The Great Lover (34 page)

She is busy when I find her, cleaning fish for supper. I don’t know at first what to say, how to ask her, but when this Mahu appears and then disappears, Georges trailing behind him, I find
that a nod towards him, and a few gestures make the question clear enough.

Taatamata laughs and says, ‘Eh,
mahu
,’ which I now understand to be the name for the males who are raised as girls in, apparently, almost every family in Tahiti.

‘If Tahitian family has eight children, one be
mahu
,’ Taatamata says.

And–with a few crude gestures I get to the nub of the matter–not all of them are inverts either, although the fact that many are seems to surprise nobody. Well. It seems the missionaries weren’t able to halt in Tahiti all things they found abominable, after all.

Later that afternoon we step down to the beach to help the day’s gathering of clams, and when she is intent, bent over, her hair curtaining her face, I suddenly ask her what I really want to know. ‘Taata, do you think a person has only one true self? You know, underneath it all…’

‘One true self?’

‘Yes, yes, you know–
un vrai
…’ Stupidly, I can’t remember the French for ‘self’. I shrug, point to my chest, hoping to suggest this might be where my ‘true self’ resides.

‘
Non
,’ comes the reply, swiftly, once she understands the question. She straightens, rubbing the small of her back. ‘Many selves,’ Taatamata says. She sweeps an arm round the beach. ‘Plenty selves like–
pahua
.’

Pahua
. Clams. I stare at the thousands and thousands of shells lining the beach inscrutably, as far as the eye can see. She said it with complete conviction.

Afterwards, lying in his bed, Rupert whispers, ‘But, Nell, I thought you were married now, a mill worker’s wife, or whatever?’ and I realise he believes I married Jack.

That gives me some peace, for I understand at last some of his coldness. ‘Tommy has asked me,’ I confess. I haven’t told a soul this.

‘Tommy? The marvellous British Working Man?’

A long pause, and he offers me a cigarette, and then, to my surprise, takes one from the case on his bedside table himself. I’ve never seen him smoke before. I thought he didn’t smoke. I shake my head, trying to make my thoughts settle.

‘Do you think there are some people who are not made for marriage, Nell?’

‘Yes,’ I answer, without hesitating.

He props himself up on one elbow, making the cigarette glow in the darkness as he draws on it. I’m dizzy with the smell of him, the salty nearness, the liquid feeling of my own hot nakedness flowing in the sheets beside him and that great huge kick sizzling along my stomach like a seam of fire whenever a memory of what we just did surfaces. I can barely think straight to answer him.

‘Not a feminist, I hope, child? Never be a feminist or–God forbid–a marcher, or a Sapphist. Be a woman.’

And there it is again, my anger with him, for his annoying habit of spoiling everything, of always thinking he knows best. Maybe that’s why I don’t answer honestly when he whispers plaintively, ‘Will you say yes to the spotty Tommy?’

I laugh, and simply murmur, ‘That depends.’

On what, I never said. Perhaps I hoped he would understand. But of course, nothing between us could ever be simple, or spoken aloud, and he did not understand at all. I might as well have been from a South Seas island myself for all the likelihood of Rupert understanding me.

Rupert dashed the cigarette in the saucer by his bed, turned over and was soon asleep. I crept out of his room and retraced my steps. I knew with absolute certainty that what we had just done was an end to it, not a beginning, and I lay awake all night,
in my own little bed back at the Orchard, thinking about it, reliving every last caress.

Rupert left the next day and travelled by train to Portsmouth, to sail, and that was the last time I saw him that year. We never spoke of it again.

Poetry comes creeping back. My traveller’s letters to the
Westminster Gazette
are one thing: they pay the bills. But poetry! Such joy to wake to the sight through my open door of a strange bird pecking in the yard, a bird the size of an English thrush but with a black crest atop its head and a vermilion splash under its rump.

