The Great Lover (27 page)

I feel so awfully lonely. And sorry that I’m so filthy. I have written Noel a package of vile letters, accusing her of everything from flirting with Other Poets (Békássy) to driving me to suicide. I believe the last line of the last letter was: ‘I love you more than anyone ever will–damn you!’

Even I know this is not the lexicon of a lover.

But I put on a jolly face, shove the rest of the proofs under the bed and join Dudley–waiting for me by the sundial like a man condemned–for a breakfast of tea and a slice of apple cake, placed invitingly on a frosted tray on the table. We step on to the iced lawn, which cracks beneath our shoes. We pull blankets round ourselves and pretend it’s summer: I even manage a cheery smile when the conversation turns again to Anne-Marie and Dudley’s Plans. (Plans with a capital P is what engaged people have, the rest of us are only half human, of course, and our plans don’t matter.)

This is all very well and I am just about managing it, and half listening, when Dudley suddenly delivers a glancing blow: ‘And Lamb. Yes, I imagine she would become his mistress at a pinch.’

Who would become Henry Lamb’s mistress? Noel? My mind does some sort of piercing dive, somersault and back-flip until I remember–he was talking about Ka. Lovely, firm-rumped, predictable Ka…Ka become a mistress of anyone, least of all that greasy painter Lamb? But Ka said no to Jacques. Ka is–incorruptible. Dudley must be mistaken…A presentiment of alarm shivers through my body.

‘Lamb? The disgusting snake? Isn’t he—I thought he was
fully engaged in pilfering Augustus John’s mistress–what’s her name? Not Dora, the one before that.’

‘No, no, that’s old news, Brookie. Where the devil have you been?’

Where, indeed? I pull the blanket more tightly round myself. I must have been far away, and I am having trouble returning.

I’m thinking of Nellie and my Nijinsky dream again. And how once, when I was a very, very small child, the Ranee told me of a dream
she
had had. ‘About your poor dead sister,’ she said. ‘What do you think that means, darling?’ she’d asked, in such a wistful, intimate, caressing voice, as if she’d forgotten for a moment precisely who I was, and actually believed I could help her.

‘Why, do dreams
mean
something?’ I piped, in my shattering, six-year-old way. She looked startled then, and retreated.

‘I’ve made a date with Noel,’ I announce to Dudley, standing up, flinging the blanket to the chair. ‘December the fifteenth. We’ll see the Cezanne-Gauguin exhibition and talk.’ I wave my arms around to emphasise this breakthrough. (And to warm up.) ‘I find I can think of nothing else.’ (A fat lie, of course, but tactful Dudley keeps mum about how much my forthcoming book of poetry preoccupies me.) ‘I have to resolve things with her once and for all because the tangle is spoiling my health. And, more to the point, interfering with my Webster essay. And, in any case, I must see these marvellously pornographic South Sea maidens that are causing such a Tear in the Fabric of British Morality, eh, Dudders?’

Dudley springs from the chair at my feet to give me what he imagines is a reassuring pat. ‘Bravo, bravo! That’s the spirit.’ I nearly choke up breakfast.

We both sit down, and Dudley pours tea, trembling a little in the cold. After listening to the sound of the amber liquid tinkling into blue-rimmed porcelain, Dudley says cautiously, rather quietly, shivering before pushing his pince-nez up his nose first, ‘I wonder, though…Is that wise, old chap?’

‘What–immersing myself in the unnatural colours and gaudy nakedness of Gauguin’s South Seas?’

‘No, of course not. I meant Noel. You know that pressing her in the past has only ever strengthened her resolve…’

Ha! Such expertise now, such superior skill in love-making, my friend might have been married twenty years, not merely become betrothed a week ago. I stare at the top of his pate with a swell of loathing. ‘Well, you may be right, but I find I
want
to push. To discover when, indeed, the Surrey and St John’s Wood upper-middle classes will permit that she and I walk together. Do you know I saw a letter from Noel in the hand of that damned poet Ferenc Békássy. Did you know that Noel and he were acquainted?’

‘No. A letter, though. Might have been two lines at most! What’s to say there was anything to fret about?’

‘What’s to say there wasn’t? I mean—I’m sorry, old man. I’m–I’m tired. I haven’t been sleeping. I find that I can’t. Every time I close my eyes some fresh horror emerges.’

‘Fresh horror?’ Dudley sounds anxious.

