Sofka Zinovieff - Putney

Alexander sent an email from Seattle, where he’d been doing something complicated in cyber technology for the last five years. Take it easy, Dad. Look after yourself.He was still the baby, even if he was thirty-four. He had been born in America, during the excruciating year when Ralph accepted a residency at Columbia University.

He’d done it when he realised he could no longer contain his feelings for Daphne. Daff was fourteen. Or perhaps a bit older – he couldn’t remember. Certainly, Nina had two babies and another on the way. How on earth had they managed that? What about the pill? Well they had managed it. The offer of composer-in-residence looked like a solution to a desperate situation. His composition work was overwhelming, his family needed him and yet he was hanging around Putney train-bridge in the hope of glimpsing a schoolgirl. It was beginning to feel like an addiction.

He hoped the distance would be like medicine for him. And for Daphne, of course. ‘You should spend more time with your young friends,’ he told her, though the idea of other boyfriends tormented him to the extent of a physical ache. He imagined spotty youths pawing over her perfect body and felt murderous.

They left England in 1977, crossing the Atlantic on a jumbo jet. He drank five brandies with ginger ale, which left Nina in charge of three-year-old Jason – already a flirt, running up and down the aisles, stopping to speak to the prettiest women. Little Lucia, milky and soft, ringlets in her hair, snuggled against the modest protrusion from Nina’s abdomen that would one day be Alexander.

The family moved into a spacious apartment provided by the university and Ralph was not expected to teach or commit to much, apart from an occasional seminar and a few social events. It should have been a dream, yet looking back he remembered it as one of the saddest times in his life. There was an excellent crèche for the children, Nina was filled with new energy and looked spectacular. He saw her through American eyes – exotic and different, with her yard of flowing hair, colourful robes and burgeoning body. She was painting huge canvases (now he thought of it, they’d been getting gradually smaller ever since) and even had a show on the Lower East Side. Together, they were treated like a golden couple – feted as beautiful young artists, fresh from Europe, embracing the new world and at the height of their powers. He felt dejected and bereft.

Dearest Daff,

I keep writing long, boring letters to you trying to analyse why and wherefore and then give up – my mind is too fuzzy. Why do I love you when it’s so obviously hopeless? Hopeless? Maybe it’s not, in the sense that it’s not about hope or lack of it, it’s about loving you. You’re a great strong wilful force in my life. Even when I’m not with you, you are with me every minute. How would I have survived without you? I wrote that damn violin concerto for you – all for you.

I think I’m still drunk from last night. Or at least so hung-over it’s hard to tell the difference. Nina had some paintings in a gallery on a road called the Bowery. I got slaughtered – pissed as a rat, a dirty dog in the gutter. There was a rumour that Andy Warhol was going to come so everyone was overexcited. He didn’t. I hardly noticed. I was picturing your dark eyes with those long lashes, your hair growing back into its old tangles, your breasts. Christ. It’s much worse here than I imagined.

I hear your derisive laugh – if I do put you on a pedestal it’s because you’re worth it. You inspire all my work. Ridiculous? Am I mad, foolish, or just childlike? I love my family and I love you. Love you differently. You are like a stove that my fire must warm – see, I cannot express myself in words. The fact is I cannot explain it. I cannot stop my passion. As you have grown older it has only increased. Does it hurt you? I don’t believe it. All I know for certain is that I love you – that you make my life possible.

Meanwhile, I surround you with love like a great cloak.

I love you.

Later, he regretted sending her a letter so soaked in self-pity and, the next day, wrote another, more jaunty one.

Dear lovely old Daff, how are you, my Strawberry?

Sorry about raving like a lunatic in that last dispatch. Destroy it at once!

I’ve been working all day on my Three Songs, sitting in my new study in the university. I miss you so much sometimes I think I’ll just jump on a plane and come back to see you, even if it’s only for a day. Maybe I will.

America still feels like a very foreign country and they find me rather quaint – ye olde England bollocks, and making a fuss about my accent. The only solution will be to work as hard as possible and write so much music that this time away from you will at least be productive. You are at the centre of my creativity – like afire that is always alight.

Please write and tell me how you are. Do you ever think about me or have you completely forgotten your loyal Dog, you fickle little monkey? How is Lady Jane? How are the snogging parties? Do I want to know the answer? Have you had more trouble at school?

I’ve been very secret about your letters and nobody knows you’ve written to me. For Dog’s sake make sure you lock mine away. Your parents may be wrapped up in their own affairs (joke) but Ellie will be bound to sniff them out and read them if you’re not careful – except the enclosed one which you should leave lying. It’s super-innocent and designed especially to allay suspicions!

My lovely girl, my beloved one. Try to be happy. Know that I love you.

The communication for public consumption was folded up alongside the love letter.

My dear Daphne,

Everything in America is so large it makes us feel like dwarfish Europeans. When we go out to eat the plates are like cartwheels, the hamburgers like birthday cakes, and Coca-Cola comes in pint glasses with buckets of ice. If you want a bottle of milk, you buy a giant carton that you can barely lift and Jason and Lucia love the boxes of multicoloured cereal that are almost big enough for them to crawl into. As to the cars, well poor old Maurice looks like a crumbling chariot unearthed from an archaeological dig compared to the shiny spaceships on the streets here. I wonder if you’d like it. I’d like to walk through Central Park with you one day and take you to see the monkeys in the zoo, who are not nearly as well behaved as dear departed Hugo.

He often said to Daphne that he could tell her anything, but there was actually quite a lot he omitted from the letters. He mentioned the cocaine in the hope that she would make confessions in return, but he made it sound more like a one-off experiment. Tequila was also a new discovery, but the white powder was his favourite antidote to desolation. It made him feel powerful, fearless, like dancing all night, which he sometimes did. As Nina neared the end of her pregnancy, he took to going out with people he’d met through her gallery and they went to clubs where girls were boys and vice versa. Initially, it was the drugs that allowed him to appreciate the music playing in the dark cellars and flashing dance floors; he had rejected the flimsiness of pop until then. But the mad rawness of punk and the chest-thumping power of rock now provided something he could embrace. He adopted elements in his own music and included an electric guitar in one of his orchestral pieces.

Usually, he managed to get to the morning post first, in case there was something from Daff. On the whole, it was easy. Their letter box was downstairs in the building’s entrance, so he made sure he got there before Nina left the apartment, nipping down ‘in case the contract has arrived’ or some such excuse. One morning, however, he failed. Shattered from the excesses of partying and having returned in the small hours, he felt deeply depressed and physically crushed. He would have liked to sleep it off but the children were shouting and he had a mid-morning appointment at the university. Much of the night had been spent with Candy, a young singer with an extraordinarily visceral voice – Nina Simone meets Patti Smith. She was the first black woman he’d ever slept with. He already had her in mind for his Lullabies for an Unborn Child . The three short songs were one of his greatest successes, especially in America, where they premiered that year, just after Alexander’s birth.