You Left Early. Louisa Young

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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. ‘Insert?’

      ‘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.’

       Chapter Eight

       London, Greece, Accra, Cairo, 1995–97

      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.

      And as it turned out, Robert’s ex, Lisette, arrived the next day, with her hired car, her camera to take photos of cats for Kath, etc. I didn’t know that till much later. He said, ‘Oh yeah, it was just an idea, I didn’t know she was actually going to come.’ She said, ‘Bollocks, I had my ticket and everything.’ But at least she wasn’t sleeping with him. I remembered her comment from long before: ‘I was pretty and I was there.’

      But I was in London publishing my book: A Great Task of Happiness: the Life of Kathleen Scott. I went on Woman’s Hour. I got nice reviews. A book and a baby. Thirty-four years old. Yes.

      In the meantime, a friend of mine, Charlotte, had moved to Italy. Her family had bought a ruin and she was planting vineyards to make wine. I had spent time with her there and another life, an Italian life, had started to develop. (That too was a Dad thing. Wayland was the Observer correspondent in Rome in the 1950s and I had never got over the fact that though I was conceived in Italy I had never, unlike my big sisters, lived there. Such injustice.) I went to Charlotte’s, and Robert was in Australia; then Louis, Lola and I went to Ghana for a family wedding. By the time Robert and I were both back in London it was October. I was missing him badly, and he was avoiding me. I knew why. The entire grapevine, including my own housemate who shared an office with the woman in question, knew why, and told me. He didn’t. In the end I told him.

      ‘Isn’t there anything you want to tell me?’

      ‘No,’ he said, looking puzzled and innocent.

      ‘Not about Victoria, the woman who works in the same office as Clare, who you met at Nina’s party, and who you’ve been seeing for three months, and who’s generally regarded to be your girlfriend?’

      ‘Oh, that,’ he said.

      That week we met every day. Why couldn’t he just be honest about what was going on, given that I never gave him a hard time about anything except drink and lying?

      He said: ‘I lie to myself all the time. How can I be honest with you?’

      I said: ‘Exactly.’ And, ‘Are you honest with her?’

      I had a sense of him then, as a grenade with the pin out. But I was very angry. I told him, we can’t break up because we’re not together, but whatever we have going on, whatever all this has been, it’s over.

      Swift and I had it all worked out. He wanted to carry on being his old self with a new person who didn’t know him well, when what he needed was to become a new him.

      *

      I wrote three novels about an English belly dancer in love with Cairo. Something of Robert crept into the policeman character. The first, Baby Love, was listed for the Orange Prize; I went to the party and spent it with Nina Sequin-Smythe. We picked up Claire Rayner, the agony aunt, and talked about Robert all evening.

      I spent time in Cairo, researching. Julio was around. I didn’t see much of Robert, though he’d pitch up sometimes when he was lonely, and I would be polite.

      *

      In June 1997 I dreamed I had to cut my foot off. It was an epic dream, full of adventure and difficulty in labyrinthine mansions with hanging bridges and invisible enemies. I was sitting panting on a low ledge, having escaped something, and had to cut my foot off. I used a bread knife. Then Lola had a drama, and when that was done we sighed with relief – then remembered the foot. It was sitting there on its own, waxy, yellowish, but not bloody, its surface at the ankle healed over into a slightly flaccid stump.

      ‘But СКАЧАТЬ