The Great Lover Read online

  Then when we returned to camp, we sat for a while and I was able to feast on Noel for longer, watching her, again in the bicycle light, near the blazing fire, the river water trickling from her hair down her bare shoulders where her towel had slipped. I stared and stared at those bare shoulders. With such poor light, I couldn’t see much: only a few strands of duckweed. The moon rose full and we crawled back into our sleeping-bags and she slept, but I lay awake writing my pathetic little lines, with the vision of her dripping in my mind and she only two tents away.

  Wells’s emphasis on free love, his conviction that this will be the model for the sexes in future…Something about this thought alarms me. The man has said that in order to experiment you must be base. The relationships between men and women are so hemmed in by law that to experiment starts with being damned. Fine sentiment, of course. Intellectually I cannot fault it. But. Is this to be all, then? Are relations between men and women to be reduced to this–to copulation? Will it be the end of love, and of all feelings more holy and beautiful? There is horror for me in that idea and it is this: I don’t want my darling Noel to be base. She is a flower in moonlight. She is not childish and befouled like James, full of jokes and phlegm and other disgusting things.

  How confusing. It’s all very well, but my burdensome virginity remained unlost.

  And with this thought another young woman suddenly appeared beneath my window, calling up. Ka Cox. I heard the sound of a bicycle being propped against the wall of the house, and then Ka calling softly, shyly, clearly afraid for others to hear, ‘Rupert!’

  A stone was thrown before I could push on the window and look out over the hedges. Then I saw her head, wrapped peasant-style in a vivid green scarf, and caught sight of her pince-nez. My mood lifted at once. ‘Hello there! I’m still breakfasting–with you in five minutes!’

  She beamed up at me, bending to undo some of the tangle in her skirts, which had been tucked into her boots. Thank Heaven! Earnest, dear, horsy Ka, with her matronly bosom, her slightly stooped figure, her serious face and her pince-nez–surely she will work like a charm? My thoughts returned immediately to the Fabian leaflets she was no doubt–in her devoted capacity as Secretary of the Society–delivering. She was more effective than a bracing dip in a cold bath to return a person at once from their lowest to their most elevated thoughts.

  ‘Ka! Such joy to see you!’

  The dear thing beamed and beamed.

  So many books, he has, Mr Brooke. Books sprouting everywhere. I suppose this is how all poets are, or maybe all Varsity men, but it’s a wonder. Sometimes I sneak a look at the titles. This makes me sick with ignorance. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster. Montaigne by somebody called Florio. Piles of copies of the English Review magazine. A huge great thing called The Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission. How could anyone read such a volume? Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare–I recognise that one, of course. The other one I recognise is The Secret River by R. Macaulay–this is a brand new book, with flowers down the spine, and in blue ink inside it says, ‘To Rupert’, so I know this must be the same Miss Macaulay who visited him here at the Orchard. I sneaked a glance inside, but when I read ‘the slumberous afternoon was on the slow green river like the burden of a dream’ my brain thickened and refused to carry on.

  When he asked me, he had no idea how stupid so many books can make a girl feel. I said nothing, knowing how he would laugh–that sudden, high-pitched, girlish blast of laughter he does sometimes–if he knew that the last book I read was The Book of Cheerfulness by Flora Klickmann. I was glad–so glad–to have at least read Mr H. G. Wells, although afraid of blushing when I feared he might broach the subject of relations between men and women. I did not venture my opinion of the heroine of that book. That she was a very silly girl indeed to end up in a room alone with a man and not realise what he might think of her.

  I wasted a good portion of time in his room and now I have a deal of catching up to do. There’s the dusting and the fireplaces, the hateful black-leading to do, then the halls and stairs to be swept, and the boots waiting to be cleaned in the kitchen and, after all that, the lunches for the first guests to start preparing. I can’t really understand how I allowed myself to be delayed–after all, he is so annoying, and so spoiled, and I always feel he is trying to provoke me somehow, catch me out, make me blush or falter with those questions, put in such a strange way.

