You Left Early

by Louisa Young

  Whilst listening to King’s College Cantab Choir on R3 alone on Christmas night, preparing a frozen Tesco Weightwatchers fish pie with frozen soya beans and accompanied by a cold refreshing glass of 2007 Tesco Sparkling water, I experienced an extraordinary epiphany: admittedly for less than ten seconds, I liked myself, approved of myself. I have always abhorred the notion, thinking it narcissistic, self-absorbed etc. Transference, avoidance, esp. exaggeration of ‘outward’ emotions. Projected out and if in, contorted, distorted. All this semi-sensical bullshit, if you can understand it, goes a long way to explaining my dis-ease. Enough.

  I have just finished talking with you ont’ blower. Despite the shock of hearing educated ‘posh’ – but actually not that posh (eg ‘rarely’ for ‘really’ doesn’t ’appen) – I really (pronounced ‘reeughleh’) enjoy talking to with you – a delectable cocktail of warmth, compassion, empathy, love (?!), didacticism with hardly a hint of aristocratic austerity, dictatorial dominatrixdom (joke. – bad one)

  It ends there.

  Typing out his SESs, his stepwork, his grief, pain, fear and courage, made me sad and angry, but typing out this letter I found a big smile on my face, and my heart glowing.

  As the Frenchman said, Happiness writes in white ink on a white page. Here followed two years of smutched white-ink sober happiness – halcyon days! – when he was only a bit crippled, vulnerable, but functioning, kind of normal. Happy. I think we were both amazed about it. Cooking together. Working. Sitting there on the sofa like a pair of Celia Johnsons saying, ‘Happy, darling? Oh, terribly.’ My cold feet tucked under his skinny thighs. Dancing together! He would put on Horace Silver, and stand, holding out one elegant hand, about eye level. I would take it, and twirl and jive around him as he stood there, one leg a little bent, leaning on his stick and occasionally pulling me in. Collapsing in that laughter which sometimes seems the whole point of human beings being together. Resting our heads on each other and thinking oh thank God, thank God. Him coming to pick me up from Luton airport in a minicab, on his sticks, with flowers. Me trying to play the piano. There was a Chopin nocturne I tried to learn for about a year; I once played it all the way though, stumbling, counting, restarting, forming each chord from scratch. It took me about two hours, from beginning to end. ‘Semi-quavers!’ Robert would call cheerfully down the stairs. I found little messages from him on the sheet music: ‘More regular here – otherwise sounding lovely! x’. It didn’t sound lovely at all. It didn’t even sound like Chopin’s description of how English ladies play his music – ‘looking at their hands, with great feeling, and many wrong notes’.

  Happy! Yes. Two and a half years out of ten.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Happyland, March 2009

  For his fiftieth birthday I gave him a signet ring. Lockhart is a clan, I thought – there’ll be a crest. The jeweller had a vast two-volume book of all the crests for all the names. The Lockhart crest is, to Robert’s amusement, a wild boar’s head on a plate. I had a signet ring already, a present from my mother. I didn’t have the Young family motto on it because the Young family motto is ‘Be Right and Persist’, and I didn’t feel I should be encouraged in that. Also, as Baroness Alacrity pointed out, the sight of my whole family being right and persisting simultaneously would make strong men weep.

  I knew something of the Lockhart clan. Robert, against whatever odds, and very indirectly, had cropped up in my Book of the Heart.

  Robert the Bruce, 1274–1329, the King of Scotland who was famously saved by a spider, wanted his heart taken to Jerusalem after his death [by] Sir James Douglas, in a silver canister which he wore round his neck. On the way Douglas got caught up in the battle between the King of Castille and the Saracen King of Granada, during which, surrounded by the enemy and seeing that all was lost, he flung his precious necklace before him crying ‘Onward as thou wert wont, I will follow or die!’ Alas he died. The heart was found beneath his body, and taken up by Sir Simon Locard of Lee, who with others carried it back to Melrose Abbey in Scotland where after much dispute it was reburied in 1998. Locard changed his name in its honour – to Lockheart. He included in his coat of arms a fetterlock and a motto – corda serrata pando. It means ‘I open locked hearts’.

