by Graham Swift
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 i
t. 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.
She supposed that there must be two essential choices: the shirt to be tucked into the waiting trousers, or the trousers to receive the waiting shirt. Each might have its advantages. Yet he looked for a moment like a clown or, instead of a man about to face the world (and a fuming fiancée), like an overgrown boy made ready for bed.
Once it would have been so, she thought. A boy in a nightshirt. Once, he had told her—a rare door opening to the past—about Nanny Becky, who’d left when he’d been sent to school. Once, he would have had a nanny to dress and undress him, all three brothers would have had her.
And what a strange thing, a nanny, a substitute mother. Presenting the offspring to their parents at five o’clock, like a cook offering a cake. And where was Nanny Becky now? In some other household presumably. Or at her mother’s.
She did not giggle at his shirt. It might have been nice to giggle, from her vantage point on the bed. There might have been another world, another life in which all this might have been a regular, casual repertoire. But there wasn’t. She might have been some lounging wife in a room in London, watching him dress to be a joke of a lawyer.
They had hardly spoken for some time. A little while ago they’d made gasping, groaning animal noises. It seemed that they’d entered some diminishing gap of existence together in which, to use a phrase only to be known to her in later life, only ‘body language’ might apply. Only her body might speak. She did not want to falsify—or nullify—anything by the folly of putting it into words. And this, in her later life too, would come to be an abiding occupational conundrum.
It seemed that any words they spoke now must be only ruinous banalities. Even as he engaged with the banalities of underpants and socks.
Yet he was putting on his finery. The fresh white shirt. It was a formal shirt. It would require a collar. It was not just a clean soft-collared shirt that might serve for a Sunday outing, a spin in a car with the top down. It was—even then in a rather old-fashioned sense—his ‘Sunday best’. She watched while he dealt, with unflustered skill, with cufflinks—little silver ovals winking in the sunshine—with collar studs and collar, semi-stiff. He had brought in a tie, a restrained but sheeny thing of slate blue with little white spots. He selected a tie pin. Was that actually, really a tiny diamond? His chin was already smooth—she’d had occasion to feel it—and now anointed with cologne.
It was as if he was dressing for his wedding. But it was not his wedding—yet. He was only going to meet his wife-to-be for a lunch by the River Thames. And if, as now seemed almost certain, he was going to be seriously late, how on earth was being so superbly turned-out going to help?
He had tied his tie studiously, giving due attention to the knot and the hanging lengths before fixing the pin, and all of this still without his trousers on. She did not, could not laugh. Yet it would seem to her later that everything had hinged upon this piece of farcical theatre. Once he put on his trousers all would be lost. If only she had said to him, screamed at him, ‘Don’t put them on!’
But he went now again to the dressing room, lingering there (did he think time had stopped?) for several rustling minutes, then returned, with trousers on, as well as a jacket and shoes, even with a silk handkerchief, exactly complementing his tie, poking from his pocket.
So had it all been because he hadn’t decided yet on the trousers—the ones he’d earlier discarded or ones still hanging in the dressing room? She would never know. She would never say, or be able to say, so he could make some quip or elucidate it all, ‘You took a long time putting on your trousers.’
‘Ah yes, Jay. So I did.’
What a preposterous word anyway: ‘trousers’.
He stood there, complete. He gathered the cigarette case and lighter. He needed only, perhaps, a buttonhole. There were the white orchids in the hall. He might actually have been leaving for his wedding. It wasn’t today, but he was signalling it anyway, it was perhaps what all this elaborate sprucing was about: he was leaving—wasn’t he?—for his marriage. She felt an actual sting of jealousy for the woman who would be the recipient of all this dawdling decking-out. If she wasn’t already in a fury of affrontedness.
And she, lying here, had had his unwrapped nakedness.
Then it struck her that it might all in fact have been simply for her. Her last look. His ‘going-away’ clothes. Surely not. All the same, in spite of herself—they were the first words she’d spoken for some time—she said, ‘You look very handsome.’ She tried to make it sound not like some maid’s blushing and inappropriate cooing—‘Ooo you do look ’andsome, sir’—nor, on the other hand, like some royal approval. ‘You pass muster, you may go now.’ She tried to make it not sound even like the steady veiled declaration she wanted it to be.
He did not say to her, ‘And you look beautiful.’ He had never said that, never used that word. Only the word ‘friend’. She couldn’t even be sure there wasn’t some shadow of discomfort in his face at the tribute she’d just paid him.
Only banality would do. Demolish—but do. He delivered a whole speech of it now.
‘You don’t have to hurry. I don’t suppose the shower will be back till at least four. When you go, lock the front door and put the key under the rock by the boot-scraper. It’s not a rock, actually, it’s half a stone pineapple. From when Fr
eddy took a swing at it with his cricket bat. But it’s what we do, whenever we leave the house empty. Which is hardly ever. And I’m not leaving it empty now, am I? But the shower will expect it—with no Ethel or Iris—if they get back first. It’s a whacking great key, they won’t have taken it themselves. I’ll put it on the hall table. That’s all really. Leave everything.’
Did he mean by that the sheets, his shirt, his rejected trousers, dangling over the chair? What else could he mean? Was he telling her not to be a bloody maid? All this while he fingered the knot of his tie and tweaked at his cuffs.
‘If you’re hungry, there’s a veal-and-ham pie, or half of one, in the kitchen. I can always tell Cookie I scoffed it. I mean—as well as going out to lunch. Not that I have to tell anyone anything. Anything.’
It was his last, oddly echoing remark. Was it just about the veal-and-ham pie?
And later she would chew over not just a veal-and-ham pie but almost every word of that matter-of-fact speech. It would stay eerily imprinted. But, precisely because of that, it would sometimes seem that she had made it up, that he could not have said all those things that she remembered so clearly, even fifty years later. He might have just said after all, ‘You’d better get some clothes on, you’d better make yourself scarce.’
She would brood over it like some passage that perhaps needed redrafting, that might not yet have arrived at its proper meaning.
Then he was gone. No goodbye. No silly kiss. Just one last look. Like a draining of her, like a drinking up. And what he’d just bestowed on her: his whole house. He was leaving it to her. It was hers, for her amusement. She might ransack it if she wished. All hers. And what was a maid to do with her time, released for the day on Mothering Sunday, when she had no home to go to?