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 in the hedgerow. But his crisp command had simply empowered her. The front door.
Beyond the hedgerow—it was dense and spreading at this point and it seemed that even in the space of hours the hawthorns had sprouted more green leaves and more white frothing blossom—there was the curve of a narrow minor road. Once on its surface, she could speed anywhere, a mere carefree wayfarer, out pedalling on a heavenly Sunday afternoon.
Though for a crippling moment she didn’t know which way to turn. It must have been perhaps three o’clock. She had half the afternoon yet. To turn left would have been the quickest way back to Beechwood, so the obvious choice was right. But where to? Pushing off, she decided that it didn’t matter, the main thing was simply to be riding, careering through this warm exhilarating air, and since the road to the right took her down a long sunny swoop then up a gentle rise (it was the back of the Upleigh grounds) her decision, to be indecisive, was confirmed.
Pedalling hard at first, then freewheeling and gathering speed, she heard the whirr of the wheels, felt the air fill her hair, her clothes and almost, it seemed, the veins inside her. Her veins sang, and she herself might have sung, if the rushing air had not stopped her mouth. She would never be able to explain the sheer liberty, the racing sense of possibility she felt. All over the country, maids and cooks and nannies had been ‘freed’ for the day, but was any of them—was even Paul Sheringham—as untethered as she?
Could she have done what she’d done today if she’d had a mother to go to? Could she have had the life she didn’t yet know she was going to have? Could her mother have known, making her dreadful choice, how she had blessed her?
And, like a mother to herself, she would never forget that girl on a bicycle, though she would never mention her to anyone, never breathe a word.
Girl? She was twenty-two. The air up her skirt and a Dutch cap up her fanny.
Beyond the top of the rise was a crossroads with one of those four-fingered country signposts, black on white. She might have taken any direction and ridden off for ever. She had her hidden treasure. She had taken a secret munch of pie and swig of ale in that house over there, behind the trees!
But she stopped for a long time at the crossroads. Three o’clock. At Henley now, puddings finished, they might be reflecting on the forthcoming event. Mr Hobday would have established his benign authority over the assembly and Mr Niven might have become hopeful that he would not have to share the bill. Meanwhile at Bollingford the subjects of their rosy considerations might have passed miraculously—who knows?—beyond the moment of almost terminal conflagration. Fireworks quenched by champagne. Emma Hobday might have succumbed to Paul Sheringham’s impregnable poise. ‘Must we, Emsie? On a day like this? Just because I was half an hour late . . . All right, forty minutes. What’s ten minutes?’ His hand, by now, finding her knee.
Is that how it might have gone after all? All the scenes. Suppose.
She stood, one foot on the verge, the other on a pedal. There was not a murmur, in any direction, of traffic. There was only the birdsong and, in the warm air, the half-heard stirring and rousing of—everything. Spring.
She took the left turn, only, after a mile or so, to take another left turn. It was a circuitous way back to Beechwood. She had still half the afternoon, yet she knew, now, what she wanted to do with her remaining time.
It was what she might have done anyway, what she might have said to Mr Niven, had not circumstances happily dictated otherwise. Or she might have just set off on this bicycle, with a sandwich from Milly and two and six, and found some sunny quiet spot. To sit, to lie, with her bicycle and her book. It was a book by Joseph Conrad. She’d never heard of him. She’d only just begun it.
She might have brought the book with her, she thought, so she might have had it now. But that was absurd. The front door, with her Dutch cap—and a book to read! But she might, all along—had not the telephone triumphantly rung—have said that thing about just sitting in the garden with a book.
‘If I may, Mr Niven.’
And he might have said, imagining the rather charming scene, ‘Of course you may, Jane.’
Well now she would finish her day, her Mothering Sunday, as it might have begun.
