Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift Read Free Book Online Page A

Even as he engaged with the banalities of underpants and socks.
    Yet he was putting on his finery. The fresh white shirt. It was a formal shirt. It would require a collar. It was not just a clean soft-collared shirt that might serve for a Sunday outing, a
spin in a car with the top down. It was—even then in a rather old-fashioned sense—his ‘Sunday best’. She watched while he dealt, with unflustered skill, with
cufflinks—little silver ovals winking in the sunshine—with collar studs and collar, semi-stiff. He had brought in a tie, a restrained but sheeny thing of slate blue with little white
spots. He selected a tie pin. Was that actually, really a tiny diamond? His chin was already smooth—she’d had occasion to feel it—and now anointed with cologne.
    It was as if he was dressing for his wedding. But it was not his wedding—yet. He was only going to meet his wife-to-be for a lunch by the River Thames. And if, as now seemed almost
certain, he was going to be seriously late, how on earth was being so superbly turned-out going to help?
    He had tied his tie studiously, giving due attention to the knot and the hanging lengths before fixing the pin, and all of this still without his trousers on. She did not, could not laugh. Yet
it would seem to her later that everything had hinged upon this piece of farcical theatre. Once he put on his trousers all would be lost. If only she had said to him, screamed at him,
‘Don’t put them on!’
    But he went now again to the dressing room, lingering there (did he think time had stopped?) for several rustling minutes, then returned, with trousers on, as well as a jacket and shoes, even
with a silk handkerchief, exactly complementing his tie, poking from his pocket.
    So had it all been because he hadn’t decided yet on the trousers—the ones he’d earlier discarded or ones still hanging in the dressing room? She would never know. She would
never say, or be able to say, so he could make some quip or elucidate it all, ‘You took a long time putting on your trousers.’
    ‘Ah yes, Jay. So I did.’
    What a preposterous word anyway: ‘trousers’.
    He stood there, complete. He gathered the cigarette case and lighter. He needed only, perhaps, a buttonhole. There were the white orchids in the hall. He might
actually have been leaving for his wedding. It wasn’t today, but he was signalling it anyway, it was perhaps what all this elaborate sprucing was about: he was leaving—wasn’t
he?—for his marriage. She felt an actual sting of jealousy for the woman who would be the recipient of all this dawdling decking-out. If she wasn’t already in a fury of
affrontedness.
    And
she
, lying here, had had his unwrapped nakedness.
    Then it struck her that it might all in fact have been simply for
her
.
Her
last look. His ‘going-away’ clothes. Surely not. All the same, in spite of herself—they
were the first words she’d spoken for some time—she said, ‘You look very handsome.’ She tried to make it sound not like some maid’s blushing and inappropriate
cooing—‘Ooo you do look ’andsome, sir’—nor, on the other hand, like some royal approval. ‘You pass muster, you may go now.’ She tried to make it not sound
even like the steady veiled declaration she wanted it to be.
    He did not say to her, ‘And you look beautiful.’ He had never said that, never used that word. Only the word ‘friend’. She couldn’t even be sure there wasn’t
some shadow of discomfort in his face at the tribute she’d just paid him.
    Only banality would do. Demolish—but do. He delivered a whole speech of it now.
    ‘You don’t have to hurry. I don’t suppose the shower will be back till at least four. When you go, lock the front door and put the key under the rock by the boot-scraper.
It’s not a rock, actually, it’s half a stone pineapple. From when Freddy took a swing at it with his cricket bat. But it’s what we do, whenever we leave the house empty. Which is