The day Roger gave me up for his pianist I had spent two hours waiting for him in a draughty hall where he was rehearsing the King of Hades in Monteverdi. It was within days of my final exams. The three of us went thereafter to the Science Museum, where I caught my destiny in the innuendo of ganging up. While his young woman gave her attention to a showcase of limestones, Roger diverted me on to the upper-floor landing beyond the skeleton of the hanged man. The thing was as efficient as a premeditated putsch. Exorcising his own guilt, no doubt, and uneasiness, he made me a careful articulate pyramid of my shortcomings, which was anything but kind. It said, in short, that, weighed in the balance, I showed up trivial. That I covered my notebooks in Florentine wrapping-paper like a Girl Guide on a nature trail, that I cared more for knitting than logic, that I made a brazen virtue of all that was unfortunate, vulgar and semi-educated in my own history, that, frankly, my mother’s plaster ducks left him feeling ill, that I fondled my earrings while he, Roger Goldman, played the violin, that I laughed too much, that in that very Science Museum I had, that very day, spent the bulk of my time admiring the stencil designs on the iron vaults, ‘as if’, he said, ‘as if the place were housing an annual craft exhibition run by the Women’s Institute’.
I think that before he turned and walked away from me I said that I was sorry. In this life there are those that apologise and those that do not. I am a person who says sorry if a passer-by stands on my foot. I thought, first, crazily, that I ought to tell him that my mother’s ducks were china and not plaster; that my mother, whose chocolate cake he had not disdained, was my property to criticise, not his. Then, as the tears spilled in silence down my face, I thought that I would do anything, anything to get him back. That I would do algebra in sackcloth for the privilege of touching the hem of his hand-on Sea Scout jumper. Suddenly, as I saw him reach his showcase of limestones, my only thought was to get my stuff from his room and go before they came back to it; before Roger could encounter the disfiguring squalor of my tears, and to go quietly, without fuss. I was no good at rage and indignation. It had never been encouraged in my house. I had never told my parents, for example, to fuck off, or thrown garlic bread across the dinner table. These things were not licensed in my house. I did not pursue the option, therefore, of following Roger across the floor to his limestones and dismantling his personality, as he had done mine. Of screaming at him, gratifyingly, that he was an arrogant and joyless youth, rejoicing righteously in the fate of the damned; scrambled, punitive and jealous. Might we have hammered out something and moved on together? Perhaps not, though I will never know. Perhaps all Roger’s words said nothing more than that he wanted his pianist in his bed, not me. Perhaps I was always more in love with him than he with me. To this day I cannot watch Roger Goldman shake hair from his eyes without some pain. He is an absurd, abiding, adolescent passion, which I resolve by being seldom in his company.
In Roger’s bedsitting room I took down from the cupboard the travelling bag with which he had come back from Kenya two years before. Into it I stuffed my mother’s whistling kettle, which he had on loan, my two patchworked sofa cushions with which I had adorned his room, and an Aran sweater of my own making which we had shared. The routine petty division of property. In the train I registered over and over, through a film of tears, that the bag still bore an East African Airways luggage-label on which was written, in block capitals, R.J. GOLDMAN. It put me in mind of the laundry basket full of old wellington boots. It evoked for me, vividly and painfully, an image of Roger at the kitchen table in the Hamlet hat, raising his eyes for the first time to encounter mine. It made me, quite simply, want to die.
After that, the nights were the worst. In the daylight I occasionally talked the thing over with a girlfriend or in my own mind, working my misery into a rational shape which gave an hour’s relief. But alone, at the end of the day, the painful fact of Roger was still there, impinging like the appalling and sudden scream of brakes. Sometimes I did not sleep at all. Twice on these occasions I tiptoed downstairs and sat wrapped in a blanket on a tree-stump in that rigid little suburban garden, watching distant inky clouds blow across the moon, watching the relentless progress of each one towards its own disintegration, as it crossed the moon, into dispersed and tortured fragments. I cried a lot, but only to myself. I telephoned the speaking clock in the small hours for the sound of a voice.
‘At the first stroke it will be four forty-two and ten seconds,’ said the voice. ‘Peep, peep, peep.’ I never telephoned Roger. I slipped politely and obligingly out of his life without a word of recrimination. Once, at a news-stand, I went so far as to buy for him a picture postcard of a snarling female tiger, feeling that in that creature’s rage I could take some vicarious, impotent stand. I never posted it. I wrote my final exams in an almost indifferent stupor, drugged up on purple hearts, wondering what Jacob would say to me if I failed. It had ceased to matter to me for myself. Wondering would the British taxpayer rise up, with just clamour, for the return of his money? After that I did what I hadn’t done for a long time. I telephoned John Millet and told him.