The Great Lover (19 page)

‘No. Quite. Perhaps not for those who don’t have it. I’m sorry I mentioned it yesterday, Nell, you being an orphan like Ka. It was horribly tactless of me, but I only meant that Ka not having parents means she’s not chaperoned the way Noel Olivier is, she’s rather more free…but, then, you working people are always free. You have no idea how–how stultifying it is to be a nice upper-class girl like Noel Olivier!’

He is chewing on a strand of dewy grass and spits it out angrily.

‘
I HATE THE UPPER CLASSES
!’

This he says with such a shout that I glance over to the
riverbank, fearing someone might appear there and discover us. I am sitting with my skirts tucked round my knees, watching a ladybird travel carefully down a blade of grass, the grass arching with her weight; bending, but never breaking. ‘I’m not sure we have such freedoms.’

The ladybird’s wings spread like a shell cracking open and she takes off.

‘No, forgive me, Nellie. I suppose not. It’s only that–it’s just that. I once saw a working girl. Not a prostitute, you know, just a girl with her lad, under a lamp-light, on Trinity Street. And she was kissing him, and I saw her face shining in that yellow light, and her eyes were open and in that glimpse—I can never get that glimpse, that expression, out of my mind.’

I shoot a shy glance at him. We are close enough for me to see the blond hairs on his upper lip. Something has peeled back. His face is so naked that I glance hastily away again.

We do not acknowledge what I have seen. He shifts, props himself up on one elbow and pats the dandelions in the grass beside him.

‘Lie here beside me, Nellie. Can you swim? What time is it?’ (He glances at his watch.) ‘The water will be icy so early in the day before the sun has properly warmed it, but I am certain you are a splendid swimmer! Tell me I’m right?’

He is pulling off his sand-shoes. Now the woodpecker in my chest starts its knocking again. I could not have believed he meant it when he first suggested swimming this morning, but here he is, stripping off his blue flannel shirt so that his bare chest, sun-browned with its light fur of golden hair, is suddenly in front of me, and nowhere to hide my face.

‘Be brave, Nellie. No one ever comes here. Only his ghostly lordship practising his stroke.’

I don’t understand, and my face betrays it.

‘Byron, Nellie. The poet. Safely dead these ninety years.’

When I still say nothing, he lowers his voice to a whisper:
‘Take off your dress. You must have done it once–swum naked as a child?’

I have, of course, only last summer. But that was a river filled with noisy children, with Stanley and Edmund and Lily and Olive, and splashing and mud-drenched limbs, a river in which I had been a child myself. A summer when I still had a father.

Slowly, without looking at him, I begin unbuttoning my boots. My hands are sticky with sweat and the clamouring in my heart is so loud that it seems to bounce from tree to tree. Since I’m not properly dressed, there is only my nightdress, with a coat thrown over it, and my drawers. I take off the coat, and shiver in the flimsy cotton-lawn. I don’t like him watching me, and tell him so. He pretends to look away, shielding his eyes, then peeping from under his hands. This makes me laugh.

‘You’re very beautiful, Nell,’ he says softly.

As fast as I can, I pull the nightdress over my head, taking an enormous deep breath. Then the drawers are flung high, so that they catch on a branch behind me. My whole body sizzles, as if the trees might catch fire.

I run to the water’s edge and dive, and Rupert shouts, and the green water rears up to smack me with a cold, a startling, a gloriously shocking slug.

So we are on the road, in a cart, to be exact. We left Winchester this morning. A cat–a tabby stray, we’ve named it Pat the Cat–has accompanied us, which gives Dudders something to stroke (he is missing Anne-Marie, his new love). Dudders sits up front on the box while I keep Guy stocked up with his nosebag and whistle happily, all the while composing more Poor Law speeches, planning the meeting with Noel and her delightful sister Bryn and thinking, beneath it all, of Nellie Golightly. Remembering
her leaping into the river–such a lightning jolt of joy stiffening my entire body as I watched her. What a swimmer! What a girl! Such thrilling transgression in even sitting by the water and talking to her. But it’s impossible. How could one ever continue a dalliance with the maid when one is watched over at every turn by kindly friends, like James and Lytton and Eddie, with an interest in assuring one remains a committed Sodomite? Which I clearly never was–only an adventurer. Easier to have such an adventure with a boy from one’s own class than with Nell.

Too much thinking about it makes me sigh, and I cannot share it with Dudley. I know his feelings on Inversion and Sodomy. And for all his fine talk and good intentions, he is even more afraid of the lower classes than I am.

