Except, as it would turn out, the whole situation — the whole atmosphere and needs of the household — would be different. No one, certainly, would be interested, if they ever had been, in whether Ethel had had a good time with her mother. And anyway Ethel would already have changed the sheets.
She had never watched a man get dressed before. Though she had to deal intimately with men’s garments, and during that summer at the big house had been rapidly educated in the astonishing range of them that one man might own and in their complications and intricacies. Though she had often and in a strange variety of places (stables, greenhouse, potting shed, shrubbery) interfered intimately with Paul Sheringham’s clothes, even as he was wearing them, on the condition of course — or, rather, assumption — that he could interfere with hers.
He put the shirt on first, the clean white shirt he’d brought from the dressing room. To put it on — or, rather, enter it — he hoisted it above his head, like any woman tunnelling into a shift. She hadn’t thought it would be the shirt first. But to every act of gentlemanly dressing there must be a mix of personal preference and prescribed order. In the ‘old days’, after all, a manservant might have ‘dressed’ him. Just as she could still be required to ‘dress’ as well as ‘undo’ Mrs Niven.
Dressing, anyway, among their kind, was never conceived of as just a flinging on of clothes. It was a solemn piecing together. Though, in the circumstances, he had every reason to be flinging his clothes on as fast as he could. Another man, in another story, might be saying, as he madly tugged and tucked, ‘Christ, Jay, I have to damn well scoot!’
But his shirt first. That surprised her. Since it meant an immediate loss of dignity, the very thing that in his absence of haste he seemed bent on preserving. It was his trick, she would later think, it was always Paul Sheringham’s great trick, to have such scorn for indignity that he never actually underwent it. He had lost his dignity and found it again so many times with her. But any man in just his shirt became automatically comic, and had it been some other story she might well have giggled.
She supposed that there must be two essential choices: the shirt to be tucked into the waiting trousers, or the trousers to receive the waiting shirt. Each might have its advantages. Yet he looked for a moment like a clown or, instead of a man about to face the world (and a fuming fiancée), like an overgrown boy made ready for bed.
Once it would have been so, she thought. A boy in a nightshirt. Once, he had told her — a rare door opening to the past — about Nanny Becky, who’d left when he’d been sent to school. Once, he would have had a nanny to dress and undress him, all three brothers would have had her.
And what a strange thing, a nanny, a substitute mother. Presenting the offspring to their parents at five o’clock, like a cook offering a cake. And where was Nanny Becky now? In some other household presumably. Or at her mother’s.
She did not giggle at his shirt. It might have been nice to giggle, from her vantage point on the bed. There might have been another world, another life in which all this might have been a regular, casual repertoire. But there wasn’t. She might have been some lounging wife in a room in London, watching him dress to be a joke of a lawyer.
They had hardly spoken for some time. A little while ago they’d made gasping, groaning animal noises. It seemed that they’d entered some diminishing gap of existence together in which, to use a phrase only to be known to her in later life, only ‘body language’ might apply. Only her body might speak. She did not want to falsify — or nullify — anything by the folly of putting it into words. And this, in her later life too, would come to be an abiding occupational conundrum.
It seemed that any words they spoke now must be only ruinous banalities. Even as he engaged with the banalities of underpants and socks.
Yet he was putting on his finery. The fresh white shirt. It was a formal shirt. It would require a collar. It was not just a clean soft-collared shirt that might serve for a Sunday outing, a spin in a car with the top down. It was — even then in a rather old-fashioned sense — his ‘Sunday best’. She watched while he dealt, with unflustered skill, with cufflinks — little silver ovals winking in the sunshine — with collar studs and collar, semi-stiff. He had brought in a tie, a restrained but sheeny thing of slate blue with little white spots. He selected a tie pin. Was that actually, really a tiny diamond? His chin was already smooth — she’d had occasion to feel it — and now anointed with cologne.
It was as if he was dressing for his wedding. But it was not his wedding — yet. He was only going to meet his wife-to-be for a lunch by the River Thames. And if, as now seemed almost certain, he was going to be seriously late, how on earth was being so superbly turned-out going to help?
He had tied his tie studiously, giving due attention to the knot and the hanging lengths before fixing the pin, and all of this still without his trousers on. She did not, could not laugh. Yet it would seem to her later that everything had hinged upon this piece of farcical theatre. Once he put on his trousers all would be lost. If only she had said to him, screamed at him, ‘Don’t put them on!’
But he went now again to the dressing room, lingering there (did he think time had stopped?) for several rustling minutes, then returned, with trousers on, as well as a jacket and shoes, even with a silk handkerchief, exactly complementing his tie, poking from his pocket.
So had it all been because he hadn’t decided yet on the trousers — the ones he’d earlier discarded or ones still hanging in the dressing room? She would never know. She would never say, or be able to say, so he could make some quip or elucidate it all, ‘You took a long time putting on your trousers.’
‘Ah yes, Jay. So I did.’
What a preposterous word anyway: ‘trousers’.
He stood there, complete. He gathered the cigarette case and lighter. He needed only, perhaps, a buttonhole. There were the white orchids in the hall. He might actually have been leaving for his wedding. It wasn’t today, but he was signalling it anyway, it was perhaps what all this elaborate sprucing was about: he was leaving — wasn’t he? — for his marriage. She felt an actual sting of jealousy for the woman who would be the recipient of all this dawdling decking-out. If she wasn’t already in a fury of affrontedness.
And she, lying here, had had his unwrapped nakedness.
Then it struck her that it might all in fact have been simply for her. Her last look. His ‘going-away’ clothes. Surely not. All the same, in spite of herself — they were the first words she’d spoken for some time — she said, ‘You look very handsome.’ She tried to make it sound not like some maid’s blushing and inappropriate cooing—‘Ooo you do look ’andsome, sir’—nor, on the other hand, like some royal approval. ‘You pass muster, you may go now.’ She tried to make it not sound even like the steady veiled declaration she wanted it to be.
He did not say to her, ‘And you look beautiful.’ He had never said that, never used that word. Only the word ‘friend’. She couldn’t even be sure there wasn’t some shadow of discomfort in his face at the tribute she’d just paid him.
Only banality would do. Demolish — but do. He delivered a whole speech of it now.
‘You don’t have to hurry. I don’t suppose the shower will be back till at least four. When you go, lock the front door and put the key under the rock by the boot-scraper. It’s not a rock, actually, it’s half a stone pineapple. From when Freddy took a swing at it with his cricket bat. But it’s what we do, whenever we leave the house empty. Which is hardly ever. And I’m not leaving it empty now, am I? But the shower will expect it — with no Ethel or Iris — if they get back first. It’s a whacking great key, they won’t have taken it themselves. I’ll put it on the hall table. That’s all really. Leave everything.’