Tenderness, page 39
With one leg in her trousers, she almost fell over as she scooped up her underwear belatedly. She surveyed the box-room. ‘I’m afraid we’ve made a mess of your index cards.’
‘Will we do this again?’ he asked through a yawn. But his voice had feeling in it he couldn’t disguise.
Her cheeks burned from the chafing of his stubble. ‘Here, you mean?’
‘My key-ring is large.’ He jingled his trousers.
She bent to his belly-button and kissed it.
His cock woke and climbed to her.
‘Jingle, jingle,’ he tried.
‘Very subtle,’ she said.
‘Penises are incapable of subtlety.’
She retrieved her gift from the desk that blocked the door – her illicit library loan – as if it were a present left by elves. ‘I really didn’t believe you when you said you’d find Lawrence for me.’
He propped his head on his hand. ‘I don’t disappoint.’
She smoothed the wrapper lovingly. ‘I’ll return it by end of week, I promise.’
He turned over, reached for a stack of index cards and cleared his throat. ‘Sit down for a few minutes and listen to this. Then I’ll break you out of this place.’
She fastened her bra. ‘E. M. Forster himself is giving the Lawrence lecture. Apparently, they knew each other – centuries ago.’ She stared at her new acquisition: ‘With any luck, I might even be corrupted.’
‘My work here is not done, clearly!’
She still hadn’t conceded to sit. She nudged his armpit with her big toe. ‘You don’t do any work up here, do you? I bet you’re wanking away over’ – she waved an arm at the assorted stacks – ‘all this.’
He fished for his specs in a case in his trouser pocket. ‘Why do you think I’m already half-blind?’ Then he patted the rug, determined to delay her departure.
So she stopped fretting about porters and keys, and seated herself again, rapt as her lover narrated for her, from assorted index cards, the journey of a single book, from Italy to England.
‘That was wonderful,’ she said, blinking, when he finished. ‘Thank you.’ She smoothed her hair. ‘Right. Up! – or we’ll both be sent down.’ She stuffed her knickers into her trouser waistband.
He rose at last, scratched his chest, ran his hands through his hair, and stumbled into his clothes. He was lean and pale-skinned, now that she could see him properly. Her eyes lingered on the clean hollows above his buttocks; the strong strips of muscle in his legs; the beautiful movement of his shoulder blades. She loved the naked nape of a man’s neck; they were still children there somehow.
‘And they’re off!’ he said, pivoting suddenly and slapping her bottom.
She slapped his back.
Together they moved in stealth, down corridors and through reading-rooms. At each door, he studied the keys on his ring and, in trial-and-error, on they went, until they arrived at her locker, where she hurriedly buttoned and belted her mac over her ‘library loan’. Finally, at the top of the stone staircase where his lips had first brushed the lobe of her ear, they stood, unsure, dazzled by each other, and embarrassed.
He broke the silence, patting the illicit book and bending to speak to its bump under the belt of her buttoned coat. ‘Be sure to grow big and strong for Mamma and Papa.’
Then she kissed him, urgently on the lips, turned and dashed down the stairs, expectant.
iv
The red-brick chimney stacks of Newnham College surveyed her approach. Trinity’s clock had just chimed the hour – 5 a.m. – which meant the gates were still locked. She stood, her face pressed to the wrought-iron sunflowers, wondering how long she might have to wait before a porter passed. And then, what to say? Would she be fined? Or worse?
She resigned herself to the hidey-hole passage, through the gap in the hedge by the bike sheds – every renegade Newnhamite’s last resort. It meant crawling on all fours, and in this instance, with the added challenge of a stolen rare book smuggled in her coat.
When she emerged, the college grounds were transformed. In the night, she and Nick had registered the high winds outside his tower, but their world had reduced to the dimensions of that box-room. Now, she saw the white petals of the great rose garden everywhere. The blooms had been blasted and, in their blown abundance, they looked, that late-September morning, like the first snow of the year.
