Louisa Young - You Left Early

‘I don’t want to sing. I …’

‘Have you had lunch?’ he said. ‘Come to lunch.’

I hadn’t had lunch.

We went and ate fish and drank two bottles of Pouilly-Fumé and were very attractive to each other in the afternoon sun. We went home to my house and did things we hadn’t done in a while, with the window open and the scent of the wisteria wafting in on the breeze.

So, unannounced, undeclared, unofficial, it became, again, kind of, me and Robert. On and off. Friends and lovers. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Sometimes he’d go away for a week or two. We weren’t going out together. It went on for a couple of years, and became domestic. Robert and Louis would watch the rugby together. My lodger Clare’s mother came to visit, and Clare wondered if I could ask Robert to tone down his language. I felt not, as he was, kind of, part of the household.

‘Where’s Robert going?’ Lola asks.

‘He’s going to Wigan,’ I say.

‘No, to the off licence,’ she says. She’s three.

My notebook tells me, ‘Robert was a pig’. Perhaps it was this, also written down at the time:

‘Darling,’ he calls from the other room. ‘Come in here and listen to this. It’s Bill Evans.’ I like Bill Evans and am grateful to Robert for having introduced me to his work. However I have a headache. A thumper.

‘No, sweetheart, I’m going to bed.’

‘Come and listen – just this one.’

‘No, I’ve a headache, I’m going upstairs.’

‘Oh come on, don’t be a spoilsport.’

Is it sport for him to try to make me listen to jazz when my head is thumping?

I start up the stairs, wondering where the paracetamol are.

‘Come on!’ he yells cheerfully. ‘I’ll start it again.’

I turn back down the stairs, and poke my head through the doorway. I don’t want to shout. I don’t like shouting, emotionally or physically. He’s sitting on the floor by the stereo; volume turned up loud.

‘I have a headache and I’m going to bed,’ I say clearly.

‘Ah, come on, Lou – just the first track …’

Wouldn’t a nice lover say ‘Oh, darling’ and turn it down, and try to find a painkiller?

‘No, sit down,’ he says. ‘You have to hear the sax on this …’

‘I’ve said it three times!’ I shout. ‘I HAVE A HEADACHE AND I’M GOING TO BED. What do you mean, “No”? It’s not “no”. It’s true – whether you like it or not. Why are you insisting – I don’t want to! I’m not your toy for you to play with whenever you feel like it! Jesus Christ will you leave me alone!’

He stares at me in amazement. Why am I shouting at him? ‘Barrage!’ he says, mildly.

I stomp out. Upstairs. Painkillers. Into bed, teeth beginning to ache now, pulling the duvet tight. The music comes up from the room below. When it finishes, he starts practising his jazz decorations, his Red Garland twirls. Very bloody restful. Perhaps, I think, rather than fighting about it, I should move my bed to the back room.

I’m too hot, in my red and gold Chinese pyjamas. I’m damned if I’m going to take them off. He’ll come up at three and murmur in my ear: ‘It’s a civilised hour – not dawn yet’ and be all over me. How I used to laugh at that – before I had to get up in the morning. Why doesn’t he notice that there are all kinds of times when children are absent or sleeping and I am awake and available? Why does he come to me when I am murderously, suicidally desperate for sleep as only a mother of young can be? She has asthma and eczema. She doesn’t sleep well. Since her birth I have never had an undisturbed night.

He comes up at three, making no attempt to be quiet. ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘I see you’ve got your Mongolian don’t-fuck-me trousers on. OK. Message received.’ He goes down again to the front doorstep, his counter-asthmatic smoking spot, rattling the door I locked earlier. After a moment or two I smell tobacco smoke.

I don’t know what time it is when he comes up again. I roll away from him as he whispers in my ear how much he loves, how he adores me, how I have the best arse on the planet, how he longs to insert his …

At that I laugh.

‘Insert?’ I say. ‘In sert ?’

‘Yeah,’ he says, sensing advantage, and I am laughing, and have had a few hours’ kip, and after all it’s not as if I’d have to do anything.

My daughter wakes at six, and I go to her, accepting without complaint from the child what is so hard to take from the man: your time is not your own, woman. We go down to the kitchen, her bouncing with early morning child glee, me banging into walls with exhaustion. I put her in her high chair with a pile of slices of peeled apple, and fall asleep with my head on the kitchen table.

When I get in from work he’s at the piano in sunglasses with a towel round his waist. He’s just got up. ‘I love your bed,’ he says. ‘I slept really well.’

He wanted a holiday, a change, something new. He had been working incredibly hard and drinking to match. He was going to go to Australia. But first we went to Greece together, for ten days. I had to be back in time for the publication of my first ever book.

I remember: Buying a Femidom at Heathrow, and finding it hilarious. The tall stone towers of the Mani. Kardamili, Vathia. Being woken by a nuthatch, and Robert almost weeping with joy about it. Swimming. Tiny domed ruined churches, their frescoes open to the sky. Playing pool, drinking Amstel, him getting annoyed at a fisherman eyeing me up. Him getting brown, putting on some weight, playing with a lobster outside a taverna, making me photograph cats to send to his stepmother, putting jasmine behind his ear and making a peace sign, looking so much better every day. Us at a peaceful, solitary bay, an all-day lunch, so quiet, so beautiful, and two hideously loud military planes flew over incredibly fast and the noise of it was such a shock I burst into tears, and Robert looked at me strangely and said, ‘I didn’t know you had it in you’, and I said ‘What?’ and he said, ‘Such sensitivity’. Me reading Louis de Bernières endlessly on the beach while Robert slept. Me pouring the remains of a bottle of Ouzo out of the window at Vathia so Robert wouldn’t drink it. Me wanting to go to bed, with him, on our last night, and him wanting to stay up drinking alone. Us having a terrible fight about that; me unable to sleep unless we made up, and him refusing to make up. Me reading again all my last morning, on the beach, thinking I bet Louis de Bernières would be a nice boyfriend. Robert finally bothering to get up around lunchtime, saying, ‘I’m sorry, I get prickly when I feel attacked.’ Me saying, ‘Yeah, don’t you just.’ Me leaving; suntanned Robert framed in bougainvillea against the whitewashed wall. Me pursued as far as Kalamata airport by a lunatic pervert trying to drive my car off the road.