Уильям Николсон - Motherland

‘She’s an unusual girl, Nell.’ He wants very much to tell Kitty about the baby, but something holds him back. ‘She always had a thing about being independent. She has her job at the gallery, she earns far more money than I do. She knows I like to spend a lot of my time alone. So it works out quite well, really.’

‘It sounds like you’re leading separate lives.’

‘No, not separate. We’re very close.’ He realises he sounds as if he’s making excuses for her. ‘It’s hard to explain. She hates to make demands on me.’

He can see Kitty’s lovely face puzzling over what he tells her, unable to make sense of it. He wants so much to touch her. But things are as they are, and he must make the best of it.

‘She sounds a bit like Ed,’ she says.

‘You mustn’t think I’m complaining,’ he says. ‘She’s warm, and loving.’

‘Maybe she’s waiting for you to propose.’

‘I’ve done that.’

‘You’ve proposed!’

‘She says she’s thinking about it.’

‘Well!’ Now Kitty is awestruck. ‘She must be a fool.’

But her tone of voice says otherwise. Her tone of voice shows Nell has risen sharply in her estimation.

‘She’s not a fool,’ says Larry. ‘She just doesn’t want to compromise. Her parents have a bad marriage. She wants to be sure.’

‘And she’s not sure about you.’

‘Apparently not.’

‘How do you feel about that?’

‘A bit odd, to be honest.’

‘You’re a good man, Larry. A rare man. What more does she want?’

‘Who knows? It’s not as if I’m such a terrific catch.’

‘You know that’s not true. But who am I to talk? We all play that game.’

‘What game?’ says Larry.

She gets up and starts clearing the table, speaking lightly as she works, to make out it’s no more than idle chatter.

‘Doing yourself down. Feeling you’re not really worth very much at all. Thinking you haven’t much to offer anybody. And there’s the one person you’re supposed to make happy, and you can’t even do that.’

Larry understands then that she’s telling him about herself.

‘So what are we supposed to do about it?’ he says.

‘Try harder. Be more loving.’ Stacking plates in the sink. ‘Stop minding about our own happiness.’

So she’s unhappy. He feels a sharp pang, both painful and sweet.

‘He’s away too much, isn’t he?’ he says.

‘He works so hard.’ Now she’s standing still, her hands on the draining board, her head bent. ‘He’s doing it for us, so we don’t have to live on George and Louisa’s charity. So we can have a house of our own. He’s thinking of Pammy and schools and all the things that need money. But I’d rather have him than the money.’

‘Of course you would,’ says Larry.

She looks up then, searching his face for clues.

‘Why doesn’t he know that?’

‘That’s how Ed is,’ says Larry. ‘He never does anything halfway. He’s decided this is what he has to do, and he’s doing it as well as he can.’

‘What if it’s because he doesn’t love me any more?’

‘No!’ Larry’s denial is immediate, urgent. Too urgent. ‘Ed adores you. You know that.’

‘Do I? I don’t see why he should.’

‘Kitty! What nonsense is this? Everyone adores you. You’d have to be blind not to see it.’

‘Oh, that.’ She passes one hand across her face, as if waving away a buzzing fly. ‘That’s just how you look. That’s nothing.’

‘But that’s only the start of it! You’re so much more than just a pretty girl.’

‘I don’t see how.’

She seems to mean it. There’s a sadness in her voice that shocks him. How can she not know her own value?

‘Ed loves you because you’re beautiful and loyal and kind-hearted. He loves you because you’re strong and don’t weigh him down. He loves you because you understand things without having to be told them. He loves you because you don’t ask him to be someone he isn’t. Most of all, he loves you because you love him.’

He’s looking at her as he speaks, and he can’t help it, his eyes are giving him away. But what is there to give away? Kitty has known his feelings for her for a long time.

‘Does he talk to you about me?’ she says.

‘Sometimes.’

‘Does he say he loves me?’

‘Many times.’

‘All he says to me is that he doesn’t deserve me.’

‘Yes,’ says Larry. ‘He says that too.’

‘You know what?’ she says. ‘I think it’s because of that damned beach at Dieppe. That’s where it all started.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘I think that day did something to Ed. I don’t know what. He won’t talk about it. He hates it when anyone asks him about his VC. Why’s he like that, Larry? So many people saw what he did on that beach. Why won’t he talk about it? What happened to him there?’

‘Something happened to all of us,’ says Larry. ‘It’s hard to explain. You’d have to have been there. It was like the end of the world.’

‘Is that what Ed thought? It was the end of the world?’

‘It was all so stupid and pointless. Just a gigantic mistake, really. We all saw that. But Ed – he just went crazy. He was so angry he didn’t care if he lived or died. He didn’t even try to protect himself. He kept thinking it’d be his turn next, but his turn never came. He says it was just luck. And I think he feels he doesn’t deserve his luck. I think some part of him feels he should have died on that beach.’

Kitty listens in silence. Larry is picking his words carefully, protecting her from the single most devastating cry that burst from Ed that night they talked in the chapel: I wanted to die . How can he say this to Kitty? Did he not want to live for her?

‘Thank you,’ Kitty says. ‘That helps me.’

‘But he should talk to you about all this himself.’

‘People don’t always talk about things.’

But you and I talk, Larry wants to say. You and I talk about everything and anything. There’s nothing I can’t say to you.

‘It was different for me on that beach.’ Suddenly he realises he’s going to tell her what he’s told nobody except Ed. ‘I was a coward on that beach.’

‘Oh, Larry. Everyone must have been terrified.’

‘All I did was take cover. All I could think about was saving myself.’

‘Anyone would’ve been the same.’

‘No. There were a lot of brave men that day. I just wasn’t one of them.’

She smiles at him.

‘That damned beach,’ she says.

Larry feels a weight roll off him, a weight he’s been carrying for four years. He has told Kitty his shameful secret, and she doesn’t mind. It seems to make no difference. He’s flooded with love and gratitude; but this, unlike his shame, must remain unspoken.

There’s something else he isn’t telling Kitty, too. He isn’t telling her about Nell and the baby.

Larry spends the next day painting. He sets up a board in the farmyard, using the split-chestnut rails as an easel. For a while Pamela watches him at work, saying nothing.

So long as he’s absorbed in his painting he has no dreams and no regrets. This is the joy of it, the way it allows him to escape his own uncertain self, and live in another space. There, within the frame of his chosen image, the complexities are limitless, the challenges insurmountable, but he himself almost ceases to exist.

Kitty comes out to tell him George and Louisa will join them for supper. She looks at the work in progress.

‘Caburn again,’ she says.

At supper Louisa is eager to hear news of the artist’s model who poses naked.

‘She doesn’t do that any more,’ says Larry.