Mothering Sunday (12 page)

Why did it seem that Mr Niven was projecting onto her a whole confusion of scenes that she might have been in, but wasn’t? She was only the maid—and, temporarily, not even that. Why
did it seem that this day and its now terrible meaning—it wasn’t Mothering Sunday any more at all—had blurred the usual order of things between herself and Mr Niven?

He might have been speaking to his wife.

‘Jane. Jane, I have left Clarissa—Mrs Niven—with the others. In Henley. She felt she might be of better—service—there. Of course Emma—Miss Hobday—will
drive to be with them. If she is able to. There was the question of whether they might all drive to her—to Bollingford. She is in Bollingford. Did I explain that? Or whether they might all
drive to be at the Hobdays’. There is the question, Jane, of where everyone—ought to be. But I thought I should be here, Jane. I thought I should be here to . . .’

‘Yes, Mr Niven?’

‘To go to Upleigh.’

‘Upleigh?’

‘Yes. I stopped here first to use the telephone. I have just done so. I was just leaving. I have spoken to Clar—to Mrs Niven. They are still at Henley. But they have decided to meet
Miss Hobday—at the Hobdays’. That is the decision. I think that is the best plan. Miss Hobday must come first. Mr and Mrs Sheringham do not wish to return yet to Upleigh. Not yet. You
can understand. I shall drive to the Hobdays’ myself later. I am glad—I mean I am sorry—to be able to explain all this to you. But, Jane, you are back early—?’

‘I thought, sir—it doesn’t matter now—I might just come back here and read my book for a bit.’

‘Your book?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, if you— I mustn’t—’

‘It doesn’t matter, Mr Niven. My book doesn’t matter.’

‘Someone must inform the staff at Upleigh, you see. Mr Sheringham has told me that your—opposite number—is called Ethel. And the cook is called Iris.’

‘But—’

‘Yes, I know, they have gone to their families. Like Milly. But they must be made aware as soon as possible of the—circumstances. Mr and Mrs Sheringham told me—oh good
God—that Paul drove them both to the station this morning, but they will return separately. This—Ethel—most likely first. So I must go to Upleigh, you see, to await her. To inform
her.’

‘Not the station, sir?’

Had she gone pale twice?

‘That might not be the best place for such a purpose. In any case—how can I put this, Jane?’

‘Put what, sir?’

‘I feel that someone must—ascertain the situation at Upleigh in any case. I mean the situation as Mister Paul would have left it.’

‘But—’

‘Yes, of course, he would simply have left the house. Good God, he was going to be brushing up on his law apparently. Yes, he would simply have left the house. There is no situation. But I
feel—someone should check the situation. To prepare the Sheringhams. I mean, to reassure them. They are not ready to return there yet. They feel they should be with Miss Hobday. But you can
imagine, Jane, you can imagine. The state of their— I offered to do what I have just told you. To make sure of things at Upleigh. They said that when he—when Mister Paul—left, and
as the house would have been empty, he would have left a key, under a piece of stone—a stone pineapple, they said. Mrs Sheringham said it was a stone pineapple. By the front porch.
So—’

‘So—?’

‘I must drive to Upleigh. To wait for this Ethel. And to ascertain—’

Mr Niven did not seem entirely ready for the task he had plainly volunteered for. He cleared his troubled throat.

‘Jane—may I ask you something?’

‘Ask me what, Mr Niven?’

She was still gripping the handlebars of the bicycle. She realised she was even squeezing its brake levers, though she was standing, quite still, beside it.

‘If you would accompany me.’

‘Go with you, sir?’

‘Of course, I understand it is still
your
day. If you wish, Jane, if you wish just to read your book—’

‘
Your
book, Mr Niven.’ She had no idea why she corrected him.

‘Of course.’

A brief contortion crossed his face, as if the beginning of a smile had turned into something else.

Was he going to sob? This wasn’t his son. He was only an entangled neighbour.

‘Yes, sir. I will go with you.’

‘I appreciate that, Jane. That is very good of you. I don’t suppose you have ever been inside Upleigh House—’

‘Would you mind, Mr Niven, if I went in first and had a glass of water?’

