The Great Lover Read online

  ‘He does have a young face, doesn’t he? How old do you think he is? Twenty? Twenty-two?’

  ‘He’s here to apply for a fellowship at King’s. He’s failed his Tripos and that surely makes him—’ But I don’t know how old that makes him. In truth, I have no idea what this ‘Tripos’ is, although I’ve heard Mr Brooke and his friends talk of it. My ignorance must be hidden from Kittie, for it would make her despise me. I know that my authority over her rests on the fact that I am used to shouldering the burdens of a mother. Also that I had two more years’ schooling than her.

  ‘Oh, no–not that knife!’ I suddenly screech, seeing her about to pick up a steel knife to prise the walnut from its shell. ‘The metal gives such a terrible taste–honestly, Kittie, don’t you know anything?’

  Well, that remark does it, and she sets her mouth in a pout and refuses to speak to me for the rest of the afternoon. It is only when Mrs Stevenson’s daughter, Lottie, serving another boating party on the lawn, comes running into the kitchen, giggling, that Kittie breaks her sulk.

  ‘He’s back! They all are–and on the meadow there was a lady, a lady arrived on a train from Cambridge–another one! And this one, you wouldn’t believe it—’ Lottie is saying. She doesn’t complete her sentence, ending with a laugh that veers into a shriek. Mrs Stevenson comes into the kitchen then, and Lottie has to wait for her mother to leave before she carries on. ‘She’s got this hat–enormous!–and she’s as tall as a man, but sort of drooping, like a great–like a sort of arum lily, drooping over the field! You can’t believe how grand she is. Her nose–like a beak. Like a great parrot!’

  ‘Well, which is it?’ I ask. ‘An arum lily or a parrot? She can’t be both—’

  But Lottie ignores my tart tone. ‘She lets the children run about her and makes eyes at the painter–she must be another mistress! And the other two wives allow it!’

  ‘Is she coming here for tea?’ I ask in alarm, calculating the scones and whether to send Kittie to fetch more milk.

  Lottie and Kittie pay no heed to me at all but continue breathlessly. They run about the kitchen muttering and whispering, their voices spilling with excitement.

  ‘She’s a lady. A real one. Lady Ottoline, I heard Mr Brooke call her. A lady in fancy dress! Go peep at her, Kittie. Take a look at that great beaky nose! And that long trailing dress in such a lovely shade of green, fanning behind her and soaking up all the mud. It’s like a peacock’s tail–yes, that’s it! She’s like a–peacock!

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Lottie, how can one person be a flower, a parrot and now a peacock?’

  ‘That hardly matters,’ Kittie puts in. ‘What I want to know is–why would the artist need a mistress when he already has the lovely wife with the plum-coloured dress and her sister too, for seconds?’

  ‘How many mistresses can one man have?’

  Here they put their heads together and wail with laughter. When they set out the tray the cups rattle against their saucers–their bodies shaking with giggles. Lottie can’t halt herself. ‘And the cart!’ she squeaks. ‘I heard such a story from Mr Neeve’s son. That huge horse they use to drag it slipped and fell down! And the painter–Mr Augustus John–just stares at it, staring and staring at the great brute kicking and struggling, and him just smoking his cigarette, like he hasn’t an idea in his head what to do next. Station loafers had to come to the rescue. The man is like–what is he like?’

  ‘A peacock, perhaps? Another kind of bird, or plant?’

  But Lottie doesn’t hear the sarcasm in my voice. ‘He’s like one of his own wild boys!’ she blurts. ‘Honestly, I’m sure he’s quite mad. Cyril, Mr Neeve’s boy, says the whole of Cambridge is terrified of him.’

  And so their twittering continues, and there is nothing I can do to stop them. The surprise of the things they describe keeps hitting my body in waves, and I cannot stop myself wanting to hear more. Can it really be possible that this ‘greatest painter’, as Mr Brooke described him, has three mistresses? Or even three wives? Why would a grand lady from London want to associate with a raggle-taggle gypsy band in a tent and two caravans? Lottie reports that Lady Ottoline left before tea, finding the meadow sodden and the other wives unfriendly. This makes the pair hoot.

  ‘The other wives unfriendly? No!’ Kittie howls.

