Motherland

by William Nicholson

  ‘Yes,’ says Larry. ‘I realise that.’

  ‘But marriage is for ever. It’s till death.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Larry.

  His father was married till death. Nine years, and then death. Those nine years have crystallised into a sacred monument. The perfect marriage.

  ‘Can you do that, Larry?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Larry. ‘How do you know? Did you know?’

  His father gives a slow emphatic nod. No words. He has never spoken about his dead wife. Never mentioned her name since her death, except in their prayers. God bless Mummy and watch over us from heaven and keep us safe till we meet again.

  Watch over me now, Larry thinks, wanting to cry.

  ‘I’m not your priest,’ says his father. ‘I’m your father. I want to say something the Church can’t say to you. If you don’t really love this girl, you would be doing a wicked thing if you married her. You would be condemning both of you, and your children, to a life of unhappiness. From what you tell me, she understands this very well. She doesn’t want a husband who is merely doing his duty. Of course, whatever happens, you must support her. But if you marry, marry of your own free will. Marry for love.’

  Larry is unable to speak. In every word his father utters, he feels the powerful force of his love for him. He may use the language of moral imperatives, but his underlying concern is for his son’s happiness. This is what it is to be a father. He’s willing to set aside even his most deeply cherished beliefs for the sake of his child.

  ‘Don’t ruin your life, Larry.’

  ‘No,’ says Larry. ‘That is, if I haven’t already.’

  ‘But if you think you really can love her – well then.’

  Larry meets his father’s eyes. He wants so much to hug him, and feel his father’s arms holding tight. But it’s years since they hugged.

  ‘There’s the practical side of things,’ he says. ‘You say I must support her, and of course I must. But it’s not so simple.’

  ‘I take it,’ says his father, ‘that art has not proved to be remunerative so far.’

  ‘Not so far.’

  Now his father will tell him that this is just as he predicted in their one great row before the war. That he’s wasted his youth on a foolish dream. That now he must face up to his responsibilities.

  ‘But you love it?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Your painting. Your art. You love it.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘You sound very certain about that.’

  ‘You’re asking me if I love to paint, Dad. I am certain of that. It’s all I want to do. But I’m not certain about anything else. I’m not certain that I’m good enough. I’m not certain I’ll ever be able to make my living at it.’

  ‘But you love it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s a rare thing, Larry. That’s a gift from God.’

  Abruptly he gets up from his chair and goes to the desk where he keeps his private papers. For a few moments he fiddles about, consulting the pages of his ledgers.

  ‘Here is what I propose,’ he says. ‘I will increase your allowance by an additional £100 a year. I will pay for the rental of an appropriate flat for this young lady. Whether you live there with her, and upon what terms, is entirely your own business. How will that do?’

  ‘Oh, Dad!’

  ‘I’m trying to be practical about this, Larry. It’s not for me to judge you.’

  ‘I thought you’d tell me to take a job in the company.’

  ‘What, as a punishment? The company isn’t a penal colony. If you ever join the company, it must be of your own free will.’

  ‘Like marriage.’

  ‘Yes. Very like.’

  He holds out his hand. Larry takes it and grasps it.

  ‘Let me know what you decide.’

  *

  Bicycling back across London, Larry finds himself once more tossed this way and that by conflicting emotions. His father’s generosity awes him and leaves him floundering. Without realising it, he now knows he had gone home to receive instruction in his duty. Unable to take the decision himself, he looks to the institutions that frame his life, family, school, church, to force his hand. Instead he leaves his father’s house freer and more empowered than when he arrived; and therefore more solitary and more burdened.

  How is it that others make this decision so easily? Do they feel absolute certainty? He thinks then of Ed and Kitty. They met twice – twice! – before deciding to marry. At the time he felt no surprise: why should love require more than an instant? And in wartime there was always too little time, and only a very uncertain future. But let peace break out, let the future stretch before you for its full span of years, and who can know for certain what they want?

