by Louisa Young
I am in a towel. I was about to get into the bath. I think: You’ve been drinking, but I dress quickly and look nice and get in the cab, because he’s taking me out, and it is to be nice. I hope. I do, I hope. Though this is not really a date designed to please me – it is, as usual, him doing what he wants to do, and inviting me along, and pretending on some level that it is for me. On that level, he wants it to be for me, because he wants me to love what he loves, and I do love much of what he loves, including Tchaikovsky, but I need him to do something at the moment which is really about him thinking about me.
I remembered an elegant biker I had known long ago who, when he had a Meccano frame like this round a multiple fracture after a crash, had had it chromed, and etched with a foliate design to match the etched chrome on the oil tank of his Harley.
Robert is talking to the cabbie, too loudly, with words too long and too demanding for someone whose native tongue is Urdu. I choose to see this talking to the taxi driver, the movie star, the waiter, the priest, the child, all in the same way as a kind of integrity but it is also very annoying.
‘You’re drunk,’ I say, pointlessly. He denies it. He can say he’s not drunk till he’s blue in the face; is he acting drunk is all I care about. I remind myself that I have promised never again to have a conversation which is a direct repetition of a conversation I have had before. We continue that conversation, a conversation we have had many many times before.
He is this alternate Robert, the one I have come to acknowledge as the Evil Twin. I’m so angry I shake.
The traffic is bad, it takes hours to get to the Festival Hall, and we’re late. It’s not Tchaikovsky anyway, it’s Mozart and Bartók. I experiment by leaving him to do things without my help. Finally he finds the lift. He is standing in his socks, with his crutches.
‘I actually can’t do this any more,’ I say. ‘I am that far from saying “I’ll see you when you come out of rehab”. That far from saying “I’m leaving you”.’
He’s not listening.
He really wants to go in to the concert, and me to go in with him. Nothing is more important to him than this music, and avoiding what I am saying. We have time for all this because the first half is Mozart. He only wants me for the Bartók, because he needs someone’s knee to grip. He goes up to the auditorium – he has both our tickets – and I stand by the lift and cry for fifteen minutes. Then I go and get myself another ticket.
In the interval he’s at the bar, buying a vodka and tonic; 100-proof proof, if proof was what I wanted. Then he’s outside on the concrete terrace, smoking and talking to strangers. I see him through the glass, with London spread out behind in summer evening light. I can see the oily vodka round the ice, the strangers’ embarrassment as they think who is this person, crutches and socks, talking intellectual. The girl has very white bare legs. They are young.
Why am I still here?
I step outside and take the drink from him, saying, ‘I assume this is for me.’
‘No it’s not!’ he roars. The strangers are surprised but he looks like a madman anyway.
I walk off fast on my two good legs in their clickety high heels, breathless at my audacity, and put the drink down on a table. (Later I learned that coming between an addict and their substance is called ‘Interfering in the Zone’, and will always bring down punishment, a furious lashing out – as it did that time in Greece.)
I go back into the concert for the second half, and watch from two rows down and half a concert hall sideways as he listens to the Bartók. He doesn’t see me. Throughout, his head is bowed, and occasionally it rears, in recognition, or admiration, or ecstasy. He is in conversation with the music; talking to a dead man.
Coming out with tears in his eyes, he goes for a fag on the balcony. I’m cold, no coat. He’s crying for Bartók in New York in 1945 with leukaemia, only ten people at his funeral. I’m thinking, Can’t you cry because you’re breaking me and I’m leaving and I’ve walked out on you twice tonight already?
He wants to go for dinner.
‘Not if you want to talk about Bartók,’ I say. ‘Only if you’ll talk about reality and why I’m crying and you don’t notice.’
We get a cab in the rain. He asks the cabbie if he can smoke, opens the window. I am shivering, wet and cold. I think, not for the first time, It would be so good if you looked out for me. I don’t mind if you don’t look out for me. But do you have to actually sabotage me?
He won’t shut the window. I get out into the middle of the traffic at Victoria, and get the Tube.
I think he rang later, wanting to come round. I can’t remember, it had happened so often.
