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Mothering Sunday: A Romance, by Graham Swift
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A luminous, intensely moving tale that begins with a secret lovers’ assignation in the spring of 1924, then unfolds to reveal the whole of a remarkable life.
Twenty-two-year-old Jane Fairchild has worked as a maid at an English country house since she was sixteen. For almost all of those years she has been the clandestine lover to Paul Sheringham, young heir of a neighboring house. The two now meet on an unseasonably warm March day—Mothering Sunday—a day that will change Jane’s life forever.
As the narrative moves back and forth from 1924 to the end of the century, what we know and understand about Jane—about the way she loves, thinks, feels, sees, remembers—expands with every vividly captured moment. Her story is one of profound self-discovery, and through her, Graham Swift has created an emotionally soaring, deeply affecting work of fiction.
- Sales Rank: #164291 in Books
- Brand: Alfred a Knopf Inc
- Published on: 2016-04-19
- Released on: 2016-04-19
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.51" h x .83" w x 4.73" l, .61 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 192 pages
Features
Review
“A demonstration of what this Booker winner can do.”
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“Save some tissues for Graham Swift’s latest, an exquisite, emotionally resonant romance.”
—Entertainment Weekly
"Intense . . . the lush, sorroful prose gives considerable pleasure."
—Sophie Gee, The New York Times Book Review
“Graham Swift’s slim, incantatory new book is one of those deceptively spare tales (like Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending) that punch well above their weight. . . . More than just a story about crossing ‘impossible barriers’ like class and education it is a love song to books, and to finding words, language, and a voice. . . . It is a book you’ll want to read more than once—and then urge on your friends.”
—Heller McAlpin, NPR
“Swift accomplishes a great deal in such a tight narrative. . . . A sort of deeper Downton Abbey . . . It can be read in a sitting or two, and could make your day.”
—Robert Cremins, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Mothering Sunday is a dazzling read: sexy, stylish, subversive. You finish it and immediately read it again.”
—Jackie McGlone, The Herald (Scotland)
“A kind of feminist Cinderella . . . haunting . . . possesses a new emotional intensity.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“In examining Jane’s fears and her joys, her dreams and her dreads, Swift captures—in all its complexity—what it means to love someone you know will hurt you. But Mothering Sunday is about more than that. It is about every unrealized future, about ‘all the scenes that never occur, but wait in the wings of possibility’ . . . a touching, profound and—above all—intimate portrayal of a relationship from the perspective of a woman whom it indelibly changed.”
—Drew Schwartz, Readers Digest
“Powerful . . . dazzling . . . beautifully written and carefully observed, redolent with genuine—and often contradictory—emotion. . . . Swift is a master of subtlety, of the meaningful nuance, the casual gesture, the break in speech. Mothering Sunday is a masterpiece of understatement, of fundamental human truth and the simplicity, and significance, of single moments. It’s a stunning achievement, one woman’s story explored through the events of a single day that served as a door opening to her future.”
—Robert J. Wiersema, National Post (Toronto)
“A magnificent book, a small miracle . . . an intricate examination of our notions of love and sex, class and gender, fact and fiction and the act of memory itself . . . Exposing the extraordinary within the unexceptional has always been Swift’s genius. And so it is here. . . . Understated and enthralling, a majestic performance.”
—Stephen Finucan, Toronto Star
“A short yet powerful and intricately layered work . . . engaging and exquisite . . . It may not be Swift’s meatiest book, but with every sentence counting, and not a word out of place, it is his most perfectly formed.”
—Malcolm Forbes, The Australian
“Masterful . . . [Swift] performs a complex enough conjuring trick, creating a perfect small tragedy with all the spring and tension of a short story, spinning around it a century of consequences with so light a touch that they only brush against the charmed centre. . . . Mothering Sunday is both a dissection of the nature of fiction and a gripping story; a private catastrophe played out in the quiet drawing rooms of the English upper middle-class, the drama that unfolds is all the more potent for its containment. . . . The narrative . . . accumulates the saturated erotic intensity of a Donne sonnet. . . . Mothering Sunday is bathed in light; and even when tragedy strikes, it blazes irresistibly. . . . Swift’s small fiction feels like a masterpiece.”
