Mothering Sunday (7 page)

She didn’t know what was Dutch about it. But part of her maid’s outfit was a little white cap. So, there were times when she was wearing two caps.

And ‘seed’. That was another strange word, or it was a strange way of using it, since it didn’t look like anything resembling seed—the pips in an apple, the tiny black
things that might dust a loaf. And yet it was the proper and the right word, she could see that too, and she rather liked it. And it was the word he’d first used for it, when she first became
acquainted with the stuff. ‘It’s my seed, Jay.’ It seemed so long ago now. ‘It’s my seed. We could put it in the ground and water it and see what happens.’ She
honestly hadn’t known if he was being serious.

And now it was springtime. Seed time. ‘We plough the fields and scatter . . .’

All the emissions.

Had her mother been a pregnant maid? Was that the whole story? Had her mother not had a cap to put in? All the omissions. As Milly might have put it.

She went into the dressing room. She was tempted to touch, finger—even try on—everything that hung in it. It was something that servants could only wonder at. What
will it be today? Who shall I be today? How had he chosen, on such a day, his almost severe yet perfect steel-grey jacket?

She went back into the bedroom. There was the soft onslaught of the birdsong again.The far-off snorting of a train.

She might retrieve her clothes, put them on and leave at once. What was the phrase she had sometimes read in books? ‘Cover her tracks.’ But he’d said what he’d said: the
house was hers. She would truly make it so. And it would have seemed somehow like a wrongness, a retreat, to put her clothes back on again.

She went out onto the landing, into shadow, her bare feet on mossy carpet. Shafts and dapples of sunlight from some upper window or skylight caught the red and brown weaves beneath her, the worn
patch at the top of the staircase, the gleam of banisters, the glitter of dust in the air. There was always dust in the air. Why else the need for dusting?

She descended the stairs, her fingers stroking the rail more out of delicate assessment than to steady herself. Where the stairs turned, stair rods gleamed. Ethel was no slouch. Below, the hall
seemed to tense at her approach. Objects might have scuttled and retreated. They had never witnessed anything like this before. A naked woman coming down the stairs!

Her feet struck the coolness of the hall tiles. On one side of the exit to the vestibule was a grandfather clock, on the other a full-length mirror. Across the hall was a table with the large
bowl and the sprigs of white flowers. His mother’s precious orchids. They did not look like any other flower. They had a stillness, an insistence, each little bloom was like a frozen
butterfly.

Might he have picked one before he left? They looked indeed too precious to be picked. But what should he care? It was not his way to respect such things. As it was not his way, plainly, to
respect punctuality. The grandfather clock said a quarter to two! And who would notice one little flower missing from the stem? If there was one missing now, she wasn’t noticing it.

It was all in her head, in any case, that he might have picked an orchid. Then stood before the mirror to attach it. As was the picture that she might have stood here and picked one for him.
‘Here—before you go.’ And held it to his lapel.

Pictures hung around the hall, as they hung, in step-fashion themselves, above the stairs, as they hung also around the walls at Beechwood. It was a strange thing, this need among their kind for
pictures to adorn the walls, since she had never seen Mr or Mrs Niven actually stand before a picture and look at it. They were things, perhaps, only to be noted out of the corner of the eye, or
only for visitors to appreciate. Or rather for maids to study closely and be their true connoisseurs, as they dusted the frames and cleaned the glass.

She had stared repeatedly at all the pictures at Beechwood, so that she would remember them always, even when she was ninety, like some thumbed catalogue in her head, as people apparently
remembered with uncanny clarity the illustrations in their first children’s books. As she would remember always the big gloomy pictures of men in dark coats—benefactors,
overseers—that hung in the hall in the orphanage, where there had been no reading of bedtime stories.

Could she ‘catalogue’ this place? Or at least take in and preserve in some way its sudden crowding presence for her, its multiplicity of contents. Given that she would never be here
again. Given that she could only give it so long—how long might she dare?

