Forty-eight and famous. In the Mind’s Eye. Some people were shocked and scandalised. It was only 1950. It would look tame in twenty years’ time. And she was — to make it worse — a ‘lady novelist’. A lady novelist? Where did they get that phrase from? And where did they think she came from?
Forty-eight and famous and widowed and childless and not yet halfway through her orphaned life.
‘I have some distressing news.’
Even as Mr Niven spoke, words displayed their fickle ability to fly away from things. Such was his evident struggle to find words and such her recent experience that she thought he’d said ‘undressing news’. I have some undressing news. A mistake that even Milly couldn’t have made.
And when, after he’d got more words out, he said, ‘You have gone very pale, Jane,’ she had the fleeting thought that it was surely something people only did in books. People only ‘went pale’ or had ‘faces of thunder’ or eyes that ‘flashed fire’ or blood that ‘ran cold’ in books. Books that she had read.
‘I’m so sorry, Jane, to be telling you this. On Mothering Sunday.’
As if his presence — it seemed now that he was alone — back here at Beechwood at this hour was expressly to deliver news meant for her. As if he had come with the unexpected information that she had no mother.
‘There has been an accident, Jane. A fatal accident. Involving Paul Sheringham. Mister Paul at Upleigh.’
She had the presence of mind, or mere mumbling reflex, to say, ‘At Upleigh?’
‘No, Jane, not at Upleigh. A road accident. A car accident.’
That was when he said, ‘You have gone very pale, Jane.’ It even seemed that he was stepping forward, arms held out, a little hesitantly but gallantly, because he thought she might be going to faint.
She would never know how Mr Niven might have recorded his own version of this scene and all that followed. How he might have ‘written it’, as it were. She would never know — but this was surely her own sudden panicky surmise — how much he knew.
She would never know (even at seventy or eighty) how much other people — people who weren’t writers — did any of this stuff. It was a mystery.
Paul Sheringham didn’t. She would have said she was sure of that. And that was — had been — his glory.
He had driven off (as she knew) when, unless some sorcery, some suspension of the laws of physics occurred, he would have been late. She knew (though she would never tell anyone) that he had made no effort to hurry — the opposite — though he was going to meet his bride-to-be. But he had made every effort, nonetheless, to prepare himself immaculately. This too only she would ever truly know, since after the impact the car had caught fire and his body was not only mangled but burnt. But items survived, she would learn, to suggest his state of attire — and his identity. An initialled cigarette case, a signet ring. The car itself was not so destroyed that it could not be readily identified as the car Paul Sheringham (often with some verve) drove.
But he would anyway have been significantly late. So that Emma Hobday’s at first trivial but then intensifying feelings of bafflement, anger and indignation might have turned eventually into appalling conjecture. Good God — she had simply been stood up! Her husband-to-be had chosen this day — this marvellous day — to isolate her while he made his getaway. Law studies indeed! He had seized the opportunity of the house being completely deserted to — desert her! To drive off into the blue yonder. Because he could not face — it was only two weeks — marrying his betrothed wife. Or any other of his looming obligations. And this was his monstrous way of announcing it.
In short, she was being royally jilted. And, while she knew that her outraged imagination might just be getting the better of her and she could be becoming hysterical, some part of her — which knew Paul Sheringham — yet thought: And it might be just like him.
And so. .
But only she, perhaps, Jane Fairchild, the maid at Beechwood, would ‘write’ this scene. Emma Hobday wasn’t a character in a book, was she? She hadn’t invented her. She would never know how Emma Hobday herself might have written it.
And so. . And so Miss Hobday couldn’t just sit there, looking at her dainty wristwatch, could she, and being looked at by others? Her stomach unpleasantly rumbling. She had asked to use the hotel’s telephone. This was all so unthinkable and embarrassing. But she was now at the centre of a world that was betraying her, undoing her appointed future. She had called first Upleigh House. No answer. The ringing telephone even seemed to be saying: This house is empty, there is no one here, no one listening. So then!
And then, after pacing this way and that and biting her lip, even going outside to draw deep breaths and look in all directions, and struggling with the thought that she really was behaving insanely, she had called the police. Perhaps the police might actually chase — chase and capture — her escaping fiancé, or come up with some other explanation that might at least save her from total ignominy.
And so, by that time of day, with information they by then would have had, the police would have had no alternative but to answer her enquiry and, yes, at least to save her from ignominy.
And so a further rapid and terrible succession of telephone calls had followed. The Swan at Bollingford was now ministering to a shocked woman who yet could still impart some vital details. Yes, the George Hotel at Henley. Further down the river. That’s where they’d all gone, that’s where they’d all be.
If they hadn’t actually decided on some picnic. Or if they weren’t, even now, on a sudden whim, cruising gaily and unreachably along the Thames on a hired launch. It had all been going to be like a sunny saluting of the imminent marriage — from which the happy couple themselves had judiciously excused themselves. If only they had meekly signed up to it.
But fortunately they were all still at the George, even still at their lunch table, still toying with sherry trifles.
And so everyone’s day had changed utterly.
And so Mr Niven had driven back here on his own, for reasons he was yet fully to explain. Though those can’t have been — she might still have been anywhere, even by the banks of the Thames herself, enjoying her motherless Mothering Sunday — to announce it all to her.
‘Jane, would you like to sit down?’
The only place would have been inside the Humber. Like Ethel and Iris. But she wasn’t going to faint. She was still clutching the handlebars of her bicycle.
All the available evidence was that — whatever had detained him — he was trying to minimise his lateness. He must have been driving fast at any rate. And he had taken the minor road which, though narrower and twistier, was a short cut, crossing the railway line by a bridge and so avoiding the level-crossing on the main road, which it might have been just his luck to find shut against him.
But he never crossed the railway line.
He was known to be a sometimes speedy yet knowledgeable user of the local lanes. So he would certainly have known about the short cut — if you were heading for Bollingford — and known about the distinct right-hand bend the road made half a mile or so before the railway bridge. It was more of a corner in fact, indicating perhaps where surveyors and landowners had once failed to agree. There was even a large oak on the apex of the bend, marking the hazard. And Paul Sheringham had driven straight into it.
It was bright sunshine, a glorious day. There was no possibility that he had not seen the bend, the approaching, still leafless oak. There were road signs anyway. And he must have taken this bend scores of times. Perhaps his brakes had failed. The condition of the car could never reveal this. Perhaps — since no other traffic was involved — some innocent yet fatal factor, such as a stray farm animal, was responsible. Though would you crash into a tree to avoid a lesser, if significant, mishap?