The doorbell rings. I open the door and look out. The man on the steps looks poised and professional. He wears a three-piece suit and horn-rim glasses. He carries a white coat over his arm. I make the bold deductive leap:
‘Hello. You must be from the Institute of Whiteness.’
That shakes his poise somewhat. He stands there considering, as if he were deciding who to be that day. He comes swiftly to the decision.
‘Ermph. You were expecting me?’
‘Well, not expecting, but I was hoping that you would call. How can I help you?’
‘Perhaps it is rather a matter of what I can do for you. If I could come in and have a few words …’
‘Come in, then. Where would you like to see, the bathroom, the living room, the lavatory …?’
‘Wherever you feel most comfortable talking.’
He cocks his head and eyes me triumphantly. That beautifully judged reply has given him the ascendancy and made me uncomfortable. I don’t like Dr Hornrim (for so I have mentally christened him), but still, an expert from the Institute of Whiteness! Can he be real? I let my eyes go out of focus, then focus again and he is still there. I am not going to allow myself to be rattled by him.
‘Oh, in that case come up to the bathroom. That’s where we keep the washing-machine. I expect that you would like to see the washing-machine.’
He looks dubious but follows me up anyway.
He stalks into the bathroom like a hunting panther. His eyes miss nothing – my toothbrush with the toothpaste still on it, the linen-basket piled high with unwashed clothes, a pair of tights dangling out of the washing-machine door – and there is Mucor clinging to the wall above the bath. Surely he does not miss Mucor? But he says nothing. Mucor whispers agitatedly to itself. I grab things from the linen-basket and shove them in until the machine is full (that means two thirds full; the machine won’t work properly if it is jam-packed full). I am talking all the time while I do this, about coloureds, biological cleaners and the boil wash. It is the sense of his eyes boring into my back that makes me babble. But at last the machine is loaded, the door slammed shut, the dial turned. I pull myself together and turn to face him with my fingertips lightly resting on the machine which is beginning to throb. However I may feel, I am aware that I must seem confident and pretty, capable of handling the household wash.
His question comes like a karate chop:
‘How do you feel about all this?’
‘All this? Oh, you mean the wash. All right I suppose. Some things don’t come out as well as others. The sweat in the armpits of Philip’s shirts and understains … understains are particularly difficult. It’s because of the proteins in understains, I suppose.’
I forage about in the linen-basket, looking for something suitable to show him, but all the best bits have gone into the machine already. A brief hesitation and then I pull my skirt up and step out of my knickers. I hand them to him to look at. I can see that he is fascinated by the understain on the gusset. This is of course not the sort of thing I would do normally, but he is a man of science, professionally distanced from such intimacies.
Mucor, however, has been excited by the vision of an understain so very close to me and his hissing has become audible to me:
‘For him or for me? You are the biodegradable woman, Marcia. The ultimate biodegradable woman. I’ll hump you in pools of sweat and stains and pus. Pus, pus, pus.’ Then, seeing that this is having no effect on me, Mucor changes tack. ‘This is mad. Why do you have a man in your bathroom examining your knickers? It’s all fantasy. This man is not real. He is a metaphor for the power of male science to intervene in the domestic domain of the female. Take a tip from me. You have got him excited now. Seduce him and get him down to the kitchen and take the bread-knife to him and see how easily he falls apart. He is not real, you know.’
‘Did you hear what I said, Mrs … Marcia? May I call you Marcia?’ Dr Hornrim does not look excited, just impatient.
‘Yes – er, no, I didn’t hear what you said.’
‘I said, is it that the washing and the housework are getting you down?’
‘Well, sometimes. Who doesn’t get the washday blues sometimes? But I know that perfect whiteness is not attainable yet. But that’s what the Institute is working towards, isn’t it?’ I tilt my head and put my finger to my cheek in a gesture that I think is simultaneously intelligent and attractive. ‘What I would like to know is how can the Institute help me?’
‘You recognize that you need help?’
‘Sure. What with the wash and the dishes and the hoovering, who doesn’t?’
‘Take the bread-knife to him, Marcia. You have the power. Human filth! Blood and guts all over the kitchen table!’
Mucor’s exospore is rigid with excitement.
