Dripping and naked, I run into the living room and kneel, gazing up in supplication at the painting that hangs over the mantelpiece. How calm! How cleanly! Like all great art, it is a balm to the soul. My eye is drawn in, in pleasurable contemplation, by the diminishing perspective of black-and-white tiles. I don’t know about art critics, but I reckon that most people look at paintings the way I do. I like to imagine myself walking into the picture. It doesn’t matter what it is – a painting of an English harvest scene, a feast in a Venetian palace or a mass of pink dots and purple oblongs. I like to imagine myself inside the painting and then, if I like being there, I reckon it is a good painting. It is also nice to imagine how the painting goes on beyond the frame where one can’t see. What’s more, despite all the stuff that was being talked this morning about ‘the formal and ideological bases of feminist art’, I reckon all my friends look at paintings the same way too, only they daren’t say so. The society I live in is very hypocritical in that way. So many topics are taboo, aren’t they? I saw that this morning. One never gets the intimacy from talk that one gets from certain smells. It makes me sick sometimes.
Another thing that is hypocritical is the way my friends go bananas about something in a painting which they wouldn’t give a second glance to if it was in real life. I noticed this last night when Philip and I had finished dinner. The dinner things were still on the table – I remember the scooped-out eggshell, almost translucent in the guttering candle-light, and the wax coiling round the base of the candle’s stand and the spiral of lemon peel reeling out over the edge of the piled-up dishes and my glass overturned and the lees of its spilt wine mingling with the rose petals from my fading table-piece. I thought it was marvellous. If it had been a painting by Claes van der Heda or Pieter de Hooch we would have been obliged to stand in front of it for at least ten minutes. As it was, Philip just looked irritated that the stuff was still on the table. Dead-eyed. So I just had to clear it away, feeling melancholy for the transience of all things. Why did he marry me? Surely we all see the same world? Why can’t we talk about it in the same way? Leonardo was not hypocritical like that.
Not that all this is going on in my head at this moment. Rather, mindful of Mucor at my back, I rush straight into the painting and there I find instant comfort. My God, I could have my dinner off these tiles!
A force stronger than my will draws me to my knees on these gleaming tiles and I run my moist fingers over them, ravished, almost swooning at their tactile values. Amazing! There is not even any dust in the joins between the tiles! This floor must have been gone over with a tooth-comb. (Mind you, if I was going to have my living room painted I’d be jolly sure it was clean too, but still …) Wonderingly I raise my eyes. The whole room is just so. It gleams and sparkles. No dark shadows anywhere. (If it had been a Leonardo, it would have been full of dark shadows. Shadows fascinate Leonardo. But it is a De Hooch, just the painter to appreciate a nice clean house. Stephanie said something funny about De Hooch this morning. I can’t remember what it was now. No matter, it will come back to me.)
What a picture! Once inside, the mind’s eye can travel in every direction and have a good look round. The furniture is solid, varnished, dustless – all of it, even down to the fretted cabinet under the table that contains the chamber-pot. The white table-cloth on the table is so dazzling and so sharply creased with starch that it aspires to the condition of cut glass. On it rest not plastic utensils that can be washed by a quick dunk and a rinse, but solid silver and pewter that must be and that have been polished. Just look at the milk churn by the door! It has a handle that shines like gold! Through the open door one can glimpse the garden path running away in diminishing perspective and one knows without having to check that the very bricks of that path have been scrubbed. And the secret of the house – it is from the lips of the child that I learn the secret of the house. The little girl who stands beside The Lady Peeling Apples has been practising her reading, by deciphering the poker-work motto on the fire screen in the corner of the room. The motto from the collected sermons of Pastor Warburg reads, ‘God lies in the detail.’
Goodness! And thank goodness that I just had a bath! For it is as if I am in the painting and dripping over this wonderful floor, and the Lady is smiling at me and her eyes following me as I seem to crawl towards her. (I knew that this was a good painting. You can tell when the eyes of the people in the painting follow you.) I am going to tell this Lady everything about myself. It is time to come clean.
And I do. I tell her of my problems with the bed-making and about my archaeological experiences and my conversations with Teilhard and with Leonardo and about the low mentality of the ladies at the coffee morning and how my Hoover has packed up. Nothing is omitted. Above all I tell her of my lonely struggle against Mucor. One may sleep with other people, one may eat with other people, but essentially one does one’s housework alone. I am terribly alone.
I am conscious of going on a bit, yet my confession is only a prelude to my inquisition. I want answers from the Lady. Who am I? Why have I been chosen? I am not one of those who go about their work without a second thought, and many questions have come to me as I have stood over the washing-up bowl. In the first place it is extraordinary that I am precisely the housewife that I am. In the second if there are others like me, why do they not reach out and contact me? How is it that I find myself to be the only housewife to whom has been revealed the menace of Mucor and his legions of rubbish? Why have I been chosen?
Lady, you say nothing. Give me answers. Why is it that the world spins around me? That the sun follows me when I walk? That things close to me are large and things distant are small? Why is it that the clouds, the walls, the very grains of dust talk to me and to me alone? There have been poets and painters of vision, but history has not recorded any housewives of vision before my birth. I cannot deny my visions and I sense that I am chosen, yet I feel my visions are a curse that has been laid upon me. Save me from them. At least explain them.
The Brazilian clinic, the washing up, tracing the passage of the invisible beast through the cornfield, one thing after another in my working day and there seems no point to it, just one damn thing after another. And housework is unending. After today’s dishes there will be tomorrow’s dishes to be washed and dried. Housework is like painting the Forth Bridge. When one has finished it then one knows it is time to start again. But still, when all this is said, I know that what I do has a meaning. Some great mysterious Meaning. What tells me this is something I sense but cannot see. Though it is invisible I know for certain it is there, an invisible audience. As I go about my dusting and sweeping I know that I have an invisible audience. A vast yet unseen audience follows me round the house watching how I do things and it drinks up my thoughts, word by word, image by image. It is for this invisible audience, I think, that I keep this running monologue going on in my head. I have to think loud and clear for them to get it all. I picture this invisible audience as flies upon the wall, thousand upon thousand of them, so closely pressed that some are humped on the backs of others, so many twitching wings and feelers that their presence is almost audible. (Commercially prepared insecticides, by the way, are not much use against the common house-fly, which can rapidly build up an immunity against such products. Personal hygiene and conscientiously performed housework are the best defence against these pests. Flies are extraordinarily filthy in their habits, devouring our food and our excrement quite impartially and paddling their feet in both.) But no, that is all by the way and I mention flies only for comparison, and to make a vivid picture. The truth is that I think of my invisible audience as somewhat closer to human beings than to house-flies.
But why do these invisible creatures watch and listen to me and only to me? Why am I always at the centre of things?