Rupert’s father is ill. He has gone to his mother’s home to be with her and there he has been for days now. I can’t quite picture the home he describes because it seems his mother lives in the school, the same one in Rugby that he went to, and no school I have ever been inside could be a place where anyone could live. It is a school full of ‘charming boys’, Rupert says. A charming boy was staying with him in October last year, a boy from his old school called Denham Russell-Smith.

I have heard of such things. That is, I didn’t know that I knew but that night, coming late and tired to bed, after staying up to finish the washing-up and put away all the plates, I saw candlelight flickering under the door, heard the bed squeaking in Rupert’s room. An unmistakable sound, and a giggle too. I stopped dead on the landing–I remember asking myself, Was there a girl with him earlier in the day? I was surprised to find myself trembling and a hot, fierce, stabbing feeling shooting through my body. It was a relief at first when I thought, No, only that young man, the smiling, jug-eared, bouncing sort of man, the one who had been at school with Rupert and turned up unexpectedly. He was like a friendly Labrador, bouncing and cheery, and Rupert said casually that Denham was an old friend and going to be staying in the Orchard and would I mind awfully making up a bed in the little box-room that was not often used?

I had done this gladly, so why, then, were the two of them now in Rupert’s room, and why were the bed-springs squeaking like that, in such an unmistakable, rhythmic way?

So I stood there, trembling, fixed to the floor like a blob of wax, and I tried to move away and I tried not to listen, because it made my heart twist so, and then as the grunts and squeaks rose, my hands flew to my ears and I suddenly managed to wrench myself away and ran to my room and flung myself face first into my pillow and sobbed and sobbed, a choking, stifling kind of sob, because Kittie was sleeping her log-like sleep beside me and if she woke she would ask unbearable questions.

In the morning Rupert wasn’t there for his breakfast, and neither was the boy Denham. He had already left, taking his bicycle with him. I knocked on Rupert’s bedroom door, but there was no reply, so I went in. The sheets had been stripped and heaped on the floor. My first thought was to glance behind me at the open door, and when I was sure that no one was there, I closed it. It was a grim, cold girl who glanced at their bloodied stains, not the wretched, wild-hearted girl of last night. On waking I had gathered up my old self and tried to steel myself, so here I was: facing those hard facts yet again. Such a silly effort Rupert had made to scrub them. My shock on seeing those sheets sprang my body hot first, then cold. It was one thing to hear sounds, and wonder and imagine. Another to see such stark evidence. I sat on his stripped bed and, once again, tears fell.

I tried to say to myself, Nellie, so it is. Give up your silly daydreams and admit that not only is he not for you he’s not for any girl.

I don’t think I persuaded myself. The way he kissed me out there among the bees, the way he looked at me as if he knew me, really saw me and knew me, Nell, the girl I am, kept floating back to my mind; and then I felt such a rising pain that I almost ran to the garden in fear of vomiting. How could it be so? What made a man–do something like that? My poor education in such matters and my lack of anyone to ask meant that all day I went about my duties in a state of punishing bewilderment. Mrs Stevenson asking more than once, and not with a smile, if I was sleep-walking. The only thing I was grateful for was that Rupert was nowhere to be seen. I did not have to bump into him, nor face him, until I’d laundered the sheets and left them to flap in the weak autumnal sunlight while I placed clean ones on his bed and a whole day had passed.

There was no mistaking the gratitude and embarrassment in Rupert’s eyes when he did finally pass me and I could not see how it could ever be easy between us again. First there was the problem of the kiss. And then the worse one of my knowledge of his shame and him knowing that I knew. What could be said? I felt dreadfully sorry for him; sorry for his sickness, too–how much shame and misery it must bring him I could hardly fathom. Truth be told, I struggled to accept that such a tendency exists, and I didn’t want to know any more about it than had already been forced into my thoughts.

That was months ago, now, we’ve had a whole general election and the government nearly voted out, then in again, since then.

I took to my work and did it with such vigour that Mrs Stevenson made me chief among the girls, and rewarded me with an extra shilling a week. And then in January, Rupert’s father, a master at his old school, was sick, and so he’s gone to Rugby to be with him, and I won’t see him for weeks on end, and I’ve vowed to put him out of my mind. His kiss–I told myself it must have been some sort of experiment. Perhaps he’d never kissed a girl before. But then, confusingly, he always spoke as if he felt great affection for Noel Olivier…Hadn’t he ever kissed her? Was it all a sham? Maybe he wanted to know if kissing me would, if it wouldn’t–what’s the word?–disgust him too much? (And did it disgust him, I wonder, for how could I tell? The feel of his mouth, and the hardness of his teeth, and the warmth and the feel of his little tongue are vivid with me just the same.)

There was only Kittie to talk to about my discovery, and I didn’t dare. She did ask me several times, in a leading sort of way, why was I so pale, and was I pining after somebody? But for all her chatter and sweetness, I didn’t know if I could trust her. And this morning, waking up at six, I find my doubts are founded. Because something dreadful has happened. Kittie has gone.

The place where her hot snuffling shape usually is is flat, with the blue counterpane smoothed over it. Now first I think, Well, fancy that! Kittie up first, and maybe making up the fire in the kitchen…So I tiptoe downstairs, pulling on an old sweater over my uniform, looking forward to the warmth. But, no, she’s not in the kitchen, nor nowhere to be found. And when I run back to our room, I discover that her things are all gone–the little brown bag she arrived with, the skirts, the blouses, the combs and pins for her hair, the tiny bottle of Mischief she so loved. Only her uniform remains: when I peep under the bed, there it is, stuffed in a dusty corner.

Mrs Stevenson is speechless with fury when I tell her. She only paid us last night, and Kittie must have taken her wages and left in the early hours of this morning, while we all slept.

‘But where can she have gone?’ Lottie asks, casting her eyes on the larder, where the tins and bottles have been taken from the shelves in readiness for ‘a thorough set-to with the mop and scrubbing brush’, which now she will have to do alone.

‘Oh, there’s no doubt where the silly girl has gone. Wasn’t she always talking about it? Wasn’t she always poring over the paper and listening to those silly speeches? What did she say yesterday? She was reading the paper about Lady Constance Lytton disguising herself as a seamstress to prove that working women were treated differently by gaolers—’

‘I don’t understand…’ wails Lottie, stupidly.

‘She must have caught the train from Cambridge to London,’ I say. Understanding is dawning on me, too. ‘She has gone to offer her services to the Suffragists.’

‘And for what, for what?’ Mrs Stevenson keeps repeating, gazing in despair at the unwashed pots and pans and the piles of tins removed from the larder and stacked on the kitchen floor. ‘So she can end up in prison, and starving herself, so that women might–what? Might put a cross on a piece of paper that makes not a hap’orth of difference to any of our lives…or behave in vile ways and ruin the girl’s chances of ever finding a husband!’

Mrs Stevenson’s angry words ring round the kitchen. Lottie bursts into tears. ‘Poor Kittie!’ she says. I glance sharply at her. Why is her voice full of such doom-mongering horror? Kittie’s not dead.

‘Well, no point standing around, Lottie. Let’s get started on the larder. Fetch me a bucket of water,’ I say brusquely, hoping to starch her up some. In truth, I’m angry too. I suddenly remember Kittie’s look as she was reading the paper yesterday morning, the hot way she insisted ‘See, Nellie–you’re wrong. The Suffragists do care that there should be no distinction between us and them. Look at Lady Constance Lytton! Disguising herself as Jane Wharton to show that prison guards treated her roughly when they thought she was a poor working girl—’ and pressing her finger down on the paper to show me the article. I didn’t trouble to read it. I told her to get on with her task. Now I wish I’d read the look in her eyes a little better, seen what she was about.

Rupert said once to Miss Darwin that something that never ceased to amaze him was the respect women had for men, even hopeless men, as if the men had the same power over them that they are said to have over horses or, indeed, as if women see men as bigger than they truly are. That was a day in summer, and as he was saying it, Kittie was bringing over the dish of strawberries. I know she heard him, and I noticed how her hands trembled as she placed the bowl in front of him. Because–this is the ridiculous bit–for all her hot talk, Kittie was sweet on him, and definitely thought of him in exactly that way. For sure, that’s the real problem between men and women. That we don’t see one another in the proper way–that women do reflect men back at twice their natural size.

Well, there’s nothing for it but to get on. Lottie sets to at last with the bucket and mop, and I light the stove in the kitchen, ready for the first batch of scones. The linoleum is icy beneath my feet so I make haste to get the coals burning–taking care not to smudge the stove’s gleaming surfaces, after Kittie and I spent most of last night black-leading it, at Mrs Stevenson’s request. Poor Kittie, I think with a stab, seeing the black-leading. All that horrible work for nothing.

Then I put my shoes on and run over to the Old Vicarage gardens to check the bees before breakfast. There is a crusty frost underfoot and the trees in the orchard are stripped and ghostly in the green morning. Once Mr Pudsey Dawson makes me squeal by appearing from behind one of them in the early-morning fog exactly like a green ghost. The bees are fine, with enough candy to last the rest of winter. The mouse guards are safe too, with no signs of interference.

 

Mrs Stevenson out of the room, I snatch a cup of tea and a piece of bread, put an extra log on the fire and pull my pen and paper from my apron pocket to write Betty and the littlies a note to include with my wages. Outside I hear the sound of rain dripping from bare branches on to fallen leaves, like twigs snapping. ‘I hope the littlest are all attending Sunday school,’ I write. ‘I hope you are remembering to feed the bees over the winter.’ Outside, the sky hangs low like a sodden woollen blanket. ‘I hope you have remembered to put the mouse guard on so that mice can’t steal the stocks.’

I know that Betty took some ten pounds of honey to Ely market, and still has beeswax candles and soap to sell, but this can’t possibly sustain the whole family until the late-spring months when there will be new honey at last. So I get to thinking about Sam, the eel man, who is mentioned frequently in Betty’s letters. Sam has made himself very useful to our family for many a long year now. Having no boy of his own he takes Edmund with him on the punt and two Sundays ago they came back with a whole brace of swans. I know that Betty cooks for him, and helps with the eel-hives in return for whatever Sam might be able to drop into the pot from his time on Cowbit Wash: fish, wildfowl, eels. I have not been able to visit as often as I intended: this winter has been a harsh one, with often impassable roads, so I begin wondering, reading between the lines, if Sam has moved in with them, but as I’m not there to take care of things, I don’t see it as my right to ask. Stanley and Edmund need a profession, and handling a punt-gun is good learning for a boy. Still, I can’t help but wish they spent more time in school.

A picture of Stanley then, with his blond curls and his rosy, skinny little naked body being bathed in front of the fire, brings a catch to my throat. I remember how he uttered not a word when he saw Betty and me trundle Father in like that, his body sprawled across the wheelbarrow, the only way we could think to move him, and how he edged closer to Father, reaching out a little finger to touch his arm once, and then burst into tears.

This is a troubling memory because it brings back queer details of the hours after Father’s death. How while he lay on the kitchen table, dressed in his best clothes, now so thin and empty and cold, just like a basket of ribs, with nothing inside it, I searched frantically among his things. How few things he had! But I was all haste and mayhem, turning up handkerchiefs, balls of string, beeswax candles, socks, muslin circles for jars, a lock of Mother’s hair. What was I searching for? I worked with a sense that Father was behind me, listening and watching, and I wheeled round in terror when I heard a tread in the kitchen, relieved to find it was only Betty, weeping deliriously into her apron.

Suddenly, sitting down with a plonk in Mrs Stevenson’s dining room, I feel certain at last that I know what I sought. I realise I was looking for a message: a note from Father. A card, a line, a letter, a gift that would tell me. Explain. What he thought of me, why he had brought me into this world. What his life–forty-two years of it–was for.

Foolish, I know. I hardly ever saw Father write a word, and know that his skills with pen and paper were slight. Thinking this over, I sit in the dining room, staring out at the frosted lawn where Rupert usually sits among the roses, fiddling nervously with the lace doilies, my mind tick-ticking over it, querulous and unsettled. My eye falls on a leaflet that Rupert has left on the table, and I begin unthinkingly to read the lines staring up at me: ‘Is Poverty always the Price of Idleness? Why a Man might be Poor through no Fault of his own…’

I wonder, then, if this is my message, at last. Rupert’s leaflet about Mr and Mrs Webb and the Poor Law reform. How bitterly I’ve regretted not being born into a home of books and schooling, a home where my Brains would be treasured, where I would not hear every day that I should ‘keep my strange ideas to myself’ or that I was ‘too clever by half’. Before I came to the Orchard and met Rupert, I could barely imagine how such a home might be. And yet a young woman like Gwen Darwin is evidence that some households might welcome even a girl’s wit and cleverness and not punish her for it.

