This Is All (94 page)

Arry came to a celebration supper on our first night (takeaway Chinese, because I wasn’t cooking for guests till I’d got used to the van’s minimalist equipment). D&D joined us afterwards, bringing a ‘caravan-warming’ present of a portable tv and a DVD player. Will’s brother, his wife and their children, Patsy, four, and Fiona, three, visited us before the meal. They seemed genuinely pleased to have us there. (‘The van is better when it’s lived in. It gets damp standing empty,’ they said.) I liked the kids and they liked me (in the weeks that followed, I baby-sat a few times to give their parents a night out). And Will struck a deal with his brother: in exchange for looking after the garden we would live in the van rent and electricity free.

Four weeks later we’d settled into a steady routine. I missed my room and the space of D&D’s house more than I dared tell Will. I knew I had to give us a chance and was determined to try hard. But I had plenty of excuses to go back to what I still thought of as home every day. I studied there while Will was hunting for jobs, or investigating one tree or another as part of a research project he’d started at college and continued (with a little help from his Cambridge hero) so that he could keep up his studies. There was the laundry to be done, for which we used D&D’s washing machine. And the caravan didn’t have a piano of course, so I had to go to D&D’s to practise; Will would regularly join me for oboe and piano duets; and because we were often there practising in the early evening after his work, D&D would invite us to stay for supper. Very quickly, the caravan became little more than an annexe. Will and I slept and ate in it, and stayed there
when we wanted to be alone together. But we were at D&D’s most days and used it as a second base. So once again I had two rooms in two homes. Or rather, three, because I went to Julie’s two or three times a week and at weekends for meditation and for our Open University mutual tutorials.

Eight days after delivering the Tree Care leaflets Will landed his first job. It was nothing spectacular nor required much expertise – trimming an overgrown hedge and pruning some bushes and fruit trees for an old man who’d had a stroke and couldn’t manage any longer – but it was our first paid job, and like all firsts, the excitement of it added a special lustre to its mundanity. It also paid our food bill for two weeks.

The second job came two days later. A big tree in a garden had a branch broken in the wind but hadn’t come off. The owner was afraid it would fall and hurt someone. Will needed Arry’s help. As the owner didn’t want to keep the lopped-off branch, disposing of it was part of the job. Will and Arry sawed it into logs and sold them as firewood, which earned enough to pay Arry’s wage, leaving the income from the pruning for us. Result: enough to cover our outgoings for another two weeks.

Job number three came not from our leaflet but from the best advertising agent: word of mouth. The old man who gave us our first job had recommended us to a neighbour. It involved removing a large dead tree and clearing up the debris. Arry was needed again. But there were unexpected complications. Will had to hire a special piece of equipment, the work took longer than estimated and he needed a pickup to get rid of the debris. Even with the sale of the wood, the total cost, including Arry’s wages, resulted in a loss. We had to pay out more than we earned. A lesson learned the hard way. Doris made us sit down with her and review our charges and Will’s method of estimating the cost of a job. Like many people starting out self-employed, he was charging too little,
because he was afraid he’d not get work if he charged too much. He was also under-estimating the time jobs would take, because he’d forgotten to include such items as the time of travelling to and from the sites and of clearing up when he’d finished, and the need for extra help.

And we did lose two jobs after putting our charges up, because customers didn’t like the cost. But D&D stiffened our resolve, and after two weeks of nothing, the fourth job came in. It was the kind Will wanted. He’d spotted a copse attached to a large house on the edge of town. It hadn’t been managed for years. He went to see the owner and explained to him the benefits of getting the copse back in good shape, the cost of doing it and what could be done to make it pay for itself. The owner agreed and gave Will the job. It would take two months and need both Will and Arry. We were cock-a-hoop, Will most of all, because he’d taken the initiative instead of waiting for the work to come to him. And this time the costing was right.

