The Great Lover Read online

  The trouble is, she smells of lemons and sawdust and the alcohol used to clean paintbrushes. She has a tiny chin, and a certain roundness of form that puts me in mind of Lord Rosebery, and eyes big as golf balls, and her mother is an artist with free ideas. There was a terrifying moment when anything might have happened and almost did–we had been roaming among the gay young in the street and even dancing and talking, yes, talking and talking, and the night wore on. Confetti sprinkled our hair and everyone was in costume of a riotous kind–myself in Greek dress, which meant a great deal of freedom and rather less of modesty. We moved to Luitpold café together to drink beer and black coffee and then more beer, and I was so surprised to find myself unchaperoned with a young woman that even had she been ugly (which she wasn’t) my thoughts would have turned to Taking Advantage, or Making the Most of an Ideal Opportunity, in a good Christian sense.

  So then we kissed and, in poor German, I suggested taking a room at the hotel next door and, to my enormous astonishment and no small amount of fear, Elisabeth acquiesced. We kissed all the way up the stairs (full of fat, simple Germans and dreadful Jews) and the kisses were feverish but more than a little repulsive to me because I began to realise how fervently she desired them and, as of old, such expectation kills off feeling in me. Immodest though it is to say it, knowing myself so desired is familiar enough, and every lover seeks the unique, the exceptional. And, furthermore, the taste of beer in another’s mouth is not especially nice.

  We stumbled to the bed in the corner, and Elisabeth sat down and patted the counterpane, with its glut of apricot roses and disorderly green leaves, and I moved in to kiss her again. In fact, the kissing was helpful in dulling my brain, being damp and excessive and not enjoyable. But I kept on with it in order to put all thoughts aside. Then Elisabeth was munching on my fingers, my head in her lap. However, just as she was tugging at the buttons on her dress and giving me my first glimpse of a large flat saucer of nipple I felt myself fizzle like a cork going out of a bottle and knew it to be quite, quite hopeless. (That breast put me in mind of pink babies and of the Ranee.)

  Elisabeth’s enthusiasm was filthy. Her watery, protruding eyes swam in front of me and I suddenly realised from the catches in her breathing and the faint sweat that gleamed on her forehead and upper lip that she was in the sort of state that I had naïvely believed only young men ever reached. There was a Crisis at hand. Our kissing and my meaningless caresses had brought her to it. The caresses were the work of an amateur; I aimed anywhere I could reach; twice I thought I had a breast and discovered it a pocket handkerchief; once I thought I’d traversed the top of her thigh but couldn’t break away to check if I was inside or outside her stocking. I had been prodding her (through my Greek robe) with a baton that was now limp and extinguished and she, poor sculptress, had every right to expect me to–to put it colloquially–‘go on’.

  It was five in the morning. A beetle crawled along the floorboard and some bed springs squeaked mournfully next door as I pulled away from her politely and told her how much I respected her and understood the delicacy of a woman’s situation and of having an unimpeachable reputation, and how much I admired her, etc., etc. Her mouth opened and closed like Mr Pudsey Dawson’s when eating a frog. Her golf-ball eyes swelled larger than ever, but she was too much a lady to protest. It was like extricating oneself from an octopus. My shirt button caught on her brooch and we had to untangle it with our faces horribly close so that I smelled the white-spirit again and glimpsed the pores at the side of her nose and vacillated wildly between thinking, Oh, for goodness’ sake, have done with it, and Hang it all, the girl is repulsive! No wonder the obelisk refuses to stand up!

  I wandered home down Ludwigstrasse and thought about Isben and composed a letter in my head to Dudley. (Dudeln, I plan to tell him, is a verb meaning to play the bagpipes.) But now I have escaped the Dutch sculptress, and am alone in my room. The Algerian dancing master next door is, for once, silent. My feet, infinitely disconnected from the rest of my body (sticking out from the covers as I’m too tall for this cot), tell me it is freezing again. I fondle only a cup of hot milk and my Webster essay and a pile of Elizabethan and German books that I may never read. Suddenly I am immensely regretful. Elisabeth, I realise, was uniquely willing. She is the first.

  I will write to James and ask his advice. French letters, pessaries and such. After all, I must practise, if I’m not to remain an unconverted Sodomite for ever. I can hardly practise on Noel or Ka, and the maid is far too clever. Plus, I like her. The maid, that is. She has short nails and normal-sized eyes and her body when you hold her doesn’t yield but maintains its own shape, slender and well formed, like the trunk of a good tree.

