This Is All (97 page)

‘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?’

He shook his head. ‘Just thinking.’

‘What about?’

He pushed his empty bowl aside, leaned back on the two hind legs of his chair and regarded me through his glasses. His hair was tousled and he was wearing one of my old silk dressing gowns.

‘Shall I get you something else?’

‘I’m okay, thanks,’ he said, and quite matter-of-factly added, ‘I like it. It smells of you.’

I pretended to concentrate on my cornflakes till I could say, ‘Going to tell me what you’re thinking about?’

‘Cambridge.’

‘What about it?’

‘I’m not going.’

Now a quite different emotional surge forced me to look at him.

‘
What!
’

‘I’m not going.’

‘What
are
you talking about! Don’t be so silly! You’ve been looking forward to it for ever. I don’t understand.’

He set his chair down on all fours and leaned towards me, elbows on the table, his hands reaching for mine, but I was too stunned to give them to him.

‘Look.’

‘I’m looking.’

‘We’re getting plenty of work. And there’s more to be had. The jobs are getting better all the time. More the kind I want. If it goes on like this, in six months we’ll be making a fairly good income, even without what you earn. We’ll be able to afford a place of our own. And more important than that, the point is, I enjoy the work. I like working with my
hands. I like being outside in all seasons and all weathers. I like working with the trees. And what surprises me a bit is that I like the business side of it. I like making a living from what I’m doing. I like planning it and organising it. I can see how it could grow as a proper business. And I can see how I can do the research I want to do at the same time. Better, probably, than I can do it at Cambridge, where I’d have to follow the course they set rather than studying what I want to study.’

‘You haven’t said anything like this before.’

‘Because it’s taken me till now to see it. And because it’s time to make a decision. If I’m not going to Cambridge, I should let them know soon, so someone else can have the place.’

‘Lordy, Will. I don’t know what to say. I mean, what d’you mean about your research? How can you do it better on your own than at uni with Rackham the Great?’

He opened his file and turned the pages. One after another of printed-out notes, photos, drawings, clippings from newspapers and magazines, extracts from books, diagrams, graphs, mini-essays, all so beautifully presented they were a work of art in themselves. Will had often talked about it and shown me what he was doing. It was a study of a parcel of trees in an area of ground roughly the size of a football field. About forty years before the owner had a craze for organic gardening. He fenced off the area and tried to cultivate it. But the craze passed after a couple of years – too much hard work – and he let it go wild. Since then nature had taken its course, trees and bushes and plants had sprouted and taken root and grown till by now it was a little wood, undisturbed and isolated in the middle of this private land.

While Will was at tree college, he was required to make a study of a tree and write a long essay about it during the summer holiday at the end of his first year. He knew this plot of land and chose one of the trees because it was near home, his father was a friend of the owner, who gave him carte
blanche, and the little wood appealed to him, it was unusual and young and evidence of how nature takes over once it’s left alone. (He liked to quote his hero’s statement, ‘The best method of conservation is three strands of barbed wire’ – in other words, Will would add, keep the bastards out.)

He finished his essay for college, but for his own interest, and to develop his research skills he continued to study the little wood, identifying the trees and bushes, the flora and fauna that grew in or inhabited or visited the place. He spent hours there, days, sometimes nights as well, observing, measuring, photographing, drawing, collecting samples, and at home copying up his notes and writing about what he’d found. He consulted staff at the arboretum, learned from their expertise and used their specialist resources. He sent samples of soil and wood and puzzling finds for analysis and identification to a laboratory and learned how to use the information they provided. Gradually, he pieced together a portrait of the little wood, its fourteen varieties of trees, I don’t know how many different kinds of bushes and plants, scores of birds, hundreds of insects and spiders and beetles and moths and butterflies and creepy-crawlies and lichens and mosses and the myriad microscopic organisms that lived in the trees and undergrowth, the badgers and foxes, deer and rabbits, mice and rats and hedgehogs and snakes and squirrels (greys only of course, no reds) etc. etc. etc. that came and went and thrived there.

‘This,’ Will said, as he turned the pages, ‘is worth a first degree. Not my opinion. I’ve had it looked at. The only reason for going to uni, would be to get a piece of paper that says so. And I don’t care about the piece of paper or the letters after my name. Three years for something I can do already and a debt of thousands of pounds for the privilege – not what I want.’

‘But, Will, studying at Cambridge is more than just the degree. It’s something you’ve always wanted to do.’

‘No. It’s something my mother always wanted me to do. I’d not even have applied, if it hadn’t been for Hannah.’

‘Hannah!’ The cold hand of jealousy clutched my stomach. ‘How? Why?’

‘You never understood about me and her. She was rubbish at the practical stuff. Never really got used to climbing. Was hopeless at the manual side of the job. Only did the course to learn the skills that would be useful with her academic work at uni. But she was clever, I mean really clever. A scholar. She was the first person I’d met of my own age who knew how to study and loved it, loved it for its own sake, and who knew more than I did about trees. That’s why I admired her, and we became friends because there was no one else on the course like us, and because we helped each other with the stuff we were good at that the other wasn’t. University – Cambridge – is her natural habitat. She’ll thrive there. And because we got on so well and were together so much and I admired her, I suppose I picked up her excitement about going to Cambridge and doing academic research. But the truth is, I’m not like that. I don’t want to spend all my time only doing academic work. That’s what I’ve learned these last few months. For me, the academic stuff has to be part of everyday practical work with trees. Working with the trees, studying conservation and how to manage it while I’m working, and earning my living from it. It’s all one. It’s all of a piece. D’you see, Leah?’

