The Great Lover Read online

  ‘You will be delighted to know that I’ve taken the plunge and signed the pledge–or the Basis, is it?–or whatever the blazes it’s called: Mr Rupert Brooke is now a fully signed up member of the Fabian Society,’ was my opening gambit.

  She looked up, chin still to chest, and her eyes widened in–one can only imagine–joy unmitigated at my marvellous new level of commitment to the socialist cause she holds so dear. Admittedly, she said nothing, but I am sure that these were her emotions; after all, she imbibed socialism and atheism at her mother’s breast; her father, Sir Glamorous Dashing Sydney Olivier was practically a founder member, was he not? Still she remained maddeningly silent. Then suddenly her hand trailing the water snatched back towards the boat as she realised she was swirling it in a froth of goose feathers where some poor creature had met an ugly death.

  ‘Such a shame…’ she murmured. ‘If I had a butterfly net I might have caught the feathers–there’s a pillowful of goosedown there…’

  I laughed. ‘Ha! Here am I thinking you are lamenting the goose’s brief life on earth and about to wish it a better one in Heaven—’

  ‘You know I don’t believe in goose Heaven, or any other kind, and neither do you,’ she said, frowning slightly, and raising those intense grey eyes to mine.

  Here was the part of the trip where the meadows and willows gave way to the rushing sound of the weir and we had to disembark the boat and drag it a few hundred yards over the wooden rollers before launching it again. Noel obliged with admirable zeal, but still, with only the two of us and she in a skirt, it was awkward. I had arranged to drop her with her sister Margery and the others on the sleek, forbidding lawns of King’s and as we were now as far as the Mathematical Bridge, I didn’t have long to enjoy this conversation. So I paused, pretending to mop my feverish brow, holding the pole still and allowing the boat to drift slowly along the glassy green water. ‘Don’t I? I’m writing a paper, for the Carbonari, on that very subject…’

  ‘Another of your secret societies,’ she muttered sarcastically.

  I laid the pole the length of the punt and came to sit beside her. She looked up at me expectantly. From the Backs came shouts of students and towards us the thump of wood on water, as a noisy canoe full of revellers approached, scattering ducks.

  ‘But you see, Noel, I was raised on Heaven–things are quite different for you. Dick’s funeral was full of heraldic burbling about angels and trumpets…and God forbid anyone mentioning–me, for instance–that if life was so glorious, why was Dick in such a dash to be out of it?’

  ‘You think your brother–committed suicide?’

  ‘Oh, nothing as–considered as that. I only mean–his drinking, when his health was already poor–his seeming not to care. And sometimes I remember him, you know, so many little memories, over the years. He was six when I was born. I doubt he ever liked me: I was just his horrible pudding-haired younger brother. What he liked was to thrash me at cricket, at chess, at rugby. You name it, he excelled in thrashing me at it. But he was there, the backdrop to my childhood, like curtains, like the smell of Watson’s Nubolic Disinfectant Soap and now he’s–not. I can’t quite believe it. Where is he? I ask myself. Dick, where are you? And the answer comes back: nowhere.’

  Another boat passed us and the occupants waved loudly and I faintly recognised them–Justin Brooke, and a party, I think–and blushed to be found so still and intent, next to Noel. In my confusion, I hoped that Noel had not recognised the Brooke Bond Tea Boy, Justin, so said nothing, and pretended an insouciant, debonair perkiness, in the face of his leering smiles as his boat slid away from us. If this got back to Margery, I’d suffer. But Noel was tactful. She listened and she nodded and she did not panic, as Mother would have done, at my raising the extraordinary subject of Dick.

  ‘Yes,’ she said simply. Then: ‘I envy those people who have Firm Beliefs. An afterlife and so forth. It must be very comforting.’