—Christobel Kent, The Guardian
“An almost musical quality, like a Bach prelude and fugue reworking and reinventing themes and ideas . . . both unsettling and deeply affecting. Mothering Sunday is a powerful, philosophical and exquisitely observed novel about the lives we lead, and the parallel lives—the parallel stories—we can never know. . . . It may just be Swift’s best novel yet.”
—Hannah Beckerman, The Observer (London)
“Love and death and much in between are expertly handled in this short but powerful novella.”
—Harry Ritchie, The Daily Mail (London)
“Swift has written a book that is not just his most moving and intricate but his most engrossing, too.”
—Leo Robson, Financial Times
“This is the story of a woman’s becoming, as she discovers her power and possibility. It is a lot to pack into such a slim and tidy volume. But for all the detailed examination of character and the bold sweep of time, there is not a word wasted. . . . A lesson in poetic brevity . . . There is a lulling quality to the movement between sections of the book—rhythms and repetitions, the ebb and flow of a tide, the wearing down of rock to form sand on a beach. . . . This is a rare read indeed.”
—Ellah Allfrey, The Spectator
“A dazzling novel . . . beautiful . . . A vanished world is resurrected with superb immediacy. The shires gentry and their servants move around the pages with solid authenticity. . . . Wonderfully accomplished.”
—Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times (London)
“This deceptively short, sexy novel reflects on big themes . . . Proustian . . . reminiscent of Edward Thomas’s great poem ‘Adlestrop’ . . . a Conradian homage to a wellspring of inspiration.”
—James Runcie, The Independent
“From start to finish Swift’s is a novel of stylish brilliance and quiet narrative verve. . . . Swift is a writer at the very top of his game.”
—Ian Thomson, Evening Standard
“Mothering Sunday recommends itself as an antidote to the cloying sentimentalities of Downton.”
—John Sutherland, The Times (London)
“A perfect gem of a novel. With his unmistakable gift for detailed exactitude and emotional subtlety, Swift lightly touches on weighty issues of loss and abandonment, boldness and survival. The antidote to Downton Abbey’s prolonged manor-house soap opera, Swift’s succinct rags-to-riches tale of a young woman’s unexpected metamorphosis is a rich and nuanced evocation of an innocent yet titillating time.”
—Carol Haggas, Booklist (starred review)
“This elegiac tale offers a haunting portrait of lives in a world in transition. . . . [Swift’s] depiction of a fragile caste clinging to traditions that define their sense of noblesse oblige while struggling to bear the era’s crushing burden of ‘accumulated loss and grief’ is poignant and moving—as is his intimation of a brilliant personal destiny that rises from the ashes of a tragically bygone social order.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Sly humor and sensual detail . . . Jane is a marvelous creation who can seam wry, world-weary, innocent, or lusty. Swift has fun with language, with class conventions, and with narrative expectations in a novel where nothing is as simple or obvious as it seems at first.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
“This is a book about tales, and about time; about fictional truth and the fiction-making we call memory, and about words, ‘an invisible skin, enwrapping the world and giving it reality.’ The world would exist without words, but tales and memory—would not. . . . The book’s subtitle is ‘A Romance,’ and undeniably it is one. On length alone it will be called a novella. By whatever name one might call it, it is a masterpiece, as indelible as only the best tales are.”
—Keshava Guha, The Hindu
“Swift’s pristine gentle prose speaks to us about class in many senses—money, lineage, gender—but it speaks softly. It speaks also of memory, about truth and about knowing the truth.”
