by Louisa Young
I cry. He cries. I love David. I’m wearing the ring now.
Chapter Forty
Westbourne Grove, January 2012
At the glamorous florist I considered the roses available in January: striped ones, lush ones, elegant ones, pink, crimson, globe-shaped, petticoat-shaped, creamy white, purple, green-tinged, scented, all incredibly expensive and beautiful, stark and shivering in their chrome buckets in the cold on the street. The florist wondered what they were for, filled up with tears when I told him, showed me all his catalogues, ordered me a stupidly gorgeous amount of the loveliest there were, and pressed a big bunch of the ones I first admired into my arms as I left. I took them to the Italian restaurant where we had put my engagement ring on the prawn, cried, and texted three friends. Within half an hour they were all there. I hadn’t even asked them to come.
You are stranded: all the love you had for your dead person has nowhere to go, and it backs up inside you as grief: terrible, rocking, draining, mad, unreadable grief. Love which has lost its object.
After a while – weeks, months, years – when grief’s crazy pinball ricocheting has calmed a little, you begin to learn what to do with it. You redistribute it. The love that turned into grief becomes love again, and you spread it about, among whoever needs it. I needed a great deal, and I got it, and I learned a new territory of gratitude.
Chapter Forty-One
West London, February 2012
For a brief and peculiar period Steve the coroner became my friend. He called by on his motorbike, and told me over tea how he didn’t really want to be a coroner any more. He used to be a policeman. Policemen like me, always have, I don’t know why.
He had to consider suicide, though he didn’t tell me that, not wanting to upset me. Will told me, after Steve had rung him about it. Steve wanted to know why Robert’s throat had been stuffed with unchewed meat. I said: He just wanted his lunch. Having not had lunch for eighteen months. He was a greedy man, capable of sudden compulsive bad decisions. If Robert had any sense about what he put in his mouth he would never have been an alcoholic or had the bloody cancer in the first place. The friend who had found him with his foot off wrote: ‘I gather the circumstances were typically bizarre and weirdly in character.’ As Swift said, ‘He died of being who he was.’
Steve recorded Robert’s death as ‘Accident’. I would have called it misadventure. There’s a bit in La Traviata, where she sings ‘ch’avvi una vittima della sventura’ – you’ve been a victim of – misfortune, misadventure, bad future – avventura being Italian for future, same root as advent. It’s one of those bits where Robert would grab your leg, saying with rising excitement to match the rising notes, ‘Oh, oh, she’s off! She’s off!!’
Of course I wondered about whether the whole thing had been a long, slow suicide by instalments. I couldn’t swear it wasn’t. In his triumph he was superb, he had fought and worked, his appetites were ferocious. I found him superb all the time, the streak of granite in him, his tenderness, his love. But I understand that he did not like not being as superb as he used to be.
But no. It was not suicide. He was happy that day, feeling up to a meeting, promising to look after me. And in a house full of morphine, would a kind man go out to a family pub and choke to death on purpose in front of children? Though – even when the kindness of a suicide is not in doubt, he or she has by definition reached a point where the desperation for release has become so clamorous that it drowns out all else.
I can’t know if Robert intended to die. When I wonder what went through his mind as he ordered and then began to eat that meal, I wonder if he kind of ‘forgot’, fudged, that he mustn’t eat solid food. I don’t think he thought ‘This may kill me, but fuck it, I don’t care if I die’, nor ‘Haha I shall do what I’m not allowed to do.’ But he may have thought along these lines: ‘I have lost too much. The sheer density of loss in my life is unacceptable. I must reclaim at least one of the things I’ve lost. People have underestimated my capacity to defy the odds before. They say I cannot eat. What if I can? What if I order a proper meal, eat the fucking thing (maybe with the odd splutter and cough) and then tell Louisa and everyone else, to their amazement, I had roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and broccoli. It was bloody gorgeous. What’s the worst that could happen? I’ll have wasted a few quid, coughed up some beef, and been a bit embarrassed. I am Robert Lockhart. I have specialised in confounding people’s expectations. I will confound them now.’
