a habit to spend Thursday evenings with Robert. We went to concerts, watched videos of what he was writing the score for so I could explain the plot to him, played pool at the Carlton Club on the corner of my street. This was a late Victorian dance hall, one of four built by an Irish navvy magnate, one for each of his four daughters, in the north, south, east and west of London. Only this western one survives. (For some years now it has been the music venue Bush Hall.) The ceiling was high and dim, the lights low, the plasterwork ornamental and the company mainly off-duty police. You could order a cheese toastie via the little phone on the wall beside each vast green baize table. Andy who ran it played golf and lived on milk because of his ulcers; he would never let a lady pay for a drink, and gave both me and my child lifetime membership. At least, he never let me pay for membership and he always let her pop in for a pee if during potty training she was taken short up the road.
Phone numbers Robert uses are in the back of my diaries from these years; his gas and electricity bills fall from between their leaves. He came round three or four times a week; brought me food, took me to lunch. One pub he liked was just round the corner from Lola’s nursery school. There had been builders next door to his house for a year now. During those noisy days he would work or sleep in my quiet house, only going home to work all night. He didn’t sleep with me though. No, he wasn’t my boyfriend. But he came and went as he pleased.
For a year or two I was seeing an Argentine musician, Julio, when he came from Rome for his concerts and recording. I recall a morning: Julio was there because we had spent the night together. Louis was there because I was going to work, and he had come to look after the baby. And Robert turned up, wild-eyed and hair on end, up-all-night-with-a-deadline written all over him, looking for coffee and company. I recall a knife with which I had been buttering toast flying out of my hand in a great curve across the kitchen, and the three of them looking at it, and me, and each other, each knowing who the other two were, laughing in their various ways, and the baby thumping on the tray of her high-chair.
I felt safe in those days. Louis was great; family life was steady, my friend Clare was living in the back bedroom, Julio was a pleasure; Robert was a friend. I had finished the biography, it was to be published; I was writing a novel. I got rid of the tragic little mossy mouldy piano. If there was to be a piano for Robert to play at my house it should be a decent one. He helped me choose it: a little Pleyel boudoir grand with red felt inside and gleaming gold-painted beams, a right showgirl of a piano, with its curly music-stand and tooled legs.
In March we had a joint birthday party; I did all the work but he turned up on time, sober, in a clean shirt with clean hair, champagne and a CD player for my present. He played three complete nocturnes, didn’t try to get off with any of my friends and left – not the last to go – at one thirty. He said he got me the CD player because he needed something decent to listen to music on at my house. Then Emer was about, and I hardly saw him.
*
The birth-related gap ended like this. I’m not pretending to remember what we said, or rewriting. I wrote this down at the time.
I saw Robert tonight leaning on a cherry tree – the wrong man for this clean, child-speckled street. The angles of his body were wrong, leaning and twisted, and he was grubby. He was staring at the sky and for a moment I nearly walked past him, not looking at him as you don’t look at those men, in case they look back, but then he muttered ‘Fuck of a fucking moon’ – and I realised it was him. Unshaven. Smell of vodka and fags. He stared at me and there was something bovine in his look: guarded, resentful, passive, out-of-focus.
‘Robert?’ I said. He frightened me.
‘I’m dead,’ he replied. ‘I’m dead, don’t talk to me,’ and he turned and tried to walk down the street.
I called his name and followed him, and went round in front of him, walking backwards, talking to him, and he tried to dodge me, but he was unsteady and ended up propped against a wall, leaning in to its old red bricks, his face hidden. ‘Go away,’ he said. ‘I’m dead.’
‘The bollocks you’re dead,’ I said. ‘You’re dead drunk.’
‘Not drunk,’ he said.
I thought: It’s my golden boy. This is terrible.
‘Robert,’ I said.
He gave a lurch, and straightened up.
‘You can’t be out here like this. Come home.’
He looked me in the face. His head was doing the drunk head’s dance of minuscule movements.
‘Not now,’ he said, quite clearly. ‘I’ll come round later.’
He flung himself off the wall and down the road, scrabbling in his pocket for a cigarette. His feet seemed magnetised to the ground, heavy. He paused a moment to light the cigarette. His shoulders were hunched over and he had too many clothes on for the golden evening. Pianist posture, I thought, and I wanted to run after him.
He turned up the next day, clean, shaved, fragrant, bearing a bunch of tatty corner-shop chrysanthemums.
‘God you’re gorgeous,’ he said. ‘You are extremely bloody pulchritudinous. You’ve improved. Well done,’ he said, looking round. ‘Sorry about yesterday. I wasn’t drunk actually but there’s this rather evil weed about. I made the mistake of having a drag or two of a friend’s and it completely did me in …’
‘You said you were dead,’ I observed.
‘Well I’m not,’ he said, slightly pettishly. ‘Can I come in? How are you?’
‘I’m all right,’ I said. ‘You should’ve said you were coming, I’d’ve …’
‘I did,’ he said. ‘I told you.’
‘You didn’t say when, I’m worki—’
‘I didn’t know when,’ he said, ‘so how could I tell you?’
He walked through into the sitting room, shaking out a cigarette, heading for the piano. He trailed his fingers across the keyboard, and said, ‘Bet it’s out of tune.’ His hands landed lightly as blossom falling on to a lake, and the notes rippled out. After a dozen bars he stopped and looked at me, expectantly.
‘Don’t stop,’ I said.
‘Yes but this is where you come in,’ he explained.
‘Me?’ I said. ‘I don’t believe I do.’
‘Yes,’ he said, and played the last few bars again, counting over them, ‘two three’, with an exaggerated movement with his head, and a big encouraging smile.
I looked at him blankly.
‘I’ll do it,’ he said. Played the few bars again, and then at the point in question began to sing: ‘Votre âme est un paysage choisi …’ He smiled up at me.
‘I can’t sing that, Robert.’
‘Course you can. Can’t you? You have to. This is the most beautiful song. Fauré. You know it. It’s not easy, I know. How about this one? “Après un Rêve”?’ He played a few bars.
‘Robert, I don’t know them. I’ve no voice. Don’t be such a dork.’
‘Dork,’ he said, and smiled. ‘That’s nice. Dork. I’ve not heard that in years. What do you want to sing then?’
‘I don’t want to sing. I …’
‘Have you had lunch?’ he said. ‘Come to lunch.’
I hadn’t had lunch.
We went and ate fish and drank two bottles of Pouilly-Fumé and were very attractive to each other in the afternoon sun. We went home to my house and did things we hadn’t done in a while, with the window open and the scent of the wisteria wafting in on the breeze.
So, unannounced, undeclared, unofficial, it became, again, kind of, me and Robert. On and off. Friends and lovers. Sometimes more, sometimes