And so it was that in order to keep an appointment with a book—with Joseph Conrad—she turned left, then left again, making her way back to Beechwood earlier than needed, though, even so, not directly or quickly. She might still enjoy this glorious sunshine and the thrill of being so fully alive in it, on a whirring, whizzing bicycle. She might still stamp the memory of it on herself for ever.
And so it was that she reached Beechwood some while after four, only to discover that Mr and Mrs Niven had, surprisingly, already returned. There was Mr Niven, as she rode up the drive, standing on the gravel beside the Humber, almost as she had last seen him that morning, though clearly, as she drew near him, in a very different frame of mind. And saying, ‘Jane. Is that you, Jane?’
What a strange thing to say. Was she someone else?
‘Jane, is that you—back so early? I have some distressing news.’
One day, when it had long been her business—her profession, even the reason why she was ‘well known’—to write stories and to deal intricately with words, she would be asked another perennial and somewhat tedious question: ‘So when—so how did you become a writer?’ She had answered it enough times and, really, you couldn’t answer it in a different way every time. Yet people—surprisingly since her occupation was telling stories—did not jump to the conclusion that in giving her standard answer, she might also be telling a story, only kidding, as it were. They took her at her word. And, after all, it was a good answer, a fairly unchallengeable one.
‘At birth. At birth, of course,’ she would say, even when she was asked this question in her seventies or eighties or nineties, when her birth, always a mysterious fact, now seemed the remotest and strangest of events.
‘I was an orphan,’ she would divulge for the umpteenth time. ‘I never knew my father or mother. Or even my real name. If I ever had one. That has always seemed to me the perfect basis for becoming a writer—particularly a writer of fiction. To have no credentials at all. To be given a clean sheet, or rather, to be a clean sheet yourself. A nobody. How can you become a somebody without first being a nobody?’
And a characteristic glint might enter her eye, an additional crease appear at the corner of her mouth, and her interviewer might think that, yes, there was a touch of slyness here. Jane Fairchild was known for being a crafty old bird. But the gaze, for all the glinting, was steady, the face, for all its knottiness, essentially straight. It even seemed to be putting the innocent counter-question: You think I would tell you a lie?
‘Not just an orphan,’ she might go on, ‘but a foundling. Now there’s a word for you. Not such a common one, is it, these days? Foundling. It sounds like a word from the eighteenth century. Or from a fairy tale. But I was left on the steps of an orphanage—in some sort of bundle, I suppose—and taken in. That is what I was told. There were places in those days where that sort of thing could happen. 1901. It was a different world. Not the start in life any of us might wish for. But then in some ways’—the glint would appear again—‘the perfect one.
‘My name, Fairchild, was one of the names that were given to foundling children. There were lots of Fairchilds, Goodchilds, Goodbodys and so on who came out of orphanages—so that they would have, I suppose, a well-intentioned start in life. People sometimes ask me—goodness knows why—do I write under my own name, my real name? Well yes I do—it was my given name. Jane Fairchild. But it might as well be a pen name. I might as well call myself Jane Foundling. In fact, it has a rather pleasing ri
ng, don’t you think?’
‘And the Jane?’
‘Oh Jane is just any old girl’s name, isn’t it? Young girl’s, I mean. Jane Austen, Jane Eyre, Jane Russell . . .’
And so, with a gleam in her eye and a tightening of her lips, she would suggest she had come into the world with an innate licence to invent. And with an intimate concern for how words attach to things.
‘My birthright, so to speak. If you’ll pardon the pun.’
But she would never disclose that when she really became a writer, or had the seed of it truly planted in her (and that was an interesting word, seed) was one very warm day in March, when she was twenty-two and she had wandered round a house without a shred on—naked, you might say, as on the day she was born—and had felt both more herself, more Jane Fairchild, than she’d ever felt before, yet also, as never before, like some visiting ghost. Had felt, you might say, what it truly means to be put down in this world, placed, so to speak, on its extraordinary doorstep.