‘Yes—of course. Forgive me. This is all such a shock. And you have been cycling around all day! Yes, yes, of course, you will need to collect yourself, refresh yourself. Forgive me.
I will be here, Jane, by the car, when you are ready.’

And perhaps that five minutes or so made all the difference. And when had it ever happened before: Mr Niven waiting for
her
? Even standing by the car, when she
reappeared, with its leather-lined door opened for her. She thought again of Ethel and Iris.

Inside the house—inside another empty house—her face had momentarily flooded, before she drenched it anyway with cold water. She might even have stifled a scream.

They drove to Upleigh. It was not a long drive at all. But he drove very slowly and carefully, as if to some appointment he might have wished not to be keeping. They found it hard to speak. Yes,
she felt like Ethel. She might have been Ethel.

And as it happened, Ethel was ahead of them. The docile and dutiful Ethel had decided, as if unequipped for her day of freedom, to return in time even to make the Sheringhams their tea, should
they themselves be back early enough to require it. Her ‘day’ with her mother must have been a matter of just a couple of hours, and perhaps, for her own reasons, she had preferred not
to stretch it out any longer. She would have alighted from the 3.42, then simply walked. It was only a mile or so. There were short cuts through fields. The sun would have been turning a deeper
gold. Primroses peeping, rabbits hopping. It would have taken the agile Ethel maybe twenty minutes. And they might have been the best twenty minutes of her day.

Even as they drove up the Upleigh drive, between the limes, she had seen the tell-tale sign: the upstairs window. Tell-tale only to her. It was closed now. Someone had closed it. Who else but
Ethel? Ethel had been in the bedroom and closed the window.

And so she’d gasped—audibly to Mr Niven—as they still drove up the drive. And Mr Niven had taken it perhaps as a general gasp of distress, since they were both no doubt
thinking—if in different ways—of how Paul Sheringham had driven down this very drive only hours ago in the opposite direction. For the last time. So Mr Niven had said needlessly,
‘Yes, it’s terrible, Jane.’

And it
was
a gasp of distress, but it contained a small gasp of relief. And she otherwise betrayed nothing.

The sun was now off the front of the house and the gravel. When they got out of the car there was even a distinct chill in the air after the earlier heat of midday. And while Mr Niven began
looking for ‘this pineapple thing’ and while she restrained herself from pointing at it or saying anything, Ethel suddenly opened the door—as she naturally would, since it seemed
that there were visitors. She might even have thought, hearing the car from within, that it was Mr and Mrs Sheringham returning. But there she was on the porch suddenly, with a surprising air of
being in charge of—of guarding—the whole edifice of Upleigh.

And as she watched Ethel open the door she naturally thought of when she had last seen it being opened.

‘Mr Niven—?’ Ethel had mustered, with a mixture of surprise and composure which didn’t begin to embrace the puzzle of why Mr Niven was there with Jane
What-was-her-name, the maid from Beechwood.

Were all maids being offered rides today?

And Mr Niven said, ‘You are Ethel, aren’t you?’ Which was also puzzling.

So there had been no need to wait for Ethel. She struggled, later, to imagine what that might have been like. And the whole procedure of informing Ethel took place at the front porch. Since
Ethel plainly wouldn’t be told to go in and sit down, not by Mr Niven who wasn’t her own master, even though it was clear from his manner that something really awful might be about to
be uttered. And was that Beechwood girl supposed to be coming inside and sitting down too?

Ethel, in fact, suddenly changed. Or perhaps her true Ethelness appeared. She would never know if her (and even Paul Sheringham’s) whole conception of Ethel had been mistaken from the
beginning.

Ethel’s eyes, even as Mr Niven was grappling with words again, had suddenly bored into her own as if she, Ethel Bligh, knew everything. Though equally they might have been saying, just as
unswervingly, ‘We maidservants have to stick together, don’t we, and know our place in the world?’

Her look went a lot further anyway than a mere bewildered, ‘And what are
you
doing here? What are you doing consorting with your master?’

Behind Ethel, she could just make out, through the vestibule and the shadows of the hall, the table and the bowl with the white clusters of orchids. It was somehow incredible that they should
still be there.

‘I have some distressing news, Ethel,’ Mr Niven began. ‘If I may call you Ethel?’

‘Yes, sir.’

