This Is All

by Aidan Chambers

  Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

  The still, sad music of humanity,

  Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

  To chasten and subdue …

  … Well pleased to recognize

  In nature and the language of the sense

  The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

  The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

  Of all my moral being.

  She had wondered what those words really meant. She had understood them with her mind, but not emotionally, not in her heart.

  She said the lines to herself again.

  This time their meaning became clear with a sudden flash of understanding. The world, the universe, was alive. She was not only in it but part of it. She only knew this because she could say it to herself in words. And somehow, though she could not yet understand how, this knowing, this consciousness, was what people call God.

  At the same time as she thought this she realized with equal clarity that she would never be the same again. Whatever had happened, whatever all this meant, she knew her life had changed in that brief moment for ever. She could not yet say exactly how, only that it had.

  After a while, when the moment had passed and she could

  and always there, everything that made me feel safe, was stable and safe no longer. Dad would not be the same Dad as he’d always been, Doris no longer the same Doris. I could no longer talk to either of them, no longer confide in them as I used to. They weren’t separate any more; they were together, more each other’s than mine. The house that had been my home since I was born would be sold. Just the thought of someone else living in it made me feel as if my home had already been taken from me. And Will, the person who had filled my thoughts every day, almost every minute for months, the person who stirred emotions and feelings I’d never felt before, the person who had kept me going and for whom I did everything, the person who had become the centre, the heart of my life, was going away. And even if I didn’t lose him, even if he stayed true to me and faithful and always came back to me, he would, I knew, be changed by his time away. And yes, I would be changed too by our separation. Separation for anything more than a few days always changes people and changes their relationship to each other. When they meet again there’s always a part of them that’s a stranger to the other. They have to rediscover each other, retune themselves, become accustomed to the stranger. I knew that, but I didn’t think Will had learnt it yet.

  Everything that mattered to me was changing at the same time. Nothing would ever be quite the same again. And I didn’t know how to think about that. I wished I understood myself better – I still do! It seemed I could only understand my simplest thoughts and feelings, while there were all sorts of complicated thoughts and feelings deep inside that I couldn’t reach.

  I thought of going to Ms M.’s. I wanted to talk to someone older and wiser, who would understand but wasn’t involved. I could think of no one else like that who I could appeal to right then. But I didn’t dare bother her again. So I stayed

  move and breathe normally again, she got up and left the church, and saw, really saw, with a deep sensual thrill that sparkled through her body, that the colours of everything outside were as full-fleshed and as alive as they had been in the church during the brief magical time she came to think of as her godspell.

  For a few days after that she tried to behave as if nothing had happened. Her godspell had been exciting, but she didn’t trust it. She’d heard about such things in religious studies classes. The teacher called them ‘epiphany experiences’ and said they were fairly common during adolescence. Ms M. had decided they were nothing more than hallucinations, the brain reacting to various stimuli – stress or drugs or whatever. A kind of dream, maybe. She was too embarrassed by it to tell anybody she’d had one.

  But the hallucination (or whatever it was) didn’t pass. A week, two weeks later the colour of colours still impressed her and everything in the world was still aware of her. She also found herself stopping outside St James’s on her way from school and wanting to go inside again. At first she told herself this was silly and teased herself by thinking, You’re only after another spiritual buzz. But one day she couldn’t resist.

  This time the only other person inside was the vicar, the Reverend Philip Ruscombe. She knew his name from the board outside the church, where there was also a tatty poster that said, ‘Jesus is the Breath of Life’, under which some wag had scrawled, ‘And he has hellitosis.’ The vicar was sitting in his pew in the chancel, staring straight ahead as stone-still as a statue. She supposed he must be praying. She’d seen him around, a rather seedy-looking, balding, rotund, late middle-aged man, always dressed in a grubby cassock, but had never spoken to him. He was usually accompanied by an ancient black labrador that trailed wearily after him, moulting on the lean earth as it limped along. It was sprawled at his feet,

  where I was, sitting under our kissing tree and watching the river as it flowed past my feet.

  I thought how lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing in it is never the same water and is never still. It’s always changing and is always on the move. And over time the river itself changes too. It widens and deepens as it rubs and scours, gnaws and kneads, eats and bores its way through the land. Even the greatest rivers – the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtze and the Mississippi, the Amazon and the great grey-green greasy Limpopo all set about with fever trees – must have been no more than trickles and flickering streams before they grew into mighty rivers.

  Are people like that? I wondered. Am I like that? Always me, like the river itself, and always life flowing through me but always different, like the water flowing in the river, sometimes walking steadily along andante, sometimes surging over rapids furioso, sometimes meandering with hardly any visible movement tranquillo, lento, ppp pianissimo, sometimes gurgling giocoso with pleasure, sometimes sparkling brilliante in the sun, sometimes impetuoso, sometimes lacrimoso, sometimes appassionato, sometimes misterioso, sometimes pesante, sometimes legato, sometimes staccato, sometimes sospirando, sometimes vivace, and always, I hope, amoroso.

  Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there’s too much water, too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I stagnate and become an arid riverbed? Will I allow people to dam me up and confine me between walls so that I flow only where they want? Will I allow them to turn me into a canal to use for their own purposes (as Mrs Blacklin had tried to do)? Or will I make sure I flow freely, coursing my way through the land and ploughing a valley of my own?

  displaying no signs of life. Neither of them did, not even when she coughed to make sure they knew she was there.

  She sat in the same pew near the back of the church. But the Bible had gone and there were no other books nearby. She felt awkward, with nothing to occupy her. She had her school bag, thought of doing some homework, but that didn’t seem right somehow. So she copied the vicar, sat stock still and stared straight ahead. At first, she desperately wanted to leave, but after a few minutes the silence began to soothe her and she felt herself ‘settling into the stillness’.

  The church clock was striking five when she came in. She was surprised when she heard it chime six. She didn’t think she’d been there that long.

  On the stroke of the hour, the vicar got up and walked down the aisle towards her. She knew as soon as he stood up he meant to speak to her and she wanted to leave but that would have been even more embarrassing.

  ‘Sorry to intrude,’ he said, ‘but were you wanting to see me?’

  ‘No no. Just wanted to look at the church.’ It was the best excuse she could think of.

  ‘And you haven’t come for Evensong?’ the vicar asked.

  ‘No. Am I in the way?’

  ‘Not at all. Rather hoped you might hav
e. Gets a bit lonely saying it by myself every day.’

  ‘Then why bother?’ Ms M. said and blushed at her unintended rudeness. She was trying to be jokey, which is usually a mistake on such occasions.

  ‘Part of my job, you see,’ the vicar said, taking her seriously. ‘Matins and Eucharist said in church every morning. Evensong every evening. Most of my colleagues don’t nowadays. But what else is a priest for, if not to pray on behalf of the people who don’t? I’m a bit traditional, I’m afraid. Out of date, I’m told.’

  Ms M. felt sorry for him and such a heel for her rudeness,

  And if I am like that, I thought, if I am all those things and more, isn’t everyone else like that too? Will was, I knew that for sure; his depths attracted me like a great lake into which I wanted to plunge and dive down to the bottom to find the secrets of his life that lived there, the secrets he never talked about and perhaps didn’t even know existed in him. And if everyone is like that, then nothing can ever stay the same, because everyone will always be changing in some way, and not everyone will change in the same way at the same time. So I must be prepared, I told myself, I must be ready, must accept changes when they occurred. But at that moment, with so many big changes coming all at once, changes I didn’t want, this was very difficult to accept.

  I wish I had gone to Ms M. She might have turned me away, but I don’t think so. (In fact, I know so, but I couldn’t know that then.) Now it seems starkly clear why I would feel so upset – what it was deep inside me that made me feel as I did. But at the time I couldn’t work it out for myself because I didn’t know myself well enough. And so I sat by the river, watching the water amble by, and brooded and fretted and, to tell the truth, wallowed in a bout of self-pity (that petty sickness of the soul which is the most unattractive sickness of all).

  What I couldn’t see, what I didn’t understand was this:

  From the time my mother died, my father and Doris tried to protect me from the shock of her loss. This began even before she died, while she was in hospital. I wasn’t taken to see her. Dad told me she’d gone away for a while to a place where children were not allowed. I was given presents from her each day with a letter, which my father read to me. I found out only recently that Dad bought the presents and the letters were written by Doris. Mother was too ill to do anything.

  Then one day while Dad and Doris were at work – or so they said – I was being looked after by my beloved

  that she said, meaning only to apologise, ‘I wouldn’t mind helping but I’m not a Christian. Not a practising Christian. Not anything, really.’

  ‘O, that doesn’t matter,’ the vicar said, giving her a beaming grin that quite changed his face from morbid to boyish. ‘It’s the company that counts, you see. Would you mind? Have you time? It’s quite easy. It’s all in the service book. If you sit next to me I’ll show you what to do and what to say as we go along. Would that be all right?’

  She didn’t feel up to refusing. The thought crossed her mind that the rev. might be one of those priests who get their names in the papers – sitting next to him while he showed her what to do, one thing leading to another – but she sensed that he wasn’t. There was something likeable about him, despite his weary appearance – partly because of his weariness. At any rate, she did as he suggested and they said Evensong in low ritual voices, the vicar using the wrong end of a pen to point to the words she had to say. When they came to the creed, I believe in God the Father Almighty … the vicar muttered, ‘Me only.’ There was a ‘lesson for the day’ from the Old Testament, which the vicar read out, and a passage from the New Testament that he asked Ms M. to read, which she enjoyed, as she always enjoyed reading aloud. The part of the service she liked the most was one of the psalms for the day:

  O how amiable are thy dwellings: thou Lord of Hosts!

  My soul hath a desire and longing to enter into the courts of the Lord: my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God.

  She thought you could say that about whichever god you believed in. And she liked the words themselves. That a dwelling could be amiable was a lovely idea, entering the courts of the Lord had a stately sound, and rejoice was exactly what her heart and her flesh had been doing ever since her godspell.

