Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift Read Free Book Online Page B

hardly ever. And I’m not leaving it empty now, am I? But the shower will expect it—with no Ethel or Iris—if they get back first. It’s a whacking great key, they won’t
have taken it themselves. I’ll put it on the hall table. That’s all really. Leave everything.’
    Did he mean by that the sheets, his shirt, his rejected trousers, dangling over the chair? What else could he mean? Was he telling her not to be a bloody maid? All this while he fingered the
knot of his tie and tweaked at his cuffs.
    ‘If you’re hungry, there’s a veal-and-ham pie, or half of one, in the kitchen. I can always tell Cookie I scoffed it. I mean—as well as going out to lunch. Not that I
have to tell anyone anything. Anything.’
    It was his last, oddly echoing remark. Was it just about the veal-and-ham pie?
    And later she would chew over not just a veal-and-ham pie but almost every word of that matter-of-fact speech. It would stay eerily imprinted. But, precisely because of that, it would sometimes
seem that she had made it up, that he could not have said all those things that she remembered so clearly, even fifty years later. He might have just said after all, ‘You’d better get
some clothes on, you’d better make yourself scarce.’
    She would brood over it like some passage that perhaps needed redrafting, that might not yet have arrived at its proper meaning.
    Then he was gone. No goodbye. No silly kiss. Just one last look. Like a draining of her, like a drinking up. And what he’d just bestowed on her: his whole house. He was leaving it to her.
It was hers, for her amusement. She might ransack it if she wished. All hers. And what was a maid to do with her time, released for the day on Mothering Sunday, when she had no home to go to?
    She listened to his steps receding down the staircase. They became louder again as they clicked and loitered on the tiles of the hall. He was gathering an item or two before
his actual departure? A hat? The buttonhole? Why not? Perhaps he kept a pin for such a thing in his jacket pocket. He was finding that key?
    She did not move. She froze. She heard the front door—or doors—being opened then closed. It was neither a slam nor a gentle manipulation. Then she heard—it came up from outside
through the open window, not echoing through the house itself—his sudden giggle. If giggle it was. It was more like some trumpeting, defiant call, weird and startling as a peacock’s.
She would never forget it.
    There was the crunch of his shoes on the gravel. He was walking towards the old stable and his garaged car. He would see her bicycle against the front wall. She’d simply propped it there,
since he’d said the front door—and the front door had already been opening magically. She hadn’t left it discreetly out of sight. And so, she realised now, if Miss Hobday had
decided to turn up mischievously, as a fiancée might in this modern age, in her own car, to surprise him—and surprise him she would have done—she would have seen it: a
woman’s bicycle, without a crossbar. And then there might have been a scene, a wild and frantic scene. And the day would have turned out very differently.
    But wasn’t there going to be a scene now in any case, at the Swan at Bollingford?
    All the scenes. All the scenes that never occur, but wait in the wings of possibility. It was perhaps already almost half past one. Birds chorused. Somewhere on a road the other side of
Bollingford, Emma Hobday, in her Emmamobile, would already be nearing the place of their rendezvous. Or perhaps she too was late. It was her woman’s right. Perhaps she was always maddeningly
late and perhaps he was only banking on this exasperating habit. If he timed it right they might serenely coincide.
    Perhaps that was the simple explanation.
    But in any case Emma Hobday would be enjoying, as she drove, the dazzling rush of this spring day. What it might be like to drive a car was beyond her maid’s experience—she had