Free Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift Page A

peculiar if he did. But
then his personally taking them to the station was rather peculiar too.
    It was a peculiar day.
    Ethel, she supposed later, might have constructed such a story, and she might even have seen, when the time came, how her story had its failings. But much the greater likelihood was that Ethel,
when attending to one or both messes, would not have thought very much about either of them, or their nefarious implications, it not being her business to think about such things. She had enough to
think about anyway, having just been to her mother’s.
    Would Ethel even have thought, or would Iris, who had much more to do with the pie: Well if he ate the pie, it was the last meal he ate?
    She ascended the stairs. There was another kind of popular book besides the boys’ adventure book and one even favoured by adults. But she would say, in her interviews,
that she had never had much time for the detective story. For reading them—let alone writing them. Life itself was riddle enough.
    She climbed up from the kitchen into the warmth and light of the upper floors. And now, though she had no actual need to hurry—the clock in the hall said twenty past two and the world was
still at lunch—she wished to leave, she had explored sufficiently.
    It was then anyway (so she would always know the exact timing of its ringing) that the telephone—or a telephone—rang from some nearby recess she hadn’t previously noticed. She
froze. She had the odd sensation that it had rung because she’d moved close to it. She didn’t answer it anyway, it would have been foolish to answer it, though she was quite good at
answering telephones. Its ringing went on for some time while she stood stock-still, as if, had she moved, the telephone might somehow have observed her, which was foolish too.
    But wasn’t it utterly foolish anyway to be standing here in this unfamiliar hall with nothing on?
    She climbed the staircase and re-entered the bedroom. It was the same, of course it was, as she had left it. Only the sun, still flooding in, had lowered its angle a little. There was the open
window, the clothes over the armchair, his unwanted trousers, still scarfed with one of her stockings. The pulled-back bedclothes. The patch, a little drier. Yet it seemed like a room round which,
even in such a short interval, some invisible fence had been raised. Was it really the room in which . . . ? Was it really here that . . . ?
    It was the profoundest of questions. Had it really happened?
    Beyond the window the birds chirped eternally and in the blue sky she could not see, or would not remember seeing, any flaw.
    The mirror on the dressing table offered its last three-fold glimpse of her nakedness. She put on her clothes. They slipped on like some much-used disguise. She touched—only to touch, to
stroke, not to tidy—his trousers. She didn’t close the open window. Again, as he might have carelessly left it. Ethel’s job. And who anyway was going to come with a ladder . . . ?
She did not touch the bed, even to cover the patch.
    The young men in their frames on the dressing table seemed now oblivious of her. Was it all her vain fancy that they had previously peeped? They looked immovably through her, at some camera that
had clicked long ago. She stood in the doorway and took her own last mental photograph. Then left.
    In the hall she paused again and took—plucked—one of the orchid flowers from the clusters above the bowl. Well, if he hadn’t, she would. She realised at once that it would be
the most incriminating of items, if she were to wear it. If she were to return to Beechwood with an orchid stuck in her frock. But it wasn’t for wearing. She slipped it where earlier in the
day she had slipped her half-crown. It would get quickly bruised and tattered perhaps, but it was her proof to herself. It was so she herself would always know. No one else ever would.
    Adventure stories, not detective stories. Boys’ books. They were