The Great Lover (26 page)

‘Well…’ I venture, and stop. One minute I’m standing next to Rupert in a wood, by a river, late at night, the next I’m somewhere else–I don’t know where–watching. A chill passes over me and I observe only two figures talking: one tall, troubled; the other wearing a coat over her shoulders and looking up to the man with a shining face.

It lasts only a moment, then I’m back at the river, back in my body, with my heart hammering and the scent of river garlic floating round me, and I’m talking. I’m trying so hard to be helpful, to respond to the request made of me. Help me, he says.

‘Why write, then? No one is making you—’

This comment makes him angry.

‘No, it’s true. Ha! My own hopeless vanity and–compulsion, which catches me in its snare. I can neither stop, go back, nor go on.’

‘Well, then,’ I say, ‘it
is
a brave thing, to–expose yourself so. I’m sure all of us have…secrets…parts of ourselves we labour not to show others. I can’t imagine my father, for instance, understanding for one moment why I would risk my position to stand at night with you looking into a black river. That would be a part of myself I would not want to show to him.’

‘Oh, Nell, how sweet you are. Such a small risk, compared with mine.’

I am silent, pondering this.

‘Whereas I,’ he goes on, ‘risk exposure to the whole world! And then there is the further, ghastly, conflict of knowing that, even as I suffer them, these fears are ridiculous, too, and how much I despise myself for them, and how I am unable to confess to anyone but you. Can you imagine Abercrombie or Drinkwater or just about anyone else caring–for God’s sake–what one’s
mother
thinks?’

At this he gives another sulky laugh. ‘And if it were only Mother that might be bearable. But the next minute I imagine the thoughts of certain Rugby masters on reading it, or my godfather, or my aunts or–Mrs Stevenson, or God knows who, really. But each time, at each looming person, another doubt presents itself, another opportunity to be mocked, judged and disliked. Each for a different line, or poem, or reason. I’ve had one devil of a fight with Sidgwick and I don’t suppose it’s over yet. Is his objection to including “Lust” only that it’s bad poetry or that it’s shocking as morals? Technically it’s not much, I admit–any fool can write a technically good sonnet! No, that’s not his real objection, although he disguises it as such. If he takes it out of the collection, the whole thing is reduced to unimportant prettiness. No one offended, Mother least of all, but nothing achieved either!’

I pull my coat round me, feeling the chill at last. An owl just above us gives a soft, soothing call. ‘Shall we go back?’ I say, at last.

He catches me up and kisses me, another of those dark, impulsive kisses that make my body tighten, as if he were pulling taut a string from my drawers to my neck. ‘So you do like me, Nell,’ he suddenly murmurs, ‘just a little?’

We break apart for my answer, tears springing to my eyes. ‘Of course I do! Of course!’

And he kisses me again. My body is still, like the black water gathering in the pool below us, but I’m almost choked by the power of it.

He breaks away to try to look at me in the darkness, then wraps his arms round me in a deep hug so that I breathe in the smell of him, the grass and Coal Tar Soap, the woodsmoke from his room, and shavings from a pencil, and the texture–the flannel shirt, the softness of his hair, the prickle of his mouth where his stubble rubs me like sandpaper. He doesn’t
mean
anything by it, I try to tell myself, with one last feeble gasp of reasoning, but the feeling is of something else entirely. Something hot and close and true.

‘You’ve no idea,’ he mumbles, ‘the things I feel. I am without a skin, permeable, terrified…I think I must be a–filthy person. I have such foul thoughts and I can’t sleep, and yet I’m
so unutterably
tired, and I lie down and my thoughts race and I feel a cloud in my head that won’t go away…’

‘Ssh, now, of course you’re not
filthy
! You’re just tired, and you’ve been working too hard and, well, anyone would be a little nervous about their first book of poetry…’

The direction of his mumblings now is more alarming than it was a moment ago. I have to admit to myself that, despite all my good sense, I am surely at sea. My response to his kiss–Lord, my conviction that he meant it–seems wrong suddenly. The strong feeling I have, flooding from him in the darkness, is
like the feeling I have sometimes standing near the bees. A swell in the air, something massing: a warning. He does not seem to be talking to me at all, but to the night. There is something very wrong indeed with Rupert.

