Читать книгу You Left Early: A True Story of Love and Alcohol - Louisa Young - Страница 17

He arrived on the front doorstep on a Sunday afternoon, while I was having lunch in the back garden with Swift and David.

‘How are you?’ I said. He looked terrible: distraught, humbled, sarcastic, confused, angry.

‘Not great,’ he said. ‘She’s kicked me out.’

‘God,’ I said. ‘When?’

‘Ten minutes ago,’ he said. His house was ten minutes from mine.

‘Where will you stay?’ I asked.

‘Well,’ he said.

So he moved in.

‘Don’t you need stuff from, um, home?’ I asked, that night.

‘Have you got a razor?’ he said.

‘Yeah.’

‘Pelléas and Mélisande?’

‘Er – Debussy or Schoenberg?’

‘That’s my girl,’ he said. ‘Debussy.’

‘Yes.’

‘OK then,’ he said.

‘Clothes?’ I wondered.

‘No,’ he said. And looked at me.

‘Fuck sake,’ I said.

‘Oh come on,’ he said. ‘I’m not married any more. Hardly, anyway.’ So his capacity for entirely inappropriate jokes was intact within his distress.

‘Certainly not,’ I said – a phrase of his. God, I’d already picked it up.

The following week I came back from work to find him in the kitchen with all kinds of fancy mushrooms, talking quickly about a risotto he wanted to make for me. I wasn’t hungry but I let him make it. The chopping and the smells soothed him. Garlic and warm olive oil, the crunch of salt, the chicken bones boiling up into broth, the dim musk of the bay leaf, the warmth. I left him to it; and went to read.

He brought me a glass of wine. White, smoky, just cold enough.

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I’m not going to have one. Like you asked.’

When I smelt burning I went into the kitchen.

‘I’ve fucked it up,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and get an Indian.’ He left – swiftly, windily, before I could take in the situation. I turned off the flame under the pan, and went back to my book. It was nice to read without him coming in for a chat, ignoring the fact I was actually doing something.

I read two chapters. Three. Peace and quiet. Lovely.

It doesn’t take that long to get a curry.

Even as I thought ‘Should I worry?’ I realised that yes, of course I should.

He didn’t come back that night.

He was nocturnal. He could be at any one of a dozen regular haunts. Many of them I had haunted with him, in days gone by. Was I meant to go out and trawl them, asking barmen whether he’d been in, finding him and dragging him out by his ear, demanding that he get in the house and eat his supper, like some fishwife?

Or ring hospitals?

Or police stations?

I couldn’t sleep, overslept the next day, was late to work (I was writing a book about the cultural history of the human heart), rang my landline every hour. He didn’t answer my phone anyway. One of his little acts of respect – unnecessary, often unhelpful, but somehow sweet. One of the many ways in which he gave what he wanted to give, not what you wanted to be given. He didn’t answer any phone, basically. He felt powerless not knowing who was there, and what they might want.

The following evening, when I came in, he was smoking a cigarette in the back yard, staring through the kitchen door at a pan of risotto.

‘What time do you call this?’ he cried, throwing down the cigarette. ‘Dinner’s ready. Sorry about the slight delay. You just need to stir it and add the parmesan.’ He was stone sober, pale, clean. He looked exceptionally Northern, like a piece of granite. ‘Get the plates,’ he said.

Seeing that he was all right, I was angry.

‘A word,’ I said. ‘Where were you? While you’re staying here, don’t walk out and just stay out overnight. And don’t throw your fag ends in my garden. And don’t tell me what to do.’

‘That’s about twenty-five words,’ he said.

‘Is that the important bit of what I just said? Or a fatuous diversion? I’m leading a normal life here. Courtesy, and kindness.’

‘Normal,’ he said.

‘I know you’re quite a peculiar person,’ I said. ‘That’s fine. You can be peculiar. But don’t be rude and don’t be unkind.’

‘Unkind!’

‘I was worried about you. When you didn’t come back. You don’t drink if you stay here. You don’t stay here if you drink. Simple choice.’

He grunted.

‘And no, I’m not making your risotto for you.’

‘It’s not for me. It’s for you.’

Left to myself, I’d have had four apples for dinner, and no washing up.

‘It’s for both of us,’ he said.

He’s trying to help, I thought.

The risotto was delicious.

It was me who cleared up.

He had a bath. He called me in; standing with the towel round his waist, wet hair pushed back, shaving, the bathroom half flooded. He’d aged. The snakey young torso had metamorphosed into a bit of an egg on legs. He was oblivious to the decline.

‘You know that bit I never reach under my chin and it always pisses you off,’ he said – a memory from many years ago, which staggered me. ‘You do it,’ he said. ‘Do it the way you like it. Oh, whoops, unfortunate double entendre,’ he said. ‘Sorry, darling.’

Later he said, ‘Let me sleep in your bed tonight at least.’