  ‘How few of us realise how little time there is! If only we could grasp this in our imaginations, I mean really grasp it, not just know it intellectually, with our heads, but know it really with our hearts and bodies…how long the before and after probably are, and how dark…’

  I expected Noel to look shocked, then, tell me to ‘buck up’ and speak of something cheerier. I almost wished she had. Instead she said, ‘Yes, isn’t that the point of the country, somehow? To remind us, I mean. That there is no ‘state beyond the grave’. Last week Bunny and I found a dead mole under the bushes at the bottom of the garden. Bunny thought we should dissect it to see how it all worked—’

  Without meaning to, Noel had shifted the mood. I stood up and picked up the pole at once and with one deep push slid us under the Mathematical Bridge and on towards the spires of King’s. I also burst out laughing.

  ‘Last week you and Bunny Garnett were skinning a mole? Is that what they teach you at Bedales? How appallingly grisly you Bedalians are. Do tell my dear Bunny that I called him “grisly”, won’t you? So is he planning to be a veterinary surgeon now? Are you, in fact? I thought it was to be a doctor, last time we spoke…’

  ‘Well, I do intend to be a doctor, yes, and I don’t see what’s funny—’

  ‘Oh, Noel, how glorious you are! How truly, truly magnificent! You are a Prince among Women, a—’

  ‘If you talk to me like a schoolgirl I shall beat you over the head with your own pole.’

  ‘And she would do! I’m sure of it! Oh, what a girl is Noel Olivier…she’d throw you in the drink as soon as look at yer…!’

  And the mood changed, and the memory of Dick was dissolved, and Noel told me not to despair, for in the country you dimly sense, after all, if not an afterlife then a ‘wonderful unity…’ and we agreed on this, and grew peaceful again, after I had whooped with joy at the damned calming good sense of Noel Olivier.

  I’m trying to remember it all for my paper. There is something in the conversations one has on a river, with a beautiful young woman of not quite sixteen, that sound silly spoken to a group of King’s men in a hot room.

  We must feel and be friends. We must seek in Art and in Life for the end here and now.

  (How glorious to be In Love with the young Noel Olivier, but why then did I suddenly picture Nellie, with a glossy black curl sneaking loose from her cap, holding out to me my newly polished boots?) We have inherited the world. Why should we go crying beyond it?

  The present is amazingly ours.

  Mr Brooke might be a poet but he is, first, a man and in some aspects he does not differ from any other. A girl charged with cleaning out a gentleman’s room knows these things.

  So, late that first week I was in the garden, not the orchard; the roses were grey in the twilight but the day’s heat still soaked me as I ran about with my last tasks of the evening. I was on my way to the two-holer where it’s my job to change the buckets in the hatch. Naturally, it’s my least favourite chore and if I could have dispatched it to Kittie, I would. But she has the advantage of her longer time here and greater experience, so I resigned myself and put a peg on my nose. That’s why I didn’t see him at first. Now, thinking on it, I can’t truly believe how it might be possible. But there you have it. A peg was pinching my nose and I did not at first notice that approaching me was the poet who, in the semi-darkness, was quite naked.

  My hands flew to my face. I stood there, as if turned to stone, my palms balling my eyes. The peg plopped to the ground. I felt ridiculous, like the child who believes if she covers her face no one can see her, but I honestly couldn’t think what else to do. I heard the tread of his bare feet on the mossy grass and I heard that his steps did not falter in the slightest as he approached me. No, there was no hesitation in those steps at all, and I kept thinking: He must have seen me! Why does he not scurry away, or hide, or step back, or run inside the two-holer?

  ‘Glorious evening, Nell—’

  I opened my eyes then, thinking he had passed, and his hand flew down towards his private parts and, widening his
legs comically, he said: ‘“Down, little bounder, down!” as Edmund Gosse said to his heart,’ and then he laughed, rudely and very loudly. He passed so close that I could smell the scent of the muddy river that wrapped his skin. I continued to wait there, stung with shame and embarrassment, like the most foolish of statues, my face aflame under my palms, until Mr Pudsey Dawson, the bull-terrier from the Old Vicarage, hurled himself out of the shadows barking, and chased after Mr Brooke into the house.

  Well, now. I was tired later, but every time the scene formed in my mind, my face would flare again. Undressing for bed, I fancied I heard him–only a landing between us–although likely it was just Kittie snoring and snuffling in her sleep. I closed my eyes, and on the inside of my eyelids I saw him, in all his glory, as Mother would have said, a marbled colour on account of the twilight.

