This Is All

by Aidan Chambers

  When at last I was naked, Edward, kneeling a few feet away, gazing at me, asked me to turn slowly round, so he could see all of me, front and back and sides.

  I turned once, shyly, coyly, my arms across my chest, my hands holding my shoulders, hiding my breasts.

  ‘Again,’ Edward said, when I’d turned full circle. ‘With brio. Be proud of yourself. You’re beautiful.’

  I held my arms out a little, stood straight, looked him firmly in the eyes, and turned again.

  He twirled his hand.

  I turned again. This time, with growing confidence. I began to enjoy displaying myself, and smiled, and Edward was smiling, and I turned again, and again, each time playing up the game of showing myself off. And as I did so I heard Edward sigh in a way I recognised, because I had sighed like that the first time I saw Will naked and was overwhelmed by his beauty and by the thought that he was offering himself, offering his beauty to me.

  There is something unspeakable, something beyond the power of words to describe beauty, or to explain that this is your kind of beauty – beauty that is, whatever anyone else may think of it, the beauty that is yours because it is everything you wish for and wish it to be.

  When looking at me was no longer enough Edward undressed himself, urgently this time, his back to me, yanking off his clothes carelessly, desperate to be out of them. I remember thinking it was funny the way he flung his clothes off and stumbled a step or two when he was tugging off his shoes and socks so that he had to hang on to his desk to stay upright.

  I had never seen a mature man in the nude – well, I had of course on tv and in films, but not a man in the flesh who was about to have sex with me – which rather changes the way you look at him. When Edward was naked, I remember feeling almost shocked by his bulk. Not that he was fat, or even flabby, not at all. His body was fit and taut and deliciously moulded. He ran every day and worked out at a gym three times a week and ate healthily. What I mean is that his body was so solid, so dense, compared with Will’s. There was just so much more of Edward. And I instantly ‘felt’ him on me in a kind of premonition of his weight and strength, and this is what shocked me.

  When he turned to face me again, his penis was erect, thicker, longer than Will’s. Another gasp of shock and a touch of fright. I wanted to hold it, caress it, inspect it close up. And very much wanted it inside me. My eyes scanned the bush of hair around it, blacker and thicker than Will’s, and travelled the river of hair that channelled my gaze up his body to where it spread over his chest. I wanted to stroke my fingers through it and feel the texture of his skin and the bulk of his muscles. And then I saw his face, watching closely my reaction to him, and smiling, his eyes eager and bright.

  I twirled my hand, as he had twirled his at me, and said, ‘Now you.’

  And laughing, he turned, slowly, aping my showing-off, which made me laugh too, and I thought to myself again, This is what I want. His manness. And as I thought this, Edward came to me and—

  And o, it’s impossible to write of these things without being silly or embarrassing or pornographic. So why do I try? Why does anyone try, as people do all the time? I suppose, because sex, and making love, and most of all Love itself, are so important that we cannot help trying again and again to record them in words, because words are as essential to our lives as beauty and sex and love. But it’s the art of the impossible. The only description worth anything is doing them. Which is why I thought I needed Edward to teach me essential things, things which cannot be learned in school nor from books.

  17

  That’s how my affair with Edward began. Now it’s over I don’t regret it. Had things turned out differently, as Edward wanted them to, I’m sure I would be regretting it bitterly. We judge our actions by their consequences more than by any other standard. Happiness surfs on hindsight.

  For a few weeks afterwards Edward was like the antidote to a sickness. I was in a constant state of excitement. I glowed. The pride of conquest. I told no one. Secrecy quickened the thrill. But everyone noticed.

  ‘You’re bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,’ Dad said. ‘Am I?’ said I.

  Doris gave me a knowing look. ‘Has something happened?’ she asked. ‘Not a new boyfriend by any chance?’ ‘No, no,’ I said and was not lying. I didn’t have a new boyfriend, I had a manfriend. ‘Just feeling good.’ ‘Thank heaven!’ she said. ‘The way you’ve been acting lately, I was sure you were headed for Depressives Anonymous.’

