Mothering Sunday (5 page)

But there was the little matter now of his getting dressed, of his making himself presentable, of his putting together again his outward person. He seemed in no hurry to do so. He looked at her,
his eyes ran up and down her. He must have surely noticed the little patch between her legs.

She’d never known him show, even when actually hurrying, any sense of haste or unseemly agitation. Except, that is—but it seemed suddenly a very long time ago—when it had all
been a boy’s uncurbable rush. She’d sometimes said to him, ‘Slow down.’ She’d even said, as if she were steeped in experience herself, ‘Slower is
better.’

Well, they were steeped in experience now. He had never known anyone better, she was sure of it. Nor had she. It was in the look he gave her now. And in the stare she returned.

She found it difficult, even as she stared, not to let tears come into her eyes, even as she knew that to allow them, use them, would have been somehow to fail. She must be brave, generous,
merciless in allowing him this last possible gift of herself.

Would he ever forget her, lying there like that?

And he
was
in no hurry. The sun from the window lit him. A bar or two of shadow ran across his torso. He finished winding the watch. His eventual car journey must be getting impossibly
fast.

She didn’t know how he had acquired his sureness. Later, in her memory, she would marvel at it and be almost frightened by his possession of it then. It was the due of his kind? He was
born to it. It came with having no other particular thing to do? Except be sure. But that, surely, would flood you with unsureness. On the other hand, to be a lawyer, merely a lawyer—she even
felt it for him and saw him in a lawyer’s imprisoning dark suit—could only take his sureness away.

She thought momentarily and madly: Supposing she—Emma, Miss Hobday—had come to get him anyway. Supposing—this was 1924, it was the modern age—she had taken it upon
herself to come here, in her car, to collect him now. To surprise him, drag him from his ‘mugging up’. On such a marvellous day. Wheels on the gravel. Her flowery voice—with a
slight touch of horse—shouting up, as she noticed the opened window, knowing that it was his bedroom.

‘Come to get you, Paul! Where are you?’

What then? She had no doubt that he would have handled it all, somehow, surely. Even wearing just his signet ring. Even standing at the window. ‘Emsie, darling! What a surprise! Give me a
mo to put a shirt on, would you?’

And how might she, the Nivens’ maid in the Sheringhams’ house, have handled it?

On the dressing table beside him were all the other little accoutrements of his life, sentimental or purposeful, each one like his own piece of unhidden treasure. Hairbrushes and combs.
Cufflinks and studs in boxes. Photos in silver frames. A preponderance of silver, kept bright by Ethel. Maids had perpetually to dust round, not to mention actually polish such paraphernalia,
making sure nothing was moved from its ordained position. Well, it was easier than a woman’s dressing table.

If you were brought up with such stuff attached to you, such personal insignia, then perhaps it was easy to be sure. Not to mention the contents of his wardrobe, in the adjacent dressing
room—she had briefly seen it as she was bustled in. All his hanging choices. Not to mention other possessions scattered round the house.

All that she owned or wore could be put in one plain box. If she had to leave in a hurry, and she always might, she could.

But it was these little trinkets, this boys’ jewellery that seemed now to claim him, confirm him. Signet ring. Pocket watch. Cufflinks. When he was dressed and before he left he would
gather up the initialled cigarette case and lighter. He would run the hairbrush across his hair, apply the tortoiseshell comb. His two brothers must have taken an assortment of such things, much of
it perhaps newly and morale-boostingly purchased, when they went across to France, never to come back. Ivory-handled shaving brushes, that sort of thing. They, the brothers, were on the dressing
table now, in silver frames. She’d noticed them as soon as she entered the room. That must be Dick and Freddy. Both in officers’ caps. She’d never seen them before. How could she
have?

She’d looked at them as he’d undone her clothes.

He padded out of the room to the bathroom. Still only the signet ring. He wasn’t there for long. He had only to wash and rinse himself, whatever men did. Remove, that is,
all immediate traces of herself on him. She would think about this later.

