He turned up the next day, clean, shaved, fragrant, bearing a bunch of tatty corner-shop chrysanthemums.
‘God you’re gorgeous,’ he said. ‘You are extremely bloody pulchritudinous. You’ve improved. Well done,’ he said, looking round. ‘Sorry about yesterday. I wasn’t drunk actually but there’s this rather evil weed about. I made the mistake of having a drag or two of a friend’s and it completely did me in …’
‘You said you were dead,’ I observed.
‘Well I’m not,’ he said, slightly pettishly. ‘Can I come in? How are you?’
‘I’m all right,’ I said. ‘You should’ve said you were coming, I’d’ve …’
‘I did,’ he said. ‘I told you.’
‘You didn’t say when, I’m worki—’
‘I didn’t know when,’ he said, ‘so how could I tell you?’
He walked through into the sitting room, shaking out a cigarette, heading for the piano. He trailed his fingers across the keyboard, and said, ‘Bet it’s out of tune.’ His hands landed lightly as blossom falling on to a lake, and the notes rippled out. After a dozen bars he stopped and looked at me, expectantly.
‘Don’t stop,’ I said.
‘Yes but this is where you come in,’ he explained.
‘Me?’ I said. ‘I don’t believe I do.’
‘Yes,’ he said, and played the last few bars again, counting over them, ‘two three’, with an exaggerated movement with his head, and a big encouraging smile.
I looked at him blankly.
‘I’ll do it,’ he said. Played the few bars again, and then at the point in question began to sing: ‘Votre âme est un paysage choisi …’ He smiled up at me.
‘I can’t sing that, Robert.’
‘Course you can. Can’t you? You have to. This is the most beautiful song. Fauré. You know it. It’s not easy, I know. How about this one? “Après un Rêve”?’ He played a few bars.
‘Robert, I don’t know them. I’ve no voice. Don’t be such a dork.’
‘Dork,’ he said, and smiled. ‘That’s nice. Dork. I’ve not heard that in years. What do you want to sing then?’
‘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. ‘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.’