This Is All Read online

  So now there was another silence, a staring silence, a separated silence, with the mallards paddling by and the sun among the trees shooting glances at the water enough to blind you with ricochets.

  I’m thinking hard as I write, trying to sort myself out, Will out, us out, that moment out, and why I did what I did after he suddenly turned and grabbed me, started kissing me again, not just with lust but with some violence, some anger. The devil had risen in him, lordy lordy, and his hands were touring forbidden territory. (I won’t say he didn’t excite me. To be so much wanted is exciting. But he panicked me too.)

  I started pushing him away, saying, No no, stop stop!

  But he didn’t, and his hand working to undo the top of my jeans.

  No, I said, no, Will, stop!

  Why? he said not letting go. Not good enough for you now, is that it?

  No no! I said, holding him off. Not that, honest. Just – My period is on!

  I might as well have said I had terminal leprosy or was rampant with AIDS. He was off me and on his feet so fast it was like a jump cut. One second he’s lying half on me, his hand groping my crotch, then cut, the next second he’s on his feet in shock-horror, backed against the weeping willow.

  And now this is the thing I did that I cannot understand and need to. Plain as plain, I’ll say it to make the meaning plain.

  I got up.

  I said, Why the face?

  Your period, he said, as you might say, Your vomit.

  What’s wrong with that?

  Nothing.

  So? If nothing’s wrong, what’s wrong?

  Your period, he repeated again like those were the only words in his vocabulary.

  Anger. Is that what hit me? Anger? He was being so wet, so wimpish, so prissy. I thought then that I was angry with him but now I know that really I was angry with myself. But why, what for, what at? I don’t know! Something.

  Well, I said, and started stripping off. My sweater, my trainers, my jeans, my panties.

  You like trees, I said, Well—

  And I plunged into the river, plodged to the middle (the water came no higher than my knees), and turned and stood there, dressed only in my bra, my arms held out cruciform.

  You like trees, I said. You like nature. Well, here you are. This is nature. This is natural. Here I am. The tree of life. Look at me!

  And I reached down and took hold of the string of my tampon and pulled it out, and held my arm out to my side again, the tampon dangling from my finger and thumb like a red fruit. And a little drop of blood – I did not need to look, I could feel its warmth – trickling down my thigh.

  You see it? I sang out, quite sang. The blood. You see it?

  Stop it! he shouted. Stop it!

  You see, I went on, and bent my knees to display my crotch and pointed at it with one strict finger of my empty hand. This is where you came from. Here. Without this (I waggled my tampon at him), without me, there is no you. Is that so awful? Is that so repulsive? Look, I went blundering on, Look, I’ll wash. I’ll clean it off. And began to splash water onto my thighs and to scrub myself vigorously between the legs, saying, Will that do? Does that make it all right? Do you want me now?

  Will picked up my panties and jeans and held them out to me.

  I must say, I couldn’t help being impressed by how calmly he took all this. I’d wanted to horrify him, and he wasn’t

  We stood glaring at each other, neither moving, neither speaking. And when I had calmed down enough to hear the quietness again – muffled traffic from the bypass, a cow coughing, bird chatter, the breeze fribbling the leaves, the river’s rilling flow – Will said,

  That isn’t what I meant.

  Pause for effect, such a drama queen I was, before I climbed out and snatched my clothes from him.

  Will packed up his things while I bunched my panties to use as an ST and pulled on my jeans and sweater and trainers, and without another word we walked back to my place, me behind him, where he didn’t say anything, not a word, didn’t even look at me, not a glance, as he retrieved his bike and pedalled away.

  I felt flattened, broken, hideous. Hated myself. Went to my room. Burst into tears. Couldn’t bear the way I felt inside or out a minute longer. Stripped. Showered. Washing washing as if contaminated. Ran a bath. Poured in my favourite lime soak. Submerged myself. It was hot. Hot hot. I wanted it so hot it would burn me, scorch me, cauterise me.

  Lying there, all of me drowned but my head, the room smoking steam, the tang of lime clearing my nose, and over and over the time the words dinning in my head: I’ve lost him, I’ve lost him. Why did I do that? Why did I do that? Why? Why? And now I’ve lost him.