  I turned over, turned my face to the wall for shame, and tried to make the picture go away. I sat up in bed, and my heart beat fast with anger. I thought again of Mr Brooke’s appearance. I thought again of what he’d said, some clever joke, I knew, from this Mr Gosse I’d never heard of. His laughter, or rather the memory of it, made my face flame again.

  Of course a girl like me has seen a man naked before. I’ve seen Edmund and Stanley and Father–it was my job to lay him out, to bathe his poor stiff body. Sheep’s Green and Coe Fen are always pink with boys in the summer, as naked as God made them. We only went there once as children, but it made us smile to see the ladies going for their picnics Up the River and how they hid behind their parasols so as not to see all that pinkness dancing about while the gentlemen had to row like billy-oh but, then, none of those occasions are the same thing. Edmund and Stanley are just boys. Father was an old man. The swimming boys, though, they were not ‘horrid’, as Kittie says. I always thought them a beautiful sight–thin naked boys dancing about in the sunlight on the bright green grass; the sparkling river; the reckless high dives, when the slim bodies shot through the air like angels coming down from Heaven.

  When you lived as we did, four to a bed and in a house as small as the sheds the university men use here for boats, you learn fast. You learn to be like the three wise monkeys and hear, see and say nothing. But now my mind would not leave it alone, and who could I tell? The glory of him: the magnificence, the sheer wicked springing force of it–like a soldier saluting, or like the long fowling gun out in the punt. Oh, to be a man and possess such a toy; small wonder my brothers could not leave theirs alone! I had more sympathy for Father then, these seven long years since Mother’s death, thinking how he was just like the sun, rising every morning without fail, and how he struggled to hide it from me.

  But it wasn’t Father I was thinking of, nor Father who had opened me to these ideas of Nature and of showing a greater sympathy. Every time I tried to close my eyes and sleep I would see it again, and my body would flicker somewhere, like a match being struck. Then at last the anger seeped away and instead I wanted to giggle. How strange to be a gentleman and possess such a thing, and so casually own it that even when a young girl he’s scarcely met is accidentally greeted by it the gentleman might simply press at it, casually, with the flat of his palm, the way a child might push down a yelping dog; only to have it bounce back up again.

  I tried to think hard of Pudsey Dawson, for that snuffed out the flickering-match sensation and dispelled the power of the picture in my mind’s eye. Mr Rupert Brooke’s splendid maleness compared to a dog! Mr Pudsey Dawson is an ugly bull-terrier, not an attractive beast. He eats frogs. He is too alive, too much of a yapping thing! So springy! It should, of course, be something more glorious, like a great head of strong golden corn, or Pan with his pipes. I smiled, tasting the cool kindliness of the pillow. How offended Mr Brooke would surely be, if only he knew what I was thinking.

  Oh, the bouncing elasticity and hard heart of Youth! I’ve just this minute received an appallingly cold letter from the disgraceful young wench with the live hair that is Shining and Free (Noel Olivier, of course), which makes me want to strike her. Instead we plan to visit her again, Dudley and I, to descend on her near the river Eden at Penshurst where Dudley assures me she’ll be bathing nude with her sisters (Bryn especially, I hope) or at the very least drinking cream and lying on the grass. There I shall gaze upon her magnificence. Or, rather, Dudley and I shall affect to be passing, hands in pockets. As all those pupils of Bedales are like fish and cannot live long out of water, if we time it well, we should be in luck.

  Now, if I can persuade her to bathe nude with me, that might be something. Of course I mean simply innocent, child-like naked swimming. It’s always a question of clothes. You become part of it all, and bathe. The only terror left is of plunging head foremost into blackness; a moderate terror. I have always had some lurking suspicion that the river may have run dry, after all, and that there is, as there seems, no water in it. (I knew a man once who never dared to dive because he always feared there might be a corpse floating just below the surface into which he’d go headlong.)

