The Great Lover (9 page)

In the end I was glad to be back in my little room at the Orchard, and to hear my tapioca approaching. Conveyed to me by the lovely Nell, of course. I pretended to be reading–that is, I had Moore’s
Principia Ethica
across my lap (the irony would escape her, I think)–so that when she arrived I might nonchalantly ask if she’d read it…

She said she had not. I wondered whether to launch into an explanation of its basic tenets, or simply paraphrase Beatrice Webb, who told Dudley a week ago that she thought we ‘university men’ (she meant us Apostles, I suspect, although she doesn’t know there is a distinction) relied upon its dubious morals in a quite childish way.

Still, Nellie showed no interest in learning of Moore’s dangerous moral contents, so I accepted the coffee and tapioca she held out to me, taking it from the tray and putting it on the table beside the bed, and amused myself with admiring the way the sunlight fell on a patch of skin at her throat, looking like a spot of lace.

‘You’ve no interest in books, then, Nell? Or–how would the Webbs put it?–in bettering yourself?’

Here she twirled round, and seemed to inspect me for teasing. ‘Oh, yes, I do,’ she said firmly, after a pause. ‘I love books.’ And
her arm swept around my room at the books tumbling on the floor in piles and on the shelves and propped against the cupboard. Her expression was–what? One of exasperation at all the dusting she has to do? I couldn’t read it, but was glad to have detained her.

I took a spoonful of the tapioca from the bowl (considering whether to ask her why she’d brought me the bowl with the chip in the rim, isn’t it a little…unhygienic?) and
Principia Ethica
slid noisily to the floor and remained simmering there, while Nell opened windows to ‘let some fresh air in’ and asked if there was anything else I needed.

Bah!

I decided against domestic complaints about the crockery and tried instead to engage her with some talk of the Fabian summer school I’d just been to. Did she know what a Fabian was and how it might differ from a socialist? She did not. Had she been to that part of Wales where the summer school was held? The furthest she’d been was King’s Lynn, sir, and to Sheep’s Fen, by river. And what about the break-up of the Poor Law of 1834? Did she think it a good idea that the poor should no longer be lumped together and blamed for their ills, but instead, as Beatrice proposes, be divided into separate groups–the sick, the aged, the unemployed–and offered pensions, sanitary care and employment benefits? Indeed, sir, she had never heard of the idea, and had no opinion. I bit my tongue to stop myself enquiring tartly if she didn’t feel it might behove her to be better informed, since it was her class that was the most likely to benefit from the efforts of the Fabians.

So I asked if she had even
heard
of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and it seemed she had, and when I mentioned the novelist Mr H. G. Wells, the recognition flitting across her face made me wonder if she didn’t know a little more than she was letting on.

‘Does he have a big moustache and–and—’

‘A highly disreputable character?’

‘I was going to say, did he write
Ann Veronica
?’

‘Ah…so you have heard of Mr Wells?’

She nodded.

‘Of course, dear Beatrice would rather you hadn’t read that particular book,’ I observed. ‘It’s entertaining, of course, but he does encourage inaccurate thinking so…Mr Wells practises what he preaches, of course. Suggesting that if women were free to act as vilely as some men do, this would magically solve all the problems of the world.’

She gave no reply but glanced pointedly at
Principia Ethica
, the book lying heavily on the floor. If I hadn’t known better I might have thought her glance implied a question. Something like: one rule for the boys, is it, and another for the girls?

‘I cannot help but agree with Dudley that the devil is in the detail,’ I explained hastily. ‘That if we really have an eye on progress we should–thrash out the finer points, not just sweep away all that is good and true along with all that is rotten.’

Here I apparently lost her. (The attention span of the British maid is very short.) She shook her head, a dear little movement, and swept at her cheek as if seeking an invisible smut. My tapioca almost finished, the coffee grown cold, I had barely a reason to detain her. I glanced once more at the spot on her throat where the sunlight made a pattern, but a shadow had fallen there. My stock of Subjects to Take Up with the Servant was exhausted.

However, I had not reckoned on the Sex Question coming to my rescue.

‘She–she’s one of those women who campaign for the Vote, isn’t she, this Mrs Webb?’ Nellie asked suddenly, as she loaded spoon and bowl back on to the tray.