—Sandipan Deb, India Today
About the Author
GRAHAM SWIFT was born in 1949 and is the author of ten novels; two collections of short stories; and Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry and reflections on his life in writing. With Waterland he won The Guardian Fiction Award, and with Last Orders the Booker Prize. Both novels have since been made into films. His work has appeared in more than thirty languages.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ONCE UPON A TIME, before the boys were killed and when there were more horses than cars, before the male servants disappeared and they made do, at Upleigh and at Beechwood, with just a cook and a maid, the Sheringhams had owned not just four horses in their own stable, but what might be called a “real horse,” a racehorse, a thoroughbred. Its name was Fandango. It was stabled near Newbury. It had never won a damn thing. But it was the family’s indulgence, their hope for fame and glory on the racecourses of southern England. The deal was that Ma and Pa—otherwise known in his strange language as “the shower”—owned the head and body and he and Dick and Freddy had a leg each.
“What about the fourth leg?”
“Oh the fourth leg. That was always the question.”
For most of the time it was just a name, never seen, though an expensively quartered and trained name. It had been sold in 1915—when he’d been fifteen too. “Before you showed up, Jay.” But once, long ago, early one June morning, they’d all gone, for the strange, mad expedition of it, just to watch it, just to watch Fandango, their horse, being galloped over the downs. Just to stand at the rail and watch it, with other horses, thundering towards them, then flashing past. He and Ma and Pa and Dick and Freddy. And—who knows?—some other ghostly interested party who really owned the fourth leg.
He had a hand on her leg.
It was the only time she’d known his eyes go anything close to misty. And she’d had the clear sharp vision (she would have it still when she was ninety) that she might have gone with him—might still somehow miraculously go with him, just him—to stand at the rail and watch Fandango hurtle past, kicking up the mud and dew. She had never seen such a thing but she could imagine it, imagine it clearly. The sun still coming up, a red disc, over the grey downs, the air still crisp and cold, while he shared with her, perhaps, a silver-capped hip flask and, not especially stealthily, clawed her arse.
—
BUT SHE WATCHED him now move, naked but for a silver signet ring, across the sunlit room. She would not later in life use with any readiness, if at all, the word “stallion” for a man. But such he was. He was twenty-three and she was twenty-two. And he was even what you might call a thoroughbred, though she did not have that word then, any more than she had the word “stallion.” She did not yet have a million words. Thoroughbred: since it was “breeding” and “birth” that counted with his kind. Never mind to what actual purpose.
It was March 1924. It wasn’t June, but it was a day like June. And it must have been a little after noon. A window was flung open, and he walked, unclad, across the sun-filled room as carelessly as any unclad animal. It was his room, wasn’t it? He could do what he liked in it. He clearly could. And she had never been in it before, and never would be again.
And she was naked too.
March 30th 1924. Once upon a time. The shadows from the latticework in the window slipped over him like foliage. Having gathered up the cigarette case and lighter and a little silver ashtray from the dressing table, he turned, and there, beneath a nest of dark hair and fully bathed by sunshine, were his cock and balls, mere floppy and still sticky appendages. She could look at them if she liked, he didn’t mind.
But then he could look at her. She was stretched out naked, except for a pair—her only pair—of very cheap earrings. She hadn’t pulled up the sheet. She had even clasped her hands behind her head the better to look at him. But he could look at her. Feast your eyes. It was an expression that came to her. Expressions had started to come to her. Feast your eyes.
Outside, all Berkshire stretched out too, girded with bright greenery, loud with birdsong, blessed in March with a day in June.
He was still a follower of horses. That is, he still threw money away on them. It was his version of economising, to throw money away. For nearly eight years he’d had money for three, in theory. He called it “loot.” But he would show he could do without it. And what the two of them had been doing for almost seven years cost, as he would sometimes remind her, absolutely nothing. Except secrecy and risk and cunning and a mutual aptitude for being good at it.
But they had never done anything like this. She had never been in this bed before—it was a single bed, but roomy. Or in this room, or in this house. If it cost nothing, then this was the greatest of gifts.
Though if it cost nothing, she might always remind him, then what about the times when he’d given her sixpences? Or was it even threepences? When it was only just beginning, before it got—was it the right word?—serious. But she would never dare remind him. And not now anyway. Or dare throw at him the word “serious.”
