‘Hi! Am I first as usual? You took your time. I haven’t come at an awkward moment, have I?’
Stephanie Yeats. She walks straight in, not so much as glancing at the carpet beneath my feet. I stamp about in the hallway and, on the pretext of being shivery, I surreptitiously brush bits of fluff off my jersey. I smile tightly at her. My smile is tight because I remember that I have not cleaned my teeth this morning. Stephanie rattles away, intending I suppose to put me at my ease. Tight-lipped, I rattle back at her lest she suppose that she has caught me at an awkward moment, but at my ankles all this time I hear the whisper of the Fungus. I wonder if Stephanie has the same problems with her carpet as I have with mine?
No, it’s plain that Stephanie sees nothing, suspects nothing. She is going on about the cuts in London Transport services. It is as if I were entertaining a deaf and blind person to tea in the middle of a battlefield. But perhaps she does see? Perhaps this is her sang-froid? It’s just not the sort of thing one talks about. I don’t know.
As I glide away to hang up her coat, she spots the unwashed breakfast things in the kitchen.
‘Oh, let me help you with those things before the others come.’
‘No!’ My ‘no’ is almost a scream. ‘No, it’s all right. I actually like doing the washing up. I was saving it to do later.’
Stephanie’s eyebrows rise almost imperceptibly. I reach behind me to close the kitchen door, and shepherd her into the sitting room.
Once inside the sitting room Stephanie marches straight across the room. For an instant I play with the notion that she is going to examine the far wall for dust. (It was only yesterday that I noticed that the dust that clings to walls is quite different from the dust that rests on the carpet. The dust that clings to the wall has when one examines it the appearance of a thin vibrant matting. Naturally the coarser heavier bits will drift off to join the rest of the dust on the floor. On the other hand the little specks that are too fine to have been properly attached to the dustballs will float up to find a nesting place on the superficially smooth surface of the wall. On a fine day I have often taken pleasure in observing these transformations taking place in a beam of sunlight.) But no, it is the picture on the wall that Stephanie has gone to look at.
‘What a super picture. I’d never really noticed it before.’
The picture is a reproduction of a painting in the Wallace Collection, ‘A Woman Peeling Apples’ by Pieter de Hooch – a quiet Dutch interior; in the corner of a room the mevrouw sits between the sunny window and the glowing fire. There is a basket of apples on her aproned lap and her little girl stands beside her to watch her peel them. The wall is white, the mirror over their heads unblemished, the window has been cleaned and no dust dances in the beams that stream through its closely set panes. There is an open hearth and a fire burning, yet the tiled floor that extends before it is as glossy as a big-budget science-fiction movie. The mevrouw, serene in her starched collar and heavy apron, is a vision from the Other World. She hangs over our mantelpiece, my Saviour looking down compassionately upon me.
Stephanie says, ‘It’s a Vermeer, isn’t it?’
‘No, it’s a De Hooch. You can tell because in Vermeer the tiles of the floor are always at an angle to you, I mean so that they’re like lozenges with a pointy bit towards you, whereas in De Hooch the lines of the tiles run away from you like so many railway lines.’
(I’ve only seen a few Vermeers, but personally I find less to comfort me in his stuff. Things haven’t been tidied up properly in his rooms – the table-cloth is usually rumpled and there’s a great scatter of things on it, a cup, some letters, some half-eaten fruit and, though the place looks perfectly clean, I always suspect his women of having swept the dust under the carpet.)
‘De Hooch! He died mad, didn’t he? Gosh! I didn’t know that you were into that sort of thing. You should be an art historian. Hey look, you must come with me to the exhibition of feminist art that’s opening at the Hayward Gallery this week.’
Mercifully the doorbell now rings again, saving me from having to invent some reason for not going. It is Mary at the door and, before I have finished hanging Mary’s coat, Rosemary and Griselda arrive too. I usher Rosemary and Griselda into the sitting room where Mary and Stephanie have already started a wrangle about feminist art. I hurry into the kitchen.
For a few minutes in the kitchen I am on automatic and the robot within me produces the necessary list for the hands to collect – scones, biscuits, small plates, sugar, milk jug, coffee pot. I switch the kettle on and stand contemplating it. It is at this point that I always think, ‘A watched pot never boils.’ I always think that. It is as automatic as the list of coffee things. It infuriates me.
There are places and activities scattered throughout the house that always provoke in me set and invariable thoughts. Thinking these thoughts humiliates me. I feel that I have been reduced to the level of a dog. Philip was telling me once about some Russian scientist who has proved that dogs always salivate when they hear the sound of a bell. They can’t help it. Anyway, as I say, at this point I always think, ‘A watched pot never boils.’ Not only that but having thought that, I always think, ‘I always think that at this point.’ It infuriates me. I mean, there must be deep grooves in my head, like when a jelly has set, you can pour a trickle of hot water on its surface and watch the hot water furrow a pathway across the surface of a jelly, and the furrows will remain fixed there even after you have tipped the hot water off.
‘At this point I always think that. At this point I always think that.’ I suppose that theoretically that sort of thinking could go on for ever. Fortunately somehow I always manage to short-circuit the idiotic internal mumble after only a brief series of repetitions. As now, when I remember my guests. This time I resolve to watch the pot. Perhaps there is some truth in the folk wisdom after all. The point now is that today I am resolved to speak out at my coffee morning. I’m not going to let it drift on without saying what I really think about life and things. On the other hand, though I am nerving myself to this, I am at the same time terrified of what I think I have committed myself to. What will they say? How will they look? Just how awful will the awful silence be?
