Mothering Sunday Read online

  ‘Thank you, sir. That’s very kind of you.’

  ‘Well—you have a beautiful day for it,’ he reiterated, and she wondered again, even a little flusteredly, what he could mean by ‘it’.

  But he looked at her only enquiringly, not searchingly. Then he drew himself up, even becoming rather official.

  It was a strange business, this Mothering Sunday ahead of them, a ritual already fading, yet the Nivens—and the Sheringhams—still clung to it, as the world itself, or the world in dreamy Berkshire, still clung to it, for the same sad, wishing-the-past-back reasons. As the Nivens and the Sheringhams perhaps clung to each other more than they’d used to, as if they’d become one common decimated family.

  It was strange in her case for quite different reasons, and it all elicited from Mr Niven, as well as the half-crown, much throat-clearing and correctness.

  ‘Milly will take the First Bicycle and leave it at the station for her return. And you, Jane . . . ?’

  There were no longer horses, but there were bicycles. The two in question were virtually identical—Milly’s had a slightly larger basket—but they were scrupulously known as the ‘first’ and ‘second’ bicycles, and Milly, as befitted her seniority, had the first one.

  She herself would have the second one. She might be at Upleigh inside fifteen minutes. Though there was still the matter of formal permission—if not for going to Upleigh.

  ‘If I may, sir, I’ll just take myself off. On the Second Bicycle.’

  ‘That’s what I had been assuming, Jane.’

  She might have just said ‘my bicycle’, but Mr Niven was a stickler for the ‘first’ and ‘second’ thing, and she’d learnt to go along with it. She knew, from Milly, that the ‘boys’—Philip and James—had once had bicycles (as well as horses) which had become known as the First and Second Bicycles. The boys were gone, so were their bicycles, but for some strange reason the ‘first’ and ‘second’ tradition had carried over to the two servants’ bicycles, even though these were, necessarily, ladies’ versions, without crossbars. She and Milly perhaps didn’t qualify as ladies, but they qualified, in one persistent respect, as the dim ghosts of Philip and James.

  She had never known Philip and James, but Milly had once known them and indeed cooked for them. And Milly had once known ‘her lad’, who’d gone the same way as Philip and James, even perhaps in the same dreadful part of France. And her lad had been called Billy. Milly would not often use his name—‘my lad’ had become as obligatory as ‘first’ and ‘second’ bicycles—so it was hard to gauge how much she’d actually, really known him. Yet if they’d ever got married they would have been Milly and Billy. Perhaps ‘her lad’ was a fiction of Milly’s that no one could disprove, or would wish to. The war had suited all purposes.

  Once upon a time . . . Once upon a time she’d arrived, the new maid, Jane Fairchild, at Beechwood just after a great gust of devastation. The family, like many others, had been whittled down, along with the household budget and the servants. Now, there was only a cook and a maid. Cook Milly, with her seniority, had been theoretically promoted to cook and housekeeper, but she clung to the kitchen, while she, the new and inexperienced maid, soon effectively did most of the housekeeping.

  She didn’t mind any of this. She loved Milly.

  Cook Milly was just three years her elder, but it seemed a condition of the loss of ‘her lad’ that she’d rapidly put on weight and girth, even developed an air of scatty wisdom, and so become like the mother she’d perhaps always wanted to be. ‘Her lad’ even began to suggest she might have been the poor boy’s mother.

  And today Cook Milly, if her bicycle could bear her weight to the station, was going to see her mother.

  ‘Of course you may, Jane,’ Mr Niven had said, inserting the napkin into its silver ring. Was he going to ask her where she was thinking of going?

  ‘You have the Second Bicycle at your disposal and you have—ahem—two and six. And you have the whole county at your disposal. As long as you come back again!’

  Then, as if slightly envying the broad freedom he’d just granted, he said, ‘It’s your day, Jane. You may be—ahem—at your own devices.’ He knew, by now, that such a phrase would not be over her head—it might even have been meant as a gentle tribute to her reading habits. Cook Milly might have thought ‘devices’ meant kitchen spoons.

