The Great Lover Read Online Free PDF Page A

pedalling fast in the direction of the Orchard and Byron’s Pool. I feel sure, suddenly, that it is him for one reason only and that is one I’ll concede: he does have the sort of face that you notice. A face that girls like Kittie would call handsome, or even beautiful. I spent the moments after he’d cycled past me wondering what it was in him that combined to give me this impression. His forehead was high and his hair of a sandy gold colour. He wore it longer than usual, and he wore no tie, either, so that his throat was bare to the sun. I’d only had a second to consider him as he cycled past the church of St Andrew and St Mary, with his long fringe lifting up in the wind like a cock’s comb. Cock of the Walk, Father would have said. It would not have been a compliment.
     
    Mrs Stevenson is all ‘Snap-snap, chop-chop! On you get by seven o’clock this morning,’ and so I set to. The room has been empty for a while. The window is so firm shut that I cannot open it.Dried leaves, half trapped beneath the frames, flicker to dust when I touch them.
    I work hard and don’t dawdle. I am sorry that I have no time to poke my head outside to sniff the lilac and the dog-roses in the garden, or breathe in the smell of the fruit trees in the orchard next door. Apple, pear, plum, medlar and quince, and there might be still more varieties. I’m thinking of the bees again and the wild array of honeys that Mr Neeve must make here, with such a source of food for them. Then I think of Father and my heart pinches a little. I picture him with his strong but bony wrist, turning the handle on the honey-spinner, the frames inside rattling, and the table shaking too, with his efforts, making a sound like a ball scattering inside a barrel. In this memory I hear rain too, spattering the roof of our kitchen, and see the fire glowing and the sweat popping on Father’s brow, until the first honey appears at the mouth of the tap: fat, like a bulb of amber.
    I thought I’d shed my tears for Father two weeks ago. I’m surprised at myself.
    These thoughts are not helping get the work done and, with an effort, I turn my attention to an old bitten-looking beam above the bed. Filthy cobwebs hang from it. When I attack them with the duster, shavings fall too, like flakes of chocolate. Of course, no young man from Cambridge will appreciate the labour it is to turn out a bedroom, so I am not expecting any thanks for the fact that I soaked his china candlesticks in soda to remove the grease, nor that I spent an hour and a half with bottle-brush and patience to clean his water bottle. I dither over whether to put on the pillow shams Mrs Stevenson left out for me. Finally I decide that a young poet with such a good head of silky blond hair has no need of frills and might prefer a plainer spot to lay it. Mrs Stevenson favours such things, but Mother used to say that an ornate pillow sham is only ‘display’, with no place here in England. Such display has come over from the United States.Mother was always scornful of ‘display’. She was full of sweeping condemnations. Her favourite phrase was ‘nature needs no ornament’–I remember being told that when I wanted pretty pins to wear in my hair. I always knew the real reason was that we had no money for such things, so I grew to hate the saying, but since Father’s passing it has come back to me as a decent one, and serviceable.
    ‘I see too much and I hear too well for an old lady,’ Mrs Stevenson said, so I work hard, and with some nervousness for how she will judge me. I sense that the young man is a special favourite of hers and that she is at pains to please him. So I clean the ironwork of the bed with paraffin, rubbing it into every ledge and crevice with the rag and thinking happily of how it will hardly creak now when he rolls over in the night. I wash the tumbler and the soap-dish, carefully using a different cloth from the one for the slop-pail and the chamber, adding a little splash