Writers Louisa Young and Michel Faber share their experiences of being widowed, and how they were presented with a fresh chance at happiness

Michel and I met at work: a literary festival. Given our work is solitary, writers don’t often meet. So that was the first miracle. I’d done my event in the afternoon, on facial reconstructive surgery in the First World War; he was headlining that evening, reading from The Book of Strange New Things, the sad and beautiful novel he’d written through his wife’s long illness. There was an avant-garde musician, and images projected on the wall. One was an eerie black and white negative of a skeleton, floating like Ophelia into reeds.  

I knew his wife had died. I overheard someone say ‘two months’. I was then a widow of two years. His raw face and the way his hair was almost standing on end were very familiar to me: I’d been there. He looked like he shouldn’t have been allowed out alone.

Towards the end, he read some of the poems he’d been writing, about Eva’s death. They were astonishing, terrifying, bleeding love. At the end there were to be questions: unsurprisingly, the audience was struck dumb. There’s an unwritten rule in this situation: any writer in the audience is obliged to break the ice. So I did. I asked him about the skeleton image. He said, ‘Does anyone here know what a PET scan is?’

I knew. It’s the scan that tells you whether or not your cancer has come back.

Eva had made the image, using her own PET scan.

I could have slid under the table and cried. Instead, I emailed him a day later, offering what small practical wisdom I had as a widow of longer standing. My fiancé, the composer Robert Lockhart, and I had met in 1976 when we were 17. He died aged 52 in 2012, unavoidably, longwindedly and yet unexpectedly, of the cumulative effects of alcoholism, cancer and cancer treatment – which included facial reconstructive surgery. He’d been meant to be recovering. I was writing a memoir about it.

Michel started sending me the poems as he wrote them. Some – in particular, Don’t Hesitate To Ask – were hilarious. As a widow, where others would feel the need to be circumspect, I could howl with laughter. This was nice for both of us, I think – a relief. And that was the second miracle: we were on equal terms in this loss and grief business. No pussyfooting or embarrassment was necessary; no Rebecca-style fears and jealousy about the dead spouse. Our model was fidelity and care: there was no baggage of betrayal. Both of us knew that being dead is a useless quality in a partner. So here was a sense of balance. Plus, when writer meets writer you can do your research: read their books. Of course I’d read The Crimson Petal and the White, and for that book I already loved him.

We became friends over a year, mainly via email. What luxury! It was (still is) a very full and wonderful correspondence, old-fashioned in a way, but strewn with the modern jewels of photographs and web links to bits of music; 5,152 messages, so far. I didn’t think it was a growing romance. I’m notoriously bad at noticing. My friends had started saying, ‘Oi oi then, what’s this?’ and I’d say, ‘No, not at all…’ One asked me how we said goodbye, after meeting. I demonstrated: a small hug, his hand on the small of my back. The gathered group laughed and shook their heads: ‘That’s a romance,’ they said.

Over conversation in the British Library tea room, I mentioned that I was bad at noticing. ‘Oh well,’ he said, direct and Dutch. ‘Let me clear that up…’

Love had never been my friend before. For decades my compass had had only two points, directly opposing ones: insane romanticism and ferocious independence. I feared what I desired: I knew what it could do to me. Meanwhile I’d been blessed with a star of a daughter, and her very dear to us all dad. By my 50s, with a lot of drama under my belt, I had become less extreme, less fearful.

Michel needed to meet my daughter (then 21) properly before anything began: I introduced them and within minutes they were having a little dance to some Krautrock (which they both love). Krautrock is not my favourite. I’m more Schoenberg and Al Green. How sweet to see them sharing pleasure in something I don’t care for!

He offered me space and peace to get on with my memoir without the influence of him, the next stage of my life. Where does thoughtfulness like that come from? Not even my most cynical streak thought: ‘Oh, it’s an excuse, he’s backing off.’ A year or so later I offered him the manuscript to read. I didn’t expect the response to be 20,000 words in two colours of ink: one for, ‘Jesus, new girlfriend, what you have been through!’ and another for, ‘A semicolon might work better here.’ It wasn’t easy to have your tenderest book edited by a writer who you admire enormously, and are getting involved with. Especially when he has a pitiless eye and that old Dutch directness. But guess what. It was worth it.

We don’t live together. We don’t need to. When we met he lived in the Highlands, and when he left in 2016 I helped him find a flat, aware of the poem in which he thanks Eva for ‘choosing well’ a previous home. But he and I are not having children or building lives. We already have lives. I like London and cider and capsizing dinghies; I put the roof of the car down and head south, singing along to Hank Williams. He likes intense overhead lighting, databasing CDs and comic compilations in what he refers to as his burrow, and laying things out on the floor. He doesn’t swim, doesn’t drink and can’t take the sun. I’m physically incapable of staying inside when it’s shining. I love his little garden that he never goes into, and he’s agreed to water it because he likes me being happy. We go to foreign book festivals for long weekends and walk around all day talking about language and music; he kindly makes excellent puns for me, although he doesn’t find puns funny at all. At every opportunity I get into any water available; he holds my things, and I glance back and see him standing on the shore.

He doesn’t have to come into the sun for me. I don’t have to love Krautrock for him (though he introduced me to a track by Neu! – Lieber Honig – that makes me cry). I don’t need him at my side the whole time. It’s not just that we respect each other’s work and need for solitude, we understand it, and furthermore share it. Another miracle! The spirit of ‘getting to know you’ is for me the continuing joy of learning, infinitely better than the ‘now what?’ collapse after the pleasure of achievement. The moment everything feels fully known in a relationship is the moment it begins to dry out and fall off the branch. As the Ghanaian proverb says: To, yet not.

