The Great Lover Page 12

  Will I be allowed to say that I believe God a fool and Father a bigger one? There are things–pieces of folly, or bad taste, or wanton cruelty–in the Christian, middle-class way of burying the dead that make me ill. My avowed rejection of immortality as a theory or a reality has to be all swallowed up again in speaking some nonsense about Father at peace with angels, just as we did for Dick. Preparing the valedictory lines has been the worst task of my life so far, and not, as Mother imagines, because of the sorrowfulness of losing Father that it evokes. No. The pain is caused by being forced to write and speak lines I believe to be false and unworthy! My sickness has come back with a vengeance, and in some sinister way I welcome it–as (and here I confuse even myself) with the sickness comes such intense awareness of every ache and twinge and stab in my limbs and head and neck and eyes and throat: in short, with sickness comes the strong feeling that I, at least, am alive. Which is something.

  I’m sweating in a dreadful fever. I’ve subsisted on milk and the pieces I could surreptitiously bite out of my thermometer. At times I want to kill Podge and then I remember in a state of forgiveness that to be the favourite child (after dear departed Dick) is probably, in point of fact, a curse. Far better to be in my shoes–the replacement girl, the reincarnated babe that Mother lost! Allows me my yellow hair and my squashy nature.

  Tomorrow the fifty-three boys arrive, inky babes all of them; they are young and direct and animal. It will become my charming task to freeze their narrowing views. At least until April.

  So I’m in full feather by the time I leave my duties at the Orchard and beg a lift from the butcher’s boy, who is taking the horse van from Grantchester to Ely market. It will be but an hour’s walk at the other side. I sing all the way.

  In the end the boy takes me right to Prickwillow because, he says, he’s never seen the Fens and ‘Well! This is a funny bit of England!’ I suspect he has other reasons but I give him no cause to hope, keeping my eyes straight and my shawl clutched round my chest.

  The frost gives way to snow once we get past Streatham. The pretty lanes and curving hedges soon begin to flatten out into the iced white fields, so plain and flat they might be cut-up pieces of paper, the black lines being the droves and the silver the strips of water. At first the plainness is a shock to me–I realise I’ve quickly forgotten it–and I feel only shame, seeing my old home through the eyes of the butcher’s boy, as a drab, treeless, man-made landscape, poor cousin indeed to the historic countryside of Grantchester, with its tall church spires and charming rose gardens and grand old elm trees. But as the horse takes us deeper into Fen country and the huge white sky starts to spread its arms over us, and at the first sight of a Fen skater flashing past, blue as a kingfisher, on the ice at Soham Mere, my heart lifts and my old pride floods back. We stop to watch the skaters for a while, drinking the tea from the flask that Mrs Stevenson sent with us, with the butcher’s boy exclaiming over the low, clumsy Fen style (‘Designed for speed, not grace,’ I say) and asking me why we call the skates patines in this part of the world. (The answer is I don’t know.) We stay a while, fascinated by the speed of the figures whisking past, listening to the familiar chafe of skates on ice, and the fine crusts of ice upturned by them, which look to me just like the scrapings of beeswax that we take off with the knife. Our ears and noses are singing from the cold; and we place halfpenny bets on the various boys we see racing, until he tries to pull me to him and kiss me, and I have to pretend that Betty expects me at a particular hour.

  The kiss is damp and childish, and a poor specimen, compared to Rupert’s.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I squeal, from under the damp wool and worsted of him.

  ‘Tommy,’ he says proudly.

  ‘Well, Tommy, you can put me off here after the three bridges and the three level crossings. The place down by the river and the shock-head willows.’

  He falls silent then, hearing the sharpness in my voice. But the silly boy cannot be silent for long: ‘Look at those toy-like trees, and the whole place flat as a pancake!’ he says, and then, ‘Tit-willer, what a funny name for a village!’ I have to tell him again that it’s Prickwillow, named for the custom of pricking the osier willows into the soil–that the whole place used to be nothing but osier willows–and he jumps down off the van as we arrive at the house, and Betty runs out into the garden, her face beaming with surprise at the sight of me.

