Tenderness, page 36
In recent years, if she were visiting her grandmother during the break in the Lent term, she felt increasingly conscious of her own ‘stasis’ as the procession passed. She was well aware that the Greatham girls with whom she’d played as a child in the war years had ‘beaux’ and husbands now. Some had children as well. She had to be the only virgin left among them. Even the Virgin Mary, on the plaque on Shed Hall, seemed to look at her sorrowfully these days.
At Cambridge – at her all-female college – boys were forever being sneaked in and out of her residence, Peile Hall, with drain-pipes the principal mode of transport. But she herself had never felt sufficient inspiration or motivation to take that risk, not even by her third year, when any self-respecting Newnhamite had the measure of things. What if she were rusticated? Sent down? Her father would have been furious, and her mother deeply disappointed. Only her grandmother, in rural Greatham, would have laughed and shrugged it off.
She was ‘pretty enough’, the other girls assured her, although she did wonder if that was ‘damning with faint praise’. Her parents had never encouraged vanity or self-consciousness in their children, and as a family they had an unspoken policy in which they simply did not comment on the appearances of others. It was, she knew, beneath them, but it had left her ill-equipped among most her age.
She couldn’t objectively see anything wrong with herself. She was tall, but not too tall; slim but not skinny. She had the thick, dark hair and wide eyes of the Meynells, and the fair skin and long legs of the Lucases. From her grandfather, she had inherited her ‘aquiline nose’ – or so said Granny Madeline. In the inventory of herself, she did not discover beauty, but she did not fare badly. It was not impossible, or even unlikely, she decided, that a boy might feel attracted to her. Would she feel the same? It seemed against the odds, two people not only liking each other, but wanting each other. What magic.
There had been no boys at her school, of course. Nor were there any at Newnham. She had joined ‘societies’: the Drama Society, the Ramblers’ Society, and the Christian Society which, she was surprised to discover, was the most louche of the lot. The problem was that she had not wanted to ‘go off’ with just anyone, or even a friend of a friend from her year-group for the sake of it. She didn’t want to ‘have done with it’, as other girls had for curiosity’s sake, although she was curious.
She’d heard mixed reviews from the girls on her corridor. Four or five of them would gather on Sunday afternoons over crumpets and tea, often around the fireplace in Verity’s rooms. Verity was a striking, auburn-haired girl who revealed to the others that, at the critical moment, ‘it’ had been so big, she’d half-expected a kidney to pop from her mouth.
Verity was thought to be an inveterate liar.
‘Where does one put it all?’ said another girl, Rosemary, her lower lip trembling. An awkward silence followed. Unlike Verity, who had maintained a smile throughout her account, Rosemary had made a schoolgirl error. Don’t show fear. Everyone knew that. People could be merciless to those of their own age and sex and, predictably, after she left the room, Rosemary was dismissed as ‘brainy’ but lacking in sophistication and ‘sex appeal’.
Verity and Diana were confident that ‘sex appeal’ was something they could identify as easily as a permanent soft wave.
Dina’s bob wasn’t waved; her hair was thick and straight. She lay low in Peile Hall and adopted a blasé persona. Privately, she didn’t expect her first experience of sex to be the stuff of ‘souls conjoined’, but nor could she accept it was merely a hurdle to get past, or a sacred duty to be performed on her wedding night. If she waited, as her Church instructed, she might find she’d made a dreadful mistake, and the gate of Life would crash shut. She would have ‘made her bed’, her marital bed, and that would be that.
It made complete sense to her that Othello had wooed Desdemona with his stories. She only wanted someone who might catch her imagination. She only wanted ‘a story’. Perhaps she even wanted to be in a story. Briefly. She wasn’t greedy.
Her mind was made up: she did want to have sex, and sooner rather than later.
At that very moment, the high-spirited family in the carriage burst out laughing, as if all those ears had been listening to her every thought.
* * *
—
As she walked from the station, the fields of Greatham were shorn and gold-stubbled. The harvest was in. Somewhere a bonfire was burning – she could smell the sweetness of the smoke – and, in the hedgerows, the blackberries were ripe. She’d take a pail out later and pick for her grandmother.
