Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift Page B

experience that she thought he’d said
‘undressing news’. I have some undressing news. A mistake that even Milly couldn’t have made.
    And when, after he’d got more words out, he said, ‘You have gone very pale, Jane,’ she had the fleeting thought that it was surely something people only did in books. People
only ‘went pale’ or had ‘faces of thunder’ or eyes that ‘flashed fire’ or blood that ‘ran cold’ in books. Books that she had read.
    ‘I’m so sorry, Jane, to be telling you this. On Mothering Sunday.’
    As if his presence—it seemed now that he was alone—back here at Beechwood at this hour was expressly to deliver news meant for her. As if he had come with the unexpected information
that she had no mother.
    ‘There has been an accident, Jane. A fatal accident. Involving Paul Sheringham. Mister Paul at Upleigh.’
    She had the presence of mind, or mere mumbling reflex, to say, ‘At Upleigh?’
    ‘No, Jane, not at Upleigh. A road accident. A car accident.’
    That was when he said, ‘You have gone very pale, Jane.’ It even seemed that he was stepping forward, arms held out, a little hesitantly but gallantly, because he thought she might be
going to faint.
    She would never know how Mr Niven might have recorded his own version of this scene and all that followed. How he might have ‘written it’, as it were. She would
never know—but this was surely her own sudden panicky surmise—how much he
knew
.
    She would never know (even at seventy or eighty) how much other people—people who weren’t writers—did any of this stuff. It was a mystery.
    Paul Sheringham didn’t. She would have said she was sure of that. And that was—had been—his glory.
    He had driven off (as she knew) when, unless some sorcery, some suspension of the laws of physics occurred, he would have been late. She knew (though she would never tell anyone) that he had
made no effort to hurry—the opposite—though he was going to meet his bride-to-be. But he had made every effort, nonetheless, to prepare himself immaculately. This too only she would
ever truly know, since after the impact the car had caught fire and his body was not only mangled but burnt. But items survived, she would learn, to suggest his state of attire—and his
identity. An initialled cigarette case, a signet ring. The car itself was not so destroyed that it could not be readily identified as the car Paul Sheringham (often with some verve) drove.
    But he would anyway have been significantly late. So that Emma Hobday’s at first trivial but then intensifying feelings of bafflement, anger and indignation might have turned eventually
into appalling conjecture. Good God—she had simply been stood up! Her husband-to-be had chosen this day—this marvellous day—to isolate her while he made his getaway. Law studies
indeed! He had seized the opportunity of the house being completely deserted to—desert her! To drive off into the blue yonder. Because he could not face—it was only two
weeks—marrying his betrothed wife. Or any other of his looming obligations. And this was his monstrous way of announcing it.
    In short, she was being royally jilted. And, while she knew that her outraged imagination might just be getting the better of her and she could be becoming hysterical, some part of
her—which knew Paul Sheringham—yet thought: And it might be just like him.
    And so . . .
    But only she, perhaps, Jane Fairchild, the maid at Beechwood, would ‘write’ this scene. Emma Hobday wasn’t a character in a book, was she? She hadn’t invented her. She
would never know how Emma Hobday herself might have written it.
    And so . . . And so Miss Hobday couldn’t just sit there, looking at her dainty wristwatch, could she, and being looked at by others? Her stomach unpleasantly rumbling. She had asked to use
the hotel’s telephone. This was all so unthinkable and embarrassing. But she was now at the centre of a world that was betraying