She’d put in the cap that he’d helped her get. It was why there had been so much dribble. She couldn’t have got such a thing without him, and it had all been done, with his usual scorning of difficulty or embarrassment, one day when she’d had the afternoon off. She’d got the 1.20 to Reading and met him. Afterwards, they’d gone to a cinema.
God knows how he’d arranged it. He out-clevered her, perhaps, at some things. ‘There’s a doctor chappie I know, Jay. .’ It had taken her some time to — adapt to it. It was her (their) precious means of prevention.
And suppose, she would think later, she had become pregnant. Would she have suffered all the consequences — they would have been all her consequences and would have included swift banishment — so that his marriage would not have been cancelled? Would she have borne all that for him?
Suppose she had deliberately neglected to put the thing in, say three months ago.
Suppose.
‘A Dutch cap, Jay. So my seed doesn’t get anywhere near you. I mean, any nearer than it needs to.’
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?