by Graham Swift
‘For the 9.40. I took them in the Ma-and-Pa-mobile.’
Which would now perhaps be already parked somewhere in Henley. His own car, still in the stable-turned-garage, was a racy thing with a top that came down, only really meant for two.
Perhaps he did it every year, drove them to the station. A Sheringham tradition. But then he said, ‘I wanted to give them a proper goodbye.’
A proper goodbye? They might be back by teatime. They weren’t going for ever.
Was it his roundabout way of saying that this was what he was giving her? A proper goodbye. She could hardly give it much thought at the time, since—his own clothes removed and quickly draped with hers over the armchair—they had moved, with no more ceremony, to the bed.
But she would think about it later. All her life she would picture it: the two women, awed and silent in the back of the big black saloon while he drove them, chauffeur-style. On the station forecourt he might have opened doors and helped them out with the same gracious attentiveness with which he’d removed her clothes. They might even have thought he was going to offer them each a kiss.
All her life she would try to see it, to bring back this Mothering Sunday, even as it receded and even as its very reason for existing became a historical oddity, the custom of another age. As he set them down the distant white puffs of the 9.40 to Reading might already have been visible in that brilliant blue sky. On the platform there might have been two or three others like Iris and Ethel waiting to set off on similar journeys (though not yet Cook Milly who would get the 10.20).
All the maids. All the mothers getting out in readiness what passed for their best china. All the maids with their mothers to go to.
And she knew the maid at Upleigh. She was called Ethel Bligh. Poor mouse. She had had conversations with Ethel—they met on errands at Sweeting’s the grocer’s in Titherton—conversations that scarcely became conversations and that never got near becoming gossip. The cook at Upleigh was a stout creature rather like Milly, but Ethel was a nimble-bodied maid, a little like herself. With another sort of Ethel she might not only have gossiped—the two of them leaning on their bicycles outside Sweeting’s—but even giggled, even giggled just a tiny bit like she giggled with Paul Sheringham.
But even then she wouldn’t have told this other Ethel what she got up to with Mister Paul. Or rather this other Ethel would have known, guessed already. Or rather this other Ethel would have got in first, or have been got in first, being so handily under the same roof.
So it was just as well, in fact, that Ethel was not this other Ethel, but a good little maid who, without having to struggle much to do it, did what maids were constantly required to do: turned a blind eye and a deaf ear and, above all, kept a closed mouth.
Ethel might be going to her mother’s today in the same spirit of meek submission with which she’d once offered her services to Mrs Sheringham. The two things might have become indistinguishable.
Did she and Iris gossip? Surely they did. On the train after their tongue-tied car ride, did they suddenly start to talk? So what was all that about? Was it because he was getting married and would soon be—leaving them?
Or would they have sunk into deeper silence, unaccustomed as they were to being out in the world and to being reminded that they had lives, even mothers, of their own? Would they have just gawped and blinked at sun-bathed, lamb-dotted England?
While Paul Sheringham religiously undressed her.
‘Stay still, Jay.’
And, even as he undressed her and as if to answer another, unspoken question of hers, he’d said, ‘I’m mugging up, Jay. My law books. That’s what I’m doing now. Mugging up.’ It might have produced a giggle, from either of them, but it didn’t. It was said with such an instructive urgency, as if, were she ever to be asked—interrogated—that’s what she was to say that he, that they, had been doing.
It would pass into her private unconfessable code-language, standing for so much that was beyond telling anyway. She would never be able to hear the phrase lightly, even in Oxford, where a great deal of mugging up went on.
But it had been his ruse for getting out of the Henley expedition and for securing the house for himself—and her. It was also, neatly, like a virtuous pledging of his future responsibilities. When they were married he and Emma Hobday were going to live in London (this she knew and could only bleakly accept) and he was supposed to be going to make an honest man out of himself and even an honest living—regardless of his new access to ‘loot’—by studying to become a lawyer.
How times, indeed, could change.
So even today, even on such a glorious morning, he would demonstrate his commitment to this plan with a spot of serious mugging up. It was unlike him, it was out of character, but hardly to be objected to. Perhaps there being only two weeks left—so they might be chucklingly surmising in Henley—had brought out this sudden rush of conscientiousness in him.
Except that he knew and she knew—did Miss Hobday know?—that he had about as much intention of becoming a lawyer as becoming a lettuce.
‘We’re mugging up, Jay.’ If anyone should ask.
