Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift

Author:Graham Swift [Swift, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471155253
Publisher: Scribner UK

One day, after she had lodged her bold but shy, even slightly simpering request, Mr Niven had said, after a lengthy pause for thought, ‘Well yes, of course you may, Jane.’ The pause might have suggested that he was permitting some inversion in the hierarchy of the household, or just his puzzlement on a practical point: Well when was she going to read the things, with all her duties to perform? In her sleep? It might have suggested amazement—had the ability not long ago been put to the test—that she could read at all.

But it was nonetheless a yielding, even kindly pause.

‘Of course you may, Jane.’

They were magic, door-opening words. A different answer—‘Who do you think you are, Jane?’—might have undone her life.

It deserved one of her full bobbings. Nothing less.

‘But you must let me know which book first. And, of course, you must return it.’

‘Of course, sir. Thank you very much, sir.’

She became a borrower from the Beechwood library, on a carefully monitored yet intrigued, even fostered basis. In fact things took a noticeably sensitive turn with Mr Niven when it became clear which section of the library she was really interested in. She wouldn’t have wanted, after all, to read Foxe’s Book of Martyrs or Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers (in five volumes). Who would?

‘Treasure Island, Jane? What do you want to read Treasure Island for? All these books for boys.’

It wasn’t really a question or query at all, but more like some general bafflement—or a sort of being caught off his guard. He might perhaps have said, with a lot of coughing, ‘Not those books, Jane. Any books but those.’

As for his other observation, well where were the books for girls?

Which she didn’t mind at all. Boys’ stuff, adventure stuff. She didn’t mind not reading girls’ stuff, whatever that might be. Adventure. The word itself often loomed and beckoned from the pages: ‘adventure’.

It did not seem that the Nivens of Beechwood, or their kind generally, though they had time and means, were in any way adventurous or even advocates of the idea of adventure. ‘A jamboree in Henley.’ Libraries themselves were like dry, sober rejections of adventure. Yet in the Beechwood library was this little spinning cache of stuff that had once, plainly, been gulped down, like an allowable dosage before the onset of tedious or terrible maturity.

Mr Niven might have said, ‘Not that bookcase please, Jane.’ But he didn’t.

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