While she was still standing like this, waiting for the courage to put her own excellent advice into practice, Phyllis put her untidy head round the door.
“Oh, that’s much better. Oh you are getting on!” she lied desperately: and seeing her employer’s panic, Milly almost forgot about her own.
“I’m just getting down to it,” replied Milly, soothingly: and even as she spoke, she felt welling up in her the strength to start. Already she had caught sight of the One Thing that could be done.
The dirty mugs and cups. Let them be her salvation. Dregs of tea. Dregs of coffee. Some fresh, some almost mildewed. Milly collected them all up and carried them out to the kitchen—and by the time she came back, she knew that her faith in the One Thing had once again been vindicated. She could see, now, exactly how to tackle the room.
First, the scattered garments. Nothing like clothes for making a room look sordid. She had not forgotten that the absent Mr Lane was due to go mad if she touched anything, but she was using her own discretion as to what a man—particularly a husband—would think of as a thing. Certainly not clothes in need of ironing. Nor a hunk of beige knitting in a paper bag. Nor half a wizened grapefruit in a pie-dish. Milly also surmised that the unknown Mr Lane might be prepared to overlook the disappearance of the glum little collection of objects awaiting his manly attention: the broken electric iron: the Teasmaid that didn’t make tea any more: the dust-caked Do-It-Yourself china-mending outfit, complete with several cardboard boxes containing all the crockery that had been broken in the Lane household during the last eleven years. She set herself, bit by bit, to remove all the things which, in her experience, a man is happier without. Soon, some surfaces appeared, which could be wiped or dusted. She only wished that her employer wouldn’t keep popping her head round the door and telling her how marvellous it looked. It didn’t, yet, and by the time it did there would be nothing left to say.
By half past three, Milly was facing a new problem—one that, foolishly, she hadn’t foreseen. She was tired. Not pleasantly, satisfyingly tired, as one might be after a long walk, but tired with an aching, urgent intensity that was like nothing she had ever experienced before. Of course, she should have realised that her middle-aged, out-of-condition body would at some point rebel: that aching in her legs last night, after just Mrs Graham’s, should have been a warning. What a fool she had been! Gaily, and without a thought for anything but the extra money, she had taken on afternoon jobs for every day of the week, and had never for one moment pondered on whether she would be physically able to do them!
Typical!—she scolded herself. Typical! This is how I’ve been all my life: this has been at the root of every trouble I’ve ever had. Why don’t I ever learn?
Learn what? That she must be careful in future to take account of her own limitations? Or that anyone can do anything if they once put themselves into a situation where they’ve got to? There is never only one lesson.
And so it came about that, since Milly had got to go on working for another two hours, she did go on working. She finished the study, and even started on the boys’ rooms. She found that her legs would carry her here and there whether they thought they could or not; that her back would bend, and bend again, long after she thought it had reached the limit of its endurance.
And after about an hour, a strange thing began to happen. At half past four, or thereabouts, she became aware, with a dawning, incredulous wonder, that she was becoming unmistakably less tired, not more, as she went on working! Psychosomatic? Second wind? Some sort of physiological adaptation to stress? For the second time in her new-born existence, Milly whispered a prayer of gratitude to her own body, with its extraordinary, untapped powers. Once more it had been put to the test, and it had not failed: she and it, in partnership, had beaten tiredness at its own game, and they need never fear it again. For the next half hour Milly worked on, as painlessly as in a dream, her limbs moving in some rhythm which seemed to come from quite outside herself. Only a faint buzzing in her ears, and a certain slowness of thought, still reminded her how near she had been to collapse from exhaustion.
*
“Would you like some tea?” came Phyllis’ voice from downstairs. “Or would you rather finish the boys’ rooms first?”
Milly was finding these double-barrelled invitations a little disconcerting: but since the tea was already made, and the two cups and saucers set ready on the kitchen table, she could only suppose that she was meant to accept.
