The Great Lover (10 page)

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, breakfast 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?

He loves his honey. Spoonful after spoonful into the milk. He balances the pot on the saucer of the cup, dripping sticky strands
all over his mattress. And so today, this morning, I’m not completely surprised when he makes his request. Mightn’t I take him out with me, show him the hives?

‘Well, see, I don’t know if I ought.’

‘You are going out to inspect them?’

‘Yes. Mr Neeve says there will be showers tomorrow so today is best—’

‘Splendid!’ He springs from the bed with alarming speed.

‘If you come with me you must wear the veil and gloves, sir, as the bees are not–they don’t rightly know you. They are more likely to sting a stranger.’

He finds the thought funny. He wonders why he should wear a veil when the maid ‘goes naked’. I ignore this and tell him that the bees know me well and wouldn’t dream of stinging me. ‘Bluster!’ he says, laughing, reaching for his razor and the bowl of hot water I’ve brought…‘And do drop this “sir” business, Nell, there’s a girl. Call me Rupert, or Chawner, if you prefer–now, there’s a name to conjure with. What was Mother thinking, eh?’

And so, later in the morning, he joins me and that’s when it happens. We’re in the ramshackle gardens of the Old Vicarage next door, him dressed in the white veil that belonged to Father, over a hat he has borrowed from Mr Neeve:
Rupert
, it seems, doesn’t possess one. He is also wearing shoes for once, but no socks. I tie the gloves for him at the wrists so the bees can’t creep inside them. I have to lift his hands in mine to do this, and he doesn’t raise his eyes so that I see his eyelashes resting on his cheeks and notice that they are as long as the legs on a raft spider.

His student friend comes to laugh at him: the dark, beaky Frenchman staying at the Old Vicarage, Jacques. This friend stands close to Rupert and murmurs something odd, something like ‘Is this your lady under ze lamp-post?’ with his strange accent and plum-coloured voice, but as I can’t understand, and since
they speak as if I’m invisible, I continue with the pretence that I’m deaf too.

The garden stretches down to the mill stream, where the big chestnuts trail their branches in the water, and Mr Neeve has a full number of modern hives, the square-box sort with frames, placed to face the morning sun and encourage the bees to begin their work early. It makes me sorry to see these modern hives–they have so little beauty compared to the straw skeps that Father always used and that the eel man Sam makes for us, with their pointed tops and fat bellies, the shape of giant acorn cups.

And not just the hives but the garden, too, is the sort that Father would have despaired of: wild, with such an unkempt, dense thicket of trees and bushes at the bottom. There is a strange Gothic ruin there that Rupert laughs at and says is not Gothic at all, but a sham. I love the sunny part of the garden where the bees live, the part of the Old Vicarage that borders on to the apple and quince trees of the orchard, but at the bottom end near the river the air is damp and suffocating, and the huge trees smothered in ivy make me think of Sleeping Beauty, and shudder.