The Great Lover (23 page)

‘Ooh, hark at you,’ says Kittie, mockingly. ‘Living as a Poet wants to? What on earth can that mean? Our Nellie’s smitten, isn’t she?’ She pulls some woollen underwear out of the tub and watches it stretch its long legs into the water. ‘Are these his?’ she whispers to Lottie, and the pair of them cackle like old hens while I seize the leggings and stuff them back into the water.

Kittie laughs. ‘I mean, who’s paying for him to swan around, that’s what I’d like to know? I thought he had to work as a schoolmaster…’

‘That was only to help his mother. So they could stay in their old house. His mother agreed to move.’ Of course, this information betrays some of my conversations with Rupert and Kittie looks surprised. Surprised, but unrelenting.

‘Three months in Germany doing what? This lot love the Germans, don’t they? Mr Ward is smitten with a German girl, I heard…And, ooh, Lottie, did you hear that our French froggie Mr Raverat proposed to Miss Ka Cox? You know who Miss Cox is, don’t you, the one who stoops so badly she looks as if she’s nursing a child?’

‘Oh, you’re years behind,’ Lottie says importantly. ‘Miss Cox turned Mr Raverat down! She’s sweet on our Rupert…and Mr Raverat has married the artist one, the one at the Slade, Miss Darwin, you remember her? Gwen Raverat, she is now. Although,
for a while, there was a suggestion…Well, listen to this…’

She whispers something then, and Kittie snatches her ear away as if on fire.

‘He didn’t! Mr Raverat openly proposed Miss Cox as a mistress? And what did Miss Darwin have to say?’

‘She seemed to think it a good idea. It was Miss Cox who said no to the arrangement, and only, it seems, because she didn’t love Mr Raverat, not because she thought it wrong to be a mistress! They’re like those gypsies who stayed in Grantchester Meadows, no more morals than honey bees…’

‘Bees have morals! They’re loyal. They’re devoted to their queen and they work so hard! There’s no shame in service…Bees live only to serve!’

I’m plunging the dolly-peg into the tub of linen with a fierce push as I say this, making it splash all around us. My misery at Rupert’s sudden departure to Germany has dulled as the weeks have gone by, but the careless comments of Lottie and Kittie make it surface, like the mucky water swirling back up despite all my pushing and pressing down.

I try to steady my voice. ‘Well. Despite everything I’ve taught you it’s clear you have no love for the bees as I have,’ I mutter…I’m surprised that the girls have fallen silent. So I glance up and it is Kittie’s face that tells me he’s arrived–the way her eyes widen suddenly and her cheeks turn scarlet. I wheel round, and there he is in his cream flannels, a blaze of sunlight, his eyes the colour of the brightest morning glory.

‘Ah, to find the prettiest maids in England washing up a storm in a garden full of blossom and–what’s this? Extolling the virtues of service, too! Am I in Heaven? Or merely dreaming?’

Did he hear me defend him? Lord, how long was he standing there?

‘Mr Brooke, sir—’

‘Nellie Golightly. Lovely to see you again. Good morning to you all! Nell–a word, my dear.’

His hand is on my arm and I know the others are watching. He flashes each a smile but speaks quietly to me, steering me away from the garden and towards the kitchen at the Orchard, then towards the bottom of the stairs leading to his old room. Here he pauses. I am fiercely conscious of his hand, brushing the bare skin of my arm.

‘I left some things here. A small diary–buff-coloured? Some papers, part of my Webster essay, which I must finish this year to be considered for the Fellowship. And…the other matter is…letters, I wonder if any letters have arrived here from a very strange lady? You would notice the stamp, Belgian, and the return address–a Miss van Rysselberghe? I’ve never seen her handwriting but no doubt it has all the distinguishing features of a madwoman’s…’

‘I can look for you, sir—’

‘
Sir?
Nellie! Have you forgotten me so soon?’ In a pretend whisper, he says, ‘Did our swim mean nothing to you?’

When he teases I have no idea how to respond. After a second’s pause I become as serious as he is flippant, and try to explain. ‘Sorry. It is hard for me to call you–Rupert. Surely you don’t want me to–not when there are–when Kittie and Lottie are about? I haven’t found any of your things. But I shall certainly check for you. There’s a new gentleman in there now, so it will have to be later.’

