The Great Lover (4 page)

Yes, marvellous place this. Except that the dear plump weather-beaten kindly old lady gave me a look like a donkey’s rump when she saw my bare feet, and one even fouler (if that could be possible) when she caught me making some benign request of the maid. Who is rather pretty with the sort of high cheekbones that give her an almost Oriental look, and eyes of an extraordinary violet colour. I almost had to duck my head closer to take a second look, but that would have been…rather obvious.

My bedroom looks as though it hasn’t been cleaned since Thomas Hardy was first weaned and the beam above my bed sheds little flakes of rotting wood like a shower of chocolate on the sheets in the morning. As I said, a rustic.

I’m glad to have escaped here, though. The delicious freedom of writing a letter to my darling Noel Olivier while lying face down in bed in a room filled with the scent of dusty lilac–rather than working on Shakespeare or snuffling together in a room of besocked King’s men–more than compensates me for the apple lady’s opprobrium. Despite the fact that my intention in moving here is to win not one but two prizes and cover myself with glory, I’m not working on either of them–instead I’m lying here daydreaming, writing to Noel, and dreaming up a paper to give to the Carbonari Society next week. The time is right for me to dazzle the Carbonari with fresh thoughts (as I outstandingly failed to do with my poetry a few months ago). So my paper will be called ‘From Without’–something about the splendid difference between my life out here among the sun and the dog-roses and the black-haired beauty with the eyes like harebells who brings my breakfast, and
their lives
, with their whirring brains and clever bright eyes, evolving their next joke or two, in the stifling rooms of King’s.

I am only two miles away, in Grantchester, but
here
there are so much better things to be concerned about, such as the white bed and the open window with the dark coming in.

The problem is, I’m so certainly and prominently an entertainer
of so many various (and possibly not continuously compatible) young people that the likelihood of my paper on Shakespeare and my essay for the Harness Prize and my paper for the Carbonari Society
and
my thousand letters to a thousand friends actually being written is small indeed. I do find it more pressing and a million trillion times more glorious to stand naked at the edge of the black water in perfect silence than sit in stuffy rooms thinking bespectacled thoughts.

Two nights ago I did exactly that. The water shocked me as it came upwards with its icy-cold, life-giving embrace. Then a figure appeared: some local deity or naiad of the stream. In point of fact I know exactly who it was. It was the young maid-of-all-work, the afore-mentioned black beauty: a girl I’ve discovered is called Nellie Golightly. (Which sounds like something out of a music hall.) The sight of me turned her to stone. I acted as though it was the most normal thing in the world to me to appear naked in front of a beautiful young woman I hardly know. But then she opened her eyes again, picked up a peg that had dropped on to the lawn and marched off without a glance back. Nude young men with stunned erections are obviously
de rigueur
where she comes from.

It’s impressive, this refusal of hers to be impressed. I rather like her. I resolve to swim again, tomorrow night and every night. Nell reminds me of a girl I once saw, a working girl with her fellow, standing under a lamp-post on Trinity Street, her face lit up. The intensity with which he kissed her, the freedom, the abandon, all were apparent to me in that glimpse, and then I became horribly aware of myself as proud owner of none of those qualities. Fixed there, staring, like a hungry urchin gazing at a cake in the baker’s window. A version of myself that made me shudder, melt back into the soup along with all the other dull, spectacled people from Cambridge. Oh, Grantchester…Feeling the grass between my toes, and the river sweep over my head, perhaps at last I might shake off the sensation that my
head is not attached to my body, that I am not really here at all.

As for Nell…That sumptuous nymph, naiad, the unearthly creature…(There is something infinitely good, and gracious, in the dark shadow that forms between her breasts when she leans forward to kneel at the grate or to put something on the table. I find myself dreaming up excuses–‘Could I trouble you for another cup of milk? Yes, just there on the rather low table is fine, thank you…’–to allow me to witness it frequently.) I feel sure she is an extraordinarily intelligent girl. Her eyes, now I think of it, are not so much harebells as–the exact shade of violets in a darkening wood. And she smells divine, like honey, of course (for I have discovered that this is what she does, tend the bees, and she has a rare talent for it) and apples and grass and floor-polish. What on earth can such a girl be thinking of as she stands beside the oh-so-refined Mr Neeve with his handkerchief on his head?

