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You Left Early: A True Story of Love and Alcohol
Louisa Young


�Extraordinarily powerful’ Emma ThompsonThere are a million love stories, and a million stories of addiction. This one is transcendent.Louisa Young met Robert Lockhart when they were both 17. Their stop-start romance lasted decades, in which time he became a celebrated composer and she, an acclaimed novelist.This is both a compelling portrait of a lifelong love affair, and an incredibly affecting guide to how the partner of a 'charismatic, infuriating, adorable, self-sabotaging’ alcoholic can find the strength to survive when the disease rips both their lives apart.























Copyright (#u05f332be-c8f9-5f23-9f9b-f5e935b2af0f)


The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright В© Louisa Young 2018

Cover photographs В© Margie Hurwich/Arcangel Images, В© Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)

Cover design by Claire Ward В© HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Louisa Young asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library

This book is a work of non-fiction based on the author’s experiences. In order to protect privacy, names, identifying characteristics and details have been changed.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008265175

Ebook Edition В© June 2018 ISBN: 9780008265199

Version: 2018-07-18




Dedication (#u05f332be-c8f9-5f23-9f9b-f5e935b2af0f)


For everyone who has found themselves here




Epigraph (#u05f332be-c8f9-5f23-9f9b-f5e935b2af0f)


Inversion of Intervals:

Major becomes Minor.

Perfect stays Perfect.

Augmented becomes Diminished.

from Robert Lockhart’s

music theory notebook

1969


Contents

Cover (#u96ca7c64-e5ce-5f1d-9025-389a02a8dfa8)

Title Page (#u109fabf2-02b8-5a19-933c-af19fe459b31)

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction: The Book You Hold in Your Hand

Part One 1959–2002

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Part Two 2003–05

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Part Three 2005–07

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Part Four 2007–09

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Part Five 2010–12

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Part Six 2012—

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Appendices

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Louisa Young

About the Publisher




Introduction (#u05f332be-c8f9-5f23-9f9b-f5e935b2af0f)

2017


The book you hold in your hand is a memoir by me, Louisa Young, a novelist, about Robert Lockhart, a pianist, composer and alcoholic, with whom I was half in love most of my adult life and totally in love the rest of it. It’s as much about me as about him, and is of necessity a difficult book to write. So why am I writing it? Why expose, so openly, chambers which are only usually displayed via the mirrors and windows with which novelists protect their privacy?

Because his life is a story worth telling.

Because our love story, while idiosyncratic, is universal.

Because alcoholism has such good taste in victims that the world is full of people half or totally in love with alcoholics – charismatic, infuriating, adorable, repellent, self-sabotaging, impossible alcoholics – and this is hard, lonely, baffling, and not talked about enough.

Because although there are a million and a half alcoholics in Britain, many people don’t really know what alcoholism is.

Because alcoholics also love.

Because I don’t want to write a novel about an alcoholic and a woman; I want to write specifically about that alcoholic, Robert, and this woman, me.

Because everything I have ever written has been indirectly about Robert, and the time has come for me to address him directly.

Because the last time I tried to address it directly I told him, and he said, �You won’t be able to finish this until I’m dead.’

Because I have realised that for me, quite the opposite: he won’t be properly dead until I’ve finished it.

Four months after he died, I wrote this:

It can’t be surprising that I can’t write now. All I can think about is Robert and death, so that is all I could write about, but I can’t. To write Robert would be to seal him. I, who can rationalise my life into any corner of the room and out again and rewrite my every reality in any version I like, and back, twice before lunch, I cannot pin that man to the specimen paper. I cannot claim to have all of him in view at one time. I cannot slip him into aspic, drown him in Perspex, formalise him – look, there he is in that frame, that’s how he was, that’s him. No, that is not him. He is an alive thing. His subtleties and frailties are living things. I cannot bind to myself or any other place the joy that he was. It makes no sense to me for him to be dead. And when it does make sense to me, as no doubt it must at some stage, then – well then he is even deader, because I will have accepted it. And I do not accept it. I do not want to accept it. I reject it. I say to death: Fuck off.

But I am a writer, and without writing I was bereft. And God knows I was bereft enough already. I have so much and yet these have been years of loss. Each loss lost me something else as well. Losing Robert lost me writing. I wanted to talk to him about it. Instead there I was, writing about not being able to write: If I write this book, am I preventing other versions? Will making this our conversation disbar me from remembering other things we said? Am I bruising my memories by handling them? If I file them, will I ever find them again? Will their bloom be intact?

I was always terrified of losing him; I lost him a hundred times and had him back. I wanted him back yet again. His nine lives, the nadirs he specialised in. I thought: he wouldn’t really be dead. It’s so unlike him.

This is my version. Anyone who knew him will have their own version. I understand that. I’ve done my best to balance open honesty about this illness with sensitivity.



Part One (#u05f332be-c8f9-5f23-9f9b-f5e935b2af0f)




Chapter One (#ulink_75ce20ca-523c-5050-b164-7e2e83585ab5)

Uxbridge Road, 1990s


Beirutsbridge Road, he called it. This neighbourhood! Between charming Holland Park and its neighbour Shepherd’s Bush there is a difference in life-expectancy of eight years. A six-foot woman pushing a buggy yells �I’ve got my child wiv me ’ave some fuckin’ respect’ at me for no reason I can imagine, unless it’s that I’m wearing only one blue paper flipflop following a pedicure-related broken-blue-paper-flipflop incident. Then a big West Indian man comes towards me, with a tiny Thai man trying to pat his – the big man’s – back and wipe something off his – the big man’s – front at the same time, both of them giggling. A scrawny pasty-faced undertaker in his frock coat walks by, swigging Diet Coke from a bottle. A tiny pregnant person who says she’s Greek but I’m not sure she is wants some money, so I give her some and direct her to the Greek church, but I don’t think she understands. An old Spanish man informs me that he’s seventy-one; I say Happy Birthday, he howls with laughter and says �Happy New Year!’ There are giant yellow tubes piled up all down the middle of the road. A barefoot man goes by on crutches, his feet swollen and dry and sad; he gives me a glance of barefoot complicity, but mine are bare out of vanity, not need. I wanted to get home, but I didn’t want the nail polish to smudge. It’s Dickensian. A barefoot man on crutches.

