The Great Lover (29 page)

It’s only in bed that night that I’m able to let my mind run on and think of what Kittie says about Rupert. Could it really be that easy to go quite mad like that–and for what? Because Ka Cox turned him down. This seems an easy explanation, but not a true one, because what I saw in him that night by Byron’s Pool was already glittering in his eyes, and I know he hadn’t asked her to marry him then. How do people
break down
? And do they mend again? Can this stuffing cure really work? I realise I know nothing about madness, if that’s what it is. I don’t understand at all, and it frightens me. The mood I felt crackling in him that night, the look in his eyes, did it seem like madness to me?

I think back to that time in his room, going over and over how he appeared. One moment his face was lit up with some of its old naughtiness; the next he was serious, and somehow frail. But there was that moment when his words were mumbled and the edges of him seemed to be blurring, softening. He did not seem to know that his face was shining wet, that he was crying. As if the very boundaries of him, of his face and his body and being, were melting. Yes, that’s it. Rupert was melting, like a candle, down to a liquid nothing. Thinking this, I’m oddly comforted. For after all, after today, didn’t we see how the wax hardens again and takes up fresh shapes? Maybe that is what the London doctor will bring. Maybe, God willing, that is what will happen to darling Rupert.

Ka is like having black beetles in the house. I put down carbolic powder. That did not work. The Ranee took me to Cannes to cure me of my madness and I wrote to Ka, over and over, and arranged for her to meet me in Munich. That did!

Meeting with Ka in Munich was achieved after much wrangling and conniving, for Mother had to be deceived at all costs. By then I was desperate. I wrote and wrote. I pleaded, I begged her. Give up Lamb, I said. In Cannes the Ranee was at her most magnificent and frightening. I
was
afraid, truly afraid, of Mother’s strong, womanly powers, no doubt about it. Such awful scenes, with Mother always restless for facts, always suspicious, with a nose for…what? The word I wanted there, the one I paused over, was ‘erotic’. Yet it’s true. Mother has an extraordinary skill for sniffing out my every erotic thought. No wonder I felt so invaded, so trespassed upon!

Once I managed to convey to Mother that I
hated
her, hated Cannes, the sea, and I reduced her to a crumble, and it wasn’t good at all. A Pyrrhic victory. It’s beastly hurting people, especially the Ranee, who looks to me for so much now that Father and Dick have both gone. Thankfully she put it down to my sickness and telegraphed Dr Craig, who repeated the advice: no writing, more stuffing. I put on a stone, became as fat as a baby. Of course, it was the Ranee’s money I needed. How to get to Munich without it? I told her I was meeting Dudley and she caved in, finally, and was generous, too, and I felt worse than ever.

So,
enfin
, there were those nights in Munich with Ka, and
that
put an end to all desire. I had Ka at last, and that did the trick, like a colossal dose of bromide. I realised in the first glow of tumescence that it was a terrible mistake. I didn’t pause–
that would have been impolite–I ploughed on, gave up my prolonged chastity to plunge into the abyss of Ka’s body and show her a little more than the Apollo-golden-haired version of me, show her the true horribleness of my nature. I thought of Denham only briefly, how lustful he was, how immoral, how affectionate and delightful, and wondered whether I could, after all, put the thing through with a woman. But the image of Denham, the one touch of his that made me shiver so much I was frightened…I used that to blank out Ka’s anxious expression, and her little, tough, brave ‘
Oh
’ as I entered her. Afterwards she said she was willing to give up Lamb and marry me. My misery was complete.

I sat up all night, sweating in a fever. (Perhaps it was the word ‘marry’.) I could not tell if it was sickness of the body or mind or soul but it felt like all three. There was a dark little cave in one part of my brain, and I knew that inside it there was someone or something that I wanted badly, so badly, but couldn’t quite see or reach. A feeling so infuriating and frustrating that I wanted to tear my hair and scream.

Kind Ka sat beside me, concerned, warm, hoping to infect me with her calm, but it was no good. I told her strange things that night, cracked open the contents of my vile brain and spilled them before her, trying to find this one good patch, this little nugget. But it remained out of reach.

