They drove to Upleigh. It was not a long drive at all. But he drove very slowly and carefully, as if to some appointment he might have wished not to be keeping. They found it hard to speak. Yes, she felt like Ethel. She might have been Ethel.
And as it happened, Ethel was ahead of them. The docile and dutiful Ethel had decided, as if unequipped for her day of freedom, to return in time even to make the Sheringhams their tea, should they themselves be back early enough to require it. Her ‘day’ with her mother must have been a matter of just a couple of hours, and perhaps, for her own reasons, she had preferred not to stretch it out any longer. She would have alighted from the 3.42, then simply walked. It was only a mile or so. There were short cuts through fields. The sun would have been turning a deeper gold. Primroses peeping, rabbits hopping. It would have taken the agile Ethel maybe twenty minutes. And they might have been the best twenty minutes of her day.
Even as they drove up the Upleigh drive, between the limes, she had seen the tell-tale sign: the upstairs window. Tell-tale only to her. It was closed now. Someone had closed it. Who else but Ethel? Ethel had been in the bedroom and closed the window.
And so she’d gasped — audibly to Mr Niven — as they still drove up the drive. And Mr Niven had taken it perhaps as a general gasp of distress, since they were both no doubt thinking — if in different ways — of how Paul Sheringham had driven down this very drive only hours ago in the opposite direction. For the last time. So Mr Niven had said needlessly, ‘Yes, it’s terrible, Jane.’
And it was a gasp of distress, but it contained a small gasp of relief. And she otherwise betrayed nothing.
The sun was now off the front of the house and the gravel. When they got out of the car there was even a distinct chill in the air after the earlier heat of midday. And while Mr Niven began looking for ‘this pineapple thing’ and while she restrained herself from pointing at it or saying anything, Ethel suddenly opened the door — as she naturally would, since it seemed that there were visitors. She might even have thought, hearing the car from within, that it was Mr and Mrs Sheringham returning. But there she was on the porch suddenly, with a surprising air of being in charge of — of guarding — the whole edifice of Upleigh.
And as she watched Ethel open the door she naturally thought of when she had last seen it being opened.
‘Mr Niven—?’ Ethel had mustered, with a mixture of surprise and composure which didn’t begin to embrace the puzzle of why Mr Niven was there with Jane What-was-her-name, the maid from Beechwood.
Were all maids being offered rides today?
And Mr Niven said, ‘You are Ethel, aren’t you?’ Which was also puzzling.
So there had been no need to wait for Ethel. She struggled, later, to imagine what that might have been like. And the whole procedure of informing Ethel took place at the front porch. Since Ethel plainly wouldn’t be told to go in and sit down, not by Mr Niven who wasn’t her own master, even though it was clear from his manner that something really awful might be about to be uttered. And was that Beechwood girl supposed to be coming inside and sitting down too?
Ethel, in fact, suddenly changed. Or perhaps her true Ethelness appeared. She would never know if her (and even Paul Sheringham’s) whole conception of Ethel had been mistaken from the beginning.
Ethel’s eyes, even as Mr Niven was grappling with words again, had suddenly bored into her own as if she, Ethel Bligh, knew everything. Though equally they might have been saying, just as unswervingly, ‘We maidservants have to stick together, don’t we, and know our place in the world?’
Her look went a lot further anyway than a mere bewildered, ‘And what are you doing here? What are you doing consorting with your master?’
Behind Ethel, she could just make out, through the vestibule and the shadows of the hall, the table and the bowl with the white clusters of orchids. It was somehow incredible that they should still be there.
‘I have some distressing news, Ethel,’ Mr Niven began. ‘If I may call you Ethel?’
‘Yes, sir.’
And so Ethel was informed. And stood there, like an unbudging defender on the front porch, as if she were fully prepared, now so much harm had apparently come to this house, to prevent any further assaults upon it. Mr Niven, who was still on the gravel below, seemed to cower before her sudden authority.
‘Then it is just as well, Mr Niven, I came back early, so I can be of assistance. I must have known in my bones something was wrong. That I might be needed. Mr and Mrs Sheringham — they must be quite beside themselves. They must be in such a state again.’ Ethel had said that deliberate ‘again’. ‘I will be here for them when they return. I will inform Cook when she returns. I will take — I will make, if required — any telephone calls.’
‘Ethel—’
But Ethel had carried on, perhaps in rare defiance, for her, of the speak-when-spoken-to rule.
‘I have already tidied around. I have tidied Mister Paul’s room—’
‘That is just the point, Ethel.’
‘The point, Mr Niven?’
‘I need to ask you— I am here to ascertain—’ Mr Niven floundered. ‘Did you find anything, in Mister Paul’s room?’
‘Anything? I don’t know what you mean, Mr Niven.’
‘Like — a note, Ethel. Anything written.’
‘No, sir. I did not find anything written. And I would not have read it if I had, sir.’ Ethel almost looked as if her next words might have been a snappy, ‘Would that be all, sir?’ Or even a, ‘And what business would that be of yours?’
‘Then— That is all right, Ethel. That is all — all right.’
‘Are you all right, sir? Would you be requiring a cup of tea or anything?’
‘No, thank you, Ethel. Are you all right? Would you require — our company? Or Jane here’s company?’
That was a possibility she, the Beechwood maid, hadn’t been prepared for and she waited, surrenderingly, for Ethel’s grasping of the initiative.
‘No, sir. I can manage, thank you.’
But she had said it not looking at Mr Niven, but squarely, unwaveringly at her ‘opposite number’.
And her look was like the look of the sternest and most forgiving of parents.
So, she would never know many things. But she knew now that, certainly by the time the Sheringhams returned, Ethel would have thoroughly ‘tidied up’ Mister Paul’s room. The flung-aside trousers, the bedclothes. The sheets would have been replaced (though no one, Ethel must later have reflected on this, was going to sleep in them), the removed ones bundled into the laundry basket, waiting for Monday’s copper. The kitchen table — a simple kindness to Cook Iris — would have been cleared and cleaned. And everything returned to as it should be. Even though everything was different.
And Ethel would one day find her way into another minor (not so minor) character — in If the Truth Be Known. She would be transmuted and (though only the author would know) honoured by fiction. She would not be called Ethel (she would be called Edith) or be anything like Ethel, or even be a maid, but she would be one of those characters who exist, seemingly, on the periphery of things and yet know everything. And she would be one of those characters whose real ‘character’ goes for most of the time unsuspected and unperceived. But that was a general truth she, the author, would know by then to apply to the creation of character in fiction, as it was a general truth about life and people.
But she would never know exactly how much Ethel had known all along. And she would never know what Ethel did or thought or imagined or felt when she was left alone again in that house in the interval before the Sheringhams (and Cook Iris) returned, and even, in time, the police appeared, just for some routine questions.