*
The following Sunday, I went, nervous, shaky, and alone, to his regular AA meeting. Two people spoke of doubts, of feeling undermined in their recovery. At the end I was allowed to speak: rather incoherently, I told them of Robert’s death, and said that even if they didn’t feel great about their own recovery today they had helped in his, even though he had died, and that through that they had helped me, and his son, and that there were thousands of us at home, who they probably never thought of, but who valued AA hugely, that their contribution was priceless, and I thanked them.
That this went down well was reported to me later, through people who’d heard it spoken of in other meetings.
*
When you crave the physicality of a dead person, what is it that’s doing the craving? A physical person. A body, a heart. All of which will be dead itself soon enough. He looked very much deader after they had carved him up. When he was first dead he looked smooth, angelic, and empty; now he looked angry and 103. There was lots of extra scarring and stitching on him. I peeked, at the undertakers, at his chest and his scalp. This was not the exquisite needlework he had on his throat, his ankle, his thigh, his back. The Lady Undertaker said to me, ‘Now why did you do that?’
Steve brought me round the autopsy report. I have it still: a huge file. I now know the size of Robert’s lungs: one much bigger than the other – but this is normal. One is smaller to make space for the heart. And I know the weight of Robert’s heart. I wanted to keep it, like Mary Shelley kept her husband’s. I want to carry his heart with me literally. Keep it in a jar of wine on my desk. Lots of people have kept people’s hearts. I felt Steve might have given it to me, if I’d asked.
And where was it now? Stuffed back in any which way among a mess of organs? How could I know if his heart was in the right place? I needed it to be. I asked Sue Bullock, Robert’s friend since the Royal Northern College of Music decades ago, to sing his setting of ‘i carry your heart’ at the funeral. That helped.
There was no alcohol in Robert’s body when he died, and there was no cancer.
Chapter Forty-Two
Wiltshire: a graveyard, February 2012
Maria the vicar, a smiling Irish blonde, told me that as a young music student she had heard Robert play at the Wigmore Hall. She approved our choices for the music, and said: ‘You’ll need something not too tragic for the end when the coffin goes out because people will be in bits.’
We’d thought that, what with everything, we’d like Cole Porter’s ‘Why Can’t You Behave?’, sung by Ella Fitzgerald, if that was OK by her and the church.
‘OK?’ she said. ‘Oh it’d be grand’ – and she sang a few lines, and told me it was one of her favourites from when she’d been in cabaret. I marvelled again at Robert’s ability to surround himself with fabulous women. I also made a note to clear the song with Jim – everybody else would get the joke and the love behind it, but Jim, although he knew perfectly well his father was capable of considerable naughtiness, was only twelve.
His funeral day was cold with bright bright sun. The handsome pallbearers, suited and booted, were crooked as children with sorrow. The coffin lay draped in roses and a cherry-red Wigan Rugby League shirt: Robert Lockhart True Hero printed across it. Jackie was back from Australia, straight from the airport, wearing my clothes. The men of Wigan. Sue Bullock sang, her full soprano ringing across the little Gothic church and the bright February graveyard. His cousins Diane and Denise read Granny Annie’s prayer together: ‘Courage for the great sorrows …’
The church heavenly full. Jim read the poem about don’t be sad – ‘He is Gone’ by David Harkins. My mother and siblings walked where we had walked for Wayland, skirting the war memorial, Wayland’s own grave, and his father’s. Faces of friends we’d shared for thirty-five years; and unexpected people – his counsellor from Camden came, with her husband who had also counselled us. I wore my dashing Dalmatian print fake fur 1950s swing coat, and knelt by the grave until the funeral directress pulled me away, fearing I suspect that I might jump in. We threw earth and flowers on him. Would he think I was making a meal of it? Well I was, I bloody was. But running through it all was the thought: he should be here, taking the piss, enjoying the attention, a little drunk, flirting, moving on to the piano so someone could sing ‘My Funny Valentine’.