  He can’t surely have meant anything else by it.

  It was March 30th 1924. It was Mothering Sunday. Milly had her mother to go to. But the Nivens’ maid had her simple liberty, and half a crown to go with it. Then the telephone had rung, rapidly altering her previous plan. No, she wouldn’t be having a picnic.

  And it was surely more than she could ever have hoped for, since even if Mister Paul and Miss Hobday were not to be of the Henley party it had left open the question of how they might both pass the day together anyway. A question which still remained open.

  They both had cars, she knew this. Young people of their kind could have cars now. He sometimes referred to hers as the ‘Emmamobile’. They would certainly both be at their own devices, and if they played their cards right they might, if it was their inclination, have at their disposal either of two helpfully emptied houses. If you thought about it, up and down the country on this day there might be any number of temporarily vacated houses available for secret assignations. And if she knew Paul Sheringham . . .

  Exactly. She knew him and she didn’t know him. She knew him in some ways better than anyone—she would always be sure of that—while knowing that no one else must ever know how much she knew him. But she knew him well enough to know the ways in which he was not knowable. She didn’t know what he was thinking now, as he lay naked beside her. She often thought he didn’t think anything.

  She didn’t know how he behaved with Emma Hobday. She didn’t know how much Emma Hobday—Miss Hobday—knew him. She didn’t know Emma Hobday. Having only glimpsed her once or twice, how could she? She knew she was pretty, in a flowery kind of way. She was the kind of woman who might be called a flower, who dressed in flowery clothes. But she had no idea what she was like, as it were, beneath the flowers. How could she? Paul scarcely spoke of her, though he was going to marry her. And that, while it showed her how much she didn’t know Paul Sheringham, was a comforting mystery.

  What seemed, oddly, to be happening was that the closer Paul Sheringham and Miss Hobday got to marrying, the less time they actually spent in each other’s company. She had heard of that thing where brides and grooms weren’t supposed to see each other for a day (or was it just a night?) before their wedding, but this was a sort of expanded version of that practice and had been going on for some time. He ought surely to make some stronger show of being the eager husband.

  So the phrase had come to her, like a phrase too from a book, that had suddenly acquired actual meaning: ‘arranged marriage’.

  It was the best she could hope for. Not that it really helped her. But if, for whatever reason, a combination of flowers and money, he was slipping towards such a thing, then this day—so she had thought even as she attended to breakfast and Mr Niven spoke about hampers—this day that had begun with such promising sunshine might be the last chance. She didn’t know whether to call it his or hers, let alone theirs.

  In any case she was getting ready to lose him. Was he getting ready to lose her? She had no right to expect him to see it that way. Did she have any right to think she was losing him? She had never exactly had him. But oh yes she had.

  She didn’t know what it would be like to lose him, she didn’t want to think about it, though lose him she must. Perhaps all she was thinking on the morning of Mothering Sunday, as she brought in more coffee at Beechwood, was that if he played his cards right with this day then she wanted him to play them with her. Some hope. Then the telephone had rung. ‘Wrong number.’ Her heart had soared.

  ‘The shower will be leaving soon. I’ll be on my tod here. Eleven o’clock. Front door.’

  He had spoken in
a strong whisper, as if picturing her exact predicament, even down to the open breakfast-room door. It was an order, a curt order, but a transforming one. And she had listened, or appeared to listen, with polite patience, as if to some ineptly garrulous caller who had not yet realised their error.

  ‘I’m awfully sorry, madam, but you have the wrong number.’

  How skilled she’d become, in seven years. At imitating their ‘awfully’s. And at other things too. But she still had to assimilate it: just the two of them in the empty house. It had never happened before. Front door. She had never been bidden to any front door. Though sometimes, in earlier days, it might have indicated his required form of congress.

  ‘That’s quite all right, madam.’

  Mr Niven’s munching on his toast and marmalade had perhaps obliterated some of her flawless performance.

