The Great Lover Read online

  She laughs again.

  ‘After all,’ I continue, dropping the mimicry in my tone and aiming for sincerity, ‘why make a distinction between times of adversity and times of trouble or danger from others? If we are in danger from other people we have no difficulty in throwing ourselves at the mercy of the state in the shape of the local policeman or law courts. This carries no shame or social stigma! Why should it be otherwise in times of financial trouble? This “loss of independence” does not weaken the character. It leaves men free to use their energies more profitably!’

  She claps and smiles one of her deep, bosomy smiles and I feel immensely pleased, and immensely relieved and, yes, it almost does feel easy between us again. I jump down from my soapbox. ‘Marvellous! Thank you, Nell. Oh, yes, I’m quite prepared now for whatever Assaults on Reason these working folk are going to throw at us–not to mention the eggs!’

  She gives a little shriek then, and disappears to the pantry again, returning with a box of eggs. ‘Take these too. I’ve asked. I’ll bring extra from home when I visit and Mrs Stevenson says it’s fine.’

  ‘Oh, Nell, you are too kind. I’m not sure young Dudders knows how to boil an egg, but we can teach him, eh?’

  ‘You’re funny,’ she says.

  I stare into her glorious violet eyes and I know that I was not wrong in my estimation of her intelligence. ‘I’m sorry about your sister, Nell,’ I say, and in an instant we are both serious again. ‘Marrying an old man is a horrible fate.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Whenever I let slip the mask for a moment, Nellie never fails to respond. It is not in what she says–Tradition and Centuries are difficult to undo–but in her glances. That is where the truth between us resides. At least, sometimes I believe this. But then the glorious violet eyes of Nell Golightly could persuade a man of anything.

  Now she covers her hands with a teacloth and takes the tray of scones from the oven. A delicious hot smell wafts around us. I hear from the voices outside on the lawn that Ka and Geoffrey and the others are returning and a private conversation cannot be continued. I’m surprised at how angry this makes me feel.

  ‘We leave tomorrow next week for our trip, so any–provisions you might secrete before then would be gratefully received.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘It’s all for the Cause, of course.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she says. I realise from her tone and that ‘sir’ that the others are in earshot and Mrs Stevenson’s approaching tread is on the stair, so I lean forward to whisper my next remark, and I have no idea what I’m going to say until the words are out of my mouth.

  ‘I have one more request of you, Nellie. I will make it first thing in the morning.’

  ‘Yes, sir. As you will.’

  Her eyes widen. Violets. Darkening woods. Nature hammers out a drumbeat.

  I straighten up. Quelle surprise! Whatever that request might be, it seems Nell has said yes!

  Rupert says, ‘Let’s swim at Byron’s Pool.’

  ‘What–now? At this hour?’

  ‘Come on, no one’s up. It’s a glorious morning. Come, come on, Nellie…’

  ‘But my duties–I haven’t finished in the kitchen.’

  ‘It’s six o’clock! The sun’s barely up. Surely your sister might cover for you just this once. Tell Mrs Stevenson you have some errand–I don’t know…Don’t you have to go to the butcher’s sometimes?’

  I smile at this, for meat is delivered, every morning, by the butcher’s boy, Tommy, long before Rupert wakes. But the idea of it, of sneaking away with Rupert, of being outdoors by the river in the earliest, freshest part of the day, rather than indoors, hot and sweaty, cleaning out the copper and blackening the stove and starching the linen for the new tenants, feels so tempting, so scandalous, that I can hardly stop my heart picketing my chest for permission. How many times have I listened bitterly to the shouts, the laughter and calls of Rupert and his friends, the thud of wood and splash in the water, remembering with longing Edmund frolicking in the river Lark, while Rupert rows back along the Cam escorting some lady in a hat or being read to by some twit in a silk tie, and I’m out by the hives, working?

  ‘All right,’ I say. ‘Betty will stand in for me.’

  And I grab the smoker and some quicklime so that I might inspect the bees on the way back and make-believe I have been checking that no surplus queen cells have been forming in the brood chamber. Rupert goes on ahead, carrying the butterfly net, and some rolled-up towels so that we won’t be seen walking together. The Stevensons are still asleep. Betty is just stirring and I tell her that I will be gone an hour and she’s to make out I’m busy with the bees, if anyone asks. She looks startled but is too sleepy to ask more.

