Read Mothering Sunday for Free Online Page A

only to wash and rinse himself, whatever men did. Remove, that is,
all immediate traces of herself on him. She would think about this later.
    The room seemed to close in on her during his short absence, even to claim her as part of its furniture. She did not move. She lay indeed like an inanimate object, though she was all tingling
flesh. He had made no sign to her that she
should
move—that now he’d got up, it might be proper for her to do the same. Rather the opposite. It was no surprise to him, when he
reappeared, that she was still tenaciously lying there. It was what, it seemed, he had even expected, wanted her to do.
    He had a scent about him now that she might have appreciated, save that it cancelled out the sweeter smell of his sweat. She would think about this too later: that he put on his cologne. But he
was still naked and in no apparent haste. He had brought in, from the dressing room, a fresh white shirt, a pale-grey waistcoat and a tie, but it seemed that the rest of his outfit would consist of
what he’d discarded on the chair. He might have done all his dressing in the dressing room, but perhaps this was his habit anyway, to dress by the light of the window, by his dressing table
and its angled mirrors. The dressing room was merely a wardrobe.
    But it seemed that he did not want to be separated from her, though he was about to leave. It was in some way all for her—that she should watch him dress, watch his nakedness gradually
disappear. Or that he just didn’t care. The sureness, the aloofness, the unaccountable unhurriedness. She should leave too? But he said nothing and she remained, as if now actually commanded
to, where she was, while his eyes travelled over her again, even as he dressed.
    He must have noticed the trickle. But it was part of his fine disdain not to notice it. It was like the clothes he might leave pooled on the floor, to find their way back to him, laundered and
pressed, hanging in the dressing room. These were things to be cleared up discreetly by people who cleared up such things. And she, normally, was such a one. She was part of the magic army that
permitted such disregard. Was he really going to tell her, before he left, to deal with the mess? And give her her cheap moment to remind him that she was not his servant?
    But she saw as he looked at her—and surely at that incriminating patch—that such a squalid little scene was far from his thoughts. Some other kind of indifference was making him
careless of such a minor matter as a stain on a sheet. Was it a stain, anyway, that it should be removed? Any more than she should remove herself—and she was not a stain—from his bed.
Yes, he
wanted
her to be there, when it might have been her role, in another life, in a commoner, comic story, to be already scurrying downstairs, still adjusting her clothing. It was his
wish, before he left, to see her there, to have her there, nakedly and—who knows?—immovably occupying his bedroom, so that the image of her would be there, branding itself on his mind,
even as he met—his vase.
    She was doing, as she lay there, the right, the finest thing. She understood it, even as she understood that her lying there had lost all argument, all pleading for his not going. He was clearly
going. And he wanted her, for some reason she couldn’t fathom, to watch, even as she blazoned her nakedness, this business of his getting dressed, of his putting back on again the life that
was his.
    Why was he being so slow?
    The room had been filled now with as much light and unseasonal warmth as was possible. The minute hand on his watch must be moving towards one, even beyond it. The dark line on the sundial in
the garden at Beechwood—where she might have been sitting right now, a book on her lap—would have crept further round. She could not make out the face of the little clock on the
dressing table—the two brothers, either side, guarding it.
    Was there ever such a day as this? Could