  Kathleen, my grandmother, was a Bruce. We used to have a sign up by the bath, typed long ago, wiggly from damp, and foxed: ‘As this family is directly descended in two lines from Robert the Bruce, we should rescue spiders from a dreary end in the bath.’ I liked to think of Robert’s ancestor carrying my ancestor’s heart across Europe.

  ‘Did I open your locked heart, darling?’ Robert says in his special affectionate piss-taking thespian voice, with a headtilt, and concerned eyebrows. ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yes, darling,’ I say. ‘You did. And so did I.’

  We had a party for that birthday at my parents’ house. My nephew’s band Penguin Café played, led by him on the Blüthner beneath which I used to read and eat almonds. There were speeches of a most gratifyingly sentimental kind. One of Robert’s favourite exes, Beth, the one who broke his heart when he was twenty, sent a huge bunch of flowers but didn’t come because she thought we were going to announce our engagement, and wasn’t sure she could bear it. My dad had a lovely evening flirting with our friends, wondering whether or not they were his daughters, then went to bed at about midnight. Around one he got up again, dressed and came downstairs saying, ‘Are we having a party? How wonderful, now who wants a drink? Robert? You haven’t got one.’

  Robert said, ‘No thanks, Wayland, I’m still an alcoholic.’

  ‘Doesn’t that mean you want one all the more?’ Dad said. This was not the first time they’d had this conversation. Robert did not forgot that he, for a while, had been the demented one.

  Robert’s present to me was a necklace made up of tiny multi-faceted Indian sapphires, all different colours. We had worked out a way whereby he could only buy me things I liked. We’d go to his friend Susan’s shop. He’d sit in the cafe next door smoking, drinking quadruple espressos and reading the rugby league reports in the Daily Telegraph, drawing spectacles, moustaches, witty captions and speech bubbles on the photographs, while I went round the shop looking at the pretty things and choosing a small array at a variety of prices, which I left with Susan. Then I’d go to the cafe, drink a single cappuccino and laugh at the things he’d done to the newspaper while he went in and chose something from my selection.

  His birthday card read: ‘Ma Chere, je te souhaite une bonne anniversaire. Tu as achevé cinquante et un ans avec beaucoup de grace. Tu a un beauté, une intelligence et une poitrine (bleep) extremement idiosyncratique. Je t’aime sans aucune condition. Amour, Robert.’ (I wasn’t fifty-one, by the way. He liked to indulge his morbidity by saying, for example, of a thirty-ninth birthday, ‘now that you’re entering your fortieth year’.) Another card involved my head being photoshopped on to the drum of a washing machine, alongside a version of the serenity prayer entreating me to accept the dirty socks that I cannot wash.

  The party was a big, good, normal thing to do; an announcement to everyone that though battered and fragile, he was alive and well and available and cheerful, that we were together, that happiness was entirely achievable as long as you pay attention. Fifty years old; thirty-three years since we met, twenty-seven since we first shagged, seven we’d been together, and two that he had been sober. We felt like we’d only just begun.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Wigan, London, the hereafter, 2009

  A week after our birthday party, Kath rang. I woke Robert: John had collapsed dead on the bathroom floor. He’d been in pain and refused to see a doctor, and cracked jokes about more movements than a Beethoven symphony, and so forth, but nobody had expected him to die. It was bowel cancer.

  Six weeks later I was asleep beside Robert when I got the midnight call: Wayland was dead in St Mary’s. Really dead, this time.

  I’d woken that morning on his hospital room floor; when I left he’d asked where I was of
f to. I said I was going to the library to work. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Work well.’

  Robert and I went together to the Chapels of Rest. I was there with him in Wigan when he tapped his dead dad so sweetly and ruefully on the nose, and let out a sigh, so very slowly. He was waiting for me after I held my dead dad’s hand till it was cold, and with me when I went back to mortuaries in London and Wiltshire, over and over, to hold his cold hand again. We walked together at their funerals. We blubbed like fools. We took photos of our dead dads to lunch with us, and propped them up against the salt and pepper. We were the Dead Dads Club. We listened to Horace Silver’s ‘Song for My Father’, and designed a repertoire of duets that John and Wayland might be playing together in heaven: Schubert’s Fantasia in F minor; Brahms’s Hungarian Dances, and his Sonata in F minor if they were allowed a piano each, and their playing had improved on account of them being immortal now. I have no idea how I would have got through that loss without Robert sober and strong at my side.

