The Great Lover Read online

  What I remember is the feel of friendly fingers rubbing soap over my legs, and splashing water up to my chest. And, looking down, the sight of the water trickling towards my white stomach and my little member perking up like a soldier standing to attention, and saying something to the nurse to this effect, and her smiling–yes, she definitely smiled and did not scold me!, although she ceased her rubbings and her splashings–and then suddenly the Ranee was in the room, casting about us a giant sweeping grey towel of disapproval and worse than that. Worse than disapproval, I knew at once how she felt towards me, all the feelings she swept into the room with her: disgust, horror, dislike, might I even say intense hatred for my very childish boyish perkiness. Swirling this mood around me and aiming it finally at such an essential bit of me made me know at once what she felt about all of me.

  That nurse–her name suddenly came to me as Dorothy–was soon after dismissed and I was expected to bathe unaided or with my brothers, but not before the girl had muttered to me one day, ‘Poor Mrs Brooke, don’t be too hard on her, Rupert, for no boy can understand what it is to lose a daughter,’ and the two events conflated at once, and I decided in my childish mind that this was why Mother so disliked my male anatomy, and would like to chop it off and make me a girl, like my poor dead sister.

  Musing on this only caused the same conflicting feelings to surface and I wished to God I might think of something else. When Nell Golightly had gone, with the soft closing click of the door behind her and the squeak of her tread on the stairs, I turned my mind deliberately, and with an effort, to the group of Young Poets I met that time in London. All of them extremely poor. And how they write–some are good, others bad–as they talk. That is to say, their poems give the fullest value when pronounced as they thought and felt them. They allow for ow being aow. Their love poems begin (I invent) ‘If yew wd come again to me’. That is healthy. That way is life. In them is more hope–and more fulfilment–than in the old-world passion and mellifluous despair of any gentleman’s or lady’s poetry.

  Mightn’t Nellie inspire poetry of that sort in me? Mightn’t she offer what Noel can’t possibly? Because, and Noel’s letters make this clear, severing Noel from her family, from her protective sisters who do not allow her to walk alone with a man and were horrified by that simple punt down river, is not a possibility. Whereas Nell is all alone, and has no one here to separate her from me. Only the weight and silence of custom, of my own cowardice, of a million things.

  How easy or hard will it be to talk to the maid? There is this strange idea that the lower classes, the people entering into the circle now of the educated, are coarsely devoid of taste, likely to swamp the whole of culture in undistinguished, raucous, stumpy arts that know no tradition. It is only natural that the tastes of the lower classes should be at present infinitely worse than ours. The amazing thing is that it is probably rather better. It is true many Trade Unionists do not read Milton. Nor do many university men. But take the best of each. Compare the literary criticism of the Labour Leader with that of the Saturday Review. It is enormously better, enormously readier to recognise good literature.

  Of course, I myself have written for the Spectator and do not wish to decry it. But the force of primness that exists in this country, the washy, dull, dead upper-class brains that lurk in the Victorian shadows…do I wish to throw in my lot with them? Is it all to be such prettiness, my work, and is that what I’m to be remembered for? Not the short fat man with fair hair who wrote the plays (Shakespeare, idiot!) but the pretty golden one who wrote–what was it again that he wrote? Oh, did he write then, that golden Apollo, so handsome, hardly needed to lift a pen, surely, it was enough for him to flick his hair and bend his arse over some Trinity Fellow’s desk, wasn’t it? ‘Lest man go down into the dark with his best songs unsung…’

  O, that way madness lies; let me shun that. My head hurts. I have the pink-eye again.

  Mr Brooke doesn’t seem unduly interested in a lady’s looks–the lady here yesterday with two other gentlemen was an ill-dressed lump, yet he seemed to like her well enough, laughing and once putting his arm on hers. Her name is Miss Darwin, and she is related to the famous man who claims we are all no better than apes in the forest. She wears a walking skirt with brush braid sewn round the bottom to catch the mud, which is a clever idea, although it looks funny.

  They sit outside in the orchard, in deckchairs, and talk about the strangest, most inconsequential things.