I am finding the hissing very distracting, and a nasty doubt is beginning to seep into my mind. If Hornrim is from the Institute, why is it that he hasn’t registered the presence of Mucor? He looks quite old and competent, but I am wondering if he is Dr at all. He may just be some junior starting at the Institute with no research qualifications. Hornrim – maybe Dr Hornrim – takes off his glasses and rubs them very carefully. Curiously, without the lenses his eyes seem even more piercing.
‘Marcia, would you say that you have many friends?’
‘Not many, no.’
‘But some?’
‘Some, certainly. Why, only this morning we had a coffee morning downstairs. Eight or nine people came. Rosemary Crabbe the novelist was here.’
‘But some would only be coffee morning acquaintances. Any special friends? People you feel that you could trust?’
‘Well, there’s Mrs Yeats. Possibly her.’
‘Stephanie. Yes.’
What is all this? He seems more interested in me than my whites. But I may have underestimated him. Suddenly he swoops back to the subject:
‘Suppose, for example, I or someone else were to say to you that not only is your washing not perfectly white, but some other people get their clothes whiter than you do. Suppose that someone were to hint that there is an improved technique for getting things white, something that is a complete secret?’
‘I would say that I would be interested to learn about this so-called improved technique.’
‘That is a very positive attitude to take, Marcia. Most encouraging.’
‘Kill him, Marcia.’ Mucor’s message is more urgent yet. ‘Get him into the kitchen where the knives are. Now. I’ve worked it out. He is a real doctor and he thinks that you are mad. If you let him go, he will be back with a strait-jacket for you. Take him before he takes you. Just us is cosy.’
Ignoring Mucor’s ravings I reach for a packet and tip a little of the soap powder into my hand. It rests quiet, white and still on my palm, its immense powers of lather quite latent. It is power within my grasp. I thrust it at him. I want him to take some of this deceptively quiet powder, but he still has my knickers in his hands and does not know where to put them, so my gesture remains unconsummated. I am going to show this man in a suit that he does not know it all. I am going to give him a taste of the discourse of detergent power, power to thrust and drive out, to lift off dirt; in the fight for family hygiene it kills germs – both known germs and unknown germs – and breaks down bacteria, it smashes, beats and bites. Soused with water, it combats dirt like a mad Lascar. The only language detergent power understands is violence. Together I and my powder, we conquer.
I start, ‘In the fight against dirt –’
He cuts me short there.
‘The fight against dirt? Can you tell me why your fight against dirt is important, Marcia?’
I am so irritated by his snotty questions that I come close to throwing the powder in his face. However I master myself with some difficulty.
‘Because … because I think … take dust for example. No, let’s start with thought. Do you know what the smallest unit of thought is? I don’t, but it is certainly very small. We cannot possibly imagine how small our thoughts are. And when we have had them, they drift off and float around –’
‘Like spores,’ Mucor adds helpfully.
‘– like spores and eventually they attach themselves to the hard grit cores of dust particles, and the dust and the thoughts mingle together in unswept places and then the thoughts begin to decay and the decay of thought is evil. The decay of reason produces monsters. Have I got it right so far?’
‘You are most interesting. Go on.’
I take a deep breath, but then I hesitate. I start feeling a little clammy inside. I have noticed something, something that a delegate from the Institute of Whiteness really shouldn’t have. A stain on his tie.
‘By the way, do you know that you have got a stain on your tie?’
He looks casually down at it. ‘I have, haven’t I? You are very observant.’
‘You can’t put it in the washing-machine, you know.’
‘I know. The colours tend to run. On the other hand, I would not trust a dry-cleaner’s with a tie.’
I relax a little. Perhaps he is from the Institute after all. He seems to know the elementary stuff at least. Deep breath again.
‘From the point of view of mental hygiene, the free association of discarded thoughts can be very dangerous. In a healthily functioning human brain there are billions of cells. It takes billions of particles of dust before the mental powers of dust can begin to match the powers of the human brain, but what some people don’t realize is how easy it is for a billion dust particles to accumulate in the unswept corner of a room. They pile on top of one another, gathering dead thoughts. These dark brains interfere with ours and send messages to us. I’m healthy, thank God, and my house is fairly clean.’
‘So you feel happy when you have got the house fairly clean?’
What is he getting at? He’s asked something like that before. I clean the dirt. I drive it out of my house. And I am content. What more should there be? It is like a doctor asking his houseman, ‘Are you happy with your work – I mean just curing patients? Wouldn’t you like to torture them a bit first?’ Does Dr Hornrim – if that is his name – want me to torture dirt?
