Mothering Sunday

by Graham Swift

  But what had mattered most—and was strangely clear—was that Cook Milly, who was only three years her elder, was implicitly proposing to be her, Jane Fairchild’s, mother—her substitute mother—for the duration. And such was the sincerity that flowed out of Milly that she, the new, disoriented maid, could not help but at once implicitly accept this offer. And never disown it, even though it would emerge that she was a good deal sharper than Cook Milly, so that Milly, who did not have an ounce of cleverness or cunning in her, might be seen as the child of the two of them.

  Yet she would always wonder if she had really meant to say ‘orchid’. And how much she might have known, guessed all along, about her and Paul Sheringham.

  She would call the character, after all, Molly Cook. And the duration—of her adoption, as it were, by Milly—would be seven years, since within six months of that Mothering Sunday Cook Milly, who had always had her eccentricities with words, went more seriously funny in the head and was taken away to some place (she never knew where, if it wasn’t her own poor mother’s) where women of her station and condition got taken, never to return.

  So she was orphaned, you might say, a second time.

  And what if orphans really were called orchids? And if the sky was called the ground. And if a tree was called a daffodil. Would it make any difference to the actual nature of things? Or their mystery?

  And what if she had not stayed on the bed but had gone down the stairs with him, still naked, her cool feet on the cool chessboard tiles, to take an orchid from the bowl and hold it to his lapel?

  ‘For me. Since we will never meet again.’

  Like some far-fetched scene in a far-fetched story book.

  She would become a writer, and because she was a writer, or because it was what had made her become a writer, be constantly beset by the inconstancy of words. A word was not a thing, no. A thing was not a word. But somehow the two—things—became inseparable. Was everything a great fabrication? Words were like an invisible skin, enwrapping the world and giving it reality. Yet you could not say the world would not be there, would not be real if you took away the words. At best it seemed that things might bless the words that distinguished them, and that words might bless everything.

  But she would never say these things in interviews.

  She would sometimes discuss them—even discuss them in bed—with her husband Donald Campion. She would call him the Great Dissector. And he would call her the Great Vivisector. Now, there was a word. And she would poke her tongue out at him.

  ‘And what other things do you think are necessary for becoming a writer?’

  ‘Well, you have to understand that words are only words, just bits of air . . .’

  The crow’s feet round her eyes positively dancing.

  ‘Oh, adventure stories, of course, boys’ stories. In spite of the fact that there was still a war going on and all that boys’ stuff had become sheer nonsense. Sheer tommyrot.’

  ‘And—boys themselves?’

  ‘You mean—adventures with boys . . . ?’

  She would become a writer. She would live to be ninety-eight. She would live to have seen two world wars and the reigns of four kings and one queen. And very nearly two queens, since she must have been begotten—only just—in the reign of Queen Victoria. ‘Begotten, then forgotten.’

  She was ten years old and in an orphanage when a big ship hit an iceberg, making some more orphans. She was twelve years old when a woman threw herself under a king’s horse. She had just turned fifteen when she worked for a while, one summer, in a big house—she had never seen such a palace—and learnt all about nocturnal emissions.

  She would live to be almost as old as the century and to know she had probably known and seen—and written—enough. She did not mind, she would cheerfully say, if she did not make it to the year 2000. It was a wonder she had made it this far. Her life had ‘19’ written on it and nineteen was a good age to be. Her face would bloom.

  Not that it was really so much—the knowing and seeing—even in seventy, eighty, ninety years. ‘Her maid’s years’, ‘her Oxford years’,‘her London years’,‘her Donald years’.You lived in your own little cranny, didn’t you? All those years at a desk! Even her years of so-called fame, of being shunted around the world, being in places she would never have dreamed of being in—they had all gone by in a blur. And then it was ‘Jane Fairchild at Seventy’, ‘Jane Fairchild at Seventy-five’,‘Jane Fairchild at Eighty’. For heaven’s sake! And batting away the same old questions.

