The Great Lover Read online

  Finally, the penny drops. I can’t believe I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, that it had to be the simpleton Betty who saw it before me. I sink down in the scullery chair with my head in my hands. ‘What’s to be done, what’s to be done?’

  ‘He says he’ll marry her,’ Betty says, sniffing. Then, with feeling: ‘You shouldn’t have left us all alone if you didn’t want this to happen!’

  ‘Oh, my fault, is it, for trying to find a way to send money home? And why couldn’t Edmund see the bastard off–why couldn’t Edmund look after her?’

  ‘Sam was always there! You know what he’s like. You know what he was like with all of us. He loved Lily the best and he says he’s always wanted to marry her…’

  ‘Always wanted to! How long has it been going on? Didn’t you try to stop it, if you knew? She’s only fifteen! Does she want to marry him? He’s–what? Thirty-five, at least! And so…’

  A shudder runs through me as I picture Eel Sam, with his brown cap and his stubbly beard, with the long punt-gun across his knees, or sitting outside the house mending one of his eel-baskets. And always wearing wet galoshes, and with flecks of water-reed clinging to his trousers, and the whole muddy watery smell around him. And my lovely Lily, fresh and pink. Surely Lily didn’t think it was right to let Sam have his way? Couldn’t she have asked Mr Edwards to help her? But even as I think this, I know how foolish the idea is. To speak of such things to another man, to a church minister! And Lily with her wide eyes, her soft heart–how would she have fended off a man who could carry a punt-gun, a brace of swans, and put an eel-basket on his back and still stride through the water as if it were air?

  I had had hopes for Lily. She shares my Brains in a way that Betty doesn’t. The wicked thought passed through me: better that it would have been Betty, not Lily, who was lost. ‘And did she not try Mrs Gotobed, and gin, and jumping?’

  Now Betty’s chin juts up smartly, and the eyes she raises to mine are horrified. ‘Nellie! How can you say such a thing? No, she did not, and I’m glad that she didn’t think of such a–wicked, murderous thing!’

  I remember with a sick feeling then how strange Lily looked when I saw her last, how unhealthily swollen in cheeks and belly, and I curse myself for not seeing what was in front of my eyes. ‘How far gone is she?’

  ‘Six months. She’s due at the end of summer.’

  The kitchen is hot with shame. The smell of rising dough nearly suffocates us. Betty tells me that they’ll be married in church next week, just a two-minute affair with the minister, Mr Edwards, doing the blessing; and Lily begged her to tell me, and she’s thankful now she’s got it off her chest, but I’m not to blame her. And Lily’s life isn’t over, Betty says, why speak as if it is? Why, it’s simply the most natural thing in the world! Perhaps the best thing that could have happened. Sam will be a proper father to them now, and we can all breathe easy. And the Spike won’t loom in the same scary way that it has since Father passed.

  Breathe easy? While Sam’s brats slither into our kitchen like a bucket of brown eels and my darling Lily is lost for ever into a life like Mother’s, a life of Fen Blows, or under that foul green fog that hangs over the river, choking the life from everything? And it’s all my fault because I left them, and despite my Brains and Good Sense, my facing of Hard Facts, I didn’t foresee it.

  We work in silence after that, and as there is so much to do, we can appear industrious to each other and yet be deep in our own thoughts. ‘Lily’s life isn’t over,’ Betty said. And: ‘Perhaps it’s the best thing that could have happened.’ If only I could share her estimation of marriage and motherhood for Lily.

  I thump the dough on to the table: it is gratifying to have a pliant substance to shake and throw around just now. My mind runs on, remembering the day Rupert opened the letter from Margery Olivier, and his fury at what he read there, the way he railed at me, at no one in particular: ‘I’m informed, yes, that’s the word, I’m informed by an estimable source, that marriage is the death of the intellectual girl, kills her off, or something, kills all development. When a woman falls in love, apparently, she does it so much more completely and finally than a man. (Strange, then, isn’t it, that all the great poets and lovers of time have been male?)’

