The Great Lover (3 page)

There is no fireplace in the tiny bedroom she shows me. Two small cots and no window greet me; more of a cupboard than a room. The one shelf is empty, except for a carton of Keating’s insect powder. I’m told I’m to share with another maid called Kittie. I feel a little pang when Mrs Stevenson shows me this room, which tells me that I was expecting more, and I chide myself for foolishness in thinking that a servant will be a step up in the world from a bee-keeper’s daughter.

‘I see too much and I hear too well for an old lady,’ says Mrs Stevenson, on her way back down the stairs.

Now I’m going to describe something that happens to me often and which I have come to accept as part of me. And yet
whenever it happens I am brought up short and reminded all over again of something very strange: how impossible it is to be one person in the world, so different from all others, having these particular experiences at this particular time. And how difficult to explain about one particular experience to another living being, no matter how you might want to. And yet it happened to me right then, on that first visit to the Orchard House.

It’s like this: I’m behind Mrs Stevenson on the stair. My hand is on the wooden rail, which is smooth and plain, and like a thousand other hand-rails I have touched, rasping slightly beneath my dry palm. I can see Mrs Stevenson’s black skirt, swishing the floor in front of me, and the tie on her apron at the waist, and a wisp of grey hair escaping the pins near her neck, and I believe she is talking, but I cannot hear her. I cannot feel my own tongue in my mouth. The world simply stops. I do not belong. I am separate, outside, looking on.

With the next beat of my heart, the world goes on again. The smell of apples and bread and dusted wooden floors and the chafe of the bib of my new apron against my throat comes back to me; the chatter of cups on saucers floating up from downstairs.

I was much shaken the first time it happened to me, as a girl of six: this feeling that I was separate, outside things, had somehow slipped through some veil of time and slid through to another place, but now I have come to accept it. I have no explanation; it’s just how things are with me. When it happens, the world seems more vivid, and things happen more slowly and with all their full colours, scents and sensations. When it stops, life picks up a pace.

Although I fear I
have
left something out in my account of my character. I must add another fault to the list, which I have just remembered and it is this: when I take up a particular idea, I am fixed in it, stuck as fast as the seal that bees make for honey. This seal is the propolis that I mentioned earlier, on Father’s hands. It starts off sticky but soon hardens to a form not easily removed. We have to scrape it from the frames with a knife to release the liquid honey underneath but there is always a seal that remains there, that cannot be undone. It has a burned, toffee-brown look. My nature, I fear, is as sealed and capped as propolis. Father would chide me for it, although it was a quality we shared.

I have wandered now in thinking of this, and wonder if a person’s character and propolis is a good comparison? But honey has been my life since I was a tiny girl, and I surely can’t be blamed if thoughts about honey, or bees, occur to me more often than to other people.

Now, within a week of my moving into the Orchard House there is a small commotion. A young gentleman-poet, having enjoyed a May Ball here a few weeks back, has requested rooms. His name is Rupert Brooke. I have heard of him but that means nothing. Kittie tells me that he will be a very great man and that there is already a space on the school wall in Rugby that he went to (and where his mother still lives) that awaits a plaque for him: he told her this himself. This strikes me as mischievous. It’s hard for me to decide if he is teasing, acting the arrogant goat, or truly believes it. Most likely of all, I suppose, is a little of both. In either case, he is certainly guilty of the Sin of Pride and not just about his poetry, either. He is one of those vain men, Kittie says, who has been told so often he is handsome that he is for ever pulling a fresh, boyish stunt, and running elegant fingers through fashionably long, springy hair.

I have not met him yet. Mrs Stevenson has charged me with getting two rooms ready for him. One is to be his bedroom, at
the far end, top of the house, and the other, downstairs, is to be his sitting room, for entertaining friends. There’s a dirt track running alongside the house that carries the young men and women on bicycles from the university to his rooms, where they can throw stones and call up at the window for him.

After Mrs Stevenson has told me about this Rupert Brooke, and I’ve listened to Kittie and Mrs Stevenson’s daughter Lottie chattering excitedly of him in the kitchen (remembering the May Ball occasion and a separate one when he came with another famous writer to the house: this writer gentleman–an old man, an American, much taken with Mr Brooke–was apparently accidentally clocked on the head with the pole by Mr Brooke when he took him for a punt down the river; and Kittie had to bathe his head and give him brandy), a funny thing happens. I’m quite convinced that, five minutes later, I pass this very same person.

