she wept easily, and also Clarkapart, because she was short like Napoleon Bonaparte, which developed into Wellaparte, because her profile was like the Duke of Wellington’s. When I heard, I cried so hard that Baroness Alacrity sent me flowers at work. My colleagues assumed they were from Robert, cheering me up about whatever it was I was so sad about. What a great guy, they said.

*

My daughter – let’s call her Lola – was born in the evening. She was the most strange and glorious little thing that ever existed. It took forty-eight hours, two inductions and an emergency caesarean. Did I care? Did I hell. I was listening to La Bohème, eating satsumas and translating the libretto for the nurses, as if they were interested, high as a satellite on gas and air. Louis was wearing surgical greens and talking Twi with the midwives. The babe was finally pulled out to the strains of Aretha Franklin singing ‘Dr Feelgood’, and I was fully, fully in love (apart from during the two-hour attack of post-natal depression three days later, when I decided to send her back, as clearly I would never be good enough for her).

Robert came to visit the next morning. He pulled the pleated curtains shut behind him and said ‘Fancy a fuck?’ Then he sat and held her and got that look of amazement, and said, ‘She’s not that black. She could be mine?’

I moved house. I didn’t want my baby to live in a one-room flat. I extended the mortgage and got a place in Shepherd’s Bush, natural home of those who can no longer afford Notting Hill. Home also of Louis. And of Robert. The new place had a little garden to put the pram in. That’s what babies need.

Robert really liked her. I hadn’t expected that. I’d assumed that as a roué he would find babies dull, but far from it. He thought she was just great, called her ‘your pulchritudinous semi-negritudinous offspring’ and would attempt to come and sit smoking in the bathroom with us while I washed her, saying useful things like ‘She’ll need a nappy now, won’t she? Don’t babies need a nappy?’ It became apparent that he was to be my disreputable friend still, companion of nights off, keeper of misbehaviour and preserver of my wild young soul now that I was a clean and decent mother. He and Louis took to each other, and Louis was honoured with a nickname: Enigmus Africanus. Louis babysat when I went out with Robert; Robert babysat when I went out with Louis. But more often, in practice, it meant that when I finally collapsed with exhaustion after a long day’s mothering followed by him keeping me up all hours, he would go and talk to her. One dawn I found him lounging in a chair with an unlit fag and his feet up on the cot, explaining counterpoint. She was fast asleep.

Chapter Seven (#ulink_d5c06f5c-9ac6-5563-9d81-90636251fe32)

London, 1994

I bought piano #3, a weird little square late nineteenth-century thing, in a junk shop for £15. It looked like no piano I had ever seen: much smaller than an upright, more like a low-level cabinet made of walnut or cherry. Inside the strings were rusted and it had moss growing on the swollen dampers. I thought of restoring it somehow, but one visit from Art put paid to that. Art is a soft-spoken, shaven-headed, polo-necked LA jazzer who learnt to tune pianos as apprentice to the ancient blind Jewish man who tuned the instruments in Hugh Hefner’s bunny mansion. His patience is considerable, but it was clear the little piano was, musically speaking, going nowhere. Meanwhile Robert tried to play ‘La Cathédrale Engloutie’ on it, in honour of its internal dampness, and burnt a hole in the top with a neglected cigarette. (This sort of thing happened frequently. I’ve seen him with three on the go.) In the end I gave it to a theatrical props company. It would look good at the back of someone’s parlour in a period drama. Why did I buy it in the first place? Because it was pretty, and £15, and, because I didn’t like having Robert around without a piano for him to play. When he was at the piano, I was happy. And because a proper home, one with a baby in it, needed a piano. Clearly, a Dad thing.

Robert’s work took him to Dublin, so I was able to get some kip. He’d broken up with Lacrimosa Clark. There was an Irish friend, Emer, who he brought round to meet me, which was unusual. She was, like every girlfriend of his I ever met, clever, funny, gorgeous, self-deprecating, warm-hearted, hardworking and very worried about him. They are an excellent array of women. Some – Jackie, Nina (nicknamed Sequin-Smythe, for her double-barrelled surname) whose window he fell out of, Beth from school, Antipodean Cath – have become, or always were, good friends of mine. I met Lacrimosa Clark years later. We spent the whole evening saying to each other ‘I so see what he saw in you’. She said she’d never met anyone since who uses words like ‘detritus’ and ‘homo-sapient’ but could only get three-letter words on the Scrabble board; that she adored Rob but wasn’t an intellectual match for him, that he would be up all night composing and muttering about directors who pissed him off – all of them – and occasionally bursting into the room (usually naked) to holler ‘you know NOTHING about fucking Chopin’ – ‘and sadly he was right’. She told me she had been jealous of how moved he was by my daughter’s birth. Something in me likes the same women he does.

