The Great Lover (28 page)

Lytton is still staring at me, in the most ridiculous, lugubrious fashion. ‘You look terrible, my dear chap. Are you sick? It’s so awfully mild, though, isn’t it, despite this confounded drizzle? Some of us thought we’d bathe in the sea…see the New Year in. We’ve arranged to meet at the cove.’

‘Yes. I’m sick. Off to bed. Count me out. Don’t worry about me! Oh, no. I have my Pride to keep me company.’

I stomp up the stairs towards the top bedroom, grinding the name of Henry Lamb underfoot with each step.

It’s morning and Ka appears. She is wearing a peacock-blue scarf and heavy boots. She has never looked lovelier. The wind
whips hair in front of her face and wraps her legs with her skirt and I remember seeing her naked once, posing in nothing but her pince-nez for the camera (who was it took the photograph, I wonder now) and how, despite the beauty of her sculpted white body, she looked like a woman destined always to be matronly before her years, as if someone had stuck the wrong head on the charming young figure.

We set off on our walk. Behind her the divinely beautiful sea, the creamy white cliffs, the sky a Giotto blue…

But too soon the words coming out of her are disgusting, filthy, foul. Unbearable foul sickening disgusting blinding nightmare–is she truly saying she loves him? Loves the vile Lamb? Wants to marry him? Would do
anything
for him? Including, by implication, spreading her legs?

I must be mishearing. It’s this sickness, this head-cold. Inside my head is so much sheep’s wool.

She is intent on dirtying everything, everything I felt for her. Our boots marching together across the downs. I watch the imprints as they magically appear behind us, side by side in the frost. After Noel’s rejection, I believed dear Ka was safe! Believed her pure!

My head pounds with a thousand bees hammering to escape. Death and Hell! Ka’s doing the most evil thing in the world. She says she is willing to be his mistress, allow that soiled snake to sneak between her legs, degrade her, everything…The filthiest image of all for the fouling comes into my head: and that is what Ka is willing to do.

‘Rupert–please,’ she says. ‘You’re exaggerating horribly. One can’t choose who to love.’

Seagulls are screaming overhead; the bees inside me clamour to get out; the sea rises up in a great green tide, ready to throw itself at us. Ka moves towards me. Her face comes into view with her fat mouth and her stupid fat chin–something of Elisabeth van Rysselberghe about her–and her gross neck, with its folds of white flesh.

‘Why are women such
whores
, Katharine Cox? That’s it, isn’t it? You simply long for the
artist
Henry Lamb to drive supremely home and you’d open your legs, whimper and smirk and submit, accept his mastery, and you believe I am a bugger like the rest of them and not up to the task—’

‘Rupert! I can’t believe you would say such things! No! No, that’s not it. I had no idea you had feelings for me–you never said. I understood that you loved Noel…’

‘I did love Noel. I do! That sweet child is everything you are not. Noel is fine and true and pure and clean and—’

So she crumbles down on the Purbeck Hills and puts her head in her hands–Pah! A bid for sympathy, nothing more–and she keeps muttering, ‘Rupert, darling, you are being cruel, cruel–I had no idea, no idea…’

Women have such twilight shadowy souls, like a cat behind a hedge. What can one do? And, what’s more, they offer themselves endlessly, pathetically. How dreadful that the whole world’s a cunt for one.

‘So, you won’t marry
me
, then? You prefer that greasy, slimy, blisteringly foul Henry Lamb with his giant Obelisk—’

‘Marry you? Are you serious? I—But you never asked me! How could I know it was in your mind? And why now, when it should only be a marriage of pity?’

‘Ha! It’s no, then! Is it my
Poems
? Do you find them so vile, so laughable, so beastly and unnatural that you must refuse my proposal for fear of befouling yourself by connecting with my name?’

‘No, no, that’s not it. Rupert, you seem so–unwell, I’m frightened for you. I had no idea that my–my confession about Henry Lamb would bring you to this. We have always been honest with one another…’ she is standing up now, attempts one hand on my shoulder, her scarf unravelling and flicking between us in the wind ‘…and I have always understood how much you loved Noel…Couldn’t you be a little happy for me?’

‘Happy? Happy for you? When you want to sully your life by mingling it with these detestable buggers? Lytton, James, the fucking Blooms
buries
, the lot of them. Jews and buggers! I wash my bloody hands of you.’

