The Great Lover Page 11

  What does one do in a household of fools and a Tragedy? And why is Pain so terrible, more terrible than ever when you see it in others?

  But breathe no word. If it’s kept dark, the school goes on paying us.

  (Later).

  Eh! Well I’ve had a bad time with Mother; and she’s wild, praying for his death and so on. The London doctors are vague and ignorant, but not cheering. It is a form of Neuralgia, they say. That we may have another term’s profits from the House, we’re going to beg the new Housemaster to let us stay on. We’ll be thrown out at Easter, all right. Now, we’re to get a youth to take a form, and Mother and I will run the House. From now until April. So I don’t go to Cambridge this term. I shall, as a matter of fact, go across for various week-ends (cheap ticket 6/6 return) to get books, etc.

  All the details are too horrible–smell, and so forth–and I’ve not seen people dying before…

  Rupert

  And now I’m ill myself with a fever and a temperature of 102, and blackly angry at all and sundry (especially James, who writes of his love for me at the most inopportune moments). I long to talk to Nellie, to Nellie! To bury my face in her neck and breasts and blubber all the ridiculous, hideous, shameful, childish nonsense that I have been feeling these last few days. The rage that Father was never the man I wanted him to be; the shame of longing for it to be otherwise. Do other fellows get better luck? Would they find it amusing to have a father with the nickname ‘Tooler’?

  But then–what daydream, what fantasy is that? Nellie has no feeling for me, and would tell me to ‘buck up’, just as the Ranee would, and I would be shamed once more. I’ve tested her…that impulsive kiss I ventured…The response was calm, and unequivocal. (Oh, I want to bury myself up to the neck in a cellar full of dirt every time I remember it! What on earth possessed me? The bees, no doubt, cast some sort of spell on me…Nell will think me a perfect example of my class: a precise cliché in every way…I positively groan with embarrassment whenever I remember it.) She is as solid and good as a bar of white soap and nothing I press upon her can soil her or lather her. Our conversations, the occasions when I felt certain that something, oh, very close to a real exchange took place between us, well, of course all that feeling has stalled in the face of the tragic reality: I am vile, full of lust, and a slave to inconstancy. Nell, being the opposite of all those things, knows it better than anyone.

  At least my wretched virginity is cast off. I should be more relieved or, even, delighted. I should be dancing a jig on the tin roof of the Orchard tea pavilion where the graceful Nell stands with her fellow maids, awaiting my every whim. But part of the problem is, who to tell? It was, thankfully, Nellie, not one of the others, who silently took away the sheets and delivered them back to me in snowy pristineness, as if the whole incident had never happened.

  A few days later Denham and I cycled past one another near the Backs, and for a filthy moment I feared he would cut me. Then his hand flew up in an insouciant wave, and I thought, All is forgiven, and if he turns up at the Orchard again, I’m in for another go. He always was such a charming, lustful boy.

  But then a weariness descends, for I have discovered that the career of the Sodomite is not for me. Practice and experience have not in the slightest erased my love for Noel, or quelled my lust for Nellie (or should ‘love’ and ‘lust’ be reversed?). I have resolved that Sodomy can only ever be for me a hobby, not a full-time occupation. I’ve discovered I’m no true Sodomite, at least not in the way of James and Lytton. Perhaps only one quarter, and the other three quarters shared equally between Noel, Nellie and Ka Cox.

  Ka now. Why did I picture her just then? Turning up at the Orchard on her bicycle, doing something complicated with her skirt and boots to allow her to cycle…She would surely be a safer wager. That bear-like plodding and devotion to the socialist cause. (Isn’t that Virginia’s nickname for her–something to do with a bear?) That earnestness. So, for a happy moment, I picture Ka at Fabian meetings, in her secretary role, with her head bent over the accounts and her dark green beads glinting like bubbles of river-water at her throat. Jacques has admitted he finds her attractive–if only I could say the same! She does have a certain, well, dash in how she dresses: the peasant scarves wound round her head actually suit her, whereas on the other girls they look contrived, striving rather for effect. Her pince-nez make me think of her in the same way as Dudley–as rather kind and hapless. And she is certainly warm, and clever, with a marvellous listening ear. (A sort of cushion or soft-floor quality.) In addition to all that, she is a wealthy orphan too, so not nearly as well protected as Noel Olivier. Oh, yes, she is a friendly girl and highly obtainable, too…but the heart, sadly, does not work like that, and I cannot muster mine to beat quicker for the Ka Coxes of this world.

