The Great Lover (5 page)

Well, now. I was tired later, but every time the scene formed in my mind, my face would flare again. Undressing for bed, I fancied I heard him–only a landing between us–although likely it was just Kittie snoring and snuffling in her sleep. I closed my eyes, and on the inside of my eyelids I saw him, in all his glory, as Mother would have said, a marbled colour on account of the twilight.

I turned over, turned my face to the wall for shame, and tried to make the picture go away. I sat up in bed, and my heart beat fast with anger. I thought again of Mr Brooke’s appearance. I thought again of what he’d said, some clever joke, I knew, from this Mr Gosse I’d never heard of. His laughter, or rather the memory of it, made my face flame again.

Of course a girl like me has seen a man naked before. I’ve seen Edmund and Stanley and Father–it was my job to lay him out, to bathe his poor stiff body. Sheep’s Green and Coe Fen are always pink with boys in the summer, as naked as God made them. We only went there once as children, but it made us smile to see the ladies going for their picnics Up the River and how they hid behind their parasols so as not to see all that pinkness dancing about while the gentlemen had to row like billy-oh but, then, none of those occasions are the same thing. Edmund and Stanley are just boys. Father was an old man. The swimming boys, though, they were not ‘horrid’, as Kittie says. I always thought them a beautiful sight–thin naked boys dancing about in the sunlight on the bright green grass; the sparkling river; the reckless high dives, when the slim bodies shot through the air like angels coming down from Heaven.

When you lived as we did, four to a bed and in a house as small as the sheds the university men use here for boats, you learn fast. You learn to be like the three wise monkeys and hear, see and say nothing. But now my mind would not leave it alone, and who could I tell? The glory of him: the magnificence, the sheer wicked springing force of it–like a soldier saluting, or like the long fowling gun out in the punt. Oh, to be a man and possess such a toy; small wonder my brothers could not leave theirs alone! I had more sympathy for Father then, these seven long years since Mother’s death, thinking how he was just like the sun, rising every morning without fail, and how he struggled to hide it from me.

But it wasn’t Father I was thinking of, nor Father who had opened me to these ideas of Nature and of showing a greater sympathy. Every time I tried to close my eyes and sleep I would see it again, and my body would flicker somewhere, like a match being struck. Then at last the anger seeped away and instead I wanted to giggle. How strange to be a gentleman and possess such a thing, and so casually own it that even when a young girl
he’s scarcely met is accidentally
greeted
by it the gentleman might simply press at it, casually, with the flat of his palm, the way a child might push down a yelping dog; only to have it bounce back up again.

I tried to think hard of Pudsey Dawson, for that snuffed out the flickering-match sensation and dispelled the power of the picture in my mind’s eye. Mr Rupert Brooke’s splendid maleness compared to a dog! Mr Pudsey Dawson is an ugly bull-terrier, not an attractive beast. He eats frogs. He is too alive, too much of a yapping thing! So springy! It should, of course, be something more glorious, like a great head of strong golden corn, or Pan with his pipes. I smiled, tasting the cool kindliness of the pillow. How offended Mr Brooke would surely be, if only he knew what I was thinking.

Oh, the bouncing elasticity and hard heart of Youth! I’ve just this minute received an appallingly cold letter from the disgraceful young wench with the live hair that is Shining and Free (Noel Olivier, of course), which makes me want to strike her. Instead we plan to visit her again, Dudley and I, to descend on her near the river Eden at Penshurst where Dudley assures me she’ll be bathing nude with her sisters (Bryn especially, I hope) or at the very least drinking cream and lying on the grass. There I shall gaze upon her magnificence. Or, rather, Dudley and I shall affect to be passing, hands in pockets. As all those pupils of Bedales are like fish and cannot live long out of water, if we time it well, we should be in luck.

Now, if I can persuade her to bathe nude with me, that might be something. Of course I mean simply innocent, child-like naked swimming. It’s always a question of clothes. You become part of it all, and bathe. The only terror left is of plunging head
foremost into blackness; a moderate terror. I have always had some lurking suspicion that the river may have run dry, after all, and that there is, as there seems, no water in it. (I knew a man once who never dared to dive because he always feared there might be a corpse floating just below the surface into which he’d go headlong.)

