The Great Lover

by Jill Dawson

  I’m glad to discover a bar at the front of Mrs Lovina’s hotel, with gin shining on shelves and an equally shining barman. A small brown man wearing the fascinating concession to the missionaries that most adopt here: the blue-flowered pareu, or skirt, with a white shirt and hat, and when the hat is removed (as now), usually white flowers tucked behind each ear. To cap it all, this man has a moustache bigger even than Banbridge’s. He stands, his hand twirling a teacloth inside a glass, and talking softly to a native girl beside him; a girl swathed in a dress of royal blue.

  The cock crows again–wildly this time, as if demented–and this girl, this exquisite, shimmering, black-eyed girl, glances up. I’m tiptoeing down the stairs towards her, feet bare, limping inelegantly on my bad toes, wrapped like a parcel in my nativestyle pareu. Our eyes meet, and I can only think, in my startled, not-quite-awake way, that this girl, despite her brown skin–how can that be?–this girl is the living image of another girl I know: Nell Golightly, back home in Grantchester.

  ‘Ia ora na,’ I venture. My first attempt at Tahitian.

  The girl says nothing, but the barman answers at once. ‘Good evening, sir. Bonsoir, Monsieur Rupert. Je m’appelle Miri. Very good, sir. Sleep no good?’

  ‘The confounded cockerel. I thought it was morning.’ I grin to acknowledge that it’s a lame excuse, and nod at once to accept the bottle of rum he smoothly produces from under the counter. From a jug he tops the rum with some kind of juice, smiling broadly and pushing the drink towards me. ‘Good for sleep,’ he says.

  So I sit at the bar and sip the dark, honey-tasting liquid, and from nowhere and despite the hour, others appear: a native boy of five or six in a blue-flowered pareu, with missing teeth at the front; another young woman, slim and tall with coffee-coloured skin, broad shoulders and hair in a straight plait down her back. This woman, while taking the teacloth from the barman and shaking her head at him as if to insist she take over, offers me a convoluted explanation for the crowing cock: something like a bad god, Pae, trying to steal the island of Raiatea and how the cocks crowed a warning and woke Hero–presumably the good god; no, she says, he was the god of thieves and sailors–who rose up and rescued the isle, and now cocks crying all night long is a reminder, a warning, to those who might wish to steal the islands that they are guarded.

  I can scarcely follow this story, told in the usual mix of Tahitian, French and English, because my attention is so diverted by the deepness of this woman’s voice, rich and baritone. She, too, wears the missionary-style dress, dark green this time, buttoned to the neck, shapeless and long, but when she catches me looking at her, she swishes her plait over her shoulder coquettishly, and adjusts the white tiare flower behind her ear. Though her chest is straight and fallow, my eye is drawn there. She seems pleased and acknowledges me. Then, calling to the child to cease his sport–pulling faces at me–she turns her attention to him, shooing him back with her towards the kitchen.

  The blasted cock crows on.

  From above us we hear the rumbling of Banbridge’s snores and the wooden floorboards tremble so violently the oil lamp shakes.

  The barman–what did he say his name was? Miri?–is now slumped on his stool behind the bar, his eyes half closed, so I reach for the bottle and help myself to another shot of rum. I had forgotten about the other woman, the one who looks like Nell, but now she appears, slowly swishing a pandanus broom from one side to another and watching me out of the corner of her eye.

  ‘Your foot hurting plenty? Mr Monsieur Brooke? You would like Tahitian medicine?’

  ‘Ah, my foot. I stepped on–one assumes–something poisonous. In the coral, in Samoa, you know? I must say, it has been giving me some gip.’

  She nods. She rests her broom against the polished wooden bar. ‘I’m good nurse. Show me le pied, Monsieur,’ she says, and gestures with her hands, making pushing movements, as the other woman did when shooing the child. Obediently, I climb down from my bar stool and head in the direction she sweeps me towards.

  So I followed them back to the Old Vicarage and my tears soon dried. I saw him part from Phyllis, and I saw that it was done without friendliness, and that she took off on her bicycle and he made his way to his rooms at the Old Vicarage. And this was where I should have turned back, gone to my little bedroom at the Orchard. I dried my tears on my apron and watched as a light appeared in his window, and thought of that nursery gate to his stairs and how everyone else, Mr and Mrs Neeve, their son Cyril, the girls at the Orchard, would be sleeping, for it was dark now suddenly, but the moon was full, fat as a giant white eye.

