broken up anyway.’
And I did say, that night: ‘If you want to do this, and if the love of a good woman is going to help you with it, then yes, I’m on.’
This was a massive thing for me to say. Why had I never said it before? Because I wanted it to be his idea. Because I was embarrassed to describe myself as a good woman. Because I assumed he’d say no, or mock me, say, What, you! As if!
Where did it come from, this disbelief in myself? Why do women apologise all the time? Where do we mislay our strength and faith? I was unbeatable when I was eight – Queen of the World. Now I hardly knew how to love or be loved. I wish to God I’d picked him up five, ten, twenty years earlier.
A few days later I had a sudden, very strong urge to be with him. Physical. An absolute magnetic pull. I’d been out for dinner, and coming back up the Uxbridge Road I glanced through the windows of his regular hang-outs – the Office, the Thai – and then followed the invisible urge into Bush Hall, formerly the Carlton Snooker Club, where we’d wasted so much time back in the day. He was there at a round table, a cold open beer in front of him.
‘Ah there you are,’ he said. ‘This is for you’ – and he held it out to me. The familiar greeting, made more poignant by the not-drinking campaign that had been started.
‘How are you?’ I asked.
‘Miserable, fucked up, insecure, immature, motherless, neurotic, troubled, tragic, raging,’ he said. ‘All the usual.’
‘You’re drinking too much,’ I said.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘But not in front of you. And I’m going to stop.’
‘Are you?’
He’d just moved flat, and wanted me to see it. It was just after our birthdays, nineteen years after our first night together. It was our third first kiss, suddenly and completely irresistible. I don’t remember this one either. I just remember being on the floor with him, with a cliff-jumping, home-coming sense of this, this, this is who I love, and being unbelievably happy.
He said, ‘So are we going out together now?’
I said, ‘Our being together is for if you want to stop drinking.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. That’s what I want.’
I said to myself, Oh God.
After that I ran away to the country. He left most of a Liszt Sonata as a message, upset, inchoate and incoherent. I stood on a prehistoric earthwork high on the Marlborough Downs, Liszt and the wind competing in my ears. He rang at seven in the morning and said: ‘I’ve been awake all night, come and see me.’ He rang at three in the afternoon and said: ‘I’m in Le Suquet, I’ve ordered lobster, are you coming?’ He rang at nine when I was in the bath, and wouldn’t get off the phone so I was standing in my towel, dripping and getting cold. He rang at two in the morning and said: ‘What are you wearing? Take it off.’ A stranger rang, saying ‘Hello? Is that Miss Louisa? Mr Robert is here; he would like to talk to you please.’ He rang at tea-time and said: ‘I am aware this is a little odd but I love you and we need to talk about this.’
I love you?
I stared out at swaying piles of wet roses and sodden lawns, tunnels and frothy mounds of cow parsley blocking off all but the sky, heavy branches drooping down to moss and frogs, and I thought about it. There are things you are honour-bound to honour, above and beyond your common sense. Now, you say you love me, I thought – and started laughing at my inadvertent quote from ‘Cry Me a River’, alarming some crows, who rose in an upward swoop, chorusing doom. It had always been incredibly easy to describe my relationship with Robert in lyrics. Every damn Motown song. Plenty of country and western. A rather embarrassing amount of Rod Stewart. Robert said we were more like enharmonics. Did I know enharmonics?
‘Yes, I know the word.’
‘What is it then?’
‘It’s when the same note has two different names and roles, depending which scale you’re thinking about: hence it might be D flat in one key, but in another it’s C sharp.’
‘It’s a good image that, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘How it can look and sound exactly the same, but it can mean, and be, something else entirely. The last note of one scale could be the first note of a completely different scale.’
When the rain stopped, I walked out into the brilliance of sudden English sun after rain, raindrop-spattered cobwebs glittering all around, the wooden garden fence steaming lightly, and I sang ‘Cry Me a River’ softly to the sheep who stood with tiny rainbows in their oily wool, as the wet grass soaked through my shoes and drenched my jeans up to the knee.
Tenderness crept through me. I could feel it. I imagined a future: him at the piano, playing; me on a sofa, reading. A fire. French windows, maybe. A touching end to a long saga.
Would I make him cry me a river?
No. I would follow Johnny Cash’s advice. I would be what I was – in love with him. With him, finally. To turn my back on this would go against nature. All I could do now was be honest. See where love would take us. Because love can take you anywhere.
*
On my return to London I had a little speech semi-prepared, and waited for the moment, which occurred across a bowl of tom yung koong.
‘I must try and make this,’ he said. ‘You like it, don’t you?’
‘So, Robert,’ I said.
‘Yes, Louisa,’ he said, with a demeanour of self-aware ironic obedience. He was wearing a clean white shirt, and was sober, though over-shaved.
I hadn’t smoked for years, but I rather wanted one now. It felt so charmingly youthful to be here with Robert. Like being twenty-five again. I took a fag from his packet.
‘Bloody amateur,’ he grumbled, and didn’t light it for me.
‘So, Robert,’ I said.
‘You’re looking gorgeous,’ he said. ‘Let’s skip dinner. Come under the table with me. I’ve had a demi-maître all week at the thought of you.’ (Demi-maître = half-master = semi-erection.)
‘Robert,’ I said.
‘Don’t brush me off,’ he said.
‘No!’ I said – and realised suddenly his vulnerability.
‘No?’ he said.
‘Do you want me for your girlfriend?’ I asked. The seventeen-year-old ghost me shivered. The nerve! To ask Robert that!
‘Well it seems a bit of a juvenile way to put it,’ he said, ‘but partner is a dreadful term, sounds like I want you to set up in a law firm or play squash, and it’s probably a little early to ask you to marry me, though I could start quite soon with the veiled hints …’
‘I’ll be your girlfriend,’ I said. ‘What I said – if you’re looking for a good woman so you can be saved by her love, I’ll do that. I can’t not. Two things though.’
He was smiling.
‘You stop drinking, and you get a shrink.’
My seventeen-year-old gaped. To ask Robert, straight out, and to set requirements!
He was taking a long drag, cigarette held between finger and thumb. He smiled down at the cigarette. ‘Drink and smoke till the day I die,’ he murmured.
‘Smoking is a detail,’ I said. ‘Of course you smoke too much, but it doesn’t make you a cunt.’
‘Does drinking make me a cunt?’ he asked.
‘You should know. You’re there every time it happens.’
‘I do drink too much,’ he said. ‘Far too much. You’re right, I should cut down.’
‘You