The Great Lover (37 page)

On the boat that night I looked for the Southern Cross for the last time, seeking it in vain. It must already have slipped below the horizon. It is still wheeling and shining for Taatamata, for that bastard Banbridge, for Lovina and little Georges and Miri and Teura, but for me it is set. As the vessel pulled away I watched the green shores and rocky peaks fading with hardly a pang. But when the Southern Cross left me that night I knew I’d left those lovely places, lovely people, for ever. So I wept a little, and very sensibly went to bed.

In bed I read my letters, and tried to inject a little Englishness back into my soul. Cathleen–she is the most effective remedy,
being capable,
almost
, of out-perfuming the others. Sweetly fragrant Cathleen, who nevertheless knows about sorrow and the alcoholism of loved ones, and other things besides.

‘Parting, it’s always a little like death,’ an old Frenchman, watching me, leaning over the rail, commented. He said he was going home to France for a year for his health, but he resented it bitterly. Home! His home was in Tahiti, he told me repeatedly. He’s been married to a native woman these last fifteen years. No children of his own, but plenty adopted. She was so much finer than a white woman, he sighed, so lovely, so faithful, so competent, so charming and happy, and so extraordinarily intelligent.

I am not cheered.

So I lie in my bunk, clutching the letters and reading them by the light of a kerosene lamp. The black sand of Lafayette beach still clings to my body and grits the sheets, like poppy seeds. The letters cover three or four months. The accounts of England are depressing and confirm my worst fears.
Blessed are the peacemakers. For they shall have the fun of knocking a lot of bloody men on the head.

When I have read them through, several times over, and decided that I must put a bullet in Sir Edward Carson and another in Mr Murphy for smashing the Dublin strike, I settle down to write a letter to…the new baby of Frances and Francis Cornford, whose name, I’m told, is Helena.

What kind of England do I travel back to? An England of houses and trams and collars? Will I be forced to endure the total prohibition of alcohol in England, which is the female idea of politics, and the establishment of Christian Science as the state religion, which is the female idea of religion? I begged baby Helena not to grow up a feminist, but to become a woman. I
hate
feminists.

Everything’s just the wrong way round. I want Germany to smash Russia to fragments, and then France to break Germany. Instead of which I’m afraid Germany will badly smash France,
and then be wiped out by Russia. France and England are the only countries that ought to have any power. Prussia is a devil. And Russia means the end of Europe and any decency.

I suppose the future is a Slav empire, world-wide, despotic and insane. If war comes, should one enlist? Or turn war correspondent? Or what?

My mood, my tone, has altered entirely. One might detect a complete solidifying, congealing, rather like my gift of coconut oil from Taatamata (mysteriously transformed, without the tropic’s liquid heat, into something the colour of milk, lumpy and hard as stone). Whatever cool Cambridge irony the South Seas erased is slipping back with every knot of this ship. What
will
happen tomorrow? And whatever it is, won’t it be dreadful?

Feeling my old voice returning, I suddenly leap from my bunk and, grabbing my coat, make my way to the deck. The sky is inky and pricked with stars; salt spray leaps into my mouth. There is the moon, full and fat, shining on Taatamata, on the island, on the hibiscus flowers that bloom orange in the full of day, purple at night, and disappear by morning. I picture Taatamata somewhere, and know that I should have stayed, but could never have stayed, and wonder if she understands. And Nell. Dear Nell too! I finally wrote Nell a letter. Both women are there, somewhere, in words. Words are things, after all. And the night is sweet as thickest honey. Tenderly, day that I have loved, I close your eyes.

I saw Rupert only once after his return to Grantchester. I wasn’t working at the Orchard at that time because of the baby, and I’d moved in with Tommy at his parents’, and I was full, full up with my darling baby, and the hard work of it all, and the tiredness. I had no regrets. I hadn’t reckoned, in those youthful thoughts
I’d had that were so bitter towards marriage, on all the simple ways in which it would be good to be loved. To be held, to be called tender names, to see a man’s face light up when I came into the room. That was my marriage to Tommy. And best of all was to share a bed, to lie with a small warm baby between us, breathing hotly. Then, finally, the summer came and I worried about my bees. I’d left Betty in charge of them and I knew she was doing her best, and so was Mr Neeve, of course, but I was their mistress now, and surely they must be missing me.

So I went to the Old Vicarage, wondering if he might be back from his travels (although Betty had reported that he hadn’t been sighted in Grantchester) and there he was. He was in the garden, standing near the sundial with a couple of people I didn’t recognise, although one might have been Mr Eddie Marsh–I couldn’t tell, he had his back to me. Rupert was laughing. I saw that his skin was sun-browned, and he was a little thinner. He looked healthy. I was glad of that. Inside, all of me was alive: my body set up a kind of chattering, quivering feeling, but I managed to keep my head, and simply nod to him. I saw at once how hard it would be for him to acknowledge me in front of his friends. The two men were talking excitedly to him–no doubt about Germany, about politics, for that was all anyone talked about that summer–but Rupert did his best: he raised his chin and stared over their heads; he met my eyes, and held them for a second. We smiled at one another, and he nodded back, and that was it. Then he went inside, into the house.