  Last night I dreamed I was in love again with the One before the Last. (I’m writing a poem that begins with those lines.) Charles Lascelles, to be precise. Being here at School Field inevitably conjures up Charles for me–that day when he asked for a photograph of me! Would that it had been him, not Denham, I had seduced at the Orchard…or even Denham’s brother, Hugh, but of course with Denham you could say there had been that long period of foreplay. We had hugged and kissed and strained, Denham and I, on and off for years–ever since that quiet evening I rubbed him, in the dark, speechlessly, in the smaller of the two dorms. But in the summer holidays of 1906 and 1907 he had often taken me out to the hammock, after dinner, to lie entwined there. He had vaguely hoped, I fancy…But I lay always thinking of Charles.

  Denham was, though, to my taste, attractive. So honestly and friendlily lascivious. Charm, not beauty, was his fate. So it was Denham, and not Charles, whom I had, just as it seems it is destined to be Ka, and not Noel or Nell, whom I might have. I have seen the way Ka looks at me. I endeavour not to notice.

  Sometimes I wonder why that schoolgirl Noel Olivier is so appealing to me. She has none of the attributes of Ka. To name three faults, she is infuriating, stubborn, ignorant. Her sister Bryn is surely the exquisite beauty and a practised flirt, too. Even Margery, maddening though she is, is lovelier. Noel is a mere child. A horrible child whom I can’t seem to win over.

  Little wonder that my mood is bleak. Here, death cowers in every room–inside cupboards and coiled in drawers, ready to spring.

  At breakfast, the servants bring toast and tea with a shuffling gait, so unlike the lively step of Nell, and even the cups and plates smell of sickness, and remind me of long days spent in the hospital dorm, my eyes stuck and plugged with streaming conjunctivitis, so that all my attention congeals there and my eyes are the only part of my body that feel alive. Is that what Father feels now? Is he suffering, in that simple, physical way, pain and discomfort in the head and eyes, or is it something far worse? Does he in fact understand that he is facing down death–and what is it like to grapple with that particular foe?

  There was that moment when I first arrived, standing in the hall still clutching my small leather bag as if there were a question over whether I might stay or not, and when we all talked of other things. Alfred and Mother and the servants–we talked of the trains and the weather and the new telephone and why I hadn’t first called to say I was arriving (I hadn’t the penny for the telephone at the station). Mother took me upstairs and into the room, which–never exactly a spring-like room–now was drowned in a dark, winter green light, with the curtains tightly closed. Of course thoughts of Dick hovered all around me and the terrible aching fear welled up again: that it was hereditary, this tendency to melancholy and blackness and a frail mind and worse: that even without his illness Father had always had it, and Dick too, and mightn’t I be the next to go exactly the same way?

  Mother sat down beside the little table with its Mer-Syren pills for Indigestion, Biliousness and Nervous Depression and I kept looking at Father, with his paper-fine skin and his eyes open but dull, then back at Mother, not knowing what to say. And nobody dared to say the things they thought, and there were words
floating in the air and in the brain and in the middle of the conversation and one suddenly saw them and felt unable to speak.

  Then last night the Ranee broke down with me. I have seen her weep so few times in my life that my palms sprang with sweat, and I was immediately again a child of six years old. I watched, as her bowed head shook in her hands, like a bouncing silver melon and I wondered in horrified fascination whether it might in fact drop right off and she lift only the stub of her neck to me, rather than that wild, beseeching face.

  She prayed, she said, he could die quickly.