  ‘Any chance of giving a boy a glass of beer for his trouble?’ Tommy says, to which Betty looks disapproving and replies, ‘But didn’t you know we’re Primitive Methodists? Lily and me are just off to the church now and you’re more than welcome to join us if you like…’

  Well, that sure mops the smile from his face and, with a few coins shoved in his hand, he jumps back in the driver’s seat, shaking the horse into such speed that the van’s in danger of toppling. He calls over his shoulder that he’ll be back at three o’clock to fetch us to Grantchester and not to be late!

  Betty smiles at his haste. She doesn’t mention that Sam keeps a good stock of ale in back and that our going to church has always been more through habit and schooling than conviction.

  Then at last I can hug my brothers and sisters, smother myself with the rough kisses of the boys and the damp cheeks of Lily and Betty and Olive. The children look thin and they smell of sarsaparilla–a powerful stench that lets me know Betty has done a good job, dosing them up to prevent the nits and doing it on Saturday night too, as I taught her, so that it can be washed out on Sunday night and the children don’t go to school on Monday morning smelling of Rankin’s ointment. I look them all over carefully and it’s not all cause for celebration.

  ‘Betty, have you been giving them the caster oil?’ I ask. Stanley in particular looks frail and a mite green around the gills. Lily is the opposite–a touch swollen in the cheeks and belly–but in a way that’s not healthy either.

  I can see Betty resents my asking but her reply is friendly enough: ‘Yes, and the jar with black treacle and powdered sulphur too, and poppyhead tea for the littlies…’

  ‘Not the poppyhead tea! No one gives their children that in Grantchester! They’ll think us backward. It turns children sleepy and stupid. Don’t give them it, Betty, you hear? No matter what Mrs Gotobed says…’

  At this Betty turns sulky. ‘All right, all right, but it’s fine for you, sleeping in that warm house and your own room too. It’s me here with the little ones wailing and crying about Daddy and always hungry for food and Edmund out at all hours on a sledge on Cowbit Wash when he should be chopping wood for me. It’s the only way I can get a night’s sleep sometimes.’

  ‘But Edmund is working, surely, with Sam? Isn’t he setting the decoy? Doesn’t he bring home waterfowl?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course he does, but I can’t rely on it, and there’s still nights when we go to bed hungry…’

  So here is the perfect moment to tell her about the live-in position. But somehow I can feel a silence taking hold of my throat and a wish to prolong the happy mood, knowing how the others will protest if I take Betty away from them.

  ‘Show me the skeps–have you put the mouse guard on for the winter? I have to tell you what I’ve learned from Mr Neeve. His methods are so modern–he doesn’t kill off most of the swarm to remove the honey, he uses removable frames and keeps nearly an entire swarm. He’d be willing to sell us some of those frames so that I can teach you that way to do things, too.’

  Betty sets her mouth in a disbelieving line. ‘Well, Father’s honey always was the best in the Fens…the Runhams told me the other week that they might take two dozen pots this year, as a sample. I thought you’d be pleased.’

  ‘I am pleased. You are doing a fine job. Now, come, show your sister the bees, and then we’ll go to church…And then I’ve some news and a proposition for you…We’ll need the whole family to say yes, mind, and I know the littlies will want persuading…’

  On the way back, Tommy makes no such move again. At Stuntney Fen we pass an en
ormous bird of prey squatting at the side of the road, like a hunched old man. It takes off at our approach and I see the vole dangling from its clutches, and the leather strap tied to its foot, too. So it’s not free at all, as I imagined, for a moment, watching it enviously. No–I see the bird make for the gloved arm of its master, a black figure in the distance, the falconer. The sky over the Fens is gathering red, Ely Cathedral sitting atop. The bird rests on the falconer’s arm the way a flame sits on a candle. Does he ever think of me? I have no need to ask myself who I mean.

  This morning I fell out of love with the schoolgirl Noel Olivier, with a resounding crash, probably loud enough for the Ranee to hear it in the drawing room. I’m not quite sure how it happened, but only that a blank space descended where my previous affections lived and I contrived to write a whole sonnet on the subject of not loving her at all. I suspect it is absence that has made the heart grow colder; absence and the presence of fifty-three distracting young colts.

