I asked Noel Olivier to marry me. It wasn’t a success.

I declared myself. I don’t remember my exact words, only the shy expression on her face and the fact that the solid Noel suddenly cracked open and–admitted she loved me too! I wanted to rush back at once to the others (we were at Summer Camp at Buckler’s Hard) and bellow the news from the treetops, but she put a hand on my arm and stopped me. And there, frozen, we have remained ever since.

I can only assume that she regretted immediately her frankness, but I can’t believe there is no truth in the declaration itself. Why did she say it if she did not feel it? Did her witch of a sister Margery persuade her to recant? She writes mysteriously that ‘what happened at Camp will not affect her’ (whatever that might mean!) and her photo sits again on the new mantel in the Old Vicarage, her face brown and inscrutable. She agreed to play Envy (oh, wicked tease) in Faustus, along with the lovely Bryn, who played, of course, Helen of Troy. She did permit me the odd occasion where my feet tickled hers under the Old Vicarage table a day or two ago when she stayed here–and she smiled at me above her grey pinafore–but that was all.

Two and a half years I have laboured like this. If it weren’t for Margery’s absurd position about intellectual women and marriage, and Noel’s hopelessness at defying her…but that’s not the only reason. Noel does not trust me. She thinks I am–what was her word? She thinks I am in love with being in love rather than with her.

Am I capable of loving one person for more than one day? Is everyone capable of this, or is it denied to some of us?

Gwen and Jacques announced their wedding plans yesterday, which doesn’t help. I kept having a strange flash of the square-headed woman who cuts wood (Gwen) with the beaky botanist (Jacques) doing something disgusting in a train carriage. Of course they would probably never do any such thing but that did not stop the mental picture plaguing me.

Now that Noel has returned to Bedales I write her ridiculous letters full of hot feeling and beastliness. (It does show one up, this business of being in love.)

I have grown closer to Ka, who offers some solace. Ka is squashy and has a good listening ear. With her I do not feel quite so ashamed and out of control–especially in the regions of (a) jealousy and (b) mistrust. (I want so much to be splendid.)

The thing is. Nell.

That moment in the boat-shed.

How exquisite it was to roughly towel her dark hair, to see it damp and curling down her neck like fronds of seaweed. To help her slip her arms into her coat, smelling the water-mint that clung to her skin. The memory of her, the way her hot wrist shivered in mine, her burning, bending head as she bent to button up her boots; my throat was dry, like a man starving. I practically had to push her out of the door. I leaned back against the cold wood of the shed and wanted to weep. What is it that so inhibits my career as a lover? What on earth prevented me catching hold of her once more, pulling her back and making the kiss longer, and harder?

I might wish to name it Honour and Goodness. Or is it Pride, and Caring What Others Think? Or, more likely, simple Fear of Mother? Or All-round Hopelessness? Well. I closed the door behind her and, ha!, later I wrote a poem about it. I thought myself fine and clever to have resisted. Oh, my cleverness! My poor, grubby cleverness. Because the truth is, I worship her. I do not want her defiled. These days I can’t even allow myself to imagine her pale silky limbs when I’m pumping ship for even that would sully her. That holy far-off serene splendour would all be spoiled if she returned my desire.

My conqueror’s blood was suddenly cool as a deep river.

So, with that miserable realisation, the Obelisk–as James and I call Henry Lamb’s active member (or, rather, in my case, the Sad Little Cock)–withered despairingly and a sonnet was written. I called it ‘Success’.

I longed afresh for a clean, rushing splash in the river.

My plan, my escape route, is to travel. Away from the Ranee and Eddie and the confusions of Noel Olivier and her rejections of me, the temptations of the bursting cream-puff of a maid or young boys who are in love with me, to a place that is manly and swimming in beer, where I can finish my essay undisturbed. I’ve decided on Munich.

 

Betty saw me talking to Rupert. That day in the garden when his betrothed was there. We are lying in our bed in our little room, the blue counterpane pulled up to our chins.

‘What were you talking about?’ she asks.

‘Nothing–his laundry, if you must know. Why do you ask?’

‘Was it only that? You seemed–you looked—I thought you looked upset.’

‘Upset? Of course not! Why should I be upset?’

‘I know you have been sad,’ she says, after a pause, ‘and not just about Lily and the baby. I—Nell. Why do you never confide in me?’

‘Why should I?’

She begins sniffing then, and calls me a ‘hard-hearted Hannah’, and says I’m ‘not much of a sister at all’.

I lie in the darkness beside her, a desire to confess welling and subsiding in me in waves. ‘Oh, Betty, please don’t press me. It will only make it worse!’

‘So there is something? Something else, I mean. I knew it! You are in love with him. Or has he–you know—Is it that he has tried it on with you?’

‘Oh, he’s kissed me, yes…’

‘He kissed you?’

Betty’s excitement crackles beside me. In a minute, she will be asking for details and chattering with girlish fever–I must tell her at once before she makes matters worse. ‘But, Betty…Don’t go on so. It’s not that simple. I don’t know how to tell you–I don’t know if you will understand.’

I take a breath before saying it.

‘Rupert is–he—He doesn’t like girls.’

‘What?’

‘He is—Oh, Betty! You must have heard of such a thing.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You must have heard of men who–of some men who–of, you know, men like Mr Eddie Marsh…’

‘Eddie Marsh? Government secretaries, you mean?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Betty. You know! Boys who like other boys. Ah–don’t make me say any more, please.’

Such a long pause then in the beating darkness. I can hear Betty breathing. I can feel her shock somehow, so great that it is like a vibration, through the satin coverlet between us. I feel her body stiffen, and her long silence. I can almost hear her thoughts violently leaping.

‘Are you sure?’ she asks eventually, in a tiny child’s voice, aghast.

I say yes. I do not want to explain about Denham and the sheets, so I just say to rest assured that her big sister knows what she’s talking about. After a pause I remind her to tell no one. Especially not Lottie. Men can go in prison for it, and women never do it, but for the men who go in for it, it is probably a sight more common than we could guess, especially among men who get sent away to school, who spend so much time in each other’s pockets, and where doing such things with ladies from their own set is so restricted.

‘That’s true, but it’s easy for them to take liberties with us!’ Betty answers, after a moment, recovering her voice.

So then I say again, wearily, that I don’t know, and I don’t want to say any more, because look at what has just happened to our poor dear Lily, and isn’t it best not to go on with talk of love for a man you can never have, a man who doesn’t love women in any case? The only thing you could have from such a man is trouble.

‘What a filthy thing.’ That’s all she says for a long while.

I lie there listening to the call of the tawny owl, soft and familiar, and thinking of Lily.

My words seem to have satisfied Betty, and believing that the end of it, I allow sleep to press its fingers into me. Then there pipes a small voice, still bright awake: ‘But how can you be so sure, Nellie? Is it something to do with that strange Eddie Marsh, or the other one with the pince-nez and way of creeping up on you like a black cat? What is his name–Mr Strachey? Mr James Strachey? Is it because of those two? You can’t imagine Rupert is in love with either of them…pansies?’

She has heard the word ‘pansy’, then, and now understands it. ‘No, of course not!’

‘Well, then. If he doesn’t–if he isn’t drawn to girls, I don’t understand! Why is he getting married? And why did he kiss you? It makes no sense…and I have even seen Rupert look at that plain Miss Ka Cox in a sweet way, if you want my honest opinion…’

‘Oh, go to sleep, Betty, for God’s sake, and keep your honest opinion to yourself.’

I feel little better for my unburdening. In fact, telling Betty has only made it more real, and seem more hopeless. But I mean to keep my vow to God. I promised to give up Rupert, or mooning after him, and didn’t I say that when I made up my mind to something I’m stuck to it, like honey cappings?

 

I’m here at last in Germany, where I intend to stay, probably for ever. Or at least for three days. From there I shall wander south and east and no one will hear of me more, save the mariners who ply among the Cyclades, who will bring back strange tales of a bald, red-bearded man sitting on the rocks in the sun, naked, chanting wicked little Latin poems. Actually, it will more likely be three months. Here is a good place to (a) write my Webster essay, (b) improve my German, and (c) be free of Mother and all the conflicting feelings about Noel and Ka and Nell.

I have put Nell out of my head. It was difficult, involving a knife, a chisel and a clamp. Ka Cox and I had a small spat in a bookshop before I left London for Munich, and I hurt her, and for that I feel bloody. She wanted to buy me a book and I acted as if I couldn’t care less, and Ka felt slighted and snubbed and sniffy and a million other things beginning with s, and the truth is, I did feel bad. I suddenly waved my arm in the bookshop at thirty books, but by then it was too late. Ka’s sweetness, her reliability–I saw in a flash that even they might one day be snatched from me. My cushion, my sofa, my safe place to park my weary backside! I considered fleetingly pressing my mouth to hers, knowing that such behaviour would seal her in my thrall for ever, but even I hadn’t the heart to do it. And in any case, I am, of course, deluding myself. If my kisses are so powerful, why hasn’t the lovely Nellie Golightly succumbed?

Of course, I didn’t venture a full and thorough test. I cut the experiment short–and now I am wailing and gnashing my teeth and wondering why the devil did I? Why do I lack the necessary detachment with that girl, the little voice that simply says: ‘An adventure!’

Thank Heaven, then, that Nellie has the marvellous talent of forgetting, a few moments afterwards, and never mentioning the indiscretion again. She took the same attitude towards my glorious steaming erection that time when she saw it in the garden. (I’ve tried waving it at her timidly a few times since.) She acts always as if I–it–were nothing at all, so I must assume that this is indeed true. Difficult, then, that I remember the experience of kissing Nellie rather differently. Difficult that even here in this ridiculous pension (like something out of a Forster novel, with ladies ludicrous and serious, dropping words of wisdom at breakfast like pats of butter…thank God for Frau Ewald, the portrait painter), I remember most vividly the warm, living shape of Nell, how it felt to hold her (it felt hot and good and ordinary, the way it feels when Laddie, the Old Vicarage dog, sleeps at the bottom of the bed), and her startled expression when I pulled away from her. Difficult, too, that it is Nellie I wish to confide in now about the young Dutch sculptress I met yesterday in the alley, during the Carnival, the Bacchus-Fest.

Right now I’m lying in my room in the Pension Bellevue in Munich where the blanket is emaciated and grey and the smell of smoke rising up through the floorboards makes me lonely and excited at once, and am wondering whether to seek her out again. The Dutch sculptress. Elisabeth, I mean. Elisabeth van Rysselberghe.

The trouble is, she smells of lemons and sawdust and the alcohol used to clean paintbrushes. She has a tiny chin, and a certain roundness of form that puts me in mind of Lord Rosebery, and eyes big as golf balls, and her mother is an artist with free ideas. There was a terrifying moment when anything might have happened and almost did–we had been roaming among the gay young in the street and even dancing and talking, yes, talking and talking, and the night wore on. Confetti sprinkled our hair and everyone was in costume of a riotous kind–myself in Greek dress, which meant a great deal of freedom and rather less of modesty. We moved to Luitpold café together to drink beer and black coffee and then more beer, and I was so surprised to find myself unchaperoned with a young woman that even had she been ugly (which she wasn’t) my thoughts would have turned to Taking Advantage, or Making the Most of an Ideal Opportunity, in a good Christian sense.

So then we kissed and, in poor German, I suggested taking a room at the hotel next door and, to my enormous astonishment and no small amount of fear, Elisabeth acquiesced. We kissed all the way up the stairs (full of fat, simple Germans and dreadful Jews) and the kisses were feverish but more than a little repulsive to me because I began to realise how fervently she desired them and, as of old, such expectation kills off feeling in me. Immodest though it is to say it, knowing myself so desired is familiar enough, and every lover seeks the unique, the exceptional. And, furthermore, the taste of beer in another’s mouth is not especially nice.

We stumbled to the bed in the corner, and Elisabeth sat down and patted the counterpane, with its glut of apricot roses and disorderly green leaves, and I moved in to kiss her again. In fact, the kissing was helpful in dulling my brain, being damp and excessive and not enjoyable. But I kept on with it in order to put all thoughts aside. Then Elisabeth was munching on my fingers, my head in her lap. However, just as she was tugging at the buttons on her dress and giving me my first glimpse of a large flat saucer of nipple I felt myself fizzle like a cork going out of a bottle and knew it to be quite, quite hopeless. (That breast put me in mind of pink babies and of the Ranee.)

