The Great Lover

by Jill Dawson

  Nell wearing church clothes, with petals caught in her dark hair.

  I find my stomach lurching to my boots and cannot speak, but only stand staring at her, like an imbecile, trying to take in the information.

  Quite horribly the lines from my poem float tauntingly back to me:

  Unkempt about those hedges blows

  An English unofficial rose…

  A lump rises in my throat, as my English unofficial rose stops in her tracks, one arm linked in her sister’s, and we appraise one another. I watch Nell’s expression–shock, also, I think registers there, and then she struggles to compose herself.

  ‘Nell! And Betty! Not at work today, girls?’ Does my voice sound strained, high-pitched? I fear it does.

  ‘No–it’s—We’re just back from a wedding celebration, sir.’ This is Betty, beaming and blushing. Yes. There it is. There can be no mistaking it. A wedding celebration. Nell’s eyes are fixed on the gravel and she is unable to meet mine. I remember suddenly the way she dabbed at my mouth once, after I’d been stung, and the touch of her finger, sticky with honey, at the corner of my mouth. Such a combination of pain and sweetness. It was nothing, I see now, compared to this.

  I manage to force out the next question: ‘I see. And who is the lucky groom? Someone I know?’

  ‘It’s Jack, sir,’ Betty says, turning to her sister and blushing again. ‘You know, the boy who works at the Mill and brings the flour for the bread in the mornings…’

  ‘Ah, Jack.’ A very long pause. We all stare horribly.

  ‘Well, I’m not really in England,’ I say loftily. ‘It’s just a–an interim between periods abroad. One gets into the state of mind for being abroad…’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ And the girls suddenly break into peals of inexplicable laughter, put their heads together and skitter away from me.

  So. That is it, then. Horrible truth like egg in the face. Nell is married.

  The two girls disappear down the lane as I stare after them. I have so rarely seen Nell without her apron and her uniform, without most of that long black hair tucked away behind an ugly cap. Their dresses, the colours, make me think of dog-roses, shades of eyelid pink, fragile against dark leaves. (‘And down the borders, well I know, the poppy and the pansy blow…’) What is the point? What is the point of this feeling? I am melting with weariness; my legs will hardly hold me.

  I lean against the five-barred gate to the Old Vicarage, hooked back in the bushes, and listen for the dull beat of my heart. It feels like one of those paper boats, sailing hopelessly away from me and catching in a twig, to falter there for ever. (Oh, I know it’s a trifle to lose a heart such as mine but, after all, it is the only one I’ve got.)

  With great weariness I pick up my bags. Time to face Florence Neeve and the creepy-crawlies in my old room. Suddenly it occurs to me that I haven’t bathed since November, and there is such a lot of dirt to wash off. A pale flash in the corner of my eye stops me. It is Nell, running back along the road and reaching the Old Vicarage gate.

  She is out of breath, her hair falling from its pins and her dress clinging to her. Her cheeks are flushed and her forehead shines with sweat. The sister is nowhere to be seen. Nell stops at a little distance from me. ‘I–I loved your poem, Rupert. We saw it, we all saw it–“Ah God! To see the branches stir, across the moon at Grantchester!”’

  ‘You read my poem?’

  ‘Mrs Neeve read it out to us in the kitchen at the Old Vicarage. To all of us. “And laughs the immortal river still. Under the mill, under the mill?” Or my favourite bit: “To smell the thrilling sweet and rotten, Unforgettable, unforgotten, river smell; and hear the breeze, sobbing in the little trees…” And she said, Mrs Neeve said, “Of course! There is honey still for tea.”’

  ‘Nell, you didn’t memorise every word, I hope?’

  She laughs, and glances back along the lane to see that her sister is waiting for her.

  ‘Well. Who would have imagined that Mrs Neeve read the pleasant silly passages of my musings in the King’s magazine? And did you find it horribly sentimental and insincere?’

  ‘No, I—’ Here her confidence crumbles, which gives me a cruel pulse of pleasure.

  ‘Well, I’m very pleased that my little ornamental gesture has pleased you. I may have to rename it–I had no idea that the Old Vicarage would so approve.’

