Motherland

by William Nicholson

  41

  Larry stays on at River Farm, taking charge of all the necessary arrangements. Ed’s body is recovered by the coastguards. After a short service in Edenfield church, throughout which Kitty remains silent and dry-eyed, the body is buried in the churchyard. The obituary notice in The Times is entirely taken up by the events of one day in August eight years ago that won Edward Avenell the Victoria Cross.

  Pamela cries in her mother’s arms, but Kitty hardly cries at all. Grief has paralysed her. At the same time she finds she can’t forgive Ed for what he’s done to them. She’s angry that he believed what he was doing was best for her. Alone in bed at night she speaks to him, not shouting, bitter in her insistence.

  ‘What gave you the right to walk away? What makes your suffering so much greater than everyone else’s? How can you not see the damage you’ve done? You have oblivion. What about us? We have a sorrow that won’t end. We have our failure to love you enough. We have your example before us for the rest of our lives, that unhappiness wins in the end.’

  Larry makes no attempt to console Kitty, nor she him. He concentrates his energies on securing the family’s finances, and helping Hugo with the wine import business. By the time Hugo asks him to become a legal partner in the firm he has already made himself indispensable.

  ‘So now Ed’s got what he wanted,’ says Kitty. ‘You’re obliged to look after us, whether you want to or not.’

  She doesn’t refer to Ed’s other bequest to them. Kitty feels numbed, trapped by Ed’s final act, rendered powerless. The thought of profiting from his death is repugnant to her. Such a hurtful wasteful denial of life can have no good consequences.

  Elizabeth, three years old, placid and good-tempered, cries for a while and then returns to her daily concerns. Her father had always been away for such long periods that little in the daily routine changes. Pamela moves on from grief to incomprehension. Neither of the girls has been told the truth about their father’s death. He was out walking, they’ve been told, and he had an accident, perhaps a heart attack, and fell to his death.

  ‘How is it an accident?’ says Pamela. ‘Why was he so close to the edge? I don’t understand.’

  There are no answers.

  ‘We just don’t know,’ Larry tells her. ‘It’s a terrible thing to have happened. All we can do is help each other.’

  ‘How?’ says Pamela. ‘How are we to help each other?’

  ‘By loving each other,’ says Larry.

  ‘Will you love me and Elizabeth? Will you love Mummy?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Larry.

  ‘Will you marry Mummy?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Larry.

  ‘I don’t want you to,’ says Pamela. ‘I’m waiting till I’m grown up, then you can marry me.’

  ‘All right,’ says Larry.

  *

  Larry makes a pilgrimage of sorts to Beachy Head. He goes on his own. He has no way of knowing where Ed stood in that last moment of his life, but this seems to be the closest he can get to him now.

  There are other walkers out on the bald grass. They throw him furtive looks. He knows what they’re thinking. Is he a jumper? Will it happen now, the unstoppable unforgivable act of self-termination?

  I could do it. They could do it. That’s what grips the imagination. Just a few steps, and then a few more, and the story ends.

  But for us the story hasn’t ended.

  My best and oldest friend. I dream of running after you, of arriving here on the cliff top just in time. There you stand, the deed not yet done, and I shout out to you, ‘Wait!’ You turn and see me, and you wait for me. I take you by one arm, I hold you tight, I say, ‘Come home.’ You smile that half smile of yours and step away from the cliff edge and we walk home together, you pushing your bike. There are two letters in your jacket pocket that will never be delivered.

  I’ve loved you for so long. How could you leave me?

  *

  Larry has a visit from Rupert Blundell. He seems uncomfortable, which is to be expected, since they haven’t met since the break-up of Larry’s marriage to Geraldine. It turns out he’s seen Ed’s obituary.

  ‘I was so shocked,’ he says. ‘I don’t quite know why, but he always seemed to me to be immortal.’

  ‘I sometimes felt that too.’

  ‘He was’ – Rupert reaches for the right word – ‘debonair.’

  ‘Some of the time,’ says Larry.

  ‘I suppose he meant to do it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Dear God. The poor boy.’

  There seems to be nothing more to say.

  ‘How’s Geraldine?’ asks Larry.

  ‘Geraldine?’ Rupert takes his glasses off and cleans them with one end of his tie. ‘She’s as you’d expect. Miserable. Angry.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘She says there’s another woman in the case.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Rupert puts his glasses back on and looks up at Larry.

  ‘She feels what you’ve done is breaking one of the fundamental laws of the Church,’ he says.

  ‘I don’t want to duck my share of the blame,’ says Larry. ‘But if you go by the laws of the Church you could say I have grounds for annulment.’

  ‘Right.’ Rupert passes one hand across his eyes. ‘There was something of that sort before.’

  ‘So I gather.’

  ‘Just to be clear,’ Rupert says after a pause. ‘You’re saying the marriage was never consummated.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Larry.

  Rupert bows his head as if in prayer.

  ‘’Tis a consummation,’ he murmurs, ‘devoutly to be wished.’ He shakes his head. ‘Hamlet’s talking about death, of course. Ed Avenell, of all people.’