*
I had friends, the closer of whom were fully aware of the novelist’s capacity to paint herself in and out of every corner of the room, adjusting the narrative to fit, modifying storylines to suit her moods and needs. They thought it would be a better idea if I were to paint myself into a different corner, a different room even, hell, a different house, town, planet – better, they thought, if I were to write a version of my life in which I wasn’t crying daily, in which my child wasn’t living with an alcoholic. A version in which I stuck to my word, to myself and to Robert, and genuinely gave him back his responsibility for himself. i.e., kicked him out. They were right, they spoke from love, and sometimes some grew scared to speak because I bit their heads off. If they backed away from it, and from me too, it was not to a culpably unfriendly degree. I – we – must have been very difficult to be near.
We went round to a friend’s house. Robert liked her and disliked her boyfriend, and the feelings were mutual. The boyfriend, already drunk, said Robert looked like something the cat brought in. Robert walked out, on his crutch. The friend and I made eyes at each other, women’s eyes. You-too-huh eyes. I went after Robert. If it had been just her I might have stayed, but I wasn’t staying there to give credence to her alcoholic over mine.
Another night, much later, they came over to my house. Robert played, I sang. I’m by no means a good classical singer – no timing – but I can hit the notes and have a decent accent, and he was patient with me, and it was something we both loved to do. Every couple needs a project, and his recovery couldn’t be our only one. I think we did Duparc probably, or Fauré. Sad nineteenth-century French art songs about dreams and death. ‘Après un Rêve’, which I hadn’t been able to sing all those years ago. The boyfriend sat as if pinned to the back of the armchair, almost in shock. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Oh God, now I get it. Oh God.’ He was almost in tears.
I recall my friend Deborah, from Motherwell, a sharp and golden-hearted political journalist, saying, ‘What has Robert Lockhart ever done for you?’ For weeks I pondered this, worried at it, drawing up lists and justifications. The list included: Plays the piano. Sex. Piano lessons by phone. Offered to buy Ducati – meant it. Pays if we eat out. Gave up bed happily when Lola wanted it. Cooks – one time out of two so far. Offered to help clear up (didn’t let him because he cooked). Makes the bed, badly, touchingly – ‘You like that, don’t you, because it implies respect.’ Offered lunch on Sunday, inc Lola, didn’t fuss when we didn’t want to, and brought back baklava. Flowers on birthday. Remembers to smoke up chimney and in garden. Remembers to piss on compost heap not herbs. Makes Lola laugh (finsbury park backwards is krapy rubsnif). Talks, listens – sometimes. Not enough though. Pays compliments. Doesn’t flush loo in case it wakes people. Working on: letting me go to bed, bathing.
I still find it both desperate and touching. The reality was simple though. What he did for me was what he had always done: sex, music and laughter. And a promise. We had promised each other.
I was so utterly relieved and glad that I had achieved a state of shared promise with a man, with this man, finally, that I doubt anything could have diverted me from it. I was one of a We now, and because of various issues with reality (see novelistic tendency to write my own story, passim) I had never really achieved We-ness before. My boyfriends had been in large
part fantasy princes, as Swift called them: I gave them nicknames and attributes, simultaneously creating them in the image of what I desired and distancing them. They always included aspects of unattainability. The Deep Sea Diver, the Argentine in Rome, the Married Man, the Zydeco Fiddler, the Gorbals Intellectual twice my age, the far too old, the way too young, an array of musicians/charmers/foreigners/bikers/addicts in various stages of the condition reaching a peak in the Colombian coke-head war correspondent with an ex-wife on every continent, and the Born-Again-Christian Gang Biker in New Jersey, who I considered, momentarily, a contender. That my daughter’s dear father, just as unlikely in his own sweet way, turned out to be so right for us is a small miracle.
Add to this pride, stubborn pig-headedness, a sense of loyalty which verges on the grandiose, and a total inability to lose face, and you will see something of why the little sister will never admit to being wrong. Anyway, I wasn’t wrong (she says, even now). I just wasn’t leaving without him.