So I set myself to watch the kettle. My aim is to freeze time. Anything to delay the awful moment. Ah, my Saviour, my frozen icon with peeled apples, let it always be like this, with them in mid-sentence in the sitting room and me here in the kitchen watching a kettle that never boils! For a time, for a long time I think, it seems to me that my wish has been granted and I scarcely dare to breathe. Nothing happens. My face is set in the reflecting gleam of the kettle. Then, like a long exhalation of regret, I hear the faint beginning of the kettle’s whistle and its steam dissolves the frozen moment.
I turn to putting honey on buttered scones. I tip the honey-filled spoon and nothing happens. Only awkward seconds later does a thick gob of honey begin to form below the bowl of the spoon and then drop towards the scone. Education has turned me against honey on buttered scones. No one who has read Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Être et le Néant could watch me let the honey slowly roll off the spoon without shuddering. If there ever was an immoral household condiment it is honey, sticky, golden, shape-shifting honey. It pretends by turns to be a solid then a liquid! A drop of the stuff falls on my hand. It clings. It wants to be part of me – an extra layer of skin, sticky and viscous. It is soft yet it clings determinedly, so it is like the fungus. If I could, I would breast the world cleanly like a swimmer breaking through water and see the heavens as they really are, but the honey, the fungus, the household dirt, they cover my perceptions like a greasy film. The honey which first, oh so compliantly, filled the spoon, having fallen to the scone spreads over its surface in masochistic self-display. Honey is like a dog who has recognized that he is about to be worsted in a fight and who then turns on to his back to offer his vital organs to the fiercer dog in a ritualized gesture of appeasement. I am filled with revulsion for the cowardly dog who resembles honey and who will live to fight another day. On the other hand, now I come to think of it, I am not sure that I am really any fonder of the fiercer dog, who certainly has no resemblance to honey. Fierce dogs like the one who has just finished contemptuously sniffing the cowardly dog’s groin and who seems to be a mongrel with a lot of Alsatian blood in him always make me very nervous. Despondently I return to the business in hand, watching the golden fluid fall and the reflection of my weirdly elongated face trapped in its fall. Then again, I reflect, no one could read Lévi-Strauss’s Le Cru et le Cuit without identifying honey with menstrual blood and opposing it to tobacco. However the stuff is good enough for a coffee morning and I have in the past noted that smokers do not seem to sense any contradiction between their cigarettes and the scones and honey they are scoffing. By now the two dogs have gone their separate ways and my head is almost on the table, watching the honey spread over the surface of the scones, but I hear sounds behind me. Stephanie and Griselda are in the kitchen. I do not know how long they have been watching me.
‘Can we help you carry things through?’
I smile brightly at them. ‘Honey on scones for everyone?’
From their gratified expressions I deduce that they have not read Lévi-Strauss’s Le Cru et le Cuit. We carry through tea things, coffee things, scones and boudoir biscuits. Penny and the rest have been let in while I was in the kitchen. The women in the sitting room form an approximate circle of light, heads bending inwards in innocent communion, faces all smiling, their backs turned to the gathering forces of darkness around them. Flights of conversation pass in all directions like arrows on a muddled battlefield.
‘… just like a battlefield.’
‘… so there we were passing this egg-cup round and, as you passed it to the next one, you had to say your name and the name of the person who had just passed it to you. Honestly, I just got the giggles.’
‘What lovely scones! They must have taken you ages to make!’
A morning like this is really an occasion for the display of one’s housekeeping skills, but one is not supposed to really talk about them. I am supposed to brush the compliment lightly off and move the conversation swiftly on to some new topic – arts, politics, society, whatever. But I do not want to. I want to talk about the passage of time while making scones.
‘… a black-belt now, and it’s all because she went along thinking that Tae Kwan Do was the Japanese for flower arranging.’
‘What you are arguing for is a politics of hysterectomy, isn’t it?’
I am unable to speak. My attention is caught by a ball of fluff on Stephanie’s skirt and then moves to the folds of the skirt itself. A shallow central valley runs down from the waist to the knees. The gathering of the skirt under her legs creates areas of tension which in turn generate the creases and wrinkles that feed into the central valley, their highlighted ridges and deep shadowed undercuttings simultaneously denying and proclaiming the nature of the fabric.
‘I got it at Monsoon.’ She laughs nervously. She has seen me staring.
I say nothing. We lack a vocabulary, a notation, for what I am seeing. As it tumbles from the knees the structure of the skirt’s folds becomes looser. In loops and whirls and arcs it cascades in glorious complexity. Here is the Great Mystery, for it is as if in the creases of Stephanie’s skirt I see the Fingerprint of the Almighty impressed upon her thighs. I find this fingerprint everywhere – the Divine Illiterate, His mark – the mysterious Signature of Things, that leaps from the folds of a rumpled skirt to the grain of an oak tree to the striations of a wind-shaped rock to ash in a deserted fireplace. Now I want to cry out. Ecstasy! Fire! Joy! Look at those creases! Don’t move your legs, Steph! Don’t speak!
‘It was in the sale. Most of the good things were gone, but I got this.’
A brief pause. Is it possible that she in turn is enraptured by the gathered folds of my skirt? But no, it is an essential sign of my grasp on reality that I realize that this is not likely. A thousand dustballs could silently rumble over the carpet towards her ankles and she would not notice them, but they do. I see them and I understand that she cannot – does not wish to – see them. I am not like Stephanie, but, to use a favourite phrase of hers, I know where she is at. She has shifted her position ever so slightly and with her movement the undulations of her skirt arrange themselves in a new configuration that is random and yet harmonious, and I marvel how the smaller tributary wrinkles conform to the strong pressure of the central cleft between her legs. She is still looking at me very oddly. Not the creases, then. Perhaps she is thinking that I am a lesbian staring at her like this.
