The coffee morning! And if they use the loo upstairs then they may see the unmade bed! They must not see the unmade bed. Be calm.
It’s hours to go yet. Two hours. I shall make the bed. And try not to think what I shall do after that.
I stand at the end of the bed, patting my cheeks. My skin is still smooth; the sheets before me are wrinkled. I suppose that, as I walk among men and they look at me and see me still pure and youthful (facial exercises and skin-cream actually), as I walk about among them, so pure and youthful, here in the upper part of the house, my secret lies concealed, shut up. It is the bed. It is the ageing monster. Tightly constrained by blankets, it is the bed, hideously creased and riven, that is the passive recipient of my griefs and vices.
It is as if I had spent not one night but eighty years in that bed. I continue patting my cheeks to reassure myself as I look down on it. Most of the ridges run crosswise and I can deduce from this that I spent most of the night pulling myself up on the pillow.
I could be an amnesiac who fears she may have committed a murder the night before. If only she could reconstruct the sequence of events that fateful night, for is that brown mark not a blood stain? If not a blood stain, then what? (By the way, the best thing with blood stains is a soaking and a biological powder. When I scatter flakes of the biological powder on my hand and contemplate their forms, vaguely reminiscent of crystalline snowflakes, I smile for I know that their stillness is deceptive. Locked in these frozen inorganic forms, like so many djinn in so many bottles, millions of living cells are hidden. These flakes pulse with life. I am their mistress, the Snow Queen. The cells wait to be released by the action of water – a single tear might be enough – so that they in turn may release their enzymes. The enzymes descend through the swirling waters to grapple on the strands of fabric with the clotted blood. They crouch over the reddish brown stuff, tearing, chewing, ripping, breaking up the surface of the stain, so that its particles drift towards the surface of the water. I think biological powders are wonderful.)
Still rapt in the sheets, I am also Indian tracker and geologist. I have done nothing about making the bed. Skilled tracker though I am, I can deduce nothing from Philip’s side of the bed. The man is an utter enigma, for his side of the bed is quite smooth. Is my husband a man who does not dream? Or does he carefully smooth his half of the bed when he gets up? Every morning when I wake I mean to check but I keep forgetting. It would be strange if he did tidy his half, only his half of the bed. Why should he act like that? As strange as the man with no dreams …
Does he fear me? And does he walk like a hunted Indian treading backwards and carefully scuffing out each footprint after he has made it? Yet I am not such a skilled tracker after all, for my eyes travel bewildered over the white wastes. Their Antarctic monotony is broken only by the irregular furrows of the snow dunes and the blood stain, an oasis of dark heat in all this chill. It is windless, and without the wind the formation of these snow dunes is inexplicable. One has the impression that millions of years have gone into their making, but millions of years of what? I do not know. Bemused by these and other mysteries, my eyes travel along the snowy shore, observing the tide-marks and jetsam of the night, but I find no clues that can help to interpret this landscape that lies beneath all reason.
I am sad. It is not only that I am cold and alone, but crumpled linen makes me think of grave cloths. Making the bed makes me think of the laying out of the dead. Let me not think of these last things.
I see it all not successively but simultaneously, so that my broodings on the sheets come together in a composite narrative. The night tide has ebbed from the snowbound desolation. In a house on the edge of the snows someone lies dying. It is the hideous old woman, the wrinkled portrait of evil in the attic. She tosses and writhes in her bloody strait-jacket. For so many years this bed of confinement has been all that she has known; it has been the poor woman’s opera. Now it will be her grave. She ceases to struggle. She waits for death and hopes for the Four Last Things. The first spot of blood appears on the sheets.
It is murder. She has been stabbed by the man who does not dream. As she lies there, slowly dying, she struggles to remember how she could so have offended him. She cannot. The man who does not dream meanwhile is making his escape. It is not easy to tread backwards in snow-shoes and he keeps stumbling. In any event he soon realizes that his precautions are useless, for far away, white on a white horizon, he can see his pursuer. I have called her the Queen of the Snows. She is perhaps an avenging spirit in the Eskimo pantheon. Her marvellous hatchet-nosed Indian profile reminds me of a smartly mitred sheet. It is plain that she is a spirit of vengeance, not of compassion, for she has left the victim of the attack to die unattended.
The old woman peers uncomfortably down the length of her strait-jacket. For a long time she sees only pale shades and she is comforted, they seem to beckon her on to a painless oblivion. Then she sees something else. A thin white trickle, very small, scarcely visible, has reached the foot of the bed. These are the enzymes – the snow-ants I call them. Though they have been roused by the smell of blood, they do not hurry, but advance in perfect military discipline. Even so, to the trained observer, the snapping of their mandibles and their saw-toothed claws and the swelling of their poison sacs reveal their eagerness to be at the old woman’s fatal wound. The claws of these warrior-ants are truly amazing – out of all proportion to the rest of the body and curving and swelling like pelican beaks. (By the way, to get rid of ants, the best thing is to buy a special powder. The powder is a bit messy, and stamping on them is in a way more effective, but formic acid I have found has a peculiarly nasty smell.)
