Motherland (56 page)

Why should love end? Once you start loving someone the love continues to grow and change for the rest of your life. But we’re all so afraid, so unsure we’re lovable, so fragile. We want love never to change.

I’m growing stronger now. I want a life of my own. I want adventures of my own. If one day I marry and have children, I want to be able to make that commitment as a woman who knows she deserves to be loved.

I come from a long line of mistakes. And one true love story.

The historical background to the events in
Motherland
is as accurate as I have been able to make it. The account of the Dieppe raid is based on several first-hand reports, in particular by the war journalists A.B. Austin, Quentin Reynolds, and Wallace Reyburn.

My knowledge of the events surrounding Indian independence began when I was asked to write a screenplay based on Alex von Tunzelmann’s excellent
Indian Summer
. For the details I have relied heavily on Alan Campbell-Johnson’s diary of that time, published in 1951 as
Mission with Mountbatten
.

For background on William Coldstream and Camberwell College of Art in the post-war period I have been greatly helped by the first-hand memories of my mother-in-law, Anne Olivier Bell.

For the tale of Fyffes and the banana business I am indebted to my old friend David Stockley, whose father, grandfather and great-grandfather managed Elders & Fyffes for so many successful years. The business details are accurate; the character details of the fictional Cornford family are of course invented. I have relied
also on A.H. Stockley’s privately printed autobiography
Consciousness of Effort: The Romance of the Banana
, 1937;
The Banana Empire
by Charles Kepner and Jay Soothill, 1935; and
Fyffes and the Banana
by Peter N. Davies, 1990.

In matters of historical fact and tone of voice I have relied throughout on my wife, the social historian Virginia Nicholson, whose own books, particularly
Millions Like Us
, her account of the lives of women in the Second World War and after, have been an inspiration to me.

Readers may be interested to trace the links between the characters in
Motherland
and characters in my other Sussex-based novels. Alice Dickinson appears at the age of eleven in
The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life
, and again aged nineteen in
All the Hopeful Lovers
. Her father Guy Caulder also plays a part in both novels. George Holland’s curious love life is discovered long after his death in
Secret Intensity
, where a very old Gwen Willis makes an appearance. Louisa, George Holland’s wife, dies in 1955, after
Motherland
has ended and many years before
Secret Intensity
begins, but her son Billy has a large part to play in the later book. Anthony Armitage, the artist, appears as an angry old man in
All the Hopeful Lovers
. Rex Dickinson, briefly encountered in
Motherland
, is the absent husband of Mrs Dickinson, who appears in
Secret Intensity
and
The Golden Hour
. The farmhouse where Larry and Rex are billeted, and where Kitty and Ed later live, appears in all three earlier novels as the home of the Broad family. Edenfield Place appears in all four novels, at different stages of its existence. This great Victorian Gothic house is based on Tyntesfield, the Gibbs family mansion near Bristol, now owned by the National Trust.

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Motherland
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Read on for an extract of William Nicholson’s next novel

Tea at Cliveden, September 1943

Rupert Blundell did not want to go to tea with the princess.
He was unsure how to address her, and he was shy with
girls at the best of times. Lord Mountbatten, his commanding
officer, brushed aside his murmurs of dissent.

‘Nancy wants some young people,’ he said. ‘You’re a
young person, and you’re available.’

Rupert was twenty-six, which felt to himself both young
and old. Princess Elizabeth was of course much younger,
but being heir to the throne she was unlikely to be short
of savoir-faire.

‘And anyway,’ said Mountbatten, ‘you’ll like Cliveden.
They still have a pastry cook there, and it has one of the
best views in England.’

So Rupert put on his rarely worn No.2 dress uniform,
which fitted poorly round the crotch, and reported to
COHQ in Richmond Terrace. A car was to pick him up
from here and drive him to Cliveden, Lady Astor’s country
house.

‘Very smart, Rupert,’ said Joyce Wedderburn, passing
through on her way back to her office.

