Free Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift

to—the library, for example, so as not to interrupt his studies. That is, if he
did not wish to savour the novel experience of eating by himself in the kitchen—and assuming, of course, that he didn’t have other plans for passing his time and taking his
luncheon.
    Who anyway, on a day like this, would really want to bury their nose in a book?
    It was a half-pie, a leftover, but, even so, too much for one. But she attacked it with a sudden ravenous unmannerly hunger. There was no one to watch. He might have done this, she supposed, if
the day had turned out differently, if it had followed the course of the pretence he’d invented for it. He might have come down to the kitchen and, suddenly relishing the perverse pleasure of
it, wolfed the pie right there at the table. He might have ceased to be the aloof and splendid Paul Sheringham and, with no one to see, become, cheeks bulging, like some guzzling schoolboy or
starving tramp.
    And she, in her ladylike liberty—and with two and six in her pocket—might have stopped at some village tea shop for egg-and-cress sandwiches and cake.
    He must by now be sitting down in his impeccable get-up, with her, at the Swan. Though how might he have accomplished that? By magic? By sheer gall and bravado? ‘Well, I’m here now .
. .’ Or readiness to stake everything? ‘Well, if you want to call it off . . .’
    Had that even been his brutal, polished plan? It gave her a brief tingle of hope. To call it off—first clearing his path by causing serious displeasure.
    She tried anyway to imagine the scene, even as she chewed on the pie, as he himself, sitting here, might have chewed on it: cheeks crammed, pieces spilling. She wanted to eat this pie, which he
hadn’t eaten, for him. As if she
were
him.
    It was a very good pie. She opened the bottle of beer and drank, if only to wash down the food. It tasted as beer had always tasted the few times she’d drunk it, like brown autumn leaves.
She attacked the pie again. Then she felt suddenly like the most miserable and desperate of creatures: no clothes to her back, no roof of her own, and eating someone else’s pie.
    She shivered. She got to her feet. The pie was too much anyway. She burped loudly. She left everything as it was. She left it, she thought, only as he would have left it—as he had left his
discarded clothes. She even turned at the door to see it as if it were all his heedless doing. Ethel would clear it up, of course, later. Ethel or Iris. And it was strange, either of them might
think, that he’d eaten the pie, or most of it, if he’d gone to have lunch with Miss Hobday. And if he’d gone to have lunch with Miss Hobday then it was strange that there was also
that patch on the sheet.
    But Ethel, if it was for her to note both pie and patch, might piece together a story, not unlike one she herself, the Beechwood maid, had fleetingly envisaged. That Miss Hobday, on such a
beautiful morning, had taken it upon herself to drive all the way to Upleigh and ‘surprise’ Mister Paul. Meanwhile Mister Paul, toiling at his law books, had got bored and hungry and
remembered the veal-and-ham pie. The marauded but unfinished remnants and the barely broached bottle of beer might indeed suggest he had been surprised in his mid-morning raid of the kitchen. And
after Miss Hobday’s arrival one thing had, unexpectedly or not, led to another, accounting for the stain on the sheet.
    And then Mister Paul and Miss Hobday, having taken advantage of the empty house, had left for their lunch, each driving their own car, to preserve the appearance that they had met at their
rendezvous. Ethel might even have remembered Mister Paul’s saying, on that strange little drive to the station, that he dared say he’d be meeting Miss Hobday for lunch, and then Iris
saying that she’d put out a bit of veal-and-ham pie for him anyway, just in case. He wasn’t obliged of course to discuss his plans with the servants, and it was