  Julie was watchful but kept her distance until she asked, ‘All well?’ as I went by her after a lesson. ‘Yes, thanks,’ I replied, unable to look her in the eye.

  There’s something I should explain, in case I’ve misled you. When I went to Edward to have sex with him, I didn’t have anything more in mind. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it, to comfort myself for the loss of Will. I wanted to feel wanted. But I didn’t mean to go further than that. Not a one-night stand; I did expect we’d have sex now and then when we felt like it, but nothing more. I assumed Edward would think of it as a pleasant fling with a girl he fancied, no strings attached. Hardly more than taking me out for a meal. I knew I wasn’t in love with him. I admired him, and wanted to learn from him, and enjoyed being with a mature man who liked looking after me and teaching me. But that was all. And what was wrong with that? I asked myself. You hear about people playing around all the time, don’t you? Dad used to, for a start. Why shouldn’t I have the same kind of fun? Wasn’t it part of growing up? Will and I weren’t together any more, and he had Hannah, so why not?

  Every morning when I woke an email was waiting, sent late the night before. At first, they were a patchwork of bits and pieces he’d written during the day in breaks from his work: funny stories about himself; serious chatter about a painting or a piece of music or an item in the news or a new scientific discovery and things he wanted me to know about; silly jokes – the sillier the better; angry grumbles about people who annoyed him – politicians, ignorant clients, planning officials; elaborate slapstick riffs that he improvised as he wrote, turning them into surreal comic adventures, beginning with something as simple as making himself a cup of tea; purple passages about the beauty of my body written in high-flown prose that mocked itself; poems he liked; pictures inserted into the text, sometimes deliberately distorted to make them ridiculous. His morning emails were not lovey-dovey letters; I didn’t want them to be. I liked them precisely because they weren’t the clichés of romantic splurge, but were more special than that, were full of fun and interest, were for me only, and were the proof I wanted that he thought about and desired me all day long.

  Before I got dressed I’d reply, always teasing and joshing him, but also telling him things about me I knew he wanted to know – how I was feeling, what I was thinking, things I wanted him to explain to me, or wanted him to do for me. (He’d often say, ‘What shall I do for you today, my sweet Cordelia? What would you like? You’ve no idea how much pleasure it gives me to do things for you.’) During the day we’d text each other and arrange to meet, using our secret code, such as C67530, which meant I’d come to his office (67 High Street) at five-thirty, and SYP7, which meant he’d pick me up in his car (a top of the range black Saab) from ‘Your Place’ at seven – a bus stop round the corner out of sight of our house, convenient for a quick getaway without much chance of being spotted. If I wasn’t there, the plan was he would circle the block and try again twice more. If I still wasn’t there, he’d go without me. The first time I missed, because Dad insisted on talking about something to do with school, left both Edward and me in such a frustrated tizz for the rest of the evening that we altered our routine to include a text message ten minutes before pick-up to confirm everything was still okay, and a call from the bus stop if I wasn’t there when he arrived. I revelled in all this secret-service clandestine-lover nonsense so much that twice I deliberately didn’t turn up just for the thrill. I didn’t tell Edward that of course. But the second time he blew his top – he hated things not workin
g as planned; no tolerance for lateness or messing up – and wanted to change everything. It was quite a job to cool him off and get him to stick to the same arrangement till it went wrong again, which I made sure it didn’t.

  Every time we met, Edward was as eager as he had been the first time. Saturdays, when I was supposed to be working for him, became a feast of pleasure. He’d always have a surprise for me (jewellery, clothes, a book, a silly toy, a pretty notebook, special food), and something to show me (a magazine article, a video to look at together, something he’d bought for himself and wanted me to approve). And always our sex, tempestuous sometimes, coddling and gentle sometimes, light and frivolous sometimes, experimental sometimes with a new position or a technique we’d not tried before. He was inventive and skilled and funny. It was from Edward that I learned about the region in Africa where they called making love ‘laughing together’. We did a lot of laughing together and laughed a lot when doing it.