‘I’m under orders,’ said Rupert glumly.

‘Aren’t the trousers a bit small for you?’

‘In parts.’

‘Well, I think you look very dashing.’

She gave him one of her half-smiles that he could never
interpret, that suggested she meant something other than
what she seemed to be saying. But Rupert liked Joyce. He
could talk to her more freely than to the other girls. There
was no nonsense about her, and she had a fiancé in the
Navy, in minesweepers.

The car arrived: a Humber Imperial Landaulette, driven
by one of Lady Astor’s chauffeurs. Its rear hood was down,
and sitting in the wide back seat was an American officer
of about Rupert’s own age. He introduced himself as Captain
McGeorge Bundy, an aide attached to Admiral Alan R.
Kirk, commander of the Allied amphibious forces.

‘Call me Mac,’ he said.

He revealed to Rupert that they were to represent the
wartime allies at this tea party. There was to be a Russian
too. All this in a crisp monotone, as if to impart the information
in the most efficient way possible.

The Russian was news to Rupert.

‘I’ve no idea what we’re supposed to do,’ he said. ‘Have
you?’

‘I think the idea is the princess wants to meet people
nearer to her own age,’ said Bundy.

‘What for?’

‘Maybe it’s a blind date.’ Bundy smiled, but with his
mouth only. ‘How’d you like to marry your future queen?’

‘God preserve me,’ said Rupert.

Mac Bundy was trim and sleek, with sand-coloured hair
brushed back smoothly over his high forehead. He wore wire-rimmed glasses. His navy-blue uniform had every
appearance of being excellently cut. Looking at him, Rupert
felt as he did with so many Americans that they were the
physically perfected version of the model, while he himself
was a poor first draft.

He shifted on the car seat to ease the itching in his trousers.
The landaulette drove through Hyde Park, past the
Serpentine. From where he was sitting he could see himself
reflected in the driver’s mirror: his long face, his thickrimmed
spectacles, his protruding ears. He looked away,
out of long habit.

‘So who got you into this?’ said Bundy.

‘Mountbatten. He’s a friend of Lady Astor’s.’

‘Kirk fingered me,’ said Bundy, adding in a lower tone,
with a glance at the driver, ‘His actual order was, “Go and
humour the old bat.”’

They exchanged details of their postings. Bundy confessed
he owed his staff job to family connections.

‘I wanted a combat posting. My mother had other ideas.’

His father, Harvey Bundy, was currently a senior adviser
in the US War Department under Henry Stimson.

‘So this princess,’ he said. ‘I hear she’s all there.’

‘All there?’ said Rupert.

Bundy curved one hand before his chest.

‘Oh, right,’ said Rupert. ‘I wouldn’t know.’

He had never thought of the seventeen-year-old Princess
Elizabeth as a sexual being.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Bundy. ‘I’m not going to wolfwhistle.’

Rupert looked at the passing shopfronts and was silent.
Wartime was supposed to change things, break down the
barriers. But even when the barriers were down, you had
to do it yourself. No one was going to do it for you. There
was no one you could talk to about these things. No one
in all the world. About feeling ashamed. About wanting it
so much.

The car emerged onto the Bayswater Road.

‘I asked round for tips on meeting royalty,’ said Bundy.
‘Apparently you call her ma’am, and you don’t sit until she
sits.’

‘Ma’am? The poor girl’s only seventeen.’

‘So what are you going to call her? Liz?’

‘In the family she’s called Lilibet.’

‘How’d you know that?’

‘Mountbatten told me.’

‘Okay. Lilibet it is. Have another slice of pie, Lilibet.
Want to take a walk in the shrubbery, Lilibet?’

Rupert glanced nervously at the back of the chauffeur’s
head, but he showed no signs that he was listening.

‘Is that what you do with girls?’ said Rupert. ‘Take them
into the shrubbery?’