Elisabeth’s enthusiasm was filthy. Her watery, protruding eyes swam in front of me and I suddenly realised from the catches in her breathing and the faint sweat that gleamed on her forehead and upper lip that she was in the sort of state that I had naïvely believed only young men ever reached. There was a Crisis at hand. Our kissing and my meaningless caresses had brought her to it. The caresses were the work of an amateur; I aimed anywhere I could reach; twice I thought I had a breast and discovered it a pocket handkerchief; once I thought I’d traversed the top of her thigh but couldn’t break away to check if I was inside or outside her stocking. I had been prodding her (through my Greek robe) with a baton that was now limp and extinguished and she, poor sculptress, had every right to expect me to–to put it colloquially–‘go on’.

It was five in the morning. A beetle crawled along the floorboard and some bed springs squeaked mournfully next door as I pulled away from her politely and told her how much I respected her and understood the delicacy of a woman’s situation and of having an unimpeachable reputation, and how much I admired her, etc., etc. Her mouth opened and closed like Mr Pudsey Dawson’s when eating a frog. Her golf-ball eyes swelled larger than ever, but she was too much a lady to protest. It was like extricating oneself from an octopus. My shirt button caught on her brooch and we had to untangle it with our faces horribly close so that I smelled the white-spirit again and glimpsed the pores at the side of her nose and vacillated wildly between thinking, Oh, for goodness’ sake, have done with it, and Hang it all, the girl is repulsive! No wonder the obelisk refuses to stand up!

I wandered home down Ludwigstrasse and thought about Isben and composed a letter in my head to Dudley. (Dudeln, I plan to tell him, is a verb meaning to play the bagpipes.) But now I have escaped the Dutch sculptress, and am alone in my room. The Algerian dancing master next door is, for once, silent. My feet, infinitely disconnected from the rest of my body (sticking out from the covers as I’m too tall for this cot), tell me it is freezing again. I fondle only a cup of hot milk and my Webster essay and a pile of Elizabethan and German books that I may never read. Suddenly I am immensely regretful. Elisabeth, I realise, was uniquely willing. She is the first.

I will write to James and ask his advice. French letters, pessaries and such. After all, I must practise, if I’m not to remain an unconverted Sodomite for ever. I can hardly practise on Noel or Ka, and the maid is far too clever. Plus, I like her. The maid, that is. She has short nails and normal-sized eyes and her body when you hold her doesn’t yield but maintains its own shape, slender and well formed, like the trunk of a good tree.

I must stop thinking of Nellie Golightly and write my letter of enquiry to James, and stop flogging the pillow with my umbrella.

As a footnote, I have sampled and sought out German culture. It has changed all my political views. Everyone is right! Germans are arming ferociously. I am now wildly in favour of nineteen new dreadnoughts. German culture must never, never prevail. The Germans are nice and well meaning and they try; but they are SOFT. Oh! They ARE soft. The only good things (outside music, perhaps) are the writings of Jews who live in Vienna.

James replies by return of post with a long list of advice. I read it sitting in the Café Bauer drinking hot milk and reading yesterday’s copy of The Times. I hide the letter under the Sports Section as it is full of crude drawings but I can’t hide my smiles. I laugh so much at one point that I spill my milk and another cup must be brought. I am planning a long round of social engagements–Fifth Symphony, Wagner, Debussy, Valkyries. But plans to Complete the Task with Elisabeth loom large.

So. The gist of it is. Preventatives are of three kinds: letters, pessaries and syringes. Letters are condemned on all accounts for you get hardly any pleasure from them and they are most likely to be torn in the excitement of the moment. (This information from James’s brother Oliver who is an adept.)

Pessaries. Sound like very unpleasant things. James draws me a picture of Rendle’s Wife’s Friend, obtainable at all chemists in cardboard boxes as shown. It’s made of quinine and oil and you shove it up the lady’s cunt before you start, he says. It makes a filthy soapy mess that comes out over everything. In general, it’s efficient.

Syringe. James draws terrible pictures of these too. Used to clean out the lady’s insides. The enema is far the most popular instrument, apparently, but has to be used after you’ve emitted and James stresses that everything must be cleaned really thoroughly, everything (meaning Elisabeth’s insides, presumably), with quinine. This immediately presents a picture so awful, so foul, that all stiff parts of me wither in horror.

No method is certain. James added that the best time to attempt it is as nearly as possible halfway between ‘the monthlies’. If you do it just before a ‘monthly’ you’re most likely to have a baby. To do it during a ‘monthly’ is too incredibly disgusting. And Henry Lamb uses the withdrawal method, which requires an iron nerve. Hmmm. Not surprisingly, James tells me to spare myself the whole filthy business and come to bed with him instead. But I’m resolved to approach Elisabeth again and talk to her this very evening. This state of ignorance and inexperience cannot be allowed to persist! I know it is only the Bloomsberries who copulate and we Neo-Pagans (Virginia Stephen’s name for us) simply walk together in woods talking about poetry and Nature, but personally speaking, I wish to expand my knowledge of the world and in particular my experience of emitting into something warm and accommodating. (Always assuming Elisabeth possesses such a place.)

I finish my hot milk, and slip James’s valuable reading matter under my sleeve. I pen him a reply, marvelling at the equally fascinating subject of his brother Lytton, at twenty-three, having the mumps, to which I reply with a description of my own experience at sixteen. Not so much the pain as the Disgrace, and the madness. At first they just swell and swell till they’re tight and shiny and cracking, two monstrous red balloons. Then, all of a sudden, they go hard–hard as a rock. You lie and stare at the mountain under the bedclothes, and you pretend it’s your knees. The doctor strips you and eyes them till you have an erection, then thinks you’re a bad lot. You cannot pump ship and your semen turns green. It lasts for months. I suppose the fatal cases are when they grow too far and explode.

When I’ve finished this brilliant epistle I leave at once in search of a chemist. The pessaries sound messy but the easiest to persuade Elisabeth to use, so I go in search of them. And book myself a hotel, since the pension would be an impossible venue for the seduction. I perk up just thinking of it all, and my homesickness for the Orchard Tea Gardens and its inhabitants, and honey-scented flowery English girls generally, begins to fade away in lovely anticipation of my sweaty Dutch sculptress and her hot and salty delights.

(By the way, I have discovered she is Belgian, rather than Dutch, but I cannot see that it makes the slightest difference.)

 

(Later) The Hotel Berchielli.

Elisabeth arrives looking flushed and nervous and I announce at once that I have something important to discuss. She perches on a pink-cushioned chair at some distance from the bed and I stand leaning one knee nonchalantly against the counterpane. This starts to be so uncomfortable that the knee begins to tremble and my words come out a little staccato so I straighten up and then begin to feel I am towering over her, idly wishing that she would stop looking up at me with those bulbous eyes and let down her pinned hair so that I might find her attractive again.

I outline the methods for avoiding pregnancy and show her the options: a box of Rendle’s Wife’s Friends or the syringe. (The Jew who sold them to me could hardly keep the smirk from his face.) I am red in the face by now and unable to meet her eyes. I have not felt this bad since practising my let-us-support-working-class-artists speech on Augustus John and cannot silence the little voice in my head wailing, Stop, stop! throughout. But some devil makes me persist in outlining the ways in which a little preparation is infinitely preferable to a state of heated intoxication such as almost overcame us a week ago. Then I pause and the room shudders and Elisabeth emits a piercing sob.

‘How could you?’ She staggers to her feet and I think for one moment she is going to slap me.

I step back and fall on to the bed. Elisabeth stands over me, glaring. (I haven’t seen a face so alarming since the Ranee last slippered me.) My courage utterly fails as I see how badly I have understood the whole affair and my heart starts a drumbeat of terror as Elisabeth makes clear how wrong, how very wrong, I have been in my assessment of her, in her saliva-specked, broken English. How could I be so cruel, so evil, make such assumptions–the outburst goes on and on. I see instantly my enormous error. (I feel disadvantaged by my prone position, made even more foolish by a tassel from a cushion tickling my face.) Elisabeth is a woman who wanted to feel that if she gave herself to me she did so in a dream, a stupor, like Tess of the d’Urbervilles. That she was hypnotised, hoodwinked. In short: that I made her. When I protest breathlessly–swiping the tasselled cushion dramatically aside–that I had assumed we were both interested in the same thing and had only looked at practical, sensible ways to achieve our goal, she says suddenly: ‘And are you then going to marry me as you so–desire me, as you say?’

‘Good God, no!’ Perhaps not the most advised reply but it leaps out before I can silence it.

Then she hurls herself sobbing on to the bed, giving the loudest of animal-like shrieks. ‘Oh, Heavens above, I am–you have–I cannot believe you said that to me!’

‘Ssh, Elisabeth, others will hear!’ I’m afraid the bellboy will skate across the icy blue lake of carpet outside our room with his supercilious air and arrest me for a rapist. What is interesting, in a passing kind of way, is that in her damsel-in-distress pose her hair has come loose and is now tumbling round her face in tendrils and if it weren’t for the fact that her extreme response has made her repugnant to me, she might once again be attractive. (If that isn’t a contradictory and nonsensical statement, which I fear it is.)

I make one last attempt to rescue things. ‘Elisabeth. I’m so sorry. I’ve misunderstood–I’m an awful snake–forgive me–I thought it something we both desired. I misunderstood—Forgive me, Elisabeth, I thought you were–a Modern. I thought we agreed on these things. Forgive me—Here, take my handkerchief, ssh, darling, please…’

At length she allows herself to be calmed a little, and I stop feeling like a desperate character from Ann Veronica. What I do feel is bloody angry. Surely it’s not honest to want to be raped? Why must everything be so difficult and deceitful? I know I have rather muffed the thing but I do feel resentful that my frankness has been met with such nineteenth-century histrionics.

I’m sick of Munich and quite frightened of Elisabeth. She’s given me a cold in the head and I’m not sure she isn’t mad. I should return home at once.

 

I have heard Rupert is coming home. I have more to worry about here. Lily is not well–she is with child again, so soon after her loss that she is naturally thin and struggling–and Betty has gone this week to Prickwillow to take care of her. Kittie has returned, full of her Suffragette talk and London ways and not in the least shamed of her actions, or grateful to Mrs Stevenson for giving her back her position.

When Mrs S is out of earshot Kittie can’t wait to tell Lottie all about the last few months, and how she met Miss Emily Wilding Davison, the one they call Guy Fawkes in Petticoats, and how it was absolutely true, she did indeed conceal herself under the Houses of Parliament for forty-six hours. ‘We’d stocked her up with meat lozenges, you know, and lime juice to keep her going and she spent Sunday night there.’

‘And all for what?’ I say. ‘I remember hearing Mr Dudley Ward talking about it–a cleaner found her before she had her chance to leap out and frighten Mr Asquith with her protest, anyway, so what was the point?’

‘The point is—’ Kittie starts, but on Mrs Stevenson suddenly appearing in the garden, where we are, she falls silent, only soon she can’t keep it up, and begins singing the dreadful ‘March of the Women’ under her breath–‘Cry with the wind for the dawn is breaking…March, march, swing you along…’ I have a horrid picture of eager women barging forward, with overmuch action from the rump. The type that describes itself as Awf’ly Fit. The Miss Ka Cox type, for instance.

It’s washday and we’ve dragged the tub and the Faithfull washer out into the garden to make the most of the spring sunshine. Of course, Kittie being Kittie, she has her opinions on my doing Rupert’s washing. It was Mr Neeve who told me he was coming back and sheepishly handed me a bundle of Rupert’s things that had lain in the laundry basket these last three months. And the bed linen that they might make his room ready. Mr Neeve hands the bundle to me with a thrust, as if he can’t wait to be rid of it. Taking in lodgers was not his idea.

‘And Rupert pays you, then–you don’t just do it as a kindness?’ asks Kittie, when Mr Neeve has strode off towards the Old Vicarage garden.

‘Of course he pays me! And he says I do it better than Mrs Neeve.’

Lottie goes inside and comes out again, struggling to carry the tub with the shirts that have been soaking in lye. She plonks it on the grass with a heavy splash. ‘It’s cos Mrs Neeve boils wool and flings the rest in the Granta. Her place is riddled with lice and mice and more besides!’ Lottie has a horror of anything small that creeps, and will never go in the apple loft here at the Orchard for that reason.

‘Oh, don’t be silly, Lottie. What’s a few fieldmice when you can live as a Poet wants to, with friends to stay and–and reading aloud from books at midnight?’ I say. I feel very loyal to the Neeves and can’t stand Mrs Neeve’s housekeeping skills to be compared to Mrs Stevenson’s in this way.

‘Ooh, hark at you,’ says Kittie, mockingly. ‘Living as a Poet wants to? What on earth can that mean? Our Nellie’s smitten, isn’t she?’ She pulls some woollen underwear out of the tub and watches it stretch its long legs into the water. ‘Are these his?’ she whispers to Lottie, and the pair of them cackle like old hens while I seize the leggings and stuff them back into the water.