  He looks up and meets Larry’s puzzled gaze.

  ‘People always turn out to be so much more complicated than we imagine.’

  He rises.

  ‘Well, I’d better be off.’

  Larry walks with him to his car.

  ‘One question. I ask because it rather obsesses my sister. What’s become of your faith?’

  ‘It seems to have fallen off the back of the truck,’ says Larry. ‘It’s been a bumpy ride.’

  *

  Larry tells Kitty about Rupert Blundell’s visit, and how Geraldine said there was another woman in the case. For the first time since Ed’s death she bursts into laughter.

  ‘Another woman in the case? Meaning me?’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Oh, Larry. I’ve never been the other woman before.’

  ‘I’ve no idea where Geraldine got the idea from. I never said a thing to her.’

  ‘Things don’t need to be said.’

  ‘Yes, they do,’ says Larry.

  Kitty smiles for him, and he knows then that the sadness will pass.

  ‘I love you,’ he says. ‘All I want is to be with you. I want to go to sleep with you at night, and I want to wake up with you in the morning.’

  She takes his hand and raises it to her lips and kisses it. Such an odd old-fashioned gesture, that speaks of her humility, her sadness, her gratitude.

  ‘Here I am,’ she says.

  He folds her into his arms and they kiss, a true lovers’ kiss that doesn’t have to end, the kiss that has been waiting for so long. Then she remains warm and close in his arms, and lets herself cry. It’s the first time she’s cried since Ed died.

  ‘I really did love him,’ she says.

  ‘So did I,’ says Larry.

  EPILOGUE

  2012

  Alice comes down on the morning of her last day to find the house silent, bathed in sunlight. Breakfast is laid on the terrace. Gustave appears with coffee and fresh bread. Alice eats and drinks alone. She wonders where her grandmother is.

  When she’s had her breakfast she gets up and walks across the grass to the trees, as she did on her first day at La Grande Heuze. Ahead of her stretches the forest, as far as the eye can see. There are no paths, or many path
s. She walks a little way between the smooth trunks over the crunching ground. Her mind is lost in the past, haunted by ghosts.

  Alone now among the trees, seeing only the same patterns of light and shade in every direction, it seems to her that with her new deeper past has come a deeper future. Her life extends infinitely backwards, but also forwards. The story her grandmother has told has shown her, as if from a great height, her own place in time. This immensity is consoling. One life can contain so much.

  She returns to the house, and finds Pamela taking her breakfast on the terrace. She joins her, and drinks another cup of coffee.

  ‘I was thinking,’ her grandmother says, ‘before you go home maybe we should visit the graves.’

  ‘The graves?’

  ‘They’re buried here, in Bellencombre. My mother, and Larry. Larry made it to eighty-four, not such a bad age. I was with him when he died.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes, here. This was his house. This is where they lived in their later years.’

  Somehow this comes as a surprise. After the long story of the distant past, it brings them shockingly close. I could have met them, Alice thinks. I could have known them.

  ‘I adored Larry,’ says Pamela. ‘Really he was the one I wanted to marry.’

  ‘But you married Hugo.’

  ‘Yes. Poor Hugo. All frightfully Freudian, I suppose. Except I can’t help thinking Freud got it all wrong. I was never in competition with my mother. I loved her far too much for that. No, it was all the other way about. I wanted to be my mother.’

  *

  They drive in to Bellencombre and visit the graveyard by the side of the church of St Martin. Here Kitty and Larry lie buried in the same grave. The headstone, looking disconcertingly new, bears only their names and dates. Kitty is named as Katherine Avenell.

  ‘They were together for just over fifty years,’ says Pamela.

  ‘Were they happy together?’ says Alice.

  ‘Yes, they were very happy.’

  ‘They deserved to be happy.’

  ‘Why do you say that? Because Larry had waited for so long?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ says Alice.

  ‘He wasn’t just a sweet patient man waiting in the wings, you know. His love was the biggest thing in all our lives. It was like a blazing fire in the room. Love can be so ruthless, can’t it?’

  They walk back between the headstones to the waiting car. Alice is silent, thinking.

  ‘Has any of that helped you?’

  ’In a way,’ says Alice.

  *

  Why should love end? Once you start loving someone the love continues to grow and change for the rest of your life. But we’re all so afraid, so unsure we’re lovable, so fragile. We want love never to change.

  I’m growing stronger now. I want a life of my own. I want adventures of my own. If one day I marry and have children, I want to be able to make that commitment as a woman who knows she deserves to be loved.

  I come from a long line of mistakes. And one true love story.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The historical background to the events in Motherland is as accurate as I have been able to make it. The account of the Dieppe raid is based on several first-hand reports, in particular by the war journalists A.B. Austin, Quentin Reynolds, and Wallace Reyburn.