  I think I had been standing there a long time, my heart beating furiously.

  I was remembering that first time, when he cheekily said, ‘“Down, little bounder, down!” as Edmund Gosse said to his heart…’ and how angry I had felt towards him, how I lay in my own bed with that stricken heat flaring up in me, over and over. How exhausted I was by morning. And how it crackled again right now, under my skin, the same fury and wildness, the same desire to go find him, to give him at last ‘what for’, as Mother used to say: a piece of my mind.

  But not anger. Not really anger, no. I was a girl then, not quite seventeen. Newly without a father. A long time ago. Almost four years since I first met Rupert and in that time I have grown up, and understood certain things. I have listened to Kittie talk about women and their purity, their pure minds, and I’ve turned inside to listen to my own blood and learned plenty.

  So I dried my face and tidied my hair with my hands, and straightened myself up as best I could. I unbuttoned my boots and shoved them under a hedge where I’d be able to find them tomorrow. I felt my breath catch and the heat settle in me, low in my body. I knew its name, at last, and I knew it was not ugly or dirty any more than it was pure and holy, but only true. I tiptoed barefoot across the gravel, and through the french windows, which I knew I’d find unlocked, and stepped into the Old Vicarage. I knew where the doors to the pantries were, without being able to see them. I knew the tiles beneath my feet were red; they still held a trace of the day’s warmth. Then I felt my way in darkness, my hand sweating stickily on the banister as I guided myself up the stairways and to the nursery gate that guarded Rupert’s rooms. I stepped over it. I knocked boldly on the door. I knew he liked boldness. Boldness was something he found hard to resist. I went in.

  I stood by his bed. I did not know whether he was asleep at first, but then he whispered: ‘Well?’ I sat down on the bed, and he put his arms around me, and I laid my head on his shoulder. He pressed me closer, and something in the touch of him made me suddenly afraid, and I began to tremble violently from head to foot.

  ‘Are you frightened?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said I.

  ‘You needn’t be,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t do anything you wouldn’t like.’ (This very quietly.)

  And that was when I had to admit it. I would like it. I would. Very much.

  And that’s how I end up here at Hotel Tiare Tahiti, in a queer back room, a small room with only a wooden pallet on the floor with white sheets on it; a kind of hovel, with a door open to a yard and this young woman beside me, swishing a huge fan in front of my face (made of the ubiquitous pandanus leaves). She has poured coconut juice over my foot, which made it sing with a flaming, shooting pain; but I understand from her utterings about ‘clean, clean, propre!’–that this is a folk remedy, which makes sense as the coconut liquid is sterile; and so I submit, delirious and beyond defending myself.

  But for two days now the foot has got worse, and a general sickness has taken me over. I’m sweating in a fever. Strange thoughts are crowding me. It is as if I’ve submitted at last to something I fought off for so long. Am I back in chilly Lulworth, after the débâcle with Ka on the clifftops, crying into my pillow, and hoping–in lucid interludes–that no James or Lytton will visit to witness my misery? Sickness always returns me to my childhood bed, and as I feel the soft smack of another damp cloth on my brow, I imagine I am back in the sick dor
m at school and that it is the Ranee or perhaps Nell whose white hand smoothes my forehead–and then I catch sight of the brown hand of my Tahitian nurse and realise with a jolt where I am.

  She brings me bowls of some yellow fruit–nono or noni or some such thing–tells me to ‘eat, eat, Pupure!’–that word again, only on her tongue it sounds more like Pu-pu–but when she lifts my foot, the injured one, that only a few days ago was bearable, simply inflamed, now it is burning. A fierce flame at the end of my leg, and her touch is like knives digging under the toenail.

  I long to scream in complete ingratitude: ‘Get this witch doctor away from me!’

  On the third day it is not her, whose name I discover, from listening to others calling to her, is Taatamata, but the other, the fruity-voiced one with the broad shoulders and the plait, who attends me. Her touch is kinder and she lays tiare flowers on my pillow so that when I toss and turn it is their waxy white scent snaking up my nostrils. Now she with the flirtatious flicking of hair is a little more like the lascivious girls I was led to expect. Her name, I discover, is Mahu. Not that anyone calls her this, only that Taatamata nods and says, ‘Eh, Mahu,’ in answer to my questioning glance. So I suppose it might mean something else.

