WITH AN EFFORT, Milly roused herself. It was quarter past one now, and Mrs Graham still wasn’t back. Milly was going to be late for her next job. By the time Mrs Graham had come in, and by the time she had finished reproaching Professor Graham for whatever it was he was doing wrong there behind the newspaper….
“Arnold!”
Mrs Graham’s voice and the slam of the flat door came almost simultaneously:
“Arnold! Why on earth haven’t you started lunch? Whatever are you waiting for?”
A swirl of briskness and frosty air flicked for a moment at Milly’s domain in the kitchen, and then moved on. Mrs Graham might be reckless in some ways, but not so reckless that she would risk annoying the Daily Help when there was a perfectly good husband available.
“It’s such a waste of time!” she rounded on him again. “There’s no need to wait for me, I’ve told you a million times! You could practically have finished your lunch by now, and given yourself a bit of time to relax before you have to rush back!”
“I am relaxing,” the professor pointed out, placidly. “At least, I was till you came in, my love. And I never have to rush back, as you know very well, dearest. I always leave myself plenty of time.”
He had lowered his newspaper as he spoke, and was blinking at his wife over the top of it with a sort of innocent wonder. Or was he annoying her on purpose?
It was hard to tell, for by now Mrs Graham was launched on a saga of grievance so fluent that nothing he could say, annoying or otherwise, could deflect it even for a moment from its (obviously) well-worn channels:
“If we had a car—” she was saying—and from her tone of voice Milly knew that she must have been saying it for years—“If you’d only get a car, Arnold, we wouldn’t have all this trouble! It would cut your travelling time by an hour a day, at least….”
“But I like my hour’s travelling time,” the professor explained, maddeningly. “It gives me time to collect my thoughts. It’s peaceful.”
“Peaceful!” The word seemed to have touched the very core of Mrs Graham’s annoyance. She flung her coat and scarf on to a peg and came right into the room. “Peaceful! And how peaceful do you think I find it, slogging about in all weathers? Do you realise that I had to wait forty minutes for the bus this morning? Forty minutes, on that icy corner by the library gardens?”
“You must have just missed the twelve twenty-five, then,” observed her husband, consulting his watch interestedly. “If you miss the twelve twenty-five there’s nothing till after one. I find that myself, when I’m coming from the library.”
Whoever it was who first suggested turning swords into ploughshares must have had a shrewd idea of how devastating, in skilled hands, the weapons of sweetness and light can be.
“Oh—you!” cried Mrs Graham, fast losing control of the situation. “I’ve never known anyone so …! Ah, thank you, Mrs Er, we’re just ready …!”
The complete change in her voice and manner, from fishwife to lady of the house, almost made Milly drop the joint, from sheer admiration. What acting! And what made it even more of a tour-de-force was that Mrs Graham surely knew—and knew that Milly knew that she knew—that Milly had heard every word of the dispute across the four feet of space dividing the kitchen from the dining-room.
Pure atavism, of course: a race-memory of the days when servants weren’t quite real, and so it didn’t matter what they heard. And more appropriate—had Mrs Graham but known it—than anyone could have guessed, because Milly, of course, wasn’t quite real. Not her name, nor her way of life, not anything about her. She was a construct: a figment of her own imagination: a splinter off the final, shattering explosion of her former self, shot out into space, and now somehow taken root, like a dragon’s tooth, in Mrs Graham’s kitchen….
“… And did you chop up Alison’s lettuce and mix it in as I showed you, Mrs Er?”
Mrs Graham’s rather school-mistressy tone, and the exaggerated concern with which she peered into her daughter’s plate, annoyed Milly for a moment. Had she not been chopping Alison’s lettuce for a long time now, and never a word of complaint from either the carpet or the plastic seat of the high chair? For a moment, intoxicated by that consciousness of power which is part and parcel of being a Daily Help, she toyed with the idea of Taking Offence: of watching them grovel and squirm, pumping out flattery and blandishments on an absurd scale, in a desperate effort to placate her.
But, noblesse oblige. Like other ruling classes before them, the Daily Helps of today must learn to wield their power decorously, and to resist its heady corruptions.
Besides, by now Milly realised that the fuss about the lettuce wasn’t really about the lettuce at all, nor was it really addressed to her. Mrs Graham was simply trying to reestablish her own image of herself after the quarrel. Outmatched by her husband, she was going to show herself in control at least of a lettuce leaf.
Lunch was necessarily a rather subdued affair after all this. Mrs Graham took over the carving, as she always did when she wanted to show her husband how late it was, and how there was no time to have him fumbling about at the job; and while the knife flashed this message across the table in a morse-code of lightning strokes, and slices fell from the leg of lamb like grass before the blades of a mower, conversation would have seemed discourteous: a boorish interruption of this fine flow of communication. Even Alison messed her dinner about more quietly than usual, refraining from saying “Da!”, with craftsman’s satisfaction, as each handful landed on the floor. And as to Professor Graham, he showed no signs of being aware of anything at all. With the loose-leaf notebook of his afternoon’s lecture propped in front of him, he accepted with apparent contentment whatever food was set before him, and ate it with good appetite. The only sign he made of being aware that anyone else existed was in the way he clutched absently at his plate and glass every time Milly passed behind his chair on her errands to and from the kitchen: a legacy, this, of years of eating in university canteens, where zealous clearing-up women, like seagulls on the Embankment, snatch food from under the very knife and fork of the unwary. Milly wondered if he would ever learn that she, at least, was not as zealous as all that? Or were the long-term effects of Higher Education irreversible?