I pick up the leaflet, and read on. It describes a society for the Prevention of Destitution, where workers can be ensured of ‘steady progress in health and happiness, honesty and kindliness, culture and scientific knowledge, and the spirit of adventure’. I can’t stop myself thinking sourly of how Mr and Mrs Webb, and Rupert too, know precious little about such things! I suppose the author meant to raise our spirits with that sentence but suddenly, for me, the writing wavers. My eyes flood with tears as it looms up in front of me: Ely Union Workhouse, the place they call the Spike. Sam has said that the old ways, the ways on the water, wildfowling and eeling, can’t go on for ever, now the land in the Fens is more successfully drained. He says a new pump engine is coming that will do the job it took ten men to do, and then the battle to keep the water back might well be won. And with the water would go the wildfowl, the geese and eels and pike that feed us all. Since it would take only one outbreak of disease to kill a hive and ruin a honey crop for a year, we are perilously close to ending up there, in the Spike, if things turn bad. I’ve never known why the villagers call it the Spike, but to me it’s the exact same shape as one of our skeps, and so I picture it swarming inside, abuzz with the heaving, gathering brown mass of three hundred and sixty creatures who will never see daylight again.

I let another hot tear spill. Why dwell on all this sadness, this misery now? Is it the knowledge that Rupert, too, is attending at his father’s bedside? And then I chide myself–why do my thoughts always turn to Rupert? You can be sure, Nell Golightly, that he is not thinking of you! With an effort, I think of poor foolish Kittie, giving up such a good position and a home and food in her belly for a future so undecided and all for a cause that everyone knows is doomed to failure. Then it strikes me like an arrow from Heaven. Betty. I should suggest Betty for the under-maid’s job! After all, Lily will be fifteen in October; easily old enough to take over from her, and the boys will still have their mothering and cooking and cleaning when it’s needed. If Betty were to work here that would be ten shillings more to live off, and one less person to feed, with Betty’s food and keep all paid for.

When Mrs Stevenson at last comes downstairs and I mention Betty to her, she says at once it’s a splendid idea and I’m to fetch my sister right away. She says she will ‘hold the fort’ in the tea gardens, murmuring that when Cambridge realises ‘our dear shoeless Mr Brooke’ is away in Rugby, the visitors will surely be halved. With that she scoops the Poor Law reform leaflets from the tables, stuffing them into the fire. ‘Chop-chop!’ she tells me, clapping her hands behind my head.

Rupert will be angry when he discovers her crime; those leaflets are sincerely meant by him, I’m sure of it.

January 1910, School Field Rugby

And now I’m ill myself with a fever and a temperature of 102, and blackly angry at all and sundry (especially James, who writes of his love for me at the most inopportune moments). I long to talk to Nellie, to Nellie! To bury my face in her neck and breasts and blubber all the ridiculous, hideous, shameful, childish nonsense that I have been feeling these last few days. The rage that Father was never the man I wanted him to be; the shame of longing for it to be otherwise. Do other fellows get better luck? Would they find it amusing to have a father with the nickname ‘Tooler’?

But then–what daydream, what fantasy is that? Nellie has no feeling for me, and would tell me to ‘buck up’, just as the Ranee would, and I would be shamed once more. I’ve tested her…that impulsive kiss I ventured…The response was calm, and unequivocal. (Oh, I want to bury myself up to the neck in a cellar full of dirt every time I remember it! What on earth possessed me? The bees, no doubt, cast some sort of spell on me…Nell will think me a perfect example of my class: a precise cliché in every way…I positively groan with embarrassment whenever I remember it.) She is as solid and good as a bar of white soap and nothing I press upon her can soil her or lather her. Our conversations, the occasions when I felt certain that something, oh, very close to a real exchange took place between us, well, of course all that feeling has stalled in the face of the tragic reality: I am vile, full of lust, and a slave to inconstancy. Nell, being the opposite of all those things, knows it better than anyone.

At least my wretched virginity is cast off. I should be more relieved or, even, delighted. I should be dancing a jig on the tin roof of the Orchard tea pavilion where the graceful Nell stands with her fellow maids, awaiting my every whim. But part of the problem is, who to tell? It was, thankfully, Nellie, not one of the others, who silently took away the sheets and delivered them back to me in snowy pristineness, as if the whole incident had never happened.

A few days later Denham and I cycled past one another near the Backs, and for a filthy moment I feared he would cut me. Then his hand flew up in an insouciant wave, and I thought, All is forgiven, and if he turns up at the Orchard again, I’m in for another go. He always was such a charming, lustful boy.

But then a weariness descends, for I have discovered that the career of the Sodomite is not for me. Practice and experience have not in the slightest erased my love for Noel, or quelled my lust for Nellie (or should ‘love’ and ‘lust’ be reversed?). I have resolved that Sodomy can only ever be for me a hobby, not a full-time occupation. I’ve discovered I’m no true Sodomite, at least not in the way of James and Lytton. Perhaps only one quarter, and the other three quarters shared equally between Noel, Nellie and Ka Cox.

Ka now. Why did I picture her just then? Turning up at the Orchard on her bicycle, doing something complicated with her skirt and boots to allow her to cycle…She would surely be a safer wager. That bear-like plodding and devotion to the socialist cause. (Isn’t that Virginia’s nickname for her–something to do with a bear?) That earnestness. So, for a happy moment, I picture Ka at Fabian meetings, in her secretary role, with her head bent over the accounts and her dark green beads glinting like bubbles of river-water at her throat. Jacques has admitted he finds her attractive–if only I could say the same! She does have a certain, well, dash in how she dresses: the peasant scarves wound round her head actually suit her, whereas on the other girls they look contrived, striving rather for effect. Her pince-nez make me think of her in the same way as Dudley–as rather kind and hapless. And she is certainly warm, and clever, with a marvellous listening ear. (A sort of cushion or soft-floor quality.) In addition to all that, she is a wealthy orphan too, so not nearly as well protected as Noel Olivier. Oh, yes, she is a friendly girl and highly obtainable, too…but the heart, sadly, does not work like that, and I cannot muster mine to beat quicker for the Ka Coxes of this world.

Last night I dreamed I was in love again with the One before the Last. (I’m writing a poem that begins with those lines.) Charles Lascelles, to be precise. Being here at School Field inevitably conjures up Charles for me–that day when he asked for a photograph of me! Would that it had been him, not Denham, I had seduced at the Orchard…or even Denham’s brother, Hugh, but of course with Denham you could say there had been that long period of foreplay. We had hugged and kissed and strained, Denham and I, on and off for years–ever since that quiet evening I rubbed him, in the dark, speechlessly, in the smaller of the two dorms. But in the summer holidays of 1906 and 1907 he had often taken me out to the hammock, after dinner, to lie entwined there. He had vaguely hoped, I fancy…But I lay always thinking of Charles.

Denham was, though, to my taste, attractive. So honestly and friendlily lascivious. Charm, not beauty, was his fate. So it was Denham, and not Charles, whom I had, just as it seems it is destined to be Ka, and not Noel or Nell, whom I might have. I have seen the way Ka looks at me. I endeavour not to notice.

Sometimes I wonder why that schoolgirl Noel Olivier is so appealing to me. She has none of the attributes of Ka. To name three faults, she is infuriating, stubborn, ignorant. Her sister Bryn is surely the exquisite beauty and a practised flirt, too. Even Margery, maddening though she is, is lovelier. Noel is a mere child. A horrible child whom I can’t seem to win over.

Little wonder that my mood is bleak. Here, death cowers in every room–inside cupboards and coiled in drawers, ready to spring.

At breakfast, the servants bring toast and tea with a shuffling gait, so unlike the lively step of Nell, and even the cups and plates smell of sickness, and remind me of long days spent in the hospital dorm, my eyes stuck and plugged with streaming conjunctivitis, so that all my attention congeals there and my eyes are the only part of my body that feel alive. Is that what Father feels now? Is he suffering, in that simple, physical way, pain and discomfort in the head and eyes, or is it something far worse? Does he in fact understand that he is facing down death–and what is it like to grapple with that particular foe?

There was that moment when I first arrived, standing in the hall still clutching my small leather bag as if there were a question over whether I might stay or not, and when we all talked of other things. Alfred and Mother and the servants–we talked of the trains and the weather and the new telephone and why I hadn’t first called to say I was arriving (I hadn’t the penny for the telephone at the station). Mother took me upstairs and into the room, which–never exactly a spring-like room–now was drowned in a dark, winter green light, with the curtains tightly closed. Of course thoughts of Dick hovered all around me and the terrible aching fear welled up again: that it was hereditary, this tendency to melancholy and blackness and a frail mind and worse: that even without his illness Father had always had it, and Dick too, and mightn’t I be the next to go exactly the same way?

Mother sat down beside the little table with its Mer-Syren pills for Indigestion, Biliousness and Nervous Depression and I kept looking at Father, with his paper-fine skin and his eyes open but dull, then back at Mother, not knowing what to say. And nobody dared to say the things they thought, and there were words floating in the air and in the brain and in the middle of the conversation and one suddenly saw them and felt unable to speak.

Then last night the Ranee broke down with me. I have seen her weep so few times in my life that my palms sprang with sweat, and I was immediately again a child of six years old. I watched, as her bowed head shook in her hands, like a bouncing silver melon and I wondered in horrified fascination whether it might in fact drop right off and she lift only the stub of her neck to me, rather than that wild, beseeching face.

She prayed, she said, he could die quickly.

This bald statement flitted ominously in the air between us like a bat, and then she stood up. Her shaking ceased and I saw at once that she was recovering, that she was becoming again the formidable Matron, Housemistress, School Mother she had always been–and I felt a little calmer for clearly no action from me was required. I had neither embraced her nor even moved towards her, and the powerful revulsion I felt, wondering if I was called upon to do either, subsided like a wave, as she moved away from me and composed herself, dabbing at her eyes.

‘Oh, my darling Rupie, thank Heaven for you!’ she ejected, suddenly, as if I had risen to the occasion. My shame was absolute.

We went next door to the green Nubolic room, and sat by the bedside with the old man croaking between us. Once he opened his eyes and seemed to focus, but not on me, on something just behind me, over my shoulder. (It was ever thus. Did he ever truly see me, I wonder, see the Rupertness of me, rather than the obedient, dreary boy he longed for?)

An ugly thought came back to me then. How at fourteen, I once heard a boy say out loud what I knew had long been rumoured: that Tooler (Father) was so horse-whipped that Mother sent him out to pick up manure for the garden in the middle of the night. I thrashed the offender, of course. Yet what I remembered was that even as I did it I wished it was Father I was pummelling. Why could he not stand up to her, just the once, and set an example for all of us?

My head began to pound with the force of these thoughts and their unsuitability for thinking so close to a death-bed. If only I could subdue them in some way! I tried offering Father a glass of water from the jug beside the bed but he made no sound, and Mother frowned and shook her head, as if to say, ‘He is too far gone for that.’ The smell in the room was becoming stifling–no longer just Watson’s Nubolic Soap but an odd, sickening combination of that and…a smell like pond-weed, powerful, rotted, slippery and foul.

I stood up, as if to leave, but Mother put her hand on mine and I pretended to be adjusting the curtain, drawing the gap in the centre so that no slit of light could fall on his face, rendering the skin any greener than it already appeared. When would that foul gurgling sound in his chest and lungs cease? When would the miasma, the disgusting smell surrounding us, lift? Mother took hold of his limp hand, picking it up as if it were a dead leaf and clutching it in hers.

What on earth could he be thinking now? Did he know? After all, he was always such a pessimistic man, prone to brooding, and not much to fall back on in the way of thoughts. He had never recovered from Dick’s death, and a picture of Dick now, sloppy, not quite upright, a glass of whisky in his hand, inserted itself between the bed and me, impossible to shake.

I paced the room, sat down and then stood up again, my desire to do something, anything, being quite overwhelming. Couldn’t I, despite being such an absolute and unimaginative dolt, even with my enormous ineptitude, could not I find some way to help him, help ease the passage, say one word or phrase to help? What is the point of being a Bloody Poet if words abandon you at essential moments? Is not a word something, better than nothing, to offer a dying man? ‘When the white flame in us is gone, and we that lost the world’s delight…’ Oh, but it’s all helpless, useless.

‘Father—’ I said.

And there was a moment, a glint, where the word ‘Goodbye’ welled up and all the words stoppered up in me rose to my throat and I longed to speak something true, anything true, just the once, before it was too late.

‘Father–I’m here–do you see me?’

But Father closed his eyes again. I did not have a sense, not have much of a sense, that he saw or understood anything at all. And the room drew in around us, dark and green and foul. I thought of Nellie, and something she had described about her own father slipping away in the meadow near the river, sliding out of life like something natural and good, with his bees humming round him and his hands smelling of honey, and meanwhile Mother and I continue to sit in silence, breathing in that fetid, frightening smell.

‘Oh, my dearest—’ Mother said, and flung herself at Father’s chest.

I had my wish–the strange gurgling sound stopped, at last.

