This Is All (62 page)

‘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
askin
g.’

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 wonderful 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.

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
boy
friend, I had a
man
friend. ‘Just feeling good.’ ‘Thank heaven!’ she said. ‘The way you’ve been acting lately, I was sure you were headed for Depressives Anonymous.’