The Great Lover Page 6

  When the conversation about the Frances and Francis state of affairs dies down, Mr Brooke and Mr Dudley Ward fire up a curious conversation with the children, chiefly with the eldest one, a boy called Pyramus, who tells Mr Brooke of an imaginary world where the river is milk, the mud honey, the reeds and trees green sugar, the earth cake. (The boys must be starving, to dream up such things. The blades of their brown bare shoulders poke out like little wings. One of them, David, reminds me of my own sweet Stanley, with his long curls, and his fat bottom lip and his habit of lying on his stomach on the grass, gazing at ants and ladybirds.)

  ‘And what would the leaves be?’ asks Mr Brooke, his cheeks flushed, one hand brushing back his floppy fringe, persisting with the foolish game long after the children have lost interest.

  ‘The leaves would be ladies’ hats!’ announces Pyramus, and the party falls to laughing, so that Mr Brooke knocks over the little brown jar of Devonshire cream and another has to be fetched.

  Then they carry on to declare that the sky is made from the blue pinafore of the youngest boy, Robin. The sun is a spot of honey on this same blue pinafore. ‘What would happen,’ asks Mr Dudley Ward, ‘if you were all in a tree, and at the bottom a big bear sat and waited so that you couldn’t come down?’

  ‘The bear would die after a little,’ Pyramus says boldly, with all the adults looking at him as if his views are to be considered, and again the lot of them laugh, as if the boy has said something witty.

  This children’s game and Mr Brooke’s enthusiasm for it makes me cross with him. It’s a part of his nature I find irksome. For instance, he has asked several times if he could take tea and ‘whales’, and it was only this afternoon that he explained that ‘whales’ was sardines on toast. Seems to me he has spent too long in the classroom with other boys, giving the same boys too great an importance, with their secret games and private names. Our way, where children are not separated and sent to school together but given the duties of adults very soon, produces a more natural child, if you ask me, and more natural adult too, without the two being confused. Mr Brooke and his friends seem not to understand that others might not share their pleasure in childish things. Or, rather, they know full well and delight in shunning all but their school friends.

  By the time the meal ends, my poor burned palm is raw and stinging and my neck and shoulders aching. The party breaks up suddenly, on a word of Mr Brooke’s, that the Lady Don can’t be kept waiting a minute longer, and the children scatter in the direction of the river, so Mrs Stevenson charges her daughter, Lottie, with helping us clear away the tea things. The artist’s chief wife Dorelia watches us silently as we do so, shyly pushing a saucer and spoon towards me at one moment, rather than ask me for more strawberries. The younger girl, despite Mr Brooke’s calling her a ‘second wife’, is to my mind merely a sister to the first, and there as a general helpmeet, with no relation to the painter that could be guessed at from the little that passed between them.

  Mr Brooke has offered to take the family down-river by boat. As suddenly as the hullabaloo arrived, it disappears. The colourful figures melt through the trees towards the gate and the river, and the cheeky sparrows who had hopped around the table all afternoon now land on it to pluck at the crumbs, joined by a poor straggly robin with naughty black eyes. When I make a move towards him, I’m surprised that he doesn’t fly off but guards his little portion of crumbs like an Indian brave. The poor bird must be starving. I name it Pyramus and feel another stab of sorrow for little Stanley and Edmund. No doubt they, too, are out on the river Lark or the mere in this summer heat, but it won’t be playing and splashing for them. They will be lying low in the boat, holding the gun for the eel man, Sam, and steadying the recoil in the punt, while Sam shoots wildfowl for Betty to boil up in a pot for his dinner. I pray God he shares some with my brothers, later.

  And so I punt, and Dudley slumbers and the sweet river slips past us, melancholy and enchanted, and the boys quickly return to their water-naiad forms, while Augustus, with Dorelia lying beside him, sleepily complains of the constraints of patronage. A terrible sprite grips me and persuades me that this should be the occasion for venturing my little speech on that very subject (an essay I have been musing on for the Fabian Society). Trying to sound natural and unrehearsed, I begin: ‘Since we all agree that poets and artists matter, and since we know they require periods of development, should it not be the state that provides, you know, bread and cheese and whatever for those who show promise?’