How could I not? And I remembered Julie on order and discipline, and thought: That’s exactly what Will is talking about, his discipline and his order – his way of worship, his way of study, his way of working with his hands as well as his head, his way of life.

I nodded, speechless, loving, adoring him, and a little in awe, aware of the weight and density of him, his power.

Will said, ‘Another thing, while we’re on the subject. You say that readiness is all. Which is true enough. But what I
want to say is that to me our togetherness is all. You asked me which came first, you or trees. And what I’d do if I had to choose. But it isn’t either/or. And it doesn’t need to be either/or. I don’t have to choose. You don’t have to choose. I can have you and trees. You can have me and your poetry. And why not? So what I want to ask you – what I
must
ask you – is whether you’re ready for us to live together like that, not temporarily as a trial but for good? I really need to know this, Leah. I need to know it so that we can get on with our lives, no ifs or buts.’

I wanted to say yes yes yes, but couldn’t while separated from him by the table.

I got up and straddled his lap, and kissed him. And when that was done said:

‘I’ll always fear losing you, Will. I’ll always fear I can’t match you. I’ll always fear I’ll disappoint you. But yes, I do want us to live together for good, come what may.’

I took my ring – the ring he put on the finger of my right hand the day he came back – and put it on the ring finger of my left hand. I took his ring from the finger of his right hand and put in on the ring finger of his left hand. And we kissed again.

We were in bed a few minutes later. I had my diaphragm in. We both hated condoms. But what no one had told us is that in a typical year roughly sixteen per cent of women using a diaphragm get pregnant because tiny holes sometimes occur in the rubber. And unless, as your father jokes, a higher power intervened, that’s the only reason we can think of to explain why you were conceived at around five o’clock in the morning of the last day of the last year of my teens, in my bed, in my room, in my childhood second home, the room where my mother, your grandmother, grew up and the bed she slept in as a child and then with her husband, my father, your grandfather, till the day she died, and the bed where I was born.

*

When we recovered from the surprise of discovering I was pregnant no one was more pleased than your father. So pleased that I parried his joke about the intervention of ‘higher powers’ by accusing him of making the holes in my diaphragm so that he could have his way and
get on with it
.

Mind you, your father’s delight was certainly equalled by my father’s, who behaved as if he were the one responsible. Doris disguised her pleasure by remarking that here was yet another example of my determination never to be average and always different from the norm, however unwise it might be. Arry set himself up as your devoted uncle from day one and performs his self-appointed duties to perfection. As for Julie, she rivalled my father’s assumption of your fathering by carrying on as if she were your mother and about to give birth to you herself. There were times in the following nine months when I felt entirely redundant.

But not now. If those who ought to know, the doctor and midwife, and if my mother-to-be’s instincts are right, by this time tomorrow you will be lying in my arms and suckling at my breast.

BOOK SIX
The Blue Pillow Box

Will’s Notes

FOUR MONTHS AFTER
you were born your mother died of an intercranial saccular (Berry) aneurysm. In the simplest nonmedical terms, this means a blood vessel in her brain burst, causing her instant death. There was no warning. The doctors assured us she would have known nothing and have felt no pain. She was twenty years old. Twenty years and two months.

Today is the third anniversary.

They say that grief is cured by time. So far, this is not my experience. How do you recover from the death of the person who was the love of your life? How can you? Such love has no past tense.

As you know, when we discovered your mother was pregnant she set herself the task of compiling a homemade book that would be a kind of portrait of herself and her life from the age of fifteen until you were conceived. She planned to give it to you on your sixteenth birthday, hoping that in this way you and she could share your teenage years, and compare your similarities and differences. I knew she was doing this, but was never allowed to see any of it.

When your mother died, her task was unfinished. Along with her other writing, the six box-files in which she kept everything intended for your book remained untouched in a cupboard in our room. I couldn’t open them, afraid it would be like opening her coffin.

When we moved into our present home I brought your mother’s things with me and stored them in a room next to
my bedroom. And still I couldn’t bring myself to open the boxes. But late at night on the second anniversary of her death I was thinking about how you would grow up knowing very little of your mother, and decided that I must do whatever I could to preserve her book in the best possible condition to give to you.

Before I had time to change my mind, I took the boxes to my room, laid them on the bed, and went through them one by one.

The effect was devastating, though not in the way I had feared. I could do nothing for a week except read the hundreds of pages the boxes contained. I didn’t go to work. I hardly ate or slept. I shut myself in my room, telling the few people who needed to know that I wanted to be undisturbed, didn’t answer the door or the phone.

Until then, I had not cried over your mother’s death. I’d kept grief at bay by working long hours and helping to look after you and doing anything that would distract me not only from grief but also from anger and resentment – anger that your mother had been taken from me, resentment that she had left me behind. But that week I wept again and again, rackingly (an awkward word your mother would not have allowed me to use), every time I opened the boxes and every time I closed them, and intermittently at other times while reading, when the tears were not tempestuous but quiet sobs.

At first I assumed these were the delayed tears of grief, which indeed they were. But as the days went by I realised they were also tears of joy. Grief with joy. I discovered in what I was reading that my beloved Cordelia was vividly alive. On the one hand the grief this brought to the surface was almost too acute to bear, while on the other hand I was filled with joy because she had come back to me and always would be with me in the words she had written with her own hand in pencil on narrow-ruled A4 pads of recycled paper, and that she had rewritten, using her favourite Bembo
typeface, on the Apple Mac her father, your grandfather Kenn, had given her on her nineteenth birthday, and had printed out and revised again and again. The pages even smelt of her. To me these pages
are
Cordelia.