Mothering Sunday (13 page)

The gathering evening, the apricot light, the gauzy green-gold world, was impossibly beautiful.

After another long silence he said, ‘That’s all five of them, Jane.’

She knew what he meant. She knew exactly what he meant. But she said, ‘Yes, sir,’ in the way that maids simply mouth those words in general concurrence with everything.

Then, when they’d turned into the sweep in front of Beechwood and he’d switched off the engine he suddenly leant across to her and, like a child, wept—blubbed—even
pressed his head, his face to her breasts, so that she thought of when she’d pressed them—had it been only this afternoon?—to the opened pages of a book. ‘I’m so
sorry, Jane, I’m so sorry,’ he said, even as his face remained where it was. And she said, involuntarily cradling the back of his head, ‘That’s quite all right, Mr Niven,
that’s quite all right.’

The book was called
Youth
—the book she might have read on the bench in the garden, or might have mentioned to Mr Niven when he’d asked. She might have just
uttered the odd word ‘youth’.

Or rather it was called
Youth, a Narrative; and Two Other Stories
, a clumsy, unexciting mish-mash of a title. It was the only book by Joseph Conrad in the Beechwood library, and the
narrative called
Youth
was the first thing in it and a good place anyway to start, since, as she would come to know, it was loosely based on Conrad’s own early experiences and on his
first encounter (she would come to know that he wrote about it often) with a thing—a vision, a promise, a fact, an illusion—called ‘the East’.

It was anyway what, on that Mothering Sunday, she’d only just begun, and if her day had gone differently, if the telephone hadn’t rung, she might quite easily have finished it in
some sunny corner of Berkshire or even in the Beechwood garden. She might even have got on to the
Other Stories
. One of them was called ‘Heart of Darkness’ and as it turned out
(her Mothering Sunday having turned out as it did) it was a long time before she got round to that story, even though she knew she had discovered in Joseph Conrad someone important. It was the
forbidding title perhaps.

She knew that Conrad was different from anything else she had read, but she could sense that there were things she might not be ready for. It was a little like reading
Treasure Island
and
Kidnapped
but not wanting yet to read
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
.

She quite liked the word ‘narrative’, it was a sober, dependable-sounding word, but she didn’t see why the one thing should be called a narrative and the other things just
stories. The word she most liked in those days was ‘tale’—and she was glad to find out that Conrad often preferred it too. There was something more enticing about calling
something a tale rather than a story, but this had to do, perhaps, with the suggestion that it might not be wholly truthful, it might have a larger element of invention.

About all these words—tale, story, even narrative—there was a sort of question, always hovering in the background, of truth, and it might be hard to say how much truth went with
each. There was also the word ‘fiction’—one day this would be the very thing she dealt in—which could seem almost totally dismissive of truth. A complete fiction! Yet
something that was clearly and completely fiction could also contain—this was the nub and the mystery of the matter—truth. When she had read all three of them, she felt she could say
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
was more truthful than
Treasure Island
or
Kidnapped
. Though some people might say it was the weirdest and certainly the most frightening of the lot.

‘Telling tales’: it could have the sense of concocting downright lies. Like ‘spinning yarns’. It seemed in fact that ‘yarn’ might be the best word for those
adventure books she’d been first drawn to in the library at Beechwood, and to have questioned whether those books were truthful would have been pointless. They were yarns. In the word yarn
itself there was a salty tang of men and the sea. And so many of those ‘boys’ books’ she read had involved, one way or another, going to sea—a voyage, an unknown
land—as if that was the essence of adventure and what every boy wanted to do. And here was Joseph Conrad who seemed to have been just one of those boys.

And she liked the word ‘youth’. Or rather she was challenged by it, because it wasn’t in any obvious way like the title of a tale, story or narrative—or adventure. It
seemed more like just an idea. Yet when she had first flipped through the pages of
Youth
in the Beechwood library it had seemed to be full of all that seafaring, yarny stuff she was already
familiar with. Perhaps it was what one of the Niven boys, or by then young men, had thought too, though it was obvious he hadn’t got very far with the book, if he’d read it at all.
Unlike other books in the revolving bookcase, it still looked clean and new. It even bore an inscription, in dark-blue ink, ‘J. Niven, Oct. 1915,’ that looked fresh enough to have been
written yesterday. And maybe that was another reason why she picked it out.