This feels good. At last–saying what I feel. I stride off, away from her, and she is a only a bright blue dot, tiny as a forget-me-not, on the green hills. It’s as bracing as a dip in the Granta. Oh, if only the cloud in my head would lift, I could taste the real pleasure of this, of finally, finally, uttering exactly what I long to. Goddamn buggers the lot of them.

God burn roast castrate bugger and tear the bowels out of every last one of them.

I’m on the train, then, and Lytton and Ka and James somewhere else, and Lamb too, and only Gwen and Jacques in the seats opposite, glancing at me all the time in that frightened, pathetic way they both have, as if they want to offer me bromide and tea, or strap my arms to my chest. In between these kindly injunctions I sleep. In sleep Lytton appears to tell me how he orchestrated the whole thing:
You needed taking down a peg, Brooke old man
. ‘Of course I invited the creature (Lamb) to Lulworth and left the others to go out on walks with him so that the whole disgusting, unbearable, sickening nightmare could happen right under your nose. I knew you were a virgin after all. What splendid sport!’

I open my eyes and meet Gwen’s anxious gaze. ‘I loathe Lytton!’ I tell her.

Gwen and Jacques start in alarm, and Gwen reaches for her flask, enquiring if I’d like brandy. ‘You’re crying, dear,’ she says very softly, as she leans towards me and, ridiculously, fetches my own handkerchief from my pocket and dabs at my face as if I were a child.

The brandy burns my throat and makes me cough and we roll through tunnels, and in the black window beside me my
own face appears, striped with white lines and fields and rabbits running through it. ‘Where are we going? Where is Ka?’

‘She–she left, Rupert. She was very upset. I think you–perhaps you were a little cruel to her.’

‘Was I? Where are we going?’

‘We’ve made an appointment for you with Dr Craig in London. We’ll take you there. And we’ve telegraphed your mother. She says you’re to come to Cannes with her at once.’

‘Does she indeed? And is Ka coming with me? I’ve asked her to marry me, you know.’

‘Yes, we do know,’ Gwen says, with a quick glance at the carriage door as if someone might open it. She says nothing more but dabs at my cheeks again, which are surprisingly wet.

‘Are we to be married then, Ka and me? Is it agreed?’

‘No, dear.’ And Jacques begins telling me in great detail about this man, this Dr Craig, and how renowned he is, how he has helped others–why, Virginia Stephen, he thinks, has been to see him.

Mentally, then, I compose a letter to Virginia. ‘Let me implore you not to have, as I’ve been having, a nervous breakdown. It’s
too
unpleasant.’

‘Poor Virginia,’ I say out loud. ‘What tormented and crucified figures we literary people are!’

This at least raises a smile from Jacques. ‘I’ve heard Dr Craig is excellent,’ he assures me.

I tell them both about an incident at Holy Trinity in Rugby three Sundays ago. In the afternoon there is first a choral service, then a children’s service, then a service for Men Only. Two fourteen-year-old choirboys arranged a plan during the choral service. At the end they skipped round and watched the children enter. They picked out the one whose looks pleased them best, a youth of ten. They waited in seclusion till the end of the children’s service. Then they pounced on their victim as he came out, took him each by a hand and led him to the vestry. There, while the service for
Men Only proceeded, they removed the lower parts of his clothing and buggered him, turn by turn. His protestations were drowned by the organ pealing out whatever hymns are most suitable for men only. Subsequently they let him go.

‘He has been in bed ever since with a rupture,’ I announce.

Gwen materialises again in front of me with the handkerchief. Now I see that for some reason it is
she
who is crying.

‘Hush, dear…’ I tell her fondly, and the train slices through the pink of the neat little English hills on their perfect drawing-room scale; just like the blade in a bacon-slicer.

Rupert is sick. He’s not here. After New Year he was taken off to somewhere in France by his mother, but everyone at the Orchard is talking about it, and Kittie tells me with great excitement that she heard Mr Ward talking to Mr Raverat about it, and she gathers that Rupert had a nervous breakdown and began cussing and wandering the clifftops of Dorset like a madman–as she says this, she’s glancing sideways at me all the time, as if she expects me to slap her–and had to be taken to the famous Dr Craig for his stuffing treatment.

We’re in the kitchen with the wax kettle on the stove. I wonder hopelessly how to hide the trembling in my hands as I hold the kettle; the shaking in my shoulders as I turn my back on them, reaching for the candle moulds. I knew something was very wrong that night out by Byron’s Pool. Should I have done something? Stayed with him in his room, despite his telling me to go? Have I failed him once again, despite all my best intentions? What, what on earth could I have done?

