Уильям Николсон - Motherland

‘Do lots of men think sex is bad? Do you?’

‘No, not exactly. But there is a kind of sex that can feel bad.’

‘What kind? Tell me about it.’

‘Oh, Kitty. This isn’t easy.’

‘Just shut your eyes and pretend you’re talking to a man. What’s this bad kind of sex?’

Larry shuts his eyes.

‘It’s a feeling you get,’ he says, ‘that’s quite aggressive, and urgent, and entirely selfish. You want a girl, any girl. Not to be sweet to, or to love. Just for the one thing. You don’t want to ask, you just want to take. It’s a kind of conquering, I suppose. It’s very primitive. You don’t like it about yourself. But it’s there in you.’

‘Yes,’ says Kitty. ‘Yes, I can understand that.’

‘Does it disgust you?’

‘No. Not at all. Now tell me more. This bad feeling, is it there all the time?’

‘Oh, no.’

‘So what’s there the rest of the time? Is there a good feeling?’

‘Yes, there is. There’s real love, where you want to be loved back. The opposite of taking what you want, and conquering, and selfishness.’

‘And this real love – is that part of sex too?’

‘Yes. I think so.’ He hesitates, and then gives up the effort of pretence. ‘Actually, I don’t know. I don’t have enough experience.’

‘Does Ed have experience? Apart from me, I mean?’

‘I don’t know. Not that I know of. Probably.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I don’t mind about that, really I don’t. I just want so much to understand what it is men are thinking and feeling. It’s hard for us girls, you know. We’re told such stories all the time. Then you come up against the reality, and nothing makes any sense.’

‘It’s the same for us. We don’t really know anything about girls. I don’t, at least.’

‘You can forget about worshipping us, for a start.’

She gets up out of her chair.

‘Now I’m going to let you get some sleep.’

She reaches out for him, and gives his hand a little squeeze.

‘Thank you, Larry. You’re a good friend.’

One afternoon Larry’s class is set to work on a life drawing of a female nude. The model is Nell. She takes off her clothes without hesitation, and places herself as the teacher instructs her, sitting on an upright chair, one leg tucked a little back. She asks him how she should hold her head, and he tells her to make herself comfortable. She chooses to bend her head a little forward, gazing over her knees at the bare boards of the floor.

The students set to work on a pencil sketch, following the measuring technique Coldstream has taught them. The teacher moves among them, checking to see they are marking what he calls the ‘fixed points’.

‘It’s all about touch,’ he says. ‘Your own feelings about what you see are unimportant. See accurately, and the touch will come.’

Larry doesn’t fully understand this, but he works away as best he can, and a passable sketch begins to emerge. At the same time he can’t deny the presence of other feelings. Nell’s naked body becomes more beautiful to him, and more desirable, as his pencil traces the curves of her thigh. He glances round the other students, almost all of them male, and sees them all intent on their work, and wonders if they’re feeling the same.

When the class finishes Nell puts her clothes back on, and lingers in the Life Room as the students pack up their sketches. Larry, watching furtively, sees the effect she has on the others, how they stand up straighter when talking to her, and laugh more loudly. He hears her asking Leonard Fairlie if she can see his sketch, and hears Fairlie say, ‘I’m useless at figures.’

‘It’s not figures,’ Nell says. ‘It’s me.’

Fairlie laughs at that, his baby face going pink beneath his month-old beard. Larry wants Nell to come over and talk to him, but instead now she’s talking to Tony Armitage, the wild boy who’s become something of a friend. Larry can tell at once from Armitage’s agitated arm movements that he’s trying to impress Nell.

‘What are you thinking when you’re drawing?’ she says.

‘I don’t think,’ Armitage replies. ‘Artists never think. I look.’ He gives Nell a ferocious glare. ‘I look.’

‘And what do you see?’

‘I see you ,’ says Armitage.

Then evidently aware that he can’t improve on this, he sweeps himself out of the room, following the others.

Larry has lingered. Now he gets his reward.

‘I think they’re all shy,’ Nell says to him.

‘Well, they have been staring at you with no clothes on.’

‘You wouldn’t know it. No one’s mentioned it.’

‘What do you expect them to say?’ says Larry.

‘Oh, you know. Ooh, I can see your titties! Ooh, I can see your bum!’

Larry laughs. She slips one arm through his.

‘Buy me a drink, Lawrence.’

The Hermit’s Cave has survived the war unscathed, protected, say the locals, by the hermit himself, who gazes philosophically into the distance on the pub sign, wearing what seems to be a nightdress. Inside, beneath the smoke-grimed mustard-coloured ceilings, the students from the art college lunch on Scotch eggs and Murphy’s stout and argue about art and politics and religion. Leonard Fairlie takes the orthodox Marxist line on Christianity.

‘How else are the ruling classes to persuade the masses to be content with their pitiful share of the nation’s wealth? Obviously you have to create a compensation mechanism for them. You have to tell them the less jam they have today, the more jam they’ll have tomorrow.’

‘So who are these people, Leonard? Who are these cynical liars who’ve fabricated this monstrous perversion for their own evil ends?’

Peter Prout is a big smiley young man who may or may not be homosexual.

‘You want me to tell you who rules the country?’ says Leonard.

‘Somehow I don’t think Churchill dreamed up Christianity,’ says Peter. ‘Or Attlee or Bevin, for that matter.’

‘Beveridge, more like,’ says Larry.

‘Listen,’ says Peter. ‘I’m not saying any of it’s true . I don’t believe in Jesus being the son of God and all that. But it doesn’t have to be a conspiracy. It’s a folk myth. It’s a kind of communal dream.’

Larry then says, almost apologetically, ‘Actually I do believe Jesus was the son of God.’

This causes general amazement. Nell, sitting by Larry’s side, grins to see the looks on their faces.

‘You can’t!’ says Tony Armitage.

‘And I believe in heaven and hell,’ says Larry. ‘And the Last Judgement. And I think I believe in the virgin birth. And I’m trying hard to believe in papal infallibility.’

‘Oh, God!’ says Leonard. ‘You’re a Catholic.’

‘Born and bred,’ says Larry.

‘But Larry,’ says Tony Armitage, ‘you can’t believe all that rubbish. You just can’t.’

‘I suppose it may be rubbish,’ says Larry, ‘some of it, anyway. But it’s the rubbish I grew up with. And it does make a sort of sense, you know. You belong to a church because you believe the wisdom of an institution is greater than the wisdom of one man. We have rather overdone the cult of the individual, don’t you think?’

‘The cult of the individual!’ Peter Prout mocks shock. ‘Next you’ll be doubting the romance of the lone artist!’

‘But Larry!’ exclaims Armitage. ‘Virgin birth! Papal infallibility!’

‘Well, to be honest,’ says Larry, ‘I don’t really follow some of that. But then, why would I? I don’t know everything. It’s like falling in love. You don’t go down a checklist of all the girl’s opinions, making sure you agree with each one. You just love her, and you take what you get.’