Уильям Николсон - Motherland

‘Nell! What is it?’

‘Doesn’t matter. You don’t want to know.’

‘Yes, I do. Tell me.’

‘You’ll say I’m just being silly. I am being silly.’

‘No, tell me.’

‘Sometimes I think I’ll never be married and have children.’

‘Of course you will. We’ll be married tomorrow if you like. We’ll have hundreds of children.’

‘Oh, Lawrence, you are sweet. Maybe one day. I’m still only twenty.’

Then just as he’s beginning to think they should get a flat together somewhere, she’ll disappear for days on end. On her return she gives him no real answers to his questions about where she’s been. She holds fiercely to her right to live her own life in her own way.

‘Don’t try to tie me down, Lawrence. That’s what my father did. It drives me crazy.’

And yet she can erupt with sudden explosions of jealousy. Once after a party where he talked with another girl, she turns on him in fury.

‘Don’t ever do that to me again! I don’t care what you do and who you do it with, but don’t do it while I’m in the same room.’

‘What have I done?’

‘And don’t gape at me like you don’t know exactly what I’m talking about. I’m not a complete idiot.’

‘Nell, this is all some fantasy of yours.’

‘I’m not asking for fidelity. I’m asking you to show me some respect in public.’

‘All I was doing was talking to her. Am I not to talk to other girls?’

‘Fine,’ she says. ‘Have it your own way. Call it what you like.’

‘For God’s sake, Nell. It’s not as if you don’t talk to other men. Do I ever ask you not to talk to other men?’

‘If you don’t want me to go out with other men, Lawrence, all you have to do is say so.’

‘I don’t want to lock you up. You know I don’t.’

‘So what do you want, Lawrence?’

‘I want us to trust each other.’

He tells himself her behaviour has no consistency, but at a deeper unacknowledged level he knows well enough what she’s asking of him. She wants unconditional love. She wants to be told that he will be her lover and her protector and her friend for ever, however badly she behaves. There are times when his own need is strong in him and he wants to make all the promises in the world; but an instinctive caution in him prevents him from saying the words. So long as she’s wild and free and desired by other men she’s all that he wants. But the closer they come to each other the more clearly he sees her fragility and neediness, and in self-protection he pulls back once more.

He tries to understand what’s happening to him, and why he swings so wildly between extremes. Is it just sex? Is it as simple as that? She takes it for granted that he wants and needs sex, and makes herself readily available to him, and for this alone he adores her. But it’s not just sex. After a few days without her what haunts him is not just her naked body and the gratifications it brings, but her teasing laughter, her unpredictable turns of phrase, the vitality with which she floods his life. It’s Nell who takes him swimming at night in Hampstead pond, or who goes out on an impulse to get crumpets to toast on the gas fire. It’s Nell who knows the all-night cab-drivers’ hut by Albert Bridge where a cup of tea can be had in the small hours. How can he not love her for the adventure she makes of his life? It seems to him then that this must be the fundamental shape of love, this cycle of craving and satiety and withdrawal.

Unless somewhere there’s another kind of love, where you and your lover want never to be parted.

At such times he thinks of Kitty. He allows these thoughts with shame, knowing they’re foolish. After all, what does he really know of Kitty? He’s spent a few hours in her company, nothing more. It would be ridiculous to claim to be in love with her. Worse than ridiculous, it would condemn him to a life of loneliness. She’s married to a man she loves, who is also his own best friend. Why then does it persist, this secret conviction? Sometimes, when he’s alone, he feels a kind of terror at the thought of Kitty. What if it’s given to every man to fall in love truly only once, and he has fallen for a girl he can never have?

‘You know your trouble, Lawrence?’ Nell tells him. ‘You’ve got this thing about being good, but really you want to be bad.’

What does it mean, to be bad? It means to pursue your own desires at the expense of other people’s. It means to live according to your own will, not the will of God. It means the pursuit of selfishness.

If I were to be bad, what would I do? I would paint, and I would love Kitty. That’s all I want in life. And what value is that to others?

At such times he prays the prayer of Père de Caussade.

‘Lord have pity on me. With you all things are possible.’

On the day of the private view Larry stands silent, smoking ceaselessly, white-faced, in the back of the room in which his three paintings hang. All three now seem to him to be lifeless and without merit. The guests move through the rooms exclaiming over the varied works, never pausing long over his paintings. No red spots appear beneath them to indicate a sale. Bill Coldstream is here, talking with his old Euston Road crowd. Leonard Fairlie is here, and while not being directly rude about Larry’s work he makes it all too clear that he is unimpressed with the show.

‘Of course it’s a commercial show,’ he says. ‘One shouldn’t be surprised. It’s all about opening wallets. These days the kind of people who can afford to buy want to be reassured that the old world is with them still, in all its bourgeois glory. One has to expect to have one’s mouth stuffed with bonbons.’

Tony Armitage is present, being one of the ‘artists of promise’. He is as nervous as Larry, but shows it in a different way.

‘Don’t you hate the shits who come to these private views?’ he growls. ‘They wouldn’t know real art if it was stuck up their bums with a poker.’

Despite this, Armitage’s striking portraits are among the first to achieve the coveted red spot. Larry moves away, unable to bear the sight of his own unloved works. He sees Nell come in with her employer Julius Weingard, and another man who is small and prosperous and in his forties, if not older. He has his arm looped through Nell’s in a proprietorial way, and is smiling at her as they go by. Two well-dressed middle-aged women pass near him, one saying to the other, ‘Why are English artists so dreary compared to the French?’

This is hell, thinks Larry to himself. The glory of having been selected is all forgotten. He feels only the humiliation of looking on as his works are ignored. His distress is not wounded vanity. He has no conviction that his works deserve more attention. It’s the gap between what he felt as he painted them and what he feels seeing them now that is so unbearable. These three all gave him such joy in the making. He can recall the heart-stopping excitement of realising the work was going to emerge at last, whole, living and harmonious, from the marks and daubs that went into their making. Impossible to describe to someone who hasn’t attempted it. There’s a magic to it, like being present at the birth of new life. And now these perfect creations, these gifts of wonder, are dying before his eyes. They hang on crowded walls, denied the love and attention which alone caused them to shine, revealed as commonplace efforts by a painter of no more than average ability.

‘Larry!’

He looks round. There stands Kitty, her eyes bright, her pale face lit up by a smile.

‘I’m so proud of you!’

She takes him in her arms for a warm hug.

‘Kitty!’ he exclaims. ‘I didn’t think you’d come.’