  I bathed again tonight in Byron’s Pool, and wandered back to the Orchard House, past the tin-roofed lavatory, which that refined working man Mr Neeve calls a ‘two-holer’. He says this with a proclamatory cough every time, as if to boast. Perhaps the dear fellow has two arses?

  As I passed it, the black-haired beauty appeared again, popping up like a frozen monkey, hands again glued to her eyes while I passed her. I could not help myself from laughing. I thought how like Noel she was, and dreamed a little. Why, their names are practically identical, except for one letter! And yet a girl who lives without parent or chaperone to prevent it must surely experience things that a child like Noel, protected by all those sisters and parents, could not. In point of fact, what could one ever know about such lives as Nell’s? About such queer minds, which must remain as mysterious as the minds of water nymphs or coalmen?

  I sighed then, and retired to bed to pump ship. After that I wrote to my dear friend and most assiduous correspondent, Master James Strachey–more banter aimed at discouraging and inflaming his crush on me in equal measure. James writes that he’s sorry to see that poor Kitty Holloway was arrested, but I cannot for one moment understand his concern for a Suffragette! Has the boy gone mad? And he seriously expects me to help him distribute announcements for Shaw’s Press Cuttings at the Court Theatre and doesn’t at all seem to understand that I am not remotely vexed by questions of Suffrage, in any direction, shape or form. He also said, mysteriously, that poor Cecil Taylor–I can’t even remember who he is–has three of something, then enticingly refrains from explaining what he means. ‘Three of what?’ I wrote back. James jealously believes I’m in love with Apostle no. 244–Hobhouse (who had an affair with Duncan, according to James). Little does he know the uncomfortable truth of my utter and untarnished virginity. And long may I hide it from him.

  Three what? Three balls he writes on a postcard, which the Postmaster General graciously conceded to deliver, the following day.

  With Hobhouse James is far off the mark. Closer are his questions about Charles Lascelles, who at least has the dignity of being exquisitely handsome and a former love of mine from schooldays. But James writes, ‘You needn’t think I’m jealous of a ghost,’ and I suppose he has a point–Charlie is a boy of yesteryear, with Rugby seeming a hundred years ago now.

  All this made for a busy evening of scribbling tonight, after a day of lunches and dinners and teas with the shifting folk of Cambridge, but very little work being done. And, amusing though it may be, my feelings when I’m alone, and all the bright things have departed, are rarely light-hearted, but more often disturbed.

  Tonight, as ever, my mind returns to Dick, and the nature of his…illness. His drinking. The thing that sticks with me is that horrible ironic letter from Dick’s firm. How it arrived–in the midst of the funeral preparations–with its airy news of a better job. Would it have cheered him? Would it have been enough? I never thought so, somehow. His unhappiness seemed deep, constitutional. And that is
the fear–that is the dark thought that sometimes nestles up to me, here in this bed. That it might be a familial weakness, this dark, deep despair of Dick’s. What paltry gifts do I have to set against it? Only my friends, my many thousands of cheery and airy friends, and my bright thoughts and my Fabian principles (which keep me from the temptations of beer, of course), my writing and my professed desire to live in the here and now and my feeling for art and living–and yes, why, I have persuaded myself: it is true. I am nothing like Dick. No, nothing at all! Nothing like that side of the family.

  Thankfully, the unhappy ballooning of these thoughts was splendidly punctured by Nell Golightly, bringing in my milk and apple pie. I watched her set the tray down and stand with her back to my little window so that the light shone through that fine black hair of hers, curling at the bottom of her cap, tinting it red at the edges, as if singed by fire. She has such a way of standing, surveying me and waiting for my instruction, with no hint of subservience or insolence, which I find grand.

  I sat upon the bed, cross-legged, and nodded to her, and longed to ask her Important Things–things of which I have no knowledge yet, but I know I would like to ask. Nell reminds me of a young nurse I had once, a girl I thought I had forgotten, who had a manner not dissimilar: straightforward, straight-talking, clean as soap and just as fragrant. And staring at Nell raised the memory of that young nurse bathing me, it must have been when Alfred was newborn, perhaps even before we moved to School Field, because surely once living there Mother never employed a nurse, but was Housemistress to all of us?