by Graham Swift
She listened to his steps receding down the staircase. They became louder again as they clicked and loitered on the tiles of the hall. He was gathering an item or two before his actual departure? A hat? The buttonhole? Why not? Perhaps he kept a pin for such a thing in his jacket pocket. He was finding that key?
She did not move. She froze. She heard the front door—or doors—being opened then closed. It was neither a slam nor a gentle manipulation. Then she heard—it came up from outside through the open window, not echoing through the house itself—his sudden giggle. If giggle it was. It was more like some trumpeting, defiant call, weird and startling as a peacock’s. She would never forget it.
There was the crunch of his shoes on the gravel. He was walking towards the old stable and his garaged car. He would see her bicycle against the front wall. She’d simply propped it there, since he’d said the front door—and the front door had already been opening magically. She hadn’t left it discreetly out of sight. And so, she realised now, if Miss Hobday had decided to turn up mischievously, as a fiancée might in this modern age, in her own car, to surprise him—and surprise him she would have done—she would have seen it: a woman’s bicycle, without a crossbar. And then there might have been a scene, a wild and frantic scene. And the day would have turned out very differently.
But wasn’t there going to be a scene now in any case, at the Swan at Bollingford?
All the scenes. All the scenes that never occur, but wait in the wings of possibility. It was perhaps already almost half past one. Birds chorused. Somewhere on a road the other side of Bollingford, Emma Hobday, in her Emmamobile, would already be nearing the place of their rendezvous. Or perhaps she too was late. It was her woman’s right. Perhaps she was always maddeningly late and perhaps he was only banking on this exasperating habit. If he timed it right they might serenely coincide.
Perhaps that was the simple explanation.
But in any case Emma Hobday would be enjoying, as she drove, the dazzling rush of this spring day. What it might be like to drive a car was beyond her maid’s experience—she had only driven a bicycle. But she tried to put herself momentarily in the shoes—or on the wheels—of Emma Hobday who did not know yet what a show of himself her husband-to-be had prepared for her. Or that he’d taken so long in putting on his trousers.
And at Henley they might have finished the smoked salmon and be anticipating perhaps the duck or the lamb with mint sauce—surely not as good as Milly’s. And remarking yet again on the marvellous weather, and if only it would repeat itself for the wedding. She imagined a dining room with tall French windows flung open to the sunshine. A lawn leading down to the river. Tables even, laid up, outside. White hats. Like a wedding itself.
All the scenes. To imagine them was only to imagine the possible, even to predict the actual. But it was also to conjure the non-existent.
She heard the car start. A throaty revving or two. Perhaps he always did it, as if a race was starting. And he would surely have to race now, to redeem himself even partially. But she heard the wheels simply crackle, not spin or lurch, over the gravel, then the sound of the engine gathering speed and noise, as he drove between the lime trees and the two big lawns, then getting fainter and simply merging with the birdsong.
She did not move. She did not go to the window. A brief, flourishing roar, as he turned onto the metalled road—the same road he had taken this morning, in the other car, with the honoured but cowed Ethel and Iris—and at last put his foot down.
She didn’t move. The curtains stirred slightly. A naked girl in his room. She didn’t move—she didn’t know how long she didn’t move—until it seemed the absurdity of her not moving won out against some dreadful need not to.
Then she moved. She reared up from the pillow. Her feet found the carpet. She walked over it, naked, as he had. The two brothers in their silver frames stared at her. She saw herself in the mirror. She went to the window. There was nothing to see. Berkshire. There was no one to notice her sudden unaccountable face at the window, her bare sunlit breasts. The sky was an unbroken blue.
She turned back into the room, resisting the fleeting urge to begin picking up clothes. She looked at the bed where they had both been, the covers flung back, the dented sheets, the little blatant stain.
She thought of Ethel.
All the emissions. Ethel, maid in a house of boys, would be not unfamiliar with them, though this little stain would be curiously different. All the emissions of three brothers, and two of them gone now. Though there they were, in their silver frames, eyeing a naked girl. And Ethel, she strongly supposed, had never known what it was like to be the direct cause of a man’s emission, let alone to feel it inside her, or, mingling with her own fluids, trickling out of her. A maid—and, yes, a maid. And Ethel must be nearing thirty. Her parents must be ancient. But at least she had them and had been allowed to see them today.
All the wasted emissions. The sunlight for a moment seemed to be filling the room only with a bright bare emptiness. But why should she be feeling so bereft and alone in the world when she’d had what she’d had this day? And when, after all, she wasn’t Ethel. And when she had right now a whole house along with a small parkland at her disposal—as Mr Niven might have put it.
She walked out, past the dressing room, into the nearby bathroom. A little masculine temple. She looked at razors and brushes and bottles of cologne and wondered whether to touch them. She wondered whether to touch and finger every last item on the glass shelves. She washed and dried herself anyway, using the basin and the towel—damp from his own use of it—that Ethel would remove unthinkingly.
She’d put in the cap that he’d helped her get. It was why there had been so much dribble. She couldn’t have got such a thing without him, and it had all been done, with his usual scorning of difficulty or embarrassment, one day when she’d had the afternoon off. She’d got the 1.20 to Reading and met him. Afterwards, they’d gone to a cinema.
