Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift Read Free Book Online

was.
    Except, as it would turn out, the whole situation—the whole atmosphere and needs of the household—would be different. No one, certainly, would be interested, if they ever had been,
in whether Ethel had had a good time with her mother. And anyway Ethel would already have changed the sheets.
    She had never watched a man get dressed before. Though she had to deal intimately with men’s garments, and during that summer at the big house had been rapidly educated
in the astonishing range of them that one man might own and in their complications and intricacies. Though she had often and in a strange variety of places (stables, greenhouse, potting shed,
shrubbery) interfered intimately with Paul Sheringham’s clothes, even as he was wearing them, on the condition of course—or, rather, assumption—that he could interfere with
hers.
    He put the shirt on first, the clean white shirt he’d brought from the dressing room. To put it on—or, rather, enter it—he hoisted it above his head, like any woman tunnelling
into a shift. She hadn’t thought it would be the shirt first. But to every act of gentlemanly dressing there must be a mix of personal preference and prescribed order. In the ‘old
days’, after all, a manservant might have ‘dressed’ him. Just as she could still be required to ‘dress’ as well as ‘undo’ Mrs Niven.
    Dressing, anyway, among their kind, was never conceived of as just a flinging on of clothes. It was a solemn piecing together. Though, in the circumstances, he had every reason to be flinging
his clothes on as fast as he could. Another man, in another story, might be saying, as he madly tugged and tucked, ‘Christ, Jay, I have to damn well scoot!’
    But his shirt first. That surprised her. Since it meant an immediate loss of dignity, the very thing that in his absence of haste he seemed bent on preserving. It was his trick, she would later
think, it was always Paul Sheringham’s great trick, to have such scorn for indignity that he never actually underwent it. He had lost his dignity and found it again so many times with her.
But any man in just his shirt became automatically comic, and had it been some other story she might well have giggled.
    She supposed that there must be two essential choices: the shirt to be tucked into the waiting trousers, or the trousers to receive the waiting shirt. Each might have its advantages. Yet he
looked for a moment like a clown or, instead of a man about to face the world (and a fuming fiancée), like an overgrown boy made ready for bed.
    Once it would have been so, she thought. A boy in a nightshirt. Once, he had told her—a rare door opening to the past—about Nanny Becky, who’d left when he’d been sent to
school. Once, he would have had a nanny to dress and undress him, all three brothers would have had her.
    And what a strange thing, a nanny, a substitute mother. Presenting the offspring to their parents at five o’clock, like a cook offering a cake. And where was Nanny Becky now? In some other
household presumably. Or at her mother’s.
    She did not giggle at his shirt. It might have been nice to giggle, from her vantage point on the bed. There might have been another world, another life in which all this might
have been a regular, casual repertoire. But there wasn’t. She might have been some lounging wife in a room in London, watching him dress to be a joke of a lawyer.
    They had hardly spoken for some time. A little while ago they’d made gasping, groaning animal noises. It seemed that they’d entered some diminishing gap of existence together in
which, to use a phrase only to be known to her in later life, only ‘body language’ might apply. Only her body might speak. She did not want to falsify—or nullify—anything by
the folly of putting it into words. And this, in her later life too, would come to be an abiding occupational conundrum.
    It seemed that any words they spoke now must be only ruinous banalities.