All that he was to me was gathered into that look I cast, but I don’t know if he saw it, or knew. I turned towards the hives, and directed a few puffs from the smoker I was holding towards the crown board to warn the startled bees of my arrival. I put my face a little closer to the hive, and a few bees circled round my head, making a dark looping shape of a lasso in the air. ‘I’m back,’ I whispered to them. ‘Stop your naughtiness and set to work–here’s sensible Nellie. I’m back!’

Underneath I was thinking, So that’s it, Nell, be done with him. He was trouble from the start. Be glad of all you have. Your lovely son. Your lovely Tommy. And soon I was calm, and no tears threatened, as I turned my full attention to the bees. The mischievous ones flew off. I looked for the queen in the hive, reminding myself, as Father taught me, keep the sun over your shoulder and watch for her running to the darkest side. It’s a curious thing that the queen is the one who will always head for darkness. Every good bee-keeper knows that.

To Dudley Ward (envelope marked:
If I die to be sent to Dudley Ward, etc.
) Sent from Lemnos, during the Gallipoli advance, March 1915:

About the author

First Words

About the book

The First Tiny Throb: How a Novel Begins

This Side of Paradise

Read on

The Old Vicarage, Grantchester

Tiare Tahiti

The Soldier

About the author

First Words

I
CAN’T REMEMBER
the first book I ever read, but I can remember the first words:
ice cream.
My sister taught me to read before I went to school. What I remember, and think has influenced me most in my writing, was the physical pleasure a particular word could suggest, the powerful feelings reading it aroused. I wonder now if it was a kind of synesthesia, but I suppose it was also logical. The words
ice cream
are particularly delicious—to say, to read, to write, to think about.

I wanted to be a writer from the age of nine, but I would never have told my parents. That would have been showing off, something that was ferociously crushed in our family. Being gifted at
something, or excelling, was drawing attention to yourself and greeted with palpable contempt. Perhaps this is a British thing, or to do with the surprise my parents felt—disliking as they did the discussion of feminism or politics or religion or literature or philosophy or, well, anything at all really—on producing a child who wanted to discuss these things, who went around
expressing herself
all over the place. I still feel a trace of shame about being a novelist, not least because I enjoy it so much. How did I become a writer, in such a family? I have a stubborn streak.

It’s really all I’ve ever done. I’ve never had another “proper” job. I had a ten-year apprenticeship after graduation where I lived in squats and subsidized housing in London, writing poetry, winning a few prizes, having a child, being very poor, and becoming dispirited. Then suddenly, in my early thirties, I ended a relationship, studied for an MFA in creative writing, bought my first house, and published my first novel. I met my husband six months later.

By the time I started this, my sixth novel, I had quite a few friends who were writers; a couple of them were renowned biographers. I read a lot of biography, and I’ve always been fascinated with it as a form. So I felt some trepidation on beginning
The Great Lover.
I challenged myself with the questions about Rupert Brooke that my fictional character Nell is asked in the book: What did his living voice sound like? What did he smell like? How did it feel to wrap one’s arms around him? And lastly, Was he a good man?

These are subjective, emotive, relative questions that it seems to me that fiction—especially fiction written in the first person, which never claims to be objective but only human—is well placed to answer. In
Orlando,
Virginia Woolf writes, “A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.” That idea went into
The Great Lover,
spoken by Taatamata, who claims we have as many selves as there are clams on a beach.

“Do you change facts, if they don’t suit the
plot?” I was asked, at a book event, on a panel discussion. The other novelist on the panel, writing her own family’s story, agreed at once that she did, if it might improve the storyline. Briefly I felt like a fraud. Surely hers, I thought, is the proper reply for a novelist. Isn’t it our job to fictionalize, to make things up? But then I understood my own compulsion better. For me, it’s not making up, entirely, but a belief in fiction or the logic of imagination as a means of discovery
.

I think of it as applying fiction to facts like a poultice, to draw something out…. My novels based on true stories probably evolved because of the decade of psychoanalysis I underwent in my twenties, and my beginnings as a poet. I wanted psychological truths, not representational social realism.

I like to explore characters through their dreams, or rather the dreams I make up for them. Anaïs Nin, in her essay on the poetic novel, says: “What the psychoanalysts stress, the relation between dream and our conscious acts, is what poets already know. The poets walk this bridge with ease, from conscious to unconscious, physical reality to psychological reality.”

When I have a “fact” about a character I’m writing about, I want to investigate it the way a therapist might. Tell me about your mother, I might ask Rupert Brooke. Tell me about this fact that she lost a child, a one-year-old daughter, before you were born. Then I will go over this detail: the accounts, the references by other biographers, the letters, possible references in his poetry, the phrases Brooke used to describe this one small “fact.” It’s as if I have my client (Brooke) on the couch and can get him to tell me something over and over until the truth—or, I admit, what feels like the truth to me—emerges, in certain words, the perfect words, which briefly feel not to be mine but coming directly from somewhere else.