The room seemed to close in on her during his short absence, even to claim her as part of its furniture. She did not move. She lay indeed like an inanimate object, though she was all tingling
flesh. He had made no sign to her that she
should
move—that now he’d got up, it might be proper for her to do the same. Rather the opposite. It was no surprise to him, when he
reappeared, that she was still tenaciously lying there. It was what, it seemed, he had even expected, wanted her to do.

He had a scent about him now that she might have appreciated, save that it cancelled out the sweeter smell of his sweat. She would think about this too later: that he put on his cologne. But he
was still naked and in no apparent haste. He had brought in, from the dressing room, a fresh white shirt, a pale-grey waistcoat and a tie, but it seemed that the rest of his outfit would consist of
what he’d discarded on the chair. He might have done all his dressing in the dressing room, but perhaps this was his habit anyway, to dress by the light of the window, by his dressing table
and its angled mirrors. The dressing room was merely a wardrobe.

But it seemed that he did not want to be separated from her, though he was about to leave. It was in some way all for her—that she should watch him dress, watch his nakedness gradually
disappear. Or that he just didn’t care. The sureness, the aloofness, the unaccountable unhurriedness. She should leave too? But he said nothing and she remained, as if now actually commanded
to, where she was, while his eyes travelled over her again, even as he dressed.

He must have noticed the trickle. But it was part of his fine disdain not to notice it. It was like the clothes he might leave pooled on the floor, to find their way back to him, laundered and
pressed, hanging in the dressing room. These were things to be cleared up discreetly by people who cleared up such things. And she, normally, was such a one. She was part of the magic army that
permitted such disregard. Was he really going to tell her, before he left, to deal with the mess? And give her her cheap moment to remind him that she was not his servant?

But she saw as he looked at her—and surely at that incriminating patch—that such a squalid little scene was far from his thoughts. Some other kind of indifference was making him
careless of such a minor matter as a stain on a sheet. Was it a stain, anyway, that it should be removed? Any more than she should remove herself—and she was not a stain—from his bed.
Yes, he
wanted
her to be there, when it might have been her role, in another life, in a commoner, comic story, to be already scurrying downstairs, still adjusting her clothing. It was his
wish, before he left, to see her there, to have her there, nakedly and—who knows?—immovably occupying his bedroom, so that the image of her would be there, branding itself on his mind,
even as he met—his vase.

She was doing, as she lay there, the right, the finest thing. She understood it, even as she understood that her lying there had lost all argument, all pleading for his not going. He was clearly
going. And he wanted her, for some reason she couldn’t fathom, to watch, even as she blazoned her nakedness, this business of his getting dressed, of his putting back on again the life that
was his.

Why was he being so slow?

The room had been filled now with as much light and unseasonal warmth as was possible. The minute hand on his watch must be moving towards one, even beyond it. The dark line on the sundial in
the garden at Beechwood—where she might have been sitting right now, a book on her lap—would have crept further round. She could not make out the face of the little clock on the
dressing table—the two brothers, either side, guarding it.

Was there ever such a day as this? Could there ever be such a day again?

It would be Ethel’s job, she realised, to deal with the stain—the trickle, the patch. Ethel who would even now, she imagined, be sitting in a house filled with the
pricey smell of roasting beef—on such a warm day, when a bit of cold ham might have served. Sitting where her mother had commanded her to sit and not get up or lift a finger. It was her day
off, wasn’t it? Today everything was different, special. ‘Talk to your dad for a while, Ethel.’ If Ethel still had a dad, or a dad still in one piece. For these few hours of
reunion, of mother-honouring, Ethel’s mother would toil in the kitchen and Ethel’s mother and father would live for a week on bread and dripping.

But Ethel when she returned to her duties later—when the ‘shower’ would have perhaps also returned, invigorated yet fatigued from their sunny outing and in need of
attention—would have to change the sheets in Mister Paul’s bedroom, not having been present earlier to do so, and would notice the stain. In so far as Ethel noticed such things, since
it was her job simultaneously to notice them and quickly make it seem that they had never existed.

