My name is Nellie Golightly. I’m a good, sensible girl, seventeen years old this August; well brought up and well schooled and blessed with a few more Brains than most. Being the eldest of six and a Mother to them all since my own Mother died when I was eleven years old, I’m accustomed to hard work, no secrets, many loud voices and some small authority. If I have a fault it is that I’m apt to wanting things done my way. Well, truth be told I have many faults: I am feverishly curious, some would say nosy; I have no compunction about reading other people’s letters; I’m proud and full of vanity; I’ve a quick temper although I forgive just as easily; I am not fond of horses and I am wont to be impatient with bees; and, worst of all, I am a girl who is incapable of being romanced because I don’t have a sentimental bone in my body. Moons and Junes mean nothing to me, unless it is to signify good conditions for bees.

Now that I have made a list of my defects let me introduce my talents. These chiefly involve bees. I can distinguish a particular swarm from some distance, simply by the sound being made: is it soft and low like a snarling sea, or is it a fierce high note, like an arrow piercing from the sky? I have been stung only once in all my years at Prickwillow helping Father, or these last few weeks at Grantchester helping Mr Neeve with his apiary. I am as tender with the bees as I’m snippy with the children, but I’ve learned the same rule for both: all creatures are more amiable when they’ve recently been fed. Let bees gorge themselves on honey and they will be putty–no, beeswax–in my hands.

My strongest trait is one that I’ve found uncommon in others, and I can’t now be sure whether to name it gift or defect: I am able to face, very easily, the ugly facts of things. I can look squarely at them and not look away. I’ve had this ability since childhood. I’ve learned to keep it to myself and I’ve learned that others are not as interested in poking beneath the surface. Mother used to tell me just to ‘take things at face value’ but I never learned to, so here I am, trapped in my own private musings and conclusions, my dark, bare version of the world, which none seems to share.

Those are my talents, as I can presently think of them.

The worst events of my life took place a few short months ago when Father passed away one day, out in the meadow, dressed in his white veil and gloves, tending his bees. I was carrying the smoker, Betty following at a distance. I saw his white shape slip over like a bottle of milk and I knew before we reached him exactly how much of him had been spilled. All of him. The bees seemed to know it too and were swelling around his head in the shape of a giant fur hood until Betty ran at them, puffing with the bellows to direct them, the soft brown swarm, into the skep. Then we ran for Sam, the eel man from two doors up, to help us lay Father out on the kitchen table.

His funeral was like all funerals in this part of the world. The fen soil shines like black oil when the harvest blade turns it up and is far too soft and rich for any to be buried in it. So Father was carried the nine miles to the surrounding higher land by a large corn wagon, with a team of two horses harnessed to it. My brothers and sisters–Betty, Lily, Stanley, Edmund and Olive–sat around the sides; the younger ones wearing looks of pleased importance, Betty with a face as mine must have been: an expression of flattened shock. We two surely looked–if anyone had cared to examine us–as the land itself does: as if something of huge, terrible weight had just rolled over us. Sam drove the horses and old Mrs Gotobed sat at the back, pouring cups of poppyhead tea from a leather flask to keep everyone quiet.

When the soft, violet-black clods of fen earth fell on Father’s coffin, I sipped more tea until my head clouded over and Mrs Gotobed began her nonsense singing of ‘The shock head willows, two and two, by rivers gallopading…’ and on the long, blank route to the sky there was only one white gate, standing out against the black, which, in my poppy-dulled state, I confused with the gate of Heaven. I tried to turn my thoughts to practical matters, such as my plan to present myself to Mr Neeve, the bee-keeper at the Old Vicarage, and whether I might try for a position at the Orchard Tea Gardens (Quiet and Select Up-river Resort on the Banks of the Granta, close to the Mill and offering Breakfasts, Light Luncheons and Teas for large or small Boating or Cycling parties), leaving my younger sister Betty in charge of my brothers and sisters back home. But, as I have indicated, ugly facts are what I dwell on, and ugly facts are what came to me then.

Father had never wanted daughters: he made that plain. Boys can be put to work in the fields, or handle a gun in the punt, put food on the table, he said. That was not a reason but a justification for his feelings, because so could I. I’m better than Stanley and Edmund at all those things. Fact was, girls were more than just an economic burden to him. They were foolish, unimportant, yes, but more than that they were foreign and bewildering, even disturbing. He wished we did not exist to trouble him so. When Mother died he slipped without a word to expecting me to take her place: bring his meals to him, wash the babies, clean the house, help in the corn harvest in season, tend the bees year round, be a new young wife in all ways but one. I never stood next to Father by the skeps, with that soft low drone of bees all around us, without knowing keenly what his estimation of me was. I insisted on going to school, I was fierce and firm, my mother’s daughter, and to Sunday School too, at the Primitive Methodist Church here in Prickwillow. I was soon teaching there on Sundays–I reached a degree of learning that Father never did, nor my brothers either. But nothing would shift him, it was just what was. Girls were a waste of breath and nothing on this earth was going to change his mind.

As the last clod fell I thought, Too late, then, to make him proud of me, and I shed brief tears, and that was that.

Or almost. There was one task I still had to do, and it had to be done before the day was over. That was the telling of the bees. So when the red circle of the sun started to slip through the clouds like a coin through a magician’s fingers, I took Betty out with me to the skeps, first winding a ribbon of black crêpe around them, and we stood there with our heads bowed, while I murmured the story of Father to the bees. I told them that Alfred had ‘passed away’ from a long-standing illness common in these parts, the ague, but that they were not to worry, he loved them dearly, and would have stayed if he could. I told them he left them in good hands (mine, and Betty’s and Lily’s, and the entire Golightly family’s); that they need not fear for their future, nor take off and leave us, because they would always be cared for, loved, in fact, and because life goes on, whether we wish it to or not. It is an end we all must come to, I said, though we like to pretend otherwise. When it happens, it shocks us for a day or two, and then the curtain swings back into place and we carry on as before. But the place behind the curtain is where we children were right now and we were all frightened by it.

The bees murmured back in low tones to tell me they were listening.

Betty’s sniffling stepped up when I said the bit about the bees being loved, and me promising to care for them and that Father would have stayed if he could. I realised that I was saying to the bees all the things I knew Father didn’t feel towards us and never said and never would, and that I was making a picture for the bees as if they were my own dear children, of how I would like things to be. If only I had a kind mother or grandmother who might say those same reassuring words to me! The only care and good sense I’ve ever known is my own.

One fat drone escaped as I was speaking, then a scout bee took off too, and I knew they had heard enough. I’d done my duty and the bees were sure now to stay. The sky blushed crimson as Betty tucked the end of the last ribbon of black crêpe underneath the skep to stop it flapping and we turned to go back into the house. I remembered then a song that Father used to sing, or was it a poem? ‘Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence! Mistress Mary is dead and gone!’ and I sang it slowly, over and over, in a voice I hoped was something like Father’s.

There was something else, too. Pulling off Father’s gloves, when Betty and I brought him in from the meadow lying stiff across the wheelbarrow. Gloves that were stained dark and golden with propolis, so that they looked as if they had been burned. The hands beneath were milky white. Soft black hairs on the knuckles. Long, tapering fingers and skin like the downy cheeks of a baby. His daily duties with the honey, the beeswax, the brown clouds of bees and, chiefly, the bathing of his fingers in that sticky, dark brown propolis had smoothed his skin to that of a young man. Like many a daughter, I had forgotten that Father was ever young, and this surprised me. My thoughts went something like: Why, are these the hands of Father, the man I know?

I dreamed of Father that night and, as in life, it was only a glimpse. He was sitting in the chair outside the front door, mending a skep. And as I looked at him, he made as if to get up. That’s all. He moved, as if to get up. I could not tell what he intended, whether to move towards me or perhaps…leave. Goodbye, I mouthed, in the dream. He looked at me.

Then I was suddenly awake. I had only one desire: the honey stocks. Without lighting a candle I tiptoed to the shelves where they were kept, reached for a comb, a tanner’s worth, and bit into it, hard. The sweetness, a lavender and heather mix, spilled over my tongue, slid down my chin and dripped on to my nightdress, clinging to my hair. All around me was the smell of him. Of clover, of grass, of sweat and the filthy brown water, of blood and eels and the smoker; of years and years and years of work, and the smell of his skin, his strong arms lifting me up, over the gate; and his lovely rich singing voice and all that he was to me, despite how little I was to him, was in that blackness, that sweetness. And Father’s warm face, sunburned and tired, so tired in his eyes, swam in front of me at last, and then I was crying and digging my nails into the soft chewy cone and spitting out the cappings, and squeezing hard and biting, and sobbing like a baby, and biting.

He will never be proud of me. He will never know the things I’ll do, he’ll never know my children, never be able to tell me the things I long to know. Father, where are you? I wanted to cry out. Don’t go yet! Stay with me, stay with your beloved bees, please–don’t leave your little Nellie all alone. My mouth was choked with honey. I sounded like an animal. I felt ashamed at last and, sick with the sweetness, I crept back to bed.

Thankfully no child woke to see their sister behaving like a criminal, raiding the stocks. My dreams were full of buzzing and that image again, of Father getting up from his chair, and then–nothing. Nothing more.

My last glimpse of the village as I set off on my journey to Grantchester was of my sister Betty, in her blue bonnet, waving goodbye under the gloaming grey light. She was standing at the Toll House on the river, Blackwing Mill in the background; the huge beam engine beside her, steaming away with a great trundling racket, pumping the water into the dikes. Betty was calling to me to take care, to write often, and promising to do her best with the children. I called back, over my shoulder: ‘But, Betty–do your best with the bees!’

 

And that is how I come to be in Grantchester, presenting myself to the landlady of the Orchard, Mrs Stevenson, recommending myself to her with my talents and keeping mum about my defects. I have in my bag a book by Mrs Flora Klickmann (The Flower-Patch Among the Hills, A Book of Cheerfulness: You just smile your way right through) and drawings of flowers and eels done by Stanley and Olive. The young ones wailed and hollered about why I had to work so far away, further than Ely Cathedral and Cambridge too; but it was on account of Mr Neeve, the bee-keeper, I told them, who had known our Father and was a kind and refined man. Mr Neeve says I might help him when my duties for Mrs Stevenson are done; and for this he will pay me two extra shillings and two jars of honey, so that my poor family (he says), who have been raised on milk and honey, would always live that way, even if our own beehives were hit by the wax moth and failed.

My position as a maid-of-all-work means I live in at the Orchard House and get all my food and lodging free. I can send home almost ten shillings a week, which is not a bad amount for five youngsters, who also have honey to sell. I work from six in the morning until ten p.m. every day except Sundays, when the tea gardens are closed and I have only light duties in the mornings. On Sunday afternoons I will travel the fifteen miles to visit my sisters and brothers in Prickwillow.

Grantchester village is a grand sort of place, after Prickwillow. Its nearness to the university is what makes it grand. It has a huge mill and a fancy church with a gold weathercock, and a famous pool where a famous poet–Lord Byron–once swam. The Manor House is really a farm: Mrs Stevenson tells me it supplies the Fellows at King’s College with pigeons from the Great Duffhouse nearby, and vegetables and herbs from the doctor’s garden. She started her famous tea gardens over ten years ago, when some students came up the river Cam in punts demanding tea and scones, with honey from the Old Vicarage beehives, asking to take them sitting under the trees in the orchard. She is kept busy now from morning until dusk. In addition to the teas she also lets rooms to a number of lodgers; they, too, need meals and laundry and all the other services that young gentlemen require.

She sees that I am clean and disciplined, and that I read and write well, and she murmurs that she values the good opinion of Mr Neeve. She has one requirement and that is that ‘her girls’ do not make nuisances of themselves by paying too much attention to the ‘goings on’ of the young Varsity men and women who frequent her premises, some of whom might have…modern ideas.

‘I hope you are not a gossip, Nell, nor easily shocked.’

I assure her that I am neither.

I’m shown upstairs to my room. The house smells throughout of apples, a healthy, green, grassy sort of smell: one of the furthest rooms is used to store them. There is also the smell of yeast rising and smoking logs and warm wood and floor-polish. I hear the chatter of girls working in the scullery and the rap of a dog somewhere outside and a constant rattle of china and cutlery. I notice how clean the flagstones are in the kitchen, and the stairs too, hardly a speck on them, which shows me this is a tight ship and Mrs Stevenson, for all her kindness, a strict mistress.

There is no fireplace in the tiny bedroom she shows me. Two small cots and no window greet me; more of a cupboard than a room. The one shelf is empty, except for a carton of Keating’s insect powder. I’m told I’m to share with another maid called Kittie. I feel a little pang when Mrs Stevenson shows me this room, which tells me that I was expecting more, and I chide myself for foolishness in thinking that a servant will be a step up in the world from a bee-keeper’s daughter.

