films, anything, anyone, but not that Chelsea banker quacking entitled educated ignorant money-making narrow-minded posh ungrateful world … It was in that mood that I ran into Robert at Emma’s party.
*
Tallulah came back from New York in 1986, and moved in with my friend Swift. We all, in our late twenties, became pals again. We were working hard. I got a mortgage on a one-room flat; I was a freelance journalist now, travelling the world for Marie Claire, correcting the spelling on The Sunday Times, riding motorcycles for Bike magazine, doing columns in the Guardian. Tallulah was running a publishing house. Swift was moving from magazines into the literary end of film. Robert had meanwhile come to London to study piano as a postgraduate, teach at Oxford, and play cocktail jazz in wine-bars to support himself as well as concerts on Radio 3, at Wigmore Hall and the South Bank. He had a girlfriend: kind, pretty, mickey-taking Lisette, who everybody liked. And his mother died. ‘Seeing her dying,’ he wrote, ‘aged 52, looking aged 80, deaf, blind, incontinent, was probably the most disturbing moment of my life.’ He retired from professional piano around then, unsure if it was because of his mother’s death or not, and started writing music for radio and TV, theatre, films and advertising. He was a musical director at the National Theatre, he triumphed in the West End and New York. He had his little thespian habits and nicknames: Serena McKellen for fellow Wiganer Sir Ian McKellen; Pierre Vestibule for Peter Hall; Pierre Ruisseau for Peter Brook. In 1986 he did the musical arrangements for a production of Arthur Miller’s The American Clock, and was extremely excited after meeting the author – mostly because of shaking his hand, and Marilyn Monroe. ‘I know where it’s been,’ he said, staring lovingly and disbelievingly at his own hand that had shaken the hand that had made love to the goddess. There was big pressure and scary deadlines, but he didn’t have to be on stage, and could therefore drink. That world brimmed with drink.
Being Terence Davies’ music director, on The Long Day Closes (1988) and Distant Voices, Still Lives (1992) and The Neon Bible (1995) drew him back to the North, and to his father. He had to conduct a choir of Liverpool schoolboys, singing in Latin. When he corrected their pronunciation one of them said to him, ‘Sir, sir, are you Latin?’ Oh the joy. As a Wiganer – or Cocchiite, he preferred, because it was both Latin and rude – he liked nothing better than mocking Liverpudlians (unless it was mocking people from Skelmersdale, or his default position in the south, épater-ing les fuckin’ bourgeois). He orchestrated the gorgeous version of ‘Love Is a Many Splendored Thing’, in the scene where they’re all in the cinema, crying. Years later I sat in the cinema, crying. I looked at those 1950s Northern people, so beautifully turned out, quoting lines from The Philadelphia Story, and thought, is that where he’s from?
When he told me how he had fallen out of someone called Nina’s window, I thought he and Lisette must have broken up (which they did several times) and felt, God help me, a little pang of jealousy. I wanted him to be falling out of my window, or at least trying to climb in it – and it wouldn’t have been nearly so perilous, as I was on the ground floor with a window directly on to the street, Jesus, there’d have been no risk at all, he certainly wouldn’t have impaled his arse on the railings.
