things like, ‘You don’t want a boyfriend who drinks and smokes all the time and keeps you up all night.’ Not unless he loves me, I thought. I didn’t say it.
*
A few days after we came back, I went to the US to write some articles: Washington, Williamsburg Virginia, Nashville, San Diego to a Swingers’ Convention – a repellent episode full of repellent men trailing their surrendered wives round arid ballrooms full of stands selling fluffy handcuffs and writing-paper with pictures of sex positions on it in mauve. Crossing the parking lot, I was invited to an orgy; in the spirit of journalistic integrity I thought I ought to go, but the sight, among the many bodies writhing on nylon sheets in an executive suite, of a fungus-coloured middle-aged dentist patting the hair of a woman with pink plastic beads dangling on a clip from her clitoris who was sucking him off while being unconvincingly fucked from behind by what could have been his twin – this tad of humanity so revolted me that for the first and last time in my life as a journalist I made my excuses and left. My old school-friend Boots (male – from the boys’ school I went to after I deserted the horrid girls’ school) came down from LA and we went to Tijuana together and decided, in a jokey and merry mood of exasperation with the world, that to get married would be a splendid idea, but fortunately we couldn’t find the wedding chapel. And then I went north! To Alaska, to interview single men who advertised themselves for love in a special magazine, full-page shots of them in their plaid shirts with their dogs and pick-up trucks and hopeful expressions, and sometimes a bit of pipeline or a chainsaw. I slept in a log cabin with antlers above the door; I had blueberry pancakes for breakfast and spent a day on a horse in the wilderness, and it really was wild – there were no fences and the sky was huge and the air was sweet. I sang ‘Don’t Fence Me In’, and have never had a happier day. Back at the hotel in Washington I picked up one of the foot-long dark and white chocolate grand pianos with the lid up full of chocolate-dipped strawberries that they used as the little chocolate on the pillow. They packed it for me beautifully, and I brought it as hand baggage home across the Atlantic to Robert. He was not nearly appreciative enough, and left it at my flat.
We were not boyfriend and girlfriend – as I told everybody who asked, or assumed. I had seen enough of him as a boyfriend to accept the truth of what he said: ‘You don’t want a boyfriend like me. You just want a shag. That’s all right, it’s a common mistake. But I’m very easy, you can have me without, you know, signing up.’ However, we were talking, all the time; making each other laugh, a lot; sleeping together, kind of regularly; he worried and annoyed me, much of the time. But we weren’t going out together, oh no.
I wrote: ‘He professes “virtue”. Climbs into bed with me long after I’m asleep, and I murmur “Is it six o’clock then?” because it had been the night before, and he says “No, one thirty. I’m learning. Civilised.” I love the way he says “civilised” – you can almost see what he calls mono-lateral northern erectile nostril – but I don’t know if he really thinks civilised has anything to do with it. It. The big business of letting Robert live, opening the shutters on Robert’s soul and flooding him with sunlight. Emptying out the ashtrays of his heart. It’s all starting to look wrong but he remains our designated roué.’
He said he had tried not drinking.
‘How long?’ I said.
‘Three days,’ he said, ‘Staring at a bottle of Poire William and drinking only beer.’ He believed that counted. He thought it proved he had a balanced attitude. Robert wouldn’t know a balanced attitude if it kicked him.
He said he didn’t feel well. I said, ‘Do your nails no longer fit your fingers and does your flesh feel like over-ripe fruit?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ ‘It’s a hangover,’ I said. ‘You coming to the pub?’ he said.
He read things I was writing, and picked up on aspects that nobody else did. I wrote: ‘He is wrapped in a veil of misconception, a curious blindness rent with insight but cut off from us and his true self. Anyway, he’s gone off to Wigan with his drink and his fags and his weldschmerz, if that’s what I mean, and if that’s how you spell it.’
What an utter fool I was. But everyone knows the romantic hero has to be flawed – how else can the heroine save him? And even if you are quite convinced that’s not what you’re doing, you probably are. Even knowing you are can’t protect you. My rational history-graduate self says knowledge should protect you. My hindsight, meanwhile, quotes from O Brother Where Art Thou?: ‘It’s a fool looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart’.
*
Robert made a recording with Steve Parr, his mate/recording engineer/producer, of the Dmitri Tiomkin song ‘Wild Is the Wind’, famous for versions by Nina Simone and David Bowie. On it, Robert sings like Tom Waits, plays the piano like Red Garland, and undermines the whole thing with fart noises and stupid bleeps. It opens with the sound of a match striking and a cigarette being lit, ice cubes clinking into a glass, and closes with the sound of two hands clapping. It is a precise portrait of him: musically sublime, funny, seductive, naughty, self-sabotaging, vulgar, beautiful, ridiculous.
My memory is that Robert sent a cassette of it to a girl he was flirting with who took it as a love declaration; it caused some confusion. My memory is, I was sad he hadn’t sent it to me. But you know, we weren’t going out together. It would have been during one of our off periods. Steve’s memory is that late one evening, after they had finished recording Robert’s piano overdubs for a film soundtrack, they were about to drop into the Lily Langtry when Robert asked if he could run in to the studio and record something extra. The piano was still set up and Steve had some sound effects running live in the S1000 sampler. He popped in a tape and hit record; Robert started to play and sing. It was all very ad hoc and they only did one take. ‘And then,’ Steve told me, ‘if I remember correctly he asked me to run off a cassette so that he could give it to you.’
I like this incorrect memory very much. I could have this one for myself – look, I have a witness that says it wasn’t for her, it was for me. Perhaps I remembered incorrectly! Perhaps it was for me! Certainly, it is for me now: the tenderness with which he sings; the slight echo of laughter as you-hoo-hoo kiss me, the fart noises bubbling up when he hears the sound of mandolins; the clink of the ice cubes as he wonders whether we know we’re life itself.
Tiomkin was second only to Bernard Hermann in Robert’s pantheon of film composers. He revelled in tales of the great Russians and Germans who went to Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s; Schoenberg writing his Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene without there actually being any film; and on being complimented on his ‘lovely music’ snarling ‘I don’t write lovely music’. And Stravinsky – or was it Shostakovich? Or Schoenberg again? – could be all of them – who when invited to write a score wrote it and sent it in, and when told no, he needed to see the film and write the music to go with it, suggested that the director cut the film to go with the music.
Steve emailed ‘Wild Is the Wind’ to me in 2012, with the message ‘I know he wanted you to have this. No one who didn’t know him can understand what we have lost.’
*
In London Robert’s regime was to work all night, sleep till 3 p.m., wake up and get a cab to his preferred curry house. It was beautiful to see him working. It remained unchanged all his life: manuscript paper, pencil, sharpener, rubber, pack of fags, lighter, ashtray. Seven items denoting concentration. Initial work could be done anywhere – in the margin of the newspaper often – the five lines of the stave sketched, the phrase or chord that struck him jotted down over a coffee (double/triple/quadruple espresso, lots of sugar, several cigarettes, a brandy or calvados or two) in the sun somewhere, on a paper napkin over lunch, in a pub. But for concentration he preferred an actual table, and silence. In his flat, this was regularly assaulted by his neighbours’ building work. Hence his frequent presence in my house, or in Wiltshire. I can see the curve of his back now. His terrible posture.
‘Don’t you need a piano?’ I asked. He was working on the soundtrack for Distant Voices, Still Lives: full orchestra, serried ranks of gorgeous strings, muted brass, moody woodwind, crashing percussion, the whole shebang. No, he didn’t need a