Later, much later, when the doctor had left, and the servants retired, and Mother’s sobbing in the other room finally ceased to shake the house, I sat wearily on the edge of my bed, pulling at my socks and thinking. I’ve always felt so especially unlike and separate from both my parents–in good and bad qualities alike. It has been a constant mystery to me–and to others, too, no doubt!–how such parents managed to spawn me.

The irony is that at this moment, despite this dizzying unlikeness, despite being the one boy in the school (along with James, I suppose) whom the masters always accused of looking like a girl, with my too-long hair and bandy legs–Father has achieved exactly what he always longed for: I shall be forced to step into his shoes and become a Schoolmaster, at least for one term.

At this thought I’m obliged to fling myself backwards on to the bed like a felled log. If one of the servants wasn’t still creeping about sniffling I swear I’d throw back my head and howl like a wolf. Oh, and I’m so sad and fierce and miserable not to be in my garden and little house in Grantchester this term! I love being there so much–more than any other place I’ve ever lived in. I’d thought of being there when the spring was coming, every day this winter, and dreamed of seeing all the brown and green things. And I always hate being at home.

I snuff the candle and pull off my shirt, slipping beneath the cold, stiff sheets and lying on my back in horrible mimicry of a corpse. My solace will be the boys, I tell myself. They all love me. They are not very ugly. They vary from four to seven feet in height. They are a good age–fourteen to nineteen. (It is between nineteen and twenty-four that people are insufferable.) They look rather fresh and jolly too. But, oh!, the mask-like faces that come before me. I am ‘master’ and therefore a moral machine. They will not believe I exist. Also, I am shy.

However, they all remember I used to play for the school at violent games and they will respect me accordingly.

 

Father’s death is what others call A Blessing: it put an end to his gurgling and choking, his face twisted out of recognition, and the hours of vigil required of us. There is paperwork and the funeral to arrange and Mother to hold up. It is exactly like the days after Dick’s death, but worse. I feel sure that the unspoken–the unacknowledged fact of weakness or Brain Fever or Madness: something terrible and horrible and too dreadful to contemplate within me, too, will soon manifest, like an ugly blister that suddenly reveals how badly a shoe chafed and for how long it was ignored.

My fever has receded but I am weary beyond belief.

James assures me by letter that his penis and balls are (in the words of Mr Scott-Coward) at my disposal. Astonishing, the levels to which these Cambridge men will go to avoid acknowledging anything that matters. My father has died and Mother is in agony; Alfred’s career uncertain and I’m suddenly to be a Schoolmaster (I hope for only a term but maybe for longer; perhaps I shall have to give up all hope of being a poet). Still James expects me to go on with the witticisms and the posturing. (I’m certainly making a game attempt with my usual immensely egotistic nature, but can hardly be expected to excel just now.)

I had several hours of respite yesterday: I travelled by train to Grantchester and called in at the Orchard–if I’m to stay a while in Rugby I need my books and papers. The route from Cambridge was full of cyclists hurtling through muddy puddles with their robes flowing, and Grantchester was immediately peace and raindrops and spiders busying in diamond-encrusted webs in soon-to-be-dusted rooms. I called ostensibly to pick up a few books, intending dinner in the Union in the evening with James. I had tickets for Richard the Second by the Marlowe Society.

In truth, I hoped to see Nellie. I felt certain that, in my present simmering mood, one brush with those flaming violet eyes and that vastly sympathetic bosom would bring all to the surface, allowing it to boil over and pour forth.

Sensibly, the marvellous child was absent. Visiting her family, Mrs Stevenson said, in some strangely named village in the Fens. I indulged myself with another brief picture of Nellie there with other buxom maids, picking celery or–what do they do in Fen country?–carrying eels in nets or milk in churns or some such glorious thing, hair shining in the golden sun, tumbling in black folds down her bare shoulders, her elegant throat freckling like a speckled egg. No rude reality (it’s winter drizzle, with frost and bare twigs, no sun or eggs to be seen) interfered: the picture was a pretty one.

A telegram arrived then, which cut short my visit–Memorial for Father arranged for tomorrow: come back at once. And so here I am, in my old room in School Field, with the curtains with their swinging red parrots and their smell of cooked cabbage, and Podge stoical and podgy in the bed next door, and Father in the Chapel of Rest at last, while we prepare some sentimental nonsense of a life devoted to God and the School to be read out at the service tomorrow morning.

Will I be allowed to say that I believe God a fool and Father a bigger one? There are things–pieces of folly, or bad taste, or wanton cruelty–in the Christian, middle-class way of burying the dead that make me ill. My avowed rejection of immortality as a theory or a reality has to be all swallowed up again in speaking some nonsense about Father at peace with angels, just as we did for Dick. Preparing the valedictory lines has been the worst task of my life so far, and not, as Mother imagines, because of the sorrowfulness of losing Father that it evokes. No. The pain is caused by being forced to write and speak lines I believe to be false and unworthy! My sickness has come back with a vengeance, and in some sinister way I welcome it–as (and here I confuse even myself) with the sickness comes such intense awareness of every ache and twinge and stab in my limbs and head and neck and eyes and throat: in short, with sickness comes the strong feeling that I, at least, am alive. Which is something.

I’m sweating in a dreadful fever. I’ve subsisted on milk and the pieces I could surreptitiously bite out of my thermometer. At times I want to kill Podge and then I remember in a state of forgiveness that to be the favourite child (after dear departed Dick) is probably, in point of fact, a curse. Far better to be in my shoes–the replacement girl, the reincarnated babe that Mother lost! Allows me my yellow hair and my squashy nature.

Tomorrow the fifty-three boys arrive, inky babes all of them; they are young and direct and animal. It will become my charming task to freeze their narrowing views. At least until April.

 

So I’m in full feather by the time I leave my duties at the Orchard and beg a lift from the butcher’s boy, who is taking the horse van from Grantchester to Ely market. It will be but an hour’s walk at the other side. I sing all the way.

In the end the boy takes me right to Prickwillow because, he says, he’s never seen the Fens and ‘Well! This is a funny bit of England!’ I suspect he has other reasons but I give him no cause to hope, keeping my eyes straight and my shawl clutched round my chest.

The frost gives way to snow once we get past Streatham. The pretty lanes and curving hedges soon begin to flatten out into the iced white fields, so plain and flat they might be cut-up pieces of paper, the black lines being the droves and the silver the strips of water. At first the plainness is a shock to me–I realise I’ve quickly forgotten it–and I feel only shame, seeing my old home through the eyes of the butcher’s boy, as a drab, treeless, man-made landscape, poor cousin indeed to the historic countryside of Grantchester, with its tall church spires and charming rose gardens and grand old elm trees. But as the horse takes us deeper into Fen country and the huge white sky starts to spread its arms over us, and at the first sight of a Fen skater flashing past, blue as a kingfisher, on the ice at Soham Mere, my heart lifts and my old pride floods back. We stop to watch the skaters for a while, drinking the tea from the flask that Mrs Stevenson sent with us, with the butcher’s boy exclaiming over the low, clumsy Fen style (‘Designed for speed, not grace,’ I say) and asking me why we call the skates patines in this part of the world. (The answer is I don’t know.) We stay a while, fascinated by the speed of the figures whisking past, listening to the familiar chafe of skates on ice, and the fine crusts of ice upturned by them, which look to me just like the scrapings of beeswax that we take off with the knife. Our ears and noses are singing from the cold; and we place halfpenny bets on the various boys we see racing, until he tries to pull me to him and kiss me, and I have to pretend that Betty expects me at a particular hour.

The kiss is damp and childish, and a poor specimen, compared to Rupert’s.

‘What’s your name?’ I squeal, from under the damp wool and worsted of him.

‘Tommy,’ he says proudly.

‘Well, Tommy, you can put me off here after the three bridges and the three level crossings. The place down by the river and the shock-head willows.’

He falls silent then, hearing the sharpness in my voice. But the silly boy cannot be silent for long: ‘Look at those toy-like trees, and the whole place flat as a pancake!’ he says, and then, ‘Tit-willer, what a funny name for a village!’ I have to tell him again that it’s Prickwillow, named for the custom of pricking the osier willows into the soil–that the whole place used to be nothing but osier willows–and he jumps down off the van as we arrive at the house, and Betty runs out into the garden, her face beaming with surprise at the sight of me.

‘Any chance of giving a boy a glass of beer for his trouble?’ Tommy says, to which Betty looks disapproving and replies, ‘But didn’t you know we’re Primitive Methodists? Lily and me are just off to the church now and you’re more than welcome to join us if you like…’

Well, that sure mops the smile from his face and, with a few coins shoved in his hand, he jumps back in the driver’s seat, shaking the horse into such speed that the van’s in danger of toppling. He calls over his shoulder that he’ll be back at three o’clock to fetch us to Grantchester and not to be late!

Betty smiles at his haste. She doesn’t mention that Sam keeps a good stock of ale in back and that our going to church has always been more through habit and schooling than conviction.

Then at last I can hug my brothers and sisters, smother myself with the rough kisses of the boys and the damp cheeks of Lily and Betty and Olive. The children look thin and they smell of sarsaparilla–a powerful stench that lets me know Betty has done a good job, dosing them up to prevent the nits and doing it on Saturday night too, as I taught her, so that it can be washed out on Sunday night and the children don’t go to school on Monday morning smelling of Rankin’s ointment. I look them all over carefully and it’s not all cause for celebration.

‘Betty, have you been giving them the caster oil?’ I ask. Stanley in particular looks frail and a mite green around the gills. Lily is the opposite–a touch swollen in the cheeks and belly–but in a way that’s not healthy either.

I can see Betty resents my asking but her reply is friendly enough: ‘Yes, and the jar with black treacle and powdered sulphur too, and poppyhead tea for the littlies…’

‘Not the poppyhead tea! No one gives their children that in Grantchester! They’ll think us backward. It turns children sleepy and stupid. Don’t give them it, Betty, you hear? No matter what Mrs Gotobed says…’

At this Betty turns sulky. ‘All right, all right, but it’s fine for you, sleeping in that warm house and your own room too. It’s me here with the little ones wailing and crying about Daddy and always hungry for food and Edmund out at all hours on a sledge on Cowbit Wash when he should be chopping wood for me. It’s the only way I can get a night’s sleep sometimes.’

‘But Edmund is working, surely, with Sam? Isn’t he setting the decoy? Doesn’t he bring home waterfowl?’

‘Yes, yes, of course he does, but I can’t rely on it, and there’s still nights when we go to bed hungry…’

So here is the perfect moment to tell her about the live-in position. But somehow I can feel a silence taking hold of my throat and a wish to prolong the happy mood, knowing how the others will protest if I take Betty away from them.

‘Show me the skeps–have you put the mouse guard on for the winter? I have to tell you what I’ve learned from Mr Neeve. His methods are so modern–he doesn’t kill off most of the swarm to remove the honey, he uses removable frames and keeps nearly an entire swarm. He’d be willing to sell us some of those frames so that I can teach you that way to do things, too.’

Betty sets her mouth in a disbelieving line. ‘Well, Father’s honey always was the best in the Fens…the Runhams told me the other week that they might take two dozen pots this year, as a sample. I thought you’d be pleased.’

‘I am pleased. You are doing a fine job. Now, come, show your sister the bees, and then we’ll go to church…And then I’ve some news and a proposition for you…We’ll need the whole family to say yes, mind, and I know the littlies will want persuading…’

On the way back, Tommy makes no such move again. At Stuntney Fen we pass an enormous bird of prey squatting at the side of the road, like a hunched old man. It takes off at our approach and I see the vole dangling from its clutches, and the leather strap tied to its foot, too. So it’s not free at all, as I imagined, for a moment, watching it enviously. No–I see the bird make for the gloved arm of its master, a black figure in the distance, the falconer. The sky over the Fens is gathering red, Ely Cathedral sitting atop. The bird rests on the falconer’s arm the way a flame sits on a candle. Does he ever think of me? I have no need to ask myself who I mean.

 

This morning I fell out of love with the schoolgirl Noel Olivier, with a resounding crash, probably loud enough for the Ranee to hear it in the drawing room. I’m not quite sure how it happened, but only that a blank space descended where my previous affections lived and I contrived to write a whole sonnet on the subject of not loving her at all. I suspect it is absence that has made the heart grow colder; absence and the presence of fifty-three distracting young colts.

I felt the best I have felt since the funeral. I rose from my bed lively and invigorated.

This morning I caned a boy for the first time. I had no consciously sexual sensations. Occasionally I determine to make a great attempt to pierce their living souls by some flaming, natural, heartfelt remark. So I summon one. Then he trots into my study, a sullen meekness. I can only say, in a mechanical voice, ‘Jones, mi, I hear your Latin grammar was not sufficiently prepared. Please do me fifty lines.’