Great-Uncle Francis was visiting too. As she arrived in the library, Dina surprised him with a kiss to his bald head before she had even dropped her satchel and overnight bag. Then Granny Madeline wheeled in the tea-trolley and seated herself in the winged armchair, where she proceeded to slice lemons for the tea and great slabs of lemon sponge. Dina, she said with a nod of approval, had timed her arrival perfectly.
Great-Uncle Francis, ever the man of letters, quizzed her about her reading for the English Tripos exam. She swallowed a forkful of cake, and projected her voice in the direction of the ear-trumpet he clamped to his head: ‘The Moderns!’ she called.
Francis sniffed. ‘The Moderns.’ His lot, in other words. It was hard to take one’s own contemporaries seriously. One had seen them, close up and from afar, in too many compromising positions over the years. Were there actually any Greats among them? One was aware, he told his great-niece, of the cliques and lucky breaks; of the random breakthroughs and the flash-in-the-pans; of the inflated reviews and the overlooked talent – of which, it went without saying, he considered himself one.
Cambridge had just gone down a notch in his estimation. ‘The Moderns!’ he declared again with a harrumph. As a designation for academic study, it lacked rigour and distinction. What would follow it? The post-moderns? And the post-post-moderns?
‘And who might these “Greats” be?’
Dina called out again for the benefit of his ear-trumpet. ‘Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Katherine Mansfield if I’m permitted—’
His face crumpled, as if with a minor stroke. ‘Do you remember Katherine, Madeline?’
‘I do indeed. She was full of life. A piquant mind, as I recall, and an alert intelligence. Not that I knew her well…’ Madeline leaned forward to pour herself more tea. Her eyes, when she looked up again, were veiled, as if the past were processing before them. ‘She and I were only ever introduced.’ She refrained from stating by whom – Lawrence, or He-Whose-Name-Must-Not-Be-Spoken. ‘I like her stories very much. “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” makes me roar every time.’
‘ “The little colonial”,’ Francis muttered.
‘No,’ called Madeline, craning forward. ‘The “Late Colonel”! It’s a short story.’
‘I know it is!’ he said, vexed. ‘The “little colonial” is what some used to call Katherine M. That’s what she was, after all. Small in stature and from Australia. Or was it New Zealand?’
‘Uncle Francis!’ scolded Dina.
‘I didn’t say I called her that!’
‘Well,’ said Madeline, ‘I approve of your choice, Dina, whatever Francis and your don might say. It was heartbreaking to learn she died so young. In her early thirties, as I recall.’
‘I always thought she must have caught it off him,’ opined Great-Uncle Francis. ‘The tuberculosis, I mean.’
‘Off who?’ asked Dina.
After all these years, he still couldn’t say it. ‘Oh, you know…That bearded chap. Sons and Lovers…Lady Chatterley.’ Francis waved his hand impatiently.
‘D. H. Lawrence!’
He looked up, slightly shaken.
‘D. H. Lawrence,’ Dina repeated happily. ‘He’s my “specialism” this year.’
Her great-uncle coughed into his napkin.
‘Are you quite all right, Francis, dear?’ Madeline’s gaze was steely over the rim of her tea-cup.
‘Shall I pound your back?’ offered Dina.
‘Francis, take a drink of your tea, for heaven’s sake.’
He did as his sister instructed. The utterance of the accursed name had not brought down the roof of Winborn’s. How had it not?
Dina poured herself more tea. ‘I love his novels, those I’ve read, that is, and, if my proposal is approved by my tutor, I’ll read absolutely everything by him.’ She put down her cup, sprang to her feet and started searching the library’s bookshelves. ‘In fact, I thought he might be here somewhere…’
Francis scowled.
‘You know…’ she called over her shoulder. ‘Old editions and whatnot.’
‘Well, you prepared the card-catalogue for the library, so you should know. I rather doubt it myself.’ Francis marvelled at his own powers of restraint.
Madeline would not meet his eye.