  Now she is staring at the ground again, and biting her lip, and her hand flies up to her forehead to sweep at invisible locks of hair. ‘Are you–well now, then? You are recovered?’ she asks.

  Finally, anger and disappointment swell to boiling-point and spill over. ‘No, I am not well,’ I answer shortly. ‘I am rather fat and stupid, wouldn’t you say, from looking at me?’

  I am gratified to see my words have reached their target. She takes a step back and glances down the lane towards her sister. ‘Well, I should go–we’re having a little party, you know, at Jack’s house.’

  The knife twists again as she mentions the wedding. ‘Yes. I see that. Acres of fun for all.’

  She turns to go, then whirls round suddenly. ‘I wonder what it would cost you,’ she asks, quietly, her face strangely close to mine, ‘to be sincere for once?’

  Birds cease their piping. Nell’s white face blots out the sun.

  ‘Ah, my dear Nell. How disappointingly predictable of you. You have confused sincerity with constancy. Does it not occur to you that one might be both ludicrously flippant and hideously serious–and truly sincere in both?’

  With that I turn away from her, and after a moment’s hesitation, I hear her steps behind me, snapping smartly down the lane.

  I spend a sad night at Florence Neeve’s with legions of woodlice dizzily climbing the walls, their babies trotting in and out between their legs, until I am mad with chasing them and despair of ever sleeping or (perhaps my true fear) ever waking again.

  Four

  ‘This is Samoa, by a full moon. You’re in London, in a fog. Both are very wonderful. I love you.’

  Rupert Brooke, letter to Cathleen Nesbitt, November 1913

  Pango-Pango

  Samoa

  November 1913

  My Dear Phyllis,

  Your letter of May or June found me wandering somewhere in Canada. Now I’m here, in the South Pacific, for how long, I don’t know.

  For nearly two years I have planned to get away like this. I think it is a good thing. One sees more clearly. Perhaps it would have been better, had I done it sooner.

  My dear child, there are only two ways of approaching relationships. One is only to allow love on the supposition that it may lead to marriage–the other is–the wandering way. And there are people made for the first way and perhaps people made for the second. But to introduce those made for the first to people made for the second is to invite pain and endless trouble.

  You are the first kind. That need not imply that you are better or worse than the second kind. Only different. You are meant for love and marriage…I’m a wanderer…

  God, bugger and damn. Letters are hellish hard to write. Now Phyllis, too, weighs on me with her dark red hair and her hurt eyes, and I have yet another devouring woman to appease when I should be making sport with the finest-made man I’ve ever seen: like a Greek statue come to life, strong as ten horses. (To see him strip and swim a half-flooded river is an immortal sight.)

  Last night I stayed in the house of a mountain chief who has fierce yearnings after civilisation. When these grow strong he sends a runner down to the coast to buy any illustrated papers he can find. He knows no English, but he pastes his favourite pictures around the wall and muses over them. Result: I have a curious version of what is going on back home. The miners are balloted on the question: Are you in favour of a minimum wage? And nearly five hundred thousand of them reply yes. An overwhelming yes, to make the heart sing again with faith in the intelligence of the Working Man, a man whom once, many moons ago, one was interested in helping. A major coal-mining strike looks imminent. Yet wai
t. Didn’t one once care about such things? And wasn’t the date some time around September 1911, before one’s poems came out, before one became officially a crackpot, and then a Georgian Poet? And when I look again, that’s exactly the date of these papers. Here’s the Prince of Wales with his arms around two ladies, in dresses circa 1911.

  It’s very perplexing. These people–Samoans and Fijians–are so much nicer and so much better-mannered than oneself. And they are–under our influence–a dying race. We gradually fill their lands with plantations and Indian coolies. The Hawaiians, up in the ‘Sandwich Islands’, have almost altogether gone, their arts and music with them, and their islands are a replica of America.

  And they’re so…impossible to describe. How far nearer the Kingdom of Heaven or the Garden of Eden these good naked people are than oneself or one’s friends.

  I seem to have shed my Fabian self, the same way I’ve shed my Apostle’s wings, in favour of being a genuine child of nature. Fiji in moonlight is like nothing else in this life or the next. And here, where it’s high up, the most fantastically shaped mountains in the world tower all around, and little silver clouds and wisps of mist run bleating up and down the hillsides like lambs looking for their mother. There’s only one thing on earth as beautiful and that’s Samoa by night.