  But if you counted what she had seen in her mind’s eye.Well then . . . All the places, all the scenes. In the Mind’s Eye: it was the title of her most well-known book. And could she disentangle it, the stuff she’d seen in her mind’s eye, from the actual stuff of her own life? Well of course she bloody well could, she wasn’t a fantasist. And of course she bloody well couldn’t. It was the whole point of being a writer, wasn’t it, to embrace the stuff of life? It was the whole point of life to embrace it.

  ‘Her Oxford years’! That was a case in point. Yes, she’d gone to Oxford. She could truly say that, but not in the way, of course, some people could say it. Yet she would love to say gaily and freely in interviews, ‘Oh yes, I was at Oxford . . .’ ‘When I was at Oxford . . .’

  Yes, she had gone to Oxford, in October 1924, to work as an assistant in a bookshop, Paxton’s Bookshop in Catchpole Lane. And books, she knew by then, were one of the necessities, the rocks of her life.

  It was her first job after being a maid and the first big step in life she had taken for herself. Not a big step, you might think, from maid to shop girl, but it had required some initiative and daring, even some writerly skill, in answering the advert. And it had required Mr Niven’s cooperation in writing her a reference. Perhaps he had said that she’d made more use of his own library than he had.

  In any case she had got the job. And Mr Niven must have understood what a big step it was for her and that she was fully determined to take it, since when she left he gave her ten pounds (ten pounds!) with which to set herself up in Oxford. And she had anyway the money she’d saved from her maid’s wages (not having a family that had any call on them), not to mention from the occasional half-crowns and florins Mr Niven would bestow on her.

  Mr Niven had learnt economy, but there were still the vestiges of largesse.

  By this time Milly had left and there was a new cook called Winifred, and there would soon be a new maid too. And she, Jane Fairchild, would never know what became of Beechwood or Upleigh. She would never go back. It was almost a superstition. Some things, some places perhaps take up their truer existence in the mind. Even when she had a car—especially when she had a car—she would never go back, even just to drive by, to stop and look and wonder.

  She went to Oxford, to work for Mr Paxton. She was only an assistant in a bookshop, but an able one, increasingly familiar with books and—what perhaps mattered most—very good with customers, who ranged from mere townsfolk to the cream of the university, even professors. It soon became clear to Mr Paxton that he had acquired an asset. And it became clear soon enough too that the increasing familiarity with books went with an increasing familiarity with the customers.

  The fact was that she began to consort, to go out, even to go to bed with some of them, and it wouldn’t have been wrong to say that this is what she had hoped, even vaguely foreseen. If she couldn’t have ‘gone to Oxford’ in the other sense, then she became intimate with those who had. It might even be said that she moved in university ‘circles’ even more freely and successfully than many—poor swots that they were—who were actually there. She could even pass herself off quite convincingly as that rare and frightening creature, a female undergraduate.

  ‘And what are you studying?’

  ‘Studying? Oh no, I’m just a shop girl.’

  It was remarkable how their eyes might light up.

  And later on she might dare to say, ‘I’m a shop girl, but—I write too.’

 
; One day, in the little back office, Mr Paxton, close observer of all this and committed family man, had said, ‘I’m going to get a new typewriter, Jane. This thing has seen better days.’ There was an awkwardly stoical look in his eye as if he might have been talking about himself. The old typewriter was perfectly serviceable.

  ‘Would you like it?’ he said.

  And that, you might say, was when she really became a writer. The third time. As well as at birth. As well as one fine day in March, when she was a maid.

  Her Oxford days! Her Oxford years! Oh they were great days. She saw Oxford all right. It was an education. And, to be perfectly honest, she was sometimes in some respects the educator. Even of some of the best brains in the land. How many, in Oxford? Oh, she couldn’t remember now. And of course it was in Oxford that she met her husband, Donald Campion. But that was a whole other story. It was funny how you could say even of life itself: that was another story.