Always, walking down this road, heading west from the Tube station to the street where I have lived for twenty-five years, to the house where he had so often pitched up over the decades, and kind of lived with me for ten years, I look for Robert: leaning in the doorway of Paolo’s cafe, beaky nose, skinny legs, having a cigarette; coming out of Jay’s newsagent, hobbling across the road from the Nepalese restaurant popularly known as the Office, in the brown velvet-collared tweed coat I gave him after he left the dark blue one on the train to Wigan; or the old leather jacket, or the new old leather jacket, in his jazz-cat hat, hunched like a grey heron at the edge of the city street, being liminal, looking about him, in the rain, or the sunshine, perhaps sitting outside a cafe, newspaper, cigarettes, espresso, pencil, sketches of a melody in the margins of the sports section. In later days, glasses, and crutches, or the two ugly black walking sticks with ergonomic handles shaped like bones.

In his youth he was beautiful like an off-duty Bowie – skinny, pale, romantic-looking, naughty, with something fugitive about him; he was always about to leave. In maturity, a craggy battered face, Northern, a big bent nose, a small chin, no eyebrows to speak of, cheekbones, a broad brow, small scar to the left, brown to grey hair tending to the fine and fluffy unless smoothed back, from which it benefitted, plenty of it, usually either too long or too short, always badly cut, because I did it, because he wouldn’t go to the barber. Widow’s peak. A bashed pale mouth, thin lips, curled in some sardonic look often enough. Big flat English ears. Beardwise, kind of bald on one side, a bit goatee-ish on the other; a wiry moustache which could have been elegant with the slightest bit of care. The odd pockmark. Glasses – whoever’s, it didn’t matter much. A bit Ted Hughes, a bit Samuel Beckett. All crag and stoop. Eyes? Yes, he had eyes. They were blue, and much clearer than they had a right to be. I may come back to them. Right now they are staring at me from various photographs, and, writing this, I see him looking at me, and my tears come up again and I need to go and rail against horrid fortune which made him as he was and not just a tiny bit different.

I see him, sometimes, in the criss-crossing currents of people. But he is not there.




Chapter Two (#ulink_92f1fee8-a081-522b-8500-e99c5a48834a)

Primrose Hill, Wigan, Oxford, Battersea, 1982


I know for a fact which balcony it was. It has grown mythical in my mind: the balcony on to which he invited me, where he first kissed me, though I can’t actually remember the first kiss. But I remember the thrill of him wanting me to go out there with him. First floor, overlooking the park, leaves – plane trees? A very London balcony, as seen on the first floors of many handsome white stucco London houses of the mid nineteenth century.

It was our mutual friend Emma’s party, in a first-floor sitting room with long windows. We were twenty-two, twenty-three, at the stage where you go to parties in flocks, losing and gaining companions in the course of the night. I recall it being crowded, glamorous, noisy. I recall my little thrill at the sight of him.

I’d met him before. The first time was on a staircase in an Oxford college in 1976. We were going in and he was coming out. (�We’ was me, my childhood friend Tallulah and her calm, amiable law-student boyfriend Simon, who we were visiting, and whose new friend Robert was.) I, a born, bred and dedicated Londoner, had never met a Northerner before, never heard gravelly basso profundo Wigan profanities coming out of a skinny whiplash chips-and-lemonade body. An old cricket blazer of some kind hung off him; clearly not his. He had that romantic demeanour of consumptive turn-of-the-century sleeplessness and intense energy – what my father called �pale and interesting’ (I was more pink and interested). He was gorgeous, incandescent. And leaving. He may return. Please return was my only thought.

He did return. He was at an upright piano between two windows, playing – Chopin? Debussy? People piped down. Girls were leaning over him. With my usual instinct to avoid what was attracting me, I went to the other end of the room and stood looking cross with my back to the wall. Oh, I knew how to let a chap know I liked the cut of his jib. And I listened. As someone said years later, �It was different when Robert played.’ It was. He was mesmerising. And he knew it, and he used it, and he was not comfortable with it.

People talked about him. He’d won his place to read music at Magdalen from Wigan Comprehensive (formerly Wigan Grammar) at the age of sixteen. (I, a day older than him, had only just passed my O-levels.) By seventeen he was a demy, a half-Fellow – this is a form of scholarship for �poor scholars of good morals and dispositions fully equipped for study’. Previous incumbents included Oscar Wilde and Lawrence of Arabia. By his third year he was teaching the first years, and he graduated at nineteen with a double first, twice as good as the normal and tragically insubstantial single first, which was clearly not good enough for him. He’d got Ds in his two other A-levels, French and German, and had massive streaks of ignorance about everyday subjects. Two highly knowledgeable musicians recently – and separately mistook a tape of the young Robert playing for Arthur Rubinstein.

Child prodigy? Massive over-achiever? Cultural clichГ©? Chippy Northerner? Workaholic artist? All of the above?

�There’s no fuckin’ frites on my épaule,’ he said.

There was a song he used to sing:

�We’re dirty and we’re smelly,

We come from Scholes and Whelley,

We can’t afford a telly,

We’re Wigan Rugby League, diddley de dum OI OI.’