‘No no no,’ I said.

‘But I’m so sad and lonely,’ he said.

‘Jesus Christ,’ I said, ‘just shut up, would you.’

He rather fixatedly bought a white suit, and lived in the back room for a few months. He was booked to start a home detox the day he got the divorce papers. I watched him carefully, delicately, wondering.

Often when I think about how things might have been, I search in a kind of orgy of ungratifiable hindsight for the many occasions when I could have said, ‘Don’t do that. Come with me instead.’ I was thinking of saying it now. But before he was strong enough to be told it, towards the end of that summer, he headed off with Anna who I’d met in Peru, a fine woman, and one who wasn’t saying, ‘You can stay here if you’re sober and you’re serious about recovery.’ And that became another year.

When Anna lost patience with him, he rolled up again from time to time, the white suit forgotten, the T-shirts grubby again. Antipodean Cath, another ex-girlfriend (or old girlfriend – what’s the precise difference here? An ex-girlfriend is someone you were meant to be faithful to and broke up with; an old girlfriend is someone you used to sleep with on an informal arrangement, and may yet do so again, who knows?) had given him tickets to something at the Albert Hall – Carmen, I think. Did I want to go? Sure. Afterwards we went to a Lebanese cafe on Gloucester Road. On the way there I tripped on a kerb in my heels while we were getting into a taxi and he made some cheap crack to the driver about me being drunk.

I hadn’t been drunk since 1992. I had a vision of a headline about something terrible happening to a child, and the subhead saying ‘The Mother Was Drunk’, and that I could not abide. God I was angry.

At the Lebanese place we sat in the window. I can see him now, ordering imam bayildi and some huge kebab, arguing. In the end he seemed to understand that for me being so drunk you fall over is shameful and undignified, and that though I liked drinking I was not and never would be a woman who fell down drunk in the street, and, also, he was an absolute hypocrite to throw that at me, and try to make a fool of me to the cab driver. In other words, I was well up on my high horse, and after a while I had stirred myself into such a tottering tower of outrage that I was able to say: ‘The point is, actually, that you have to not drink.’

He said, ‘Christ, why does everyone keep saying this?’

I said, ‘Because it’s true.’

He didn’t drink that evening. He drummed his fingers and smoked.

Back at my house later, he said, ‘What, so, I should break up with Anna and be with you?’

I said, ‘She thinks you’re broken up anyway.’

And I did say, that night: ‘If you want to do this, and if the love of a good woman is going to help you with it, then yes, I’m on.’

This was a massive thing for me to say. Why had I never said it before? Because I wanted it to be his idea. Because I was embarrassed to describe myself as a good woman. Because I assumed he’d say no, or mock me, say, What, you! As if!

Where did it come from, this disbelief in myself? Why do women apologise all the time? Where do we mislay our strength and faith? I was unbeatable when I was eight – Queen of the World. Now I hardly knew how to love or be loved. I wish to God I’d picked him up five, ten, twenty years earlier.

A few days later I had a sudden, very strong urge to be with him. Physical. An absolute magnetic pull. I’d been out for dinner, and coming back up the Uxbridge Road I glanced through the windows of his regular hang-outs – the Office, the Thai – and then followed the invisible urge into Bush Hall, formerly the Carlton Snooker Club, where we’d wasted so much time back in the day. He was there at a round table, a cold open beer in front of him.

‘Ah there you are,’ he said. ‘This is for you’ – and he held it out to me. The familiar greeting, made more poignant by the not-drinking campaign that had been started.

‘How are you?’ I asked.

‘Miserable, fucked up, insecure, immature, motherless, neurotic, troubled, tragic, raging,’ he said. ‘All the usual.’

‘You’re drinking too much,’ I said.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘But not in front of you. And I’m going to stop.’

‘Are you?’

He’d just moved flat, and wanted me to see it. It was just after our birthdays, nineteen years after our first night together. It was our third first kiss, suddenly and completely irresistible. I don’t remember this one either. I just remember being on the floor with him, with a cliff-jumping, home-coming sense of this, this, this is who I love, and being unbelievably happy.

He said, ‘So are we going out together now?’

I said, ‘Our being together is for if you want to stop drinking.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. That’s what I want.’

I said to myself, Oh God.

After that I ran away to the country. He left most of a Liszt Sonata as a message, upset, inchoate and incoherent. I stood on a prehistoric earthwork high on the Marlborough Downs, Liszt and the wind competing in my ears. He rang at seven in the morning and said: ‘I’ve been awake all night, come and see me.’ He rang at three in the afternoon and said: ‘I’m in Le Suquet, I’ve ordered lobster, are you coming?’ He rang at nine when I was in the bath, and wouldn’t get off the phone so I was standing in my towel, dripping and getting cold. He rang at two in the morning and said: ‘What are you wearing? Take it off.’ A stranger rang, saying ‘Hello? Is that Miss Louisa? Mr Robert is here; he would like to talk to you please.’ He rang at tea-time and said: ‘I am aware this is a little odd but I love you and we need to talk about this.’