  So maybe, he thinks, it’s this very demand for certainty that’s the stumbling block. If certainty is impossible, then why expect it? Perhaps the decision to marry is a provisional one, made on best information at the time, and it takes years to grow into certainty. If this is the case, all that’s needed to kick-start the process is some outside pressure. And what could be a more traditional outside pressure than a baby on the way? In some countries it’s understood that no engagement takes place until the girl is pregnant; that, and not sex, being the purpose of marriage.

  But what about love?

  Still debating within himself, he turns into the road where he lives, and there’s Nell, sitting on the steps, looking out for him. She jumps up, her face grinning from side to side.

  ‘Guess what?’ she says. ‘I’ve been at Julius’s. He says your pictures are all sold!’

  ‘Sold! Who to?’

  ‘Some anonymous buyer. Isn’t that wonderful? You’re being collected! Like a real artist!’

  ‘I’m amazed.’

  ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’

  He feels a sudden exultation as the news sinks in. His paintings are wanted. Money has been paid for them. There’s no endorsement quite as gratifying as this. Words cost the speaker nothing. But no one pays out real money unless they mean it.

  He props his bike against the wall and takes Nell in his arms. Her excitement is all for him. In this time of crisis for herself, she thinks only of him.

  ‘I couldn’t wait to tell you. I’ve been sitting on the steps hugging myself.’

  ‘It’s brilliant,’ he says. ‘I can’t believe it.’

  He kisses her, there on the steps.

  ‘We have to celebrate,’ she says.

  ‘Yes, but what about your message?’

  ‘Oh, that,’ she says. ‘Did you manage to get it out of the bottle without breaking it?’

  ‘No. I had to smash it.’

  ‘I thought you might.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have run away.’

  ‘Shouldn’t I?’

  She’s in his arms, and she’s smiling up at him, and she’s so funny and beautiful, and his paintings have sold and the sun is shining, and suddenly it seems easy.

  ‘Marry me, Nell.’

  She goes on smiling at him, but says nothing at all. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.

  ‘Nell? I asked you a question.’

  ‘Oh, it was a question, was it?’

  ‘I want you to marry me.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Don’t you want to?’

  ‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘You’re not sure!’

  ‘Well, I am only twenty.’

  ‘Almost twenty-one.’

  ‘But I do love you, Lawrence.’

  ‘There you are, then,’ he says.

  ‘I just don’t know that I’d be good for you.’

  ‘Of course you would!’ Hearing her express her doubts frees him of his own. ‘You’re perfect for me. You’re good to me, and you never stop surprising me, and you make me happy. How am I to live without you?’

  She gives him such an odd look then, as if that secret part of h
erself is revealing itself to him for the first time, the fearful, vulnerable part of herself. Her look says to him: promise me you won’t hurt me.

  ‘You see,’ she says, ‘it’s different for girls.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’ve got your painting, and being important in the world, and doing the things men do. But for us it’s just the husband and the children. There isn’t anything else. So we have to get it right.’

  She sits back down on the step, and he sits down beside her and takes her hand in his.

  ‘So let’s get it right together,’ he says.

  ‘We don’t have to decide anything today, do we?’

  ‘Not if you don’t want to,’ he says.

  ‘I don’t really know what I want,’ she says.

  Larry is nonplussed.

  ‘But I thought …’

  He doesn’t complete the thought. Suddenly it seems foolish.

  ‘You thought all girls want to be married, and it’s the men who have to be pushed.’

  ‘You said you want to be married.’

  ‘I do,’ says Nell. ‘But only in the right way.’

  ‘What’s the right way?’

  ‘My parents are married,’ she says. ‘But they’re not happy. Sometimes I think they hate each other. I don’t want to end up like that.’

  ‘But if two people love each other,’ Larry says.

  ‘I suppose they thought they loved each other. In the beginning. You never really know, it seems to me. Not for absolute sure.’

  She’s looking at him earnestly now, stroking his hand as she speaks. He feels as if the world is spinning round him. Her words and her touch contradict each other. Does she love him or not?