  When they finished the vicar sat in silence for a minute, then ruffled his dog’s head, man and dog stood up, the vicar

  grandfather Kenn, who used to take me to visit the churchyard. I was playing with my favourite doll, Betsy Borrowdale. (She was named Betsy after a character in a book my mother used to read to me, and Borrowdale after a place in the Lake District where we’d stayed for a holiday the year before Mother died and which Dad liked.) Betsy was home-made, a birthday gift from Doris when I was two, a rather lumpy rag doll whose hair came off at the slightest pull after I decided one day that she needed a bath, during which I used lavish amounts of shampoo that, combined with the hot water, weakened the glue with which Doris had stuck it on. I think I loved Betsy as much as I did because she was not like the mass-produced plastic child-proof dolls of the Barbie variety but had been made only for me and needed considerable motherly care if she were to stay alive and not fall apart. She was so often my companion and had endured so many adventures that by the day Granddad was looking after me she was almost completely bald, had one floppy arm that had lost its stuffing and her painted-on face had almost worn off. In fact, by then she was the ghost of her original self.

  I was sitting on the floor nursing Betsy while Granddad read me a story I hadn’t heard before about a rabbit that went to heaven.

  ‘Do you think,’ Granddad said when he finished, ‘that Betsy might go to heaven one day?’

  This thought had never entered my head, the prospect appalled me, and as I knew that when grown-ups asked such a question something of the kind was likely to happen, I hugged Betsy to me all the harder.

  ‘Everyone has to go to heaven sometime,’ Granddad said.

  ‘But not yet,’ I said in my most determined voice.

  ‘Heaven is a pretty good place to be. So maybe Betsy would like it there.’

  ‘She can go when I go,’ I said.

  ‘That’s all right for Betsy,’ Granddad said. ‘But people are

  said, ‘Thanks so much. You were very kind.’ ‘No problem,’ Ms M. said. And the vicar and his canine acolyte processed into the vestry. And that was that.

  Ms M. left the church feeling she’d been given a gift and pleased with herself for pleasing the Old Vic.

  The next day she resisted. But two days later she was back again, sitting beside Old Vic ‘saying the office’, as he called it. And the day after, and the day after that. Then it was Sunday. Not being ‘one of the congregation’, she stayed away, but felt the miss. On Monday she was there again. And so began a routine that became a habit.

  Nothing much was ever said between them. Ms M. would arrive, go straight to her seat beside Old Vic, who was always there before her, praying silently. They’d say the office. Afterwards, Old Vic would ask how she was, she’d reply briefly, adding some item of news, such as ‘Wordsworth for homework tonight,’ or ‘I’ve a club after school tomorrow. Can’t get away before five-thirty.’ To which Old Vic would reply, ‘Ah, Wordsworth!’ or ‘I’ll wait till six-thirty. Would that suit you? No one will be inconvenienced after all.’ He never said anything about himself, except with a smile when she asked how he was, ‘Fit and well. Fit and well,’ even though he always looked unfit and unwell and tired and she was sure he must have high blood pressure because his face was florid and he had broken veins in his lumpy nose.

  Which is why she wasn’t surprised when she arrived one day to find the door locked and a note pinned on it, in beautiful italic writing that said, Services cancelled due to illness of vicar. What did surprise her was the distress she felt that Old Vic was ill and the depth of her disappointment that she wouldn’t be saying the office with him. For a moment this nonplussed her.

  By the time she got home she had to know what was the matter.
She looked up Old Vic’s phone number and rang. A croaky voice answered – Old Vic being strangled.

  different. They aren’t the same as dolls. Sometimes people we love have to go heaven, even though we don’t want them to.’

  There was nothing I wanted to say about that. I didn’t like this conversation.

  But Granddad continued. ‘What would you think if Mummy had to go to heaven?’

  ‘Mummy wouldn’t go without me,’ I said.

  ‘Ah,’ said Granddad, ‘but you see, heaven is somewhere you have to go to on your own. And you wait there for the people you love to come to you when it’s their turn.’

  ‘I don’t like turns,’ I said. ‘We have to take turns at school and it’s always the nasty people who push in first, even when it isn’t their turn.’

  ‘It isn’t like that in heaven,’ Granddad said.

  ‘How do you know? Have you been there?’

  ‘No. No one comes back from heaven.’

  ‘So how do you know?’

  ‘I just do. It’s one of the things you know when you’re old, like me, but not when you’re young, like you.’

  ‘Grownups always say that,’ I said. ‘They always say you have to wait for the things you want till you’re grown up.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Granddad said. ‘They do. And about understanding things.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I must say, you’re a clever girl to have spotted that.’

  I was knee-wriggling pleased to be called clever by Granddad. Praise from him always gave me a thrill because he so rarely praised anybody I felt he meant it and wasn’t just being nice.

  Granddad was quiet for ages. I hung on to Betsy and waited to see what would happen next. (Another thing you’re always having to do when you’re a child is wait for the grownups to be ready to do whatever they want to do, whereas they don’t like waiting for you.)