pattern, gold on cream. Curtains similarly patterned and completely drawn back (while he undressed her!) and gently stirring. An open window. A carpet of a pale grey-blue,
the colour of cigarette smoke caught in sunlight—and sunlight was pouring in. A bed.
‘What is this, Jay? Your hidden treasure?’
His fingers had found something in the recesses of her clothing.
A half-crown piece.
It was Mothering Sunday 1924. Mr Niven had indeed watched her unspeedily cycle off, since he’d just brought the Humber round to the front to await Mrs Niven. She supposed
that, most of the time, Mr Niven would ‘undo’ Mrs Niven, if she couldn’t undo herself. What a word—‘undo’! She supposed that Mrs Niven might now and then say,
‘Undo me, Godfrey,’ in a different way from how she might say it to her maid. Or that Mr Niven might sometimes say in a different way still, ‘Can I undo you, Clarrie?’
She supposed that Mr and Mrs Niven might still, now and then . . . even though some eight years ago they had lost two ‘brave boys’. But she did not suppose. She occasionally saw the
evidence. She changed the sheets.
She did not know, even on Mothering Sunday, what it would be like to be a mother and lose two sons—in as many months apparently. Or how such a mother might feel on such a day. No boys
would be coming home, would they, with little posies or simnel cakes to offer?
But Paul Sheringham would be getting married in two weeks’ time and he was the one son left. And of course the Nivens would be there. He was (and oh how he knew it) both families’
darling.
Now Mr and Mrs Niven would be driving, sitting side by side, through the bright spring sunshine to Henley. Milly already, before any of them, had creaked her way out of the
Beechwood gates to get the 10.20 from Titherton. And this house, Upleigh, was now obligingly empty, except for themselves, since Mr and Mrs Sheringham—‘the shower’—had also
departed for Henley, and the Upleigh cook and maid—Iris and Ethel—had been driven to Titherton Station by no less a person than Paul Sheringham.
Only now did he tell her this, as he undressed her—or rather, since she was soon standing naked in his sunlit room, as she, in reciprocal fashion, began to undress, to ‘undo’
him.
‘I drove Iris and Ethel to the station.’
It was something that hardly needed announcing. Did it relate to what they were doing right now? And it was something—she thought later—that had hardly needed doing. On a morning
like this Iris and Ethel might have been happy to walk. Upleigh was even closer to Titherton Station than Beechwood was.
Was it his way of explaining why his telephone call had come so agonisingly late? Or of assuring her that the house really was all safely theirs? He had packed off the staff himself.
But he had said it in such an untypically earnest way. As if he wished her to know, she would think later, that on this special upside-down day he had placed himself, lordliest of the lordly as
he could be, in the deferring role. He had not only offered her his house, opened its door for her obediently on her arrival, then undressed her as if he were her slave, but he had, in this other
way too, been of service to servants, kind to her kind.
‘For the 9.40. I took them in the Ma-and-Pa-mobile.’
Which would now perhaps be already parked somewhere in Henley. His own car, still in the stable-turned-garage, was a racy thing with a top that came down, only really meant for two.
Perhaps he did it every year, drove them to the station. A Sheringham tradition. But then he said, ‘I wanted to give them a proper goodbye.’
A proper goodbye? They might be back by teatime. They weren’t going for ever.
Was it his roundabout way of saying that this was what he was giving
her
? A proper goodbye. She could hardly give it much thought at the time, since—his own clothes removed and
quickly draped with hers over the armchair—they had moved, with no