He would do it in broad Wigan – �We coom fro Scerls’n’Welli’ – or, for variety, in a posh, southern, actor-y manner: �We come from Scales, end Welleh, we carn’t, afford, a telleh …’ Alongside his exceptional ability on the piano, it made an amusingly ambiguous impression. No Brit is left untouched by the terrible four – class, geography, money, education – and there was an assumption among Oxbridge undergraduates at that time that Northern = working class. The niceties of �Rough’ v �Respectable’ working class, or respectable working class v lower middle class, were pretty irrelevant in that world. It all counted as Not Posh. Sometimes when posh people realised Robert wasn’t entirely working class they would say he pretended to be, and resent him for it, when in fact it had been their own presumption in the first place. Once, for a week, he made a conscious effort to get rid of his accent. Then he realised people noticed him because of it, and that as long as he could put up with the mockery it was actually an advantage. People whose class is unexpected can get away with things. They can be seen by the class they are arriving in as somehow superior, gifted with knowledge from the other side. It can work well for intelligent, socially mobile working-class boys: their strangeness confers a powerful status – which in turn contributes to the anxiety of the uprooted, those who by being socially mobile become psychologically divided.

In his uncomfortable, nervy move south and up, Robert did sacrifice pronouncing book to rhyme with fluke. In Wigan once, a cabbie taking him home from the station wouldn’t believe he was from there, saying �Ner, yer not’ as Robert, upset, insisted. Meanwhile in Oxford and London he remained the most Northern thing anyone had ever seen. He never rescinded his Northern passport, preached the gospel of rugby league daily (and interminably), and replaced bath-to-rhyme-with-hath not with bath-to-rhyme-with-hearth but with, every time he used the word, a piss-takingly long, self-aware and scornful barrrrth. He couldn’t use the word �dinner’ without either a sarcastic accent or a short monologue on why he wasn’t saying �tea’. People were often accused of mitherin’ and maulin’ him. Checking there was enough cash for an outing, he’d say �As geet caio?’, a usage so arcane I doubt there’s a Wiganer alive now who’d use it other than in nostalgia and irony. But then those two never quite sorted out their differences in Robert’s first-in-the-family-to-go-to-university heart.

His was not a childhood of clogs and tinned food – they had a piano, records, laminated recipe cards – but he was familiar with factory sirens and rough lads and the River Douglas – the Dougie – running a different colour on different days of the week because of the dyes. He loved Les Dawson and explained to me the source of his silent exaggerated mouthing: the �mee-maw’ that women working the mills would use to make themselves understood over the sound of the machinery. And he reserved a lifelong interest in people who, like him, made the risky, lonely leap of class: David Hockney, Alan Bennett, Jeanette Winterson, Keith Waterhouse, Victoria Wood, Dennis Potter. Especially if they were drinkers: Dudley Moore, Richard Burton, George Best, Gazza.

At Oxford, with people he didn’t know well, who all seemed to sound like the BBC and wear Eton ties, he felt he had to assert himself to be noticed. He didn’t like to be ignored. He wanted to experience everything at once, to lead a life as intense as it could be, to go to bed with as many women as possible, see everything, do everything. �It’s what you do in these sorts of moods that gets you a bad reputation,’ he said to a friend who wrote a profile of him for a student magazine. �And when I’m in one of them I really revel in my reputation.’ But he also wanted an introverted life, writing music, reading, with a real relationship, warm and secure and emotional. Then, he said, he despised his other self for sleeping anywhere, and putting up a huge facade. He was really a romantic. �Just one note,’ he said, �a particular chord, can give me an incredible sense of, well, it can’t be nostalgia, because it’s not for anything in the past. I suppose it’s more like nostalgia for another world …’

Robert was very popular. His legends abounded: the time his tutor popped in to see him, and a naked girl was playing his piano. The occasion when a scorned admirer – male – dropped an empty champagne bottle from a high window, just missing Robert’s head – Robert was convinced it was a murder attempt. The pissing in the sink so often it had to be removed, whereupon he just pissed out of the window. The Dean of Music calling in to wake him every day around noon. The dancing naked on the lawns; the streak across the river during an Eights Week boat race, pursued by loud-hailing patrol boats. And, as a female friend said years later: �He slept with everyone except me and Benazir Bhutto.’

People mooned over him. I’m not bloody mooning over you, I thought. So proud! I longed to moon over him. I was SO romantic, and the only thing I was more so than romantic was proud. And of course I found him SO romantic, and so of course, because I was seventeen, He Must Never Know. Also, I was narked about him being two years ahead of me academically, though a day younger, and fully state-educated where I was only half, which to my mind gave him a cracking moral advantage. I went from a posh Lefty West London home – �don’t say pardon, say what’ – to a state primary – �don’t say what, say pardon’ – and then to the kind of highly academic girls’ private school which told us that we were better than everybody else. Some of my coevals took this as read, and are currently running the world; those who knew it not to be true tended to slump to the polar opposite and believe themselves to be worse than everybody else, and certainly Not Good Enough, hence the prevalence of drugs and eating disorders among pupils at those places; or, in my case, a mildly dysmorphic conviction of my own fatness, and cider. I grew up drenched in all that should have made me feel at home when I went to university at Cambridge, from accents to architecture, yet found myself bemused, class- and location-wise. Three thick card invitations in the same envelope, to a �dinner party’, a �dance’ and a �house party’, all from names I didn’t recognise, on the same night, at different addresses, in Hampshire where I had never been – what was this? I quietly asked a country-gentry type I knew. He sneered at me, for �faux naivety’ and �inverted snobbery’, for, as he saw it, pretending not to know. But I didn’t know. In London, at nineteen, dinner was a doner kebab on the night bus; if you stayed over after a party it was because you fell asleep on someone’s sofa. Being sneered at by someone who considered himself my social superior was … educative.

