The Great Lover (33 page)

‘What’s your name?’ I ask her, trying to summon up some of my former Apollo-sun-god charm, although I know her name already.

‘Taatamata.’

‘What does it mean in Tahitian?’

‘
Rien
. I don’t know. What does Monsieur Rupert mean?
Popaa
?’

To my surprise, she grabs a lock of my hair, shakes it. Now I’m confused.
Popaa
, I thought, meant white man or European. But Pupure–the name the child at the harbour called out–I had thought meant pure, or perhaps pale. Which pleased me. Is it in fact another word, or the same one pronounced differently?

‘
Popaa
? Pupure. Ha! That’s me. Pure one. Yes, do call me that. Not Monsieur Rupert, he’s–I left him back on the boat.’

And now Pupure, I tell her, wants to sleep, as the fever starts to rage again, and sweat drenches my skin and soaks the sheets, the effort of speaking becoming too much.

I think she has left. The candle is blown out and the smell of wax overcomes the strong tiare-flower smell, a sweet gardenia scent. The room crackles darkly. Outside the cockerel crows insanely and the voice of a child–the boy from the bar, Georges, can be heard; along with the occasional rumble of Banbridge opining about something or other upstairs. I believe at first that Taatamata has gone; then I hear water splashing in an
umete
, and feel the icy stroke of a cloth against my burning foot. Relief seeps up towards my calf with infinite pleasure. Perhaps I even moan a little; certainly someone does. And so it goes on: stroke after stroke, cool and sweeping, soothing and divine. She works in a marvellous, seamless way, each stroke following the last without pause; and when she refreshes the cloth she keeps one hand on my leg so that contact between us is unbroken. Soon waves of pleasure are sneaking along my calves and, inevitably, onwards and upwards. Shame floods me, and panic, lest she notice! But my sickness melts my body and my will, and darkness hides the rest.

I find myself longing for her to go on and dreading a sign that she might stop, but she doesn’t. Stroking, sweeping, cooling, calming, soothing. Then I hear the droplets splashing in the
umete
as she refreshes and wrings out the cloth and starts again on the other leg. When was I last bathed by another, so gently and so expertly? Not since…being a little boy…that nurse Mother so despised…Dorothy…It’s such a tender, exquisite sensation, and I let my sticky mind wander in the heat, thinking how clean I am now, cleaner than I’ve ever been, perhaps, here on Tahiti, with all my woes behind me in England and all my bad behaviour, my ghastly errors…

Munich, with Ka. The lamp wobbling on the bedside table as I bucked like an animal on top of her. And afterwards, her sudden cry: ‘Oh–I’m bleeding!’ Her face shamed and startled, and then horribly in pain, and me hopping about with only one pyjama leg on, fetching more of the grey, hopeless towels to
staunch the flow and saying, ‘I say–was I a beast, then? Is this normal? Dear Ka, I’m sorry, I—Is it all right?’ And only later, only in a roundabout way when I mentioned or hinted at something of it to James, did it occur to me. Was that a miscarriage? Did we–did Ka and I–copulate so foully, so dirtily, that we
murdered our own child
?

But my mind was so deranged in those months. It was all I could do to silence the clamouring that told me generally I was dirty, a dirty little boy. I bought Ka a gift, a tactless gift of an Eric Gill statue–a square-headed Mother and Child. That was the closest we came to speaking of it. I angered Phyllis, and I–I—Lord knows what damage I did to Nell Golightly.

Now Taatamata’s skilful hands are working further up my thighs. Cleansing, purifying. Now she is lifting the sheet and uncovering me like a mummy, black and hotly stiff in the darkness. Even here, when she reveals me, she does not hesitate. I think I hear her mouth widen, not in shock but into a smile. The stroking continues, on my stomach, my thighs, this time–is it my imagination?–more intense, more deliberate, determined. Heat burns every inch of me; I place my hand on my cock, I hardly know what I’m doing, I feel my nipples stiffen and my whole body rise and buck, but I’m too weak to get up off the bed or roll over, or touch her or take her, and so I merely spill myself, with a sob that I take no trouble to stifle, on to the sodden sheets. Taatamata hardly breaks stride to sponge the sheet too. Patting me tenderly on my stomach with the cloth, she leaves, tactfully closing the door to the noisy yard.

The next morning I can hardly look at her. She draws the curtain, takes off the straw hat she is wearing, and produces an orange, which she proceeds to peel and offer me segment by
segment. I open my mouth like a child and taste the most glorious orange in the world.