‘I see too much and I hear too well for an old lady,’ says Mrs Stevenson, on her way back down the stairs.

Now I’m going to describe something that happens to me often and which I have come to accept as part of me. And yet whenever it happens I am brought up short and reminded all over again of something very strange: how impossible it is to be one person in the world, so different from all others, having these particular experiences at this particular time. And how difficult to explain about one particular experience to another living being, no matter how you might want to. And yet it happened to me right then, on that first visit to the Orchard House.

It’s like this: I’m behind Mrs Stevenson on the stair. My hand is on the wooden rail, which is smooth and plain, and like a thousand other hand-rails I have touched, rasping slightly beneath my dry palm. I can see Mrs Stevenson’s black skirt, swishing the floor in front of me, and the tie on her apron at the waist, and a wisp of grey hair escaping the pins near her neck, and I believe she is talking, but I cannot hear her. I cannot feel my own tongue in my mouth. The world simply stops. I do not belong. I am separate, outside, looking on.

With the next beat of my heart, the world goes on again. The smell of apples and bread and dusted wooden floors and the chafe of the bib of my new apron against my throat comes back to me; the chatter of cups on saucers floating up from downstairs.

I was much shaken the first time it happened to me, as a girl of six: this feeling that I was separate, outside things, had somehow slipped through some veil of time and slid through to another place, but now I have come to accept it. I have no explanation; it’s just how things are with me. When it happens, the world seems more vivid, and things happen more slowly and with all their full colours, scents and sensations. When it stops, life picks up a pace.

 

Although I fear I have left something out in my account of my character. I must add another fault to the list, which I have just remembered and it is this: when I take up a particular idea, I am fixed in it, stuck as fast as the seal that bees make for honey. This seal is the propolis that I mentioned earlier, on Father’s hands. It starts off sticky but soon hardens to a form not easily removed. We have to scrape it from the frames with a knife to release the liquid honey underneath but there is always a seal that remains there, that cannot be undone. It has a burned, toffee-brown look. My nature, I fear, is as sealed and capped as propolis. Father would chide me for it, although it was a quality we shared.

I have wandered now in thinking of this, and wonder if a person’s character and propolis is a good comparison? But honey has been my life since I was a tiny girl, and I surely can’t be blamed if thoughts about honey, or bees, occur to me more often than to other people.

Now, within a week of my moving into the Orchard House there is a small commotion. A young gentleman-poet, having enjoyed a May Ball here a few weeks back, has requested rooms. His name is Rupert Brooke. I have heard of him but that means nothing. Kittie tells me that he will be a very great man and that there is already a space on the school wall in Rugby that he went to (and where his mother still lives) that awaits a plaque for him: he told her this himself. This strikes me as mischievous. It’s hard for me to decide if he is teasing, acting the arrogant goat, or truly believes it. Most likely of all, I suppose, is a little of both. In either case, he is certainly guilty of the Sin of Pride and not just about his poetry, either. He is one of those vain men, Kittie says, who has been told so often he is handsome that he is for ever pulling a fresh, boyish stunt, and running elegant fingers through fashionably long, springy hair.

I have not met him yet. Mrs Stevenson has charged me with getting two rooms ready for him. One is to be his bedroom, at the far end, top of the house, and the other, downstairs, is to be his sitting room, for entertaining friends. There’s a dirt track running alongside the house that carries the young men and women on bicycles from the university to his rooms, where they can throw stones and call up at the window for him.

After Mrs Stevenson has told me about this Rupert Brooke, and I’ve listened to Kittie and Mrs Stevenson’s daughter Lottie chattering excitedly of him in the kitchen (remembering the May Ball occasion and a separate one when he came with another famous writer to the house: this writer gentleman–an old man, an American, much taken with Mr Brooke–was apparently accidentally clocked on the head with the pole by Mr Brooke when he took him for a punt down the river; and Kittie had to bathe his head and give him brandy), a funny thing happens. I’m quite convinced that, five minutes later, I pass this very same person.

I’m on an errand in Grantchester to fetch milk and a young man passes me on a bicycle, pedalling fast in the direction of the Orchard and Byron’s Pool. I feel sure, suddenly, that it is him for one reason only and that is one I’ll concede: he does have the sort of face that you notice. A face that girls like Kittie would call handsome, or even beautiful. I spent the moments after he’d cycled past me wondering what it was in him that combined to give me this impression. His forehead was high and his hair of a sandy gold colour. He wore it longer than usual, and he wore no tie, either, so that his throat was bare to the sun. I’d only had a second to consider him as he cycled past the church of St Andrew and St Mary, with his long fringe lifting up in the wind like a cock’s comb. Cock of the Walk, Father would have said. It would not have been a compliment.

 

Mrs Stevenson is all ‘Snap-snap, chop-chop! On you get by seven o’clock this morning,’ and so I set to. The room has been empty for a while. The window is so firm shut that I cannot open it. Dried leaves, half trapped beneath the frames, flicker to dust when I touch them.

I work hard and don’t dawdle. I am sorry that I have no time to poke my head outside to sniff the lilac and the dog-roses in the garden, or breathe in the smell of the fruit trees in the orchard next door. Apple, pear, plum, medlar and quince, and there might be still more varieties. I’m thinking of the bees again and the wild array of honeys that Mr Neeve must make here, with such a source of food for them. Then I think of Father and my heart pinches a little. I picture him with his strong but bony wrist, turning the handle on the honey-spinner, the frames inside rattling, and the table shaking too, with his efforts, making a sound like a ball scattering inside a barrel. In this memory I hear rain too, spattering the roof of our kitchen, and see the fire glowing and the sweat popping on Father’s brow, until the first honey appears at the mouth of the tap: fat, like a bulb of amber.

I thought I’d shed my tears for Father two weeks ago. I’m surprised at myself.

These thoughts are not helping get the work done and, with an effort, I turn my attention to an old bitten-looking beam above the bed. Filthy cobwebs hang from it. When I attack them with the duster, shavings fall too, like flakes of chocolate. Of course, no young man from Cambridge will appreciate the labour it is to turn out a bedroom, so I am not expecting any thanks for the fact that I soaked his china candlesticks in soda to remove the grease, nor that I spent an hour and a half with bottle-brush and patience to clean his water bottle. I dither over whether to put on the pillow shams Mrs Stevenson left out for me. Finally I decide that a young poet with such a good head of silky blond hair has no need of frills and might prefer a plainer spot to lay it. Mrs Stevenson favours such things, but Mother used to say that an ornate pillow sham is only ‘display’, with no place here in England. Such display has come over from the United States. Mother was always scornful of ‘display’. She was full of sweeping condemnations. Her favourite phrase was ‘nature needs no ornament’–I remember being told that when I wanted pretty pins to wear in my hair. I always knew the real reason was that we had no money for such things, so I grew to hate the saying, but since Father’s passing it has come back to me as a decent one, and serviceable.

‘I see too much and I hear too well for an old lady,’ Mrs Stevenson said, so I work hard, and with some nervousness for how she will judge me. I sense that the young man is a special favourite of hers and that she is at pains to please him. So I clean the ironwork of the bed with paraffin, rubbing it into every ledge and crevice with the rag and thinking happily of how it will hardly creak now when he rolls over in the night. I wash the tumbler and the soap-dish, carefully using a different cloth from the one for the slop-pail and the chamber, adding a little splash of cold water to the pot before I put it back in the toilet cupboard. I do all this with loving attention, with such a particular satisfaction that I am sitting back on my heels admiring my own thoroughness when Mrs Stevenson bursts into the room with another of her hand-clappings and chop-chops to say that the afore-mentioned will be here in a minute and haven’t I got rid of that mouse yet?

That makes my heart skitter in my chest, though whether it is the mouse (which I chase with the broom) or the afore-mentioned it’s hard to say. Mrs Stevenson clops downstairs to attend to her scones, which, from the smell wafting upstairs, are in danger of burning. I run behind her.

So it is me who admits him. He appears at the door, tall and sunny, loose-limbed and lanky, with his high forehead and mane of hair that I remember, from my glimpse earlier in the day. I present myself politely, my hands stinging with the efforts of the scrubbing. I hold them tidily behind my back and smile as he grins a glorious grin at me and the sun blazes through the door, warming my face to scarlet. He wears grey flannels and a soft collar with no tie; and his face is rather innocent and babyish and, at the same time, inspired with a fierce life. Perhaps that is the secret of the ‘impression’ he creates of extraordinary loveliness, the sort of loveliness you’d more often see in a girl than a young man.

He holds a half-bitten apple. ‘I say–anyone here mind if I take off my shoes?’ he asks. It isn’t really a question. He holds the apple between his teeth, bending down to step out of his shoes and socks. Mr Rupert Brooke steps over the threshold and into the kitchen.

 

His naked toes. I try, of course, not to look. But later, when he asks for tea outside on the lawn at the front of the house, and I bring it to him on a wobbling tray, the milk shaking in the little jug, there they are again. Each toe well formed and strong-looking, like the long white keys on a piano. ‘Handsome’ and ‘shapely’ are the two words that present themselves to me, thinking of his feet. And ‘wrong’ is the next. Or should I perhaps say ‘revealing’?

I have mentioned my habit of looking at things too hard, and considering them too assiduously. Like Father’s hands and the little shock it caused me to understand that Father was not always old and unlovely. Mr Brooke’s toes told me the opposite tale. That he was not only or always a Varsity man, a poet, a person of dust and chalk and King’s College, Cambridge, but a human creature who had once been bathed by a mother. How even his toes were, I think, like the feet of–oh, I don’t know–an animal, a monkey perhaps, something that can use toes the way an ordinary man cannot. And his ankles, too! The naked ankle bone peeping from his trouser leg so prominent, and angular, so beautifully formed. His ankle could never have been mistaken for the ankle of a young woman. It is undeniably male. Such a curious thought made me shiver.

I have spent long enough in observing toes and weighing my conclusions about them and must surely, I chide myself, have some pressing duties.

Kittie comes to twitter over him. Seeing that I have forgotten the honey for his tea she brings him a pot, and a spoon, and drops a curtsy and pauses until he looks up from the copy of English Review lying in front of him on the grass and says: ‘Forster’s tale: “Other Kingdom”. Best story ever written, Nellie. It is Nellie, isn’t it?’

‘It’s Kittie, sir. Nellie’s the tall one. The girl with the black hair over there.’ She nods towards me and he laughs then and turns in his lazy way to look at me. The garden shudders with a sudden breeze as he does and a purple hairstreak butterfly flickers past my face.

Seconds later I bob a foolish curtsy, just like Kittie, then want to kick myself. Escaping, I realise that even though he is lying on his side on the grass, propping his head on his elbow in an appearance of complete relaxation, he is in fact watching me. He is saying something to me! I hurry close to hear him.

‘And hot milk would be good too and eggs, if you have them.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘On the lawn here in Arcadia would be admirably suitable.’

I glance down again, at his white feet among the three-leafed clover on the springy lawn. Another of his grins then. A grin that–he must know–is like a taper being lit and would melt any girl’s skin to liquid wax. I–luckily for him–am not ‘any girl’. He is fortunate that I am the good, practical sort with my head screwed tight and that none of his charms will work on me. I pick up my tray at once and hasten to the kitchen, to set to coddling the eggs.

 

July 1909

I am in the Country in Arcadia; a rustic. It is a village two miles from Cambridge, up the river. You know the place; it is near all picnicing grounds. And here I work at Shakespeare and see few people. Shakespeare’s rather nice. Antony and Cleopatra is a very good play. In the intervals I wander about bare foot and almost naked, surveying Nature with a calm eye. I do not pretend to understand Nature, but I get on very well with her, in a neighbourly way. I go on with my books, and she goes on with her hens and storms and things, and we’re both very tolerant. Occasionally we have tea together. I don’t know the names of things (like the tramp in Mr Masefield’s poem), but I get on very well by addressing all flowers ‘Hello, buttercup!’ and all animals ‘Puss! Puss!’ I live on honey, eggs and milk, prepared for me by an old lady like an apple (especially in face) and sit all day in a rose garden to work. Of a morning Dudley Ward and a shifting crowd come out from Cambridge and bathe with me, have breakfast (out in the garden, as all meals) and depart. Dudley and I have spent the summer in learning to DIVE. I can generally do it now: he rarely. He goes in fantastically; quite flat, one leg pathetically waving, his pince-nez generally on. But, O, at 10pm (unless it’s too horribly cold) alone, very alone and (though I boast of it next day) greatly frightened, I steal out, down an empty road, across emptier fields, through a wood packed with beings and again into the ominous open, and bathe by night. Have you ever done it? Oh but you have, no doubt. I, never before. I am in deadly terror of the darkness in the wood. I steal through it very silently. Once, I frightened two cows there, and they me. Two dim whitenesses surged up the haunted pathway and horribly charged on me. And once, returning bare foot through the wood, I trod on a large worm, whose dying form clung to the sole of my foot for many minutes.