  ‘Here, did I tell you that story that a fellow at King’s told me? About his cousin who died when she was seventeen, and the poor chap was too deep in his Tripos to really give it his full attention and he rather muffed the grieving part of things. Then one day–oh, yes, thank you, Nell, and cream too, please–he had such a dream. In it he saw the girl standing in front of a mirror, powdering her face. One can imagine how impossible this seemed to him–the child was just seventeen, why would she be painting her face? Then he saw clearly in the glass that she was dead and that’s how it struck him at last. She was trying to cover up a ravaged face.’

  It’s Mr Brooke who tells this tale. He says ‘ravaged’ in a teasing, theatrical manner, with his eyelashes flickering. But the young Miss Darwin woman doesn’t laugh, she continues staring down at a small notebook where she is sketching, and mutters, without looking up, ‘A girl of seventeen, painting her face!’ To which Mr Brooke replies, ‘It was a dream, Gwen. The chap was dreaming. There’s a curious obviousness, finality, certainty about it, somehow, when one hears of it, isn’t there?’

  I remember then that Kittie told me Mr Brooke lost a brother. His older brother, Dick, ‘went to the bad,’ she said, hinting heavily with meaningful looks. When I pressed her she said that Dick had died of pneumonia, just a couple of years ago, when Rupert first came up to Cambridge, but that it wasn’t really the pneumonia that killed him, he’d been a drinker and, worse, other dark things. Kittie tapped her head with one finger to convey her meaning and, annoyed, I swiped at her with the teacloth. I wondered at how Kittie knows so much about Rupert’s life. This thought produces a suspicious pang. It is not that I harbour romantic illusions about Mr Brooke–I’m far too honest a girl for that–but only that his loss of a brother makes me feel that he and I, for all our different stations, might share something, that we know what it is to reach the end of our childhood and have certainty snatched from us, be reminded what a sad, sorry place the world is. But this is only a fancy, a thought in my own imagination, after all, and not a hard fact of any kind: not real like this tray in front of me and these blue-rimmed teacups and this amber liquid steaming in the pot and the soft molehills on the grass and the sounds of a boatman shouting on the river…

  Miss Darwin says do I mind if she ‘plays Mother’, so I set the tray down and leave the rest to them.

  My policy on the matter of bumping into Mr Brooke two times now by the two-holer is, of course, to say nothing at all, and to be careful not to catch his eye. But as I’m turning to go back to the kitchen from the orchard he suddenly looks directly at me and says, ‘Oh, Nell, have you ever trodden on a worm with your bare left foot, on a moonless night in a Dreadful Wood alone?’

  This is the way he talks. I suppose it is thought to be funny, or witty, where he comes from, but I have no reply. The others look up, expectantly. He stares straight at me with his clean blue gaze, and I recognise it for what it is, a challenge. Am I to blush, turn away, stumble? After counting to six (inwardly), I say carefully, ‘No, sir. Will that be all?’ And it is he who drops his gaze first, and laughs.

  Mrs Stevenson is cross when I get back to the kitchen, since I’ve forgotten to bring the tray. I show her a burn on my hand from the oven yesterday, which is still raw and red in two raised stripes and mention that it is hard for me to carry so much with such an injury. So she fetches the key to the locked cupboard and I’m to help myself to a small pat of butter to rub on the burn. She’s very good to us. I cannot think of many maid-of-alls who are treated as well. It is because
she has daughters of her own, I’m sure, but that is also the reason she ‘hears too much’ and I know to be wary of it.

  This afternoon there is a further commotion. A painter has arrived at Grantchester Meadows, with no more morals, according to Mr Neeve, ‘than the honey bees’. As this man has camped rather too close to the hives, Mr Neeve is exercised over it. The man has two wives with him and a hundred children, all boys (Kittie tells me this, with her customary breathlessness and elaboration)–the children wild and brown and barely dressed, except for tattered yellow and red garments.

  Mr Brooke asks me to take a letter to this man, inviting him to tea.

  ‘To tea, sir, here at the Orchard?’

  ‘Be a sensible child, Nell. He looks like a gypsy but I assure you he’s the greatest painter.’

