Mothering Sunday Read Free Page A

of the loss of ‘her lad’ that she’d rapidly put on weight and girth, even developed an air of scatty
wisdom, and so become like the mother she’d perhaps always wanted to be. ‘Her lad’ even began to suggest she might have been the poor boy’s mother.
    And today Cook Milly, if her bicycle could bear her weight to the station, was going to see her mother.
    ‘Of course you may, Jane,’ Mr Niven had said, inserting the napkin into its silver ring. Was he going to ask her where she was thinking of going?
    ‘You have the Second Bicycle at your disposal and you have—ahem—two and six. And you have the whole county at your disposal. As long as you come back again!’
    Then, as if slightly envying the broad freedom he’d just granted, he said, ‘It’s
your
day, Jane. You may be—ahem—at your own devices.’ He knew, by now,
that such a phrase would not be over her head—it might even have been meant as a gentle tribute to her reading habits. Cook Milly might have thought ‘devices’ meant kitchen
spoons.
    He can’t surely have meant anything else by it.
    It was March 30th 1924. It was Mothering Sunday. Milly had her mother to go to. But the Nivens’ maid had her simple liberty, and half a crown to go with it. Then the
telephone had rung, rapidly altering her previous plan. No, she wouldn’t be having a picnic.
    And it was surely more than she could ever have hoped for, since even if Mister Paul and Miss Hobday were not to be of the Henley party it had left open the question of how they might both pass
the day together anyway. A question which still remained open.
    They both had cars, she knew this. Young people of their kind could have cars now. He sometimes referred to hers as the ‘Emmamobile’. They would certainly both be at
their
own
devices, and if they played their cards right they might, if it was their inclination, have at their disposal either of two helpfully emptied houses. If you thought about it, up and down the
country on this day there might be any number of temporarily vacated houses available for secret assignations. And if she knew Paul Sheringham . . .
    Exactly. She knew him and she didn’t know him. She knew him in some ways better than anyone—she would always be sure of that—while knowing that no one else must ever know how
much she knew him. But she knew him well enough to know the ways in which he was not knowable. She didn’t know what he was thinking now, as he lay naked beside her. She often thought he
didn’t think anything.
    She didn’t know how he behaved with Emma Hobday. She didn’t know how much Emma Hobday—Miss Hobday—knew him. She didn’t know Emma Hobday. Having only glimpsed her
once or twice, how could she? She knew she was pretty, in a flowery kind of way. She was the kind of woman who might be called a flower, who dressed in flowery clothes. But she had no idea what she
was like, as it were, beneath the flowers. How could she? Paul scarcely spoke of her, though he was going to marry her. And that, while it showed her how much she didn’t know Paul Sheringham,
was a comforting mystery.
    What seemed, oddly, to be happening was that the closer Paul Sheringham and Miss Hobday got to marrying, the less time they actually spent in each other’s company. She had heard of that
thing where brides and grooms weren’t supposed to see each other for a day (or was it just a night?) before their wedding, but this was a sort of expanded version of that practice and had
been going on for some time. He ought surely to make some stronger show of being the eager husband.
    So the phrase had come to her, like a phrase too from a book, that had suddenly acquired actual meaning: ‘arranged marriage’.
    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