His confidence and energy rubbed off on me, and his excitement about what we were doing made leaving school easier than it would have been otherwise. There were the usual leavers’ high jinks followed by lakes of sentimentality and cataracts of tears on the last day, especially at final assembly, during the inevitable singing of ‘God be with you till we meet again’, followed by gift-giving and over-the-top goodbyes to favoured teachers. As my mind was already on Will and our plans, and as I wasn’t saying goodbye to my favoured teacher, my own plunge into the emotional wallow was more sympathetic vibration with my departing friends than heartfelt regret. School had been good to me, I’d enjoyed it on the whole, it had brought me friendships and Julie and Will and my love of reading and writing and my desire to study. It might seem mean of me to leave it with so little sorrow, but I think perhaps I’m always more affected and emotional by beginnings than I am by endings. Once I accept that something is finished I let it go without upset and get on with the next thing. Endings have only the weight of the past in them. But beginnings carry such a weight of decision – this route not that, this choice not that – and such a weight of possibilities that they cause me far more excitement and far more anxiety than giving up something that has had its day.
Leaving school did bring to a head another end. In the days after my last day at school, the desire to set up my own home grew stronger and stronger. So for two weeks after I left, Will and I concentrated on setting up Tree Care, and finding a place for us to live.
Scene Three
Conceiving
It is always easier to plan than to do.
Plans are dreams of what might be; reality is the disappointment of what can be.
Plans are neat; reality is messy.
Or as Mr Robert Burns put it, ‘The best laid schemes o’ mice and men/Gang aft a-gley.’
Our plans didn’t exactly go a-gley (though at times I thought they would), but like all plans, turning them into reality required adjustment, improvisation, compromise and acceptance of what could be done, rather than the ideal which, in the euphoria of our brain-teasing summer evening in the garden, we had dreamt of doing.
Dad thought Will and I should go away for a holiday before we set to work and even offered to fix up something for us, but Will being Will wanted to get on without delay and I was in the mood to follow rather than oppose.
The first thing we did was write and design a flyer, advertising the services of Tree Care, Will dictating (I choose the word carefully) the content and me determining (ditto) the design. An A4 sheet of textured, recycled paper, printed in three colours on both sides, folded twice to make a leaflet of six slim pages, including two pictures of Will (one a portrait, one of him in full gear working on a tree). This took a day.
Next day we toured the town and surrounding area, delivering flyers to likely-looking properties.
Then the waiting began.
But not sitting, twiddling our thumbs. I wanted to settle the question of where we would live and to move in. We checked the letting agents and the accommodation ads in the local rag. Even for poky places, the rents were way out of range of anything we could hope to earn straight away, which we were determined to rely on rather than sponging off parents. Doris drew a blank from her clients. Being August, most of them were on holiday, and those who weren’t had nothing to offer.
A frustrating week went by. No contacts for Tree Care, no luck with accommodation.
‘You could always live in a tent,’ Arry said.
I laughed. Will didn’t.
‘Only joking,’ Arry said.
‘No no,’ Will said. ‘You’re right.’
‘No no!’ I said. ‘I am not living in a tent, not even for you, William Blacklin.’
‘Not a tent,’ Will said. ‘But what about a caravan?’
‘What sort of caravan and where?’ I said, wary and serious, knowing the look on Will’s face meant decision.
‘The sort on wheels that you tow behind a car. Or behind something a bit tougher than a car, in the case of the one I have in mind, because it’s a big job with built-in shower and loo.’
‘And where is it, and why d’you think we can have it or afford it – even if I agree?’
‘It’s in my brother’s garden, and I think he might lend it to us till we fix something else. He only uses it for holidays and he’s had his this summer.’
‘Great!’ Arry said.
‘O lordy,’ I puled. ‘A caravan! And do I want to live in a caravan in your brother’s back garden, however big it is and however nice your brother and his family are? Didn’t we say we want to be away from family?’
‘How d’you know till you try it, and we can always move it somewhere else.’
‘Why not give it a go?’ Arry said. ‘You could do a lot worse.’