We made lists of each other’s irritating habits once, with a view to perhaps getting rid of some of them. I came up with two pages for him, from not brushing his teeth to not giving up smoking to setting fire to things to not doing his physio exercises. Things which were bad for him, basically. He came up with one: I would leave my bra hanging on the bathroom door handle.
Various images haunted me at that time:
He is a bucket with a hole in it. I pour in love; love pours out.
He is standing in the dark, torch in one hand, batteries in the other, complaining of how very dark it is.
He is in a deep dark hole. I stand at the edge above him holding my hand out, reaching, stretching, putting my back out, losing my balance. I will not get down in the hole with him, not even to try to push him out from behind. After a while I say, I have things to do, I cannot stay here forever holding my arm out. It’s beginning to ache. I’m going to go and do stuff, I’ll look in later. I’ll bring a ladder. I can leave it in the corner for you. Would you consider using a ladder? It would be hard to get started maybe but you might like where it took you once you tried. I’ll just leave it there for you—
Over and over, this phrase: I’m not leaving without you.
Before Robert’s illness, I had never fought for anything in my life. For my first ten years I was the youngest of five, with three glamorous big sisters and a brother two years older. I soon learned that I didn’t win anything by fighting for it. I didn’t enter into quarrels; politicking and infighting still leave me cold. I had no interest in competition, retreated at the first sign of conflict, spent my finals year at university playing gin rummy. If someone else pursued a man I liked, my response was, ‘Oh, after you.’ It wasn’t courtesy, or generosity. It was fear of rejection and of looking a tit. And it was that tiny voice sneering, ‘You have so much, you’re asking for more?’ To be ambitious for myself in any way seemed greedy. It ran side by side with the tendency of female competence and motherly concern to shade into a gentle form of arrogance. Kindly generous women, often with an awareness of their own good fortune, feel that it is it right and possible to take on the misfortunes of others, and use their own happiness and luck to cancel them out. This is the Rescuer in the Drama Triangle beloved of therapists (the other two being the Perpetrator, and the Victim; family members caught in this triangle can swap roles according to circumstance, but generally hold one primary role). ‘I have so much,’ the Rescuer feels, ‘that I can make things right for this poor other person.’ Or, ‘With all my advantages, how can I let this little thing derail me and my nice life?’ She rarely phrases it: ‘I am so fabulous I can take all this in my stride and solve all your problems too, just watch me, now shut up.’
I was fundamentally a person who liked safety over risk, and this was another reason for loving Robert. He was – or seemed – fearless. He pissed out of fourth-floor windows! He dropped his trousers to perform the opening bars of Beethoven’s fifth in naked buttock-pulses! He had no respect for, or even recognition of, times of day! He wasn’t scared to make a mess or to challenge a fool or to risk a friendship or upset a figure of authority. He delighted in it. Which of course made him a bloody liability.
A photograph comes to mind. He is standing in an arched golden-stone niche, halfway up a noble-looking wall – the kind of thing one might find in the garden of a stately home or an Oxford college, usually containing a statue of a nymph with a scrap of cloth draped over her. This one contains Robert, aged about twenty-five. He is wearing an unlikely dark blue wool cape, a jumper, jeans, and boots. He looks very pleased with himself. In one hand he has a cigarette, in the other you can just see his dick, which he has brought out – why? Because he was always getting it out. He’d say ‘It’s not the biggest but it’s a nice shape, isn’t it?’ (He was dick-obsessed, actually. His own and other people’s. He felt I must have had one in a previous life, and seemed almost sorry I didn’t still.) Anyway, getting your dick out on a plinth is funny. And naughty, with a back story of ‘Well, usually it’s naked women in this position, and when they have naked men you see all of them except the dick, so I’m just redressing the fuckin’ balance, this is actually an act of radical feminism, this—’
For the first twenty years I knew him, I didn’t fight for him. Looking back, I see that I didn’t start fighting for him until it was too late. I wish I had started fighting earlier; learned to respect my own strength in a balanced way, and know that it was not just my right but my duty to use it. I wish I’d known how very long it would take me to get my head around the situation. If I’d started fighting earlier I would have learned earlier that my fighting was not the point.