  After that night, that first night when I saw him naked, returning from his swim in Byron’s Pool I have learned that I am a very silly, puritanical girl. He was disappointed, he said, that the lower orders were as bad as the upper ones in this respect. He had thought that a girl raised on bees–birds and bees, he said meaningfully–a girl raised so might be more likely to trade the ‘ Lilies and Languors of Virtue for the Raptures and Roses of Vice’.

  When I did not know how to reply, he said, ‘Swinburne, Nell.’

  It’s this that infuriates me. He speaks in riddles, seeking always to have the advantage. After all, when I told him of my brothers and the eel-hives and the days spent on the mere catching them, I didn’t try to trick him with words he didn’t know, even though I laughed to myself to hear him describe it as ‘such joy and liberation!’ and to see from the glow in his face that he was picturing some lazy, playful days of his own rather than the hours of patient work that Edmund and Stanley endure for Sam. I think he is always conscious of the impression he is making, tossing his hair and struggling to hide his real thoughts.

  ‘Life is splendid, Nell, but I wish I could write poetry,’ he said, this morning. ‘I write very beautiful stories.’

  ‘Do you, sir? Here’s your hot milk, and would you like me to bring your slippers?’

  ‘Yes…One story I am accomplishing is about a young man who, for various reasons, felt his bookish life vain and wanted to get in touch with Nature. He began by learning to climb trees but, in clambering up an easy fir tree, fell off a low branch six feet above the ground and broke his neck. A short, simple story.’

  Then he told me of his recent visit to a place called Penshurst, to surprise some friends of his who were camping there, including one ‘very special girl’, whose name is Noel Olivier. Her father, he said, is Sir Sydney, as if I should know who that person is. He chatted as I made up the fire in the grate, the morning having a late-summer chill, and so my back was to him, which was a good thing: he couldn’t see my expression. He talked of the girl and her three lovely sisters and some strange school called Bedales that the girl attends–she is a schoolgirl then, younger than me, even!–a school where, as far as I could understand, nudity and swimming in cold lakes takes the place of book learning.

  Well, how am I supposed to reply to that? When the silence between us grew long, and I wondered (with my back to him) if he was awaiting my answer, I decided a safe bet would be to mention that, for myself, I rather like the nice Mr Ward (Kittie calls him Baldy, on account of his bald pate, though we know his Christian name is Dudley) and the sensible Miss Gwen Darwin. I remarked that it would probably be a good thing if he spent more time with a lady like Miss Darwin, for any lady who has the good sense to put a strip of braid around her skirt in order to catch the mud in a place like this is a very resourceful lady indeed. There was a long pause after I said this, then a sudden snuffle of loud laughter. I turned round.

  ‘How on earth did the maid get so familiar?’ he said, smiling broadly at me.

  I realised at once I had overstepped my place and clapped a hand to my mouth. ‘I’m sorry, I—It’s in my nature to be quick to judge,’ I murmured, and then could think of nothing more to add because the bald truth of this hung in the air between us.

  He was still in bed at this point, but he sat up and stared straight at me, with the look of someone about to deliver a speech. ‘Parents, now: you kiss them sometimes, and send for them when you’re ill, because they’re useful and they like it; and you give them mild books to read, just strong enough to make them think they’re a little
shocked, but not much, so they can think they’re keeping up with the times. Oh, you ought to be very kind to them, make little jokes for them, and keep them awake in the evening, if possible. But never, never let them be intimate and confidential because they can’t understand, and it only makes them miserable. Perhaps I should apply the same rule to you, Nell.’

  ‘Oh, I truly am sorry, sir, if I spoke out of turn.’

  ‘I’m joking Nellie. I like your…spirit. It reminds me of home. Ha! Can you imagine that? You remind me of Mother. Calmness and firmness are no good with her. She’s always ever so much calmer and firmer than I could ever be…’

  I didn’t know how to answer this, except to say that a mother is a dear thing; and that both my parents are dead. He gave me a queer look, then, and returned to his reading.

  Was I dismissed? I stood for a moment, wondering, and then turned sharply on my heels, without waiting to hear.