It’s really that I’m in a false position; and when I try to stretch out a jolly hand to any one of them, the shades of a thousand schoolmasters rise between us and form a black wall of fog and we miss each other in the dark. I manage my bluff Christian tone, which is wholly pedagogic. Every night at nine twenty I take prayers–a few verses of a psalm and one or two short heartfelt ones. I nearly had to prepare the lads for Confirmation but, rather pusillanimously, I wriggled out of that. But a certain incisive credulity in my voice when I mention the word ‘God’ is, I hope, slowly dropping the poison of the truth into their young souls.

Actually, the caning was distressing. The boy–Everett-Clegg, a yellow-haired (is that significant? James would surely think it was) sullen chap–had broken his furniture to small pieces with a coal-hammer. I could hardly let that pass. ‘Come into my study at once!’

The boy’s eyes were fierce but everything about his face shimmered. He was angry: he wanted to fight, stand firm, like a bull. He was red and frightened. I bade him in a tremulous voice to bend over.

A smell of something hot and familiar began to emanate from him, as he lifted up his jacket, as requested, and rested his hands on his knees. That sickening smell gave me pause. The clock behind me–Father’s clock–ticked stridently. The room seemed unbearably small, warm and chalky, and I feared for an instant that I could not breathe. I saw the boy raise his eyes, the pupils rolling towards his eyelashes and I knew what he was doing. He mocked me. He saw my weakness, my hesitation. It would have spread among the other fifty-two young bullocks like a disease, in an instant. So I raised the cane and held my breath and played the part, the part of Housemaster, the five hundred years of history, the pale men who slide wearily around these halls: my father’s son.

I raised and lowered the cane six times, and I did not wince as the wood fell with smart raps on reddening, then bloodying flesh. When the boy straightened up, one hand pulling at his pants, the other brushing a tear from his silent, glowering face, I had to turn my own away, making a pretence of putting the cane back in its hallowed place. ‘Go to your room, Everett-Clegg, and do not let me see you in here again!’

I wanted to cry after him, ‘I’m sorry! Can’t you see we each must play a part, always play a part, that those powerful tides, oceans of years–no matter how courageously I struggle, they are too powerful for me? Can you not see that it isn’t possible for me to ask why you broke the furniture in your room, if you are unhappy, if you are being buggered by a bigger, stinkier boy, any more than I could—’

Any more than I could declare my love for the parlour-maid.

I found my legs were shaking as I sat down in Father’s chair. There was his cap on the desk behind me, his pipe, his pen, his ink bottle, his leather-bound Bible. The ghost of the figure we conjured up as boys, James and I, John Rump, the terrible bowler-hatted, umbrellaed, briefcased shell of a man, hovered over me. Everett-Clegg closed the door behind him with an insolently loud clap, and I put my head in my hands and, for the first time since Father’s death, I wept.

 

So Betty takes up her place in Kittie’s bed, wearing Kittie’s uniform, which only needs an inch taking from the hem of the skirt and the apron to fit her, and at Easter Rupert returns from his mother’s home in Rugby, looking as pale as butter and as flat and lifeless, too.

‘I suppose you know that my father died, Nellie.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you may have heard that we were forced to leave the family home, and are living in Reduced Circumstances…’

‘I know nothing of that…’

‘Good.’

Here, some of the old spark flickers in his eyes. I am in his room, bringing him his breakfast and the morning letters.

‘Because it’s ridiculous. We are better described as living in Genteel Poverty. That is to say we just fail to live with any comfort on what would support ten working men and their families in luxury.’

I pause for a second, and then realise with relief that he is back to his old teasing.

‘I have been reprieved! My career as a Schoolmaster has been interrupted by the willingness of Mother to rent a detached house in Bilton Road and give up her reign as Housemistress…in which case I no longer need to pretend to be Housemaster…Hurrah!’

I don’t really understand this, but I see that he is happy and some of our old ease is between us again, and so I smile, and his face cracks into a laugh and he flings back the covers and jumps naked to the window.

I am used to this now, although I have warned Betty to allow me to be the one to bring the breakfast things in the morning. Rupert will often give me a naughty grin and pretend to cover up what he calls his ‘tent pole’. I have become accustomed to this behaviour by reminding myself that he was raised by a nanny and is used to servants knowing every inch of him. He means nothing by it and I must not for one moment think otherwise.

With his face to the window he grabs a sheet from the bed and begins winding it round himself, bandage-like. When he has assured himself that this morning there are no friends about to call up to him, he proceeds to the basin to shave.

‘I’ll fetch your hot water…’

‘Nellie, stay awhile! I’ve something to show you. ‘

He hops back towards the bed, looking like an Egyptian, with his long straight body in the short linen skirt.

‘You remember I went to Switzerland last December? I got sick out there. Very sick. My tongue turned a bright orange and I fainted at the Louvre on our return through Paris. It was green honey that did it–can you credit it? The very elixir, the same marvellous tonic, that cured the bee-sting made me violently sick!’

I don’t know what to say to this–if I should apologise, perhaps. ‘The honey here is always pure, sir. Always safe to eat, I hope—’

‘I know, I know that. (Do call me Rupert, child, for God’s sake.) No, that’s not what I’m concerned about. I wrote a poem. I want to show you the poem.’

He leaps across the room to his bed and rummages in the piles of books on the floor next to it for a piece of paper, which he then shoves at me. ‘There, there! “A Channel Passage”. Read it, Nellie, would you?’

His face surprises me. The paleness and flatness is gone and now his cheeks are pink and his hair sticking up where he has pushed twitchy fingers through it and he is all animation and excitement. I glance nervously at the door, mindful of the kettle I left on the stove downstairs.

I unfold the paper and read, standing up. My heart beats loudly inside my own skull, and a goblin wheels around in there too, shouting: ‘Ninny! Idiot! Now you will be found out! You will not know one word to say! What could a girl like you possibly understand about a poem by a great poet?’ The lines leap in front of me like horses galloping and refuse to make sense, so that I only glance up once and then turn back to the paper, silently reading and waiting for Rupert to speak.

‘There! It’s a sonnet, Nellie–you know what a sonnet is? Admittedly it might be the first sonnet in the English language that deals with the matter of–the question of–vomit but, well, it’s a fine sonnet just the same!’

‘Vomit?’

He snatches the paper from me.

‘“The damned ship lurched and slithered. Quiet and quick, my cold gorge rose…” You see, you see, it’s a metaphor. A metaphor for love as a physical sickness…“Do I forget you? Retchings twist and tie me; old meat, good meals, brown gobbets up I throw…” Nausea, retching, do you see, as a way to express the sickness of the soul? Sickness! Is sickness not a fit subject for poetry? It appears not! Are any of the true, the everyday, the real events of a man’s experience a fit subject for poetry? No, apparently! Mr Eddie Marsh prefers poetry that he can read while lunching, so he does! The editor of the Nation, a certain Mr Nevinson,’ (he says this name with a great sneer, and a look seeking agreement, as if I should know the man), ‘would prefer it if this poem, which I had named “A Shakespearean Love Sonnet”–ha! before I changed it–would prefer if it were not included. He would like to publish some poems of mine, but not this one as he thought it generally “too strong”. Ha! Too strong!’

This rant is delivered at such a pace that, thankfully, no reply from me is needed.

‘Too strong, Nellie.’ He backs towards the bed and the puff seems to go out of him. When he raises his eyes to mine I note again how they are not grey or bluish-white but of living blue, really living blue, like the sky that streams in through the window.

‘Does the poem shock you, Nellie?’

‘No…’

‘Sickness has been a part of your life, too, hasn’t it? It has been a lifelong companion to mine. Dick’s pneumonia, Father’s neuralgia, and me–if it’s not ophthalmia (the “pink eye”, Nellie), it’s sweating in a fever or shivering in a cold…Oh, yes, it might be said to be a trifle adolescent, oh, yes, it’s rather laid on so, I can see that–“The sobs and slobber of a last year’s woe”–yes, yes, it’s ugly–but–but—Oh, is it my fate to be permitted to write only what is beautiful and useless and never what is true?’

At this he sits down and sinks low on the bed, with his head in his hands. The curve of his naked shoulders and the nape of his neck present themselves to me. I try to remain business-like, and remember my duties, but it is such a long time since I saw that neck. How pale it looks, with its down of soft fair hair. How strong and how tender. My hand trembles a little and I push it into the pocket of my apron, lest it betray me by sneaking out to touch him.

At last I draw courage, and venture my opinion: ‘I think it a–an excellent poem, honestly I do. “Heartache or tortured liver”! Yes, very fine lines.’

There is a silence, a pause, when Rupert seems to wrestle with something. His hands are still covering his face and the sound that slips through his fingers is so strange that I think for a moment he is choking back a sob. But then another escapes, and another, and he drops his hands and falls sideways on to the bed, and I realise at once that he is rolling and shrieking with laughter.

‘Yes! The parlour-maid says the best lines are: “heartache or tortured liver”! Or perhaps that should be “heartache or chopped liver”! Nellie, you are a marvel! Oh, thank you, darling Nellie. I should have taken you that day in the orchard, shouldn’t I, while I had my chance? You didn’t get married while I was away, now, child, did you?’

‘What? No–I—’

A pause. He seems to note my look of startled horror and sobers up. Another long pause.

‘Will that be all then? Sir?’

‘Yes, yes, I’m sorry, Nellie–don’t be cross…I had hoped to explain…’

I close the door firmly behind me. As the wood slams into the frame, I can still hear him laughing, that horrible skittish, girlish laugh that makes him sound quite mad. I am shaking. I long to open the door again, go back in, beg his forgiveness, hear his explanation, but I daren’t.

Mrs Stevenson’s voice on the stairs drags me to my duties. ‘Nell! Did you leave this kettle on the stove? It’s almost boiled dry, so it has! You’ll burn us all in our beds, you will, one of these days, my girl.’

As I am hastening downstairs, Rupert’s words are running through my head, and a savage fury flares in me again: ‘I should have taken you that day in the orchard…’ How dare he? The assumption! The cheek of the man! The baldly stated, to my face, idea that he could have me any time he wanted, regardless of what my thoughts might be on the matter.

My face is hot, I know, and red, as I rush to cover my hand with a teacloth and retrieve the kettle. But the face that greets me in its shining surface has a surprised, wild look. I’m startled to see that it is not anger at all reflected there, but something else entirely.

 

I have been to the newspaper’s offices in London to have it out with Nevinson. Fat lot of good it did me. The miscreant has no idea that it’s the alteration of the little words that makes the difference between Poetry and Piddle. I had the impression from Nevinson’s startled gaze that I was being…loud, and ruddy, and possibly ludicrously beautiful too. Or just ludicrous. He said, of course, that if he were the sole editor himself he’d let them stand. It was all nonsense.

I ranted a little to Eddie Marsh later, who smoked in silence and took me out to see Trelawny of the ‘Wells’ and then on to Lady Ottoline’s salon. We stood near the window, slightly apart from the others, engrossed in our conversation.

‘I don’t claim great merit for “A Channel Passage”, dear Eddie,’ I began, sotto voce, ‘but the point of it was (or should have been) serious’. There are common or sordid things–situations or details–that may suddenly bring all tragedy, or at least the brutality of actual emotions, to you.’

Eddie repeated his preference for poetry that he could read at meals. I ran my fingers through my hair, controlling a desire to punch him. He pretended not to notice and drew long and hard on his cigarette, darting little glances at me until his monocle popped, and fell on to his cheek, where he cupped a hand to catch it.

‘Look, Eddie–Shakespeare’s not unsympathetic, is he?’ I hissed, in exasperation. ‘I mean, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.” What’s that if not an attempt to do away with sentimental and idealistic imagery? Couldn’t we compare love to something besides roses for once?’

We were both surprised to notice that I was shaking.

We travelled back to Eddie’s rooms in the Gray’s Inn Road by motor-car, belonging to some government friend of Eddie’s–a conciliatory gesture, which I refused to be impressed by. There was a tense silence as we entered his rooms and I sniffed in that bachelor smell of cigarette smoke, books and damp wool. Eddie’s rooms always make me think of Lowes Dickinson’s room at King’s: too many books and pictures for too small a space. Eddie strode to the window to wave good night to the chauffeur. Then he turned to the claret left for us on a tray by his bed-maker, Mrs Elgy, and poured us both a tiny glass. As usual Mrs Elgy had also left a cold supper of ham, cheese and bread, but I shook my head, feeling childish, when Eddie offered me some.

‘My dear—’ began Eddie.

His expression was so plaintive that I couldn’t bear it. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Eddie, pass me that claret. Must my glass be the perfect size for a visiting maiden aunt?’

‘Mrs Elgy…’ he began, by way of explanation.

I threw myself into his armchair, swinging one of my legs over the side in a hopeless effort to inject some energy into the room. Eddie glanced at the fire beside me and I know he was wondering whether he would appear too servile if he now knelt at it and made it up.

