Louisa Young - You Left Early

‘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 than the finest use of the triangle in Western Civilisation.’

We listen again. It was impossible to determine, if you didn’t know what you were looking for. Once you knew it was there, it was sublime.

Towards dawn Robert declares that we must all go to Barn Elms Reservoirs, not far away, by the river. I have a brief Bruce Springsteen moment – though to be honest there was little chance of anybody’s body being tan and wet down at that reservoir in the middle of the night …

I was at that time a biker, riding a Harley Davidson 1200 Sportster, its left foot-peg welded into place with a metal plate by a rural blacksmith after an unfortunate incident on an Italian backroad earlier in the year. Robert normally would not go near it – he didn’t drive, would hire a moped on a Greek holiday if he had to, but thought the taxi the only civilised form of transport. Motorbikes were to him alien beasts, totally incomprehensible. Nevertheless – I think because he realises he’ll get to put his arms round my waist – he decides he will ride pillion. I have a spare helmet with me, which he puts on, but he won’t change from what he is wearing, so when we are pulled over by the police on Shepherd’s Bush Roundabout ten minutes later (in convoy with Truncheon in his Morris Clubman) Robert is barefoot in a pink towelling dressing gown given to him by Dustin Hoffman as cast and crew gift at the end of the West End run of Peter Hall’s production of The Merchant of Venice , with something to that effect embroidered on the back. It is an unlikely set of biker’s colours.

The police car circles up behind us, makes itself known, and pulls us over.

Where are we going? they wonder.

‘Barn Elms,’ I say.

Why?

I am at a loss. Well – I know why I am going. Because Robert wanted to go. But that probably isn’t the answer they want.

Behind me, Robert is struggling with the visor. ‘It’s the migration season,’ he says, from the depths of the helmet.

The officer looks unconvinced.

‘We’re hopin’ to see a black-tailed godwit.’

I assume Robert is joking and bite my lip. But the copper accepts the explanation.

‘Oh, all right,’ he says. ‘Take it easy’, and waves us on.

Robert isn’t joking. He does want to see a black-tailed godwit. That is in fact the purpose of the expedition. When we get down there to the broad damp common, bordered with thick undergrowth, wet and fragrant, and after a degree of ornithological patience no black-tailed godwit is forthcoming, he decides instead to educate us in the ways of rugby league, so we run up and down alongside the reservoir, throwing the crash helmets backwards to each other as the mist rises.

In the end, after a greasy spoon breakfast, we go back, and go to bed – well, Robert goes to bed, Lisette goes to work, and Truncheon and I fall asleep on the sofa. That afternoon when we wake, Robert wants to know if it is true about the legendary penis.

‘I don’t know,’ I say.

He is bemused. ‘What do you mean?’ he asks. ‘You must know.’

He is quite bewildered – amazed – by the news that Truncheon and I shared a sofa without any sexual goings-on. It seems impossible to him.

Why? we ask. People often don’t engage in sexual goings-on.

‘It’s such a waste!’ he cries, in the end. ‘I mean, look at you! The pair of you!’

In May 1990 Swift (Baroness Alacrity; Alassitude when asleep) married David (Flussie) by the golden pagoda in Battersea Park. She wore a tiny top hat; he a riverboat gambler coat. Lisette and Robert danced. This is the only time I ever saw him on a dance-floor. She was wearing a red dress. Later she was dancing with someone else, and he said: ‘Look at her, isn’t she lovely?’ Later still he was conducting some kind of athletics competition in the shrubbery. Later still, a bunch of us filled a minicab with the wedding flowers – armfuls of fresh bouncy lilac – and went back to my flat. Robert fell asleep in my bed and was narked when I turfed him out so I could get in there with the best man. Tallulah married that year as well; but I had my Harley and purported not to care, in slightly too bravura a fashion, that my two best friends had achieved this state of romantic glory – as I saw it – whereas my most recent triumphs were getting off with a nineteen-year-old, and refusing a freebie offered by a Leeds gigolo I was interviewing for Marie Claire . And then Robert and Lisette broke up, and that changed things.

*

I was at my grandfather’s house in Wiltshire, a place of moss, wellingtons and woodsmoke, with Swift and David. I had a cold, and had retired to bed. Robert arrived by taxi from Chichester (some eighty miles) where he was a musical director at the Festival. (I knew him for thirty-four years and I never saw him on London Transport. He’d take cabs from London to Wigan, until he was on his sticks, when his pride made him take the train. Another time he came by cab to Wiltshire from London, and we offered the driver a cup of tea and the bathroom. He had arrived from Afghanistan three months before, and had not been outside London. At the sight of the Marlborough Downs, he had tears in his eyes. He said he would bring his wife and children to live here because it was the most beautiful green.)

Robert didn’t like people going to bed without him, and when Swift and David retired at around 2 a.m., he appeared in my bare bedroom, lonely. ‘I’m being good,’ he said, ‘and quiet.’ So I woke up. After a bit he went downstairs and came back up carrying the Dulcitone, singlehanded. A Dulcitone is the size and shape of a child’s coffin, on four spindly legs. My grandfather had acquired it to fit on a boat. Its mechanism is made of tuning forks, and it sounds like the arthritic ghost of a music box.

‘No, no, don’t help,’ he said. ‘You’re ill. It’s a treat for you.’ He set it up by my sickbed, with a candle on the one side and his glass of whatever it was on the other, and he played for me: Ravel’s ‘Pavane for a Dead Infanta’, La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin, a nocturne or two, and other pieces appropriate to a sick blonde, including excerpts from the Fauré requiem, and a small lecture on why Mozart is crap: ‘It’s these highly symmetrical structures which appeal to people who like their lives to be very ordered – he puts his mannered and predictable material into a preconceived structure – first movement sonata form, relying far too much on the tonic/dominant axis – you know, C to G – structurally and harmonically – it’s all SQUARE – there’s an announcement of what’s coming up, and a pompous phrase saying something’s finished – he never allows his material to grow organically because the sheer SQUARENESS cannot accommodate organic growth. Inflexibility appeals to a certain type of person, class even. OK he wrote some truly great music – Don Giovanni , the Requiem – the late concerti slow movements, that intimate interplay between the piano and the orchestra – listen to Murray Perahia – and the clarinet development in the slow movement of the quintet – but why is every boring note of every boring piece adored by these boring people? I’ll tell you – Fear. Security and predictability gets those smiles of approval because it makes them feel comfortable and secure, i.e. fuckin’ smug …’