  As I hesitate I note in the corner of my eye Kittie, with her red hair bobbing beneath her cap, staring at us. She looks for a moment as if she’s about to approach us, and so, swiftly, I accept the note. After all, Mr Brooke has entrusted me, not Kittie, to run his errand for him, no doubt already noticing that if one of us were ‘Beauty’ and one of us ‘Brains’, I would be the latter.

  But I don’t mind admitting I’m a little alarmed as I approach the artist’s camp, which does indeed look no different from the gypsy camps we see in Prickwillow, full of cheapjacks and tinkers. There’s a sky-blue van next to one of canary yellow, about a half-dozen enormous horses quietly grazing and, close by, two tents. And from one emerges an enormous figure–a man–exactly like a pirate: standing over six feet high, wearing the strangest jersey and check suit, and with a long red beard, just like the beard of Rumpelstiltskin.

  As I come closer, I can see that one eye is puffy and shadowed with black, and in the sunlight, gold earrings glitter in his hair. My hand without the sore grips the basket of fruit I’m carrying, the note lying on top. I pick my way between the thistles and flakes of dried cow-pats, coarse as matted hair, remembering how Kittie said a cabman in Cambridge had been too nervous to drive him, this Augustus John, and no wonder!

  Now a woman appears from one of the tents and stands staring towards me, shading her eyes against the sun. Her dress is long and a damson colour, her head wound with a scarf. The other wife is nowhere to be seen but the ‘hundreds’ of boys–more likely six, now I count them–are all in the river, splashing and shouting. One of the horses startles, neighing suddenly–a sound like the drawing of a saw across wood. And so I stop. Far enough, I think.

  ‘I’ve come from Mr Rupert Brooke, sir. He’s sent a message for you.’

  I have to shout a little to be heard. I feel foolish for stopping so far, but cannot now make myself shift closer. The gypsy giant strides towards me and takes the basket. The moment he lifts the note from it, with the apples lying underneath, the boys appear, like a swarm of monkeys, their bodies shining wet. They grab at the apples, shouting and splashing me with water. And not a word from the mother to chastise them!

  ‘He’d like you to take tea in the orchard, sir. The pavilion you see there beyond the gate with the tin roof, and the house is just behind it.’

  This is all in the note, but the way the artist is staring at it, I’m not certain he can read.

  Laughter and uproar from the children mean I must bellow again to be heard. A moorhen joins in with a sudden screechy warning. The lady remains at an observing distance and it is the artist who claps his hands round the children’s heads, shouting as he does, ‘Splendid! Haven’t I always said, Dorelia, how respectable people become indignant at the sight of us, but disreputable ones behave charmingly?’

  The wife surely has no means of hearing him at such a distance and over such noise, so makes no comment. The basket now empty, I pick it up, nod my goodbyes and head back towards the gate. I do not like the way this Mr Augustus John stares at me. A girl can always tell such things–if only men realised how clearly their thoughts might be read, they might perhaps try to keep them better locked up.

  As I turn, I catch a glimpse of the other wife, a younger version of the first, who might be a sister, or even a daughter. She is drying one of the younger boys with a cloth. This child holds a piece of grass between finger and thumb and whistles, his note piercing the air like a bird call.

  Dear oh dear. I can just imagine what Mrs Stevenson will say when this carnival turns up for tea.

  Oh, I have written an inarticulate but pleasant enough poem for the Cambridge Review at their request. Or, rather, I wrote it last April and yielded it to them now. At least I didn’t burn it, although I might grow to wish I had–it’s possible. About that blasted child Noel, of course, in the New Forest. ‘Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire/Of watching you…’

  A bitter lie, naturally. I’m tired already. How many years is it since I first clapped eyes on Noel? It was in Ben Keeling’s rooms in Trinity, one of those early Fabian Society meetings Ben lured me to. I sat on a window-ledge eating nuts, I remember, and Noel was there all broad-browed and smiling, with her sister Margery and probably some other Newnham girls. I remember Noel dropped a cup, a small green dainty cup of coffee, and the dark brown splash and pieces of crockery flew everywhere, and she was embarrassed. Bending down beside her, gingerly picking up pieces and putting them into a napkin, I remember her deep, shy blush. I was studying her while her eyes were on the cup and the floor. I remember that her skin was not the translucent sort that one sees the veins in, but rather creamy, opaque, thick, even. Was it Nietzsche who said one knows all one needs to about a person in the first fifteen minutes of meeting? What did I know about Noel? That she was shy, yes. That she was passionate, and had genuine socialist convictions. But also something else: that she was somewhat inscrutable, impenetrable. Ah, yes. That’ll do it every time.