And how, after all, could you admit to such things in a public interview (sprightly as some of her interviews could be): I wandered naked round a house that wasn’t even mine, that I’d never even entered before. And how did I get to be doing that? Well there was a whole story there, a story she’d sworn to herself never to tell. Nor had she. Nor would she.
Though here she was, look, a storyteller by trade.
It was Mothering Sunday 1924. A different thing from the nonsense they call Mother’s Day now. And she had no mother, you see.
She was raised in an orphanage, then put into service. Another phrase you don’t hear often these days, but another ‘start in life’ she would recommend to the would-be writer (though it was hardly to be recommended in 1980 or 1990). Since it made you an occupational observer of life, it put you on the outside looking in. Since those who served served, and those who were being served—lived. Though sometimes, to be honest, it felt at the time entirely the other way round. It was the servants who lived, and a hard life they had of it, and the ones who were served who seemed not to know exactly what to do with their lives. Proper lost souls, in fact, some of them . . .
She’d been put into service at fourteen. Two years later, in 1917, she’d gone to Beechwood House in Berkshire. She’d been ‘taken in’ once again, you might say, by Mr and Mrs Niven, whose family had been recently reduced by the loss of two sons, and who required in those hard-pressed wartime years only a novice maid (meaning perhaps simply cheap) in addition to their existing cook.
Out of motives best known to themselves—though not so difficult to fathom perhaps—they had considered and chosen an orphan, and then discovered that the poor forlorn thing was not so lacking in spark or gumption at all. It turned out she could read, more than many maids could, more than the word ‘Brasso’ on a tin, and could write more than a shopping list, and could do sums.
‘Can you tell me, Jane, what are three and six plus seven and six?’
‘Eleven shillings, Mr Niven, sir.’
She was half educated.
It even emerged one day that she wanted to read books. Books! And instead of its seeming a damned cheek, it had only stirred further the charitable urges already present in the house. It had only touched some capacity for paternal leniency in Mr Niven that this orphan girl—this Fairchild—should be allowed to borrow books from his library.
When he learned which kind of book she preferred he might have gently but firmly protested, but perhaps her preference only brought out the leniency all the more. Mr Niven sometimes disappeared into the library himself. It was what, she sometimes thought, libraries were for: for men to disappear into and be important in, even though they had disappeared. She sometimes thought Mr Niven went into the library to cry.
The leniency extended to her own occasional ‘disappearances’. Mr and Mrs Niven had no complaints about her work generally—the opposite—but she could now and then be oddly absent—beyond, that is, her designated days and half-days off. As when she seemed to take for ever over simple shopping errands. Or those times she said she had a puncture, or her chain had come off again (there seemed to be a curse on the Second Bicycle) and she’d had to seek the kind help of other passing cyclists. But then there were times—true, usually in the quieter stretches of the day—when she was simply not to be found.
Though now perhaps these absences could be explained. She had snatched a moment in her room, not, as once fondly supposed, to bemoan in private her sad orphan’s lot, but to read a book. You could hardly allow her to borrow books and then not allow her at least some time to read them. And the house was not any more, let’s face it, as in the old days, a firmly governed, a strictly regimented house. Look where regimentation had got the world.
Had Mr Niven, had either of them, ever wondered, guessed?
Oh yes, she would say, the glint in her eye, she was lucky to have been born with nothing to her name. With not even a name, in fact. Or the real date of her birth. So she was not only nameless, but ageless. And her eighty-year-old face would bloom.
The first of May was the date of birth that had been accorded to her, by rough approximation and perhaps because it was a nice date, just as Jane Fairchild was a nice name. Some mothers, apparently, left a little note, inside the bundle, with just a date of birth and a name. Only the first name. The commoner the better. No one ever deposited a Laetitia. And, if you thought about it, the name must have only been a thought anyway. And wasn’t any name just a thought? Why was a tree called a tree?
She might even have liked to be called Jane Bundle.
