It was the best she could hope for. Not that it really helped her. But if, for whatever reason, a combination of flowers and money, he was slipping towards such a thing, then this day — so she had thought even as she attended to breakfast and Mr Niven spoke about hampers — this day that had begun with such promising sunshine might be the last chance. She didn’t know whether to call it his or hers, let alone theirs.
In any case she was getting ready to lose him. Was he getting ready to lose her? She had no right to expect him to see it that way. Did she have any right to think she was losing him? She had never exactly had him. But oh yes she had.
She didn’t know what it would be like to lose him, she didn’t want to think about it, though lose him she must. Perhaps all she was thinking on the morning of Mothering Sunday, as she brought in more coffee at Beechwood, was that if he played his cards right with this day then she wanted him to play them with her. Some hope. Then the telephone had rung. ‘Wrong number.’ Her heart had soared.
‘The shower will be leaving soon. I’ll be on my tod here. Eleven o’clock. Front door.’
He had spoken in a strong whisper, as if picturing her exact predicament, even down to the open breakfast-room door. It was an order, a curt order, but a transforming one. And she had listened, or appeared to listen, with polite patience, as if to some ineptly garrulous caller who had not yet realised their error.
‘I’m awfully sorry, madam, but you have the wrong number.’
How skilled she’d become, in seven years. At imitating their ‘awfully’s. And at other things too. But she still had to assimilate it: just the two of them in the empty house. It had never happened before. Front door. She had never been bidden to any front door. Though sometimes, in earlier days, it might have indicated his required form of congress.
‘That’s quite all right, madam.’
Mr Niven’s munching on his toast and marmalade had perhaps obliterated some of her flawless performance.
‘Wrong number,’ she’d explained. And then he’d given her half a crown.
And suppose he had known what things she’d once done for Paul Sheringham — to Paul Sheringham — yes, for only sixpence, sometimes for even less. And then, after not so long, for nothing, nothing at all, mutual interest in the transactions cancelling any need for purchase.
Though when she was eighty or ninety and was asked, as she would be, even in public interviews, to look back on her younger years, she felt she could fairly claim (though of course never did) that one of her earliest situations in life was that of prostitute. Orphan, maid, prostitute.
He tapped ash into the ashtray decorating her belly.
And secret lover. And secret friend. He had said that once to her, ‘You are my friend, Jay.’ He had said it so announcingly. It had made her head go light. She had never been called that, named that thing so decisively by anyone, as if he were saying he had no other friend, he had only just discovered, in fact, what a friend might be. And she was to tell no one about this newly attested revelation.
It had made her head swim. She was seventeen. She had ceased to be a prostitute. Friend. It was better perhaps than lover. Not that ‘lover’ would have been then in her feasible vocabulary, or even in her thinking. But she would have lovers. In Oxford. She would have many of them, she would make a point of it. Though how many of them were friends?
And was Emma Hobday, even though she was his bride-to-be, his friend?
In any case, as friends or perhaps even as lovers, or just as young Mister Paul and the new Beechwood maid he’d spotted one day in the post office in Titherton, they’d done all sorts of things together, in all sorts of secret locations. The two houses were scarcely a mile apart, if you went by the back routes and then, necessarily, through the garden. The greenhouse and the disused part of the stables were just two of their recourses. And they’d done those things by a strangely dependable intuition — you could hardly call it a timetable — that had become the habit, the telepathy of true friends. As if everything were always by imagined chance, but they knew it was not.
So — they were really lovers?
Because there was anyway such an intensity and strange gravity to their experimentation, such a consciousness at least that they were doing something wrong (the whole world was in mourning all around them), it had needed some compensating element of levity: giggling. It had sometimes seemed in fact that to get each other giggling was the real aim of it all — a dangerous aim to have when another essential factor was that they should on no account be found out.
And the remarkable thing was that even now, with his suave and superior ways and his silver cigarette case, there was a giggle still inside him, still there, even now when they’d become accomplished, unfumbling, serious-faced addicts at what they did. It might still suddenly emerge, without warning, without explanation, out of his polished exterior, an explosive cacophonous giggle, as if a mould had shattered.
But he was naked now, there was no mould to shatter. And why should he giggle? It was their last day.
She had sped on her bicycle from Beechwood to Upleigh. That is, since Mr and Mrs Niven were yet to depart, she had been careful not to be seen to be hurrying at all, or to be pointing the bicycle in the direction of Upleigh. At the gate she had turned casually right not left. But then, after turning two more corners, she had sped.
Then, nearing Upleigh, she’d done something she had never done before. She had not approached by the usual back route, by the garden path — leaving her bicycle hidden in the familiar clump of hawthorns, then continuing, alertly, on foot. She had taken the front road and boldly cycled through the Upleigh gates and up the drive between the rows of lime trees and the swirls of daffodils.
It was what he had instructed — ordered her to do. The front door. It was only as she turned through the gates that the extraordinariness, the unprecedented gift of it — yes, it was her day — came to her. The front door! And he must have wanted to observe her do it, since hardly had she brought her bicycle to a halt near the porch than the front door — or rather one of them, there were two tall imposing glossy-black doors — opened, as if by a miraculous power of its own.
She did not know for certain, though she would soon, that his bedroom overlooked the drive. He might have been visible for a moment, had she been looking for him, at the open window on the first floor. But he was visible suddenly anyway, stepping from behind the apparently self-opening door — to be called ‘madam’ by her, while she would be called ‘clever’ by him. She’d propped the bicycle quickly against the front wall. The hall, beyond the vestibule, had black-and-white chessboard tiles. There were the fronds of intense white flowers.
‘My mother’s precious orchids. But we’re not here to look at them.’
And he’d led her — or rather steered her by her backside — up the stairs.
Then it might have been her turn to be called ‘madam’, since, once inside the bedroom, he began almost immediately to undress her as he’d never done before — or rather as he’d never before had such an opportunity to do. Could it even strictly be said that he’d ever ‘undressed’ her?
‘Stand there, Jay. Stay still.’
It seemed that he wanted her not to move, just to stand, while his fingers gradually undid and released everything and let it fall about her. So it was not at all unlike how she might sometimes, if Mrs Niven should wearily request it, be required to ‘undo’ Mrs Niven. Except, she couldn’t deny it, there was a reverence with which he went about the task that she could never have applied to Mrs Niven. It was like an unveiling. She would never forget it.