  I said I splendidly loved you; it’s not true.

  Such long swift tides stir not a land-locked sea…

  I felt the best I have felt since the funeral. I rose from my bed lively and invigorated.

  This morning I caned a boy for the first time. I had no consciously sexual sensations. Occasionally I determine to make a great attempt to pierce their living souls by some flaming, natural, heartfelt remark. So I summon one. Then he trots into my study, a sullen meekness. I can only say, in a mechanical voice, ‘Jones, mi, I hear your Latin grammar was not sufficiently prepared. Please do me fifty lines.’

  It’s really that I’m in a false position; and when I try to stretch out a jolly hand to any one of them, the shades of a thousand schoolmasters rise between us and form a black wall of fog and we miss each other in the dark. I manage my bluff Christian tone, which is wholly pedagogic. Every night at nine twenty I take prayers–a few verses of a psalm and one or two short heartfelt ones. I nearly had to prepare the lads for Confirmation but, rather pusillanimously, I wriggled out of that. But a certain incisive credulity in my voice when I mention the word ‘God’ is, I hope, slowly dropping the poison of the truth into their young souls.

  Actually, the caning was distressing. The boy–Everett-Clegg, a yellow-haired (is that significant? James would surely think it was) sullen chap–had broken his furniture to small pieces with a coal-hammer. I could hardly let that pass. ‘Come into my study at once!’

  The boy’s eyes were fierce but everything about his face shimmered. He was angry: he wanted to fight, stand firm, like a bull. He was red and frightened. I bade him in a tremulous voice to bend over.

  A smell of something hot and familiar began to emanate from him, as he lifted up his jacket, as requested, and rested his hands on his knees. That sickening smell gave me pause. The clock behind me–Father’s clock–ticked stridently. The room seemed unbearably small, warm and chalky, and I feared for an instant that I could not breathe. I saw the boy raise his eyes, the pupils rolling towards his eyelashes and I knew what he was doing. He mocked me. He saw my weakness, my hesitation. It would have spread among the other fifty-two young bullocks like a disease, in an instant. So I raised the cane and held my breath and played the part, the part of Housemaster, the five hundred years of history, the pale men who slide wearily around these halls: my father’s son.

  I raised and lowered the cane six times, and I did not wince as the wood fell with smart raps on reddening, then bloodying flesh. When the boy straightened up, one hand pulling at his pants, the other brushing a tear from his silent, glowering face, I had to turn my own away, making a pretence of putting the cane back in its hallowed place. ‘Go to your room, Everett-Clegg, and do not let me see you in here again!’

  I wanted to cry after him, ‘I’m sorry! Can’t you see we each must play a part, always play a part, that those powerful tides, oceans of years–no matter how courageously I struggle, they are too powerful for me? Can you not see that it isn’t possible for me to ask why you broke the furniture in your room, if you are unhappy, if you are being buggered by a bigger, stinkier boy, any more than I could—’

  Any more than I could declare my love for the parlour-maid.

  I found my legs were shaking as I sat down in Father’s chair. There was his cap on the desk behind me, his pipe, his pen, his ink bottle, his leather-bound Bible. The ghost of the figure we conjured up as boys, James and I, John Rump, the terrible bowler-hatted, umbrellaed, briefcased shell of a man, hovered over me. Everett-Clegg closed the door behind him with an insolently loud clap, and I put my head in my hands and, for the first time since Father’s death, I wept.

  So Betty takes up her place in Kittie’s bed, wearing Kittie’s uniform, which only needs an inch taking from the hem of the skirt and the apron to fit her, and at Easter Rupert returns from his mother’s home in Rugby, looking as pale as butter and as flat and lifeless, too.

  ‘I suppose you know that my father died, Nellie.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you may have heard that we were forced to leave the family home, and are living in Reduced Circumstances…’

  ‘I know nothing of that…’

  ‘Good.’

