Mothering Sunday Read Online Free Page B

more ceremony, to the bed.
    But she would think about it later. All her life she would picture it: the two women, awed and silent in the back of the big black saloon while he drove them, chauffeur-style. On the station
forecourt he might have opened doors and helped them out with the same gracious attentiveness with which he’d removed her clothes. They might even have thought he was going to offer them each
a kiss.
    All her life she would try to see it, to bring back this Mothering Sunday, even as it receded and even as its very reason for existing became a historical oddity, the custom of another age. As
he set them down the distant white puffs of the 9.40 to Reading might already have been visible in that brilliant blue sky. On the platform there might have been two or three others like Iris and
Ethel waiting to set off on similar journeys (though not yet Cook Milly who would get the 10.20).
    All the maids. All the mothers getting out in readiness what passed for their best china. All the maids with their mothers to go to.
    And she knew the maid at Upleigh. She was called Ethel Bligh. Poor mouse. She had had conversations with Ethel—they met on errands at Sweeting’s the grocer’s
in Titherton—conversations that scarcely became conversations and that never got near becoming gossip. The cook at Upleigh was a stout creature rather like Milly, but Ethel was a
nimble-bodied maid, a little like herself. With another sort of Ethel she might not only have gossiped—the two of them leaning on their bicycles outside Sweeting’s—but even
giggled, even giggled just a tiny bit like she giggled with Paul Sheringham.
    But even then she wouldn’t have told this other Ethel what she got up to with Mister Paul. Or rather this other Ethel would have known, guessed already. Or rather this other Ethel would
have got in first, or have been got in first, being so handily under the same roof.
    So it was just as well, in fact, that Ethel was not this other Ethel, but a good little maid who, without having to struggle much to do it, did what maids were constantly required to do: turned
a blind eye and a deaf ear and, above all, kept a closed mouth.
    Ethel might be going to her mother’s today in the same spirit of meek submission with which she’d once offered her services to Mrs Sheringham. The two things might have become
indistinguishable.
    Did she and Iris gossip? Surely they did. On the train after their tongue-tied car ride, did they suddenly start to talk? So what was all that about? Was it because he was getting married and
would soon be—leaving them?
    Or would they have sunk into deeper silence, unaccustomed as they were to being out in the world and to being reminded that they had lives, even mothers, of their own? Would they have just
gawped and blinked at sun-bathed, lamb-dotted England?
    While Paul Sheringham religiously undressed her.
    ‘Stay still, Jay.’
    And, even as he undressed her and as if to answer another, unspoken question of hers, he’d said, ‘I’m mugging up, Jay. My law books. That’s what
I’m doing now. Mugging up.’ It might have produced a giggle, from either of them, but it didn’t. It was said with such an instructive urgency, as if, were she ever to be
asked—interrogated—that’s what she was to say that he, that they, had been doing.
    It would pass into her private unconfessable code-language, standing for so much that was beyond telling anyway. She would never be able to hear the phrase lightly, even in Oxford, where a great
deal of mugging up went on.
    But it had been his ruse for getting out of the Henley expedition and for securing the house for himself—and her. It was also, neatly, like a virtuous pledging of his future
responsibilities. When they were married he and Emma Hobday were going to live in London (this she knew and could only bleakly accept) and he was supposed to be going to make an honest man out of
himself and even an honest living—regardless of