He sat on the bed beside her. He ran a hand across her belly as if brushing away invisible dust. Then he arranged on it the lighter and ashtray, retaining the cigarette case. He took two cigarettes from the case, putting one in her own proffered, pouting lips. She had not taken her hands from the back of her head. He lit hers, then his. Then, gathering up the case and lighter to put on the bedside table, he stretched out beside her, the ashtray still positioned halfway between her navel and what these days he would happily, making no bones about it, call her “cunt.”
Cock, balls, cunt. There were some simple, basic expressions.
It was March 30th. It was a Sunday. It was what used to be known as Mothering Sunday.
—
“WELL, you have a gorgeous day for it, Jane,” Mr. Niven had said as she brought in fresh coffee and toast.
“Yes, sir,” she’d said and she’d wondered quite what he meant by “it” in her case.
“A truly gorgeous day.” As if it were something he had generously provided. And then to Mrs. Niven, “You know, if someone had told us it was going to be like this, we might as well have all packed hampers. A picnic—by the river.”
He said it wistfully, yet eagerly, so that, putting down the toast rack, she’d thought for an instant there might actually be a change of plan and she and Milly would be required to pack a hamper. Wherever the hamper was, and whatever they were supposed to put in it at such inconsiderate notice. This being their day.
And then Mrs. Niven had said, “It’s March, Godfrey,” with a distrusting glance towards the window.
Well, she’d been wrong. The day had only got better.
And anyway the Nivens had their plan, on which the weather could only smile. They were to drive to Henley to meet the Hobdays and the Sheringhams. Given their common predicament—which only occurred once a year and only for a portion of one day—they were all to meet for lunch at Henley and so deal with the temporary bother of having no servants.
It was the Hobdays’ idea—or invitation. Paul Sheringham was to marry Emma Hobday in just two weeks’ time. So the Hobdays had suggested to the Sheringhams an outing for lunch: an opportunity to toast and talk over the forthcoming event, as well as a solution to Sunday’s practical difficulty. And then because the Nivens were close friends and neighbours of the Sheringhams and would be honoured guests at the wedding (and would have the same difficulty), the Nivens—as Mr. Niven had put it to her when first notifying her of these arrangements—had been “roped in.”
This had all made clear one thing she knew already. Whatever else Paul Sheringham was marrying, he was marrying money. Perhaps he had to, the way he got through his own. The Hobdays would be paying in two weeks’ time for a grand wedding, and did you really need to celebrate a forthcoming celebration? Not unless you had plenty to spare. It might demand nothing less than champagne. When Mr. Niven had mentioned the hamper he had perhaps been wondering how much the Hobdays’ liberality could be relied on or how much the day might involve his own pocket.
But that the Hobdays had plenty to spare pleased her. It had nothing to do with her, but it pleased her. That Emma Hobday might be made of five-pound notes, that the marriage might be an elaborate way of obtaining “loot,” pleased or, rather, consoled her. It was all the other things it might entail that—even as Mr. Niven explained about the “roping in”—gnawed at her.
And would Mister Paul and Miss Hobday be joining the party themselves? She couldn’t really ask it directly, vital as it was to her to know. And Mr. Niven didn’t volunteer the information.
“Would you mention these arrangements to Milly? None of it of course need affect—your own arrangements.”
It was not often that he had the occasion to say such a thing.
“Of course, sir.”
“A jamboree in Henley, Jane. A meeting of the tribes. Let’s hope we have the weather for it.”
She wasn’t quite sure what “jamboree” meant, though she felt she had read the word somewhere. But “jam” suggested something jolly.
“I hope so too, sir.”
—
AND NOW they clearly had the weather for it, and Mr. Niven, whatever his earlier misgivings, was indeed getting rather jolly. He was going to be driving himself. He had already announced that they might as well set off soon, so they could “pootle around” and take advantage of such a lovely morning. He wouldn’t, apparently, be calling on Alf at the garage, who—for the right sum—could become a convincing chauffeur. In any case, as she’d observed over recent years, Mr. Niven liked driving. He even preferred the pleasure of driving to the dignity of being driven. It gave him a boyish zest. And as he was always saying, with a whole variety of intonations, ranging from bluster to lament, times were changing.