Kittie laughs. ‘I mean, who’s paying for him to swan around, that’s what I’d like to know? I thought he had to work as a schoolmaster…’

‘That was only to help his mother. So they could stay in their old house. His mother agreed to move.’ Of course, this information betrays some of my conversations with Rupert and Kittie looks surprised. Surprised, but unrelenting.

‘Three months in Germany doing what? This lot love the Germans, don’t they? Mr Ward is smitten with a German girl, I heard…And, ooh, Lottie, did you hear that our French froggie Mr Raverat proposed to Miss Ka Cox? You know who Miss Cox is, don’t you, the one who stoops so badly she looks as if she’s nursing a child?’

‘Oh, you’re years behind,’ Lottie says importantly. ‘Miss Cox turned Mr Raverat down! She’s sweet on our Rupert…and Mr Raverat has married the artist one, the one at the Slade, Miss Darwin, you remember her? Gwen Raverat, she is now. Although, for a while, there was a suggestion…Well, listen to this…’

She whispers something then, and Kittie snatches her ear away as if on fire.

‘He didn’t! Mr Raverat openly proposed Miss Cox as a mistress? And what did Miss Darwin have to say?’

‘She seemed to think it a good idea. It was Miss Cox who said no to the arrangement, and only, it seems, because she didn’t love Mr Raverat, not because she thought it wrong to be a mistress! They’re like those gypsies who stayed in Grantchester Meadows, no more morals than honey bees…’

‘Bees have morals! They’re loyal. They’re devoted to their queen and they work so hard! There’s no shame in service…Bees live only to serve!’

I’m plunging the dolly-peg into the tub of linen with a fierce push as I say this, making it splash all around us. My misery at Rupert’s sudden departure to Germany has dulled as the weeks have gone by, but the careless comments of Lottie and Kittie make it surface, like the mucky water swirling back up despite all my pushing and pressing down.

I try to steady my voice. ‘Well. Despite everything I’ve taught you it’s clear you have no love for the bees as I have,’ I mutter…I’m surprised that the girls have fallen silent. So I glance up and it is Kittie’s face that tells me he’s arrived–the way her eyes widen suddenly and her cheeks turn scarlet. I wheel round, and there he is in his cream flannels, a blaze of sunlight, his eyes the colour of the brightest morning glory.

‘Ah, to find the prettiest maids in England washing up a storm in a garden full of blossom and–what’s this? Extolling the virtues of service, too! Am I in Heaven? Or merely dreaming?’

Did he hear me defend him? Lord, how long was he standing there?

‘Mr Brooke, sir—’

‘Nellie Golightly. Lovely to see you again. Good morning to you all! Nell–a word, my dear.’

His hand is on my arm and I know the others are watching. He flashes each a smile but speaks quietly to me, steering me away from the garden and towards the kitchen at the Orchard, then towards the bottom of the stairs leading to his old room. Here he pauses. I am fiercely conscious of his hand, brushing the bare skin of my arm.

‘I left some things here. A small diary–buff-coloured? Some papers, part of my Webster essay, which I must finish this year to be considered for the Fellowship. And…the other matter is…letters, I wonder if any letters have arrived here from a very strange lady? You would notice the stamp, Belgian, and the return address–a Miss van Rysselberghe? I’ve never seen her handwriting but no doubt it has all the distinguishing features of a madwoman’s…’

‘I can look for you, sir—’

‘Sir? Nellie! Have you forgotten me so soon?’ In a pretend whisper, he says, ‘Did our swim mean nothing to you?’

When he teases I have no idea how to respond. After a second’s pause I become as serious as he is flippant, and try to explain. ‘Sorry. It is hard for me to call you–Rupert. Surely you don’t want me to–not when there are–when Kittie and Lottie are about? I haven’t found any of your things. But I shall certainly check for you. There’s a new gentleman in there now, so it will have to be later.’

‘I know. Dratted fellow. Sleeping in my friendly sheets! Why does nothing ever stay the same?’

I have no reply to this. My sleeves, I notice for the first time, are becoming unrolled and, being wet from the washing, are dripping on to the red-tiled floor. I stare down at them and then up again at Rupert’s enquiring face. A little thought goes through me that he looks tired, that his brows are lighter than ever, his hair a little longer. As if he could read my thoughts he suddenly runs a hand up through his parting, letting his hair fall between his fingers. Then he nods, as if I had spoken, pursing his mouth and looking closely at me. A tiny petal of blossom that had been caught in his hair floats to the floor. I think for a moment he wants to say something more but he merely swipes at the white petal with his foot as if it were a cigarette to extinguish, and strides out of the kitchen.

It is only when he has left that I notice how vividly I remember his smell, the smell of him, and how I have missed it. It’s a clean green river smell, the smell of warm flannel and Wrights Coal Tar Soap, and the smell of my childhood, my brothers playing in the river, or stripping bark to make a pipe: something fresh mixing with something older, something male and a little sour, too. The smell reminds me of the other things he left here in his room at the Orchard that I didn’t tell him about: a half-empty tin of Cherry Blossom boot polish, one black leather-bound notebook, some strands of sandy-gold hair wound round a masculine kind of no-handled comb, one old dark green woollen sock, the melting lather on his razor.

I’m weak suddenly, with his remembered smell, and sink down a while on the kitchen chair, my face in my hands. He might just as well be in another country.

When I rejoin Kittie and Lottie they’ve stopped staring after Rupert and are eagerly discussing the Great Procession of Suffragists planned for next month, which Kittie says she intends to sneak away to and join.

‘Why did you come back, then, if you’re still keen to be in the thick of it with your Suffragist friends?’ I ask her, surprising myself with the spite in my voice.

‘To educate you, my dear!’ she says, flipping a bubble of soapsuds at my ear with the wooden dolly-peg. ‘The Lord knows, someone must!’

I know this can’t be true. And when she says it her eyes slip away, as if there is something she doesn’t want me to see. Lottie doesn’t notice–the girl is a simpleton. So he is back, I’m thinking, and sweet torture must begin once more.

 

The worst has happened. A letter from Elisabeth. Clever Nellie intercepted it. (Of course Mademoiselle van Rysselberghe believes me to be still living at the Orchard, and has guessed at my address–she must have heard me mention it.) On the pretext of checking on her hives, Nellie comes over to deliver it to me in the Old Vicarage garden. I open it in front of her, read it, turn green and then pale and then green again, smoke pouring out of my ears. And then I calm down and stuff it into my pocket.

Elisabeth’s purple prose dances wildly round my brain. I know not what I will do but ending my life appeals to me as the only true course… My God! She’s madder than I thought. I give a huge, drawn-out sigh, and turn to Nell with my hands in my pockets. ‘Do all women want to be raped, Nell?’

Of course the sentence shocks her, but it is interesting, watching her stiffen, rally, recover, and then determine to meet my eyes. She has spark, that girl! Oh, yes, she is–magnificent! Whenever she is here I find myself searching for conversational gambits to detain her. This one is a corker.

‘I don’t believe so, sir. Rupert. No.’

‘That is…’ I take a step towards her, and she takes a tiny step back ‘…do they wish to act chaste, and pass the blame for all lustful feelings on to us?’

Here Nellie permits herself a smile, a very small smile, with only the corners of her eyes crinkling to show she means it. Sometimes she has a way of looking at me as if I were a very silly child. A naughty way of looking at me, indeed.

‘Well, it certainly would be–would be hard for a girl to act anything other than chaste…’ she says uncertainly.

‘I imagine you can guess that my Flemish acquaintance–Flemish? Belgian, I think–is rather…What can I say?…taken with me, and has an understanding of our relations that I did not intend.’

Nellie, tactful girl, says nothing, but I am filled with a desire to confide in her, in any case. ‘Ah…I have been foolish, Nell.’

‘You have?’

She stands a little way from the hives. I know she does this because the bees recognise her, and will agitate if they smell her presence. I have a notebook on my knee and my poem, ‘Lust’, in front of me.

‘Let me read you a few lines of this–did I tell you that the Ranee is paying Frank Sidgwick nine pounds to publish my poetry? I’m having the devil of a job putting my collection together but, well, I know that this one is going to make Eddie spitting mad and Sidgwick too, no doubt! Not decent…I actually mention a person’s “remembered smell”. But people do smell, don’t they?’

She looks startled, as if I read her mind, but nods and lifts her eyebrows, and I carry on. I stand up, cough, sweep a low bow with one arm and pretend not to be serious. Then I read from my notebook:

When I finish, I have the oddest sensation. I do not want to raise my eyes from the page. The line ‘my heart beneath your hand’ suddenly suggests something else entirely that had lain limp beneath Elisabeth’s hand. Might Nell guess this? Oh, Lord, why did I try this out on her? What devil makes me long for the maid’s approval so?

But she is smiling. I finally meet her eyes and cease blushing, and the girl is smiling, properly, her deliriously desirable mouth a little open. She nods, saying eagerly, ‘I like it very much. I–I don’t see why it isn’t a fit subject for poetry. After what you said last time, I’ve been thinking. About what is a fit subject and what might not be. And I decided–it came to me–that all feelings should be equal. The good ones and the–the ones we are ashamed of.’

‘Ah, Nell–my only true convert! Would that everyone was as broad-minded as you! So my “Channel Passage” poem worked on you, did it, to loosen up your thoughts on the matter? And you don’t feel certain that my first collection should be entitled A Flowery Book of Flowery Florets by a Mr Flowery Brooke?’

She laughs and then nods again, now looking a little doubtful, as if wanting to be serious again. But I suddenly long to tease her, for the sincerity of a moment ago is such that I’m quite drained. (I find such self-revelation can only be done comfortably in the most minuscule of packages.) Why is it that I want to unpeel another layer when I’m with Nell? There’s such loveliness and wisdom in her. And she has feeling, real feeling, without ever being sentimental or squashy. Unfortunately, as I am standing beside her, contemplating this admirable aspect of her nature, one who is not immune to squashiness appears in the Old Vicarage dining room and I see she is about to stride out towards us.

Ka Cox is staying here. Sleeping in a little bed across the corridor from me, in the Neeves’ side of the Old Vicarage. Following the direction of my eyes Nell turns silently back to the bees. I feel a stab of sorriness, but there is no chance to say more. I return to my deckchair and sit down in it, picking up my Webster essay, which nicely covers the letter I was writing to Noel Olivier.

My God, sometimes I write well. Better than almost anybody in England!

As I’m writing, and dwelling on all this, Ka wanders over towards the hives. Without looking up I hear the humming bees intensify–a warning sound, like the waves of the sea gathering towards a storm. ‘I say, Ka, don’t go too close!’

‘Oh, I saw the maid there just now,’ Ka replies. ‘She brushed them away with her hands…’

‘That’s the maid, though. She has a way with them. She’s a bee-keeper’s daughter. I wouldn’t risk it.’

Ka looks a trifle piqued at being told not to do something, but seems to take my advice and strides towards me. With her hair wrapped in some sort of emerald green scarf and those rather loose, full skirts she wears, I do see it, just for a moment. What Jacques means when he describes her as looking like one of the peasants in Augustus John’s paintings. But, then, Jacques is in love with her.

‘How’s it coming along?’ she says, in that deep, hot voice she has.

She means the Webster essay, I suppose. Or perhaps my poems. I cast around for a line to try on her to persuade her that this is indeed what I’m writing, meanwhile closing the notebook (Noel’s letter inside it), and standing up to stretch, hoping the sight of my manly torso elongating in miraculous fashion might temporarily distract her.

A timely shriek from the Old Vicarage rescues me. It’s a shriek so piercing and frightened that we both run at once towards the sound–coming from the kitchen. Billows of black smoke greet us and the sight of Mrs Neeve in a panic, face smeared with soot, shrieking, ‘Help, help!’, smoke everywhere in black clouds–the beam in the kitchen is on fire. It is difficult to get at, being in part the chimneypiece, but I dash for a bucket and Ka runs to the garden tap to fill it, while I flap at the beam with a rug, meaning to smother it, but succeeding only in fanning the flames.

Tommy–the butcher’s boy–has dashed for the Brigade, borrowing someone’s motorbike. Good, practical, bear-like Ka attacks the beam, sloshing water at it and then running to the mill stream at the bottom of the garden again to fill another bucket, until with a foul, sizzling smell the flames start to die down and the kitchen is full of maids from next door (Nellie silent and–could it be?–amused) and Mrs Stevenson saying, ‘Oh, these old houses!’ and Florence Neeve answering her, ‘There can be no doubt we were all Lying in Danger last night!’ (She means that the chimney beam has been smouldering all night long, which is patently not true.) And all the time Ka and Nellie appraising one another in that way women have and Tommy arriving back to announce, with glorious cheer, ‘The Brigade is on its way!’