  All in all Edward was wonderful to be with. And I blossomed. There is nothing so healing, nothing that makes you feel so good as the hungry appreciation of a well-tuned lover, who tells you exactly what you need to hear about yourself and means it. I was getting everything I wanted. Being totally spoilt in fact. And that obliterated my jealous thoughts of Will, except for the occasional (frequent, if I’m honest) in-the-night pangs of longing. I learned a lot from Edward. But I taught myself the most valuable lesson, which was this:

  Nothing is real until it is imagined.

  I said I learned this by myself, which isn’t quite true. I don’t believe we ever learn anything entirely by ourselves. The thought came to me during a meditation, and I talked it through afterwards with Julie. So I ought to have said that I learned this by myself with a little help from a friend. And I’d better explain what it means. Suppose all the information known to the human race was entered into a computer. You could say the computer was better informed than any human being. But could you say it was cleverer? Or wiser? Would it be able to do things and think things no human being could do or think? No, it couldn’t. It would still be just a dumb machine. Why? Because it can’t select items of information from the data stored in it, and combine them together and ‘make something of them’ – perhaps something no one has ever thought or done before. It can’t do that because a computer has no imagination.

  So what is the imagination? Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834, author of one of our greatest poems, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, and friend of William Wordsworth, who wouldn’t have been half the poet he was without the help of Coleridge) defined the imagination as a magical and synthetic property.

  It’s magical because no one has ever been able to explain how it works, and no scientist has ever been able to locate it in the brain (in the way they have located where our senses of smell and sight and touch and taste and hearing are located).

  It’s synthetic because it synthesises, selecting bits of information that do not seem to have anything to do with each other, combines them, like a cook combining the ingredients of a cake, and produces a thought we haven’t had before, for example, or a new idea, or a new solution to a problem. Until we can do that we’re just dumb computers. And only when we do that do we understand what is ‘real’.

  Think of a stone or a flower or a caterpillar. Does a stone know it’s a stone? Does a flower know it’s a flower? Does a caterpillar know it’s a caterpillar? Does a stone know that the flower growing beside it is a flower? Does the flower know that the caterpillar eating its leaves is a caterpillar? And does the caterpillar know that the stone it crawled over and the flower it is eating are a stone and a flower? No, I don’t think they do. To know what they are, they have to imagine what they are, and I don’t believe stones and flowers and caterpillars can do that. We are what we imagine ourselves to be. Other people are what we imagine them to be.

  We only know what we are and what life is because we can imagine it. In that sense it’s true that we ourselves and everybody else, everything in the world, everything in the entire universe, all of life itself, is only what it is, is only real, because it has been imagined. Some people call this super-universal imagination God. And maybe they are right.

  Ergo: Nothing is real, nothing exists, until we have imagined it.

  And what has this to do with Edward and me?

  I’d imagined what I wanted from him and what an affair that gave me what I wanted would be like. And for a while, that was how it was. It was a reality. But I hadn’t allowed myself to imagine what it might be that wasn’t what I wanted.

  Nothing in life stays the same. Everything changes, sometimes so slowly we aren’t aware of it, sometimes so dramatically we can’t help noticing. After a while, I began to notice details I hadn’t before, and Edward began to behave in ways he hadn’t so far. Some of these details were trivial; they wouldn’t have meant anything by themselves. But some bothered me so much I couldn’t help worrying about them. And when enough of them had lodged in my mind my imagination combined them into a reality I didn’t like and didn’t want.

  This is how it came about.

  Edward liked walking and I liked walking with him, holding hands, or his arm round my shoulders and my arm round his waist, my hand tucked into the back pocket of his trousers so that I could feel his bum, and talking as we walked, and now and then, when the impulse dictated, stopping to kiss. We liked walking at night as much as in the day, which was just as well, because it was winter and many of our secret meetings were in the evening after dark. During our affair we had three clandestine weekends together. One in London, one in the Derbyshire Peaks, and one – the last one – by the sea at Eastbourne. It was during our second weekend while we were walking in the hills that I noticed we weren’t walking together but in single file, me in front. And the thought flitted through my head that this hadn’t happened before. We’d always walked side-by-side, and if there wasn’t room for both of us, we’d get past that part quickly so that we could walk linked together again. That day the path was wide enough but we were strolling along in single file, saying nothing. We hadn’t had a row or even a minor difference of opinion, and I couldn’t remember how it happened that we weren’t walking together. Had I let go of Edward and walked ahead, or had he let go of me and dropped behind? As soon as the thought occurred I stopped, Edward came alongside, we joined hands and walked on, and I thought no more about it.

