This Is All (98 page)

Which should have been no surprise. For me, writing is always hard work. But your mother loved writing for its own sake and for the pleasure of doing it. She
needed
to write. She used to say she wrote because she had to and read because she wanted to; that she wrote to live and lived to read. But though I often saw her reading, curled up in her chair, usually with one leg tucked under the other and holding the book in her lap, I rarely saw her writing. I don’t mean shopping lists and emails and everyday things. But never her poems and stories, never her pillow book and private letters. When she was writing these she protected her seclusion fiercely. She would be very ratty indeed if anyone intruded, even if by accident. For her, writing was the most intimate and private of all occupations. She compared it to talking to herself in her head, and she didn’t want anyone – not even me – to see her doing it or to know what she was saying until she was ready to reveal it.

Writing was so much part of her nature that she often wrote to me about something important before she would talk to me about it. There were occasions, for example, when waking in the morning, your mother lying beside me, I would find a letter in an envelope on my bedside table, placed there during the night while I was asleep. Or I would arrive home, and a typed or handwritten page headed
WILL
in large red letters was waiting for me on the kitchen table, with a pebble she’d picked up somewhere or a flower or a bottle of beer or whatever took her fancy used as a paperweight.

When I read anything she has written I always feel I am meeting the real Cordelia. There is something of her deepest self behind the words – under the words – conveyed by the
words – held in the words – I don’t know how to express it – that amazes and captivates and – yes! – arouses me. She would have called this presence her soul – the essence of herself. And this is the Cordelia I was and still am in love with.

Because the boxes contained many pages from what your mother called her pillow book, I named them Pillow Boxes. I assumed she had told no one but me of their existence, and I told no one. After my first reading, I hid them in a locked wooden case I made specially for the purpose. Not a week has gone by since then without my reading umpteen pages again, most often in the middle of the night, when grief returns full blast and the longing for your mother is torture.

O lordy! – to use your mother’s favourite exclamation – it’s taken me three hours to write the above.

You might well ask why, if I dislike writing so much, I’m writing this. There are several reasons. Because I need to tell you why your mother’s book is like it is. Because I want you to know what happened to us after she died. Because I want to record this before time and memory blur the edges and sentimentalise its rawness. And one more reason: Julie suggested that writing about your mother might be cathartic. I’m sure Cordelia would have agreed.

But I’ve had enough for now. I need a break.

I think I should begin by telling you about the weeks after your mother’s death so that you will understand what happened to her book and why it is like it is.

When Cordelia died we were all plunged into deep shock. Your grandfather Kenn collapsed when he heard the news. It
was weeks before he could function properly again. Doris looked after him, night and day, and somehow managed despite her own grief to oversee each of their businesses sufficiently to keep them going, though only with a lot of help from the staff. She said that looking after George got her through the crisis, but a year later, when George had recovered enough to function again, she suffered for her stoicism and had to take three months off work while she got herself back into shape.

As I’ve told you, in the days after the funeral, as the initial shock wore off, I steeled myself against expressing my grief and buried myself in work.

As for you, not yet six months old and deprived of your mother, I couldn’t look after you on my own, and work at the same time. Julie and Arry helped me.

They were both shattered by your mother’s death. But Julie has a fatalistic and practical view of life – what is is and life must go on whatever it is. I know she suffered as much as anyone, but on the day of your mother’s death, George and Doris and I were in such a state that she took care of you. We regarded this as a temporary solution to get us through until we could reorganise our lives.

For two days after Cordelia’s death Arry sobbed his heart out, then pulled himself together and coped by looking after me and dealing with our Tree Care clients. For convenience’ sake, he moved in with me, and did the domestic chores. Whenever he could, he helped Julie by looking after you while she did what she had to for her own welfare.

You lived with Julie because that saved us from carrying everything you needed to and from her house and ours every day. We also thought it least likely to disturb you. We had no idea how the loss of your mother would affect you, and we all agreed it was best that you were in a settled home with a woman you knew well and who loved you. I made sure you saw me every day at the times you were used to seeing me,
in the morning before I went to work and every evening when I played with you and helped to bath you and put you to bed.

To do this, Julie took time off from school. Because your mother was well known there, everyone sympathised and there was no problem. A supply teacher was engaged and some of Julie’s colleagues called in after school and at weekends to bring her work to mark and to see if there was anything they could do.

Three weeks went by. We knew by then that George and Doris couldn’t help. George was in too bad a condition and Doris was too busy looking after him and their businesses. We decided to try day care, with Julie and Arry and me taking turns to look after you in the evening. You responded badly to this and we hated it. You cried endlessly, wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t go to sleep unless Julie or I held you. We were so upset by the end of the second week we knew we couldn’t go on that way.