Conrad, she soon felt, might be generally called a ‘challenging author’. ‘Heart of Darkness’ . . . Maybe J. Niven had thought this too. ‘Challenging author’
was not yet part of her writer-judging vocabulary and certainly not a phrase she could imagine one day being applied to herself. She would take it, when it was, as a complimentary phrase, but of
course there were people who used it adversely. It was another way of saying ‘off-putting’. Well that was their bloody problem.

‘Conrad,’ she would say, when answering another of those repeated and bothersome questions. ‘Oh Conrad—he was the one.’ As if she were talking
about someone she had met. Which in a sense she had.

‘Oh Conrad, I used to love all that seafaring stuff.’

‘But a man’s author, don’t you think?’

‘And your point is . . . ?’

The other reason why she liked the word youth was of course that it was what she had—then. She was ‘a youth’. Although there was a way in which ‘youth’, like
‘yarn’, had a strongly masculine bias to it. A man could be a ‘youth’, but a woman? But then everything had a masculine bias in 1924.

There was in any case a question—and the word youth seemed to have a rubbery quality to it to accommodate this—about where youth began and where it turned into something else. But,
surely, still at twenty-two. In 1924 even the century was still in its youth . . . Though, in fact, that wasn’t the case at all. Youth—great swathes of it—was just what the
century had lost.

And yes, of course, by 1924 Conrad was arguably outmoded, already behind the times. Sailing ships? The exotic East? Didn’t he know what had happened to the world?

But he was truly the one. On the night of Mothering Sunday 1924, when, for good reasons, she was utterly unable to sleep or rest, she picked up again Joseph Conrad’s
Youth
. What else could she do? Cry? And cry again? In her little plank of a bed. People read books, didn’t they, to get away from themselves, to escape the troubles of their lives?

And it was and it wasn’t an adventure story. It was different, it had something special. It was about five crusty old men sitting round a table—yarning—who had done different
things with their lives, but had all once been at sea, in their youth. She could see the men at the table, see their lined faces. One of them was called Marlow and it was he who told his story. It
wasn’t really an adventure story at all. It was about a dumpy old ship that was always having bad luck, never getting far from murky home waters, but which one day, at the end of the story,
which was also a sort of beginning, finally makes it to—the East.

When she had finished
Youth and Other Stories
, even managing to read ‘Heart of Darkness’—which was indeed challenging and truly like nothing else she
had read—she knew she had to get more Conrad, and so she’d written to a bookshop in Reading which sent books by post. She had the half-crown still that Mr Niven had given her, not to
mention other half-crowns put by. She could buy a postal order in the village. And dealing with a bookshop in this enterprising way perhaps even made her think: A bookshop, a bookshop . . .

She bought a book called
Lord Jim
, which was not unlike
Youth
, but much longer—and challenging. It was called a ‘tale’. It involved that man Marlow again, and it
was tempting to think that Marlow was really Conrad in disguise. Then she bought a book called
The Secret Agent
, which was quite different, since it wasn’t set in the East or to do
with ships, but set in the grubby streets of London, though it still had that feeling of entering unknown and possibly dangerous territory which, if she’d had the word, she might have called
‘Conradian’.

By then she’d think that Conrad himself must be a sort of secret agent, slipping between worlds. And much later she’d think and sometimes say that all writers are secret agents. But
perhaps the truth was—though she wouldn’t say this—that we are all secret agents, that’s what we are.

Anyway, by the time she’d read
The Secret Agent
, and foolish as it might have been, she had formed her own secret wish to become a writer. And she was not unused to having
secrets.