I don’t like the way he looks at Nell, that young man.

I feel, of course, faintly ridiculous and undoubtedly irrelevant. (There is something particularly galling about the British Working Man that makes one feel this way when one is attempting to do something male and heroic around the ladies.) Tommy wears no shirt, and one cannot help observing that his chest is golden and glazed like a good apple pie. And that he and Nell giggle together and she seems to be very well acquainted with him.

Infuriating. I am still smarting from my recent brush with Tommy’s equivalent in Dorset–men who made no mystery of their contempt for Dudley and me, whatever our intentions. My eyes keep returning to Nell. How well does she know this fellow?

My nose is covered with smuts, my shirt is blackened and hanging out from my trousers, and my besocked feet are grey and soaking wet. I catch sight of Mrs Neeve glancing at me and nudging her son, Cyril, and with a dignified sniff, I decide I can be most useful by returning outside to my writing.

As I go I hear Mrs Neeve say firmly, ‘Ooh. That was a Danger Closely Avoided.’

Sheepishly, I pick up the notebook from the grass and sit back down in the deckchair. And there suddenly is Nellie, hurrying, scurrying, with blackened beams and detritus to a bonfire near the sundial.

‘I trust you weren’t hurt, child?’ I ask her, leaping up and offering to help.

‘I’m fine, thank you.’

She doesn’t look at me but wipes at her sooty hands with dock leaves and tries to rub the soot from her dress. I move to help her, taking my handkerchief from my pocket, but from the corner of my eye once again I see Ka approaching–God, does the woman have clairvoyant powers?–with her unmistakable swinging stride.

‘Ehm–when you’ve a moment, Nellie, would you be so kind as to bring us some apple cider? We’ll take it in the Orchard gardens rather than here, if you prefer.’

‘Yes, Mr Brooke,’ Nellie says simply, and if she feels offended, there is no sign of it.

Ka, recovered from her exertions, comes to join me under the apple trees, selecting a tree furthest from the house and pulling out a deckchair after thoughtfully doing the same for me. Absently I brush some of the white crust of bird droppings from the wooden frame with my handkerchief.

‘She’s pretty, isn’t she?’ Ka says.

‘Who?’

‘The maid, of course. Nellie. The one you said was a bee-keeper’s daughter.’

‘Is she? I hadn’t noticed.’

Ka plumps herself down in the deckchair, leaning her head back and stretching her legs beneath her skirt, while I search for something to change the subject.

‘You didn’t turn up to Gwen and Jacques’ supper party, Ka. I was relying on you. More of our circle joining up and abandoning us single folk…Didn’t we pledge never to do it? Married people make me sick. They suddenly have secrets–it’s like being a child outside one’s parents’ bedroom!’

Her face tells me that I have departed the frying-pan and plunged into the fire.

Hurriedly I carry on, ‘Ah, well, they will be safely on their honeymoon by now…Virginia Stephen is coming to stay here next week. How do you rate my chances at getting Virginia to swim naked in Byron’s Pool?’

To my horror, a large tear rolls down Ka’s face and she succumbs to a gulp and then a full-blown sob. She lifts her pince-nez to wipe at it with her fingers but another soon follows and she can only close her eyes and cover her face with her hands.

‘Ka, Ka–what have I said? I’m sorry, what is it? Don’t you like Virginia? But you know she and I are practically cousins, have been friends since childhood…’

Ka shakes her head, giving me to understand that this is not the source of her pain at all. I feel for my handkerchief again as Nellie arrives, puts the tall glasses of cider in front of us with a napkin for each, and turns soundlessly away. I know she has seen Ka’s tears. I wonder at the light she will cast them in, but there is nothing I can do about it. When Nell is out of earshot I leap from my chair and hurry to Ka’s side.

Ka shoots one glance at the bird-stained handkerchief and, with a wet laugh, pushes it away. ‘No,’ she says, sniffing. ‘No, not Virginia, nothing about that…’

‘What then, dear Ka? It’s surely not Jacques and Gwen…I can’t understand it! You turned Jacques down…’

‘Yes, yes, I know. I’m foolish and–and it makes no sense! But when you mentioned their honeymoon, and I thought of them in Churchfield House, in Lulworth–the very place he proposed to me!–it was only then that I minded…not the marriage, no, not that. But more–well, what you said about feeling excluded. That’s the part that hurts. Being excluded from a friendship with both of them. And then Jacques’ suggestion to me, his marvellous solution…You heard, I suppose?’

I am listening, I swear I am. But there is something else going through my mind, as Ka leans forward, the large green baubles round her neck glinting in the sun and tinkling like a mountain goat’s bells…I see the deep place between her breasts, and the tear-streaked cheek suddenly appears downy and young. And my attention is diverted by a wood-pigeon cooing away incessantly in one of the trees and the departing figure of Nell disappearing between them; so that I miss a little of what she is saying…

‘Ah, yes, I did hear something,’ I say diplomatically. In fact, Jacques discussed it with me at length and I’d advised him to have a punt on the taking-up-Ka-as-a-mistress idea. Wasn’t surprised to find dear Ka appalled, but three months ago I didn’t know Ka as well as I do now. Actually, I am impressed that she’s made of stronger stuff at least than the dreadful mad witch Elisabeth. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘that was pretty low of him. Anyone can see you’re not that sort. What a–snake!’

Ka falls silent. The wood-pigeon finally seems to invade her consciousness too, like a child insistently tooting a paper whistle. The tears have dried; she even gives a hollow laugh. ‘Illogical…isn’t it, that when we feel we can have something at the snap of our fingers we don’t want it, but when obstacles are put in our way…? Funny creatures, human beings, aren’t we?’ she says, to which I agree, heartily glad to return to cheerier mode. I am not used to Ka being anything other than Ka–jolly Ka, making sandwiches for picnics and diligently carrying buckets to put out fires.

‘Do you think it’s safe to venture back to the Old Vicarage without fear of being burned in our beds?’ I ask, standing up.

She says she thinks it is. But later, in my bed that night, I marvel at my own silliness in the Old Vicarage kitchen, grabbing Florence Neeve’s best Indian rug. I picture myself rolling the thing up and flapping demoniacally towards the fire on the chimneypiece. The rug was heavy and didn’t roll easily, the underside rough and reeking of floor-polish and dog-hair. Laddie cowered in the corner, watching me warily, as if I was a madman. As I flapped, more and more flakes of beam and black wood swooped down and showered me like angry bats. Ka and Nellie watched too; the other maids hovered somewhere around the edges. I felt Ka’s eyes on me, and I felt Nell’s attention slip away, turn towards that boy Tommy. It was a horrible moment, when I realised that I seemed to have snared one at the same point that I let another go free: like an eel-catcher opening the trap inexpertly and seeing his prize slip away down the river.

Not that Nell is an eel, of course. She is a bright country girl and a maid-of-all-work, I chide myself, trying to reel in my maddening thoughts. But she is a prize, and any man, even perhaps the dreaded Tommy, can surely see that.

 

Lily’s health is picking up, and Betty has gone to visit her, sending word that she is carrying well, and plumper. My own visit is due Sunday, but learning this news from Betty last night is like a stone lifting from my heart; I attack my chores with vim and vigour, even bursting into song sometimes. I realise from my own gladness that I had feared (without knowing it) for Lily’s life. I resolve to stick firmly to my pact, to give up all thoughts of Rupert, and feel reassured that God will reward me by taking care of my family.

My heart is lighter than it has been in a while.

Tommy offers to take me, come Sunday. He brings me a small packet, pink and sodden, and shyly pushes it over the tabletop to me on a morning when Mrs Stevenson is not at home. I peel off the paper to find two beautiful lamb chops. ‘For you,’ he says. ‘For your family in Prickwillow.’ Tommy has freckles and a direct brown stare, and there is no mistaking his kindness. He has not tried to kiss me again but he is watchful and, I suspect, patient.

So for now the only irritation is sharing a room with Kittie, who loves her secrets and is always gossiping: ‘Do you think he’ll marry her? Which one will he marry, do you think? The prettiest of all is Miss Olivier, not the young one, you know, but the older one, Miss Brynhild–the one with the big hats and the lovely cheekbones. She’s the one I’d pick, if I were a man.’

I consider for a moment passing on to her the same information about the tastes of Mr Rupert Brooke that I passed on to Betty. That would surely hush her. Rupert himself told me, laughing, of an occasion in Munich where he mistakenly called a gentleman by the familiar ‘you’ (in German there must be a more proper, formal way to address a gentleman you don’t know) and the same man’s hand leaped to his trouser buttons and he was practically on top of Rupert in an instant! Rupert laughs about this, and I smile as I bring him a clean pile of bed linen, and pretend not to be shocked. It is simply understood now, by Rupert and me, that the whole world is in love with Rupert, men and women, and he in love with no one. Oh, yes, he has a fancy to be in love with Miss Noel Olivier, a wish to believe himself in love with her. But, if you ask me, that’s a desire born of frustration, and part of his disguise. He acts like such a Gay Dog, such a Jack-among-the-maids (in his case truly among the maids!) only to hide his true persuasion.

Tonight, Kittie and I are no sooner lying side by side under the blue satin counterpane than she starts on her campaign: ‘Why would a brainy girl like you, Nell, not think it better for women to have the Vote? Don’t you believe we’re as good as any man, any day?’

I wonder about this. Father made me feel so strongly that I wasn’t as good as my brothers. Since Kittie asks such a searching question and we’re alone in the darkness I rummage around for an honest answer. ‘I think I do. It’s not that that makes me doubt. It’s–well–some of the speeches I’ve seen in the newspaper. Miss Pankhurst and those others. They talk of men as if they were savage beasts, every one of them wanting to steal us for the white-slave trade. And it’s our job to raise them from their filthy needs, their diseases, that sort of thing.’

When Kittie says nothing, and I gather from her breathing that she is still listening to me, I grow bolder, and carry on: ‘And then I examine myself and I think–I don’t want to do that. To be as good as a man, yes. But not to–to take care of his soul. Not to be an angel without–without a body of my own…’

The pillow next to me moves suddenly and Kittie sits up. ‘Why, Nellie, are you saying you have impure thoughts?’

‘No, of course not!’ I struggle to change the subject. ‘But…I’m not so sure your precious Votes for Women Bill will achieve anything much for girls like us–we wouldn’t even have the Vote anyways. It’s only for married ladies.’

‘And won’t you be a married lady one day? And able to vote then?’

This startles us both, with a gasp from me, and then a funny little silence.

‘I can’t imagine it,’ I finally say.

‘Well, isn’t that just like you? You can only imagine your life as it is, wedded to the Orchard, scrubbing and sweeping and running errands from noon till dusk…’

It’s true. Her words alarm me, because what Kittie calls drudgery is freedom to me. My little room–the first bedroom I’ve not shared with five others; the kindly way Mrs Stevenson lets us eat the broken scones for breakfast, warm and crumbling with butter; the new-pin order of the kitchen; the shouts and capers of Rupert next door, with his constant stream of visitors turning up on bicycles, arms always heaped with books; the snatches of their conversation, the lines from poetry and plays; the ladies in their lovely hats demanding strawberries brought to them at the riverside at their punts; Mr Neeve carefully removing the frames, and the swarm, brown and gold and shimmering in his hands like a field of old fen sedge with the wind rippling through it. How could I give this up and go back to a life like Lily’s, never to see a soul all day besides Mrs Gotobed and wailing little ones? And since it’s not marriage but work that has widened my world, why should marriage hold any charms for me? The others tease me about Tommy, but marriage…doesn’t enter my thoughts. Even Betty has started mooning over the boy who works at the mill, a boy named Jack, who delivers flour to us; a boy with squinty eyes that make me think of a mole, although he is cheerful enough, I suppose, and not a bad sort, and kind.

While I’m lying on my back beside her, thinking this, Kittie then takes it into her head that she needs cocoa. She sits up again. It’s past midnight, we’ll be up again at six, but she wants us to sneak downstairs and make ourselves some.

‘You’ll get us both sacked!’ I whisper, but I’m giggling too, because for all her sauciness, and her want of good sense in the kitchen, I am used to the company of sisters and things are always more gay when Kittie is here.

We take a candle and carry it trembling down the stairs, not wanting to risk the sound of the light switch, which, nine times out of ten, fails to work anyway.