‘Ah…you are not a Suffragist, I hope, Nell?’

‘No, indeed not!’ she returned hotly.

Reading
Ann Veronica
had not corrupted her then. I was immensely relieved.

‘I can’t think of anything more–
daft
,’ she said, ‘than throwing stones at the windows of buildings, or stamping things, slogans, on the walls of the House of Commons and getting yourself arrested. I can’t see what on earth–I wouldn’t take such a risk, sir, myself, if I had a position to think of, or a family waiting for me at home.’

‘Indeed. And do you have such a family?’

At last, then, we talked freely, and there was a burst of natural energy in the room as Nellie stood a while longer to describe in the liveliest terms her brothers and sisters, whom she said she missed ‘bodily’, whatever that meant. It was, though, curiously comforting to be granted this little glimpse, to picture this rural life in the vast flat land of the Fens: the five happy siblings and the bees and flowers and water everywhere, full of fish and fowl caught with a punt-gun–all rather free and fine and marvellous, I couldn’t help remarking. She blushed then, and fretted about the time, and said she must return to her duties.

After she’d left I did not at once get up. Talk of Wells (or, rather, thoughts of Wells) breaching those Newnham ramparts (I exaggerate:
walls
, of course) to get at Amber Reeves distracted me, rather. I had a sudden memory of Noel Olivier at Penshurst. Noel Olivier’s naked limbs, to be exact. Beatrice’s blasted meddling in the Wells-Reeves affair infuriated me afresh when I remembered what Dudley had said about her warning Noel’s father not to let his four handsome daughters run around. Damn Beatrice! She’s like a bigger, more alarming version of the Ranee, without the Ranee’s occasional bouts of charm and financial sustenance.

Still, I did see Noel naked. We bathed by the light of a bicycle lamp propped up in the grass by the edge of the water. Of course we were not alone–although in my mind, we were. A whole bunch of Bedalians–a whole school of them, ha!–was there. And neither could we actually make out one another’s naked forms, just white shapes, like the cows at Grantchester Meadows, looming up, ghostly but vivid. We all laughed and dived in the
weir. I felt the water-lilies clutching my legs, and that gasping, bracing thrill in my lungs that swimming in cold rivers always produces.

Then when we returned to camp, we sat for a while and I was able to feast on Noel for longer, watching her, again in the bicycle light, near the blazing fire, the river water trickling from her hair down her bare shoulders where her towel had slipped. I stared and stared at those bare shoulders. With such poor light, I couldn’t see much: only a few strands of duckweed. The moon rose full and we crawled back into our sleeping-bags and she slept, but I lay awake writing my pathetic little lines, with the vision of her dripping in my mind and she only two tents away.

Wells’s emphasis on free love, his conviction that this will be the model for the sexes in future…Something about this thought alarms me. The man has said that in order to experiment you must be base. The relationships between men and women are so hemmed in by law that to experiment starts with being damned. Fine sentiment, of course. Intellectually I cannot fault it. But. Is this to be all, then? Are relations between men and women to be reduced to this–to copulation? Will it be the end of love, and of all feelings more holy and beautiful? There is horror for me in that idea and it is this: I don’t want my darling Noel to be base. She is a flower in moonlight. She is not childish and befouled like James, full of jokes and phlegm and other disgusting things.

How confusing. It’s all very well, but my burdensome virginity remained unlost.

And with this thought another young woman suddenly appeared beneath my window, calling up. Ka Cox. I heard the sound of a bicycle being propped against the wall of the house, and then Ka calling softly, shyly, clearly afraid for others to hear, ‘Rupert!’

A stone was thrown before I could push on the window and look out over the hedges. Then I saw her head, wrapped
peasant-style in a vivid green scarf, and caught sight of her pince-nez. My mood lifted at once. ‘Hello there! I’m still breakfasting–with you in five minutes!’

She beamed up at me, bending to undo some of the tangle in her skirts, which had been tucked into her boots. Thank Heaven! Earnest, dear, horsy Ka, with her matronly bosom, her slightly stooped figure, her serious face and her pince-nez–surely she will work like a charm? My thoughts returned immediately to the Fabian leaflets she was no doubt–in her devoted capacity as Secretary of the Society–delivering. She was more effective than a bracing dip in a cold bath to return a person at once from their lowest to their most elevated thoughts.

