nobody has syphilis any more. Well, they do, but not tertiary syphilis, which is when the angels start serenading you, or if you’re Schumann stood in a river it’s Schubert, and then your wife puts you in the loony bin and runs off with fuckin’ Brahms – so, putting the interests of art above the interests of health, and bearing in mind that it’s not just Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, Scriabin, Donizetti, Delius, Smetana, Scott Joplin, Wolf, Ivor Gurney and Henry the Eighth but also Toulouse Lautrec, Van Gogh, Maupassant, Flaubert, Rochester, Monet, Oscar Wilde … and probably a few others … is the loss of syphilis actually a benefit to civilisation? Or does the truly dedicated artiste in fact have a creative fuckin’ responsibility to acquire the poxy disease, so as to honour his muse? What d’you think?’
Then he burnt our socks, because they were wet, before getting hold of my foot so as to demonstrate his ideal blowjob on it.
I was very afraid of the effect he had on me. I could never remember, when he was kissing me, what I knew fifteen minutes before, and the following morning: i.e., why I didn’t want to sleep with him. I told him this; he stroked my head. I burst into tears and wouldn’t have him. Looking at him, I saw my enemy. I saw what I could lose myself in; what could take me from myself, enthrall and imprison me, keep me from my own free life. I feared it, and I desired it.
The following morning I went and curled up with my book on the end of his single spare-room bed, and that was that really. Sex to oblivion, and that night he dragged me out barefooted on to the frosty lawn, and there was a shooting star.
That weekend became the mainstay of the opening (or the middle, or the end) of the novel I tried to write about him. ‘He’s much gentler out of town,’ I wrote. ‘He points out fieldfares. His mother has died. Lisette has left him. He’s given up performing, and won’t compose except for money. I believe he thinks that because geniuses are tormented, and because he is not as much a genius as Debussy, he must therefore torment himself. We his all-knowing friends think he should take his talent back to his heart and face its responsibilities. We believe that he is frightened to do so. We think this is the root of his sadness, the demon which he seems to be trying to drown. He wonders why everybody is always doing down his fucking work, which we are not, we respect his hard work and success, but we know that he wants and needs something else. He knows this too. We all find this hard to talk about. It is easy to be simplistic.’
None of us blamed Lisette for leaving him. We all knew that he drank twice his share in half the time. She said, he didn’t know why he loved her; that it was just because she was pretty, and there. That wasn’t enough for her. And every now and then some other girl was pretty, and there. He provoked emotion: envy, lust, admiration, resentment – many people felt seduced by him. But how enviable is it to live constantly surrounded by those emotions? How could he possibly satisfy them all? They were there and often the easiest way out was just to give people what they so wanted. How was he to know what they meant by wanting that? It wasn’t just girls. If there was food he’d eat it; if there was drink he’d drink it. Everything existed to be flirted with or consumed. His considerable self-discipline was occupied elsewhere.
Lisette also said, ‘It’s amazing how boring he is when you’re not in love with him.’ I flinched at the truth in this: drunk, he could be boring.
On the Monday night I gave him a lift back to London and said, not for the first time, that I didn’t think we should. But I did think we would. He and Lisette having broken up, that line of defence was gone, and I was stuck with my own dichotomy: I wanted what I did not want. And he said things like, ‘You don’t want a boyfriend who drinks and smokes all the time and keeps you up all night.’ Not unless he loves me, I thought. I didn’t say it.
*
A few days after we came back, I went to the US to write some articles: Washington, Williamsburg Virginia, Nashville, San Diego to a Swingers’ Convention – a repellent episode full of repellent men trailing their surrendered wives round arid ballrooms full of stands selling fluffy handcuffs and writing-paper with pictures of sex positions on it in mauve. Crossing the parking lot, I was invited to an orgy; in the spirit of journalistic integrity I thought I ought to go, but the sight, among the many bodies writhing on nylon sheets in an executive suite, of a fungus-coloured middle-aged dentist patting the hair of a woman with pink plastic beads dangling on a clip from her clitoris who was sucking him off while being unconvincingly fucked from behind by what could have been his twin – this tad of humanity so revolted me that for the first and last time in my life as a journalist I made my excuses and left. My old school-friend Boots (male – from the boys’ school I went to after I deserted the horrid girls’ school) came down from LA and we went to Tijuana together and decided, in a jokey and merry mood of exasperation with the world, that to get married would be a splendid idea, but fortunately we couldn’t find the wedding chapel. And then I went north! To Alaska, to interview single men who advertised themselves for love in a special magazine, full-page shots of them in their plaid shirts with their dogs and pick-up trucks and hopeful expressions, and sometimes a bit of pipeline or a chainsaw. I slept in a log cabin with antlers above the door; I had blueberry pancakes for breakfast and spent a day on a horse in the wilderness, and it really was wild – there were no fences and the sky was huge and the air was sweet. I sang ‘Don’t Fence Me In’, and have never had a happier day. Back at the hotel in Washington I picked up one of the foot-long dark and white chocolate grand pianos with the lid up full of chocolate-dipped strawberries that they used as the little chocolate on the pillow. They packed it for me beautifully, and I brought it as hand baggage home across the Atlantic to Robert. He was not nearly appreciative enough, and left it at my flat.
We were not boyfriend and girlfriend – as I told everybody who asked, or assumed. I had seen enough of him as a boyfriend to accept the truth of what he said: ‘You don’t want a boyfriend like me. You just want a shag. That’s all right, it’s a common mistake. But I’m very easy, you can have me without, you know, signing up.’ However, we were talking, all the time; making each other laugh, a lot; sleeping together, kind of regularly; he worried and annoyed me, much of the time. But we weren’t going out together, oh no.
I wrote: ‘He professes “virtue”. Climbs into bed with me long after I’m asleep, and I murmur “Is it six o’clock then?” because it had been the night before, and he says “No, one thirty. I’m learning. Civilised.” I love the way he says “civilised” – you can almost see what he calls mono-lateral northern erectile nostril – but I don’t know if he really thinks civilised has anything to do with it. It. The big business of letting Robert live, opening the shutters on Robert’s soul and flooding him with sunlight. Emptying out the ashtrays of his heart. It’s all starting to look wrong but he remains our designated roué.’
He said he had tried not drinking.
‘How long?’ I said.
‘Three days,’ he said, ‘Staring at a bottle of Poire William and drinking only beer.’ He believed that counted. He thought it proved he had a balanced attitude. Robert wouldn’t know a balanced attitude if it kicked him.
He said he didn’t feel well. I said, ‘Do your nails no longer fit your fingers and does your flesh feel like over-ripe fruit?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ ‘It’s a hangover,’ I said. ‘You coming to the pub?’ he said.
He read things I was writing, and picked up on aspects that nobody else did. I wrote: ‘He is wrapped in a veil of misconception, a curious blindness rent with insight but cut off from us and his true self. Anyway, he’s gone off to Wigan with his drink and his fags and his weldschmerz, if that’s what I mean, and if that’s how you spell it.’
What an utter fool I was. But everyone knows the romantic hero has to be flawed – how else can the heroine save him? And even if you are quite convinced that’s not what you’re doing, you probably are. Even knowing you are can’t protect you. My rational history-graduate self says knowledge should protect you. My hindsight, meanwhile, quotes from O Brother Where Art Thou?: ‘It’s a fool looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart’.
*
Robert made a recording with Steve Parr, his mate/recording engineer/producer,