  I must stop thinking of Nellie Golightly and write my letter of enquiry to James, and stop flogging the pillow with my umbrella.

  As a footnote, I have sampled and sought out German culture. It has changed all my political views. Everyone is right! Germans are arming ferociously. I am now wildly in favour of nineteen new dreadnoughts. German culture must never, never prevail. The Germans are nice and well meaning and they try; but they are SOFT. Oh! They ARE soft. The only good things (outside music, perhaps) are the writings of Jews who live in Vienna.

  James replies by return of post with a long list of advice. I read it sitting in the Café Bauer drinking hot milk and reading yesterday’s copy of The Times. I hide the letter under the Sports Section as it is full of crude drawings but I can’t hide my smiles. I laugh so much at one point that I spill my milk and another cup must be brought. I am planning a long round of social engagements–Fifth Symphony, Wagner, Debussy, Valkyries. But plans to Complete the Task with Elisabeth loom large.

  So. The gist of it is. Preventatives are of three kinds: letters, pessaries and syringes. Letters are condemned on all accounts for you get hardly any pleasure from them and they are most likely to be torn in the excitement of the moment. (This information from James’s brother Oliver who is an adept.)

  Pessaries. Sound like very unpleasant things. James draws me a picture of Rendle’s Wife’s Friend, obtainable at all chemists in cardboard boxes as shown. It’s made of quinine and oil and you shove it up the lady’s cunt before you start, he says. It makes a filthy soapy mess that comes out over everything. In general, it’s efficient.

  Syringe. James draws terrible pictures of these too. Used to clean out the lady’s insides. The enema is far the most popular instrument, apparently, but has to be used after you’ve emitted and James stresses that everything must be cleaned really thoroughly, everything (meaning Elisabeth’s insides, presumably), with quinine. This immediately presents a picture so awful, so foul, that all stiff parts of me wither in horror.

  No method is certain. James added that the best time to attempt it is as nearly as possible halfway between ‘the monthlies’. If you do it just before a ‘monthly’ you’re most likely to have a baby. To do it during a ‘monthly’ is too incredibly disgusting. And Henry Lamb uses the withdrawal method, which requires an iron nerve. Hmmm. Not surprisingly, James tells me to spare myself the whole filthy business and come to bed with him instead. But I’m resolved to approach Elisabeth again and talk to her this very evening. This state of ignorance and inexperience cannot be allowed to persist! I know it is only the Bloomsberries who copulate and we Neo-Pagans (Virginia Stephen’s name for us) simply walk together in woods talking about poetry and Nature, but personally speaking, I wish to expand my knowledge of the world and in particular my experience of emitting into something warm and accommodating. (Always assuming Elisabeth possesses such a place.)

  I finish my hot milk, and slip James’s valuable reading matter under my sleeve. I pen him a reply, marvelling at the equally fascinating subject of his brother Lytton, at twenty-three, having the mumps, to which I reply with a description of my own experience at sixteen. Not so much the pain as the Disgrace, and the madness. At first they just swell and swell till they’re tight and shiny and cracking, two monstrous red balloons. Then,
all of a sudden, they go hard–hard as a rock. You lie and stare at the mountain under the bedclothes, and you pretend it’s your knees. The doctor strips you and eyes them till you have an erection, then thinks you’re a bad lot. You cannot pump ship and your semen turns green. It lasts for months. I suppose the fatal cases are when they grow too far and explode.

  When I’ve finished this brilliant epistle I leave at once in search of a chemist. The pessaries sound messy but the easiest to persuade Elisabeth to use, so I go in search of them. And book myself a hotel, since the pension would be an impossible venue for the seduction. I perk up just thinking of it all, and my homesickness for the Orchard Tea Gardens and its inhabitants, and honey-scented flowery English girls generally, begins to fade away in lovely anticipation of my sweaty Dutch sculptress and her hot and salty delights.

  (By the way, I have discovered she is Belgian, rather than Dutch, but I cannot see that it makes the slightest difference.)

  (Later) The Hotel Berchielli.