  ‘Huh?’ is all Augustus says, so I continue.

  ‘Well…the ordinary system of incomplete endowment and jobbery and such things as payment for dedications is a ramshackle affair…wouldn’t you say…?’

  The water plops as a fish jumps, and as we leave the dense trees on the bank behind us and reach Dead Man’s Bend, I fall quiet for a moment, the better to concentrate. It’s a devil to punt here, if one doesn’t know it, as the water is deeper than the length of the punt pole. Augustus is oblivious to the expertise of his chauffeur, however, and continues to drone quietly to Dorelia about the woman who is to sit to him, Jane Harrison, making no attempt to include me in the conversation. My hands sweating, the pole nearly slips through them. I take off my shirt and tie and lay them at my feet. After a cough, I try again, a little more forcefully: ‘I mean, it affects the work, doesn’t it? You see it in Elizabethan times when most of the best writers lost all their shame (which doesn’t much matter) and half their vitality (which does) in cadging and touting.’

  Augustus glances slyly at me, interested at last, but unsure, I believe, at this point, whether my remarks are intended to contradict or support his position. His eyes are closed, his arm dangling lazily over the edge of the boat, Dorelia and her sister Edie resting either side of him, and the children bobbing beside us in the water like noisy ducklings. Dudley snoozes stiffly at the other end of the boat (his flimsy weight hardly achieving its task of balancing us), the sun bouncing off his shiny pate.

  ‘I wonder how much more Milton or Marvell might have given us had they had enough to live on? If anything at all, the loss is enormous, surely.’

  Now Augustus opens one eye and surveys me thoroughly. Finally, he bestirs himself to speak. ‘What about losing half of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene? Would have been rather an achievement, in my view.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I have to agree, flummoxed. ‘But it’s terrifying, is it not, to think how many artists are living on inherited capital? And if you were to really count the waste of past centuries, one would have to include the artistic potentialities sown here and there in the undistinguished mass of the people, which have perished unconscious in that blindest oblivion–the mute, inglorious Miltons of the village and slum Beethovens—’

  Augustus opens both eyes at last and interrupts, with his slow drawl, ‘You think poets and artists should compose at the loom, the way William Morris hoped?’

  He is calmly smoking a cigarette now. With his curious pale face and his sea-anemone eyes, he might have been a Macedonian king himself, or a Renaissance poet. A stab of envy races through me as Dorelia snuggles up to him and I remember again all I have heard about his prodigious sexual appetites, the many, many conquests. My heartbeat quickens and something akin to fear grows there, when I’m faced with his challenging stare and the feeling that Augustus, after all, is living the life as I am not, and might uncover me as the ridiculous virgin that I am.

  ‘No,’ I mutter at once, beginning to wish my little experiment over, adding sotto voce, like an insolent schoolboy, ‘Although most of Morris’s own stuff surely was–probably why the poetry was so dull.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Well, not the idea that the artists of the future will all be those who do common work in the day and have time to compose in the evening–no. And art must always be an individual and unique affair, not “expressing the soul of a community”. All I’m suggesting is that the state might endow individuals who show promise with a substantial sum, say,
two hundred and fifty pounds a year, in order that they may pursue a life that would otherwise be closed to them.’

  Dorelia shifts a little in the boat, crossing one foot over the other so that I am suddenly confronted with her soles: rude and dirty and bare, and this, more than Augustus’s hard expression, is what finally silences me.

  ‘I didn’t take you for a socialist, Brooke.’

  I am pink by now and quite ridiculous. How to extricate myself and prevent him shooting straight to Newnham to make Jane Harrison hoot with laughter about me? ‘Well, you knew, of course, that I’m a member of the Cambridge Fabian Society? Although, admittedly, not quite as devout as the Webbs would like me to be, no, nor as interested in economics, it’s true, but—’

  ‘He’s not a socialist,’ Dorelia murmurs in her lazy way. ‘He says what he believes will please or provoke you.’

