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.
And later, much later in her life, she would say in interviews, in answer to a perennial (and tedious) question, ‘Oh boys’ books, adventure books, they were the thing. Who would want to read sloppy girls’ stuff?’
Her eyes might glint, her wrinkled face purse up a bit more. But then she might say, if she wanted to be less skittish, that reading those books then—‘the war, you understand, the first one that is, was barely over’—was like reading across a divide. So close, yet a great divide. Pirates and knights-in-armour, buried treasure and sailing ships. But they were the books she had read.