‘Oh, nothing, really. Just, you know, a few small worries about my poems coming out, I suppose. And then I’m so tired, and the not sleeping is exhausting. Grantchester used always to afford me that. Sleep, I mean, even when London or Rugby didn’t. Such a shame it no longer works.’

The white sky bulges between the trees like a hanging wet sheet. I sip my tea and stare at the spot where the Madonna lilies bloomed in summer. ‘So glad they’re dead now, aren’t you? I find them rather ugly. Too much.’ The light that falls on their dead clump is bleak, as if spilled hopelessly. (What is it waiting for? What am I waiting for? Mild Deaths gathering winds, frightened and dumb.)

‘What?’ Dudley says, bewildered. ‘Oh, the lilies…’

‘Did you know a young woman, a young artist, called Phyllis saw me on a train and has tracked me down? She was sketching
me. Very pretty she is. She persuaded her aunt to write me a letter. It’s all very amusing.’

‘The lengths the New Woman will go to!’

We snicker at this and Dudley is eager to believe my black mood has passed. It is freezing cold out here in the garden. Some large plops of rain drip on us, flooding the dregs left in our cups, so we make a dash for the dining room. Dudley smiles–ah! the scaly cheerfulness of the engaged person!–and passes some comment about Florence Neeve’s new antique, a gigantic white vase of marble with a single flower in it. I stamp my feet and shake the raindrops from my hair, then dart off to a side issue–my impending trip away–hoping to forget that I’m a desperate worm, or a fly crawling on the score of the Fifth Symphony.

Mrs Neeve brings a fresh pot of tea. She sets it next to her grand antique with a flourish, and Dudley laughs, as if we are schoolboys again, smirking in the dorm, and all is right with the world.

So. I arrive at Lulworth, at Wool station, shortly after four. I spent the entire train journey worrying that it was too horrible of me to send my poems to unsuspecting individuals who have never done harm to a soul. Bill and Eva Hubback. Sybil Pye. Eddie, of course. I suppose they might burn them, should they wish to. In any case, one hopes that they never refer to it again. Apart from Eddie, who, bless him, has written a fine letter, which reminds me of why, contrary to the feelings of some notable others, I persist in our friendship.

I have been sleepless these last four nights. My Webster essay is done but at what cost? I am in a stupid state, and the hopeless, helpless conversations with Noel roll round and round my head like a bag of marbles on a ship’s floor, all against a backdrop of Gauguin’s colours, colours so strange that I cannot begin to describe the troubling emotions they raised. Looking at them,
trying not to listen to Noel’s sensibleness, I thought, These forms are like something created in a stage of the earth’s dark history when things were not irrevocably fixed to their forms. It is curious that the befrilled spires of King’s College Chapel have never inspired in me the same shock and awe. (Clearly, I have a Pagan soul. These days, I only ever look upon the spires and wonder why they are all wearing baker’s hats.) Oh, Gauguin’s work is not shocking or scandalous in the way that critics suggest. Contemplation of the Tahitian School will not make maiden aunts turn primitive and drop their drawers, or young men take up cannibalism and ravish their neighbour, more’s the pity. But there is something–something unsettling–in the work that calls to me.

I asked Noel if she agreed with the
Daily Express
that the show was pornographic, and the three figures of brown women in
Maternité
repulsively ugly and no better than drawings on a privy wall.

‘No, of course not,’ she said, in that considered Noel sort of way. So then I quoted Byron’s
The Island
, the bit about the young hearts of the mutineers ending up languishing in some sunny isle, half uncivilised, preferring the cave of ‘some soft savage to the uncertain wave’ and, to my surprise, it made her angry.

‘But isn’t that just like you? You want to go so far from the common view–that we have made some progress over savagery and barbarism–that you take up the opposite position with equal zeal. That everything the natives do is perfect, and superior, and
noble
.’

‘Well, he is certainly a perfect specimen…’ I pointed out, pressing my face close to a fine example of noble savagery in a loincloth. ‘What fun to knock about like that, naked under the sun and having your feet nibbled by fish in lagoons all day…’

‘I’m sure it would only seem that way to a drifter, to a foreigner, to Gauguin, for instance. In fact, I’m very sure that South Sea
island people have their privations, Rupert, like everyone else!’ she retorted angrily.