  It is not me who is familiar, I was thinking, but quite the other way round. He is easy with me in that way of men who have lived their whole life with servants: we’re invisible to them most of the time, except when they need us. I picked up the breakfast things and left the room, asking stiffly if I could do anything more for him (to which he muttered something I didn’t choose to hear). I left without bidding him good morning.

  This morning I have received something vile and unwelcome. Seven pages of damn plain speaking from the eldest Olivier girl, Big Sister Margery. Any fond memories I have of the afore-mentioned with her brown mane seductively awry, romping on the grass at Penshurst camp, kicking up her skirts and holding Noel in a headlock worthy of any man dissolved at once. How mistaken I was about her.

  Margery Olivier, I’ve decided, cannot possibly be made of the same flesh and blood as Noel–she must be a witch, sent by the Ranee to torture me. The letter was brought by Nellie, cheerily oblivious to its contents, plopping it down with my breakfast milk and apple, and as the door closed behind her, the letter cast a dark shadow–like a long, pointed finger–in my sunny bedroom.

  I (not as an individual, but as a Young Man) am now, it seems, to be entirely shut out of Noel’s existence. It’s Margery’s New Educational Scheme. Love, for a woman, she says, destroys everything else. It fills her whole life, stops her developing intellectually, absorbs her. ‘You’ll see what I mean if you look at a woman who married young,’ she grimly adds. ‘No woman should marry before twenty-six or-seven.’ (That’s ten more years of waiting, then! An ugly, dry decade!) ‘Do be sensible,’ Margery pleads. ‘She is so young–you are so young…’ All about my ‘wild writing’ and how I must ‘look ahead’ and a thousand things.

  On reading it, I leap from bed and call Nellie back. ‘Nell, Nell–come here!’

  ‘What is it? Ooh, I forgot the honey!’

  ‘No, not that, child. I need your opinion on something.’

  I wind the bed sheets round my torso–conscious of the girl’s blushes–and close the bedroom door behind me. Waving the letter as if Nellie had read the entire blazing sermon, I start at once: ‘Do you think Love destroys a woman? Finishes her off?’

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean—’

  ‘Margery Olivier has a bloody theory. No woman should marry before twenty-six or-seven–marriage, or rather love, ends a girl’s life, stifling her, finishing off her intellectual development, her–education, or—Oh, I’m not sure I understand at all.’

  ‘Well.’ The maid pauses, and I realise, with a furious stab, that she is seriously contemplating this theory.

  ‘The logical outcome,’ I interject quickly, ‘is that one must only marry the quite poor, unimportant people who don’t matter being spoiled, and leave the splendid ones untouched!’

  ‘Yes, I see. But I think there might well be a grain of truth in the idea that—You see, when I think of my dear mother, or my sisters, well, of course we read many penny books where love and marriage bring us the greatest happiness, and the popular songs say the same thing, but then when we take the temperature of our own hearts, or look at the lives of those girls around us—’

  ‘Surely, Nell, for every human being, male or female, love is the greatest thing? Don’t, please, tell me you’re going to agree with Margery. We must thunder against such mediocrity! Make a protest against idiocy and wickedness–not show a calm Christian spirit! Such a view is all reasonableness and cowardice and calmness–and how evil it is to let things slide and not snatch at opportunities!’

  Staring at Nellie, her violet eyes fixed anxiously on my face, I’m aware suddenly that I may be shouting, and that she appears to be a little unnerved. I let my hands swing to my sides and compose myself. The truth is, I feel mistrustful of myself, and full of fear and despair. A shadow of my old fears, the thoughts I have at sharing Dick’s…instability, comes back to me. It’s the tone of Margery’s letter. ‘Wait! Wait! She’s so reasonable about you now. Let her remain so,’ Margery says. That is painful. Is Noel Olivier reasonable about me? To have it rubbed in so. Oh, of course, I am delighted. Should I wave a hat with pallid enthusiasm, and say in a high voice: Hurray, hurray! Just what she should be–reasonable about me! Excellent, excellent!

  ‘I’m sorry, Nellie.’ I collapse on to the bed. ‘I find it hard to be reasonable. It’s not an emotion I admire, to be exact. It’s like fondness. Throw your fond in a pond! Give me love, I say, or nothing!’