Last night two local fellows pelted us with stones and we had to wake up the damned horse and move on. We have not yet addressed one meeting but we have a plan that if such stone-throwing happens again we will simply display the poster, look wise and scatter pamphlets.

There was a frightful scene with the Stevensons the morning we left. Something about going barefoot–villagers have talked. The apple-cheeked old lady was quite unsentimental about it and the apples looked hard and crisp and even, suddenly, not cosy at all. She even brought refined Mr Neeve to make the point more
refinedly
. It was most embarrassing. I had to stand at the bottom of the stairs like a naughty schoolboy and was horribly reminded of the Ranee on one of her rants and did not like the craven small-boy stance I could not help taking up. I caught a glimpse of Nellie, hovering at the top of the stairs, her hand to her cheek in that mannerism she has, and I wondered. Had a villager in fact seen me at Byron’s Pool with Nellie? Was that what Mrs Stevenson was alluding to?

Not that anything happened, of course, except for swimming and nakedness. Oh, and a kiss. One more small kiss. However, this was no ordinary nakedness. Oh, my word, no. It truly was
the most extraordinary nakedness. That’s the problem. Nellie’s naked loveliness is something even the naiads at the water’s edge have never before seen the like of. With her upturned girl’s breasts like the bellies of little sparrows–well, it was quite enough to signal to the whole village that Lust herself was in the garden.

I caught a fish. A tiddler. (
A minnow! A minnow! I have him by the nose!)
He turned over fitfully and we saw the flash of his gold stripe and Nellie crouched beside me, shivering, asking if I would put him back since he was so tiny. I was reluctant–it had taken a good ten minutes of standing in the water with the disturbed mud billowing round my legs like smoke, carefully hovering behind him (so as not to make a shadow), hands cupped, to accomplish my goal, but I did as she bade, and the lucky fellow flipped over on one side and limped off to his cool, curving world. My thoughts had not been entirely on the fish, and my concentration, with Nellie standing so close beside me, her water-drenched body slim and green in the watery light like the shoot of a young tree, giving off her salty intimate river smell, was stiffening me so violently that I had to plunge quickly into the cold river to disguise it.

The child acted as if she had not noticed, just as she did that time in the garden. I do not know how to corrupt her. I do not
want
to corrupt her. Or only a little. And then I should regret it horribly. It seems, for all my posturing, I am not in the cast of Henry Lamb or Augustus John. I am shy. I like her rather too much. I did kiss her, damp and trembling in the boat-shed, and then I rubbed her hair with a towel, but she was by then in a fit of terror and kept wailing that she was late for breakfast duties. It was not the moment for a seduction scene. I found I was trembling myself, and couldn’t quite explain it.

I did regret my ill-judged remark in the bedroom that I should have ‘taken’ her that day by the beehives. How ferociously she glared at me! I almost ducked.

No, she’s hardly a girl to mess with, this Nell Golightly. Far too fierce and resolute for that.

So we arrive, and tie up the horse, in the spot we identified the night before, nailing a poster to a tree, announcing our intention to deliver an Important Speech at 10 a.m. prompt. The audience, eagerly gathered for our performance (one old gent), is filling a pipe in great anticipation. I inspect my watch: ten precisely. But surely Guy needs a feed, I decide, and Dudley agrees. And after that Dudley finds that posters must be added beneath the one advertising our speech, and a wooden soapbox carried from the caravan and leaflets spread upon the grass. The old gent coughs impatiently.

Dudley decides that Pat the Cat needs feeding, also, and offers her the last in our tin of sardines.

I stand on the box. Our audience swells to two as a delivery boy joins the old gent.

I clear my throat. ‘Between two and three million are destitute in Britain! If the whole population were under the command of one sane man, the first thing he would do would be to feed those millions so that they could contribute towards the production of wealth!’

‘Aye,’ says the old gent, to my surprise. The delivery boy stares, bottom lip dropping open, placing his basket against his bicycle, and waits for more. Dudley, having finished feeding Pat, hovers behind me, studiously cleaning his pince-nez.

‘The Poor Law has remained untouched for more than eighty years! The system of the Workhouse is an abomination in a civilised society such as ours! Lumping the poor, the sick, the aged and the crippled together and blaming them equally for their ills is outmoded and–and–why, it is
ridiculous
!’

