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 from Wigan was a simple ‘GFW’. Martha Argerich, the pianist he most admired, was ‘That gap-toothed Jewish Argentine Lesbian’, spoken in tones of awe and wonder. The soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was Betty Blackhead. Phil, who has a mole on his forehead and played Subbuteo, was Centre Forewart. One woman who always got up to dance, no matter the circumstances, was Pan’s Person. An employer called Charles, who didn’t always pay reliably, was Cheque-bounce Charlie. A Wigan pub, the Swan and Railway, could be the Cygne et Chemin de Fer, the Duck and Tram, the Albatross and Cyclepath. An acquaintance who was born without feet, on an occasion of infidelity became ‘Foot-Free and Fancy Loose’. Only composers were allowed their real names – their first names, usually used thus, while listening to their music: ‘Maurice, you fucker …’ with a shake of the head and a smile of delight, at some particularly beautiful turn of musical phrase. When I told him about the church that Satie set up in Paris – the Metropolitan Church of Christ Conductor – he was just so happy. ‘Eric,’ he said, with such fondness in his voice. ‘Oh, Eric, you bastard.’ That Debussy changed his name from Achille-Claude Debussy to Claude-Achille Debussy was a source of perpetual and unresolved fascination.
Mostly that night we are listening to Chopin.
‘I hate them,’ Robert says. ‘Arseholes. They know nothing.’
‘Who?’ we enquire.
‘Those arseholes.’
‘What arseholes?’ we say, concerned.
‘Critics.’
‘Who? Where?’ We think he must be referring to something in the paper, or recent. Certainly neither Truncheon nor I have said a word against Chopin. We don’t want Robert thinking we are against Chopin.
It becomes apparent that nobody has called Chopin second rate for some years, when somebody, it wasn’t apparent who, did.
It comes up that I have never knowingly heard Puccini’s opera La Bohème. Robert is appalled by this state of affairs, and cannot let it continue. He rumbles about in a pile of cassettes, throwing unwanted ones aside till he finds it, and puts it on. We are to listen to it. It is essential. We refill our glasses and subside, swoonily.
‘The thing is,’ he says, lounging back in a zigzag of skinny torso and crossed legs on the sofa – ‘there is no orgasm. Listen – all build up, and build up – but no orgasm.’
Soon enough Rodolfo – it’s José Carreras singing – is catching hold of Mimi’s hand on the floor, because they have dropped the key in the dark, and telling her in his heartbreaking bravura romantic tenor that it doesn’t matter because they have the moon, and he’s a poet, he writes, he lives! I am blown away like Cher in Moonstruck: the singing, the beauty, the emotion – I’m lying on my back on the horrid new carpet in a state of considerable ecstatic delight – the piling up of the music, oh my God, this is SO BEAUTIFUL—
‘No orgasm!’ Robert cries. ‘See? The bastard’s doing it again!’
‘SHUT UP,’ shout Truncheon and I. We’re busy being blown away. Mimi is responding, telling Rodolfo who she is: ‘Mi chiamano Mimi, ma il mio nome è Lucia’ – they call me Mimi, but my name is Lucia – how she embroiders roses and lilies in her little white room under the rooftops, where she lives alone and the first kiss of April is hers, how sweet is the scent of a flower—
And then just when she is reaching the peak of this gorgeous spiralling climactic moment, Robert shouts, ‘There! Did you hear it?’
‘WHAT!?’ we snap, wrenched from our reveries.
‘Talk about no orgasms,’ Truncheon says. ‘You keep pulling out.’ But Robert is up again and over to the stereo, rewinding the tape, fag between his teeth. Replay. Mimi – Barbara Hendricks – takes up her magnificent song again, in mid-bar, heading for, whatever he says about orgasms, some kind of climax—
‘Wait …’ he says. ‘It’s coming …’
‘Foglia a foglia la spio!’ she sings. ‘Cosi gentile il profumo d’un fior—’
‘THERE!’ he shouts.
‘What?’ Truncheon and I cry. ‘For God’s sake, man.’
‘Oh fuck sake,’ he grumbles. ‘You’ve no fucking idea …’ Rewind, again. ‘Pay attention,’ he says. ‘Sit up.’ He presses play. ‘OK,’ he says, ‘now – listen – OK – OK – NOW!’
What? We are genuinely uncomprehending, and bewildered. What is he hearing that we are not hearing? What is he so desperate to share?
‘Dear God,’ he says. ‘Fuckin’ hellfire. I don’t know. Fuckin’ southern philistines … What you just heard three times is no less