  My heart raps at my ribcage for fear, for naughtiness, swift and stubborn as the spotted woodpecker at the tree. The sky is clean, the day shiny as a newborn, and a light wind is brushing my cheek as I trip along behind Rupert, watching his figure in the distance as he leaves the garden and joins the lane; his blue shirt, his long, loose-limbed gait. I haven’t run away like this since I was in the schoolhouse and that was a day that the Reverend himself came to find me.

  I venture this thought to Rupert when I catch up with him. Thick white dust is shifting under his sand-shoes. He seems dismayed to discover my family are regular churchgoers.

  ‘But how else could a girl like me get an education?’ I ask, and he stares at me for a moment, and nods. We cross the bridge in front of Grantchester Mill and walk through a meadow, which is still sopping with dew.

  ‘I must give you Principia Ethica and more poems by Swinburne. I shall soon corrupt you.’

  I set my mouth then, knowing he is laughing at me. We are now in sight of the the dam with its grey sluice gates and the deep, waiting water. The smell of mint and mud swells around us. He sits at the edge of the water, at the place where the river widens into a pool and cow-parsley grows on the banks in huge white clumps. He seems to be waiting for me to join him. I’m shy at first, but seeing him look up expectantly and brush his fringe from his eyes, I sit myself down beside him. Not too close.

  ‘What do you think of Ka Cox, Nellie?’

  This is not what I expected. I put down the smoker on the grass.

  Miss Cox. Yesterday, coming back late with the Frenchman, Mr Raverat, she startled me in the kitchen, where I had my back to the lawn and the french windows and was drying crockery with the teacloth. Her sudden appearance made me jump and I dropped a cup. To my surprise she bent with me to pick up the pieces and, handing them to me, said, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry! I startled you. How silly of me.’ Mr Raverat stood awkwardly while she gathered more of the pieces and placed them in my outstretched palm. ‘I really am terribly sorry,’ she said, and opened her mouth to say more. I imagined she was about to offer to pay, but to my astonishment she said, ‘Where does Mrs Stevenson keep the pan and brush? Let me sweep up the rest.’

  ‘Oh, no, ma’am,’ I said hastily, and Mr Raverat put his arm on hers and murmured something in French to her. He swept her out of the kitchen and on to the lawn.

  ‘She is very…kind,’ I say now cautiously.

  Rupert has rolled on to his stomach, holding the butterfly net in the green eddies of the water so that the back of his head is towards me. ‘Kind…Hmmm. How observant you are!’ He sits up and pokes me with a little twig, and laughs.

  I blush, wondering if my interest in Miss Cox betrays me. But he seems not to notice.

  ‘Kind, though. Is that enough? Is kindness what a man wants…after all? Not especially pretty…She’s sweet on Jacques, of course,’

  ‘Oh. For myself I thought your friend Mr Keynes rather fond of her,’ I answer.

  Rupert seems surprised. ‘Geoffrey? Surely not? But, then, that’s the surprise with Ka. Other chaps do seem rather to find her–attractive. It’s a mystery to me. Jacques is perfectly smitten.’

  To my surprise, now that she is being so dismissed, I feel obliged to defend Miss Cox. ‘
Well, there’s plenty to be said for kindness, after all. For warmth and a generous nature…more than, you know, looks alone…’

  ‘Perhaps. Or perhaps it’s that some men wish to be mothered. And some of us would run a thousand miles before taking up that particular offer!’

  Knowing this to be a reference to his mother, I now feel the need to defend her, too. ‘I don’t see that maternal affection is so…dreadful…’

  ‘No. Quite. Perhaps not for those who don’t have it. I’m sorry I mentioned it yesterday, Nell, you being an orphan like Ka. It was horribly tactless of me, but I only meant that Ka not having parents means she’s not chaperoned the way Noel Olivier is, she’s rather more free…but, then, you working people are always free. You have no idea how–how stultifying it is to be a nice upper-class girl like Noel Olivier!’