It’s not putting it too strongly to say that you made the decision. By the Sunday afternoon, the three of us were at the end of our tether, exhausted by the worry, the anxiety, the endless discussion about what to do, and the debilitating undercurrent of grief. We were lying on the floor in Julie’s front room, with you on cushions in the middle like the hub of a wheel, when you looked at Julie and smiled and held out your arms to her.

We made the
oh ah
noises adults seem to produce at such times, then looked at each other with suddenly grim faces as the significance hit us.

‘That does it,’ Julie said. ‘No more day care. No more taking turns. I’m looking after her full time.’

Arry said, ‘Great.’ I said, ‘You can’t. What about your job?’ Julie said, ‘I’m leaving. As of now.’ ‘You can’t,’ I said. ‘How will you live?’

Julie launched into a riff. She began by pointing out that I
had been earning enough for Cordelia to stay at home with you. Now I’d have to pay for day care, so why not pay her for doing the same job and doing it better? We could try it for a year and see how it went. She could go on working for her PhD. Looking after you wouldn’t prevent that. She could earn a bit more by taking a few pupils for private tutoring – there were always people who wanted that for their children. Also, she pointed out, I’d need someone to do the office work Cordelia used to do for Tree Care. That would cost money. Why shouldn’t she do it? We’d get by well enough. Money wasn’t the problem. The problem was ensuring your welfare and your happiness. She loved you, she said, loved you as her own; you were Cordelia’s daughter and she had loved Cordelia as her own as well. So why not keep it in the family? The family Cordelia had made – of me and Arry and her.

She was more passionate by the time she finished than I had ever seen her. She wept then, too, her grief coming out after weeks of suppressing it while she helped me cope.

I couldn’t say no. I had to accept there was no better solution in the circumstances.

As for Arry, he muttered his agreement with every point Julie made and by the end was smiling the self-satisfied smile of someone who had thought this all along.

The days after that I think of as the time when we tidied up, pulled ourselves together, and began to live fairly normal lives again. Julie’s resignation from her school took effect from the end of that term. To keep everything as convenient as possible, I moved into her house, using her spare bedroom. Arry worked with me full time – we were offered more jobs than we could accept – and though he continued lodging with Doris and George he might as well have been living with us, as he would have had there been room.

And you? With all the love and attention you were receiving you thrived. That you were so happy gave us the heart to pick ourselves up and go on. You made us smile. You restored
us. You gave us a purpose. Eventually you spoke your first word. You called Julie Mamma. It was an acknowledgement of something we knew, of course: that by then you took her for your mother. You were too young to know otherwise. We have often talked of when we should tell you and how. You are nearly three years and a half. You go to preschool playgroup three afternoons a week. Julie didn’t return to teaching after a year, as we thought she would; she’s a Doctor of Philosophy now and works at home, doing exactly what she said she’d do: tutoring private pupils, dealing with the office work of Tree Care, and – her new project after gaining her PhD – researching and writing the biography of a lesser-known poet whose work she admires.

There’s only one more thing to tell you before I continue with the story of Cordelia’s book. Once things settled down it became clear that we needed somewhere bigger than Julie’s little house. We needed a room each for you, for Julie and for me. And one for Arry if he came to live with us, which we all wanted. This is when my father stepped in.

So far, I haven’t mentioned my parents, your grandfather and grandmother Blacklin. I’ll have to now. My father arranged and conducted Cordelia’s funeral. I wasn’t sure this was right; I thought he should allow one of his staff to do it. But he insisted; he said he owed it to Cordelia. It was then that I found out how deeply he too felt about her.

It’s customary during a funeral for the undertaker to wait with the underbearers at the back of the church or the crematorium after he has seen the coffin and the mourners to their places, and then to come forward after the service and accompany the chief mourners to the cars for their journey home. After my father led us in, he went to the back as usual, even though he was officially one of the mourners. But at the
end of the service he didn’t come forward to see us out. One of the underbearers did that. When we reached the cars and he still hadn’t turned up, I asked my brother to go home with Doris and George, and asked the hearse driver to wait till I found my father and then to drive us back.

Dad was in the lavatory, weeping. I’d never seen him weep before, not in the whole of my life. He was so upset during the service that he left the crematorium, intending to wait outside till it was over. But as soon as he was out of the chapel he started to cry uncontrollably, and not knowing where else to go to be out of sight, he went into the washroom and locked himself in one of the lavatories. I persuaded him to come out and helped him pull himself together, and had to make sure everyone had gone before he’d come outside.