Authors: Graham Swift
This had all made clear one thing she knew already. Whatever else Paul Sheringham was marrying, he was marrying money. Perhaps he had to, the way he got through his own. The Hobdays would be
paying in two weeks’ time for a grand wedding, and did you really need to celebrate a forthcoming celebration? Not unless you had plenty to spare. It might demand nothing less than champagne.
When Mr Niven had mentioned the hamper he had perhaps been wondering how much the Hobdays’ liberality could be relied on or how much the day might involve his own pocket.
But that the Hobdays had plenty to spare pleased her. It had nothing to do with her, but it pleased her. That Emma Hobday might be made of five-pound notes, that the marriage might be an
elaborate way of obtaining ‘loot’, pleased or, rather, consoled her. It was all the other things it might entail that—even as Mr Niven explained about the ‘roping
in’—gnawed at her.
And would Mister Paul and Miss Hobday be joining the party themselves? She couldn’t really ask it directly, vital as it was to her to know. And Mr Niven didn’t volunteer the
information.
‘Would you mention these arrangements to Milly? None of it of course need affect—your own arrangements.’
It was not often that he had the occasion to say such a thing.
‘Of course, sir.’
‘A jamboree in Henley, Jane. A meeting of the tribes. Let’s hope we have the weather for it.’
She wasn’t quite sure what ‘jamboree’ meant, though she felt she had read the word somewhere. But ‘jam’ suggested something jolly.
‘I hope so too, sir.’
And now they clearly had the weather for it, and Mr Niven, whatever his earlier misgivings, was indeed getting rather jolly. He was going to be driving himself. He had already
announced that they might as well set off soon, so they could ‘pootle around’ and take advantage of such a lovely morning. He wouldn’t, apparently, be calling on Alf at the
garage, who—for the right sum—could become a convincing chauffeur. In any case, as she’d observed over recent years, Mr Niven liked driving. He even preferred the pleasure of
driving to the dignity of being driven. It gave him a boyish zest. And as he was always saying, with a whole variety of intonations, ranging from bluster to lament, times were changing.
Once upon a time, after all, the Nivens would have met the Sheringhams at Sunday service.
‘Tribes’ had suggested something hot and outdoors. She knew it was to be the George Hotel in Henley. It was not to be a picnic. And it might well have been a day, since it was still
March, of evil gales, even snow. But it was a morning like a morning in summer. And Mrs Niven left the table to go up to get herself ready.
She couldn’t ask, even now with Mr Niven conveniently alone, ‘Would Miss Hobday and . . . ?’ Even if it sounded like just a maid’s idle curiosity. Wasn’t the coming
wedding the only current talking-point? And she certainly couldn’t ask, ‘If not, then what other separate arrangements might the two of them have in mind?’
She didn’t think that if she were one half of a betrothed couple—or at least Paul Sheringham’s half—she would want, two weeks before their wedding, to attend a jamboree
in Henley to be fussed over by the older generation (by what he might have called—she could see him speaking with a cigarette in his mouth and wincingly screwing up his
eyes—‘three bloody showers together’).
But in any case, if she got no further information, it still left the problem that was peculiarly hers on this day, as Mr Niven knew, of what to do with it. Today it was painfully peculiar. The
gorgeous weather didn’t necessarily help at all. It only seemed—with two weeks to go—to deepen a shadow.
She was going to say to Mr Niven, when the moment came, that if he—if he and Mrs Niven—didn’t mind, she might not ‘go’ anywhere. She might just stay here at
Beechwood and read a book if that was all right—‘her book’ as she might put it, though it belonged to Mr Niven. She might just sit somewhere in the sunshine in the garden.
She knew that Mr Niven could only approve of such a harmless suggestion. He might even think it was a rather appealing image. And of course it would mean she’d be ready to resume her
duties at once, whenever they returned. She could find something to eat in the kitchen. Milly, before she left, might even make her a sandwich. She could have her own ‘picnic’.
And it might even have happened just like that. The bench in the nook by the sundial. Bumblebees tricked by the weather. The magnolia tree already loaded with blossom. Her book on her lap. She
knew which book it would be.
So—she would put the idea to Mr Niven.
