This Is All

by Aidan Chambers

  He didn’t regard reading a book just for the sake of it as nerdy; reading has always been one of my greatest passions.

  As much as anything what mattered was that he made me laugh. Because he was gifted with a dry, oblique, deadpan sense of humour, before people got to know him they often wondered whether he was being funny or snide. This made many among the ancientry as well as his peers uneasy. Most of our teachers were wary of him. They weren’t quite sure whether he was winding them up or not. Intellectual cleverness is often distrusted by those who don’t possess it. Add ambiguity and you add fear. Will mixed both. But once you got to know him you learned that his humour was as conscious and intended as any can be. The trouble was, he didn’t make any concessions to people who hadn’t the wit to catch on. Not that he didn’t notice; he just didn’t care whether they caught on or not. The only way to take him therefore was straight and undiluted. And I liked that about him. It challenged me to be more than I thought I could be.

  Finally in this list of qualifications, I chose Will because he wanted everything to be right. For him, good enough was never good enough, only perfect would do. Naturally, this meant he could be infuriating. The boys in his band sometimes fell out with him and left because he was never satisfied with their playing or his own. But they always came back because without him they did nothing and got nowhere.

  His perfectionism also meant he frequently thought he was a failure, which in turn meant he was never completely happy. And this belief, this assumption, was Will’s biggest weakness. He sometimes needed reassurance, encouragement, solace, but would never ask for it or even show that he needed it. Of course, I didn’t know this about him at first. When I picked him out for my devirgining he seemed the most self-confident person I’d ever met.

  … and Sex

  If music be the food of love, as the great god Shakespeare says, and as William Blacklin likes music so much, then, me thought, I’ll capture my chosen one by feeding music to him.

  But before I could feed him, I had to cook up a menu to entice him to the meal. A few minutes’ Netsearch turned up a neat little recipe for piano and oboe: Three Romances by Schumann. To be honest it was a grade or two beyond my capacity. But I thought this might be an advantage, because my poor playing compared with his would bolster his male pride. Besides, there wasn’t much to choose from, certainly not in my range of pianistic accomplishment, music for piano and oboe not being exactly thick on the ground, so this one would have to serve as bait with which to catch my Willy. And he took it.

  Was I so calculating? Was I so embarrassingly brash? Was I so arrogant that I hadn’t one hint of doubt, one twinge of worry that well-favoured Will might find me less than his delight?

  Well, I have horse’s-mouth evidence to help answer those questions. Here’s what I wrote in my pillow book the day I set my trap:

  Just sent WB an em.

  hi. i’m learning the piano part of schumann’s 3 romances, op 94, for piano and oboe, and need to try it with the oboe. any chance of trying it with you? cordelia kenn

  Now I’ve sent it I feel even more like a nerk than when writing it. I mean, why should he care? Why should he bother? I know he knows who I am. But why should he take any notice? Am I out of my mind? Am I stupid? I look like nothing these days. No, not nothing. At least then I’d be invisible. Like – never mind! Like shit. I’m probably not his type at all. And even if he does say yes, which he won’t, just to be helpful, just to be nice – how I detest being niced to – he’ll hate me when he finds out just how bad bad BAD totally hopeless I am and just how no way can I play the fugueing Schumann. I must have been bananas to send him that em. And now it’s too late. Sent. Gone. Delivered. And he’ll tell everybody and they’ll all laugh at me for being so gauche as to think even for one nanosecond that he, the coveted William Blacklin, would pick up such an obvious pass from me, the local dodo.

  As for thinking I could get him to – urrrrrrrrgggg.

  I hate myself. I loathe myself with the deepest direst loathing. I am in hell. I’m going to the garden to eat worms.

  Lordy! He’s emmed back already!

  ok ck. name day time place. c u. will b

  It’s a YES! I don’t believe it!!!

  will b, will b, will u b mine?

  say yes, will b, and I will b thine!!!

  As you see, I wasn’t so hot as a poet, then, except on the use of exclamations.

