Mothering Sunday

by Graham Swift

  One day, after she had lodged her bold but shy, even slightly simpering request, Mr Niven had said, after a lengthy pause for thought, ‘Well yes, of course you may, Jane.’ The pause might have suggested that he was permitting some inversion in the hierarchy of the household, or just his puzzlement on a practical point: Well when was she going to read the things, with all her duties to perform? In her sleep? It might have suggested amazement—had the ability not long ago been put to the test—that she could read at all.

  But it was nonetheless a yielding, even kindly pause.

  ‘Of course you may, Jane.’

  They were magic, door-opening words. A different answer—‘Who do you think you are, Jane?’—might have undone her life.

  It deserved one of her full bobbings. Nothing less.

  ‘But you must let me know which book first. And, of course, you must return it.’

  ‘Of course, sir. Thank you very much, sir.’

  She became a borrower from the Beechwood library, on a carefully monitored yet intrigued, even fostered basis. In fact things took a noticeably sensitive turn with Mr Niven when it became clear which section of the library she was really interested in. She wouldn’t have wanted, after all, to read Foxe’s Book of Martyrs or Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers (in five volumes). Who would?

  ‘Treasure Island, Jane? What do you want to read Treasure Island for? All these books for boys.’

  It wasn’t really a question or query at all, but more like some general bafflement—or a sort of being caught off his guard. He might perhaps have said, with a lot of coughing, ‘Not those books, Jane. Any books but those.’

  As for his other observation, well where were the books for girls?

  Which she didn’t mind at all. Boys’ stuff, adventure stuff. She didn’t mind not reading girls’ stuff, whatever that might be. Adventure. The word itself often loomed and beckoned from the pages: ‘adventure’.

  It did not seem that the Nivens of Beechwood, or their kind generally, though they had time and means, were in any way adventurous or even advocates of the idea of adventure. ‘A jamboree in Henley.’ Libraries themselves were like dry, sober rejections of adventure. Yet in the Beechwood library was this little spinning cache of stuff that had once, plainly, been gulped down, like an allowable dosage before the onset of tedious or terrible maturity.

  Mr Niven might have said, ‘Not that bookcase please, Jane.’ But he didn’t.

  And later, much later in her life, she would say in interviews, in answer to a perennial (and tedious) question, ‘Oh boys’ books, adventure books, they were the thing. Who would want to read sloppy girls’ stuff?’

  Her eyes might glint, her wrinkled face purse up a bit more. But then she might say, if she wanted to be less skittish, that reading those books then—‘the war, you understand, the first one that is, was barely over’—was like reading across a divide. So close, yet a great divide. Pirates and knights-in-armour, buried treasure and sailing ships. But they were the books she had read.

  The library at Upleigh was remarkably similar. There was the same dominant wall of books that looked as though they had never been read. There were the same small white or black busts—as if from a central warehouse—of men with heavy brows and beards and toga-draped shoulders. There was a desk and, instead of the leather sofa, two dumpy red-brick-coloured armchairs. There was a rack of newspapers and magazines, strange objects of modernity in what might have been a museum. Sunlight came from the window between half-drawn curtains and stretched itself in a bright rectangle over the soft-brown carpet.

  On the desk was a small stack of what she recognised as law books. But it was the only sign—it even looked rather arranged—of his supposed intentions while the house was empty and at peace. On a morning like this? Mugging up. She imagined anyway that his diligent studying would have consisted of putting his feet up on the desk and smoking several cigarettes.

  She seemed to see him actually doing this, like a ghost in the room. That made two ghosts then. But her ghost was—had been—palpably and unadornedly there. Though no one would ever know.

  It was only March, but such was the warmth that a fly was buzzing and knocking obstinately against the window. And then she saw it, on the other side of the desk: a little enclave of books very similar to the one she knew and had recourse to at Beechwood. She even recognised familiar titles, books she had actually read. So she was not a stranger or trespasser here. In some way she even belonged.

