The copse led to a small wilderness of rough grass and brambles, then a straggly hedgerow, where there was another way out of what was still Upleigh land. It involved lifting the bicycle fully over a stile, but she had done it enough times. She might, of course, have left the bicycle — it was her usual practice — safely hidden in the hedgerow. But his crisp command had simply empowered her. The front door.
Beyond the hedgerow — it was dense and spreading at this point and it seemed that even in the space of hours the hawthorns had sprouted more green leaves and more white frothing blossom — there was the curve of a narrow minor road. Once on its surface, she could speed anywhere, a mere carefree wayfarer, out pedalling on a heavenly Sunday afternoon.
Though for a crippling moment she didn’t know which way to turn. It must have been perhaps three o’clock. She had half the afternoon yet. To turn left would have been the quickest way back to Beechwood, so the obvious choice was right. But where to? Pushing off, she decided that it didn’t matter, the main thing was simply to be riding, careering through this warm exhilarating air, and since the road to the right took her down a long sunny swoop then up a gentle rise (it was the back of the Upleigh grounds) her decision, to be indecisive, was confirmed.
Pedalling hard at first, then freewheeling and gathering speed, she heard the whirr of the wheels, felt the air fill her hair, her clothes and almost, it seemed, the veins inside her. Her veins sang, and she herself might have sung, if the rushing air had not stopped her mouth. She would never be able to explain the sheer liberty, the racing sense of possibility she felt. All over the country, maids and cooks and nannies had been ‘freed’ for the day, but was any of them — was even Paul Sheringham — as untethered as she?
Could she have done what she’d done today if she’d had a mother to go to? Could she have had the life she didn’t yet know she was going to have? Could her mother have known, making her dreadful choice, how she had blessed her?
And, like a mother to herself, she would never forget that girl on a bicycle, though she would never mention her to anyone, never breathe a word.
Girl? She was twenty-two. The air up her skirt and a Dutch cap up her fanny.
Beyond the top of the rise was a crossroads with one of those four-fingered country signposts, black on white. She might have taken any direction and ridden off for ever. She had her hidden treasure. She had taken a secret munch of pie and swig of ale in that house over there, behind the trees!
But she stopped for a long time at the crossroads. Three o’clock. At Henley now, puddings finished, they might be reflecting on the forthcoming event. Mr Hobday would have established his benign authority over the assembly and Mr Niven might have become hopeful that he would not have to share the bill. Meanwhile at Bollingford the subjects of their rosy considerations might have passed miraculously — who knows? — beyond the moment of almost terminal conflagration. Fireworks quenched by champagne. Emma Hobday might have succumbed to Paul Sheringham’s impregnable poise. ‘Must we, Emsie? On a day like this? Just because I was half an hour late. . All right, forty minutes. What’s ten minutes?’ His hand, by now, finding her knee.
Is that how it might have gone after all? All the scenes. Suppose.
She stood, one foot on the verge, the other on a pedal. There was not a murmur, in any direction, of traffic. There was only the birdsong and, in the warm air, the half-heard stirring and rousing of — everything. Spring.
She took the left turn, only, after a mile or so, to take another left turn. It was a circuitous way back to Beechwood. She had still half the afternoon, yet she knew, now, what she wanted to do with her remaining time.
It was what she might have done anyway, what she might have said to Mr Niven, had not circumstances happily dictated otherwise. Or she might have just set off on this bicycle, with a sandwich from Milly and two and six, and found some sunny quiet spot. To sit, to lie, with her bicycle and her book. It was a book by Joseph Conrad. She’d never heard of him. She’d only just begun it.
She might have brought the book with her, she thought, so she might have had it now. But that was absurd. The front door, with her Dutch cap — and a book to read! But she might, all along — had not the telephone triumphantly rung — have said that thing about just sitting in the garden with a book.
‘If I may, Mr Niven.’
And he might have said, imagining the rather charming scene, ‘Of course you may, Jane.’
Well now she would finish her day, her Mothering Sunday, as it might have begun.
And so it was that in order to keep an appointment with a book — with Joseph Conrad — she turned left, then left again, making her way back to Beechwood earlier than needed, though, even so, not directly or quickly. She might still enjoy this glorious sunshine and the thrill of being so fully alive in it, on a whirring, whizzing bicycle. She might still stamp the memory of it on herself for ever.
And so it was that she reached Beechwood some while after four, only to discover that Mr and Mrs Niven had, surprisingly, already returned. There was Mr Niven, as she rode up the drive, standing on the gravel beside the Humber, almost as she had last seen him that morning, though clearly, as she drew near him, in a very different frame of mind. And saying, ‘Jane. Is that you, Jane?’
What a strange thing to say. Was she someone else?
‘Jane, is that you — back so early? I have some distressing news.’
One day, when it had long been her business — her profession, even the reason why she was ‘well known’—to write stories and to deal intricately with words, she would be asked another perennial and somewhat tedious question: ‘So when — so how did you become a writer?’ She had answered it enough times and, really, you couldn’t answer it in a different way every time. Yet people — surprisingly since her occupation was telling stories — did not jump to the conclusion that in giving her standard answer, she might also be telling a story, only kidding, as it were. They took her at her word. And, after all, it was a good answer, a fairly unchallengeable one.
‘At birth. At birth, of course,’ she would say, even when she was asked this question in her seventies or eighties or nineties, when her birth, always a mysterious fact, now seemed the remotest and strangest of events.
‘I was an orphan,’ she would divulge for the umpteenth time. ‘I never knew my father or mother. Or even my real name. If I ever had one. That has always seemed to me the perfect basis for becoming a writer — particularly a writer of fiction. To have no credentials at all. To be given a clean sheet, or rather, to be a clean sheet yourself. A nobody. How can you become a somebody without first being a nobody?’
And a characteristic glint might enter her eye, an additional crease appear at the corner of her mouth, and her interviewer might think that, yes, there was a touch of slyness here. Jane Fairchild was known for being a crafty old bird. But the gaze, for all the glinting, was steady, the face, for all its knottiness, essentially straight. It even seemed to be putting the innocent counter-question: You think I would tell you a lie?
‘Not just an orphan,’ she might go on, ‘but a foundling. Now there’s a word for you. Not such a common one, is it, these days? Foundling. It sounds like a word from the eighteenth century. Or from a fairy tale. But I was left on the steps of an orphanage — in some sort of bundle, I suppose — and taken in. That is what I was told. There were places in those days where that sort of thing could happen. 1901. It was a different world. Not the start in life any of us might wish for. But then in some ways’—the glint would appear again—‘the perfect one.