  Searing rain

  But now, my as yet unborn child, I’m tired. I ache with the swell of you. I shall explode. There are times during pregnancy when you feel like a hot-air balloon with a lead weight inside it. No hope of floating.

  Anyway, I don’t like stories that go on and on in the same fashion page after page, with no variation, no changes of pace, of mind, of music, no pauses to catch my mental and emotional breath. I like stories that are like the English weather and the English landscape with its hills and wolds and valleys and plains and woods and forests and hedged fields and open moors and wide downs and mini-mountains and silent ponds and lonely lakes and trilling rills and surging streams and curling rivers and haphazard skies and shifting reaches of the sea. A place where nothing is anything for long or is ever too much.

  And you can be in love with a place, can’t you? Have you discovered that yet? Which is your place, I wonder, which is your land, your natural home? Even though I don’t feel I belong anywhere or that anywhere belongs to me, I do feel at peace in England and love it as nowhere else. This I’ve learned from trips to foreign lands, one benefit of having a father who is a travel agent.

  (If you ask me where my own home is, the only answer I can give is that it’s not a place but words. I live in words and words are where I belong.)

  It is night. Your father’s working away from home this week. A sweaty storm rampages outside. A few minutes ago there was an almighty crash of thunder and lightning, which made you jump inside me. I’m getting to know you by your shifts and shimmies. And at the moment you’re as edgy as I am. These days I cry about nothing. I saw an old man trip and fall down in the street today and I started to blub like a fountain. Couldn’t stop. Had to get in the car and drive away.

  Tonight we feel alone, you and I.

  We long for the touch of your father.

  First date

  Precisely at the appointed hour William Blacklin arrived, a little black oboe case tucked under his black-leathered arm.

  I’d picked an evening when I was house-sitting for my Aunt Doris. She was away on one of her monthly jaunts to London’s theatreland, plays and music being her passions.

  Doris. I love Doris dearly. Since my mother’s death when I was five, she’s been my second mother. And she, unmarried and childless, loves me as her surrogate daughter. At that time, when I was fifteen, I trusted her completely. She was the only one who knew everything about me that I knew about myself.

  One of her biggest regrets is that she hadn’t the courage of her desire to be an actress, rather than training to be an accountant and spending the rest of her life as a well-paid calculator. All her father’s fault. He was opposed to any daughter of his going on the stage, an insecure and dissolute occupation according to him, though he was happy enough, in fact only too keen, to ogle any dishabille actress who turned up on the telly, preferably so dishabille she was stripped to the nethers. (As you’ll guess, I never liked him and didn’t cry when he died. Let’s not dwell on the other reasons why.) Always a good little girl, Doris was dutiful and foolish enough to listen and obey. She rebelled later, as Little Goody Two Shoes usually does. Seems to me, it’s never too good to be too good when you’re growing up. The longer you leave being bad, the harder you fall. I know what I’m talking about, as you’ll find out.

  From the time my mother died, I had a room of my own in Doris’s house – the house where both she and my mother were born and grew up – and often slept in it for a row of nights at a time. From my early teens, when she and Dad thought me responsible enough, I spent the night
there when she was away, sometimes alone and sometimes with Izumi for company, we playing at being grown-up and independent.

  It was Doris from whom I caught my devotion to the piano. A peach of a player herself, she was the proud owner of a white Bösendorfer baby grand, which lived in a music-only room painted a deep blue-green with white trim at the back of her house. We called it the music box. I first put my fingers to that magnificent instrument when I was seven, after which Doris taught me till I was eleven, when she decided I needed the detached discipline of a professional, a teacher I still see once a week.

  *

  Being the guardian of my secrets, confessor of my sins, best comforter in calamity, I had told Doris of my hankering for Will. But I hadn’t mentioned that my hankering was only for initiate sex. I hoped this could be taken as read. And it was Doris who suggested I use music as bait to entice him.