And that was when she said it, there in the Grafton Gallery, just as another livid Tahitian breast loomed into view, words of soft kindness that slid like a knife under my skin: ‘I’m afraid we must give it up. Until you love less or I love more.’ Then I knew I must leave England. I glanced around the gallery, as if expecting a surge of people to come forward and clap me on the back: ‘See, old man? She doesn’t want you. Your work is no good. Your poems are shoddy. In short, you are an embarrassment. Slip quietly off to some foreign shore, there’s a good lad, or do as your brother did and slip away entirely.’

Noel found me, head in my hands, under the rosewood carving of a Polynesian girl with flowers in her hair. She took pity on me and held out her hand, but she did not take back what she had said. ‘You know Eddie loves my
Poems
,’ I told her. She seemed startled. ‘Oh, yes,’ I continued, ‘he is the only one who has troubled to write to me about it. I know you all hate him, I know what you all say about my friendship with him–don’t bother to deny it! But only Eddie has taken the trouble to say that I have “brought back into English poetry the rapturous beautiful grotesque of the seventeenth century”–thank God for Eddie, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Let’s have some tea,’ Noel suggested, to which I wittily countered, ‘Yes.’

She was right, though, to refuse to be impressed by Eddie’s review. For, after all, there was more in his letter. Of the ‘smell’ line he still managed to say: ‘There are some things too disgusting to write about, especially in one’s own language.’

And yet people do smell, don’t they?

I did not dare mention this to Noel, but I
do
remember asking Nellie this. I remember that she started–as if I’d interrupted a private thought she’d been having about that very subject–and then smiled, and I sniffed the air close to her and answered
inwardly: honey. Violets. Beeswax candles and polish. Then: fish. Eels–I don’t know why; perhaps she had been handling them that morning. Then: hair–earth, blackness, salty, girlish sweetness with a nip of something sour. And a whole host of other things that had no name, but did indeed have a fragrance.

Christ, four hundred poems are written every year that end ‘The wondrous fragrance of your hair’ and nobody objects. And, for God’s sake, why am I thinking about Nell?

I have telegraphed to Lytton to send a driver to take me to Churchfield House. The sea air is grey and snippy with wailing seagulls and I find myself strangely unwilling to stay with the others at Cove Cottage. Who is to be there? Ka, of course. James arrives Monday. They will all know of my book. They will all know that ‘Lust’ has been renamed ‘Libido’ and is not a good poem.

The driver duly arrives and in the carriage I get my first sight of a prowling grey sea, and a hundred army volunteers in white tents, like a strange spore of mushrooms on the hills above me. I wonder if they have read my
Poems
. I wonder if even now, within those white tepees, there they all are, a hundred young men, tittering at my literary ambitions and foolishness.

I have the strongest feeling of foreboding. Something beyond my worst fears is about to happen. I don’t know what it is but I know I’m right because I’m almost there. I’m approaching it with every rattle of this coach’s wheel. The sea slides beside me, just within my vision, like a strip of grey slime, persistent and unfriendly. And I think I know what it might be, but what I cannot tell is whether it is coming from inside my head or outside. Whatever it is, it is here at last. The construction, the Rupert Brooke, cannot hold me any longer. I am surely a Lulworth lobster, dropped into a pot, about to be boiled to death.

Lytton announces, standing on the flagstones in the doorway of Churchfield House, that Ka has begged ‘a word’ with me. Will I take a walk with her tomorrow along the clifftops?

‘I’d forgotten you’d grown that ridiculous beard,’ I say, noticing it afresh.

‘And I don’t know if–if James mentioned it but Henry is here. I just took them over to Lulworth Cove Inn.’

‘Henry?’

‘Henry Lamb, of course.’

Lytton’s simpering is insufferable. He practically drools as he says it.

And so the name seeps into my pores like arsenic. Ah. This is what I have been anticipating. This, then, is the blow, the bomb, the reason to feel such inexplicable dreary terror.

‘Will Ka bring a lobster pot on her walk?’ I ask, but Lytton only stares at me with an expression concerned and un comprehending.

‘Come inside, old fellow,’ he says gently. ‘You are drenched through with rain.’

‘Oh, is it raining?’ I murmur, as I begin to unravel myself from my sweater. A Christmas present from the Ranee. I’m surprised to find that Lytton’s right: the wool is soaked through, now smelling of damp old sheep and other Christmases when I was a boy. Ha! It smells of my remembered smell. I cannot dislodge the line from my head.