‘No really, Rosemary, I don’t know how you do it. I have enough difficulty writing a letter. Anyway tell us, will it be autobiographical? Eeh hee! You’re not going to put us in it, are you?’
‘… so he said he was talking about the role of a Christian caring community in South London and I said that I was talking about him coming into my home and behaving like a pantomime cart-horse …’
‘No one’s blaming you. Well, it’s an accolade, isn’t it?’
‘I wish I could do something – write a novel, make scones like Marcia’s, hang-glide or something.’
Perhaps on the other hand she is a lesbian. It is a funny look she is giving me. Or perhaps, if she is quick as me, she may have deduced from minute indications in my comportment that I have toyed with ideas that she might think me a lesbian and then gone on to consider the alternative possibility … but no, if she is as deep as all that she will have realized that I do not really think she can be a lesbian, so that this whole unprofitable flight of thought cancels itself out, as if it had never been, but with it the golden moment in the folds of her skirt has been lost.
‘… then she came in with him, oh you know, on the lines of would female ordinands be coping people and what would you call them and so on. What about vicarettes, I said …?’
‘… No more than I could count the hairs on his chest, I said, and he had to laugh at that.’
‘… You’ve got to come. Marcia is coming. It’s at the Hayward …’
‘… The nature of the guerrilla war in South-east Asia is such that we never really know who the enemy really is and atrocities are bound to be committed by both sides. You can’t say that we should judge …’
‘… The point is, where are all the female Rembrandts and Vermeers? The bottom line of all that sort of Dutch painting is men’s proprietorial attitude to women. They are possessed, just like the carpets, dogs and fruit-bowls …’
I take a boudoir biscuit from the plate and I dip it into my coffee and I suck it, eyes closed in concentration. It is a precise psychological experiment which can transport me back to my youth, back to a coffee place opposite the college where I dip a boudoir biscuit into a cup. This movement, this flavour, this texture should be capable of evoking in vivid detail the fall of sunlight over the coffee things all those years ago and the thumb-prints on the copy of a novel that I sat reading as I waited – waiting for Philip to enter the café, waiting for the dreary academic year at college to be over, waiting for the years of preparation to be over when I could assume my chosen role as home-maker and combatant in the struggle against dirt. The smell and texture of the vinyl covering of the table overheating in the sun … Two biscuits, two beaded brown surfaces being broken by the dipping biscuits, two Marcias, one looking forward, the other looking back – how should I not be pulled out of the present moment by such an echo of the flavour and sentiment of that exact moment all those years ago? Yet I have to say that nothing of the sort happens for me. Well, I vaguely remember waiting in a café and fretting about Philip and whether I could live only for Philip and become not only a love object for him but also a household object. I can remember that and I suppose the coffee must have been murky brown and the sky must have been blue and so forth, but I have no memory for the precise fall of sunlight through the window across the teacups to illuminate the grubbily thumb-printed novel. What I have is a vague sort of black-and-white memory of something like that made up as much of words as of pictures. I am not transported in a swooning rapture out of time. I am left with my eyes shut in the middle of a coffee morning chewing on a soggy biscuit. The watched kettle of memory has once again failed to boil for me.
‘Well, when do you find the time? What is your little secret? Honestly, by the time I have got the kids off to school in the morning …’
‘… not denying that the Open Information Act hasn’t made some difference but if you think that now we are going to discover all the secrets about that war you must be very naïve. Too much of it just isn’t on paper …’
My eyes are open now. I am considering my ‘friends’ around me. What do they look like? To describe them one by one could be tedious. A composite portrait will do. She is English, youngish, middle-class. The eyes are a bit blurred, the hair straggly, no bra or not much of one, sensible shoes, sandals almost. There is a fading bruise on her left cheek which she got from a punch-up with her husband, a skiing fall, from walking into a door, an injection which went wrong, an incident which she is not prepared to talk about. Sit on a park bench and see how long it takes for her to pass by – this woman who is walking away from my coffee morning. My description is a little vague, but no way can you confuse her with Mucor, and that is what matters.
To return to that pale memory of a boudoir biscuit in the café. That was very much a living-room memory. I am a great believer in the orderly storing of memories, to make them easier to retrieve. It is quite a common mnemonic trick. I have a sort of mental image of my house, the House of Memory, and in each room I mentally place certain kinds of thing I want to remember. Generally things are pretty evenly distributed around the house, but as much as one fifth of my store of useful facts is kept in the bathroom. Partly this is because the bathroom is exceptionally well lit and clean, so it is easier to find things in there. Also, it is easier for me to run through all this useful stuff when I am actually in the bathroom, during moments of mental leisure sitting on the loo. Numbers, though, are spaced out evenly around the house. Five is in the kitchen. It is yellow and it hovers in a shimmery sort of way in front of the kitchen window. A green one and a dark blue nine are cramped together in the downstairs lavatory. Two is at the front door, and further along the hallway a black six hangs suspended more or less directly over the spot of fungus on the carpet.
Four and seven are in opposite corners of the living room where I am now silently presiding over a coffee morning. While I am sure we all visualize numbers differently I imagine that there would be a large measure of agreement about keeping four and seven in the living room, for after all they are the numbers of conviviality, aren’t they? Perhaps it is this that I should raise now, cutting in on their arguments about the Vietnam War and the display of women in Dutch art. I wish, I really wish, I could pay attention for long enough to what they were saying to be able to participate more fully. Perhaps when they are gone I should get a notebook out and reconstruct from memory as much of their conversation as I can remember. If I made a regular practice of this then perhaps I should be able to set up a file of cards on the sorts of thing that everyone says and from my cards be able to memorize a list of suitable topics to bring into the conversation.