  He is chewing on a strand of dewy grass and spits it out angrily.

  ‘I HATE THE UPPER CLASSES!’

  This he says with such a shout that I glance over to the riverbank, fearing someone might appear there and discover us. I am sitting with my skirts tucked round my knees, watching a ladybird travel carefully down a blade of grass, the grass arching with her weight; bending, but never breaking. ‘I’m not sure we have such freedoms.’

  The ladybird’s wings spread like a shell cracking open and she takes off.

  ‘No, forgive me, Nellie. I suppose not. It’s only that–it’s just that. I once saw a working girl. Not a prostitute, you know, just a girl with her lad, under a lamp-light, on Trinity Street. And she was kissing him, and I saw her face shining in that yellow light, and her eyes were open and in that glimpse—I can never get that glimpse, that expression, out of my mind.’

  I shoot a shy glance at him. We are close enough for me to see the blond hairs on his upper lip. Something has peeled back. His face is so naked that I glance hastily away again.

  We do not acknowledge what I have seen. He shifts, props himself up on one elbow and pats the dandelions in the grass beside him.

  ‘Lie here beside me, Nellie. Can you swim? What time is it?’ (He glances at his watch.) ‘The water will be icy so early in the day before the sun has properly warmed it, but I am certain you are a splendid swimmer! Tell me I’m right?’

  He is pulling off his sand-shoes. Now the woodpecker in my chest starts its knocking again. I could not have believed he meant it when he first suggested swimming this morning, but here he is, stripping off his blue flannel shirt so that his bare chest, sun-browned with its light fur of golden hair, is suddenly in front of me, and nowhere to hide my face.

  ‘Be brave, Nellie. No one ever comes here. Only his ghostly lordship practising his stroke.’

  I don’t understand, and my face betrays it.

  ‘Byron, Nellie. The poet. Safely dead these ninety years.’

  When I still say nothing, he lowers his voice to a whisper: ‘Take off your dress. You must have done it once–swum naked as a child?’

  I have, of course, only last summer. But that was a river filled with noisy children, with Stanley and Edmund and Lily and Olive, and splashing and mud-drenched limbs, a river in which I had been a child myself. A summer when I still had a father.

  Slowly, without looking at him, I begin unbuttoning my boots. My hands are sticky with sweat and the clamouring in my heart is so loud that it seems to bounce from tree to tree. Since I’m not properly dressed, there is only my nightdress, with a coat thrown over it, and my drawers. I take off the coat, and shiver in the flimsy cotton-lawn. I don’t like him watching me, and tell him so. He pretends to look away, shielding his eyes, then peeping from under his hands. This makes me laugh.

  ‘You’re very beautiful, Nell,’ he says softly.

  As fast as I can, I pull the nightdress over my head, taking an enormous deep breath. Then the drawers are flung high, so that they catch on a branch behind me. My whole body sizzles, as if the trees might catch fire.

  I run to the water’s edge and dive, and Rupert shouts, and the green water rears up to smack me with a cold, a startling, a gloriously shocking slug.

  So we are on the road, in a cart, to be exact. We left Winchester this morning. A cat–a tabby stray, we’ve named it Pat the Cat–has accompanied us, which gives Dudders something to stroke (he is missing Anne-Marie, his new love). Dudders sits up front on the box while I keep Guy stocked up with his nosebag and whistle happily, all the while composing more Poor Law speeches, planning the meeting with Noel and her delightful sister Bryn and thinking, beneath it all, of Nellie Golightly. Remembering her leaping into the river–such a lightning jolt of joy stiffening my entire body as I watched her. What a swimmer! What a girl! Such thrilling transgression in even sitting by the water and talking to her. But it’s impossible. How could one ever continue a dalliance with the maid when one is watched over at every turn by kindly friends, like James and Lytton and Eddie, with an interest in assuring one remains a committed Sodomite? Which I clearly never was–only an adventurer. Easier to have such an adventure with a boy from one’s own class than with Nell.

  Too much thinking about it makes me sigh, and I cannot share it with Dudley. I know his feelings on Inversion and Sodomy. And for all his fine talk and good intentions, he is even more afraid of the lower classes than I am.

