Mothering Sunday (6 page)

She supposed that there must be two essential choices: the shirt to be tucked into the waiting trousers, or the trousers to receive the waiting shirt. Each might have its advantages. Yet he
looked for a moment like a clown or, instead of a man about to face the world (and a fuming fiancée), like an overgrown boy made ready for bed.

Once it would have been so, she thought. A boy in a nightshirt. Once, he had told her—a rare door opening to the past—about Nanny Becky, who’d left when he’d been sent to
school. Once, he would have had a nanny to dress and undress him, all three brothers would have had her.

And what a strange thing, a nanny, a substitute mother. Presenting the offspring to their parents at five o’clock, like a cook offering a cake. And where was Nanny Becky now? In some other
household presumably. Or at her mother’s.

She did not giggle at his shirt. It might have been nice to giggle, from her vantage point on the bed. There might have been another world, another life in which all this might
have been a regular, casual repertoire. But there wasn’t. She might have been some lounging wife in a room in London, watching him dress to be a joke of a lawyer.

They had hardly spoken for some time. A little while ago they’d made gasping, groaning animal noises. It seemed that they’d entered some diminishing gap of existence together in
which, to use a phrase only to be known to her in later life, only ‘body language’ might apply. Only her body might speak. She did not want to falsify—or nullify—anything by
the folly of putting it into words. And this, in her later life too, would come to be an abiding occupational conundrum.

It seemed that any words they spoke now must be only ruinous banalities. Even as he engaged with the banalities of underpants and socks.

Yet he was putting on his finery. The fresh white shirt. It was a formal shirt. It would require a collar. It was not just a clean soft-collared shirt that might serve for a Sunday outing, a
spin in a car with the top down. It was—even then in a rather old-fashioned sense—his ‘Sunday best’. She watched while he dealt, with unflustered skill, with
cufflinks—little silver ovals winking in the sunshine—with collar studs and collar, semi-stiff. He had brought in a tie, a restrained but sheeny thing of slate blue with little white
spots. He selected a tie pin. Was that actually, really a tiny diamond? His chin was already smooth—she’d had occasion to feel it—and now anointed with cologne.

It was as if he was dressing for his wedding. But it was not his wedding—yet. He was only going to meet his wife-to-be for a lunch by the River Thames. And if, as now seemed almost
certain, he was going to be seriously late, how on earth was being so superbly turned-out going to help?

He had tied his tie studiously, giving due attention to the knot and the hanging lengths before fixing the pin, and all of this still without his trousers on. She did not, could not laugh. Yet
it would seem to her later that everything had hinged upon this piece of farcical theatre. Once he put on his trousers all would be lost. If only she had said to him, screamed at him,
‘Don’t put them on!’

But he went now again to the dressing room, lingering there (did he think time had stopped?) for several rustling minutes, then returned, with trousers on, as well as a jacket and shoes, even
with a silk handkerchief, exactly complementing his tie, poking from his pocket.

So had it all been because he hadn’t decided yet on the trousers—the ones he’d earlier discarded or ones still hanging in the dressing room? She would never know. She would
never say, or be able to say, so he could make some quip or elucidate it all, ‘You took a long time putting on your trousers.’

‘Ah yes, Jay. So I did.’

What a preposterous word anyway: ‘trousers’.

He stood there, complete. He gathered the cigarette case and lighter. He needed only, perhaps, a buttonhole. There were the white orchids in the hall. He might
actually have been leaving for his wedding. It wasn’t today, but he was signalling it anyway, it was perhaps what all this elaborate sprucing was about: he was leaving—wasn’t
he?—for his marriage. She felt an actual sting of jealousy for the woman who would be the recipient of all this dawdling decking-out. If she wasn’t already in a fury of
affrontedness.

And
she
, lying here, had had his unwrapped nakedness.

Then it struck her that it might all in fact have been simply for
her
.
Her
last look. His ‘going-away’ clothes. Surely not. All the same, in spite of herself—they
were the first words she’d spoken for some time—she said, ‘You look very handsome.’ She tried to make it sound not like some maid’s blushing and inappropriate
cooing—‘Ooo you do look ’andsome, sir’—nor, on the other hand, like some royal approval. ‘You pass muster, you may go now.’ She tried to make it not sound
even like the steady veiled declaration she wanted it to be.