  ‘But Nell,’ he says helplessly. ‘What about the baby?’

  ‘You mean we should get married because of the baby?’

  ‘Well, it’s part of it, isn’t it?’

  ‘And if there hadn’t been a baby, you wouldn’t have wanted to?’

  Larry is caught. He wants to answer her, ‘I might not have asked you so soon, but I would have proposed later.’ Is that true? He feels the blazing force of her honesty, and is ashamed.

  ‘Darling Lawrence,’ she says, squeezing his hand. ‘I love you so much. Let’s not build ourselves any cages. I couldn’t bear it if I thought you were trapped where you didn’t want to be. Let’s just love each other the way we do now, and let the days go by, and not ever have to lie to each other.’

  In that moment he loves her more than he’s ever done. This sweet child of truth, he thinks. Where does she come by such instinctive purity? An odd word to apply to a girl who gives her body freely to him, but he feels it deep in her, an innocence that is not a lack of experience, nor a childlikeness. Sometimes when she’s looking at him with her solemn eyes he feels she’s far older, certainly more mature, than he can ever be, for all his eight years longer in the world. Somehow Nell has been born true.

  ‘If that’s what you want,’ he says.

  ‘And if it’s what you want,’ she says softly.

  20

  Pamela makes her way slowly, deliberately, from rock pool to rock pool, in her ruched bathing costume and little wellington boots, carrying a plastic cup from a thermos flask. Her chubby three-year-old body moves gracefully. Reaching a miniature chasm between the rocks, she crouches and springs across to the other side, and in the same movement bends down to peer into the new pool. The tide is out, and the great expanse of shining rock and seaweed reaches almost to the horizon. She’s exploring, seeking tiny crabs and transparent fishes, moving ever further from the narrow pebble beach beneath the cliffs. What if she were to fall?

  ‘Don’t go too far, darling,’ Kitty calls, sitting at the bottom of the concrete steps.

  Pamela pays her no attention as always. Silly to call out, really. This is a child who asserts her independent will so fiercely that she’ll do the opposite of what she’s told to do, just to make a point.

  Hugo, who has gone hunting along the beach for treasure, now returns to the steps. He’s a sweet-faced youth, a boy really, though as he likes to tell her, there’s only five years between them. He was called up, but it was near the end of the war, and he never saw active service.

  ‘No chance of a VC for me,’ he says.

  He’s pink-faced, bright-eyed, eager to learn. He admires Ed above all men, and without realising it, has picked up many of Ed’s ways of thinking and talking.

  ‘Look what I found,’ he says. ‘Jewels.’

  He shows Kitty a handful of shiny translucent pebbles, dark green, milky white, amber, ruby red. Fragments of glass that were once bottles or jars, ground smooth by the action of the waves.

  ‘Pammy’ll love those,’ says Kitty. And looking out at the distant figure of her daughter, ‘Do you think she’s gone too far?’

  ‘She is quite a long way out.’

  ‘She takes no notice of me when I call.’

  ‘I’ll go and get her, shall I?’

  He lopes off over the rocks, eager to be of service. Kitty is well aware that Hugo likes her company more than he should, but she sees no harm in it. Somehow the division of labour in his partnership with Ed calls for Ed to be away, touring the humbler vineyards of France, while Hugo stays home and manages the delivery of the orders as they come in. The business is not yet established enough to have its own premises, so the barn beside their farmhouse is used for storage, stacked high with cases of wine. Hugo is forever building up or depleting the stacks as the shipments come and go. His Bedford van has become a familiar sight in the yard, and he himself almost another member of the family.

  She watches him now, silhouetted against the bright horizon, as he reaches Pamela. He stands between the rock pools reasoning with her. Kitty sees how the little girl turns her back on him and hops further away from the shore; and how he circles round to block her venturing any further. Then come sharp cries of frustration, and she’s hitting his legs. Finally he’s bent down and picked her up by the waist, and he’s carrying her back.