She passed Sidgwick Hall, hurried down the mossy stone steps, and crossed the sunken garden. The circular pool at its centre was occult and murky. Early-morning mist had erased the box-hedges and benches, and the yew trees brooded over her. Yet at her feet, the earth itself seemed to surge and swell with life, as if it were a vast sheet billowing out irrepressibly.
She’d had little sleep and was still caught in the heady uplift of the night. Not ‘rapture’, but fullness. She had liked being re-made in her lover’s hands into an object of desire, a yearned-for body. Perhaps she wasn’t supposed to like being objectified, but she had. She’d loved his touch, his hunger, and as she walked, she felt again the electricity of that first clasping of palms as he led her up the stairs.
She crossed the lawns of Clough Hall. Its ground floor was uncharacteristically sober and quiet – no clatter of breakfast plates yet. Ahead, the windows of Peile Hall blinked. She checked herself before she entered: the belt of her mac was still firmly knotted and her book was in place beneath it. At the main door, she composed her face, inserted her key and slipped inside, passing the porter as he blew on his first cup of tea of the day and, thoughtfully, turned a blind eye.
On she went, past the pigeonholes, where no literary rejections waited to spoil her happiness. Then: up her staircase to her new room for her final year, Room 213. As she climbed, she was still unaware that her knickers had fallen from her person, somewhere between the college gates and the door of her room.
Inside, she unbuttoned her coat, released the book, and crossed quickly to the oak bureau, as if, even now, a determined senior librarian might be hot on her heels. She had never stolen anything – not that it was theft, she reasoned, if you planned to return it. She had merely ‘liberated’ a book which wanted to be read. The author, she assured herself, would have wanted her to have it – or would have certainly if she’d crossed his palm with two guineas.
And she remembered again her Great-Uncle Francis’s words during her most recent Greatham visit – ‘A dangerous man’ – while her Granny Madeline had avoided the topic of Lawrence altogether. Why?
Beside her narrow bed, the oak bureau was generously proportioned and somehow benign. On taking up residence in her new room, she’d discovered the decades of former residents’ signatures on its back panel, dating all the way back to 1910, the year Peile was opened. There was a quiet comfort in that. You are not alone, all those names said. You are in good company. There was even a bent compass kept in the drawer for the purpose of signing. It was the first thing she did on taking up occupancy.
The autographs, however, weren’t the bureau’s most intriguing feature. The furniture of Peile Hall was known for its quirks and anomalies, and in the bureau she’d discovered a secret compartment at its bottom.
She prised off its cover now, and into the compartment slid Lawrence’s banned novel, a prized 1928 first edition. It would be a friend, she told herself, to her own small collection stashed there: a copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the erotic stories of Anaïs Nin, the manuscript pages of her own fledgling novel, plus the eye-stone, which had travelled back with her from Greatham.
She laid the stone on top of her library ‘loan’, Lady Chatterley, and replaced the compartment’s cover. Then she slipped out of her slacks, found fresh knickers, and lay down for a few hours. Breakfast was at nine sharp and she was hungry.
Should she take the job as a hotel-girl, after all? she wondered sleepily. Perhaps her novel demanded it. Perhaps she needed worldliness; glimpses of that which, otherwise, she’d never see or know, or not if ‘society’ could help it.
She could still smell Nick on her – his hair oil on her fingers, the light yeasty smell of his balls on her palm.
Her nipples were sore.
She closed her eyes, content in the knowledge that she had a lover, that she had lost her virginity amid the erotically arcane, and that locked in a secret compartment in her college room was a rare, unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
She rolled onto her stomach. Her lover, literally, had the key to the arcane. To the mysteries.
He had an appendix scar. A scrawl of light-brown chest hair. The hair under his arms was unexpectedly soft. Eyes – green or brown? She still wasn’t sure. Notes scribbled in ink on his hand, illegible. A high, pale forehead. Thick specs.
How delicious his touch had been.
Fuck, she breathed, trying the word out.
It was good to have words at her disposal. All words. To have that ‘f’. The soft ‘ck’. To be unafraid.