  This bald statement flitted ominously in the air between us like a bat, and then she stood up. Her shaking ceased and I saw at once that she was recovering, that she was becoming again the formidable Matron, Housemistress, School Mother she had always been–and I felt a little calmer for clearly no action from me was required. I had neither embraced her nor even moved towards her, and the powerful revulsion I felt, wondering if I was called upon to do either, subsided like a wave, as she moved away from me and composed herself, dabbing at her eyes.

  ‘Oh, my darling Rupie, thank Heaven for you!’ she ejected, suddenly, as if I had risen to the occasion. My shame was absolute.

  We went next door to the green Nubolic room, and sat by the bedside with the old man croaking between us. Once he opened his eyes and seemed to focus, but not on me, on something just behind me, over my shoulder. (It was ever thus. Did he ever truly see me, I wonder, see the Rupertness of me, rather than the obedient, dreary boy he longed for?)

  An ugly thought came back to me then. How at fourteen, I once heard a boy say out loud what I knew had long been rumoured: that Tooler (Father) was so horse-whipped that Mother sent him out to pick up manure for the garden in the middle of the night. I thrashed the offender, of course. Yet what I remembered was that even as I did it I wished it was Father I was pummelling. Why could he not stand up to her, just the once, and set an example for all of us?

  My head began to pound with the force of these thoughts and their unsuitability for thinking so close to a death-bed. If only I could subdue them in some way! I tried offering Father a glass of water from the jug beside the bed but he made no sound, and Mother frowned and shook her head, as if to say, ‘He is too far gone for that.’ The smell in the room was becoming stifling–no longer just Watson’s Nubolic Soap but an odd, sickening combination of that and…a smell like pond-weed, powerful, rotted, slippery and foul.

  I stood up, as if to leave, but Mother put her hand on mine and I pretended to be adjusting the curtain, drawing the gap in the centre so that no slit of light could fall on his face, rendering the skin any greener than it already appeared. When would that foul gurgling sound in his chest and lungs cease? When would the miasma, the disgusting smell surrounding us, lift? Mother took hold of his limp hand, picking it up as if it were a dead leaf and clutching it in hers.

  What on earth could he be thinking now? Did he know? After all, he was always such a pessimistic man, prone to brooding, and not much to fall back on in the way of thoughts. He had never recovered from Dick’s death, and a picture of Dick now, sloppy, not quite upright, a glass of whisky in his hand, inserted itself between the bed and me, impossible to shake.

  I paced the room, sat down and then stood up again, my desire to do something, anything, being quite overwhelming. Couldn’t I, despite being such an absolute and unimaginative dolt, even with my enormous ineptitude, could not I find some way to help him, help ease the passage, say one word or phrase to help? What is the point of being a Bloody Poet if words abandon you at essential moments? Is not a word something, better than nothing, to offer a dying man? ‘When the white flame in us is gone, and we that lost the world’s delight…’ Oh, but it’s all helpless, useless.

  ‘Father—’ I said.

  And there was a moment, a glint, where the word ‘Goodbye’ welled up and all the words stoppered up in me rose to my throat and I longed to speak something true, anything true, just the once, before it was too late.

  ‘Father–I’m here–do you see me?’

  But Father closed his eyes again. I did not have a sense, not have much of a sense, that he saw or understood anything at all. And the room drew in around us, dark and green and foul. I thought of Nellie, and something she had described about her own father slipping away in the meadow near the river, sliding out of life like something natural and good, with his bees humming round him and his hands smelling of honey, and meanwhile Mother and I continue to sit in silence, breathing in that fetid, frightening smell.

  ‘Oh, my dearest—’ Mother said, and flung herself at Father’s chest.

  I had my wish–the strange gurgling sound stopped, at last.

  Later, much later, when the doctor had left, and the servants retired, and Mother’s sobbing in the other room finally ceased to shake the house, I sat wearily on the edge of my bed, pulling at my socks and thinking. I’ve always felt so especially unlike and separate from both my parents–in good and bad qualities alike. It has been a constant mystery to me–and to others, too, no doubt!–how such parents managed to spawn me.

