This Is All (15 page)

The day after my kaffeeklatsch with Doris, Dad said he wanted to take me out on Sunday for a special reason. Will had already planned to show me his old-old Tortworth tree, the one that meant so much to him, but Dad said it had to be that day and only Dad and me, couldn’t I put Will off? Will accepted the inevitable with a bad grace. Maybe, he fobbed, he’d take someone else instead. All right then, I said, do. Okay, he said, he would. Don’t talk like that, I said, it frightens me.
Fuckit!
he said. I wish, I wish, I said. Both of us spiteful with frustration.

Some days shift your life into another key or change the beat to faster or slower or begin a new tune. That Sunday, two months after Will and I got together, brought all of those. A shift to a major key, a change to a faster beat, and the beginning of a new tune. I knew it at the time, recorded it at length the day after, remember it vividly still. And want to tell you about it as I remember it rather than as written at the time, because since then I’ve experienced more of life, which has helped me understand better what happened and what it
all
meant
. So this is my story of Father’s day. Snapshots of an outing. A story album.

In his car, Father and I, ten thirty on a November morning, Sunday roads still quiet, sun shining between meringue clouds onto crystal frost sparkling the fields.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Mystery tour,’ Dad said. ‘Journey back in time.’

‘Lordy!’

Nothing more was said for miles. The car radio playing Dad’s kind of music. I wasn’t listening. Dad saving up whatever it was he wanted to say, me still sulking, my mind, as usual, on Will, wanting wanting.

And brooding on the night before. I’d been to a party because Will’s band was playing. I hated it. The girls making up to the boys in the band. Making up to Will. The boys only interested in girls with big boobs and crotch-cut skirts and not those like me with small boobs and sloppy jeans. No possibility of competing or of revenge. Jealousy poisons the soul.

Afterwards, walking me home, Will said, ‘Chavs – they’re a joke.’

‘Not to me,’ said I. ‘Nor the bimbos flashing their big boobs at you.’

We sat in the bus shelter round the corner from our road, repairing the damage. A full moon. No clouds. Blue moonshine.

‘Small boobs,’ Will said, ‘turn me on – I mean
seriously
.’

Later, very late, as I was putting the key in the door, Will said, ‘Write a song for me.’

‘Don’t be stupid!’ said I. ‘I can’t do that!’

‘Look,’ he said. ‘You know why I play with the band? Because I like playing the oboe, sure. But because playing in the band I don’t have to be with everybody else, doing what they’re doing. The girls like me because they think musicians are cool and I play music they like. Mostly, it’s not really my
kind of music. But. I thought if you wrote us a song and I set it. Well … It would be ours. Yours and mine. Our kind. Come on – try,’ he said. ‘Do it for me.’

Do it
for him!
Naked
blackmale!
But how could I
not?

‘No promises,’ said I, with another kiss goodnight before closing the door between us.

When you’re hot for a boy, do they
know
you’d do anything for them and work on that, or is it just an instinct because they are animales? Answer, based on cruel experience since then: It depends on the male. In Will’s case it was quite unconscious. He’d never have asked if he’d
known
what he was doing, he being the least predatory male I’ve ever met. He was all male and yet there was so little ani in him that he was an altogether unlikely male.

Altogether unlikely. But altogether the unlikely boy for me.

Wanting wanting.

Dad stopped at a pub on the edge of a little village.

‘Coffee?’ he said. He was carrying a brown-paper parcel. ‘Too cold to sit outside?’

‘No. Brisk but nice.’

We took our coffee to a table in the garden. There was a long view to the Berkshire downs. Sun shining gold on the escarpment.

Dad put the parcel on the table between us and nudged it a touch towards me.

‘For you.’

Heavy as stone. Inside the wrapping another in deep blue-green tied with crimson tape. An envelope attached, with my name on it. In the envelope a picture postcard. On the back, a message in Dad’s best travel agent’s handwriting, neat, almost print.

To my only & precious daughter

CORDELIA

on her 16 birthday

Many Happy Returns

from your loving

DAD

‘But it isn’t yet. Not for two weeks.’

‘I’ll be away. Freebie to Sardinia. Testing a new package holiday. And today’s another special anniversary. Well, two as a matter of fact. For me, and for you, though you don’t know it yet. So I thought we’d celebrate all three.’

‘What anniversaries?’

‘Patience. One at a time. Your birthday first. That’s the important one. Big day. When you were sweet sixteen. Want to open your present?’

With picky care, I undid the tape and unfolded the wrapping.

Two thick large heavy paperback books, one in lime green, one in cinnamon. Two volumes, but one book.

ALEXANDER

SCHMIDT

SHAKESPEARE

LEXICON

AND

QUOTATION

DICTIONARY

EVERY WORD

DEFINED AND LOCATED,

MORE THAN 50,000

QUOTATIONS IDENTIFIED

in two volumes

Volume I A–M

Volume II N–Z

‘Dad?’

‘Every word old Shaker used is in there, even “a” and “the”. All defined and explained. Many with quotes. And the plays where you’ll find them.’

‘Amazing! Am I ready for this? Maybe too much, even for me.’

‘You’ll grow into it. This guy Schmidt. Apparently a catalogue-brained German in the nineteenth century – a
German
, mind you, not an Englishman – who rated the Shaker so highly he did it as a labour of love. Some labour, some love! I mean, think of it. No computer to help him. Word by word, and the definitions and references and cross references and quotations and god knows what else, all written
by hand
on little cards, I guess, and filed and organised, and cross-referenced, then the whole bloody thing
written out by hand
. Imagine the work.’

‘The time it must have taken.’

‘I mean, it’s one thousand, two hundred and thirty-nine pages altogether. Two columns on every page, print the size you need a microscope to see, just about.’