*
Which is not to say we didn’t fight. One evening at the Office he tried to pretend the Nepalese Soldiers lined up in front of him were not his. I took his fag off him and put it out in one of them. He picked it up and drank it anyway, fag-end and all, sneering. I picked up the other three and knocked them back one after the other, and left. I could always leave because with his bad legs he could not come after me fast enough. I have no doubt he just ordered more, and that this made Ojay, the manager who had known him for years, very sad.
There were some horrible nights of yelling and crying (me) and sitting and sarking (him), followed by silences which got longer each time. I got hysterical. It turned out I had an Evil Twin too, who came out when invited – provoked? – by his. One thing he said – the one true thing, I felt – was that, at one stage, he hadn’t had a drink for two and a half weeks. His hard little mouth as he said it. Two and a half weeks! The official version was it’d been four months! The lies, the lies, the things you find you’ve let yourself go along with … What had it all done to my child? To his?
But I saw people who got the cure … I saw it working.
*
He was having a coffee outside a cafe near his flat when a famous actor he used to work with and drink with at the National Theatre passed by, and stopped to chat.
‘How are you?’ said the actor.
‘Not very well, as it happens,’ said Robert.
‘Is it booze?’ said the actor. ‘Let’s have lunch.’ They had lunch, then and there. Robert came home full of it, impressed. The actor, handsome, elegant, talented, successful, alcoholic, twelve and a half years sober in AA, had given him a fabulous two and a half hour bollocking of the highest order, his mobile number, and an invitation to a meeting next Monday. Me, I was starstruck and hope-struck equally.
Soon after, I saw the famous actor at a party. I whispered to him, ‘You helped Robert, thank you,’ and he dragged me into a corner, urgency, generosity and fellowship on his face, to enquire, to buck me up, to be kind. People were amazed. What could I have said, to cause the Love God who didn’t know me from Adam to respond so intensely?
But did Robert go? Did he shite.
Faith, hope, love running on empty – that was how it drained away.
*
I always found Bartók difficult, from when I was give
n his simple pieces from Mikrokosmos to play as a child, to my first experience of hearing the Quartets. I found among Robert’s music books a volume of Hungarian folk dances that Bartók had transcribed and arranged. There was one, very simple, called ‘Brâul’. It was meant to be played very fast and cheerfully, with lots of staccato notes. I found that if I played it slowly (as befitted my skills, or lack thereof), it sounded eerie and beautiful. Its strange harmonies evoked distance and timelessness and the alien in a way which at that time felt right to me. He’d glance up and say, ‘That’s sounding great, love’, and I could live on that for a while longer.
Chapter Thirteen
In a 1972 black Alfa Romeo Spider on the A29 outside Leatherhead, 25 May 2004
The Spider, a beautiful little car belonging to one of my sisters, was in my care at that time. It’s low slung and convertible and left-hand drive, from the times when cars were made of metal and canvas and leather, so worn now, aged, rusty and faded. The senses, when you’re in this car, are exposed.
After the Bartók Debacle on the South Bank Robert was hangdog. So I said, ‘Let’s go now. You can have a look round and ask questions.’ Among the alcohol-related complaints with which he had been diagnosed were liver inflammation, pancreatitis, with its pain and nausea, and peripheral neuropathy which made his legs ache and shake. As well there were the black eyes, the broken teeth, his ribs that time, the foot, the months in Meccano and plaster, and the insomnia, the pain … ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Now.’
So on the Tuesday we went to Farm Place, rehab for the prosperous, the desperate, the metropolitan; pretty much the Rehab to which two years later Amy Winehouse didn’t want to go. Robert didn’t want to go either. He’d had a bad night, sleepless, retching a lot. That was the pancreatitis. He thought that because he wasn’t feeling well he didn’t have to go. He didn’t get that it was because he wasn’t feeling well that he did have to go. I still hadn’t properly understood that though you can lead a drunk to rehab you can’t make him understand the first thing about what matters here.