  Elisabeth arrives looking flushed and nervous and I announce at once that I have something important to discuss. She perches on a pink-cushioned chair at some distance from the bed and I stand leaning one knee nonchalantly against the counterpane. This starts to be so uncomfortable that the knee begins to tremble and my words come out a little staccato so I straighten up and then begin to feel I am towering over her, idly wishing that she would stop looking up at me with those bulbous eyes and let down her pinned hair so that I might find her attractive again.

  I outline the methods for avoiding pregnancy and show her the options: a box of Rendle’s Wife’s Friends or the syringe. (The Jew who sold them to me could hardly keep the smirk from his face.) I am red in the face by now and unable to meet her eyes. I have not felt this bad since practising my let-us-support-working-class-artists speech on Augustus John and cannot silence the little voice in my head wailing, Stop, stop! throughout. But some devil makes me persist in outlining the ways in which a little preparation is infinitely preferable to a state of heated intoxication such as almost overcame us a week ago. Then I pause and the room shudders and Elisabeth emits a piercing sob.

  ‘How could you?’ She staggers to her feet and I think for one moment she is going to slap me.

  I step back and fall on to the bed. Elisabeth stands over me, glaring. (I haven’t seen a face so alarming since the Ranee last slippered me.) My courage utterly fails as I see how badly I have understood the whole affair and my heart starts a drumbeat of terror as Elisabeth makes clear how wrong, how very wrong, I have been in my assessment of her, in her saliva-specked, broken English. How could I be so cruel, so evil, make such assumptions–the outburst goes on and on. I see instantly my enormous error. (I feel disadvantaged by my prone position, made even more foolish by a tassel from a cushion tickling my face.) Elisabeth is a woman who wanted to feel that if she gave herself to me she did so in a dream, a stupor, like Tess of the d’Urbervilles. That she was hypnotised, hoodwinked. In short: that I made her. When I protest breathlessly–swiping the tasselled cushion dramatically aside–that I had assumed we were both interested in the same thing and had only looked at practical, sensible ways to achieve our goal, she says suddenly: ‘And are you then going to marry me as you so–desire me, as you say?’

  ‘Good God, no!’ Perhaps not the most advised reply but it leaps out before I can silence it.

  Then she hurls herself sobbing on to the bed, giving the loudest of animal-like shrieks. ‘Oh, Heavens above, I am–you have–I cannot believe you said that to me!’

  ‘Ssh, Elisabeth, others will hear!’ I’m afraid the bellboy will skate across the icy blue lake of carpet outside our room with his supercilious air and arrest me for a rapist. What is interesting, in a passing kind of way, is that in her damsel-in-distress pose her hair has come loose and is now tumbling round her face in tendrils and if it weren’t for the fact that her extreme response has made her repugnant to me, she might once again be attractive. (If that isn’t a contradictory and nonsensical statement, which I fear it is.)

  I make one last attempt to rescue things. ‘Elisabeth. I’m so sorry. I’ve misunderstood–I’m an awful snake–forgive me–I thought it something we both desired. I misunderstood—Forgive me, Elisabeth, I thought you were–a Modern. I thought we agreed on these things. Forgive me—Here, take my handkerchief, ssh, darling, please…’

  At length she allows herself to be calmed a little, and I stop feeling like a desperate character from Ann Veronica. What I do feel is bloody angry. Surely it’s not honest to want to be raped? Why must everything be so difficult and deceitful? I know I have rather muffed the thing but I do feel resentful that my frankness has been met with such nineteenth-century histrionics.

  I’m sick of Munich and quite frightened of Elisabeth. She’s given me a cold in the head and I’m not sure she isn’t mad. I should return home at once.

  I have heard Rupert is coming home. I have more to worry about here. Lily is not well–she is with child again, so soon after her loss that she is naturally thin and struggling–and Betty has gone this week to Prickwillow to take care of her. Kittie has returned, full of her Suffragette talk and London ways and not in the least shamed of her actions, or grateful to Mrs Stevenson for giving her back her position.

  When Mrs S is out of earshot Kittie can’t wait to tell Lottie all about the last few months, and how she met Miss Emily Wilding Davison, the one they call Guy Fawkes in Petticoats, and how it was absolutely true, she did indeed conceal herself under the Houses of Parliament for forty-six hours. ‘We’d stocked her up with meat lozenges, you know, and lime juice to keep her going and she spent Sunday night there.’

