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there ever be such a day again?
    It would be Ethel’s job, she realised, to deal with the stain—the trickle, the patch. Ethel who would even now, she imagined, be sitting in a house filled with the
pricey smell of roasting beef—on such a warm day, when a bit of cold ham might have served. Sitting where her mother had commanded her to sit and not get up or lift a finger. It was her day
off, wasn’t it? Today everything was different, special. ‘Talk to your dad for a while, Ethel.’ If Ethel still had a dad, or a dad still in one piece. For these few hours of
reunion, of mother-honouring, Ethel’s mother would toil in the kitchen and Ethel’s mother and father would live for a week on bread and dripping.
    But Ethel when she returned to her duties later—when the ‘shower’ would have perhaps also returned, invigorated yet fatigued from their sunny outing and in need of
attention—would have to change the sheets in Mister Paul’s bedroom, not having been present earlier to do so, and would notice the stain. In so far as Ethel noticed such things, since
it was her job simultaneously to notice them and quickly make it seem that they had never existed.
    Even Ethel, who had sat down only hours ago, like royalty, to roast meat, would know what such a stain was. It was the common lot of her kind to come upon them, in bedrooms. So much so that they
were sometimes known, in below-stairs parlance, as ‘come-upons’. There were other expressions, of varying inventiveness, including ‘maps of the British Isles’. If there had
to be any actual, awkward professional discussion of them, they might be officially known as ‘nocturnal emissions’—which did not necessarily cover all circumstances and might not
leave a new maid of sixteen fully enlightened. Little boys—not so little boys—had nocturnal emissions that, setting aside the fact that they might have had them more considerately, had
to be rendered rapidly absent.
    All this she had gleaned for herself before arriving at Beechwood, when she had been briefly dispatched, as part of her ‘training’ and on a sort of probation, to a big house
requiring extra staff for the summer occupancy. There had been five maids in all and, my, how some of them had talked.
    There were many emissions that were not produced solitarily and were not, directly, emissions at all (or even necessarily nocturnal), and most maids, using their powers of deduction, could tell
the difference and, using their powers of deduction further, might even draw conclusions as to exactly how the ‘emission’ had been formed. But this was not in any way to be spoken of or
even acknowledged. Though it was one of the things that could make a maid’s work interesting. All the stains, all the permutations. A summer house party with twenty-four guests. Oh Lord.
    And even Ethel would have her deductions and conclusions, though she would be staunch in pretending she’d never had to have them. And Ethel’s conclusion would be that in the period
of time in which the house would have been (supposedly) vacated, Mister Paul would have taken the opportunity to entertain his fiancée, Miss Hobday, in his bedroom. For no other reason,
possibly, than that they could do such a thing and get away with it. Setting aside that they might have waited. In two weeks’ time they would not need to be such pranksters. Setting aside
what kind of woman (one did not discuss Mister Paul) it suggested Miss Hobday was.
    It was not for her, Ethel, to judge. Further deduction, along with received, whispered knowledge, might have told Ethel that Miss Hobday was at least one kind of woman: Mister Paul had not
invited her to Upleigh for the express purpose of deflowering her. But in any case Ethel, already gathering up the sheets for the laundry basket, would assume that Mister Paul, if he’d taken
stock of the stain at all, would have known that she, Ethel, would make it vanish, like the good fairy she