‘Ka! Such joy to see you!’

The dear thing beamed and beamed.

So many books, he has, Mr Brooke. Books sprouting everywhere. I suppose this is how all poets are, or maybe all Varsity men, but it’s a wonder. Sometimes I sneak a look at the titles. This makes me sick with ignorance.
A Room with a View
by E. M. Forster.
Montaigne
by somebody called Florio. Piles of copies of the
English Review
magazine. A huge great thing called
The Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission
. How could anyone read such a volume?
Antony and Cleopatra
by William Shakespeare–I recognise that one, of course. The other one I recognise is
The Secret River
by R. Macaulay–this is a brand new book, with flowers down the spine, and in blue ink inside it says, ‘To Rupert’, so I know this must be the same Miss Macaulay who visited him here at the Orchard. I sneaked a glance inside, but when I read ‘the slumberous afternoon was on the slow green river like the burden of a dream’ my brain thickened and refused to carry on.

When he asked me, he had no idea how stupid so many books can make a girl feel. I said nothing, knowing how he would laugh–that sudden, high-pitched, girlish blast of laughter he does sometimes–if he knew that the last book I read was
The Book of Cheerfulness
by Flora Klickmann. I was glad–so glad–to have at least read Mr H. G. Wells, although afraid of blushing when I feared he might broach the subject of relations between men and women. I did not venture my opinion of the heroine of that book. That she was a very silly girl indeed to end up in a room alone with a man and not realise what he might think of her.

I wasted a good portion of time in his room and now I have a deal of catching up to do. There’s the dusting and the fireplaces, the hateful black-leading to do, then the halls and stairs to be swept, and the boots waiting to be cleaned in the kitchen and, after all that, the lunches for the first guests to start preparing. I can’t really understand how I allowed myself to be delayed–after all, he is so
annoying
, and so spoiled, and I always feel he is trying to provoke me somehow, catch me out, make me blush or falter with those questions, put in such a strange way.

After that night, that first night when I saw him naked, returning from his swim in Byron’s Pool I have learned that I am a very silly, puritanical girl. He was disappointed, he said, that the lower orders were as bad as the upper ones in this respect. He had thought that a girl raised on bees–birds and bees, he said meaningfully–a girl raised so might be more likely to trade the ‘ Lilies and Languors of Virtue for the Raptures and Roses of Vice’.

When I did not know how to reply, he said, ‘Swinburne, Nell.’

It’s this that infuriates me. He speaks in riddles, seeking always to have the advantage. After all, when I told him of my brothers and the eel-hives and the days spent on the mere catching them, I didn’t try to trick him with words he didn’t know, even though I laughed to myself to hear him describe it as ‘such joy and
liberation!’ and to see from the glow in his face that he was picturing some lazy, playful days of his own rather than the hours of patient work that Edmund and Stanley endure for Sam. I think he is always conscious of the impression he is making, tossing his hair and struggling to hide his real thoughts.

‘Life is splendid, Nell, but I wish I could write poetry,’ he said, this morning. ‘I write very beautiful stories.’

‘Do you, sir? Here’s your hot milk, and would you like me to bring your slippers?’

‘Yes…One story I am accomplishing is about a young man who, for various reasons, felt his bookish life vain and wanted to get in touch with Nature. He began by learning to climb trees but, in clambering up an easy fir tree, fell off a low branch six feet above the ground and broke his neck. A short, simple story.’

Then he told me of his recent visit to a place called Penshurst, to surprise some friends of his who were camping there, including one ‘very special girl’, whose name is Noel Olivier. Her father, he said, is Sir Sydney, as if I should know who that person is. He chatted as I made up the fire in the grate, the morning having a late-summer chill, and so my back was to him, which was a good thing: he couldn’t see my expression. He talked of the girl and her three lovely sisters and some strange school called Bedales that the girl attends–
she is a schoolgirl then, younger than me, even!
–a school where, as far as I could understand, nudity and swimming in cold lakes takes the place of book learning.