  ‘Wrong number,’ she’d explained. And then he’d given her half a crown.

  And suppose he had known what things she’d once done for Paul Sheringham—to Paul Sheringham—yes, for only sixpence, sometimes for even less. And then, after not so long, for nothing, nothing at all, mutual interest in the transactions cancelling any need for purchase.

  Though when she was eighty or ninety and was asked, as she would be, even in public interviews, to look back on her younger years, she felt she could fairly claim (though of course never did) that one of her earliest situations in life was that of prostitute. Orphan, maid, prostitute.

  He tapped ash into the ashtray decorating her belly.

  And secret lover. And secret friend. He had said that once to her, ‘You are my friend, Jay.’ He had said it so announcingly. It had made her head go light. She had never been called that, named that thing so decisively by anyone, as if he were saying he had no other friend, he had only just discovered, in fact, what a friend might be. And she was to tell no one about this newly attested revelation.

  It had made her head swim. She was seventeen. She had ceased to be a prostitute. Friend. It was better perhaps than lover. Not that ‘lover’ would have been then in her feasible vocabulary, or even in her thinking. But she would have lovers. In Oxford. She would have many of them, she would make a point of it. Though how many of them were friends?

  And was Emma Hobday, even though she was his bride-to-be, his friend?

  In any case, as friends or perhaps even as lovers, or just as young Mister Paul and the new Beechwood maid he’d spotted one day in the post office in Titherton, they’d done all sorts of things together, in all sorts of secret locations. The two houses were scarcely a mile apart, if you went by the back routes and then, necessarily, through the garden. The greenhouse and the disused part of the stables were just two of their recourses. And they’d done those things by a strangely dependable intuition—you could hardly call it a timetable—that had become the habit, the telepathy of true friends. As if everything were always by imagined chance, but they knew it was not.

  So—they were really lovers?

  Because there was anyway such an intensity and strange gravity to their experimentation, such a consciousness at least that they were doing something wrong (the whole world was in mourning all around them), it had needed some compensating element of levity: giggling. It had sometimes seemed in fact that to get each other giggling was the real aim of it all—a dangerous aim to have when another essential factor was that they should on no account be found out.

  And the remarkable thing was that even now, with his suave and superior ways and his silver cigarette case, there was a giggle still inside him, still there, even now when they’d become accomplished, unfumbling, serious-faced addicts at what they did. It might still suddenly emerge, without warning, without explanation, out of his polished exterior, an explosive cacophonous giggle, as if a mould had shattered.

  But he was naked now, there was no mould to shatter. And why should he giggle? It was their last day.

  She had sped on her bicycle from Beechwood to Upleigh. That is, since Mr and Mrs Niven were yet to depart, she had been careful not to be seen to be hurrying at all, or to be pointing the bicycle in the direction of Upleigh. At the gate she had turned casually right not left. But then, after turning two more corners, she had sped.

  Then, nearing Upleigh, she’d done something she had never done before. She had not approached by the usual back route, by the garden path—leaving her bicycle hidden in the familiar clump of hawthorns, then continuing, alertly, on foot. She had taken the front road and boldly cycled through the Upleigh gates and up the drive between the rows of lime trees and the swirls of daffodils.

  It was what he had instructed—ordered her to do. The front door. It was only as she turned through the gates that the extraordinariness, the unprecedented gift of it—yes, it was her day—came to her. The front door! And he must have wanted to observe her do it, since hardly had she brought her bicycle to a halt near the porch than the front door—or rather one of them, there were two tall imposing glossy-black doors—opened, as if by a miraculous power of its own.

  She did not know for certain, though she would soon, that his bedroom overlooked the drive. He might have been visible for a moment, had she been looking for him, at the open window on the first floor. But he was visible suddenly anyway, stepping from behind the apparently self-opening door—to be called ‘madam’ by her, while she would be called ‘clever’ by him. She’d propped the bicycle quickly against the front wall. The hall, beyond the vestibule, had black-and-white chessboard tiles. There were the fronds of intense white flowers.

