The Great Lover

by Jill Dawson

  (I cannot stop myself considering in the darkness how it is that Taatamata knows a thousand little things I could not imagine an English girl knowing, and how her preference for the position ‘originale’ during love-making (that is, not the missionary) means her own pleasure is guaranteed, and like Gauguin–for I know he wrote this–I feel there is something so much more exciting about gaining pleasure from someone who knows how to receive it.)

  I eat my fish, with its black, smoky taste, and say nothing to Taatamata, who sits beside me with Georges sleeping against her chest. After half an hour, the dancers vanish as suddenly as they appeared.

  When Taatamata reaches for my hand, and drops something in it, I know at once that it is the pearl. Europe slides from me, terrifyingly.

  I have already stayed almost two months longer than I intended. I know how the peacock-blue lustre of that pearl will burn a hole in my pocket, but tomorrow I intend to read my letters from England and see if they can’t exert a pull. Perhaps Cathleen–ah, Cathleen Nesbitt: eminently suitable, eminently charming, beautiful and accomplished, can Cathleen call me back? Should I marry Cathleen, if I marry at all?

  It’s true we hardly know one another. Four months is not a long courtship. But dear Cathleen has Suffered in Love, as I have. She told me about some fellow in the theatre, a married man, who took to drink, and I saw at once her capacity to suffer, and shuddered. But, after all, he did not seduce her. He took her to his rooms; she refused him. Phyllis Gardner all over again. It’s hopeless. Cathleen would not contemplate a liaison without marriage. She would not accept…that part of me. Separate rooms, pure white sheets, and sitting on her bed, talking to her in the fresh morning, as if she were an Irish elf (which she is, of course): a green child of twelve years old. That is what I picture when I think of Cathleen. Ironically, for all that: despite her purity, her job as an actress means Mother would disapprove.

  Marriage. It’s that word–the thought of it–that chills me, as ever. I feel older than I was. Mightn’t I, perhaps, have a life like Eddie’s–the life of a confirmed bachelor, with so many gay young friends? If only I could hire a boat and spend five years cruising around these parts. But five years would be too long. One could never then go back to bowler hats and the Strand and the Daily Mail and tea-parties…

  I suppose I have some shadowy remembrance of a place called England. I suppose I shall see it again soon.

  March 1914

  My Dear Nell

  Dear sweet Nell

  Dearest Child,

  (How to begin this letter, is, as you see, causing me no small difficulty. I wonder if you have ever expected to receive a letter from me?)

  I write to you from a distant place–a place steamy and green and teeming with the wildest flowers in the most vivid colours–a glowing scarlet hibiscus your bees would love!–a place called Mataiea, deep in the heart of the island of Tahiti. I am planning to come home and might–imagine it–perhaps be in Grantchester by June. (I must spend time with Mother at Rugby first to compensate her for my immense wanderings.) I wonder if you could be so kind as to enquire as to whether my room might be free at the Old Vicarage by asking Mrs Neeve? I would write to her myself, but I wanted to include a poem I wrote while here in Mataiea and thought you might appreciate it more than that lady.

  The poem is called ‘The Great Lover’. It’s rather a lark. It starts off full of idle boasting (‘I have been so great a lover: filled my days/So proudly with the splendour of Love’s praise’…that sort of thing) but ends in a kind of paean to ordinary things–white plates and cups, ringed with blue lines; the fragrance of live hair, shining and free (I was thinking of a Tahitian girl I know); the comfortable smell of friendly fingers, the rough male kiss of blankets; the cool kindliness of sheets–one can see the idea, I’m sure. All the lovable things of this world–including the people we love–that we shall have to leave, because we can’t take them with us, and there isn’t a next. A dull idea, I’m sure, and a very ordinary one, and perhaps it is not a good poem at all and I shall be mocked for it…but still…

  On second thoughts, the poem is hardly splendid. In fact, I’ve decided, ha!, belatedly, it’s true–I’m not much of a poet. I wrote a play a while back that I’d like to see put on in Cambridge. About a man who goes a-wandering, and returns, and decides to play a trick on the family and forestall the announcement of his happy return by pretending at first to be someone else, a rich stranger. Well, the family believe him all too well, and the mother and daughter end up beating him to death with an axe for his money. The moral? Well, a sensible girl like you, Nell, might say it is never a good idea to try and dupe a mother. Or perhaps never to go a-wandering. I’d say the opposite. How evil is the mother–whose loyalty is first to her daughter–who cannot recognise and see her own true son. I know you would never be such a mother. You would love your son no matter who he was. It’s based on a true story…