  Now my humiliation is complete, and my face flames with a blush of tomato red. Dudley stirs from his drowsy slumber, where he has melted like wax in the sun, unsticks himself from his end of the boat, stands up and offers to take the pole. (I know at once that he has been listening and, in his characteristic, kindly way, hopes to rescue me.) Dudley’s moving towards me rocks the boat violently and nearly dunks me in the drink. I’m tempted to leap in anyway, to join Pyramus and David and the others; be free of this scalding torture.

  Without waiting for Dudley to take over I drive the pole hard into the water, where it threatens to lodge in the mud and pull me out with it, to dangle, both hands clinging, like a damselfly sticking to a reed. We leave the meadows behind and reach the rushing water of the weir at last, which provides a distraction of sorts: Dorelia sits up, pushing her scarf away from her eyes, then calls to the boys once she understands that we must get out, drag the boat over the wooden rollers, and relaunch it to reach the Backs. The boys’ splashings and shrieks are temporarily stalled, as they scramble to the water’s edge to do our bidding.

  So many hands make light work. The boat is dragged over in an instant. Then we are back in the river with a splash, to the accompaniment of many small, excited voices, who remain bobbing in the water.

  Now Augustus is explaining to Dorelia and Edie the magical construction of the Mathematical Bridge, and they are readjusting their attitude to the rickety wooden structure and admiring it. I’m tempted to murmur that this is somehow my point. That regardless of age or background, this desire to be an artist surely comes from the same impulse, a very simple one: an overwhelming desire to–share or show. ‘I saw–I saw,’ the artist says, ‘a tree against a sky, or a blank wall in the sunlight, and it was so thrilling, so arresting, so particularly itself–that, well, really, I must show you—’

  But I say nothing, and hand the pole to Dudley, then stumble across a rocking boat to take up my place in Dudley’s vacated section where I hunker down like the bull-terrier Pudsey Dawson after a scolding. Impossible not to be stung by Dorelia’s remark. Does she share Henry James’s judgement, then, based on nothing more than a glance at my face, that it is possible to deduce I possess no merit in any field of endeavour?

  Dudley begins punting in an elegant, smooth rhythm. The boys, tired, suddenly want to clamber into the boat, which they do with much shouting, rocking and tipping, and thoroughly drenching us all.

  ‘I have heard there are some very lovely young women in the Fabian Society,’ opines Augustus, when the din dies down. ‘I hear H. G. Wells has found it very…accommodating.’ Closing his eyes again, he settles himself once more among his crowded nest of women and children, while Dudley–with one sympathetic glance at me–guides us skilfully under the next bridge.

  I glance up as we slide beneath, to see how the shadows and light on the underside form intricate patterns, like the veins on a leaf.

  Naturally enough, I keep this ludicrous, pointless, poetic observation to myself.

  There is ample work when Mr Brooke and the others leave to go punting. I have to clear the table and, most important, supervise Kittie washing up. Now, although I am the new girl, I have learned something about Kittie. If I don’t attend to her she simply makes more work for me later; she has complete want of a system of any sort and you might think she had to pay for water by the pint, so miserly is she with it. Left to herself, she would go on using the same drop–no matter what the colour–to the bitter end. Kittie’s mind is on other things. And if her miserly use of water isn’t bad enough, her treatment of the teacloths is worse! She doesn’t seem to understand that a soiled teacloth is unhealthy and means smeary china. That girl has had no training at all and her home is obviously a poor one.

  Yesterday she arrived from an errand at the butcher’s in Grantchester with a badge saying Votes for Women. A tin badge, with a safety-pin attached. I could scarcely believe it. ‘What are you doing with that thing?’ I said. ‘Take it off this minute and throw it away!’ (Kittie does remind me of my sister Betty, with her dreamy ways and her want of good sense.) She looked surprised at my cross tone. In truth, I think she was surprised at how quickly I’d taken charge of things. She carefully took the badge off her coat and slid it into her apron pocket, but she didn’t throw it away. ‘Where on earth did you get it?’ I hissed, as we stood at the basin, wiping the china. ‘Surely you’d lose your position here if Mrs Stevenson saw it?’