‘We’re here,’ Maria announced, ‘to comfort each one who loved him, was infuriated by him and grieves his absence today … It falls to me today to say something of Robert’s relationship with God – a hard task indeed. God and Robert? The bon viveur, the lover of life, the passionate, deeply flawed genius who described himself as a decomposer …’
When she said this, in church, I heard his voice in my ear, as clear as it ever was: ‘Well I fuckin’ am now.’
‘… the piano player at a party surrounded by dewy-eyed ladies? God, for Robert,’ she said, and many hearts sank at the prospect of imminent misunderstanding, ‘was a god of profound unending understanding, manifested in forgiveness and being forgiven, seen most strongly in nature, expressed in gratitude. In Love – for Jim and Louisa and all those sitting in this church today – in the discipline of sobriety – the gift of music and composition … he saw God in the arctic tern flying five thousand miles, and in the deep instincts of birds and creatures to return from whence they came.’ And many hearts rose again, because that was exactly it.
‘And God knew too that it was Robert’s intention to marry Louisa, proposing to her in 2010 before the operation that was likely to cause him to lose the power of speech. Here in this church we discussed the possibility of a marriage service, even if it had to be in hospital, and sadly it was not to be. But Louisa shared with me their final moments together, an exchange of rings before Robert died … While the words of marriage … may not have been said in church, and there is no legally binding bit of paper to bear witness in law to their union, I believe the God that Robert honoured will honour the love they had for each other, the intention to marry shown in the exchange of rings as he died, and when at last Louisa stands reunited with Robert before their creator it will be God himself who welcomes them as husband and wife. For with God all things are possible. For God is love and those who live in love live in God and God lives in them …’
Fucking hell. You want romance?
Simon, his best friend from Oxford, Simon who had introduced us on the stairs, gave the address. ‘Robert was a wonderful man. He had a unique and compelling personality, and a great gift for friendship. There was never any doubt in Robert’s mind as to who he was or who he wanted to be. He was just himself and did not care one jot what people thought of him. He was wiry and extraordinarily energetic. He hated pretentiousness and sent up everybody he met. Most of all he was extraordinary fun, because what he really loved was misbehaving, in every way he could possibly think of … We looked on, fascinated, entranced and frequently appalled … He adored women, and women adored him. He left behind him a trail of broken hearts. Much time was spent persuading women to lie underneath a grand piano while he played Chopin. This was, he told them, so that they could appreciate the special acoustic qualities to be found there. He said that this had the most extraordinary effect on women …’
It is wrong to laugh during your fiancé’s funeral. But it was so funny, so true.
‘… His talent and his brain were such that he could do anything, and music was his passion. He also worked extraordinarily hard. At the same time he continued to live life as he liked to, to excess, but slowly the excess began to control him. He started a long and courageous fight against the illness of alcoholism … He did survive, and there started his greatest years. No longer drinking, he achieved all the qualities which he had had before: great humour, fun, generosity but now with one extra important one: great gentleness, that turned him as a person from the extraordinary to the sublime. There was no one, no one, anything like him. During this time Robert was deeply happy. His two great loves were Jim – of whom he was immensely proud – and who he called his ‘unfeasibly handsome offspring’, and Louisa. Without Louisa, Robert would undoubtedly have died years ago. Rob was devoted to her and adored her.
‘Then one day he phoned. “Hello, Wilkie,” he said. “This is the last time that you’ll hear these dulcet tones.” And he was right. And dulcet his tones certainly were.
‘Sometimes I used to give him a lift to Somerset. On the way he would simply talk and talk and talk, for hours on end, about art, the landscape, music, everything under the sun, and he would do so with great knowledge and with a vocabulary all his own. Most of all he talked about people, with great affection and great humour. The journeys were punctuated by shouts of excitement from him every time we passed a bird, and tears of laughter from myself. At some point he would take from his pocket or his case a CD. There would be a great deal of faffing about trying to get the CD player to work – and then he would exhale, close his eyes, and lean back. And simply, in complete silence and rapt concentration, relish the music.