There is no powder in the attic. The screams of the wrinkled old woman shrill out over the snowy wastes but bring no response. Far away, the crystal-shaped knife of the Queen of the Snows rises and falls over the dreamless man’s body. She is hurriedly and clumsily trying to hack out her victim’s heart while it is still beating. So the enzymes entered in upon their bloody feast. The ice-woman’s knife sparkles in its bloody trajectory. The dreamless man is plunged yet deeper into dreamlessness. The madwoman screams once more. Though I would never call bed-making tedious, still it is something of a chore.
I take a grip and pull the sheets taut. Philip says that I am a bit inclined to let my fancies take a hold of me. It must be true. I do love him when he says things like that. We’ll be having the coffee morning in the sitting room. I must get the floor hoovered before they come. I am full of thoughts as I stand back to look at my work. Such as: geologists think that rock folds are important, I suppose, because they are so big and have been there so long. Why shouldn’t sheet folds be important because they are small and here only briefly? I should have thought it important to capture the fleeting sheet shapes just because they are so transient. It’s all relative, that’s what I say (I say it to myself of course; I wouldn’t dare say it to anyone else). I mean, to a mite, the creases must appear as enormous mountain ranges, passes and plateaux. The mite lives in the same world as ourselves, yet a different one. It’s so difficult for me to say what I mean. I thought I could see some mites on the sheets just now, but they weren’t, just white flickers on the edge of vision. My own theory is that the white monotony of the sheets allied to the solitary nature of bed-making tends to produce deceptive visual effects. It is similar to what I have read – I forget where – about members of an Antarctic expedition having all the time the feeling that there was one more member of their party than there actually was.
Actually there are flecks of white on the sheets. I can see them now, but they aren’t moving. They must be bits of scurf from the skin. Every flake of scurf will have a tiny army of mites toiling over it – they are that small, but I can’t see them. I can only think about them and marvel at their infinite littleness. I marvel at them, but at the same time their silence, their invisibility and their mystery terrify me, but that is by the way. I would never dare mention such thoughts to others. But now, just this morning, for the first time, it occurs to me that others may have similar thoughts and be similarly afraid of speaking. I resolve now to broach the subject at the coffee morning this very day and as I so resolve I am filled with an uneasy fluttering sensation. It would be a fearful thing to talk of. The silence of those tiny mites terrifies me. And I know why. The shapes I have been seeing, the forms that they are taking …
But no. This business with the sheets, it is only a game I think, something to pass the time while doing something dull. Things are never out of control, though I sometimes play with the idea that they are. Anyway the sheets have all been smoothed out and by now my thoughts have carried me downstairs to the back cupboard and I have the Hoover out. I stand at the end of the hall, one hand on the handle at the top of the casing, the other near the head of the nozzle. I drag it forward like a trainer handling a reluctant mastiff. The hall will have to be hoovered starting from the end nearest the staircase. I press the ‘on’ switch, revelling as I do so in the power that lies in the touch of a finger. I force the Hoover’s head down so that it is made to eat the dirt that lies at my feet. It snuffles and snorts around my ankles. As long as I have the Hoover I know that I have nothing to fear from the dirt. Princess and domesticated monster, we are figures from some mysterious book of emblems. A metal chain connects us. It is not clear to me who is in bondage to whom.
We are halfway along the hall carpet when I realize that, though my dragon still roars and whistles, he is no longer eating the dirt. I kneel to look. The bag is not full. It must be one of the tubes blocked. I dismantle the tubes that lead to the head and poke and blow through them all. It is no use, there is no suction.
Now I begin to shake. My most powerful ally has died on me. (It is true that there is the washing-machine in the bathroom, but though my washing-machine has been useful in the past in detaining, interrogating, even eliminating dirt, I can hardly bring the machine with me as I move from room to room.) I look on the area of the hall carpet that remains to be done. I am still on my knees and on my knees I can feel the draught coming in under the front door. It is perhaps this that accounts for my shaking.
Only a few minutes ago the Hoover was the wise woman’s helper. Now, unless I can make it work again, it has joined the enemy, become rubbish. A valued renegade, it will crown one of the rubbish dumps of South London, its hose, curled as a dragon’s tail curls, coiled round its heap of untreasure. No Hoover and the coffee morning ladies will be here in less than an hour! Whatever shall I do? At moments like this I wish that someone really helpful would pop in – a sunny smiling neighbour eager for a chat about liquid cleansers while we sip our instant coffee, or a bustling Scottish charlady who is a demon for waxing floors, or an expert from the Institute of Whiteness. I know no such persons. Still I do have other unpredictable visitors. I am sure that my coffee morning ‘friends’ would be surprised if they met these visitors. Perhaps my visitors may come today and help me with my work …