Kittie finds the Bournville powder and rations us a careful spoonful each so that Mrs Stevenson won’t notice. I help her by washing the spoon and setting it back on the dresser. A mouse flickers past in front of us, making us shriek and cover our mouths. Luckily the fire is not yet out and with a little raking and a small cup of coal, can be made to crackle into life, so that we can set the pan of milk and water atop it.

We then sit at the kitchen table, smiling at each other, the candle flame between us, ducking its head every few minutes, dancing to some unseen draught. Kittie’s eyes are bright, and though I yawn and slump in my chair, she is so wide awake that I begin to wonder.

‘Why did you come back from London, Kittie? What happened there?’ I ask her this when my back is to her, hearing the milk and water rise to the bubble and taking it off the heat to pour into the waiting cups.

Her face in the firelight is only two big eyes, like a cat’s at night. I can’t read her expression but see from the glitter in them that she is blinking back tears. ‘You heard, I suppose? Mother was so ashamed. She told me not to tell a soul but Grantchester is such a place…I knew we couldn’t keep it quiet.’

Now, it would be honest of me to say that I haven’t heard, that I don’t know what she is talking about, but my curiosity is so piqued that I keep mum, thinking this the best way to find out. I put the cup of cocoa in front of her with a soft thud.

‘It was horrible, Nell. Worse than you could ever imagine. Several times constables and plainclothes men passed their arms round me from the back and clutched hold of my breasts in as public a manner as possible and men in the crowd did it too! My poor chest was black and blue with bruises by the time I got to my cell. And they tried to lift my skirt and called me names you couldn’t dream of hearing…

Poor Kittie is sobbing now, ever so muffled, so no one might hear. I feel the wretched way I always do when someone cries; I slide the cup of cocoa across the table towards her and am glad when she pauses to sip.

‘So many people…I was–terrified. I thought I would never get out! And although I got word to Mother she never would visit me there…’

Now I understand about Kittie’s absence and sudden arrival back. How sorely we resented it, Lottie and I, the curt way Mrs Stevenson reintroduced her: ‘You know our Kittie, girls, and you know how to make room for her.’ And after that it was all chop-chop and change about and Betty and Lottie packing up their things: Lottie and Betty to take Rupert’s old room while the new tenant is in London and Kittie temporarily reinstalled with me. Mrs Stevenson must have known everything.

‘The worst of it was, Nell, there were other women I knew in there, oh, yes, some of our lot, but they didn’t talk to me! They were in separate cells with copies of the Home Beautiful in them–can you believe that? I’m not lying, Nell, I saw them carrying those very magazines! It’s because Lady Constance complained, and nearly died after her prison sentence, but it made no difference to our treatment. And those ladies could call on the Governor whenever they wanted and visit the library or the chaplain…Oh, I thought, it’s fine for them, for when they get out they have homes to go to and husbands to forgive them, but what about me? I thought I’d never get a position again, or the prison guards might just think I was a common girl of the streets and never let me out!’

‘But then why must you go on another march next week? Weren’t you talking only this morning about the procession from the Embankment and the white horse that must be found and…Why, surely it’s a terrible risk, Kittie, you might get arrested again!’

Whatever her reply might be, I am none the wiser as a sudden noise outside makes us jump out of our skins and snuff the candle. We sit frozen at opposite sides of the table, the smell of hot wax sharp between us, listening. All at once I feel the hard wooden chair under my backside, through the cotton of my nightdress, and taste the cocoa on my tongue, and notice my fingers smoothing the grain of the table, my feet shuffling beneath it, dusty and dry.

Is it a fox? Someone is outside in the garden.

I’m the bravest, and tiptoe to the french windows to look. Of course I see nothing but glassy black, and when I press my face to the pane, only moonlit lawn and grey rosebushes, poised and still.

‘It’s over there, by the two-holer!’ Kittie whispers, her hand on the key, opening the door to get a better look. She’s right: I can make out a figure in the moonlight. A barn owl, silver as a ghost, flies suddenly past it and the figure ducks and lets out a shout.

‘I know who that is,’ I whisper.

Then I hear his voice, and a pebble rattles the glass: ‘Nell! Nellie Golightly–is that you?’

I twirl round to Kittie, and her look in the semi-dark tells me what mine must be: alarmed, excited, surprised. ‘It’s–Mr Brooke, Kittie. He must need something. I can deal with this. Quick, wash the cups and leave them on the dresser–and go back to bed!’

Then she gives me a different look entirely. I can just make out the set of her fat bottom lip and the saucy narrowing of her eyes, the direction her thoughts are taking, but before she can speak I say, quickly and fiercely, the wickedest thing I’ve ever said: ‘Kittie. I will keep your secret. I promise to keep it–to tell no one about your time in prison. I can keep a secret sometimes, if I really try. And if I feel sure that you would do the same for me.’

She is holding the snuffed candle. Her eyes widen, and I know at once she has grasped my meaning. She turns on her heel without another word and her nightdress swishes the stairs as she heads towards our bedroom.

My hand is trembling, too, as I struggle to open the french window. I’m thinking how well I know his shape, how I can recognise him from the shoulders, which are straight, like coat-hangers, and the loose way his arms hang, the set of his head, the wave of hair sticking up at the crown. I am thinking that despite all I tell myself of his persuasion there is a part of me that beats still, that is not in the least quieted. Just seeing him makes me know my efforts have been hopeless.

I expect him to be smiling, to giggle and grab my hands, but instead his eyes are glassy and he looks round me, as if there is a ghost behind me. ‘What is it? What is it?’ I say, and his mood affects mine: I feel my fists clench, expecting danger.

‘I–I—Come swim with me, Nell.’

‘What–now? It’s past midnight. You’ll lose me my position!’

Looking out into the garden I see that, for once, no dog has followed Rupert from the Old Vicarage, and the lawn is still and black and empty. I peer out at him. He hangs back a little from the house, nervously surveying the windows above him. In the moonlight he is pale as the barn owl in his flapping shirt and white flannel trousers. I realise as I’m doing it that I’m studying Rupert to try and understand what it is about him that is so unfamiliar. He steps forward suddenly, reaching out a hand and dragging me towards him.

‘Come on, Nell, you won’t lose your position. If you do, I’ll find you another, I promise. Mother always needs a maid. Hang it, who doesn’t? I want–I need a swim, and I—You know I hate to swim alone.’

His words are beseeching and his look is angry rather than playful. I’m not afraid of him–I believe a girl knows instinctively which men she should be afraid of–but naturally I hesitate, the request being such a strange one.

‘Do come, Nell. I’m all alone…Virginia’s gone…I can’t work–I need to talk!’

So I fetch a coat–Mr Stevenson’s coat–from a hook on the door to the scullery and once again throw it over my nightdress, and step out on to the springy grass in my bare feet. My heart launches itself at my ribcage like a cat in a basket, with the vivid memory of last time, the hot sense of a person standing beside me, knee-deep in a brown river, naked as God made him, the sun melting his back to honey, and trying to catch a fish.

The roses are grey and closed for the night. The night air smells of Rupert to me, and nothing else, and I slip into step behind him, and follow him across the lawn and down the lane. Walking two steps behind him, trying to follow the pale figure of him as a light and a guide, I almost have to run to keep up with him: over the bridge in front of Grantchester Mill and across the meadow until we reach the dam, with the sound of water tipping into the black below.

Here we stop, breathing heavily, and staring into the deep, blank water, and I acknowledge to myself the one hard fact that, despite my nature, it has taken me so long to face. There is no request Rupert could make of me that I would refuse. Whatever the pledge between me and God, this is the truth. I almost gasp aloud. What foolishness has stopped me knowing this until now? And why, thinking it, do I once again have a small dread sad picture of Father, keeling over in the meadow all snowy white in his veil and suddenly old and finished?

What would Father say if he was here now and I could ask him about Rupert? Nothing, is the likely answer. I can only imagine his look of surprise and confusion if I raised such a thing. Father’s world was…ordered, where even bees who have chosen to swarm in a cluster in a high tree can be coaxed down into the skep by his soft voice and a little smoke, without even the need of a gentle shake of the branch. But Father’s skill was only with bees. He had nothing to teach me about men, nothing to pass on beyond his limited, silent life, sitting on our front step, smoking his pipe and cleaning his uncapping knife.

Who on this earth might I ask the strangest question a girl ever formed in her head? When a man favours other men, can he ever have the needle of his compass changed, ever find it pointing towards a girl?

Could it ever point towards me?

I’m shamed now by my wicked behaviour with Kittie–pressing her like that, nearly blackmailing her with her secret. At the same time, I pray bitterly that she keeps her word and says nothing, or I’m sunk.

Rupert leans over, peering into the water, and says, ‘A man I knew once wanted to know what it felt like to shoot the rapids, and he did it here, and that wooden thing under the water is all full of little nails or something so that when he came out again he was all covered with longitudinal scratches. It was rather pretty, like some sort of pattern, and it didn’t hurt him very much!’

He doesn’t seem quite himself and this remark only confirms me in my worries. Surely such a dive would wound or sting powerfully? I steal a glance sideways at him and a funny thought pops into my head. His ghostly profile in darkness is like the head on a coin–a noble head. The minute this thought is formed, I snuff it. It is the thought of a romantic girl who has lost her best skill–to look at things squarely! And because I cannot trust myself just at this minute to do that, I stare instead at the river’s surface, homely as the back of a grater: black and full of little dimples.

Rupert bends to take off his boots. Again, a part of me is admiring his toes in the moonlight, those long, elegant toes I saw the first time I met him–what is wrong with me? Why do I keep veering from my purpose like this? I’m here to help him, surely, unburden himself, or whatever it is he longs for, not to admire his fine toes!

He makes a show of squinting in the silvery light, searching for fallen chestnuts among the leaves at the water’s edge. I don’t believe in this playful mood one jot. There is something glittery and brittle about him that isn’t cheerful in the least. I’m not so far gone that I flatter myself he wants especially to talk to me: I know already that Rupert has a fear of being left alone. My true feeling is that he has times when to talk to the cows in the field would be better than nothing.

Suddenly he is turning his face towards me; squinting at me in the same searching way. It’s hard to hold his gaze, but I do.

‘We played a game, Nell. Do you see that paper boat there–that little flash of white on the bank? There’s a prize being offered for the best poem, and some friends of mine were trying to guess who might win it. We made a paper boat for each person we knew had gone in. Drinkwater, Masefield, Abercrombie–they all went off so merrily. That’s me–there–on the bank. Stranded helplessly, stuck like a sorry fool in those branches.’

He says this with such bitterness, with such a catch in his voice, that I know at once I have tapped the source of his misery.

‘Oh, I’m sure your poetry will–will swim off as merrily as you might hope…’ I say, hoping to be reassuring.

He greets this with a harsh laugh. ‘You think so? I wish I was so sure. Can you imagine, Nell—’ He turns to me so suddenly to say this that I slip a little in the soft mud and he has to shoot out a hand to help me. The coat over my shoulders slips a little and I feel his hand on my bare shoulder, and notice it there, and wish I hadn’t. ‘People have no idea at all. You people have no idea,’ he says.

‘No idea of what?’

‘How painful it is! How embarrassing! How ridiculous. One imagines the glow of pride when an author sees his own name in print. It doesn’t occur to anyone–why should it?–that the author might feel something else entirely. Something inexplicably ridiculous. A fraud. An idiot–to see one’s own ambition and limitations writ large.’

He links his arm in mine, rearranging the draped coat so that it covers me more thoroughly. Then, hiding his tenderness with a gruff push, he steers us away from the sluice gates and towards a part of the river where we swam last time. The light is enough to see by, but the ground beneath our bare feet is full of peril–the spikes of the horse-chestnut shells, acorns, twigs, and every few seconds one or the other of us stops to squeal in pain or brush a barb from our soles.

‘I can imagine that!’ I say boldly. ‘To have the world read your innermost thoughts, committed to paper…I–well, I do understand it would make a body feel…shy.’

‘Shy. Yes. You’ve met Mother? No, of course, she’s never been to the Orchard, nor the Old Vicarage. Well, then, dear Nellie, imagine a woman–a rather beautiful woman, actually–tall and grand and of the same severe disposition as, say, Mrs Stevenson, with none of Mrs Stevenson’s apple-roundness. There you have my mother: the Ranee. And now picture the same woman reading the poetry of her beloved son, one Mr Rupert Brooke! Her eyes flickering over a word like “Lust” and her fierce mouth hardening at lines like “her remembered smell”–the worst kind of disgust would fill her mind!’ He puts his head in his hands and groans. A white cow at the other side of the river skitters in fright at the sound.

‘Well…’ I venture, and stop. One minute I’m standing next to Rupert in a wood, by a river, late at night, the next I’m somewhere else–I don’t know where–watching. A chill passes over me and I observe only two figures talking: one tall, troubled; the other wearing a coat over her shoulders and looking up to the man with a shining face.