*

At Emma’s, I remember a long sofa against the wall; sitting on it with him being, as we later called it, Lockharted – being tested and chauved (a Wigan verb, meaning to wind someone up), regaled and assaulted with a barrage of combative and contrary wit, filthy flirtation and intense, wilfully polysyllabic musical erudition which made strong men weak and weak girls melt – and some people, of course, sidle off in bemusement and/or disgust. Gesualdo’s duel, Schubert’s syphilis, my bra strap, Bill Evans, more wine, Red Garland, Singapore laksa, Argerich’s rubato … He was a centre towards which things spun. So when you’re on the sofa with him, the focus of him, getting all of it, the intensity, immediacy, challenging, drinking, smoking, the you – here – now. I want yer – there was a tendency to go �Whoa!’ and fall into the tidal wave.

Seeing myself as fat and not what boys wanted, I drank too much and had had my heart severely broken at university. I wasn’t stupid, but I was dismally blind when it came to reading men’s intentions towards me: I got into situations. It was still, just, the era of �men’ and �girls’. I did agency work (security guard, catering, tea-lady in a parking meter factory) and lived in a squat and wanted to be a writer but I had nothing to say on paper and I knew it. I was frustrated and not good at going after what I wanted. I knew exactly how lucky I was, and I suffered the paralysis which can affect intelligent posh girls, saying to them �You have been given so much; you with your education and your stable family and your prosperity and your accent, seriously, you’re asking for more?’ I thought to be loved you just lived your life until someone turned up and loved you. I did actually think, like Shakespeare’s Helena, that we cannot fight for love, as men may do; we should be woo’d, and were not made to woo. It didn’t occur to me to go out and get them. Quite often I stayed in bed reading because it was easier. Looking back at me, I might say I was depressed. Emotions were extreme.

That night, he made me laugh so much. The cutting through the crap – he wouldn’t just cut to the chase, he would cut to three chases at once, going too far too fast in all directions and assuming that everyone else wanted to go there too. Which I did. He seemed to carry a kind of truth within him, an honesty beyond that of less intense people. This he never lost. Anyway, we went on to the balcony, and later we went back in a cab to the cheerful little house I lived in. A cab! I was the posh one, but I couldn’t afford cabs. We stopped on the way at a kebab shop on Queenstown Road, and Robert kept the taxi waiting. There was a group of skinheads at the back: Ben Shermans, Doc Martens, overhead strip lighting. They made Robert nervous, but it was me they laughed at, with my very long hair – �Oi, skin’ead!’ they yelled at me.

I remember that the wall between my bedroom and the back room was half dismantled; I’d taken down the plasterboard and the strips of lath, leaving only the wooden struts, which I used as a kind of tiny unsatisfactory shelving system. I had a single bed. I remember he was very thin, and the sex was revelatory.

He left the next afternoon, and vanished off the face of my earth. I remember I was hurt and mortified. For months. I did not understand – and still don’t – how a brilliant night with someone could possibly not lead to wanting another brilliant night with them, and another, and another. Seriously, why? I didn’t understand how you could do all that together, and then – nothing. It made me a fool and him a bastard. I hated being a fool and I hated him being a bastard.

Many years later, we discussed it. He said, �You could have rung me. You’re a feminist.’ But girls didn’t ring men in those days. Even educated feminist London girls. Politics was all very well, fear of rejection was something else. And there were none of the modern alternatives – a Facebook friending or a witty little tagged snap on Instagram of something of mutual interest. The telephone was all you had. Or a letter, but Christ, a letter! The permanence! No, it was the telephone or nothing, and that meant the possibility of having to talk to his mother, or his flatmate, or, if you did get hold of him, of the embarrassed silence. Boys, of course, had to face this great compounding pyramid of potential embarrassment all the time. (There was a sub-clause whereby if a girl was more attractive than the man she was allowed to ring, as long as she was prepared to take the risk that as the man was less attractive, he might be over-awed, or as we called it, �scared of you’. But this never worked in practice, because then as now most girls thought themselves unattractive, and even if they didn’t they weren’t allowed to admit it, for fear of being labelled �full of herself’. No, ringing a man you fancied meant you were desperate.)

We – girls – well, I – believed that the boys knew what they were doing. I believed they had thought about it, and were doing it on purpose. I assumed they had all the power. By assuming that, I actually gave them all the power. I didn’t learn that for another twenty-odd years. I wish I had rung him. Everything might have been different. But no. I sentenced myself to a ludicrous punishment: burn with desire, and keep quiet about it.

�What would you have done if I’d rung you?’ I asked.

�I’d’ve loved it,’ he said. �I’d’ve been flattered.’

�But why didn’t you ring me?’

�Because I was a little twat.’

*

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


A grand piano’s feet take up only a tiny area: three indentations in the carpet, each the size of a conker, cradling a brass ball clad in a brass foreskin attached at an unlikely angle, like a stallion’s ankle, to a rising pillar of polished hardwood. Very small, to hold so much weight, and cover so much area: a superior crate the shape of Africa, hollow yet full. With the solid wing raised it shows the heartstrings within, laid in green felt across swirls of miniature golden architecture, and the internal teeth, the hammers coming up from below, sharks from the darkness to bite and bump the strings; dampers above swooping down to see them off every time.

