Authors: Graham Swift
Though now perhaps these absences could be explained. She had snatched a moment in her room, not, as once fondly supposed, to bemoan in private her sad orphan’s lot, but to read a book.
You could hardly allow her to borrow books and then not allow her at least some time to read them. And the house was not any more, let’s face it, as in the old days, a firmly governed, a
strictly regimented house. Look where regimentation had got the world.
Had Mr Niven, had either of them, ever wondered, guessed?
Oh yes, she would say, the glint in her eye, she was lucky to have been born with nothing to her name. With not even a name, in fact. Or the real date of her birth. So she was
not only nameless, but ageless. And her eighty-year-old face would bloom.
The first of May was the date of birth that had been accorded to her, by rough approximation and perhaps because it was a nice date, just as Jane Fairchild was a nice name. Some mothers,
apparently, left a little note, inside the bundle, with just a date of birth and a name. Only the first name. The commoner the better. No one ever deposited a Laetitia. And, if you thought about
it, the name must have only been a thought anyway. And wasn’t any name just a thought? Why was a tree called a tree?
She might even have liked to be called Jane Bundle.
And did it matter if you marked your birthday on the wrong day? If it had really been the 25th of April, though you never knew. The wrong day became the right day. This was the great truth of
life, that fact and fiction were always merging, interchanging. And if you were a maid you weren’t given much leisure to mark your birthday anyway—if anyone even knew it. You
weren’t given the day off. And being a maid was a little like being an orphan, since you lived in someone else’s house, you didn’t have a home of your own to go to.
Except on Mothering Sunday. When you did get the day off, to go home to your family. Which would always put her at a bit of a loss. What to do, what to do with herself on Mothering Sunday? She
could hardly go looking for her mother.
Though what would she have done with herself anyway, with her life, if she hadn’t been a maid? And she supposed—the furrowed face would bloom again—that it was a very common
human predicament. To be at a loss, not to know what to do with yourself.
‘My years as a maid’, she would call them, ‘my maid’s years’, never adding, ‘but not for long my maidenly ones’. ‘My years in
service’. It was hard to think now of a time when half the world was ‘in service’. She was born in 1901—at least the year must have been right—and she would grow up to
become a maid, which anyone might have predicted. But to become a writer—no one could have predicted that. Not even the kindly committee at the orphanage who had reconceived her as Jane
Fairchild, born on the first of May. And, least of all perhaps, her mother.
When she was asked, in the interviews, to describe the atmosphere of those wartime years (meaning, of course, the First War), she would say that it was so long ago now and so like another world
that trying to remember it was a bit like—writing a novel. Had she really been alive then? But if she were honest she would add that she’d been not unaware of it, of course—all
that accumulated loss and grief. How could anyone be unaware of it? Every week she dusted two rooms where everything was to remain ‘just as it was’. You went in, took a little breath
perhaps, and got on with it.
But she had never known them, the boys who’d had those rooms, and what she mainly thought was: A whole room, full of furniture,
each
. And if you had yourself been comprehensively
bereaved at birth—and that was her situation, wasn’t it?—how could you share in all that stuff, how could you have anything left over for it? The war wasn’t her fault, was
it? And, yes, you might say she was lucky, not to have a brother or father, let alone, at that age, a husband to think about. And, yes, you might say it was her good luck to have been raised in a
good orphanage, they weren’t all evil places rife with abuse. Her mother, whoever she was, had perhaps had some discernment.
So she’d received a rudimentary education when many who had parents didn’t. When many who were packed off to the trenches didn’t. She’d been put into service at fourteen
with a relatively advanced ability to read and write and—free from all family ties—with perhaps more than a usual eagerness for life.
And who wouldn’t want to be Jane Fairchild, born on the first of May?
Oh yes—the face would flower again—she was very fortunate to have been born destitute.
‘Are you an orchid, Jane?’ Cook Milly had said, after first looking at her very closely, not long after she’d arrived, as if to establish precisely what sort
of specimen she would have to work with.
‘Because my mother was an orchid too.’
Had she really said it? And if so, had she used that word deliberately and knowingly—knowing that she was using the wrong word, not the right one? There was a look of purest artlessness
and candour in Cook Milly’s eye. And did it matter if she’d used the wrong word—if the wrong word was a better one? It would have been wrong to point out that she had made a
mistake—to expose, at such a moment, Milly’s poor grasp of language and lack of education, while asserting her own accomplishment. That is, if it was a mistake.
And if you were an orphan, then perhaps you might turn into an orchid, as Cinderella turned into a princess.
Had she really said it? Or had she herself misheard it? Or invented this little exchange between herself and Milly? Even then? Surely not. The great truth of life. So that one day she might go
on to invent a whole character—a minor but colourful character in her novel
Tell Me Again
(she actually thought of calling her Milly Cook)—who was given to using misapprehended
words. Who said ‘cucumbered’ when she meant ‘encumbered’. And in fact the real and living Cook Milly became more and more, in the course of those ‘maid’s
years’ at Beechwood and certainly by the time of that Mothering Sunday, like some cook in a story book, plump and sturdy and red-cheeked, with thick forearms meant for commanding a mixing
bowl.
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?’