Love across the class divide is at the heart of Graham Swift’s Mothering Sunday, a wonderful novella that takes place on one day in 1924.
The story is told from the perspective of Jane Fairchild, an orphaned maid in a small country house who’s been in a secret relationship with the son of a nearby well-to-do family for several years. On a Sunday in March when the other servants depart to visit their mothers, Jane makes her own plans for a quiet day in the garden, reading books borrowed from her employer’s library. Her day — and her life — are changed when her lover calls with a proposal of a tryst at his parents’ house.
This may be their last ever assignation for Paul Sheringham is due to marry (purely for financial reasons) within a few weeks. So this time together in the empty house is especially precious. Neither want their morning of passion to end but Paul is expected for lunch at Henley with his parents, his fiancée and her parents. He speeds off to his appointment, leaving Jane lying naked in his bed, bathed in sunlight.
The older Jane remembers those hours of sheer joy and so too the shock of the news that awaited her when she eventually returned to her employer’s house. As the narrative moves back and forth from young woman in 1924 to her 80-year-old version at end of the century, we’re drawn further and further into Jane’s mind on that day. The shock over the catastrophe, the fear her secret will be discovered, her distress because she could not share her feelings with anyone. And her thoughts about what might have been:
She would brood over it like some passage that perhaps needed redrafting, that might not yet have arrived at its proper meaning
It’s a very personal and interior type of narrative. Are we always told the truth or the whole truth? Jane isn’t your typical unreliable narrator but as a successful writer, the older Jane acknowledges that over the years she’s laid several false trails to avoid her fans or the media getting anywhere close to the truth about her life.
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.
Mothering Sunday beautifully evokes the atmosphere of the 1920s, a time of sorrow still as families mourn the loss of their offspring during the war (Paul’s two brothers were themselves killed in action). But also a time of change with new possibilities for the future emerging.
It’s a tightly written piece of fiction with so many layers of subtlety that when you reach the end it’s tempting to begin afresh to discover what you might have missed the first time around.
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