‘Not quite, Dad. You need your eyes tested.’

‘I know. Bloody middle-age.’

‘Don’t start! … It’s really
something
, isn’t it. Pity you don’t like Shakespeare.’

‘Not exactly my pint of beer. Too verbose.’

‘Did you know he uses the biggest number of individual words of any writer in the English language?’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘Twenty-three thousand. Give or take.’

‘Show-off. Don’t know where you get your liking for him from.’

‘Yes you do. Ms Martin.’

‘Ah, yes! Ms Martin. Bless her pedagogic socks. Teachers have a lot to answer for.’

‘You’re talking about yourself and your teachers, Dad, not about me and Ms Martin.’

‘That so?’

‘You blame Ms Martin for everything I do that you don’t like.’

‘Not everything. Your Aunt Doris mostly.’

‘Doris has always been good to me. And to you. You’d be in a pickle without her. Don’t know what you’ve got against her.’

‘She spoils you.’

‘Anyway.’

‘Anyway!’

‘Thanks thanks thanks for this.’

‘A pleasure.’

‘How did you know about it?’

‘Your old dad isn’t quite as stoopid as you take him for.’

‘
Dad!
Come
on!
Not allowed to be a bore on my non-birthday.’

‘The world wide web is wondrous. Bet old Shakes doesn’t use that word.’

‘Wondrous?’ I looked it up. ‘Yes he does, so there! Forty-five times, by a quick count.’

‘O, god! What have I let myself in for! Now I’ll not be able to say anything without you telling me how many times he uses it and in which plays and quoting the verbose old sod at me. Should have had more sense than to give you such a present to abuse me with.’

‘Won’t. Promise.’

‘Well, stop pawing the damn books. Leave them till later. Thought they might help with your exams.’

‘You’re a real fit wickedeeboo, you know that?’

‘Am I to understand you’re indicating I am a hip cool cat and all round regular groovy guy?’

‘You dig, man!’

Laughing. Both of us.

I leaned over the table to give him a thank-you kiss. He took my head in his hands and kissed me full-blooded on the
lips. Hadn’t done that for months. And something more than just a return of thanks. Shocked me a lot. What had got into him?

Drank some coffee to unkiss my mouth and looked at the view to cover my confusion.

‘You were beautiful from the moment you were born,’ he said. ‘And look more like your mother every day.’

O lordy! If he cries! He used to, whenever he mentioned Mum. He’d kept off the subject for a long time. Self-defence, poor man. There’s something very disturbing about your dad crying. And very touching as well. And if he cried now, I knew I would. And I didn’t want to. Not that day, and not there in the pub garden.

As I write, you move inside me. A kick just then. Are my memories unsettling you too – or amusing you perhaps? It was a happy, not an angry kick. I know you well enough already to know which is which. Are you aware of what goes on in my mind? Does it enter you and become
you
as the food I eat enters you and turns into you? You’ve been inside me more than twenty-eight weeks. After twenty-eight weeks, so I’m told, you can hear sounds from outside and even smell smells, and detect sunlight. What will you be like on your sixteenth birthday? What will your father give you? What will he say? What will I? I plan to give you this book of mine on that important day. What will you think about it? I wonder.

‘Did you look at your card?’ Dad said, lifting it up and holding it out for me to see. ‘The picture.’

‘O!’

‘Like it?’

‘Lovely.’

‘Recognise it?’

‘Dunno. Vaguely familiar.’

‘Come here.’

We got up. He led me to the edge of the garden, where, standing behind me like he used to when I was a little girl, eight or nine, with his hands on my shoulders (but now the top of my head came up to his chin), he said,

‘Look over there … bit more to the left.’

‘O, yes! There it is!’

And there it was. Three or four miles away. Not black on white, as on the postcard, but white on the sun-bleached blond of autumnal grass, galloping along the hillside, the figure cut, I guessed, out of the turf so that the chalk of the downs showed through.

‘The White Horse of Uffington,’ Dad said as if reciting a poem or a holy text. ‘Three hundred and seventy-four feet long, one hundred and ten feet high. And at least three thousand years old. What d’you make of that, eh?’

‘It’s beautiful, Dad. Truly beautiful.’

‘This new boyfriend of yours that you’re so keen on—’

‘He’s called William Blacklin, as you well know.’

‘This
William Blacklin
of yours wants to show you something old that matters to him. Well, today I’m showing you something
really
old that matters to me. And to you. And it’s not some old tree that just happened to grow somewhere. But it’s something man-made that’s survived as long as any of
William Blacklin’s
old trees.’

He kissed the top of my head.

As displacement activity, I said, ‘
Man
made?’

‘Okay, yes. I’d say there were certainly women involved. But we don’t know. It’s prehistoric. No one wrote down how they made it because no one could write in those days.
Didn’t know how. Except … They did. In their own way.’

‘Meaning?’

‘It’s a horse, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘But, at the same time, it isn’t. It makes you
think
of a horse, but
in fact
, it’s just a few, kind of … lines. See what I’m getting at? It’s Michelangelo and Picasso, it’s Raphael and Matisse. It’s representational and it’s abstract. Both at the same time. It’s as old as old and as modern as modern. Yes?’

‘Yes.’

He chuckled. ‘This is not a horse.’

‘So what is it?’

‘A signature.’

‘Someone’s name?’

‘When you were little and painted a picture, can you remember what you always drew on it when you’d finished?’

‘My name?’

‘Your name, Cordelia, in big letters. The biggest thing in the picture sometimes. All little kids do that when they draw pictures. They want everybody to know that they made them.’

‘And you think whoever made the Uffington horse – what did you say? – three thousand years ago? – were kind of signing their name on the hillside?’

‘The signature not of one person but of a people. We are the horse people. This is our place.’