Enough about Nell. This kind of distraction will not get the Carbonari paper written.

Last week I arranged, during the visit of one Noel Olivier, that I might be the one to punt her down-river to Cambridge and snatch a few minutes alone with her. Having achieved it, so startled was I by the sudden absence of sisters, friends, parents, tutors and chaperones that I fell devastatingly silent. Noel sat with her chin tucked towards her chest in that way she has, her serious brown head bowed towards the water, dangling one hand over the edge; I stared at the buttons on the shoulder of her grey pinafore and the parting of her mouse-coloured hair, while digging the pole deep into the mud and preparing to do my fresh boyish stunt once more. (Oh, when I was in love with you, then I was clean and brave! And miles around the wonder grew–How well did I behave!)

‘You will be delighted to know that I’ve taken the plunge and signed the pledge–or the Basis, is it?–or whatever the blazes
it’s called: Mr Rupert Brooke is now a fully signed up member of the Fabian Society,’ was my opening gambit.

She looked up, chin still to chest, and her eyes widened in–one can only imagine–joy unmitigated at my marvellous new level of commitment to the socialist cause she holds so dear. Admittedly, she said nothing, but I am sure that these were her emotions; after all, she imbibed socialism and atheism at her mother’s breast; her father, Sir Glamorous Dashing Sydney Olivier was practically a founder member, was he not? Still she remained maddeningly silent. Then suddenly her hand trailing the water snatched back towards the boat as she realised she was swirling it in a froth of goose feathers where some poor creature had met an ugly death.

‘Such a shame…’ she murmured. ‘If I had a butterfly net I might have caught the feathers–there’s a pillowful of goosedown there…’

I laughed. ‘Ha! Here am I thinking you are lamenting the goose’s brief life on earth and about to wish it a better one in Heaven—’

‘You know I don’t believe in goose Heaven, or any other kind, and neither do you,’ she said, frowning slightly, and raising those intense grey eyes to mine.

Here was the part of the trip where the meadows and willows gave way to the rushing sound of the weir and we had to disembark the boat and drag it a few hundred yards over the wooden rollers before launching it again. Noel obliged with admirable zeal, but still, with only the two of us and she in a skirt, it was awkward. I had arranged to drop her with her sister Margery and the others on the sleek, forbidding lawns of King’s and as we were now as far as the Mathematical Bridge, I didn’t have long to enjoy this conversation. So I paused, pretending to mop my feverish brow, holding the pole still and allowing the boat to drift slowly along the glassy green water. ‘Don’t I? I’m writing a paper, for the Carbonari, on that very subject…’

‘Another of your secret societies,’ she muttered sarcastically.

I laid the pole the length of the punt and came to sit beside her. She looked up at me expectantly. From the Backs came shouts of students and towards us the thump of wood on water, as a noisy canoe full of revellers approached, scattering ducks.

‘But you see, Noel, I was raised on Heaven–things are quite different for you. Dick’s funeral was full of heraldic burbling about angels and trumpets…and God forbid anyone mentioning–me, for instance–that if life was so glorious, why was Dick in such a dash to be out of it?’

‘You think your brother–committed suicide?’

‘Oh, nothing as–
considered
as that. I only mean–his drinking, when his health was already poor–his seeming not to care. And sometimes I remember him, you know, so many little memories, over the years. He was six when I was born. I doubt he ever liked me: I was just his horrible pudding-haired younger brother. What he
liked
was to thrash me at cricket, at chess, at rugby. You name it, he excelled in thrashing me at it. But he was there, the backdrop to my childhood, like curtains, like the smell of Watson’s Nubolic Disinfectant Soap and now he’s–not. I can’t quite believe it. Where is he? I ask myself. Dick, where are you? And the answer comes back: nowhere.’

Another boat passed us and the occupants waved loudly and I faintly recognised them–Justin Brooke, and a party, I think–and blushed to be found so still and intent, next to Noel. In my confusion, I hoped that Noel had not recognised the Brooke Bond Tea Boy, Justin, so said nothing, and pretended an insouciant, debonair perkiness, in the face of his leering smiles as his boat slid away from us. If this got back to Margery, I’d suffer. But Noel was tactful. She listened and she nodded and she did not panic, as Mother would have done, at my raising the extraordinary subject of Dick.