  ‘It wasn’t the smoothest of marriages, was it? You and Donald Campion?’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Well—two minds. Two careers. He was the bright young philosopher, wasn’t he?’

  She didn’t say, ‘It was a thing of bodies too.’ Though at eighty she might have got away with it. If the truth be known—but Donald himself had never known it—Donald had reminded her of Paul Sheringham. And she certainly wasn’t going to reveal that in an interview.

  ‘You mean there wouldn’t have been room for both his books and mine?’ But she didn’t say that either. She could clam up sometimes just as effectively as she could quip. What a good mask it was, being turned eighty, with a face like a squeezed-out dish mop.

  ‘And—so tragically short.’ Her interviewer blundered on.

  ‘Donald or the marriage?’ But she didn’t say that either.

  ‘Yes, it was tragic,’ she said, with a voice like flint. And didn’t say, as she might have done—at eighty she could be oracular: We are all fuel. We are born, and we burn, some of us more quickly than others. There are different kinds of combustion. But not to burn, never to catch fire at all, that would be the sad life, wouldn’t it?

  But she’d said it anyway, or something like it, in a book somewhere. And if the truth be known, grief at Donald’s death, the second grief of her life, was like the end of her own life. She might have jumped on his pyre. Instead of which she became a better and famous writer.

  In the Mind’s Eye. It wasn’t published, it wasn’t finished—in some ways, it wasn’t even begun—till after Donald was taken away from her in the autumn of 1945 by a brain tumour. His bleak joke was that he’d been too brainy. Another was that there’d be no chance now of his breaking any Secrets Act. He had safely survived the war as a code-breaker, and his best work was perhaps still to come. It would all now, she thought—her own bleak joke—be like a work of fiction.

  ‘We had the same quandary, you know, Donald and I. Words and things.’

  She had toyed with All in the Mind. She had even toyed with Secrets Act. But fancy publishing a novel called that. In the Mind’s Eye . . . All in the Mind . . . Either way, it sounded abstract, even rather cerebral. Ha! Twelve years the wife of a philosopher.

  In fact it was her most physical, her most carnal, her most downright sexual book. She had found a way, at last, of writing about all that stuff. And it was her first big success. She was forty-eight, not so old (there are some mercies) for a writer, but too old to be the mother that, for her own reasons, she’d always shied away from being. You might say she was given no good examples in motherhood. Except Milly. Now, with Donald and his blue-grey gaze and his rat-a-tat laugh gone, she wished she’d yielded.

  Forty-eight and famous. In the Mind’s Eye. Some people were shocked and scandalised. It was only 1950. It would look tame in twenty years’ time. And she was—to make it worse—a ‘lady novelist’. A lady novelist? Where did they get that phrase from? And where did they think she came from?

  Forty-eight and famous and widowed and childless and not yet halfway through her orphaned life.

  ‘I have some distressing news.’

  Even as Mr Niven spoke, words displayed their fickle ability to fly away from things. Such was his evident struggle to find words and such her recent experience that she thought he’d said ‘undressing news’. I have some undressing news. A mistake that even Milly couldn’t have made.

  And when, after he’d got more words out, he said, ‘You have gone very pale, Jane,’ she had the fleeting thought that it was surely something people only did in books. People only ‘went pale’ or had ‘faces of thunder’ or eyes that ‘flashed fire’ or blood that ‘ran cold’ in books. Books that she had read.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Jane, to be telling you this. On Mothering Sunday.’

  As if his presence—it seemed now that he was alone—back here at Beechwood at this hour was expressly to deliver news meant for her. As if he had come with the unexpected information that she had no mother.

  ‘There has been an accident, Jane. A fatal accident. Involving Paul Sheringham. Mister Paul at Upleigh.’

  She had the presence of mind, or mere mumbling reflex, to say, ‘At Upleigh?’

  ‘No, Jane, not at Upleigh. A road accident. A car accident.’

