‘Who was it, Jane?’ Mr Niven had said. He might have been thinking, from the ‘madam’, that it was Mrs Sheringham or even Mrs Hobday with some change of plan.
‘Wrong number, sir.’
‘Really, and on a Sunday,’ he’d said, rather meaninglessly.
Then, glancing at the clock and furling his napkin, he’d given a ceremonious cough.
‘Well, Jane, after you’ve dealt with the breakfast things, you may go. So may Milly. But before you do—’
And with these words he’d awkwardly produced the half-crown that she knew had been waiting and that merited one of her more pronounced bobbings.
‘Thank you, sir. That’s very kind of you.’
‘Well — you have a beautiful day for it,’ he reiterated, and she wondered again, even a little flusteredly, what he could mean by ‘it’.
But he looked at her only enquiringly, not searchingly. Then he drew himself up, even becoming rather official.
It was a strange business, this Mothering Sunday ahead of them, a ritual already fading, yet the Nivens — and the Sheringhams — still clung to it, as the world itself, or the world in dreamy Berkshire, still clung to it, for the same sad, wishing-the-past-back reasons. As the Nivens and the Sheringhams perhaps clung to each other more than they’d used to, as if they’d become one common decimated family.
It was strange in her case for quite different reasons, and it all elicited from Mr Niven, as well as the half-crown, much throat-clearing and correctness.
‘Milly will take the First Bicycle and leave it at the station for her return. And you, Jane. .?’
There were no longer horses, but there were bicycles. The two in question were virtually identical — Milly’s had a slightly larger basket — but they were scrupulously known as the ‘first’ and ‘second’ bicycles, and Milly, as befitted her seniority, had the first one.
She herself would have the second one. She might be at Upleigh inside fifteen minutes. Though there was still the matter of formal permission — if not for going to Upleigh.
‘If I may, sir, I’ll just take myself off. On the Second Bicycle.’
‘That’s what I had been assuming, Jane.’
She might have just said ‘my bicycle’, but Mr Niven was a stickler for the ‘first’ and ‘second’ thing, and she’d learnt to go along with it. She knew, from Milly, that the ‘boys’—Philip and James — had once had bicycles (as well as horses) which had become known as the First and Second Bicycles. The boys were gone, so were their bicycles, but for some strange reason the ‘first’ and ‘second’ tradition had carried over to the two servants’ bicycles, even though these were, necessarily, ladies’ versions, without crossbars. She and Milly perhaps didn’t qualify as ladies, but they qualified, in one persistent respect, as the dim ghosts of Philip and James.
She had never known Philip and James, but Milly had once known them and indeed cooked for them. And Milly had once known ‘her lad’, who’d gone the same way as Philip and James, even perhaps in the same dreadful part of France. And her lad had been called Billy. Milly would not often use his name—‘my lad’ had become as obligatory as ‘first’ and ‘second’ bicycles — so it was hard to gauge how much she’d actually, really known him. Yet if they’d ever got married they would have been Milly and Billy. Perhaps ‘her lad’ was a fiction of Milly’s that no one could disprove, or would wish to. The war had suited all purposes.
Once upon a time. . Once upon a time she’d arrived, the new maid, Jane Fairchild, at Beechwood just after a great gust of devastation. The family, like many others, had been whittled down, along with the household budget and the servants. Now, there was only a cook and a maid. Cook Milly, with her seniority, had been theoretically promoted to cook and housekeeper, but she clung to the kitchen, while she, the new and inexperienced maid, soon effectively did most of the housekeeping.
She didn’t mind any of this. She loved Milly.
Cook Milly was just three years her elder, but it seemed a condition of the loss of ‘her lad’ that she’d rapidly put on weight and girth, even developed an air of scatty wisdom, and so become like the mother she’d perhaps always wanted to be. ‘Her lad’ even began to suggest she might have been the poor boy’s mother.
And today Cook Milly, if her bicycle could bear her weight to the station, was going to see her mother.
‘Of course you may, Jane,’ Mr Niven had said, inserting the napkin into its silver ring. Was he going to ask her where she was thinking of going?
‘You have the Second Bicycle at your disposal and you have — ahem — two and six. And you have the whole county at your disposal. As long as you come back again!’
Then, as if slightly envying the broad freedom he’d just granted, he said, ‘It’s your day, Jane. You may be — ahem — at your own devices.’ He knew, by now, that such a phrase would not be over her head — it might even have been meant as a gentle tribute to her reading habits. Cook Milly might have thought ‘devices’ meant kitchen spoons.
He can’t surely have meant anything else by it.
It was March 30th 1924. It was Mothering Sunday. Milly had her mother to go to. But the Nivens’ maid had her simple liberty, and half a crown to go with it. Then the telephone had rung, rapidly altering her previous plan. No, she wouldn’t be having a picnic.
And it was surely more than she could ever have hoped for, since even if Mister Paul and Miss Hobday were not to be of the Henley party it had left open the question of how they might both pass the day together anyway. A question which still remained open.
They both had cars, she knew this. Young people of their kind could have cars now. He sometimes referred to hers as the ‘Emmamobile’. They would certainly both be at their own devices, and if they played their cards right they might, if it was their inclination, have at their disposal either of two helpfully emptied houses. If you thought about it, up and down the country on this day there might be any number of temporarily vacated houses available for secret assignations. And if she knew Paul Sheringham. .
Exactly. She knew him and she didn’t know him. She knew him in some ways better than anyone — she would always be sure of that — while knowing that no one else must ever know how much she knew him. But she knew him well enough to know the ways in which he was not knowable. She didn’t know what he was thinking now, as he lay naked beside her. She often thought he didn’t think anything.
She didn’t know how he behaved with Emma Hobday. She didn’t know how much Emma Hobday — Miss Hobday — knew him. She didn’t know Emma Hobday. Having only glimpsed her once or twice, how could she? She knew she was pretty, in a flowery kind of way. She was the kind of woman who might be called a flower, who dressed in flowery clothes. But she had no idea what she was like, as it were, beneath the flowers. How could she? Paul scarcely spoke of her, though he was going to marry her. And that, while it showed her how much she didn’t know Paul Sheringham, was a comforting mystery.
What seemed, oddly, to be happening was that the closer Paul Sheringham and Miss Hobday got to marrying, the less time they actually spent in each other’s company. She had heard of that thing where brides and grooms weren’t supposed to see each other for a day (or was it just a night?) before their wedding, but this was a sort of expanded version of that practice and had been going on for some time. He ought surely to make some stronger show of being the eager husband.
So the phrase had come to her, like a phrase too from a book, that had suddenly acquired actual meaning: ‘arranged marriage’.