Our grief books are done. He’s writing Listen, a new book about music and tribalism; I’m publishing my not-at-all-autobiographical novel about love and death and matchmaking ghosts. I almost dedicated it to Eva and Robert, but in the end, though they’re both in the acknowledgments, it’s dedicated to the living. Of course it only depends on where you stop the story, but I do like to point everyone towards some kind of happy ending.

There we were, in L’Aquila, a city devastated by an earthquake. Years had passed since the calamity, but piles of rubble still lay everywhere. Walking around the streets with our Italian hosts, we could see into abandoned homes, glimpse the sentimental wreckage of lost lives.

Louisa and I had experienced life-altering quakes of our own. In 2012, the man Louisa had loved since they were both teenagers died after long struggles with alcoholism and throat cancer. In 2014, the woman who’d been my companion for a quarter of a century died of an especially evil cancer of the bone marrow. When Louisa and I visited L’Aquila, she was five years into her grief journey; I was three.

By then, I’d published Undying: A Love Story, a book of poetry about my wife Eva’s illness and death and how it felt to lose her. The Italian translation had just come out, hence the trip. In a literary venue, I read one of the poems aloud. It may have been The Second-Last Time, about making love with Eva when the end was near. As a courtesy to the non-English speakers in the audience, Louisa stood next to me onstage and read the poem in fluent Italian.

Think about that for a moment. A woman stands up in public and, without any loss of dignity, helps the man she loves express how much he will always love another woman.

That same year, I was helping Louisa with her memoir of her relationship with Robert Lockhart. I copy-edited the manuscript, sent Louisa a thick dossier of comments and suggestions. We both wanted this book to be the best possible evocation of that lost love. The text was full of Louisa’s still-glowing passion for my predecessor, and my response was copious notes on narrative logic, syntax, whether the term ‘co-dependent’ should have a hyphen, etc. ‘Marvellous writing,’ I occasionally observed. And it was.

There’s an awkward conversation that two widows who deeply loved their dead partners never need to have. It’s the one where a hurt person says, ‘Look, I’m sick of hearing about how amazing your ex was. You’re going to have to choose. Is it them or me?’ Such conversations arise when you get together with someone who may be lying (to you or to themselves) about how estranged they are from their former sweetheart.

Louisa and I never broke up with the loves of our lives. They weren’t our exes. They got sick and died. If they’d survived, we’d still be with them. That’s understood. But Eva and Robert are dead and we’re not. Fate has laid off being cruel for a bit and kindly offered us a precious opportunity. We, whose tragic tales of loss have made readers weep, are blessed.

For several years after Eva’s death, I always travelled with her pretty red leather ankle boots. She hadn’t found a chance to wear them much, what with the oedema and the neuropathy. Stowed in my bag, they journeyed to all sorts of places that Eva would’ve liked to see, like Pasadena, Adelaide, Bantry and the Arctic Circle. They’d stand in front of scenes of interest, and I would photograph my absent wife taking it all in. I’m pretty sure L’Aquila was the first of my post-widowhood trips where I didn’t take Eva’s shoes along.

There is a season for all these grieving rituals, and the season eventually ends. It took Louisa many years to throw away Robert’s tweed overcoat that the paramedics cut up as they tried to save his life. She turned his well-worn green jumper into a cushion cover. (I rest my head against it when I relax on her sofa.) The other week, I helped her dispose of one of his defunct keyboards. I almost got it through the metal flap of the recycling bin, but not quite. ‘A misfit to the last,’ I told Louisa, and that seemed to be the right thing to say. Bereavement grows more distant, but still needs to be handled carefully.

The sense of humour of people who’ve nursed their doomed partners through extremes of physical humiliation can be a peculiar thing. In the early months of my correspondence with Louisa, I would send her poems as they arose. Sad and horrifying as they were, she found some of them hilarious.

When Undying came out, it attracted an online troll – the first I’d ever had. He inserted poisonous comments into all the review forums and websites he could find, accusing me of exploiting my dead wife to inflate my ego and flog my crummy poetry. He also delighted in making waspish remarks about Louisa, who he habitually referred to as ‘the Honourable Louisa Young’, as if to suggest I was some sort of sexual parvenu desperate to hobnob with the aristocracy.

I’m the son of a factory worker; she’s the daughter of a baron. The disparity between Louisa’s social background and mine has caused mutual puzzlement at times, I’ll admit. But by far the bigger chasms to negotiate have been the gulf between a woman who grew up in a loving family and a man whose parents were hellishly damaged; the gulf between a sociable woman and a reclusive man; the gulf between a ‘normal’ person and a neurodivergent one; and – most challenging of all – the gulf between English and Dutch-Australian manners.

Every now and then, one or other of us will waggishly sing ‘Getting to knoooow you, getting to know all abouuut you’ from The King and I. We’re joking, but there’s a rueful undercurrent.

It takes a long time to build up an intimate relationship. Eva and I had 26 years, most of which we spent cohabiting in the same house. Louisa and I have been lovers more than six years now but live in different cities and see each other once or twice a month. Also, we’re both set in our ways, as older people tend to be. We can’t have the formative, life-quaking effect on each other that was possible when we met Robert and Eva as youngsters.

Nevertheless, here we are. Boyfriend and girlfriend, having adventures together, sharing our thoughts and enthusiasms, grateful for a love we hadn’t expected to find. The next chapter.

Twelve Months and a Day, by Louisa Young, is out on 9 June (Borough Press, £14.99). Undying: A Love Story, by Michel Faber, is out in paperback now (Canongate, £9.99). Order both from books.telegraph.co.uk

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