‘Pupure, you now feel better? No more fever?’

‘Ah! How right you are–Pupure feels like a Changed Man. Perhaps I truly am Robert Louis Stevenson now–in both thinness, literary style and dissociation from England! Pah, what glory—’

She frowns at me and shoves the last piece of orange into my mouth. (An uncharitable reading of this would be that she wishes to shut me up.)

‘Mama Lovina
m’a donné
these. For you.’

Letters are produced from a pocket deep in her drab dress. Who can this chap be–
Mr Rupert Brooke, c/o The Union Steamship Company Agents, Papeete, Tahiti
? Put like that, it does give one some kind of jolt. Feeling Taatamata’s eyes on me I pick the envelopes up, recognise the handwriting of Eddie, Phyllis, Cathleen. A distinct smell of the theatre floats from Cathleen’s letter–of greasepaint, wooden boards and yards of Irish green tulle. I resist a powerful desire to hand the letters back. No further cheques from the
Westminster Gazette
for my ‘Letters from America’. And none either from the Ranee.

As I sink back to my pillow, closing my eyes, she says slyly, ‘Pupure, your letters are from a sweetheart? Or wife?’

‘What an extraordinary question! Where I come from a girl could be hanged for asking such a thing!’

More frowning. She folds her arms across her chest to indicate that she is patiently waiting for a decent answer.

I sigh. ‘Yes. My dear–many sweethearts. Too many! But no wives.’

This satisfies her and, gathering up the orange peel, she leaves me.

So, later that day I’m well enough to join Banbridge at table, and have my delicious
mahi-mahi
ruined by his opinions on the German government of Samoa. As he speaks I am thinking that I see no reason for his existence, and several against.

‘You were in Samoa, weren’t you, Brooke? My view is that the English in Fiji handle things far better–we know what we’re about, eh? I’m sure the niggahs would prefer it, too.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. The Germans seem to govern it much better than I thought they would. The first governor was a wily man and studied Fiji, then started German Samoa entirely on British lines—’

‘Well, that’s my point, man. They need
us
to show them how to do it. And I hear that whenever the Germans’ backs are turned the Samoans cheerily forget the German they’ve been taught and return to speaking English.’

Taatamata, Mahu and another native girl slam plates of breadfruit on the table, and jugs of some strange drink we’re assured is not alcoholic. I tentatively spear a piece of yellow-white breadfruit flesh, cut into triangular chunks, noticing Mahu smiling encouragingly–earlier today I saw her cook the fruit, skin and all, in the fire, and scoop out the flesh. It has a smoky, faintly sweet, bland taste, and dense texture, rather like plantain–not offensive at all. And I catch her eye to nod my approval.

A scarlet and turquoise parrot replaces the hysterical cockerel in accompaniment to Banbridge’s diatribe. I don’t know whose squawking is worst.

I cannot help myself from persisting in my defence of German rule. ‘Most people in the Pacific, black
and
white, agree that the German Customs officers in Apia are incomparably more courteous than the English in Fiji.’

Banbridge practically chokes on his fish. ‘But the private traders complain bitterly! Their trade is interfered with by so much regulation.’

‘Well, that’s partly so that they can’t exploit the natives in quite the same way the British in Fiji can.’

‘Look here, that’s a bit rich, isn’t it? Under British or American rule we’d have four times the trade in Samoa. And look at how the Germans tax them in Samoa.’

‘Ah that’s only in direct taxation. In indirect taxes the Fijians under us are far worse off.’

‘Where do you get your facts, Brooke? A Samoan head of the family has to pay a pound a year—’

‘Yes, and that represents, oh, three days’ work picking and drying coconuts for copra–so they needn’t kick. You know, I’d warrant a guess any time that the Samoans are richer, and far happier, than the average European.’

Here Banbridge puts his fork down and brushes angrily at imaginary mosquitoes near his face. ‘Ah, now I understand you, my man. Full of admiration for the “noble savage”, are we, whose life, I presume, you find infinitely preferable to ours?’

His eyes skim over the
pareu
I’m wearing as if noticing it for the first time. And, if I’m not mistaken, they slide over Taatamata too. ‘Actually, Brooke, that’s jogged some memory in me. Are you a Kingsman? A poet, perhaps? I think I’ve heard of you. Did you in fact go native in–where was it? Oh, somewhere rural in Cambridgeshire, a village…you know, barefoot with a bunch of cronies, eschewing meat and tobacco and that sort of thing, what?’