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.

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.

They sit outside in the orchard, in deckchairs, and talk about the strangest, most inconsequential things.

‘Here, did I tell you that story that a fellow at King’s told me? About his cousin who died when she was seventeen, and the poor chap was too deep in his Tripos to really give it his full attention and he rather muffed the grieving part of things. Then one day–oh, yes, thank you, Nell, and cream too, please–he had such a dream. In it he saw the girl standing in front of a mirror, powdering her face. One can imagine how impossible this seemed to him–the child was just seventeen, why would she be painting her face? Then he saw clearly in the glass that she was dead and that’s how it struck him at last. She was trying to cover up a ravaged face.’

It’s Mr Brooke who tells this tale. He says ‘ravaged’ in a teasing, theatrical manner, with his eyelashes flickering. But the young Miss Darwin woman doesn’t laugh, she continues staring down at a small notebook where she is sketching, and mutters, without looking up, ‘A girl of seventeen, painting her face!’ To which Mr Brooke replies, ‘It was a dream, Gwen. The chap was dreaming. There’s a curious obviousness, finality, certainty about it, somehow, when one hears of it, isn’t there?’

I remember then that Kittie told me Mr Brooke lost a brother. His older brother, Dick, ‘went to the bad,’ she said, hinting heavily with meaningful looks. When I pressed her she said that Dick had died of pneumonia, just a couple of years ago, when Rupert first came up to Cambridge, but that it wasn’t really the pneumonia that killed him, he’d been a drinker and, worse, other dark things. Kittie tapped her head with one finger to convey her meaning and, annoyed, I swiped at her with the teacloth. I wondered at how Kittie knows so much about Rupert’s life. This thought produces a suspicious pang. It is not that I harbour romantic illusions about Mr Brooke–I’m far too honest a girl for that–but only that his loss of a brother makes me feel that he and I, for all our different stations, might share something, that we know what it is to reach the end of our childhood and have certainty snatched from us, be reminded what a sad, sorry place the world is. But this is only a fancy, a thought in my own imagination, after all, and not a hard fact of any kind: not real like this tray in front of me and these blue-rimmed teacups and this amber liquid steaming in the pot and the soft molehills on the grass and the sounds of a boatman shouting on the river…

Miss Darwin says do I mind if she ‘plays Mother’, so I set the tray down and leave the rest to them.

My policy on the matter of bumping into Mr Brooke two times now by the two-holer is, of course, to say nothing at all, and to be careful not to catch his eye. But as I’m turning to go back to the kitchen from the orchard he suddenly looks directly at me and says, ‘Oh, Nell, have you ever trodden on a worm with your bare left foot, on a moonless night in a Dreadful Wood alone?’

This is the way he talks. I suppose it is thought to be funny, or witty, where he comes from, but I have no reply. The others look up, expectantly. He stares straight at me with his clean blue gaze, and I recognise it for what it is, a challenge. Am I to blush, turn away, stumble? After counting to six (inwardly), I say carefully, ‘No, sir. Will that be all?’ And it is he who drops his gaze first, and laughs.

Mrs Stevenson is cross when I get back to the kitchen, since I’ve forgotten to bring the tray. I show her a burn on my hand from the oven yesterday, which is still raw and red in two raised stripes and mention that it is hard for me to carry so much with such an injury. So she fetches the key to the locked cupboard and I’m to help myself to a small pat of butter to rub on the burn. She’s very good to us. I cannot think of many maid-of-alls who are treated as well. It is because she has daughters of her own, I’m sure, but that is also the reason she ‘hears too much’ and I know to be wary of it.

This afternoon there is a further commotion. A painter has arrived at Grantchester Meadows, with no more morals, according to Mr Neeve, ‘than the honey bees’. As this man has camped rather too close to the hives, Mr Neeve is exercised over it. The man has two wives with him and a hundred children, all boys (Kittie tells me this, with her customary breathlessness and elaboration)–the children wild and brown and barely dressed, except for tattered yellow and red garments.

Mr Brooke asks me to take a letter to this man, inviting him to tea.

‘To tea, sir, here at the Orchard?’

‘Be a sensible child, Nell. He looks like a gypsy but I assure you he’s the greatest painter.’

As I hesitate I note in the corner of my eye Kittie, with her red hair bobbing beneath her cap, staring at us. She looks for a moment as if she’s about to approach us, and so, swiftly, I accept the note. After all, Mr Brooke has entrusted me, not Kittie, to run his errand for him, no doubt already noticing that if one of us were ‘Beauty’ and one of us ‘Brains’, I would be the latter.

But I don’t mind admitting I’m a little alarmed as I approach the artist’s camp, which does indeed look no different from the gypsy camps we see in Prickwillow, full of cheapjacks and tinkers. There’s a sky-blue van next to one of canary yellow, about a half-dozen enormous horses quietly grazing and, close by, two tents. And from one emerges an enormous figure–a man–exactly like a pirate: standing over six feet high, wearing the strangest jersey and check suit, and with a long red beard, just like the beard of Rumpelstiltskin.

As I come closer, I can see that one eye is puffy and shadowed with black, and in the sunlight, gold earrings glitter in his hair. My hand without the sore grips the basket of fruit I’m carrying, the note lying on top. I pick my way between the thistles and flakes of dried cow-pats, coarse as matted hair, remembering how Kittie said a cabman in Cambridge had been too nervous to drive him, this Augustus John, and no wonder!

Now a woman appears from one of the tents and stands staring towards me, shading her eyes against the sun. Her dress is long and a damson colour, her head wound with a scarf. The other wife is nowhere to be seen but the ‘hundreds’ of boys–more likely six, now I count them–are all in the river, splashing and shouting. One of the horses startles, neighing suddenly–a sound like the drawing of a saw across wood. And so I stop. Far enough, I think.

‘I’ve come from Mr Rupert Brooke, sir. He’s sent a message for you.’

I have to shout a little to be heard. I feel foolish for stopping so far, but cannot now make myself shift closer. The gypsy giant strides towards me and takes the basket. The moment he lifts the note from it, with the apples lying underneath, the boys appear, like a swarm of monkeys, their bodies shining wet. They grab at the apples, shouting and splashing me with water. And not a word from the mother to chastise them!

‘He’d like you to take tea in the orchard, sir. The pavilion you see there beyond the gate with the tin roof, and the house is just behind it.’

This is all in the note, but the way the artist is staring at it, I’m not certain he can read.

Laughter and uproar from the children mean I must bellow again to be heard. A moorhen joins in with a sudden screechy warning. The lady remains at an observing distance and it is the artist who claps his hands round the children’s heads, shouting as he does, ‘Splendid! Haven’t I always said, Dorelia, how respectable people become indignant at the sight of us, but disreputable ones behave charmingly?’

The wife surely has no means of hearing him at such a distance and over such noise, so makes no comment. The basket now empty, I pick it up, nod my goodbyes and head back towards the gate. I do not like the way this Mr Augustus John stares at me. A girl can always tell such things–if only men realised how clearly their thoughts might be read, they might perhaps try to keep them better locked up.

As I turn, I catch a glimpse of the other wife, a younger version of the first, who might be a sister, or even a daughter. She is drying one of the younger boys with a cloth. This child holds a piece of grass between finger and thumb and whistles, his note piercing the air like a bird call.

Dear oh dear. I can just imagine what Mrs Stevenson will say when this carnival turns up for tea.

 

Oh, I have written an inarticulate but pleasant enough poem for the Cambridge Review at their request. Or, rather, I wrote it last April and yielded it to them now. At least I didn’t burn it, although I might grow to wish I had–it’s possible. About that blasted child Noel, of course, in the New Forest. ‘Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire/Of watching you…’

A bitter lie, naturally. I’m tired already. How many years is it since I first clapped eyes on Noel? It was in Ben Keeling’s rooms in Trinity, one of those early Fabian Society meetings Ben lured me to. I sat on a window-ledge eating nuts, I remember, and Noel was there all broad-browed and smiling, with her sister Margery and probably some other Newnham girls. I remember Noel dropped a cup, a small green dainty cup of coffee, and the dark brown splash and pieces of crockery flew everywhere, and she was embarrassed. Bending down beside her, gingerly picking up pieces and putting them into a napkin, I remember her deep, shy blush. I was studying her while her eyes were on the cup and the floor. I remember that her skin was not the translucent sort that one sees the veins in, but rather creamy, opaque, thick, even. Was it Nietzsche who said one knows all one needs to about a person in the first fifteen minutes of meeting? What did I know about Noel? That she was shy, yes. That she was passionate, and had genuine socialist convictions. But also something else: that she was somewhat inscrutable, impenetrable. Ah, yes. That’ll do it every time.

It’s a poor sonnet. Considering I don’t believe in a ‘last land’, I wonder why I persist in imagining myself and Noel there in it, her turning and tossing her ‘brown delightful head/Amusedly among the ancient Dead…’? (But I wrote it three months ago and a lot can happen in three months, including utter abandonment of the concept of immortality.) It’s a poem full of ‘breezy obviousness’, no doubt. Or, as the Master of Magdalene might say, ‘conventional in its deliberate modernity, uneven and bizarre’. Must try harder, in fact. The moment it was sent, I wished to snatch it back, but there it is. A longing to be seen and read and known, and yet an even more powerful one not to be; to fabricate and obfuscate and posture and all the rest. It’s exhausting. No wonder I have ophthalmia again, no doubt caught from one of Augustus’s scallywags–their eyes are as pink as the eyes of albino rabbits. How I passionately long to lock myself wholly up, deny admittance to a soul, soothe my eyes with milk, and read and write only and always (with the regular interval for pumping ship, naturally). And improve, improve, improve! Wasn’t that what I came here to do? To escape the distractions of Cambridge life, to patch up my lost scholarly reputation, and not to invite those same distractions to join me here at every turn?

‘If he looked like that and was a good poet too, I don’t know what I should do.’ Henry James’s summation. Or, rather, according to Dudley, voiced thus: ‘Well, I must say I’m relieved to hear his poetry is not good, for with that appearance if he had also talent it would be too unfair.’

Oh, one needn’t think I don’t hear these things. My Prodigious Beauty, incidentally, does not interfere with the proper functioning of my ears.

 

So the whole circus arrives later in the afternoon and, Lord, what a spectacle! There are six boys, it turns out, aged from three to eight and such a tribe they are…They even bring their groom, Arthur. The gypsy man says they brought Arthur along for ‘washing up’ but they still expect him to be fed! It is this Arthur, it turns out, who is the reason for the painter’s black eye. It seems he and Mr John are fairly in the habit of disagreeing and like to demonstrate as much to each other with a rain of blows.

My hand is still smarting from the burn, and it’s fetch and carry, fetch and carry from three o’clock to six, and I can scarcely hear myself think, what with the racket they make. More scones (we have to keep the oven constantly stoked), more tea, more honey, more butter, more milk, more eggs…

The artist is here to paint a Lady Don, at the university, and all the talk is of her. ‘A very charming person,’ Mr John announces, ‘although a puzzle to paint…’ He says she smokes cigarettes all day and reclines on green drapes for the sitting with a red book on her lap. Somehow I gather that this Lady Don, although of an advanced age, has been harbouring romantic illusions about a friend of Mr Brooke’s and Mr Ward’s, a man older than them called Francis Cornford. (I think the man has visited. I think he is the tall, older man on a bicycle, with such a mop of curly black hair that it looks like a wig, who is very stiff and shy. Mr Brooke calls him Comus–a part he had in a play they were in. Their habit of nicknames for one another only adds to my confusion but I can’t help myself from concentrating hard, from wanting to keep up.) The Lady Don sounds very wretched because she only has her books now, and Mr Brooke blurts out that she should know better ‘as she’s old enough to be his mother’, and they all laugh as if he has said something witty, with Mr Brooke then shouting that hadn’t they all taken an oath, during the play, Comus, not to marry within six months of it–and that surely Francis Cornford had broken that oath by making overtures during that time to Miss Darwin’s cousin? This last part of the conversation is the hardest to fathom because it seems that Miss Darwin’s cousin is called Frances too, and that Frances and Francis Cornford are to marry…

During all this talk and kerfuffle the mother does not scold the boys at all for snatching, stuffing food into their faces, tearing at the clover they find in the grass and scattering the leaves all over the linen tablecloth, or leaping from chair to chair or under the tables and so, of course, they do all of these things, all of the time, like a tribe of monkeys let loose in a wood.

When the conversation about the Frances and Francis state of affairs dies down, Mr Brooke and Mr Dudley Ward fire up a curious conversation with the children, chiefly with the eldest one, a boy called Pyramus, who tells Mr Brooke of an imaginary world where the river is milk, the mud honey, the reeds and trees green sugar, the earth cake. (The boys must be starving, to dream up such things. The blades of their brown bare shoulders poke out like little wings. One of them, David, reminds me of my own sweet Stanley, with his long curls, and his fat bottom lip and his habit of lying on his stomach on the grass, gazing at ants and ladybirds.)