‘What a strange evening!’ I said, in conciliatory mood at last. ‘Full of Ottoline’s admirers and would-be lovers. Was that Henry Lamb?’

Eddie, clearly relieved by my changed mood, nodded at once, and poured me another glass of claret, filling it to the brim, where the red liquid skin trembled dangerously in the miniature glass. ‘The fellow in the queer suit?’ he asked.

‘Oh, I thought it rather marvellous. Quite the most interesting thing about him–did you see it had tails, shaped at the hips? And the rather jaunty red handkerchief round his neck? I might adopt that myself–he looked far more elegant and fashionable than any of the men in faultless evening dress.’

‘Oh, Rupert, no, you looked by far the most–dapper!’

Eddie’s look of serious alarm was so laughable I spluttered on my claret. I put my hand to my tieless collar and opened the second button on my shirt. Fun to watch Eddie’s eye behind his eye monocle, see him struggle with himself not to glance there, at my bare throat.

‘I’m teasing, old man. Ka made me this shirt–rather nice, isn’t it? I think blue’s my colour.’

‘Ka?’

‘You know Ka…Katharine Cox. Newnham girl. Fabian secretary. Bad posture and serious thoughts. A fine seamstress, though. She’s mad for me.’

‘Ah…’

The words ‘Aren’t we all?’ hovered around him like the words in a thought balloon, and I had to stifle another laugh.

The thawing of my mood seemed to give Eddie false confidence, and after a slug of claret, he suddenly ventured, ‘You know, dear, it would be a great shame to feel you have to be ugly in your poetry in order to somehow compensate for your…erm…personal beauty…’

Immediately, I felt my ire rise again. ‘Ugliness! That’s just the thing. What you call ugly I call realism. Oh, not the realism of those critics who believe that true literary realism is a fearless reproduction of what real living men say when there is a clergyman in the room!’ I snapped. I felt a little prickle of joy at the hurt look on Eddie’s face. It was the kind of remark I’d so often wanted to make with the Ranee, or even Father, but had never dared. It’s always gratifying how much liberty Eddie’s admiration permits me.

And with that I downed my glass and picked up the English Review.

There was a pause while the cogs in Eddie’s brain clicked audibly, as he searched desperately for a new way to mollify me. He swept some books from a chair and perched himself on it, as close to me as he dared. ‘Oh, yes, Rupert, I saw your article on Richard the Second. Marvellous stuff…’

I silently munched bread and Stilton, not feeling inclined to let him off the hook that readily. More cogs whirring. Eddie sat tense and alert, like a listening terrier. Then, at last, inspiration: ‘You know, dear boy, I have been thinking. I’m out at the Admiralty so often–why don’t you use this place as your London pied-à-terre? It’s splendidly convenient and Mrs Elgy is very fond of you…and I could leave you a key…’

Oh, joy! Such genius! I pretended to be considering his offer. My mind immediately danced ahead with the possible freedoms this might bestow…Of course I will have to endure Mrs Elgy calling me ‘Duck’ and ‘Me-duck’ so often I’m tempted to quack. And that annoying habit she has of wanting to detain me with chat about the ‘carry-on’ of that wicked Adelaide Knight (of whom I know nothing), married–can you believe it, Mr Rupert, sir?–to a negro man (and care less). But Mrs Elgy aside, the spare room has a large and comfortable bed, an enervating view over Holborn rooftops, some impressive paintings and artworks.

So I leaped from my armchair and took Eddie’s hands and thanked him, and drank another brimming glass of claret, and stumbled off to bed in a vastly improved mood.

It’s not hard to guess why the Ranee dislikes Mr Marsh so much. She would be vastly reassured if she knew of the indomitable Mrs Elgy, with her witchy laugh and constant monologue. The Ranee doesn’t even know, of course, that Eddie’s a member of the Apostles, but she isn’t wrong in her general suspicions. It’s only that she’s wrong in her estimation of Eddie’s courage. Except for one extraordinary occasion after the Cambridge production of Eumenides at the ADC, when I was standing around in my heraldic little skirt–an occasion never again mentioned–and Eddie was horribly sloshed and crept up behind me and goosed me with his long, refined fingers; apart from that, there is no indication at all of what she suspects. Eddie is a model of decorum. Sober, Eddie is an exemplary companion.

I lay in the tight little bed, and contemplated his offer. At last–a place to bring my conquests! Admittedly, there haven’t been any yet (if Denham is not to be counted, and he isn’t) but, well, I have begun–and now I give my sensual race the rein! Ha! Thank you, Eddie, dear boy.

Whatever your motives might be.

 

There are two things I had forgot about my sister Betty. One is how vain she is about her looks. Falling dead-beat into bed each night, I’m forced to wait while she curls each strand of hair round a strip of rag before I can snuff out the candle. Mornings are delayed while she unties them again, fixing her hair in the tiny mirror we’ve propped against our only shelf. Since our hair must be pinned up and most of it is hidden beneath caps all day, I can’t fathom the trouble she takes. How did she get this way, in the middle of the Fens, where there is no one to see her but the geese over the fields?

The second is that she is a worrier, in a way that I am not, nor never have been. Taking care of five youngsters from the age of eleven, I never had indulgence, and that has served me well. But for Betty, all must be talked through in the tiniest detail before anything can be done. She is very worried about her duties at the Orchard. She is terrified of some of Mrs Stevenson’s new-fangled objects, like the Faithfull washer, with its dangerous figure-of-eight movement that takes flight on the kitchen floor when you rock it. I keep trying to explain that it’s simply a mimicry of the sort of thing we’d do if we were scrubbing the linen in a dolly-tub, to which she wails, ‘Well, then, why can’t we wash the clothes in the river Granta, as we would at home?’

The May Day celebrations that Rupert and his friends demand nearly finish her off: strawberries and honey and cream and tea on the lawn for about a half-dozen of them (and every time she fetches something Betty forgets the tray, or the request of a spoon, or some brown sugar, or some plum jam, and has to run back in again, doubling the work she does). Being in service, I realise, is something I took to right away; but, then, I had always been the one keeping house, and bossing the others. Betty had some small freedoms to roll a hoop or skip with the others. And she had never been good with skinning a rabbit or baking an eel pie.

I keep trying to teach her that a good maid must listen at all times to what is being said, in case a request is buried in it. ‘Oh, yes, and more tea would be good…’ But at the same time she must never, on any account, appear to be listening. When the men shout strange quotes to one another, or if she accidentally comes across a joke about ‘Higher’ and ‘Lower’ Sodomy, her face must be blank. I remind her of Mrs Stevenson’s warning to me that she will not keep girls who take too much notice of the goings-on of the Varsity men. When they talk of Apostles and Embryos and the Carbonari Society, Betty finds the blank eyes easy; the difficulty is if someone suddenly says, ‘I thought I asked for a knife half an hour ago, what?’

She is afraid of Rupert, for his way of addressing her directly and quite suddenly, having learned her name and that she is my sister. He calls her ‘Young Bet’, or ‘Wild Bet’ and he always says this with a smile, and a glance at the dark beaky Frenchman (whose name I now know is Mr Raverat), as if to share some private joke. I’ve troubled to tell Betty the names of the ones I recognise: the lady with the brown hair in a long plait and the large behind and the pince-nez, with the rounded shoulders and a sort of thick mouth, is Miss Katharine Cox (the others call her Ka). She is a little greedy, and always asks for more cream. Miss Gwen Darwin is very kind, but likes to do things herself: just put the pot beside her and let her pour, and fetch her own spoon. The other lady is her cousin, Mrs Frances Cornford, a poet, very sweet on Rupert; she will always sound a little sharp in her requests, but don’t be frightened, she simply has a loud voice. The man with the pressed-down hair across his bald head, whom Rupert calls ‘Dudders’, is Mr Dudley Ward to us: a very gentle man indeed, who will preface any request with ‘I say, I don’t suppose I might trouble you for the…’ but it must be remembered that he likes a slice of lemon, not milk, with his tea and is always dropping something under the table, which, being short-sighted, he can never find. The only other person I recognise is the handsome one, Mr Geoffrey Keynes, who tends to drift off in his requests, and you must stand awhile and wait for him to finish his ‘Oh–I say–might I–um…’

Today they are in high spirits. I have the feeling that Mr Keynes is sweet on Miss Ka Cox (my instincts are rarely wrong). He is part of some silly game, which they think is a May Day ritual; it involves planting a mandrake root and putting a sprig of blossom around it and calling it the Vegetation God. Mr Keynes finds a baby slug in a cowslip and carries it on his palm towards this mandrake root and the others sing a rhyme: ‘Geoffrey who behaved so Odd; Geoffrey who put slugs in God.’

Then the heavens open and a great bucket of rain is sloshed at us. Betty, Lottie and I scurry to carry cups and plates into the kitchen and to fetch umbrellas and overcoats for our guests, but they wave them away, laughing like lunatics, throwing back their heads, and sticking out their tongues to catch the drops.

It’s a wet and frantic task to fold the tables and chairs and take them in from the lawn to stack in the shed near the two-holer to keep dry. Cyril, Mr Neeve’s boy from the Old Vicarage came to help us, and Mr Neeve too. The guests have gone off for a swim in the rain at Byron’s Pool. Mrs Stevenson reminds us that they will soon be back, wanting scones and sandwiches, so charges Betty with stoking up the oven and kneading the dough.

‘All that foolish May Day kerfuffle,’ Betty mumbles, once Mrs Stevenson is out of earshot. ‘And us missing May-ladying, the best day of the year…’

She misses Prickwillow far more than I do. I miss the littlies, yes, but the minute I arrived here I was compensated for that loss by all the new company: Rupert, Miss Darwin, Mr Ward and Mr Neeve, and all the constant visitors, and the comings and goings of the postmaster on his red bicycle, delivering another letter from London.

I try to pacify her by saying that I always forbade her and Lily to go May-ladying door to door, in any case, as in my view it’s just as bad as begging, and she snapped back, ‘And why shouldn’t we beg? Sixpence a comb isn’t going to last long when there’s another mouth to feed!’

Another mouth to feed? The phrase makes no sense. My thoughts skitter wildly, thinking of Father returning from the grave, or Mother, walking back into our lives with her old babe in her arms, Ernestine, the last child, the sister who finished her off and was buried with her in that dark spot, where no flowers grow. What on earth can Betty mean?

She breaks down then. She has to tell me between tasks, between flouring the wooden board and the rolling-pin, between cutting out the scone shapes and between Mrs Stevenson’s entering the kitchen and going out again, and Lottie’s flapping ears. Her skin grows red and her shoulders shake and the words tumble out heavily, falling to the table like broken teeth.

Finally, the penny drops. I can’t believe I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, that it had to be the simpleton Betty who saw it before me. I sink down in the scullery chair with my head in my hands. ‘What’s to be done, what’s to be done?’

‘He says he’ll marry her,’ Betty says, sniffing. Then, with feeling: ‘You shouldn’t have left us all alone if you didn’t want this to happen!’

‘Oh, my fault, is it, for trying to find a way to send money home? And why couldn’t Edmund see the bastard off–why couldn’t Edmund look after her?’

‘Sam was always there! You know what he’s like. You know what he was like with all of us. He loved Lily the best and he says he’s always wanted to marry her…’

‘Always wanted to! How long has it been going on? Didn’t you try to stop it, if you knew? She’s only fifteen! Does she want to marry him? He’s–what? Thirty-five, at least! And so…’

A shudder runs through me as I picture Eel Sam, with his brown cap and his stubbly beard, with the long punt-gun across his knees, or sitting outside the house mending one of his eel-baskets. And always wearing wet galoshes, and with flecks of water-reed clinging to his trousers, and the whole muddy watery smell around him. And my lovely Lily, fresh and pink. Surely Lily didn’t think it was right to let Sam have his way? Couldn’t she have asked Mr Edwards to help her? But even as I think this, I know how foolish the idea is. To speak of such things to another man, to a church minister! And Lily with her wide eyes, her soft heart–how would she have fended off a man who could carry a punt-gun, a brace of swans, and put an eel-basket on his back and still stride through the water as if it were air?

I had had hopes for Lily. She shares my Brains in a way that Betty doesn’t. The wicked thought passed through me: better that it would have been Betty, not Lily, who was lost. ‘And did she not try Mrs Gotobed, and gin, and jumping?’

Now Betty’s chin juts up smartly, and the eyes she raises to mine are horrified. ‘Nellie! How can you say such a thing? No, she did not, and I’m glad that she didn’t think of such a–wicked, murderous thing!’

I remember with a sick feeling then how strange Lily looked when I saw her last, how unhealthily swollen in cheeks and belly, and I curse myself for not seeing what was in front of my eyes. ‘How far gone is she?’

‘Six months. She’s due at the end of summer.’