Robert’s Bechstein, as long as Rachmaninoff was tall, his father’s before him, lives with me now. (I smile as I write that. To Robert, saying a thing �lived’ somewhere was an unforgivable anthropomorphic poncey fuckin’ southern bourgeois affectation.) Underneath it are boxes and suitcases containing the entire history of Robert’s family. It has been my job to poke around in them, sorting things out. I find a brown paper-covered booklet, costing 30p, 15p if sold on Saturday only: the programme of the Wigan and District Competitive Music Festival, 1972, affiliated to the British Federation of Music Festivals, of which Her Majesty the Queen is patron. It smells of coal-dust and rain, and opens with a message from the mayor, who with the mayoress hopes to see the festival well supported. It lists the patrons, the areas which count as �local’ – Abram, Aspull, Billinge, Ince, Orrell, Standish, Skelmersdale, Holland, Chorley. Perhaps it is in fact these place names which smell of coal-dust and rain. It lists the scale of marks (for piano: accuracy of notes and time, technique, fluency, pace, touch, expression, interpretation); the trophies and medals available and who they are in memory of, the general regulations, appreciations, thanks, and the policy for receiving suggestions. There are ninety-nine classes, with up to twenty-five entrants in each. Choirs, recorder solo, folksong, violin, instrumental ensemble, organ, sight-reading, girls’ vocal duet. Thirty-six ten- and eleven-year-olds play �Ship Ahoy!’ by Arthur Pickles on the piano.

In Pianoforte Solo (ages thirteen–fifteen), Robert Lockhart, turned thirteen a week earlier, plays Debussy’s 2nd Arabesque, and comes first with 91 points. He wins £1.65, and a stiff certificate with a gold, red and green coat of arms. The following night he comes back to hear Pianoforte Solo (open), and marks what he hears. His marks are a little harsher than the adjudicators’ and his observations, in tiny blue biro, are precise. Betty Wilson was slightly too temperamental in her Dohnányi; Richard Eastham lost all movement in his La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin. Alison Cratchley’s rubato was not up to scratch, though otherwise her Bartók was superb. �Not delicate,’ he writes. �Dotted notes not clear’; and �Too much Chopin style for Bach’.

I have Robert’s little red Letts diary for 1969, when he was ten: lists of rugby players in pencil, and a few entries in splatty blue fountain pen: �Grandpa just out of bed been ill. Grandma in bed now.’ �Play with train practise putting hippy wig on.’ I have photographs: tiny 1960s black-and-white ones with scalloped edges, carrying all the freight of the out-of-focus faded technology of the past. There he is: a fat baby in incredibly tidy clothes with smocking across the front, chortling. With an ice cream, in Blackpool. Aged about seven on Coniston Avenue in Wigan, with a cricket bat and knobbly knees under baggy shorts. Hurtling towards a finishing line, when he was the second fastest boy in Wigan. With his four plastic horses hitched up to the Bonanza covered-wagon playset. There at the piano with his father, John.

�My parents, John and Pat, were deemed to be a glamorous couple in their lower middle class (for want of a better term) milieu,’ Robert wrote, much later, in his rehab papers. �He a travelling salesman with a souped-up Ford Anglia, she a hairdresser.’ John, charismatic, grumpy, lovable and extremely musical, developed a form of agoraphobia which rendered him incapable of leaving his home town. If he drove ten miles from the town centre he would start shaking, and have to turn around. It happened once during an outing to Manchester to see a special railway yard, for which permission had had to be sought. Robert and his friends were very excited to go, but by the time they got to Longsight Depot John had what we would now call a panic attack; Robert was embarrassed, his pals in the car didn’t know what to say.

John had been a choirboy at Wigan Parish Church and knew everybody in the town. He was once seen weeping in uniform – National Service – at Wigan Casino, in the early fifties, out of unrequited love. As a young man he’d made a record in Norman Leather’s record-yourself studio. �Johnny Lockhart’ plays a jazzy, elegant piano and sings in a lustrous baritone the smooth Eddie Fisher song �When I Was Young’. He must have recorded it for Pat; they married in 1954, the year after the song came out: elegant, beautiful, a satin dress, a dress suit. It’s from another world, a Terence Davies world of face-powder and Ford Anglias, a Northern world that I never knew, with a lingering G at the end of my own surname, Young, a way I never heard it pronounced before I met Robert. It’s the voice of a man I knew and loved. Not that we pronounced the word love the same either.

John, young, looked like Alain Delon in a raincoat, on a bridge; older, like Michael Caine in the heavy glasses. He stopped drinking overnight in his early forties, but smoked tremendously. Robert called him the Owl of Ormskirk, because of the specs on the very tip of his big nose, always just about to fall off. Or, Pop Lockers. Pat, Robert’s mother, had the maiden name North which was already funny because she was from the South. She was blonde and pretty and ran a hairdressing salon in their front room in Coniston Avenue, where Robert was dandled by the ladies, played at their stocking-clad, high-heeled 1960s feet, listening as they chatted, absorbing their affection and glamour. Later Pat worked on the beauty counter at Boots. �Not quite Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, but never mind,’ Robert observed. I never met Pat; cancer got her before I made it north. Robert could be dismissive about her, which made me want to talk to her all the more. It must have been quite something being the woman in a household made up of John and Robert. They all played the piano, but Pat, who was not a bad player either, never got near it because Robert or John was always on it.

�I was a relatively happy child,’ Robert wrote, �successful academically and at sport, plenty friends … I didn’t think it odd that my dad often got home from “work” at ten p.m. ’

John had a girlfriend called Lily Glinka, an anorexic Russian secretary who was afraid of the wind. John took her out on to Southport Sands to try to cure her. Later there was another, Jenny, who loved horses. Robert knew about these things. He and John always talked. And he was woken by the arguments in his parents’ bedroom late into the night. His mother was protective but eventually she too �succumbed to an affair’.

Robert was twelve or thirteen when the family fell apart. John lost his job. He came up to Robert’s room and said, �Are you staying with her or coming with me?’ So Robert got up out of bed, put some things in a bag and went with John on their bicycles to John’s mother Granny Annie’s house. There they shared a single bed. Robert was horrified by John’s toenails, which looked to him like nicotine-stained elephant tusks. He and his mother became �somewhat estranged’. He said it was not because he loved her less, just that he had more in common with his father. Then Pat’s boyfriend died, of diabetes. The trauma ping-pong started, as Robert shuttled from one unhappy home to the other.