  ‘They used to say,’ Doris mused, ‘the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. I’ve never found that to be true. In my experience the way to a man’s heart – if he has one, which in many cases is doubtful – is via his dingus. But from what you tell me about the boy William, I’d say the way to his heart is through his head. If, that is,’ she added, smiling, ‘it’s his heart you’re after. And,’ she went on, not pausing for an answer, ‘I’d say what he needs in a girl is someone he can admire. Pretty girls, beautiful girls, certainly sexy girls, are ten a penny. Sounds to me like your William could take his choice. My guess is he’ll choose someone who inspires his respect. And a full frontal approach won’t work, Cordy love.’ (Doris is the only person I ever allow to call me Cordy, a diminutive I detest. Delia I don’t mind; but prefer to be called by my full name.) ‘Lure him with music. Hook him unawares. Play him into admiration. That’s my advice.’

  So here we are, a few days later, William and myself, the two of us alone in the music box, setting up our scores and sussing out the interpersonal subtext.

  ‘Didn’t know you played,’ said Our Hero, wetting his reed with erotic succulence and eyeing the set-up.

  ‘Just for myself,’ said Our Heroine, with obnoxious modesty. ‘Don’t expect too much. Only a hobby really. Don’t want it to become a school thing.’

  ‘Bit of a hobby horse, then. Nice piano. And a room just for music. How tonic.’

  I’d explained about Doris and the home-alone situation.

  ‘Should be the dining room, I suppose. But Doris prefers music.’

  ‘If music be the fruit of love,’ he said.

  My heart missed a beat. Had he seen through my plot?

  I said, fussing with my score to cover my panic, ‘Food, I think.’

  ‘Shakespeare?’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Most quotations seem to be.’

  ‘Or the Bible.’

  ‘Or pop songs.’

  ‘Want to make a start?’

  We slaved at the notes for two hours. Two hours! And guess what – in all that time Will uttered not one word, shot not one glance, made not one slightest move that even hinted he was interested in anything but the music. I was not scoring with this score. If music be the food of love, all it seemed to do, as far as I could tell, was feed his desire for more of it.

  ‘Like a drink – or anything?’ I asked with hint-full emphasis at one moment when we stumbled over a phrase, hoping that during a fermata for refreshment he might move his eyes from the score on to me and I might modulate his mind into a sexier key, like, say, F-sharp. (Sorry! An unworthy pun. But I mean! – the Schumann pieces were called Romances. That’s one reason I picked them.) But no. ‘I’m okay if you are,’ said he, and took to tootling again.

  His concentration was infuriating, his tenacity exhausting, his absorption in his playing – well, there’s the rub, you see.

  When I told Izumi about it afterwards, she said, ‘Hito-o-norowara, ana-futatsu.’

  ‘O yes?’

  ‘Means: When you put curse on another, two graves will wait in cemetery.’

  ‘Well, thanks!’

  But she just laughed in her Japanese way, hand over mouth, and said, ‘You set trap for him, and he trapped you. Isn’t that right?’

  And it was. I can even tell you the moment it happened.

  There we were, after two hours of o-no! and no-no!, getting on nicely-nicely-thank-you, when suddenly the clouds parted in the sky, the setting sun came swanning in through the french windows and picked out like a spotlight the thin length of Will, in his floppy white T-shirt and sloppy light-blue jeans, his music propped against a pile of books on top of the piano, his fine long fingers dancing a jig on the black rod of his oboe, his succulent lips embracing the reed, his cheeks forming peculiar curves and crevices as he puffed and sucked, his deep hazel eyes focused through his glasses intently on the score, the whole of him, body, mind and soul, totally absorbed, totally engaged, all of his self completely at one with what he was doing. And:

  He was so unbearably beautiful, so adorable, so completely himself, I couldn’t take my longing eyes off him and as a result lost my place, tripped over the keys, stumbled to a stop, and fell passionately in love.

