This Is All (101 page)

‘Let’s get you to bed,’ Julie said, and she and Arry helped me upstairs, one each side, my arms round their shoulders. Remembering this moment next day I thought of George at the White Horse after we’d scattered Cordelia’s ashes, and understood the pain and loss and impotent weakness he must have felt that day. They say the death of a loved one is one of the worst pains a human being can experience and that the death of your own child is the greatest pain of all. I can believe it.

Arry and Julie undressed me and put me to bed. Wanting to be with me to help if I got worse, Arry lay down beside me. Julie switched off the light and closed the door and went down to clear away the wreckage on her own. I was too far gone to take this in at the time, but next day when I realised it I felt guilty about this too. In the event, I was unconscious before she reached the bottom of the stairs.

I woke once in the night. Arry was in bed beside me, fast asleep. I looked at the photo of Cordelia on my bedside table and smiled at her. We both knew how Arry felt about me, and we sometimes joked about it, though not to him. ‘Well,’ I said in my mind to her picture, ‘he’s got his way at last. Or part of
his way.’ And I knew Cordelia would not only find it funny but also be pleased. She and Arry had been very close, like brother and sister – or rather more like sister and sister. I’m sure she talked to him in a way she never did, or perhaps couldn’t, to me. She always indulged him and he adored her. He was – he is – my closest friend. Our friendship deepens as we share our longing for Cordelia and comfort each other for her loss.

I was woken in the morning by your arrival in my bed. After such an exhausting upset, we adults wanted to sleep late. But you woke as usual at six. Arry heard you and went to Julie’s room, where she was struggling with her weariness – she hadn’t finished clearing up the kitchen till after three – took you from your cot, allowing Julie to go back to sleep, and put you through your morning routine, and then came back to my bed with you, which woke me up. I felt as if a forty-tonne truck had rolled over me and wanted to stay sleeping. But you were eager for the joys of the day, and to be in bed with both Arry and me was a special delight.

The way you treated each of us by then – and still do – was quite different. Julie was your mother, was with you most of the time, and you were as close as a mother and daughter can be. In other words, you took her for granted. I was your daddy of course, you flirted and were coy with me, you came to me when there was something special you wanted and wheedled it out of me – a trick you learned very quickly, knowing I’d indulge you in ways Julie wouldn’t. But you were wary of me too; perhaps, as Cordelia used to tell me, there is something about me that frightens people a little, though I have never understood what it is. As for Arry, you treated him as your big brother and your playmate. When you were tetchy or upset, he was the one who could make you smile. As soon as you saw him your face lit up with a look of pleasure and anticipation reserved only for him. You
were always from your first days volatile in nature; you had no middle gear, no cruising speed; you approached everything with passion. When your spirits were low, they were low with as much intensity as your highs. Arry could keep up with you better and for longer than Julie or me. Julie said he could do that because there was a childness in him that she and I had lost, and perhaps never had. Neither of us had liked being children, we’d both always wanted to grow up. To be honest, I played with you because I’m your dad and that’s what dads do. A kind of natural duty, and I enjoyed it, but couldn’t keep it up for long. But Arry could – still can – spend all day with you and never tire. And whereas I could only talk to you as I talk to an adult – I never learned child-speak or if I did I’ve forgotten it – Arry spoke in a language you and he seemed to understand. And when we bought presents, his were always the ones you liked best.

Take your second birthday, for instance. Julie bought a set of clothes she knew you needed and thought you would like. I bought a picturebook and a special toy that would help your manual co-ordination and required you to think about how to use it. Arry gave you a cardboard box he’d covered in coloured paper decorated with cut-out shapes and figures, and filled with bits of paper of different colours and sizes that he’d cadged from a printer for nothing – offcuts from printing jobs, waiting to be carted away for recycling; he’d topped it off with a set of six child-safe felt-tip pens bought cheap from a charity shop. Result? Yes, you liked the clothes, which you enjoyed trying on and which were then immediately put away. Yes, you liked the book, which you insisted I read to you at once and which you then put aside to try out your new toy, which you took about half an hour to become proficient at and which you then put aside to open Arry’s present. This produced howls of delight and for the rest of the day you and Arry lay on the floor drawing (you scrawling and scribbling, Arry making outlines for you to colour in),
cutting (Arry) and pasting (you, soon resembling a girl made of glue), making (Arry: houses, trees, fish, motor cars, etc.) and unmaking (you), and ending up with the pens being used as make-up on each other’s faces, while talking to each other in Secret Speak without ever seeming to draw breath, and giggling and rolling about and cuddling and demanding food and drink and generally having what passes in childhood for a good time. Need more be said? QED.

To continue with the morning after the traumatic night before. Prolonged indolence couldn’t be indulged. There were household goods to be bought, otherwise we’d be eating out of saucepans and drinking out of tooth mugs from the bathroom, not to mention the bottles of comestibles and lord knows what else I’d demolished. And as I was the guilty party and was shamefaced not only for causing the mayhem but for leaving Julie to clear it up, I levered myself out of bed by ten o’clock, and while Arry kept you entertained, Julie and I drove to the largest superstore open on Sundays and bought as cheaply as possible barring the ugly and badly made (which means that nothing was
that
cheap) enough of the essential items to keep us going till we had recovered and had had time to decide which style, make, price and quantity of permanent replacements we preferred and could afford.