I’m on an errand in Grantchester to fetch milk and a young man passes me on a bicycle, pedalling fast in the direction of the Orchard and Byron’s Pool. I feel sure, suddenly, that it
is
him for one reason only and that is one I’ll concede: he does have the sort of face that you notice. A face that girls like Kittie would call handsome, or even beautiful. I spent the moments after he’d cycled past me wondering what it was in him that combined to give me this impression. His forehead was high and his hair of a sandy gold colour. He wore it longer than usual, and he wore no tie, either, so that his throat was bare to the sun. I’d only had a second to consider him as he cycled past the church of St Andrew and St Mary, with his long fringe lifting up in the wind like a cock’s comb. Cock of the Walk, Father would have said. It would not have been a compliment.

Mrs Stevenson is all ‘Snap-snap, chop-chop! On you get by seven o’clock this morning,’ and so I set to. The room has been empty for a while. The window is so firm shut that I cannot open it.
Dried leaves, half trapped beneath the frames, flicker to dust when I touch them.

I work hard and don’t dawdle. I am sorry that I have no time to poke my head outside to sniff the lilac and the dog-roses in the garden, or breathe in the smell of the fruit trees in the orchard next door. Apple, pear, plum, medlar and quince, and there might be still more varieties. I’m thinking of the bees again and the wild array of honeys that Mr Neeve must make here, with such a source of food for them. Then I think of Father and my heart pinches a little. I picture him with his strong but bony wrist, turning the handle on the honey-spinner, the frames inside rattling, and the table shaking too, with his efforts, making a sound like a ball scattering inside a barrel. In this memory I hear rain too, spattering the roof of our kitchen, and see the fire glowing and the sweat popping on Father’s brow, until the first honey appears at the mouth of the tap: fat, like a bulb of amber.

I thought I’d shed my tears for Father two weeks ago. I’m surprised at myself.

These thoughts are not helping get the work done and, with an effort, I turn my attention to an old bitten-looking beam above the bed. Filthy cobwebs hang from it. When I attack them with the duster, shavings fall too, like flakes of chocolate. Of course, no young man from Cambridge will appreciate the labour it is to turn out a bedroom, so I am not expecting any thanks for the fact that I soaked his china candlesticks in soda to remove the grease, nor that I spent an hour and a half with bottle-brush and patience to clean his water bottle. I dither over whether to put on the pillow shams Mrs Stevenson left out for me. Finally I decide that a young poet with such a good head of silky blond hair has no need of frills and might prefer a plainer spot to lay it. Mrs Stevenson favours such things, but Mother used to say that an ornate pillow sham is only ‘display’, with no place here in England. Such display has come over from the United States.
Mother was always scornful of ‘display’. She was full of sweeping condemnations. Her favourite phrase was ‘nature needs no ornament’–I remember being told that when I wanted pretty pins to wear in my hair. I always knew the real reason was that we had no money for such things, so I grew to hate the saying, but since Father’s passing it has come back to me as a decent one, and serviceable.

‘I see too much and I hear too well for an old lady,’ Mrs Stevenson said, so I work hard, and with some nervousness for how she will judge me. I sense that the young man is a special favourite of hers and that she is at pains to please him. So I clean the ironwork of the bed with paraffin, rubbing it into every ledge and crevice with the rag and thinking happily of how it will hardly creak now when he rolls over in the night. I wash the tumbler and the soap-dish, carefully using a different cloth from the one for the slop-pail and the chamber, adding a little splash of cold water to the pot before I put it back in the toilet cupboard. I do all this with loving attention, with such a particular satisfaction that I am sitting back on my heels admiring my own thoroughness when Mrs Stevenson bursts into the room with another of her hand-clappings and chop-chops to say that the afore-mentioned will be here in a minute and haven’t I got rid of that mouse yet?

That makes my heart skitter in my chest, though whether it is the mouse (which I chase with the broom) or the afore-mentioned it’s hard to say. Mrs Stevenson clops downstairs to attend to her scones, which, from the smell wafting upstairs, are in danger of burning. I run behind her.

So it is me who admits him. He appears at the door, tall and sunny, loose-limbed and lanky, with his high forehead and mane of hair that I remember, from my glimpse earlier in the day. I present myself politely, my hands stinging with the efforts of the scrubbing. I hold them tidily behind my back and smile as he grins a glorious grin at me and the sun blazes through the
door, warming my face to scarlet. He wears grey flannels and a soft collar with no tie; and his face is rather innocent and babyish and, at the same time, inspired with a fierce life. Perhaps that is the secret of the ‘impression’ he creates of extraordinary loveliness, the sort of loveliness you’d more often see in a girl than a young man.