The idea that I was
recovered
from my breakdown began to fly from her understanding. As the morning light crept through the green gloom of the room I remembered only Father’s death and the futility of it all, green and foul and reeking of disappointment. Nothing will come of nothing–and nothing, worse than nothing, is who I am.

She told me she pictured our children: a son, she said, and sobbed. She lay naked as she said this, her hair spread on the pillow, pince-nez on the lace doily on the table beside her, along with the hotel-room key–the number was twenty-six, I remember
–and the unwritten postcards of Munich and the emerald green beads that Ka always wears. Her goodness made me feel worse. We had tried the irrigator and the syringe that I had ventured with Elisabeth with more success. It made an awful mess. But I hoped it had worked. I was sad that Ka had not seemed to enjoy the experience much, and I remember writing to her, later, when we thought she might be pregnant, to try to establish what, in any case, a woman should expect:

Oh, yes, there was a second night, despite everything, more than one–a second honeymoon, in fact, a month later. I did, in some dim place of pride in my man’s soul, believe that I came a little nearer to achieving it, this
rapture
that women, too, are supposed to experience. I saw perhaps a small sign of it in Ka.

Perhaps not. Undoubtedly I am as useless a Lover as I am everything else. A Fabian, a Socialist, a Poet, a Son. The Ranee plainly accused me of the latter, writing in a letter: ‘Why are you so unsatisfactory? Is it my fault?’ And this because I begged her to give me the money to travel for a year, to escape. Ka says she will give it to me, she has her inheritance, but I don’t want her money, that is too cruel. I want to go to America and to the South Seas. The Ranee is against it. She thinks my scholarly efforts should come first, but that was before we heard the results of the Fellowship. Oh, yes, my marvellous Webster essay that I risked my health for rather failed to perform. Fellowship went to some other chap. Seems a long way away now, and of tiny importance.

The only good thing is a poem I managed to write in Munich. ‘A Sentimental Exile’. I cabled the editor of the King’s magazine from the Café des Westerns: ‘A Masterpiece is on its way.’ Of course I instantly regretted that, when it was only in fact a silly, quickly written thing that might amuse.

And yet, as I arrive back in Grantchester, in a cab from Cambridge station, ‘Just now the lilac is in bloom, All before my little room’ echoes in my head as I glance up at the Orchard from my banished position as ex-tenant, then turn sorrowfully towards the gravelled approach of the Old Vicarage instead. Who was I thinking of when I wrote those lines? It wasn’t Florence Neeve.

(‘Hypersensitive and introspective,’ the good Dr Craig said I was.)

There are sounds of laughter, and people arriving on the road behind me, and I turn quickly and see that the servants are arriving back from somewhere, all dressed in their church clothes, with hats on and flower buttonholes. Could it be? Yes, it is! Nell. In fact, the two Golightly sisters: Betty and Nell, glorious Nell coming into view in a blush pink dress, with rice confetti on her shoulders. Rice. Confetti. Flowers. Church clothes.

Nell wearing church clothes, with petals caught in her dark hair.

I find my stomach lurching to my boots and cannot speak, but only stand staring at her, like an imbecile, trying to take in the information.

Quite horribly the lines from my poem float tauntingly back to me:

A lump rises in my throat, as my English unofficial rose stops in her tracks, one arm linked in her sister’s, and we appraise one another. I watch Nell’s expression–shock, also, I think
registers there, and then she struggles to compose herself.

‘Nell! And Betty! Not at work today, girls?’ Does my voice sound strained, high-pitched? I fear it does.

‘No–it’s—We’re just back from a wedding celebration, sir.’ This is Betty, beaming and blushing. Yes. There it is. There can be no mistaking it. A wedding celebration. Nell’s eyes are fixed on the gravel and she is unable to meet mine. I remember suddenly the way she dabbed at my mouth once, after I’d been stung, and the touch of her finger, sticky with honey, at the corner of my mouth. Such a combination of pain and sweetness. It was nothing, I see now, compared to this.

I manage to force out the next question: ‘I see. And who is the lucky groom? Someone I know?’