‘And what would the leaves be?’ asks Mr Brooke, his cheeks flushed, one hand brushing back his floppy fringe, persisting with the foolish game long after the children have lost interest.

‘The leaves would be ladies’ hats!’ announces Pyramus, and the party falls to laughing, so that Mr Brooke knocks over the little brown jar of Devonshire cream and another has to be fetched.

Then they carry on to declare that the sky is made from the blue pinafore of the youngest boy, Robin. The sun is a spot of honey on this same blue pinafore. ‘What would happen,’ asks Mr Dudley Ward, ‘if you were all in a tree, and at the bottom a big bear sat and waited so that you couldn’t come down?’

‘The bear would die after a little,’ Pyramus says boldly, with all the adults looking at him as if his views are to be considered, and again the lot of them laugh, as if the boy has said something witty.

This children’s game and Mr Brooke’s enthusiasm for it makes me cross with him. It’s a part of his nature I find irksome. For instance, he has asked several times if he could take tea and ‘whales’, and it was only this afternoon that he explained that ‘whales’ was sardines on toast. Seems to me he has spent too long in the classroom with other boys, giving the same boys too great an importance, with their secret games and private names. Our way, where children are not separated and sent to school together but given the duties of adults very soon, produces a more natural child, if you ask me, and more natural adult too, without the two being confused. Mr Brooke and his friends seem not to understand that others might not share their pleasure in childish things. Or, rather, they know full well and delight in shunning all but their school friends.

By the time the meal ends, my poor burned palm is raw and stinging and my neck and shoulders aching. The party breaks up suddenly, on a word of Mr Brooke’s, that the Lady Don can’t be kept waiting a minute longer, and the children scatter in the direction of the river, so Mrs Stevenson charges her daughter, Lottie, with helping us clear away the tea things. The artist’s chief wife Dorelia watches us silently as we do so, shyly pushing a saucer and spoon towards me at one moment, rather than ask me for more strawberries. The younger girl, despite Mr Brooke’s calling her a ‘second wife’, is to my mind merely a sister to the first, and there as a general helpmeet, with no relation to the painter that could be guessed at from the little that passed between them.

Mr Brooke has offered to take the family down-river by boat. As suddenly as the hullabaloo arrived, it disappears. The colourful figures melt through the trees towards the gate and the river, and the cheeky sparrows who had hopped around the table all afternoon now land on it to pluck at the crumbs, joined by a poor straggly robin with naughty black eyes. When I make a move towards him, I’m surprised that he doesn’t fly off but guards his little portion of crumbs like an Indian brave. The poor bird must be starving. I name it Pyramus and feel another stab of sorrow for little Stanley and Edmund. No doubt they, too, are out on the river Lark or the mere in this summer heat, but it won’t be playing and splashing for them. They will be lying low in the boat, holding the gun for the eel man, Sam, and steadying the recoil in the punt, while Sam shoots wildfowl for Betty to boil up in a pot for his dinner. I pray God he shares some with my brothers, later.

 

And so I punt, and Dudley slumbers and the sweet river slips past us, melancholy and enchanted, and the boys quickly return to their water-naiad forms, while Augustus, with Dorelia lying beside him, sleepily complains of the constraints of patronage. A terrible sprite grips me and persuades me that this should be the occasion for venturing my little speech on that very subject (an essay I have been musing on for the Fabian Society). Trying to sound natural and unrehearsed, I begin: ‘Since we all agree that poets and artists matter, and since we know they require periods of development, should it not be the state that provides, you know, bread and cheese and whatever for those who show promise?’

‘Huh?’ is all Augustus says, so I continue.

‘Well…the ordinary system of incomplete endowment and jobbery and such things as payment for dedications is a ramshackle affair…wouldn’t you say…?’

The water plops as a fish jumps, and as we leave the dense trees on the bank behind us and reach Dead Man’s Bend, I fall quiet for a moment, the better to concentrate. It’s a devil to punt here, if one doesn’t know it, as the water is deeper than the length of the punt pole. Augustus is oblivious to the expertise of his chauffeur, however, and continues to drone quietly to Dorelia about the woman who is to sit to him, Jane Harrison, making no attempt to include me in the conversation. My hands sweating, the pole nearly slips through them. I take off my shirt and tie and lay them at my feet. After a cough, I try again, a little more forcefully: ‘I mean, it affects the work, doesn’t it? You see it in Elizabethan times when most of the best writers lost all their shame (which doesn’t much matter) and half their vitality (which does) in cadging and touting.’

Augustus glances slyly at me, interested at last, but unsure, I believe, at this point, whether my remarks are intended to contradict or support his position. His eyes are closed, his arm dangling lazily over the edge of the boat, Dorelia and her sister Edie resting either side of him, and the children bobbing beside us in the water like noisy ducklings. Dudley snoozes stiffly at the other end of the boat (his flimsy weight hardly achieving its task of balancing us), the sun bouncing off his shiny pate.

‘I wonder how much more Milton or Marvell might have given us had they had enough to live on? If anything at all, the loss is enormous, surely.’

Now Augustus opens one eye and surveys me thoroughly. Finally, he bestirs himself to speak. ‘What about losing half of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene? Would have been rather an achievement, in my view.’

‘Yes, yes,’ I have to agree, flummoxed. ‘But it’s terrifying, is it not, to think how many artists are living on inherited capital? And if you were to really count the waste of past centuries, one would have to include the artistic potentialities sown here and there in the undistinguished mass of the people, which have perished unconscious in that blindest oblivion–the mute, inglorious Miltons of the village and slum Beethovens—’

Augustus opens both eyes at last and interrupts, with his slow drawl, ‘You think poets and artists should compose at the loom, the way William Morris hoped?’

He is calmly smoking a cigarette now. With his curious pale face and his sea-anemone eyes, he might have been a Macedonian king himself, or a Renaissance poet. A stab of envy races through me as Dorelia snuggles up to him and I remember again all I have heard about his prodigious sexual appetites, the many, many conquests. My heartbeat quickens and something akin to fear grows there, when I’m faced with his challenging stare and the feeling that Augustus, after all, is living the life as I am not, and might uncover me as the ridiculous virgin that I am.

‘No,’ I mutter at once, beginning to wish my little experiment over, adding sotto voce, like an insolent schoolboy, ‘Although most of Morris’s own stuff surely was–probably why the poetry was so dull.’

‘What, then?’

‘Well, not the idea that the artists of the future will all be those who do common work in the day and have time to compose in the evening–no. And art must always be an individual and unique affair, not “expressing the soul of a community”. All I’m suggesting is that the state might endow individuals who show promise with a substantial sum, say, two hundred and fifty pounds a year, in order that they may pursue a life that would otherwise be closed to them.’

Dorelia shifts a little in the boat, crossing one foot over the other so that I am suddenly confronted with her soles: rude and dirty and bare, and this, more than Augustus’s hard expression, is what finally silences me.

‘I didn’t take you for a socialist, Brooke.’

I am pink by now and quite ridiculous. How to extricate myself and prevent him shooting straight to Newnham to make Jane Harrison hoot with laughter about me? ‘Well, you knew, of course, that I’m a member of the Cambridge Fabian Society? Although, admittedly, not quite as devout as the Webbs would like me to be, no, nor as interested in economics, it’s true, but—’

‘He’s not a socialist,’ Dorelia murmurs in her lazy way. ‘He says what he believes will please or provoke you.’

Now my humiliation is complete, and my face flames with a blush of tomato red. Dudley stirs from his drowsy slumber, where he has melted like wax in the sun, unsticks himself from his end of the boat, stands up and offers to take the pole. (I know at once that he has been listening and, in his characteristic, kindly way, hopes to rescue me.) Dudley’s moving towards me rocks the boat violently and nearly dunks me in the drink. I’m tempted to leap in anyway, to join Pyramus and David and the others; be free of this scalding torture.

Without waiting for Dudley to take over I drive the pole hard into the water, where it threatens to lodge in the mud and pull me out with it, to dangle, both hands clinging, like a damselfly sticking to a reed. We leave the meadows behind and reach the rushing water of the weir at last, which provides a distraction of sorts: Dorelia sits up, pushing her scarf away from her eyes, then calls to the boys once she understands that we must get out, drag the boat over the wooden rollers, and relaunch it to reach the Backs. The boys’ splashings and shrieks are temporarily stalled, as they scramble to the water’s edge to do our bidding.

So many hands make light work. The boat is dragged over in an instant. Then we are back in the river with a splash, to the accompaniment of many small, excited voices, who remain bobbing in the water.

Now Augustus is explaining to Dorelia and Edie the magical construction of the Mathematical Bridge, and they are readjusting their attitude to the rickety wooden structure and admiring it. I’m tempted to murmur that this is somehow my point. That regardless of age or background, this desire to be an artist surely comes from the same impulse, a very simple one: an overwhelming desire to–share or show. ‘I saw–I saw,’ the artist says, ‘a tree against a sky, or a blank wall in the sunlight, and it was so thrilling, so arresting, so particularly itself–that, well, really, I must show you—’

But I say nothing, and hand the pole to Dudley, then stumble across a rocking boat to take up my place in Dudley’s vacated section where I hunker down like the bull-terrier Pudsey Dawson after a scolding. Impossible not to be stung by Dorelia’s remark. Does she share Henry James’s judgement, then, based on nothing more than a glance at my face, that it is possible to deduce I possess no merit in any field of endeavour?

Dudley begins punting in an elegant, smooth rhythm. The boys, tired, suddenly want to clamber into the boat, which they do with much shouting, rocking and tipping, and thoroughly drenching us all.

‘I have heard there are some very lovely young women in the Fabian Society,’ opines Augustus, when the din dies down. ‘I hear H. G. Wells has found it very…accommodating.’ Closing his eyes again, he settles himself once more among his crowded nest of women and children, while Dudley–with one sympathetic glance at me–guides us skilfully under the next bridge.

I glance up as we slide beneath, to see how the shadows and light on the underside form intricate patterns, like the veins on a leaf.

Naturally enough, I keep this ludicrous, pointless, poetic observation to myself.

 

There is ample work when Mr Brooke and the others leave to go punting. I have to clear the table and, most important, supervise Kittie washing up. Now, although I am the new girl, I have learned something about Kittie. If I don’t attend to her she simply makes more work for me later; she has complete want of a system of any sort and you might think she had to pay for water by the pint, so miserly is she with it. Left to herself, she would go on using the same drop–no matter what the colour–to the bitter end. Kittie’s mind is on other things. And if her miserly use of water isn’t bad enough, her treatment of the teacloths is worse! She doesn’t seem to understand that a soiled teacloth is unhealthy and means smeary china. That girl has had no training at all and her home is obviously a poor one.

Yesterday she arrived from an errand at the butcher’s in Grantchester with a badge saying Votes for Women. A tin badge, with a safety-pin attached. I could scarcely believe it. ‘What are you doing with that thing?’ I said. ‘Take it off this minute and throw it away!’ (Kittie does remind me of my sister Betty, with her dreamy ways and her want of good sense.) She looked surprised at my cross tone. In truth, I think she was surprised at how quickly I’d taken charge of things. She carefully took the badge off her coat and slid it into her apron pocket, but she didn’t throw it away. ‘Where on earth did you get it?’ I hissed, as we stood at the basin, wiping the china. ‘Surely you’d lose your position here if Mrs Stevenson saw it?’

‘I went to Camden Town with my sister Fanny and listened to a woman speaker. Fanny says—’

‘Listen, Kittie. Women are destined to make voters, rather than be one of them. That’s our task in life, not to stand on street corners making a show of ourselves,’ I said. This was something Father had told me many times while we stood together by the hives, wiping the bees from the frames with our long sticks of feathers. I thought that Kittie, like Betty, would then fall silent, on account of my greater age and unyielding tone, but to my astonishment she didn’t.

‘Fanny says we are brave soldiers in the women’s army. That the time for talk is over. Action is what we need…’

The girl is more stupid than I thought. She pores over the Daily Mail every morning, and yesterday she brought in something new, the Daily Sketch. She read it all through breakfast, which, given that we are only allowed ten minutes for that meal, seemed to me like a royal waste of time. She read things out to me: women throwing stones and raiding the House of Commons and Mrs Pankhurst smacking a police inspector’s face. It made my blood boil. ‘Do you seriously think that these grand ladies with their big hats are fighting for the Vote for girls like us?’ I asked her. ‘Don’t you know that, were they ever to win such a thing, it would only be for grand ladies and married ladies and ladies with property? Why should we risk our positions and our good names so that they might vote at every turn against the working man’s best interests?’