‘They all break down in the end,’ Kittie says cheerfully. ‘Writers, I mean. This doctor makes them drink milk and stout and stop writing. Stopping writing is the only cure.’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous!’ I reply, so fiercely that three moulds topple over. I’m trying to teach Kittie and Lottie how to make candles. Lottie, being a diligent girl, is applying herself to the task; Kittie’s tongue keeps up steady work of another kind.

‘Stopping writing–oh, and drinking the blood of bullocks or something–is the only cure,’ Kittie repeats, undeterred, ‘but
Love
is the cause. I heard he asked Miss Cox to marry him and she turned him down! But why would our handsome Mr Brooke choose Miss Bespectacled Cox with the fat behind when he could have Miss Olivier or, well, anyone at all?’

‘Here–put the muslin over the spout,’ I tell her, a warning in my voice. ‘The wax is melted enough–can’t you see it there floating on top of the water?–so now we can tip it into the moulds. Here, Lottie, get the first cast ready. We need both of us to lift the kettle–it’s heavy.’

‘And there was another young woman came asking for him the other day. Did you see her, Lotts?’ Kittie is not in the least put off. She slaps her hand over mine on the handle of the kettle, but carries on, ‘Miss Phyllis Gardner. Came on a bicycle. Long red hair. Shameless, she was. She showed me a sketch she’d made of him and asked me, “Do you know this gentleman?”’

This gives me a stab of fury to almost take my breath away. ‘Hold the kettle, will you? I can’t do it on my own–put your back into it, Kittie!’

Another young woman, asking after him. Another young artist with modern ideas who thinks he belongs to her.

‘And were it a good likeness?’ Lottie wants to know.

‘The sketch? Not bad at all. Easy to see it was our Mr Brooke. Had his nose, you know, fine and straight but with a sort of little snub at the end. He’s made another conquest, no doubt, but I told her he was away “convalescing”. I thought that was the best word for it.’

‘Oh, where in God’s name can Betty be?’ I burst out, my voice ringing in the kitchen. She was sent on an errand an hour ago
to fetch the meat from Tommy, who has been flat on his back with a broken ankle and unable to make deliveries. As if in answer to my lament, Betty appears at the kitchen door, just as the three of us are struggling to lift the kettle and direct the spout towards the moulds. She hurries to help by steadying the candle casts so that the wax pours in the right place and does not end up all over Mrs Stevenson’s table. I notice some hot, honey-coloured blobs dripping on her hands and marvel that she makes no response, nor snatches her hand away. I soon learn why: her mind is entirely elsewhere.

‘I’ve an announcement to make,’ she says, glancing up shyly at Kittie, but avoiding, I think, my eyes. ‘Me and Jack. You know Jack? The boy who works at the Mill? Jack and me. He asked me–he asked me—Oh, Nell, do say you’ll look well on it. He wants us to get married!’

The kettle is nearly dropped as the girls crowd round Betty to kiss her and shriek with excitement. The room is full of commotion and it falls to me–as ever–to remember that Mrs Stevenson is only in the apple loft on the floor above and can hear every word.

‘Ssh, ssh now, girls, the wax is hardening–this is not the moment to neglect the task completely!’ I cry.

‘Oh, do say you think it a grand idea, Nell–
please
,’ begs Betty.

I pull her towards me and kiss her cheek. I feel her pounding heart under her apron and regret my selfishness, my own foolish woes. But the wax is cooling and will form badly if we don’t attend to it now. ‘Of course I do!’ I say. ‘That’s fine, fine news. Father would have been very proud of you. Now help me, won’t you?, or the candles will be spoiled and we’ll have to start all over again.’

Her hair smells of the silky hot beeswax, the melting flavour of our childhood, and I believe my instinct for guessing at Father’s feelings might, on this one occasion, be true. Jack is the good,
steady sort and his family is kind, even if they are not Methodists and do have some funny
traditions
. Yes, of course I’m glad for her, for she will stay in Grantchester now and be part of another family, with a new mother and a father and even new brothers and sisters. Perhaps my prayers–the bargain I struck–are being answered after all? To live in Grantchester, near the millstream? That’s surely a life, a life for a girl with Betty’s inclinations and dreamy, well-meaning nature?