  But if Paul Sheringham had ever gone near any of these books, he never said. He gave the impression that he thought there were many things at Upleigh that ought by now to have been chucked away. After all, the bloody horses had all gone. And when she’d told him about her own reading at Beechwood (she wished she hadn’t) he’d scoffed, as he scoffed at so many things, and said, ‘All that tommyrot, Jay? You read all that stuff?’ And reminded her at once that their relationship was essentially bodily, physical and here-and-now, it wasn’t for droning on about books.

  A lawyer? Hardly.

  The only difference at Upleigh was that the ‘boys’ books’ were not in a separate bookcase, revolving or otherwise, but in a little section (perhaps once cleared of weightier matter) of the main big case, convenient for access.

  And the other difference of course was that she was standing naked in the library at Upleigh, something she had never done at Beechwood.

  She took one of the books from the shelf in front of her and opened it, and then, for reasons she couldn’t have explained, pressed it nursingly to her naked breasts. It was a copy of Kidnapped. She knew it. She had read the copy from the bookcase at Beechwood. There was the map of ‘The Wanderings of David Balfour’. There were the words, ‘I will begin the story of my adventures . . .’

  She pressed the book to her, then replaced it. No one would know. No one would know about that book’s little wandering and adventure. No one would know about the ‘map’ on the sheet upstairs.

  She left the library. The house’s scattered retinue of clocks ticked and whirred. It was the only sound. Outside, the world shone and sang. Here everything was muted, suspended, immured.

  She turned into a passage that she instinctively knew would take her to the stairs to the kitchen. This one, after she descended the stairs, was so still and quiet it might as well have been a library. She felt its unnerving calm. Any kitchen normally has a residual warmth, but this one, beneath the sunny upper floors and left inert all morning, was distinctly cool. But that was her fault perhaps, for wearing no clothes.

  Goose bumps emerged on her skin. So too did a vulgar gurgle from her stomach.

  The pie, with a knife for cutting it, was on the table, beneath a blue-and-white tea towel. Beside it was a tray with cutlery, napkin, condiments, a bottle of beer and a glass, a bottle opener. The whole collation was presented so that Mister Paul might carry it up to any part of the house if he cared to—the library, for example, so as not to interrupt his studies. That is, if he did not wish to savour the novel experience of eating by himself in the kitchen—and assuming, of course, that he didn’t have other plans for passing his time and taking his luncheon.

  Who anyway, on a day like this, would really want to bury their nose in a book?

  It was a half-pie, a leftover, but, even so, too much for one. But she attacked it with a sudden ravenous unmannerly hunger. There was no one to watch. He might have done this, she supposed, if the day had turned out differently, if it had followed the course of the pretence he’d invented for it. He might have come down to the kitchen and, suddenly relishing the perverse pleasure of it, wolfed the pie right there at the table. He might have ceased to be the aloof and splendid Paul Sheringham and, with no one to see, become, cheeks bulging, like some guzzling schoolboy or starving tramp.

  And she, in her ladylike liberty—and with two and six in her pocket—might have stopped at some village tea shop for egg-and-cress sandwiches and cake.

  He must by now be sitting down in his impeccab
le get-up, with her, at the Swan. Though how might he have accomplished that? By magic? By sheer gall and bravado? ‘Well, I’m here now . . .’ Or readiness to stake everything? ‘Well, if you want to call it off . . .’

  Had that even been his brutal, polished plan? It gave her a brief tingle of hope. To call it off—first clearing his path by causing serious displeasure.

  She tried anyway to imagine the scene, even as she chewed on the pie, as he himself, sitting here, might have chewed on it: cheeks crammed, pieces spilling. She wanted to eat this pie, which he hadn’t eaten, for him. As if she were him.

  It was a very good pie. She opened the bottle of beer and drank, if only to wash down the food. It tasted as beer had always tasted the few times she’d drunk it, like brown autumn leaves. She attacked the pie again. Then she felt suddenly like the most miserable and desperate of creatures: no clothes to her back, no roof of her own, and eating someone else’s pie.

