You Left Early. Louisa Young
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.
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.
‘You can’t be out here like this. Come home.’
He looked me in the face. His head was