Mothering Sunday (11 page)

‘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 she 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.

‘Jane, would you like to sit down?’

The only place would have been inside the Humber. Like Ethel and Iris. But she wasn’t going to faint. She was still clutching the handlebars of her bicycle.

All the available evidence was that—whatever had detained him—he was trying to minimise his lateness. He must have been driving fast at any rate. And he had taken
the minor road which, though narrower and twistier, was a short cut, crossing the railway line by a bridge and so avoiding the level-crossing on the main road, which it might have been just his
luck to find shut against him.

But he never crossed the railway line.

He was known to be a sometimes speedy yet knowledgeable user of the local lanes. So he would certainly have known about the short cut—if you were heading for Bollingford—and known
about the distinct right-hand bend the road made half a mile or so before the railway bridge. It was more of a corner in fact, indicating perhaps where surveyors and landowners had once failed to
agree. There was even a large oak on the apex of the bend, marking the hazard. And Paul Sheringham had driven straight into it.

It was bright sunshine, a glorious day. There was no possibility that he had not
seen
the bend, the approaching, still leafless oak. There were road signs anyway. And he must have taken
this bend scores of times. Perhaps his brakes had failed. The condition of the car could never reveal this. Perhaps—since no other traffic was involved—some innocent yet fatal factor,
such as a stray farm animal, was responsible. Though would you crash into a tree to avoid a lesser, if significant, mishap?

The conclusion, even the formal verdict of an inquest, would be that a terrible—a ‘tragic’—accident had occurred. And this conclusion was reached not just from lack of
witnesses or evidence to the contrary, but because it was the conclusion that everyone—the Sheringhams and Hobdays particularly, who had considerable connections with local
officialdom—wished to reach. No one wished to believe that, two weeks before his marriage to Miss Emma Hobday and while actually driving to meet her, Paul Sheringham had driven fatally into a
tree for any other reason than that it was an accident.

Mr Sheringham senior would no doubt have explained, when asked, that because of the peculiarity of the day there would have been no one at Upleigh when his son departed. Both the cook and the
maid, he would have stated, would have been at their mothers’ homes. And this might have produced another breast-shaking spasm from Mrs Sheringham. And the visiting policeman might have
thought that he had asked questions enough, and put away his notebook.

But she, Jane Fairchild, would not have to answer any questions. Why should she? She was only the maid at Beechwood, not even at Upleigh. She had simply ridden off on her bicycle, and gone
nowhere near, as it happened, the scene of the accident (though Mr Niven might have thought that was why she had gone pale). Then she had returned, somewhat early.

And she had never heard—it was a never-spoken fact—as she wandered naked round that house any distant ‘crump’. Would there have been a detectable ‘crump’? And
she had never seen, in so far as she’d looked from any window, any smudge in that blue sky.

Though she had heard the telephone ring.

Mr Niven didn’t actually take hold of her. Not then. And she didn’t faint, even if she had gone pale.

He repeated, ‘I’m so sorry, Jane, I’m so sorry to have to tell you this.’

Why did it seem, at that complexion-changing moment, that she might have been someone else? It was an expression: ‘not to be yourself ’. Why did it seem that she might have been Emma
Hobday? Or that she might have been Mr Niven’s own daughter (though Mr Niven didn’t have one), who was also Emma Hobday. That Mr Niven was, himself, Mr Hobday. That the characters in
this story had all been jumbled up.