Mothering Sunday (3 page)

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, with 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.

‘For the 9.40. I took them in the Ma-and-Pa-mobile.’

Which would now perhaps be already parked somewhere in Henley. His own car, still in the stable-turned-garage, was a racy thing with a top that came down, only really meant for two.

Perhaps he did it every year, drove them to the station. A Sheringham tradition. But then he said, ‘I wanted to give them a proper goodbye.’

A proper goodbye? They might be back by teatime. They weren’t going for ever.

Was it his roundabout way of saying that this was what he was giving
her
? A proper goodbye. She could hardly give it much thought at the time, since—his own clothes removed and
quickly draped with hers over the armchair—they had moved, with no more ceremony, to the bed.

But she would think about it later. All her life she would picture it: the two women, awed and silent in the back of the big black saloon while he drove them, chauffeur-style. On the station
forecourt he might have opened doors and helped them out with the same gracious attentiveness with which he’d removed her clothes. They might even have thought he was going to offer them each
a kiss.

All her life she would try to see it, to bring back this Mothering Sunday, even as it receded and even as its very reason for existing became a historical oddity, the custom of another age. As
he set them down the distant white puffs of the 9.40 to Reading might already have been visible in that brilliant blue sky. On the platform there might have been two or three others like Iris and
Ethel waiting to set off on similar journeys (though not yet Cook Milly who would get the 10.20).