Anyway to go back to the numbers, three and eight are in the dining room across the hallway from the sitting room. I don’t know why they are there, unless possibly it is because we keep the TV there as well and Philip and me and the TV makes three, while eight is the maximum number of people we can get round our dining table, but I’m guessing. Tens I keep upstairs in the two bedrooms, the bathroom and on the landing. Hundreds and powers of ten higher are fished out from the jumble in the attic. I see infinity as the cloudy sky rolling over our house. Before I went ‘underground’ as a housewife, I read mathematics at college (not a very good degree, I am afraid!) but, like many mathematicians who are even better than I am at Boolean algebra and so on, I am not much good at doing quite simple sums of addition and subtraction. So then, when totting up the household accounts, I have found it a help to go up and down the stairs into the various rooms, so as to visualize the figures I am adding up more clearly. It really works! Sometimes though I must admit I have found myself walking into a room and forgetting what I have come for, an imaginary number or a pair of Philip’s socks in the drawer. There are limits to all memory tricks, but still … I have thought about writing to Good Housekeeping about this in the hope of seeing it printed as Tip of the Month.
They are so close in confabulation that their heads almost touch. I stand on the edge tightly smiling (my dirty teeth). The sitting room was done yesterday when I remembered that they were coming. Nevertheless even here, in ‘the room for best’, the Fungus has its allies. How can they be so oblivious? I am straining to pick up an interchange about men not putting their shoes away, but it is lost. Meanwhile Steph is going on about the feminist exhibition, Griselda and Mary are talking about the new vicar, and the rest are listening to Rosemary being solemn about her bloody novel.
Stuff her novel. Isn’t her housework enough for her? It’s all so false. In God’s name why don’t we, why can’t we talk about housework? That’s all we ever do all day long so it must be important. It is always in our thoughts. We must talk about it, then. I am screwing up my courage to say so. But the truth is that I would rather be anywhere than here and now.
Politics, religion, art, all that high-pitched chatter – they remind me of coolies round a camp-fire, backs to the dark, talking of anything except He whom they fear.
The coolies sit with the soles of their boots showing to the fire. Their eyes are tight slits against the stinging wind. Somewhat shapeless in their fur caps, worn jerkins and wrappings of cloth strips, they are disposed around the fire in a way which reminds me of the tea parties I used to arrange for my dolls when I was a girl. The chief muleteer is holding a stick up in the firelight. The coolie heads come closer together. I cannot see, but I know that on the stick there will be two tiny insects and that the coolies are going to make them fight.
‘According to the philosopher Arbus, the Chinese believe that one passes through boredom to fascination.’ This is Père Teilhard who has come up behind me while I stood engrossedly contemplating the delight that our workers find in the smallest things.
Père Teilhard is a priest of course. He is also one of the leaders of the expedition and the undisputed authority on the excavation.
‘I wish I shared their faith,’ I reply. ‘How many days have we been here now? And what have we found? And if it’s like this now, what will it be like when winter comes …?’ I give an expressive shiver.
‘Yes, one always expects a desert to be hot. That is not true of the Gobi, I am afraid.’ He speaks softly. ‘Yet it must be admitted that even for one like myself who has dedicated his life to work in these unChristian parts, this must be the coldest place in which I have ever had to conduct a dig.’
I look quickly back at him. Does he fear what I fear here at Lop-Nor? The coolies sense it, I know. They have been talking about the earth spirits, how the earth spirits show themselves when disturbed. Faces have been seen in chance arrangements of gravel or carelessly folded linen. The faces can easily be made to disappear with a scuff of the boot. Still they have been seen. And some of the workers have been making surreptitious visits to Dust-Muhammad, the Buryat geomancer who is camped on the other side of the Nor.
The eyes of Teilhard are heavily pouched, the cheeks so cadaverous as to suggest that he has no jaws, and his skin is yellower than any Chinaman’s. If I let my eyes drift out of focus, then his face seems to blend in with the sand-laden air around us. Through a freak of turbulence, the air around the camp fire at the head of the crevasse is relatively clear, but everywhere else, all around us, the wind whips up billows of yellow sand and coils of darker subsoil. Even though banks of thick cloud lie between us and the sun, the sky is yellow. A susurrus of grains trickles over our boots. The Bactrians are tethered on the very edge of visibility twenty yards away. Our camels were being loaded with supplies for the geologists’ forward camp when this blew up and the chief cameleer (now totally absorbed in urging his insect on) has not troubled to unload them again. The camels strain against their ropes. Some of them, too obstinate to kneel, are lurching dangerously, for their loads which were poorly trussed threaten now to tip them over.
‘As to what we have found,’ Teilhard continues, ‘we have found a great deal. You must admit it. Come to my tent and I will show you what has been turned up today.’
I nod and, throwing up my scarf to cover my mouth and nose, I plod behind him in the yellow storm. The tent is found only by stumbling over its guy ropes. He fumbles at the flaps, then stands aside to let me untie them. We throw ourselves head first into the tent and a great deal of sand follows before the flap can be fastened behind us. For a while there is nothing but darkness and grit. Then the flame of the oil lamp shoots up between the hands of the priest. He forages in his haversack and passes something to me. I take it from him gingerly, expecting it to be one of the day’s finds. It is a piece of Sporting and Military Chocolate.
