Louisa Young - You Left Early

And then I was sent to interview Johnny Cash, at home in Tennessee. At that time, he was almost a has-been; his rebirth as Patriarch of Americana was many years in the future. We got talking about the evils of the world. I mentioned a song he recorded, ‘Here Comes that Rainbow Again’ by Kris Kristofferson. It’s a small drama, based on an intensely touching scene from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

‘You know that book?’ Johnny said, his face lighting up.

‘I love that book,’ I said. ‘And you know that book!’

‘I was that book.’ He smiled at me. It was like being smiled at by Monument Valley, or the Hoover Dam.

‘You like that song?’ he said, and pulled over his guitar. He tuned up, and played, and sang – all my favourites, all afternoon, in that shadowy room with the sun hot outside, and it was one of the finest afternoons I’ve ever spent, and definitely the worst interview I’ve ever done. We hardly talked, because this music was his way of communicating. He did say one thing I remember: ‘You have to be what you are. Whatever you are, you gotta be it.’

I came away realising that I didn’t want to be a journalist any more. Although it was journalism that had given me this extraordinary day, I didn’t want to be the person oohing and aahing on paper about Kris Kristofferson, John Steinbeck and Johnny Cash. I wanted to be the person writing and making the stuff that makes people ooh and ahh. Cash loving Kristofferson’s song; Kristofferson loving the way Cash sang it, both of them loving Steinbeck’s book. I wanted to be one of them. I might as well admit it.

Somebody took a photo with my camera of Johnny Cash and me in the low spring sun. He has his arm round my waist. He picked me a daffodil from his front garden, gave me a kiss, and then I went home to start trying to be what I was: someone who wanted to create. I had the daffodil on my desk while I wrote my first book, a biography of my father’s mother, Kathleen, the sculptor. I still have it – a little dried-up papery ghost of a thing, reminding me that that’s what integrity means: being what you are. It’s somewhere in a pile of significant flowers (a rose from a May Ball, jasmine and marigold from the Taj Mahal, a tuber-rose from Graz, a tuft of the last cotton Tammy Wynette ever picked). I kept it in a bowl by my bed, until Robert set fire to it – rather unsuccessfully – with a cigarette end.

Well, I was only half in love with him, and just as well, as I had every reason to tell myself. Imagine the chaos if I had been fully in love with him! He was trouble. Not nothing but trouble – he was plenty else, but all that just added to the trouble. And anyway, I had other fish to fry.

In early summer 1992, I found I was pregnant, and not by Robert. This was a massive surprise, a great adventure, and, strictly, another story. Briefly, it was the only night Louis (kind, handsome, self-contained, Ghanaian) and I spent together, and, as the agony aunts warn the teenagers, it is possible to get pregnant without actually having sex. He and I both knew that we had done nothing that would normally result in conception. Tell that to most people though (they did ask …) and eyebrows screech into hairlines because all of a sudden everyone knows much more than me about what I got up to in bed on a particular occasion. Also, I had been told I would find it hard to conceive, for medical reasons. It was rather surreal. But there it was. Piss-on-a-stick proof.

I told Robert on the day of the pregnancy test. He, who never wanted to be left out of anything, was very keen that the baby should be his. I would have had to be three months pregnant already, which I wasn’t, but he was not interested in details, unless they were musical. I told him about Louis. ‘It’ll be an entertaining nine months,’ Robert said, ‘waiting to see if it’s white or black. I’ll babysit! There’s going to be a massive rallying round.’ It had a curious effect on him: he developed a kind of want/don’t want attitude. He was very keen to help. I went to Wiltshire to be with my sisters; he wanted to come. It was May and lush, with six little children for me to look at in a new light. Robert cooked, played Frisbee with my nephews, played Debussy on the Dulcitone, and reduced one sister to near hysteria by smoking while brushing his teeth. He understood that we couldn’t sleep together any more – found it absurd on one level, but understood. His presence was a massive comfort to me. We all lay about on lawns in the sun and I revealed my secret to my nephew Joe.

From my notebook:

Joe (4): Louisa’s going to have a baby

Louis (8): No she’s not

Sisters (43 and 39): !

Joe: But you’re not married

Louis: Yeah you need a sperm

Joe: Where will you get a sperm from?

Louis: Will you get it from a sperm bank?

Me: I’ve already got one

Louis: Where did you get it! Did you sex? Who with?

Sisters: !!

Theo (6): Person with a baby in her tummy, how did it get there?

Louis: You were being naughty!

Joe: Is your baby already in you?

Louis: It’s a joke

Sisters: Is it?

Me: No

Louis: ‘Well you’ll need to know what children want so I’ll tell you – sweets and wrestling stickers and a wrestling magazine

Joe: What’s its daddy called?

Me: Louis, like Louis

Louis: Isn’t Robert its daddy?

Me: Nope.

Robert: (shaking with silent laughter)

Joe: Is it going to see its daddy if you’re not married?

Me: Yes I hope so

All childish faces crease in horror. Hope so?

Me: Yes! Yes of course!

Louis: Is he going to sleep all the time like Tom?

Tom (a baby): snuffle

Me: Not when he’s bigger

Lily (2½, coming to sit beside me, very quietly): I’m glad you’ve got a baby in your tummy

Sisters and Alice (12): (unbridled delight)

Robert had told me how some months ago he had declared love to someone and been heartbroken because she rejected him. And that a glamorous Middle Eastern woman, a single mother who was engaged to a man she didn’t love, had become obsessed with him and now the fiancé wanted to kill him. I dropped him off at the BBC just as ‘Papa Was a Rolling Stone’ finished on the car radio. That night I was suddenly, irrationally and oddly joyously certain that the baby was Robert’s, though I knew perfectly well it couldn’t be. I sat by an open window with Tallulah and she told me all the ways in which Louis was perfect.

The next day I had a painful conversation with Robert. I found myself being snide, protective, defensive. He was upset, I was upset – chucking out what I half wanted in order to protect myself against wanting it more and it not wanting me. I explained that if he helped me I’d come to rely on his help. ‘Look, shall I come over?’ he said, and I said no, I’d want you to come and stay and be here. And of course I wouldn’t really. He’d just be smoking, drinking, requiring instructions, taking no responsibility. That phrase want/don’t want applied to us both. I cried a lot, after I’d hung up.