And did it matter if you marked your birthday on the wrong day? If it had really been the 25th of April, though you never knew. The wrong day became the right day. This was the great truth of life, that fact and fiction were always merging, interchanging. And if you were a maid you weren’t given much leisure to mark your birthday anyway—if anyone even knew it. You weren’t given the day off. And being a maid was a little like being an orphan, since you lived in someone else’s house, you didn’t have a home of your own to go to.
Except on Mothering Sunday. When you did get the day off, to go home to your family. Which would always put her at a bit of a loss. What to do, what to do with herself on Mothering Sunday? She could hardly go looking for her mother.
Though what would she have done with herself anyway, with her life, if she hadn’t been a maid? And she supposed—the furrowed face would bloom again—that it was a very common human predicament. To be at a loss, not to know what to do with yourself.
‘My years as a maid’, she would call them, ‘my maid’s years’, never adding, ‘but not for long my maidenly ones’. ‘My years in service’. It was hard to think now of a time when half the world was ‘in service’. She was born in 1901—at least the year must have been right—and she would grow up to become a maid, which anyone might have predicted. But to become a writer—no one could have predicted that. Not even the kindly committee at the orphanage who had reconceived her as Jane Fairchild, born on the first of May. And, least of all perhaps, her mother.
When she was asked, in the interviews, to describe the atmosphere of those wartime years (meaning, of course, the First War), she would say that it was so long ago now and so like another world that trying to remember it was a bit like—writing a novel. Had she really been alive then? But if she were honest she would add that she’d been not unaware of it, of course—all that accumulated loss and grief. How could anyone be unaware of it? Every week she dusted two rooms where everything was to remain ‘just as it was’. You went in, took a little breath perhaps, and got on with it.
But she had never known them, the boys who’d had those rooms, and what she mainly thought was: A whole room, full of furniture, each. And if you had yourself been comprehensively bereaved at birth—and that was her situation, wasn’t it?—how could you share in all that stuff, how could you have anything left over for it? The war wasn’t her fault, was it? And, yes, you might say she was lucky, not to have a bro
ther or father, let alone, at that age, a husband to think about. And, yes, you might say it was her good luck to have been raised in a good orphanage, they weren’t all evil places rife with abuse. Her mother, whoever she was, had perhaps had some discernment.
So she’d received a rudimentary education when many who had parents didn’t. When many who were packed off to the trenches didn’t. She’d been put into service at fourteen with a relatively advanced ability to read and write and—free from all family ties—with perhaps more than a usual eagerness for life.
And who wouldn’t want to be Jane Fairchild, born on the first of May?
Oh yes—the face would flower again—she was very fortunate to have been born destitute.
‘Are you an orchid, Jane?’ Cook Milly had said, after first looking at her very closely, not long after she’d arrived, as if to establish precisely what sort of specimen she would have to work with.
‘Because my mother was an orchid too.’
Had she really said it? And if so, had she used that word deliberately and knowingly—knowing that she was using the wrong word, not the right one? There was a look of purest artlessness and candour in Cook Milly’s eye. And did it matter if she’d used the wrong word—if the wrong word was a better one? It would have been wrong to point out that she had made a mistake—to expose, at such a moment, Milly’s poor grasp of language and lack of education, while asserting her own accomplishment. That is, if it was a mistake.
And if you were an orphan, then perhaps you might turn into an orchid, as Cinderella turned into a princess.
Had she really said it? Or had she herself misheard it? Or invented this little exchange between herself and Milly? Even then? Surely not. The great truth of life. So that one day she might go on to invent a whole character—a minor but colourful character in her novel Tell Me Again (she actually thought of calling her Milly Cook)—who was given to using misapprehended words. Who said ‘cucumbered’ when she meant ‘encumbered’. And in fact the real and living Cook Milly became more and more, in the course of those ‘maid’s years’ at Beechwood and certainly by the time of that Mothering Sunday, like some cook in a story book, plump and sturdy and red-cheeked, with thick forearms meant for commanding a mixing bowl.