Talking (writing!) about buying crocks reminds me that I was going to tell you how it came to pass that Julie, Arry and I are sharing a house.

When you were conceived, your mother and I were living in my brother’s caravan, but had decided we couldn’t put up with it much longer and were looking for a flat or a small house we could afford to rent. By Easter we still hadn’t found anything we liked in our price range. We were spending
more and more of our spare time at Doris and George’s and even sleeping there quite often. During the Easter holiday we held another Kaffeeklatsch Council, at which we reluctantly decided to move into D&G’s full time until after you were born. And so that Cordelia and I could have a living room and a bedroom to ourselves, Arry moved into the caravan, but of course spent most of his spare time with us anyway.

When Cordelia died we were in the middle of negotiating for a small house very like Julie’s and a five-minute walk away. Your mother’s death put an end to that. There followed a very difficult time. George’s condition made life hard for Doris. Julie was looking after you, which meant I was often at her house. I needed Arry’s help so much both at work and personally, and as Doris often needed help too, he moved back into his room at D&G’s and I made do with the one room that used to be Cordelia’s and had become our bedroom.

It was an ugly time, we were depressed and sad and uncertain of the future.

As I mentioned earlier, it was my father who stepped in with the help we needed. Without saying anything to me, he visited Julie and talked to her about the situation, and suggested that he should buy a house big enough to accommodate herself, Arry, you and me, with our own rooms, two or three bathrooms, a couple of sitting rooms, a garden where it would be safe for you to play, a utility room and a garage. Julie would sell her house and become joint owner with my father of the new house. If she received for her house less than half of the cost of the new place, Dad still wanted her to own half of the new one. He said she deserved no less for all she was doing for us. I would pay Dad rent, which he would count as repayment for his share of the house until I’d bought it from him. He would leave me to decide what arrangement to make with Arry. If things changed and the house had to be sold, Julie would take half of the sale price and Dad and I would divide the other half
between us. This, at least, was the general idea. The details would be sorted out by Dad’s accountant (i.e. Doris), a lawyer and the estate agent.

After thinking about it overnight Julie agreed. The day after, Dad took me to lunch and laid out the plan, adding one condition: my mother was to know nothing about the arrangement. That afternoon I discussed it with Arry. He was keen. He would pay rent for his accommodation. I could see the advantages for each of us. That evening I talked with Julie. Not that it took long. The more we thought about it, the more we liked it.

Next morning I rang my father at his office and said we would go ahead. As I might have known, he already had a house in mind, two streets from Doris and George’s, very like theirs, only larger, an empty, chain-free Victorian family house, recently refurbished. We visited it that evening. Six weeks later we moved in. I took your mother’s possessions with me and stored them in a room connected to my bedroom, originally intended as the dressing room or a walk-in wardrobe for the master bedroom, though the estate agent had it listed as an optional extra single bedroom. It was there that I kept your mother’s Pillow Boxes until the night I opened them.

Which brings me back, not before time, to where I started and to what I wanted to tell you about your book – the book you will have read, if you started at page one and worked through to here.

On the Sunday evening of the day after my fit of rage, Julie and I went through your mother’s Pillow Boxes together. Each one was a different colour and each box seemed to cover one period of the story she wanted to tell. That is:

The Red Box covered her life from aged fifteen until the
day of our ‘Sex Saga’ just before her sixteenth birthday. Written on the inside of the lid of the box were the words ‘Romeo and Juliet’.

The Green Box covered the time from her sixteenth birthday until the day before I left for college the summer after our Saga. The note in this box said ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’.

The Orange Box told the story of Cordelia’s affair with Mr Malcolm and my rejection of her, which happened in March, four months after her seventeenth birthday. The note on this one was ‘Measure for Measure’.

The Black Box covered the time from our break-up to my return after her awful experience with Cal, when she was eighteen and a half. The note: ‘A Winter’s Tale’.

The Yellow Box was a pretty straightforward account of your mother and me setting up together, ending with your conception. ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’.

The Blue Box contained a play and many pages of poetry, but there was no indication of what she meant to do with them or if she planned to add anything more; and there was no note on the lid.

This summary makes it seem that everything in each box was neat and trim and finished. Not so. The Red and Green boxes were full and the arrangement of the passages wasn’t clear. There were lists in which the titles of each piece were arranged differently and there were poems and passages not included on the lists. It seemed fairly certain that Cordelia had intended the Red Box to be arranged in a sequence, one item following another. But the Green Box contained the uninterrupted story of the months after our Saga, up to the day before I left for college, and separate from this, many passages of different kinds. There was nothing to indicate whether Cordelia had intended to insert these different passages into the story, as she had in the Red Box, or to keep them separate, or had some other plan in mind.

The Orange Box contained the story of her affair with
Edward Malcolm and nothing else. She had worked on it a lot – there were three versions, each numbered and dated, the third in a printout without any handwritten changes or revisions on it. It looked as if she had intended this to be like a short novel. It is certainly written in a style different from everything else.