Free The Great Lover by Jill Dawson

incomplete endowment and jobbery and such things as payment for dedications is a ramshackle affair…wouldn’t you say…?’
    The water plops as a fish jumps, and as we leave the dense trees on the bank behind us and reach Dead Man’s Bend, I fall quiet for a moment, the better to concentrate. It’s a devil to punt here, if one doesn’t know it, as the water is deeper than the length of the punt pole. Augustus is oblivious to the expertise of his chauffeur, however, and continues to drone quietly to Dorelia about the woman who is to sit to him, Jane Harrison, making no attempt to include me in the conversation. My hands sweating, the pole nearly slips through them. I take off my shirt and tie and lay them at my feet. After a cough, I try again, a little more forcefully: ‘I mean, it affects the work, doesn’t it? You see it in Elizabethan times when most of the best writers lost all their shame (which doesn’t much matter) and half their vitality (which does) in cadging and touting.’
    Augustus glances slyly at me, interested at last, but unsure, I believe, at this point, whether my remarks are intended to contradict or support his position. His eyes are closed, his arm dangling lazily over the edge of the boat, Dorelia and her sister Edie resting either side of him, and the children bobbing beside us in the water like noisy ducklings. Dudley snoozes stiffly at the other end of the boat (his flimsy weight hardly achieving its task of balancing us), the sun bouncing off his shiny pate.
    ‘I wonder how much more Milton or Marvell might have given us had they had enough to live on? If anything at all, the loss is enormous, surely.’
    Now Augustus opens one eye and surveys me thoroughly. Finally, he bestirs himself to speak. ‘What about losing half ofSpenser’s The Faerie Queene ? Would have been rather an achievement, in my view.’
    ‘Yes, yes,’ I have to agree, flummoxed. ‘But it’s terrifying, is it not, to think how many artists are living on inherited capital? And if you were to really count the waste of past centuries, one would have to include the artistic potentialities sown here and there in the undistinguished mass of the people, which have perished unconscious in that blindest oblivion–the mute, inglorious Miltons of the village and slum Beethovens—’
    Augustus opens both eyes at last and interrupts, with his slow drawl, ‘You think poets and artists should compose at the loom, the way William Morris hoped?’
    He is calmly smoking a cigarette now. With his curious pale face and his sea-anemone eyes, he might have been a Macedonian king himself, or a Renaissance poet. A stab of envy races through me as Dorelia snuggles up to him and I remember again all I have heard about his prodigious sexual appetites, the many, many conquests. My heartbeat quickens and something akin to fear grows there, when I’m faced with his challenging stare and the feeling that Augustus, after all, is living the life as I am not, and might uncover me as the ridiculous virgin that I am.
    ‘No,’ I mutter at once, beginning to wish my little experiment over, adding sotto voce , like an insolent schoolboy, ‘Although most of Morris’s own stuff surely was–probably why the poetry was so dull.’
    ‘What, then?’
    ‘Well, not the idea that the artists of the future will all be those who do common work in the day and have time to compose in the evening–no. And art must always be an individual and unique affair, not “expressing the soul of a community”. All I’m suggesting is that the state might endow individuals who show promise with a substantial sum, say, two hundred and fifty pounds a year, in order that they may pursue a life that would otherwise be closed to them.’
    Dorelia shifts a little in the boat, crossing one foot over the other so that I am suddenly confronted with her soles: rude and dirty and bare, and this, more than Augustus’s hard expression, is what finally silences me.
    ‘I didn’t