by Louisa Young
‘Yes, I know the word.’
‘What is it then?’
‘It’s when the same note has two different names and roles, depending which scale you’re thinking about: hence it might be D flat in one key, but in another it’s C sharp.’
‘It’s a good image that, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘How it can look and sound exactly the same, but it can mean, and be, something else entirely. The last note of one scale could be the first note of a completely different scale.’
When the rain stopped, I walked out into the brilliance of sudden English sun after rain, raindrop-spattered cobwebs glittering all around, the wooden garden fence steaming lightly, and I sang ‘Cry Me a River’ softly to the sheep who stood with tiny rainbows in their oily wool, as the wet grass soaked through my shoes and drenched my jeans up to the knee.
Tenderness crept through me. I could feel it. I imagined a future: him at the piano, playing; me on a sofa, reading. A fire. French windows, maybe. A touching end to a long saga.
Would I make him cry me a river?
No. I would follow Johnny Cash’s advice. I would be what I was – in love with him. With him, finally. To turn my back on this would go against nature. All I could do now was be honest. See where love would take us. Because love can take you anywhere.
*
On my return to London I had a little speech semi-prepared, and waited for the moment, which occurred across a bowl of tom yung koong.
‘I must try and make this,’ he said. ‘You like it, don’t you?’
‘So, Robert,’ I said.
‘Yes, Louisa,’ he said, with a demeanour of self-aware ironic obedience. He was wearing a clean white shirt, and was sober, though over-shaved.
I hadn’t smoked for years, but I rather wanted one now. It felt so charmingly youthful to be here with Robert. Like being twenty-five again. I took a fag from his packet.
‘Bloody amateur,’ he grumbled, and didn’t light it for me.
‘So, Robert,’ I said.
‘You’re looking gorgeous,’ he said. ‘Let’s skip dinner. Come under the table with me. I’ve had a demi-maître all week at the thought of you.’ (Demi-maître = half-master = semi-erection.)
‘Robert,’ I said.
‘Don’t brush me off,’ he said.
‘No!’ I said – and realised suddenly his vulnerability.
‘No?’ he said.
‘Do you want me for your girlfriend?’ I asked. The seventeen-year-old ghost me shivered. The nerve! To ask Robert that!
‘Well it seems a bit of a juvenile way to put it,’ he said, ‘but partner is a dreadful term, sounds like I want you to set up in a law firm or play squash, and it’s probably a little early to ask you to marry me, though I could start quite soon with the veiled hints …’
‘I’ll be your girlfriend,’ I said. ‘What I said – if you’re looking for a good woman so you can be saved by her love, I’ll do that. I can’t not. Two things though.’
He was smiling.
‘You stop drinking, and you get a shrink.’
My seventeen-year-old gaped. To ask Robert, straight out, and to set requirements!
He was taking a long drag, cigarette held between finger and thumb. He smiled down at the cigarette. ‘Drink and smoke till the day I die,’ he murmured.
‘Smoking is a detail,’ I said. ‘Of course you smoke too much, but it doesn’t make you a cunt.’
‘Does drinking make me a cunt?’ he asked.
‘You should know. You’re there every time it happens.’
‘I do drink too much,’ he said. ‘Far too much. You’re right, I should cut down.’
‘You must stop,’ I said.
‘Completely?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that a requirement?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t ask much, does she.’
‘It’s not for me.’
‘Yes it is,’ he said. ‘OK. I’ll do it.’ (Air of doing a great favour.) ‘I won’t drink when I’m with you.’ He announced it as if it were in his gift.
‘At all,’ I said gently.
‘And I won’t be POA,’ he said. ‘All right?’ A little aggressively. (POA is Pissed On Arrival.)
‘At all,’ I said.
He avoided understanding.
‘OK,’ he said.
‘At all, ever, whether I am there or not,’ I said, very clearly. ‘Ever again.’
‘But I can’t have a steak without a glass or two of nice fat red wine,’ he said. ‘It’s a cultural thing, it’s …’
‘At all,’ I said.