It wasn’t his real name—Conrad—she found out, since he was really Polish. So he had a name a little like hers. It wasn’t a pen name either, it was just his
‘English’ name. But the remarkable, the truly astonishing thing about Joseph Conrad was that in order to write all his books, he hadn’t just had to learn how to write, but to
write in a
whole new language
. That was almost unbelievable. It was like crossing some impossible—impassable—barrier, and she felt that perhaps that was the greater thing, the
greater achievement and truer adventure, greater even than going on all those voyages in his youth, more thrilling even than reaching the East.

And it was what she would have to do to become a writer: cross an impossible barrier. And she too, she would come to understand this, would have to find a language, even though she
had
a
language, since finding a language, finding
the
language—that was what, she would come to understand, writing really was. But she would seldom say these things in interviews either.
They were too near the bone.

‘Conrad, oh yes—he had something special.’ As if she might have been talking about some old lover.

And, if the truth be known, in her last months at Beechwood and before she ‘went to Oxford’ it became a thrill for her to know that Joseph Conrad, who’d been born in Poland and
had sailed the seas, was actually alive then, somewhere not so far away, in the folds of England. A thrill that couldn’t last long, though she’d been alive to know it, because one
morning in August 1924—it was like a sudden personal shock—she’d read in the paper, before reflattening it and putting it on Mr Niven’s breakfast table, that Joseph Conrad
had died.

And, if the truth be known (though she would never say this, in interviews or to anyone), all the pictures she’d got to see of Joseph Conrad—the later Conrad—had made her fall
in love with him. The gravity, the beard, the expression in his eyes as if he were seeing something far off that was also deep inside. She had even sometimes imagined what it might be like to lie
in bed with Conrad, just to lie beside him, not speaking, a naked, ageing Conrad, both of them looking up and watching the smoke from their cigarettes rising, mingling under the ceiling, as if the
smoke held some truth greater than either of them could find words for.

The first sigh of the East on my face. That I can never forget.

She would become a writer. She would write books. She would write nineteen novels. She would even become a ‘modern writer’. Though how long do you remain
‘modern’? It was like the word ‘youth’. And was that what writing was about anyway: modernity? She would know times and changes, and write about them. She would live to be
over ninety, nearly a hundred, and in her later years when she developed a definite mischievous streak and when she was wheeled out yet again—‘Jane Fairchild at Eighty’,
‘Jane Fairchild at Ninety’—she would mention the names of writers of the past as if, once upon a time, they had actually been her friends.

All the scenes. All the real ones and all the ones in books. And all the ones that were somehow in-between, because they were only what you could picture and imagine of real people. Like trying
to picture her mother. Or only what you could suppose might have been true, if things had turned out differently, once, long ago. She might have gone with him, it might somehow have been magically
arranged, to stand, pressed close to him, by the rail, in the chill of the dawn, as the sun unfurled great fiery carpets across the downs and as Fandango drew close, nostrils flaring and steaming,
hooves pounding. She might have understood it and known it for ever. The fourth leg? The fourth leg was hers.

She would tell in her books many stories. She would even begin to tell, in her later careless years, stories about her own life, in such a way that you could never quite know if they were true
or made up. But there was one story she would never tell. On some things she would be as impeccably silent as Ethel (who became Edith after all) proved to be. As silent as, she supposed, Joseph
Conrad, for all his story-telling genius, would have been about some things, lying there beside her like some wonderful hollow husk of a man.

Telling stories, telling tales. Always the implication that you were trading in lies. But for her it would always be the task of getting to the quick, the heart, the nub, the pith: the trade of
truth-telling. It had been Donald’s task too, in his way. Poor Donald, taken away from her forty, fifty years ago.

Enough of this interview claptrap and chicanery. So what was it then exactly, this truth-telling? They would always want even the explanation explained! And any writer worth her salt would lead
them on, tease them, lead them up the garden path. Wasn’t it bloody obvious? It was about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the
very feel of being alive. It was about finding a language. And it was about being true to the fact, the one thing only followed from the other, that many things in life—oh so many more than
we think—can never be explained at all.