syphilis, my bra strap, Bill Evans, more wine, Red Garland, Singapore laksa, Argerich’s rubato … He was a centre towards which things spun. So when you’re on the sofa with him, the focus of him, getting all of it, the intensity, immediacy, challenging, drinking, smoking, the you – here – now. I want yer – there was a tendency to go ‘Whoa!’ and fall into the tidal wave.
Seeing myself as fat and not what boys wanted, I drank too much and had had my heart severely broken at university. I wasn’t stupid, but I was dismally blind when it came to reading men’s intentions towards me: I got into situations. It was still, just, the era of ‘men’ and ‘girls’. I did agency work (security guard, catering, tea-lady in a parking meter factory) and lived in a squat and wanted to be a writer but I had nothing to say on paper and I knew it. I was frustrated and not good at going after what I wanted. I knew exactly how lucky I was, and I suffered the paralysis which can affect intelligent posh girls, saying to them ‘You have been given so much; you with your education and your stable family and your prosperity and your accent, seriously, you’re asking for more?’ I thought to be loved you just lived your life until someone turned up and loved you. I did actually think, like Shakespeare’s Helena, that we cannot fight for love, as men may do; we should be woo’d, and were not made to woo. It didn’t occur to me to go out and get them. Quite often I stayed in bed reading because it was easier. Looking back at me, I might say I was depressed. Emotions were extreme.
That night, he made me laugh so much. The cutting through the crap – he wouldn’t just cut to the chase, he would cut to three chases at once, going too far too fast in all directions and assuming that everyone else wanted to go there too. Which I did. He seemed to carry a kind of truth within him, an honesty beyond that of less intense people. This he never lost. Anyway, we went on to the balcony, and later we went back in a cab to the cheerful little house I lived in. A cab! I was the posh one, but I couldn’t afford cabs. We stopped on the way at a kebab shop on Queenstown Road, and Robert kept the taxi waiting. There was a group of skinheads at the back: Ben Shermans, Doc Martens, overhead strip lighting. They made Robert nervous, but it was me they laughed at, with my very long hair – ‘Oi, skin’ead!’ they yelled at me.
I remember that the wall between my bedroom and the back room was half dismantled; I’d taken down the plasterboard and the strips of lath, leaving only the wooden struts, which I used as a kind of tiny unsatisfactory shelving system. I had a single bed. I remember he was very thin, and the sex was revelatory.
He left the next afternoon, and vanished off the face of my earth. I remember I was hurt and mortified. For months. I did not understand – and still don’t – how a brilliant night with someone could possibly not lead to wanting another brilliant night with them, and another, and another. Seriously, why? I didn’t understand how you could do all that together, and then – nothing. It made me a fool and him a bastard. I hated being a fool and I hated him being a bastard.
Many years later, we discussed it. He said, ‘You could have rung me. You’re a feminist.’ But girls didn’t ring men in those days. Even educated feminist London girls. Politics was all very well, fear of rejection was something else. And there were none of the modern alternatives – a Facebook friending or a witty little tagged snap on Instagram of something of mutual interest. The telephone was all you had. Or a letter, but Christ, a letter! The permanence! No, it was the telephone or nothing, and that meant the possibility of having to talk to his mother, or his flatmate, or, if you did get hold of him, of the embarrassed silence. Boys, of course, had to face this great compounding pyramid of potential embarrassment all the time. (There was a sub-clause whereby if a girl was more attractive than the man she was allowed to ring, as long as she was prepared to take the risk that as the man was less attractive, he might be over-awed, or as we called it, ‘scared of you’. But this never worked in practice, because then as now most girls thought themselves unattractive, and even if they didn’t they weren’t allowed to admit it, for fear of being labelled ‘full of herself’. No, ringing a man you fancied meant you were desperate.)
We – girls – well, I – believed that the boys knew what they were doing. I believed they had thought about it, and were doing it on purpose. I assumed they had all the power. By assuming that, I actually gave them all the power. I didn’t learn that for another twenty-odd years. I wish I had rung him. Everything might have been different. But no. I sentenced myself to a ludicrous punishment: burn with desire, and keep quiet about it.
‘What would you have done if I’d rung you?’ I asked.
‘I’d’ve loved it,’ he said. ‘I’d’ve been flattered.’
‘But why didn’t you ring me?’
‘Because I was a little twat.’
*
Many years later, in Primrose Hill with Emma, she pointed out the flat where she used to live. It was on a different street. It didn’t look out over Primrose Hill. It had no balcony.
I pointed out the balcony I remembered, a few streets away. She had never been in that building.
But I remember. There had been a brightly patterned rug hanging on the wall on the left as you went in; reds and oranges.
‘Hm.’ She looked doubtful. Neither of us knew if we remembered or not.
And then in November 2015, poking around in my own past for structure for this book, I found this. (The previous entry ended: ‘I’m going celibate’.)
From my notebook: 20 December 1982:
Friday night to a party full of precious hunch-shouldered Oxford boys working on modern TV channels.
‘Oh goody,’ Emma cries, ‘my pianist has arrived. Such a shame we don’t have a piano.’
‘Who is your pianist?’ I enquire.
‘Oh he’s wonderful, he comes from Wigan and he’s …’ Rob Lockhart, of course. Who was being his usual sweet dirty charming self, uttering his usual friendly lascivious greetings. ‘One of these days someone is going to take you seriously,’ I say.
‘I wish you would,’ he replies.
‘OK, I do.’
‘What, now?’ he says.
‘Perhaps a little later,’ I suggest.
‘Excellent!’ he says.
And so we check up on each other periodically and then run off up Primrose Hill in the frost and kiss in a most fourteen-year-old haze of clothes and cold and party smells. He slips one shoulder out of my clothes and kisses my throat, and we run down the hill and into a taxi and take the piss out of each other all the way to the Queenstown Road.
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ he says. ‘You see I went off the pill last week and I’ve got my period.’ (True of me, but not of him.) ‘And I’ve just broken up with someone and I’m still very depressed about it …’ We bought kebabs and chocolate among the skinheads. ‘But could you bear to wake up to this face on the pillow tomorrow morning, or will it be just one of the worst figments of your hangover?’ And all through, the feeling that we don’t have to do anything, we’re just mucking about together.
At home he played and I sang Cole Porter, drank tea, I went to the loo, he hopped into bed. I grew a little shy as we sobered up, towards three. ‘Are you going to sit there and read me a bedtime story and then creep off somewhere else?’ he asked. Nope.
I rang Tallulah today as I felt she ought to know. ‘Well one of us had to before he lost his looks,’ she said. ‘Was he good?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought he would be.’
He was. It was. Complete and revitalising and full and bloody nice. Literally, actually – ‘I’ve bled all over everything, oh dear,’ I say.
‘Sooner you than me,’ he says. ‘You’re meant to. I don’t mind if you don’t.’
In the morning he said, ‘Well, what