  Here, some of the old spark flickers in his eyes. I am in his room, bringing him his breakfast and the morning letters.

  ‘Because it’s ridiculous. We are better described as living in Genteel Poverty. That is to say we just fail to live with any comfort on what would support ten working men and their families in luxury.’

  I pause for a second, and then realise with relief that he is back to his old teasing.

  ‘I have been reprieved! My career as a Schoolmaster has been interrupted by the willingness of Mother to rent a detached house in Bilton Road and give up her reign as Housemistress…in which case I no longer need to pretend to be Housemaster…Hurrah!’

  I don’t really understand this, but I see that he is happy and some of our old ease is between us again, and so I smile, and his face cracks into a laugh and he flings back the covers and jumps naked to the window.

  I am used to this now, although I have warned Betty to allow me to be the one to bring the breakfast things in the morning. Rupert will often give me a naughty grin and pretend to cover up what he calls his ‘tent pole’. I have become accustomed to this behaviour by reminding myself that he was raised by a nanny and is used to servants knowing every inch of him. He means nothing by it and I must not for one moment think otherwise.

  With his face to the window he grabs a sheet from the bed and begins winding it round himself, bandage-like. When he has assured himself that this morning there are no friends about to call up to him, he proceeds to the basin to shave.

  ‘I’ll fetch your hot water…’

  ‘Nellie, stay awhile! I’ve something to show you. ‘

  He hops back towards the bed, looking like an Egyptian, with his long straight body in the short linen skirt.

  ‘You remember I went to Switzerland last December? I got sick out there. Very sick. My tongue turned a bright orange and I fainted at the Louvre on our return through Paris. It was green honey that did it–can you credit it? The very elixir, the same marvellous tonic, that cured the bee-sting made me violently sick!’

  I don’t know what to say to this–if I should apologise, perhaps. ‘The honey here is always pure, sir. Always safe to eat, I hope—’

  ‘I know, I know that. (Do call me Rupert, child, for God’s sake.) No, that’s not what I’m concerned about. I wrote a poem. I want to show you the poem.’

  He leaps across the room to his bed and rummages in the piles of books on the floor next to it for a piece of paper, which he then shoves at me. ‘There, there! “A Channel Passage”. Read it, Nellie, would you?’

  His face surprises me. The paleness and flatness is gone and now his cheeks are pink and his hair sticking up where he has pushed twitchy fingers through it and he is all animation and excitement. I glance nervously at the door, mindful of the kettle I left on the stove downstai
rs.

  I unfold the paper and read, standing up. My heart beats loudly inside my own skull, and a goblin wheels around in there too, shouting: ‘Ninny! Idiot! Now you will be found out! You will not know one word to say! What could a girl like you possibly understand about a poem by a great poet?’ The lines leap in front of me like horses galloping and refuse to make sense, so that I only glance up once and then turn back to the paper, silently reading and waiting for Rupert to speak.

  ‘There! It’s a sonnet, Nellie–you know what a sonnet is? Admittedly it might be the first sonnet in the English language that deals with the matter of–the question of–vomit but, well, it’s a fine sonnet just the same!’

  ‘Vomit?’

  He snatches the paper from me.

  ‘“The damned ship lurched and slithered. Quiet and quick, my cold gorge rose…” You see, you see, it’s a metaphor. A metaphor for love as a physical sickness…“Do I forget you? Retchings twist and tie me; old meat, good meals, brown gobbets up I throw…” Nausea, retching, do you see, as a way to express the sickness of the soul? Sickness! Is sickness not a fit subject for poetry? It appears not! Are any of the true, the everyday, the real events of a man’s experience a fit subject for poetry? No, apparently! Mr Eddie Marsh prefers poetry that he can read while lunching, so he does! The editor of the Nation, a certain Mr Nevinson,’ (he says this name with a great sneer, and a look seeking agreement, as if I should know the man), ‘would prefer it if this poem, which I had named “A Shakespearean Love Sonnet”–ha! before I changed it–would prefer if it were not included. He would like to publish some poems of mine, but not this one as he thought it generally “too strong”. Ha! Too strong!’