  Why? I hate not understanding myself. If I could I would be aware of every smallest thing that happens to me every second of every day and know and understand why it happened, why I did what I did, why I said what I said. I want to know everything about my life. Is there life, are you alive, if you don’t know it? What else is life but knowing it? Knowing is life.

  all we know

  is knowing –

  when a bird sings

  does it know

  it is singing?

  when a fish swims

  does it know

  it is swimming?

  when a tree grows

  does it know

  it is growing?

  when a flower blooms

  does it know

  it is blooming?

  we know

  we know –

  and I wish

  to know

  knowing you

  and you

  to know

  knowing me

  most

  The water soothed me. Its heat lulled me. Only the din in my head was unrelenting.

  I heard the phone go. And then Dad outside the bathroom saying, Will Blacklin, and don’t be all day, I want the bath. I got out of the bath, retrieved the phone from where Dad had left it by the door, and sat on the loo while holding the following conversation:

  Will?

  Cordelia?

  Yes.

  Look – Sorry.

  – Me too.

  – I was wondering—

  What?

  How about some Schumann Romance?

  (Pause to keep myself calm.) If you like.

  Where? Yours? Mine?

  Doris’s.

  Good. – Listen. – That second section, the one that’s giving us trouble?

  What about it?

  Well, you know how it is with passages like that. You have to rethink them, don’t you? Understand the phrasing. Get the tempo right. Get the fingering right. And play them again and again and again. Starting very slowly and notching up the pace. Till your fingers know what they’re doing, without you having to think about the notes at all. Right?

  (Laughed. Couldn’t help it.) Right.

  (He laughed too.) So that’s what we’ll do. Eh? Rethink it. Get the phrasing right. Start slowly. And notch it up. Agreed?

  Agreed.

  See you next Sunday at two.

  And he rang off.

  Lordy, I think I’ll love him till I die.

  But I mustn’t tell him that. Not yet. Not yet. Too soon.

  Prancing

  One late summer evening when I was about nine, Doris gave a party. I had two girlfriends to sleep over. Their parents were at the party, and Dad with his current lover, and a couple of Doris’s women friends.

  After the meal the adults went out into the garden and sat under the apple tree with their drinks. My friends and I sneaked off to the attic where there was a trunk full of my grandmother’s things. We got out her old dresses and made up our faces with Doris’s make-up and chose Grandma’s high-heeled shoes and large-brimmed hats, all of which were far too big for us of course, and flounced about pretending to be catwalk models.

  By the time we’d had enough, dusk had fallen, one of those soft balmy evenings at the end of summer when all is still and the air is heady with the smell of ni
ght and the beginning of autumn. So out we went attired as nymphs with old net curtains draped around us like diaphanous cloaks and performed a ballet on the lawn in front of the grownups.

  We knew nothing about ballet, but we improvised an elaborate dance as we went along. There was no music, but it felt as though there was, and we sang and ululated as we circled and arabesqued and pirouetted and whirled and bent and stretched and high-stepped and jumped and rolled and spun and waltzed.

  Quite soon we kicked off Grandma’s shoes, and as the dance progressed discarded our cloaks and dresses, until we were in nothing but our vests and panties. How risqué we felt doing this, how cheeky, how naughty! The adults clapped when they felt the show had gone on long enough and wanted us to go to bed and leave them in peace, but we danced on and on without a pause. In the end they left us to it, thinking, I suppose, that all we wanted was attention and that if they stopped watching we’d give up. I’m sure at the start we were showing off and did want their attention. But by the time they left we were lost in our performance and in whatever story we were acting out – nothing of which I remember. What I do remember is the wonderful feeling of our bodies moving together in extravagant uninhibited ways and the sense of freedom as we discarded our clothes.

  When the adults had gone we even got rid of our undies, first our tops and then with a delicious frisson of wickedness our knickers, and danced naked. I can still feel the cool wetness of the dew refreshing my feet and the night air furling on my skin like the gentlest possible massage, and can still see the glow of our white bodies in the moonlight.