John was playing Tchaikovsky in a public place – a hotel? – one evening, and a woman called Kath Griffin sat next to him, saying, �I prefer the slow movement’. It turned out all she knew about classical music was that she preferred the slow movements, but that wasn’t an impediment.

I say all this. I don’t know if it’s true. It’s hard enough getting sense out of your own memories, let alone somebody else’s. Robert told me his versions. His parents fighting one Christmas because John had given Pat a bottle of Elizabeth Arden Blue Grass which wasn’t what she liked, it was what Lily Glinka liked. Another Christmas when Robert was in the back of the car and he threw up on Granny Annie – or her best hat? – having drunk half a bottle of repulsive sweet sherry because he didn’t want to go to Kath’s family – or indeed his mother’s place, but he hadn’t been invited. Pat had met another man. John married Kath, Pat married Mike. Robert was in no mood to like step-parents, but acknowledged later that it must have been �very difficult … to deal with a precocious, wilful teenager’.

He had made the under-13s 100-metre and triple jump teams and went to the Royal Northern College of Music junior school in Manchester on Saturday mornings. This coincided with an influx of �rough lads who beat the shit out of us supposedly posh grammar-school boys’. He escaped punishment despite being a prime target as a classical pianist – �automatically a puffter’ – because he had played for Wigan Rugby League schoolboys, which even at that age was �a sport for hard lads’. He loved rugby league with a passion all his life, but because he was studying the piano, due to the high risk of breaking fingers, he had to stop. He had obsessions, often masochistic: �I would force myself to practise a difficult passage 100 times, having to start again from scratch if a mistake was made. By the 99th rendition, I’d have hot sweats, shaky legs. I assumed I was doing this to harden myself against concert nerves – to develop the ability to switch into robotic. It worked, sort of – but it made arguably the most beautiful language – both to “speak” and to listen to – awkward, dry, an academic, technical exercise.’ And, �having to hold my hand under a boiling hot tap for ten minutes. If not, my mother would die. She did. Admittedly not until eight years after I stopped the habit.’ I still wonder what, of the things young children are diagnosed with now, Robert might have been diagnosed with when he was small: Asperger’s? Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder? He thought so. Depression? Certainly. Autistic spectrum?

I asked Robert’s cousin Diane, who’s a few years older than Robert, what he was like when he was little. She said, �Always on the naughty stool’, with a smile.

So there in the north, the boy Robert is beside his father on the yellow brocade duet stool; or on it alone, perfecting his left-hand trills, making certain his Fille aux Cheveux de Lin maintains its structure and momentum.

Meanwhile in the south, though I had lessons for years, I had no talent and did no work. I remember locking myself in the loo in a futile attempt not to have to go to a piano lesson. Even now I read music like a six-year-old, counting up and down the notes, naming them under my breath. Robert was repeatedly amazed by the fact that I am, as he put it, �illiterate’. It was not that I didn’t love the piano. I adored it. I spent hours beneath my dad’s Blüthner while he played. My companions there were a French horn in its battered leather case lined in blue velvet; an old silver trombone, ditto; a curious stringed thing our grandfather brought from Iraq in the 1920s in a heavy wooden box with a price label in Arabic inside the lid; a schoolchild’s violin with a soft lemony cloth and a little round of rosin; my brother’s trumpet, yellow and bright compared to the older horns, and a moth-eaten concertina in an octagonal box like a gothic chapter-house. Usually I was eating almonds and sultanas from my jeans pocket, and reading. I couldn’t put my book down even for a moment (Narnia, Moomins, Swallows and Amazons, the myths of Greece and Rome – it wouldn’t cross my mind to put the book down. I used to read walking down the street, and bump into nothing) and it was tricky for me to get my hand into my pocket when piled in among instruments, so sometimes I’d kick the pedal column. My father, Wayland, who would be playing Bach, or Schubert ländlers: �Homage to the fair ladies of Vienna’, didn’t mind. Our double stool is the kind that opens, full of children’s music books and collections of carols published in the 1950s. It is covered in worn petit point done by my grandmother. Over that is a sheepskin, put there to cover the wear in the petit point, now worn itself. On that, Wayland, who I loved more than life. The music came down through the belly of the piano. It sounds quite different under there. He was careful not to play too loud. For decades I didn’t know he did that. Across the room my mother would sit on a sofa in a pool of light, reading about defence policy and sea-use planning.

Before the Second World War, before he went into the Navy, Wayland studied music at Cambridge. When he went back to university after the war, he switched to history. His youthful compositions are still in that petit point piano seat. Instead of being a composer, his first dream, he became a journalist, a writer, and ultimately a politician, a Labour member of the House of Lords. My mother, Liz (Oxford and the Wrens) was his partner in politics, his backroom intellectual powerhouse. Their subjects were foreign policy, conservation, peace, the sea, the environment. Wayland’s mother was a sculptor, Captain Scott of the Antarctic’s widow.

These are the composers Wayland rated: Bach. Then Mozart, who added characters, then Beethoven, who became one great huge character, then Brahms and Schubert, who were just beautifully lyrical. Wagner? �A bicycle pump,’ he said. I liked Chopin and César Franck and Verdi: I knew they weren’t officially as good as the ones Wayland liked, but I could run around to them and be fleeing through the forest, hiding from bears, clambering mountains, rescuing and being rescued, riding unlikely beasts. I thumped and pirouetted up and down the sitting room (I did ballet classes – the plump one in a class of music-box fairies). Nobody minded the thumping but if I wriggled too much when sitting near my mother she would say: �You’re making me seasick.’ Liz’s mother drowned at the age of twenty-nine; six-year-old Liz, playing with her in Lake Geneva, was rescued. This shaped everything, but that is another story.