  Last night two local fellows pelted us with stones and we had to wake up the damned horse and move on. We have not yet addressed one meeting but we have a plan that if such stone-throwing happens again we will simply display the poster, look wise and scatter pamphlets.

  There was a frightful scene with the Stevensons the morning we left. Something about going barefoot–villagers have talked. The apple-cheeked old lady was quite unsentimental about it and the apples looked hard and crisp and even, suddenly, not cosy at all. She even brought refined Mr Neeve to make the point more refinedly. It was most embarrassing. I had to stand at the bottom of the stairs like a naughty schoolboy and was horribly reminded of the Ranee on one of her rants and did not like the craven small-boy stance I could not help taking up. I caught a glimpse of Nellie, hovering at the top of the stairs, her hand to her cheek in that mannerism she has, and I wondered. Had a villager in fact seen me at Byron’s Pool with Nellie? Was that what Mrs Stevenson was alluding to?

  Not that anything happened, of course, except for swimming and nakedness. Oh, and a kiss. One more small kiss. However, this was no ordinary nakedness. Oh, my word, no. It truly was the most extraordinary nakedness. That’s the problem. Nellie’s naked loveliness is something even the naiads at the water’s edge have never before seen the like of. With her upturned girl’s breasts like the bellies of little sparrows–well, it was quite enough to signal to the whole village that Lust herself was in the garden.

  I caught a fish. A tiddler. (A minnow! A minnow! I have him by the nose!) He turned over fitfully and we saw the flash of his gold stripe and Nellie crouched beside me, shivering, asking if I would put him back since he was so tiny. I was reluctant–it had taken a good ten minutes of standing in the water with the disturbed mud billowing round my legs like smoke, carefully hovering behind him (so as not to make a shadow), hands cupped, to accomplish my goal, but I did as she bade, and the lucky fellow flipped over on one side and limped off to his cool, curving world. My thoughts had not been entirely on the fish, and my concentration, with Nellie standing so close beside me, her water-drenched body slim and green in the watery light like the shoot of a young tree, giving off her salty intimate river smell, was stiffening me so violently that I had to plunge quickly into the cold river to disguise it.

  The child acted as if she had not noticed, just as she did that time in the garden. I do not know how to corrupt her. I do not want to corrupt her. Or only a little. And then I should regret it horribly. It seems, for all my posturing, I am not in the cast of Henry Lamb or Augustus John. I am shy. I like her rather too much. I did kiss her, damp and trembling in the boat-shed, and then I rubbed her hair with a towel, but she was by then in a fit of terror and kept wailing that she
was late for breakfast duties. It was not the moment for a seduction scene. I found I was trembling myself, and couldn’t quite explain it.

  I did regret my ill-judged remark in the bedroom that I should have ‘taken’ her that day by the beehives. How ferociously she glared at me! I almost ducked.

  No, she’s hardly a girl to mess with, this Nell Golightly. Far too fierce and resolute for that.

  So we arrive, and tie up the horse, in the spot we identified the night before, nailing a poster to a tree, announcing our intention to deliver an Important Speech at 10 a.m. prompt. The audience, eagerly gathered for our performance (one old gent), is filling a pipe in great anticipation. I inspect my watch: ten precisely. But surely Guy needs a feed, I decide, and Dudley agrees. And after that Dudley finds that posters must be added beneath the one advertising our speech, and a wooden soapbox carried from the caravan and leaflets spread upon the grass. The old gent coughs impatiently.

  Dudley decides that Pat the Cat needs feeding, also, and offers her the last in our tin of sardines.

  I stand on the box. Our audience swells to two as a delivery boy joins the old gent.

  I clear my throat. ‘Between two and three million are destitute in Britain! If the whole population were under the command of one sane man, the first thing he would do would be to feed those millions so that they could contribute towards the production of wealth!’

  ‘Aye,’ says the old gent, to my surprise. The delivery boy stares, bottom lip dropping open, placing his basket against his bicycle, and waits for more. Dudley, having finished feeding Pat, hovers behind me, studiously cleaning his pince-nez.