  I think we might have danced for ever if Doris hadn’t come out and shepherded us inside, where we insisted on bathing together and sleeping in the same bed, our bodies wrapped round each other as if nothing in the whole world could separate us.

  This was one of the most blissful moments in all my childhood. Perhaps what I treasure most about it is the perfect happiness of a brief time when our unthinking, uninhibited, spontaneous performance bound us in unquestioning friendship as we danced naked in the moonlight under the apple tree in Doris’s garden.

  The memory of it came back to me while I was reading what I’d written about my upset with Will. It’s true I was angry with him, having misunderstood his reaction to my period. And yes, I was angry with myself for showing off and making a vulgar scene. But there was something else far more important, which I didn’t understand at the time. I realise now that I was testing him. I wanted to see how far I could stretch his patience and try his tolerance of me. I wanted to see how much I could offend him before he would walk away. I wanted to know if he loved me and how strong his love was.

  And I also know, and can say it to myself now whereas I couldn’t then, that what lay behind this, both the showing off and the testing, was my fear of losing a loved one, as I lost my mother. I was so young when she died, only five, that I couldn’t understand what had happened, but could only think that she had deliberately abandoned me. That she’d gone away and left me behind.

  One to go

  ‘Look in your bedside drawer,’ Doris said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Just in case.’

  A packet of condoms.

  ‘Are you trying to encourage me?’

  ‘Neither encourage nor discourage. Better safe than sorry. I’ve never met a man you could trust in that regard.’

  ‘You’ll be here, so we won’t get that far.’

  ‘I have to go out for a couple of hours.’

  Will arrived for our reconciliation. Doris kept out of the way. Not a word was said about our riverside upset. We began playing Schumann. And instead of words, our playing said everything. Our discomfort, our embarrassment, our anger – it all came out during the first half hour. We scratched at each other, clashed wrong notes, got out of time, played too loudly as if shouting, lost our places, missed out bars so that one of us got ahead, played too slowly and too tentatively as if trying to apologise, and raced the last section as if hurrying to get it over with.

  Playing music is like that. It reveals the state you’re in, body and soul, as soon as you begin. To play better, and most of all to play well, you have to rearrange yourself, refocus, find a new stability. And you do that by forgetting yourself and attending entirely to the music itself, nothing else. Then the music reshapes you, restores your equilibrium and refreshes you.

  Will ended the struggle by suggesting we talk about the music for a while, agree on what it wanted of us, and how we should play it. Being more advanced than me as a player, and better taught too, he knew that this was how we could forget ourselves and refocus.

  Then we began again. This time everything was different. The music flowed, our fingers danced, our bodies relaxed, our minds were lost in the sound we made together. Three pieces, twelve and a half minutes in total. But an hour and a half of steady happy slog before we felt satisfied that we’d done justice to the music and to ourselves.

  We paused to catch our breath. A knock on the door and in came Doris, bearing drinks. Woodchester Water and Diet Coke. He took the water, I the Coke. He was so health conscious it made you sick! Then:

  ‘How are you getting on?’ Doris said.

  We laughed, Will and I.

  ‘Not easy,’ Will said.

  ‘No,’ Doris said. ‘Heaven knows why Cordy chose it. One of the most difficult oboe pieces in the repertoire. So I read.’

  ‘True,’ said Will.

  ‘What!’ said I.

  ‘The breath control,’ Will said. ‘A beast.’

  I said, all confusion, ‘I didn’t know – I didn’t mean—’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Will said. ‘I like a challenge.’

  ‘What I think you need now,’ Doris said, ‘is an audience. Why not play it through for me, no stops allowed?’

  ‘O, I don’t know,’ said I.

  ‘Sure,’ said Will, ‘we’ll have a go.’ And to me, offering no way out, ‘Won’t we, Leah?’