‘Fuck, how lovely you are,’ he’d said.
Her body had moved him to expletives.
She smiled into her pillow.
It was difficult to think of E. M. Forster, a shy, short man with a receding chin – a kindly but desiccated figure – reading aloud from Lady Chatterley, or lecturing on Lawrence’s philosophy of men, women and the ‘sacred-sexual’.
She had passed Mr Forster once outside the university concert hall. He’d seemed too unprepossessing a figure to have written A Room with a View. She could never imagine old people any younger than they were, just as she could never see bomb-sites in London and imagine them as anything but waste ground or car-parks, not even when her parents described the great buildings that had once filled those gaps. In the same way, she could see only the octogenarian Forster – the weeds growing from his ears and nose; the uncleared rubble of a long life.
If she was unable to imagine a young Mr Forster, perhaps she’d never be capable of a novel at all.
Certainly her tutors, in the reverence they communicated for the ‘Greats’, had managed to stymie hers and most of her peers’ hopes of achieving anything more than a respectful appreciation of their betters. Even so, she was determined that she should have more, and be more.
In Cambridge, she had now passed a ‘great writer’ outside a concert hall: Mr E. M. Forster. That was exciting, no matter his age. That was at least a start to life.
Somewhere within that small, balding head were brain cells which held the residue of old conversations with Lawrence himself. She almost wished she could press that elderly, liver-spotted pate between her palms, and listen for Lawrence’s voice as she’d once listened, as a child, for voices through a tin can on a string.
‘Why so cramped and miserable in your being, Forster? Why do you not act? Why do you dodge yourself? Why a virgin?’
We cannot see Forster’s blind tramping through four miles of semi-darkness, across the floods of Sussex, to catch the train that morning in February 1915. His own novel of illicit love, already written by the time he visited Lawrence – his love story of the stockbroker Maurice Hall and the gamekeeper Alec Scudder – was to remain a secret and unpublished, at Forster’s instruction, until after his death.
For the forthcoming lecture, Dina wished she could summon the courage to stand and propose her thesis to this genteel don and celebrated author. She should like to suggest that Lawrence’s notion of ‘tenderness’ – significant enough to have once been the working title of Lady Chatterley’s Lover – was, in fact, the very concept upon which the novel, his ‘bright book of life’, depended; that he and his friend Katherine Mansfield had shared this notion of ‘tenderness’ in relation, not only to life, but to art itself.
Lawrence, she would argue – in her fantasy lecture-hall scenario – derived his notion of tenderness from his writer-hero (heroine) George Eliot, from her artistic devotion to ‘sympathy’, or the imaginative ‘entering into’ the mind, soul, spirit or body of another. The life of the body was not, for Lawrence, separate from those other things. Rather, it was the way to those other things, and could not be divided from them. It was only Christianity which had cut them asunder.
Her thoughts rushed on as she spoke from her place in the imaginary lecture hall.
It was this fundamental principle of sympathy or ‘tenderness’ – namely, the recognition that we all share a human form and spirit, and are vulnerable – and not merely the development of social realism in literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – which had, in her opinion, allowed the novel to become the most profound vehicle for the expression of human consciousness.
The great power of the form lay in the tenderness of the novel’s ‘eye’; in it, and also in the fact that, as Lawrence himself had said, the novel, as a form, was entirely incapable of absolutes. Yet in that ‘incapability’ lay its power.
In her imagined scene, she reads aloud, in a clear voice, to Mr Forster from her notes: ‘ “All vital truth,” Lawrence said, “contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.” ’ Wasn’t that a wonderful thing to say? she would venture.
It seemed to her that systems of thought, which, by definition, must aim for a purity of absolute thought, so often went terribly wrong. One only had to look at the French Revolution, she would say, as if off the top of her head – or Nazism or Stalinism or McCarthyism. If only the world wanted novels as much as it wanted ideologues, pure ‘philosophies’, and so-called great ‘systems’ of thought!