‘Then you two can live in it, if you’re that keen,’ I said, ‘and I’ll stay in my beloved room, thank you.’
But we looked, of course. It was one of those big bruisers that puts you in mind of a monster shoebox with windows. In this case, windows draped with lace curtains. The curtains can go for a start, I thought as soon as I saw them. Which thought I should have known indicated I’d live in it if I had to. And I have to admit that it was attractive for a caravan. Everything was fresh and clean. It had the appeal of a grown-up Wendy house, with all mod cons, except for no washing machine, and no bookshelves.
‘Well?’ Will said.
‘Where’ll we keep our books?’ knowing I was only asking out of perversity.
‘We’re not going to live in it for ever. We’ll have the ones we need and leave the rest where they are for now.’
‘And the laundry?’
‘Doris won’t mind if we use her machine once a week, will she?’
‘There’s only one room. We said we need our own spaces.’
‘It’s only a stop-gap. It’ll do for a while. Have you a better suggestion?’
‘No.’
‘Well then?’
‘I’ll think about it.’
‘You could always try it for a week or two,’ Arry said. ‘See how you get on.’
‘What do we do about water and electricity?’
Will said, ‘We’ll run a pipe for water and a line for electricity from my brother’s house. We’ll pay him for the use.’
‘You mean, we live in it here?’
‘If we’re just trying it out. No point in moving till we know we want to use it for longer. And we have to find somewhere we like to park it.’
‘It’s not near the house,’ Arry said. ‘You’re on your own really. And you can come and go without anybody bothering you.’
Which was true.
I said, ‘I won’t even ask about the loo.’
‘There’s a tank,’ Will said. ‘Forget it. I’ll deal with it.’
‘If you ask me,’ Arry said, ‘you’ll be hard pushed to find anything better. There’s many a couple would give their eye teeth for such a pad.’
‘Well …’ I said, ‘in the circumstances.’
‘Good,’ Will said.
‘You’ve made the right decision, colleen,’ Arry said.
‘I haven’t decided anything,’ I said. ‘You two have. I don’t know why I’m letting you talk me into it.’
‘Because we’re wonderful, we are indeed,’ Arry said, ‘and you just can’t resist us, you can’t at all, hard as you try.’
*
At home that evening there was huffing and puffing, Doris huffing, Dad puffing, but in the end they reached the same impasse I’d reached with Will: what else was on offer? Dad again argued for us staying at home; Doris again opined it was important for us to be on our own, even if it meant living in a caravan for a while; and ’twixt and ’tween them they licked the platter clean, Dad gave in, and the decision was made that we’d live in the caravan for ‘a trial period’.
The discussion moved on. Next item on the agenda – our life was dominated by the new business and run on management lines thes
e days – was a vehicle for Will’s work. He explained the problem. Customers would expect the cuttings from trees and hedges to be carted away as part of the service. Will couldn’t do that in the boot of his car. But we couldn’t afford a pickup or other suitable vehicle.
Dad wanted to know if there would always be a lot of stuff. Will said it would vary with each job.
‘No problem,’ Dad said, ‘you hire. If there’s not a lot, hire a trailer for your car. If there’s too much for a trailer, hire a vehicle that’s big enough. Build the cost of each hire into the price you charge the customer. That way, you don’t have to lay out for the purchase of a vehicle, you don’t have running costs for it, or road tax and insurance, you don’t have parking problems when you aren’t using it, and you only spend what you can charge for.’
Another case of: Why didn’t we think of that before?
‘Because you still have a lot to learn about business,’ Doris said.
‘So we oldies,’ Dad said, ‘do have our uses after all.’
Within two days we were installed in the caravan. Not that it was difficult. We only had to move our clothes, some bed linen, our essential books, CDs, laptops and other gear, some food and basic ingredients for cooking, and that was it. A car load from each of our homes, Will’s accomplished while his mother was at work. The caravan was fully equipped with kitchen utensils, crockery and cutlery. Will and Arry fixed up the water, an electrician friend of Arry’s fitted the electric line in return for an unspecified favour from Arry about which I felt it best not to enquire.
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.’
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