  Leah. This was the first time Will used that name for me. In the circumstances, I was too nonplussed to object. When I tackled him about it afterwards he said he couldn’t call me Cordelia all the time because it was too long and he liked the sound of Leah. At which, I told him, very well, in that case I would call him Will mostly, out of respect for Shakespeare, but Liam when I felt like it, because I liked the sound of Liam, William was also too long, Bill was disgusting, as for Willy best not to mention it, nor Billy, which only made me think of a goat – so I would reserve Billy for times when he was in a bad mood. He merely laughed. Couldn’t care less what anyone called him. Boys are often like that. Whereas girls hate being called names they don’t approve of. Later, I looked up the meaning of Leah. Hebrew, meaning cow. Old English, meaning meadow. I asked Will which he had in mind. Depends on the circumstances, he replied, whether you’re being bovine or nice to lie on. I assaulted him with a wet tea cloth.

  To continue. I couldn’t refuse. I felt too guilty for having imposed such a piece without checking on difficulty for him first. Besides, Doris is one of those people who thinks it’s a cop-out not to try, even if you can only fail, and I never like to disappoint her. Somehow or other we got through without making too big a bog of it. In fact, though I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time, it was a joy, errors and all. Joy most of all, apart from the music itself, because I felt Will was telling me that he loved me, as I was telling him, though we were both pretending, like actors in a play, that it was Schumann who was speaking to whoever he had in mind when he wrote these three lovely loving pieces.

  All Doris said was, ‘Thank you.’ But her smile was enough. She knew better – how I loved her for her judgement, her sensibility – than to crit us right then. Instead, she said, ‘Let’s have a celebration. Could you stay to supper, Will?’

  He looked as surprised as I was, thought a moment and said, ‘Yes, sure, thanks. I mean, if Cordelia would like it.’

  ‘Why not,’ said I.

  ‘Good,’ said Doris. �
�What’s your favouritest food?’

  He smiled at her silliness. ‘My very favouritest – if I’m to be absolutely honest—’

  ‘Always best.’

  ‘Fresh lobster. On its own. With a salad maybe.’

  ‘My lordy,’ said Doris.

  ‘So you’re the one Cordelia gets it from.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lordy. She’s always saying it.’

  ‘Family fingerprint. My mother used to say it too. You do have expensive tastes.’

  ‘You did ask,’ said Will.

  ‘I did indeed.’

  ‘But a hamburger will do,’ said Will, not meaning it for one moment.

  ‘It might have to,’ said Doris. ‘Finding fresh lobster on a Sunday in these parts won’t be easy. But nil desperandum, I’ll have a go. You two go on playing – or whatever it is you have in mind. I’ve a friend to visit in hospital. I’ll buy supper on the way. Waitrose will be open. See you in a couple of hours.’

  And she was gone.

  Will packed his oboe away.

  ‘Quite someone,’ he said.

  ‘She’s all right.’

  ‘More than all right. Look, Leah—’

  ‘Yes, Liam, I’m looking.’ And I was, being still at the stage of finding it almost impossible not to look at him, and adding, to cover myself, ‘Why do people say look when they mean listen?’

  ‘Listen – look – about by the river last week—’

  ‘Yes. Sorry.’

  ‘It was pretty naff.’

  ‘Yes. Vulgar. Sorry sorry! Don’t know what came over me.’

  ‘Nor me. I mean, apart from being naff, which doesn’t matter. I mean I don’t know what came over me. Well, I do.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You came over me.’

  ‘Ah!’

  Pause.

  Then we kissed, what else? A rather firmly played but pianissimo chord, four-four time, in straight C major to begin with. Then when that turned out well, another, this time a very hungry fortissimo in G major lasting at least six bars. Followed instantly with only a snatched breath by a sustained ten-bar fortissimo vigoroso chord in F minor moving legato into an equally sostenuto cadenza, E minor modulating into a spiritoso C via B flat major, lasting for so many bars that I simply had to come up for breath before either of us wanted the passage to end. By which time I was pinned in the bend of the Bösendorfer, which was emitting an occasional sympathetic vibrato as it echoed the slancio appassionato of our amoroso. I even thought he might take me on top of it, and feared for the health of Doris’s treasured instrument if he did, given that he still had his boots on. Nor could I remain upright any longer, my legs being reduced to tremolando by this time.