The Great Lover

by Jill Dawson

  So, later that day I’m well enough to join Banbridge at table, and have my delicious mahi-mahi ruined by his opinions on the German government of Samoa. As he speaks I am thinking that I see no reason for his existence, and several against.

  ‘You were in Samoa, weren’t you, Brooke? My view is that the English in Fiji handle things far better–we know what we’re about, eh? I’m sure the niggahs would prefer it, too.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. The Germans seem to govern it much better than I thought they would. The first governor was a wily man and studied Fiji, then started German Samoa entirely on British lines—’

  ‘Well, that’s my point, man. They need us to show them how to do it. And I hear that whenever the Germans’ backs are turned the Samoans cheerily forget the German they’ve been taught and return to speaking English.’

  Taatamata, Mahu and another native girl slam plates of breadfruit on the table, and jugs of some strange drink we’re assured is not alcoholic. I tentatively spear a piece of yellow-white breadfruit flesh, cut into triangular chunks, noticing Mahu smiling encouragingly–earlier today I saw her cook the fruit, skin and all, in the fire, and scoop out the flesh. It has a smoky, faintly sweet, bland taste, and dense texture, rather like plantain–not offensive at all. And I catch her eye to nod my approval.

  A scarlet and turquoise parrot replaces the hysterical cockerel in accompaniment to Banbridge’s diatribe. I don’t know whose squawking is worst.

  I cannot help myself from persisting in my defence of German rule. ‘Most people in the Pacific, black and white, agree that the German Customs officers in Apia are incomparably more courteous than the English in Fiji.’

  Banbridge practically chokes on his fish. ‘But the private traders complain bitterly! Their trade is interfered with by so much regulation.’

  ‘Well, that’s partly so that they can’t exploit the natives in quite the same way the British in Fiji can.’

  ‘Look here, that’s a bit rich, isn’t it? Under British or American rule we’d have four times the trade in Samoa. And look at how the Germans tax them in Samoa.’

  ‘Ah that’s only in direct taxation. In indirect taxes the Fijians under us are far worse off.’

  ‘Where do you get your facts, Brooke? A Samoan head of the family has to pay a pound a year—’

  ‘Yes, and that represents, oh, three days’ work picking and drying coconuts for copra–so they needn’t kick. You know, I’d warrant a guess any time that the Samoans are richer, and far happier, than the average European.’

  Here Banbridge puts his fork down and brushes angrily at imaginary mosquitoes near his face. ‘Ah, now I understand you, my man. Full of admiration for the “noble savage”, are we, whose life, I presume, you find infinitely preferable to ours?’

  His eyes skim over the pareu I’m wearing as if noticing it for the first time. And, if I’m not mistaken, they slide over Taatamata too. ‘Actually, Brooke, that’s jogged some memory in me. Are you a Kingsman? A poet, perhaps? I think I’ve heard of you. Did you in fact go native in–where was it? Oh, somewhere rural in Cambridgeshire, a village…you know, barefoot with a bunch of cronies, eschewing meat and tobacco and that sort of thing, what?’

  ‘What can I say? Guilty as charged, Officer.’

  He pushes his umete away and shakes his head as Lovina leaps up to offer more breadfruit, more mahi-mahi. He mops at his moustache with a piece of tapa cloth he finds on the table. (No doubt the pattern has some spiritual significance–I will ask Taatamata later. The bloody fool thinks it’s a napkin.)

  ‘Your defence of the Germans in Samoa is a surprise, though, Brooke,’ he pronounces. ‘I think I’d heard you had some strange Fabian ideas, knew the Webbs, that sort of thing. I didn’t have you down as pro-German.’

  The parrot squawks triumphantly. Man and bird are detestable. His last remark reminds me horribly of Augustus John: ‘I didn’t take you for a socialist, Brooke.’ Why is it that everyone in the damn mother country thinks they know who I am; what to take me for?

  ‘Ah, well,’ I announce, rising rather unsteadily and eyeing with longing the corridor that leads to my little bed, the room I called a day ago a ‘hovel’, which now appeals to me as the most entrancing luxury because it is no longer a shared bedroom with Banbridge. ‘That reminds me. I’ve been reading the “Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands”, you know. You’ll remember what King Finow said on seeing how he was described by the white man.’