  Love me do

  How scornful I’d always been of ‘soppy romance’, of saying it with flowers, of candlelit dinners, of whispered lovey-dove, of moonlight mush, of secret swapping of amorous tokens, of all things valentine. She speaks, O speak again, bright angel! All that Romeo and Juliet stuff. Yuk yuk, puke puke, excuse me while I slash my jeans with a Stanley knife. I knew girls were supposed to like it, but I didn’t. Or perhaps I only pretended that I didn’t. As a kind of protection? What you can’t have you pretend you don’t want. What you long for the most, you scorn the most.

  But there I was, in a moment, in a flash, suffused with symptoms of seduction: flushes of hot sweats, dizziness of the brain, yearnings of the lips, hastings of the heart, pricklings of the breasts, churnings in the belly, weakness in the knees, wobbles in the legs, tinglings in the inner thighs, liquid fire gorging my vag, heaving of sighs. And afterwards: sudden loss of appetite, inability to sleep or to concentrate on anything other than the object of desire, imagination breeding fantasies of what might be, could be, was wished for, and an insatiable need to wallow in the very poetry that had so far received only my disdain: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? If thou must love me, let it be for naught Except for love’s sake only, My true love hath my heart and I have his, How I do love thee, Let me count the ways …

  What’s more, I couldn’t keep news of my in-loveness to myself. I just had to tell someone. Not Doris. Not yet. I didn’t want adult advice, didn’t want help, especially didn’t want an I-told-you-so look in her eyes. There’s nothing more irritating than being told you’re doing precisely what you said you’d never do and were told you certainly would. Older people – relatives and friends at least – should have the decency to pretend they never ever thought such a thing.

  I told Izumi. She was glad, as a best friend should be, and envious too, which pleased me. She was without a boyfriend at the time. She was generally agreed to be the most beautiful girl in our year. But she found most Western males too aggressive, too harsh and loud, too in-your-face, as, she said, Japanese women often do. Also she once told me it was not the boy but the love letters and little gifts and other such signs of passion that she really liked. It was love play that she wanted, not love itself. And you know how good most boys are at all that.

  As a present for my fifteenth birthday Izumi had given me an English-language copy of one of her favourite books, The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, written a thousand years ago by a Japanese woman in her early twenties who was a lady-in-waiting at the court of the emperor’s first wife. Izumi explained that it’s one of the masterpieces of Japanese literature. We read many parts of it together, and soon it became one of my favourite books too. Sei Shōnagon seemed more alive to us, more ‘there’ than many of the people we met every day. This is sometimes the case with books, don’t you find? And it was because of S
ei’s Pillow Book that I secretly started keeping my own.

  Now, ten months later, when I told Izumi of my sudden hunger for love poetry, she told me about the poetry written by other young Japanese women who lived around the same time as Sei Shōnagon. And particularly about Izumi Shikibu, after whom my Izumi had been named by her mother because she was a big fan of the long-dead but still-alive poet. This poet Izumi had numerous hot affairs, two of them with sons of the emperor, the second of which, Prince Atsumichi, was the true love of her life. When he died she composed hundreds of poems mourning her departed lover, which I think must be some of the best poems of love and grief ever written.

  All of Izumi Shikibu’s poems and of the other women’s are very short, what the Japanese call tanka. My Izumi could recite some of them by heart, in English translation as well as in Japanese, which she did that day she introduced them to me. After which I couldn’t wait to get my hands on them. A couple of days later she gave me a little Japanese notebook covered with traditional red ‘dragonfly’-patterned paper, into which she had copied in careful neat writing a selection of her own favourites. I treasure it, have added favourites of my own, and look forward to the day when the time has come to give it to you.

  Here is the poem by Izumi Shikibu that first drew me.

  Wishing to see him,

  to be seen by him –

  if only he

  were the mirror

  I face each morning.

  It said exactly what I felt about Will. So short and simple, yet behind the simple words and between the few short lines there lies much more that cannot be said, or is best left unsaid. It was like a snapshot of my thoughts and like an x-ray of my feelings. It spoke of love without using any of the clapped-out over-cooked language I’d always sneered at. It and Izumi Shikibu’s other poems helped me see that in my own flush of love there was something wonderful and special to me that was not just a repeat performance of the same old experience everyone has had from the year dot.