LITMIR.BIZ

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be playing Bach, or Schubert ländlers: ‘Homage to the fair ladies of Vienna’, didn’t mind. Our double stool is the kind that opens, full of children’s music books and collections of carols published in the 1950s. It is covered in worn petit point done by my grandmother. Over that is a sheepskin, put there to cover the wear in the petit point, now worn itself. On that, Wayland, who I loved more than life. The music came down through the belly of the piano. It sounds quite different under there. He was careful not to play too loud. For decades I didn’t know he did that. Across the room my mother would sit on a sofa in a pool of light, reading about defence policy and sea-use planning.

      Before the Second World War, before he went into the Navy, Wayland studied music at Cambridge. When he went back to university after the war, he switched to history. His youthful compositions are still in that petit point piano seat. Instead of being a composer, his first dream, he became a journalist, a writer, and ultimately a politician, a Labour member of the House of Lords. My mother, Liz (Oxford and the Wrens) was his partner in politics, his backroom intellectual powerhouse. Their subjects were foreign policy, conservation, peace, the sea, the environment. Wayland’s mother was a sculptor, Captain Scott of the Antarctic’s widow.

      These are the composers Wayland rated: Bach. Then Mozart, who added characters, then Beethoven, who became one great huge character, then Brahms and Schubert, who were just beautifully lyrical. Wagner? ‘A bicycle pump,’ he said. I liked Chopin and César Franck and Verdi: I knew they weren’t officially as good as the ones Wayland liked, but I could run around to them and be fleeing through the forest, hiding from bears, clambering mountains, rescuing and being rescued, riding unlikely beasts. I thumped and pirouetted up and down the sitting room (I did ballet classes – the plump one in a class of music-box fairies). Nobody minded the thumping but if I wriggled too much when sitting near my mother she would say: ‘You’re making me seasick.’ Liz’s mother drowned at the age of twenty-nine; six-year-old Liz, playing with her in Lake Geneva, was rescued. This shaped everything, but that is another story.

      I’m seeing myself here aged about seven, when my parents were about forty. My brother and sisters are older than me. In the way of elder siblings, they went out more, and further, and in a different way: Beatles concerts, boarding schools, festivals, university, California, Afghanistan. Later, I had a baby sister. Robert always rather yearned for a sister – he thought if he had one he could look after her. He wondered if he could borrow one of mine, I had so many.

      The Blüthner had been in that room for forty years, and was there another forty afterwards. My nephew has it now. My family was large, individually adventurous, but overall, steady.

      Robert came on a school trip to London when he was eleven, and stayed in a hotel in Lancaster Gate – a hundred yards from where I lived. (He went on another school trip a few years later, an exchange to Amiens. He ran away to Paris and got into trouble.) We might have passed on the pavement as I set off for school, and he crocodiled off to the Tube station to go to the Planetarium. We were born one day apart at different ends of the country, but you could get a direct train from where I was born – Euston in London – to where he was, in Wigan. We were both conceived on holiday. One day a year – my birthday – I was his older woman.

      The first time he came to my childhood home, he didn’t come in. It was 1978: after our encounter in Oxford, before Primrose Hill. I was recently back from my post-school year off adventures in India with a small array of revolting digestive illnesses, and had to spend the traditional few weeks in the Hospital for Tropical Diseases at St Pancras, and some time at home recuperating. Tallulah came to visit.

      ‘I can’t stay long, the boys are in the car.’

      Which boys?

      ‘Simon and Robert.’

      My bedroom was on the ground floor. I thought of the yellow line outside, and Simon’s little Renault 4, the only car owned by anyone we knew of our age.

      Which Robert?

      ‘Lockhart.’

      ‘Oh, they can come in,’ I say, nonchalantly.

      ‘You’re not well enough,’ she said.

      ‘I am well enough,’ I said.

      ‘No you’re not.’

      ‘Yes I am.’

      ‘No,’ she said.

      ‘Yes,’ I said.

      She didn’t bring them in. This occasion was one of the moments when the slippery crystal polyhedron of missed opportunities slips sideways and could, just might, have landed on a different surface. Robert didn’t know the details at the time, but later it became for him a moment when we might have got together. ‘You’d have been irresistible,’ he’d say. ‘In bed, all skinny from your illness, too knackered to give me any grief – we could have got together then. We’d have got married – and you’d have divorced me, of course, but then we’d’ve got married again and been happy and I never would’ve become an alcoholic …’ Our non-existent children were to be named after composers: Claudette, Frederica, Cesar and Sergei, for Debussy, Chopin, Franck and Rachmaninoff. Much as he loved Satie and Ravel, we drew the line at Eric and Maurice.

      Tallulah doesn’t like this story, because it suggests he would only have wanted me then because I was thin and brown. I don’t see it that way. At her fiftieth birthday party, we formally forgave her for not bringing him in to see me. She said, ‘Actually, you do make rather a good couple’, and I felt it as a blessing. I thrilled like a seventeen-year-old to see our names written together on the invitation, even when we were well middle-aged. Public acknowledgement of coupledom. I was never the marrying kind and anyway Louisa Lockhart would be a terrible name – I can see Louisa Lockhart in a third-rate novel, scurrying over the storm-lashed moors, sodden shawl clutched round her after the Young Master done her wrong. Or writing light erotica. Or being an eighteenth-century fishing boat.

      According to my diary, I went to his twenty-first birthday party, on 27 March 1980. ‘Jolly flirt with L’, I wrote in my diary. I have no memory of it whatsoever. And there is his name on the list for my twenty-first birthday party, a few days later. All the names are crossed out, in an ‘invitation sent’ or ‘def coming’ way, in a single straight line. His is crossed out in a cloud-formation zigzag of circling pencil, which continues into an arrow pointing to the top of the page. I remember that I cooked dinner for about ten people and then everyone else came afterwards. I made a veal thing where you rolled it up with an omelette inside, and ham, so when you sliced it it was striped pink and yellow, and I added lots of parsley so it could be green as well, deckchair stripes like my favourite trousers of that period. And a pile of meringues and cream. I had friends old and new from different areas of my disparate twenty-one-year-old life, and none of the dinner people, my nearest and dearest at the time, knew each other. I remember we had two bands – Sore Throat and The Arials – and Sore Throat’s roadie took all his clothes off and chased round the house trying to apologise to me for being naked, and Shane McSweeney hid the clothes up a tree. But I can’t remember if Robert came. So I can’t have loved him much then. The following year, only one sighting: ‘… in the foyer of the Wigmore Hall, listening to the pleasant strains of the first half of the programme, and the whispers and rustlings of the latecomers and ushers. The second half is Rob Lockhart …’

      I had recently graduated, and was working as a lowest-of-the-low on the making of Britannia Hospital, the third of Lindsay Anderson’s trilogy of films which started with If … and O Lucky Man! It was filmed in the still-active mental hospital at Friern Barnet, where actors and mental patients mixed perhaps more than had been planned. One chap followed me about to give me ginger cake in a brown paper bag. I had a weakness for talented men with beautiful accents: Glaswegian Robbie Coltrane who slid across the floor of the cast bar on his knees and collided with my bum, which he bit; another of the actors, Welsh Bob Pugh, who read me Gerard Manley ’Opkins and played Van Morrison songs on the piano; history professor Norman Stone (also Glaswegian) who had taught me at Cambridge. I’d had it, forever, with Cambridge, with posh English chaps, dinner jackets, repression, arrogance, misogyny and fear faintly concealed behind perfect manners.

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