‘Oh, but you’re wrong, Nell,’ she replied, cool as you like. ‘There’s many a maid or a girl like us what wants the Vote. Have you not heard of Annie Kenny? Look, here she is, right here, and look how she’s lost a finger. That happened in the cotton mills…’ She pointed at a grubby, blackened picture in the Daily Sketch, which I could barely make out.

‘Well, that only proves that this Kenny girl is accident prone and hardly to be admired,’ I said.

That was yesterday, but it’s clear the subject is not forgotten, any more than the badge. I notice that Kittie is fiddling with the place on her apron where the pin was and, to forestall another argument, I say, with a firm tone, ‘See that that teacloth is scalded out, Kittie, and do pick another one–otherwise it will never boil clean.’

Mrs Stevenson comes into the scullery; thankfully Kittie falls silent. She hates to be scolded, and within hearing of Mrs Stevenson too. She sets her mouth firm and her brows against me, plunging her hands back into the water with a great splash, practically knocking the bucket off the dresser in her violence.

Our next task is to pickle the day’s crop of young walnuts. Kittie is of the opinion that it is now time for a tea-break of our own and a sit-down with our feet up and perhaps to eat up the pieces of abandoned scone, but I soon put her right on that idea. A great basket of walnuts needs doing. I show her how to use only the good vinegar and where to find the jars and muslin. ‘And make sure the vinegar completely covers the walnuts…and be sure to tie them securely…They need a nice dry spot in the larder, up there on the shelf where Lottie won’t knock them,’ I add.

Kittie complains of a sore throat. She says the smell of vinegar is making her come over queasy. I promise her a piece of flannel soaked in whisky and rubbed with yellow soap to tie round her throat at bedtime, and for a while she accepts this, at last applying herself to her task. Then suddenly, in answer to no remark of mine, she sighs and springs out with ‘He’s so–he’s so fair, isn’t he? And so boyish and so–so clever—’

‘Who is?’

‘Why, Rupert–Mr Brooke–of course!’

I find I can’t speak. I am startled by the thump in my chest–my own heart leaping about like a dog when a visitor arrives. What’s this about? I ask myself. The Lord knows, you’ve no interest in the man, Nell Golightly. You’re just embarrassed to picture him again, so erect, his arms hugging a bundle of clothes, and that queer, sudden laugh he has, so unexpected but so catching, somehow, like the laugh of a ten-year-old child…and as I scold myself, I cannot help remembering the moonlight gleaming on one side of his body, like the shine on polished silver…

‘Oh!’ I sigh, and Kittie glances at me. My hand is stinging and black from the walnut stains. ‘I’ve splashed my scalded palm with vinegar,’ I snap, and my eyes prickle with tears. When Kittie turns again to stare nosily at me, I say, ‘I find it rather silly that he wanders around barefoot and refuses meat. A boy who is kept by his mother and never did a day’s work…I wonder if Mother’s allowance doesn’t run to bacon?’

Kittie shakes her head, reaching for another empty jar. She begins filling it with walnuts, and for the longest time, I believe her angry and refusing to answer me. Then I see with surprise that she is smiling.

‘He does have a young face, doesn’t he? How old do you think he is? Twenty? Twenty-two?’

‘He’s here to apply for a fellowship at King’s. He’s failed his Tripos and that surely makes him—’ But I don’t know how old that makes him. In truth, I have no idea what this ‘Tripos’ is, although I’ve heard Mr Brooke and his friends talk of it. My ignorance must be hidden from Kittie, for it would make her despise me. I know that my authority over her rests on the fact that I am used to shouldering the burdens of a mother. Also that I had two more years’ schooling than her.

‘Oh, no–not that knife!’ I suddenly screech, seeing her about to pick up a steel knife to prise the walnut from its shell. ‘The metal gives such a terrible taste–honestly, Kittie, don’t you know anything?’

Well, that remark does it, and she sets her mouth in a pout and refuses to speak to me for the rest of the afternoon. It is only when Mrs Stevenson’s daughter, Lottie, serving another boating party on the lawn, comes running into the kitchen, giggling, that Kittie breaks her sulk.

‘He’s back! They all are–and on the meadow there was a lady, a lady arrived on a train from Cambridge–another one! And this one, you wouldn’t believe it—’ Lottie is saying. She doesn’t complete her sentence, ending with a laugh that veers into a shriek. Mrs Stevenson comes into the kitchen then, and Lottie has to wait for her mother to leave before she carries on. ‘She’s got this hat–enormous!–and she’s as tall as a man, but sort of drooping, like a great–like a sort of arum lily, drooping over the field! You can’t believe how grand she is. Her nose–like a beak. Like a great parrot!’

‘Well, which is it?’ I ask. ‘An arum lily or a parrot? She can’t be both—’

But Lottie ignores my tart tone. ‘She lets the children run about her and makes eyes at the painter–she must be another mistress! And the other two wives allow it!’

‘Is she coming here for tea?’ I ask in alarm, calculating the scones and whether to send Kittie to fetch more milk.

Lottie and Kittie pay no heed to me at all but continue breathlessly. They run about the kitchen muttering and whispering, their voices spilling with excitement.

‘She’s a lady. A real one. Lady Ottoline, I heard Mr Brooke call her. A lady in fancy dress! Go peep at her, Kittie. Take a look at that great beaky nose! And that long trailing dress in such a lovely shade of green, fanning behind her and soaking up all the mud. It’s like a peacock’s tail–yes, that’s it! She’s like a–peacock!

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Lottie, how can one person be a flower, a parrot and now a peacock?’

‘That hardly matters,’ Kittie puts in. ‘What I want to know is–why would the artist need a mistress when he already has the lovely wife with the plum-coloured dress and her sister too, for seconds?’

‘How many mistresses can one man have?’

Here they put their heads together and wail with laughter. When they set out the tray the cups rattle against their saucers–their bodies shaking with giggles. Lottie can’t halt herself. ‘And the cart!’ she squeaks. ‘I heard such a story from Mr Neeve’s son. That huge horse they use to drag it slipped and fell down! And the painter–Mr Augustus John–just stares at it, staring and staring at the great brute kicking and struggling, and him just smoking his cigarette, like he hasn’t an idea in his head what to do next. Station loafers had to come to the rescue. The man is like–what is he like?’

‘A peacock, perhaps? Another kind of bird, or plant?’

But Lottie doesn’t hear the sarcasm in my voice. ‘He’s like one of his own wild boys!’ she blurts. ‘Honestly, I’m sure he’s quite mad. Cyril, Mr Neeve’s boy, says the whole of Cambridge is terrified of him.’

And so their twittering continues, and there is nothing I can do to stop them. The surprise of the things they describe keeps hitting my body in waves, and I cannot stop myself wanting to hear more. Can it really be possible that this ‘greatest painter’, as Mr Brooke described him, has three mistresses? Or even three wives? Why would a grand lady from London want to associate with a raggle-taggle gypsy band in a tent and two caravans? Lottie reports that Lady Ottoline left before tea, finding the meadow sodden and the other wives unfriendly. This makes the pair hoot.

‘The other wives unfriendly? No!’ Kittie howls.

And just at that moment, Mr Brooke steps into the kitchen and murmurs, ‘I say–any more whales on toast, girls?’ and the two stop dead, curtsy, and then when he is out of the room melt to the floor in a puddle of hysterical laughter.

That decides me. However bad it gets, however often the wicked Mr Brooke wants to parade naked in front of me, I shan’t give notice to Mrs Stevenson. Ten shillings a week and a kind mistress is not easily come by. But, most importantly, these two flibbertigibbets need a person of good judgement to knock some sense into them. Lottie might be Mrs Stevenson’s daughter but she’s worse than Kittie for a lack of good sense. No, it’s certain. I’m the only girl to do it.

 

The Fabian Summer School, Wales

This year, Beatrice Webb announces, the university men shall all be put up at Landbedr in the stables and with several of the horses still in situ. (There are different rules for the girls.) I am sure she remembers last year when–which of us was it?–Dudley got himself locked out on the balcony with the chamber pot and had to be let in (half naked and the afore-mentioned receptacle all aslosho with contents). She clearly believes the hard floors, natural smells and rudimentary lodgings will upset us delicate Cambridge boys, but little has she reckoned on the Neo-Pagan sensibility I’m encouraging–which positively relishes such privations!

So, that first night we bedded down in our sleeping-bags, tangled our legs in the cotton linings and wormed like caterpillars around in the stables, continuing our usual discussions.

I must confess that it was not the absolute urgency of addressing and revising the old Poor Law, dividing it into Health, Old Age and Employment, to demonstrate the different ways that the poor become poor, thus recognising the differing needs of each, no, not quite that.

Rather, James, propping himself up on one elbow, his eyeglasses carefully placed on a shelf next to the horse-feed, opined on the predilections of my own dear brother Alfred, repeating a conversation of two days ago. He said that Podge (‘Rupie’s darling brother Alfred,’ he clarified loudly, for those who might be listening and not know the soubriquet) had plunged into the worm-eaten convention of discussing Sodomy as usual, its uses and abuses. Podge, James claimed, was very sound, and sentimental and, oh, definitely ‘Higher’, poor chap. But after all–it’s surely only in the most special circumstances that copulation is at all tolerable?

We laughed and snuffled inside our bags, like choking insects. So much so that James knocked over the candle and several of us had to prevent a major fire erupting. In the midst of this–us leaping around naked and jumping on sparking bundles of hay–Hugh Daddy Dalton conceived a light lust for James and tried to tickle him gently under the armpits. Poor old James jumped back into his sleeping-bag on the floor but not before Daddy stood over him, waving an immense steaming penis in his face, until James was nearly sick.

This seemed a good moment to turn the conversation to the disgraceful behaviour (Beatrice Webb’s opinion) of that ‘terrible little Pagan’ Amber Reeves. Could it be true that H. G. Wells actually had her in her room at Newnham? And, worse still (Dudley, to our left, silently listening, showed by his breathing that he was, of course, actually shocked), that she’s now–carrying his child? We giggled again, picturing the Marvellous Utopian Scene: Wells sweaty and panting, Amber pert and stranded as an upturned wheelbarrow with its handles stuck in the ground.

Beatrice’s interfering in the Wells-Reeves affair, James said, included her spilling the story to Noel Olivier’s father, advising him not to let his four handsome daughters run around with Wells. This infuriated me. Gloomily, I stared up at the roof of the stables, at the shifting black shape of a bat. No doubt this would only mean more restrictions for Noel, and my campaign generally thwarted, but I said nothing of this to James, sensing that he was drifting off to sleep.

Sleep was not my mistress that night. Thoughts whirled until dawn slithered her rosy light through the stable windows, and the horses at the other end greeted us with a hot stench of fresh manure. Time already to get up for Swedish drill. I hadn’t slept a wink.

The bracing exercises took place on the grass, overlooked by the Welsh sheep-spotted hills, providing us at least with our first glimpse of the dewy Fabian girls. They all looked as if they had slept blissfully without a filthy thought in their heads–even Amber Reeves. (What on earth do the creatures talk about when the lights go out? They actually discuss Fabian ideals, James suggested. Margery Olivier no doubt debates the merits of eugenics in her father’s book, how the Germans and Japanese have made such astounding progress in regulating the races. ‘Or more likely the exquisite displays of grasses in vases at the house, and the William Morris tiles,’ Daddy offered.)

I noticed that the usually at-the-centre-of-things Amber Reeves did not take part in these vigorous jumps but sat instead on the grass, pretending a swollen ankle. Could Daddy Dalton be right, then, about her presumed condition? A sudden image of H. G. Wells twirling his moustache in pride entered my head as I sneaked glances at her, and filled my mouth with a sudden vile taste.

Daddy and some of the other fellows found the alcohol ban intolerable. ‘That filthy fake beer, No-Ale, is the only aspect of Fabianism I can’t swallow,’ he said. Of course, Dudley and I were glad to eschew the whisky our fathers believe makes us manly, and happy to continue the practice wherever we might be, as long as it is not in the presence of those same fathers. Even horribly sober, however, we managed to have a row on that same first night, when Dudders–of course the most devout among us–happened to mention how elucidating he had found the talk that afternoon by the visiting lady, Miss Mary Macarthur, of the Women’s Trade Union and Labour League. The one about the appalling conditions of the girl florists in the West End. And then, he added hotly, growing quite pink with the effort, had any of us heard that it was actually Mrs Asquith herself who wanted the florists excluded from the Factory Acts so that they could dress her rooms with flowers until ten o’clock at night?

Well, he had a point, and I found Dudley’s earnestness touching. So I was more than a little angered by James and Hugh Daddy Dalton and the rest for giving him such a ribbing. It was all too familiar–the same dismissive attitude Augustus John had towards my socialism. Beatrice Webb has said (apparently) that the egotism of the university men is ‘colossal’ and we have a long way to go towards proving to her that we might have a serious interest in the subject of Fabianism. But why, I thought, without muttering it out loud to the others, must the two things be mutually exclusive, a sense of humour, or wit, or playfulness, and a genuine socialism. Must we all be cloth sacks and grow our own sandals to be taken seriously?

