The Great Lover (14 page)

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

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

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

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

‘Father—’ I said.

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

‘Father–I’m here–do you see me?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My fever has receded but I am weary beyond belief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Tommy,’ he says proudly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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