She would hardly have composed a thank-you note to her mother.
They drove back. The sun was dipping and turning orange. The afternoon was waning. And crispening. It was only March. Ethel would light fires too, no doubt, among her other tasks. The right thing to do in the circumstances, keep the home fires burning. Just as she herself would do soon, when she became a maid again at Beechwood.
What was she now, for the time being?
Mr Niven said, after a long silence, ‘I’m sorry to have kept you from your reading, Jane. I’m so sorry to have used up your time. What is the book at present? I forget.’
‘It’s all right, sir. It doesn’t matter.’
She was sitting beside him in the front seat, where, when her husband drove, Mrs Niven would sit. She was trying very hard not to weep, to hold herself together.
If only Mr Niven might say, ‘You must take the evening off. You must take a long hot bath.’ But maids never took long hot baths or were given unscheduled evenings off, especially when they had had the day off anyway. In a little while she would have to resume her duties. She would have to be at least as strong as Ethel.
The gathering evening, the apricot light, the gauzy green-gold world, was impossibly beautiful.
After another long silence he said, ‘That’s all five of them, Jane.’
She knew what he meant. She knew exactly what he meant. But she said, ‘Yes, sir,’ in the way that maids simply mouth those words in general concurrence with everything.
Then, when they’d turned into the sweep in front of Beechwood and he’d switched off the engine he suddenly leant across to her and, like a child, wept — blubbed — even pressed his head, his face to her breasts, so that she thought of when she’d pressed them — had it been only this afternoon? — to the opened pages of a book. ‘I’m so sorry, Jane, I’m so sorry,’ he said, even as his face remained where it was. And she said, involuntarily cradling the back of his head, ‘That’s quite all right, Mr Niven, that’s quite all right.’
The book was called Youth—the book she might have read on the bench in the garden, or might have mentioned to Mr Niven when he’d asked. She might have just uttered the odd word ‘youth’.
Or rather it was called Youth, a Narrative; and Two Other Stories, a clumsy, unexciting mish-mash of a title. It was the only book by Joseph Conrad in the Beechwood library, and the narrative called Youth was the first thing in it and a good place anyway to start, since, as she would come to know, it was loosely based on Conrad’s own early experiences and on his first encounter (she would come to know that he wrote about it often) with a thing — a vision, a promise, a fact, an illusion — called ‘the East’.
It was anyway what, on that Mothering Sunday, she’d only just begun, and if her day had gone differently, if the telephone hadn’t rung, she might quite easily have finished it in some sunny corner of Berkshire or even in the Beechwood garden. She might even have got on to the Other Stories. One of them was called ‘Heart of Darkness’ and as it turned out (her Mothering Sunday having turned out as it did) it was a long time before she got round to that story, even though she knew she had discovered in Joseph Conrad someone important. It was the forbidding title perhaps.
She knew that Conrad was different from anything else she had read, but she could sense that there were things she might not be ready for. It was a little like reading Treasure Island and Kidnapped but not wanting yet to read Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
She quite liked the word ‘narrative’, it was a sober, dependable-sounding word, but she didn’t see why the one thing should be called a narrative and the other things just stories. The word she most liked in those days was ‘tale’—and she was glad to find out that Conrad often preferred it too. There was something more enticing about calling something a tale rather than a story, but this had to do, perhaps, with the suggestion that it might not be wholly truthful, it might have a larger element of invention.
About all these words — tale, story, even narrative — there was a sort of question, always hovering in the background, of truth, and it might be hard to say how much truth went with each. There was also the word ‘fiction’—one day this would be the very thing she dealt in — which could seem almost totally dismissive of truth. A complete fiction! Yet something that was clearly and completely fiction could also contain — this was the nub and the mystery of the matter — truth. When she had read all three of them, she felt she could say Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was more truthful than Treasure Island or Kidnapped. Though some people might say it was the weirdest and certainly the most frightening of the lot.
‘Telling tales’: it could have the sense of concocting downright lies. Like ‘spinning yarns’. It seemed in fact that ‘yarn’ might be the best word for those adventure books she’d been first drawn to in the library at Beechwood, and to have questioned whether those books were truthful would have been pointless. They were yarns. In the word yarn itself there was a salty tang of men and the sea. And so many of those ‘boys’ books’ she read had involved, one way or another, going to sea — a voyage, an unknown land — as if that was the essence of adventure and what every boy wanted to do. And here was Joseph Conrad who seemed to have been just one of those boys.
And she liked the word ‘youth’. Or rather she was challenged by it, because it wasn’t in any obvious way like the title of a tale, story or narrative — or adventure. It seemed more like just an idea. Yet when she had first flipped through the pages of Youth in the Beechwood library it had seemed to be full of all that seafaring, yarny stuff she was already familiar with. Perhaps it was what one of the Niven boys, or by then young men, had thought too, though it was obvious he hadn’t got very far with the book, if he’d read it at all. Unlike other books in the revolving bookcase, it still looked clean and new. It even bore an inscription, in dark-blue ink, ‘J. Niven, Oct. 1915,’ that looked fresh enough to have been written yesterday. And maybe that was another reason why she picked it out.
Conrad, she soon felt, might be generally called a ‘challenging author’. ‘Heart of Darkness’. . Maybe J. Niven had thought this too. ‘Challenging author’ was not yet part of her writer-judging vocabulary and certainly not a phrase she could imagine one day being applied to herself. She would take it, when it was, as a complimentary phrase, but of course there were people who used it adversely. It was another way of saying ‘off-putting’. Well that was their bloody problem.
‘Conrad,’ she would say, when answering another of those repeated and bothersome questions. ‘Oh Conrad — he was the one.’ As if she were talking about someone she had met. Which in a sense she had.
‘Oh Conrad, I used to love all that seafaring stuff.’
‘But a man’s author, don’t you think?’
‘And your point is. .?’
The other reason why she liked the word youth was of course that it was what she had — then. She was ‘a youth’. Although there was a way in which ‘youth’, like ‘yarn’, had a strongly masculine bias to it. A man could be a ‘youth’, but a woman? But then everything had a masculine bias in 1924.
There was in any case a question — and the word youth seemed to have a rubbery quality to it to accommodate this — about where youth began and where it turned into something else. But, surely, still at twenty-two. In 1924 even the century was still in its youth. . Though, in fact, that wasn’t the case at all. Youth — great swathes of it — was just what the century had lost.