Уильям Николсон - Motherland

Kitty feels her heart pounding, scrambling all rational thought. Somewhere far away there are things she should be concerned about, but she doesn’t want to know. She wants to possess him. She wants all of him in all of her.

He moves again, and penetrates a little deeper. She can tell from his breathing that he’s excited. Then she feels a spasm of pain, and makes a sound. He stops. For a brief moment of terror she thinks, He can’t do it. I’m too small for him. But all the time she can feel herself opening up. And now he’s moving again, and it hurts but she doesn’t make a sound, and he’s deeper in.

This is his desire. His desire is hot and hard. The deeper into me he goes, the more he wants me.

Now he’s all the way in. She can feel the weight of his body on hers. He lies still, letting her grow accustomed to the sensation. For Kitty this is the time, when he’s inside her but neither of them are moving, this is the time she remembers for the rest of her life. Their haven of love.

He’s mine. We’ll never be parted now.

‘Darling,’ she whispers. ‘Darling.’

He starts to move, drawing almost all the way out, then pushing back all the way in. Kitty feels the pain again.

‘Slowly,’ she whispers.

He moves slowly after that, and when he’s all the way in he pauses. Then out, then in. The sweet pause.

‘Oh, God!’ he cries.

‘What is it?’

A shudder goes through his body. His hips convulse in a series of sharp jerks. She feels him twitch inside her. Then he lies still.

So it’s happened. She thinks she can feel it, a liquid warmth, but maybe she imagines it. This is what they do it for. This is the prize.

‘Was it good?’ she whispers.

He grunts. She realises that whatever it is he has just experienced, it has half-stunned him. All his limbs have gone slack. His weight is heavy on her. She doesn’t mind, she wraps her arms round him, holds him tight. His moment of helplessness touches her deeply. Then all at once she has the strangest thought.

He has died for me.

She pushes the thought away, ashamed to compare what they’ve just done to the real death that waits in this real war. But the two are tangled up, even so. Had she not stood on the quay at Newhaven and thought of him dying in France, would she be naked in his arms now?

He’s shrinking inside her. She feels a cool trickle between her thighs. He gives a long groaning sigh. Then he rolls off her, and lying beside her, takes her in his arms.

For a while they lie together in the dark room in silence. She thinks he might be sleeping, but she can’t tell. He has become infinitely precious to her, she doesn’t want to disturb him, doesn’t need to disturb him. What they have just done together changes everything. They’re together now.

Kitty wonders at this, wonders that her girlfriends have so much to say about the act and so little about the closeness. Perhaps it’s just too ordinary. It happens to all couples. Except it’s extraordinary, it’s beyond anything she believed possible, that two people can lie together and become one.

‘Kitty?’

His soft voice interrupts her thoughts. He’s looking at her, smiling.

‘Will you marry me?’

‘Yes.’

She feels no sense of surprise. Of course she’ll marry him. They’re married already. But the way he asks, with a slight hesitation in his voice, floods her with a tender joy. She draws him close, kissing him.

‘Of course I’ll marry you, Eddy darling.’

‘We seem to have done things the wrong way round.’

‘What difference does it make?’

‘And I’m sorry …’

She understands he feels bad because it was all over so quickly, but doesn’t know how to say so.

‘It was wonderful, Eddy. It was perfect.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘But it will be.’

He gazes at her and there’s no mockery any more. No distance.

‘I do love you, Kitty,’ he says. ‘I’ll do my best for you.’

The library at Wakehurst Place is packed with officers assembled for the operational briefing by General Harry Crerar, commander of the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division. Larry Cornford stands near the back, his hands clasped behind his back, his gaze roaming the room. The Elizabethan library has an embossed ceiling and an elaborately carved fireplace. As he listens to the general’s steady tones, he finds himself studying the figures in the niches on either side of the fireplace. A curiously shaped female, naked from the waist up, holds a large naked child horizontally across her midriff, like a roll of carpet. The child reaches one hand up to tweak her left nipple, and with the other hand pats the head of a second smaller child at its mother’s knee; if mother it is. What can it all signify?

‘The forces chosen for Operation Jubilee are as follows. The RHLI, the Essex Scottish, the South Saskatchewans, the Camerons, the Royals, and the Fusiliers Mont-Royal. The 14th Armored, the Calgary regiment, will be in action for the first time with the new Churchill tanks. Number 3 Commando, Number 4 Commando, and 40 Royal Marine Commando will carry out designated tasks, as will a small unit of US Rangers, and Free French forces. Operation Jubilee will be a reconnaissance in force. Its object is to seize and hold a seaport for twenty-four hours, and then to withdraw. It is not an invasion. It is not the opening of a second front. I can’t tell you our destination, or our planned date. But I can tell you that it will be very soon now.’

A murmur of satisfaction runs round the room.

‘This is pretty much a Canadian show, boys,’ says the general. ‘Ham Roberts will be in overall charge. I’m very proud that we’re being given the first real smack at the Hun on his own ground. I know you won’t let me down.’

There’s nothing in the general’s briefing that hasn’t been rumoured for weeks now, but the official confirmation creates a buzz of excitement. As the meeting breaks up, Larry sees Brigadier Wills go into a huddle with Crerar and Roberts. A trolley of tea and coffee is wheeled clanking into the room by two members of the kitchen staff. Officers crowd round, jostling each other to be first in line. Dick Lowell, Larry’s Canadian opposite number, joins him by the doorway.

‘Bigger show than I expected,’ he says. ‘But my God, are they ready for it! What do you reckon? Boulogne? I say Le Touquet.’

Larry, who has known the target port for weeks, says nothing to this. He looks out through the high windows to the handsome grounds beyond.

‘Quite a place, isn’t it?’

‘Famous, too,’ says Dick Lowell. ‘Culpeper the herbalist lived here.’

‘Do you think I’ve got time for a wander round the grounds?’

‘Christ, we’ll be here all morning. There’s still the supply and logistic meetings to go.’

‘Do me a favour, Dick? If Woody comes looking for me, give me a shout.’

Larry leaves the library, and passes down the wood-panelled corridor and out through the south-east door to the gravelled forecourt. Here the rows of staff cars are pulled up, waiting to convey the top brass back to their bases. Beyond the line of cars, in a bend of the drive, stand two tall sequoia trees. The staff drivers have gathered in the shade of the trees to gossip, or just to doze.

Larry shields his eyes from the glare and scans the shadowed figures. He locates Kitty at last, sitting a little apart from the rest, reading a book.

He goes to her.

‘Still on Middlemarch ?’

She looks up with a pleased smile.

‘Almost at the end now. Poor, poor Lydgate.’

‘I’ve got another book for you.’ He takes a book out of his shoulder bag. ‘You may have read it already.’

It’s The Warden by Trollope.