The Great Lover (31 page)

January
1914

So the boat arrives in a lovely, bewildering port, and there are people everywhere, just as there have been each time we docked, and excitement and an unidentifiable scent in the air, a foreign scent of smoke from the chimneys of houses, heat and some kind of frangipani flowers. The sea is a coloured soup, heaving with boats of brown-skinned merchants, naked except for their red and peacock-blue kilts, holding out baskets and shouting. Coconuts and pineapples piled high, and coconut leaves littering the water. The men carry a splendid little tool, tucked into their colourful wrapped skirts–it’s shaped like a flat spoon, made of bone and with a serrated edge. One of them, standing up in a canoe nearest to our boat, demonstrates its use: for scraping the meat out of the coconut once opened.

‘How much for the tool?’ I call out, towards his canoe. Fellow passengers start, and turn to stare at me, but my target seems not to hear and simply stands holding up more coconuts.

We queue on the deck to leave, fanning ourselves in the sticky heat, staring out towards the rocky lump of that mysterious island Moorea, rising from its plume of mist, one huge forest of palm trees and secrecy. Someone on board was telling me that its name means ‘yellow lizard’, and I try hard to discover if it is because the island itself is shaped like a lizard, but the sea breeze and spots of rain whip tears into my eyes as I try to look harder.

‘Look at those niggers! Whose are they?’ calls an American Suffragist lady from the SS
Tahiti
as we enter the harbour.

The white population of Heaven, I think, must be very small.

And afterwards, my first step on Lafayette beach, the strange, fine black sand, dark as iron-filings, crunches under my feet. I immediately feel a desire to take off my shoes and socks, which
I succumb to, while children laugh and point and run to carry them for me, taking hold of my hands, while their older brothers hustle to act as porters, and smiling women place garlands of sweet-smelling white flowers over my head.

I long to leave the umbrellas, rope and Gladstone bags of my English life on board but, of course, nothing is that easy. There are rooms to be got, and merchants to turn down. I have introductions at least, and I must hunt up some Gauguins, although I heard–damn!–that a man had got there ahead of me and carried off some paintings on glass.

The blasted boat was nearly a week late so I’ve had to spend three weeks in New Zealand, a sort of mildly Fabian England, very upper-middle class and gentle, with laws in place that should make me happy: old-age pensions, access to the land, minimum wage, insurance, etc., etc. And yet it’s not Paradise. All the women smoke and dress badly, and nobody drinks. There are the same troubles between unions and employers. Perhaps there’ll be no peace anywhere until the rich are curbed altogether.

Among the crowd a young woman or, rather, a girl–thirteen years old, no more–is holding out a flat basket full of
tapa
, the bark made into stiff cloth, covered with a brown pattern that I saw in Samoa, too, and calling to
me
, I think.

‘Pupure! Pupure!’ she says, laughing, pointing to my hair, so that others in the throng turn and look and smile, too. What can it mean? Something about my fairness, perhaps? I nod and laugh, as if I understand, and lift the garland of white flowers round my neck to sniff its warm, waxy scent. (Thinking: Perhaps, like my old Rugby master, she’s saying I look like a girl. Ah, shame that, even here, my golden locks cannot go ignored.)

I smile and nod, for the excitement around me seems to demand it, press coins into the hands of the children, and gaze up at the little huts that surround the beach, their roofs a mixture of corrugated tin and pandanus leaves, then glance around for Banbridge, the fellow I met on the boat, who says he knows a
place we might stay. The Hotel Tiare in Papeete. He knows a merchant, too, a chap to show us how to find the best black pearls in the world, which no one, Banbridge insists, must leave the island without purchasing. These black pearls–
poe rava
–signify undying love, according to Banbridge. They are the finest of all pearls, fetching higher prices than any other variety due to the unique blackish-green tint, often tinged with yellow or rose. I must not leave Tahiti without purchasing some…

I play along, wondering. For whom would I purchase them? Phyllis? Cathleen Nesbitt? Ka? Noel Olivier? Lady Eileen Wellesley? Elisabeth? James or Eddie, perhaps? Undying love. The Lord knows, I have no need of that.

First he took her to the boat-shed at the end of the garden. There was no possibility to follow them there without being seen, so I stayed for a moment by the hives, and watched. I knew the inside of that boat-shed. Lined with little drawings of figures bathing naked as God made them. How they made Rupert laugh–he liked to point out how silly were those who disapproved of the drawings, and the antics of the bathers, the shapes their bodies made.