Once upon a time, after all, the Nivens would have met the Sheringhams at Sunday service.
“Tribes” had suggested something hot and outdoors. She knew it was to be the George Hotel in Henley. It was not to be a picnic. And it might well have been a day, since it was still March, of evil gales, even snow. But it was a morning like a morning in summer. And Mrs. Niven left the table to go up to get herself ready.
She couldn’t ask, even now with Mr. Niven conveniently alone, “Would Miss Hobday and…?” Even if it sounded like just a maid’s idle curiosity. Wasn’t the coming wedding the only current talking-point? And she certainly couldn’t ask, “If not, then what other separate arrangements might the two of them have in mind?”
She didn’t think that if she were one half of a betrothed couple—or at least Paul Sheringham’s half—she would want, two weeks before their wedding, to attend a jamboree in Henley to be fussed over by the older generation (by what he might have called—she could see him speaking with a cigarette in his mouth and wincingly screwing up his eyes—“three bloody showers together”).
But in any case, if she got no further information, it still left the problem that was peculiarly hers on this day, as Mr. Niven knew, of what to do with it. Today it was painfully peculiar. The gorgeous weather didn’t necessarily help at all. It only seemed—with two weeks to go—to deepen a shadow.
She was going to say to Mr. Niven, when the moment came, that if he—if he and Mrs. Niven—didn’t mind, she might not “go” anywhere. She might just stay here at Beechwood and read a book if that was all right—“her book” as she might put it, though it belonged to Mr. Niven. She might just sit somewhere in the sunshine in the garden.
She knew that Mr. Niven could only approve of such a harmless suggestion. He might even think it was a rather appealing image. And of course it would mean she’d be ready to resume her duties at once, whenever they returned. She could find something to eat in the kitchen. Milly, before she left, might even make her a sandwich. She could have her own “picnic.”
And it might even have happened just like that. The bench in the nook by the sundial. Bumblebees tricked by the weather. The magnolia tree already loaded with blossom. Her book on her lap. She knew which book it would be.
So—she would put the idea to Mr. Niven.
But then the telephone had rung and—it being one of her numberless duties—she’d hastened to answer it. And her heart had soared. That was a phrase you read in books, but it was sometimes actually true of what happened to people. It was true then of herself. Her heart had soared, like some stranded heroine’s in a story. Like the larks she would hear in a little while, trilling and soaring high in the blue sky, as she pedalled her way to Upleigh.
But she’d been careful to say, quite loudly, into the receiver and with her best answering-the-telephone voice that was both maid-like and somewhat queenly, “Yes, madam.”
Most helpful customer reviews
38 of 38 people found the following review helpful.
The power of storytelling
By switterbug/Betsey Van Horn
“Once upon a time,” is half of Swift’s sly first line, “before the boys were killed…” is a fairytale opening followed by a gut punch. And that won’t be the last of those moments that hit you like a fist. I’ve never read Swift before, but his acute word choices, lean prose, subversive undertones, recursive prose, and refined layering mark him as a mature word master and subtle storyteller. This tale centers on the life of Jane, a maid to an upper-class family, set in Berkshire, England, 1924, on Mothering Sunday, when the servants and staff are free to spend the day off to visit their parents. It is almost a tragic echo, this ritual of Mothering Sunday, considering how many young men were killed in World War I, and left their parents without sons. It reminds us that the lightness of the fairytale is offset by serious tragedies.
Jane is an orphan in her early twenties in 1924. Her story alternates between then and the present, now a woman in her nineties and a celebrated writer at the close of the twentieth century, looking back at the events that marked a turning point in her life. She had been having a seven-year affair with wealthy neighbor Paul Sheringham, whose brothers died in WW I, and who is to be married in two weeks time to the affluent Emma Hobday. As we open the story, Jane has spent part of Mothering Sunday having a tryst with Paul in his bedroom at the mansion, her only time meeting him there, rather than their usual more sordid locations. It’s like being Cinderella for the first time, without the virginity.
