ago he had declared love to someone and been heartbroken because she rejected him. And that a glamorous Middle Eastern woman, a single mother who was engaged to a man she didn’t love, had become obsessed with him and now the fiancé wanted to kill him. I dropped him off at the BBC just as ‘Papa Was a Rolling Stone’ finished on the car radio. That night I was suddenly, irrationally and oddly joyously certain that the baby was Robert’s, though I knew perfectly well it couldn’t be. I sat by an open window with Tallulah and she told me all the ways in which Louis was perfect.
The next day I had a painful conversation with Robert. I found myself being snide, protective, defensive. He was upset, I was upset – chucking out what I half wanted in order to protect myself against wanting it more and it not wanting me. I explained that if he helped me I’d come to rely on his help. ‘Look, shall I come over?’ he said, and I said no, I’d want you to come and stay and be here. And of course I wouldn’t really. He’d just be smoking, drinking, requiring instructions, taking no responsibility. That phrase want/don’t want applied to us both. I cried a lot, after I’d hung up.
Two days later I sat Louis down, gave him a vodka, and told him. He straightened his shoulders, looked me in the eye, and said, ‘Well it must be mine then.’ I knew in that movement that everything was going to be OK, and I was right. Everything I wrote in my notebook about him at the time – he’s sunny, he’s private, he’s reliable, he’s mysterious – turned out to be true. I was unbelievably lucky in who I got accidentally pregnant with. We both were.
The following day I had the first scan: there it was, a tiny little thing having a kip. An ammonite, a croissant, a coracle. Eight weeks, they said. Louis had rung to give me all his phone numbers and ask if he could come to the next scan. Sometimes you can feel reassurance running through your veins.
I had to drop a tape off at Robert’s. He answered the door shirtless, and for a strange moment there on the steps in the London sun it was as exactly as if we were in love. I told him about the scan, and the dates.
‘So there’s no chance it’s Lockhartian in origin?’ he said sadly.
‘No.’
‘Have you told Louis?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you’ve fucked him now?’
‘No!’
‘Fuckin’ hellfire, why not?’
‘Because I don’t love him,’ I said.
*
My father was in hospital having heart surgery again, which terrified us all. (‘News like yours would give him another heart attack,’ Robert said.) My sister-in-law was about to give birth. My Harley had been stolen, and the insurance cheque arrived the week I found out I was pregnant – well there’s a message from Fate. No more leathers for me, for the duration. Everyone expressed their fears and concerns about my situation in the best and worst ways: I have never had so much advice in my life. I should marry him, I should have an abortion, I should be aware I’ll never make any money now, my career is over, no one will want to marry me, Louis will be sad if he thinks I’m waiting for someone better, we should live together, if I won’t move in with him I should move in with Robert. Shotguns were polished, voices were raised, true natures revealed. Relatives arrived from Ghana. My dad said to Louis, ‘I suppose I should take you into the library for a chat about your intentions, but I don’t have a library. How about the dining room?’ Louis and I sat in the middle of all this getting to know each other, saying to each other: ‘It’s going to be fine.’ To everybody else, we said: ‘One thing at a time, you know.’ The phrase ‘no, we’re just good parents’ emerged. ‘Semi-detached’ was another. We went around together, happy, fond, pregnant, proud, planning to stick by each other, but we weren’t a couple, nor planning to be.
My old friend Cynthia, the perfect embodiment of Jewish humour, was over from New York. She sat us down. ‘Could you have made it weirder if you tried?’ she asked.
‘He could have been gay?’ I suggested.
‘No, that would have been easier. No jealousy,’ she said.
‘OK, one-legged?’
Louis offered to cut his leg off.
Cynthia pointed out, later, that I couldn’t fall in love with Louis if I wasn’t sleeping with him.
It was so confusing for others that we had to make it clear for ourselves, and we did.
I didn’t stop to think of it being confusing for Robert. I wrote down a conversation we had in my notebook:
Robert: ‘There’s love between us, and we fancy each other.’
Louisa: ‘So why aren’t we going out together?’
R: ‘I was just wondering that.’
L: ‘Well, it’s because you love another’ (the one who had rejected him)
R: ‘I gangrene another – you said so.’
L: ‘Yeah, you gangrene lots of things.’
Silence
R: ‘Well we kept that moment of melodrama up for a good ten seconds.’
Later he was talking about friends having sex. I said, you’re not my friend, and he was hurt. I explained: that he was my friend of course, but not only: he was my lover and always would be. He told me a friend had said he should marry me; I agreed, but didn’t mention that I of course shouldn’t marry him. He said, again – Jesus, doesn’t it get repetitive? – ‘Anyway you don’t want to go out with an alcoholic.’ And again, it wasn’t about who I wanted to go out with, it’s about who I wanted him to be – or rather, not to be. I didn’t want him to be an alcoholic (not that either of us knew what alcoholic actually meant). I didn’t want him smoking sixty fags a day. I wanted him to stop drinking himself stupid and smoking himself dead. I described Dad’s bypasses to him blow by blow and told him about the writer Dee Wells having half her leg amputated because of smoking. ‘But why?’ he asked, and I explained about the blood system, and clots, atherosclerosis and nicotine, the hardening of arteries, the risk of embolism.
Ten days later we had another argument, explained by a letter I wrote from Paris but didn’t post:
30.6.92
Dear Robert
Here I am on the steps of Chopin’s tomb, so of course you cross my mind.
Yes I hope we are on speaking terms. Foolish not to be. But when at one a.m. a fellow has a choice between being with a woman who is crazy about him or going for another drink, and he chooses to go for another drink, the woman would be foolish not to hear what she is being told. And when he defends himself by saying ‘But this is how I am’ she would be foolish not to defend herself against him. When I invite you in it is because my feelings for you are uppermost in my heart. When I hold you off it is because your lack of feelings for me are uppermost in my mind. Meanwhile I have a pregnancy to look after and a life to try to make sense of after it has been turned upside down and I have to go to bed early and no doubt alone. None of this means I don’t wish you well.
xx L
Back in London his messages went from ‘Give us a call’ to ‘Still not in … hm’ to ‘Lou, please ring me, I hope you’re OK’ to ‘Give me a fucking call’. In the end we spoke. He thought I was giving him an ultimatum. I said yes I was, but it wasn’t about our relationship, it was about him. It was, Grow Up.
There now. Was that a moment? The polyhedron of missed opportunities flashes me another possibility as it whirls slowly by. He saw an ultimatum. What if I’d let him define his own ultimatum, and respond to it as he wished? What then?
A month’s silence followed. Then he was there at a party: for the first three hours I avoided him, but he needed to talk me through Ravel’s string quartet in F, quoting Debussy and Stravinsky (‘bespectacled little gay Russian dwarf’ – was that sardonic or reverent?). I was