  The flirty Pleyel got shipped out to a friend in Camberwell to make room for the two-metre Bechstein after John died. It’s as long as Rachmaninoff was tall. ‘That’s a big piano, for a house,’ said the movers. We still can’t open one of the doors.

  I became obsessed with buying miniature grand pianos on eBay. I bought a little pale blue enamel Chinese one, a shining black one from which a ballerina springs up when you open the lid, to the tinkling strains of the Moonlight Sonata; an elegant brass 1930s piano-shaped powder compact, with collapsible legs, a velvet powder puff and a mirror in the lid. Another has a little wood-lined cavity, the proportions of a grave, in which to keep cigarettes; it plays Brahms’ famous lullaby.

  At John’s funeral, Kath shoved John’s tweed porkpie hat on Robert’s head. It suited him very well. ‘Do I look like a twat in a hat?’ he said. ‘Or a jazz cat?’ Actually he looked like – imagine if Snufkin took a wrong turn, and turned louche. One thing he would never wear was a suit jacket with jeans. It meant something tragic to him: a failing attempt at respectability you can’t afford; the poor man in court with nobody to speak for him and no decent trousers, lonely old blokes in basement flats trying to keep up appearances.

  He looked like a jazz cat. He lost the hat within weeks. He professed not to mind. I did mind. I got him replacements (no sentimental value), and he would lose them too; the wind would blow them off and they’d go bowling down the Uxbridge Road and be squashed under a bus. He couldn’t go after them, on his sticks. God knows where they all are. He could have re-hatted half the neighbourhood.

  *

  All through this period, Robert must have been doing the cool, relentless Steps.

  ‘What does unmanageability mean to me?’ the book made him ask himself. ‘Unhealthy untrue belief systems,’ he wrote, ‘about ourselves, the world, and people. Such as: We’re worthless. The world revolves around us – not that it should, but that it does. It isn’t really our job to take care of ourselves. Responsibilities other people take on as a matter of course are just too large a burden for us to bear. We over- or under-react to events. Emotional volatility—’

  ‘Do I accept responsibility for my life and my actions?’ it continued. ‘Yes,’ he wrote, misunderstanding it a little. ‘I am almost always able to carry out my daily responsibilities. This has given me self-esteem.’

  ‘Do I treat every challenge as a personal insult?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Is there something I think I can’t get through sober?’

  ‘If I was diagnosed with a terminal illness I would seriously contemplate resuming my not so illustrious drinking career.’

  I wondered why he didn’t consider the effect this would have on everybody who had re-invested in him now he was sober. Such disregard too for the people who would look after him. Did he not care? But I suppose that is not what the question asks. And as it happened, when it came near it, this was not what he did.

  ‘Do I ignore signs re my health, thinking things will work out somehow?’

  ‘I try to ignore the fact that my heavy smoking may eventually kill me.’

  ‘What convinces me that I can’t drink successfully any more?’

  ‘I don’t want to die.’

  *

  I do think the vocabulary used in AA might have been better thought out. Like God, surrender is just not a good word for a lot of people. (It’s good that a new translation, as it were, has appeared: Recovery, by Russell Brand, in which the first two steps are now: 1: Are you a bit fucked? 2: Could you not be fucked?)

  ‘SURRENDER: If resignation is acceptance of the problem; surrender is accepting that recovery is the solution. What am I afraid of about the concept of surrender, if anything?’

  ‘I’m not afraid,’ Robert responds. ‘Perhaps the “if anything” may be my arrogance in terms of losing my individuality.’

  When the vocabulary becomes annoying, reading and meetings help: you can find out the nuance and the context, through actual human beings who have been there. AA really doesn’t need to be religious. But perhaps one of the functions of the religious aspect of AA is precisely to deflate defiant addicts who consider themselves intellectually superior to simple religiosity. The message (which the self-destroying addict sorely needs to take on board) is along the lines of: You consider yourself more evolved than the poor saps who use this sort of language, but you are wrong and your talent for nuance and spontaneity is closely allied to your talent for lying, avoiding responsibility and fucking up your life. Your precious individuality means nothing here. You are an addict like all the other addicts. Get into line. Surrender. When you are securely sober, we can talk again about your distaste for this vocabulary. Until then, lay your ego down at the door, fall into step.