‘I know. Dratted fellow. Sleeping in my friendly sheets! Why does nothing ever stay the same?’

I have no reply to this. My sleeves, I notice for the first time, are becoming unrolled and, being wet from the washing, are dripping on to the red-tiled floor. I stare down at them and then up again at Rupert’s enquiring face. A little thought goes through me that he looks tired, that his brows are lighter than ever, his hair a little longer. As if he could read my thoughts he suddenly runs a hand up through his parting, letting his hair fall between his fingers. Then he nods, as if I had spoken, pursing his mouth
and looking closely at me. A tiny petal of blossom that had been caught in his hair floats to the floor. I think for a moment he wants to say something more but he merely swipes at the white petal with his foot as if it were a cigarette to extinguish, and strides out of the kitchen.

It is only when he has left that I notice how vividly I remember his smell, the smell of him, and how I have missed it. It’s a clean green river smell, the smell of warm flannel and Wrights Coal Tar Soap, and the smell of my childhood, my brothers playing in the river, or stripping bark to make a pipe: something fresh mixing with something older, something male and a little sour, too. The smell reminds me of the other things he left here in his room at the Orchard that I didn’t tell him about: a half-empty tin of Cherry Blossom boot polish, one black leather-bound notebook, some strands of sandy-gold hair wound round a masculine kind of no-handled comb, one old dark green woollen sock, the melting lather on his razor.

I’m weak suddenly, with his remembered smell, and sink down a while on the kitchen chair, my face in my hands. He might just as well be in another country.

When I rejoin Kittie and Lottie they’ve stopped staring after Rupert and are eagerly discussing the Great Procession of Suffragists planned for next month, which Kittie says she intends to sneak away to and join.

‘Why did you come back, then, if you’re still keen to be in the thick of it with your Suffragist friends?’ I ask her, surprising myself with the spite in my voice.

‘To educate you, my dear!’ she says, flipping a bubble of soapsuds at my ear with the wooden dolly-peg. ‘The Lord knows, someone must!’

I know this can’t be true. And when she says it her eyes slip away, as if there is something she doesn’t want me to see. Lottie doesn’t notice–the girl is a simpleton. So he is back, I’m thinking, and sweet torture must begin once more.

The worst has happened. A letter from Elisabeth. Clever Nellie intercepted it. (Of course Mademoiselle van Rysselberghe believes me to be still living at the Orchard, and has guessed at my address–she must have heard me mention it.) On the pretext of checking on her hives, Nellie comes over to deliver it to me in the Old Vicarage garden. I open it in front of her, read it, turn green and then pale and then green again, smoke pouring out of my ears. And then I calm down and stuff it into my pocket.

Elisabeth’s purple prose dances wildly round my brain.
I know not what I will do but ending my life appeals to me as the only true course…
My God! She’s madder than I thought. I give a huge, drawn-out sigh, and turn to Nell with my hands in my pockets. ‘Do all women want to be raped, Nell?’

Of course the sentence shocks her, but it is interesting, watching her stiffen, rally, recover, and then determine to meet my eyes. She has spark, that girl! Oh, yes, she is–magnificent! Whenever she is here I find myself searching for conversational gambits to detain her. This one is a corker.

‘I don’t believe so, sir. Rupert. No.’

‘That is…’ I take a step towards her, and she takes a tiny step back ‘…do they wish to act chaste, and pass the blame for all lustful feelings on to us?’

Here Nellie permits herself a smile, a very small smile, with only the corners of her eyes crinkling to show she means it. Sometimes she has a way of looking at me as if I were a very silly child. A naughty way of looking at me, indeed.

‘Well, it certainly would be–would be hard for a girl to act anything
other
than chaste…’ she says uncertainly.

‘I imagine you can guess that my Flemish acquaintance–
Flemish? Belgian, I think–is rather…What can I say?…taken with me, and has an understanding of our relations that I did not intend.’

Nellie, tactful girl, says nothing, but I am filled with a desire to confide in her, in any case. ‘Ah…I have been foolish, Nell.’

‘You have?’

She stands a little way from the hives. I know she does this because the bees recognise her, and will agitate if they smell her presence. I have a notebook on my knee and my poem, ‘Lust’, in front of me.