She was digressing – apologies, Mr Forster, she would say. If he would permit it, she would like to argue that Lawrence had departed from his hero George Eliot’s ‘formulation’ of sympathy only, but crucially, in one sense: Lawrence’s view of tenderness was a form of ‘coming through’ – a coming-through from shame, a confronting of the human predilection for violence, a painful stripping away to truth, the truth of human need, frailty and longing. Lawrence believed that was the tender point at which change was possible. Real change. Metamorphosis. And healing too, she added. The war, the Great War, had ‘killed’, or at least crippled, Lawrence’s England. She did not need to tell Mr Forster that, of course, for it had been his England too.
It could be healed, Lawrence had believed. She did as well. It could stand free again, but not on the back of jingoism and false glories. It had been D. H. Lawrence’s dying effort to say it could be healed, but to say so un-absolutely. And that was Lady Chatterley.
Dina concluded her imaginary disquisition with Lawrence’s own words: ‘We should ask for no absolutes, or absolute. Once and for all and for ever, let us have done with the ugly imperialism of any absolute.’
As she lay on her bed, Forster quietly commended her from the lectern. In reality, she knew she hadn’t a hope of a First.
Her room was cold. The heating of Peile Hall would not be turned on until November, and her room had no fireplace. But she could not let herself get under the bedcovers. She’d fall asleep and miss the breakfast hour. Instead she leaped up, grabbed her academic gown from its peg, and draped it over herself, wishing she were back at Greatham, dozing by the fire in the library – or out in the day’s gusts, picking beans and tomatoes for lunch with her grandmother.
As she lay down again, wrapped in black, she thought of Granny Madeline at Winborn’s before she, Dina, had left the last time. Her grandmother had insisted she take a bag of supplies: a pot of Greatham honey, farm butter in a jar, and crumpets for toasting on her arrival back in Peile Hall.
She adored her grandmother, having spent most of her first seven years of life with her, as her parents travelled back and forth, to Italy and London, for literary and war-work. In fact, Greatham still seemed like her true home, not Bayswater at all. When in London, a deep part of her missed the green cradle of the Downs.
At least, she thought, she had finally had a lover.
At least she’d experienced ‘mysteries’. The arcane.
At least she’d smuggled out the most dangerous D. H. Lawrence novel for her private education.
As she lay in her Newnham bed, she could not imagine that, in a year’s time, she would be standing in a court of law, telling the world about that education – and stretching a point, just occasionally, as she did so:
‘The influence of the book, in unexpurgated form, on me, and on my many friends with whom I discussed it at the time, was to turn our thought entirely against experimental sexual relations and in favour of a settled and lifelong one…’
She felt languorously post-coital. Then sleep ambushed her. Twenty past eight, said her bedside clock. Her stomach rumbled but it was still too early for breakfast. She got to her feet and retrieved her treasure from her bureau.
‘Her’ copy, Nick had narrated, was one of only a thousand printed in Florence by a friend of Lawrence, the ‘broadminded’ Florentine bookseller ‘Pino’ Orioli, whom he first met in England, and who had helped the Lawrences to find their Tuscan ‘Villa Mirenda’ to lease. Lawrence’s first typist in Italy had objected to the ‘language’ in the manuscript, then quit. Aldous Huxley’s wife, Maria, took over.
In February 1928, Lawrence wrote to Orioli: ‘I am going to make expurgated copies for Secker and Alfred Knopf’ – his publishers – ‘then we can go ahead with Florence edition, for I am determined to do it.’
‘It’ being – Nick explained – the full, living story. But Lawrence simply couldn’t do the deed. He couldn’t bring himself to start chopping. I cannot expurgate the real one – physical impossibility. I might as well try to clip my own nose into shape with scissors. The book bleeds…
A plan was agreed, namely to sell the novel through private subscription only – which would be, they hoped, Lawrence’s means of bypassing all publicity and, with it, the worry of another ban. He had not forgotten the experience of The Rainbow. Nor the penury which followed.
