LITMIR.BIZ

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and the keys and the time-signature for every part of the orchestra. Then he needed to write down all the music that was in his head, individual parts, a line for each instrument, twenty or thirty parts. Occasionally he’d go and check something on the Dulcitone – that least dulcet of instruments, its tuning forks well out of tune after seventy years in a Wiltshire cottage – but otherwise the orchestra flowed direct from his mind to the paper. When Daniel Barenboim was on Desert Island Discs, he said he’d rather take the scores than any recordings of music, because when he read the scores he could recall and enjoy every performance he’d ever heard.

      I am a puddle of admiration for this kind of capacity. This admiration makes it difficult for me to talk about Robert’s music. I fall at the first hurdle: I love it. I loved things he said were crap; I was bedazzled by his skill, by the ease with which he created pure beauty, by the delicacy with which he could shift a mood, by his versatility. He’d produce a piece of cracking 1920s flapper jazz; a haunting scrap of electronica with chanting sopranos; a lush nineteenth-century orchestral waltz; a fair imitation of 1959 Miles Davis; a driving hard rock piece with electric guitars; a sprightly yet somehow corrupt carousel melody; something feral and Celtic that seemed to be made entirely of cloud and a girl’s voice, a hackneyed 1980s-style TV crime theme. ‘They want hackneyed,’ he said. ‘I give them what they want.’ De-composing, he’d call it. But even if he tried, he couldn’t write bad music. Everything had something in it which stopped you, or moved you. God knows he was articulate in English but music was his first language. It was a language I could understand but not myself speak, though I devoutly wished I could. It meant, to me, blood and love and beauty. It meant my father at home.

      And then I was sent to interview Johnny Cash, at home in Tennessee. At that time, he was almost a has-been; his rebirth as Patriarch of Americana was many years in the future. We got talking about the evils of the world. I mentioned a song he recorded, ‘Here Comes that Rainbow Again’ by Kris Kristofferson. It’s a small drama, based on an intensely touching scene from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

      ‘You know that book?’ Johnny said, his face lighting up.

      ‘I love that book,’ I said. ‘And you know that book!’

      ‘I was that book.’ He smiled at me. It was like being smiled at by Monument Valley, or the Hoover Dam.

      ‘You like that song?’ he said, and pulled over his guitar. He tuned up, and played, and sang – all my favourites, all afternoon, in that shadowy room with the sun hot outside, and it was one of the finest afternoons I’ve ever spent, and definitely the worst interview I’ve ever done. We hardly talked, because this music was his way of communicating. He did say one thing I remember: ‘You have to be what you are. Whatever you are, you gotta be it.’

      I came away realising that I didn’t want to be a journalist any more. Although it was journalism that had given me this extraordinary day, I didn’t want to be the person oohing and aahing on paper about Kris Kristofferson, John Steinbeck and Johnny Cash. I wanted to be the person writing and making the stuff that makes people ooh and ahh. Cash loving Kristofferson’s song; Kristofferson loving the way Cash sang it, both of them loving Steinbeck’s book. I wanted to be one of them. I might as well admit it.

      Somebody took a photo with my camera of Johnny Cash and me in the low spring sun. He has his arm round my waist. He picked me a daffodil from his front garden, gave me a kiss, and then I went home to start trying to be what I was: someone who wanted to create. I had the daffodil on my desk while I wrote my first book, a biography of my father’s mother, Kathleen, the sculptor. I still have it – a little dried-up papery ghost of a thing, reminding me that that’s what integrity means: being what you are. It’s somewhere in a pile of significant flowers (a rose from a May Ball, jasmine and marigold from the Taj Mahal, a tuber-rose from Graz, a tuft of the last cotton Tammy Wynette ever picked). I kept it in a bowl by my bed, until Robert set fire to it – rather unsuccessfully – with a cigarette end.

       Chapter Six

       London, Wiltshire, Paris, 1992–3

      Well, I was only half in love with him, and just as well, as I had every reason to tell myself. Imagine the chaos if I had been fully in love with him! He was trouble. Not nothing but trouble – he was plenty else, but all that just added to the trouble. And anyway, I had other fish to fry.

      In early summer 1992, I found I was pregnant, and not by Robert. This was a massive surprise, a great adventure, and, strictly, another story. Briefly, it was the only night Louis (kind, handsome, self-contained, Ghanaian) and I spent together, and, as the agony aunts warn the teenagers, it is possible to get pregnant without actually having sex. He and I both knew that we had done nothing that would normally result in conception. Tell that to most people though (they did ask …) and eyebrows screech into hairlines because all of a sudden everyone knows much more than me about what I got up to in bed on a particular occasion. Also, I had been told I would find it hard to conceive, for medical reasons. It was rather surreal. But there it was. Piss-on-a-stick proof.

      I told Robert on the day of the pregnancy test. He, who never wanted to be left out of anything, was very keen that the baby should be his. I would have had to be three months pregnant already, which I wasn’t, but he was not interested in details, unless they were musical. I told him about Louis. ‘It’ll be an entertaining nine months,’ Robert said, ‘waiting to see if it’s white or black. I’ll babysit! There’s going to be a massive rallying round.’ It had a curious effect on him: he developed a kind of want/don’t want attitude. He was very keen to help. I went to Wiltshire to be with my sisters; he wanted to come. It was May and lush, with six little children for me to look at in a new light. Robert cooked, played Frisbee with my nephews, played Debussy on the Dulcitone, and reduced one sister to near hysteria by smoking while brushing his teeth. He understood that we couldn’t sleep together any more – found it absurd on one level, but understood. His presence was a massive comfort to me. We all lay about on lawns in the sun and I revealed my secret to my nephew Joe.

      From my notebook:

      Joe (4): Louisa’s going to have a baby

      Louis (8): No she’s not

      Sisters (43 and 39): !

      Joe: But you’re not married

      Louis: Yeah you need a sperm

      Joe: Where will you get a sperm from?

      Louis: Will you get it from a sperm bank?

      Me: I’ve already got one

      Louis: Where did you get it! Did you sex? Who with?

      Sisters: !!

      Theo (6): Person with a baby in her tummy, how did it get there?

      Louis: You were being naughty!

      Joe: Is your baby already in you?

      Louis: It’s a joke

      Sisters: Is it?

      Me: No

      Louis: ‘Well you’ll need to know what children want so I’ll tell you – sweets and wrestling stickers and a wrestling magazine

      Joe: What’s its daddy called?

      Me: Louis, like Louis

      Louis: Isn’t Robert its daddy?

      Me: Nope.

      Robert: (shaking with silent laughter)

      Joe: Is it going to see its daddy if you’re not married?

      Me: Yes I hope so

      All childish faces crease in horror. Hope so?

      Me: Yes! Yes of course!

      Louis: Is he going to sleep all the time like Tom?

      Tom (a baby): snuffle

      Me: Not when he’s bigger

      Lily

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