‘What else should I do with a dirty house?’
He smiles thinly. He finds it amusing. I bloody well don’t.
‘I see that we are talking at cross purposes.’ He runs his thumb against the hard edge of his jaw. ‘Am I right in supposing that you suppose that I have come here to examine your washing-machine?’
The machine throbs beneath my fingertips. Who is teaching who? I wonder. It is Mucor he should examine. Mucor raves on,
‘If he is not a doctor, he does not have a white coat. He does have a white coat and so he is a doctor. He will get you locked up. You do not know what confinement is like.’
Mucor has known what confinement is like. He can paint a grim picture of the nineteenth-century precursor of the Institute of Whiteness, La Savonnerie. The Savonnerie or Guild Temple of Balneotherapy, despite its French-sounding name, lay in the shadow of the dirt and cinder mounds at what is now King’s Cross. In those days there were woods to the north of it and much of the labour employed was village labour. The folk were employed in hauling sleds of rubbish from the mounds into the Savonnerie itself. Dredger-men bring other types of rubbish up from the Regent’s Canal. Just recently yet another kind of filth has been obtained from the skin of lunatics. This is an age when great strides have been made in the classification of dirt. Sir Francis Galton has published on the marks left by fingers, and Holmes’s no less epoch-making Seven Types of Tobacco Ash is being eagerly read.
‘Dust or Ugliness Redeemed’ is written in letters of iron over the great gates of the Savonnerie. Beneath these words there is a ceaseless toing and froing, physicians and sewage engineers, stevedores and dredgermen, boilermen and charring ladies – and there are the distinguished visitors. Sir Francis Galton has been here of course, and his even more famous uncle Charles Darwin. So has Mrs Beeton. Today Charles Dickens is to be shown round, and if Dickens should write favourably about the Savonnerie’s work, who knows, perhaps the Prince Consort may come? Dickens’s party are ushered first into the Superintendent’s office. The Superintendent is effusive and gives them tea. The Superintendent keeps referring to himself by name in the hope of seeing that name in print in one of Dickens’s articles. Dickens, vastly irritated, makes a mental note to forget it, and indeed it has been forgotten. After poring over a map of the works and being shown different types of dirt under glass slides, the party are conducted to the viewing gallery. This involves going out into the wintry air once more, for the viewing gallery is reached by an outside staircase that runs along the wall of the vast barn-like structure in which the main vats are tended. The Superintendent’s deputy, a quieter man with a genuine enthusiasm for his work, leads them up the stairs. He takes the arm of the prettiest of the ladies. There is a lot of giggling among the party as they ascend. It conceals nerves. What horrors may they see inside?
Inside the long chamber their heads are more or less level with the rafters. The noise is enough to drive one out of one’s mind. There is the clanking of chains and buckets coming up from the wells. There is the cranking of the gears that drive and turn the long wooden spoon-like objects that stir the mud in the vats. Rejected sludge gurgles as it trickles out of bungholes at the bottom of the vats. And, more distantly outside the main chamber, there is the perpetual din of people shouting, doors slamming and keys turning. Here in the long gallery of the Savonnerie we are spectators at the beginning of the Great Incarceration of Dirt. These pioneering reformers are going to have it shut up in bags, bins and sewage tanks. The deputy has to cup his hands and shout to make himself heard. When he is heard one of the great wooden spoons is made to rise from a vat up almost to the level of the horrified gaze of the visitors; wrapped around the ladle-end is a woman’s soiled shift.
Down goes the spoon again into the central mudbath. Attendants recommence their experiments, squirting jets of water into the vat and running electric currents through the water. The men tend to the vats and the electric batteries. The women, heavily muscled launderesses, keep clear of the danger area and are employed in the grating of large cakes of soap. Meanwhile Dickens is warming to the deputy. He finds the young man’s attentions extremely flattering. Why, the deputy claims to have been put on the road to his present career by reading Great Expectations! That scene with Miss Havisham and the dusty bridal feast!
‘I tell you I know key passages by heart and can recite it from memory,’ shouts the deputy. And he does so:
‘“… was spacious, and I dare say had once been handsome, but every discernible thing in it was covered with dust and mould, and dropping to pieces. The most prominent object was a long table with a table-cloth spread on it, as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all stopped together. An épergne or centre-piece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite indistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckled-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstance of the greatest public importance had just transpired …”’
The deputy could have continued, but he is interrupted by the Superintendent.