  She shivered. She got to her feet. The pie was too much anyway. She burped loudly. She left everything as it was. She left it, she thought, only as he would have left it—as he had left his discarded clothes. She even turned at the door to see it as if it were all his heedless doing. Ethel would clear it up, of course, later. Ethel or Iris. And it was strange, either of them might think, that he’d eaten the pie, or most of it, if he’d gone to have lunch with Miss Hobday. And if he’d gone to have lunch with Miss Hobday then it was strange that there was also that patch on the sheet.

  But Ethel, if it was for her to note both pie and patch, might piece together a story, not unlike one she herself, the Beechwood maid, had fleetingly envisaged. That Miss Hobday, on such a beautiful morning, had taken it upon herself to drive all the way to Upleigh and ‘surprise’ Mister Paul. Meanwhile Mister Paul, toiling at his law books, had got bored and hungry and remembered the veal-and-ham pie. The marauded but unfinished remnants and the barely broached bottle of beer might indeed suggest he had been surprised in his mid-morning raid of the kitchen. And after Miss Hobday’s arrival one thing had, unexpectedly or not, led to another, accounting for the stain on the sheet.

  And then Mister Paul and Miss Hobday, having taken advantage of the empty house, had left for their lunch, each driving their own car, to preserve the appearance that they had met at their rendezvous. Ethel might even have remembered Mister Paul’s saying, on that strange little drive to the station, that he dared say he’d be meeting Miss Hobday for lunch, and then Iris saying that she’d put out a bit of veal-and-ham pie for him anyway, just in case. He wasn’t obliged of course to discuss his plans with the servants, and it was peculiar if he did. But then his personally taking them to the station was rather peculiar too.

  It was a peculiar day.

  Ethel, she supposed later, might have constructed such a story, and she might even have seen, when the time came, how her story had its failings. But much the greater likelihood was that Ethel, when attending to one or both messes, would not have thought very much about either of them, or their nefarious implications, it not being her business to think about such things. She had enough to think about anyway, having just been to her mother’s.

  Would Ethel even have thought, or would Iris, who had much more to do with the pie: Well if he ate the pie, it was the last meal he ate?

  She ascended the stairs. There was another kind of popular book besides the boys’ adventure book and one even favoured by adults. But she would say, in her interviews, that she had never had much time for the detective story. For reading them—let alone writing them. Life itself was riddle enough.

  She climbed up from the kitchen into the warmth and light of the upper floors. And now, though she had no actual need to hurry—the clock in the hall said twenty past two and the world was still at lunch—she wished to leave, she had explored sufficiently.

  It was then anyway (so she would always know the exact timing of its ringing) that the telephone—or a telephone—rang from some nearby recess she hadn’t previously noticed. She froze. She had the odd sensation that it had rung because she’d moved close to it. She didn’t answer it anyway, it would have been foolish to answer it, though she was quite good at answering telephones. Its ringing went on for some time while she stood stock-still, as if, had she moved, the telephone might somehow have observed her, which was foolish too.

  But wasn’t it utterly foolish anyway to be standing here in this unfamiliar hall with nothing on?

  She climbed the staircase and re-entered the bedroom. It was the same, of course it was, as she had left it. Only the sun, still flooding in, had lowered its angle a little. There was the open window, the clothes over the armchair, his unwanted trousers, still scarfed with one of her stockings. The pulled-back bedclothes. The patch, a little drier. Yet it seemed like a room round which, even in such a short interval, some invisible fence had been raised. Was it really the room in which . . . ? Was it really here that . . . ?

  It was the profoundest of questions. Had it really happened?

  Beyond the window the birds chirped eternally and in the blue sky she could not see, or would not remember seeing, any flaw.

