Free The Great Lover by Jill Dawson Page A

take you for a socialist, Brooke.’
    I am pink by now and quite ridiculous. How to extricate myself and prevent him shooting straight to Newnham to make Jane Harrison hoot with laughter about me? ‘Well, you knew, of course, that I’m a member of the Cambridge Fabian Society? Although, admittedly, not quite as devout as the Webbs would like me to be, no, nor as interested in economics, it’s true, but—’
    ‘He’s not a socialist,’ Dorelia murmurs in her lazy way. ‘He says what he believes will please or provoke you.’
    Now my humiliation is complete, and my face flames with a blush of tomato red. Dudley stirs from his drowsy slumber, where he has melted like wax in the sun, unsticks himself from his end of the boat, stands up and offers to take the pole. (I know at once that he has been listening and, in his characteristic, kindly way, hopes to rescue me.) Dudley’s moving towards me rocks the boat violently and nearly dunks me in the drink. I’m tempted to leap in anyway, to join Pyramus and David and the others; be free of this scalding torture.
    Without waiting for Dudley to take over I drive the pole hard into the water, where it threatens to lodge in the mud and pull me out with it, to dangle, both hands clinging, like a damselfly sticking to a reed. We leave the meadows behind and reach the rushing water of the weir at last, which provides a distraction of sorts: Dorelia sits up, pushing her scarf away from her eyes, then calls to the boys once she understands that we must get out, drag the boat over the wooden rollers, and relaunch it to reach the Backs. The boys’ splashings and shrieks are temporarily stalled, as they scramble to the water’s edge to do our bidding.
    So many hands make light work. The boat is dragged over in an instant. Then we are back in the river with a splash, tothe accompaniment of many small, excited voices, who remain bobbing in the water.
    Now Augustus is explaining to Dorelia and Edie the magical construction of the Mathematical Bridge, and they are readjusting their attitude to the rickety wooden structure and admiring it. I’m tempted to murmur that this is somehow my point. That regardless of age or background, this desire to be an artist surely comes from the same impulse, a very simple one: an overwhelming desire to– share or show. ‘I saw–I saw,’ the artist says, ‘a tree against a sky, or a blank wall in the sunlight, and it was so thrilling, so arresting, so particularly itself–that, well, really, I must show you—’
    But I say nothing, and hand the pole to Dudley, then stumble across a rocking boat to take up my place in Dudley’s vacated section where I hunker down like the bull-terrier Pudsey Dawson after a scolding. Impossible not to be stung by Dorelia’s remark. Does she share Henry James’s judgement, then, based on nothing more than a glance at my face, that it is possible to deduce I possess no merit in any field of endeavour?
    Dudley begins punting in an elegant, smooth rhythm. The boys, tired, suddenly want to clamber into the boat, which they do with much shouting, rocking and tipping, and thoroughly drenching us all.
    ‘I have heard there are some very lovely young women in the Fabian Society,’ opines Augustus, when the din dies down. ‘I hear H. G. Wells has found it very…accommodating.’ Closing his eyes again, he settles himself once more among his crowded nest of women and children, while Dudley–with one sympathetic glance at me–guides us skilfully under the next bridge.
    I glance up as we slide beneath, to see how the shadows and light on the underside form intricate patterns, like the veins on a leaf.
    Naturally enough, I keep this ludicrous, pointless, poetic observation to myself.
     
    There is ample work when Mr Brooke and the others leave to go punting. I have to clear the table and, most important, supervise Kittie washing up. Now, although I am the new girl, I have learned something about Kittie. If I don’t attend