‘What can I say? Guilty as charged, Officer.’

He pushes his
umete
away and shakes his head as Lovina leaps up to offer more breadfruit, more
mahi-mahi.
He mops at his moustache with a piece of
tapa
cloth he finds on the table. (No doubt the pattern has some spiritual significance–I will ask Taatamata later. The bloody fool thinks it’s a napkin.)

‘Your defence of the Germans in Samoa is a surprise, though, Brooke,’ he pronounces. ‘I think I’d heard you had some strange Fabian ideas, knew the Webbs, that sort of thing. I didn’t have you down as pro-German.’

The parrot squawks triumphantly. Man and bird are detestable. His last remark reminds me horribly of Augustus John: ‘I didn’t take you for a socialist, Brooke.’ Why is it that everyone in the damn mother country thinks they know who I am; what
to take me for
?

‘Ah, well,’ I announce, rising rather unsteadily and eyeing with longing the corridor that leads to my little bed, the room I called a day ago a ‘hovel’, which now appeals to me as the most entrancing luxury because it is no longer a shared bedroom with Banbridge. ‘That reminds me. I’ve been reading the “Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands”, you know. You’ll remember what King Finow said on seeing how he was described by the white man.’

Banbridge shakes his head and continues distractedly stuffing his pipe.

‘“This is neither like myself nor anybody else! Where are my eyes, where is my head? Where are my legs? How can you possibly know it to be I?”’

Banbridge’s face is a marvel. Even the native child Georges couldn’t contort his features into
that
particular monster.

The dear fellow is no doubt at this very moment remembering he had also heard that this barefoot Georgian monstrosity, this Rupert Brooke, had, incidentally, gone quite mad.

Hardly surprising, then, that I am not charmed by Banbridge’s plans to leave the Hotel Tiare and travel to Mataiea tomorrow. (The month, I discover, has changed, and is now February, although no one told me.) Mataiea is about thirty miles from Papeete, in the heart of the island, a native village with one fairly large European house in it, possessed by the chief. It’s the coolest place, everyone says, and we can make an easier journey to the coast where the pearl divers are to be found.

At first I try protesting that I’m not yet well enough to travel. As I had spent the morning swimming in a lagoon with two large Tahitian boys, spearing fish, this was patently a lie.

He leans in then and I smell his dreadful stale male breath and do my best not to reel back in horror: I think I am in the sixth at Rugby again. ‘Take her with you, what?’ Banbridge says. ‘The native girl. No one here will bat an eyelid.’ He straightens up and, with a disgusting wink, says to Lovina: ‘Brooke here
needs a nurse for our travels. And we’ll need a guide, too. Your man Miri, perhaps? Or what about the pansy? What’s his name? Teura? I’m sure under that dress he’s quite the muscle-man, what? Two weeks is all. Surely you can spare them.’

Lovina laughs her big laugh. To my astonishment, I realise that the ‘muscle-man’ Banbridge is referring to is the woman with the long braid, the one I thought was called Mahu (now sitting out on the terrace, making a basket from pandanus leaves). Of course, the minute the truth is out, the ‘woman’ reshapes in front of my eyes and I realise at once that her tallness, her broadness of shoulder, the deepness of her voice and the blunt flatness of her chest should have made it obvious. Not to mention–now I’m staring at them, plaiting the leaves–the size of her hands! I remember, with a curious, humiliated sensation, my pleasure at the tiare flowers she left on my pillow…Am I so transparent, then, even here? And Banbridge, Lovina, no doubt everyone else, appear so untroubled, so wholly unsurprised by her,
his
, hermaphrodite status. I have a stab then of an old feeling, one that Lytton and James used to provoke in me: of being naïve, inexperienced and unworldly–clumsy, foolish and
wrong
. I stomp towards my room, while Banbridge continues to make his loud arrangements. He wants to feel safe, what, in case he carries back the pearls or better still the Gauguins, and three fine young Tahitians with a pansy built like a tanker should, he says, be just the ticket.

I go in search of Taatamata. After her devoted ministrations to me, she is the only one capable of reassuring me. I’ve no wish to think of England, or remember my quarrel with James and Lytton, or my humiliation at the hands of that sleek operator Henry Lamb, which has somehow, just then, unbidden, managed to skip over the ramparts and enter my mind.