God knows how he’d arranged it. He out-clevered her, perhaps, at some things. ‘There’s a doctor chappie I know, Jay . . .’ It had taken her some time to—adapt to it. It was her (their) precious means of prevention.
And suppose, she would think later, she had become pregnant. Would she have suffered all the consequences—they would have been all her consequences and would have included swift banishment—so that his marriage would not have been cancelled? Would she have borne all that for him?
Suppose she had deliberately neglected to put the thing in, say three months ago.
Suppose.
‘A Dutch cap, Jay. So my seed doesn’t get anywhere near you. I mean, any nearer than it needs to.’
She didn’t know what was Dutch about it. But part of her maid’s outfit was a little white cap. So, there were times when she was wearing two caps.
And ‘seed’. That was another strange word, or it was a strange way of using it, since it didn’t look like anything resembling seed—the pips in an apple, the tiny black things that might dust a loaf. And yet it was the proper and the right word, she could see that too, and she rather liked it. And it was the word he’d first used for it, when she first became acquainted with the stuff. ‘It’s my seed, Jay.’ It seemed so long ago now. ‘It’s my seed. We could put it in the ground and water it and see what happens.’ She honestly hadn’t known if he was being serious.
And now it was springtime. Seed time. ‘We plough the fields and scatter . . .’
All the emissions.
Had her mother been a pregnant maid? Was that the whole story? Had her mother not had a cap to put in? All the omissions. As Milly might have put it.
She went into the dressing room. She was tempted to touch, finger—even try on—everything that hung in it. It was something that servants could only wonder at. What will it be today? Who shall I be today? How had he chosen, on such a day, his almost severe yet perfect steel-grey jacket?
She went back into the bedroom. There was the soft onslaught of the birdsong again.Th
e far-off snorting of a train.
She might retrieve her clothes, put them on and leave at once. What was the phrase she had sometimes read in books? ‘Cover her tracks.’ But he’d said what he’d said: the house was hers. She would truly make it so. And it would have seemed somehow like a wrongness, a retreat, to put her clothes back on again.
She went out onto the landing, into shadow, her bare feet on mossy carpet. Shafts and dapples of sunlight from some upper window or skylight caught the red and brown weaves beneath her, the worn patch at the top of the staircase, the gleam of banisters, the glitter of dust in the air. There was always dust in the air. Why else the need for dusting?
She descended the stairs, her fingers stroking the rail more out of delicate assessment than to steady herself. Where the stairs turned, stair rods gleamed. Ethel was no slouch. Below, the hall seemed to tense at her approach. Objects might have scuttled and retreated. They had never witnessed anything like this before. A naked woman coming down the stairs!
Her feet struck the coolness of the hall tiles. On one side of the exit to the vestibule was a grandfather clock, on the other a full-length mirror. Across the hall was a table with the large bowl and the sprigs of white flowers. His mother’s precious orchids. They did not look like any other flower. They had a stillness, an insistence, each little bloom was like a frozen butterfly.
Might he have picked one before he left? They looked indeed too precious to be picked. But what should he care? It was not his way to respect such things. As it was not his way, plainly, to respect punctuality. The grandfather clock said a quarter to two! And who would notice one little flower missing from the stem? If there was one missing now, she wasn’t noticing it.
It was all in her head, in any case, that he might have picked an orchid. Then stood before the mirror to attach it. As was the picture that she might have stood here and picked one for him. ‘Here—before you go.’ And held it to his lapel.
Pictures hung around the hall, as they hung, in step-fashion themselves, above the stairs, as they hung also around the walls at Beechwood. It was a strange thing, this need among their kind for pictures to adorn the walls, since she had never seen Mr or Mrs Niven actually stand before a picture and look at it. They were things, perhaps, only to be noted out of the corner of the eye, or only for visitors to appreciate. Or rather for maids to study closely and be their true connoisseurs, as they dusted the frames and cleaned the glass.
She had stared repeatedly at all the pictures at Beechwood, so that she would remember them always, even when she was ninety, like some thumbed catalogue in her head, as people apparently remembered with uncanny clarity the illustrations in their first children’s books. As she would remember always the big gloomy pictures of men in dark coats—benefactors, overseers—that hung in the hall in the orphanage, where there had been no reading of bedtime stories.
Could she ‘catalogue’ this place? Or at least take in and preserve in some way its sudden crowding presence for her, its multiplicity of contents. Given that she would never be here again. Given that she could only give it so long—how long might she dare?
And how long before, for him, the catalogue of this place, in his new life, might seep from his head? Not quickly, she imagined, even hoped. And how long before, for him, the catalogue of all the moments with her . . . ? Before even this day would fade.
Within the vestibule—it was much like at Beechwood—there were all the regular accompaniments—umbrella stand, hat stand—of departures and arrivals, gatherings or sheddings of coats. Here (though it was Ethel’s task) she might easily have stood to practise that essential art of the servant of being both invisible yet indispensably at hand. She was invisible now.
On a little felt-topped narrow table where gloves and other belongings might sometimes rest she saw the key that he’d left out for her. It was large and very key-like and somehow like some troubling, waiting test, though it was not the key for opening anything, merely for locking up.