  And just at that moment, Mr Brooke steps into the kitchen and murmurs, ‘I say–any more whales on toast, girls?’ and the two stop dead, curtsy, and then when he is out of the room melt to the floor in a puddle of hysterical laughter.

  That decides me. However bad it gets, however often the wicked Mr Brooke wants to parade naked in front of me, I shan’t give notice to Mrs Stevenson. Ten shillings a week and a kind mistress is not easily come by. But, most importantly, these two flibbertigibbets need a person of good judgement to knock some sense into them. Lottie might be Mrs Stevenson’s daughter but she’s worse than Kittie for a lack of good sense. No, it’s certain. I’m the only girl to do it.

  The Fabian Summer School, Wales

  This year, Beatrice Webb announces, the university men shall all be put up at Landbedr in the stables and with several of the horses still in situ. (There are different rules for the girls.) I am sure she remembers last year when–which of us was it?–Dudley got himself locked out on the balcony with the chamber pot and had to be let in (half naked and the afore-mentioned receptacle all aslosho with contents). She clearly believes the hard floors, natural smells and rudimentary lodgings will upset us delicate Cambridge boys, but little has she reckoned on the Neo-Pagan sensibility I’m encouraging–which positively relishes such privations!

  So, that first night we bedded down in our sleeping-bags, tangled our legs in the cotton linings and wormed like caterpillars around in the stables, continuing our usual discussions.

  I must confess that it was not the absolute urgency of addressing and revising the old Poor Law, dividing it into Health, Old Age and Employment, to demonstrate the different ways that the poor become poor, thus recognising the differing needs of each, no, not quite that.

  Rather, James, propping himself up on one elbow, his eyeglasses carefully placed on a shelf next to the horse-feed, opined on the predilections of my own dear brother Alfred, repeating a conversation of two days ago. He said that Podge (‘Rupie’s darling brother Alfred,’ he clarified loudly, for those who might be listening and not know the soubriquet) had plunged into the worm-eaten convention of discussing Sodomy as usual, its uses and abuses. Podge, James claimed, was very sound, and sentimental and, oh, definitely ‘Higher’, poor chap. But after all–it’s surely only in the most special circumstances that copulation is at all tolerable?

  We laughed and snuffled inside our bags, like choking insects. So much so that James knocked over the candle and several of us had to prevent a major fire erupting. In the midst of this–us leaping around naked and jumping on sparking bundles of hay–Hugh Daddy Dalton conceived a light lust for James and tried to tickle him gently under the armpits. Poor old James jumped back into his sleeping-bag on the floor but not before Daddy stood over him, waving an immense steaming penis in his face, until James was nearly sick.

  This seemed a good moment to turn the conversation to the disgraceful behaviour (Beatrice Webb’s opinion) of that ‘terrible little Pagan’ Amber Reeves. Could it be true that H. G. Wells actually had her in her room at Newnham? And, worse still (Dudley, to our left, silently listening, showed by his breathing that he was, of course, actually shocked), that she’s now–carrying his child? We giggled again, picturing the Marvellous Utopian Scene: Wells sweaty and panting, Amber pert and stranded as an upturned wheelbarrow with its handles stuck in the ground.

  Beatrice’s interfering in the Wells-Reeves affair, James said, included her spilling the story to Noel Olivier’s father, advising him not to let his four handsome daughters run around with Wells. This infuriated me. Gloomily, I stared up at the roof of the stables, at the shifting black shape of a bat. No doubt this would only mean more restrictio
ns for Noel, and my campaign generally thwarted, but I said nothing of this to James, sensing that he was drifting off to sleep.

  Sleep was not my mistress that night. Thoughts whirled until dawn slithered her rosy light through the stable windows, and the horses at the other end greeted us with a hot stench of fresh manure. Time already to get up for Swedish drill. I hadn’t slept a wink.

  The bracing exercises took place on the grass, overlooked by the Welsh sheep-spotted hills, providing us at least with our first glimpse of the dewy Fabian girls. They all looked as if they had slept blissfully without a filthy thought in their heads–even Amber Reeves. (What on earth do the creatures talk about when the lights go out? They actually discuss Fabian ideals, James suggested. Margery Olivier no doubt debates the merits of eugenics in her father’s book, how the Germans and Japanese have made such astounding progress in regulating the races. ‘Or more likely the exquisite displays of grasses in vases at the house, and the William Morris tiles,’ Daddy offered.)