  I have been wandering a great deal, and that has its charms. The sort of thing I searched for in Grantchester, the things Virginia Stephen mocked me for, paganism and honey and fruit and goodness and such: I have found it here and now I have it inside me, and might–with some luck–even be able to bring it home and write about it. What I’d like most would be to write a novel, about the girl I mentioned, the Tahitian one. Her queer mind quite intrigues me. (Sometimes, my dear, she reminds me a little of you.)

  I once wrote to Ben Keeling that there were only three things in life: to read poetry, to write poetry but, best of all, to live poetry. I feel I have done that now, at least a little.

  Do feel free to burn it. The poem, I mean, should you so wish. Such a simple idea, really. That once one loves, is perhaps taught to love, loves well, I mean, one loves everyone and everything. The domestic. The stuff of life…I can’t imagine why it took me twenty-six (nearly twenty-seven) years to come to that discovery. (You, of course, learned this lesson early. I thank you for your setting me on the road to recovery, Nell.)

  Quite properly, I seem to have given up writing with any enthusiasm. While in the South Seas I found I had stopped thinking, and that was a Good Thing! My senses instead became more authoritative, more demanding, and I trusted them a little more. I do a little work, as I knock about. (I await a cheque from Mother for my fare home.) But it seems, somehow, more amusing just to live.

  I also include a pearl, for safe-keeping. I’d like you to have it. It’s not valuable, apparently, but it does have a rather jolly lustre and an unusual colour, and…well, I hope you like it. I wish you all the luck in the world and hope to see you in Grantchester some day soon.

  Your Rupert

  I have a letter from Rupert. My first and only letter. And to come on such a day–1 April 1914–April Fool’s Day! The day my son, my own little boy, is born. I can’t stop weeping. Betty says, ‘This must be what they mean when they talk of waters breaking!’ and Tommy watches anxiously as I kiss the baby’s head, over and over, and cry some more. But he doesn’t ask to see the letter, nor what its contents are. Tommy is such a good man, and such a tactful one. He says nothing. He sees that I open the piece of tissue in the envelope and roll out the shiny pea-sized pearl and hold it to the light and admire its strange colour, one minute black, the next a gorgeous peacock-blue, then clutch at it. All the while the baby is sleeping hot as a fresh bun in my arms with his tiny, tiny nose with the turned-up tip just like the tip of a pencil, and then I sob some more, and Betty says I’m exhausted, and all women get the blues like this during their confinement, and Tommy’s to leave now, and let me sleep.

  She sits on the bed beside me and we unfold the poem included in the letter and read it together. ‘The Great Lover’. Then I fold it up again.

  ‘Is it for you?’ she says. ‘Did he write it for you, do you think?’ Then she asks, in a different tone, ‘Will you tell Tommy?’ I shake my head so hard that the baby opens one milk-encrusted, dark blue eye, and stares quizzically at me.

  ‘And what of—Will you tell Rupert, if he e
ver comes back to Grantchester?’

  Again I shake my head. ‘Don’t be daft…Tommy will be a good father, he won’t ask questions. He’s never suspected a thing between me and Rupert. Never even saw us together. Why, he’s not said a word about the name I’m wanting…’

  ‘Oh, Nell! Don’t tell me—’

  ‘Yes. And before you say anything, let me remind you: I’m your Big Sister and I know best. In any case, the dates are so close. Who could ever say? I can’t be sure myself.’

  Betty gives me a big grin, and stares hard at the baby. She murmurs, ‘Funny little chap,’ and strokes the baby’s toes. Rupert Christopher Sanderson’s toes. They open briefly, like an anemone being prodded, then curl up again.

  Taatamata comes to the boat to see me off. She has been crying, but not in the way the Ranee cries, with weeping and demonstrable sniffing and handkerchief-dabbing, and glancing over it at me to see if I’m yet quite crumbled. In Taatamata’s case, her face is impassive, except for the odd rolling tear, which she brusquely wipes away.