She did not want to touch it yet.
She turned back into the hall where a choice of doors and directions faced her. It did not matter perhaps. She had no particular business in any of the rooms—except the bedroom upstairs, where the business was over. Yet her general and compelling business seemed to be to impregnate with her unseen, unclothed intrusion this house that was and wasn’t hers.
And so she did. She glided from room to room. She looked, took in, but also secretly bestowed. She seemed to float on the knowledge that, outrageous as her visiting was—she hadn’t a stitch on!—no one would know, guess she had even been here. As if her nakedness conferred on her not just invisibility but an exemption from fact.
Ethel would know of course. But Ethel would think she had been Miss Hobday.
She entered the drawing room. It was like a small deserted foreign country, a collection of pleading but abandoned possessions. As if life itself—she had never had this thought at Beechwood—was the sum of its possessions. She could not help entering it with the studied deference of a maid announcing a caller or bringing in tea. Yet there was no one there. It was almost like entering those unalterable shrines of the boys’ rooms at Beechwood—no need to knock but you felt you should—and she decided at once that she wouldn’t go into the equivalent rooms that must be here upstairs. Had she really thought she would? Like this?
The gilt mirror over the mantelpiece suddenly leapt to arrest her, to prove her undeniable, flagrant presence. Look, this is you! You are here!
And had he supposed that he was exempt from fact? That a quarter past two might conveniently turn into half past one? She tried to guess the exact calibration of minutes by which his lateness would be merely excused, excused but with frostiness, excused but with hot anger, not excused at all. Not excused, even with the forgiving closeness of their wedding—not excused especially because of that.
She tried to put herself again in the shoes, the skin of Emma Hobday. On the mantelpiece was an invitation, on thick, gold-edged, round-cornered card, expensively printed with scrolling black letters. It was an invitation to Mr and Mrs Sheringham from Mr Hobday and Mrs Hobday to the wedding of their daughter, Emma Carrington Hobday. It was a formality of course, and had been put there on the mantelpiece simply in proud proclamation. As if they would not have gone to their son’s wedding.
‘Carrington’?
Returning to the hall, she went to stand before the tall mirror, as though to put herself in her own oddly intangible skin. She had never before had the luxury of so many mirrors. She had never before had the means to view her whole unclad self. All she had in her maid’s room was a little square of a mirror, no bigger than one of the hall tiles.
This is Jane Fairchild! This is me!
Paul Sheringham had seen, known, explored this body better than she had done herself. He had ‘possessed’ it. That was another word. He had possessed her body—her body being almost all she possessed. And could it be said that she had possessed and might always possess him?
And had he ever ‘possessed’ Emma Hobday? Well, he would in two weeks.
She tried to picture Emma Hobday’s naked body—how it might resemble or not resemble hers. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t even imagine Emma Hobday without clothes. What was she wearing now, on a March day that was like June? A flowery summer frock? A straw hat? She tried to see Emma Hobday in the mirror. It was even hard to see—though he must have stood before this mirror, a last magnificent look, orchid or no orchid, less than an hour ago—him.
Can a mirror keep a print? Can you look into a mirror and see someone else? Can you step through a mirror and be someone else?
The grandfather clock chimed two o’clock.
She had not known he was already dead.
She turned, to consider another choice of doors and, opening one and then another, found herself in the library. It was not, perhaps, such a random choice. Houses have patterns and proper ‘houses’, even modest ones like Beechwood or Upleigh, had their libraries. I
n any case she was glad it was where she found herself to be.
Libraries too—libraries especially—had normally to be entered with much delicate knocking and caution, though as often as not, judging by the one at Beechwood, there was actually no one inside. Yet even when empty they could convey the frowning implication that you should not be there. But then a maid had to dust—and, my, how books could gather dust. Going into the library at Beechwood could be a little like going into the boys’ rooms upstairs, and the point of libraries, she sometimes thought, was not the books themselves but that they preserved this hallowed atmosphere of not-to-be-disturbed male sanctuary.
So, few things could be more shocking than for a woman to enter a library naked. The very idea.
The Beechwood library had its wall’s worth of books, most of which (a maid knows) had hardly ever been touched. But in one corner, near a buttoned-leather sofa, was a revolving bookcase (she liked to twirl it idly when she was cleaning) in which were kept books that clearly had been read. Surprisingly perhaps, in such a generally grown-up place, they were books that harked back to childhood, boyhood or gathering manhood, books that she imagined might once have flitted between the library and those silent rooms upstairs. There were even a few books that looked newly and hopefully purchased, but never actually begun.
Rider Haggard, G.A. Henty, R.M. Ballantyne, Stevenson, Kipling . . . She had good reason to remember the names and even the titles on some of the books. The Black Arrow, The Coral Island, King Solomon’s Mines . . . She would always see their grubby, frayed dust jackets or the exact coloration of their cloth bindings, the wrinklings and fadings of their spines.
Of all the rooms at Beechwood, in fact, the library, for all its dauntingness, was the one she most liked to clean. It was the room in which she most felt like some welcome, innocent thief.
