On an impulse, I said, ‘Let’s go for a swim.’
‘Now? At this time of night?’
‘Why not?’
‘Where?’
‘The sea.’
‘That’s an hour and a half away.’
‘So? I want to be in water, and I want it to be cold. I want it to shock me out of myself. I want to see the sea and be in it. I want its space. I want to feel it pulling at me and carrying me. And I want you to be in it with me. Now!’
‘All right! All right, we’ll go. But what about the job tomorrow, I mean today?’
‘We’ll be back by lunch time. You can ring Arry before work. He’ll cover for you. Let’s just grab our things and go.’
We drove there in silence, listening for part of the time to a recording of the piece we were practising, Ponchielli’s Capriccio for piano and oboe. Dawn was lighting the foot of the cyclorama when we arrived. The tide was in, the sea calm, no rollers breaking, only the surge and drag of its skirt on the beach. No one to be seen.
‘Skinny-dip?’ I said.
Will stripped, me an item behind, he racing for the water, then me. Knee deep, I caught him up and jumped onto him piggyback. He staggered but kept his footing and ploughed on till he was up to his waist.
‘Stop,’ I said. ‘Shoulder dive.’
He helped me to stand on his shoulders and held my legs till I shouted ‘Now!’ and dived in, he plunging after me. For the next half hour we played antic porpoises and slow breaststroke turtles, bottling seals and basking whales, and tag and kiss, until we were too puffed and too cold for any more, when we ran out, dried each other, pulled on some clothes, and wanted breakfast.
In a café on the sea front they were preparing to open and we wheedled a pot of tea out of the woman behind the counter, who of course took a fancy to Will and unasked made us fried egg and toast, which she served with a disparaging flourish intended to hide her nostalgia for lost youth and what might have been and all too clearly hadn’t.
Will rang Arry while I used the loo to wash the salt off my face and arms and tidy myself up. I wanted a shower and a change of clothes but would have to wait till we got home.
On the way back I felt much better. The sun was up, illuminating white skeins spun by passenger jets high overhead, their test-tube bodies full of bleary-eyed travellers on the way to Heathrow. My skin was covered with a carapace of sticky salt, but inside I felt clean and sharp and renewed. The beloved sea and the humbling perspective of a distant horizon had restored my balance of mind and heart.
‘Will,’ I said, ‘I’m going to think out loud.’
‘Go on, then.’
‘It’s time I learned to drive. It’s ridiculous and annoying that you can and I can’t and that you have to do the driving wherever we go and I can’t go anywhere in the car on my own.’
‘Agreed. I’ll give you a start, but you’ll need a few lessons from a professional before your test.’
‘And it’s time I got a job. I should have done by now but we’ve been so busy—’
‘Setting me up.’
‘Setting you up, that I haven’t bothered. Partly, though, I admit, because I didn’t want to. But I must. We need the money, and I need something else to think about.’
‘We’ll start looking today. Arry can manage without me till tomorrow. Anything else or is that it?’
‘Question. What would you do if you could have me but not your trees, or could have your trees but not me?’
‘It won’t happen.’
‘But if.’
‘But me no buts and if me no ifs.’
‘Because you know that in the end the trees would win.’
‘Would they?’
‘I think so.’
‘That’s a hard saying. What’s your point?’
‘I don’t think love is ever exclusive. Choices have to be made. It’s possible for two loves to exist at the same time – not the same kind of love, but two different kinds at the same time. And sometimes the lover has to make a choice between them.’
‘Are you saying I have to?’
‘No.’
‘What, then?’
‘I have two loves too, just like you.’
‘Poetry and me.’
‘Correct.’
‘And if you had to make a choice?’
‘Don’t ask.’
‘You asked me.’
‘Only to make the point. And you didn’t answer either.’
‘Because I don’t have to. Do you?’
‘I don’t want to find out what the answer would be.’
‘So?’
‘So the caravan will do for a little while longer. But we must find something better soon, with more space for each of us. I know it’ll be difficult, but there has to be something somewhere that we can afford or wangle.’
‘You need a room of your own for you and your poetry.’
‘And to study. Like you’re going to need a workshop if jobs keep coming in, and a place where you can study.’
‘You need to drive so that you don’t have to rely on me.’
‘And can share the driving with you.’
‘And you need a job so that you’re earning money of your own.’
‘I’ll never be only a wife, Will. And you’ll never be only a husband. We face each other, but we face ourselves as well.’
‘Meaning?’
‘We both have something else of our own that we have to do besides love each other. If we don’t arrange our life together with that in mind, we’ll have to answer the question we don’t ever want to ask.’
Will was silent for a mile or two. Then pulled into a layby, switched the engine off, turned to me and said, ‘All the time I think I can never love you more than I already do. And then you do something or say something, and I love you more than ever. Like just now. Like now. How is it possible? Can you love someone more and more and at the same time, all the time, love them as much as it’s possible to love anyone?’
‘How would I know? I’m no expert. But on present experience, Mr Blacklin, I’d say yes, it is. Though don’t ask me how.’