  She brought me gifts this morning. As we’re now back at Lovina’s hotel in Papeete, she is dressed in her city clothes, the high-necked dress and hat, and she hovers at the door of my room, not knowing if the rules have changed again: is she allowed to enter? She is employed here at the hotel as a maid and cook and goodness knows what else, and even though Lovina is also her aunt, that does indeed change things, making her role a little like Nell’s at the Orchard, friendship strangely com promised.

  Wanting to dispel this idea, I nod at once to her, but still she does not rush in. She hesitates further, simply showing me, one by one, the things she has brought: a string of amber beads, some shells, some congealed strangeness in a little bottle, a knife with a nacre handle. She seems unsurprised by my leaving, as if she never for one moment believed I might stay, even when I spoke of it.

  She opens the bottle to show me the oil scented with tiare flowers and indicates the foot she nursed, reminding me to take care of it. At that moment, the whisker of the tail of a yellow lizard flickers across my bedroom floor, and soon afterwards Georges appears in the doorway in pursuit of it. As the animal flashes out of sight and into some crack between the window and the wall, the boy quickly loses interest and rushes instead to his mother to be petted. Only after doing this, after immersing herself in a flurry of tender caresses, does Taatamata suddenly lift her face to mine, over his dark head, and sear me with a look of hot, fierce pain.

  I rise from the bed and close the door behind them both before dressing.

  ‘Don’t forget me,’ she says. Georges, meanwhile, rummaging in the pocket of her dress, finds her pipe there and, pulling it out, pretends to smoke it. This is such a funny sight that I cannot stop a guffaw, but one glance at Taatamata’s face and my hand shoots to my mouth to stifle it.

  Now, feeling horribly lacking in gifts, I look around for something to offer. A yellow silk tie she once admired, the one Ka bought me and the Ranee so hated, finding it appallingly gaudy. I press it into her hand, and close her fingers round it, and she, using it as a ribbon, ties it round her straw hat, cocks her head as if to ask for my opinion. Yes, you are very beautiful indeed. I smile admiringly at the effect, and take one last photograph of her, standing outside on the balcony, staring wistfully out towards the sea.

  Back in my room again, I rummage in my case for the little coconut-scraping tool, the anna I bought from one of the traders, and present it to Georges. He pockets it at once, and holds out his hand for another. His mother scolds him and we both laugh.

  A light tap at the door, and Lovina tells me that Miri will carry my baggage down to the harbour.

  That is my signal to take Taatamata in my arms at last–hang it all, in front of her wide-eyed son, too–and kiss her. Poetry swims at me, like shoals of fish. But the best I’ve known stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown about the winds of the world, and fades from brains of living men, and dies…Nothing remains…

  That is one lucky little fellow, I think, as Taatamata bends to include Georges in our embrace, squatting on her haunches better to enable her to enclose us both in the circle of her arms. I whisper into her ear, opening my mouth against the black screen of her hair, drinking in the smell of her, the taste. She is hot, alive, beating. The child stands immobile and absorbent, as if to be drenched in love like this is customary for him, no more than his lordly due. ‘Sweetheart, mon petit Rupert,’ a weeping Taatamata says, patting my back convulsively, as we remain in our clumsy knot, the three of us, crouched by the door. I say stiffly that I will not forget her, forget this moment, no, never…and on that last word, my voice betrays me at last, fracturing slightly, sounding awfully–one has to admit–like the helpless cry of a child.

  On the boat that night I looked for the Southern Cross for the last time, seeking it in vain. It must already have slipped below the horizon. It is still wheeling and shining for Taatamata, for that bastard Banbridge, for Lovina and little Georges and Miri and Teura, but for me it is set. As the vessel pulled away I watched the green shores and rocky peaks fading with hardly a pang. But when the Southern Cross left me that night I knew I’d left those lovely places, lovely people, for ever. So I wept a little, and very sensibly went to bed.

  In bed I read my letters, and tried to inject a little Englishness back into my soul. Cathleen–she is the most effective remedy, being capable, almost, of out-perfuming the others. Sweetly fragrant Cathleen, who nevertheless knows about sorrow and the alcoholism of loved ones, and other things besides.

