‘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.
The reason I thought of this when we talked yesterday is that I could tell you are having trouble working out what you want your life to be about. That’s not a surprise. Your life so far has been regulated (ordered) by your family and by school. Your discipline was to become an adult. You didn’t have to think about it, because it’s the inborn discipline of all children. Other people decided how to order your life to reach that end. You accepted this, as ‘good’ children do. Now that’s over. You’re expected to decide for yourself what your discipline will be and how you’ll order your daily life to achieve it.
But you haven’t found your discipline yet and so you’re feeling disordered – ‘all over the place’ as you put it. And what makes it worse is that you’re living with Will, who is someone who does know what his discipline is and who is already pretty good at ordering his life in relation to it. He’s one of those lucky people who seem to be born like that. That’s why he always falls on his feet, as your father put it. And finding you, and realising that you are as important to him as anything else, has completed him. That’s why he says he’s happier than he’s ever been. You are observing this in the one you love and naturally it makes you uneasy about yourself, because you feel you should be complete too. You feel you should be as sure of yourself – of your discipline – as Will is. And knowing that Will is a perfectionist, maybe you worry that he’ll reject you because you aren’t perfect in the way you think he is.
Then you discovered he has bouts of terrible doubt, when his confidence deserts him, and that frightens you because you fear he might do something terrible – hurt himself, kill himself even – out of disappointment with his imperfection.
But he won’t. Will is a survivor if ever I saw one. But because he loves you – because you are part of his image of himself – he needs you to accept his imperfection and help him over the difficult patches. And he won’t reject you. He tried that once and found he couldn’t live completely without you.
Some people are like Will, born with their vocation. Others, most people, are like you and me. We only find our discipline the hard way, by trial and error, by searching and waiti
ng, by living our way into it. Or maybe I should say by it living its way into us.
At the moment, you’re testing yourself with Will by trial and error, finding out if you do want to commit yourself to him as he has already committed himself to you.
And you want to be a poet, but haven’t yet accepted that you can be in any but the hobbyist sense.
You want to be a learner, a student, but not in the institutionalised way that a university imposes.
You love reading but cannot see how to make this into a work – a way of life. (You look at me and see I’ve done it by teaching, but you know that teaching isn’t for you.)
What you cannot see, because you’re in the midst of doing it, but I can see, because I know you well and can observe you doing it, is that you’re getting there. Your vocation is gradually inhabiting you. Trust it. Be patient with yourself, dearest Cordelia. You know all you need to know about yourself; you just haven’t let yourself know you know it yet.
Is this right? Or right enough to help you?
Love, Julie.
It helped and it didn’t. It helped me organise my thinking about myself, but it didn’t help me with the practicalities.
I couldn’t sleep after reading it that night. Will and I made love. Soon afterwards he was dead to the world. But not me. My mind was like a tumble drier, with all my thoughts churning around, tangled together. I was sweating at first hotly, post-coitus, but then coldly, intra-anxiety. And, as I’ve told you, bed at such times becomes torture to me.
I got up and, as quietly as I could, poured a bowl of cornflakes and leaned against the sink, eating them. There was nowhere to sit, because at night we had to turn the seats into our bed. In the dark night of my soul, this seemed to epitomise the problem. And at that moment I began to hate the caravan.
Will can’t have been as deeply asleep as I’d thought, or perhaps the light above the kitchen unit had disturbed him, because he woke and looked at me over the duvet and asked what was wrong.
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ I said. ‘Go back to sleep.’
He sat up, knees to chin. ‘What are you eating?’
‘Cornflakes.’
He looked at the alarm clock on the ledge by the bed. ‘Cornflakes at two in the morning and there’s nothing wrong?’
‘Nothing we need talk about now.’
‘It’s keeping you awake and now I’m awake. There isn’t a better time to talk about it.’
‘It’s just me. It’ll pass.’
‘What’ll pass?’
‘This!’ I said with sudden anger, waving my hand at the caravan.
‘This being the van or us?’
I put the bowl in the sink and sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed, facing him.
‘Not us,’ I said. ‘I love you and I love us living together.’
‘The van, then?’
‘Not only.’
‘Come on, Leah. Out with it. What’s the problem?’
I huffled a laugh. Typical Will. Everything could be listed and dealt with and ticked off and be done with.
‘I’m used to more space and plenty of room. I do find the van a bit cramped. Don’t you?’
‘Sure. But it’s only temporary. Till we decide what we’re doing next year. And it’s not costing us anything. We’re saving already.’
‘I know. And I’m grateful. We couldn’t be on our own without it. I’ll get used to it. I’m trying to.’
‘But that isn’t the main thing?’
‘It is and it isn’t. I feel all over the place. Here and D&D’s and Julie’s and Dad’s office.’
I shrugged.
‘And nowhere is your own?’
‘Nowhere is my own. But worse than that, Will. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing … No, that’s wrong … I don’t know what I’m supposed to be … Who I’m supposed to be … I’m confused.’
Will reached for his glasses, put them on and consumed me with the full-stare attention of those piercing wonderful eyes. For a few moments he said nothing. Then he got up and poured himself a bowl of cornflakes and stood where I’d stood, eating them.