  Banbridge shakes his head and continues distractedly stuffing his pipe.

  ‘“This is neither like myself nor anybody else! Where are my eyes, where is my head? Where are my legs? How can you possibly know it to be I?”’

  Banbridge’s face is a marvel. Even the native child Georges couldn’t contort his features into that particular monster.

  The dear fellow is no doubt at this very moment remembering he had also heard that this barefoot Georgian monstrosity, this Rupert Brooke, had, incidentally, gone quite mad.

  Hardly surprising, then, that I am not charmed by Banbridge’s plans to leave the Hotel Tiare and travel to Mataiea tomorrow. (The month, I discover, has changed, and is now February, although no one told me.) Mataiea is about thirty miles from Papeete, in the heart of the island, a native village with one fairly large European house in it, possessed by the chief. It’s the coolest place, everyone says, and we can make an easier journey to the coast where the pearl divers are to be found.

  At first I try protesting that I’m not yet well enough to travel. As I had spent the morning swimming in a lagoon with two large Tahitian boys, spearing fish, this was patently a lie.

  He leans in then and I smell his dreadful stale male breath and do my best not to reel back in horror: I think I am in the sixth at Rugby again. ‘Take her with you, what?’ Banbridge says. ‘The native girl. No one here will bat an eyelid.’ He straightens up and, with a disgusting wink, says to Lovina: ‘Brooke here needs a nurse for our travels. And we’ll need a guide, too. Your man Miri, perhaps? Or what about the pansy? What’s his name? Teura? I’m sure under that dress he’s quite the muscle-man, what? Two weeks is all. Surely you can spare them.’

  Lovina laughs her big laugh. To my astonishment, I realise that the ‘muscle-man’ Banbridge is referring to is the woman with the long braid, the one I thought was called Mahu (now sitting out on the terrace, making a basket from pandanus leaves). Of course, the minute the truth is out, the ‘woman’ reshapes in front of my eyes and I realise at once that her tallness, her broadness of shoulder, the deepness of her voice and the blunt flatness of her chest should have made it obvious. Not to mention–now I’m staring at them, plaiting the leaves–the size of her hands! I remember, with a curious, humiliated sensation, my pleasure at the tiare flowers she left on my pillow…Am I so transparent, then, even here? And Banbridge, Lovina, no doubt everyone else, appear so untroubled, so wholly unsurprised by her, his, hermaphrodite status. I have a stab then of an old feeling, one that Lytton and James used to provoke in me: of being naïve, inexperienced and unworldly–clumsy, foolish and wrong. I stomp towards my room, while Banbridge continues to make his loud arrangements. He wants to feel safe, what, in case he carries back the pearls or better still the Gauguins, and three fine young Tahitians with a pansy built like a tanker should, he says, be just the ticket.

  I go in search of Taatamata. After her devoted ministrations to me, she is the only one capable of reassuring me. I’ve no wish to think of England, or remember my quarrel with James and Lytton, or my humiliation at the hands of that sleek operator Henry Lamb, which has somehow, just then, unbidden, managed to skip over the ramparts and enter my mind.

  She is busy when I find her, cleaning fish for supper. I don’t know at first what to say, how to ask her, but when this Mahu appears and then disappears, Georges trailing behind him, I find that a nod towards him, and a few gestures make the question clear enough.

  Taatamata laughs and says, ‘Eh, mahu,’ which I now understand to be the na
me for the males who are raised as girls in, apparently, almost every family in Tahiti.

  ‘If Tahitian family has eight children, one be mahu,’ Taatamata says.

  And–with a few crude gestures I get to the nub of the matter–not all of them are inverts either, although the fact that many are seems to surprise nobody. Well. It seems the missionaries weren’t able to halt in Tahiti all things they found abominable, after all.

  Later that afternoon we step down to the beach to help the day’s gathering of clams, and when she is intent, bent over, her hair curtaining her face, I suddenly ask her what I really want to know. ‘Taata, do you think a person has only one true self? You know, underneath it all…’

  ‘One true self?’

  ‘Yes, yes, you know–un vrai…’ Stupidly, I can’t remember the French for ‘self’. I shrug, point to my chest, hoping to suggest this might be where my ‘true self’ resides.

