Mothering Sunday Read Online Free

they knew it was not.
    So—they were really lovers?
    Because there was anyway such an intensity and strange gravity to their experimentation, such a consciousness at least that they were doing something wrong (the whole world was in mourning all
around them), it had needed some compensating element of levity: giggling. It had sometimes seemed in fact that to get each other giggling was the real aim of it all—a dangerous aim to have
when another essential factor was that they should on no account be found out.
    And the remarkable thing was that even now, with his suave and superior ways and his silver cigarette case, there was a giggle still inside him, still there, even now when they’d become
accomplished, unfumbling, serious-faced addicts at what they did. It might still suddenly emerge, without warning, without explanation, out of his polished exterior, an explosive cacophonous
giggle, as if a mould had shattered.
    But he was naked now, there was no mould to shatter. And why should he giggle? It was their last day.
    She had sped on her bicycle from Beechwood to Upleigh. That is, since Mr and Mrs Niven were yet to depart, she had been careful not to be seen to be hurrying at all, or to be
pointing the bicycle in the direction of Upleigh. At the gate she had turned casually right not left. But then, after turning two more corners, she had sped.
    Then, nearing Upleigh, she’d done something she had never done before. She had not approached by the usual back route, by the garden path—leaving her bicycle hidden in the familiar
clump of hawthorns, then continuing, alertly, on foot. She had taken the front road and boldly cycled through the Upleigh gates and up the drive between the rows of lime trees and the swirls of
daffodils.
    It was what he had instructed—ordered her to do. The front door. It was only as she turned through the gates that the extraordinariness, the unprecedented gift of it—yes, it was
her
day—came to her. The front door! And he must have wanted to observe her do it, since hardly had she brought her bicycle to a halt near the porch than the front door—or rather
one of them, there were two tall imposing glossy-black doors—opened, as if by a miraculous power of its own.
    She did not know for certain, though she would soon, that his bedroom overlooked the drive. He might have been visible for a moment, had she been looking for him, at the open window on the first
floor. But he was visible suddenly anyway, stepping from behind the apparently self-opening door—to be called ‘madam’ by her, while she would be called ‘clever’ by
him. She’d propped the bicycle quickly against the front wall. The hall, beyond the vestibule, had black-and-white chessboard tiles. There were the fronds of intense white flowers.
    ‘My mother’s precious orchids. But we’re not here to look at them.’
    And he’d led her—or rather steered her by her backside—up the stairs.
    Then it might have been her turn to be called ‘madam’, since, once inside the bedroom, he began almost immediately to undress her as he’d never done before—or rather as
he’d never before had such an opportunity to do. Could it even strictly be said that he’d
ever
‘undressed’ her?
    ‘Stand there, Jay. Stay still.’
    It seemed that he wanted her not to move, just to stand, while his fingers gradually undid and released everything and let it fall about her. So it was not at all unlike how she might sometimes,
if Mrs Niven should wearily request it, be required to ‘undo’ Mrs Niven. Except, she couldn’t deny it, there was a reverence with which he went about the task that she could never
have applied to Mrs Niven. It was like an unveiling. She would never forget it.
    ‘Don’t move, Jay.’
    Meanwhile she could look around her at this remarkable room she had never been in before. A dressing table, with a triple-panelled mirror, cluttered with small objects, mainly silver. An
armchair with a striped