The Great Lover Read Online Free PDF

of cold water to the pot before I put it back in the toilet cupboard. I do all this with loving attention, with such a particular satisfaction that I am sitting back on my heels admiring my own thoroughness when Mrs Stevenson bursts into the room with another of her hand-clappings and chop-chops to say that the afore-mentioned will be here in a minute and haven’t I got rid of that mouse yet?
    That makes my heart skitter in my chest, though whether it is the mouse (which I chase with the broom) or the afore-mentioned it’s hard to say. Mrs Stevenson clops downstairs to attend to her scones, which, from the smell wafting upstairs, are in danger of burning. I run behind her.
    So it is me who admits him. He appears at the door, tall and sunny, loose-limbed and lanky, with his high forehead and mane of hair that I remember, from my glimpse earlier in the day. I present myself politely, my hands stinging with the efforts of the scrubbing. I hold them tidily behind my back and smile as he grins a glorious grin at me and the sun blazes through thedoor, warming my face to scarlet. He wears grey flannels and a soft collar with no tie; and his face is rather innocent and babyish and, at the same time, inspired with a fierce life. Perhaps that is the secret of the ‘impression’ he creates of extraordinary loveliness, the sort of loveliness you’d more often see in a girl than a young man.
    He holds a half-bitten apple. ‘I say–anyone here mind if I take off my shoes?’ he asks. It isn’t really a question. He holds the apple between his teeth, bending down to step out of his shoes and socks. Mr Rupert Brooke steps over the threshold and into the kitchen.
     
    His naked toes. I try, of course, not to look. But later, when he asks for tea outside on the lawn at the front of the house, and I bring it to him on a wobbling tray, the milk shaking in the little jug, there they are again. Each toe well formed and strong-looking, like the long white keys on a piano. ‘Handsome’ and ‘shapely’ are the two words that present themselves to me, thinking of his feet. And ‘wrong’ is the next. Or should I perhaps say ‘revealing’?
    I have mentioned my habit of looking at things too hard, and considering them too assiduously. Like Father’s hands and the little shock it caused me to understand that Father was not always old and unlovely. Mr Brooke’s toes told me the opposite tale. That he was not only or always a Varsity man, a poet, a person of dust and chalk and King’s College, Cambridge, but a human creature who had once been bathed by a mother. How even his toes were, I think, like the feet of–oh, I don’t know–an animal, a monkey perhaps, something that can use toes the way an ordinary man cannot. And his ankles, too! The naked ankle bone peeping from his trouser leg so prominent, and angular, so beautifully formed. His ankle could never have been mistaken for the ankle of a young woman. It is undeniably male. Such a curious thought made me shiver.
    I have spent long enough in observing toes and weighing my conclusions about them and must surely, I chide myself, have some pressing duties.
    Kittie comes to twitter over him. Seeing that I have forgotten the honey for his tea she brings him a pot, and a spoon, and drops a curtsy and pauses until he looks up from the copy of English Review lying in front of him on the grass and says: ‘Forster’s tale: “Other Kingdom”. Best story ever written, Nellie. It is Nellie, isn’t it?’
    ‘It’s Kittie, sir. Nellie’s the tall one. The girl with the black hair over there.’ She nods towards me and he laughs then and turns in his lazy way to look at me. The garden shudders with a sudden breeze as he does and a purple hairstreak butterfly flickers past my face.
    Seconds later I bob a foolish curtsy, just like Kittie, then want to kick myself. Escaping, I realise that even though he is lying on his side on the grass, propping his head on his elbow in an appearance of