‘I was seventeen when I did that job! I can’t be expected to remember every book!’
Behind her back, Francis looked meaningfully across to his sister, as if to say, Books here, by that man? When Hell freezes!
Madeline shook her head. A warning. He was to hold his tongue. She doesn’t need to know about all that, her eyes said. Let her enjoy his books if she wants to.
Yet the man, thought Francis – if man he was, and not devil – had wantonly injured their family. He had betrayed their parents’ warm-hearted hospitality. He had humiliated dear Madeline and Percy, Dina’s own grandparents. He had dreamed up that horrible death for Percy on the page of his evil story, a death that subsequently and sickeningly came true, in part at least, at the Somme. He had written grotesque words about Sylvia. ‘Distorted’. ‘Crippled’. ‘Ugly’. How dared he?
He – Lawrence – had been the stunted excuse for a man. It was true: more than forty years had passed, but Francis still didn’t know how Madeline could remain so calm.
For his part, he would honour his promise to his mother, Alice. He would refuse to speak the man’s name. Yes, he would keep the truth from Dina, and let her pursue her own path. But he couldn’t be expected to encourage it! ‘His prose is far too preachy for my taste, and overdone.’
At the bookshelves, Dina turned, ingenuous. ‘Gosh. Do you think? I’ve never read more wonderful descriptions. He breathes life into every primrose, larch and squirrel.’
‘Dangerous,’ muttered Francis. ‘A dangerous man.’
‘He grows more interesting all the time!’ She joined them again at the hearth. ‘Dangerous, how exactly?’
‘With people. He’s dangerous with people.’
Madeline shot her brother a look.
‘With characters, that is. I always felt rather sorry for poor wounded Sir Clifford Chatterley, relegated to that mechanical bath-chair, and then vilified by both his wife and his author! Insult to injury. That’s what I call it.’
‘Uncle Francis!’ Dina chided. ‘Lawrence isn’t hard on him because he’s in a wheelchair! He’s hard on him because he’s mean-spirited. Sir Clifford is morally paralysed.’
Well, his creator knew all about that.
‘The wheelchair is only the outward manifestation of his soul.’
‘Is that so?’ Francis grimaced.
‘Moreover, Lawrence has given Lady Chatterley a war-hero husband in a wheelchair whom she wants to divorce. He deliberately stacks our sympathies against her – but we still love her! That alone is a triumph!’
‘Well, I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say I loved Lady Chatterley…’
‘No?’ Dina framed an inch of air with her thumb and index finger. ‘Not just a little?’
A hint of a smile appeared on her great-uncle’s face. ‘I suppose it’s possible I once lusted after her – a little.’
Dina took a swig of tea. ‘Well, I should hope so!’
‘Madeline,’ he said, as if to save himself, ‘I think I will have another piece of cake.’
‘But why,’ asked Dina, exasperated, ‘is he – or was he – “dangerous”?’
Her great-uncle cleared his throat. ‘Oh, that was just something Martin Secker, his publisher, used to say. Lord knows what he meant, but that man had a talent for trouble.’ He stared into the fire, remembering. ‘Charming at first. Offensive as soon as your guard was down.’
‘Did you ever meet him?’
Francis had clearly married young. ‘Whatever for?’ the exile asked him over the piano-top. ‘Nearly all marriages are frauds or failures.’ He threw him a walnut. ‘Is it because you were afraid of yourself?’
‘I was rather in love,’ Francis replied, blushing.
‘I’m not sure…’ He looked across to his sister, fiddling with his shirt cuffs. ‘He might have passed through. Our parents were generous to all manner of artists and writers who needed a meal, a roof – or a bath, more often than not.’
Madeline sighed loudly.
‘I believe my friend David – Bunny – Garnett knew him. I suppose I might have met him…But, as I did not “take to” his work, his impression was not, shall we say, lasting.’
Even Dina’s grandfather, who had died in the Great War, long before she was born, seemed to stare out sceptically from his photograph as he listened to Francis.
Dina turned to Madeline. ‘Did you ever meet him, Granny?’