It lasts only a moment, then I’m back at the river, back in my body, with my heart hammering and the scent of river garlic floating round me, and I’m talking. I’m trying so hard to be helpful, to respond to the request made of me. Help me, he says.

‘Why write, then? No one is making you—’

This comment makes him angry.

‘No, it’s true. Ha! My own hopeless vanity and–compulsion, which catches me in its snare. I can neither stop, go back, nor go on.’

‘Well, then,’ I say, ‘it is a brave thing, to–expose yourself so. I’m sure all of us have…secrets…parts of ourselves we labour not to show others. I can’t imagine my father, for instance, understanding for one moment why I would risk my position to stand at night with you looking into a black river. That would be a part of myself I would not want to show to him.’

‘Oh, Nell, how sweet you are. Such a small risk, compared with mine.’

I am silent, pondering this.

‘Whereas I,’ he goes on, ‘risk exposure to the whole world! And then there is the further, ghastly, conflict of knowing that, even as I suffer them, these fears are ridiculous, too, and how much I despise myself for them, and how I am unable to confess to anyone but you. Can you imagine Abercrombie or Drinkwater or just about anyone else caring–for God’s sake–what one’s mother thinks?’

At this he gives another sulky laugh. ‘And if it were only Mother that might be bearable. But the next minute I imagine the thoughts of certain Rugby masters on reading it, or my godfather, or my aunts or–Mrs Stevenson, or God knows who, really. But each time, at each looming person, another doubt presents itself, another opportunity to be mocked, judged and disliked. Each for a different line, or poem, or reason. I’ve had one devil of a fight with Sidgwick and I don’t suppose it’s over yet. Is his objection to including “Lust” only that it’s bad poetry or that it’s shocking as morals? Technically it’s not much, I admit–any fool can write a technically good sonnet! No, that’s not his real objection, although he disguises it as such. If he takes it out of the collection, the whole thing is reduced to unimportant prettiness. No one offended, Mother least of all, but nothing achieved either!’

I pull my coat round me, feeling the chill at last. An owl just above us gives a soft, soothing call. ‘Shall we go back?’ I say, at last.

He catches me up and kisses me, another of those dark, impulsive kisses that make my body tighten, as if he were pulling taut a string from my drawers to my neck. ‘So you do like me, Nell,’ he suddenly murmurs, ‘just a little?’

We break apart for my answer, tears springing to my eyes. ‘Of course I do! Of course!’

And he kisses me again. My body is still, like the black water gathering in the pool below us, but I’m almost choked by the power of it.

He breaks away to try to look at me in the darkness, then wraps his arms round me in a deep hug so that I breathe in the smell of him, the grass and Coal Tar Soap, the woodsmoke from his room, and shavings from a pencil, and the texture–the flannel shirt, the softness of his hair, the prickle of his mouth where his stubble rubs me like sandpaper. He doesn’t mean anything by it, I try to tell myself, with one last feeble gasp of reasoning, but the feeling is of something else entirely. Something hot and close and true.

‘You’ve no idea,’ he mumbles, ‘the things I feel. I am without a skin, permeable, terrified…I think I must be a–filthy person. I have such foul thoughts and I can’t sleep, and yet I’m so unutterably tired, and I lie down and my thoughts race and I feel a cloud in my head that won’t go away…’

‘Ssh, now, of course you’re not filthy! You’re just tired, and you’ve been working too hard and, well, anyone would be a little nervous about their first book of poetry…’

The direction of his mumblings now is more alarming than it was a moment ago. I have to admit to myself that, despite all my good sense, I am surely at sea. My response to his kiss–Lord, my conviction that he meant it–seems wrong suddenly. The strong feeling I have, flooding from him in the darkness, is like the feeling I have sometimes standing near the bees. A swell in the air, something massing: a warning. He does not seem to be talking to me at all, but to the night. There is something very wrong indeed with Rupert.

Father would say it’s no more than he deserves. If he knew, if he knew what Rupert had done with that young man in his room at the Orchard, he would see it as God’s punishment, his sickness coming to taunt him. Maybe that’s what Rupert believes too. Is that the ‘filthy’ thing he’s thinking of?

‘I’m a mean thing, full of smallness and jealousies and dirt,’ Rupert murmurs.

I put my arm firmly in his, and steer him back towards the meadow and the lane.

When we reach his rooms at the Old Vicarage, I discover that his part of the stairs has a little wicket gate (for his bedroom was once a nursery). He steps over this without pausing but I hesitate. ‘Yes, Nell, the ghosts of Victorian children pluck at our sleeves here, don’t they?’ he whispers, but I shake my head. It’s clear he’s asking me to go with him, to help him, so I step over the barrier too, and carry on past the glass door with the beautiful flowery designs on the yellow panes and into his bedroom. I close the door as softly as I can manage, and sit heavily on the bed beside him. It’s a bigger room than his old one at the Orchard, but it smells the same: of warm paper from books, the smoke from a recent fire, and of him, of course.

‘Stay here with me, Nellie,’ he whispers.

I light the candle beside his bed with an ember from the fire in the grate. His flickering face looms in front of me and, to my horror, I see that his cheeks are wet, that big tears slide down his face. I take a corner of his sheet and dab at them, and he smiles at me, and in an instant his mood has changed and he nods and mutters quickly, as if I had refused him, ‘No, I’m sorry. You’re right. Of course it’s a big thing to risk your position. An enormous thing! I’m being selfish and silly. I shall get us both into trouble–lose my lodgings again! Thank you, child. You’re a very sweet girl.’

And so I find myself on the wrong side of his bedroom door, and wondering how in God’s name it always happens: that whatever my heart desires, my mouth fails to utter it.

 

Virginia was here at the Old Vicarage. She stayed a week in the room that Ka stayed in, and we played at being interested in one another, and we mostly sat in the garden and wrote. She is writing a novel called Melymbrosia. I tell her I do not care much for the title. She asks me laughingly if the blank spaces left in my sonnets are to be filled later with ‘oh, God’s’? She is different, alone. Not the Virginia of our childhood. Quieter, for one thing. And the pallor of headache is always upon her.

I did persuade her to swim with me one warm night. She was terribly thrilled with her own daring, and one couldn’t help considering throughout that it was merely an experience with which to regale Vanessa, or perhaps Lytton, not a real experience at all. I saw her glance slyly at me once, and as the moon was full I saw her ghostly limbs. They left me rather limp, and made me miss the plumper charms of dear Nell.

Virginia undressed is a rather vulnerable creature; I much prefer her clothed. The moment her dress was on she recovered her wits and said, laughing, ‘Ah, so your legs are not bandy at all as Lytton claims!’

I chased her back to the Old Vicarage, to sit and dry our hair in front of the fire.

One morning that week we were at work under the shade of the chestnuts, and I was reading a newspaper and exclaiming about the national rail strike. ‘Don’t you feel we live in extraordinarily violent times? Women picketing Parliament and throwing stones at shop windows almost daily, unrest, strikes, upheaval at every turn…and yet when Dudley and I try to engage the Working Man in debate about his own predicament…’

As I said this Nellie appeared at the other end of the garden in my line of vision and, seeing me with Virginia, turned on her tail smartly and left. I knew that Virginia’s beady eye didn’t miss this, and I wondered what she might have read into it.

‘Oh, I heard about your little tour. Must have been terribly disappointing for you. Yes…your interest in the wretched lives of the lower classes is legendary, dear,’ she said mildly, without looking up from her notebook. ‘No need to waste time on persuading me of its veracity.’

This was laced with sarcasm, of course.

Nell’s retreating figure was dark in the dazzling whiteness of the day; like a drop of ink on a page.

‘Virginia–what’s the brightest thing in Nature?’ I asked, pretending to be considering.

‘Sunlight on a leaf,’ she provided, without looking up.

Cloud-like we lean and stare as bright leaves stare.

I tried not to stare after Nell, but when I closed my eyes her figure appeared on the inside of my eyelid, like a shadow puppet on a canvas screen.

The week after Virginia left, I sought Nell out. I don’t know what I planned. A full declaration, perhaps? An assault on her person? But I hadn’t allowed for the return of my most fearful thoughts and feelings, and by the time I’d gathered my strength, the occasion was lost. No man wants a woman to succumb to him out of pity.

 

I have the book in front of me. The proofs that is. Poems, 1911. There is still time for corrections and I intend to ask–who? Ka? James? Yes, only those two. James has Judgement. Is it true then, as I told Nell, that an author feels no glow, only shame on seeing his name in print? In my case, this morning, tearing it out of the envelope I felt–yes, I think it was indeed the hot glow of shame.

I had dreamed of Nijinsky again, and the dream clung to my skin, like dew. He was dancing the part of the golden slave in Scheherazade and I was–I think I was the shoe-maker. Yes, that was it. I sat in the bowels of the theatre sewing, surrounded by wooden shoe-horns, making little shoes for that perfect man’s feet, and then helping him into them, encasing his wondrous heel with my hands, nestling it with reverence, as if it were an egg. But he said, in this strong Russian accent, ‘No, for I dance the part barefoot, of course!’ And I felt such shame, powerful shame, for such a simple error, for getting everything so awfully, catastrophically wrong.

I woke up with a pounding erection, of course.

Noel has rejected my offer of the Dedication in the book, so that page remains glaringly vacant. My humiliation is absolute.

I quickly thrust the pages into an envelope to Ka. Ka I trust. Ka is not unkind and there is still time for her to make some corrections to such things as italics and capitals although as for the rest—My heart beats a tattoo every time I look at it. I have half a thought to fling it on the fire and shoot myself.

Later, in the same dream, the one I was recalling, I was given the task of helping Nijinsky into his bejewelled codpiece, and as I was rising to this task, studying the beautifully sewn construction with great attentiveness, Dudley rushed into the room and began shouting at me!

I wake to find him downstairs. Dudders, that is. He has been shouting up to my window. Mrs Neeve had sent the maid in to take the chill out of the room by making up a fire, and to see if I was awake but I pretended not to be. Autumn is over. No more stumbling by the water with Nellie; the bitter weather is here and with it my bitter mood, quite confirmed.

Dreary, blasted, filthy development. Dudley’s getting married. They’re dropping like flies. First Frances, then Gwen, now Dudley. He speaks of his betrothed with such touching embarrassment that I almost feel glad for him–he told me a few weeks ago on Hampstead Heath, saying, ‘She only weighs six stone eleven, can you imagine it?’ as if this was some sort of recommendation. Anne-Marie. A German. A German with the physique of a tiny child. During the telling, a cat attached itself to Dudley’s legs, and I remembered the other cat, Pat, on our Poor Law Caravan Trip and that, and youth, seemed a small number of centuries ago. Dudley and Anne-Marie I saw as two little mice about to be eaten. Not a happy thought.

My dream of Scheherazade was rather detailed. (Small wonder, since I must have seen it now at Covent Garden at least a dozen times.) But interesting that I had cast the concubine Zobeide dancing in some of the scenes and, well, who would be the obvious person to cast? Elisabeth? A concubine who can raise an ankle to her ear and causes our marvellous Nijinsky to prostrate himself? Noel? But there I’ve given up. She has a fairly serene future in front of her and I have decided I must go away. Somewhere far. Germany again, if I can manage to avoid Elisabeth.

It was Nell. I’ve just remembered. In the dream. Darling Nell had the part of the saucy concubine. With her plummeting black hair and her snake hips, her defiant little chin, her extraordinarily supple white limbs, dancing with surprising skill for one so untutored. Very surprising indeed.

Of course, my shame really swells when I turn to the poem, ‘Lust’. Sidgwick has changed the title to ‘Libido’ and this foolish compromise leaps out at me. I feel the despair of one who has caved in like a collapsed pudding. I’ve behaved like Ophelia and turned ‘thought and affliction, passion, hell itself…to favour and to prettiness’.

And then the ghost of Denham comes to stand behind me, with his remembered smell, and looks over my shoulder, and laughs aloud. Surely I am the subject of your poem? he asks. He flings my notebook at me, with the scribbled lines of ‘Lust’ jiggling and dancing amid the drawing of the young sleeping figure, and it’s true: it looks exactly like him, his head turned away from me, the line ‘the image of your kin’ being his brother Hugh, of course, nothing at all like Elisabeth. Who on earth have I been trying to dupe?

I feel so awfully lonely. And sorry that I’m so filthy. I have written Noel a package of vile letters, accusing her of everything from flirting with Other Poets (Békássy) to driving me to suicide. I believe the last line of the last letter was: ‘I love you more than anyone ever will–damn you!’