  ‘Non,’ comes the reply, swiftly, once she understands the question. She straightens, rubbing the small of her back. ‘Many selves,’ Taatamata says. She sweeps an arm round the beach. ‘Plenty selves like–pahua.’

  Pahua. Clams. I stare at the thousands and thousands of shells lining the beach inscrutably, as far as the eye can see. She said it with complete conviction.

  Afterwards, lying in his bed, Rupert whispers, ‘But, Nell, I thought you were married now, a mill worker’s wife, or whatever?’ and I realise he believes I married Jack.

  That gives me some peace, for I understand at last some of his coldness. ‘Tommy has asked me,’ I confess. I haven’t told a soul this.

  ‘Tommy? The marvellous British Working Man?’

  A long pause, and he offers me a cigarette, and then, to my surprise, takes one from the case on his bedside table himself. I’ve never seen him smoke before. I thought he didn’t smoke. I shake my head, trying to make my thoughts settle.

  ‘Do you think there are some people who are not made for marriage, Nell?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answer, without hesitating.

  He props himself up on one elbow, making the cigarette glow in the darkness as he draws on it. I’m dizzy with the smell of him, the salty nearness, the liquid feeling of my own hot nakedness flowing in the sheets beside him and that great huge kick sizzling along my stomach like a seam of fire whenever a memory of what we just did surfaces. I can barely think straight to answer him.

  ‘Not a feminist, I hope, child? Never be a feminist or–God forbid–a marcher, or a Sapphist. Be a woman.’

  And there it is again, my anger with him, for his annoying habit of spoiling everything, of always thinking he knows best. Maybe that’s why I don’t answer honestly when he whispers plaintively, ‘Will you say yes to the spotty Tommy?’

  I laugh, and simply murmur, ‘That depends.’

  On what, I never said. Perhaps I hoped he would understand. But of course, nothing between us could ever be simple, or spoken aloud, and he did not understand at all. I might as well have been from a South Seas island myself for all the likelihood of Rupert understanding me.

  Rupert dashed the cigarette in the saucer by his bed, turned over and was soon asleep. I crept out of his room and retraced my steps. I knew with absolute certainty that what we had just done was an end to it, not a beginning, and I lay awake all night, in my own little bed back at the Orchard, thinking about it, reliving every last caress.

  Rupert left the next day and travelled by train to Portsmouth, to sail, and that was the last time I saw him that year. We never spoke of it again.

  Poetry comes creeping back. My traveller’s letters to the Westminster Gazette are one thing: they pay the bills. But poetry! Such joy to wake to the sight through my open door of a strange bird pecking in the yard, a bird the size of an English thrush but with a black crest atop its head and a vermilion splash under its rump.

  I thought that poetry was done with me. I thought I had decided to be a playwright, albeit a wretched one. Then last night, at the lagoon with Taatamata, I wrote–surely–my best poem ever. Eddie has been begging me to send more verse and I have been reluctant to oblige. I’m far too old for Romance and my soul is seared! It’s horribly true, as Edmund Gosse wrote, that one only finds in the South Seas what one brings here. And what did I bring? A longing to return to childhood, not the real childhood, rather to the childhood that never was, but exists only as a sentimental constructed memory; a place where time is not, and supper takes place at breakfast time, and breakfast in the afternoon, and life consists of expeditions by moonlight and diving naked into waterfalls and racing over white sands beneath feathery brooding palm trees.

  A childhood before the Ranee banned the nurse, before being cast out of the Garden. This side of Paradise.

  With Taatamata. For when she lifted a hand to stroke my face, and said again, ‘Pupure,’ in that way, and looked at me with those black eyes, as big as olives, and took off her hat and laid it on the sand, stepping into the small, wobbling boat, it was an invitation, like no other, and not simply because I wanted it to be.

