You Left Early: A True Story of Love and Alcohol. Louisa Young

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 need a nappy now, won’t she? Don’t babies need a nappy?’ It became apparent that he was to be my disreputable friend still, companion of nights off, keeper of misbehaviour and preserver of my wild young soul now that I was a clean and decent mother. He and Louis took to each other, and Louis was honoured with a nickname: Enigmus Africanus. Louis babysat when I went out with Robert; Robert babysat when I went out with Louis. But more often, in practice, it meant that when I finally collapsed with exhaustion after a long day’s mothering followed by him keeping me up all hours, he would go and talk to her. One dawn I found him lounging in a chair with an unlit fag and his feet up on the cot, explaining counterpoint. She was fast asleep.

       Chapter Seven

       London, 1994

      I bought piano #3, a weird little square late nineteenth-century thing, in a junk shop for £15. It looked like no piano I had ever seen: much smaller than an upright, more like a low-level cabinet made of walnut or cherry. Inside the strings were rusted and it had moss growing on the swollen dampers. I thought of restoring it somehow, but one visit from Art put paid to that. Art is a soft-spoken, shaven-headed, polo-necked LA jazzer who learnt to tune pianos as apprentice to the ancient blind Jewish man who tuned the instruments in Hugh Hefner’s bunny mansion. His patience is considerable, but it was clear the little piano was, musically speaking, going nowhere. Meanwhile Robert tried to play ‘La Cathédrale Engloutie’ on it, in honour of its internal dampness, and burnt a hole in the top with a neglected cigarette. (This sort of thing happened frequently. I’ve seen him with three on the go.) In the end I gave it to a theatrical props company. It would look good at the back of someone’s parlour in a period drama. Why did I buy it in the first place? Because it was pretty, and £15, and, because I didn’t like having Robert around without a piano for him to play. When he was at the piano, I was happy. And because a proper home, one with a baby in it, needed a piano. Clearly, a Dad thing.

      Robert’s work took him to Dublin, so I was able to get some kip. He’d broken up with Lacrimosa Clark. There was an Irish friend, Emer, who he brought round to meet me, which was unusual. She was, like every girlfriend of his I ever met, clever, funny, gorgeous, self-deprecating, warm-hearted, hardworking and very worried about him. They are an excellent array of women. Some – Jackie, Nina (nicknamed Sequin-Smythe, for her double-barrelled surname) whose window he fell out of, Beth from school, Antipodean Cath – have become, or always were, good friends of mine. I met Lacrimosa Clark years later. We spent the whole evening saying to each other ‘I so see what he saw in you’. She said she’d never met anyone since who uses words like ‘detritus’ and ‘homo-sapient’ but could only get three-letter words on the Scrabble board; that she adored Rob but wasn’t an intellectual match for him, that he would be up all night composing and muttering about directors who pissed him off – all of them – and occasionally bursting into the room (usually naked) to holler ‘you know NOTHING about fucking Chopin’ – ‘and sadly he was right’. She told me she had been jealous of how moved he was by my daughter’s birth. Something in me likes the same women he does.

      *

      I went to Peru, where I chummed up with Centre Forewart’s sister Anna. I was writing the biography of my grandmother. Robert and I spent New Year’s Day up to our elbows in Szechuan crab at Poons in Whiteley’s. He bought me a pair of pink velvet Indian pyjamas for a late Christmas present, only his credit card failed and the shop assistant was instructed to chop it up, physically,