‘Maybe it’s one of those things you do and don’t question.’
‘I question everything, Mr Blacklin, and don’t you forget it.’
‘But for now, let’s stop asking and just do.’
He leant over and kissed me, which I returned as keenly.
When we needed to draw breath, I said quickly, ‘I hope you’re not thinking it would be nice to do what I’m thinking it would be nice to do, because if you are I should warn you that I don’t have my diaphragm in.’
He sat back and thumped the steering wheel. ‘Damn! And you don’t have it with you?’
I shook my head. It hadn’t occurred to me in the rush to leave for the sea.
‘We could take a chance,’ Will said. ‘We’ve never done it in the car before.’
‘I’m half way through my cycle. D’you want a baby?’
‘Very much. Don’t you?’
‘One day. But now?’
‘Yes, if it happened.’
‘Not yet, Will. I’m not ready.’
‘No. Well, let me know as soon as you are. I’m ready any time. I like the idea of being a dad.’
‘You really are determined to give us a hard time. As if we hadn’t enough on our plate. I think I’d better pass my driving test first.’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘A fat lot you know about having a baby! Home, James, and don’t spare the ccs.’
Perhaps I should have clocked this as an omen, but, just as I’m never aware how I regard something till it’s over and done with and, as Mr Wordsworth advises, can recollect it in tranquillity, I never spot omens till that which they have omenned has occurred. Not that I could have changed anything if I had, for like déjà vu with its irritating flashback of a flash forward, omens are apt to indicate future eventualities you can’t do anything to prevent when their time comes.
> But omen or not, Cordelia was herself again. Even in the car as we drove back to the caravan I was aware of a shift in my state of being. I’d accepted into myself, as part of what I now was, the discord of my mistake with Edward and the hurt and fear caused by Cal. Somehow or other, between last night and this morning, I’d reached a settlement. Without thinking it out beforehand, not consciously anyway, I’d outlined to myself and to Will what I had to do to arrange the order of my life so as to protect our life together.
I know I’m rushing through this period of my story, leaving out much that I want to tell you, but the time of your birth is only a few days away; and everything will be different after your arrival, even what I remember of my life before you came. And because this story is for you and was started soon after you were conceived, I’m sure the urgency of my need to birth it onto the page is the twin of the peremptory need I’m suffering every minute of the day to give birth to you. Never before have I felt such a creature of the earth, subject to imperatives I cannot control. Yet at the same time, knowing in the rareness of my soul that you are mine and are of me, and with my conscious, my willing heart, wanting you out of me, not only because biology demands it but so that you can become you.
*
When the time is ripe, when readiness is satisfied, it’s astonishing how problems seem to solve themselves. Within a few days of our dip in the sea I’d found a part-time job, set about learning to drive (William proving a mostly patient and punctilious teacher), and the hunt was on again for somewhere better to live.
The job was receptionist in a newly established health clinic where they offered massage and aromatherapy, chiropractics, chiropody, etc. I did the mornings, nine till twelve-thirty and all day every other Saturday. The pay was good, the work was pleasant with enough to do to prevent boredom – fixing appointments, taking fees, typing letters and emails for the staff, showing clients to the right rooms at the right times, keeping the reception area tidy and supplied with fresh flowers, and smiling a lot and being polite to clients. Required clothing provided – white top, neat black jacket and slacks – and the perk of a regular massage.
Afternoons and at other times when Will was working I studied for my OU degree.
By the time of my nineteenth birthday, I’d passed my driving test, Will and Arry were working every day full time and often overtime as well, I was settled in at the clinic, and we were saving money.
We spent Christmas Day with Will’s family, Mrs Blacklin’s resentment closeted away for the season of good will, though there were moments when the closet door burst open and had to be firmly shut by Mr Blacklin. Will’s brother’s children were in any case the focus of attention, Mrs Blacklin’s especially, as she seized every opportunity to seduce with excessive gifts and ingratiating spoliation the still malleable next generation of Blacklins into her controlling maw. Out of her sight, Mr Blacklin slipped us an envelope containing a Christmas-present cheque for one thousand pounds. For this relief much thanks, prospective Daddy-in-law!
Boxing Day spent with Dad, Doris, Arry and Julie was a sloppy happy contrast to the formalities and strains of the Blacklin ménage. D&D’s wassailtide present to me was an Apple Mac PowerBook (he knew my old laptop was on the blink); Dad’s to Will was a top-notch chain saw which Doris matched with a set of Silk Fox pruning tools. Shameless pleasure was displayed by all.
Afterwards, though, I felt guilty at receiving so much and giving so little.
‘Why,’ I moaned to Will, ‘does everything depend on money?’
‘It doesn’t,’ he said. ‘Everything depends on trade. What have I got that you want and what have you got that I want? That’s what makes the world go round. Money is only a symbol of trade.’
‘Well it was pretty one-sided trade this Christmas.’
‘No it wasn’t.’