Though it still left one unanswered, and not even asked, question. She didn’t dare ask it, or want to ask it. It was for him to say.
Assuming that he (they) would not be—mugging up—all day, what other separate arrangement might there be, might he have in place, with Miss Hobday?
They lay side by side, uncovered, flicking ash, not talking, watching the smoke from their cigarettes rise up and merge under the ceiling. For a while such smoke-sharing was enough. She thought of the white puffs from trains. Their cigarettes, now and then merely lodged vertically in their lips, were like miniature companion chimneys.
There was only the bird-chatter outside and the strangely audible, breath-held silence of the empty house, and the faint ripple of air over their bodies, reminding them, though they eyed the ceiling, that they were entirely naked. Two fish on a white plate, she thought. Two pink salmon on a sideboard, waiting for guests, guests at a wedding even, who would never arrive . . .
She did not want to say, to ask, anything that might puncture the possibility of their staying like this for ever.
It was called ‘relaxation’, she thought, a word that did not commonly enter a maid’s vocabulary. She had many words, by now, that did not enter a maid’s vocabulary. Even the word ‘vocabulary’. She gathered them up like one of those nest-building birds outside. And was she even a maid any more, stretched here on his bed? And was he even a ‘master’? It was the magic, the perfect politics of nakedness.
More than relaxation: peace.
With one hand, the other holding her cigarette, she just brushed, not looking, his moist cock, feeling it stir almost instantly, like some sleeping nestling. As if she might have done such a thing all her life, an idle duchess, stroking a puppy. Only moments ago, with the same hand twisted back to grasp one of the brass rods of the bedstead—this bed she’d never been in before—she’d pressed with the other hand, palm flat but fingers digging, the small of his back, pressed hard the place where it seemed his cock joined his spine. She was commanding him—what command could be stronger and more bidding? Yet he had commanded her: the front door.
Now it seemed that what they’d just done was only a doorway itself to this supreme region of utter mutual nakedness.
Peace. It was true of all days, it was the trite truth of any day, but it was truer today than on any day: there never was a day like this, nor ever would or could be again.
Her cigarette was burning down. She moved the little ashtray—it was surely her prerogative—onto the strip of sheet between them. It was her belly, she might have said, it wasn’t a table, she didn’t want him stubbing his cigarette out against it—much as she might actually have liked it. And how she would remember that ashtray coolly resting on her belly.
Then she wished she hadn’t been so fastidious or presumptuous, hadn’t done anything at all.
He took the cigarette from
his mouth and simply held it, upright, against his own belly.
‘I have to meet her at half past one. At the Swan Hotel at Bollingford.’
He didn’t otherwise move, but it was like the breaking of a spell. And only anyway what she must have anticipated. Though she thought she might have passed, by magic dispensation, beyond that ‘must’. The rest of the day? One portion of it couldn’t (could it?) last for ever. One fragment of a life cannot be the all of it.
She didn’t stir, but she might have, inwardly, altered. As if she might have had her clothes invisibly on again, might even be turning back into a maid.
But nor did he stir, as if in his stillness countering—belying—what he’d just said. He didn’t have to keep his appointment, did he? Who said so? He didn’t have to do a damn thing he didn’t want to, did he? He might simply lie here and ignore it.
And ‘her’—not ‘Emma’. It was like some dismissal shared between them. And ‘I have to’.
His cigarette was almost finished.
He didn’t move, nor did she, as if in fact he hadn’t just spoken. Yet equally as if the slightest movement on her part, let alone a sound, a word, might have been to acknowledge that he’d said it and so commit him to its consequences.
It was not her place, after all, with her ghostly maid’s clothes back on again, to speak, suggest or do more than wait. Years of training had conditioned her. They are creatures of mood and whim. They might be nice to you one moment, but then—And if they snapped or barked, you must jump. Or rather take it in your stride, carry on, not seethe. Yes sir, yes madam. And always—it was half the trick—be ready for it.
Then it came to her that the whole thing might be turned the other way round. This upside-down day. She was lying here with him in his room, like his wife, and he was brazenly consulting with her as to whether he should go and see his troublesome mistress. Some couples, some of their kind, might actually do this. And wasn’t it in fact, at heart, like that? He wasn’t yet married. To either of them. She and Emma Hobday were equals.
He did not speak, as if enough silence after his remark, for all its apparent call for punctuality, might cancel everything. And he was perfectly capable of such contempt for nicety. Of having it both ways. He hadn’t been dishonest, had he? He just hadn’t acted accordingly. It was his way: he misbehaved, but he didn’t lie about it.
