The Great Lover (13 page)

I pick up the leaflet, and read on. It describes a society for the Prevention of Destitution, where workers can be ensured of ‘steady progress in health and happiness, honesty and kindliness, culture and scientific knowledge, and the spirit of adventure’. I can’t stop myself thinking sourly of how Mr and Mrs Webb, and Rupert too, know precious little about such things! I suppose the author meant to raise our spirits with that sentence but suddenly, for me, the writing wavers. My eyes flood with tears as it looms up in front of me: Ely Union Workhouse, the place they call the Spike. Sam has said that the old ways, the ways on the water, wildfowling and eeling, can’t go on for ever, now the land in the Fens is more successfully drained. He says a new pump engine is coming that will do the job it took ten men to
do, and then the battle to keep the water back might well be won. And with the water would go the wildfowl, the geese and eels and pike that feed us all. Since it would take only one outbreak of disease to kill a hive and ruin a honey crop for a year, we are perilously close to ending up there, in the Spike, if things turn bad. I’ve never known why the villagers call it the Spike, but to me it’s the exact same shape as one of our skeps, and so I picture it swarming inside, abuzz with the heaving, gathering brown mass of three hundred and sixty creatures who will never see daylight again.

I let another hot tear spill. Why dwell on all this sadness, this misery now? Is it the knowledge that Rupert, too, is attending at his father’s bedside? And then I chide myself–why do my thoughts always turn to Rupert? You can be sure, Nell Golightly, that he is not thinking of you! With an effort, I think of poor foolish Kittie, giving up such a good position and a home and food in her belly for a future so undecided and all for a cause that everyone knows is doomed to failure. Then it strikes me like an arrow from Heaven. Betty. I should suggest Betty for the under-maid’s job! After all, Lily will be fifteen in October; easily old enough to take over from her, and the boys will still have their mothering and cooking and cleaning when it’s needed. If Betty were to work here that would be ten shillings more to live off, and one less person to feed, with Betty’s food and keep all paid for.

When Mrs Stevenson at last comes downstairs and I mention Betty to her, she says at once it’s a splendid idea and I’m to fetch my sister right away. She says she will ‘hold the fort’ in the tea gardens, murmuring that when Cambridge realises ‘our dear shoeless Mr Brooke’ is away in Rugby, the visitors will surely be halved. With that she scoops the Poor Law reform leaflets from the tables, stuffing them into the fire. ‘Chop-chop!’ she tells me, clapping her hands behind my head.

Rupert will be angry when he discovers her crime; those leaflets are sincerely meant by him, I’m sure of it.

January 1910, School Field Rugby

And now I’m ill myself with a fever and a temperature of 102, and blackly angry at all and sundry (especially James, who writes of his love for me at the most inopportune moments). I long to talk to Nellie, to Nellie! To bury my face in her neck and breasts and blubber all the ridiculous, hideous, shameful, childish nonsense that I have been feeling these last few days. The rage that Father was never the man I wanted him to be; the shame of longing for it to be otherwise. Do other fellows get better luck? Would they find it amusing to have a father with the nickname ‘Tooler’?

But then–what daydream, what fantasy is that? Nellie has no feeling for me, and would tell me to ‘buck up’, just as the Ranee would, and I would be shamed once more. I’ve tested her…that impulsive kiss I ventured…The response was calm, and unequivocal. (Oh, I want to bury myself up to the neck in a cellar full of dirt every time I remember it! What on earth possessed me? The bees, no doubt, cast some sort of spell on me…Nell will think me a perfect example of my class: a precise cliché in every way…I positively
groan
with embarrassment whenever I remember it.) She is as solid and good as a bar of white soap and nothing I press upon her can soil her or lather her. Our conversations, the occasions when I felt certain that something, oh, very close to a
real
exchange took place
between us, well, of course all that feeling has stalled in the face of the tragic reality: I am vile, full of lust, and a slave to inconstancy. Nell, being the opposite of all those things, knows it better than anyone.

At least my wretched virginity is cast off. I should be more relieved or, even, delighted. I should be dancing a jig on the tin roof of the Orchard tea pavilion where the graceful Nell stands with her fellow maids, awaiting my every whim. But part of the problem is, who to tell? It was, thankfully, Nellie, not one of the others, who silently took away the sheets and delivered them back to me in snowy pristineness, as if the whole incident had never happened.

A few days later Denham and I cycled past one another near the Backs, and for a filthy moment I feared he would cut me. Then his hand flew up in an insouciant wave, and I thought, All is forgiven, and if he turns up at the Orchard again, I’m in for another go. He always was such a charming, lustful boy.

But then a weariness descends, for I have discovered that the career of the Sodomite is not for me. Practice and experience have not in the slightest erased my love for Noel, or quelled my lust for Nellie (or should ‘love’ and ‘lust’ be reversed?). I have resolved that Sodomy can only ever be for me a hobby, not a full-time occupation. I’ve discovered I’m no true Sodomite, at least not in the way of James and Lytton. Perhaps only one quarter, and the other three quarters shared equally between Noel, Nellie and Ka Cox.