He did not say to her, ‘And you look beautiful.’ He had never said that, never used that word. Only the word ‘friend’. She couldn’t even be sure there wasn’t
some shadow of discomfort in his face at the tribute she’d just paid him.

Only banality would do. Demolish—but do. He delivered a whole speech of it now.

‘You don’t have to hurry. I don’t suppose the shower will be back till at least four. When you go, lock the front door and put the key under the rock by the boot-scraper.
It’s not a rock, actually, it’s half a stone pineapple. From when Freddy took a swing at it with his cricket bat. But it’s what we do, whenever we leave the house empty. Which is
hardly ever. And I’m not leaving it empty now, am I? But the shower will expect it—with no Ethel or Iris—if they get back first. It’s a whacking great key, they won’t
have taken it themselves. I’ll put it on the hall table. That’s all really. Leave everything.’

Did he mean by that the sheets, his shirt, his rejected trousers, dangling over the chair? What else could he mean? Was he telling her not to be a bloody maid? All this while he fingered the
knot of his tie and tweaked at his cuffs.

‘If you’re hungry, there’s a veal-and-ham pie, or half of one, in the kitchen. I can always tell Cookie I scoffed it. I mean—as well as going out to lunch. Not that I
have to tell anyone anything. Anything.’

It was his last, oddly echoing remark. Was it just about the veal-and-ham pie?

And later she would chew over not just a veal-and-ham pie but almost every word of that matter-of-fact speech. It would stay eerily imprinted. But, precisely because of that, it would sometimes
seem that she had made it up, that he could not have said all those things that she remembered so clearly, even fifty years later. He might have just said after all, ‘You’d better get
some clothes on, you’d better make yourself scarce.’

She would brood over it like some passage that perhaps needed redrafting, that might not yet have arrived at its proper meaning.

Then he was gone. No goodbye. No silly kiss. Just one last look. Like a draining of her, like a drinking up. And what he’d just bestowed on her: his whole house. He was leaving it to her.
It was hers, for her amusement. She might ransack it if she wished. All hers. And what was a maid to do with her time, released for the day on Mothering Sunday, when she had no home to go to?

She listened to his steps receding down the staircase. They became louder again as they clicked and loitered on the tiles of the hall. He was gathering an item or two before
his actual departure? A hat? The buttonhole? Why not? Perhaps he kept a pin for such a thing in his jacket pocket. He was finding that key?

She did not move. She froze. She heard the front door—or doors—being opened then closed. It was neither a slam nor a gentle manipulation. Then she heard—it came up from outside
through the open window, not echoing through the house itself—his sudden giggle. If giggle it was. It was more like some trumpeting, defiant call, weird and startling as a peacock’s.
She would never forget it.

There was the crunch of his shoes on the gravel. He was walking towards the old stable and his garaged car. He would see her bicycle against the front wall. She’d simply propped it there,
since he’d said the front door—and the front door had already been opening magically. She hadn’t left it discreetly out of sight. And so, she realised now, if Miss Hobday had
decided to turn up mischievously, as a fiancée might in this modern age, in her own car, to surprise him—and surprise him she would have done—she would have seen it: a
woman’s bicycle, without a crossbar. And then there might have been a scene, a wild and frantic scene. And the day would have turned out very differently.

But wasn’t there going to be a scene now in any case, at the Swan at Bollingford?

All the scenes. All the scenes that never occur, but wait in the wings of possibility. It was perhaps already almost half past one. Birds chorused. Somewhere on a road the other side of
Bollingford, Emma Hobday, in her Emmamobile, would already be nearing the place of their rendezvous. Or perhaps she too was late. It was her woman’s right. Perhaps she was always maddeningly
late and perhaps he was only banking on this exasperating habit. If he timed it right they might serenely coincide.

Perhaps that was the simple explanation.