And he’d taken Ethel and Iris nobly to the station.
And she wasn’t going to say, like some remarkably forbearing wife, ‘Then you’d better go, hadn’t you?’ Was he really asking her to?
His lengthening silence might have given her an increasing power—or compliance. But the moment was passing when he might have said, ‘But I think we have the whole day, Jay, don’t you?’ Putting his hand where the ashtray had been. Or a little lower.
It must happen. He would go to her and have his lunch with her and even perhaps, somehow or other, later today, have his entitled way with her. If that is how it was between them. He might even bring her back here to do so. To this very room. She hadn’t asked him when his ‘shower’ were expected to return. He was in charge of that contingency. They would hardly yet have sat down to lunch in Henley.
And now, with his own lunch plans suddenly hovering in the air, but with their clothes still strewn together over the armchair, their moment already was passing. He didn’t have that much time.
Moment? It was too mean a word. Hour? Day? Gift? But it was slipping away, as the day had already slipped away from the peak of noon. He must have looked at the little clock, or at his silver pocket watch, on the dressing table when he got up to fetch the cigarettes.
And there was the unalterable truth that it might never have happened at all. And, yes, she should be grateful, eternally grateful. ‘I wanted to give them a proper goodbye.’ She might have been touring Berkshire on a bicycle.
And he might, by the same connivance, have brought ‘her’ here anyway. His telephone call might have been to the Hobday residence. ‘She’ might have had to speak into the telephone just as slyly and pretendingly. Did they communicate in such ways? Then turned up here, crunching the gravel, in her car. The Emmamobile. She might be here with him now.
But she couldn’t imagine it. Her flowery dress over the chair, her silky underwear. She was the one actually lying here, and shouldn’t she be grateful? Even if he’d be lying here beside the other one later. Two in one day. Was it possible? The Swan at half past one. But she couldn’t imagine it.
At the back of her mind was the scrambling thought that if his wife-to-be was in some way ‘arranged’ then the arrangement might include that she must be a flawless, untouched virgin, as if he were marrying a vase. And unlikely as it was—that he could promise himself to a vase—there must be some truth in her thought or some other reason for his lack of soon-to-be-married enthusiasm. If it were not the plain fact that he was lying here now with her.
In any case after minutes of mere stillness, of almost defiant inertia, he suddenly moved, and with an excessive upheaval of his limbs. The whole mattress rocked like a boat. He picked up the slipping ashtray and crushed the stub of his cigarette brutally against it.
And it was then, as she lifted one knee to counter the commotion, that she felt the trickle from between her legs: his seed leaving her, along with liquid of her own. She had other words than ‘seed’, but she liked the word seed. It might have happened at any moment, but its happening now, along with its seeping sadness, seemed almost like a sudden riposte. Well, it would be difficult for him now to be here, later, with her, the flowery one, if that was part of his plan.
Unless he were to tell her right now—she was still a maid, if not his—to replace the sheets.
It was crude arguing. It was what animals, who made no marriage vows and kept no servants, relied on. They marked their territory.
And she wasn’t going to say, now he was on his feet and the decision all but made, ‘Please, don’t go. Please, don’t leave me.’ She was disqualified from the upper world in which such dramas were staged. She had her lowly contempt for such stuff anyway. As if she couldn’t have used—but she wasn’t his wife, it was all the other way round—a different, quieter but fiercer language. Or just the bullet of a look.
In any case, there was the trickle between her legs.
He moved across the room. He might be going only to consult the time. Once again she was able to view him in his surly nakedness. Yes, he had a different walk without his clothes on, an animal walk.
He turned at the dressing table to look at her, holding his watch now in his hand. She hadn’t moved, dared to move, herself. There was only her lifted, theoretically coaxing knee, only her own unhiding nakedness to make him think again. He was taking it in, no more abashed, once again, about his looking than about his own display of himself. His cock was a little fuller but still merely hanging. And now he was familiarly winding the watch, blindly dealing with it even as he gazed.
‘Not quite a quarter to. If I step on it, I should make it. We’re meeting halfway. The Swan. She knows the people there. It was her idea.’
As if she, the Beechwood maid, knew anything about the Swan Hotel at Bollingford or how long it took to get there by car. But the party at Henley would have known? The young things were having their own private lunch. Well, you couldn’t blame them. After he’d commendably spent the morning with his law books.
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.’
&nbs
p; 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.