LITMIR.BIZ

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Kevin, Kevin looking for gas fittings to build the bathroom with, came and went about their business. We got up around five, knowing that as a one-night-stand we couldn’t push it to the second night, but could make the first last as long as possible. He slept very very deep, very long, very quiet. Hardworking boy. Talking about music, first and last. ‘What’s the point of music? I’ll tell yer. Order from chaos. You don’t know where you’re being taken. But when you get there, it’s all all right. Of course it’s not so effective if there’s not an interesting route taken, enough chaos on the way, and that’s why Mozart is so fucking dull, it’s all order, nothing but fucking order …’ And food. ‘I’ll take you there,’ he says, of a Thai restaurant. I quite wish he would. I quite want more, of course, but

      i) I’m celibate

      ii) I don’t want a boyfriend I want love

      iii) If I did it wouldn’t be Lockhart

      iv) You don’t get love from one-night stands

      v) (iii) and (iv) vice versa.

      So we parted on the corner with a friendly peck and a see-ya, and that’s it. It has cheered me up no end, so much I did two dance classes on Sunday.’

      The notebook continues with seeing my friend off to Hong Kong, having breakfast in bed with my housemates Claude and Berny, band rehearsal, washing the sheets, a long talk with Tallulah where she says that he wasn’t actually planned as the father of my kids but that evidently a good time was had by all. ‘I have the obvious leaning towards Lockhart but the head says no’ – and then: ‘Lockhart called to say don’t cash the cheque yet and he’ll be in touch when he’s back from Christmas in Wigan’.

      He called?

      All that resentment about not ringing was about nothing? What, I somehow made that up?

      And then, a few weeks into the New Year: ‘Tonight I had dinner with Lockhart. Nice. We took a taxi to Queensway because he is so thin that he couldn’t take the cold.’

      I had been totally maligning him as a discourteous Lothario, for decades. He was a courteous Lothario, and by this evidence so was I. In this contemporary account I am giving every impression of not particularly wanting to continue our liaison. I have rewritten history. Hmm. Thank you, memory.

      And I’m wondering – why was there a cheque? My mind leaps in to assist: perhaps the cabbie wouldn’t have taken a cheque, so I paid cash and Robert, insisting on paying the fare, gave me a cheque. That makes sense. It must have been that.

      Dangerous phrases, ‘that makes sense. It must have been that’. Armed with those phrases a passing thought can march off into the back of your head and set up in its pomp as memory, as truth even, claiming through the passing years all the rights and privileges of those titles, to which it is not, actually, entitled. It can permeate a person’s overall idea of what their life has been.

      So, practically the only thing my memory got right was that it was Emma’s party, it was Primrose Hill, there was a taxi and skinheads. I’m really sorry not to have looked at the notebook for thirty-five years, not to have had the chance to read it to him, and have that ‘I wasn’t a bastard! You weren’t a fool!’ conversation, in which he would have got to say it was all my fault. How he would have laughed.

      And then I think again. Well. When, exactly, did I rewrite this history? Was I, perhaps, lying to my notebook, with all that cavalier one-night-stand stuff? Was that my pride? The ‘I know he won’t want me so I’ll not want him first’ approach?

      I have no idea. But yes, of course that is possible. Probable, even.

      Perhaps it was after the dinner that he didn’t ring.

      And now I’m rewriting it all over again; anecdotalising, shifting perspectives on long ago, making excuses, looking for reasons, searching for meaning, wishing.

      They say you don’t remember what people said, or what they did, but you remember how they made you feel. I would adjust that a little. You remember that they made you feel.

      *

      There’s his phone number in the back of a notebook: 720 5399. But I didn’t see him for a few years. Tallulah broke up with Simon and moved to New York; I was half in love with loads of other people.

      There’s another party I do remember: Oscar Moore’s, in a snooker club in King’s Cross: very dim and low-ceilinged, smoky and so forth as things were then. Robert was wearing a Wigan Rugby League rosette: cherry red, though I was not familiar with the term then. In a move of pure attention-seeking, I stole it off him. He was quite drunk in a cheerful way and didn’t really notice, until he saw that I had it pinned to the back pocket of my jeans, whereupon he chased me all round the room demanding to know why I had never told him of my passion for rugby league, and Wigan in particular, with not the foggiest that it was his rosette I was sporting, and that I was trying, with considerable lack of either clarity or effect, to express thereby my deep attraction to him.

      Anyway, he left, with a group of others, and I stood on a rainy corner in King’s Cross with the rosette. I think that’s what happened.

       Chapter Three

       London and Wigan, 1970s

      A grand piano’s feet take up only a tiny area: three indentations in the carpet, each the size of a conker, cradling a brass ball clad in a brass foreskin attached at an unlikely angle, like a stallion’s ankle, to a rising pillar of polished hardwood. Very small, to hold so much weight, and cover so much area: a superior crate the shape of Africa, hollow yet full. With the solid wing raised it shows the heartstrings within, laid in green felt across swirls of miniature golden architecture, and the internal teeth, the hammers coming up from below, sharks from the darkness to bite and bump the strings; dampers above swooping down to see them off every time.

      Robert’s Bechstein, as long as Rachmaninoff was tall, his father’s before him, lives with me now. (I smile as I write that. To Robert, saying a thing ‘lived’ somewhere was an unforgivable anthropomorphic poncey fuckin’ southern bourgeois affectation.) Underneath it are boxes and suitcases containing the entire history of Robert’s family. It has been my job to poke around in them, sorting things out. I find a brown paper-covered booklet, costing 30p, 15p if sold on Saturday only: the programme of the Wigan and District Competitive Music Festival, 1972, affiliated to the British Federation of Music Festivals, of which Her Majesty the Queen is patron. It smells of coal-dust and rain, and opens with a message from the mayor, who with the mayoress hopes to see the festival well supported. It lists the patrons, the areas which count as ‘local’ – Abram, Aspull, Billinge, Ince, Orrell, Standish, Skelmersdale, Holland, Chorley. Perhaps it is in fact these place names which smell of coal-dust and rain. It lists the scale of marks (for piano: accuracy of notes and time, technique, fluency, pace, touch, expression, interpretation); the trophies and medals available and who they are in memory of, the general regulations, appreciations, thanks, and the policy for receiving suggestions. There are ninety-nine classes, with up to twenty-five entrants in each. Choirs, recorder solo, folksong, violin, instrumental ensemble, organ, sight-reading, girls’ vocal duet. Thirty-six ten- and eleven-year-olds play ‘Ship Ahoy!’ by Arthur Pickles on the piano.

      In Pianoforte Solo (ages thirteen–fifteen), Robert Lockhart, turned thirteen a week earlier, plays Debussy’s 2nd Arabesque, and comes first with 91 points. He wins £1.65, and a stiff certificate with a gold, red and green coat of arms. The following night he comes back to hear Pianoforte Solo (open), and marks what he hears. His marks are a little harsher than the adjudicators’ and his observations, in tiny blue biro, are precise. Betty Wilson was slightly too temperamental in her Dohnányi; Richard Eastham lost all movement in his La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin. Alison Cratchley’s rubato was not up to scratch, though otherwise her Bartók was superb. ‘Not delicate,’ he writes. ‘Dotted notes not clear’; and ‘Too much Chopin style for Bach’.

      I have Robert’s little red

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