*
It was nearly three o’clock by the time Milly got to Mrs Day’s that afternoon: but it didn’t really matter, because Mrs Day was never in. Milly had, in fact, never met her, and apart from that initial telephone call, and later on a message about where to find the key, she had never spoken to her. Thus she didn’t know her at all—or rather, the only Mrs Day she knew was the one she had gradually constructed, clue by clue, from the trail of evidence left around the flat.
A typewriter, with always the same dusty page jutting from the roller:
This may seem, on the face of it, a rather extreme position to adopt, or at least to savour of the disingenuous; but it must be borne in mind that congruence rather than equivalence should be our aim.
Yes, indeed! Good, safe stuff, congruence! Milly used to wonder about it sometimes, when, at her lowest ebb of afternoon tiredness, she reached this point in the dusting: and to wonder, too, if it wouldn’t be rather fun to go on with it—say to half way down the page—and see if her employer noticed? Why, the poor woman might even be grateful; it was obviously something waiting to be finished.
What, though? A highbrow novel—with a publisher’s deadline being missed while the crucial pages sat thus immobilised in the typewriter? Or an article for some specialist journal on almost any subject whatsoever with the Editor ringing up, more and more irate, as press day drew near? Or could it even be a love-letter—there were couples, Milly knew, who in the heat of passion wrote this sort of thing to each other endlessly, in the interests of analysing their relationship to shreds. She imagined the poor man sitting alone in his attic/boarding-house/loveless mansion, rushing for the post each morning, his soul afire with longing for polysyllables that never came.
When she was at her very tiredest, Milly would toy idly with ways of continuing the passage that would fit all of these three possibilities. As she slumped over the dusting, taking the weight off her feet as best she could, appropriate sentences seemed to flow through her exhausted brain with extraordinary fluency:
But of course, as far as this is concerned, there are two ways of looking at the matter, neither of them entirely atypical, and neither (at least from the point of view of the onlooker) either more or less convincing than any other possible approach. For it must not be forgotten that the factors previously cited may well be only marginally relevant to the particular point at issue. In saying this, one is, of course, discounting the more obvious considerations: it is a matter, really, of the concepts applied, and the level of coherence aimed at …
Why, one could go on like this for ever! Milly was amazed that the clever Mrs Day should be finding any difficulty with it. She must be either a very busy sort of woman, or a very muddled one. Muddled, probably: a truly busy woman either finishes this sort of thing, or she refrains from starting.
Or perhaps the incomplete masterpiece wasn’t hers at all? Perhaps she had a highbrow lover who had brought his typewriter to his assignations just once too often, and had thus found himself out on his ear, minus the end of his paragraph?
Yes, this seemed the most likely. It was more in keeping, too, with the Mrs Day revealed by the rest of the flat.
Her bedroom, for instance, strewn with fringed ponchos and psychedelic cat-suits. Four kinds of eye-shadow and a blonde hair-piece belied the learned pretensions of the typewriter: while flimsy shoes, kicked here and there as though the wearer had shed them triumphantly the moment she entered the flat, suggested that her feet were killing her more often than not—sure sign of an exciting social life. No one has ever been able to get far in the glamour stakes unless her feet are hurting.
What did Mr Day think of it all? So far, Milly had found no conclusive evidence of his existence, unless you counted the cigarette ash all over the place, and the permanent presence of a man’s overcoat on a peg in the hall. Though this, of course, could just as easily have been left behind by the congruence man, when he leapt up from his typing and fled before the onslaught of Mrs Day’s scarlet, inch-long nails.
If there was a Mr Day, then he must be a very tidy man, Milly decided, as day by day she tidied the all-feminine clutter from Mrs Day’s bedroom floor. The bed, too, though a double one, had a decidedly feminine look, with its pink nylon sheets and matching frilled pillow cases; not to mention the pink panda night-dress case, with its simpering Walt Disney eyelashes and the zip coyly camouflaged along the length of its stomach. No doubt such a creature passed muster with the occasional lover—occasional lovers put up with almost anything, knowing that tomorrow they will be safe back in their own beds with their indigestion tablets to hand. No doubt such a one would easily bring himself to smile benignly on the awful panda, and to agree that it was cute. “You must pander to it, darling!” Mrs Day perhaps giggled, each time, as she shimmered out of her cat-suit … and each new lover in turn would be enchanted by such wit. But a husband? To have this sort of thing year in and year out … it would be an odd sort of man who would put up with it.