*
His past is in boxes under his piano in my sitting room, for me to deal with, to rationalise or romanticise (which sometimes seem to be the same thing); to put in order, any order that can pass as orderly, so that thereafter it can be put away. I am in charge of his sheet music, his music manuscripts, his CDs, his cassettes, his dad’s LPs, his rehab papers, medical notes, autopsy report, boots, books, love letters from his girlfriends, letters to them that he never sent. ‘Dear Buttock’, he wrote, in 1981; ‘Dear Rectangle’. They break my heart. The older ones from Manchester and Nottingham, biro and lined paper; fountain pens and Basildon Bond like a granny, then brown Rotring ink and cartoon sunsets, speech bubbles coming from the picture of the queen on the stamp, or the cherub on the front. Postcards from Siena and San Gimignano, airmails from Ohio and California. Letters starting, ‘I’ve just put down the phone from our conversation but I can’t bear not to be talking to you still …’ Letters which stop and start over days: ‘I’m on the train now; sorry about the writing … I’m home now, it’s so cold … Just scribbling this at the bus stop …’ Funny letters, love letters. Haunting letters: ‘WHERE IS YOUR WARM BODY NOW?’ A lipstick kiss. A postcard showing a naked lady from behind, waist down, long legs in high heels crossed at the ankle to make a very elongated heart-shape, and on the back, in thick black felt pen: ROBERT JE VOUS ATTENDS AVEC IMPATIENCE. Incomprehensible letters: ‘Arms and legs! Arms and legs!’ And: ‘… I have written endless letters to you, but have abandoned all due to distress and muddle. There isn’t much to say anyway, other than what a fantastic and unforgettable adventure we had, despite our differences … If love isn’t worth fighting for it was probably not love in the first place but a mutual passion driven by intensity (of a volatile nature). Because to me love is about understanding and security as well as the sex and excitement which always features in the beginning …’
One from him, giving his phone number as 999. A photo of a girl with a teddy bear, aged about twenty, and on the back written: ‘Only one of these is your girlfriend’: she’s a film star now. Several have filled me with jealousy appropriate to the age I was at the time they were written: But I knew you then, why didn’t you want me? wept the ghost of me aged seventeen.
I don’t want to read them. They’re not mine. Yet here I am in charge of them, which is a damned odd sort of victory over time and the ghosts of love rivals who have long been living other lives.
And there’s something addressed to me: a printed invitation to a production of Woyzeck, which as it is in ‘the Newman Rooms’ and gives the date ‘Tues–Sat 4th Week’ must be to do with Oxford, which exists in its own chronological universe. I do look at that and think –1978? 1979? What if I’d gone?
I could identify about 80 per cent of the letters’ senders. I recognise their handwriting; I know the stories, the places, the timings. Tough, sympathetic curly-haired Beth who was my pal at school; Emma who I knew a bit at Cambridge; Jackie the violinist. I put them back in the boxes. All that love, all that youth. I take them out again. Put them back again.
It adds up to a chaotic record of a life which might have been lived differently; a map across which he might have traced a different, better, route. A map I was going to have to look at.
And, for a while, it was like getting a dose of him, after he was gone.
West London, Late summer, 1990
I am invited for dinner at Robert’s flat; the top half of a Victorian house in Shepherd’s Bush. He has cooked – late, delicious, pans all over everywhere, as usual. Everyone is clever and funny and affectionate, relaxed verging on chaotic, and it turns into one of those magical evenings. There’s a string of fairy lights around the kitchen window frame; we drink lots of cheap wine sitting at the wooden table. Robert plays – Liszt, Debussy’s La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin, which has become my song, as I have cheveux de lin – on his new piano, a Yamaha Boston, black and very sleek. I am surprised by the piano. He doesn’t usually like new things. I don’t like his new carpet either. It’s purple and shiny – the kind you think you’d get electric shocks from. Lisette goes to bed early – perhaps midnight? – as she has work in the morning, and we all agree this is a terrible waste. I’m actually thinking ‘how can she bear to?’
As the small hours start to get bigger again people fall away and it ends up with Robert, me and Alastair – a very tall, handsome builder, nicknamed Truncheon for his apparently prodigious dong – lying about smoking and talking rubbish. Nobody in Lockhart-land was allowed their actual name. I was FCB – Flat-Chested Brunette (which I am not). Patrick (who is tall) was The Giraffe. The other Patrick, large of chin with a regal manner, was the ‘Crown Jowls’. His adored Jackie, middle name Ruth, a very kind, ferociously talented and focused red-haired violinist, was known as ‘Ruthless’. His best friend Graham