But in any case Emma Hobday would be enjoying, as she drove, the dazzling rush of this spring day. What it might be like to drive a car was beyond her maid’s experience—she had only
driven a bicycle. But she tried to put herself momentarily in the shoes—or on the wheels—of Emma Hobday who did not know yet what a show of himself her husband-to-be had prepared for
her. Or that he’d taken so long in putting on his trousers.

And at Henley they might have finished the smoked salmon and be anticipating perhaps the duck or the lamb with mint sauce—surely not as good as Milly’s. And remarking yet again on
the marvellous weather, and if only it would repeat itself for the wedding. She imagined a dining room with tall French windows flung open to the sunshine. A lawn leading down to the river. Tables
even, laid up, outside. White hats. Like a wedding itself.

All the scenes. To imagine them was only to imagine the possible, even to predict the actual. But it was also to conjure the non-existent.

She heard the car start. A throaty revving or two. Perhaps he always did it, as if a race was starting. And he would surely have to race now, to redeem himself even partially. But she heard the
wheels simply crackle, not spin or lurch, over the gravel, then the sound of the engine gathering speed and noise, as he drove between the lime trees and the two big lawns, then getting fainter and
simply merging with the birdsong.

She did not move. She did not go to the window. A brief, flourishing roar, as he turned onto the metalled road—the same road he had taken this morning, in the other car, with the honoured
but cowed Ethel and Iris—and at last put his foot down.

She didn’t move. The curtains stirred slightly. A naked girl in his room. She didn’t move—she didn’t know how long she didn’t move—until it seemed the
absurdity of her not moving won out against some dreadful need not to.

Then she moved. She reared up from the pillow. Her feet found the carpet. She walked over it, naked, as he had. The two brothers in their silver frames stared at her. She saw herself in the
mirror. She went to the window. There was nothing to see. Berkshire. There was no one to notice her sudden unaccountable face at the window, her bare sunlit breasts. The sky was an unbroken
blue.

She turned back into the room, resisting the fleeting urge to begin picking up clothes. She looked at the bed where they had both been, the covers flung back, the dented sheets, the little
blatant stain.

She thought of Ethel.

All the emissions. Ethel, maid in a house of boys, would be not unfamiliar with them, though this little stain would be curiously different. All the emissions of three brothers, and two of them
gone now. Though there they were, in their silver frames, eyeing a naked girl. And Ethel, she strongly supposed, had never known what it was like to be the direct cause of a man’s emission,
let alone to feel it inside her, or, mingling with her own fluids, trickling out of her. A maid—and, yes, a maid. And Ethel must be nearing thirty. Her parents must be ancient. But at least
she had them and had been allowed to see them today.

All the wasted emissions. The sunlight for a moment seemed to be filling the room only with a bright bare emptiness. But why should she be feeling so bereft and alone in the world when
she’d had what she’d had this day? And when, after all, she wasn’t Ethel. And when she had right now a whole house along with a small parkland at her disposal—as Mr Niven
might have put it.

She walked out, past the dressing room, into the nearby bathroom. A little masculine temple. She looked at razors and brushes and bottles of cologne and wondered whether to
touch them. She wondered whether to touch and finger every last item on the glass shelves. She washed and dried herself anyway, using the basin and the towel—damp from his own use of
it—that Ethel would remove unthinkingly.

She’d put in the cap that he’d helped her get. It was why there had been so much dribble. She couldn’t have got such a thing without him, and it had all been done, with his
usual scorning of difficulty or embarrassment, one day when she’d had the afternoon off. She’d got the 1.20 to Reading and met him. Afterwards, they’d gone to a cinema.

God knows how he’d arranged it. He out-clevered her, perhaps, at some things. ‘There’s a doctor chappie I know, Jay . . .’ It had taken her some time to—adapt to
it. It was her (their) precious means of prevention.

And suppose, she would think later, she
had
become pregnant. Would she have suffered all the consequences—they would have been all
her
consequences and would have included
swift banishment—so that his marriage would not have been cancelled? Would she have borne all that for him?

Suppose she had deliberately neglected to put the thing in, say three months ago.

Suppose.

‘A Dutch cap, Jay. So my seed doesn’t get anywhere near you. I mean, any nearer than it needs to.’