She’d looked at them as he’d undone her clothes.
He padded out of the room to the bathroom. Still only the signet ring. He wasn’t there for long. He had only to wash and rinse himself, whatever men did. Remove, that is, all immediate traces of herself on him. She would think about this later.
The room seemed to close in on her during his short absence, even to claim her as part of its furniture. She did not move. She lay indeed like an inanimate object, though she was all tingling flesh. He had made no sign to her that she should move — that now he’d got up, it might be proper for her to do the same. Rather the opposite. It was no surprise to him, when he reappeared, that she was still tenaciously lying there. It was what, it seemed, he had even expected, wanted her to do.
He had a scent about him now that she might have appreciated, save that it cancelled out the sweeter smell of his sweat. She would think about this too later: that he put on his cologne. But he was still naked and in no apparent haste. He had brought in, from the dressing room, a fresh white shirt, a pale-grey waistcoat and a tie, but it seemed that the rest of his outfit would consist of what he’d discarded on the chair. He might have done all his dressing in the dressing room, but perhaps this was his habit anyway, to dress by the light of the window, by his dressing table and its angled mirrors. The dressing room was merely a wardrobe.
But it seemed that he did not want to be separated from her, though he was about to leave. It was in some way all for her — that she should watch him dress, watch his nakedness gradually disappear. Or that he just didn’t care. The sureness, the aloofness, the unaccountable unhurriedness. She should leave too? But he said nothing and she remained, as if now actually commanded to, where she was, while his eyes travelled over her again, even as he dressed.
He must have noticed the trickle. But it was part of his fine disdain not to notice it. It was like the clothes he might leave pooled on the floor, to find their way back to him, laundered and pressed, hanging in the dressing room. These were things to be cleared up discreetly by people who cleared up such things. And she, normally, was such a one. She was part of the magic army that permitted such disregard. Was he really going to tell her, before he left, to deal with the mess? And give her her cheap moment to remind him that she was not his servant?
But she saw as he looked at her — and surely at that incriminating patch — that such a squalid little scene was far from his thoughts. Some other kind of indifference was making him careless of such a minor matter as a stain on a sheet. Was it a stain, anyway, that it should be removed? Any more than she should remove herself — and she was not a stain — from his bed. Yes, he wanted her to be there, when it might have been her role, in another life, in a commoner, comic story, to be already scurrying downstairs, still adjusting her clothing. It was his wish, before he left, to see her there, to have her there, nakedly and — who knows? — immovably occupying his bedroom, so that the image of her would be there, branding itself on his mind, even as he met — his vase.
She was doing, as she lay there, the right, the finest thing. She understood it, even as she understood that her lying there had lost all argument, all pleading for his not going. He was clearly going. And he wanted her, for some reason she couldn’t fathom, to watch, even as she blazoned her nakedness, this business of his getting dressed, of his putting back on again the life that was his.
Why was he being so slow?
The room had been filled now with as much light and unseasonal warmth as was possible. The minute hand on his watch must be moving towards one, even beyond it. The dark line on the sundial in the garden at Beechwood — where she might have been sitting right now, a book on her lap — would have crept further round. She could not make out the face of the little clock on the dressing table — the two brothers, either side, guarding it.
Was there ever such a day as this? Could there ever be such a day again?
It would be Ethel’s job, she realised, to deal with the stain — the trickle, the patch. Ethel who would even now, she imagined, be sitting in a house filled with the pricey smell of roasting beef — on such a warm day, when a bit of cold ham might have served. Sitting where her mother had commanded her to sit and not get up or lift a finger. It was her day off, wasn’t it? Today everything was different, special. ‘Talk to your dad for a while, Ethel.’ If Ethel still had a dad, or a dad still in one piece. For these few hours of reunion, of mother-honouring, Ethel’s mother would toil in the kitchen and Ethel’s mother and father would live for a week on bread and dripping.
But Ethel when she returned to her duties later — when the ‘shower’ would have perhaps also returned, invigorated yet fatigued from their sunny outing and in need of attention — would have to change the sheets in Mister Paul’s bedroom, not having been present earlier to do so, and would notice the stain. In so far as Ethel noticed such things, since it was her job simultaneously to notice them and quickly make it seem that they had never existed.
Even Ethel, who had sat down only hours ago, like royalty, to roast meat, would know what such a stain was. It was the common lot of her kind to come upon them, in bedrooms. So much so that they were sometimes known, in below-stairs parlance, as ‘come-upons’. There were other expressions, of varying inventiveness, including ‘maps of the British Isles’. If there had to be any actual, awkward professional discussion of them, they might be officially known as ‘nocturnal emissions’—which did not necessarily cover all circumstances and might not leave a new maid of sixteen fully enlightened. Little boys — not so little boys — had nocturnal emissions that, setting aside the fact that they might have had them more considerately, had to be rendered rapidly absent.
All this she had gleaned for herself before arriving at Beechwood, when she had been briefly dispatched, as part of her ‘training’ and on a sort of probation, to a big house requiring extra staff for the summer occupancy. There had been five maids in all and, my, how some of them had talked.
There were many emissions that were not produced solitarily and were not, directly, emissions at all (or even necessarily nocturnal), and most maids, using their powers of deduction, could tell the difference and, using their powers of deduction further, might even draw conclusions as to exactly how the ‘emission’ had been formed. But this was not in any way to be spoken of or even acknowledged. Though it was one of the things that could make a maid’s work interesting. All the stains, all the permutations. A summer house party with twenty-four guests. Oh Lord.
And even Ethel would have her deductions and conclusions, though she would be staunch in pretending she’d never had to have them. And Ethel’s conclusion would be that in the period of time in which the house would have been (supposedly) vacated, Mister Paul would have taken the opportunity to entertain his fiancée, Miss Hobday, in his bedroom. For no other reason, possibly, than that they could do such a thing and get away with it. Setting aside that they might have waited. In two weeks’ time they would not need to be such pranksters. Setting aside what kind of woman (one did not discuss Mister Paul) it suggested Miss Hobday was.
It was not for her, Ethel, to judge. Further deduction, along with received, whispered knowledge, might have told Ethel that Miss Hobday was at least one kind of woman: Mister Paul had not invited her to Upleigh for the express purpose of deflowering her. But in any case Ethel, already gathering up the sheets for the laundry basket, would assume that Mister Paul, if he’d taken stock of the stain at all, would have known that she, Ethel, would make it vanish, like the good fairy she was.