‘Don’t move, Jay.’
Meanwhile she could look around her at this remarkable room she had never been in before. A dressing table, with a triple-panelled mirror, cluttered with small objects, mainly silver. An armchair with a striped pattern, gold on cream. Curtains similarly patterned and completely drawn back (while he undressed her!) and gently stirring. An open window. A carpet of a pale grey-blue, the colour of cigarette smoke caught in sunlight — and sunlight was pouring in. A bed.
‘What is this, Jay? Your hidden treasure?’
His fingers had found something in the recesses of her clothing.
A half-crown piece.
It was Mothering Sunday 1924. Mr Niven had indeed watched her unspeedily cycle off, since he’d just brought the Humber round to the front to await Mrs Niven. She supposed that, most of the time, Mr Niven would ‘undo’ Mrs Niven, if she couldn’t undo herself. What a word—‘undo’! She supposed that Mrs Niven might now and then say, ‘Undo me, Godfrey,’ in a different way from how she might say it to her maid. Or that Mr Niven might sometimes say in a different way still, ‘Can I undo you, Clarrie?’
She supposed that Mr and Mrs Niven might still, now and then. . even though some eight years ago they had lost two ‘brave boys’. But she did not suppose. She occasionally saw the evidence. She changed the sheets.
She did not know, even on Mothering Sunday, what it would be like to be a mother and lose two sons — in as many months apparently. Or how such a mother might feel on such a day. No boys would be coming home, would they, with little posies or simnel cakes to offer?
But Paul Sheringham would be getting married in two weeks’ time and he was the one son left. And of course the Nivens would be there. He was (and oh how he knew it) both families’ darling.
Now Mr and Mrs Niven would be driving, sitting side by side, through the bright spring sunshine to Henley. Milly already, before any of them, had creaked her way out of the Beechwood gates to get the 10.20 from Titherton. And this house, Upleigh, was now obligingly empty, except for themselves, since Mr and Mrs Sheringham—‘the shower’—had also departed for Henley, and the Upleigh cook and maid — Iris and Ethel — had been driven to Titherton Station by no less a person than Paul Sheringham.
Only now did he tell her this, as he undressed her — or rather, since she was soon standing naked in his sunlit room, as she, in reciprocal fashion, began to undress, to ‘undo’ him.
‘I drove Iris and Ethel to the station.’
It was something that hardly needed announcing. Did it relate to what they were doing right now? And it was something — she thought later — that had hardly needed doing. On a morning like this Iris and Ethel might have been happy to walk. Upleigh was even closer to Titherton Station than Beechwood was.
Was it his way of explaining why his telephone call had come so agonisingly late? Or of assuring her that the house really was all safely theirs? He had packed off the staff himself.
But he had said it in such an untypically earnest way. As if he wished her to know, she would think later, that on this special upside-down day he had placed himself, lordliest of the lordly as he could be, in the deferring role. He had not only offered her his house, opened its door for her obediently on her arrival, then undressed her as if he were her slave, but he had, in this other way too, been of service to servants, kind to her kind.
‘For the 9.40. I took them in the Ma-and-Pa-mobile.’
Which would now perhaps be already parked somewhere in Henley. His own car, still in the stable-turned-garage, was a racy thing with a top that came down, only really meant for two.
Perhaps he did it every year, drove them to the station. A Sheringham tradition. But then he said, ‘I wanted to give them a proper goodbye.’
A proper goodbye? They might be back by teatime. They weren’t going for ever.
Was it his roundabout way of saying that this was what he was giving her? A proper goodbye. She could hardly give it much thought at the time, since — his own clothes removed and quickly draped with hers over the armchair — they had moved, with no more ceremony, to the bed.
But she would think about it later. All her life she would picture it: the two women, awed and silent in the back of the big black saloon while he drove them, chauffeur-style. On the station forecourt he might have opened doors and helped them out with the same gracious attentiveness with which he’d removed her clothes. They might even have thought he was going to offer them each a kiss.
All her life she would try to see it, to bring back this Mothering Sunday, even as it receded and even as its very reason for existing became a historical oddity, the custom of another age. As he set them down the distant white puffs of the 9.40 to Reading might already have been visible in that brilliant blue sky. On the platform there might have been two or three others like Iris and Ethel waiting to set off on similar journeys (though not yet Cook Milly who would get the 10.20).
All the maids. All the mothers getting out in readiness what passed for their best china. All the maids with their mothers to go to.
And she knew the maid at Upleigh. She was called Ethel Bligh. Poor mouse. She had had conversations with Ethel — they met on errands at Sweeting’s the grocer’s in Titherton — conversations that scarcely became conversations and that never got near becoming gossip. The cook at Upleigh was a stout creature rather like Milly, but Ethel was a nimble-bodied maid, a little like herself. With another sort of Ethel she might not only have gossiped — the two of them leaning on their bicycles outside Sweeting’s — but even giggled, even giggled just a tiny bit like she giggled with Paul Sheringham.
But even then she wouldn’t have told this other Ethel what she got up to with Mister Paul. Or rather this other Ethel would have known, guessed already. Or rather this other Ethel would have got in first, or have been got in first, being so handily under the same roof.
So it was just as well, in fact, that Ethel was not this other Ethel, but a good little maid who, without having to struggle much to do it, did what maids were constantly required to do: turned a blind eye and a deaf ear and, above all, kept a closed mouth.
Ethel might be going to her mother’s today in the same spirit of meek submission with which she’d once offered her services to Mrs Sheringham. The two things might have become indistinguishable.
Did she and Iris gossip? Surely they did. On the train after their tongue-tied car ride, did they suddenly start to talk? So what was all that about? Was it because he was getting married and would soon be — leaving them?
Or would they have sunk into deeper silence, unaccustomed as they were to being out in the world and to being reminded that they had lives, even mothers, of their own? Would they have just gawped and blinked at sun-bathed, lamb-dotted England?
While Paul Sheringham religiously undressed her.
‘Stay still, Jay.’
And, even as he undressed her and as if to answer another, unspoken question of hers, he’d said, ‘I’m mugging up, Jay. My law books. That’s what I’m doing now. Mugging up.’ It might have produced a giggle, from either of them, but it didn’t. It was said with such an instructive urgency, as if, were she ever to be asked — interrogated — that’s what she was to say that he, that they, had been doing.
It would pass into her private unconfessable code-language, standing for so much that was beyond telling anyway. She would never be able to hear the phrase lightly, even in Oxford, where a great deal of mugging up went on.