  ‘Parting, it’s always a little like death,’ an old Frenchman, watching me, leaning over the rail, commented. He said he was going home to France for a year for his health, but he resented it bitterly. Home! His home was in Tahiti, he told me repeatedly. He’s been married to a native woman these last fifteen years. No children of his own, but plenty adopted. She was so much finer than a white woman, he sighed, so lovely, so faithful, so competent, so charming and happy, and so extraordinarily intelligent.

  I am not cheered.

  So I lie in my bunk, clutching the letters and reading them by the light of a kerosene lamp. The black sand of Lafayette beach still clings to my body and grits the sheets, like poppy seeds. The letters cover three or four months. The accounts of England are depressing and confirm my worst fears. Blessed are the peacemakers. For they shall have the fun of knocking a lot of bloody men on the head.

  When I have read them through, several times over, and decided that I must put a bullet in Sir Edward Carson and another in Mr Murphy for smashing the Dublin strike, I settle down to write a letter to…the new baby of Frances and Francis Cornford, whose name, I’m told, is Helena.

  What kind of England do I travel back to? An England of houses and trams and collars? Will I be forced to endure the total prohibition of alcohol in England, which is the female idea of politics, and the establishment of Christian Science as the state religion, which is the female idea of religion? I begged baby Helena not to grow up a feminist, but to become a woman. I hate feminists.

  Everything’s just the wrong way round. I want Germany to smash Russia to fragments, and then France to break Germany. Instead of which I’m afraid Germany will badly smash France, and then be wiped out by Russia. France and England are the only countries that ought to have any power. Prussia is a devil. And Russia means the end of Europe and any decency.

  I suppose the future is a Slav empire, world-wide, despotic and insane. If war comes, should one enlist? Or turn war correspondent? Or what?

  My mood, my tone, has altered entirely. One might detect a complete solidifying, congealing, rather like my gift of coconut oil from Taatamata (mysteriously transformed, without the tropic’s liquid heat, into something the colour of milk, lumpy and hard as stone). Whatever cool Cambridge irony the South Seas erased is slipping back with every knot of this ship. What will happen tomorrow? And whatever it is, won’t it be dreadful?

  Feeling my old voice returning, I suddenly
leap from my bunk and, grabbing my coat, make my way to the deck. The sky is inky and pricked with stars; salt spray leaps into my mouth. There is the moon, full and fat, shining on Taatamata, on the island, on the hibiscus flowers that bloom orange in the full of day, purple at night, and disappear by morning. I picture Taatamata somewhere, and know that I should have stayed, but could never have stayed, and wonder if she understands. And Nell. Dear Nell too! I finally wrote Nell a letter. Both women are there, somewhere, in words. Words are things, after all. And the night is sweet as thickest honey. Tenderly, day that I have loved, I close your eyes.

  I saw Rupert only once after his return to Grantchester. I wasn’t working at the Orchard at that time because of the baby, and I’d moved in with Tommy at his parents’, and I was full, full up with my darling baby, and the hard work of it all, and the tiredness. I had no regrets. I hadn’t reckoned, in those youthful thoughts I’d had that were so bitter towards marriage, on all the simple ways in which it would be good to be loved. To be held, to be called tender names, to see a man’s face light up when I came into the room. That was my marriage to Tommy. And best of all was to share a bed, to lie with a small warm baby between us, breathing hotly. Then, finally, the summer came and I worried about my bees. I’d left Betty in charge of them and I knew she was doing her best, and so was Mr Neeve, of course, but I was their mistress now, and surely they must be missing me.

  So I went to the Old Vicarage, wondering if he might be back from his travels (although Betty had reported that he hadn’t been sighted in Grantchester) and there he was. He was in the garden, standing near the sundial with a couple of people I didn’t recognise, although one might have been Mr Eddie Marsh–I couldn’t tell, he had his back to me. Rupert was laughing. I saw that his skin was sun-browned, and he was a little thinner. He looked healthy. I was glad of that. Inside, all of me was alive: my body set up a kind of chattering, quivering feeling, but I managed to keep my head, and simply nod to him. I saw at once how hard it would be for him to acknowledge me in front of his friends. The two men were talking excitedly to him–no doubt about Germany, about politics, for that was all anyone talked about that summer–but Rupert did his best: he raised his chin and stared over their heads; he met my eyes, and held them for a second. We smiled at one another, and he nodded back, and that was it. Then he went inside, into the house.