I thought that poetry was done with me. I thought I had decided to be a playwright, albeit a wretched one. Then last night, at the lagoon with Taatamata, I wrote–
surely
–my best poem ever. Eddie has been begging me to send more verse and I have been reluctant to oblige. I’m far too old for Romance and my soul is seared! It’s horribly true, as Edmund Gosse wrote, that one only finds in the South Seas what one brings here. And what did I bring? A longing to return to childhood, not the real childhood, rather to the childhood that never was, but exists only as a sentimental constructed memory; a place where time is not, and supper takes place at breakfast time, and breakfast in the afternoon, and life consists of expeditions by moonlight and diving naked into waterfalls and racing over white sands beneath feathery brooding palm trees.

A childhood before the Ranee banned the nurse, before being cast out of the Garden.
This
side of Paradise.

With Taatamata. For when she lifted a hand to stroke my face, and said again, ‘Pupure,’ in that way, and looked at me with those black eyes, as big as olives, and took off her hat and laid it on the
sand, stepping into the small, wobbling boat, it was an invitation, like no other, and not simply because I wanted it to be.

Taatamata told me many things that night. She told me–it was no small shock–that the child Georges was her son; his father had been a French soldier who sailed two days later and whom she never saw again. She told me she’d seen twenty-eight summers, she thought, making her two years older than me. ‘Mama Lovina’, it transpires, is her aunt, and Taatamata is now an orphan, having been the daughter of a chief, an important man, distant cousin of the great Queen Pomare herself. (As she says this I think of the first night I saw her, and how I considered her features ‘noble’, attributing them to a French heritage and never once considering the aristocracy of her own native line.) As she speaks–in her queer French with many gestures and acting out–I remember her friendly hands on me, and the way she patted my stomach during my sickness and my wondering if it wasn’t a feverish dream.

The foam on the waves of black water is pearlescent, lapping beneath us, as we lie in a wooden canoe, as far from England as it’s possible to be, under stars one cannot even recognise and doubts very much are real. I lift myself gently on top of her, and bury my face in the salty-sea scent of her neck, loosen the shining black oil of her hair around me, and I hazard, with one hand, the buttons at the neck of her dress. She nods for me to remove it, smiling at me in the darkness in a flash of white, and as there can be no mistaking her meaning, it would be–ha!–ungentlemanly of me to refuse. Nell. I think of Nell again, and her courage, in coming to me in that way, and how I wasn’t really well, not well enough to appreciate her.

Taatamata rolls up her dress and, placing it like a pillow under her head, lays herself down with unmistakable felicity, and when I murmur her name she smiles and shakes her head and says something I take to mean ‘Sweetheart’ and so I grow bold at last, after what feels like a courtship of twenty-six years, my entire life leading to this.

Taatamata, with great patience and skill, shows me the error of my ways in the past, laughing and kissing my hair and taking my hand and guiding it here and there, as if it were a darting fish, catching hold of my fingers and prodding them at hot wet crevices, and holding my head, calling me Pupure, and pressing my mouth down at her breast, her stomach and her neck, guiding me the way a skilled boatman slides his boat through water; and when clumsily, trying to shift position in the canoe, I smash one elbow on the inside of the wood and cry out, she takes it only as a sign of coming off and tightens the grip in her thighs with such mastery, lifting her legs high up over my shoulders. Then the boat rocks so hard it threatens to spill us into the black sea. No man could doubt her meaning, or the loving offer she just bestowed: to deliver oneself to her, whole and unpeeled, every last drop.

Does Taatamata believe in an afterlife? In Paradise here on earth or…somewhere else? I ask her, rightly or wrongly understanding this word of hers,
Taü
, to mean the same thing; to mean Heaven.

We are lying in the canoe and she is–such awful lack of dignity!–smoking a pipe, the way so many of the native women here do, stuffing it with tobacco from the pocket of her dress. It makes me smile, the combination of pipe and white flowers in her hair–dreadfully the most fashionable way to adorn oneself in Tahiti. (Taatamata is puzzled when she discovers that poor ugly European women don’t dress their hair in this way–how can man desire such woman? she asks, astonished.)