‘Let me read you a few lines of this–did I tell you that the Ranee is paying Frank Sidgwick nine pounds to publish my poetry? I’m having the devil of a job putting my collection together but, well, I know that this one is going to make Eddie spitting mad and Sidgwick too, no doubt! Not decent…I actually mention a person’s “remembered smell”. But people do smell, don’t they?’

She looks startled, as if I read her mind, but nods and lifts her eyebrows, and I carry on. I stand up, cough, sweep a low bow with one arm and pretend not to be serious. Then I read from my notebook:

When I finish, I have the oddest sensation. I do not want to raise my eyes from the page. The line ‘my heart beneath your hand’ suddenly suggests something else entirely that had lain limp beneath Elisabeth’s hand. Might Nell guess this? Oh, Lord, why did I try this out on her? What devil makes me long for the maid’s approval so?

But she is smiling. I finally meet her eyes and cease blushing, and the girl is smiling, properly, her deliriously desirable mouth a little open. She nods, saying eagerly, ‘I like it very much. I–I don’t see why it isn’t a fit subject for poetry. After what you said last time, I’ve been thinking. About what is a fit subject and what might not be. And I decided–it came to me–that all feelings should be equal. The good ones and the–the ones we are ashamed of.’

‘Ah, Nell–my only true convert! Would that everyone was as broad-minded as you! So my “Channel Passage” poem worked on you, did it, to loosen up your thoughts on the matter? And you don’t feel certain that my first collection should be entitled
A Flowery Book of Flowery Florets
by a Mr Flowery Brooke?’

She laughs and then nods again, now looking a little doubtful, as if wanting to be serious again. But I suddenly long to tease her, for the sincerity of a moment ago is such that I’m quite drained. (I find such self-revelation can only be done comfortably in the most minuscule of packages.) Why is it that I want to unpeel another layer when I’m with Nell? There’s such loveliness and wisdom in her. And she has
feeling
, real feeling, without ever being sentimental or squashy. Unfortunately, as I am standing beside her, contemplating this admirable aspect of her nature, one who is not immune to squashiness appears in the Old Vicarage dining room and I see she is about to stride out towards us.

Ka Cox is staying here. Sleeping in a little bed across the corridor from me, in the Neeves’ side of the Old Vicarage. Following the direction of my eyes Nell turns silently back to the bees. I feel a stab of sorriness, but there is no chance to say more. I return to my deckchair and sit down in it, picking up my Webster essay, which nicely covers the letter I was writing to Noel Olivier.

My God, sometimes I write well. Better than almost anybody in England!

As I’m writing, and dwelling on all this, Ka wanders over towards the hives. Without looking up I hear the humming bees intensify–a warning sound, like the waves of the sea gathering towards a storm. ‘I say, Ka, don’t go too close!’

‘Oh, I saw the maid there just now,’ Ka replies. ‘She brushed them away with her hands…’

‘That’s the maid, though. She has a way with them. She’s a bee-keeper’s daughter. I wouldn’t risk it.’

Ka looks a trifle piqued at being told not to do something, but seems to take my advice and strides towards me. With her hair wrapped in some sort of emerald green scarf and those rather loose, full skirts she wears, I do see it, just for a moment. What Jacques means when he describes her as looking like one of the peasants in Augustus John’s paintings. But, then, Jacques is in love with her.

‘How’s it coming along?’ she says, in that deep, hot voice she has.

She means the Webster essay, I suppose. Or perhaps my poems. I cast around for a line to try on her to persuade her that this is indeed what I’m writing, meanwhile closing the notebook (Noel’s letter inside it), and standing up to stretch, hoping the sight of my manly torso elongating in miraculous fashion might temporarily distract her.

A timely shriek from the Old Vicarage rescues me. It’s a shriek so piercing and frightened that we both run at once towards the sound–coming from the kitchen. Billows of black smoke greet us and the sight of Mrs Neeve in a panic, face smeared with soot, shrieking, ‘Help, help!’, smoke everywhere in black
clouds–the beam in the kitchen is on fire. It is difficult to get at, being in part the chimneypiece, but I dash for a bucket and Ka runs to the garden tap to fill it, while I flap at the beam with a rug, meaning to smother it, but succeeding only in fanning the flames.