I’m seeing myself here aged about seven, when my parents were about forty. My brother and sisters are older than me. In the way of elder siblings, they went out more, and further, and in a different way: Beatles concerts, boarding schools, festivals, university, California, Afghanistan. Later, I had a baby sister. Robert always rather yearned for a sister – he thought if he had one he could look after her. He wondered if he could borrow one of mine, I had so many.

The BlГјthner had been in that room for forty years, and was there another forty afterwards. My nephew has it now. My family was large, individually adventurous, but overall, steady.

Robert came on a school trip to London when he was eleven, and stayed in a hotel in Lancaster Gate – a hundred yards from where I lived. (He went on another school trip a few years later, an exchange to Amiens. He ran away to Paris and got into trouble.) We might have passed on the pavement as I set off for school, and he crocodiled off to the Tube station to go to the Planetarium. We were born one day apart at different ends of the country, but you could get a direct train from where I was born – Euston in London – to where he was, in Wigan. We were both conceived on holiday. One day a year – my birthday – I was his older woman.

The first time he came to my childhood home, he didn’t come in. It was 1978: after our encounter in Oxford, before Primrose Hill. I was recently back from my post-school year off adventures in India with a small array of revolting digestive illnesses, and had to spend the traditional few weeks in the Hospital for Tropical Diseases at St Pancras, and some time at home recuperating. Tallulah came to visit.

�I can’t stay long, the boys are in the car.’

Which boys?

�Simon and Robert.’

My bedroom was on the ground floor. I thought of the yellow line outside, and Simon’s little Renault 4, the only car owned by anyone we knew of our age.

Which Robert?

�Lockhart.’

�Oh, they can come in,’ I say, nonchalantly.

�You’re not well enough,’ she said.

�I am well enough,’ I said.

�No you’re not.’

�Yes I am.’

�No,’ she said.

�Yes,’ I said.

She didn’t bring them in. This occasion was one of the moments when the slippery crystal polyhedron of missed opportunities slips sideways and could, just might, have landed on a different surface. Robert didn’t know the details at the time, but later it became for him a moment when we might have got together. �You’d have been irresistible,’ he’d say. �In bed, all skinny from your illness, too knackered to give me any grief – we could have got together then. We’d have got married – and you’d have divorced me, of course, but then we’d’ve got married again and been happy and I never would’ve become an alcoholic …’ Our non-existent children were to be named after composers: Claudette, Frederica, Cesar and Sergei, for Debussy, Chopin, Franck and Rachmaninoff. Much as he loved Satie and Ravel, we drew the line at Eric and Maurice.

Tallulah doesn’t like this story, because it suggests he would only have wanted me then because I was thin and brown. I don’t see it that way. At her fiftieth birthday party, we formally forgave her for not bringing him in to see me. She said, �Actually, you do make rather a good couple’, and I felt it as a blessing. I thrilled like a seventeen-year-old to see our names written together on the invitation, even when we were well middle-aged. Public acknowledgement of coupledom. I was never the marrying kind and anyway Louisa Lockhart would be a terrible name – I can see Louisa Lockhart in a third-rate novel, scurrying over the storm-lashed moors, sodden shawl clutched round her after the Young Master done her wrong. Or writing light erotica. Or being an eighteenth-century fishing boat.

According to my diary, I went to his twenty-first birthday party, on 27 March 1980. �Jolly flirt with L’, I wrote in my diary. I have no memory of it whatsoever. And there is his name on the list for my twenty-first birthday party, a few days later. All the names are crossed out, in an �invitation sent’ or �def coming’ way, in a single straight line. His is crossed out in a cloud-formation zigzag of circling pencil, which continues into an arrow pointing to the top of the page. I remember that I cooked dinner for about ten people and then everyone else came afterwards. I made a veal thing where you rolled it up with an omelette inside, and ham, so when you sliced it it was striped pink and yellow, and I added lots of parsley so it could be green as well, deckchair stripes like my favourite trousers of that period. And a pile of meringues and cream. I had friends old and new from different areas of my disparate twenty-one-year-old life, and none of the dinner people, my nearest and dearest at the time, knew each other. I remember we had two bands – Sore Throat and The Arials – and Sore Throat’s roadie took all his clothes off and chased round the house trying to apologise to me for being naked, and Shane McSweeney hid the clothes up a tree. But I can’t remember if Robert came. So I can’t have loved him much then. The following year, only one sighting: �… in the foyer of the Wigmore Hall, listening to the pleasant strains of the first half of the programme, and the whispers and rustlings of the latecomers and ushers. The second half is Rob Lockhart …’

I had recently graduated, and was working as a lowest-of-the-low on the making of Britannia Hospital, the third of Lindsay Anderson’s trilogy of films which started with If … and O Lucky Man! It was filmed in the still-active mental hospital at Friern Barnet, where actors and mental patients mixed perhaps more than had been planned. One chap followed me about to give me ginger cake in a brown paper bag. I had a weakness for talented men with beautiful accents: Glaswegian Robbie Coltrane who slid across the floor of the cast bar on his knees and collided with my bum, which he bit; another of the actors, Welsh Bob Pugh, who read me Gerard Manley ’Opkins and played Van Morrison songs on the piano; history professor Norman Stone (also Glaswegian) who had taught me at Cambridge. I’d had it, forever, with Cambridge, with posh English chaps, dinner jackets, repression, arrogance, misogyny and fear faintly concealed behind perfect manners. The establishment. I was moving into my squat, busking, working as a barmaid, running round with deep-sea divers, Jamaican musicians, despatch riders; saving for New York, wanting to work in films, anything, anyone, but not that Chelsea banker quacking entitled educated ignorant money-making narrow-minded posh ungrateful world … It was in that mood that I ran into Robert at Emma’s party.