I love you?

I stared out at swaying piles of wet roses and sodden lawns, tunnels and frothy mounds of cow parsley blocking off all but the sky, heavy branches drooping down to moss and frogs, and I thought about it. There are things you are honour-bound to honour, above and beyond your common sense. Now, you say you love me, I thought – and started laughing at my inadvertent quote from ‘Cry Me a River’, alarming some crows, who rose in an upward swoop, chorusing doom. It had always been incredibly easy to describe my relationship with Robert in lyrics. Every damn Motown song. Plenty of country and western. A rather embarrassing amount of Rod Stewart. Robert said we were more like enharmonics. Did I know enharmonics?

‘Yes, I know the word.’

‘What is it then?’

‘It’s when the same note has two different names and roles, depending which scale you’re thinking about: hence it might be D flat in one key, but in another it’s C sharp.’

‘It’s a good image that, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘How it can look and sound exactly the same, but it can mean, and be, something else entirely. The last note of one scale could be the first note of a completely different scale.’

When the rain stopped, I walked out into the brilliance of sudden English sun after rain, raindrop-spattered cobwebs glittering all around, the wooden garden fence steaming lightly, and I sang ‘Cry Me a River’ softly to the sheep who stood with tiny rainbows in their oily wool, as the wet grass soaked through my shoes and drenched my jeans up to the knee.

Tenderness crept through me. I could feel it. I imagined a future: him at the piano, playing; me on a sofa, reading. A fire. French windows, maybe. A touching end to a long saga.

Would I make him cry me a river?

No. I would follow Johnny Cash’s advice. I would be what I was – in love with him. With him, finally. To turn my back on this would go against nature. All I could do now was be honest. See where love would take us. Because love can take you anywhere.

*

On my return to London I had a little speech semi-prepared, and waited for the moment, which occurred across a bowl of tom yung koong.

‘I must try and make this,’ he said. ‘You like it, don’t you?’

‘So, Robert,’ I said.

‘Yes, Louisa,’ he said, with a demeanour of self-aware ironic obedience. He was wearing a clean white shirt, and was sober, though over-shaved.

I hadn’t smoked for years, but I rather wanted one now. It felt so charmingly youthful to be here with Robert. Like being twenty-five again. I took a fag from his packet.

‘Bloody amateur,’ he grumbled, and didn’t light it for me.

‘So, Robert,’ I said.

‘You’re looking gorgeous,’ he said. ‘Let’s skip dinner. Come under the table with me. I’ve had a demi-maître all week at the thought of you.’ (Demi-maître = half-master = semi-erection.)

‘Robert,’ I said.

‘Don’t brush me off,’ he said.

‘No!’ I said – and realised suddenly his vulnerability.

‘No?’ he said.

‘Do you want me for your girlfriend?’ I asked. The seventeen-year-old ghost me shivered. The nerve! To ask Robert that!

‘Well it seems a bit of a juvenile way to put it,’ he said, ‘but partner is a dreadful term, sounds like I want you to set up in a law firm or play squash, and it’s probably a little early to ask you to marry me, though I could start quite soon with the veiled hints …’

‘I’ll be your girlfriend,’ I said. ‘What I said – if you’re looking for a good woman so you can be saved by her love, I’ll do that. I can’t not. Two things though.’

He was smiling.

‘You stop drinking, and you get a shrink.’

My seventeen-year-old gaped. To ask Robert, straight out, and to set requirements!

He was taking a long drag, cigarette held between finger and thumb. He smiled down at the cigarette. ‘Drink and smoke till the day I die,’ he murmured.

‘Smoking is a detail,’ I said. ‘Of course you smoke too much, but it doesn’t make you a cunt.’

‘Does drinking make me a cunt?’ he asked.

‘You should know. You’re there every time it happens.’

‘I do drink too much,’ he said. ‘Far too much. You’re right, I should cut down.’

‘You must stop,’ I said.

‘Completely?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is that a requirement?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t ask much, does she.’

‘It’s not for me.’

‘Yes it is,’ he said. ‘OK. I’ll do it.’ (Air of doing a great favour.) ‘I won’t drink when I’m with you.’ He announced it as if it were in his gift.

‘At all,’ I said gently.

‘And I won’t be POA,’ he said. ‘All right?’ A little aggressively. (POA is Pissed On Arrival.)

‘At all,’ I said.

He avoided understanding.

‘OK,’ he said.

‘At all, ever, whether I am there or not,’ I said, very clearly. ‘Ever again.’

‘But I can’t have a steak without a glass or two of nice fat red wine,’ he said. ‘It’s a cultural thing, it’s …’