‘Yes,’ she said simply. Then: ‘I envy those people who have Firm Beliefs. An afterlife and so forth. It must be very comforting.’

‘How few of us realise how little time there is! If only we could grasp this in our imaginations, I mean really grasp it, not just know it intellectually, with our heads, but know it really with our hearts and bodies…how long the before and after probably are, and how dark…’

I expected Noel to look shocked, then, tell me to ‘buck up’ and speak of something cheerier. I almost wished she had. Instead she said, ‘Yes, isn’t that the point of the country, somehow? To remind us, I mean. That there is no ‘state beyond the grave’. Last week Bunny and I found a dead mole under the bushes at the bottom of the garden. Bunny thought we should dissect it to see how it all worked—’

Without meaning to, Noel had shifted the mood. I stood up and picked up the pole at once and with one deep push slid us under the Mathematical Bridge and on towards the spires of King’s. I also burst out laughing.

‘Last week you and Bunny Garnett were skinning a mole? Is that what they teach you at Bedales? How appallingly grisly you Bedalians are. Do tell my dear Bunny that I called him “grisly”, won’t you? So is he planning to be a veterinary surgeon now? Are you, in fact? I thought it was to be a doctor, last time we spoke…’

‘Well, I do intend to be a doctor, yes, and I don’t see what’s funny—’

‘Oh, Noel, how glorious you are! How truly, truly magnificent! You are a Prince among Women, a—’

‘If you talk to me like a schoolgirl I shall beat you over the head with your own pole.’

‘And she would do! I’m sure of it! Oh, what a girl is Noel Olivier…she’d throw you in the drink as soon as look at yer…!’

And the mood changed, and the memory of Dick was dissolved, and Noel told me not to despair, for in the country you dimly sense, after all, if not an afterlife then a ‘wonderful unity…’ and we agreed on this, and grew peaceful again, after
I had whooped with joy at the damned calming good sense of Noel Olivier.

I’m trying to remember it all for my paper. There is something in the conversations one has on a river, with a beautiful young woman of not quite sixteen, that sound silly spoken to a group of King’s men in a hot room.

We must feel and be friends. We must seek in Art and in Life for the end
here and now.

(How glorious to be In Love with the young Noel Olivier, but why then did I suddenly picture Nellie, with a glossy black curl sneaking loose from her cap, holding out to me my newly polished boots?) We have inherited the world. Why should we go crying beyond it?

The present is amazingly ours.

Mr Brooke might be a poet but he is, first, a man and in some aspects he does not differ from any other. A girl charged with cleaning out a gentleman’s room knows these things.

So, late that first week I was in the garden, not the orchard; the roses were grey in the twilight but the day’s heat still soaked me as I ran about with my last tasks of the evening. I was on my way to the two-holer where it’s my job to change the buckets in the hatch. Naturally, it’s my least favourite chore and if I could have dispatched it to Kittie, I would. But she has the advantage of her longer time here and greater experience, so I resigned myself and put a peg on my nose. That’s why I didn’t see him at first. Now, thinking on it, I can’t truly believe how it might be possible. But there you have it. A peg was pinching my nose and I did not at first notice that approaching me was the poet who, in the semi-darkness, was quite naked.

My hands flew to my face. I stood there, as if turned to stone, my palms balling my eyes. The peg plopped to the ground. I felt ridiculous, like the child who believes if she covers her face no one can see her, but I honestly couldn’t think what else to do. I heard the tread of his bare feet on the mossy grass and I heard that his steps did not falter in the slightest as he approached me. No, there was no hesitation in those steps at all, and I kept thinking: He must have seen me! Why does he not scurry away, or hide, or step back, or run inside the two-holer?

‘Glorious evening, Nell—’

I opened my eyes then, thinking he had passed, and his hand flew down towards his private parts and, widening his legs comically, he said: ‘“Down, little bounder, down!” as Edmund Gosse said to his heart,’ and then he laughed, rudely and very loudly. He passed so close that I could smell the scent of the muddy river that wrapped his skin. I continued to wait there, stung with shame and embarrassment, like the most foolish of statues, my face aflame under my palms, until Mr Pudsey Dawson, the bull-terrier from the Old Vicarage, hurled himself out of the shadows barking, and chased after Mr Brooke into the house.