This Is All

by Aidan Chambers

  Besides, he’s never said you were the only one for him. He never promised he’d be faithful, did he? So why shouldn’t he fuck Hannah? Only natural, isn’t it? And that’s what they’re doing. Fucking each other. That’s the truth, isn’t it? It’s staring you in the face. What more do you need to know to prove that he’s betrayed you? He’s fallen for her and he daren’t tell you. He always did have trouble talking about what he felt about you. I’ll bet he’s not like that with Hannah, you can tell from the way he talks to her on the phone – which he keeps switched on just for her, remember, he said so himself, switched on for her because he’s switched on to her. He’s always on for her. He’s not always on for you, is he? He doesn’t keep his mobile on when he’s at college just so you can call him any time you need to talk to him, does he? No, he does not. You’re forgotten while he’s at college. All he has time for is Hannah. She’s opened him up, and he likes that so much he’s fallen in love with her. You belong to his past. You’re history. Well, don’t put up with it. Don’t be his story. Don’t be anyone else’s story. Be your own story. Protect yourself.

  So what are you going to do about it? Say nothing? Don’t be such a fool. Chuck him? You ought to. Confront him, have it out with him? That at least, Cordelia. You’re being a coward if you don’t. You’re allowing him to use you. Don’t let him get away with it. Have more respect for yourself. And by the way, what’s good enough for him is good enough for you. Why should he have what he wants and not you? If he wants to play away, so can you. Yes? Think about it, Cordelia. Don’t be a fool and don’t be made a fool of. He’s two-timing you. He’s betraying you. And he’s lying to you – by saying nothing about what he’s doing, he’s lying to you. Don’t let him lie to you. And don’t lie to yourself. Be true to yourself. Face up to it. Get rid of him.

  They knew, those demons, that I love words, so they used words against me. But they also knew that I have a strong imagination. Or, anyway, I’m good at fantasising, which isn’t quite the same thing.3 It’s like I have a film unit in my head, always making movies out of my life. And as I say, the demons always use your strengths to destroy you. So they didn’t just use words, didn’t just talk to me, they directed my film company, showing me scenes of Will and Hannah together, and all of them so convincing I was certain they were showing me exactly what was happening every day and every night in Will’s room at college. Talking as he had never talked to me. Making love – doing things – as he and I had never made love.

  I tried to tell myself that I was making all this up. But look, the demons said, if you’re only making this up, if we’re nothing more than figments of your imagination, how do you know about sex-acts like you’re seeing them perform when you’ve never experienced them yourself?4

  By the end of the second week of that Christmas holiday I could think of nothing else but what the demons showed me Will was doing with Hannah and of how he had betrayed me. I hid this from him, because I was ashamed of mistrusting him, and because you cannot accuse someone of betraying you when the only evidence you can offer is your own daydreaming. Besides, I was afraid of what would happen if I did accuse him. Even in my ugly state of mind I couldn’t bear the thought of losing him. I worried that if I accused him, or merely told him in a light-hearted way of my fantasies, he would be so offended, so hurt, that he would reject me, even if he had done nothing wrong; and if he had, he would be so ashamed, he would cut himself off from me anyway.

  All along, I knew such behaviour was not like Will, it was not in his character. I knew he was the truest person I had ever met. Yet, isn’t it strange, isn’t it weird, how we can know that someone is not behaving in the way we imagine, and at the same time we can be totally convinced that he is! How clever the human mind is, that it can accept two contradictory beliefs as ‘facts’. Yes, I know that in this case one ‘fact’ was untrue. But the human mind can know something is untrue and still accept it as a ‘fact’, and act on it as if it were true.

  So my days with Will became a torture and my nights a waking hell. And all this torture, all this hellish confusion of beliefs and convictions was self-created – another of the brutal self-destroying capacities of human nature. I was torturing myself. I was in a hell of my own making.

  The day before Will left for college early in January, we spent the afternoon at the arboretum. He needed to check on some species or other. Everything was damp, drooping, the ground muddy, the trees dripping like leaky showerheads. Our walk took us by the bench where I confessed my secret the first time we went out together. The Nine Men’s Morris Will had scratched on the seat was still visible, but blurred and faded and filled with moss. We sat there again for a while, silent. I’m sure Will was also remembering our first time.

  Then, trying not to sound bleak, I said, ‘When will you be home again?’

  ‘Easter.’

  ‘Not at half term?’

  ‘There’s a work-experience project in Scotland.’

  Before I asked I knew the answers to my next questions.

  ‘For all your group?’

  ‘We go in pairs to different places.’

  ‘Who will you be with?’

  ‘Hannah.’

  My stomach clenched. I felt my head would explode. I couldn’t look at him. Just stared at the sign that said: 12,000 YEARS AGO. History. His story. Can the past grow again?

  My voice sounding strangled, I said, ‘You seem to be quite – you know – close.’

  He said, sternly, ‘I’ve told you. She’s a good friend.’