  I noticed that the usually at-the-centre-of-things Amber Reeves did not take part in these vigorous jumps but sat instead on the grass, pretending a swollen ankle. Could Daddy Dalton be right, then, about her presumed condition? A sudden image of H. G. Wells twirling his moustache in pride entered my head as I sneaked glances at her, and filled my mouth with a sudden vile taste.

  Daddy and some of the other fellows found the alcohol ban intolerable. ‘That filthy fake beer, No-Ale, is the only aspect of Fabianism I can’t swallow,’ he said. Of course, Dudley and I were glad to eschew the whisky our fathers believe makes us manly, and happy to continue the practice wherever we might be, as long as it is not in the presence of those same fathers. Even horribly sober, however, we managed to have a row on that same first night, when Dudders–of course the most devout among us–happened to mention how elucidating he had found the talk that afternoon by the visiting lady, Miss Mary Macarthur, of the Women’s Trade Union and Labour League. The one about the appalling conditions of the girl florists in the West End. And then, he added hotly, growing quite pink with the effort, had any of us heard that it was actually Mrs Asquith herself who wanted the florists excluded from the Factory Acts so that they could dress her rooms with flowers until ten o’clock at night?

  Well, he had a point, and I found Dudley’s earnestness touching. So I was more than a little angered by James and Hugh Daddy Dalton and the rest for giving him such a ribbing. It was all too familiar–the same dismissive attitude Augustus John had towards my socialism. Beatrice Webb has said (apparently) that the egotism of the university men is ‘colossal’ and we have a long way to go towards proving to her that we might have a serious interest in the subject of Fabianism. But why, I thought, without muttering it out loud to the others, must the two things be mutually exclusive, a sense of humour, or wit, or playfulness, and a genuine socialism. Must we all be cloth sacks and grow our own sandals to be taken seriously?

  In the end I was glad to be back in my little room at the Orchard, and to hear my tapioca approaching. Conveyed to me by the lovely Nell, of course. I pretended to be reading–that is, I had Moore’s Principia Ethica across my lap (the irony would escape her, I think)–so that when she arrived I might nonchalantly ask if she’d read it…

  She said she had not. I wondered whether to launch into an explanation of its basic tenets, or simply paraphrase Beatrice Webb, who told Dudley a week ago that she thought we ‘university men’ (she meant us Apostles, I suspect, although she doesn’t know there is a distinction) relied upon its dubious morals in a quite childish way.

  Still, Nellie showed no interest in learning of Moore’s dangerous moral contents, so I accepted the coffee and tapioca she held out to me, taking it from the tray and putting it on the table beside the bed, and amused myself with admiring the way the sunlight fell on a patch of skin at her throat, looking like a spot of lace.

  ‘You’ve no interest in books, then, Nell? Or–how would the Webbs put it?–in bettering yourself?’

  Here she twirled round, and seemed to inspect me for teasing. ‘Oh, yes, I do,’ she said firmly, after a pause. ‘I love books.’ And her arm swept around my room at the books tumbling on the floor in piles and on the shelves and propped against the cupboard. Her expression was–what? One of exasperation at all the dusting she has to do? I couldn’t read it, but was glad to have detained her.

  I took a spoonful of the tapioca from the bowl (considering whether to ask her why she’d brought me the bowl with the chip in the rim, isn’t it a little…unhygienic?) and Principia Ethica slid noisily to the floor and remained simmering there, while Nell opened windows to ‘let some fresh air in’ and asked if there was anything else I needed.

  Bah!

  I decided against domestic complaints about the crockery and tried instead to engage her with some talk of the Fabian summer school I’d just been to. Did she know what a Fabian was and how it might differ from a socialist? She did not. Had she been to that part of Wales where the summer school was held? The furthest she’d been was King’s Lynn, sir, and to Sheep’s Fen, by river. And what about the break-up of the Poor Law of 1834? Did she think it a good idea that the poor should no longer be lumped together and blamed for their ills, but instead, as Beatrice proposes, be divided into separate groups–the sick, the aged, the unemployed–and offered pensions, sanitary care and employment benefits? Indeed, sir, she had never heard of the idea, and had no opinion. I bit my tongue to stop myself enquiring tartly if she didn’t feel it might behove her to be better informed, since it was her class that was the most likely to benefit from the efforts of the Fabians.

