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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 there was a shooting star.

      That weekend became the mainstay of the opening (or the middle, or the end) of the novel I tried to write about him. ‘He’s much gentler out of town,’ I wrote. ‘He points out fieldfares. His mother has died. Lisette has left him. He’s given up performing, and won’t compose except for money. I believe he thinks that because geniuses are tormented, and because he is not as much a genius as Debussy, he must therefore torment himself. We his all-knowing friends think he should take his talent back to his heart and face its responsibilities. We believe that he is frightened to do so. We think this is the root of his sadness, the demon which he seems to be trying to drown. He wonders why everybody is always doing down his fucking work, which we are not, we respect his hard work and success, but we know that he wants and needs something else. He knows this too. We all find this hard to talk about. It is easy to be simplistic.’

      None of us blamed Lisette for leaving him. We all knew that he drank twice his share in half the time. She said, he didn’t know why he loved her; that it was just because she was pretty, and there. That wasn’t enough for her. And every now and then some other girl was pretty, and there. He provoked emotion: envy, lust, admiration, resentment – many people felt seduced by him. But how enviable is it to live constantly surrounded by those emotions? How could he possibly satisfy them all? They were there and often the easiest way out was just to give people what they so wanted. How was he to know what they meant by wanting that? It wasn’t just girls. If there was food he’d eat it; if there was drink he’d drink it. Everything existed to be flirted with or consumed. His considerable self-discipline was occupied elsewhere.

      Lisette also said, ‘It’s amazing how boring he is when you’re not in love with him.’ I flinched at the truth in this: drunk, he could be boring.

      On the Monday night I gave him a lift back to London and said, not for the

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