  I said, but didn’t need to ask and didn’t want to hear the answer but needed to, like you finger a bruise or poke your tongue at an aching tooth, ‘Did they let you choose who you paired with?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I couldn’t ask anything more and Will didn’t offer. He didn’t say Hannah didn’t matter to him, only I mattered, he didn’t say he’d call, didn’t say he’d write, didn’t say I could visit him for weekends. Nor did I want him to. Because instead of those promises he might have said something to confirm that the demons were right, and that would have been the end of us.

  We walked back to the car. Will drove me home. Nothing much was said, everyday things, hollow chatter. We had made love after our run that morning. I knew his mother wanted him at a family dinner that evening, and afterwards his mind would be fixed on going back to college early next morning. He was always like that, thinking of the next thing. Some people live in the past, others, like me, live in the present. Will lived in the future.

  As he stopped the car I said, ‘Let’s say goodbye now.’

  Which is what we did, gently and without anything more being said.

  When I got out of the car and he drove away, I was crying and Will was crying too.

  14

  I was in trouble. I knew I was in trouble. I was about to do something foolish. I tried to stop myself. I went to see Julie and poured everything out, the story of Will and me that Christmas holiday. But I didn’t tell her what I wanted to do. Why? Because I would have felt ashamed and she would have done everything she could to persuade me not to.

  How easily we fool ourselves. And how we revel in our own emotional dramas. At heart, we are all performers in our own soap operas and we thrill to the tragicomedy, the comic-tragedy of our lives.

  And I’ve come to see that I am secretive. There is the Cordelia I show to others. And there is the Cordelia, the real Cordelia, the private, secret Cordelia, who I never show to anyone. Well, here I am, the secret Cordelia laid bare for you, embarrassing flaws and all.

  Julie listened, sitting on the sofa in her meditation position, me on the floor in front of her.

  Only when at last the torrent ended did I look properly at her and notice she was wearing glasses.

  ‘You’re wearing specs,’ I said.

  She smiled. ‘All the better to see you with.’

  ‘You haven’t before.’

  ‘Onset of middle age. Short-sighted. Perfectly normal at my age. D’y
ou want to talk about glasses?’

  ‘No, I want to talk about Will.’

  ‘I’ve nothing to say about Will.’

  ‘Well, me and Will.’

  She unfolded her legs and sat with her feet on the ground and her hands on her knees.

  ‘Leave well alone.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Wait.’

  ‘Wait! I can’t! How can I wait? Why should I wait? What for?’

  ‘What d’you want to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Why ask me?’

  ‘I thought you’d know. I trust you. You’re the only one I can.’

  ‘All right. That’s my answer. I think that’s what you should do. Wait.’

  ‘No! I have to do something!’

  ‘Waiting is doing something.’

  ‘No it isn’t.’

  ‘Cordelia, listen. This kind of thing happens. Especially when you’re in love for the first time. You don’t know Will has been unfaithful. Not for sure. Naturally, you’re worried. This happens every year, you know that. You’ve seen it with the girls whose boyfriends have gone away. They always think they’ll lose the boy to someone else.’

  ‘I don’t care about other girls or about how it happens every year. I only care about me and Will.’

  ‘Yes, all right! Sorry. Shouldn’t generalise. But, honestly, if I were you, I’d hang on. Give Will some time. Give yourself some time. It’s early days yet.’

  ‘It’s been six months. That’s an age.’

  ‘Yes, okay. Then, talk to him about it. Ask him.’

  ‘No. I don’t want to. He’ll think I don’t trust him.’

  ‘Well? You don’t. Or you wouldn’t be going on like this.’

  ‘I am not going on. I’m just saying. I’m just asking.’

  She stared at me. Through her new severe black-rimmed oblong glasses. They made her look much older. I’d never thought of her as being old before, she always seemed my age but a bit older. Now she looked old enough to be my mother, and that wasn’t what I wanted at all.

  Suddenly, I didn’t want to be with her any longer. Didn’t want to say any more to her or hear any more from her.

  I stood up.

  ‘I’d better go.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘No, I should.’

  ‘Let’s have something to eat and go for a bike ride. How about that?’

  ‘No. Thanks.’

  ‘Give yourself a break, Cordelia. You need to. I know what you’re going through. Let it go for a while. Just for an hour or two.’

  ‘No. I can’t. Thanks for listening. It’s just—’

  I made for the door.

  Julie remained where she was, didn’t move, didn’t look at me, held in silence, as when she was meditating, face a blank.

  As I was closing the door I heard her say, ‘I’m here if you need me.’

  15

  There are times when you don’t know yourself. There are times when you don’t want to know yourself. There are times when you want to be what you have never allowed yourself to be before. This was one of those times for me.

  I told you, more pages ago than I can remember, about how as a child I was always a ‘good little girl’, and how dangerous that can be, because good little girls often turn into bad big girls when they are in their teens. Perhaps it’s a reaction to being good. It’s hard to be good all the time, and anyway, what does ‘good’ mean?

  This was my time to be bad. Naughty Little C took over and I became Bad Big C. I wanted to find out what it was like to be bad and what happened when you were. Remember my fantasy of going a-whoring? Well, as it turned out, my kind of bad was not like that, which was too sad, too crude, too obvious for my taste. I wanted to be bad in a subtle and calculating way. I wanted to be smart-bad, elegantly bad, cleverly bad. Didn’t they used to call such women courtesans? Posh mistresses. I wanted to be a mistress of the highest quality. (Imagine! Where did that come from? What are we, each of us, in the depths of our unknown selves? What would you be, if your unknown bad came to the surface? What amazing secret lives we all live.)

