instinct to avoid what was attracting me, I went to the other end of the room and stood looking cross with my back to the wall. Oh, I knew how to let a chap know I liked the cut of his jib. And I listened. As someone said years later, ‘It was different when Robert played.’ It was. He was mesmerising. And he knew it, and he used it, and he was not comfortable with it.
People talked about him. He’d won his place to read music at Magdalen from Wigan Comprehensive (formerly Wigan Grammar) at the age of sixteen. (I, a day older than him, had only just passed my O-levels.) By seventeen he was a demy, a half-Fellow – this is a form of scholarship for ‘poor scholars of good morals and dispositions fully equipped for study’. Previous incumbents included Oscar Wilde and Lawrence of Arabia. By his third year he was teaching the first years, and he graduated at nineteen with a double first, twice as good as the normal and tragically insubstantial single first, which was clearly not good enough for him. He’d got Ds in his two other A-levels, French and German, and had massive streaks of ignorance about everyday subjects. Two highly knowledgeable musicians recently – and separately mistook a tape of the young Robert playing for Arthur Rubinstein.
Child prodigy? Massive over-achiever? Cultural cliché? Chippy Northerner? Workaholic artist? All of the above?
‘There’s no fuckin’ frites on my épaule,’ he said.
There was a song he used to sing:
‘We’re dirty and we’re smelly,
We come from Scholes and Whelley,
We can’t afford a telly,
We’re Wigan Rugby League, diddley de dum OI OI.’
He would do it in broad Wigan – ‘We coom fro Scerls’n’Welli’ – or, for variety, in a posh, southern, actor-y manner: ‘We come from Scales, end Welleh, we carn’t, afford, a telleh …’ Alongside his exceptional ability on the piano, it made an amusingly ambiguous impression. No Brit is left untouched by the terrible four – class, geography, money, education – and there was an assumption among Oxbridge undergraduates at that time that Northern = working class. The niceties of ‘Rough’ v ‘Respectable’ working class, or respectable working class v lower middle class, were pretty irrelevant in that world. It all counted as Not Posh. Sometimes when posh people realised Robert wasn’t entirely working class they would say he pretended to be, and resent him for it, when in fact it had been their own presumption in the first place. Once, for a week, he made a conscious effort to get rid of his accent. Then he realised people noticed him because of it, and that as long as he could put up with the mockery it was actually an advantage. People whose class is unexpected can get away with things. They can be seen by the class they are arriving in as somehow superior, gifted with knowledge from the other side. It can work well for intelligent, socially mobile working-class boys: their strangeness confers a powerful status – which in turn contributes to the anxiety of the uprooted, those who by being socially mobile become psychologically divided.
In his uncomfortable, nervy move south and up, Robert did sacrifice pronouncing book to rhyme with fluke. In Wigan once, a cabbie taking him home from the station wouldn’t believe he was from there, saying ‘Ner, yer not’ as Robert, upset, insisted. Meanwhile in Oxford and London he remained the most Northern thing anyone had ever seen. He never rescinded his Northern passport, preached the gospel of rugby league daily (and interminably), and replaced bath-to-rhyme-with-hath not with bath-to-rhyme-with-hearth but with, every time he used the word, a piss-takingly long, self-aware and scornful barrrrth. He couldn’t use the word ‘dinner’ without either a sarcastic accent or a short monologue on why he wasn’t saying ‘tea’. People were often accused of mitherin’ and maulin’ him. Checking there was enough cash for an outing, he’d say ‘As geet caio?’, a usage so arcane I doubt there’s a Wiganer alive now who’d use it other than in nostalgia and irony. But then those two never quite sorted out their differences in Robert’s first-in-the-family-to-go-to-university heart.
His was not a childhood of clogs and tinned food – they had a piano, records, laminated recipe cards – but he was familiar with factory sirens and rough lads and the River Douglas – the Dougie – running a different colour on different days of the week because of the dyes. He loved Les Dawson and explained to me the source of his silent exaggerated mouthing: the ‘mee-maw’ that women working the mills would use to make themselves understood over the sound of the machinery. And he reserved a lifelong interest in people who, like him, made the risky, lonely leap of class: David Hockney, Alan Bennett, Jeanette Winterson, Keith Waterhouse, Victoria Wood, Dennis Potter. Especially if they were drinkers: Dudley Moore, Richard Burton, George Best, Gazza.
At Oxford, with people he didn’t know well, who all seemed to sound like the BBC and wear Eton ties, he felt he had to assert himself to be noticed. He didn’t like to be ignored. He wanted to experience everything at once, to lead a life as intense as it could be, to go to bed with as many women as possible, see everything, do everything. ‘It’s what you do in these sorts of moods that gets you a bad reputation,’ he said to a friend who wrote a profile of him for a student magazine. ‘And when I’m in one of them I really revel in my reputation.’ But he also wanted an introverted life, writing music, reading, with a real relationship, warm and secure and emotional. Then, he said, he despised his other self for sleeping anywhere, and putting up a huge facade. He was really a romantic. ‘Just one note,’ he said, ‘a particular chord, can give me an incredible sense of, well, it can’t be nostalgia, because it’s not for anything in the past. I suppose it’s more like nostalgia for another world …’
Robert was very popular. His legends abounded: the time his tutor popped in to see him, and a naked girl was playing his piano. The occasion when a scorned admirer – male – dropped an empty champagne bottle from a high window, just missing Robert’s head – Robert was convinced it was a murder attempt. The pissing in the sink so often it had to be removed, whereupon he just pissed out of the window. The Dean of Music calling in to wake him every day around noon. The dancing naked on the lawns; the streak across the river during an Eights Week boat race, pursued by loud-hailing patrol boats. And, as a female friend said years later: ‘He slept with everyone except me and Benazir Bhutto.’
People mooned over him. I’m not bloody mooning over you, I thought. So proud! I longed to moon over him. I was SO romantic, and the only thing I was more so than romantic was proud. And of course I found him SO romantic, and so of course, because I was seventeen, He Must Never Know. Also, I was narked about him being two years ahead of me academically, though a day younger, and fully state-educated where I was only half, which to my mind gave him a cracking moral advantage. I went from a posh Lefty West London home – ‘don’t say pardon, say what’ – to a state primary – ‘don’t say what, say pardon’ – and then to the kind of highly academic girls’ private school which told us that we were better than everybody else. Some of my coevals took this as read, and are currently running the world; those who knew it not to be true tended to slump to the polar opposite and believe themselves to be worse than everybody else, and certainly Not Good Enough, hence the prevalence of drugs and eating disorders among pupils at those places; or, in my case, a mildly dysmorphic conviction of my own fatness, and cider. I grew up drenched in all that should have made me feel at home when I went to university at Cambridge, from accents to architecture, yet found myself bemused, class- and location-wise. Three thick card invitations in the same envelope, to a ‘dinner party’, a ‘dance’ and a ‘house party’, all from names I didn’t recognise, on the same night, at different addresses, in Hampshire where I had never been – what was this? I quietly asked a country-gentry type I knew. He sneered at me, for ‘faux naivety’ and ‘inverted snobbery’, for, as he saw it, pretending not to know. But I didn’t know. In London, at nineteen, dinner was a doner kebab on the night bus; if you stayed over after a party it was because you fell asleep on someone’s sofa. Being sneered at by someone who considered himself my social superior was … educative.
*
At Emma’s, I remember a long sofa against the wall; sitting on it with him being, as we later called it, Lockharted – being tested and chauved (a Wigan verb, meaning to wind someone up), regaled and assaulted