The Great Lover by Jill Dawson

rubbings and her splashings–and then suddenly the Ranee was in the room, casting about us a giant sweeping grey towel of disapproval and worse than that. Worse than disapproval, I knew at once how she felt towards me, all the feelings she swept into the room with her: disgust, horror, dislike, might I even say intense hatred for my very childish boyish perkiness. Swirling this mood around me and aiming itfinally at such an essential bit of me made me know at once what she felt about all of me.
    That nurse–her name suddenly came to me as Dorothy–was soon after dismissed and I was expected to bathe unaided or with my brothers, but not before the girl had muttered to me one day, ‘Poor Mrs Brooke, don’t be too hard on her, Rupert, for no boy can understand what it is to lose a daughter,’ and the two events conflated at once, and I decided in my childish mind that this was why Mother so disliked my male anatomy, and would like to chop it off and make me a girl, like my poor dead sister.
    Musing on this only caused the same conflicting feelings to surface and I wished to God I might think of something else. When Nell Golightly had gone, with the soft closing click of the door behind her and the squeak of her tread on the stairs, I turned my mind deliberately, and with an effort, to the group of Young Poets I met that time in London. All of them extremely poor. And how they write–some are good, others bad–as they talk. That is to say, their poems give the fullest value when pronounced as they thought and felt them. They allow for ow being aow . Their love poems begin (I invent) ‘If yew wd come again to me’. That is healthy. That way is life. In them is more hope–and more fulfilment–than in the old-world passion and mellifluous despair of any gentleman’s or lady’s poetry.
    Mightn’t Nellie inspire poetry of that sort in me? Mightn’t she offer what Noel can’t possibly? Because, and Noel’s letters make this clear, severing Noel from her family, from her protective sisters who do not allow her to walk alone with a man and were horrified by that simple punt down river, is not a possibility. Whereas Nell is all alone, and has no one here to separate her from me. Only the weight and silence of custom, of my own cowardice, of a million things.
    How easy or hard will it be to talk to the maid? There is this strange idea that the lower classes, the people entering into thecircle now of the educated, are coarsely devoid of taste, likely to swamp the whole of culture in undistinguished, raucous, stumpy arts that know no tradition. It is only natural that the tastes of the lower classes should be at present infinitely worse than ours. The amazing thing is that it is probably rather better. It is true many Trade Unionists do not read Milton. Nor do many university men. But take the best of each. Compare the literary criticism of the Labour Leader with that of the Saturday Review . It is enormously better, enormously readier to recognise good literature.
    Of course, I myself have written for the Spectator and do not wish to decry it. But the force of primness that exists in this country, the washy, dull, dead upper-class brains that lurk in the Victorian shadows…do I wish to throw in my lot with them? Is it all to be such prettiness, my work, and is that what I’m to be remembered for? Not the short fat man with fair hair who wrote the plays (Shakespeare, idiot!) but the pretty golden one who wrote–what was it again that he wrote? Oh, did he write then, that golden Apollo, so handsome, hardly needed to lift a pen, surely, it was enough for him to flick his hair and bend his arse over some Trinity Fellow’s desk, wasn’t it? ‘Lest man go down into the dark with his best songs unsung…’
    O, that way madness lies; let me shun that. My head hurts. I have the pink-eye again.
     
    Mr Brooke doesn’t seem unduly interested in a lady’s looks–the lady here yesterday with two other gentlemen was an