‘So why aren’t we going out together?’
R: ‘I was just wondering that.’
L: ‘Well, it’s because you love another’ (the one who had rejected him)
R: ‘I gangrene another – you said so.’
L: ‘Yeah, you gangrene lots of things.’
Silence
R: ‘Well we kept that moment of melodrama up for a good ten seconds.’
Later he was talking about friends having sex. I said, you’re not my friend, and he was hurt. I explained: that he was my friend of course, but not only: he was my lover and always would be. He told me a friend had said he should marry me; I agreed, but didn’t mention that I of course shouldn’t marry him. He said, again – Jesus, doesn’t it get repetitive? – ‘Anyway you don’t want to go out with an alcoholic.’ And again, it wasn’t about who I wanted to go out with, it’s about who I wanted him to be – or rather, not to be. I didn’t want him to be an alcoholic (not that either of us knew what alcoholic actually meant). I didn’t want him smoking sixty fags a day. I wanted him to stop drinking himself stupid and smoking himself dead. I described Dad’s bypasses to him blow by blow and told him about the writer Dee Wells having half her leg amputated because of smoking. ‘But why?’ he asked, and I explained about the blood system, and clots, atherosclerosis and nicotine, the hardening of arteries, the risk of embolism.
Ten days later we had another argument, explained by a letter I wrote from Paris but didn’t post:
30.6.92
Dear Robert
Here I am on the steps of Chopin’s tomb, so of course you cross my mind.
Yes I hope we are on speaking terms. Foolish not to be. But when at one a.m. a fellow has a choice between being with a woman who is crazy about him or going for another drink, and he chooses to go for another drink, the woman would be foolish not to hear what she is being told. And when he defends himself by saying ‘But this is how I am’ she would be foolish not to defend herself against him. When I invite you in it is because my feelings for you are uppermost in my heart. When I hold you off it is because your lack of feelings for me are uppermost in my mind. Meanwhile I have a pregnancy to look after and a life to try to make sense of after it has been turned upside down and I have to go to bed early and no doubt alone. None of this means I don’t wish you well.
xx L
Back in London his messages went from ‘Give us a call’ to ‘Still not in … hm’ to ‘Lou, please ring me, I hope you’re OK’ to ‘Give me a fucking call’. In the end we spoke. He thought I was giving him an ultimatum. I said yes I was, but it wasn’t about our relationship, it was about him. It was, Grow Up.
There now. Was that a moment? The polyhedron of missed opportunities flashes me another possibility as it whirls slowly by. He saw an ultimatum. What if I’d let him define his own ultimatum, and respond to it as he wished? What then?
A month’s silence followed. Then he was there at a party: for the first three hours I avoided him, but he needed to talk me through Ravel’s string quartet in F, quoting Debussy and Stravinsky (‘bespectacled little gay Russian dwarf’ – was that sardonic or reverent?). I was to notice the pizzicato in the basses. Later he curled up asleep around a candle in the garden. We shared a cab, stopped for a curry. I got to bed at 1.45; he wanted to sleep on my sofa. I pointed out it is cruel to want to sleep on the sofa of a woman who is crazy about you. I said, what if I sneak out in the middle of the night and make passionate love to you in your sleep? He had the grace to leave. I felt that his needs were so big in his eyes that he saw no others. I thought I knew his feelings. But I thought I knew everything, and if I didn’t I’d decide, just to keep things under control. Now I’m not so sure. I gave him the chocolate piano again. I said, take it away, any way I dispose of it will be too symbolic. I was four months pregnant, and my embryo was growing eyelashes.
There was a screening of an unforgiving, bleak, heartbreaking documentary he had scored, The Execution Protocol, about death row. Robert’s music pierced through it; a blade of cold light, desperation in the sound of a muted trumpet. I wanted to drink a whisky afterwards, but couldn’t. I gave it to him. Robert’s music has always, whatever else is going on, had the capacity to unravel me, or to rebuild me, or both at once.
The following week we had lunch. He picked me up, and kissed me, and took me to Alastair Little’s where he told me how gorgeous I was and got a stiffy during the fish soup and changed the subject eighteen times a minute. He said, ‘What are you going to live on?’, offered me money ‘you know, if you need some’, and started referring to me as ‘my wife and child’. He wanted to kick off the child’s musical education, and sang to it. We went to hear Katya Kabanova at Sadler’s Wells. He argued with the doorman, fed me early enough (‘by ten thirty or I will scream, it’s not princessy, it’s physical’) and came home with me. He wouldn’t let me go to bed; wouldn’t leave me alone. He was drinking neat Campari and mauling me (in the Northern sense of not leaving someone alone); then holding me. I cried. He mocked me for crying – or I felt he did – and I cursed him. He said, ‘What did I do?’ At 4 a.m. he was still banging on about Jánaček’s atonality and smoking in my bedroom. I left him there passed out when I went to work four hours later, and came back at the end of the day to find a tune written on the back of an envelope, dedicated and directed to me, a little swoopy arrow pointing to my address on the front. And an apology. ‘I’m sorry I upset you. I don’t know what I said but I’m sorry.’
I spent half my time wanting to know where I stood, and the other half running away from it.
Meanwhile Louis came to baby preparation classes with me and pretended to have contractions. I’d met his slow-moving, smiling mother – she was a midwife! – and she’d come to dinner with my parents. The first thing she said to me, in her deep, honeyed Ghanaian voice, was, ‘A baby is a blessing from God. How are you feeling, my darling?’ The new nephew was born and christened; Louis came, and wore a suit. Everybody was in love with Louis by now, except for me.
And then one day Robert had a new girlfriend. He called her Lacrimosa Clark because she wept easily, and also Clarkapart, because she was short like Napoleon Bonaparte, which developed into Wellaparte, because her profile was like the Duke of Wellington’s. When I heard, I cried so hard that Baroness Alacrity sent me flowers at work. My colleagues assumed they were from Robert, cheering me up about whatever it was I was so sad about. What a great guy, they said.
*
My daughter – let’s call her Lola – was born in the evening. She was the most strange and glorious little thing that ever existed. It took forty-eight hours, two inductions and an emergency caesarean. Did I care? Did I hell. I was listening to La Bohème, eating satsumas and translating the libretto for the nurses, as if they were interested, high as a satellite on gas and air. Louis was wearing surgical greens and talking Twi with the midwives. The babe was finally pulled out to the strains of Aretha Franklin singing ‘Dr Feelgood’, and I was fully, fully in love (apart from during the two-hour attack of post-natal depression three days later, when I decided to send her back, as clearly I would never be good enough for her).
Robert came to visit the next morning. He pulled the pleated curtains shut behind him and said ‘Fancy a fuck?’ Then he sat and held her and got that look of amazement, and said, ‘She’s not that black. She could be mine?’
I moved house. I didn’t want my baby to live in a one-room flat. I extended the mortgage and got a place in Shepherd’s Bush, natural home of those who can no longer afford Notting Hill. Home also of Louis. And of Robert. The new place had a little garden to put the pram in. That’s what babies need.
Robert really liked her. I hadn’t expected that. I’d assumed that as a roué he would find babies dull, but far from it. He thought she was just great, called her ‘your pulchritudinous semi-negritudinous offspring’ and would attempt to come and sit smoking in the bathroom with us while I washed her, saying useful things like ‘She’ll