  Why write to Phyllis now? The distance, I suppose, makes one feel safe. When I think of Phyllis I burn with all the lust that Ka erased in me, and there’s fury burning there too, for the way Phyllis denied me and misunderstood me, and twisted my every word. When I said last time I saw her ‘there were ways’–thinking to be helpful, nothing less–she flew into a passion and accused me of murdering future children of ours! The girl was a terrible temptress. Stripping naked at the flimsiest opportunity, only to brush me with her long hair, then bristle if I put my hand in the place that she delicately called, playing the artist, ‘the centre of the figure’. When I said I had to have her, she would suddenly come over coy and accuse me of bestiality! Her thoughts, apparently, were only ever noble. I suppose she longed to see me naked only to–what? Purify her soul? Women! How damnable they are, really, with their dishonesty and their chaste souls and the ways they like to make us rise and fall and then laugh in our faces.

  I shan’t finish that letter to Phyllis today. I should wait until my mood is calm.

  Yesterday, in the fish-nibbling lagoons, I seem to have really been nibbled. That is, my foot has begun to hurt, and now that I look at the toes, I see that three on the right foot are swollen, and joining together in a way that is ugly and disturbing. Is it possible I have actually been bitten, or poisoned in some way?

  I’m reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Sea Tales. I wish I could find a little wifie, a little Uma, like his story ‘The Beach of Falesa’. Or a handful of uninhibited virgins, like Gauguin. I have read avidly the accounts by Bougainville of the first landing he made in 1768 and the Venus-like women greeting sailors with ‘lascivious gestures’. Yes, that’s the ticket. A few lascivious gestures to show me I’m on the right track. Not a great entangled argument with someone like Phyllis (who in the end said no anyway) or a dizzying affair with a Cathleen Nesbitt.

  Cathleen.

  Unfortunate timing or brilliant timing, I can’t decide, to meet her so soon before leaving like that.

  The problem was, of course, how fresh my wounds were. And Cathleen’s too, as it happens. Although she had laid hurts aside, she said, like a dress upon a chair.

  Supper at Eddie’s, I remember. Mrs Elgy hovering, clumsily taking plates before guests had even finished. (She wasn’t used to ‘entertaining’, she grumbled later.) Cathleen sat in a corner, showing off her perfect nose. When I complimented her on it (later, days later) she laughed and said that mine turned up at the end and was awfully cute. My heart broke like a flower, to badly quote someone or other. Masefield, perhaps. Do flowers break? In any case, there she was in Eddie’s room and I approached her with extraordinary wit by asking, ‘Do you know everyone here?’ I was thinking of the Violet Asquiths, the Lady Eileen Wellesleys, all those grand folk. Surely this was her circle, more than mine.

  She replied, ‘Only two people besides Eddie.’

  And then that silly gambit she had. Of telling me she loved a poem called ‘Heaven’ by someone called Rupert Brooke in the Georgian Poetry anthology, and had I read it? I know I blushed. God, I blushed. One of those dreadful oh-so-familiar occasions when my wish to convey only nonchalance and urbane acceptance of her flattery was in complete conflict with my idiotic imbecile of a self. While I was glowing hot as an ember and wanting the floor to swallow me, what did the glamorous, perfect-nosed Cathleen do?

  She laughed. And all I can remember about the rest of the conversation is that laugh. I told her I’d seen her play Perdita twice and think that I advanced the view that acting is a rum profession for a woman. To which she laughed again, annoyingly.

  Cathleen–loveliest creature! Nymph divine!

  These thoughts in a hot country are not cooling. I need someone easier to dream of. A memory that doesn’t bring with it such a poor version of myself as Lover. Who could that be?

  Ah, a throb then, when I think of her. Good, firm Nellie Golightly. Only she with her silky black hair could ever command moonlight like this, floods and floods of it, not sticky like Honolulu moonlight, not to be eaten with a spoon, but flat and abundant, such that you could slice thin golden-white shavings off it, like cheese.