The two emerged from the boat-shed and I knew Mrs Stevenson would miss me from the kitchen and might take some convincing. Maybe I’d used my excuse–the bees–once too often. But I couldn’t stop myself. I watched them take off towards the lane and my feet wouldn’t stop. They urged me on, after them.

They were laughing. It was early evening, the sky plain, the colour of milk. I stayed a good distance behind them. Once they reached the river, I was hidden by the trees that line it. The wood-pigeon came with me, hooting his call: hollow and lonely. Every so often I paused, holding my breath after I had stepped
on a twig and felt sure they must have heard me. But their thoughts were elsewhere. I heard their giggles and read his mood well enough. It was that brittle, high-pitched laughter, the kind that flickers dangerously into something else. Was he well now, or likely to tip over again? I told myself concern for his nerves was my reason for sneaking after them.

They came to a place by the river that was studded with pollard willows and a notice that trespassers would be prosecuted, and here they wanted to cross. And I knew he was asking her to bathe. I hid behind a bush, a distance from them, my boots disturbing the slippery leaves and the chicken-of-the woods and arched earthstar and, after a minute, accidentally rooting out a little frog, which hopped off in terror. I was peeping through the lacework of branches. I could see from the tilt of her head and the set of her shoulders and the tone of her voice–I couldn’t hear the words–that she was afraid. My bad heart said, ‘Ha! Not so bold, then, after all!’ since
I
never hesitated when he asked me to swim. No, not once.

But the next minute my same bad heart hurt again because I saw that they were undressing. I shrank back behind my bush, face close to a branch heavy with huge rosehips, only peeping out as they both reappeared, naked, carrying bundles of clothes.

And then I had a strange sensation. Watching them. Him so tall and beautifully formed, just as he was that very first time I ever saw him naked, in the garden at the Orchard; she so slender and small with those big bosoms, and bigger in the hips than I’d thought, too: like a candle melted down at the bottom. I could not understand the feelings it produced in me to see them both. My body felt on fire. I didn’t know whether to sob or run. Oh, I knew he came here with others. Miss Virginia Stephen, Kittie said. But I’d never witnessed it and so, in my mind, it had been
our
place and ours alone. A place to play, and swim, like children, the way I used to with my brothers in the river Lark. The place of his poem, which stupidly I had
thought was somehow–how could I have thought it?–meant for me.

I watched them wade to the other side–she dropping his boots once, and screaming with the chill of the water, and the dark tones of his voice, playfully chastising her, splashing. And then hot tears sprang to my eyes and my ears drummed, as they wrestled on the bank on the other side, rolling naked and laughing and play-fighting, and I strained and strained to see how he put his hands round her throat and his face close to hers, and I wondered–I could hardly breathe as I wondered–whether he might kill her?

I swear, so clotted with grief my heart was, I almost wished he would, as that would have been easier to bear than what I was watching.

Then suddenly there was
her
voice, loud and angry, and she sitting up, and him releasing her. The afternoon turning chill and the church bell in Grantchester striking. The beginning of grey darkness melting the trees so that I could no longer really see their shapes. Then raised voices again–I heard him say, ‘You are a fool!’–and a moment when she sat up quickly and grabbed her clothes, and I suddenly thought they might look over at my side of the river and see me. But, no, they stayed on the other bank–they must have decided not to go back through the water but to cross at the bridge–and their grey shapes moved away, and darkness began to fall.

You are a fool
. He might have been speaking to me. Nearly four years, I’ve laboured like this. Persuaded myself. That it’s only men who make him feel passion, that he feels nothing of
that
hot sort for a girl. All of his ranting. How he hated Sodomites, how filthy James and Lytton and Denham were–I took to be his way to convince me, convince himself, and the more he said it, the more I understood it to be deep in him, and stuck fast. When he talked of marriage, whether to Ka Cox or Noel Olivier–I always understood it to be about marriage of the necessary
sort, the sort a person of his upbringing
had
to take up. I never thought–not for one minute–that he
could
feel that way towards a girl.

And when he kissed me, when he held me, when his hot mouth and his tenderest caresses, his hand in my hair, seemed to speak of something else, why then I had only fought more fiercely; fought my understanding of
everything
to persuade myself that I could not trust him, that he did it for show and that I must not for one minute believe him.