‘Now I see why,’ he said. ‘Comfort food.’
‘Haven’t done it since I was a child. When I had a bad night Dad would carry me to the kitchen and we’d share a bowl of cornflakes. It used to settle me.’
When he finished, he sat facing me close up, and pulled the duvet round our shoulders, enclosing us like a tent.
‘Let’s have a wigwam pow-wow.’
I couldn’t help smiling and giving him a kiss.
‘You Big Chief,’ I said, ‘me Little Squaw.’
I’d meant only a joke as part of a game, but we both heard it as something serious that cut to the quick as jokes often do. Neither of us laughed. Will stiffened.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I get it.’
‘What?’
‘For the last couple of months, everything we’ve done has been for me.’
‘Has it?’
‘Even the van.’
‘How?’
‘How!’
‘No don’t, Will, tell me.’
‘We took the van so we could be together. But you’d have been happier if we’d stayed at D&D’s.’
‘I’m not sure that’s true.’
‘We did it because I wanted to do it. We didn’t really discuss it. You knew I wanted us to be alone.’
‘I wanted that too.’
‘And we’ve spent most of our time fixing up work for me.’
‘We had to. You’re earning the money we need.’
‘You’ve been doing most of the domestic stuff.’
‘But only because it’s easiest. And I have got going with the OU course. I haven’t spent all my time only doing things for you.’
‘Not all. But most. And I haven’t done anything much for you, have I? No wonder you’re feeling pissed off.’
‘I’m not. Not with you.’
‘With the way things are going. You’ve not been doing what you should be for yourself.’
‘Like what?’
‘How much poetry have you written since we came here?’
‘Not much.’
‘You mean none.’
‘None.’
‘How much have you read, except what you’ve had to?’
‘Not a lot.’
‘No wonder you’re eating cornflakes in the middle of the night. I’m surprised you’re not so pissed off you haven’t pissed off.’
We looked at each other, hard-eyed.
‘Why didn’t you say?’ Will asked. ‘It’s not like you. You talk about everything. You tell me everything. Why not something as important as this?’
‘I didn’t want to bother you. You’ve had enough to think about. I expected things would be difficult to start with. Haven’t they been for you? Doesn’t the van get on your nerves sometimes? You should have been at Cambridge now. Doesn’t it upset you that you’re not?’
‘The van’s just a temporary thing. I’ve thought about Cambridge sometimes, and wished I was there. But the thing is, Leah, you’re more important to me than that. I wish I could have you and Cambridge and a house to live in. But you come first, Cambridge next and a house last. Haven’t you understood that yet, you silly noddy?’
In my fragile state this was more than I could take. I pushed my way out of the wigwam.
‘Can we stop for a minute? I need the loo.’
But the loo in a caravan isn’t exactly a private place where you can make noises and not be heard. I peed and blew my nose and sat for a few minutes to try and gather myself together. My eyes felt like damp pillows filled with shards of glass. My body wanted to stretch out face down and be soothed by loving hands, which I knew Will would if I asked him, but I didn’t want to, because it would seem to me like a defeat and to him like I was dropping the subject instead of facing up to it.
What he’d said about me was right; I’d tried to pass it off as understandable and acceptable, but it wasn’t. And if
we went on as we were things could only get worse and I’d end up doing as he’d said. Pissing off.
Why? Didn’t Will mean more to me than anything else, as I for him?
Yes.
But?
I didn’t have his tenacity. I didn’t have his confidence in himself. I doubted everything about myself. Remembering our time together at school, I realised that one of the things he’d done for me – had given me – was belief in myself and a determination to be what I longed to be. He hadn’t defined it, but he’d confirmed it. I’d needed his self-confidence through which to find my own. Then he’d rejected me. And from then till now, I’d lost the faith in myself he had given me. And now I was afraid to accept it again from him, because I was afraid I would lose him again.
The same old oppression. The oppression I’d first understood under our kissing tree the day I feared I’d lost him to Hannah. But he had come back to me full-blooded after rejecting me because of Edward. He’d learned and accepted. I had learned, but hadn’t accepted. And so I still needed the reassurance of the past: my own room, time alone, the fulfilling purpose of my poetry.
So in that sense, he didn’t mean more to me than anything else. He meant everything to me, perhaps life itself. But I needed something else as well. Is it possible for there to be two equal essentials, each dependent on the other? As I thought about it, I realised the one thing Will hadn’t mentioned a few minutes before was trees. He hadn’t said that I was more important to him than his work with trees. He could do without Cambridge, however important it might be, but could he live with me and only for me, and without his work with trees?
He was being honest. He truly believed everything he’d said, and I accepted it. Will never knowingly lied. But silence can be as big a statement as words. Nothing is more important than the truths to which we are blind. What, then, I wondered, is the truth that I cannot see about myself? Can Will see it, as I can see his? Could he tell me, and should I tell him his? Or are some truths better left unsaid?
As I came out of the loo I felt I would either burst into tears or be violently angry if we went on talking as we had been. Abjection or objection. Defence or attack. Withdrawal or assault. And I wanted to be subject to neither.
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