‘Yes it was. Look at what Dad gave me compared with what I gave him, for instance. And he didn’t even want what I gave him. It was something I thought he should have that he wouldn’t buy for himself.’
‘He gave you something he knew you needed. What you gave him was being his daughter. He could give you all he owns and so far as he’s concerned it still wouldn’t be a fair trade. He’d still be in your debt.’
‘In that case, him being my dad should be fair trade for me being his daughter.’
‘That’s not how it works. You’re not responsible for him the way he is for you. He caused you, you didn’t cause him.’
‘He gave me life.’
‘Only because he wanted to.’
‘But I’m grateful for it.’
‘Sure. But the maker always gains more from the creation than the creation gains from the maker.’
‘I don’t agree.’
‘There’s one way we can prove it.’
‘Yes, all right. And one day we will.’
Two days after Christmas Arry went to stay with friends and Dad and Doris left for a week’s holiday in a smart hotel in the Peak District, where they celebrated New Year with other like-minded people. ‘And what kind of mind is that?’ I asked. ‘The kind you don’t have and don’t understand,’ Dad said. I half suspected (and Will was convinced of it) that they did this so we could have the house to ourselves instead of being in the caravan or sharing their house with them for the holiday period.
For seven days and nights Will and I were on our own, enjoying what it would be like if we had a house, and with no work to go to, and no one else to attend to, and nothing to do but what we wanted, our first holiday since we set up together six months before was bliss. I think of it now as our honeymoon.
And it was towards the end of the week, during the night of twenty-ninth December, that two things happened which bring my story – our story – almost up to date.
That evening we invited Julie to have a meal with us. She had been discreet, leaving us alone, only phoning a couple of times to see if we were all right. I had begun to miss her. Towards the end of the meal, while I was dishing up some ice cream and pineapple, she asked Will about his work and his plans. He must be looking forward, she said, to going to Cambridge in the autumn. His reply was subdued, but I assumed this was only reluctance to talk about himself and perhaps a little shyness of Julie. She had taught him English for his first three years in secondary school; he still thought of her as his ex-teacher; and anyway regarded her as my friend rather than ours. And when that topic didn’t go far, Julie suddenly asked in that scrutinising way she has that rocks you back a bit and puts you on your metal, ‘What do you believe?’
Will gave her an assessing look. ‘You mean, do I believe in a god of some kind?’
‘If you want to put it that way.’
‘No. Not in a supreme being.’
‘In what, then? Anything?’
‘What about you?’ (A typical Will tactic when asked a question he doesn’t want to answer.)
‘I believe I have a soul. That we all have souls. I believe there’s more to life than we yet know.’
‘But do you believe in a god?’
‘I believe there’s a power greater than ourselves that holds us together and of which we’re a part. It transcends us. It’s beyond our understanding. So far, anyway. And I call it God for lack of a better word.’
‘So you believe in life after death?’
‘Of some sort, yes. Don’t you?’
‘No. Not if you mean I’ll exist as myself in some way after I die.’
‘So death is an end? Nothing?’
‘Not quite.’
‘What, then?’
‘Everything is made of energy in some form or other, yes?’
‘Speaking scientifically.’
‘That’s what I’m going on.’
‘And if everything is made of energy, so are we?’
‘Correct. The first law of thermodynamics states that there is conservation of energy. Energy can’t be lost. There can’t be less of it. It doesn’t disappear. I believe that when we die the energy that is us takes
another form. So I’ll cease to be me, but the energy that is me will become something else.’
‘And you won’t be aware of it? You won’t know it?’
‘No, I won’t be aware of it and I won’t know it.’
‘So consciousness does die?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘But isn’t consciousness a form of energy?’
‘Yes, it must be, because it seems to be caused by activity in the brain. At least, I think that’s the way it works.’
‘So therefore it’s possible, surely, that consciousness could continue?’
‘Without a body to be active inside?’
‘Perhaps. Yes.’
‘But I don’t think there’s any science that says so.’
‘And until science can show that it’s possible you won’t believe it?’
‘That’s right.’
‘What about children? When they are conceived, do you think they receive their energy from their parents?’
‘They must do. From the mother especially, I should imagine.’
‘Perhaps that’s one reason why people are so keen to have children. Because they believe they’ll go on living in their children after they themselves are dead.’
‘Makes sense.’
‘Do you want to have children?’
‘Very much.’
Julie looked at me and smiled. I shrugged and grinned.
‘Cordelia will tell you,’ Will said, laughing, ‘that the readiness is all.’
‘And I’m not ready yet,’ I said, laughing as well.
I woke suddenly at two-thirty. I know the time, because I realised Will wasn’t in bed and checked the clock. At first I thought he must be in the bathroom but when after a few minutes he didn’t come back I got up to find out if anything was wrong.
He was sitting at the table in the kitchen, eating a bowl of cornflakes. I couldn’t help smiling. On the table was a large portfolio file with a strong, black leather cover that was meant to be a photograph album but that Will was using for a tree project he’d been working on since he was in college.
I poured myself a bowl and sat down opposite him.
‘Needing comfort?’