The kitchen is hot with shame. The smell of rising dough nearly suffocates us. Betty tells me that they’ll be married in church next week, just a two-minute affair with the minister, Mr Edwards, doing the blessing; and Lily begged her to tell me, and she’s thankful now she’s got it off her chest, but I’m not to blame her. And Lily’s life isn’t over, Betty says, why speak as if it is? Why, it’s simply the most natural thing in the world! Perhaps the best thing that could have happened. Sam will be a proper father to them now, and we can all breathe easy. And the Spike won’t loom in the same scary way that it has since Father passed.

Breathe easy? While Sam’s brats slither into our kitchen like a bucket of brown eels and my darling Lily is lost for ever into a life like Mother’s, a life of Fen Blows, or under that foul green fog that hangs over the river, choking the life from everything? And it’s all my fault because I left them, and despite my Brains and Good Sense, my facing of Hard Facts, I didn’t foresee it.

We work in silence after that, and as there is so much to do, we can appear industrious to each other and yet be deep in our own thoughts. ‘Lily’s life isn’t over,’ Betty said. And: ‘Perhaps it’s the best thing that could have happened.’ If only I could share her estimation of marriage and motherhood for Lily.

I thump the dough on to the table: it is gratifying to have a pliant substance to shake and throw around just now. My mind runs on, remembering the day Rupert opened the letter from Margery Olivier, and his fury at what he read there, the way he railed at me, at no one in particular: ‘I’m informed, yes, that’s the word, I’m informed by an estimable source, that marriage is the death of the intellectual girl, kills her off, or something, kills all development. When a woman falls in love, apparently, she does it so much more completely and finally than a man. (Strange, then, isn’t it, that all the great poets and lovers of time have been male?)’

At the time I’d greeted his outburst in silence, confused. I thought his interests lay in another direction, quite away from girls altogether. But then I realised all men must marry, whatever their hearts desire. And all men must appear to be interested in the question, if they do not wish to reveal themselves to others in their true persuasion. That girl, Noel Olivier, with the long brown hair parted in the middle, whose serious, maybe angry, maybe–what?–sullen eyes stare at me every morning from a photograph in a silver frame on Rupert’s mantelpiece. What a marvel that a girl might dare to be a doctor! I thought about what this Margery had said and whether she was just a moonstruck lunatic, as Rupert claimed. Marriage, or rather love, ends a girl’s life, finishing off her intellectual development, her education. How angry he was when he repeated Margery’s theory. How–cruel when he said so sarcastically that he wondered which part of my marvellous intellectual development I was afraid of losing by falling in love.

And yet. Marriage is so much the topic. I hear them talk of it all the time. Even the lady with the hooded eyes, the one who always holds her head at a cocked angle, like a little bird–what is her name? She frightens me. She always seems to be staring at something just out of sight, but then she will glance up and make the others laugh with a witty remark, or something sharp and cruel–Miss Stephen, isn’t it? Even she speaks of little else. One time, when I was bringing the scones, she and Miss Cox were together and whispering…‘Poor thing! Well, he’s not a bad man, I suppose…’ Miss Stephen said, with not the least amount of sympathy in her voice. ‘I hear her father asked her what she should do if she didn’t marry. The answer, of course, is nothing: “We were educated for marriage, and that is all…”’

‘Does she care for him?’ asked Miss Cox.

‘No, not in the least…but it’s whether she can bear another year under her parents’ roof…’

Well, that’s fine for Miss Stephen and Miss Cox. Lily is already mistress of our little house in Prickwillow, and marrying Sam will just mean more of the same, for ever more. Kittie used to say that the Suffragists believe marriage is a solemn duty, the best possible way for ‘women to raise humankind from the degradation to which men have brought it’. What she means is that men have filthy lusts and are for ever infecting their wives with all sorts of wicked diseases from the fallen women they visit–that was Kittie’s main topic, when she was here, and half the ladies she went to London with, too.

But while weighing all this, and sweeping and dusting, and now in the kitchen making scones, another part of me seems to have been considering it quietly, like a little imp in a basement room working by candlelight while the rest of the house sleeps. And, to my astonishment, this imp comes up with a judgement quite different from my own, and it is this: the imp agrees with Margery. In some low-down never-explored place in my own heart, I realise that my despair for Lily is not because Sam is a bad man or a poor man. If she was marrying the minister, Mr Edwards, I would feel the same way. No matter how kind the man, how decent, how well-meaning, whenever I picture it, my lovely Lily married and with children clinging to her apron, a terrible picture comes to me, and a choking feeling. I glance out of the kitchen window and I see the bull-terrier, Mr Pudsey Dawson, with his nasty intent face in the wet grass, snuffling for frogs. And as a frog, a poor, sprightly, free little fellow with raised eyes and spread-fingered arms hopping foolishly towards Mr Pudsey’s gaping mouth, I can see only my little Lily, green and free and wide-eyed too, now disappearing down a long black throat.

 

So, I have survived my stint as Schoolmaster and overseen Mother’s move to the rented house, and also ‘the putting an end to’ of the poor old kitchen cat, Tibby, who, at sixteen, was considered too old to accommodate the change. (And the Housemaster who is to replace me, Bradby, would never keep her.) I have surely done my bit as Eldest Surviving Son, and when I think of her (the cat, I mean) she merges in my mind rather and I wonder, Did her face turn grey and impossible, as Father’s did? Such relief that my career as Schoolmaster was cut short by Mother’s sudden repudiation of her home and willingness to consider a life of reduced circumstance. Does she actually believe I might have a future as a poet after all? Or was it simply that she could not bear for a moment longer the gloomy face that greeted her every morning and the morose kickings of the table during meals?

I believe Mother fears for my sanity sometimes, fearing I will take to drink and crumble, like Dick, and it is this that most affected her decision.

I tried not to allow the Ranee to see the joy that possessed me the moment I knew I would soon be back in Grantchester, in my old rooms at the Orchard. And here I am–in time to spend May Day breakfasting among the apple blossom with my swarms of friends, the ones Virginia Stephen calls the ‘dew dabblers’. The only frustration is that I have still not managed to manoeuvre a meeting between myself and that beguiling nymph Noel Olivier. I endeavoured to see her on a train en route to Birmingham but the dratted child could not bestir herself to tell me the right train. I have invited her to Grantchester countless times. I’ve teased and tantalised her with names of other women I spend my time with–Gwen (I know she is not in the least threatened by Gwen), Gwen’s cousin Frances (ineffective now Frances has gone and married, but she might find Frances’s poetry-writing a threat, with a bit of luck), Ka Cox, Virginia Stephen…Nothing seems to ruffle the sentimental schoolgirl Noel, however, and certainly not enough to bring her away from school and on to a train.

My dulled and deadened heart, sinking to the bottom of the river like a moss-furred stone during my term as Housemaster, has rather unfortunately bounced up since arriving back here, swinging again on its elastic before landing slap-bang at the feet of Noel once more. There is something so choking, so suffocating, about being adored. The oxygen of indifference is what I need: it surely makes my heart pump healthily. I am a Poet, so I must be the one doing the loving. The Great Lover, that’s me, not the beloved. The beloved is despicable. That’s the role of a girl.

After the rain and the swim, I come across Nellie in the kitchen, sitting alone with her head in her hands. I glance around to make sure no one can see us through the window to the lawn, then kneel at her feet and ask what might be wrong. She raises a hot face, smeared with flour. ‘My sister is just about to be married. She is fifteen. It’s something of a shock to me.’

‘Wild Bet is to be married? So suddenly?’

‘No, not Betty. I’ve another sister. Two, in fact. This is the middle one, Lily.’

‘I see. Well, I should offer my congratulations, but I see from your face that they are not merited. Is the fellow a–what?–a drunk? A fool?’

‘No, sir, not either of those. Just–old.’

‘Ah, old.’

My knees creak as I sit at her feet and ponder her dear, worried face and the way her hand keeps flying to her cheek, as if to wipe at something that does not appear there. ‘Ah…How old is he? Twenty-five? Thirty? Thirty-five! Horrible. I can’t agree more.’

She smiles then.

‘But must she marry the old fellow? Can’t she refuse him?’

Nellie blushes then, and hastens to get up and check the oven. With her back to me she mutters miserably, ‘It’s him or the Spike, if you listen to Betty. I didn’t think things were that bad. I’ve been sending money home! I can take care of them all, I said…’

‘The Spike? The Workhouse, you mean? We wish to abolish it, Nellie, and provide properly for the aged, the sick, the children, the unemployed. Did you see the leaflets I left here? About the break-up of the Poor Law?’

‘Mrs Stevenson burned them on the fire!’ she says, turning round to face me, and wailing slightly. I see that her eyes glitter with tears and, feeling disadvantaged from my position on the floor, clamber to my feet to offer her my handkerchief. She sniffs into it, apologising and sobbing in equal measure.

‘Things aren’t getting any better in our time and our country, no matter how much we preach socialism and clean hearts at them,’ I say. She snuffles quietly.

‘Dudley and I plan a campaign. I, writing poetry and reading books and living here all day, feel rather doubtful and ignorant about ‘The World’–about England and men, and what they’re like. So I thought a trip deep into the English psyche was in order! Well, to Poole Harbour and other village greens in the south-west of England, to be more accurate. We intend to hire a horse, and take our tents, and preach by day and night in support of Poor Law reform. What do you think, Nell? Think we can do it?’

Now she looks up, surprised. She crumples the handkerchief into a ball and seems to wonder whether to hand it back to me. Thankfully she decides against this and stuffs it into her apron pocket. ‘Why–yes, I–I suppose so—You and Mr Ward? In a caravan?’

‘We shall need a Primus stove, plates, spoons, cocoa, salt–any chance of you sneaking us a few things, for our supplies? I mean, not if it would get you in trouble, but it’s proving rather expensive, what with the cost of the caravan I’m renting from Hugh and Steuart Wilson of King’s.’

‘Yes,’ she says, smiling at last. ‘Of course I can.’

‘Marvellous! And, Nell, I’ve never actually, you know, minded a horse before–do you think one ought to feed it once or twice a day on such a trip? It’s called Guy, apparently. The horse, I mean.’

‘Oh, I’m sure once will do fine, if it’s a good feed.’

‘Splendid! Well, let’s hope Women’s Suffrage doesn’t hijack our more important campaign…and, yes, a tin of sardines for our “whales” would be splendid. Do you really think you could spare them?’

She runs about the kitchen then, seemingly cheered to be given a purpose–and I feel a queer stab of pride that I’m the fellow who lifted her mood. Her sleeves are rolled up so that I see the finely haired skin on her bare arms and, seeing her thus, I am reminded once again of that day among the bees and her magnificent command of the creatures. Of course, such a memory of last summer, of the moment when I took her in my arms and the sunny taste of her mouth in mine, leads immediately into the unwanted, ugly memory of other things. Of her in the garden pegging up newly laundered wet sheets. I watched her from my window, knowing that she, and she alone, knew about Denham, knew all about me, every last thing…

‘I–well, thank you, Nell. I–I suppose Ka Cox could get some of these things just as easily. Ka’s a practical girl, you know, and an orphan like yourself, so used to taking charge of things—’

Nell had disappeared into the pantry, and appears suddenly, as I say this, bearing two jars of honey, and such a stricken look that I long at once to bite back the words, although not quite understanding which of them has offended her so. Is it the mention of her being an orphan? Well, that was tactless, yes, but it is the truth, none the less, and Nell has never seemed to me to shirk simple facts. Could it, perhaps, have my been implication that Ka might do just as well as she, when Nell is trying so hard to accommodate me?

‘Oh, of course,’ Nell says, glancing down at the jars in her hands, now seeming uncertain whether to offer the honey or not.

‘I wouldn’t want to get you into trouble with Mrs Stevenson, Nell,’ I suggest, appeasingly.

Now she says hotly, ‘The honey is my own to give. From my family in Prickwillow, you know. Actually, these are two very special jars: the fields near our house with their poppies make a–quite special flavour, very different from Mr Neeve’s orchard honey.’

‘I—’ Naturally here I wish to apologise, but feel tongue-tied and then annoyed that this girl always seems to fluster me, render me foolish and clumsy and, in some queer fashion, hideously exposed. (My remarkable wit does rather desert me where Nell Golightly is concerned!) It is the matter of Denham, and the kiss, too, but more than that: it is some dreadful sense that she holds my secrets in her apron pocket along with my handkerchief. I’m delivered bound into her hands.

‘I should pack some books,’ I mutter stiffly, preparing to retreat to my room. ‘You know, decide what I’m taking. Marlowe, Donne, the Webbs’ report, that kind of thing. Yes, I need, we need, special information about the counties we’re passing through to help us plan our campaign–must go. Um, thanks awfully for the honey.’

I hold out my hands and, without a word, she places the two jars in them.

 

Poole High Street, close to the Free Library. Principal speaker Mr Brooke. Questions invited. In support of proposals for Poor Law Reform. Sponsored by the NCPD.

I am unable to remain still in my room. I sit on my bed, pile up a few books in a desultory fashion, and leap up again. I put my face to the floorboards, breathing in dust and mouse droppings, and listen.