Ka now. Why did I picture her just then? Turning up at the Orchard on her bicycle, doing something complicated with her skirt and boots to allow her to cycle…She would surely be a safer wager. That bear-like plodding and devotion to the socialist cause. (Isn’t that Virginia’s nickname for her–something to do with a bear?) That earnestness. So, for a happy moment, I picture Ka at Fabian meetings, in her secretary role, with her head bent over the accounts and her dark green beads glinting
like bubbles of river-water at her throat. Jacques has admitted he finds her attractive–if only I could say the same! She does have a certain, well,
dash
in how she dresses: the peasant scarves wound round her head actually suit her, whereas on the other girls they look contrived, striving rather for effect. Her pince-nez make me think of her in the same way as Dudley–as rather kind and hapless. And she is certainly warm, and clever, with a marvellous listening ear. (A sort of cushion or soft-floor quality.) In addition to all that, she is a wealthy orphan too, so not nearly as well protected as Noel Olivier. Oh, yes, she is a friendly girl and highly obtainable, too…but the heart, sadly, does not work like that, and I cannot muster mine to beat quicker for the Ka Coxes of this world.

Last night I dreamed I was in love again with the One before the Last. (I’m writing a poem that begins with those lines.) Charles Lascelles, to be precise. Being here at School Field inevitably conjures up Charles for me–that day when he asked for a photograph of me! Would that it had been him, not Denham, I had seduced at the Orchard…or even Denham’s brother, Hugh, but of course with Denham you could say there had been that long period of foreplay. We had hugged and kissed and strained, Denham and I, on and off for years–ever since that quiet evening I rubbed him, in the dark, speechlessly, in the smaller of the two dorms. But in the summer holidays of 1906 and 1907 he had often taken me out to the hammock, after dinner, to lie entwined there. He had vaguely hoped, I fancy…But I lay always thinking of Charles.

Denham was, though, to my taste, attractive. So honestly and friendlily lascivious. Charm, not beauty, was his fate. So it was Denham, and not Charles, whom I had, just as it seems it is destined to be Ka, and not Noel or Nell, whom I might have. I have seen the way Ka looks at me. I endeavour not to notice.

Sometimes I wonder why that schoolgirl Noel Olivier is so appealing to me. She has none of the attributes of Ka. To name
three faults, she is infuriating, stubborn, ignorant. Her sister Bryn is surely the exquisite beauty and a practised flirt, too. Even Margery, maddening though she is, is lovelier. Noel is a mere child. A horrible child whom I can’t seem to win over.

Little wonder that my mood is bleak. Here, death cowers in every room–inside cupboards and coiled in drawers, ready to spring.

At breakfast, the servants bring toast and tea with a shuffling gait, so unlike the lively step of Nell, and even the cups and plates smell of sickness, and remind me of long days spent in the hospital dorm, my eyes stuck and plugged with streaming conjunctivitis, so that all my attention congeals there and my eyes are the only part of my body that feel alive. Is that what Father feels now? Is he suffering, in that simple, physical way, pain and discomfort in the head and eyes, or is it something far worse? Does he in fact understand that he is facing down death–and what is it like to grapple with that particular foe?

There was that moment when I first arrived, standing in the hall still clutching my small leather bag as if there were a question over whether I might stay or not, and when we all talked of other things. Alfred and Mother and the servants–we talked of the trains and the weather and the new telephone and why I hadn’t first called to say I was arriving (I hadn’t the penny for the telephone at the station). Mother took me upstairs and into the room, which–never exactly a spring-like room–now was drowned in a dark, winter green light, with the curtains tightly closed. Of course thoughts of Dick hovered all around me and the terrible aching fear welled up again: that it was hereditary, this tendency to melancholy and blackness and a frail mind and worse: that even without his illness Father had always had it, and Dick too, and mightn’t I be the next to go exactly the same way?

Mother sat down beside the little table with its Mer-Syren pills for Indigestion, Biliousness and Nervous Depression and I
kept looking at Father, with his paper-fine skin and his eyes open but dull, then back at Mother, not knowing what to say. And nobody dared to say the things they thought, and there were words floating in the air and in the brain and in the middle of the conversation and one suddenly saw them and felt unable to speak.

Then last night the Ranee broke down with me. I have seen her weep so few times in my life that my palms sprang with sweat, and I was immediately again a child of six years old. I watched, as her bowed head shook in her hands, like a bouncing silver melon and I wondered in horrified fascination whether it might in fact drop right off and she lift only the stub of her neck to me, rather than that wild, beseeching face.

She prayed, she said, he could die quickly.

This bald statement flitted ominously in the air between us like a bat, and then she stood up. Her shaking ceased and I saw at once that she was recovering, that she was becoming again the formidable Matron, Housemistress, School Mother she had always been–and I felt a little calmer for clearly no action from me was required. I had neither embraced her nor even moved towards her, and the powerful revulsion I felt, wondering if I was called upon to do either, subsided like a wave, as she moved away from me and composed herself, dabbing at her eyes.

‘Oh, my darling Rupie, thank Heaven for you!’ she ejected, suddenly, as if I had risen to the occasion. My shame was absolute.

We went next door to the green Nubolic room, and sat by the bedside with the old man croaking between us. Once he opened his eyes and seemed to focus, but not on me, on something just behind me, over my shoulder. (It was ever thus. Did he ever truly see me, I wonder, see the Rupertness of me, rather than the obedient, dreary boy he longed for?)

An ugly thought came back to me then. How at fourteen, I once heard a boy say out loud what I knew had long been rumoured: that Tooler (Father) was so horse-whipped that
Mother sent him out to pick up manure for the garden in the middle of the night. I thrashed the offender, of course. Yet what I remembered was that even as I did it I wished it was Father I was pummelling. Why could he not stand up to her, just the once, and set an example for all of us?