Father would say it’s no more than he deserves. If he knew, if he knew what Rupert had done with that young man in his room at the Orchard, he would see it as God’s punishment, his sickness coming to taunt him. Maybe that’s what Rupert believes too. Is that the ‘filthy’ thing he’s thinking of?

‘I’m a mean thing, full of smallness and jealousies and dirt,’ Rupert murmurs.

I put my arm firmly in his, and steer him back towards the meadow and the lane.

When we reach his rooms at the Old Vicarage, I discover that his part of the stairs has a little wicket gate (for his bedroom was once a nursery). He steps over this without pausing but I hesitate. ‘Yes, Nell, the ghosts of Victorian children pluck at our sleeves here, don’t they?’ he whispers, but I shake my head. It’s clear he’s asking me to go with him, to help him, so I step over the barrier too, and carry on past the glass door with the beautiful flowery designs on the yellow panes and into his bedroom. I close the door as softly as I can manage, and sit heavily on the bed beside him. It’s a bigger room than his old one at the Orchard, but it smells the same: of warm paper from books, the smoke from a recent fire, and of him, of course.

‘Stay here with me, Nellie,’ he whispers.

I light the candle beside his bed with an ember from the fire in the grate. His flickering face looms in front of me and, to my horror, I see that his cheeks are wet, that big tears slide down his face. I take a corner of his sheet and dab at them, and he smiles at me, and in an instant his mood has changed and he nods and mutters quickly, as if I had refused him, ‘No, I’m sorry. You’re right. Of course it’s a big thing to risk your position. An enormous thing! I’m being selfish and silly. I shall get us both
into trouble–lose my lodgings again! Thank you, child. You’re a very sweet girl.’

And so I find myself on the wrong side of his bedroom door, and wondering how in God’s name it always happens: that whatever my heart desires, my mouth fails to utter it.

Virginia was here at the Old Vicarage. She stayed a week in the room that Ka stayed in, and we played at being interested in one another, and we mostly sat in the garden and wrote. She is writing a novel called
Melymbrosia
. I tell her I do not care much for the title. She asks me laughingly if the blank spaces left in my sonnets are to be filled later with ‘oh, God’s’? She is different, alone. Not the Virginia of our childhood. Quieter, for one thing. And the pallor of headache is always upon her.

I did persuade her to swim with me one warm night. She was terribly thrilled with her own daring, and one couldn’t help considering throughout that it was merely an experience with which to regale Vanessa, or perhaps Lytton, not a real experience at all. I saw her glance slyly at me once, and as the moon was full I saw her ghostly limbs. They left me rather limp, and made me miss the plumper charms of dear Nell.

Virginia undressed is a rather vulnerable creature; I much prefer her clothed. The moment her dress was on she recovered her wits and said, laughing, ‘Ah, so your legs are not bandy at all as Lytton claims!’

I chased her back to the Old Vicarage, to sit and dry our hair in front of the fire.

One morning that week we were at work under the shade of the chestnuts, and I was reading a newspaper and exclaiming about the national rail strike. ‘Don’t you feel we live in extraordinarily violent times? Women picketing Parliament and throwing stones
at shop windows almost daily, unrest, strikes, upheaval at every turn…and yet when Dudley and I try to engage the Working Man in debate about his own predicament…’

As I said this Nellie appeared at the other end of the garden in my line of vision and, seeing me with Virginia, turned on her tail smartly and left. I knew that Virginia’s beady eye didn’t miss this, and I wondered what she might have read into it.

‘Oh, I heard about your little tour. Must have been terribly disappointing for you. Yes…your interest in the wretched lives of the lower classes is legendary, dear,’ she said mildly, without looking up from her notebook. ‘No need to waste time on persuading me of its veracity.’

This was laced with sarcasm, of course.

Nell’s retreating figure was dark in the dazzling whiteness of the day; like a drop of ink on a page.

‘Virginia–what’s the brightest thing in Nature?’ I asked, pretending to be considering.

‘Sunlight on a leaf,’ she provided, without looking up.

Cloud-like we lean and stare as bright leaves stare.

I tried not to stare after Nell, but when I closed my eyes her figure appeared on the inside of my eyelid, like a shadow puppet on a canvas screen.

The week after Virginia left, I sought Nell out. I don’t know what I planned. A full declaration, perhaps? An assault on her person? But I hadn’t allowed for the return of my most fearful thoughts and feelings, and by the time I’d gathered my strength, the occasion was lost. No man wants a woman to succumb to him out of pity.