*

Tallulah came back from New York in 1986, and moved in with my friend Swift. We all, in our late twenties, became pals again. We were working hard. I got a mortgage on a one-room flat; I was a freelance journalist now, travelling the world for Marie Claire, correcting the spelling on TheSunday Times, riding motorcycles for Bike magazine, doing columns in the Guardian. Tallulah was running a publishing house. Swift was moving from magazines into the literary end of film. Robert had meanwhile come to London to study piano as a postgraduate, teach at Oxford, and play cocktail jazz in wine-bars to support himself as well as concerts on Radio 3, at Wigmore Hall and the South Bank. He had a girlfriend: kind, pretty, mickey-taking Lisette, who everybody liked. And his mother died. �Seeing her dying,’ he wrote, �aged 52, looking aged 80, deaf, blind, incontinent, was probably the most disturbing moment of my life.’ He retired from professional piano around then, unsure if it was because of his mother’s death or not, and started writing music for radio and TV, theatre, films and advertising. He was a musical director at the National Theatre, he triumphed in the West End and New York. He had his little thespian habits and nicknames: Serena McKellen for fellow Wiganer Sir Ian McKellen; Pierre Vestibule for Peter Hall; Pierre Ruisseau for Peter Brook. In 1986 he did the musical arrangements for a production of Arthur Miller’s The American Clock, and was extremely excited after meeting the author – mostly because of shaking his hand, and Marilyn Monroe. �I know where it’s been,’ he said, staring lovingly and disbelievingly at his own hand that had shaken the hand that had made love to the goddess. There was big pressure and scary deadlines, but he didn’t have to be on stage, and could therefore drink. That world brimmed with drink.

Being Terence Davies’ music director, on The Long Day Closes (1988) and Distant Voices, Still Lives (1992) and The Neon Bible (1995) drew him back to the North, and to his father. He had to conduct a choir of Liverpool schoolboys, singing in Latin. When he corrected their pronunciation one of them said to him, �Sir, sir, are you Latin?’ Oh the joy. As a Wiganer – or Cocchiite, he preferred, because it was both Latin and rude – he liked nothing better than mocking Liverpudlians (unless it was mocking people from Skelmersdale, or his default position in the south, épater-ing les fuckin’ bourgeois). He orchestrated the gorgeous version of �Love Is a Many Splendored Thing’, in the scene where they’re all in the cinema, crying. Years later I sat in the cinema, crying. I looked at those 1950s Northern people, so beautifully turned out, quoting lines from The Philadelphia Story, and thought, is that where he’s from?

When he told me how he had fallen out of someone called Nina’s window, I thought he and Lisette must have broken up (which they did several times) and felt, God help me, a little pang of jealousy. I wanted him to be falling out of my window, or at least trying to climb in it – and it wouldn’t have been nearly so perilous, as I was on the ground floor with a window directly on to the street, Jesus, there’d have been no risk at all, he certainly wouldn’t have impaled his arse on the railings.

*

His past is in boxes under his piano in my sitting room, for me to deal with, to rationalise or romanticise (which sometimes seem to be the same thing); to put in order, any order that can pass as orderly, so that thereafter it can be put away. I am in charge of his sheet music, his music manuscripts, his CDs, his cassettes, his dad’s LPs, his rehab papers, medical notes, autopsy report, boots, books, love letters from his girlfriends, letters to them that he never sent. �Dear Buttock’, he wrote, in 1981; �Dear Rectangle’. They break my heart. The older ones from Manchester and Nottingham, biro and lined paper; fountain pens and Basildon Bond like a granny, then brown Rotring ink and cartoon sunsets, speech bubbles coming from the picture of the queen on the stamp, or the cherub on the front. Postcards from Siena and San Gimignano, airmails from Ohio and California. Letters starting, �I’ve just put down the phone from our conversation but I can’t bear not to be talking to you still …’ Letters which stop and start over days: �I’m on the train now; sorry about the writing … I’m home now, it’s so cold … Just scribbling this at the bus stop …’ Funny letters, love letters. Haunting letters: �WHERE IS YOUR WARM BODY NOW?’ A lipstick kiss. A postcard showing a naked lady from behind, waist down, long legs in high heels crossed at the ankle to make a very elongated heart-shape, and on the back, in thick black felt pen: ROBERT JE VOUS ATTENDS AVEC IMPATIENCE. Incomprehensible letters: �Arms and legs! Arms and legs!’ And: �… I have written endless letters to you, but have abandoned all due to distress and muddle. There isn’t much to say anyway, other than what a fantastic and unforgettable adventure we had, despite our differences … If love isn’t worth fighting for it was probably not love in the first place but a mutual passion driven by intensity (of a volatile nature). Because to me love is about understanding and security as well as the sex and excitement which always features in the beginning …’

One from him, giving his phone number as 999. A photo of a girl with a teddy bear, aged about twenty, and on the back written: �Only one of these is your girlfriend’: she’s a film star now. Several have filled me with jealousy appropriate to the age I was at the time they were written: But I knew you then, why didn’t you want me? wept the ghost of me aged seventeen.

I don’t want to read them. They’re not mine. Yet here I am in charge of them, which is a damned odd sort of victory over time and the ghosts of love rivals who have long been living other lives.

And there’s something addressed to me: a printed invitation to a production of Woyzeck, which as it is in �the Newman Rooms’ and gives the date �Tues–Sat 4th Week’ must be to do with Oxford, which exists in its own chronological universe. I do look at that and think –1978? 1979? What if I’d gone?

I could identify about 80 per cent of the letters’ senders. I recognise their handwriting; I know the stories, the places, the timings. Tough, sympathetic curly-haired Beth who was my pal at school; Emma who I knew a bit at Cambridge; Jackie the violinist. I put them back in the boxes. All that love, all that youth. I take them out again. Put them back again.

It adds up to a chaotic record of a life which might have been lived differently; a map across which he might have traced a different, better, route. A map I was going to have to look at.

And, for a while, it was like getting a dose of him, after he was gone.




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