  At the time I’d greeted his outburst in silence, confused. I thought his interests lay in another direction, quite away from girls altogether. But then I realised all men must marry, whatever their hearts desire. And all men must appear to be interested in the question, if they do not wish to reveal themselves to others in their true persuasion. That girl, Noel Olivier, with the long brown hair parted in the middle, whose serious, maybe angry, maybe–what?–sullen eyes stare at me every morning from a photograph in a silver frame on Rupert’s mantelpiece. What a marvel that a girl might dare to be a doctor! I thought about what this Margery had said and whether she was just a moonstruck lunatic, as Rupert claimed. Marriage, or rather love, ends a girl’s life, finishing off her intellectual development, her education. How angry he was when he repeated Margery’s theory. How–cruel when he said so sarcastically that he wondered which part of my marvellous intellectual development I was afraid of losing by falling in love.

  And yet. Marriage is so much the topic. I hear them talk of it all the time. Even the lady with the hooded eyes, the one who always holds her head at a cocked angle, like a little bird–what is her name? She frightens me. She always seems to be staring at something just out of sight, but then she will glance up and make the others laugh with a witty remark, or something sharp and cruel–Miss Stephen, isn’t it? Even she speaks of little else. One time, when I was bringing the scones, she and Miss Cox were together and whispering…‘Poor thing! Well, he’s not a bad man, I suppose…’ Miss Stephen said, with not the least amount of sympathy in her voice. ‘I hear her father asked her what she should do if she didn’t marry. The answer, of course, is nothing: “We were educated for marriage, and that is all…”’

  ‘Does she care for him?’ asked Miss Cox.

  ‘No, not in the least…but it’s whether she can bear another year under her parents’ roof…’

  Well, that’s fine for Miss Stephen and Miss Cox. Lily is already mistress of our little house in Prickwillow, and marrying Sam will just mean more of the same, for ever more. Kittie used to say that the Suffragists believe marriage is a solemn duty, the best possible way for ‘women to raise humankind from the degradation to which men have brought it’. What she means is that men have filthy lusts and are for ever infecting their wives with all sorts of wicked diseases from the fallen women they visit–that was Kittie’s main topic, when she was here, and half the ladies she went to London with, too.

  But while weighing all this, and sweeping and dusting, and now in the kitchen making scones, another part of me seems to have been considering it quietly, like a little imp in a basement room working by candlelight while the rest of the house sleeps. And, to my astonishment, this imp comes up with a judgement quite different from my own, and it is this: the imp agrees with Margery. In some low-down never-explored place in my own heart, I realise that my despair for Lily is not because Sam is a bad man or a poor man. If she was marrying the minister, Mr Edwards, I would feel the same way. No matter how kind the man, how decent, how well-meaning, whenever I picture it, my lovely Lily married and with children clinging to her apron, a terrible picture comes to me, and a choking feeling. I glance out of the kitchen window and I see the bull-terrier, Mr Pudsey Dawson, with his nasty intent face in the wet grass, snuffling for frogs. And as a frog, a poor, sprightly, free little fellow with raised eyes and spread-fingered arms hopping foolishly towards Mr Pudsey’s gaping mouth, I can see only my little Lily, green and free and wide-eyed too, now disappearing down a long black throat.

  So, I have survived my stint as Schoolmaster and overseen Mother’s move to the rented house, and also ‘the putting an end to’ of the poor old kitchen cat, Tibby, who, at sixteen, was considered too old to accommodate the change. (And the Hou
semaster who is to replace me, Bradby, would never keep her.) I have surely done my bit as Eldest Surviving Son, and when I think of her (the cat, I mean) she merges in my mind rather and I wonder, Did her face turn grey and impossible, as Father’s did? Such relief that my career as Schoolmaster was cut short by Mother’s sudden repudiation of her home and willingness to consider a life of reduced circumstance. Does she actually believe I might have a future as a poet after all? Or was it simply that she could not bear for a moment longer the gloomy face that greeted her every morning and the morose kickings of the table during meals?

  I believe Mother fears for my sanity sometimes, fearing I will take to drink and crumble, like Dick, and it is this that most affected her decision.

