style="font-size:15px;"> John was playing Tchaikovsky in a public place – a hotel? – one evening, and a woman called Kath Griffin sat next to him, saying, ‘I prefer the slow movement’. It turned out all she knew about classical music was that she preferred the slow movements, but that wasn’t an impediment.
I say all this. I don’t know if it’s true. It’s hard enough getting sense out of your own memories, let alone somebody else’s. Robert told me his versions. His parents fighting one Christmas because John had given Pat a bottle of Elizabeth Arden Blue Grass which wasn’t what she liked, it was what Lily Glinka liked. Another Christmas when Robert was in the back of the car and he threw up on Granny Annie – or her best hat? – having drunk half a bottle of repulsive sweet sherry because he didn’t want to go to Kath’s family – or indeed his mother’s place, but he hadn’t been invited. Pat had met another man. John married Kath, Pat married Mike. Robert was in no mood to like step-parents, but acknowledged later that it must have been ‘very difficult … to deal with a precocious, wilful teenager’.
He had made the under-13s 100-metre and triple jump teams and went to the Royal Northern College of Music junior school in Manchester on Saturday mornings. This coincided with an influx of ‘rough lads who beat the shit out of us supposedly posh grammar-school boys’. He escaped punishment despite being a prime target as a classical pianist – ‘automatically a puffter’ – because he had played for Wigan Rugby League schoolboys, which even at that age was ‘a sport for hard lads’. He loved rugby league with a passion all his life, but because he was studying the piano, due to the high risk of breaking fingers, he had to stop. He had obsessions, often masochistic: ‘I would force myself to practise a difficult passage 100 times, having to start again from scratch if a mistake was made. By the 99th rendition, I’d have hot sweats, shaky legs. I assumed I was doing this to harden myself against concert nerves – to develop the ability to switch into robotic. It worked, sort of – but it made arguably the most beautiful language – both to “speak” and to listen to – awkward, dry, an academic, technical exercise.’ And, ‘having to hold my hand under a boiling hot tap for ten minutes. If not, my mother would die. She did. Admittedly not until eight years after I stopped the habit.’ I still wonder what, of the things young children are diagnosed with now, Robert might have been diagnosed with when he was small: Asperger’s? Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder? He thought so. Depression? Certainly. Autistic spectrum?
I asked Robert’s cousin Diane, who’s a few years older than Robert, what he was like when he was little. She said, ‘Always on the naughty stool’, with a smile.
So there in the north, the boy Robert is beside his father on the yellow brocade duet stool; or on it alone, perfecting his left-hand trills, making certain his Fille aux Cheveux de Lin maintains its structure and momentum.
Meanwhile in the south, though I had lessons for years, I had no talent and did no work. I remember locking myself in the loo in a futile attempt not to have to go to a piano lesson. Even now I read music like a six-year-old, counting up and down the notes, naming them under my breath. Robert was repeatedly amazed by the fact that I am, as he put it, ‘illiterate’. It was not that I didn’t love the piano. I adored it. I spent hours beneath my dad’s Blüthner while he played. My companions there were a French horn in its battered leather case lined in blue velvet; an old silver trombone, ditto; a curious stringed thing our grandfather brought from Iraq in the 1920s in a heavy wooden box with a price label in Arabic inside the lid; a schoolchild’s violin with a soft lemony cloth and a little round of rosin; my brother’s trumpet, yellow and bright compared to the older horns, and a moth-eaten concertina in an octagonal box like a gothic chapter-house. Usually I was eating almonds and sultanas from my jeans pocket, and reading. I couldn’t put my book down even for a moment (Narnia, Moomins, Swallows and Amazons, the myths of Greece and Rome – it wouldn’t cross my mind to put the book down. I used to read walking down the street, and bump into nothing) and it was tricky for me to get my hand into my pocket when piled in among instruments, so sometimes I’d kick the pedal column. My father, Wayland, who would 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