I bathed again tonight in Byron’s Pool, and wandered back to the Orchard House, past the tin-roofed lavatory, which that refined working man Mr Neeve calls a ‘two-holer’. He says this with a proclamatory cough every time, as if to boast. Perhaps the dear fellow has two arses?

As I passed it, the black-haired beauty appeared again, popping up like a frozen monkey, hands again glued to her eyes while I passed her. I could not help myself from laughing. I thought how like Noel she was, and dreamed a little. Why, their names are practically identical, except for one letter! And yet a girl who lives without parent or chaperone to prevent it must surely experience things that a child like Noel, protected by all those sisters and parents, could not. In point of fact, what could one ever know about such lives as Nell’s? About such queer minds, which must remain as mysterious as the minds of water nymphs or coalmen?

I sighed then, and retired to bed to pump ship. After that I wrote to my dear friend and most assiduous correspondent, Master James Strachey–more banter aimed at discouraging and inflaming his crush on me in equal measure. James writes that he’s sorry to see that poor Kitty Holloway was arrested, but I cannot for one moment understand his concern for a Suffragette! Has the boy gone mad? And he seriously expects me to help him distribute announcements for Shaw’s
Press Cuttings
at the Court Theatre and doesn’t at all seem to understand that I am not remotely vexed by questions of Suffrage, in any direction, shape or form. He also said, mysteriously, that poor Cecil Taylor–I can’t even remember who he is–has three
of something, then enticingly refrains from explaining what he means. ‘Three of what?’ I wrote back. James jealously believes I’m in love with Apostle no. 244–Hobhouse (who had an affair with Duncan, according to James). Little does he know the uncomfortable truth of my utter and untarnished virginity. And long may I hide it from him.

Three what? Three
balls
he writes on a postcard, which the Postmaster General graciously conceded to deliver, the following day.

With Hobhouse James is far off the mark. Closer are his questions about Charles Lascelles, who at least has the dignity of being exquisitely handsome and a former love of mine from schooldays. But James writes, ‘You needn’t think I’m jealous of a ghost,’ and I suppose he has a point–Charlie is a boy of yesteryear, with Rugby seeming a hundred years ago now.

All this made for a busy evening of scribbling tonight, after a day of lunches and dinners and teas with the shifting folk of Cambridge, but very little work being done. And, amusing though it may be, my feelings when I’m alone, and all the bright things have departed, are rarely light-hearted, but more often disturbed.

Tonight, as ever, my mind returns to Dick, and the nature of his…illness. His drinking. The thing that sticks with me is that horrible ironic letter from Dick’s firm. How it arrived–in the midst of the funeral preparations–with its airy news of a better job. Would it have cheered him? Would it have been enough? I never thought so, somehow. His unhappiness seemed deep, constitutional. And that is the fear–that is the dark thought that sometimes nestles up to me, here in this bed. That it might be a familial weakness, this dark, deep despair of Dick’s. What paltry gifts do I have to set against it? Only my friends, my many thousands of cheery and airy friends, and my bright thoughts and my Fabian principles (which keep me from the temptations of beer, of course), my writing and my professed desire to live in the here and now and my feeling for art and
living–and yes, why, I have persuaded myself: it is true. I am nothing like Dick. No, nothing at all! Nothing like that side of the family.

Thankfully, the unhappy ballooning of these thoughts was splendidly punctured by Nell Golightly, bringing in my milk and apple pie. I watched her set the tray down and stand with her back to my little window so that the light shone through that fine black hair of hers, curling at the bottom of her cap, tinting it red at the edges, as if singed by fire. She has such a way of standing, surveying me and waiting for my instruction, with no hint of subservience or insolence, which I find grand.

I sat upon the bed, cross-legged, and nodded to her, and longed to ask her Important Things–things of which I have no knowledge yet, but I know I would like to ask. Nell reminds me of a young nurse I had once, a girl I thought I had forgotten, who had a manner not dissimilar: straightforward, straight-talking, clean as soap and just as fragrant. And staring at Nell raised the memory of that young nurse bathing me, it must have been when Alfred was newborn, perhaps even before we moved to School Field, because surely once living there Mother never employed a nurse, but was Housemistress to all of us?