Yes. Nell is still in the kitchen, clattering about with the pots. Can I find some excuse to venture back downstairs, and repair the damage of my clumsy remark about Ka and, more importantly, somehow smooth over the discomfort of what has transpired between us and can never be alluded to?

I peer over the balcony in time to see Mrs Stevenson leave the kitchen. Then I return downstairs, where Nell seems happily back to her customary good spirits and Mrs Stevenson does not return. I show her one of our leaflets, which she admires. I show her some of my notes, too, and she murmurs that the Spike is indeed worse than any prison, with mothers separated from children, and husbands from wives, and hard labour all day long. ‘At least in prison you might one day be released!’ she says. ‘In the Spike no one ever seems to come out who goes in.’

I contemplate this awful thought for a moment. ‘I’m a little nervous. You know, the British Working Man can be rather–alarming to one like me!’

She laughs.

‘I’m preparing my various responses, just in case.’

I leap on to a kitchen chair in my bare feet and, in a voice that mimics Sidney Webb’s meaningful tones, announce: ‘You may fear for the moral character of the poor, yes, if these laws came to pass. Will the fibre of the working man become weak if he has recourse to the state directly he is out of a job? It is all very well, my dear young woman, to be so concerned, so incensed about the moral character of the poor individual, but what about the moral fibre of a nation as a whole and its responsibility to its citizens in need? What of that, eh, my girl?’

She laughs again.

‘After all,’ I continue, dropping the mimicry in my tone and aiming for sincerity, ‘why make a distinction between times of adversity and times of trouble or danger from others? If we are in danger from other people we have no difficulty in throwing ourselves at the mercy of the state in the shape of the local policeman or law courts. This carries no shame or social stigma! Why should it be otherwise in times of financial trouble? This “loss of independence” does not weaken the character. It leaves men free to use their energies more profitably!’

She claps and smiles one of her deep, bosomy smiles and I feel immensely pleased, and immensely relieved and, yes, it almost does feel easy between us again. I jump down from my soapbox. ‘Marvellous! Thank you, Nell. Oh, yes, I’m quite prepared now for whatever Assaults on Reason these working folk are going to throw at us–not to mention the eggs!’

She gives a little shriek then, and disappears to the pantry again, returning with a box of eggs. ‘Take these too. I’ve asked. I’ll bring extra from home when I visit and Mrs Stevenson says it’s fine.’

‘Oh, Nell, you are too kind. I’m not sure young Dudders knows how to boil an egg, but we can teach him, eh?’

‘You’re funny,’ she says.

I stare into her glorious violet eyes and I know that I was not wrong in my estimation of her intelligence. ‘I’m sorry about your sister, Nell,’ I say, and in an instant we are both serious again. ‘Marrying an old man is a horrible fate.’

‘Yes.’

Whenever I let slip the mask for a moment, Nellie never fails to respond. It is not in what she says–Tradition and Centuries are difficult to undo–but in her glances. That is where the truth between us resides. At least, sometimes I believe this. But then the glorious violet eyes of Nell Golightly could persuade a man of anything.

Now she covers her hands with a teacloth and takes the tray of scones from the oven. A delicious hot smell wafts around us. I hear from the voices outside on the lawn that Ka and Geoffrey and the others are returning and a private conversation cannot be continued. I’m surprised at how angry this makes me feel.

‘We leave tomorrow next week for our trip, so any–provisions you might secrete before then would be gratefully received.’

‘I’ll do my best.’

‘It’s all for the Cause, of course.’

‘Yes, sir,’ she says. I realise from her tone and that ‘sir’ that the others are in earshot and Mrs Stevenson’s approaching tread is on the stair, so I lean forward to whisper my next remark, and I have no idea what I’m going to say until the words are out of my mouth.

‘I have one more request of you, Nellie. I will make it first thing in the morning.’

‘Yes, sir. As you will.’

Her eyes widen. Violets. Darkening woods. Nature hammers out a drumbeat.

I straighten up. Quelle surprise! Whatever that request might be, it seems Nell has said yes!

 

Rupert says, ‘Let’s swim at Byron’s Pool.’

‘What–now? At this hour?’

‘Come on, no one’s up. It’s a glorious morning. Come, come on, Nellie…’

‘But my duties–I haven’t finished in the kitchen.’

‘It’s six o’clock! The sun’s barely up. Surely your sister might cover for you just this once. Tell Mrs Stevenson you have some errand–I don’t know…Don’t you have to go to the butcher’s sometimes?’

I smile at this, for meat is delivered, every morning, by the butcher’s boy, Tommy, long before Rupert wakes. But the idea of it, of sneaking away with Rupert, of being outdoors by the river in the earliest, freshest part of the day, rather than indoors, hot and sweaty, cleaning out the copper and blackening the stove and starching the linen for the new tenants, feels so tempting, so scandalous, that I can hardly stop my heart picketing my chest for permission. How many times have I listened bitterly to the shouts, the laughter and calls of Rupert and his friends, the thud of wood and splash in the water, remembering with longing Edmund frolicking in the river Lark, while Rupert rows back along the Cam escorting some lady in a hat or being read to by some twit in a silk tie, and I’m out by the hives, working?

‘All right,’ I say. ‘Betty will stand in for me.’

And I grab the smoker and some quicklime so that I might inspect the bees on the way back and make-believe I have been checking that no surplus queen cells have been forming in the brood chamber. Rupert goes on ahead, carrying the butterfly net, and some rolled-up towels so that we won’t be seen walking together. The Stevensons are still asleep. Betty is just stirring and I tell her that I will be gone an hour and she’s to make out I’m busy with the bees, if anyone asks. She looks startled but is too sleepy to ask more.

My heart raps at my ribcage for fear, for naughtiness, swift and stubborn as the spotted woodpecker at the tree. The sky is clean, the day shiny as a newborn, and a light wind is brushing my cheek as I trip along behind Rupert, watching his figure in the distance as he leaves the garden and joins the lane; his blue shirt, his long, loose-limbed gait. I haven’t run away like this since I was in the schoolhouse and that was a day that the Reverend himself came to find me.

I venture this thought to Rupert when I catch up with him. Thick white dust is shifting under his sand-shoes. He seems dismayed to discover my family are regular churchgoers.

‘But how else could a girl like me get an education?’ I ask, and he stares at me for a moment, and nods. We cross the bridge in front of Grantchester Mill and walk through a meadow, which is still sopping with dew.

‘I must give you Principia Ethica and more poems by Swinburne. I shall soon corrupt you.’

I set my mouth then, knowing he is laughing at me. We are now in sight of the the dam with its grey sluice gates and the deep, waiting water. The smell of mint and mud swells around us. He sits at the edge of the water, at the place where the river widens into a pool and cow-parsley grows on the banks in huge white clumps. He seems to be waiting for me to join him. I’m shy at first, but seeing him look up expectantly and brush his fringe from his eyes, I sit myself down beside him. Not too close.

‘What do you think of Ka Cox, Nellie?’

This is not what I expected. I put down the smoker on the grass.

Miss Cox. Yesterday, coming back late with the Frenchman, Mr Raverat, she startled me in the kitchen, where I had my back to the lawn and the french windows and was drying crockery with the teacloth. Her sudden appearance made me jump and I dropped a cup. To my surprise she bent with me to pick up the pieces and, handing them to me, said, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry! I startled you. How silly of me.’ Mr Raverat stood awkwardly while she gathered more of the pieces and placed them in my outstretched palm. ‘I really am terribly sorry,’ she said, and opened her mouth to say more. I imagined she was about to offer to pay, but to my astonishment she said, ‘Where does Mrs Stevenson keep the pan and brush? Let me sweep up the rest.’

‘Oh, no, ma’am,’ I said hastily, and Mr Raverat put his arm on hers and murmured something in French to her. He swept her out of the kitchen and on to the lawn.

‘She is very…kind,’ I say now cautiously.

Rupert has rolled on to his stomach, holding the butterfly net in the green eddies of the water so that the back of his head is towards me. ‘Kind…Hmmm. How observant you are!’ He sits up and pokes me with a little twig, and laughs.

I blush, wondering if my interest in Miss Cox betrays me. But he seems not to notice.

‘Kind, though. Is that enough? Is kindness what a man wants…after all? Not especially pretty…She’s sweet on Jacques, of course,’

‘Oh. For myself I thought your friend Mr Keynes rather fond of her,’ I answer.

Rupert seems surprised. ‘Geoffrey? Surely not? But, then, that’s the surprise with Ka. Other chaps do seem rather to find her–attractive. It’s a mystery to me. Jacques is perfectly smitten.’

To my surprise, now that she is being so dismissed, I feel obliged to defend Miss Cox. ‘Well, there’s plenty to be said for kindness, after all. For warmth and a generous nature…more than, you know, looks alone…’

‘Perhaps. Or perhaps it’s that some men wish to be mothered. And some of us would run a thousand miles before taking up that particular offer!’

Knowing this to be a reference to his mother, I now feel the need to defend her, too. ‘I don’t see that maternal affection is so…dreadful…’

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

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

‘I HATE THE UPPER CLASSES!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The truth is, sex is fundamentally filthy.

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

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

 

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

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

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

Now she says, ‘There’s been a mix-up with his room,’ as if that would answer matters. Mrs Stevenson rolls her eyes to the ceiling and wipes her hands firmly on her apron in a look that says, ‘We’re well rid of him.’

And so, suddenly, his room is filled with another man, a tall, stooped man, who does not admit me when he is bathing or shaving. It’s for the best. It’s surely for the best. If only I believed it was for the best! That day at Byron’s Pool, our conversations, the way he looked at me–his kiss: what sense can I make of it all? I know I wasn’t mistaken about the boy Denham in his room. I know that whatever sport he makes of me, it can only ever be that–cruelty and sport.

But he doesn’t seem cruel when he smiles, or when he kisses me, or when the early-morning light grazes the blades of his shoulders.

I put my face in my hands, remembering, and chide myself for such deep, deep foolishness, and hide myself in the pantry to weep. A scuffle outside tells me that Lottie is in the scullery so I wipe my face on my apron and rearrange my hair.

‘He’s back! He’s staying at the Old Vicarage!’

‘Who? Who on earth do you mean, Lottie?’

‘Why, Rupert, of course. And–imagine! He proposed while he was away! To that schoolgirl one, the one with the plaits. Noel Olivier.’

I sit down on the pantry floor.

‘Nell? Nell, what is it? Are you sick?’

‘It’s nothing. I’m fine. I just–I—’ I feel the touch of cool jars behind my neck. Nausea rising up to my throat and subsiding.

‘Nell, Nell, let me fetch Ma—’

‘No!’ I say fiercely. ‘I’m fine–I’ll be fine. Leave me alone, Lottie, there’s a good girl. I’ll be fine in five minutes.’

She backs away. I see from her face, her glances at the kitchen door, that she wants to tell someone and that she won’t be able to keep quiet so, with an effort, I pull myself together, compose my face and stand up. ‘It’s that time of the month is all. Let me get some air in the garden for five minutes. Go fetch me a glass of water, Lotts, there’s a girl.’

Glad of the errand, she finally leaves me. I step out into the garden and breathe hungrily. My stomach wrenches and I taste bile in my mouth.

I will go to the Old Vicarage to inspect the bees, I decide. See for myself.

 

I have moved out from the delightful Orchard and my Arcadian adventure there with the bee-keeper’s daughter is over, perhaps for ever. I shall no longer sniff the lilac in bloom beneath my little room as I wake and pump ship to the sound of Little Nell sweeping the stairs, that mouthwatering rump swaying from side to side. Or, rather, I have moved next door to the Old Vicarage. The maid has accepted my kiss with a warm mouth. I was afraid to go further, and my heterosexual virginity remains filthily intact.

The Neeves–Henry and Florence and their son, Cyril, who models himself on me–are more tolerant of my bare feet and thousands of visitors. For this tolerance I will forfeit Mrs Stevenson’s apple pies and all-round superior cooking. And, in fact, I will escape the shame that Mrs Stevenson’s lecture produced, and I could never thereafter shake off on bumping into her in the scullery or on the lawn.

There is the compensation of the Old Vicarage garden: the cement sundial in the shape of a lectern, the ghosts of vicars past, the proximity to the riverbank and a creepy, ramshackle lushness, which, I believe, will be conducive to poetry. Or to merry-making.

Nellie and her subtle, discreet ministering will be the greatest loss. It is difficult to admit to myself how great a loss. I am puzzled by my own tendency to dwell on the matter and the melancholy thoughts it has produced. She is only next door, I remind myself. But it is only when I have concocted A Plan for redeeming the situation that my mood lifts, and I cannot wait to convey it to Nell.

Here is the girl herself, suddenly, striding towards me with great purpose.

‘Nell! Nell–where are you going so fast? Slow down, I have something to ask you.’

