Motherland (24 page)

Later he takes his place following his father in the line of communicants, and receives the papery biscuit on his tongue. He feels the living God melt in his mouth. He knows that by the letter of the law he has committed mortal sin and should not take communion, but his God and his Church are merciful. Larry is a very modern Catholic, taught by enlightened monks that God loves the generous heart and the truthful mind more than a petty conformity to rules. He returns to his place in the pews, and kneeling with his head in his hands he prays that he may learn to serve God with his chosen work.

After Mass he walks home with his father to the tall house on Camden Grove and shares a late breakfast with him. His father talks to him about the company and its present difficulties. He is to make a trip to Jamaica very shortly, to attend to problems on the ground.

‘I’m afraid we’re facing a serious supply shortage,’ he says. ‘Partly it’s the hurricane season. But we also have a bad outbreak of leaf-spot disease.’

‘I thought the
Tilapa
came into Avonmouth with a full cargo.’

‘So she did, God bless her.’ His father sips at his coffee and sighs. ‘But there’s not much more where that came from. We’re
looking seriously at the Cameroons. Also I think it’s time now to come to a new arrangement with the Ministry.’

‘Are you still managing the Ministry depots?’

‘One hundred and twenty, all told. It’s far too much, of course. But the truth is the Ministry is still operating on a wartime footing.’

‘Will you see Joe Kiefer when you’re in Kingston?’

‘Joe’s retired now. I’m glad you remember him, Larry. I shall tell him so.’

William Cornford gazes wistfully across the breakfast table at his son.

‘You know we’ve got the house in Normandy habitable now,’ he says. ‘Why not join me there this summer? It should be a good place for your painting.’

‘I’d like that,’ says Larry.

‘How’s it coming along?’ He wipes his mouth with his napkin. ‘The painting and so forth.’

‘I can’t exactly say how I’m getting on,’ says Larry, ‘but I’m hard at work. I’m afraid I’ve no accounts to show you. No figures to prove my progress.’

‘Of course not. But are you happy?’

‘Yes, Dad. I’m very happy.’

His father smiles.

‘Well, then. That’s the point, isn’t it?’

*

Larry tells his father he’s happy because his father is subsidising him and he wishes to give some return on his investment. The truth is more complex. He is finding that the work he has chosen – he calls it ‘work’ following his teacher’s example, shy of grander terms – causes him almost constant unease. Somehow, however
steadily he applies himself, he always ends up dissatisfied with the end result. The process itself never fails to absorb him, even to obsess him. But he remains unconvinced of his talent.

He has chosen in recent weeks to limit himself to landscapes. Noticing that artists he admires have a way of repeating motifs in their work, or of working in defined geographical areas, he has decided to choose landscapes that feature a church. This is mostly a formal preference: the spire of the church, breaking the skyline like a knife, delivers a visual pivot for his composition. But it’s also an emotional choice. The church acts as a lightning conductor, a conduit for the supernatural into his scene. This is not something he talks about with his fellow students. More and more of them are coming under the influence of Victor Pasmore, drawn towards pictorial geometry, if not fullblown abstract painting. Among the hold-outs is Tony Armitage, the farouche boy who is showing an extraordinary talent for portraiture.

‘Geometry!’ exclaims Armitage with disgust. ‘It’s pure funk. They can’t face the world. They’re running away from life.’

Larry is inclined to agree. The Pasmore school strikes him as a form of Puritanism.

‘They’re visual Calvinists,’ he says. ‘All this reduction to pure form.’

Nevertheless his own work is highly formal. He is painting a view of St Giles’s church seen from an upper window of the college. The grey and white tower is built in three diminishing stages, two square, the last a hexagonal spire. On two sides of the tower project steep-pitched grey-tiled roofs. The church is the work of Gilbert Scott and has a window reputedly designed by Ruskin, but to Larry it has become a series of lines to be
projected outward and upward as he forms his composition. He is painting both the actual church, and a diagram of sacred space. It’s not something he fully understands, but as he works he knows very quickly which lines have significance and which are trivial. As he begins to overlay the lines with tones of grey and brown and white, he struggles to let the various colours convey the light he wants in the picture, the instinct he has that it’s not stone walls he’s painting so much as the space they enclose.