While he was working on this job another came in. The owner of big house wanted to turn the field in front of his house into park land, planting trees and shrubs to a design he’d devised himself. He needed the help of someone with specialist knowledge. Will was interviewed for a whole day. If he got the job he would be the project manager, meaning he would buy the plants and oversee the work of clearance and planting – enough work to occupy himself, Arry and a couple of labourers – and organise equipment and transport. Will and Doris spent the weekend costing the work and writing a detailed estimate. It was really too big a job for someone so young and inexperienced but Will was determined to try. He went through the estimate and his plan for the work with the client on the Monday and was offered the job. It was a triumph and at last, Will said, he felt like a professional tree man. The first phase would take a month of full-time work. There’d be two more phases during the coming six months.

Dad and Doris took us out to dinner in a country pub as a celebration. ‘Typical Will,’ Dad said to me when Will went off to the loo at the end of the evening. ‘You’re lucky to have him. He’s the sort who always falls on his feet.’

‘And deserves to,’ said Doris, with a passion that surprised me.

I felt a touch jealous. So I was lucky to have Will? Wasn’t Will lucky to have me? He would always fall on his feet, while I – what? Fell on my bum, even if I managed to stand up long enough? I knew Dad was right, and agreed with Doris. But I wanted to land on my feet too and to be told I deserved it, whereas what I felt I was doing was playing second fiddle and filling in time till I knew what I wanted to do, apart, that is, from being Will’s lover and helpmeet and guardian of his soul. Because what D&D didn’t know and I didn’t tell them was that confident, talented, clever, inevitably successful William Blacklin suffered bouts of self-doubt and anxiety, usually in the dark reaches of the night, when I had to bolster his self-esteem and boost his self-belief and pump the energy back into him that he’d lost because his work hadn’t gone perfectly to plan or he was dissatisfied with progress or a client had said something that had upset him. I learned this during the first weeks of our full-time living together, though I’d had hints of it during the time when we were lovers at school but had thought it was only ‘adolescent growing pains’ like my own. Now I realised it was something much more deep-seated, something ingrained in Will’s make-up.

I remember discussing it with Julie after the first couple of bouts, because they frightened me and I wasn’t sure how to handle them. She explained that it wasn’t unusual in strong creative perfectionists like Will. The heights of their ups are matched by the depths of their downs. And the best thing I could do to help was support him through his downs like a life raft.

‘He needs to know he’s loved and he needs to be listened to and to know his doubts are accepted.’

‘How, though? What do I have to do?’

‘Listen. Just keep listening. You’re a good listener, Cordelia. You’ll do all right. And keep reminding him of the good things, but don’t press them too hard. Help him to measure his successes by his failures. Don’t deny them or dismiss them, just help him to accept them. And if he won’t, then you have to accept them on his behalf. It’s part of the price you both pay for his perfectionism.’

‘It’s very hard. I didn’t think it would be quite as hard as it is.’

‘You’ve taken on a handful, that’s for sure.’

‘Dad says I’m lucky to have him.’

‘You are. Would you prefer someone nice and easy and no trouble?’

‘And mediocre and boring.’

‘Exactly. And if it’s any consolation, you’re just as much a handful as he is.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Believe me, I know.’

‘Have I ever been a handful for you?’

‘Now and then. And don’t ask for examples or this will turn into one of those yes-you-did, no-I-didn’t conversations that get nowhere. Just think back over the past year and a half.’

‘Yes, okay.’ I laughed. ‘But they were growing pains.’

‘And you’re still growing and there’ll be more pains. It never stops, truth to tell. How’s the sex?’

‘What? O, yes! Good. Very good. It’s one department where I know more than Will. Edward was some use after all.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. And you’re managing for money?’

‘At the moment.’

‘At the moment is good enough. So what’s the problem, apart from Will’s downs?’

‘I don’t know. Will and I are getting on fine. His work is
doing well, he’s studying hard, he says he’s never been as happy as he is now. I’m busy as well, I like living with Will, and I like what I’m doing. But I don’t seem to be getting anywhere. I seem to be all over the place. And I don’t mean geographically, though I’ll be glad when we have a house of our own. What I mean is I feel all over the place inside myself.’