I have the book in front of me. The proofs that is.
Poems, 1911
. There is still time for corrections and I intend to ask–who? Ka? James? Yes, only those two. James has Judgement. Is it true then, as I told Nell, that an author feels no glow, only shame on seeing his name in print? In my case, this morning, tearing
it out of the envelope I felt–yes, I think it was indeed the hot glow of shame.

I had dreamed of Nijinsky again, and the dream clung to my skin, like dew. He was dancing the part of the golden slave in
Scheherazade
and I was–I think I was the shoe-maker. Yes, that was it. I sat in the bowels of the theatre sewing, surrounded by wooden shoe-horns, making little shoes for that perfect man’s feet, and then helping him into them, encasing his wondrous heel with my hands, nestling it with reverence, as if it were an egg. But he said, in this strong Russian accent, ‘No, for I dance the part barefoot, of course!’ And I felt such shame, powerful shame, for such a simple error, for getting everything so awfully, catastrophically wrong.

I woke up with a pounding erection, of course.

Noel has rejected my offer of the Dedication in the book, so that page remains glaringly vacant. My humiliation is absolute.

I quickly thrust the pages into an envelope to Ka. Ka I trust. Ka is not unkind and there is still time for her to make some corrections to such things as italics and capitals although as for the rest—My heart beats a tattoo every time I look at it. I have half a thought to fling it on the fire and shoot myself.

Later, in the same dream, the one I was recalling, I was given the task of helping Nijinsky into his bejewelled codpiece, and as I was rising to this task, studying the beautifully sewn construction with great attentiveness, Dudley rushed into the room and began shouting at me!

I wake to find him downstairs. Dudders, that is. He has been shouting up to my window. Mrs Neeve had sent the maid in to take the chill out of the room by making up a fire, and to see if I was awake but I pretended not to be. Autumn is over. No more stumbling by the water with Nellie; the bitter weather is here and with it my bitter mood, quite confirmed.

Dreary, blasted, filthy development. Dudley’s getting married.
They’re dropping like flies. First Frances, then Gwen, now Dudley. He speaks of his betrothed with such touching embarrassment that I
almost
feel glad for him–he told me a few weeks ago on Hampstead Heath, saying, ‘She only weighs six stone eleven, can you imagine it?’ as if this was some sort of recommendation. Anne-Marie. A German. A German with the physique of a tiny child. During the telling, a cat attached itself to Dudley’s legs, and I remembered the other cat, Pat, on our Poor Law Caravan Trip and that, and youth, seemed a small number of centuries ago. Dudley and Anne-Marie I saw as two little mice about to be eaten. Not a happy thought.

My dream of
Scheherazade
was rather detailed. (Small wonder, since I must have seen it now at Covent Garden at least a dozen times.) But interesting that I had cast the concubine Zobeide dancing in some of the scenes and, well, who would be the obvious person to cast? Elisabeth? A concubine who can raise an ankle to her ear and causes our marvellous Nijinsky to prostrate himself? Noel? But there I’ve given up. She has a fairly serene future in front of her and I have decided I must go away. Somewhere far. Germany again, if I can manage to avoid Elisabeth.

It was Nell. I’ve just remembered. In the dream. Darling Nell had the part of the saucy concubine. With her plummeting black hair and her snake hips, her defiant little chin, her extraordinarily supple white limbs, dancing with surprising skill for one so untutored. Very surprising indeed.

Of course, my shame really swells when I turn to the poem, ‘Lust’. Sidgwick has changed the title to ‘Libido’ and this foolish compromise leaps out at me. I feel the despair of one who has caved in like a collapsed pudding. I’ve behaved like Ophelia and turned ‘thought and affliction, passion, hell itself…to favour and to prettiness’.

And then the ghost of Denham comes to stand behind me, with his remembered smell, and looks over my shoulder, and laughs aloud. Surely I am the subject of your poem? he asks.
He flings my notebook at me, with the scribbled lines of ‘Lust’ jiggling and dancing amid the drawing of the young sleeping figure, and it’s true: it looks exactly like him, his head turned away from me, the line ‘the image of your kin’ being his brother Hugh, of course, nothing at all like Elisabeth. Who on earth have I been trying to dupe?