And how long before, for him, the catalogue of this place, in his new life, might seep from his head? Not quickly, she imagined, even hoped. And how long before, for him, the catalogue of all
the moments with her . . . ? Before even this day would fade.

Within the vestibule—it was much like at Beechwood—there were all the regular accompaniments—umbrella stand, hat stand—of departures and arrivals,
gatherings or sheddings of coats. Here (though it was Ethel’s task) she might easily have stood to practise that essential art of the servant of being both invisible yet indispensably at
hand. She was invisible now.

On a little felt-topped narrow table where gloves and other belongings might sometimes rest she saw the key that he’d left out for her. It was large and very key-like and somehow like some
troubling, waiting test, though it was not the key for opening anything, merely for locking up.

She did not want to touch it yet.

She turned back into the hall where a choice of doors and directions faced her. It did not matter perhaps. She had no particular business in any of the rooms—except the bedroom upstairs,
where the business was over. Yet her general and compelling business seemed to be to impregnate with her unseen, unclothed intrusion this house that was and wasn’t hers.

And so she did. She glided from room to room. She looked, took in, but also secretly bestowed. She seemed to float on the knowledge that, outrageous as her visiting was—she hadn’t a
stitch on!—no one would know, guess she had even been here. As if her nakedness conferred on her not just invisibility but an exemption from fact.

Ethel would know of course. But Ethel would think she had been Miss Hobday.

She entered the drawing room. It was like a small deserted foreign country, a collection of pleading but abandoned possessions. As if life itself—she had never had this thought at
Beechwood—was the sum of its possessions. She could not help entering it with the studied deference of a maid announcing a caller or bringing in tea. Yet there was no one there. It was almost
like entering those unalterable shrines of the boys’ rooms at Beechwood—no need to knock but you felt you should—and she decided at once that she wouldn’t go into the
equivalent rooms that must be here upstairs. Had she really thought she would? Like this?

The gilt mirror over the mantelpiece suddenly leapt to arrest her, to prove her undeniable, flagrant presence. Look, this is you! You are here!

And had he supposed that
he
was exempt from fact? That a quarter past two might conveniently turn into half past one? She tried to guess the exact calibration of minutes by which his
lateness would be merely excused, excused but with frostiness, excused but with hot anger, not excused at all. Not excused, even with the forgiving closeness of their wedding—not excused
especially because of that.

She tried to put herself again in the shoes, the skin of Emma Hobday. On the mantelpiece was an invitation, on thick, gold-edged, round-cornered card, expensively printed with scrolling black
letters. It was an invitation to Mr and Mrs Sheringham from Mr Hobday and Mrs Hobday to the wedding of their daughter, Emma Carrington Hobday. It was a formality of course, and had been put there
on the mantelpiece simply in proud proclamation. As if they would not have gone to their son’s wedding.

‘Carrington’?

Returning to the hall, she went to stand before the tall mirror, as though to put herself in her own oddly intangible skin. She had never before had the luxury of so many mirrors. She had never
before had the means to view her whole unclad self. All she had in her maid’s room was a little square of a mirror, no bigger than one of the hall tiles.

This is Jane Fairchild! This is me!

Paul Sheringham had seen, known, explored this body better than she had done herself. He had ‘possessed’ it. That was another word. He had possessed her body—her body being
almost all she possessed. And could it be said that she had possessed and might always possess him?

And had he ever ‘possessed’ Emma Hobday? Well, he would in two weeks.

She tried to picture Emma Hobday’s naked body—how it might resemble or not resemble hers. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t even imagine Emma Hobday without clothes. What
was she wearing now, on a March day that was like June? A flowery summer frock? A straw hat? She tried to see Emma Hobday in the mirror. It was even hard to see—though he must have stood
before this mirror, a last magnificent look, orchid or no orchid, less than an hour ago—
him
.

Can a mirror keep a print? Can you look into a mirror and see someone else? Can you step through a mirror and
be
someone else?

The grandfather clock chimed two o’clock.

She had not known he was already dead.