  So I asked if she had even heard of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and it seemed she had, and when I mentioned the novelist Mr H. G. Wells, the recognition flitting across her face made me wonder if she didn’t know a little more than she was letting on.

  ‘Does he have a big moustache and–and—’

  ‘A highly disreputable character?’

  ‘I was going to say, did he write Ann Veronica?’

  ‘Ah…so you have heard of Mr Wells?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Of course, dear Beatrice would rather you hadn’t read that particular book,’ I observed. ‘It’s entertaining, of course, but he does encourage inaccurate thinking so…Mr Wells practises what he preaches, of course. Suggesting that if women were free to act as vilely as some men do, this would magically solve all the problems of the world.’

  She gave no reply but glanced pointedly at Principia Ethica, the book lying heavily on the floor. If I hadn’t known better I might have thought her glance implied a question. Something like: one rule for the boys, is it, and another for the girls?

  ‘I cannot help but agree with Dudley that the devil is in the detail,’ I explained hastily. ‘That if we really have an eye on progress we should–thrash out the finer points, not just sweep away all that is good and true along with all that is rotten.’

  Here I apparently lost her. (The attention span of the British maid is very short.) She shook her head, a dear little movement, and swept at her cheek as if seeking an invisible smut. My tapioca almost finished, the coffee grown cold, I had barely a reason to detain her. I glanced once more at the spot on her throat where the sunlight made a pattern, but a shadow had fallen there. My stock of Subjects to Take Up with the Servant was exhausted.

  However, I had not reckoned on the Sex Question coming to my rescue.

  ‘She–she’s one of those women who campaign for the Vote, isn’t she, this Mrs Webb?’ Nellie asked suddenly, as she loaded spoon and bowl back on to the tray.

  ‘Ah…you are not a Suffragist, I hope, Nell?’

  ‘No, indeed not!’ she returned hotly.

  Reading Ann Veronica had not corrupted her then. I was immensely relieved.

  ‘I can’t think of anything more–daft,’ she said, ‘than throwing stones at the windows of buildings, or stamping things, slogans, on the walls of the House of Commons and getting yourself arrested. I can’
t see what on earth–I wouldn’t take such a risk, sir, myself, if I had a position to think of, or a family waiting for me at home.’

  ‘Indeed. And do you have such a family?’

  At last, then, we talked freely, and there was a burst of natural energy in the room as Nellie stood a while longer to describe in the liveliest terms her brothers and sisters, whom she said she missed ‘bodily’, whatever that meant. It was, though, curiously comforting to be granted this little glimpse, to picture this rural life in the vast flat land of the Fens: the five happy siblings and the bees and flowers and water everywhere, full of fish and fowl caught with a punt-gun–all rather free and fine and marvellous, I couldn’t help remarking. She blushed then, and fretted about the time, and said she must return to her duties.

  After she’d left I did not at once get up. Talk of Wells (or, rather, thoughts of Wells) breaching those Newnham ramparts (I exaggerate: walls, of course) to get at Amber Reeves distracted me, rather. I had a sudden memory of Noel Olivier at Penshurst. Noel Olivier’s naked limbs, to be exact. Beatrice’s blasted meddling in the Wells-Reeves affair infuriated me afresh when I remembered what Dudley had said about her warning Noel’s father not to let his four handsome daughters run around. Damn Beatrice! She’s like a bigger, more alarming version of the Ranee, without the Ranee’s occasional bouts of charm and financial sustenance.

  Still, I did see Noel naked. We bathed by the light of a bicycle lamp propped up in the grass by the edge of the water. Of course we were not alone–although in my mind, we were. A whole bunch of Bedalians–a whole school of them, ha!–was there. And neither could we actually make out one another’s naked forms, just white shapes, like the cows at Grantchester Meadows, looming up, ghostly but vivid. We all laughed and dived in the weir. I felt the water-lilies clutching my legs, and that gasping, bracing thrill in my lungs that swimming in cold rivers always produces.