‘In France I would never eat chocolate, not even when I was a boy. Every street-corner shop sells the stuff. But here, in the middle of the Gobi, there is something luxurious in the activity – so luxurious, I would almost call it sinful.’ Teilhard giggles.
He rummages in his haversack again and hands me something else. I am holding something small but heavy, a shapeless lump – no, not shapeless, for surely nothing is truly shapeless. Soft but heavy. Perhaps its weight comes from the encrustation of dirt? I fetch out my little brush and cloth and begin to work away at cleaning it. This is my skill. That is why I am here. It had not been expected that there would be so much work for me. The expedition was not actually looking for human arte-facts. Teilhard’s own interest was in scaly lumbering horned beasts who used to lay eggs in sand – whatsitodons or that-sosaurs, some name vaguely reminiscent of a toothpaste ingredient. So the site had been chosen almost at random, a place where the erosive wind had blown away the loess and it would be quicker for us to reach the more ancient strata. Great was our astonishment then when we realized that the trench we had set our coolies to dig was cutting through the midden of an ancient civilization of which even the name was lost. For over a week now we have been digging through or around building rubble, pottery sherds, hearth ash, powder-dry turds. To the eye of the amateur all that we had found was rubbish: to the archaeologist it was gold dust. (I remember Père Teilhard remarking, in a lecture given to the Imperial Academy in Peking, that our view of the ancient preliterate civilizations, not only of Central Asia but also of East Africa, Latin America and elsewhere, had been distorted by the fact that the archaeologist worked largely from the discards and rejects of those civilizations. The museum in Peking was now full of objects which their ancestors thousands of years previously had judged too ugly or too useless to preserve.)
The heavy wind thuds against the tent. The light wavers. I turn the thing round and round in my hands. The priest leans forward anxiously.
‘What do you think?’
My reply is slow in coming.
‘I don’t know. I mean that it’s not that I don’t know. There is something very powerful in this object … I sense it. There is an idea in my head but I don’t know how to put it into words.’ (It is fear as much as anything. It is a little like the fear of ever saying anything truly intimate to casual acquaintances one has invited to one’s house.)
Père Teilhard smiles.
‘Come, come, Marcia. “Much that is inexpressible would hardly be worth expression, if one could express it.” Lichtenberg wrote that. Have you read Lichtenberg? You should, you know.’
‘I don’t know … I expect that I’ll be clearer about this thing’s purpose when I’ve given it a bit of a rub with my cloth.’
‘Perhaps – but I doubt it. You know, I sometimes feel grateful that my vocation has given me insights into our archaeological work that are denied to my lay colleagues. Now is one of those times. Let me tell you, Marcia, something that I worked out for myself when I was a young seminarian. What is a good, or rather goods? (My English is not so good, I think.) I mean those things that we purchase in shops. Why in a Christian society do we call them “goods”? Because these things make us fat, or lazy, or attractive-looking or possessed of status? Surely these are not the properties which make “goods” morally good, are they, Marcia?’
I cannot reply. I am suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that this is an extraordinarily unlikely catechism to be facing in the middle of the Gobi Desert. And there is something about the object, some half-remembered promise or threat … déjà vu perhaps …
Teilhard does not notice my distress and continues.
‘Ah no, it is because a “good” is something that is good to think with. When we purchase and consume “goods” we internalize them. Goods furnish the building-blocks of our consciousness. Do you understand what I am getting at?
‘No? Well, never mind. You will come to it. I have great faith in you, Marcia. Your skills as a housewife have been invaluable to the expedition. Who was it – Emerson perhaps? – who said that genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains? Well, you have that sort of genius.’ He sighs. ‘You must read Emerson. But what I was leading to now is that this thing there on your palm is not such a commodity. Here is one of the “bads”. This is an object which is bad to think with.’ The priest looks doubtfully at the lump which is taking on shape in my cleansing hands. ‘In truth, I now regret having shown it to you at all. It was foolish of me even to have asked you to come on our expedition. You sense the evil in this thing, do you not?’
I don’t know what to say to the priest.
‘I … wouldn’t … I couldn’t ever …’ Yes, I am floundering. Perhaps the object in my hands is bad to think with. My thoughts are slow and sticky like jelly in the process of setting, and the boundaries between my words are not as clear as they usually are. And the object is a bit the same. It is not hard. It’s a bit pulpy and sticky. It gives way to my inquiring fingers then closes over them, and when I withdraw a finger it feels greasy. It is like being blindfolded and then plunging one’s hand into the dustbin in a sort of unlucky dip. Some of the plasticity of a turd, the pulpiness of a large bit of fungus, and yet with some of the sweetly clinging quality of honey mixed with greasy butter. The words in my head are all wriggly but I know what this thing is and why I am where I am. I have never really forgotten who I face, only I feared to think it in the front of my brain where all is fully lit. All the time we have been sitting in the tent, the knowledge has been resting in a dark untended back room of the brain. Soon it will come lumbering out.
‘There is material rubbish and intellectual rubbish. You are holding the former and thinking the latter. Multo in parvo.’ The priest smiles sallowly, patronizingly. ‘Ah, Marcia, I see that you are afraid. It was foolish of me to have persuaded you to come on this expedition – no, selfish rather. You see, we needed you so much. Who but Marcia could have inspired our coolies to cut through so many layers of dirt? Who but Marcia could have kept our trench so tidy? Who but Marcia could have restored our finds to such a shine and made our little patch of wilderness like home? Even so I am sorry, Marcia, for this is no place for a woman.’
I will speak. I will not be silent.
‘Father, you did not persuade me to come. I was summoned.’