What I remember is the feel of friendly fingers rubbing soap over my legs, and splashing water up to my chest. And, looking down, the sight of the water trickling towards my white stomach and my little member perking up like a soldier standing to attention, and saying something to the nurse to this effect, and her smiling–yes, she definitely smiled and did not scold me!, although she ceased her rubbings and her splashings–and then suddenly the Ranee was in the room, casting about us a giant sweeping grey towel of disapproval and worse than that. Worse than disapproval, I knew at once how she felt towards me, all the feelings she swept into the room with her: disgust, horror, dislike, might I even say intense
hatred
for my very childish boyish perkiness. Swirling this mood around me and aiming it
finally at such an essential bit of me made me know at once what she felt about all of me.

That nurse–her name suddenly came to me as Dorothy–was soon after dismissed and I was expected to bathe unaided or with my brothers, but not before the girl had muttered to me one day, ‘Poor Mrs Brooke, don’t be too hard on her, Rupert, for no boy can understand what it is to lose a daughter,’ and the two events conflated at once, and I decided in my childish mind that this was why Mother so disliked my male anatomy, and would like to chop it off and make me a girl, like my poor dead sister.

Musing on this only caused the same conflicting feelings to surface and I wished to God I might think of something else. When Nell Golightly had gone, with the soft closing click of the door behind her and the squeak of her tread on the stairs, I turned my mind deliberately, and with an effort, to the group of Young Poets I met that time in London. All of them extremely poor. And how they write–some are good, others bad–as they talk. That is to say, their poems give the fullest value when pronounced as they thought and felt them. They allow for
ow
being
aow
. Their love poems begin (I invent) ‘If yew wd come again to me’. That is healthy. That way is life. In them is more hope–and more fulfilment–than in the old-world passion and mellifluous despair of any gentleman’s or lady’s poetry.

Mightn’t Nellie inspire poetry of that sort in me? Mightn’t she offer what Noel can’t possibly? Because, and Noel’s letters make this clear, severing Noel from her family, from her protective sisters who do not allow her to walk alone with a man and were horrified by that simple punt down river, is not a possibility. Whereas Nell is all alone, and has no one here to separate her from me. Only the weight and silence of custom, of my own cowardice, of a million things.

How easy or hard will it be to talk to the maid? There is this strange idea that the lower classes, the people entering into the
circle now of the educated, are coarsely devoid of taste, likely to swamp the whole of culture in undistinguished, raucous, stumpy arts that know no tradition. It is only natural that the tastes of the lower classes
should
be at present infinitely worse than ours. The amazing thing is that it is probably rather better. It is true many Trade Unionists do not read Milton. Nor do many university men. But take the best of each. Compare the literary criticism of the
Labour Leader
with that of the
Saturday Review
. It is enormously better, enormously readier to recognise good literature.

Of course, I myself have written for the
Spectator
and do not wish to decry it. But the force of primness that exists in this country, the washy, dull, dead upper-class brains that lurk in the Victorian shadows…do I wish to throw in my lot with them? Is it all to be such prettiness, my work, and is that what I’m to be remembered for? Not the short fat man with fair hair who wrote the plays (Shakespeare, idiot!) but the pretty golden one who wrote–what was it again that he wrote? Oh, did he write then, that golden Apollo, so handsome, hardly needed to lift a pen, surely, it was enough for him to flick his hair and bend his arse over some Trinity Fellow’s desk, wasn’t it? ‘Lest man go down into the dark with his best songs unsung…’

O, that way madness lies; let me shun that. My head hurts. I have the pink-eye again.

Mr Brooke doesn’t seem unduly interested in a lady’s looks–the lady here yesterday with two other gentlemen was an ill-dressed lump, yet he seemed to like her well enough, laughing and once putting his arm on hers. Her name is Miss Darwin, and she is related to the famous man who claims we are all no better than apes in the forest. She wears a walking skirt with
brush braid sewn round the bottom to catch the mud, which is a clever idea, although it looks funny.