And so Ethel was informed. And stood there, like an unbudging defender on the front porch, as if she were fully prepared, now so much harm had apparently come to this house, to prevent any
further assaults upon it. Mr Niven, who was still on the gravel below, seemed to cower before her sudden authority.

‘Then it is just as well, Mr Niven, I came back early, so I can be of assistance. I must have known in my bones something was wrong. That I might be needed. Mr and Mrs
Sheringham—they must be quite beside themselves. They must be in such a state again.’ Ethel had said that deliberate ‘again’. ‘I will be here for them when they
return. I will inform Cook when she returns. I will take—I will make, if required—any telephone calls.’

‘Ethel—’

But Ethel had carried on, perhaps in rare defiance, for her, of the speak-when-spoken-to rule.

‘I have already tidied around. I have tidied Mister Paul’s room—’

‘That is just the point, Ethel.’

‘The point, Mr Niven?’

‘I need to ask you— I am here to ascertain—’ Mr Niven floundered. ‘Did you find anything, in Mister Paul’s room?’

‘Anything? I don’t know what you mean, Mr Niven.’

‘Like—a note, Ethel. Anything written.’

‘No, sir. I did not find anything written. And I would not have read it if I had, sir.’ Ethel almost looked as if her next words might have been a snappy, ‘Would that be all,
sir?’ Or even a, ‘And what business would that be of yours?’

‘Then— That is all right, Ethel. That is all—all right.’

‘Are
you
all right, sir? Would you be requiring a cup of tea or anything?’

‘No, thank you, Ethel. Are
you
all right? Would you require—our company? Or Jane here’s company?’

That was a possibility she, the Beechwood maid, hadn’t been prepared for and she waited, surrenderingly, for Ethel’s grasping of the initiative.

‘No, sir. I can manage, thank you.’

But she had said it not looking at Mr Niven, but squarely, unwaveringly at her ‘opposite number’.

And her look was like the look of the sternest and most forgiving of parents.

So, she would never know many things. But she knew now that, certainly by the time the Sheringhams returned, Ethel would have thoroughly ‘tidied up’ Mister
Paul’s room. The flung-aside trousers, the bedclothes. The sheets would have been replaced (though no one, Ethel must later have reflected on this, was going to sleep in them), the removed
ones bundled into the laundry basket, waiting for Monday’s copper. The kitchen table—a simple kindness to Cook Iris—would have been cleared and cleaned. And everything returned to
as it should be. Even though everything was different.

And Ethel would one day find her way into another minor (not so minor) character—in
If the Truth Be Known
. She would be transmuted and (though only the author would know) honoured
by fiction. She would not be called Ethel (she would be called Edith) or be anything like Ethel, or even be a maid, but she would be one of those characters who exist, seemingly, on the periphery
of things and yet know everything. And she would be one of those characters whose real ‘character’ goes for most of the time unsuspected and unperceived. But that was a general truth
she, the author, would know by then to apply to the creation of character in fiction, as it was a general truth about life and people.

But she would never know exactly how much Ethel had known all along. And she would never know what Ethel did or thought or imagined or felt when she was left alone again in that house in the
interval before the Sheringhams (and Cook Iris) returned, and even, in time, the police appeared, just for some routine questions.

She would hardly have composed a thank-you note to her mother.

They drove back. The sun was dipping and turning orange. The afternoon was waning. And crispening. It was only March. Ethel would light fires too, no doubt, among her other
tasks. The right thing to do in the circumstances, keep the home fires burning. Just as she herself would do soon, when she became a maid again at Beechwood.

What was she now, for the time being?

Mr Niven said, after a long silence, ‘I’m sorry to have kept you from your reading, Jane. I’m so sorry to have used up your time. What is the book at present? I
forget.’

‘It’s all right, sir. It doesn’t matter.’

She was sitting beside him in the front seat, where, when her husband drove, Mrs Niven would sit. She was trying very hard not to weep, to hold herself together.

If only Mr Niven might say, ‘You must take the evening off. You must take a long hot bath.’ But maids never took long hot baths or were given unscheduled evenings off, especially
when they had had the day off anyway. In a little while she would have to resume her duties. She would have to be at least as strong as Ethel.