‘It was an extraordinary privilege to have been his friend. Although Robert might not have been a perfect man in some ways, to those of us who loved him he was just perfect as he was.’
Every funeral needs a speech by a person who is willing and able to speak of the dead person in a way not overburdened by tragedy, a speech that celebrates the happy qualities. Robert was a wonderful man – and one haunted by low self-esteem, shame, intense self-consciousness, tortured ambivalences, and all sorts of other darknesses that he strove to keep suppressed under the extravagant brilliance that so enchanted us all. We are all more than we know ourselves to be.
*
There was a banquet of ham and cake and tea and champagne, all sorted out by my loving siblings; wood fires inside and out, a tent, and the green eternal Dene with its trees and sarsen stones, the view he’d looked out on so often, with such pleasure. Photos of him were propped up on the piano, and a bird spotter’s list he’d made, years ago, which included ‘Great tits, blue tits, Lou’s tits (one pair), Swift’s tits (one pair)’. I couldn’t find the speedometer he’d brought back from the woods for me twenty-five years ago, and that upset me. Someone over the years must have thought it a rusty old bit of rubbish – which it was – and chucked it.
We stayed up late. There was a great deal of crying, and some terribly funny moments. A woodwind player in trackies and a leather jacket pursuing me about the place wanting to talk to me about messages from beyond … Crying on Graham. I had a marvellous sense of moving through it all, wading. I had ‘She Moved Through the Fair’ on my mind:
The people were saying
No two e’er were wed
But one has a sorrow
That never was said
And she smiled as she passed me
With her goods and her gear
And that was the last
That I saw of my dear.
I dreamed it last night
That my true love came in
So softly she entered
Her feet made no din
She came close beside me
And this she did say:
‘It will not be long, love,
Till our wedding day.’
*
The next day, in wellies and jeans, Jackie and I went back to the grave. The roses were frozen stiff on the great mossy hump. Really, it was vast. The funeral directress had said it was because I chose such a good-quality coffin – cheap ones, she said, collapse under the weight of the earth.
Kath’s sister had brought some of her ashes
to the funeral for them to go in with him too, but it was too late. He was sealed up already. So I just had the plastic bag. I put them in the hedgerow round the edge of the graveyard.
*
So many letters, cards, emails. So very welcome, so valued.
There was the odd idiot. A man I hardly know who said: ‘I heard your partner popped off – still, at least it was expected.’
‘Was it?’ I replied. ‘By who?’ – And, if it had been, in what way would that make it better? But no, it wasn’t expected. It was some long and debilitating illnesses, followed by a shockingly sudden accidental death. Which can be hard to get your head round.
My favourite was a drawing of him on crutches, a potato man with stick limbs, with written on it: ‘I am very sad also I am sorry that robbet with the sticks is dead love from ruby.’
Chapter Forty-Three
Home, February 2012
I found it hard to think about how we might have been, and impossible not to. There was so very much for us. I expected too much from him. I was sorry. Where his talent and work might have taken him, without his addiction.
It was so quick.
My hands became aerated writing certain words: ‘Wednesday was your funeral’. That electrical feeling like a skein of cramp under the skin.
When people said he would have died long before but for me, I thought perhaps I should have let him. But I wanted him. I wanted him still. I always wanted him.
How he died was quickly mythologised. I watched it happen, I did it myself, I couldn’t stop it. I had wanted to keep his death new to keep him nearer life. He had been running away in slow motion – had he? Is that what he was doing?
I was so compelled by not losing his old voice – recordings of which I couldn’t bear to listen to anyway – that I forgot his damaged voice. Writing him took him away again, farther. I stopped doing it. I’d be thinking: We’ll make love again. We’ll sit. I’m sorry I didn’t get the telly fixed.
