Mothering Sunday Read Free

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