Silence. Then: ‘I went to the doctor,’ he said.
‘Oh?’
‘A few weeks ago.’
‘And what did the doctor say?’
‘That I shouldn’t stop drinking.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. He said it was dangerous.’
‘Dangerous to stop drinking.’
‘Yes. When you’ve been drinking as much as I have, it’s dangerous to stop.’
‘So explain to me that thing where people stop drinking because they have to for their health. That whole alcoholic business – AA, and addiction, and all that?’
‘I don’t know about that,’ he said.
‘Yes, you do. You did a detox and had to be talked to every day. What did they talk about? Perhaps,’ I said, ‘the doctor meant it would be dangerous to stop drinking just like that. Presumably you’re meant to cut down bit by bit, or do it under supervision, with the librium, like you did before. Perhaps you might go to the doctor again.’
‘I hate going to the doctor.’
‘I’ll come with you.’ I really wasn’t going to mother him. But you might go to the doctor with your boyfriend anyway, mightn’t you? Isn’t that what people do? Couples? If they want?
‘What’s the cunt like?’ he asked. ‘The cunt I become?’
‘Incoherent and rude,’ I said. ‘Leaps from topic to topic, so you can’t follow a conversation. Interrupts, talks over people, to repeat himself. Same stories over and over. Gets into provocative situations with strangers. Rings up at four in the morning. Asks the same question a hundred times and doesn’t listen to the answer.’
‘Not a hundred. How you exaggerate.’
Sober, I thought, he won’t need to be defensive. Is he sober now? Maybe not entirely.
‘And doesn’t listen to the answer,’ I said again. ‘Obsessive. Bullying.’
‘Bullying!’
‘Yes. Won’t let people leave, for example. Insist they stay with you, stay awake, and listen to whatever it is that you desperately want to listen to …’
‘I want to share my passions …’
‘At one in the morning when they want to go home?’
‘Yes! People have no passion. Fucking bourgeois …’
‘They have work the next day. They have baby sitters. They have a right to go home when they want.’
He grunted. ‘What else?’
‘You don’t notice what they want or need. They might say – I’m just going to the loo; and you’ll take their arm, hold on to them, keep talking, so they feel it’s rude to leave. They could piss their pants before you’d notice. You don’t notice when people hate you swearing. You lose your sense of proportion. You swear to old ladies. You take out a fag and light it and someone else could be standing there with a fag and you wouldn’t see it to light it for them. You say stupid things, then you get hit. You get stuck on transmit. You’re never on receive.’
‘Never!’ he exclaimed softly.
‘Not when you’re drunk.’
‘And when I’m not drunk?’
‘You’re my true love,’ I said.
‘What?’ he said.
‘You heard,’ I said.
The evening had moved on. By now he was leaning in the kitchen doorway, forgetting to blow his smoke out into the back yard.
‘You were never in love with me,’ he said.
There w
as a pause while the idiocy of his statement hit me.
‘Were you?’ he asked.
And I howled with laughter.
‘Were you?’
‘Robert,’ I said. ‘I’ve been half in love with you my entire adult life.’
‘Half?’
‘I slept with you for years and years.’
‘Yeah, but you weren’t my girlfriend or anything.’
‘Exactly!’
‘So …’
‘I slept with you whenever you wanted, no matter what.’
‘Yeah, but—’
‘What – you slept with loads of people? Yes, I know!’
‘So did you!’
‘I seem to remember last time we discussed this I was on ten and you were on a hundred and fifty, including about thirty with names like “that girl on the flight to San Francisco” and “the Australian with the tits”.’
‘A hundred and forty,’ he said, as if that were the point.
‘Robert, men do often sleep with women just because they have the horn and no standards; but usually when a woman sleeps with a man, and carries on sleeping with him, it’s because it means something to her.’
‘I thought you just liked shagging me.’