Julie went into meditation mode. I sat still and waited, well used to this. She was looking tired. I wished I could help her in some way. Since Will and I set up together, I hadn’t been giving her the kind of attention I used to. How hard it is, I realised, to love someone totally as I knew by now I loved Will, and to love a friend as much as I loved Julie. How do you balance two different essential loves and lovers?

When she opened her eyes, Julie said, ‘Order and discipline.’

‘Lordy! Sounds like school.’

‘Sounds but isn’t. I think I’d better write it down for you. But you don’t need it. You’re doing wonderfully well. Truly.’

‘Thanks. I feel better for talking to you. As always. Is there anything I can do for you?’

‘Stay close.’

‘I will.’

‘And if you’re going shopping, bring me a bag of oranges.’

‘Done.’

Order and Discipline
. Cordelia: This is what I came up with while we were discussing your worries this afternoon. I don’t know if it will be any use to you. It probably seems a bit abstract. But you know how it is with meditation. We come up with all sorts of things that make no sense until they’ve had a chance to sink into our minds. So perhaps if you let this sink in, it might eventually come back to the surface and bring some practical sense with it.

Many people (not least teachers) confuse Order and
Discipline. They treat them as synonyms. But they aren’t. They do not mean the same. It was when I was thinking of becoming a nun that I learned from studying the great monks and nuns the difference between the two. Then, when I started to study literature seriously, I discovered that the great writers and artists also understood
the difference
and
the relationship
between order and discipline.

Order is the arrangement of behaviour.

The etymological root of discipline is disciple, which has the same root as teaching. Therefore, discipline has to do with discipleship and with teaching.

The discipline of monks and nuns comprises their religious beliefs and their total devotion to God and the work of God, as they understand it.

Their discipline is expressed by the way they order their lives; that is, by the arrangement of their behaviour into three main activities:

first, worship (prayer, meditation, the ritual services in church that they call ‘the offices’);

second, study (intellectual work);

third, physical work of some kind (often manual work in the fields or gardens, or craft work like pottery).

And each day they have a period of recreation, half an hour to an hour, when they relax together.

When a monk or nun has a period of doubt or uncertainty about their belief or their vocation, which they all do from time to time, it is by strictly following the order of their daily life, however dull and boring it may seem, that they get through and that saves them from going to pieces.

Discipline is the core of their life, order saves them from losing it.

The great writers and artists do the same, though less obviously. You’re studying George Eliot’s
Middlemarch
for the nineteenth-century literature unit of your Open University degree. We studied Virginia Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse
for your
exam last year. So you know that their discipline – their vocation, if you like – was literature. Writing wasn’t just a pastime or a hobby or a way of earning a living or achieving fame. It was the point, the purpose – the discipline – of their lives. And reading was part of their way of life, not an optional extra, but an essential. The way they ordered their daily lives, the way they arranged them, so that they could maintain their discipline however they felt, happy or unhappy, well or ill, was very like the way nuns order theirs. They usually wrote their books in the morning – their form of worship. They often took exercise by walking or gardening or cooking or whatever in the afternoon – their form of manual work. In the evening and at other times they read – seriously, for study. And they relaxed by meeting friends for dinner or going to the theatre or a concert.

Not all the great writers and artists lived as neatly as that, but when you look closely, you see that they arranged their lives, however roughly, into that kind of pattern. Which is why they often produced some of their best work during the most difficult times in their lives. Take the late quartets and the last four piano sonatas of Beethoven, which you and Will are studying. As you know, they are regarded as among his finest achievements. But in the years when he wrote them at the end of his life he was almost stone deaf, was physically ill, and was suffering huge emotional upsets. It was his belief in his vocation as a composer that allowed him to write such sublime music; it was the order of his daily life that got him through. His belief wouldn’t have been enough without the order that kept him grounded and focused. But order itself, order without discipline, produces nothing and is merely a mechanical way to get through life. It’s no more use than the bars in a jail; it imprisons you.