  I tried not to allow the Ranee to see the joy that possessed me the moment I knew I would soon be back in Grantchester, in my old rooms at the Orchard. And here I am–in time to spend May Day breakfasting among the apple blossom with my swarms of friends, the ones Virginia Stephen calls the ‘dew dabblers’. The only frustration is that I have still not managed to manoeuvre a meeting between myself and that beguiling nymph Noel Olivier. I endeavoured to see her on a train en route to Birmingham but the dratted child could not bestir herself to tell me the right train. I have invited her to Grantchester countless times. I’ve teased and tantalised her with names of other women I spend my time with–Gwen (I know she is not in the least threatened by Gwen), Gwen’s cousin Frances (ineffective now Frances has gone and married, but she might find Frances’s poetry-writing a threat, with a bit of luck), Ka Cox, Virginia Stephen…Nothing seems to ruffle the sentimental schoolgirl Noel, however, and certainly not enough to bring her away from school and on to a train.

  My dulled and deadened heart, sinking to the bottom of the river like a moss-furred stone during my term as Housemaster, has rather unfortunately bounced up since arriving back here, swinging again on its elastic before landing slap-bang at the feet of Noel once more. There is something so choking, so suffocating, about being adored. The oxygen of indifference is what I need: it surely makes my heart pump healthily. I am a Poet, so I must be the one doing the loving. The Great Lover, that’s me, not the beloved. The beloved is despicable. That’s the role of a girl.

  After the rain and the swim, I come across Nellie in the kitchen, sitting alone with her head in her hands. I glance around to make sure no one can see us through the window to the lawn, then kneel at her feet and ask what might be wrong. She raises a hot face, smeared with flour. ‘My sister is just about to be married. She is fifteen. It’s something of a shock to me.’

  ‘Wild Bet is to be married? So suddenly?’

  ‘No, not Betty. I’ve another sister. Two, in fact. This is the middle one, Lily.’

  ‘I see. Well, I should offer my congratulations, but I see from your face that they are not merited. Is the fellow a–what?–a drunk? A fool?’

  ‘No, sir, not either of those. Just–old.’

  ‘Ah, old.’

  My knees creak as I sit at her feet and ponder her dear, worried face and the way her hand keeps flying to her cheek, as if to wipe at something that does not appear there. ‘Ah…How old is he? Twenty-five? Thirty? Thirty-five! Horrible. I can’t agree more.’

  She smiles then.

  ‘But must she marry the old fellow? Can’t she refuse him?’

  Nellie blushes then, and hastens to get up and check the oven. With her back to me she mutters miserably, ‘It’s him or the Spike, if you listen to Betty. I didn’t think things were that bad. I’ve been sending money home! I can take care of them all, I said…’

  ‘The Spike? The Workhouse, you mean? We wish to abolish it, Nellie, and provide properly for the aged, the sick, the children, the unemployed. Did you see the leaflets I left here? About the break-up of the Poor Law?’

  ‘Mrs Stevenson burned them on the fire!’ she says, turning round to face me, and wailing slightly. I see that her eyes glitter with tears and, feeling disadvantaged from my position on the floor, clamber to my feet to offer her my handkerchief. She sniffs into it, apologising and sobbing in equal measure.

  ‘Things aren’t getting any better in our time and our country, no matter how much we preach socialism and clean hearts at them,’ I say. She snuffles quietly.

  ‘Dudley and I plan a campaign. I, writing poetry and reading books and living here all day, feel rather doubtful and ignorant about ‘The World’–about England and men, and what they’re like. So I thought a trip deep into the English psyche was in order! Well, to Poole Harbour and other village greens in the south-west of England, to be more accurate. We intend to hire a horse, and take our tents, and preach by day and night in support of Poor Law reform. What do you think, Nell? Think we can do it?’

  Now she looks up, surprised. She crumples the handkerchief into a ball and seems to wonder whether to hand it back to me. Thankfully she decides against this and stuffs it into her apron pocket. ‘Why–yes, I–I suppose so—You and Mr Ward? In a caravan?’

  ‘We shall need a Primus stove, plates, spoons, cocoa, salt–any chance of you sneaking us a few things, for our supplies? I mean, not if it would get you in trouble, but it’s proving rather expensive, what with the cost of the caravan I’m renting from Hugh and Steuart Wilson of King’s.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, smiling at last. ‘Of course I can.’

  ‘Marvellous! And, Nell, I’ve never actually, you know, minded a horse before–do you think one ought to feed it once or twice a day on such a trip? It’s called Guy, apparently. The horse, I mean.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure once will do fine, if it’s a good feed.’

  ‘Splendid! Well, let’s hope Women’s Suffrage doesn’t hijack our more important campaign…and, yes, a tin of sardines for our “whales” would be splendid. Do you really think you could spare them?’