‘Summoned here! How? By whom?’
‘I don’t know what you call him, Father … I call him Mucor. He … it is perhaps the Spirit of Uncleanliness.’
Teilhard crosses himself.
‘Merciful heavens, child! And have you seen the Spirit himself?’
‘I have and I fear that I shall do so again. It is for this that I was sent. Look here on my hand.’
Bits of grit still cling to the squashy lump which quivers on my palm. Tiny bubbles emerge on its surface and pop. I perceive that Mucor has appeared among these white bubbles. I am dizzy with horror. I can just hear the whisper of Mucor. My swooning vision can hardly hold Teilhard in focus. His pouched and leathery face is merging with the brown wrinkles of the tent’s roof. His voice too has become very faint. I can hardly tell one voice from another – and there are other voices …
‘… the source of a very ancient evil, the very well-spring of dirt, the seat of our Prince. It was from here that our Prince conjured up the Black Death and spread it about through the world on the backs of rats and fleas. It was here too that he directed the poisoning of the wells of the nomad herders, thereby transmitting typhoid to the unhygienic kitchens of the West …’
‘Unclean spirit, I adjure you to come out from this woman …’
‘… the numbers of men on earth in each generation increase geometrically, yet the rate of man’s increase can never equal the rate of increase of his rubbish. The earth is made of his rubble, the seas are filled with his effluent. Man toils and crawls over his own garbage like an insect …’
‘… Go out from her. Go out, I say!’
‘We always fry ours in batter …’
‘… so that walking round the gallery looking at them should be more of a consciousness-raising experience than an aesthetic one …’
‘Marcia, you must go home. I recognize the adversary. This struggle is reserved for the Church, not the housewife …’
‘Our master is outside … Only let him in and he will bed you in entropy … Go on, spoil yourself, give yourself a treat, caress yourself … You deserve it. Relax … It’s time for a break … Let your hair down and put your feet up … Comfy? Those are truffles growing under you … Hard to know where your body ends and the earth you lie in begins. As the body relaxes, it softens, becomes viscous, a bit like cheese fondue really. Delicious, isn’t it?’
Though the form of Teilhard is all but dissolved in the murk, yet his insistent whisper breaks through once more.
‘Get out, get out, I say! She’s ours and I will speak to her … Marcia, can you hear me? I’m sending you home. Pray for me there, will you? Now listen carefully. Picture a road. Picture a road, woman. Concentrate. Visualize. Don’t let yourself go to pieces. That’s what Mucor wants. Picture a road. You are walking down that road. On the left-hand side there is a house. Stop and look at that house. It has a minute little garden and a tarmac path going up to the front door. Do you see it, really see it? Good, now. It is your house. Don’t let go. Push open the latch of the gate. Only four steps will take you to the door of the house. Take those four steps. The door is green. Its paintwork is blistering. It is unlocked. Push it open and go in. Now you are in the hallway …’
‘Yes.’
Now I can see myself in the hallway, advancing like a sleep-walker. Something white and shimmering on the carpet hisses at my ankles.
‘Pay no attention to that. Keep moving, whatever you do. You are in the hallway. Everything about it is sharp and clear. Seven steps will take you to the door of the sitting room. Go into that room …’
I hesitate, hearing voices through the door, but I go in nevertheless. Only now does the whispering stop. I look back, for I want to argue with the priest. I have not told him what is on my mind.
‘I will speak out!’ I cry.
‘Why, Marcia! Whatever is the matter? You have been in such a brown study! Speak out about what?’
This is Stephanie, who is looking up at me in an amused fashion.
I do not know how I will be able to speak to them politely. Here they sit in my sitting room, exchanging bits of trivia that they have been fed by the newspapers, their husbands or the new vicar, while I am engaged in a struggle against dirt that ranges across all time and space.
Here they sit all cosy with their feet up. Their proper work is quite forgotten and they are grinning and chattering like a gang of Chinese coolies on the skive. The sand is filling the trench that we have dug today and the camels have still not been unloaded. As I watch, the scene around the camp fire is turning ugly. The insects on the stick have stopped fighting and one is mounting the other. The chief cameleer, who has staked much on this combat, whips a knife from out of his jerkin. Pere Teilhard sees me reapproaching and signals me away. Back along the road, the path, the door with blistering green paint.
‘Come on, Marcia. What is it? Say it.’
I simulate a vagueness, a bashfulness I do not feel. It all comes out in long jerky breaths:
‘No, what I want to say is that here we sit talking about big things that are false to our experience of life – you know, art, religion and so forth, things that really belong to men. Whereas all day, every day, what I am actually doing is folding blankets, washing up and things. I mean the amount of time I actually spend thinking about the role of the woman artist, Steph, is negligible compared to these other things and I’m sure that’s true for the rest of us. Even Rosemary’s novel takes her less time than the housework.
‘Don’t all look at me like that. You know perfectly well what I’m getting at. I reckon that I have spent most of my life doing things like watching some gobs of washing-up liquid cut through the grease on a plate and marvelling how that is done and wondering which of the gobs will get to the bottom of the plate first and things like that. So, I just want to say couldn’t we please talk about things that we actually know about, like for instance how long it takes a fish-finger to go brown under a grill?’
Silence. The silence lengthens. I look imploringly from face to face. Are they trying to force me to go on and thus fill the silence myself? The silence passes the point up to which one could have pretended not to have noticed anything socially awkward. (Oh, the shame of it!)
At last:
‘Well!’ Griselda gives a little laugh. ‘You could certainly cut the atmosphere with a knife.’