‘Oh I did,’ I said, and he smiled. ‘Stop that,’ I said. ‘We’re talking. Where was I. Yes. Shagging.’ Laughing again. ‘Yes.’ Thinking: and I liked your jokes and your conversation and your kindness and your magnificent intellect and your pale blue eyes and the fact you were quite nice to my mum and all sorts of things about you which added up to me being kind of crazy about you.
‘Bloody hellfire,’ he said. Then he got cross. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’
‘Because you never asked. You should have noticed. Instead of always saying I didn’t want to go out with a chain-smoking drunk who shags everyone. Anyway. I was sleeping with you! That should’ve told you!’
‘You should have told me! Properly!’
‘I couldn’t possibly have told you. You were off with every bloody girl you could get your hands on and you were horribly unfaithful to everybody – who’d want to be your girlfriend, the way you behaved? Who wants to go out with someone who either didn’t notice or didn’t value that they were half in love with them? And you might have rejected me.’
‘Never!’ he declared. For a moment I was hugely, enormously gratified.
‘You might have,’ I said. ‘You rejected loads of people. After you’d shagged them usually.’
‘I wasn’t like that,’ he complained.
‘Everyone except Lucy and Benazir Bhutto?’ I said. ‘The woman you’d never met before, at dinner, and you lured her to the bathroom before the main course? The one you sat next to on a plane and moved in with her and her mother for three months? The Russian woman? Four violinists in a row, I seem to remember. And me? Did you ring me? Or did I not hear from you for a year and a half?’
‘God, if I’d known,’ he said. ‘It would have been so different. We could have got together fifteen years ago.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘We didn’t. You were too drunk and I was too proud.’ Pride, the well-known B-side of low self-esteem … my fear-and-pride-fuelled passivity. Now, sod pride. Sod fear of rejection.
‘I wasn’t that drunk,’ he said.
‘Nina’s window?’
‘Obviously I’ve drunk quite a lot …’
‘You’ve been drunk for years, and you’ve got into a habit of misery …’
‘I can be positive,’ he said. ‘I can believe that a modicum of contentment might be available.’
‘A modicum of contentment!’ I laughed a lot. God, how sweet that would be.
‘So if I stop drinking and get a shrink, I get to fuck you whenever I want?’
‘More or less,’ I said.
‘Hmm,’ he said, and took a hard but leisurely drag on his cigarette. ‘OK, deal,’ he said. ‘And now what?’
‘Now you give up drinking and we live happily ever after,’ I said. ‘And see where we are in a year.’
‘Modicum of contentment here we come,’ he said. ‘Get yer coat.’
‘We’re home.’
‘Oh. So we are.’
Later, he said: ‘And what about fidelity and all that?
I said, ‘If you so much as look at another woman I’ll kill you.’
He said, ‘Thank Christ for that. What a relief.’
I was a balloon in a high and beautiful wind. I thought, We can do this. He wants to. We can. I was daffodils in April. I was Shirley MacLaine at the end of Sweet Charity. It was all going to be all right.
Part Two
2003–05
Chapter Ten
Home, 2003
I had the habits of regular life.
‘I envy you,’ he said. ‘How do you know how to do that?’ – as I had a bath, or sat down with a little salad at one o’clock, or fell asleep.
‘God, that must be a record,’ he said once, standing above me, waking me.
‘What?’
‘Seven seconds, head on pillow to fast asleep. God, I envy you that.’
The first morning he leapt out of bed at eight, dolloped yogurt into a big bowl with honey and sliced banana, and had a shower before getting dressed.
‘See?’ he said. ‘I can do it. Good habits, healthy life. I know just what needs to be done.’
He came home with flowers – nice ones, not newsagent ones. ‘I did slightly notice – you see, I do notice things, I’m not a cunt – that’s a really bad thing to call someone, you know, you shouldn’t say things like that – I did notice that you didn’t really like the ones I brought before. But these are nice, aren’t they?’ He sounded a little anxious. ‘The girl in the shop said they were … I thought they looked a bit skinny, but she said you’d like them. I told her you were very stylish and knew about stuff like that …’
They were skinny: twenty long tuber-roses, coloured like green ivory and smelling like the Elysian Fields, in thick cellophane and cream ribbons. I liked them very much. I put them in the bedroom but could hardly breathe with the scent, so I distributed them round the house, and the smell made me feel like a chorus girl in her dressing room.