He holds a half-bitten apple. ‘I say–anyone here mind if I take off my shoes?’ he asks. It isn’t really a question. He holds the apple between his teeth, bending down to step out of his shoes and socks. Mr Rupert Brooke steps over the threshold and into the kitchen.

His naked toes. I try, of course, not to look. But later, when he asks for tea outside on the lawn at the front of the house, and I bring it to him on a wobbling tray, the milk shaking in the little jug, there they are again. Each toe well formed and strong-looking, like the long white keys on a piano. ‘Handsome’ and ‘shapely’ are the two words that present themselves to me, thinking of his feet. And ‘wrong’ is the next. Or should I perhaps say ‘revealing’?

I have mentioned my habit of looking at things too hard, and considering them too assiduously. Like Father’s hands and the little shock it caused me to understand that Father was not always old and unlovely. Mr Brooke’s toes told me the opposite tale. That he was not only or always a Varsity man, a poet, a person of dust and chalk and King’s College, Cambridge, but a human creature who had once been bathed by a mother. How even his toes were, I think, like the feet of–oh, I don’t know–an animal, a monkey perhaps, something that can use toes the way an ordinary man cannot. And his ankles, too! The naked ankle bone peeping from his trouser leg so prominent, and angular, so beautifully formed. His ankle could never have been mistaken for the ankle of a young woman. It is undeniably male. Such a curious thought made me shiver.

I have spent long enough in observing toes and weighing my conclusions about them and must surely, I chide myself, have some pressing duties.

Kittie comes to twitter over him. Seeing that I have forgotten the honey for his tea she brings him a pot, and a spoon, and drops a curtsy and pauses until he looks up from the copy of
English Review
lying in front of him on the grass and says: ‘Forster’s tale: “Other Kingdom”. Best story ever written, Nellie. It is Nellie, isn’t it?’

‘It’s Kittie, sir. Nellie’s the tall one. The girl with the black hair over there.’ She nods towards me and he laughs then and turns in his lazy way to look at me. The garden shudders with a sudden breeze as he does and a purple hairstreak butterfly flickers past my face.

Seconds later I bob a foolish curtsy, just like Kittie, then want to kick myself. Escaping, I realise that even though he is lying on his side on the grass, propping his head on his elbow in an appearance of complete relaxation, he is in fact watching me. He is saying something to me! I hurry close to hear him.

‘And hot milk would be good too and eggs, if you have them.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘On the lawn here in Arcadia would be admirably suitable.’

I glance down again, at his white feet among the three-leafed clover on the springy lawn. Another of his grins then. A grin that–he must know–is like a taper being lit and would melt any girl’s skin to liquid wax. I–luckily for him–am not ‘any girl’. He is fortunate that I am the good, practical sort with my head screwed tight and that none of his charms will work on
me.
I pick up my tray at once and hasten to the kitchen, to set to coddling the eggs.

July 1909

I am in the Country in Arcadia; a rustic. It is a village two miles from Cambridge, up the river. You know the place; it is near all picnicing grounds. And here I work at Shakespeare and see few people. Shakespeare’s rather nice.
Antony and Cleopatra
is a very good play. In the intervals I wander about bare foot and almost naked, surveying Nature with a calm eye. I do not pretend to understand Nature, but I get on very well with her, in a neighbourly way. I go on with my books, and she goes on with her hens and storms and things, and we’re both very tolerant. Occasionally we have tea together. I don’t know the names of things (like the tramp in Mr Masefield’s poem), but I get on very well by addressing all flowers ‘Hello, buttercup!’ and all animals ‘Puss! Puss!’ I live on honey, eggs and milk, prepared for me by an old lady like an apple (especially in face) and sit all day in a rose garden to work. Of a morning Dudley Ward and a shifting crowd come out from Cambridge and bathe with me, have breakfast (out in the garden, as all meals) and depart. Dudley and I have spent the summer in learning to
DIVE
. I can
generally
do it now: he rarely. He goes in fantastically; quite flat, one leg pathetically waving, his pince-nez generally on. But, O, at 10pm (unless it’s too horribly cold) alone, very alone and (though I boast of it next day) greatly frightened, I steal out, down an empty road, across emptier fields, through a wood packed with beings and again into the ominous open, and bathe by night. Have you ever done it? Oh but you have, no doubt. I, never before. I am in deadly terror of the darkness in the wood. I steal through it very silently. Once, I frightened two cows there, and they me. Two dim whitenesses surged up the haunted pathway and horribly charged on me. And once, returning bare foot through the wood, I trod on a large worm, whose dying form clung to the sole of my foot for many minutes.