You Left Early Page 8

  ‘Oh, that,’ he said.

  That week we met every day. Why couldn’t he just be honest about what was going on, given that I never gave him a hard time about anything except drink and lying?

  He said: ‘I lie to myself all the time. How can I be honest with you?’

  I said: ‘Exactly.’ And, ‘Are you honest with her?’

  I had a sense of him then, as a grenade with the pin out. But I was very angry. I told him, we can’t break up because we’re not together, but whatever we have going on, whatever all this has been, it’s over.

  Swift and I had it all worked out. He wanted to carry on being his old self with a new person who didn’t know him well, when what he needed was to become a new him.

  *

  I wrote three novels about an English belly dancer in love with Cairo. Something of Robert crept into the policeman character. The first, Baby Love, was listed for the Orange Prize; I went to the party and spent it with Nina Sequin-Smythe. We picked up Claire Rayner, the agony aunt, and talked about Robert all evening.

  I spent time in Cairo, researching. Julio was around. I didn’t see much of Robert, though he’d pitch up sometimes when he was lonely, and I would be polite.

  *

  In June 1997 I dreamed I had to cut my foot off. It was an epic dream, full of adventure and difficulty in labyrinthine mansions with hanging bridges and invisible enemies. I was sitting panting on a low ledge, having escaped something, and had to cut my foot off. I used a bread knife. Then Lola had a drama, and when that was done we sighed with relief – then remembered the foot. It was sitting there on its own, waxy, yellowish, but not bloody, its surface at the ankle healed over into a slightly flaccid stump.

  ‘But what about your leg!’ she cried. We turned our attention to my bereft ankle, only to find that it had grown another foot, a perfectly good one. I wriggled the toes, and turned it this way and that, and it was fine. Healthy, plump, pink and operative. I was wearing the black sandals that I had bought to go to Greece with Robert.

  We looked back at the forlorn, dismembered foot. We were sorry for it, and picked it up to cuddle it. ‘What should we do with it?’ I wondered.

  ‘Take it to your mum,’ Lola said.

  The next morning I told Lola about the dream. She was fascinated. ‘I know who made you cut it off,’ she said, rather importantly. ‘It was a robber.’

  ‘Robert?’ I said.

  ‘Not Robert. Robber. But Robert is a robber,’ she said.

  Well of course, to the infant, Robert was a robber. Stole the mother’s time and affections, stole into her mother’s bed, stole peace of mind, stole sleep, stole the heart from the mother and the mother from the child.

  ‘Why’s Robert a robber?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh you know,’ she said, going back to her colouring book.

  I told my friends about the dream, and what she had said. One suggested a Viking burial – put the foot on a model ship and set fire to it, launched out on the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. Or put it away in a box? No, it would moulder, and smell.

  They all knew that Robert was getting married.

  Yeah, he was getting married.

  I knew the foot was the love I still carried for Robert. I wondered why I was denigrating it. Because I had denigrated it all along. If I could make it small enough and non enough, then it wasn’t even happening, and then no one could mock me for loving such an unfaithful man (There was nothing to be faithful to! It wasn’t like that!) and I wouldn’t be sad when it ended.

  The foot floated around behind me all day, as if tied by a string. Of course I was glad not to marry him. The night he came to tell me he was engaged he drank half a bottle of gin, neat, and smoked up a storm; he put on John Coltrane and talked rubbish of the highest order. He was holding my feet, and clutching at me; and the ex-lover in me was saying get off, get off, and the friend was thinking, Jesus. It was a bravura presentation of pre-wedding nerves. I got him as far as the door three times but he stood facing me, still talking, and I couldn’t shut the door in his face. Three times he came back in the house. I said no. Please, he said. No. Please. He leaned against the kitchen door, propped up, his head back, looking about seventeen.

  ‘You deserve,’ he said, ‘to love and be loved on a regular basis.’ I thought, So do you. Go on. Do it.

  The next day I was due to sit for a painter friend who was trying to do an oil-sketch portrait every day for six weeks. I thought I looked OK, despite having cried all night. He painted me wild-haired, bleak-eyed, mad.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘How could you tell?’

  ‘It’s my job,’ he said kindly.

  I thought: ‘Some men look at women, and understand us.’

  Robert used to. But he’d lost it. He was losing himself. I’d lost him.

  *

  I went round to my mother’s and told her about the dream and the foot.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you can leave it with me if that would help.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I think it would.’

  That evening my father rang. ‘Your mother told me about the foot,’ he said. ‘We’re looking after it. We thought we might plant it in the garden, see if it might grow?’

  The child thought that was a good idea. ‘It could grow a tree with little new feet on it. Then we’d have lots of feet if we needed them.’

  *

  The wedding was in August. He invited me the night before; I didn’t go. The wedding albums are under the piano. I don’t look at them. I’ve been told it started well and they were happy. At the time, of course he didn’t confide in me. He was busy elsewhere.

  I went to dinner once. Robert showed me round: his music room, his family grandfather clock in the hall. I felt like a pair of sticks walking, dry and pointless and about to snap. In 1998 their son was born. Robert brought him over sometimes, in his buggy. He adored his child; absolutely adored him. He’d be jiggling the buggy with his foot, chatting and joking with him while trying to smoke in the opposite direction. He was working hard and, the times I did see him, drinking a lot. His wife always looked great.

  Once I went into our local Nepalese restaurant to pick up a takeaway. It was known as the Office, for the time Robert spent working in there – and there he was, working, at a back table. I hadn’t seen him for perhaps a year or more. He looked up, gestured to a beer on the table, and said: ‘You took yer time. That’s for you—’

  If I don’t say much about the marriage, I mean no disrespect – quite the contrary. I’m not ignoring it, denigrating it, or writing it out of history. But I wasn’t there. I don’t know about it, and it’s not my business. They married; they had a child. This story jumps three years while they are doing that.

  Chapter Nine

  London, Wiltshire, 2000

  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?