 

In the end I was glad to be back in my little room at the Orchard, and to hear my tapioca approaching. Conveyed to me by the lovely Nell, of course. I pretended to be reading–that is, I had Moore’s Principia Ethica across my lap (the irony would escape her, I think)–so that when she arrived I might nonchalantly ask if she’d read it…

She said she had not. I wondered whether to launch into an explanation of its basic tenets, or simply paraphrase Beatrice Webb, who told Dudley a week ago that she thought we ‘university men’ (she meant us Apostles, I suspect, although she doesn’t know there is a distinction) relied upon its dubious morals in a quite childish way.

Still, Nellie showed no interest in learning of Moore’s dangerous moral contents, so I accepted the coffee and tapioca she held out to me, taking it from the tray and putting it on the table beside the bed, and amused myself with admiring the way the sunlight fell on a patch of skin at her throat, looking like a spot of lace.

‘You’ve no interest in books, then, Nell? Or–how would the Webbs put it?–in bettering yourself?’

Here she twirled round, and seemed to inspect me for teasing. ‘Oh, yes, I do,’ she said firmly, after a pause. ‘I love books.’ And her arm swept around my room at the books tumbling on the floor in piles and on the shelves and propped against the cupboard. Her expression was–what? One of exasperation at all the dusting she has to do? I couldn’t read it, but was glad to have detained her.

I took a spoonful of the tapioca from the bowl (considering whether to ask her why she’d brought me the bowl with the chip in the rim, isn’t it a little…unhygienic?) and Principia Ethica slid noisily to the floor and remained simmering there, while Nell opened windows to ‘let some fresh air in’ and asked if there was anything else I needed.

Bah!

I decided against domestic complaints about the crockery and tried instead to engage her with some talk of the Fabian summer school I’d just been to. Did she know what a Fabian was and how it might differ from a socialist? She did not. Had she been to that part of Wales where the summer school was held? The furthest she’d been was King’s Lynn, sir, and to Sheep’s Fen, by river. And what about the break-up of the Poor Law of 1834? Did she think it a good idea that the poor should no longer be lumped together and blamed for their ills, but instead, as Beatrice proposes, be divided into separate groups–the sick, the aged, the unemployed–and offered pensions, sanitary care and employment benefits? Indeed, sir, she had never heard of the idea, and had no opinion. I bit my tongue to stop myself enquiring tartly if she didn’t feel it might behove her to be better informed, since it was her class that was the most likely to benefit from the efforts of the Fabians.

So I asked if she had even heard of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and it seemed she had, and when I mentioned the novelist Mr H. G. Wells, the recognition flitting across her face made me wonder if she didn’t know a little more than she was letting on.

‘Does he have a big moustache and–and—’

‘A highly disreputable character?’

‘I was going to say, did he write Ann Veronica?’

‘Ah…so you have heard of Mr Wells?’

She nodded.

‘Of course, dear Beatrice would rather you hadn’t read that particular book,’ I observed. ‘It’s entertaining, of course, but he does encourage inaccurate thinking so…Mr Wells practises what he preaches, of course. Suggesting that if women were free to act as vilely as some men do, this would magically solve all the problems of the world.’

She gave no reply but glanced pointedly at Principia Ethica, the book lying heavily on the floor. If I hadn’t known better I might have thought her glance implied a question. Something like: one rule for the boys, is it, and another for the girls?

‘I cannot help but agree with Dudley that the devil is in the detail,’ I explained hastily. ‘That if we really have an eye on progress we should–thrash out the finer points, not just sweep away all that is good and true along with all that is rotten.’

Here I apparently lost her. (The attention span of the British maid is very short.) She shook her head, a dear little movement, and swept at her cheek as if seeking an invisible smut. My tapioca almost finished, the coffee grown cold, I had barely a reason to detain her. I glanced once more at the spot on her throat where the sunlight made a pattern, but a shadow had fallen there. My stock of Subjects to Take Up with the Servant was exhausted.

However, I had not reckoned on the Sex Question coming to my rescue.

‘She–she’s one of those women who campaign for the Vote, isn’t she, this Mrs Webb?’ Nellie asked suddenly, as she loaded spoon and bowl back on to the tray.

‘Ah…you are not a Suffragist, I hope, Nell?’

‘No, indeed not!’ she returned hotly.

Reading Ann Veronica had not corrupted her then. I was immensely relieved.

‘I can’t think of anything more–daft,’ she said, ‘than throwing stones at the windows of buildings, or stamping things, slogans, on the walls of the House of Commons and getting yourself arrested. I can’t see what on earth–I wouldn’t take such a risk, sir, myself, if I had a position to think of, or a family waiting for me at home.’

‘Indeed. And do you have such a family?’

At last, then, we talked freely, and there was a burst of natural energy in the room as Nellie stood a while longer to describe in the liveliest terms her brothers and sisters, whom she said she missed ‘bodily’, whatever that meant. It was, though, curiously comforting to be granted this little glimpse, to picture this rural life in the vast flat land of the Fens: the five happy siblings and the bees and flowers and water everywhere, full of fish and fowl caught with a punt-gun–all rather free and fine and marvellous, I couldn’t help remarking. She blushed then, and fretted about the time, and said she must return to her duties.

After she’d left I did not at once get up. Talk of Wells (or, rather, thoughts of Wells) breaching those Newnham ramparts (I exaggerate: walls, of course) to get at Amber Reeves distracted me, rather. I had a sudden memory of Noel Olivier at Penshurst. Noel Olivier’s naked limbs, to be exact. Beatrice’s blasted meddling in the Wells-Reeves affair infuriated me afresh when I remembered what Dudley had said about her warning Noel’s father not to let his four handsome daughters run around. Damn Beatrice! She’s like a bigger, more alarming version of the Ranee, without the Ranee’s occasional bouts of charm and financial sustenance.

Still, I did see Noel naked. We bathed by the light of a bicycle lamp propped up in the grass by the edge of the water. Of course we were not alone–although in my mind, we were. A whole bunch of Bedalians–a whole school of them, ha!–was there. And neither could we actually make out one another’s naked forms, just white shapes, like the cows at Grantchester Meadows, looming up, ghostly but vivid. We all laughed and dived in the weir. I felt the water-lilies clutching my legs, and that gasping, bracing thrill in my lungs that swimming in cold rivers always produces.

Then when we returned to camp, we sat for a while and I was able to feast on Noel for longer, watching her, again in the bicycle light, near the blazing fire, the river water trickling from her hair down her bare shoulders where her towel had slipped. I stared and stared at those bare shoulders. With such poor light, I couldn’t see much: only a few strands of duckweed. The moon rose full and we crawled back into our sleeping-bags and she slept, but I lay awake writing my pathetic little lines, with the vision of her dripping in my mind and she only two tents away.

Wells’s emphasis on free love, his conviction that this will be the model for the sexes in future…Something about this thought alarms me. The man has said that in order to experiment you must be base. The relationships between men and women are so hemmed in by law that to experiment starts with being damned. Fine sentiment, of course. Intellectually I cannot fault it. But. Is this to be all, then? Are relations between men and women to be reduced to this–to copulation? Will it be the end of love, and of all feelings more holy and beautiful? There is horror for me in that idea and it is this: I don’t want my darling Noel to be base. She is a flower in moonlight. She is not childish and befouled like James, full of jokes and phlegm and other disgusting things.

How confusing. It’s all very well, but my burdensome virginity remained unlost.

And with this thought another young woman suddenly appeared beneath my window, calling up. Ka Cox. I heard the sound of a bicycle being propped against the wall of the house, and then Ka calling softly, shyly, clearly afraid for others to hear, ‘Rupert!’

A stone was thrown before I could push on the window and look out over the hedges. Then I saw her head, wrapped peasant-style in a vivid green scarf, and caught sight of her pince-nez. My mood lifted at once. ‘Hello there! I’m still breakfasting–with you in five minutes!’

She beamed up at me, bending to undo some of the tangle in her skirts, which had been tucked into her boots. Thank Heaven! Earnest, dear, horsy Ka, with her matronly bosom, her slightly stooped figure, her serious face and her pince-nez–surely she will work like a charm? My thoughts returned immediately to the Fabian leaflets she was no doubt–in her devoted capacity as Secretary of the Society–delivering. She was more effective than a bracing dip in a cold bath to return a person at once from their lowest to their most elevated thoughts.

‘Ka! Such joy to see you!’

The dear thing beamed and beamed.

 

So many books, he has, Mr Brooke. Books sprouting everywhere. I suppose this is how all poets are, or maybe all Varsity men, but it’s a wonder. Sometimes I sneak a look at the titles. This makes me sick with ignorance. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster. Montaigne by somebody called Florio. Piles of copies of the English Review magazine. A huge great thing called The Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission. How could anyone read such a volume? Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare–I recognise that one, of course. The other one I recognise is The Secret River by R. Macaulay–this is a brand new book, with flowers down the spine, and in blue ink inside it says, ‘To Rupert’, so I know this must be the same Miss Macaulay who visited him here at the Orchard. I sneaked a glance inside, but when I read ‘the slumberous afternoon was on the slow green river like the burden of a dream’ my brain thickened and refused to carry on.

When he asked me, he had no idea how stupid so many books can make a girl feel. I said nothing, knowing how he would laugh–that sudden, high-pitched, girlish blast of laughter he does sometimes–if he knew that the last book I read was The Book of Cheerfulness by Flora Klickmann. I was glad–so glad–to have at least read Mr H. G. Wells, although afraid of blushing when I feared he might broach the subject of relations between men and women. I did not venture my opinion of the heroine of that book. That she was a very silly girl indeed to end up in a room alone with a man and not realise what he might think of her.

I wasted a good portion of time in his room and now I have a deal of catching up to do. There’s the dusting and the fireplaces, the hateful black-leading to do, then the halls and stairs to be swept, and the boots waiting to be cleaned in the kitchen and, after all that, the lunches for the first guests to start preparing. I can’t really understand how I allowed myself to be delayed–after all, he is so annoying, and so spoiled, and I always feel he is trying to provoke me somehow, catch me out, make me blush or falter with those questions, put in such a strange way.

After that night, that first night when I saw him naked, returning from his swim in Byron’s Pool I have learned that I am a very silly, puritanical girl. He was disappointed, he said, that the lower orders were as bad as the upper ones in this respect. He had thought that a girl raised on bees–birds and bees, he said meaningfully–a girl raised so might be more likely to trade the ‘ Lilies and Languors of Virtue for the Raptures and Roses of Vice’.

When I did not know how to reply, he said, ‘Swinburne, Nell.’

It’s this that infuriates me. He speaks in riddles, seeking always to have the advantage. After all, when I told him of my brothers and the eel-hives and the days spent on the mere catching them, I didn’t try to trick him with words he didn’t know, even though I laughed to myself to hear him describe it as ‘such joy and liberation!’ and to see from the glow in his face that he was picturing some lazy, playful days of his own rather than the hours of patient work that Edmund and Stanley endure for Sam. I think he is always conscious of the impression he is making, tossing his hair and struggling to hide his real thoughts.

‘Life is splendid, Nell, but I wish I could write poetry,’ he said, this morning. ‘I write very beautiful stories.’

‘Do you, sir? Here’s your hot milk, and would you like me to bring your slippers?’

‘Yes…One story I am accomplishing is about a young man who, for various reasons, felt his bookish life vain and wanted to get in touch with Nature. He began by learning to climb trees but, in clambering up an easy fir tree, fell off a low branch six feet above the ground and broke his neck. A short, simple story.’

Then he told me of his recent visit to a place called Penshurst, to surprise some friends of his who were camping there, including one ‘very special girl’, whose name is Noel Olivier. Her father, he said, is Sir Sydney, as if I should know who that person is. He chatted as I made up the fire in the grate, the morning having a late-summer chill, and so my back was to him, which was a good thing: he couldn’t see my expression. He talked of the girl and her three lovely sisters and some strange school called Bedales that the girl attends–she is a schoolgirl then, younger than me, even!–a school where, as far as I could understand, nudity and swimming in cold lakes takes the place of book learning.

Well, how am I supposed to reply to that? When the silence between us grew long, and I wondered (with my back to him) if he was awaiting my answer, I decided a safe bet would be to mention that, for myself, I rather like the nice Mr Ward (Kittie calls him Baldy, on account of his bald pate, though we know his Christian name is Dudley) and the sensible Miss Gwen Darwin. I remarked that it would probably be a good thing if he spent more time with a lady like Miss Darwin, for any lady who has the good sense to put a strip of braid around her skirt in order to catch the mud in a place like this is a very resourceful lady indeed. There was a long pause after I said this, then a sudden snuffle of loud laughter. I turned round.