‘It’s Jack, sir,’ Betty says, turning to her sister and blushing again. ‘You know, the boy who works at the Mill and brings the flour for the bread in the mornings…’

‘Ah, Jack.’ A very long pause. We all stare horribly.

‘Well, I’m not really in England,’ I say loftily. ‘It’s just a–an interim between periods abroad. One gets into the state of mind for being abroad…’

‘Yes, sir!’ And the girls suddenly break into peals of inexplicable laughter, put their heads together and skitter away from me.

So. That is it, then. Horrible truth like egg in the face. Nell is married.

The two girls disappear down the lane as I stare after them. I have so rarely seen Nell without her apron and her uniform, without most of that long black hair tucked away behind an ugly cap. Their dresses, the colours, make me think of dog-roses, shades of eyelid pink, fragile against dark leaves. (‘And down the borders, well I know, the poppy and the pansy blow…’) What is the point? What is the point of this feeling? I am melting with weariness; my legs will hardly hold me.

I lean against the five-barred gate to the Old Vicarage, hooked back in the bushes, and listen for the dull beat of my heart. It
feels like one of those paper boats, sailing hopelessly away from me and catching in a twig, to falter there for ever. (Oh, I know it’s a trifle to lose a heart such as mine but, after all, it is the only one I’ve got.)

With great weariness I pick up my bags. Time to face Florence Neeve and the creepy-crawlies in my old room. Suddenly it occurs to me that I haven’t bathed since November, and there is such a lot of dirt to wash off. A pale flash in the corner of my eye stops me. It is Nell, running back along the road and reaching the Old Vicarage gate.

She is out of breath, her hair falling from its pins and her dress clinging to her. Her cheeks are flushed and her forehead shines with sweat. The sister is nowhere to be seen. Nell stops at a little distance from me. ‘I–I loved your poem, Rupert. We saw it, we all saw it–“Ah God! To see the branches stir, across the moon at Grantchester!”’

‘You read my poem?’

‘Mrs Neeve read it out to us in the kitchen at the Old Vicarage. To all of us. “And laughs the immortal river still. Under the mill, under the mill?” Or my favourite bit: “To smell the thrilling sweet and rotten, Unforgettable, unforgotten, river smell; and hear the breeze, sobbing in the little trees…” And she said, Mrs Neeve said, “Of course! There
is
honey still for tea.”’

‘Nell, you didn’t memorise every word, I hope?’

She laughs, and glances back along the lane to see that her sister is waiting for her.

‘Well. Who would have imagined that Mrs Neeve read the pleasant silly passages of my musings in the King’s magazine? And did you find it horribly sentimental and insincere?’

‘No, I—’ Here her confidence crumbles, which gives me a cruel pulse of pleasure.

‘Well, I’m very pleased that my little ornamental gesture has pleased you. I may have to rename it–I had no idea that the Old Vicarage would
so
approve.’

Now she is staring at the ground again, and biting her lip, and her hand flies up to her forehead to sweep at invisible locks of hair. ‘Are you–well now, then? You are recovered?’ she asks.

Finally, anger and disappointment swell to boiling-point and spill over. ‘No, I am not well,’ I answer shortly. ‘I am rather fat and stupid, wouldn’t you say, from looking at me?’

I am gratified to see my words have reached their target. She takes a step back and glances down the lane towards her sister. ‘Well, I should go–we’re having a little party, you know, at Jack’s house.’

The knife twists again as she mentions the wedding. ‘Yes. I see that. Acres of fun for all.’

She turns to go, then whirls round suddenly. ‘I wonder what it would cost you,’ she asks, quietly, her face strangely close to mine, ‘to be sincere for once?’

Birds cease their piping. Nell’s white face blots out the sun.

‘Ah, my dear Nell. How disappointingly predictable of you. You have confused sincerity with constancy. Does it not occur to you that one might be both ludicrously flippant and hideously serious–and truly sincere in both?’

With that I turn away from her, and after a moment’s hesitation, I hear her steps behind me, snapping smartly down the lane.

I spend a sad night at Florence Neeve’s with legions of woodlice dizzily climbing the walls, their babies trotting in and out between their legs, until I am mad with chasing them and despair of ever sleeping or (perhaps my true fear) ever waking again.