  The girl’s expression is unreadable. She has a practised, clever way of glancing at the door, which tells me in no uncertain terms that she is thinking of her duties, without appearing rude, or making any reference to them.

  ‘Of course, of course. You must attend to your–your bees, is it? I see that you agree in some hideous way with Margery’s diagnosis. What part of your marvellous intellectual development you believe is arrested by falling in love I can’t quite imagine. I can take the wider view…’

  There then flits over her face something that, for want of a better word, I might describe as anger. It certainly amuses me to see it and how she struggles not to show it. It makes me like her more fervently. I struggle in exactly the same way in conversations with Mother!

  (‘I prefer Miss Ka Cox,’ the Ranee says, at Rugby, rightly noting that the serious Ka has wrists very thick and an unusual downturned expression in her mouth, and rather poor posture, and is therefore unlikely to seduce me. ‘I can’t understand what you see in these Oliviers. They are pretty, I suppose, but not at all clever; they’re shocking flirts and their manners are disgraceful.’ Mother, why do you insist on answering your own questions so elegantly? What does she imagine the Olivier girls will do, left to their own devices? Kiss the rural milkman and eat bread without butter? But, then, if I should put in a good word for Gwen, I know how she will immediately swing the other way utterly, and say, ‘I can’t understand at all what you see in Miss Darwin. She’s not pretty, or attractive. On the whole I prefer the Oliviers; at least they are good-looking.’

  Mother’s skill has always been in her colossal, enormous steadfastness of purpose. Didn’t she once say that that was the quality she prized most in a woman? I’m sure she wrote it in some Christmas book. That in a man it would be moral fortitude or some such. Perhaps I should tell Mother about James. That would really give her Cause to be Anxious about Rupert’s Friends. Poor James. If only I could tear out the heart of Noel with my teeth, and replace it with the heart of the bespectacled James Strachey, who–thank God–is not reasonable in the least about me.)

  I finish my milk and dismiss Nellie with–I hope–a kindly nod. (Can a nod be kindly?) Her little flare-up will soon pass. The lucky girl has no idea what bliss it is to receive post only once a week, as she does. That bloody letter has ruined my day.

  And then just when I think I have grown used to his habits, something happens that is so unexpected, so unlooked-for, that I no longer know if I’m coming or going, or which way is up.

  It was only yesterday that I said to Kittie I knew his habits better than a mother. Bathing every evening, bre
akfast on the lawn or in his bedroom, young men and women always calling up to the window or throwing a pebble to wake him; and a pencil and a book in his hand, and somehow, it appears, he manages to be a scholar too. He mostly takes breakfast in his room. As he has sworn off meat, he breakfasts on coddled eggs, hot milk, some chopped apple or pear and a cup of tea with honey.

  His room, when I enter it at seven o’clock, has that smell I know so well from old days with my brothers and Father. The warm salty smell of a man sleeping. It must be the loss of Father that makes the smell bring a lurch in my heart.

  I am careful always to be brisk in my tone and not to sound sleepy myself, or anything at all that isn’t fitting. Wide awake and alert, that’s me. I open the curtains, my back to the bed, give him time to bestir himself. I have learned the trick to opening the window in this room now: a brutal push upwards. This admits noises from outside. Birdsong, horses clopping past, sometimes a visitor calling up to him, and the ring of a bicycle bell.

  When Mr Brooke stirs, there are always more books, letters and papers next to his pillow, which tumble to the floor. Many’s the time I’ve discovered inky-stained pillows. (I was wrong to abandon the pillow shams: they make a good disguise for the limits of the laundry soap.) Then he will prop himself up on one elbow and begin sipping at the milk (not coffee any longer, he’s decided to swear off that, too) and say daft things, things like: ‘Women are bloody, Nell. I pray you remain a child and never become one.’

  After my blurting out my opinion on Miss Darwin, I’ve taught myself to pause, count to ten, hold my tongue. Does he seriously think of me as a child? He has a way of addressing grown women as ‘child’–I have heard him do it more than once. Perhaps he doesn’t mean to include me in the sweep of the insult; maybe he thinks I’m not human?