  ‘I went to Camden Town with my sister Fanny and listened to a woman speaker. Fanny says—’

  ‘Listen, Kittie. Women are destined to make voters, rather than be one of them. That’s our task in life, not to stand on street corners making a show of ourselves,’ I said. This was something Father had told me many times while we stood together by the hives, wiping the bees from the frames with our long sticks of feathers. I thought that Kittie, like Betty, would then fall silent, on account of my greater age and unyielding tone, but to my astonishment she didn’t.

  ‘Fanny says we are brave soldiers in the women’s army. That the time for talk is over. Action is what we need…’

  The girl is more stupid than I thought. She pores over the Daily Mail every morning, and yesterday she brought in something new, the Daily Sketch. She read it all through breakfast, which, given that we are only allowed ten minutes for that meal, seemed to me like a royal waste of time. She read things out to me: women throwing stones and raiding the House of Commons and Mrs Pankhurst smacking a police inspector’s face. It made my blood boil. ‘Do you seriously think that these grand ladies with their big hats are fighting for the Vote for girls like us?’ I asked her. ‘Don’t you know that, were they ever to win such a thing, it would only be for grand ladies and married ladies and ladies with property? Why should we risk our positions and our good names so that they might vote at every turn against the working man’s best interests?’

  ‘Oh, but you’re wrong, Nell,’ she replied, cool as you like. ‘There’s many a maid or a girl like us what wants the Vote. Have you not heard of Annie Kenny? Look, here she is, right here, and look how she’s lost a finger. That happened in the cotton mills…’ She pointed at a grubby, blackened picture in the Daily Sketch, which I could barely make out.

  ‘Well, that only proves that this Kenny girl is accident prone and hardly to be admired,’ I said.

  That was yesterday, but it’s clear the subject is not forgotten, any more than the badge. I notice that Kittie is fiddling with the place on her apron where the pin was and, to forestall another argument, I say, with a firm tone, ‘See that that teacloth is scalded out, Kittie, and do pick another one–otherwise it will never boil clean.’

  Mrs Stevenson comes into the scullery; thankfully Kittie falls silent. She hates to be scolded, and within hearing of Mrs Stevenson too. She sets her mouth firm and her brows against me, plunging her hands back into the water with a great splash, practically knocking the bucket off the dresser in her violence.

  Our next task is to pickle the day’s crop of young walnuts. Kittie is of the opinion that it is now time for a tea-break of our own and a sit-down with our feet up and perhaps to eat
up the pieces of abandoned scone, but I soon put her right on that idea. A great basket of walnuts needs doing. I show her how to use only the good vinegar and where to find the jars and muslin. ‘And make sure the vinegar completely covers the walnuts…and be sure to tie them securely…They need a nice dry spot in the larder, up there on the shelf where Lottie won’t knock them,’ I add.

  Kittie complains of a sore throat. She says the smell of vinegar is making her come over queasy. I promise her a piece of flannel soaked in whisky and rubbed with yellow soap to tie round her throat at bedtime, and for a while she accepts this, at last applying herself to her task. Then suddenly, in answer to no remark of mine, she sighs and springs out with ‘He’s so–he’s so fair, isn’t he? And so boyish and so–so clever—’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Why, Rupert–Mr Brooke–of course!’

  I find I can’t speak. I am startled by the thump in my chest–my own heart leaping about like a dog when a visitor arrives. What’s this about? I ask myself. The Lord knows, you’ve no interest in the man, Nell Golightly. You’re just embarrassed to picture him again, so erect, his arms hugging a bundle of clothes, and that queer, sudden laugh he has, so unexpected but so catching, somehow, like the laugh of a ten-year-old child…and as I scold myself, I cannot help remembering the moonlight gleaming on one side of his body, like the shine on polished silver…

  ‘Oh!’ I sigh, and Kittie glances at me. My hand is stinging and black from the walnut stains. ‘I’ve splashed my scalded palm with vinegar,’ I snap, and my eyes prickle with tears. When Kittie turns again to stare nosily at me, I say, ‘I find it rather silly that he wanders around barefoot and refuses meat. A boy who is kept by his mother and never did a day’s work…I wonder if Mother’s allowance doesn’t run to bacon?’

  Kittie shakes her head, reaching for another empty jar. She begins filling it with walnuts, and for the longest time, I believe her angry and refusing to answer me. Then I see with surprise that she is smiling.