  That was when he said, ‘You have gone very pale, Jane.’ It even seemed that he was stepping forward, arms held out, a little hesitantly but gallantly, because he thought she might be going to faint.

  She would never know how Mr Niven might have recorded his own version of this scene and all that followed. How he might have ‘written it’, as it were. She would never know—but this was surely her own sudden panicky surmise—how much he knew.

  She would never know (even at seventy or eighty) how much other people—people who weren’t writers—did any of this stuff. It was a mystery.

  Paul Sheringham didn’t. She would have said she was sure of that. And that was—had been—his glory.

  He had driven off (as she knew) when, unless some sorcery, some suspension of the laws of physics occurred, he would have been late. She knew (though she would never tell anyone) that he had made no effort to hurry—the opposite—though he was going to meet his bride-to-be. But he had made every effort, nonetheless, to prepare himself immaculately. This too only she would ever truly know, since after the impact the car had caught fire and his body was not only mangled but burnt. But items survived, she would learn, to suggest his state of attire—and his identity. An initialled cigarette case, a signet ring. The car itself was not so destroyed that it could not be readily identified as the car Paul Sheringham (often with some verve) drove.

  But he would anyway have been significantly late. So that Emma Hobday’s at first trivial but then intensifying feelings of bafflement, anger and indignation might have turned eventually into appalling conjecture. Good God—she had simply been stood up! Her husband-to-be had chosen this day—this marvellous day—to isolate her while he made his getaway. Law studies indeed! He had seized the opportunity of the house being completely deserted to—desert her! To drive off into the blue yonder. Because he could not face—it was only two weeks—marrying his betrothed wife. Or any other of his looming obligations. And this was his monstrous way of announcing it.

  In short, she was being royally jilted. And, while she knew that her outraged imagination might just be getting the better of her and she could be becoming hysterical, some part of her—which knew Paul Sheringham—yet thought: And it might be just like him.

  And so . . .

  But only she, perhaps, Jane Fairchild, the maid at Beechwood, would ‘write’ this scene. Emma Hobday wasn’t a character in a book, was she? She hadn’t invented her. She would never know how Emma Hobday herself might have written it.

  And so . . . And so Miss Hobday couldn’t just sit there, looking at her dainty wristwatch, could she, and being looked at by others? Her stomach unpleasantly rumbling. She had asked to use the hotel’s telephone. This was all so unthinkable and embarrassing. But s
he was now at the centre of a world that was betraying her, undoing her appointed future. She had called first Upleigh House. No answer. The ringing telephone even seemed to be saying: This house is empty, there is no one here, no one listening. So then!

  And then, after pacing this way and that and biting her lip, even going outside to draw deep breaths and look in all directions, and struggling with the thought that she really was behaving insanely, she had called the police. Perhaps the police might actually chase—chase and capture—her escaping fiancé, or come up with some other explanation that might at least save her from total ignominy.

  And so, by that time of day, with information they by then would have had, the police would have had no alternative but to answer her enquiry and, yes, at least to save her from ignominy.

  And so a further rapid and terrible succession of telephone calls had followed. The Swan at Bollingford was now ministering to a shocked woman who yet could still impart some vital details. Yes, the George Hotel at Henley. Further down the river. That’s where they’d all gone, that’s where they’d all be.

  If they hadn’t actually decided on some picnic. Or if they weren’t, even now, on a sudden whim, cruising gaily and unreachably along the Thames on a hired launch. It had all been going to be like a sunny saluting of the imminent marriage—from which the happy couple themselves had judiciously excused themselves. If only they had meekly signed up to it.

  But fortunately they were all still at the George, even still at their lunch table, still toying with sherry trifles.

  And so everyone’s day had changed utterly.

  And so Mr Niven had driven back here on his own, for reasons he was yet fully to explain. Though those can’t have been—she might still have been anywhere, even by the banks of the Thames herself, enjoying her motherless Mothering Sunday—to announce it all to her.