She turned, to consider another choice of doors and, opening one and then another, found herself in the library. It was not, perhaps, such a random choice. Houses have patterns
and proper ‘houses’, even modest ones like Beechwood or Upleigh, had their libraries. In any case she was glad it was where she found herself to be.

Libraries too—libraries especially—had normally to be entered with much delicate knocking and caution, though as often as not, judging by the one at Beechwood, there was actually no
one inside. Yet even when empty they could convey the frowning implication that you should not be there. But then a maid had to dust—and, my, how books could gather dust. Going into the
library at Beechwood could be a little like going into the boys’ rooms upstairs, and the point of libraries, she sometimes thought, was not the books themselves but that they preserved this
hallowed atmosphere of not-to-be-disturbed male sanctuary.

So, few things could be more shocking than for a woman to enter a library naked. The very idea.

The Beechwood library had its wall’s worth of books, most of which (a maid knows) had hardly ever been touched. But in one corner, near a buttoned-leather sofa, was a revolving bookcase
(she liked to twirl it idly when she was cleaning) in which were kept books that clearly had been read. Surprisingly perhaps, in such a generally grown-up place, they were books that harked back to
childhood, boyhood or gathering manhood, books that she imagined might once have flitted between the library and those silent rooms upstairs. There were even a few books that looked newly and
hopefully purchased, but never actually begun.

Rider Haggard, G.A. Henty, R.M. Ballantyne, Stevenson, Kipling . . . She had good reason to remember the names and even the titles on some of the books.
The Black Arrow
,
The Coral
Island
,
King Solomon’s Mines
. . . She would always see their grubby, frayed dust jackets or the exact coloration of their cloth bindings, the wrinklings and fadings of their
spines.

Of all the rooms at Beechwood, in fact, the library, for all its dauntingness, was the one she most liked to clean. It was the room in which she most felt like some welcome, innocent thief.

One day, after she had lodged her bold but shy, even slightly simpering request, Mr Niven had said, after a lengthy pause for thought, ‘Well yes, of course you may,
Jane.’ The pause might have suggested that he was permitting some inversion in the hierarchy of the household, or just his puzzlement on a practical point: Well when was she going to read the
things, with all her duties to perform? In her sleep? It might have suggested amazement—had the ability not long ago been put to the test—that she could read at all.

But it was nonetheless a yielding, even kindly pause.

‘Of course you may, Jane.’

They were magic, door-opening words. A different answer—‘Who do you think you are, Jane?’—might have undone her life.

It deserved one of her full bobbings. Nothing less.

‘But you must let me know which book first. And, of course, you must return it.’

‘Of course, sir. Thank you very much, sir.’

She became a borrower from the Beechwood library, on a carefully monitored yet intrigued, even fostered basis. In fact things took a noticeably sensitive turn with Mr Niven when it became clear
which section of the library she was really interested in. She wouldn’t have wanted, after all, to read Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs
or Smiles’s
Lives of the Engineers
(in
five volumes). Who would?

‘
Treasure Island
, Jane? What do you want to read
Treasure Island
for? All these books for boys.’

It wasn’t really a question or query at all, but more like some general bafflement—or a sort of being caught off his guard. He might perhaps have said, with a lot of coughing,
‘Not those books, Jane. Any books but those.’

As for his other observation, well where were the books for girls?

Which she didn’t mind at all. Boys’ stuff, adventure stuff. She didn’t mind not reading girls’ stuff, whatever that might be. Adventure. The word itself often loomed and
beckoned from the pages: ‘adventure’.

It did not seem that the Nivens of Beechwood, or their kind generally, though they had time and means, were in any way adventurous or even advocates of the idea of adventure. ‘A jamboree
in Henley.’ Libraries themselves were like dry, sober rejections of adventure. Yet in the Beechwood library was this little spinning cache of stuff that had once, plainly, been gulped down,
like an allowable dosage before the onset of tedious or terrible maturity.

Mr Niven might have said, ‘Not that bookcase please, Jane.’ But he didn’t.