Mary sniffs. ‘Excuse me for breathing. Do you want us to go, Marcia? Is this one of your bad days? Is that it?’
‘No, of course not.’ Actually, no sooner are the words out of my mouth than I realize that that is what I want – for them to go. The force of Darkness is gathering, not just here in my house, but in the houses of all these women, and we sit here sipping coffee and strewing crumbs all over the carpet. It’s no use talking to them. They will remain blind to the dangers until Mucor or one of his allies – soot, excrement or grease – actually strikes.
Nevertheless, I reply, ‘No, of course not. I just wanted to testify about how I see my life, that’s all.’
‘My, we are evangelical today!’
Then Steph intervenes with characteristic vigour.
‘Oh come on, Marcia! All that daily-beauty-of-domesticity crap is just a role foisted upon us by men.’
‘No, Steph. No really. There is something there which they can’t see. Actually I wonder if it can really be true that you can’t see it either. What do you think about washing up?’
‘Whaddya mean, what do I think about washing up? It’s boring, messy and it makes my hands come out in rashes.’
Murmurs of agreement all around.
‘Oh, can’t you see? Can’t any of you see? Come on into the kitchen all of you. I’ll show you. Follow me.’
And they do follow, coffee cups in hand and whispering amongst themselves.
Now I realize that it is providential that I did not get around to washing the breakfast things earlier. How often previously have I stood here at this sink, doing the washing up and imagining to myself that I was demonstrating my skills here and being admired for them. I have imagined an invisible observer – one who perhaps is initially sceptical of the truths I am trying to teach. And now I have not one invisible observer, but a real circle of baffled housewives. At last it is really happening, my fantasy come true! All it took was courage.
My coffee morning friends stand behind me like the chorus of an ancient tragedy. Red-nailed and raven-locked, the seeress, I look into the waters and prepare to prophesy. The men are away at the wars and a mysterious darkness hangs over our homes.
Streaks of silver run down from the taps. As the hot water begins to come through, tongues of steam lap over the limpid surface. I reach for the power that is mine at the press of a finger. The jet of green spreads through the water in oriental smoke-like curls and then, as I dabble my hands in it, and feel my soul seeping out through my fingers into the water, iridescent bubbles appear seemingly from nowhere, and bubble mounts on bubble. The whole surface of the washing-up bowl is covered with bubbles, all except the patch where I have been dabbling my hands. And when I remove my hands and look down into the bowl, I see this patch as the pupil of an eye looking back at me. The water gurgles, the bubbles wink, and I am filled with joy.
‘Would you like me to help with the drying up?’
‘No, I just want you to watch.’
The order of things is terribly important. Glasses first, while the washing-up water is still free from grease. I make a couple of glasses thresh in the hot soapy water, rinse them in cold and then dry immediately. It does not do to let glasses drain. They should be brought to a polish immediately. Now I spin round, glasses in hand to show them.
‘You see!’
There is complete silence.
Of course I am not really a seeress and I cannot read people’s minds. But I do think that one can tell a lot from a person’s posture. Stephanie stands erect with her arms folded. She is so erect that she is almost leaning backwards. This means she is above any arguments that I may produce. Her arms are folded against my words. Rosemary sits on one of the work surfaces, her legs wide apart. This posture tells me that she is not at that moment expecting a sexual attack by any male aggressor. (Why it wishes to tell me that I cannot guess.) Griselda on the other hand sits with her legs crossed, showing that, like Stephanie, she is closed to any arguments I may produce – or perhaps I am getting my signs muddled and it is that Rosemary is open to my arguments while Griselda is expecting a male sexual attacker? Only Mary gives me hope. Sitting on the kitchen stool, she is tipped slightly forward and her outstretched hand covers most of her face. An ambiguous sign. It may be that she fears me and what I am doing, that she is shielding herself against it. On the other hand it may be that what she is trying to cover with that fanning hand comes from within her, for I know and she knows that it is socially taboo to allow excessive emotions, such as awe and reverence, to show publicly. Perhaps in Mary I have found my true disciple.
It could be. There she is, drawn in upon herself, considering … Washing up is one of love’s mysteries. Now she may see that there is no need to deny one’s humanity and become a robot when one does the washing up, for every action may be done with loving attention. I am utterly alert to what I am doing as I plunge the greasy dishes into the almost scalding water. (The water has to be really hot. I am very tough about this, like that scene in the film where Lawrence of Arabia snuffs out matches with his bare fingers.)
Now I spin round to display two plates.
‘You see?’
Both dishes shine, but whereas one dish is lustrous from soap and water, the other is still mottled with the false shine of grease. I turn swiftly back to the sink to give my audience time to reflect. Clammy bits of food that have been scraped from the bottom of the pan flap at my hands under the water, and the ghostly smell of an old breakfast rises from the sink. I too am brooding. I need a disciple, for what can I do, a weak woman and alone, against the power of Mucor? If only I could make Rosemary understand it too, then she could put me and Mucor in that novel she is supposed to be writing about middle-class life-styles and adultery in South London. But then as I try to imagine myself at my sink in her novel, I realize how I would feature there.
Marcia’s breakdown. Her husband is so often away on business that she is to all intents and purposes living alone, and as her horizons shrink to the kitchen sink she is going hysterical. Then, early on in the novel, there is this scene with the ladies’ coffee morning, where Marcia starts raving on about how she loves washing up and how she wants to tell everyone in the world about it. Only one person in the group recognizes the seriousness of Marcia’s plight, and that is Rosemary. No, wait a minute, the names will have been changed. Rosemary is Rachel, Marcia is Sally, and Philip is Quentin. Later that same day Rachel/Rosemary rings Sally/Marcia up and invites her to come round. Sally does and it is the first of many meetings. With great subtlety Rosemary Crabbe shows how, through the ministrations and advice of Rachel, Sally the dull little housewife is initiated into a way of life that she had not even dreamt of before.