  That night Taatamata appears in the doorway with a bowl of, she says, poulet fafa–‘very good stew with plenty chicken and coconut milk’–and I sit up to take some from the spoon she offers, feeling, for the first time in a while, hunger pangs. She places a candle on the floor beside my bed and proceeds to dip the spoon in the stew and hold it to my lips, offering me sip after sip, tipping my chin with her other hand. ‘Excuse me, Monsieur Rupert, you feel better?’

  I can hardly speak between the fast-arriving spoonfuls. ‘A little–yes.’

  ‘Excuse me, Monsieur Rupert, you must eat plenty. Vous êtes trop mince–like little boy. No good. I should look at your foot?’

  I stick the foot out of the sheets and she puts the bowl of stew down to examine it, lifting it gently, tutting and shaking her head. The pain shoots up the toes as she handles them; sweat springs to my brow, and drips from my arms to the sheets. She returns thoughtfully to feeding me spoonful by spoonful, until it occurs to me to mention, ‘I say, I can do that myself, you know.’

  Now I have offended her. She shoves the bowl towards me, slaps her arms by her sides and looks angrily at me. Suddenly nauseous, I decide my brief meal is over and lean over the low bed to place the bowl and spoon on the earthen floor.

  ‘Monsieur Rupert must take some new medicine. Your foot is not better, pas bien. I think you have plenty sting from Taramea starfish. Like this, oui?’

  She demonstrates with her hands a round shape, indicating with little movements that the offender had spikes.

  ‘I don’t remember. I didn’t see. I stepped on something–I felt a sting, or what I thought of as a nibble in the water, yes. But it wasn’t too painful at the time.’

  She nods at this and seems relieved. ‘Not nohu, then. Stonefish. Nohu is very bad! Plenty die stepping on nohu. Big men faint with pain.’

  This Taatamata now demonstrates with an exaggerated swoon, falling all the way to the floor. I peer over at her, suddenly at the same low level as me.

  ‘No, not this nohu, stonefish chap, then, I don’t suppose. Just some run-of-the-mill coral or poisonous fish that I stepped on and my foot has become infected. I’m very prone to sickness, I’m afraid. Spent a lifetime in beds and sick-bays. Second nature to me.’

  She gets up, brushing down her dress. Nods at me, seeming to be studying me hard. The room is lit by flickering candles. I return her stare. Tonight she looks nothing like Nell: her features are too fine, her nose straight, her cheekbones high. She might have noble blood, French perhaps. It’s only something in her expression–large eyes of the darkest brown, almost black, her gaze direct and intelligent, like Nellie’s.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I ask her, trying to summon up some of my former Apollo-sun-god charm, although I know her name already.

  ‘Taatamata.’

  ‘What does it mean in Tahitian?’

  ‘Rien. I don’t know. What does Monsieur Rupert mean? Popaa?’

  To my surprise, she grabs a lock of my hair, shakes it. Now I’m confused. Popaa, I thought, meant white man or European. But Pupure–the name the child at the harbour called out–I had thought meant pure, or perhaps pale. Which pleased me. Is it in fact another word, or the same one pronounced differently?

  ‘Popaa? Pupure. Ha! That’s me. Pure one. Yes, do call me that. Not Monsieur Rupert, he’s–I left him back on the boat.’

  And now Pupure, I tell her, wants to sleep, as the fever starts to rage again, and sweat drenches my skin and soaks the sheets, the effort of speaking becoming too much.

  I think she has left. The candle is blown out and the smell of wax overcomes the strong tiare-flower smell, a sweet gardenia scent. The room crackles darkly. Outside the cockerel crows insanely and the voice of a child–the boy from the bar, Georges, can be heard; along with the occasional rumble of Banbridge opining about something or other upstairs. I believe at first that Taatamata has gone; then I hear water splashing in an umete, and feel the icy stroke of a cloth against my burning foot. Relief seeps up towards my calf with infinite pleasure. Perhaps I even moan a little; certainly someone does. And so it goes on: stroke after stroke, cool and sweeping, soothing and divine. She works in a marvellous, seamless way, each stroke following the last without pause; and when she refreshes the cloth she keeps one hand on my leg so that contact between us is unbroken. Soon waves of pleasure are sneaking along my calves and, inevitably, onwards and upwards. Shame floods me, and panic, lest she notice! But my sickness melts my body and my will, and darkness hides the rest.