  It’s a poor sonnet. Considering I don’t believe in a ‘last land’, I wonder why I persist in imagining myself and Noel there in it, her turning and tossing her ‘brown delightful head/Amusedly among the ancient Dead…’? (But I wrote it three months ago and a lot can happen in three months, including utter abandonment of the concept of immortality.) It’s a poem full of ‘breezy obviousness’, no doubt. Or, as the Master of Magdalene might say, ‘conventional in its deliberate modernity, uneven and bizarre’. Must try harder, in fact. The moment it was sent, I wished to snatch it back, but there it is. A longing to be seen and read and known, and yet an even more powerful one not to be; to fabricate and obfuscate and posture and all the rest. It’s exhausting. No wonder I have ophthalmia again, no doubt caught from one of Augustus’s scallywags–their eyes are as pink as the eyes of albino rabbits. How I passionately long to lock myself wholly up, deny admittance to a soul, soothe my eyes with milk, and read and write only and always (with the regular interval for pumping ship, naturally). And improve, improve, improve! Wasn’t that what I came here to do? To escape the distractions of Cambridge life, to patch up my lost scholarly reputation, and not to invite those same distractions to join me here at every turn?

  ‘If he looked like that and was a good poet too, I don’t know what I should do.’ Henry James’s summation. Or, rather, according to Dudley, voiced thus: ‘Well, I must say I’m relieved to hear his poetry is not good, for with that appearance if he had also talent it would be too unfair.’

  Oh, one needn’t think I don’t hear these things. My Prodigious Beauty, incidentally, does not interfere with the proper functioning of my ears.

  So the whole circus arrives later in the afternoon and, Lord, what a spectacle! There are six boys, it turns out, aged from three to eight and such a tribe they are…They even bring their groom, Arthur. The gypsy man says they brought Arthur along for ‘washing up’ but they still expect him to be fed! It is this Arthur, it turns out, who is the reason for the painter’s black eye. It seems he and Mr John are fairly in the habit of disagreeing and like to demonstrate as much to each other with a rain of blows.

  My hand is still smarting from the burn, and it’s fetch and carry, fetch and carry from three o’cl
ock to six, and I can scarcely hear myself think, what with the racket they make. More scones (we have to keep the oven constantly stoked), more tea, more honey, more butter, more milk, more eggs…

  The artist is here to paint a Lady Don, at the university, and all the talk is of her. ‘A very charming person,’ Mr John announces, ‘although a puzzle to paint…’ He says she smokes cigarettes all day and reclines on green drapes for the sitting with a red book on her lap. Somehow I gather that this Lady Don, although of an advanced age, has been harbouring romantic illusions about a friend of Mr Brooke’s and Mr Ward’s, a man older than them called Francis Cornford. (I think the man has visited. I think he is the tall, older man on a bicycle, with such a mop of curly black hair that it looks like a wig, who is very stiff and shy. Mr Brooke calls him Comus–a part he had in a play they were in. Their habit of nicknames for one another only adds to my confusion but I can’t help myself from concentrating hard, from wanting to keep up.) The Lady Don sounds very wretched because she only has her books now, and Mr Brooke blurts out that she should know better ‘as she’s old enough to be his mother’, and they all laugh as if he has said something witty, with Mr Brooke then shouting that hadn’t they all taken an oath, during the play, Comus, not to marry within six months of it–and that surely Francis Cornford had broken that oath by making overtures during that time to Miss Darwin’s cousin? This last part of the conversation is the hardest to fathom because it seems that Miss Darwin’s cousin is called Frances too, and that Frances and Francis Cornford are to marry…

  During all this talk and kerfuffle the mother does not scold the boys at all for snatching, stuffing food into their faces, tearing at the clover they find in the grass and scattering the leaves all over the linen tablecloth, or leaping from chair to chair or under the tables and so, of course, they do all of these things, all of the time, like a tribe of monkeys let loose in a wood.