  The mirror on the dressing table offered its last three-fold glimpse of her nakedness. She put on her clothes. They slipped on like some much-used disguise. She touched—only to touch, to stroke, not to tidy—his trousers. She didn’t close the open window. Again, as he might have carelessly left it. Ethel’s job. And who anyway was going to come with a ladder . . . ? She did not touch the bed, even to cover the patch.

  The young men in their frames on the dressing table seemed now oblivious of her. Was it all her vain fancy that they had previously peeped? They looked immovably through her, at some camera that had clicked long ago. She stood in the doorway and took her own last mental photograph. Then left.

  In the hall she paused again and took—plucked—one of the orchid flowers from the clusters above the bowl. Well, if he hadn’t, she would. She realised at once that it would be the most incriminating of items, if she were to wear it. If she were to return to Beechwood with an orchid stuck in her frock. But it wasn’t for wearing. She slipped it where earlier in the day she had slipped her half-crown. It would get quickly bruised and tattered perhaps, but it was her proof to herself. It was so she herself would always know. No one else ever would.

  Adventure stories, not detective stories. Boys’ books. They were the thing. And her interviewer might say, treating it all as a bit of a joke and not anyway wanting the interview to get too ‘booky’, ‘And boys themselves?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she would say with an away-with-you flip of her eighty-year-old hand, as if there had once been queues. The audience in their darkened seats might titter obligingly. And the interviewer might not even see, amid the playfulness, the brief narrowing of the eyes at the change of subject.

  It was that life itself might be an adventure. That was the submerged message (the ‘subtext’ they might say now) of all those books. Was there in fact any other way to live? And adventure did not have to be about pirates and narrow escapes. It might be a constant mental hazarding. Suppose, imagine. Imagine. What did writers do with their time? They were the most unadventurous souls on earth, weren’t they? Sitting all day at their desks.

  But she would not say such things in interviews. Only, with her protective twinkle and ironically squeezed lips, skirt teasingly round their intimate truth.

  I will begin the story of my adventures . . .

  She put the key under the chunk of stone pineapple. She could not see how Freddy could have broken it with a cricket bat. A battle-axe possibly. And she did not know which one was Freddy in the silver frames. She might have asked, she ought to have asked, but she hadn’t. ‘Which one is which? Tell me about them.’ Would it have been the moment, lying there together? Or would he have fended off the question, a look on his face of having tasted something bad?

  Now she would never know.

  There, against the wall, was her bicycle, her potentially incriminating bicycle that h
ad incriminated no one. She steered it for a while across the gravel before mounting, drawing deep unsteady breaths. She was slightly sore where she met the saddle. She tucked and gathered her skirt. The air was warm and bright and brimming round her.

  A sudden unexpected freedom flooded her. Her life was beginning, it was not ending, it had not ended. She would never be able to explain (or be required to) this illogical, enveloping inversion. As if the day had turned inside out, as if what she was leaving behind was not enclosed, lost, entombed in a house. It had merged somehow—pouring itself outwards—with the air she was breathing. She would never be able to explain it, and she would not feel it any the less even when she discovered, as she would do, how this day had turned really inside out. Could life be so cruel yet so bounteous at the same time?

  She rode off. She did not ride—as he’d departed and she’d arrived—along the drive to the gate and the road. Old habit and old secrecy made her take the old route. Past the stables, through the rhododendrons, past the vegetable plot, the potting shed, the cold frames and greenhouse, then along mere threading paths and through narrow gaps between neglected shrubs into a jumbled outer region that led to a copse. Every twist and turn, every screening outbuilding and clump of vegetation was familiar to her. They had met among them and made use of them often enough. It was even his standard directive: ‘the garden path’.

  The secret back route from Beechwood to Upleigh would remain always in her head, such that she might at any time have easily drawn its map, like the map in Treasure Island or of David Balfour’s wanderings in the Highlands. She would retain the ability, but of course it would be a contradiction, a betrayal, actually to draw a secret map.

  ‘The garden path, Jay.’ And, once, with a strange echoing sincerity, ‘I won’t ever lead you up it.’