I’ve been very secret about your letters and nobody knows you’ve written to me. For Dog’s sake make sure you lock mine away. Your parents may be wrapped up in their own affairs (joke) but Ellie will be bound to sniff them out and read them if you’re not careful – except the enclosed one which you should leave lying. It’s super-innocent and designed especially to allay suspicions!
My lovely girl, my beloved one. Try to be happy. Know that I love you.
The communication for public consumption was folded up alongside the love letter.
My dear Daphne,
Everything in America is so large it makes us feel like dwarfish Europeans. When we go out to eat the plates are like cartwheels, the hamburgers like birthday cakes, and Coca-Cola comes in pint glasses with buckets of ice. If you want a bottle of milk, you buy a giant carton that you can barely lift and Jason and Lucia love the boxes of multicoloured cereal that are almost big enough for them to crawl into. As to the cars, well poor old Maurice looks like a crumbling chariot unearthed from an archaeological dig compared to the shiny spaceships on the streets here. I wonder if you’d like it. I’d like to walk through Central Park with you one day and take you to see the monkeys in the zoo, who are not nearly as well behaved as dear departed Hugo.
He often said to Daphne that he could tell her anything, but there was actually quite a lot he omitted from the letters. He mentioned the cocaine in the hope that she would make confessions in return, but he made it sound more like a one-off experiment. Tequila was also a new discovery, but the white powder was his favourite antidote to desolation. It made him feel powerful, fearless, like dancing all night, which he sometimes did. As Nina neared the end of her pregnancy, he took to going out with people he’d met through her gallery and they went to clubs where girls were boys and vice versa. Initially, it was the drugs that allowed him to appreciate the music playing in the dark cellars and flashing dance floors; he had rejected the flimsiness of pop until then. But the mad rawness of punk and the chest-thumping power of rock now provided something he could embrace. He adopted elements in his own music and included an electric guitar in one of his orchestral pieces.
Usually, he managed to get to the morning post first, in case there was something from Daff. On the whole, it was easy. Their letter box was downstairs in the building’s entrance, so he made sure he got there before Nina left the apartment, nipping down ‘in case the contract has arrived’ or some such excuse. One morning, however, he failed. Shattered from the excesses of partying and having returned in the small hours, he felt deeply depressed and physically crushed. He would have liked to sleep it off but the children were shouting and he had a mid-morning appointment at the university. Much of the night had been spent with Candy, a young singer with an extraordinarily visceral voice – Nina Simone meets Patti Smith. She was the first black woman he’d ever slept with. He already had her in mind for his Lullabies for an Unborn Child. The three short songs were one of his greatest successes, especially in America, where they premiered that year, just after Alexander’s birth.
As he shuffled into the kitchen, exhausted, fur-tongued and desperate for coffee, Nina handed him an envelope with a recognisable, juvenile script in purple ink. She was not interested in spying or checking up on his stories, but there was a methodical side to her character. She was not stupid.
‘How is young Daphne?’ She didn’t sound as though she required an answer. He knew there had been some discussion between Ellie and Nina about visiting New York. Perhaps she would bring Daphne. It was shocking to hear this idea posited so casually by Nina a few days earlier. He longed for that but also dreaded it. What was the point of making this break if his darling monkey girl was going to follow him across the Atlantic and throw him into even deeper turmoil? He imagined introducing her to Candy and groaned. He put down the unopened letter as nonchalantly as possible – he would read it later in private – then, squinting with irritation at the sunshine that streamed through the windows, he poured himself some coffee and grunted the guttural moan of a vampire caught in daylight.
A few days after Nina’s return to London and her dauntless Florence Nightingale act, Ralph went back to his garden workroom. His agent wanted the corrections completed on a recent composition and he sharpened several 2B pencils, clipped the manuscript to his adjustable, architect’s drawing board and got on with it. The work wasn’t too challenging and it helped to think of something other than his body’s fragility. He loved his shed that smelled of wood like a tree house, but was filled with comforts and small luxuries like his custom-made desk and a chaise longue modelled on Ed’s old one in Putney. The shed had been strictly forbidden to anyone – when the children were young he’d locked the door and Nina understood him well enough to avoid even crossing the threshold. These days, he made an exception for their cleaner Anka’s occasional hoovering sessions, but even then, he’d watch over the pale-eyed, lip-chewing Polish girl and close the door on her with relief.
While Ralph worked, Nina cooked: avgolemono soup with chicken, stuffed peppers, baked butter beans. She made sure he ate yogurt and drank freshly squeezed orange juice. In the afternoons, she took him for slow walks down Primrose Hill and into Regent’s Park. London looked like a green city, with every possible shade bursting forth from the newly grown leaves, the scent of wisteria and fresh-ground coffee in the air. She linked her arm through his and relayed news about their children that they themselves didn’t get round to telling him. He felt she was treating him almost like a fourth child now. Any erotic spark between them had been dampened so long he could hardly remember what it had been like when they’d been lovers. It hadn’t appeared to bother her. Better, in her opinion, to be bound by the bonds of familial affection. Once or twice, he’d wondered whether she might be having an affair – not for evidence of awkward phone calls or indeed anything suspicious, but because she would glow with an internal energy that reminded him of how she’d been as an art student when she fell in love with him.
Periodically, he was overwhelmed by exhaustion, and had to lie down to recover. He took long baths, soothed by the gentle warmth and by the comfortable tones of BBC voices on the radio. It was not always calming. Indeed he experienced a sliver of anxiety when the news reported some retired teacher or scoutmaster hauled off in handcuffs for sexual abuse in the 1970s or ’80s. There was regularly a new bout of shaming some seedy, long-forgotten pop singer, now reincarnated as a molesting predator, an evil fiend. One man of ninety-six was jailed for abusing two children, who were presumably pensioners themselves by now. It would be a comedy if it weren’t so grotesque.
There was one report that disconcerted him more deeply than the others. An art teacher had run away with a pupil of fifteen, and they had travelled incognito to France. The man was eventually arrested and the girl was reported to have said, ‘We are in love.’ Ralph recognised something of his own experiences in what he heard on the radio, but sought to distance himself. The teacher was probably chasing after lots of young girls, he thought. Whereas I worshipped Daphne, body and soul. I wasn’t some Humbert Humbert obsessed with nymphets. And it’s not only that I never did anything against her will, it’s that we met as spirits, Plato’s twinned flames. It was genuine and pure.
Ralph recognised that something had been out of control. Of course it was. We were all changing the world. But now we’re expected to conform like robots or lemmings. Everyone is so conventional. It’s ghastly. Yes, Daphne was young, but so was I. It was my youth too – not just hers. Our story had nothing to do with abuse. To link them is like pouring filth on flowers, like denying the power of love.