  ‘My mother’s precious orchids. But we’re not here to look at them.’

  And he’d led her—or rather steered her by her backside—up the stairs.

  Then it might have been her turn to be called ‘madam’, since, once inside the bedroom, he began almost immediately to undress her as he’d never done before—or rather as he’d never before had such an opportunity to do. Could it even strictly be said that he’d ever ‘undressed’ her?

  ‘Stand there, Jay. Stay still.’

  It seemed that he wanted her not to move, just to stand, while his fingers gradually undid and released everything and let it fall about her. So it was not at all unlike how she might sometimes, if Mrs Niven should wearily request it, be required to ‘undo’ Mrs Niven. Except, she couldn’t deny it, there was a reverence with which he went about the task that she could never have applied to Mrs Niven. It was like an unveiling. She would never forget it.

  ‘Don’t move, Jay.’

  Meanwhile she could look around her at this remarkable room she had never been in before. A dressing table, with a triple-panelled mirror, cluttered with small objects, mainly silver. An armchair with a striped pattern, gold on cream. Curtains similarly patterned and completely drawn back (while he undressed her!) and gently stirring. An open window. A carpet of a pale grey-blue, the colour of cigarette smoke caught in sunlight—and sunlight was pouring in. A bed.

  ‘What is this, Jay? Your hidden treasure?’

  His fingers had found something in the recesses of her clothing.

  A half-crown piece.

  It was Mothering Sunday 1924. Mr Niven had indeed watched her unspeedily cycle off, since he’d just brought the Humber round to the front to await Mrs Niven. She supposed that, most of the time, Mr Niven would ‘undo’ Mrs Niven, if she couldn’t undo herself. What a word—‘undo’! She supposed that Mrs Niven might now and then say, ‘Undo me, Godfrey,’ in a different way from how she might say it to her maid. Or that Mr Niven might sometimes say in a different way still, ‘Can I undo you, Clarrie?’

  She supposed that Mr and Mrs Niven might still, now and then . . . even though some eight years ago they had lost two ‘brave boys’. But she did not suppose. She occasionally saw the evidence. She changed the sheets.

  She did not know, even on Mothering Sunday, what it would be like to be a mother and lose two sons—in as many months apparently. Or how such a mother might feel on such a day. No boys would be coming home, would they, wi
th little posies or simnel cakes to offer?

  But Paul Sheringham would be getting married in two weeks’ time and he was the one son left. And of course the Nivens would be there. He was (and oh how he knew it) both families’ darling.

  Now Mr and Mrs Niven would be driving, sitting side by side, through the bright spring sunshine to Henley. Milly already, before any of them, had creaked her way out of the Beechwood gates to get the 10.20 from Titherton. And this house, Upleigh, was now obligingly empty, except for themselves, since Mr and Mrs Sheringham—‘the shower’—had also departed for Henley, and the Upleigh cook and maid—Iris and Ethel—had been driven to Titherton Station by no less a person than Paul Sheringham.

  Only now did he tell her this, as he undressed her—or rather, since she was soon standing naked in his sunlit room, as she, in reciprocal fashion, began to undress, to ‘undo’ him.

  ‘I drove Iris and Ethel to the station.’

  It was something that hardly needed announcing. Did it relate to what they were doing right now? And it was something—she thought later—that had hardly needed doing. On a morning like this Iris and Ethel might have been happy to walk. Upleigh was even closer to Titherton Station than Beechwood was.

  Was it his way of explaining why his telephone call had come so agonisingly late? Or of assuring her that the house really was all safely theirs? He had packed off the staff himself.

  But he had said it in such an untypically earnest way. As if he wished her to know, she would think later, that on this special upside-down day he had placed himself, lordliest of the lordly as he could be, in the deferring role. He had not only offered her his house, opened its door for her obediently on her arrival, then undressed her as if he were her slave, but he had, in this other way too, been of service to servants, kind to her kind.