He was sweet to me day and night. He played for me endlessly; my personal piano jukebox. He looked vaguely healthy.
‘I’ll go swimming,’ he said, and he did, but the pool was so revolting that it was only the once. ‘Well, nonce, actually,’ he said. ‘I didn’t go in.’
It’s astonishing how many alcoholics are charismatic, witty and attractive people.
‘I’m going up the road,’ he says, one sunny morning. He always goes up the road in the morning: fags, paper, coffee at Paolo’s. ‘Do you need anything?’
‘Bog roll,’ I say.
Half an hour later he is in the front garden, chuckling. He has bought twenty-four rolls, and has unwrapped them all, and is building a pyramid for me on the grass.
I go to lunch with an editor to talk about a new book, about roses and the people they are named after. During the meal a waiter brings a massive bunch of roses to the table, to me. They are addressed to ‘the most beautiful woman in the room’. (Later I learned he had tracked through the entire publishers on the phone to find the editor, to get the name of the restaurant. He charmed her, asked her if the gesture would be naff (she said no). On a later occasion she recognised him in the street by his voice; they spoke and made friends.)
On my birthday, he is unwell and unable to take me out to Locanda Locatelli for lunch as planned. He says: Take Baroness Alacrity in my place, I’ll pay. During the meal, again a waiter brings a massive bunch of roses to the table, addressed this time to ‘The two most beautiful women in the room’, signed Roberto Lockhartelli.
Robert and Wayland (in his mid-eighties, half blind and playing from memory) are playing duets. ‘It’s amazing how much better I am, playing with him,’ Dad says, as Robert plays three and a half hands’ worth, the pair of them with their blue eyes and their twinkling.
L: Good morning
R: (On this he has drawn a traditional cock-and-balls, using the tail of the final g as one of the testicles. This was his preferred sign off, an affectionate scribble, often with a few dots for sperm, used universally, including to his father.)
L: Here are my keys – when you go out PLEASE LEAVE THEM IN THE GARDEN LETTERBOX so I can get in later.
R: (With an arrow pointing to the capitals)
could you possibly print this larger? I can’t quite read it. In addition, I can’t find a letterbox in the garden. [There is one, actually.] I think, worryingly, you might be embarking on succumbation to the evils of a distortedly surrealist malaise. Salvatore Tarka Dahli will be turning in his wooden hammock. As Apollinaire would have said: “Je ne veux pas laisser les clefs dans la boi(s)te de lettres dans le jardin … je veux ronfler.” [This, God help us, is a complex reference to the song ‘Hotel’, a setting by Poulenc of a poem by Apollinaire, of which the final line is ‘Je ne veux pas travailler, je veux fumer’ – ‘I don’t want to work, I want to smoke’. He’s made it ‘I don’t want to leave the keys in the wood/box (French pun here) of letters in the garden, I want to snore’.]
L: Also there is a chocolate croissant in the gym. [I have no idea what I meant by this.]
R: and a baguette in the brothel. Sadly I will be visiting neither today
xx
One possible explanation for this charm among alcoholics is that, like criminals and the insane and other wild people, they need it. If they didn’t make others happy at least some of the time, nobody would look after them. It’s Darwinian. Only the most irresistible alcoholics survive at all. Of course, there are also many many alcoholics who make everyone around them unhappy all the time, who are aggressive, vicious, malevolently calculating, boring, ungifted and unattractive, who keep their abusive relationships going by sheer wretched force: Take care of me or I’ll beat you up. Take care of me or I’ll discard you, and all the other people in our community will regard you as damaged goods. Take care of me or you will lose my portion of our meagre earning potential and we’ll both starve and so will our kids. Anyway you’re so stupid and ugly no one else would have you.