Ha–my strongest sentiments yet. There does not appear to be much disagreement, however. The old gent puffs at his pipe and the boy draws on a non-existent beard with his fingers. Which makes it rather a task to summon up the necessary passion.
Where is the argument I’d been anticipating? Where the philosophical objections–the great debate about the fibre of the working man being weakened if he has recourse to the state the moment he breaks his leg? Where is the concern about the moral character of the poor if we offer them greater aid in times of hardship?

After a few more rousing phrases, the old gent claps his hands together noisily and the boy with the bicycle begins to wheel it away.

‘Thank you, gentlemen!’ I shout, stepping down from my box. ‘Thank you for your concern, your outrage–nay, your
devotion
to the cause of reforming the Poor Law. Do, please, take a leaflet.’

The old man and the young one shuffle away without a word. The leaflets remain on the grass.

‘The average British Working Man is a rather lacklustre fellow, wouldn’t you say, Dudders?’

We chuckle as we set up camp on the village green and, at top speed, make a small fire and fill a pan with water from the village tap to prepare a late breakfast of boiled eggs. Dudley has, in fact, become rather skilled at these. But it’s only a matter of time before the kindly village policeman arrives to shoo us along.

Only twelve more days of this and as many places. The tour is not a success. It is hard to say which of us is the most ill at ease with the folk whose lives we hope to ameliorate. I am the better speaker. Dudley is the better egg-boiler. That is all.

We cannot admit this to each other. We wriggle into our sleeping-bags at night with cheering remarks, such as ‘Well, that’s another five fellows who know more than they did a day ago!’ and stirring discussions about Progress and other Marvellous Things. I know that Dudley falls asleep thinking of his German love, Anne-Marie. And that we are both counting the days until the camp at Buckler’s Hard (ha!) with Noel and other girls,
where I will be free as the wind, and Dudley as a monsoon. There I might even accomplish a further sighting of Noel’s water-nymph self so that I might make a fair and accurate comparison with my exquisite, my tender new shoot Nellie.

One night I dream of my days at Rugby before Dick died. I was lying out under a full moon. It was of two people–Charles Sayle and Kenny Cott (the latter in his eighteenth year, perhaps, or even younger) and…Charles got at it with Kenny by pretending he’d lost a Penwiper, and making out Kenny (‘naughty boy!’) had taken it, and searching his pockets–his trouser pockets–for it. Kenny accepted it, giggling. Excitement rose, and finally they left the room together. There were other details. I expect it all happened, really, some time.

In between our fine speeches (mine infinitely better than those of poor old Dudders, who stumbles, and drops his glasses, whereas I merely blush, which makes me appear passionate), I compose–mentally–my September talk to the New Bilton Adult School about Shakespeare. ‘This glutton, drunkard, poacher, agnostic, adulterer and Sodomite was England’s greatest poet.’ I like telling the story of Shakespeare’s love affairs. It shocks the Puritans, who want it hushed up. And it shocks the pro-Sodomites, who want to continue in a hazy pinkish belief that all great men were Sodomites…

The truth is that some great men are Sodomites
and
womanisers. Perhaps when my career as a womaniser has begun in earnest, that will be the category to which I belong.

The truth is, sex is fundamentally filthy.

How glorious that my darling girls know better than to give in to my base desires and prefer to let the river cool my ardour.

Or cool me harder, as the naughty James would say.

When Rupert returns from his lecture tour and his camping trip he must stay at the Old Vicarage, Mrs Stevenson says. She won’t have him in the house a moment longer.

I don’t dare to protest. I feel a broad misery as she says it that I struggle to disguise with sweeping. I have heard–Mrs Stevenson has heard–that the lecture tour was not all Rupert hoped for and he is compensating by staying longer with his friends at camp. ‘Silly boy,’ is all she says on that matter. She has much to say about his other misdemeanours.

Mrs Stevenson says it is the final straw. His bare feet, his friends, his strange hours and stranger requests–it’s all been too much. What is the final straw? I want to ask, but she doesn’t say. I tremble. Is it possible someone saw us at Byron’s Pool? On our way back we stopped in the little boat-shed to dry ourselves with the towels that Rupert had brought, and he showed me the saucy drawings on the walls and kissed me and I flared hot and then cold and felt swamped with confusion, and then he pushed me lightly and said that we should leave separately so that no one would see us. I ran, after I left him, my body aching with hurt but my blood singing from the cold water; in my mind scuttled all the things I didn’t dare ask him. I ran back to my room, praying that Mrs Stevenson would believe my story about washing my hair.