Read Online Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift - Free Book Online Page A

have flitted between the library and those silent rooms upstairs. There were even a few books that looked newly and
hopefully purchased, but never actually begun.
    Rider Haggard, G.A. Henty, R.M. Ballantyne, Stevenson, Kipling . . . She had good reason to remember the names and even the titles on some of the books.
The Black Arrow
,
The Coral
Island
,
King Solomon’s Mines
. . . She would always see their grubby, frayed dust jackets or the exact coloration of their cloth bindings, the wrinklings and fadings of their
spines.
    Of all the rooms at Beechwood, in fact, the library, for all its dauntingness, was the one she most liked to clean. It was the room in which she most felt like some welcome, innocent thief.
    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.
    And later, much later in her life, she would say in interviews, in answer to a perennial (and tedious) question, ‘Oh boys’ books, adventure books, they were the
thing. Who would want to read sloppy girls’ stuff?’
    Her eyes might glint, her wrinkled face purse up a bit more. But then she might say, if she wanted to be less skittish, that reading those books then—‘the war, you understand, the
first one that is, was barely over’—was like reading across a divide. So close, yet a great divide. Pirates and knights-in-armour, buried treasure and sailing ships. But they were the
books she had read.
    The library at Upleigh was remarkably similar. There was the same dominant wall of books that looked as though they had never been read. There were the same