‘The Devil’s supper!’ quips the Superintendent, pointing at the long spoons rotating in the vats. No one laughs, and the Superintendent moves on to tell Dickens all about his wife and his lovable brood of infants.
Dickens loses interest in the talk. He gazes down at the turbid shapes being stirred in the mud, seeing in them images of insanity, poverty and crime. He is working presently on the ending of Edwin Drood. It has become necessary for the Superintendent to rejoin the party now, for his presence is obligatory before the latest technique for extracting filth can be demonstrated. He makes signals, and two of the launderesses move to open the large wooden double door at the end of the chamber. Through the doors the visitors can see a smaller room, well lit by gas. In the centre of the room is a leather armchair. Strapped to the armchair is a lunatic. The director claps his hands, and jets of water spray down on the lunatic. Everybody laughs. The lunatic squirms. Sluice channels carry his filth and urine down to a small experimental vat in the main chamber. The filth will mix with water. Then the water will be boiled off and we shall have the distilled essence of madness and fear.
The lunatic has his eyes shut and is dazedly trying to shake his head away from the water. Behind his shaking head a dark patch can be detected on the leather chair-back. It is not the first time that this chair has been used for this experiment and the leather has suffered somewhat. The dark shape on the chair-back is the black exospore of common household mould, Mucor. Mucor is sending dark thoughts to the famous author in the gallery, in demented determination to secure for household mould a central role in the ending of Edwin Drood. Perhaps he will be successful. Dickens’s mind is turning over …
The Superintendent claps his hands again, and the two launderesses struggle to close the doors. The one on the left, Nelly, has a husband, Valentine. Valentine does not work in the Savonnerie, but he has secured for himself a place in a ships’ chandler’s in the Docks area. While Dickens (and Mucor) work on the ending of Edwin Drood, Nelly is thinking about what she will do when the day’s work is over. She and Valentine will take the train to Denmark Hill (LBSCR) and visit the Lava Rink. Friday night is roller-skating night for Valentine and Nelly. The management have just acquired the new Plimpton skates with rubber pads which give assistance in changing the direction of the (wooden) wheels. Nelly also likes to flirt with the skateboy while she is having her skates strapped on. But for now she can only dream of the night’s giddy pleasures when she will step out with Valentine.
‘All mad, you know,’ Mucor addresses me directly. ‘With the best of intentions, but little serious thought, the people at the Savonnerie were stumbling in a sort of half-witted way towards what they hoped would be the washing-machine. All hopelessly misconceived. Evil simply fermented in those huge unsterilized vats. The real technical ancestry of the washing-machine turned out to be quite different. And yet, and yet it was a precursor, the precursor of the Institute of Whiteness, and, when you think of it, is this trivial thing of tin that whirrs and throbs in the corner of your bathroom really worthy of the name of “washing-machine”? I think not. But you are. You are the real machine that washes in this house. You are the mechanical bride. Darwin, Dickens, Beeton – if the Victorians ever invented anything, it is you.’
Dirt under torture is not a pretty sight. Because of this, or perhaps because of the stench, one of the ladies in the gallery has been seized by spasms of vomiting. The front of her dress, which is of silk, is covered with vomit.
‘How do you get vomit stains out of silk?’
If I were to go for Hornrim with a kitchen knife, it would be hard to take him unawares. Even now, when he is bemused by my question, he retains a combative panther-like alertness.
‘I don’t know. But the tie is not silk and the stain is not vomit.’
He snatches his glasses from his face, snaps them shut and puts them in a case in his pocket.
‘I think my visit has been most useful. Perhaps you would be good enough to show me out?’
Reluctantly I lead him downstairs. I was not expecting him to go so suddenly. I am confused and suspicious.
‘Wouldn’t you like to come into the kitchen? I could make some tea, and there are still some things I would like you to put my mind at rest about.’ (Household stains, the problem of evil, Hornrim’s own credentials from the Institute of Whiteness.)
But he moves ahead of me and hurries to the door.
Mucor hisses underfoot, as if in agony, ‘Don’t let him go, Marcia! If you do he will be back soon with a strait-jacket.’
‘I will be back soon,’ says Hornrim. ‘Goodbye, Marcia.’
‘Goodbye, Dr Hornrim,’ I cry.
He smiles faintly. ‘Doctor, anyway,’ and he is gone.
Mucor does not think that we shall be alone together for very long.