  It was a moonlit night, that last one. The one before I left Grantchester. It seems a hundred years ago, although it was only the summer. Bathing was what I longed for. And bathing is what I remember now, the river Granta holy and clean because Nell’s naked body had been in it.

  But I’m confused. It wasn’t Nell, was it, who swam with me that last night? Wasn’t it…Phyllis Gardner?

  It is Nell I remember, though. Nell’s smoky violet eyes smiling at me.

  Do I dare to write to her? Since I did not see her that following morning, I owe her–a goodbye at least. Nell, who knows all my secrets, the men and the women: the secrets of the sheets. But does she ever think of me?

  In January I sail for Tahiti. I begin the new year–1914–with a whole new island to discover. I have a strange, excited feeling about this, a feeling beyond the general thrill of boarding a ship again. I feel I’m hurtling towards something. I’m out of control, like a man in a barrel hurling himself down the Niagara Falls. Perhaps I shall dare, at last, to write Nell a letter from there.

  I hardly saw Rupert the year before he left for his travels. Kittie said he was back in his lodgings at the Old Vicarage but, as far as I could tell, he was never there. He seemed to be ignoring all his old friends, moving with a different circle–Lady Eileen someone or other, Violet Asquith, the daughter of the Prime Minister, people like that. He was in London, or at the Russian ballet again in Covent Garden, or his mother’s in Rugby. After we bumped into each other that day of Betty’s wedding I saw that he was not at all recovered. Not really.

  Then this young woman, the brazen artist one, Phyllis, she starts turning up. She cycles here and she asks after him and she won’t take no for an answer. When I tell her he’s away, or staying at Mr Marsh’s again in London, she sighs as though she’s sure I’m lying.

  She orders lemonade and strawberries and sits in a deckchair in the orchard, takes out his book of poems and reads it under the trees, one eye on the page, one watching the path to the Old Vicarage like a hawk. She doesn’t seem to believe me. I think she writes letters to him. Oh, she’s modern, all right, that one. Sometimes she’s sketching, and I’ve seen the drawing too, and it’s not a bad likeness. Once, when I took her more tea, I saw her prissy black writing creeping up and down the page and felt sure I read ‘Rupert’. What on earth did he see in her, I wonder, beyond the obvious?

  Yes, she has long hair, the colour of Kittie’s, which some might think fine (for myself, I find it rather brassy). Yes, she has big eyes and is one of those large-bosomed girls, where
the buttons strain a little and the fabric gapes and she’d be better off with a decent bib to cover it.

  And then there was a day at last when he was there, he came back, and I did something I should never have done.

  Well, I’m not proud of this. And I confessed in my list of faults and talents that I’m not good at keeping secrets, and not too shamed of reading other people’s letters neither. Nor following them, once in a while, when my heart urges me to and won’t take no for an answer.

  Phyllis had chased him to the Old Vicarage that day. I know it was that way round. She’d been following and pursuing him, Kittie says, since she first saw him on a train from London, not last November but two years ago. She’d sketched him (she is a student at the Slade like Miss Gwen–I mean Mrs Raverat) and showed everyone she met the sketch, and eventually identified Rupert as the owner of the cheekbones and the nose with its tiny upward tilt. She got herself invited to a poetry reading of his, or something like that, and got herself under his skin for, the Lord knows, Rupert is susceptible to flattery even while he despises it.

  Kittie says Phyllis found Rupert the very first time by calling at the Orchard Tea Gardens. She called Kittie over, bold as brass. Did she know the house on this sketch? Did she know this man? Did she perhaps recognise…the profile? The thought of it makes me blaze. No shyness for Phyllis, no hiding her interest in him! No doubt she found him, too. Sitting outside under the huge drooping trees in the Old Vicarage garden reading or writing (those were the days when a Swedish student was visiting him, another doe-eyed girl, and he was translating something or other for her).

  I saw Phyllis once or twice again after that, but I think she mostly met him in London, during that year, that horrible year after his breakdown, when I never knew if he would be sweet to me or cruel. At Mr Eddie Marsh’s place in Gray’s Inn Road. I heard them giggling once, about Eddie and his housekeeper, a woman called Mrs Elgy.