Free Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift Page B

the thing. And her interviewer might say, treating it all as a bit of a joke and not anyway wanting the
interview to get too ‘booky’, ‘And boys themselves?’
    ‘Oh yes,’ she would say with an away-with-you flip of her eighty-year-old hand, as if there had once been queues. The audience in their darkened seats might titter obligingly. And
the interviewer might not even see, amid the playfulness, the brief narrowing of the eyes at the change of subject.
    It was that life itself might be an adventure. That was the submerged message (the ‘subtext’ they might say now) of all those books. Was there in fact any other way to live? And
adventure did not have to be about pirates and narrow escapes. It might be a constant mental hazarding. Suppose, imagine. Imagine. What did writers do with their time? They were the most
unadventurous souls on earth, weren’t they? Sitting all day at their desks.
    But she would not say such things in interviews. Only, with her protective twinkle and ironically squeezed lips, skirt teasingly round their intimate truth.
    I will begin the story of my adventures
. . .
    She put the key under the chunk of stone pineapple. She could not see how Freddy could have broken it with a cricket bat. A battle-axe possibly. And she did not know which one
was Freddy in the silver frames. She might have asked, she ought to have asked, but she hadn’t. ‘Which one is which? Tell me about them.’ Would it have been the moment, lying
there together? Or would he have fended off the question, a look on his face of having tasted something bad?
    Now she would never know.
    There, against the wall, was her bicycle, her potentially incriminating bicycle that had incriminated no one. She steered it for a while across the gravel before mounting, drawing deep unsteady
breaths. She was slightly sore where she met the saddle. She tucked and gathered her skirt. The air was warm and bright and brimming round her.
    A sudden unexpected freedom flooded her. Her life was beginning, it was not ending, it had not ended. She would never be able to explain (or be required to) this illogical, enveloping inversion.
As if the day had turned inside out, as if what she was leaving behind was not enclosed, lost, entombed in a house. It had merged somehow—pouring itself outwards—with the air she was
breathing. She would never be able to explain it, and she would not feel it any the less even when she discovered, as she would do, how this day had turned really inside out. Could life be so cruel
yet so bounteous at the same time?
    She rode off. She did not ride—as he’d departed and she’d arrived—along the drive to the gate and the road. Old habit and old secrecy made her take the old route. Past
the stables, through the rhododendrons, past the vegetable plot, the potting shed, the cold frames and greenhouse, then along mere threading paths and through narrow gaps between neglected shrubs
into a jumbled outer region that led to a copse. Every twist and turn, every screening outbuilding and clump of vegetation was familiar to her. They had met among them and made use of them often
enough. It was even his standard directive: ‘the garden path’.
    The secret back route from Beechwood to Upleigh would remain always in her head, such that she might at any time have easily drawn its map, like the map in
Treasure Island
or of David
Balfour’s wanderings in the Highlands. She would retain the ability, but of course it would be a contradiction, a betrayal, actually to draw a secret map.
    ‘The garden path, Jay.’ And, once, with a strange echoing sincerity, ‘I won’t ever lead you up it.’
    The copse led to a small wilderness of rough grass and brambles, then a straggly hedgerow, where there was another way out of what was still Upleigh land. It involved lifting the bicycle fully
over a stile, but she had done it enough times. She might, of course, have left the bicycle—it was her usual practice—safely hidden