  For whatever reasons – I could list them but leave that game to you; you know me well enough to do it – I wanted to be Edward’s mistress, his secret lover. Being secret was very important. I didn’t want to take him from his wife, because then I’d have to become his wife, which I certainly didn’t want. I didn’t want any responsibility. In fact, I wanted him to be responsible for everything. What I wanted was to be more important to him than his wife. I wanted to know I wielded such power that he would do anything for me. I wanted to be his girl, the kind of girl I had all along sensed Edward secretly desired. I would be wily, I would be sleek, I would be faux-naïf, I would be as girl-sexy as I could be. I wanted to be the mistress of his desires and the master of his passions. Then I would not be the one the demons tortured; I would be the one the demons used to torture someone else.

  Being Edward’s secret lover would banish my demons, and be my escape from unfaithful Will.

  Did I think it out like this at the time? Probably not. I don’t remember. I didn’t write anything about it in my pillow book, which must mean I didn’t want to face it but wanted to keep it secret even from myself. I didn’t want to know what I was doing or why I was doing it, because then I wouldn’t have been able to do it. Perhaps you can only be bad by turning a blind eye. Perhaps that’s why people say they were out of their minds when they’ve done bad things and the scales have dropped from their eyes when they’ve come to their senses again.

  As it happened Edward gave in far more easily than I expected. Which disappointed me. I wanted him to be much harder to seduce. I’d have enjoyed the drama of that ancient game. Besides, it crossed my mind that if he was that easy to win maybe he’d be easy prey for any girl who fancied her chances. I wanted him to want me but I didn’t want him to want anyone else. I wanted him to be invincible, strong, invulnerable to everyone else’s desires but mine. But what I didn’t know then is just how weak-willed most middle-ageing men are when played with by a young woman who piques their desire.

  Later, during our last clandestine excursion in a hotel by the sea, we talked about how I’d come on to him and everything we’d done together, the way people at the end of something important usually do – on the last day of a memorable holiday, when leaving school and university, at the finish of love affairs and marriages, and at the dying end of life itself. At the end of things we turn into historians. Sometimes happy, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes regretful or bitter, sometimes to reassure ourselves that we have amounted to something, however small. And sometimes, as I am doing now, to try with the wisdom of hindsight to make sense of ourselves.

  16

  The first time with Edward was a little frightening, as you might expect, a grown man knowledgeable about what he is doing and how to do it. But that’s what I wanted, a man who knew and, perhaps, if I’m honest, the frisson of excitement that a touch of fear added to the experience.

  It happened in his office, beginning on a sofa and ending on the floor. As soon as he took me in his arms and we kissed, we were too eager to wait and go somewhere else. Eager, but not quick. We would have been, had Edward left it to me. But from the start, he took charge, and I happily gave myself up to him. Will and I, from our first time, had followed our impulses about which of us should lead and which follow, who gave and who received. Often I had taken charge, because Will liked that. And we learned together, neither of us the teacher because neither of us knew more than the other – or knew anything much at all, except the basic obvious things. This wasn’t the way with Edward. He knew much more than me and taught me, not just about sex, but a lot about life and people and how the world worked, and I was his admiring student. He knew from doing it. And he taught me by doing it, many things I wanted to know and I couldn’t have learned at school. A great deal of the pleasure I had with Edward was the pleasure of active learning. And I must say, he was a w
onderful teacher: sympathetic, sensitive, generous but strict, never satisfied, always wanting me to learn more, to go further, to push myself. But he was fun too and skilled at knowing when to stop, when to rest, when to let Little C play with him, as if I were his child, he the doting father, me his doting daughter, which I also liked. Sexy daughter with sexy dad, the naughty tug of incest, that taboo desire many women feel and most suppress.

  I was much more shy when it came to undressing the first time than I had been with Will. But Will was my age, and we’d seen each other in gym kit and sports gear and swim-togs. My bikini was skimpier than my undies, except for a thong that I wore for a while because everybody in my year was wearing them, but I stopped when Will said he wasn’t keen and thought I was sexier in briefs. So Will knew what my body looked like before we even got together. In fact he told me that it was while watching me lark about in my gym kit on the school field that he first fancied me. But Edward had never seen me in anything other than full dress, and I was worried he might not like my body when he saw me with nothing on. And he was older, almost as old as my father, and I hadn’t allowed my father to see me naked since I was about ten. (Though, having said that, I didn’t see Edward as old. I saw him as attractively mature and knowledgeable and experienced and strong: all qualities I wanted.)

  But I didn’t have to undress, because Edward wanted to do it for me. Which he did deliberately and slowly, studying me from head to foot after he had removed each item. I could see written on his face the pleasure he took in undoing every button of my top, the hooks of my bra, the zip of my jeans. It made me feel even shyer, but at the same time thrilled me. I felt like a work of art being admired by a connoisseur.