  ‘And all for what?’ I say. ‘I remember hearing Mr Dudley Ward talking about it–a cleaner found her before she had her chance to leap out and frighten Mr Asquith with her protest, anyway, so what was the point?’

  ‘The point is—’ Kittie starts, but on Mrs Stevenson suddenly appearing in the garden, where we are, she falls silent, only soon she can’t keep it up, and begins singing the dreadful ‘March of the Women’ under her breath–‘Cry with the wind for the dawn is breaking…March, march, swing you along…’ I have a horrid picture of eager women barging forward, with overmuch action from the rump. The type that describes itself as Awf’ly Fit. The Miss Ka Cox type, for instance.

  It’s washday and we’ve dragged the tub and the Faithfull washer out into the garden to make the most of the spring sunshine. Of course, Kittie being Kittie, she has her opinions on my doing Rupert’s washing. It was Mr Neeve who told me he was coming back and sheepishly handed me a bundle of Rupert’s things that had lain in the laundry basket these last three months. And the bed linen that they might make his room ready. Mr Neeve hands the bundle to me with a thrust, as if he can’t wait to be rid of it. Taking in lodgers was not his idea.

  ‘And Rupert pays you, then–you don’t just do it as a kindness?’ asks Kittie, when Mr Neeve has strode off towards the Old Vicarage garden.

  ‘Of course he pays me! And he says I do it better than Mrs Neeve.’

  Lottie goes inside and comes out again, struggling to carry the tub with the shirts that have been soaking in lye. She plonks it on the grass with a heavy splash. ‘It’s cos Mrs Neeve boils wool and flings the rest in the Granta. Her place is riddled with lice and mice and more besides!’ Lottie has a horror of anything small that creeps, and will never go in the apple loft here at the Orchard for that reason.

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly, Lottie. What’s a few fieldmice when you can live as a Poet wants to, with friends to stay and–and reading aloud from books at midnight?’ I say. I feel very loyal to the Neeves and can’t stand Mrs Neeve’s housekeeping skills to be compared to Mrs Stevenson’s in this way.

  ‘Ooh, hark at you,’ says Kittie, mockingly. ‘Living as a Poet wants to? What on earth can that mean? Our Nellie’s smitten, isn’t she?’ She pulls some woollen underwear out of the tub and watches it stretch its long legs into the water. ‘Are the
se his?’ she whispers to Lottie, and the pair of them cackle like old hens while I seize the leggings and stuff them back into the water.

  Kittie laughs. ‘I mean, who’s paying for him to swan around, that’s what I’d like to know? I thought he had to work as a schoolmaster…’

  ‘That was only to help his mother. So they could stay in their old house. His mother agreed to move.’ Of course, this information betrays some of my conversations with Rupert and Kittie looks surprised. Surprised, but unrelenting.

  ‘Three months in Germany doing what? This lot love the Germans, don’t they? Mr Ward is smitten with a German girl, I heard…And, ooh, Lottie, did you hear that our French froggie Mr Raverat proposed to Miss Ka Cox? You know who Miss Cox is, don’t you, the one who stoops so badly she looks as if she’s nursing a child?’

  ‘Oh, you’re years behind,’ Lottie says importantly. ‘Miss Cox turned Mr Raverat down! She’s sweet on our Rupert…and Mr Raverat has married the artist one, the one at the Slade, Miss Darwin, you remember her? Gwen Raverat, she is now. Although, for a while, there was a suggestion…Well, listen to this…’

  She whispers something then, and Kittie snatches her ear away as if on fire.

  ‘He didn’t! Mr Raverat openly proposed Miss Cox as a mistress? And what did Miss Darwin have to say?’

  ‘She seemed to think it a good idea. It was Miss Cox who said no to the arrangement, and only, it seems, because she didn’t love Mr Raverat, not because she thought it wrong to be a mistress! They’re like those gypsies who stayed in Grantchester Meadows, no more morals than honey bees…’

  ‘Bees have morals! They’re loyal. They’re devoted to their queen and they work so hard! There’s no shame in service…Bees live only to serve!’

  I’m plunging the dolly-peg into the tub of linen with a fierce push as I say this, making it splash all around us. My misery at Rupert’s sudden departure to Germany has dulled as the weeks have gone by, but the careless comments of Lottie and Kittie make it surface, like the mucky water swirling back up despite all my pushing and pressing down.