‘How on earth did the maid get so familiar?’ he said, smiling broadly at me.

I realised at once I had overstepped my place and clapped a hand to my mouth. ‘I’m sorry, I—It’s in my nature to be quick to judge,’ I murmured, and then could think of nothing more to add because the bald truth of this hung in the air between us.

He was still in bed at this point, but he sat up and stared straight at me, with the look of someone about to deliver a speech. ‘Parents, now: you kiss them sometimes, and send for them when you’re ill, because they’re useful and they like it; and you give them mild books to read, just strong enough to make them think they’re a little shocked, but not much, so they can think they’re keeping up with the times. Oh, you ought to be very kind to them, make little jokes for them, and keep them awake in the evening, if possible. But never, never let them be intimate and confidential because they can’t understand, and it only makes them miserable. Perhaps I should apply the same rule to you, Nell.’

‘Oh, I truly am sorry, sir, if I spoke out of turn.’

‘I’m joking Nellie. I like your…spirit. It reminds me of home. Ha! Can you imagine that? You remind me of Mother. Calmness and firmness are no good with her. She’s always ever so much calmer and firmer than I could ever be…’

I didn’t know how to answer this, except to say that a mother is a dear thing; and that both my parents are dead. He gave me a queer look, then, and returned to his reading.

Was I dismissed? I stood for a moment, wondering, and then turned sharply on my heels, without waiting to hear.

It is not me who is familiar, I was thinking, but quite the other way round. He is easy with me in that way of men who have lived their whole life with servants: we’re invisible to them most of the time, except when they need us. I picked up the breakfast things and left the room, asking stiffly if I could do anything more for him (to which he muttered something I didn’t choose to hear). I left without bidding him good morning.

 

This morning I have received something vile and unwelcome. Seven pages of damn plain speaking from the eldest Olivier girl, Big Sister Margery. Any fond memories I have of the afore-mentioned with her brown mane seductively awry, romping on the grass at Penshurst camp, kicking up her skirts and holding Noel in a headlock worthy of any man dissolved at once. How mistaken I was about her.

Margery Olivier, I’ve decided, cannot possibly be made of the same flesh and blood as Noel–she must be a witch, sent by the Ranee to torture me. The letter was brought by Nellie, cheerily oblivious to its contents, plopping it down with my breakfast milk and apple, and as the door closed behind her, the letter cast a dark shadow–like a long, pointed finger–in my sunny bedroom.

I (not as an individual, but as a Young Man) am now, it seems, to be entirely shut out of Noel’s existence. It’s Margery’s New Educational Scheme. Love, for a woman, she says, destroys everything else. It fills her whole life, stops her developing intellectually, absorbs her. ‘You’ll see what I mean if you look at a woman who married young,’ she grimly adds. ‘No woman should marry before twenty-six or-seven.’ (That’s ten more years of waiting, then! An ugly, dry decade!) ‘Do be sensible,’ Margery pleads. ‘She is so young–you are so young…’ All about my ‘wild writing’ and how I must ‘look ahead’ and a thousand things.

On reading it, I leap from bed and call Nellie back. ‘Nell, Nell–come here!’

‘What is it? Ooh, I forgot the honey!’

‘No, not that, child. I need your opinion on something.’

I wind the bed sheets round my torso–conscious of the girl’s blushes–and close the bedroom door behind me. Waving the letter as if Nellie had read the entire blazing sermon, I start at once: ‘Do you think Love destroys a woman? Finishes her off?’

‘I’m not sure what you mean—’

‘Margery Olivier has a bloody theory. No woman should marry before twenty-six or-seven–marriage, or rather love, ends a girl’s life, stifling her, finishing off her intellectual development, her–education, or—Oh, I’m not sure I understand at all.’

‘Well.’ The maid pauses, and I realise, with a furious stab, that she is seriously contemplating this theory.

‘The logical outcome,’ I interject quickly, ‘is that one must only marry the quite poor, unimportant people who don’t matter being spoiled, and leave the splendid ones untouched!’

‘Yes, I see. But I think there might well be a grain of truth in the idea that—You see, when I think of my dear mother, or my sisters, well, of course we read many penny books where love and marriage bring us the greatest happiness, and the popular songs say the same thing, but then when we take the temperature of our own hearts, or look at the lives of those girls around us—’

‘Surely, Nell, for every human being, male or female, love is the greatest thing? Don’t, please, tell me you’re going to agree with Margery. We must thunder against such mediocrity! Make a protest against idiocy and wickedness–not show a calm Christian spirit! Such a view is all reasonableness and cowardice and calmness–and how evil it is to let things slide and not snatch at opportunities!’

Staring at Nellie, her violet eyes fixed anxiously on my face, I’m aware suddenly that I may be shouting, and that she appears to be a little unnerved. I let my hands swing to my sides and compose myself. The truth is, I feel mistrustful of myself, and full of fear and despair. A shadow of my old fears, the thoughts I have at sharing Dick’s…instability, comes back to me. It’s the tone of Margery’s letter. ‘Wait! Wait! She’s so reasonable about you now. Let her remain so,’ Margery says. That is painful. Is Noel Olivier reasonable about me? To have it rubbed in so. Oh, of course, I am delighted. Should I wave a hat with pallid enthusiasm, and say in a high voice: Hurray, hurray! Just what she should be–reasonable about me! Excellent, excellent!

‘I’m sorry, Nellie.’ I collapse on to the bed. ‘I find it hard to be reasonable. It’s not an emotion I admire, to be exact. It’s like fondness. Throw your fond in a pond! Give me love, I say, or nothing!’

The girl’s expression is unreadable. She has a practised, clever way of glancing at the door, which tells me in no uncertain terms that she is thinking of her duties, without appearing rude, or making any reference to them.

‘Of course, of course. You must attend to your–your bees, is it? I see that you agree in some hideous way with Margery’s diagnosis. What part of your marvellous intellectual development you believe is arrested by falling in love I can’t quite imagine. I can take the wider view…’

There then flits over her face something that, for want of a better word, I might describe as anger. It certainly amuses me to see it and how she struggles not to show it. It makes me like her more fervently. I struggle in exactly the same way in conversations with Mother!

(‘I prefer Miss Ka Cox,’ the Ranee says, at Rugby, rightly noting that the serious Ka has wrists very thick and an unusual downturned expression in her mouth, and rather poor posture, and is therefore unlikely to seduce me. ‘I can’t understand what you see in these Oliviers. They are pretty, I suppose, but not at all clever; they’re shocking flirts and their manners are disgraceful.’ Mother, why do you insist on answering your own questions so elegantly? What does she imagine the Olivier girls will do, left to their own devices? Kiss the rural milkman and eat bread without butter? But, then, if I should put in a good word for Gwen, I know how she will immediately swing the other way utterly, and say, ‘I can’t understand at all what you see in Miss Darwin. She’s not pretty, or attractive. On the whole I prefer the Oliviers; at least they are good-looking.’

Mother’s skill has always been in her colossal, enormous steadfastness of purpose. Didn’t she once say that that was the quality she prized most in a woman? I’m sure she wrote it in some Christmas book. That in a man it would be moral fortitude or some such. Perhaps I should tell Mother about James. That would really give her Cause to be Anxious about Rupert’s Friends. Poor James. If only I could tear out the heart of Noel with my teeth, and replace it with the heart of the bespectacled James Strachey, who–thank God–is not reasonable in the least about me.)

I finish my milk and dismiss Nellie with–I hope–a kindly nod. (Can a nod be kindly?) Her little flare-up will soon pass. The lucky girl has no idea what bliss it is to receive post only once a week, as she does. That bloody letter has ruined my day.

 

And then just when I think I have grown used to his habits, something happens that is so unexpected, so unlooked-for, that I no longer know if I’m coming or going, or which way is up.

It was only yesterday that I said to Kittie I knew his habits better than a mother. Bathing every evening, breakfast on the lawn or in his bedroom, young men and women always calling up to the window or throwing a pebble to wake him; and a pencil and a book in his hand, and somehow, it appears, he manages to be a scholar too. He mostly takes breakfast in his room. As he has sworn off meat, he breakfasts on coddled eggs, hot milk, some chopped apple or pear and a cup of tea with honey.

His room, when I enter it at seven o’clock, has that smell I know so well from old days with my brothers and Father. The warm salty smell of a man sleeping. It must be the loss of Father that makes the smell bring a lurch in my heart.

I am careful always to be brisk in my tone and not to sound sleepy myself, or anything at all that isn’t fitting. Wide awake and alert, that’s me. I open the curtains, my back to the bed, give him time to bestir himself. I have learned the trick to opening the window in this room now: a brutal push upwards. This admits noises from outside. Birdsong, horses clopping past, sometimes a visitor calling up to him, and the ring of a bicycle bell.

When Mr Brooke stirs, there are always more books, letters and papers next to his pillow, which tumble to the floor. Many’s the time I’ve discovered inky-stained pillows. (I was wrong to abandon the pillow shams: they make a good disguise for the limits of the laundry soap.) Then he will prop himself up on one elbow and begin sipping at the milk (not coffee any longer, he’s decided to swear off that, too) and say daft things, things like: ‘Women are bloody, Nell. I pray you remain a child and never become one.’

After my blurting out my opinion on Miss Darwin, I’ve taught myself to pause, count to ten, hold my tongue. Does he seriously think of me as a child? He has a way of addressing grown women as ‘child’–I have heard him do it more than once. Perhaps he doesn’t mean to include me in the sweep of the insult; maybe he thinks I’m not human?

He loves his honey. Spoonful after spoonful into the milk. He balances the pot on the saucer of the cup, dripping sticky strands all over his mattress. And so today, this morning, I’m not completely surprised when he makes his request. Mightn’t I take him out with me, show him the hives?

‘Well, see, I don’t know if I ought.’

‘You are going out to inspect them?’

‘Yes. Mr Neeve says there will be showers tomorrow so today is best—’

‘Splendid!’ He springs from the bed with alarming speed.

‘If you come with me you must wear the veil and gloves, sir, as the bees are not–they don’t rightly know you. They are more likely to sting a stranger.’

He finds the thought funny. He wonders why he should wear a veil when the maid ‘goes naked’. I ignore this and tell him that the bees know me well and wouldn’t dream of stinging me. ‘Bluster!’ he says, laughing, reaching for his razor and the bowl of hot water I’ve brought…‘And do drop this “sir” business, Nell, there’s a girl. Call me Rupert, or Chawner, if you prefer–now, there’s a name to conjure with. What was Mother thinking, eh?’

And so, later in the morning, he joins me and that’s when it happens. We’re in the ramshackle gardens of the Old Vicarage next door, him dressed in the white veil that belonged to Father, over a hat he has borrowed from Mr Neeve: Rupert, it seems, doesn’t possess one. He is also wearing shoes for once, but no socks. I tie the gloves for him at the wrists so the bees can’t creep inside them. I have to lift his hands in mine to do this, and he doesn’t raise his eyes so that I see his eyelashes resting on his cheeks and notice that they are as long as the legs on a raft spider.

His student friend comes to laugh at him: the dark, beaky Frenchman staying at the Old Vicarage, Jacques. This friend stands close to Rupert and murmurs something odd, something like ‘Is this your lady under ze lamp-post?’ with his strange accent and plum-coloured voice, but as I can’t understand, and since they speak as if I’m invisible, I continue with the pretence that I’m deaf too.

The garden stretches down to the mill stream, where the big chestnuts trail their branches in the water, and Mr Neeve has a full number of modern hives, the square-box sort with frames, placed to face the morning sun and encourage the bees to begin their work early. It makes me sorry to see these modern hives–they have so little beauty compared to the straw skeps that Father always used and that the eel man Sam makes for us, with their pointed tops and fat bellies, the shape of giant acorn cups.

And not just the hives but the garden, too, is the sort that Father would have despaired of: wild, with such an unkempt, dense thicket of trees and bushes at the bottom. There is a strange Gothic ruin there that Rupert laughs at and says is not Gothic at all, but a sham. I love the sunny part of the garden where the bees live, the part of the Old Vicarage that borders on to the apple and quince trees of the orchard, but at the bottom end near the river the air is damp and suffocating, and the huge trees smothered in ivy make me think of Sleeping Beauty, and shudder.

Mr Raverat doesn’t want to stay, he says he is ‘very much afraid’ of being stung, and I haven’t another veil and gloves so he says he has a breakfast meeting at King’s, and will see Rupert later, at the railway station in Cambridge, for aren’t they catching the same train? The eleven-thirty? He strides back towards the house, wishing us luck.

‘He was awfully impressed, wasn’t he?’ Rupert says childishly, when he’s gone.

I shrug.