  The irony is that at this moment, despite this dizzying unlikeness, despite being the one boy in the school (along with James, I suppose) whom the masters always accused of looking like a girl, with my too-long hair and bandy legs–Father has achieved exactly what he always longed for: I shall be forced to step into his shoes and become a Schoolmaster, at least for one term.

  At this thought I’m obliged to fling myself backwards on to the bed like a felled log. If one of the servants wasn’t still creeping about sniffling I swear I’d throw back my head and howl like a wolf. Oh, and I’m so sad and fierce and miserable not to be in my garden and little house in Grantchester this term! I love being there so much–more than any other place I’ve ever lived in. I’d thought of being there when the spring was coming, every day this winter, and dreamed of seeing all the brown and green things. And I always hate being at home.

  I snuff the candle and pull off my shirt, slipping beneath the cold, stiff sheets and lying on my back in horrible mimicry of a corpse. My solace will be the boys, I tell myself. They all love me. They are not very ugly. They vary from four to seven feet in height. They are a good age–fourteen to nineteen. (It is between nineteen and twenty-four that people are insufferable.) They look rather fresh and jolly too. But, oh!, the mask-like faces that come before me. I am ‘master’ and therefore a moral machine. They will not believe I exist. Also, I am shy.

  However, they all remember I used to play for the school at violent games and they will respect me accordingly.

  Father’s death is what others call A Blessing: it put an end to his gurgling and choking, his face twisted out of recognition, and the hours of vigil required of us. There is paperwork and the funeral to arrange and Mother to hold up. It is exactly like the days after Dick’s death, but worse. I feel sure that the unspoken–the unacknowledged fact of weakness or Brain Fever or Madness: something terrible and horrible and too dreadful to contemplate within me, too, will soon manifest, like an ugly blister that suddenly reveals how badly a shoe chafed and for how long it was ignored.

  My fever has receded but I am weary beyond belief.

  James assures me by letter that his penis and balls are (in the words of Mr Scott-Coward) at my disposal. Astonishing, the levels to which these Cambridge men will go to avoid acknowledging anything that matters. My father has died and Mother is in agony; Alfred’s career uncertain and I’m suddenly to be a Schoolmaster (I hope for only a term but maybe for longer; perhaps I shall have to give up all hope of being a poet). Still James expects me to go on with the witticisms and the posturing. (I’m certainly making a game attempt with my usual immensely egotistic nature, but can hardly be expected to excel just now.)

  I had several hours of respite yesterday: I travelled by train to Grantchester and called in at the Orchard–if I’m to stay a while in Rugby I need my books and papers. The route from Cambridge was full of cy
clists hurtling through muddy puddles with their robes flowing, and Grantchester was immediately peace and raindrops and spiders busying in diamond-encrusted webs in soon-to-be-dusted rooms. I called ostensibly to pick up a few books, intending dinner in the Union in the evening with James. I had tickets for Richard the Second by the Marlowe Society.

  In truth, I hoped to see Nellie. I felt certain that, in my present simmering mood, one brush with those flaming violet eyes and that vastly sympathetic bosom would bring all to the surface, allowing it to boil over and pour forth.

  Sensibly, the marvellous child was absent. Visiting her family, Mrs Stevenson said, in some strangely named village in the Fens. I indulged myself with another brief picture of Nellie there with other buxom maids, picking celery or–what do they do in Fen country?–carrying eels in nets or milk in churns or some such glorious thing, hair shining in the golden sun, tumbling in black folds down her bare shoulders, her elegant throat freckling like a speckled egg. No rude reality (it’s winter drizzle, with frost and bare twigs, no sun or eggs to be seen) interfered: the picture was a pretty one.

  A telegram arrived then, which cut short my visit–Memorial for Father arranged for tomorrow: come back at once. And so here I am, in my old room in School Field, with the curtains with their swinging red parrots and their smell of cooked cabbage, and Podge stoical and podgy in the bed next door, and Father in the Chapel of Rest at last, while we prepare some sentimental nonsense of a life devoted to God and the School to be read out at the service tomorrow morning.