  She runs about the kitchen then, seemingly cheered to be given a purpose–and I feel a queer stab of pride that I’m the fellow who lifted her mood. Her sleeves are rolled up so that I see the finely haired skin on her bare arms and, seeing her thus, I am reminded once again of that day among the bees and her magnificent command of the creatures. Of course, such a memory of last summer, of the moment when I took her in my arms and the sunny taste of her mouth in mine, leads immediately into the unwanted, ugly memory of other things. Of her in the garden pegging up newly laundered wet sheets. I watched her from my window, knowing that she, and she alone, knew about Denham, knew all about me, every last thing…

  ‘I–well, thank you, Nell. I–I suppose Ka Cox could get some of these things just as easily. Ka’s a practical girl, you know, and an orphan like yourself, so used to taking charge of things—’

  Nell had disappeared into the pantry, and appears suddenly, as I say this, bearing two jars of honey, and such a stricken look that I long at once to bite back the words, although not quite understanding which of them has offended her so. Is it the mention of her being an orphan? Well, that was tactless, yes, but it is the truth, none the less, and Nell has never seemed to me to shirk simple facts. Could it, perhaps, have my been implication that Ka might do just as well as she, when Nell is trying so hard to accommodate me?

  ‘Oh, of course,’ Nell says, glancing down at the jars in her hands, now seeming uncertain whether to offer the honey or not.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to get you into trouble with Mrs Stevenson, Nell,’ I suggest, appeasingly.

  Now she says hotly, ‘The honey is my own to give. From my family in Prickwillow, you know. Actually, these are two very special jars: the fields near our house with their poppies make a–quite special flavour, very different from Mr Neeve’s orchard honey.’

  ‘I—’ Naturally here I wish to apologise, but feel tongue-tied and then annoyed that this girl always seems to fluster me, render me foolish and clumsy and, in some queer fashion, hideously exposed. (My remarkable wit does rather desert me where Nell Golightly is concerned!) It is the matter of Denham, and the kiss, too, but more than that: it is some dreadful sen
se that she holds my secrets in her apron pocket along with my handkerchief. I’m delivered bound into her hands.

  ‘I should pack some books,’ I mutter stiffly, preparing to retreat to my room. ‘You know, decide what I’m taking. Marlowe, Donne, the Webbs’ report, that kind of thing. Yes, I need, we need, special information about the counties we’re passing through to help us plan our campaign–must go. Um, thanks awfully for the honey.’

  I hold out my hands and, without a word, she places the two jars in them.

  Poole High Street, close to the Free Library. Principal speaker Mr Brooke. Questions invited. In support of proposals for Poor Law Reform. Sponsored by the NCPD.

  I am unable to remain still in my room. I sit on my bed, pile up a few books in a desultory fashion, and leap up again. I put my face to the floorboards, breathing in dust and mouse droppings, and listen.

  Yes. Nell is still in the kitchen, clattering about with the pots. Can I find some excuse to venture back downstairs, and repair the damage of my clumsy remark about Ka and, more importantly, somehow smooth over the discomfort of what has transpired between us and can never be alluded to?

  I peer over the balcony in time to see Mrs Stevenson leave the kitchen. Then I return downstairs, where Nell seems happily back to her customary good spirits and Mrs Stevenson does not return. I show her one of our leaflets, which she admires. I show her some of my notes, too, and she murmurs that the Spike is indeed worse than any prison, with mothers separated from children, and husbands from wives, and hard labour all day long. ‘At least in prison you might one day be released!’ she says. ‘In the Spike no one ever seems to come out who goes in.’

  I contemplate this awful thought for a moment. ‘I’m a little nervous. You know, the British Working Man can be rather–alarming to one like me!’

  She laughs.

  ‘I’m preparing my various responses, just in case.’

  I leap on to a kitchen chair in my bare feet and, in a voice that mimics Sidney Webb’s meaningful tones, announce: ‘You may fear for the moral character of the poor, yes, if these laws came to pass. Will the fibre of the working man become weak if he has recourse to the state directly he is out of a job? It is all very well, my dear young woman, to be so concerned, so incensed about the moral character of the poor individual, but what about the moral fibre of a nation as a whole and its responsibility to its citizens in need? What of that, eh, my girl?’