  My knowledge of the events surrounding Indian independence began when I was asked to write a screenplay based on Alex von Tunzelmann’s excellent Indian Summer. For the details I have relied heavily on Alan Campbell-Johnson’s diary of that time, published in 1951 as Mission with Mountbatten.

  For background on William Coldstream and Camberwell College of Art in the post-war period I have been greatly helped by the first-hand memories of my mother-in-law, Anne Olivier Bell.

  For the tale of Fyffes and the banana business I am indebted to my old friend David Stockley, whose father, grandfather and great-grandfather managed Elders & Fyffes for so many successful years. The business details are accurate; the character details of the fictional Cornford family are of course invented. I have relied also on A.H. Stockley’s privately printed autobiography Consciousness of Effort: The Romance of the Banana, 1937; The Banana Empire by Charles Kepner and Jay Soothill, 1935; and Fyffes and the Banana by Peter N. Davies, 1990.

  In matters of historical fact and tone of voice I have relied throughout on my wife, the social historian Virginia Nicholson, whose own books, particularly Millions Like Us, her account of the lives of women in the Second World War and after, have been an inspiration to me.

  Readers may be interested to trace the links between the characters in Motherland and characters in my other Sussex-based novels. Alice Dickinson appears at the age of eleven in The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life, and again aged nineteen in All the Hopeful Lovers. Her father Guy Caulder also plays a part in both novels. George Holland’s curious love life is discovered long after his death in Secret Intensity, where a very old Gwen Willis makes an appearance. Louisa, George Holland’s wife, dies in 1955, after Motherland has ended and many years before Secret Intensity begins, but her son Billy has a large part to play in the later book. Anthony Armitage, the artist, appears as an angry old man in All the Hopeful Lovers. Rex Dickinson, briefly encountered in Motherland, is the absent husband of Mrs Dickinson, who appears in Secret Intensity and The Golden Hour. The farmhouse where Larry and Rex are billeted, and where Kitty and Ed later live, appears in all three earlier novels as the home of the Broad family. Edenfield Place appears in all four novels, at different stages of its existence. This great Victorian Gothic house is based on Tyntesfield, the Gibbs family mansion near Bristol, now owned by the National Trust.

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  PRELUDE

  Tea at Cliveden, September 1943

  Rupert Blundell did not want to go to tea with the princess. He was unsure how to address her, and he was shy with girls at the best of times. Lord Mountbatten, his commanding officer, brushed aside his murmurs of dissent.

  ‘Nancy wants some young people,’ he said. ‘You’re a young person, and you’re available.’

  Rupert was twenty-six, which felt to himself both young and old. Princess Elizabeth was of course much younger, but being heir to the throne she was unlikely to be short of savoir-faire.

  ‘And anyway,’ said Mountbatten, ‘you’ll like Cliveden. They still have a pastry cook there, and it has one of the best views in England.’

  So Rupert put on his rarely worn No.2 dress uniform, which fitted poorly round the crotch, and reported to COHQ in Richmond Terrace. A car was to pick him up from here and drive him to Cliveden, Lady Astor’s country house.

  ‘Very smart, Rupert,’ said Joyce Wedderburn, passing through on her way back to her office.

  ‘I’m under orders,’ said Rupert glumly.

  ‘Aren’t the trousers a bit small for you?’

  ‘In parts.’

  ‘Well, I think you look very dashing.’

  She gave him one of her half-smiles that he could never interpret, that suggested she meant something other than what she seemed to be saying. But Rupert liked Joyce. He could talk to her more freely than to the other girls. There was no nonsense about her, and she had a fiancé in the Navy, in minesweepers.

  The car arrived: a Humber Imperial Landaulette, driven by one of Lady Astor’s chauffeurs. Its rear hood was down, and sitting in the wide back seat was an American officer of about Rupert’s own age. He introduced himself as Captain McGeorge Bundy, an aide attached to Admiral Alan R. Kirk, commander of the Allied amphibious forces.

  ‘Call me Mac,’ he said.

  He revealed to Rupert that they were to represent the wartime allies at this tea party. There was to be a Russian too. All thi
s in a crisp monotone, as if to impart the information in the most efficient way possible.

  The Russian was news to Rupert.

  ‘I’ve no idea what we’re supposed to do,’ he said. ‘Have you?’

  ‘I think the idea is the princess wants to meet people nearer to her own age,’ said Bundy.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Maybe it’s a blind date.’ Bundy smiled, but with his mouth only. ‘How’d you like to marry your future queen?’

  ‘God preserve me,’ said Rupert.

  Mac Bundy was trim and sleek, with sand-coloured hair brushed back smoothly over his high forehead. He wore wire-rimmed glasses. His navy-blue uniform had every appearance of being excellently cut. Looking at him, Rupert felt as he did with so many Americans that they were the physically perfected version of the model, while he himself was a poor first draft.

  He shifted on the car seat to ease the itching in his trousers. The landaulette drove through Hyde Park, past the Serpentine. From where he was sitting he could see himself reflected in the driver’s mirror: his long face, his thickrimmed spectacles, his protruding ears. He looked away, out of long habit.