Even Ethel, who had sat down only hours ago, like royalty, to roast meat, would know what such a stain was. It was the common lot of her kind to come upon them, in bedrooms. So much so that they
were sometimes known, in below-stairs parlance, as ‘come-upons’. There were other expressions, of varying inventiveness, including ‘maps of the British Isles’. If there had
to be any actual, awkward professional discussion of them, they might be officially known as ‘nocturnal emissions’—which did not necessarily cover all circumstances and might not
leave a new maid of sixteen fully enlightened. Little boys—not so little boys—had nocturnal emissions that, setting aside the fact that they might have had them more considerately, had
to be rendered rapidly absent.

All this she had gleaned for herself before arriving at Beechwood, when she had been briefly dispatched, as part of her ‘training’ and on a sort of probation, to a big house
requiring extra staff for the summer occupancy. There had been five maids in all and, my, how some of them had talked.

There were many emissions that were not produced solitarily and were not, directly, emissions at all (or even necessarily nocturnal), and most maids, using their powers of deduction, could tell
the difference and, using their powers of deduction further, might even draw conclusions as to exactly how the ‘emission’ had been formed. But this was not in any way to be spoken of or
even acknowledged. Though it was one of the things that could make a maid’s work interesting. All the stains, all the permutations. A summer house party with twenty-four guests. Oh Lord.

And even Ethel would have her deductions and conclusions, though she would be staunch in pretending she’d never had to have them. And Ethel’s conclusion would be that in the period
of time in which the house would have been (supposedly) vacated, Mister Paul would have taken the opportunity to entertain his fiancée, Miss Hobday, in his bedroom. For no other reason,
possibly, than that they could do such a thing and get away with it. Setting aside that they might have waited. In two weeks’ time they would not need to be such pranksters. Setting aside
what kind of woman (one did not discuss Mister Paul) it suggested Miss Hobday was.

It was not for her, Ethel, to judge. Further deduction, along with received, whispered knowledge, might have told Ethel that Miss Hobday was at least one kind of woman: Mister Paul had not
invited her to Upleigh for the express purpose of deflowering her. But in any case Ethel, already gathering up the sheets for the laundry basket, would assume that Mister Paul, if he’d taken
stock of the stain at all, would have known that she, Ethel, would make it vanish, like the good fairy she was.

Except, as it would turn out, the whole situation—the whole atmosphere and needs of the household—would be different. No one, certainly, would be interested, if they ever had been,
in whether Ethel had had a good time with her mother. And anyway Ethel would already have changed the sheets.

She had never watched a man get dressed before. Though she had to deal intimately with men’s garments, and during that summer at the big house had been rapidly educated
in the astonishing range of them that one man might own and in their complications and intricacies. Though she had often and in a strange variety of places (stables, greenhouse, potting shed,
shrubbery) interfered intimately with Paul Sheringham’s clothes, even as he was wearing them, on the condition of course—or, rather, assumption—that he could interfere with
hers.

He put the shirt on first, the clean white shirt he’d brought from the dressing room. To put it on—or, rather, enter it—he hoisted it above his head, like any woman tunnelling
into a shift. She hadn’t thought it would be the shirt first. But to every act of gentlemanly dressing there must be a mix of personal preference and prescribed order. In the ‘old
days’, after all, a manservant might have ‘dressed’ him. Just as she could still be required to ‘dress’ as well as ‘undo’ Mrs Niven.

Dressing, anyway, among their kind, was never conceived of as just a flinging on of clothes. It was a solemn piecing together. Though, in the circumstances, he had every reason to be flinging
his clothes on as fast as he could. Another man, in another story, might be saying, as he madly tugged and tucked, ‘Christ, Jay, I have to damn well scoot!’

But his shirt first. That surprised her. Since it meant an immediate loss of dignity, the very thing that in his absence of haste he seemed bent on preserving. It was his trick, she would later
think, it was always Paul Sheringham’s great trick, to have such scorn for indignity that he never actually underwent it. He had lost his dignity and found it again so many times with her.
But any man in just his shirt became automatically comic, and had it been some other story she might well have giggled.