She changes Sally’s hair-style, takes her to smart parties and introduces her to Mark. With great subtlety, too, Rosemary Crabbe’s first novel shows how the relationship between the two women changes, for as Sally becomes more sophisticated she becomes the dominant one in the pair. Sally begins an affair with Mark, initially with Rachel’s blessing. Then, as the affair becomes more serious, Rachel begins to show signs of uneasiness. Mark is a Roman Catholic and tortured with guilt, but what exactly is the source of his guilt? Quentin/Philip sees what is happening, but he is inarticulate and unable to intervene. At a New Year’s Eve party in Camberwell, Rachel appears with a young man called Joachim, her brother. That same evening Mark tells Sally that he and Rachel are married but separated, and a little later Sally on her way to the loo stumbles past Rachel and Joachim making love on a sofa. A collage of scenes – wrestling limbs, a picnic laced with barbed dialogue, a fight in a pub, the ride with Quentin in the ambulance after he has taken an overdose of pills, a flashback to the childhood of Rachel and Joachim by the seaside, Sally’s flight from Mark and her hopeless attempt to find again the illusory contentment that, she believes, housework and coffee mornings formerly gave her, Rachel’s visit to Sally in the mental home and the final Gothic dénouement when Mark takes Rachel and Joachim with him on a visit to his old Oxford college. The men are shown as responding to woman’s new liberated role by taking refuge in either impotence or belligerence. Rosemary Crabbe’s observation of her characters is deft, and her handling of them compassionate.
I must admit I would like to be in it – for, during the whole long period while I am having an affair with Mark and puzzling over the mystery of Rachel’s relationship with Joachim, I don’t do any housework, and neither Mark nor Quentin/Philip gets his shirts washed and yet no one seems to notice. That is the new relaxed middle-class life-style for you. But anyway it is all escapism and in real life I shall not leave Philip, and after Rosemary has put me in her novel, she will stop coming to see me because she is embarrassed about it, and Mucor will make her pay for having neglected her housework to write novels. She will pay heavily.
Again I turn. This time both plates are lustrous and, caught in the kitchen’s light, their highlights reflect off one another and their mutual reflections seem to me to be a sort of image of infinity and endless mutual devotion.
But now Mary’s hand has fallen from her face and I am just in time to detect a hastily disappearing smile. I am furious.
‘You are not taking me seriously.’
‘Taking what seriously? You are a bloody good washer-up, I’ll give you that. Any time you want to come round and do my washing up you are welcome.’
‘Oh, that’s not the point, Mary. Don’t any of you want to communicate? To – to talk about the little things in life, those little things that are so important?’
Their eyes are lowered as if they are looking for little things on the kitchen table. (Well, there are some breadcrumbs there, but I am getting pretty shirty about their unresponsive attitudes.)
Then Stephanie says, ‘OK, Marcia. What is it that you want to tell us about them?’
‘If you really don’t know there’s no point in me saying.’
‘No, come on, Marcia.’
‘We’re really interested; I am, anyway.’
A deep breath.
‘Oh well, it’s things like – like when you go to the lavatory and you’ve flushed it, have you never tried to race against the noise of the flushing and get out of the bathroom and down the stairs before it has finished, because if you don’t the lavatory eats you up in your imagination? Or have you looked at the detergents you are using – how some of them eliminate the dirt, really kill it, while other detergents lift the dirt off from the fabrics, separating but not actually killing the muck? It has quite a psychological effect on me which one I use. It’s really interesting. Or how about when you are going to bed and you’ve switched the standard lamp off in the sitting room and then you are lying in bed and the thought comes to you that you haven’t switched that light off and though you know for certain that you have really you have to go down and check because now you have had that thought it must have a purpose, which has to be fulfilled, even if that purpose is making you get out of bed for no reason? Or what about when you are doing the same work, day in day out – washing, cleaning, ironing, shopping and cooking – have you ever thought that every day could really be the same day and it’s just that Tuesday gets called Wednesday and then Thursday and so on?’
(A lot of good topics for discussion there, I should have thought. We can get on to Mucor later.)
Complete silence.
I falter, ‘Be honest. Haven’t you even enjoyed racing drops of water, like these two running down the plate here?’
They stir uneasily like a herd of cattle before a thunderstorm.
Stephanie says, ‘You have given me a lot to think about, Marcia. I really must think about it. At our next meeting we must have it all out and discuss it.’
‘Yes, this is getting kind of heavy. I think it’s time I was going’; and Griselda goes out to look for her coat. The others all troop after her.
‘Well, thanks for the coffee and scones, Marcia. I only hope I can produce something half as good when it’s my turn.’
‘And a very interesting demonstration of how to clean dishes.’
They all nod agreement.
At the door I ask Rosemary, ‘Am I going to be in the novel you are writing?’
Rosemary looks embarrassed.
‘Writing novels isn’t like that. The novelist doesn’t put real people in what he or she writes. One takes a gesture from one person, a way of talking from another and the physical features of a couple of other people, say. So it is really a composite character and, of course, there is a lot of the novelist in that character, and then in the course of writing the character develops a personality of its own. So the character is truly fictional and something that is entirely personal to the novelist.’
Liar! I’ve watched her watching me this morning, mentally noting down my every word and action.
But now they are all gone and I am alone again. Alone, that is, with Mucor.