  Taatamata told me many things that night. She told me–it was no small shock–that the child Georges was her son; his father had been a French soldier who sailed two days later and whom she never saw again. She told me she’d seen twenty-eight summers, she thought, making her two years older than me. ‘Mama Lovina’, it transpires, is her aunt, and Taatamata is now an orphan, having been the daughter of a chief, an important man, distant cousin of the great Queen Pomare herself. (As she says this I think of the first night I saw her, and how I considered her features ‘noble’, attributing them to a French heritage and never once considering the aristocracy of her own native line.) As she speaks–in her queer French with many gestures and acting out–I remember her friendly hands on me, and the way she patted my stomach during my sickness and my wondering if it wasn’t a feverish dream.

  The foam on the waves of black water is pearlescent, lapping beneath us, as we lie in a wooden canoe, as far from England as it’s possible to be, under stars one cannot even recognise and doubts very much are real. I lift myself gently on top of her, and bury my face in the salty-sea scent of her neck, loosen the shining black oil of her hair around me, and I hazard, with one hand, the buttons at the neck of her dress. She nods for me to remove it, smiling at me in the darkness in a flash of white, and as there can be no mistaking her meaning, it would be–ha!–ungentlemanly of me to refuse. Nell. I think of Nell again, and her courage, in coming to me in that way, and how I wasn’t really well, not well enough to appreciate her.

  Taatamata rolls up her dress and, placing it like a pillow under her head, lays herself down with unmistakable felicity, and when I murmur her name she smiles and shakes her head and says something I take to mean ‘Sweetheart’ and so I grow bold at last, after what feels like a courtship of twenty-six years, my entire life leading to this.

  Taatamata, with great patience and skill, shows me the error of my ways in the past, laughing and kissing my hair and taking my hand and guiding it here and there, as if it were a darting fish, catching hold of my fingers and prodding them at hot wet crevices, and holding my head, calling me Pupure, and pressing my mouth down at her breast, her stomach and her neck, guiding me the way a skilled boatman slides his boat through water; and when clumsily, trying to shift position in the canoe, I smash one elbow on the inside of the wood and cry out, she takes it only as a sign of coming off and tightens the grip in her thighs with such mastery, lifting her legs high up over my shoulders. Then the boat rocks so hard it threatens to spill us into the black sea. No man could doubt her meaning, or the loving offer she just bestowed: to deliver oneself to her, whole and unpeeled, every last drop.

  Tiare Tahiti

  Mamua, when our laughter ends,

  And hearts and bodies, brown as white,

  Are dust about the doors of friends,

  Or scent a-blowing down the night,

  Then, oh! then, the wise agree,

  Comes our immortality…

&
nbsp; Taü here, Mamua,

  Crown the hair, and come away!

  Hear the calling of the moon,

  And the whispering scents that stray

  About the idle warm lagoon…

  Well this side of Paradise!…

  There’s little comfort in the wise.

  Papeete, February 1914

  Does Taatamata believe in an afterlife? In Paradise here on earth or…somewhere else? I ask her, rightly or wrongly understanding this word of hers, Taü, to mean the same thing; to mean Heaven.

  We are lying in the canoe and she is–such awful lack of dignity!–smoking a pipe, the way so many of the native women here do, stuffing it with tobacco from the pocket of her dress. It makes me smile, the combination of pipe and white flowers in her hair–dreadfully the most fashionable way to adorn oneself in Tahiti. (Taatamata is puzzled when she discovers that poor ugly European women don’t dress their hair in this way–how can man desire such woman? she asks, astonished.)

  Lights glimmer from the huts on the beach and the warm sea breeze flecks water on to my salted skin, dry as the skin of a fish. I have been so great a lover…oh, tra la la…Who can I tell? Shall I write to Dudley, or James–Eddie perhaps? Jacques? Gwen? Is Gwen the same girl I once told with such certainty that two people can never kiss and see each other at the same time? Tell them all I have it at last: the secret of the Universe…

  A stray thought enters my head: Gauguin’s comment that in Europe you fall in love with a woman, and eventually end up having sexual relations with her. In Tahiti you first have physical relations, after which you proceed to fall just as deeply in love. Yes. And what is the secret of this, the reason for it? It’s because Taatamata has a child already, a boy so clearly loved and accepted by her aunt, Lovina, and evidently Taatamata has no anxiety about accidentally falling pregnant. If bastardy were tolerated–if illegitimacy was not the greatest stain a child could endure, unmarried pregnancy the foulest blow to a girl’s repper–how might things alter in England?