‘I’ll be honest with you,’ said Bundy. ‘I’m no expert.’
He leaned closer and spoke low. ‘When I was twelve years
old we went to Paris, and my mother took me to the Folies-
Bergère. The way she tells it, I got bored by the naked girls
and went outside to read a book.’

‘And did you?’

‘That’s her story.’

The car was now turning into Kensington Palace Gardens.
There on the pavement outside the Soviet embassy was a
young Russian officer, standing stiffly, almost at attention.

‘Our noble ally,’ said Bundy.

The Russian had a square, serious face and heavy
eyebrows. He gazed inscrutably on the open-backed car as
it pulled up beside him.

‘You are the party for Lady Astor?’

He sounded exactly like an American.

‘That’s us,’ said Bundy. ‘Jump in.’

He squeezed onto the seat beside them, and the car set
off down Notting Hill Gate to Holland Park. His name
was Oleg Troyanovsky. His father had been the Soviet
Ambassador in Washington before the war, and he had been
sent to school at Sidwell Friends. Within minutes he and
Bundy had discovered mutual acquaintances.

‘Of course I know the Hayes boys,’ said the Russian. ‘I
was on the tennis team with Oliver Hayes.’

‘So what are you doing in London?’

‘Joint committee on psych warfare.’ The wrinkles between
his eyebrows deepened as he spoke. ‘My father arranged it,
to keep me away from the eastern front.’

‘Check,’ said Bundy. ‘Privilege knows no boundaries.’

‘And here we are, going to tea with a princess.’

They grinned at each other, bound together by a shared
awareness of the absurdity of their situation. The car picked
up speed coming out of Hammersmith and onto the Great
West Road. The wind blew away their words, and conversation
languished. They looked out at the endless line of suburban villas rolling by, and thought their own thoughts.

The war had gone on too long. It was no longer a crisis,
with the excitement that crisis brings with it, and the promise
of change. It had become an intermission. The phrase most
often heard was ‘for the duration’. Shops were closed ‘for
the duration’. Trains ran a restricted service ‘for the duration’.
Life had paused, for the duration.

Meanwhile, thought Rupert, my youth is slipping away.

Last month Mountbatten had accepted a new appointment,
as Commander-in-Chief, South East Asia.

‘You’ll come with me, won’t you, Rupert? I must have
my old team round me.’

Rupert was more than willing to go. A brighter sun, a
bluer sky. Maybe even a new dawn.

The landaulette turned off the main road at last and made
its way up a wooded hill, through the pretty red-brick village
of Taplow, and so to the great gates of Cliveden. A long
drive wound through a wilderness of untended woodland,
until quite suddenly there appeared before them a fountain,
in which winged and naked figures sported round a
giant shell. No water flowed, and the angels, or goddesses,
wore an embarrassed air, as if sensing that their nakedness
was no longer appropriate. The car made a sharp left turn.
Ahead lay a broad beech-lined avenue, at the end of which
stood a cream-coloured palace.

‘Ah!’ sighed Troyanovsky. ‘What it is to be rich!’

‘Not rich,’ said Bundy. ‘Very rich. They don’t come richer
than the Astors.’

The house grew as they approached it, revealing on either side of the central block two curving wings, reaching out
as if to embrace the awed visitor. To the right there rose
an ornate water tower, faced with a clock that had perhaps
once been gold, but was now a tarnished brown. The grass
of the flanking lawns grew long round ancient mulberry
trees.

The chauffeur drew the car to a stop before the porte
cochère, and a butler emerged from the house to greet them.
‘Her ladyship and her Royal Highness will join you
shortly, gentlemen.’

They followed the butler into an immense oak-panelled
hall, hung with faded tapestries. At one end, before a carved
stone fireplace, tea had been laid out on two small tables.
To the left of the fireplace hung a full-size portrait of a
young woman in a gauzy pale-blue dress, her hands clasped
behind her back, her head turned coquettishly to the viewer.