  She kicks her feet and beats with her fists and screams at him, but he holds on tight. By the time he deposits her before Kitty, the little girl is scarlet in the face and seriously insulted.

  ‘I hate you!’ she says. ‘I hate you!’

  ‘You went too far,’ says Kitty. ‘What if you’d hurt yourself?’

  Pamela kicks Hugo’s shin hard with her little boots. He lets out an exclamation of pain.

  ‘Pammy!’ says Kitty. ‘Stop that!’

  ‘I hate you!’ says the child.

  With a mother’s instinct, Kitty understands the source of her daughter’s rage. It’s the being picked up, the being rendered powerless. Nevertheless she can’t be allowed to kick people.

  ‘Pammy,’ she says. ‘You hurt Hugo. Look, he’s crying.’

  Hugo takes the hint, and starts to whimper.

  ‘Poor Hugo,’ says Kitty.

  Pamela looks at Hugo suspiciously. Hugo is kneeling on the pebbles, rubbing his shin, crying.

  ‘Kiss it better for him,’ says Kitty.

  Pamela crouches down and gives Hugo’s knee a quick rough kiss.

  ‘Thank you,’ says Hugo in a small voice.

  ‘There,’ says Kitty, trusting the balance of power has been restored. ‘Now say sorry.’

  ‘Sorry,’ says Pamela, scowling at the cliffs.

  Kitty then shows her the jewels Hugo has found for her, and she becomes silent, absorbed in wonder. Kitty looks up to find Hugo gazing at her.

  ‘You’re amazing,’ he says.

  Kitty pretends she hasn’t heard him. He’s becoming more and more open in his manner with her, no longer even pretending to hide his admiration. Kitty treats it as a game, which allows him, in playing along, to say more than he should. One day soon, she thinks, she must have a quiet but firm word with him, before he does something he regrets. But in the meantime, with Ed away so much, she sees no harm in letting herself enjoy his company.

 
; There was a time when Kitty found the attentions of men oppressive, with their furtive looks, their veiled suggestions, their endless importunities. But since marriage and motherhood it has all ceased, and she finds to her surprise that she sometimes misses it. So Hugo and his absurd puppy-love is not as unwelcome as she pretends.

  The three of them climb the steep flight of concrete steps up the cliff. She holds Pamela’s hand tight all the way, even though Pamela pulls crossly to be released. At the top of the steps a wide grass avenue, grazed close by rabbits, runs between banks of gorse over the brow of the hill. This is Hope Gap, a notch in the great chalk cliffs that lies between Seaford Head and the Cuckmere valley.

  Pamela, let go at last, runs on ahead. Hugo carries the basket that contains the thermos flask and what’s left of their cheese and apple sandwiches.

  ‘She’s going to be a heartbreaker, that one,’ he says. ‘Like her mother.’

  ‘What does that mean, heartbreak?’ says Kitty. ‘I’ve never understood that. I don’t see how anyone can be properly in love with someone unless they know they’re loved back. And if they’re loved back, nothing’s broken.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s possible to love all on your own?’

  ‘I suppose in the very beginning. You can get excited, and build up your hopes, and so on. But if it all goes nowhere, then what’s the point? You’re just wasting your time.’

  ‘You may not be able to help it,’ says Hugo.

  ‘Rubbish,’ says Kitty firmly. Then seeing Pamela disappear out of sight, ‘Don’t go too far, Pammy!’

  They reach the brow of the hill. From here they can see the coastline curving away for miles. Kitty looks as she always does for the long pier reaching out from Newhaven harbour. She remembers how she waited on the quayside for Ed to return, and how the first time he came back, and the second time he didn’t.

  When they reach the sheep barn by the road, Pamela has already climbed into the back of Kitty’s ten-year-old Austin. She has the shiny pebbles in her open hands and is studying them intently.

  ‘Put on a jersey, darling,’ says Kitty. ‘It’ll be blowy driving home.’