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?
She listened to his steps receding down the staircase. They became louder again as they clicked and loitered on the tiles of the hall. He was gathering an item or two before his actual departure? A hat? The buttonhole? Why not? Perhaps he kept a pin for such a thing in his jacket pocket. He was finding that key?
She did not move. She froze. She heard the front door — or doors — being opened then closed. It was neither a slam nor a gentle manipulation. Then she heard — it came up from outside through the open window, not echoing through the house itself — his sudden giggle. If giggle it was. It was more like some trumpeting, defiant call, weird and startling as a peacock’s. She would never forget it.
There was the crunch of his shoes on the gravel. He was walking towards the old stable and his garaged car. He would see her bicycle against the front wall. She’d simply propped it there, since he’d said the front door — and the front door had already been opening magically. She hadn’t left it discreetly out of sight. And so, she realised now, if Miss Hobday had decided to turn up mischievously, as a fiancée might in this modern age, in her own car, to surprise him — and surprise him she would have done — she would have seen it: a woman’s bicycle, without a crossbar. And then there might have been a scene, a wild and frantic scene. And the day would have turned out very differently.
But wasn’t there going to be a scene now in any case, at the Swan at Bollingford?
All the scenes. All the scenes that never occur, but wait in the wings of possibility. It was perhaps already almost half past one. Birds chorused. Somewhere on a road the other side of Bollingford, Emma Hobday, in her Emmamobile, would already be nearing the place of their rendezvous. Or perhaps she too was late. It was her woman’s right. Perhaps she was always maddeningly late and perhaps he was only banking on this exasperating habit. If he timed it right they might serenely coincide.
Perhaps that was the simple explanation.
But in any case Emma Hobday would be enjoying, as she drove, the dazzling rush of this spring day. What it might be like to drive a car was beyond her maid’s experience — she had only driven a bicycle. But she tried to put herself momentarily in the shoes — or on the wheels — of Emma Hobday who did not know yet what a show of himself her husband-to-be had prepared for her. Or that he’d taken so long in putting on his trousers.
And at Henley they might have finished the smoked salmon and be anticipating perhaps the duck or the lamb with mint sauce — surely not as good as Milly’s. And remarking yet again on the marvellous weather, and if only it would repeat itself for the wedding. She imagined a dining room with tall French windows flung open to the sunshine. A lawn leading down to the river. Tables even, laid up, outside. White hats. Like a wedding itself.
All the scenes. To imagine them was only to imagine the possible, even to predict the actual. But it was also to conjure the non-existent.
She heard the car start. A throaty revving or two. Perhaps he always did it, as if a race was starting. And he would surely have to race now, to redeem himself even partially. But she heard the wheels simply crackle, not spin or lurch, over the gravel, then the sound of the engine gathering speed and noise, as he drove between the lime trees and the two big lawns, then getting fainter and simply merging with the birdsong.
She did not move. She did not go to the window. A brief, flourishing roar, as he turned onto the metalled road — the same road he had taken this morning, in the other car, with the honoured but cowed Ethel and Iris — and at last put his foot down.
She didn’t move. The curtains stirred slightly. A naked girl in his room. She didn’t move — she didn’t know how long she didn’t move — until it seemed the absurdity of her not moving won out against some dreadful need not to.
Then she moved. She reared up from the pillow. Her feet found the carpet. She walked over it, naked, as he had. The two brothers in their silver frames stared at her. She saw herself in the mirror. She went to the window. There was nothing to see. Berkshire. There was no one to notice her sudden unaccountable face at the window, her bare sunlit breasts. The sky was an unbroken blue.
She turned back into the room, resisting the fleeting urge to begin picking up clothes. She looked at the bed where they had both been, the covers flung back, the dented sheets, the little blatant stain.
She thought of Ethel.
All the emissions. Ethel, maid in a house of boys, would be not unfamiliar with them, though this little stain would be curiously different. All the emissions of three brothers, and two of them gone now. Though there they were, in their silver frames, eyeing a naked girl. And Ethel, she strongly supposed, had never known what it was like to be the direct cause of a man’s emission, let alone to feel it inside her, or, mingling with her own fluids, trickling out of her. A maid — and, yes, a maid. And Ethel must be nearing thirty. Her parents must be ancient. But at least she had them and had been allowed to see them today.
All the wasted emissions. The sunlight for a moment seemed to be filling the room only with a bright bare emptiness. But why should she be feeling so bereft and alone in the world when she’d had what she’d had this day? And when, after all, she wasn’t Ethel. And when she had right now a whole house along with a small parkland at her disposal — as Mr Niven might have put it.
She walked out, past the dressing room, into the nearby bathroom. A little masculine temple. She looked at razors and brushes and bottles of cologne and wondered whether to touch them. She wondered whether to touch and finger every last item on the glass shelves. She washed and dried herself anyway, using the basin and the towel — damp from his own use of it — that Ethel would remove unthinkingly.