*

I went to Peru, where I chummed up with Centre Forewart’s sister Anna. I was writing the biography of my grandmother. Robert and I spent New Year’s Day up to our elbows in Szechuan crab at Poons in Whiteley’s. He bought me a pair of pink velvet Indian pyjamas for a late Christmas present, only his credit card failed and the shop assistant was instructed to chop it up, physically, with scissors, so I paid instead. John Schlesinger’s Cold Comfort Farm, for which Robert had written the soundtrack, was on at the cinema there. His name was on the poster.

On Thursday nights Lola went to her father’s, and it became a habit to spend Thursday evenings with Robert. We went to concerts, watched videos of what he was writing the score for so I could explain the plot to him, played pool at the Carlton Club on the corner of my street. This was a late Victorian dance hall, one of four built by an Irish navvy magnate, one for each of his four daughters, in the north, south, east and west of London. Only this western one survives. (For some years now it has been the music venue Bush Hall.) The ceiling was high and dim, the lights low, the plasterwork ornamental and the company mainly off-duty police. You could order a cheese toastie via the little phone on the wall beside each vast green baize table. Andy who ran it played golf and lived on milk because of his ulcers; he would never let a lady pay for a drink, and gave both me and my child lifetime membership. At least, he never let me pay for membership and he always let her pop in for a pee if during potty training she was taken short up the road.

Phone numbers Robert uses are in the back of my diaries from these years; his gas and electricity bills fall from between their leaves. He came round three or four times a week; brought me food, took me to lunch. One pub he liked was just round the corner from Lola’s nursery school. There had been builders next door to his house for a year now. During those noisy days he would work or sleep in my quiet house, only going home to work all night. He didn’t sleep with me though. No, he wasn’t my boyfriend. But he came and went as he pleased.

For a year or two I was seeing an Argentine musician, Julio, when he came from Rome for his concerts and recording. I recall a morning: Julio was there because we had spent the night together. Louis was there because I was going to work, and he had come to look after the baby. And Robert turned up, wild-eyed and hair on end, up-all-night-with-a-deadline written all over him, looking for coffee and company. I recall a knife with which I had been buttering toast flying out of my hand in a great curve across the kitchen, and the three of them looking at it, and me, and each other, each knowing who the other two were, laughing in their various ways, and the baby thumping on the tray of her high-chair.

I felt safe in those days. Louis was great; family life was steady, my friend Clare was living in the back bedroom, Julio was a pleasure; Robert was a friend. I had finished the biography, it was to be published; I was writing a novel. I got rid of the tragic little mossy mouldy piano. If there was to be a piano for Robert to play at my house it should be a decent one. He helped me choose it: a little Pleyel boudoir grand with red felt inside and gleaming gold-painted beams, a right showgirl of a piano, with its curly music-stand and tooled legs.

In March we had a joint birthday party; I did all the work but he turned up on time, sober, in a clean shirt with clean hair, champagne and a CD player for my present. He played three complete nocturnes, didn’t try to get off with any of my friends and left – not the last to go – at one thirty. He said he got me the CD player because he needed something decent to listen to music on at my house. Then Emer was about, and I hardly saw him.

*

The birth-related gap ended like this. I’m not pretending to remember what we said, or rewriting. I wrote this down at the time.

I saw Robert tonight leaning on a cherry tree – the wrong man for this clean, child-speckled street. The angles of his body were wrong, leaning and twisted, and he was grubby. He was staring at the sky and for a moment I nearly walked past him, not looking at him as you don’t look at those men, in case they look back, but then he muttered ‘Fuck of a fucking moon’ – and I realised it was him. Unshaven. Smell of vodka and fags. He stared at me and there was something bovine in his look: guarded, resentful, passive, out-of-focus.

‘Robert?’ I said. He frightened me.

‘I’m dead,’ he replied. ‘I’m dead, don’t talk to me,’ and he turned and tried to walk down the street.

I called his name and followed him, and went round in front of him, walking backwards, talking to him, and he tried to dodge me, but he was unsteady and ended up propped against a wall, leaning in to its old red bricks, his face hidden. ‘Go away,’ he said. ‘I’m dead.’

‘The bollocks you’re dead,’ I said. ‘You’re dead drunk.’

‘Not drunk,’ he said.

I thought: It’s my golden boy. This is terrible.

‘Robert,’ I said.

He gave a lurch, and straightened up.