  Or maybe they just need to update it.

  *

  ‘Have I stayed in touch with the reality of my disease?’

  ‘Due to WKS,’ Robert wrote, ‘I sometimes forget I’m an alcoholic. But generally yes.’

  He did tell me this. Both of us fell about laughing, until we cried.

  *

  ‘Do I believe I am a monster who has poisoned the whole world with my addiction?’

  ‘I don’t believe that I am a monster – I become one when I’m drunk.’

  ‘Have I noticed that now I don’t have to cover up my addiction, I no longer need to lie?’

  ‘I appreciate the freedom,’ he wrote. ‘I love it.’

  ‘Am I willing to give recovery my best effort?’

  ‘I am willing to give recovery my best effort in every way esp. doing these bloody steps.’

  ‘What is my understanding of Step One?’

  ‘I don’t know. Yet!’

  *

  We went up to Wigan to scatter John’s ashes – some in the garden, some on the moors at White Coppice, where you could look out to the west and see the sea and Blackpool and the long, low coast where John had walked in the wind with Lily Glinka. Kath was bald and funny in dramatic ear-rings. She’d been so busy looking after John she hadn’t noticed her own breast cancer. We gave her nice pyjamas and a red leather coat she’d liked, that I never wore. In John’s painting shed I looked through stacks of his watercolour landscapes, and found among them a couple of sketches he’d done for cover designs for my books.

  Kath gave Robert some of John’s ashes in a little bag. He didn’t know what to do with them so when we got back to London I put them in the cigarette box piano and closed it, and I put that in the bottom of the Bechstein, and kept the lid shut.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  London, 2009–10

  Robert’s music was coming back all right. Jackie the violinist, who had always been a muse to him, would come over and play; I would loll on the sofa listening to them. I was singing again; so was Lola, and some of her friends. He wrote a tender, lush theme with violin and cornet for my First World War novel. With everything he did my heart grew because I completely loved both his glorious music and the fact that he made it.
>
  He heard, somewhere, the phrase ‘Dying with your music still in you’, and it put the fear of God into him. He had always written to commission and didn’t know how to write without it. He wanted to work, but he was having trouble starting. I said, Would you set this poem, ‘i carry your heart’ by ee cummings? I had read it at my father’s funeral. Yes, he said. He would.

  He wanted to get his hand in with some quartet arrangements. I fed him melodies; he chose the ones he liked: Cole Porter’s ‘Get Out of Town’; Giulio Caccini’s ‘Amarilli, Mia Bella’, and Dido’s lament, ‘When I Am Laid in Earth’, from Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. He wrote an extraordinary Elegy (‘in a variety of keys’) for Wayland, to be played at his memorial service. He made notes and costings in his diary for a recording, a CD to include these pieces, and another, ‘String Quartet, not in a specific key, 10–15m’. He never wrote it. Periodically I come across blank prepared manuscripts. ‘Fantasy for Violin and Piano, for Jackie’: sheets taped together into their long paper accordion, all the staves and clefs written in, but not one note written. An empty promise; a flower dead in the bud.

  On the next page to where he wrote ‘Dying with your music still in you’, he had written: ‘I haven’t gone I’m just dead.

  Just like that, leaving the quote marks open. I saw it for the first time in February 2016. I’d never seen it before.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  London and Wigan

  Step Two is ‘We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity’. This too can keep people occupied for years, defining Power, defining sanity, and getting over themselves.

  The book starts cheerfully: ‘What do I have to hope about today?’

  ‘That I will become more resourceful, kinder, more helpful,’ Robert responds in kind. ‘+ more understanding of people (including myself), + more understanding of situations. That I will remain sober. That I will be able to write beautiful music that is listened to by many people in order to give intense pleasure to them which in turn gives intense pleasure to me courtesy of my considerable ego.’