Lights glimmer from the huts on the beach and the warm sea breeze flecks water on to my salted skin, dry as the skin of a fish.
I have been so great a lover…oh, tra la la
…Who can I tell? Shall I write to Dudley, or James–Eddie perhaps? Jacques? Gwen? Is Gwen the same girl I once told with such certainty that two people can never kiss and
see
each other at the same time? Tell them all I have it at last: the secret of the Universe…

A stray thought enters my head: Gauguin’s comment that in Europe you fall in love with a woman, and eventually end up having sexual relations with her. In Tahiti you first have physical relations, after which you proceed to fall just as deeply in love. Yes. And what is the secret of this, the reason for it? It’s because Taatamata has a child already, a boy so clearly loved and accepted by her aunt, Lovina, and evidently Taatamata has no anxiety about accidentally falling pregnant. If bastardy were tolerated–if illegitimacy was not the greatest stain a child could endure, unmarried pregnancy the foulest blow to a girl’s repper–how might things alter in England?

Taatamata’s answer to my question about immortality is convoluted. It involves a lagoon, water so deep that only the best divers venture into it; and according to Taatamata, once you make that dive, and reach that mysterious place, if you
survive you will never be the same again; you will come up transformed.

Such nonsense…
wash your mind of foolishness
…Hour after hour we have floated here in the blossom-hung darkness. I stroke her silky black hair and soon she is closing her eyes and purring and, with unmistakable gestures, snuggling against me again and touching my skin, smoothing her palm over the hairs on my chest, murmuring, ‘Pupure, little sweetheart, so pale…’ She seems to find it perverse when I try to kiss her, preferring instead to rub her face against mine, and bend her nose against my skin. Under her touch my skin grows more sensitive to light and night air and the feel of water and wood and sea breeze. Desire flares up again and this time she surprises me by sitting upon me in the most extraordinary way.

That alone is life, I say to myself. All else is death.

That night, the first spent in Mataiea, I dream of Father, who turns into Dick. We are in the dorm at Rugby. Father and Dick are interchangeable; I only know that it’s my brother by the glass of whisky in his hand. They are standing over me now; we’re in the sick-bay and I’m half blind with the pink-eye, and feverish. A cockerel is crowing. Someone–Teura, the
mahu
girl-boy–is tending me, pounding some mother-of-pearl into a paste in a jolly little bowl, then laying it gently on my eyes with his big, city-gent hands. Am I dead? No, only suffering with conjunctivitis.

Father and Dick are smoking and nodding. ‘He should have been a girl,’ Father says. ‘It would have compensated Ruth so.’ (It seems the Ranee had a name once, before she was Mother.) So then I stare down at my body and it is changing: I am now a small brown-skinned girl, crowned with flowers; I’m gambolling round the bedroom. I have a name, a new name, but I don’t know what it is–a girl with blonde hair and dark skin, but ancient eyes and refined cheekbones, like Taatamata. At last everyone is happy. Father tweaks my cheek and calls me Pupure.
My eyes open and the pink crust on my lids crumbles: I see properly at last–a vast lagoon of the most limpid blue.
Swimmers into cleanness leaping
. Now the lovely nymph Nell is standing there, under a mountain, dipping a basin into the pool and trickling it over her hands, just like my dear nursie used to do. Nell touches my mouth, the corner of my mouth: I have been stung by a bee. Her fingers taste of Grantchester honey from the apple orchard.
Bathtime!
She calls,
Taü here! Sweetheart
. And I wake up.

My little hut is cool, and there are leaves on the floor, walls made of leaves, leaves woven into the roof above my head, a white canopy draped like a tepee above our bed to keep out the mosquitoes. And suddenly it’s damned cold, an icy breeze, and a blond ghost is here, still hovering from the dream; someone young, and naked, slipping between those draped veils. Is it a boy? A young man? Is it Denham? Denham died. Back in the summer of July 1912, in the midst of the worst times, the times when my mind seemed to slip its moorings. He died of–of what? A short illness. I wrote a brief letter of condolence to his father. I could not be truthful. That is all.

Denham seems to have been, in the end, a pretty affectation I had no desire to repeat. As the figure turns to face me, though, I see it isn’t Denham at all. It’s a boy, much younger, a small, stubborn, serious boy, pudding-bowl hair and eyes the colour of the brightest parrotfish, and he’s staring at me. Just for a moment. If I sit up, he will be gone.