  In the evening of that same Saturday we went to a movie. Edward was mad about movies. He particularly liked the ones from the 1940s and 50s. He’d shown me quite a few of his favourites on video or DVD in his office (though after about half an hour most of them were merely an accompaniment to our ‘laughing together’, so my knowledge is all beginnings and no ends). He could talk about them for hours, the stars, the directors, the stories, the techniques.

  During the day while we walked in the hills, he’d talked a lot about the film we were to see that night. It was a remake of a 1940s film, Double Indemnity, I think. Usually we sat hitched together, his hand on my thigh, mine on his, or holding hands, or my leg over his, or his arm round my shoulders, whatever, we were never apart. That evening I got bored with the film about halfway through (to be honest, I’m not that keen a film fan) and came to, as you do at such times, like coming out of a dream, when you’re suddenly aware of everything around you, and I realised I was leaning away from Edward, my hands clasped in my lap. He was holding my thigh just above the knee, which I had always liked but this time his hand felt unpleasantly hot, sweaty even, and I wished he’d remove it.

  This so startled me I began thinking about why I should feel like that, and I remembered our separated walk earlier, and for the rest of the film I went back over the past few weeks, remembering – re-membering – putting together again in my imagination the thoughts and feelings I’d had about Edward and what he’d done that I’d not allowed myself to take notice of till now.

  For a start, his overnight emails had changed. They were less and less anthol
ogies of fun and ideas and anecdotes and had become more and more those lovey-dovey clichés I didn’t want.

  Next, he started calling on my mobile in the middle of the night, like one or two in the morning.

  Call Number One, the night before Valentine’s Day: ‘Hi, it’s me. Come to your window.’ Edward’s car at our front gate. He got out and held up a large white placard onto which he shone a torch so that I could read written on it in red. I laughed and opened my window and waved. He got back into his car, said, ‘Nighty-night, my Valentine. See you tomorrow,’ and drove off. I’d laughed, but afterwards, thinking about it as I lay in bed trying to get back to sleep, it didn’t seem funny but the kind of thing laddish boys would do. Immature. Not like Edward at all. So why had I laughed? Not because it was funny but because you do sometimes when people behave stupidly. A nervous, embarrassed reaction. Why did I wave? Because I wanted him to go away. I excused him by telling myself he’d meant it as a joke, a send-up of teeny romance.

  Call Number Two, a couple of weeks later: ‘Hi, it’s me. Come for a drive.’ Of course, I knew he meant a drive to his office for some laughing together.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s too late. I’ve some tests tomorrow.’

  ‘Just for an hour. You’ll sleep better afterwards.’

  ‘Honest. I shouldn’t.’

  ‘I’ll count three, then I’m going to blow my horn till you say yes.’

  I knew he would. So I said, ‘All right, you fool!’ pulled on some jeans and a top, crept out of the house and joined him. And yes, it was fun because it was naughty, but I was uneasy about it as well. Not for doing it, but because of Edward, how he was. As I told you, our sex had been tempestuous sometimes. But it was never out of control. It had always seemed like a game. That night for the first time, I felt frightened. I hadn’t experienced anything like it. Edward became so intense, so unrestrained, so urgent, so powerful, that I was afraid he might lose control and hurt me. I remember taking hold of his head with both hands and saying, ‘Don’t hurt me! Don’t forget I’m here! Don’t forget it’s me!’ Which brought him to himself again, he eased off, stroked my face, kissed me, said, ‘I’m sorry. I won’t. I won’t hurt you. It’s okay. It’s just, I love you so much.’