There are moments as he works when he feels so near to capturing this simple truth that all he needs to do is let his brush go free. The thing is there before him. Rather than painting it into existence he is uncovering it, his brush the instrument of exposure. At such times his excitement is so intense that he loses all awareness of time and place, and works on long into the evening.

‘You know something,’ says Armitage, pausing to look. ‘That’s not as bad as your usual stuff.’

Larry stands back to see for himself.

‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s not there yet.’

‘Of course it’s not
there
!’ exclaims Armitage. ‘It’s never
there
! But it’s not bad. And take it from me, not bad is as good as it gets.’

Larry has grown to like Tony Armitage very much, for all his startling outbursts and lack of personal hygiene. He has painted a head and shoulders of Nell that is to Larry’s mind quite extraordinary. Somehow he has managed to capture both her directness and her evasiveness. Nell of course hates the portrait.

The more Larry now looks at his St Giles, the less he likes it. But at this point Bill Coldstream appears.

‘Just the men I wanted to see,’ he says.

He stands still for a moment, examining Larry’s picture.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Good. Do you know the Leicester Galleries?’

‘Of course,’ says Larry. ‘I saw the John Piper show there.’

‘They’re putting together a summer show. Artists of Promise and so on. Phillips has asked me to suggest some of our people. I’d like to put you and Armitage up for it.’

Larry is speechless. Armitage takes it in his stride.

‘How long have we got?’

‘They want to open in early July,’ says Coldstream. ‘So the selection will have to be done by the end of April, I should think.’

With this he departs.

‘That’s one in the eye for Fairlie,’ says Armitage.

‘I had no idea,’ says Larry.

He means he had no idea their teacher rated him so highly.

‘I told you you were good.’

‘No, you didn’t. You said I wasn’t bad.’

‘What you need, Larry,’ says Armitage, ‘is faith in yourself.’

‘Any idea where I’m to get it?’

‘The great thing you have to keep in mind,’ says Armitage, ‘is that everyone else is clueless. They’re all stumbling about in the dark. They’ve no idea what’s good and what isn’t. They’re waiting to be told. So all you have to do is tell them, loudly and often.’

Larry sighs.

‘Not my style, I’m afraid.’

*

Larry tells Nell the news that evening. She throws her arms round him and kisses him.

‘I knew it! You’re going to be famous!’

Nell no longer works as a life model at the school. She’s got herself a job as receptionist to an art dealer in Cork Street. Julius Weingard, according to Nell, is both queer and crooked, but by her account so is everyone else. She tells Larry hair-raising stories of how Weingard cheats his clients. Everyone knows, she says, it’s just how the art world works. No one believes in any artist’s actual worth, only in reputation and the degree to which that can be converted into sales.

‘I shall make Julius come to your show,’ Nell says. ‘Maybe he’ll decide to take you on. He’ll tell you to use brighter colours, darling. Everyone is tired of khaki.’

Nell continues to fascinate Larry, but their relationship is not simple. They sleep together but they don’t live together. Nell has her own digs, which Larry has never entered. She is often away, carrying out assignments for Weingard, or visiting friends about whom she tells him nothing. This other life, which she keeps from him with a teasing secrecy, should trouble him, and occasionally does. But the truth is that much of the time it suits him.

Larry’s feelings for Nell are forever catching him by surprise. The volatility of their relationship both disturbs and excites him. When she’s away he can build up a longing for her that almost paralyses him. But when she’s been with him for a few days, he begins to withdraw into himself, and want to be alone.

‘You’re getting so middle-aged, Lawrence,’ she tells him. ‘You should let yourself go more.’

He knows she’s right, and he loves her for being a true Bohemian, a free spirit, a wild creature. But then there are the moments when he catches a glimpse of the other side of this freedom, and sees in her a lost child. Her youth and her powerful attractiveness disguise this inner core of fear, but every now and
again it breaks through. Once, after making love, she began to cry.

‘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.