  I find myself longing for her to go on and dreading a sign that she might stop, but she doesn’t. Stroking, sweeping, cooling, calming, soothing. Then I hear the droplets splashing in the umete as she refreshes and wrings out the cloth and starts again on the other leg. When was I last bathed by another, so gently and so expertly? Not since…being a little boy…that nurse Mother so despised…Dorothy…It’s such a tender, exquisite sensation, and I let my sticky mind wander in the heat, thinking how clean I am now, cleaner than I’ve ever been, perhaps, here on Tahiti, with all my woes behind me in England and all my bad behaviour, my ghastly errors…

  Munich, with Ka. The lamp wobbling on the bedside table as I bucked like an animal on top of her. And afterwards, her sudden cry: ‘Oh–I’m bleeding!’ Her face shamed and startled, and then horribly in pain, and me hopping about with only one pyjama leg on, fetching more of the grey, hopeless towels to staunch the flow and saying, ‘I say–was I a beast, then? Is this normal? Dear Ka, I’m sorry, I—Is it all right?’ And only later, only in a roundabout way when I mentioned or hinted at something of it to James, did it occur to me. Was that a miscarriage? Did we–did Ka and I–copulate so foully, so dirtily, that we murdered our own child?

  But my mind was so deranged in those months. It was all I could do to silence the clamouring that told me generally I was dirty, a dirty little boy. I bought Ka a gift, a tactless gift of an Eric Gill statue–a square-headed Mother and Child. That was the closest we came to speaking of it. I angered Phyllis, and I–I—Lord knows what damage I did to Nell Golightly.

  Now Taatamata’s skilful hands are working further up my thighs. Cleansing, purifying. Now she is lifting the sheet and uncovering me like a mummy, black and hotly stiff in the darkness. Even here, when she reveals me, she does not hesitate. I think I hear her mouth widen, not in shock but into a smile. The stroking continues, on my stomach, my thighs, this time–is it my imagination?–more intense, more deliberate, determined. Heat burns every inch of me; I place my hand on my cock, I hardly know what I’m doing, I feel my nipples stiffen and my whole body rise and buck, but I’m too weak to get up off the bed or roll over, or touch her or take her, and so I merely spill myself, with a sob that I take no trouble to stifle, on to the sodden sheets. Taatamata ha
rdly breaks stride to sponge the sheet too. Patting me tenderly on my stomach with the cloth, she leaves, tactfully closing the door to the noisy yard.

  The next morning I can hardly look at her. She draws the curtain, takes off the straw hat she is wearing, and produces an orange, which she proceeds to peel and offer me segment by segment. I open my mouth like a child and taste the most glorious orange in the world.

  ‘Pupure, you now feel better? No more fever?’

  ‘Ah! How right you are–Pupure feels like a Changed Man. Perhaps I truly am Robert Louis Stevenson now–in both thinness, literary style and dissociation from England! Pah, what glory—’

  She frowns at me and shoves the last piece of orange into my mouth. (An uncharitable reading of this would be that she wishes to shut me up.)

  ‘Mama Lovina m’a donné these. For you.’

  Letters are produced from a pocket deep in her drab dress. Who can this chap be–Mr Rupert Brooke, c/o The Union Steamship Company Agents, Papeete, Tahiti? Put like that, it does give one some kind of jolt. Feeling Taatamata’s eyes on me I pick the envelopes up, recognise the handwriting of Eddie, Phyllis, Cathleen. A distinct smell of the theatre floats from Cathleen’s letter–of greasepaint, wooden boards and yards of Irish green tulle. I resist a powerful desire to hand the letters back. No further cheques from the Westminster Gazette for my ‘Letters from America’. And none either from the Ranee.

  As I sink back to my pillow, closing my eyes, she says slyly, ‘Pupure, your letters are from a sweetheart? Or wife?’

  ‘What an extraordinary question! Where I come from a girl could be hanged for asking such a thing!’

  More frowning. She folds her arms across her chest to indicate that she is patiently waiting for a decent answer.

  I sigh. ‘Yes. My dear–many sweethearts. Too many! But no wives.’

  This satisfies her and, gathering up the orange peel, she leaves me.