But then the telephone had rung and—it being one of her numberless duties—she’d hastened to answer it. And her heart had soared. That was a phrase you read in books, but it was
sometimes actually true of what happened to people. It was true then of herself. Her heart had soared, like some stranded heroine’s in a story. Like the larks she would hear in a little
while, trilling and soaring high in the blue sky, as she pedalled her way to Upleigh.
But she’d been careful to say, quite loudly, into the receiver and with her best answering-the-telephone voice that was both maid-like and somewhat queenly, ‘Yes, madam.’
Church bells throbbed beneath the birdsong. Warm air wafted through the open window. He had not drawn the curtains, not even out of token delicacy to her. Delicacy to her? But
it wasn’t necessary. The room looked out over trees and grass and gravel. The sunshine only applauded their nakedness, dismissing all secrecy from what they were doing, though it was utterly
secret.
And they had never been, in all their years of—what to call it? Intimacy? Freedom with each other?—as naked as this.
Feast your eyes, she’d dared to think, like some smuggled-in beauty. Was she a beauty? She had the red knuckles and worn-down nails of her kind. Her hair must have been all over the place.
It was stuck to her forehead. Yet she’d even felt something of his imperious immodesty—as if
he
were the servant bringing her a cigarette.
And barely two hours ago she had called
him
‘madam’! Since it was his voice down the telephone and, for all her sudden servant-girl giddiness, she had needed to keep her
presence of mind. The door to the breakfast room was open. Mr Niven was still occupied with toast and marmalade. Down the telephone had come quick, terse, undisobeyable instructions, while
she’d said, ‘Yes, madam . . . No, madam . . . That’s quite all right, madam.’
Her heart had soared. Feast your eyes. A story was beginning.
And less than an hour later, after she’d stepped off her bicycle and he’d opened the front door for her—the front door no less, as if she were a real visitor and he were a head
footman—they’d laughed at her calling him ‘madam’. They’d laughed as she’d said it again as he ushered her in. ‘Thank you, madam.’ And he’d
said, ‘You’re clever, Jay. Do you know that? You’re clever.’ That was the way he paid compliments, as if revealing to her something she might never have imagined.
But yes, she was clever. Clever enough to know she was cleverer than him. She had always, especially in the early days, out-clevered him. It was what he wanted, she knew it, to be out-clevered,
even in some strange way commanded. Though it could never be said of course, or even suggested. She would never quite erase, even when she was ninety, her inner curtsey. There was always the given of his princely authority. He ruled the roost, didn’t he? He’d ruled it now for
nearly eight years. He had the run. He had the run of her. Oh yes, he was princely. She’d helped him form the habit.
But he’d called her clever, as they stood together in the vestibule, almost with confessing humility, as if he were the evident fool, the hopeless case. Outside, bordering the gravel, were
ribbons of brilliant daffodils and inside, across the hall, rising from a large bowl, were twists of almost luminous white flowers. Then the door had shut behind her, and she was alone with him
inside Upleigh House at eleven on a Sunday morning. Something she’d never been before.
‘Who was it, Jane?’ Mr Niven had said. He might have been thinking, from the ‘madam’, that it was Mrs Sheringham or even Mrs Hobday with some change of
plan.
‘Wrong number, sir.’
‘Really, and on a Sunday,’ he’d said, rather meaninglessly.
Then, glancing at the clock and furling his napkin, he’d given a ceremonious cough.
‘Well, Jane, after you’ve dealt with the breakfast things, you may go. So may Milly. But before you do—’
And with these words he’d awkwardly produced the half-crown that she knew had been waiting and that merited one of her more pronounced bobbings.
‘Thank you, sir. That’s very kind of you.’
‘Well—you have a beautiful day for it,’ he reiterated, and she wondered again, even a little flusteredly, what he could mean by ‘it’.
But he looked at her only enquiringly, not searchingly. Then he drew himself up, even becoming rather official.
It was a strange business, this Mothering Sunday ahead of them, a ritual already fading, yet the Nivens—and the Sheringhams—still clung to it, as the world itself, or the world in
dreamy Berkshire, still clung to it, for the same sad, wishing-the-past-back reasons. As the Nivens and the Sheringhams perhaps clung to each other more than they’d used to, as if
they’d become one common decimated family.