‘I mean, about the not-wearing-a-veil part. He likes a spirited girl, does Raverat. Got a soft spot for Ka Cox, as a matter of fact.’

And so we are left alone, in the sticky morning heat, while I stuff the smoker with wood shavings and Rupert watches me light it. And then leans forward and whispers, sucking the fabric of his veil into his mouth as he does, ‘I think you’re a rotten girl, Nellie Golightly. Perhaps you actually want to be stung.’

This remark is so surprising that I drop the smoker and blush furiously.

We both dive to pick it up. Now there is a sense around us of something very troubling indeed. The bees are so sensitive, they will pick it up at once. How can I tell him? Bees know our feelings before we know them ourselves. They know the heat, the cool, every flavour of human emotion. Father taught me that. ‘Stand your ground, girl. You keep calm, keep a steady hand,’ he taught me. None could handle them like me. Father! Where are you now when I need you? The bees hum round us like a gathering storm. And Rupert is in danger of sending them wild with his flirtation–yes, there’s no other word for it. At last I see that this is what he has been doing, that this is what his teasing amounts to.

‘It makes the bees out of humour when you do that,’ I suddenly say, and watch his face behind the white material, watch his big blue eyes widen naughtily and then his slow smile, starting first with the downward turn of his mouth, then lifting upwards slightly, his breath drawing in the veil. That handsome mouth with its pouty bottom lip. I’m done for. I’ve only made matters a million times worse.

I call upon all my strength, all my good, sensible nature, and load the smoker afresh, then light it with a trembling hand. Rupert is standing very close to me. I move ever so slightly away, to where I can no longer smell the shaving cream and Wrights Coal Tar Soap smell of him, and concentrate on pointing the smoker towards the hives, and at once the bees start to gather their store of honey together and make ready to leave, with one or two doing their bee dance, signalling to the others. When the smell of burning wood fills our nostrils and the soft brown cloud of bees has drifted off, their noise rolling and peaking as they pass us, like a wave cresting, I pull out some of the frames, and show Rupert with trembling hands how to scrape off the remaining bees, the ones clinging to the frames, gently, using a wand of feathers.

‘Not so hard–Rupert. We only mean to scatter them, not kill them.’

It is the first time I’ve said his name. I know without looking up that the word has drawn him like a hook and that he is staring straight at me. I can tell from the way the bees huddle in the corner of their frames like gathering moss, deep and brown and heaving, that some power from him is transmitting itself to me, to the very air around us. Even the sweetest creature on this earth can be dangerous, Father used to say, if you make it buzz too hard. Father, Father–you were never here to teach me. What do I do now?

The bees always know best, Father would say.

I put out a shaking hand to the frames and point up a fat bulge in the honeycomb.

I try to steady my voice: ‘Look, here is one threatening to become a queen. We must nip that in the bud right away…There can only ever be one queen.’ I show him how to do it, and he is shocked, he says, to see me so heartless.

He wants to know if there is ‘a royal line’, and I explain there is no such thing, that the egg used to create a queen is the same as the one used to create an ordinary worker. ‘Fascinating…’ he says softly.

‘The queen controls the temper of the hive. A gentle queen means a gentle hive. These are good bees, but more…a little more unsettled…than my own hives at home.’

He has become silent at last, still and concentrated. The danger, the noise of the humming, the sense of being surrounded and threatened, has calmed him. He is listening to them at last, I think. He likes the work, to see the honey in its fresh form, so brown and treacly, sealed with the waxy capping, and the threads of yellow liquid shining through like sunlight.

He stands, arms folded and watching, while I load the wheelbarrow with the wooden frames, bulging with the weight of honey. But still he will not drop his look, his eyes so bold, lying softly on my skin, on my bare arms and hands, like something with a tickling, stealthy creep. Perhaps it’s this: perhaps it’s that when I work with Mr Neeve, he’s full of commands and has never allowed this drowsy bee-humming silence to take hold of us like this; whatever it is, my eyes are suddenly glazed with tears and the ghost of Father appears in front of me, while I step quietly to one side, to watch.

A young man in Father’s clothes, wearing Father’s borrowed veil and gloves, is standing in an old, rambling garden, and staring hotly at me. Father steps to one side and disappears. Bees purr between us. The young man steps forward and lifts his white veil, moving his face towards mine. He pulls me towards him. The movement is forceful, not gentle. He angles his head, like a bird. Using his hand, he tilts my chin up to his mouth and moves towards me. The bees sizzle around us, like a pan of fat on the stove. I close my eyes at once. I feel the hardness of Rupert’s teeth with my tongue. I open my mouth a little, not knowing what else to do. Flakes of sunlight flutter like confetti on my eyelids.

And that is it. He kisses me in the Old Vicarage garden and I disappear for a moment. Then I return, alert to the anger all around me. The bees. A bee heading straight for Rupert. Bees are quick to smell opportunity. ‘You should never lift your veil!’ I say nervously. ‘Be still now. No, don’t move–don’t run! They will chase you in a bee-line, straight as an arrow!’

Now he is mine to rescue. I tell him to stay calm. He wants to put the veil back, but it is too late (much too late, I think). One bee is on his chin, edging up towards his mouth. The terror in his eyes is quite real. I see by the wildness in his look that he wants to flap and scream and run about but puts his trust in me, like a small boy, like one of my brothers. It is this, finally, that is my undoing. I could have held off, I reckon, if it weren’t for this. His teasing, his naughtiness, his insults, his demands, his flirting. Even the sight of him naked as the day he was born. I could resist them all, but not that one small thing. A glimpse of the boy.

‘I say!’ Rupert shouts, and slaps at his mouth. The bee strikes.

With this one gesture, thousands of bees await instruction, trembling around us like an electric storm. I talk softly to them. The bees are hot and not persuaded. Haven’t I been a good girl? Haven’t I treated them well? What’s one little accident between friends? I listen intently, and sniff at the air, which smells of smoke, and hear Rupert holding his breath.

Then the note in the air drops, just one notch, and that is our sign. Quickly I fasten Rupert’s veil at his neck, and he, gasping and laughing quietly, allows himself to be led back to the house.

‘My word!’ he crows, the moment we are in the safety of the scullery at the Orchard, with his veil off. ‘My word! What a thing! Who would have thought it? The bees–do your bidding.’

I pick the sting out of the spot at the corner of his mouth with my nails, dab honey on the sore place and bid him under my breath to be quiet. He should thank his lucky stars that it was just the one bee, I say, that took it into its head to misbehave. His lip is a little swollen, but that’s to be expected.

This tickles him, making him hoot a little. ‘Just the one! Yes, indeed, thank the Lord, eh, Nell, that it was just one outrageously naughty bee that–transgressed!’

I don’t know what he finds so funny. My fondness for him of a minute ago melts. Why does he never take things seriously? Well, I’m not one of his Cambridge girls who only knows her books and bicycles; he needn’t think he can take liberties with me! The bees showed him that. Nell Golightly might be just a maid from Prickwillow, but she can face facts and she won’t be anybody’s fool.

I thought that would put an end to it, cap it tight, the feelings, I really did. But that night, just as I am undressing for bed, Kittie already snoring in her place by the wall, the oddest memory strikes me and my heart cracks open again like a walnut shell. Father, at the front step, in the morning, polishing my boots before school. He has one hand inside the little boot and the ground is all frost and ice, and he is rubbing with the cloth and the tiny speck of polish, shining the leather until he can see his face, his old, tired face reflected in it. He did this every morning. He never wanted me to go to school. He didn’t think I’d amount to anything. But this was his one austere service, year on year. Offered to me wordlessly, and accepted without thanks.

I remember it now, as the yeasty heat of Kittie in the bed rises up to me. I remember Father’s tongue peeping at the corner of his mouth, the flecks of black polish on his hand, his concentration. ‘Father–where are you?’ I want to ask. I picture him from the dream I had of him, the night he died, the dream of him leaving me, getting up from his chair. Looking straight at me.

Father–I want to tell you something. I remember what you did and I want to say thank you. Maybe it wasn’t much, by some people’s standards, but I want to tell you something, something I never thought I would. It was enough. I know how to do it. How to love.

 

I have been thinking this morning of Denham. He has gone now. The sheets are a frightful mess, and I have no idea how to get them clean. I hear a cock crowing, over and over, but Nellie isn’t up yet and I’ve no more clean water. So I sit on the bed with my knees drawn up to my chest, and think of him, and smile to myself.

He was lustful, immoral, affectionate and delightful…But I was never in the slightest degree in love with him. I was glad to get him to come and stay with me at the Orchard. I came back late that Saturday night. Nothing was formulated in my mind. I found him asleep in front of the fire, at one forty-five. I took him up to his bed–he was very like a child when he was sleepy–and lay down on it. We hugged, and my fingers wandered a little. His skin was always very smooth. I had, I remember, a vast erection. He dropped off to sleep in my arms. I stole away to my own room and lay in bed thinking–my head full of tiredness and my mouth of the taste of tea and whales, as usual.

I decided, almost quite consciously, I would put the thing through next night. You see, I didn’t at all know how he would take it. But I wanted to have some fun and still more to see what it was like, and to do away with the shame (as I was taught it was) of being a virgin. At length, I thought, I shall know something of all that James and Norton and Maynard and Lytton know and hold over me.

Of course, I said nothing. Next evening, we talked long in front of the sitting-room fire. My head was on his knees, after a bit. We discussed Sodomy. He said he, finally, thought it was wrong…We got undressed there, as it was warm. Flesh is exciting, in firelight. You must remember that openly we were nothing to each other–less, even, than in 1906. About what one is with Bunny (who so resembles Denham). Oh, quite distant!

Again we went up to his room. He got into bed. I sat on it and talked. Then I lay on it. Then we put the light out and talked in the dark. I complained of the cold, and so got under the eiderdown. My brain was, I remember, almost all through, absolutely calm and indifferent, observing progress and mapping out the next step. Of course, I had planned the general scheme beforehand.

I was still cold. He wasn’t. ‘Of course not, you’re in bed!’

‘Well, then, you get right in, too.’

I made him ask me–oh! without difficulty! I got right in. Our arms went round each other. An adventure! I kept thinking: And was horribly detached.

We stirred and pressed. The tides seemed to wax…At the right moment I, as planned, said, ‘Come into my room, it’s better there…’ I suppose he knew what I meant. Anyhow he followed me. In that larger bed it was cold; we clung together. Intentions became plain; but still nothing was said. I broke away a second, as the dance began, to slip my pyjamas. His was the woman’s part throughout. I had to make him take his off–do it for him. Then it was purely body to body–my first, you know!

I was still a little frightened of his, at any too-sudden step, bolting; and he, I suppose, was shy. We kissed very little, as far as I can remember, face to face. And I only rarely handled his penis. Mine he touched once with his fingers, and that made me shiver so much I think he was frightened. But, with alternate stirrings, and still pressures, we mounted. My right hand got hold of the left half of his bottom, clutched it, and pressed his body into me. The smell of sweat began to be noticeable. At length we took to rolling to and fro over each other, in the excitement. Quite calm things, I remember, were passing through my brain: ‘The Elizabethan joke “The Dance of the Sheets” has, then, something in it.’ ‘I hope his erection is all right’…and so on. I thought of him entirely in the third person. At length the waves grew more terrific: my control of the situation was over; I treated him with the utmost violence, to which he more quietly, but incessantly, responded. Half under him and half over, I came off. I think he came off at the same time, but of that I have never been sure. A silent moment, and then he slipped away to his room, carrying his pyjamas. We wished each other ‘Good night’. It was between four and five in the morning.

I lit a candle after he had gone. There was a dreadful mess on the bed. I wiped it as clean as I could and left the place exposed to the air, to dry. I sat on the lowest part of the bed, a blanket round me, and stared at the wall, and thought. I thought of innumerable things, that this was all; that the boasted jump from virginity to Knowledge seemed a very tiny affair, after all; that I hoped Denham, for whom I felt great tenderness, was sleeping. My thoughts went backward and forward, I unexcitedly reviewed my whole life, and indeed the whole universe. I was tired, and rather pleased with myself, and a little bleak…We had said scarcely anything to each other. I felt sad at the thought he was perhaps hurt and angry, and wouldn’t ever want to see me again.

And so I have Begun, and at last have ‘copulated’ with someone, and how surprising that it should be Denham Russell-Smith (but how much easier to find a willing boy than a willing girl and to feel a curious private tie with Denham himself). Here I am now–it is greyly daylight and I’m left with the chief worry of the sheets. Oh, the horrors of life with servants: how much they know about the life of the body that we’d rather keep from everyone, even ourselves. The contents of the chamber pot, the state of the sheets and our underwear, and a dozen other indignities I dread to consider. Well, I’ve done my best and scrubbed and scrubbed, but let us hope that for once the dear dark Nellie slept peacefully throughout, and comes to an entirely innocent conclusion…if such a thing is at all possible.