That way, I told myself, he will have no power to hurt you.

Well.

How wrong can a girl be?

The pain I felt watching him with that Phyllis was unlike anything I’d ever felt before. Even Father’s passing did not hurt me like that. I did not know you could feel hurt this bad inside you, and live. I wanted to scream–I thought I was dying, my breathing came so hard, my lungs hurt so much. I rolled myself into a ball, under the bushes, pushed my face into my knees and sobbed.

Still I could not blank the picture of her. That saucy girl with her red hair down, and her plump backside, turning her head into the ground. His head dipping towards hers, his hands on her skin, and even from a distance I could feel it: like heat coming off the ground, like steam. This thing. This thing he felt for her.

And then I lifted my face up, realising that they had gone, and that I was alone out there, on the other side of the river, and it was dark, and the trees were creaking.

I looked down at myself and stood up. My dress dirty, my bib fraying. My nose snotty, my face streaked: a grubby little child, a street urchin, an elf. An ignorant bee-keeper’s daughter, a maid-of-all-work, with five siblings to take care of, a girl who had never read Webster, nor carried a sketch in a bag and ridden a bicycle.

A good, sensible girl, capable of facing hard facts?

Or the biggest fool a girl could ever be?

We reach our hotel as evening falls, having spent most of the afternoon idling along the waterfront trying to regain our land legs on the street known as the Broom, where Chinese merchants offer us Tahitian black pearls of every hue. I do feel I’m walking like a drunk with the swell of the boat still in my gait, but nothing like as bad as my buffoon of a companion, Mr Arnold Banbridge, sweating in his heavy jacket, and examining each pearl for so long that the Chinamen grow anxious and hammer at him to give it back. I soon enter the grip of the man’s obsession, however–it’s impossible not to, bowling along among the thousands of these glorious, luminescent little balls. Black is an inadequate word to describe the hypnotic range of shades and tones.

Our minds eventually boggle and our senses revolt; and so we progress to stalls where the curio-makers with their dusty fingers and sharp tools endeavour to sell us objects carved from mother-of-pearl, which they call here nacre. I search for the coconut tool I saw demonstrated from the SS
Tahiti
, and one of the Chinamen possesses a fine specimen, carved, he indicates with much pantomime gesturing, of volcanic rock, and called, if I’m hearing him correctly, an
anna
.

‘Gin? Gin?’ the Chinese merchants ask us, hoping we might have some to barter. (I’d hazard a guess that my moustachioed friend has some stashed in that jacket of his, but if he does, he’s not saying. I’ve discovered he has an enormous repertoire of smut and is very self-consciously Kiplingesque in a way that even Kipling himself was not.)

So then we hitch a lift from a passing boy, driving a horse
and cart, who claims to know the hotel that Banbridge mentions, run by a native woman called Lovina. This rickety mode of travel is swift, only interrupted when Banbridge loudly mentions his thirst and the burnished youth stops to shin up an immense, almost perpendicular coconut palm with utter ease and grace, to pick a baby coconut. He cracks it open Tahitian style, by spearing its hairy shell on a pointed stick. Once he has released the large nut inside and shaken it to check for freshness, he whacks it firmly on the nose with a rock (the coconut always looks like a little face to me, with dark spots for eyes, nose and mouth) and splits it neatly open, offers it to us both: chock full of the best drink in the world.

(Glorious youth! Before I leave here, I’m going to learn to handle a coconut like that. I might introduce it to Rugby as a sport.)

My sense of barrelling towards something, of something imminent, of great importance, looming in front of me, has only intensified since we docked. What this is, I know not…

Back at the Papeete post office I picked up my mail and my heart went through a very curious performance. Letter from the Ranee–including a cheque from the
Westminster Gazette
for my ‘Letters from America’. I kiss the envelope. Letter from Phyllis. Heart sinks. Letter from Cathleen–heart lifts again, soars. Letter from Lady Eileen Wellesley. Oh dear–have I accidentally garnered another convert? I laid the airmail envelopes flat inside my suitcase, atop the shirt that Ka made me and my new toy, the camera, with little desire to read them. I want only to be here, my back bumping against my case, drinking this sour, strange juice, and watching the palm trees twitch in the twilight as we pass, as though a ghost or an invisible black cat tweaks at the fronds to tease us.