Mothering Sunday Read Free Page B

spoke about hampers—this day that had begun with such promising sunshine might be the last chance. She didn’t know whether
to call it his or hers, let alone theirs.
    In any case she was getting ready to lose him. Was he getting ready to lose her? She had no right to expect him to see it that way. Did she have any right to think she was losing him? She had
never exactly had him. But oh yes she had.
    She didn’t know what it would be like to lose him, she didn’t want to think about it, though lose him she must. Perhaps all she was thinking on the morning of Mothering Sunday, as
she brought in more coffee at Beechwood, was that if he played his cards right with this day then she wanted him to play them with her. Some hope. Then the telephone had rung. ‘Wrong
number.’ Her heart had soared.
    ‘The shower will be leaving soon. I’ll be on my tod here. Eleven o’clock. Front door.’
    He had spoken in a strong whisper, as if picturing her exact predicament, even down to the open breakfast-room door. It was an order, a curt order, but a transforming one. And she had listened,
or appeared to listen, with polite patience, as if to some ineptly garrulous caller who had not yet realised their error.
    ‘I’m awfully sorry, madam, but you have the wrong number.’
    How skilled she’d become, in seven years. At imitating their ‘awfully’s. And at other things too. But she still had to assimilate it: just the two of them in the empty house.
It had never happened before. Front door. She had never been bidden to any front door. Though sometimes, in earlier days, it might have indicated his required form of congress.
    ‘That’s quite all right, madam.’
    Mr Niven’s munching on his toast and marmalade had perhaps obliterated some of her flawless performance.
    ‘Wrong number,’ she’d explained. And then he’d given her half a crown.
    And suppose he had known what things she’d once done for Paul Sheringham—to Paul Sheringham—yes, for only sixpence, sometimes for even less. And then, after not so long, for
nothing, nothing at all, mutual interest in the transactions cancelling any need for purchase.
    Though when she was eighty or ninety and was asked, as she would be, even in public interviews, to look back on her younger years, she felt she could fairly claim (though of course never did)
that one of her earliest situations in life was that of prostitute. Orphan, maid, prostitute.
    He tapped ash into the ashtray decorating her belly.
    And secret lover. And secret friend. He had said that once to her, ‘You are my friend, Jay.’ He had said it so announcingly. It had made her head go light. She had
never been called that, named that thing so decisively by anyone, as if he were saying he had no other friend, he had only just discovered, in fact, what a friend might be. And she was to tell no
one about this newly attested revelation.
    It had made her head swim. She was seventeen. She had ceased to be a prostitute. Friend. It was better perhaps than lover. Not that ‘lover’ would have been then in her feasible
vocabulary, or even in her thinking. But she would have lovers. In Oxford. She would have many of them, she would make a point of it. Though how many of them were friends?
    And was Emma Hobday, even though she was his bride-to-be, his friend?
    In any case, as friends or perhaps even as lovers, or just as young Mister Paul and the new Beechwood maid he’d spotted one day in the post office in Titherton, they’d done all sorts
of things together, in all sorts of secret locations. The two houses were scarcely a mile apart, if you went by the back routes and then, necessarily, through the garden. The greenhouse and the
disused part of the stables were just two of their recourses. And they’d done those things by a strangely dependable intuition—you could hardly call it a timetable—that had become
the habit, the telepathy of true friends. As if everything were always by imagined chance, but