‘I was coming to see you, in fact, sir–I mean, Rupert. I–had heard you were back.’

‘Yes, and here I am. My new home. You heard, I suppose, that Mrs Stevenson was not entirely happy with my shenanigans.’

Nell looks as if she is about to say something, but her eyes suddenly widen and I realise that someone has stepped outside to the garden and must be standing behind me.

Dear Noel. Noel is staying here.

Clumsily, I grasp at once for my plan, trying to speak as if this is what we had been discussing. ‘So, Miss Golightly, if you would be so kind as to continue to do my washing, bed linen, that sort of thing…I don’t feel able to further burden Florence–Mrs Neeve, kind as she is…’ And, I whisper this part, ‘I have a horror of the multitudinous creeping creatures that live in the Old Vicarage–no amount of Keating’s insect powder will vanquish them.’

‘Huh?’

‘And would an extra two shillings a week be sufficient? Would you make sure Mrs Stevenson is happy with that–with using her hot water and such? You can pick it up when you come to the Old Vicarage to tend your bees…’

Nell’s face is a picture. It seems to glow with anger, or self-righteousness, or something. Noel is striding towards us, her boyish frame bounding across the grass. There is no time to say anything more, and I’m rather startled when Nell makes a furious turn on her heel and stalks off.

‘Three shillings, if you prefer!’ I call after her. ‘I appreciate the marvellous way you have with the Jay’s woollen underwear!’ She hurries towards the hives. I am well aware that my laundry request is not the true source of her annoyance.

 

I hear Rupert’s voice first, reciting his lines from the play to a fat and snuffling Mr Pudsey Dawson in the garden. On seeing me he calls out, and I stride over. Something about the washing. I cannot really take in what he is saying. Because there, behind him, is the girl. The one from the silver photo-frame. How can I ask him now?

And so I murmur some assent to his request, and the sum of money registers with me in some distant part of my brain, and even his little joke registers: that he appreciates the way I never allow his Jay’s woollen underwear to shrink. My fists curl and uncurl under my apron; and I walk towards the hives, and set myself to work. The bees will know at once how upset I am. So I take several long, deep breaths and push my hands down into my pockets, and though tears prickle under my eyelids, I don’t allow them to spill over. After a moment, I have control of myself once more.

I’m lifting out the honey frames, filling Mr Neeve’s old wheelbarrow with them, and suddenly become aware of someone watching me. At first I think Rupert has returned. I refuse to turn my head.

Then I realise it is her, the girl. She stands at some distance, no doubt frightened by the humming of the bees swelling around us, like the sound when a bottle of fizzy lemonade is opened. Perhaps she is impressed–like Rupert and Mr Raverat–that I wear no veil (although I am wearing Father’s gloves, my arms and wrists being covered in red welts from various oven burns). I brush the creeping bees clinging to my skirt with my stick of tied feathers, trying to see as much as I can of this girl without turning my head. From the corner of my eye I see that she–Noel–is wearing an olive green headscarf over plaits, in a funny sort of knotted style, and I feel, rather than see, that she is staring at me in the same way that I would like to examine her. I am forced to continue as if unaware of her.

So, he has proposed to you, has he?

She has hair the colour of a mule’s. Face somewhat square. Overall: something serious, intent. Very quiet. Her frame like that of a boy. Bosoms–none to speak of. Oh, yes, for a man who likes boys, she fits the bill all right, I think bitterly, then chide myself. Within the range of persons he is allowed to fall in love with, this Noel Olivier, much too firm and steely for his mother, would certainly be a reasonable choice.

She continues to stare, and again the thought of a mule comes to me. It’s like being stared at by a stubborn grey donkey. She moves then, and I gloomily trundle the frames back to the kitchen at the Orchard, where Betty and Lottie help with the spinning, with Lottie ‘testing’ the honey every five minutes. This is a mixed-flower crop, with a different flavour from the dense sweetness of the high-summer crop. The kitchen soon rolls with the sound of the spinner as the girls take it in turns with the handle, and I hold the jars under the tap to catch the amber bulb of liquid, and try with all my might to put Noel Olivier out of my mind.

And that’s when it happens again. Father. The kitchen is crammed with the syrupy smell of deep purple heather, and I am thinking of that girl, Noel Olivier, staring so fiercely at me; and of Rupert, naked in Byron’s Pool; and I’m not thinking of Father but only watching the honey, green and flecked as pond-water, pouring from the tap, when things suddenly stop, and I’m not there at all, but outside the window, looking in at the scene, at the rattling spinner on the table with the frames revolving in it and the noise and the sweat on the girls’ arms and faces, at the white-muslin circles laid out next to the empty jars; and I feel certain that Father is beside me, white as smoke in his ghostly form, thin and fading, but this time, unlike the last, he is tugging at my arm, he is trying to speak.

The next minute things go on again as normal and I know then there is bad news in Prickwillow. When the last honey jar is sealed, I take off my apron and beg leave of Mrs Stevenson to go home at once.

 

It’s late afternoon by the time Tommy fetches me to Prickwillow and by then my stomach has turned to stone with the worry, with the knowledge that something is not right. It must be Lily, of course. Here I have been, stupidly dwelling on Rupert and the daft comings and goings of his heart, and my poor dear Lily’s time is drawing near. There’s nothing ghostly or magical, really, about my feelings; plain common sense would tell you that a girl of fifteen with her firstborn is never going to have a bed of roses.

Tommy turns the horse for Ely after he has dropped me at the drove, allowing me to walk the last fifteen minutes alone. He can tell from my mood not to try it on with me, so he tells me that after he has delivered the meat he can call back for me at five, but I shake my head–I want at least to stay the night.

I find Lily in the front room where someone, Sam maybe, has rigged up a space, with a curtain attached to the wall by two screws, and Lily lying on her side. Mrs Gotobed is with her, her fat rear greeting me from behind the curtain, and the others are outside, in the meadows down to the river, where she has sent them to catch rabbits and stay out of the way.

When I pull back the curtain the smell that only a woman knows reaches me. Mrs Gotobed is muttering her prayers–‘I pray thee Lord her soul to keep’–as she tries to sweep Lily’s damp hair from her forehead. For one horrible, breath-stopping moment, I think my sister is dead. Then Mrs Gotobed turns to me with her strange, flattened face, and says, without looking up, ‘She’s small, Nellie. The baby’s aside, and feet first too. Fetch me that brandy and tell the littlies not to come back till they’ve at least two rabbits apiece.’

I pass Sam outside on my way to fetch the brandy, kept hidden at the water’s edge under a large stone so that he won’t drink it. He sees me and lifts one eyebrow but carries on with his smoking and stripping the willow for an eel-grigg he is making, asking me mildly as I pass where his tea is, so I put the kettle on and set to making him some and taking it out to him, since there’s not much else I can do to help.

Lily’s damp hair is spread out like a giant golden spider on the pillow. Her head is as red as a bright poppy, so much redder than her pale swollen body in the sticky nightdress. She is not looking at me, but staring down at the pillow. I am filled with a longing to call her, to bring her back to me, but I know from the look in her eyes that she is fixed on the pain and on the urging inside her, tearing at her like a hook twisting inside the gut of a fish. She has no way to see that I need her, that I feel such fearful failure.

How did it get to this, when my little sister is going the same way as Mother? How could I have made such a choice…to go to the Orchard, to want so much to hobnob with the Varsity types, to better myself, to indulge in ridiculous flirtations with Rupert? And all for what? So that my family could fend for themselves, merely survive, take in the first ragamuffin man who needles his way inside them? I’m sorry, Lily, I’m sorry, sorry, Lily, I’m sorry, Father, I see now how I have failed you, failed all of you.

And then I fall to praying too, praying in a way that I haven’t since Mother died. Please, God, please save Lily. I will do anything, I promise. I will give up my foolishness, give up Rupert, yes, I will, I really will, I will give up whatever you ask of me. Only please save my darling, innocent Lily whom I love more than myself, who has only ever been good and true, Lord, and your servant.

Mrs Gotobed says it’s been twelve hours already and no crowning, barely even a peek of the baby’s head. Lily’s hips are not childbearing hips, and she is foolish and weak and malnourished and more besides. She won’t take the brandy-soaked rag that Mrs Gotobed holds out to her, panting between her waves of pain that she hasn’t forgotten Temperance, and why should we?

We carry on like that all through the hot afternoon and the sultry evening, while the littlies trickle in one by one and sit on the other side of the curtain, playing Whist and pausing in their soft chatter every time one of Lily’s screams pierces the curtain.

In the evening I hear Sam go down to the river to take the boat out and set the eel-traps. He returns, poking his head under the curtain, and gets shooed away, and we hear Olive crying and saying she is hungry and I leave Lily for a moment to skin the rabbits and set up a stew on the stove that they can have with bread before they go to bed. So then the house is filled with the strange smells of onions and cooking meat, and blood and salty water, and my stomach groans with hunger but I could no more eat than fly. I offer Mrs Gotobed some and she comes outside the curtain to take a bowl, and the clock ticks and Mrs G sits with a half-finished rug that Lily had been making across her knees, and Lily sleeps for a while.

Then suddenly an owl hoots and Lily stirs and gives her own, animal-sounding howl. I leap to the curtain to see her sitting up, her face contorted like the screwed-up shapes of a walnut shell. ‘Lily, Lily dear–push now, push!’ I say, feeling, without knowing how, that the baby is really coming at last, that maybe my prayers have been answered.

She kneels up with her nightdress raised and uttering one long howl like the sound of the sky wrenching in two. The house waits in silence. And then the dark wet plop of the child finally slithers on to the bed with such a dull, damp thud that I know at once my prayers may have been answered, but at a terrible price. Only Lily is saved. The blue-green rope of bloodied cord is wrapped right round the baby’s neck–something Mrs Gotobed suspected and had her arm nearly up to Lily’s neck trying to put right, but couldn’t. The mess plops all over the bed just exactly like the dead lost flesh of the skinned rabbits, and Mrs Gotobed is beside me at once, cutting Lily’s cord with a practised slice, and encouraging her to deliver the afterbirth with one last great push.

We wrap the tiny wet red thing in a torn sheet and take her outside before Lily can see her. I can’t think where to lay this bundle, and it’s dark, so I give her to Sam with one angry thrust and decide that he must do as he sees fit. He is smoking his pipe and accepts the damp bundle, and he gives only a muffled cry, like the yelp of a dog when its tail is nipped.

You might wonder how I behaved so badly but I’m blind with rage by now and thinking only of my sister, and what she has been through. All that labouring, all that labouring, a lifetime tied to Sam, and all for nothing, I think.

As I come back into the sitting room Lily sits up, thrusts back the curtain and staring directly at me, asks, ‘Did I pull the child through? Did the Lord help me manage it?’

I tell her He did not.

We eat by candlelight, and the children sigh and make up their beds once again in that loamy green room, soaked with the smell of death and babies and the feeling of some barrier passed through and not yet travelled home from. Olive’s tearful face shines up at me from her pillow. ‘Lily won’t die, will she, like Mother?’ she asks. I assure her that she won’t.

‘We should have called for a doctor!’ I say just once, and bitterly, as Mrs Gotobed is pulling her shawl from a nail near the door and turning wearily to leave. She makes no reply, instead merely returns to the bed to stroke Lily’s head and whisper to her. I hear the muttered name ‘Emily’, which must have been Lily’s chosen name for the girl. It was cruel of me to mention the doctor, I know, because it was Sam had forbidden him, saying the man was a drunkard anyway, and Sam didn’t have money to ‘throw around’. In any case, what was good enough for our own departed mother should be good enough for Lily.

Mrs Gotobed leaves with a great huff, her enormous bulk immediately emptying the room. Sam finally comes inside. I hear him breathing, I hear the thud of heavy leather on the rug as he takes off each boot, then another breath as he blows out the candle, and a creak, and then a long, slow, rolling fart, as he climbs into bed on the other side of the curtain from his now dry-eyed, wide-awake wife.

I found those few lines in Rupert’s study. A poem in his black inky scrawl called ‘The Vision of the Archangels’. I don’t know if it is a good poem or a frightful one. All is stuff and nonsense with him, all jokes and games and silliness. But then suddenly the words, phrases, lines I’d found so surprising at the time come to find me:

Yes, that was exactly how she had seemed, Emily, when I thrust her at Sam. A scrunched-up, unfurled flower-bud. How could Rupert know of such things? Of the sorrows of women? Then I remember that he had a sister, who died as a baby of one year old, a year before he was born. He told me of her once, as if she was of no consequence. But, then, he speaks of everything that way. His poetry puts another slant on things.

Such a foolish blond boy with nothing to concern him but learning his lines for some play with his friends. And yet, try as I might to be angry with Rupert, it is his lines that come to me, lying in the cot amidst my snoring family, Rupert’s words that comfort me. He is angry with God, and so am I. Rupert’s true heart beats only on paper.