Even I know this is not the lexicon of a lover.

But I put on a jolly face, shove the rest of the proofs under the bed and join Dudley–waiting for me by the sundial like a man condemned–for a breakfast of tea and a slice of apple cake, placed invitingly on a frosted tray on the table. We step on to the iced lawn, which cracks beneath our shoes. We pull blankets round ourselves and pretend it’s summer: I even manage a cheery smile when the conversation turns again to Anne-Marie and Dudley’s Plans. (Plans with a capital P is what engaged people have, the rest of us are only half human, of course, and our plans don’t matter.)

This is all very well and I am just about managing it, and half listening, when Dudley suddenly delivers a glancing blow: ‘And Lamb. Yes, I imagine she would become his mistress at a pinch.’

Who would become Henry Lamb’s mistress? Noel? My mind does some sort of piercing dive, somersault and back-flip until I remember–he was talking about Ka. Lovely, firm-rumped, predictable Ka…Ka become a mistress of anyone, least of all that greasy painter Lamb? But Ka said no to Jacques. Ka is–incorruptible. Dudley must be mistaken…A presentiment of alarm shivers through my body.

‘Lamb? The disgusting snake? Isn’t he—I thought he was fully engaged in pilfering Augustus John’s mistress–what’s her name? Not Dora, the one before that.’

‘No, no, that’s old news, Brookie. Where the devil have you been?’

Where, indeed? I pull the blanket more tightly round myself. I must have been far away, and I am having trouble returning.

I’m thinking of Nellie and my Nijinsky dream again. And how once, when I was a very, very small child, the Ranee told me of a dream she had had. ‘About your poor dead sister,’ she said. ‘What do you think that means, darling?’ she’d asked, in such a wistful, intimate, caressing voice, as if she’d forgotten for a moment precisely who I was, and actually believed I could help her.

‘Why, do dreams mean something?’ I piped, in my shattering, six-year-old way. She looked startled then, and retreated.

‘I’ve made a date with Noel,’ I announce to Dudley, standing up, flinging the blanket to the chair. ‘December the fifteenth. We’ll see the Cezanne-Gauguin exhibition and talk.’ I wave my arms around to emphasise this breakthrough. (And to warm up.) ‘I find I can think of nothing else.’ (A fat lie, of course, but tactful Dudley keeps mum about how much my forthcoming book of poetry preoccupies me.) ‘I have to resolve things with her once and for all because the tangle is spoiling my health. And, more to the point, interfering with my Webster essay. And, in any case, I must see these marvellously pornographic South Sea maidens that are causing such a Tear in the Fabric of British Morality, eh, Dudders?’

Dudley springs from the chair at my feet to give me what he imagines is a reassuring pat. ‘Bravo, bravo! That’s the spirit.’ I nearly choke up breakfast.

We both sit down, and Dudley pours tea, trembling a little in the cold. After listening to the sound of the amber liquid tinkling into blue-rimmed porcelain, Dudley says cautiously, rather quietly, shivering before pushing his pince-nez up his nose first, ‘I wonder, though…Is that wise, old chap?’

‘What–immersing myself in the unnatural colours and gaudy nakedness of Gauguin’s South Seas?’

‘No, of course not. I meant Noel. You know that pressing her in the past has only ever strengthened her resolve…’

Ha! Such expertise now, such superior skill in love-making, my friend might have been married twenty years, not merely become betrothed a week ago. I stare at the top of his pate with a swell of loathing. ‘Well, you may be right, but I find I want to push. To discover when, indeed, the Surrey and St John’s Wood upper-middle classes will permit that she and I walk together. Do you know I saw a letter from Noel in the hand of that damned poet Ferenc Békássy. Did you know that Noel and he were acquainted?’

‘No. A letter, though. Might have been two lines at most! What’s to say there was anything to fret about?’

‘What’s to say there wasn’t? I mean—I’m sorry, old man. I’m–I’m tired. I haven’t been sleeping. I find that I can’t. Every time I close my eyes some fresh horror emerges.’

‘Fresh horror?’ Dudley sounds anxious.

‘Oh, nothing, really. Just, you know, a few small worries about my poems coming out, I suppose. And then I’m so tired, and the not sleeping is exhausting. Grantchester used always to afford me that. Sleep, I mean, even when London or Rugby didn’t. Such a shame it no longer works.’

The white sky bulges between the trees like a hanging wet sheet. I sip my tea and stare at the spot where the Madonna lilies bloomed in summer. ‘So glad they’re dead now, aren’t you? I find them rather ugly. Too much.’ The light that falls on their dead clump is bleak, as if spilled hopelessly. (What is it waiting for? What am I waiting for? Mild Deaths gathering winds, frightened and dumb.)

‘What?’ Dudley says, bewildered. ‘Oh, the lilies…’

‘Did you know a young woman, a young artist, called Phyllis saw me on a train and has tracked me down? She was sketching me. Very pretty she is. She persuaded her aunt to write me a letter. It’s all very amusing.’

‘The lengths the New Woman will go to!’

We snicker at this and Dudley is eager to believe my black mood has passed. It is freezing cold out here in the garden. Some large plops of rain drip on us, flooding the dregs left in our cups, so we make a dash for the dining room. Dudley smiles–ah! the scaly cheerfulness of the engaged person!–and passes some comment about Florence Neeve’s new antique, a gigantic white vase of marble with a single flower in it. I stamp my feet and shake the raindrops from my hair, then dart off to a side issue–my impending trip away–hoping to forget that I’m a desperate worm, or a fly crawling on the score of the Fifth Symphony.

Mrs Neeve brings a fresh pot of tea. She sets it next to her grand antique with a flourish, and Dudley laughs, as if we are schoolboys again, smirking in the dorm, and all is right with the world.

 

So. I arrive at Lulworth, at Wool station, shortly after four. I spent the entire train journey worrying that it was too horrible of me to send my poems to unsuspecting individuals who have never done harm to a soul. Bill and Eva Hubback. Sybil Pye. Eddie, of course. I suppose they might burn them, should they wish to. In any case, one hopes that they never refer to it again. Apart from Eddie, who, bless him, has written a fine letter, which reminds me of why, contrary to the feelings of some notable others, I persist in our friendship.

I have been sleepless these last four nights. My Webster essay is done but at what cost? I am in a stupid state, and the hopeless, helpless conversations with Noel roll round and round my head like a bag of marbles on a ship’s floor, all against a backdrop of Gauguin’s colours, colours so strange that I cannot begin to describe the troubling emotions they raised. Looking at them, trying not to listen to Noel’s sensibleness, I thought, These forms are like something created in a stage of the earth’s dark history when things were not irrevocably fixed to their forms. It is curious that the befrilled spires of King’s College Chapel have never inspired in me the same shock and awe. (Clearly, I have a Pagan soul. These days, I only ever look upon the spires and wonder why they are all wearing baker’s hats.) Oh, Gauguin’s work is not shocking or scandalous in the way that critics suggest. Contemplation of the Tahitian School will not make maiden aunts turn primitive and drop their drawers, or young men take up cannibalism and ravish their neighbour, more’s the pity. But there is something–something unsettling–in the work that calls to me.

I asked Noel if she agreed with the Daily Express that the show was pornographic, and the three figures of brown women in Maternité repulsively ugly and no better than drawings on a privy wall.

‘No, of course not,’ she said, in that considered Noel sort of way. So then I quoted Byron’s The Island, the bit about the young hearts of the mutineers ending up languishing in some sunny isle, half uncivilised, preferring the cave of ‘some soft savage to the uncertain wave’ and, to my surprise, it made her angry.

‘But isn’t that just like you? You want to go so far from the common view–that we have made some progress over savagery and barbarism–that you take up the opposite position with equal zeal. That everything the natives do is perfect, and superior, and noble.’

‘Well, he is certainly a perfect specimen…’ I pointed out, pressing my face close to a fine example of noble savagery in a loincloth. ‘What fun to knock about like that, naked under the sun and having your feet nibbled by fish in lagoons all day…’

‘I’m sure it would only seem that way to a drifter, to a foreigner, to Gauguin, for instance. In fact, I’m very sure that South Sea island people have their privations, Rupert, like everyone else!’ she retorted angrily.

And that was when she said it, there in the Grafton Gallery, just as another livid Tahitian breast loomed into view, words of soft kindness that slid like a knife under my skin: ‘I’m afraid we must give it up. Until you love less or I love more.’ Then I knew I must leave England. I glanced around the gallery, as if expecting a surge of people to come forward and clap me on the back: ‘See, old man? She doesn’t want you. Your work is no good. Your poems are shoddy. In short, you are an embarrassment. Slip quietly off to some foreign shore, there’s a good lad, or do as your brother did and slip away entirely.’

Noel found me, head in my hands, under the rosewood carving of a Polynesian girl with flowers in her hair. She took pity on me and held out her hand, but she did not take back what she had said. ‘You know Eddie loves my Poems,’ I told her. She seemed startled. ‘Oh, yes,’ I continued, ‘he is the only one who has troubled to write to me about it. I know you all hate him, I know what you all say about my friendship with him–don’t bother to deny it! But only Eddie has taken the trouble to say that I have “brought back into English poetry the rapturous beautiful grotesque of the seventeenth century”–thank God for Eddie, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Let’s have some tea,’ Noel suggested, to which I wittily countered, ‘Yes.’

She was right, though, to refuse to be impressed by Eddie’s review. For, after all, there was more in his letter. Of the ‘smell’ line he still managed to say: ‘There are some things too disgusting to write about, especially in one’s own language.’

And yet people do smell, don’t they?

I did not dare mention this to Noel, but I do remember asking Nellie this. I remember that she started–as if I’d interrupted a private thought she’d been having about that very subject–and then smiled, and I sniffed the air close to her and answered inwardly: honey. Violets. Beeswax candles and polish. Then: fish. Eels–I don’t know why; perhaps she had been handling them that morning. Then: hair–earth, blackness, salty, girlish sweetness with a nip of something sour. And a whole host of other things that had no name, but did indeed have a fragrance.

Christ, four hundred poems are written every year that end ‘The wondrous fragrance of your hair’ and nobody objects. And, for God’s sake, why am I thinking about Nell?

I have telegraphed to Lytton to send a driver to take me to Churchfield House. The sea air is grey and snippy with wailing seagulls and I find myself strangely unwilling to stay with the others at Cove Cottage. Who is to be there? Ka, of course. James arrives Monday. They will all know of my book. They will all know that ‘Lust’ has been renamed ‘Libido’ and is not a good poem.

The driver duly arrives and in the carriage I get my first sight of a prowling grey sea, and a hundred army volunteers in white tents, like a strange spore of mushrooms on the hills above me. I wonder if they have read my Poems. I wonder if even now, within those white tepees, there they all are, a hundred young men, tittering at my literary ambitions and foolishness.

I have the strongest feeling of foreboding. Something beyond my worst fears is about to happen. I don’t know what it is but I know I’m right because I’m almost there. I’m approaching it with every rattle of this coach’s wheel. The sea slides beside me, just within my vision, like a strip of grey slime, persistent and unfriendly. And I think I know what it might be, but what I cannot tell is whether it is coming from inside my head or outside. Whatever it is, it is here at last. The construction, the Rupert Brooke, cannot hold me any longer. I am surely a Lulworth lobster, dropped into a pot, about to be boiled to death.

Lytton announces, standing on the flagstones in the doorway of Churchfield House, that Ka has begged ‘a word’ with me. Will I take a walk with her tomorrow along the clifftops?

‘I’d forgotten you’d grown that ridiculous beard,’ I say, noticing it afresh.

‘And I don’t know if–if James mentioned it but Henry is here. I just took them over to Lulworth Cove Inn.’

‘Henry?’

‘Henry Lamb, of course.’

Lytton’s simpering is insufferable. He practically drools as he says it.

And so the name seeps into my pores like arsenic. Ah. This is what I have been anticipating. This, then, is the blow, the bomb, the reason to feel such inexplicable dreary terror.

‘Will Ka bring a lobster pot on her walk?’ I ask, but Lytton only stares at me with an expression concerned and un comprehending.

‘Come inside, old fellow,’ he says gently. ‘You are drenched through with rain.’

‘Oh, is it raining?’ I murmur, as I begin to unravel myself from my sweater. A Christmas present from the Ranee. I’m surprised to find that Lytton’s right: the wool is soaked through, now smelling of damp old sheep and other Christmases when I was a boy. Ha! It smells of my remembered smell. I cannot dislodge the line from my head.

Lytton is still staring at me, in the most ridiculous, lugubrious fashion. ‘You look terrible, my dear chap. Are you sick? It’s so awfully mild, though, isn’t it, despite this confounded drizzle? Some of us thought we’d bathe in the sea…see the New Year in. We’ve arranged to meet at the cove.’