“There never was a day like this, nor ever would or could be again.” Jane intuits that, with Paul’s upcoming nuptials, that this will be their last time together. Everything is slow and languid for them—the sex, the post-coital smoking in bed--even his eventual departure is unhurried. After he leaves, Jane explores the entire house, naked, lazily, with fascinated interest, which opens up more fairytale allusion. “Can you look into a mirror and see someone else? Can you step through a mirror and be someone else?”
Through Jane’s eyes, the author embraces the power of storytelling—the stories we tell, the stories we own, and those that are passed on through legacy. As she nakedly, leisurely explores the Sheringham’s library, the reader gets glimpses of Jane’s first love of the narrative. She may only have a rudimentary education at this point, but her mind is already reaching far into fantasy, fable, and adventure, into the mind of a reader and writer. Jane is a discreet woman, who matured at silences during her affair with Paul. Now, as a modern writer, she masters the art of holding back when interviewed, understanding that the absence of words can be as powerful as the telling of them. "But she would never disclose that when she really became a writer, or had the seed of it truly planted in her...was one very warm day in March, when she was twenty-two and she had wandered round a house without a shred on--naked, you might say, as on the day she was born--and had felt both more herself, more Jane Fairchild, than she'd ever felt before..."
Jane breathes in the life she was given, but writes in the lives she dreams. Some would be penned, others would be prospects, and the rest she may never know. “All the scenes. All the scenes that never occur, but wait in the wings of possibility.”
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Gentle, affectionate, sexy: a wonderful novel
By Michiel Heyns
I'm a Swift fan anyway, but this was a special treat -- his best, I'd say, since the wonderful Last Orders. He has never written to a formula, so it's no surprise to find that this is rather different from the others -- although I suppose a surface similarity can be found in his fondness for the English countryside and certain aspects of English life -- in this instance the obsolete (?) tradition of Mothering Sunday -- which, the novel makes clear, had little in common with its modern commercialisation as Mother's Day. Here, in the aftermath of the First World War (the novel takes place in the early 1920's, though its extremely long-lived central character survives almost (?) into the new century), the day is intended to allow the (ever-diminishing number of) servants a day off to go to see their mothers. What Swift homes in on is that this leaves the servanted class to fend for themselves as far as meals are concerned. In this instance, it gives two neighbouring families an excuse for a lunch outing to a nearby hotel -- and the scion of one of the families an excuse to arrange a tryst with one of the maids of the neighbouring family, with whom he has has had an affair for some seven years -- now, presumably, to be terminated by his impending marriage. The novel is a leisurely and very sensuous exploration of the ensuing tryst, for once in the actual home of the young man. (The Modigliani nude on the cover, at first blush somewhat surprising on a Graham Swift cover, is in fact very appropriate to the frank sexuality of the encounter.) And that is about it, with flashes forward to somewhat surprising later career of the young woman, with one surprising development that I won't divulge. It has about it the warm languor of a beautiful day in early spring, the charm of the English countryside, the quaintness of a vanished style of life, the melancholy of a generation that has just been deprived of the flower of its young manhood, the beautiful entitlement of two young people in love enjoying each other without constraint. In some ways, it offers a counterweight to Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, with its appalled and appalling vision of British sexuality in the early sixties. What a difference forty years made! (And now the pendulum has swung back again.) Gentle, affectionate, sexy: a wonderful novel.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Contradictions
By Ellen Rosewall
Can you admire a book but not be pulled in by it? Much of what Graham Swift does here is brilliant - but it wasn't until he disclosed the main character's love of Joseph Conrad toward the end that I understood why I thought it had so much to admire but still left me cold. The writing is in many ways an homage to Conrad - the stream of consciousness, the artificial distance he creates by telling the story from Jane's point of view but not in first person, the lingering on seemingly minor points until it forces you to figure out why. Jane was a mass of contradictions. She is naked but hidden, a writer who hides the essence of herself, a maid who becomes the paramour of a rich young man and (later) a celebrated author. Because of these contradictions, we never fully trust what she reveals to us. I'm glad I read this, but I'm also glad it was short.
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