Well, and perhaps Mrs Day’s husband was an odd sort of man? Perhaps it was he who had fixed up that great mirror opposite the foot of the bed, in which you could see yourself as you lay propped against the pillows (Milly had tried, and so she knew). The Days could sit and watch themselves drinking morning tea, if they liked. They could see not only their partner’s ugly, contorted face during a quarrel, but their own as well. Lovely.
Sometimes, as she enlivened her solitary afternoons with this sort of thing, Milly felt it was rather sad that poor Mrs Day couldn’t do that same sort of thing about her. But there were no clues that way round: no data on which to work. Just a clean flat in place of a dirty one, and, on Fridays, the removal of the envelope with two pounds forty it. Even the most fanciful employer couldn’t build much of a picture of her Daily Help out of that.
Just as well, actually. Every now and then Milly went quite hot and cold wondering what would happen if her unknown employer did walk in suddenly, and see what she was doing.
Not that she was doing any harm: nor, in the long run, was she skimping her work at all. She always did the two hours’ work for which she was paid. It was the way she set about it—the way one does set about things when entirely alone and unobserved—that would have caused the raised eyebrows.
For the first thing Milly did, when she arrived tired, straight from Mrs Graham’s, was to choose the most inviting of Mrs Day’s new library books, and settle herself on the sofa with it. Mrs Day must belong to a very good library: the latest shiny best-sellers always seemed to be lying on her window-ledge almost as soon as they were published. Sex, cancer, the end of life on earth—all the most popular topics were laid out for Milly’s delectation week by week: and having made her choice, Milly would lie and read greedily, for twenty minutes or more, gobbling the pages with the uncritical gusto that comes from book-starvation. Access to books had been difficult for her of late.
And so there she lay, often till past three o’clock, in Byzantine luxury: central heating, absolute peace and quiet, and—if she cared to look out at it—a wonderful view through the picture window, right across the tiled roofs of the old town, to vistas of wintry sky and grey, tumbled sea. It was a lovely bit of the day, and Milly looked forward to it all morning. And later, as she bustled about the flat, she would often find herself stopping … to read a picture postcard that had arrived … to try on a pair of Mrs Day’s gold sandals … to examine the framed photograph of a handsome young man who might be Mr Day and then again he might not … or to sit on the edge of the unmade bed reading an article in the New Statesman…. This is what is called self-discipline, greatly lauded nowadays in contrast to discipline of the more old-fashioned kind. Its only disadvantage, for Milly, was that it made her two hours’ work at Mrs Day’s take at least four hours, which was very tiring, and got her home too late to put her feet up before going out for fish and chips with Jacko and Kevin.
The first thing Milly noticed, when she arrived on this particular Thursday, was that Education for Death was still there. She recognised it from right across the room, sleek and successful-looking, with its shiny red lettering and the crude silhouette, in vivid black, of a child with round white eyes, and round white buttons all down his front, and his hair sticking up all over his head—presumably with horror at the education he was receiving.
Milly noted its presence with relief (Mrs Day had a maddening habit of returning her books to the library just as Milly was getting properly into them), but before she settled down to it, she took a quick look round the flat to assess the nature of her afternoon’s tasks. It was different every time. Sometimes the bedroom was a shambles, and the sitting-room virtually unused: sometimes the other way round. Sometimes the kitchen was so cluttered with dirty crockery that you could hardly move, at others the washing up had been done, but there were beer bottles all over the bathroom. You never knew. And what made it more complicated was that Mrs Day sometimes made hasty, last-minute efforts to make the place look a bit better—shoving dirty glasses behind the window-curtains, kicking crumpled paper handkerchiefs under the bed, or tossing a clean newspaper lightly over the place where the cat had been sick.
None of this helped at all, of course, but Milly presumed that her employer meant well. Anyway, it wasn’t too bad this time. A saucepan had been burnt and not left to soak: and whichever character it was who threw his cigarette-ends into the electric fire as if it had been an open grate, had been visiting again: but otherwise everything was much as usual. There was one of Mrs Day’s scribbled notes, though, propped up for Milly’s attention against the flour-bin:
If Mr Plzpwrdge rings up, it read. Please tell him to skrr the dgllrwn and not to rwrwll prrrn beivoose until I let him know.
Thank you. A. L. Day
Milly sighed. Mrs Day was always leaving notes like this, and Milly often wondered what happened about them.
Please wash the strt grr thoroughly had been the first one, followed, the very next Tuesday, by Please be careful not to rdvool the qumqmvruin gra pllooll without removing the plug.
Milly had done her best. She had washed thoroughly everything that looked in the least like a strt grr; and as to the qumqmvruin gra pllooll, she had played for safety, and avoided anything that had a plug on it at all, for fear of rdvooling it.
So far, the method seemed to have worked all right. Anyway, she had not as yet found any fierce notes pointing out that the strt grr was still filthy. Thus it was with a fairly tranquil mind that she tossed this latest specimen into the waste-paper basket (if and when this Mr Plzpwrdge did phone, he would presumably know himself what he was talking about), and settled herself happily on the sofa to read.