‘Yes. I’m sick. Off to bed. Count me out. Don’t worry about me! Oh, no. I have my Pride to keep me company.’

I stomp up the stairs towards the top bedroom, grinding the name of Henry Lamb underfoot with each step.

 

It’s morning and Ka appears. She is wearing a peacock-blue scarf and heavy boots. She has never looked lovelier. The wind whips hair in front of her face and wraps her legs with her skirt and I remember seeing her naked once, posing in nothing but her pince-nez for the camera (who was it took the photograph, I wonder now) and how, despite the beauty of her sculpted white body, she looked like a woman destined always to be matronly before her years, as if someone had stuck the wrong head on the charming young figure.

We set off on our walk. Behind her the divinely beautiful sea, the creamy white cliffs, the sky a Giotto blue…

But too soon the words coming out of her are disgusting, filthy, foul. Unbearable foul sickening disgusting blinding nightmare–is she truly saying she loves him? Loves the vile Lamb? Wants to marry him? Would do anything for him? Including, by implication, spreading her legs?

I must be mishearing. It’s this sickness, this head-cold. Inside my head is so much sheep’s wool.

She is intent on dirtying everything, everything I felt for her. Our boots marching together across the downs. I watch the imprints as they magically appear behind us, side by side in the frost. After Noel’s rejection, I believed dear Ka was safe! Believed her pure!

My head pounds with a thousand bees hammering to escape. Death and Hell! Ka’s doing the most evil thing in the world. She says she is willing to be his mistress, allow that soiled snake to sneak between her legs, degrade her, everything…The filthiest image of all for the fouling comes into my head: and that is what Ka is willing to do.

‘Rupert–please,’ she says. ‘You’re exaggerating horribly. One can’t choose who to love.’

Seagulls are screaming overhead; the bees inside me clamour to get out; the sea rises up in a great green tide, ready to throw itself at us. Ka moves towards me. Her face comes into view with her fat mouth and her stupid fat chin–something of Elisabeth van Rysselberghe about her–and her gross neck, with its folds of white flesh.

‘Why are women such whores, Katharine Cox? That’s it, isn’t it? You simply long for the artist Henry Lamb to drive supremely home and you’d open your legs, whimper and smirk and submit, accept his mastery, and you believe I am a bugger like the rest of them and not up to the task—’

‘Rupert! I can’t believe you would say such things! No! No, that’s not it. I had no idea you had feelings for me–you never said. I understood that you loved Noel…’

‘I did love Noel. I do! That sweet child is everything you are not. Noel is fine and true and pure and clean and—’

So she crumbles down on the Purbeck Hills and puts her head in her hands–Pah! A bid for sympathy, nothing more–and she keeps muttering, ‘Rupert, darling, you are being cruel, cruel–I had no idea, no idea…’

Women have such twilight shadowy souls, like a cat behind a hedge. What can one do? And, what’s more, they offer themselves endlessly, pathetically. How dreadful that the whole world’s a cunt for one.

‘So, you won’t marry me, then? You prefer that greasy, slimy, blisteringly foul Henry Lamb with his giant Obelisk—’

‘Marry you? Are you serious? I—But you never asked me! How could I know it was in your mind? And why now, when it should only be a marriage of pity?’

‘Ha! It’s no, then! Is it my Poems? Do you find them so vile, so laughable, so beastly and unnatural that you must refuse my proposal for fear of befouling yourself by connecting with my name?’

‘No, no, that’s not it. Rupert, you seem so–unwell, I’m frightened for you. I had no idea that my–my confession about Henry Lamb would bring you to this. We have always been honest with one another…’ she is standing up now, attempts one hand on my shoulder, her scarf unravelling and flicking between us in the wind ‘…and I have always understood how much you loved Noel…Couldn’t you be a little happy for me?’

‘Happy? Happy for you? When you want to sully your life by mingling it with these detestable buggers? Lytton, James, the fucking Blooms buries, the lot of them. Jews and buggers! I wash my bloody hands of you.’

This feels good. At last–saying what I feel. I stride off, away from her, and she is a only a bright blue dot, tiny as a forget-me-not, on the green hills. It’s as bracing as a dip in the Granta. Oh, if only the cloud in my head would lift, I could taste the real pleasure of this, of finally, finally, uttering exactly what I long to. Goddamn buggers the lot of them.

God burn roast castrate bugger and tear the bowels out of every last one of them.

 

I’m on the train, then, and Lytton and Ka and James somewhere else, and Lamb too, and only Gwen and Jacques in the seats opposite, glancing at me all the time in that frightened, pathetic way they both have, as if they want to offer me bromide and tea, or strap my arms to my chest. In between these kindly injunctions I sleep. In sleep Lytton appears to tell me how he orchestrated the whole thing: You needed taking down a peg, Brooke old man. ‘Of course I invited the creature (Lamb) to Lulworth and left the others to go out on walks with him so that the whole disgusting, unbearable, sickening nightmare could happen right under your nose. I knew you were a virgin after all. What splendid sport!’

I open my eyes and meet Gwen’s anxious gaze. ‘I loathe Lytton!’ I tell her.

Gwen and Jacques start in alarm, and Gwen reaches for her flask, enquiring if I’d like brandy. ‘You’re crying, dear,’ she says very softly, as she leans towards me and, ridiculously, fetches my own handkerchief from my pocket and dabs at my face as if I were a child.

The brandy burns my throat and makes me cough and we roll through tunnels, and in the black window beside me my own face appears, striped with white lines and fields and rabbits running through it. ‘Where are we going? Where is Ka?’

‘She–she left, Rupert. She was very upset. I think you–perhaps you were a little cruel to her.’

‘Was I? Where are we going?’

‘We’ve made an appointment for you with Dr Craig in London. We’ll take you there. And we’ve telegraphed your mother. She says you’re to come to Cannes with her at once.’

‘Does she indeed? And is Ka coming with me? I’ve asked her to marry me, you know.’

‘Yes, we do know,’ Gwen says, with a quick glance at the carriage door as if someone might open it. She says nothing more but dabs at my cheeks again, which are surprisingly wet.

‘Are we to be married then, Ka and me? Is it agreed?’

‘No, dear.’ And Jacques begins telling me in great detail about this man, this Dr Craig, and how renowned he is, how he has helped others–why, Virginia Stephen, he thinks, has been to see him.

Mentally, then, I compose a letter to Virginia. ‘Let me implore you not to have, as I’ve been having, a nervous breakdown. It’s too unpleasant.’

‘Poor Virginia,’ I say out loud. ‘What tormented and crucified figures we literary people are!’

This at least raises a smile from Jacques. ‘I’ve heard Dr Craig is excellent,’ he assures me.

I tell them both about an incident at Holy Trinity in Rugby three Sundays ago. In the afternoon there is first a choral service, then a children’s service, then a service for Men Only. Two fourteen-year-old choirboys arranged a plan during the choral service. At the end they skipped round and watched the children enter. They picked out the one whose looks pleased them best, a youth of ten. They waited in seclusion till the end of the children’s service. Then they pounced on their victim as he came out, took him each by a hand and led him to the vestry. There, while the service for Men Only proceeded, they removed the lower parts of his clothing and buggered him, turn by turn. His protestations were drowned by the organ pealing out whatever hymns are most suitable for men only. Subsequently they let him go.

‘He has been in bed ever since with a rupture,’ I announce.

Gwen materialises again in front of me with the handkerchief. Now I see that for some reason it is she who is crying.

‘Hush, dear…’ I tell her fondly, and the train slices through the pink of the neat little English hills on their perfect drawing-room scale; just like the blade in a bacon-slicer.

 

Rupert is sick. He’s not here. After New Year he was taken off to somewhere in France by his mother, but everyone at the Orchard is talking about it, and Kittie tells me with great excitement that she heard Mr Ward talking to Mr Raverat about it, and she gathers that Rupert had a nervous breakdown and began cussing and wandering the clifftops of Dorset like a madman–as she says this, she’s glancing sideways at me all the time, as if she expects me to slap her–and had to be taken to the famous Dr Craig for his stuffing treatment.

We’re in the kitchen with the wax kettle on the stove. I wonder hopelessly how to hide the trembling in my hands as I hold the kettle; the shaking in my shoulders as I turn my back on them, reaching for the candle moulds. I knew something was very wrong that night out by Byron’s Pool. Should I have done something? Stayed with him in his room, despite his telling me to go? Have I failed him once again, despite all my best intentions? What, what on earth could I have done?

‘They all break down in the end,’ Kittie says cheerfully. ‘Writers, I mean. This doctor makes them drink milk and stout and stop writing. Stopping writing is the only cure.’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous!’ I reply, so fiercely that three moulds topple over. I’m trying to teach Kittie and Lottie how to make candles. Lottie, being a diligent girl, is applying herself to the task; Kittie’s tongue keeps up steady work of another kind.

‘Stopping writing–oh, and drinking the blood of bullocks or something–is the only cure,’ Kittie repeats, undeterred, ‘but Love is the cause. I heard he asked Miss Cox to marry him and she turned him down! But why would our handsome Mr Brooke choose Miss Bespectacled Cox with the fat behind when he could have Miss Olivier or, well, anyone at all?’

‘Here–put the muslin over the spout,’ I tell her, a warning in my voice. ‘The wax is melted enough–can’t you see it there floating on top of the water?–so now we can tip it into the moulds. Here, Lottie, get the first cast ready. We need both of us to lift the kettle–it’s heavy.’

‘And there was another young woman came asking for him the other day. Did you see her, Lotts?’ Kittie is not in the least put off. She slaps her hand over mine on the handle of the kettle, but carries on, ‘Miss Phyllis Gardner. Came on a bicycle. Long red hair. Shameless, she was. She showed me a sketch she’d made of him and asked me, “Do you know this gentleman?”’

This gives me a stab of fury to almost take my breath away. ‘Hold the kettle, will you? I can’t do it on my own–put your back into it, Kittie!’

Another young woman, asking after him. Another young artist with modern ideas who thinks he belongs to her.

‘And were it a good likeness?’ Lottie wants to know.

‘The sketch? Not bad at all. Easy to see it was our Mr Brooke. Had his nose, you know, fine and straight but with a sort of little snub at the end. He’s made another conquest, no doubt, but I told her he was away “convalescing”. I thought that was the best word for it.’

‘Oh, where in God’s name can Betty be?’ I burst out, my voice ringing in the kitchen. She was sent on an errand an hour ago to fetch the meat from Tommy, who has been flat on his back with a broken ankle and unable to make deliveries. As if in answer to my lament, Betty appears at the kitchen door, just as the three of us are struggling to lift the kettle and direct the spout towards the moulds. She hurries to help by steadying the candle casts so that the wax pours in the right place and does not end up all over Mrs Stevenson’s table. I notice some hot, honey-coloured blobs dripping on her hands and marvel that she makes no response, nor snatches her hand away. I soon learn why: her mind is entirely elsewhere.

‘I’ve an announcement to make,’ she says, glancing up shyly at Kittie, but avoiding, I think, my eyes. ‘Me and Jack. You know Jack? The boy who works at the Mill? Jack and me. He asked me–he asked me—Oh, Nell, do say you’ll look well on it. He wants us to get married!’

The kettle is nearly dropped as the girls crowd round Betty to kiss her and shriek with excitement. The room is full of commotion and it falls to me–as ever–to remember that Mrs Stevenson is only in the apple loft on the floor above and can hear every word.

‘Ssh, ssh now, girls, the wax is hardening–this is not the moment to neglect the task completely!’ I cry.

‘Oh, do say you think it a grand idea, Nell–please,’ begs Betty.

I pull her towards me and kiss her cheek. I feel her pounding heart under her apron and regret my selfishness, my own foolish woes. But the wax is cooling and will form badly if we don’t attend to it now. ‘Of course I do!’ I say. ‘That’s fine, fine news. Father would have been very proud of you. Now help me, won’t you?, or the candles will be spoiled and we’ll have to start all over again.’

Her hair smells of the silky hot beeswax, the melting flavour of our childhood, and I believe my instinct for guessing at Father’s feelings might, on this one occasion, be true. Jack is the good, steady sort and his family is kind, even if they are not Methodists and do have some funny traditions. Yes, of course I’m glad for her, for she will stay in Grantchester now and be part of another family, with a new mother and a father and even new brothers and sisters. Perhaps my prayers–the bargain I struck–are being answered after all? To live in Grantchester, near the millstream? That’s surely a life, a life for a girl with Betty’s inclinations and dreamy, well-meaning nature?

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You read my poem?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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