You Left Early. Louisa Young

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СКАЧАТЬ 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!’

       Chapter Five

       London, Washington, Henderson Tennessee, 1990

      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 …’

      The next day he brought the Dulcitone into the garden, and taught me a bit of Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, a duet for ten-year-olds which I could just manage, sitting in the sun on the lawn. In the evening we were in front of the fire: his tormented genius, his broken heart and me, him telling me how Brahms was raised in a brothel, what he’d cook me for lunch the next day (scallop salad with coriander and ginger, or salmon with sorrel sauce, or lamb and black-eyed peas) and watching me fix the fire, which I’m rather good at. ‘Fuckin’ hellfire,’ he said, getting enthusiastic. He took the bellows from me and held them nose into the fire, and let the top drop very slowly down, a slow breath to the embers. And again. And again, not quite so slowly. A tiny flame rose, and he slowed down, then sped up, and a little more, making faces at me while performing a tumultuous and deep-rooted fake orgasm, on the bellows. The fire blazed like merry hell. Then he honoured me with his Schubertian theory of the death of genius: ‘So, has there been any uncontested genius in any field since 1945? No there hasn’t – and not just because genius needs to be proven by time – no, it’s because, listen, since penicillin, nobody has syphilis any more. Well, they do, but not tertiary syphilis, which is when the angels start serenading you, or if you’re Schumann stood in a river it’s Schubert, and then your wife puts you in the loony bin and runs off with fuckin’ Brahms – so, putting the interests of art above the interests of health, and bearing in mind that it’s not just Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, Scriabin, Donizetti, Delius, Smetana, Scott Joplin, Wolf, Ivor Gurney and Henry the Eighth but also Toulouse Lautrec, Van Gogh, Maupassant, Flaubert, Rochester, Monet, Oscar Wilde … and probably a few others … is the loss of syphilis actually a benefit to civilisation? Or does the truly dedicated artiste in fact have a creative fuckin’ responsibility to acquire the poxy disease, so as to honour his muse? What d’you think?’

      Then he burnt our socks, because they were wet, before getting hold of my foot so as to demonstrate his ideal blowjob on it.

      I was very afraid of the effect he had on me. I could never remember, when he was kissing me, what I knew fifteen minutes before, and the following morning: i.e., why I didn’t want to sleep with him. I told him this; he stroked my head. I burst into tears and wouldn’t have him. Looking at him, I saw my enemy. I saw what I could lose myself in; what could take me from myself, enthrall and imprison me, keep me from my own free life. I feared it, and I desired it.

      The following morning I went and curled up with my book on the end of his single spare-room bed, and that was that really. Sex to oblivion, and that night he dragged me out barefooted on to the frosty lawn, and СКАЧАТЬ