It was strange in her case for quite different reasons, and it all elicited from Mr Niven, as well as the half-crown, much throat-clearing and correctness.
‘Milly will take the First Bicycle and leave it at the station for her return. And you, Jane . . . ?’
There were no longer horses, but there were bicycles. The two in question were virtually identical—Milly’s had a slightly larger basket—but they were scrupulously known as the
‘first’ and ‘second’ bicycles, and Milly, as befitted her seniority, had the first one.
She herself would have the second one. She might be at Upleigh inside fifteen minutes. Though there was still the matter of formal permission—if not for going to Upleigh.
‘If I may, sir, I’ll just take myself off. On the Second Bicycle.’
‘That’s what I had been assuming, Jane.’
She might have just said ‘my bicycle’, but Mr Niven was a stickler for the ‘first’ and ‘second’ thing, and she’d learnt to go along with it. She knew,
from Milly, that the ‘boys’—Philip and James—had once had bicycles (as well as horses) which had become known as the First and Second Bicycles. The boys were gone, so were
their bicycles, but for some strange reason the ‘first’ and ‘second’ tradition had carried over to the two servants’ bicycles, even though these were, necessarily,
ladies’ versions, without crossbars. She and Milly perhaps didn’t qualify as ladies, but they qualified, in one persistent respect, as the dim ghosts of Philip and James.
She had never known Philip and James, but Milly had once known them and indeed cooked for them. And Milly had once known ‘her lad’, who’d gone the same way as Philip and James,
even perhaps in the same dreadful part of France. And her lad had been called Billy. Milly would not often use his name—‘my lad’ had become as obligatory as ‘first’
and ‘second’ bicycles—so it was hard to gauge how much she’d actually, really known him. Yet if they’d ever got married they would have been Milly and Billy. Perhaps
‘her lad’ was a fiction of Milly’s that no one could disprove, or would wish to. The war had suited all purposes.
Once upon a time . . . Once upon a time she’d arrived, the new maid, Jane Fairchild, at Beechwood just after a great gust of devastation. The family, like many others,
had been whittled down, along with the household budget and the servants. Now, there was only a cook and a maid. Cook Milly, with her seniority, had been theoretically promoted to cook and
housekeeper, but she clung to the kitchen, while she, the new and inexperienced maid, soon effectively did most of the housekeeping.
She didn’t mind any of this. She loved Milly.
Cook Milly was just three years her elder, but it seemed a condition of the loss of ‘her lad’ that she’d rapidly put on weight and girth, even developed an air of scatty
wisdom, and so become like the mother she’d perhaps always wanted to be. ‘Her lad’ even began to suggest she might have been the poor boy’s mother.
And today Cook Milly, if her bicycle could bear her weight to the station, was going to see her mother.
‘Of course you may, Jane,’ Mr Niven had said, inserting the napkin into its silver ring. Was he going to ask her where she was thinking of going?
‘You have the Second Bicycle at your disposal and you have—ahem—two and six. And you have the whole county at your disposal. As long as you come back again!’
Then, as if slightly envying the broad freedom he’d just granted, he said, ‘It’s
your
day, Jane. You may be—ahem—at your own devices.’ He knew, by now,
that such a phrase would not be over her head—it might even have been meant as a gentle tribute to her reading habits. Cook Milly might have thought ‘devices’ meant kitchen
spoons.
He can’t surely have meant anything else by it.
It was March 30th 1924. It was Mothering Sunday. Milly had her mother to go to. But the Nivens’ maid had her simple liberty, and half a crown to go with it. Then the
telephone had rung, rapidly altering her previous plan. No, she wouldn’t be having a picnic.
And it was surely more than she could ever have hoped for, since even if Mister Paul and Miss Hobday were not to be of the Henley party it had left open the question of how they might both pass
the day together anyway. A question which still remained open.
They both had cars, she knew this. Young people of their kind could have cars now. He sometimes referred to hers as the ‘Emmamobile’. They would certainly both be at
their
own
devices, and if they played their cards right they might, if it was their inclination, have at their disposal either of two helpfully emptied houses. If you thought about it, up and down the
country on this day there might be any number of temporarily vacated houses available for secret assignations. And if she knew Paul Sheringham . . .