Madeline greeted them at the oaken door, and Lawrence removed a piece of canvas to reveal an array of gifts: pots of sweet peas for planting-out in the garden – he would make a trellis for them, he said. A jar of apple compote. A loaf of bread he’d baked that morning – ‘not as nice as Hilda’s, but nicer than the baker’s in Storrington’. A bottle of French wine.
Uncle Francis straightened in his armchair and cut across Dina’s question, to save his sister: ‘Now, here’s a story for a girl reading English Literature. Henry James himself once retrieved a fan my sister dropped at a ball and returned it to her.’
Dina blinked. What else was Henry James to do with a fan? He was hardly likely to use it himself.
H. G. Wells was the host of the occasion and would later compare the sight of the portly Mr James stooping for the fan to an elephant trying to collect a pea.
Uncle Francis continued undimmed, in his efforts, to entertain and distract. He claimed that Virginia Woolf, on ‘her throne’ in the Bloomsbury Group, was always a tad superior when it came to their mother Alice’s poetry, and also about the family’s Catholicism. But what was less known was the fact that Woolf had once observed to a mutual friend: ‘Well, at least the Meynells believe in something.’ Atheism, said Francis, with a touch of superiority himself, did become rather sterile in the end, and the ‘Bloomsbury lot’ had always laboured under what he believed to be ‘a barren intellectualism’.
Uncle Francis did witter on, Dina thought. But secretly, she regretted missing out on the Colony in its heyday. She’d have loved all the comings and goings, all the interesting people: Virginia Woolf, who had lived in Sussex as well, and all those writers roaming, hither and thither over the Downs, or so it now seemed to her. Her seminar tutor, the great F. R. Leavis, told her not to give it much thought: Woolf was ‘rather over-boiled’, and she was better off reading Conrad and Lawrence.
Of the latter she had read, chronologically – so as to travel through time with him – The White Peacock, The Trespasser, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow and Women in Love, plus the censored version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the only version her school library had owned – any other being, one, illegal and two, ‘corrupting’. She had enjoyed its melancholy romance. At the same time, she’d felt rather cheated – of what, she still didn’t know exactly. It had been like reading with dark spots swimming in front of one’s eyes.
When she’d leaped up to scan the shelves in Winborn’s library, she’d been searching in the secret hope that her grandparents might have purchased, in the twenties or thirties, a copy of the rare, original 1928 version, and that she might find it, before term started. But no one in the family seemed to have been a Lawrence fan.
In time, she’d have to read all his stories and poems too. Even the search was exciting.
She hadn’t forgotten that Granny Madeline had not replied to her question. But the next thing she knew, her grandmother was on her feet, saying she might nap before supper. She squeezed Dina’s hand and said she expected her to finish the last piece of cake. At that, Great-Uncle Francis crossed his arms and pouted.
In family life, we all revert.
* * *
—
Was Dina’s novel doomed to be ordinary? This was the question which went around and around in her mind. She expected it was. What was there left to write? Who was there left to be? She was only another bright, middle-class ‘Newnhamite’, a girl with a good convent-school education and a great-grandmother who might have been Poet Laureate once upon a time – twice upon a time – but wasn’t.
As students of Literature at Cambridge, her generation was expected to admire the Greats, but never to aspire to be one of them. That would have been foolish, and not only foolish, but laughable if you happened to be female. She was out of her depth when it came to her novel, and she knew it. She needed experience. She needed a life.
Other girls on her wing in Peile Hall had taken work as ‘hotel-girls’ at the Swan, the establishment in Cambridge known, she was informed, for its discreetly staged scenes of adultery; for help, in other words, with those divorce cases in which the co-respondent’s name had to be kept out of the courts and the Divorce News. Verity and Diana ‘educated’ her on the subject one Sunday afternoon, strewn across a pair of nun-like beds, in the room of a shy girl called Judith.
Verity slid a Gitane expertly from the box with the dancer on the front – a slender silhouette of a woman in a gypsy dress, who raised a tambourine high. Dina was by no means averse to smoking, but she knew better than to attempt it for the first time in company.