“Tea? Oh, yes, please, I’d love it,” she said: and straightaway Phyllis went into paroxysms of apology.
No lump sugar, only granulated. Oh dear. Did Milly mind? And, Oh dear, there was no cake in the tin. No cake at all, things had been a bit…. But there was plenty of Wonderloaf. And jam. And peanut butter. And marmalade. And smoked salmon…. While Phyllis scrabbled thus haphazardly in her store-cupboard, throwing suggestions over her shoulder with the abandon of someone trying to lighten a sinking balloon, Milly listened greedily. She would like them all, actually. Except the peanut butter…. And the jam turned out to have mould on top. Still, marmalade, and smoked salmon, and four slices of Wonderloaf, were not at all bad for a high tea. Milly felt her strength returning, and would readily have resumed her task in the boys’ rooms, but Phyllis wouldn’t let her.
“It’s half past five—well, just on,” Phyllis insisted, though in fact it was not yet twenty past. “I don’t want you to overstay your time, Mrs Barnes, you’ve worked very hard. Yes. You’ll come again on Monday, won’t you …?”
All the while she was speaking, Phyllis was steering Milly out of the kitchen … urging her into her coat … pressing money into her hand. “Thank you” she kept saying, over and over again, “Thank you so much ….” It was as if it was she, and not Milly, who was on the run from something…. Why, you’d think, from her frantic glances at the clock as she hurried Milly towards the front door, that the police were expected at any moment…. And just then, as if on cue, there came a knock on the front door.
Phyllis had gone quite white. She looked wildly round, as if for a way of escape. Then, pulling herself together, she stepped forward and opened the door.
No policemen. Just a harmless-looking woman in a fur coat and stylish boots. A flurry of greetings, in the course of which Milly found herself being hastily introduced as “A friend of mine, Milly Barnes, I’m afraid she’s just going….” And so, to avert deeper confusion and embarrassment all round, Milly snatched up her bag and went.
At the time, Milly found the episode puzzling, even slightly alarming—did Phyllis feel there was something suspicious about her new daily, which should be hidden from her friends? It was only when she came to know the Lanes better, and had learned just how rich they were, that she understood Phyllis’ embarrassment. Like so many rich people these days, Phyllis Lane hated to admit that she could afford anything, least of all a daily help. She liked to think of herself as one of those joyous, infinitely capable mother-figures, who bake bread, whitewash ceilings, and collect driftwood for the fires, as well as running the home single-handed, with happy-go-lucky efficiency.
Not that any of this ever happened—she couldn’t even get the coalman to call, and the supermarket only ever sold Wonderloaf. But one day—quite soon, if only this, that and the other wouldn’t keep going wrong—one day, her vision was going to come true: and meantime, naturally, she didn’t want to be caught red-handed paying the daily help. And caught, too, by one of the most penniless of all her New Poor acquaintances (witness the fur coat and the fashionable boots). If, in that moment of confusion and embarrassment, she had had any time for philosophising, she might have reflected, as she contemplated her fashionably-dressed visitor, that Poverty, these days, is every bit as difficult to ape as Riches used to be.
CHAPTER XII
BY THE END of the second week, Milly’s life had fallen into a pattern which she already felt had been going on for ever. The day started with Kevin’s and Jacko’s arrival in her room for the
ir morning tea; and always, as part of the ritual, there was the fuss about the gas. The boys seemed to take a pride in never having a shilling for the gas—it made them feel like genuine poor students, and subtly removed the stigma of wealth from the Hi Fi set, and the piles of LP’s, and the cine-camera that Jacko’s father had given him for Christmas. And since the non-possession of a shilling seemed to mean so much to them, Milly went along with it, and listened obligingly each morning to the small fuss about it, followed by the small injustice of her always being the one to produce the shilling. Thirty-five pence a week—only an hour’s work, when all was said and done. Rarely has so comfortable a friendship been bought so cheaply.
Then, at nine thirty, under the attentive gaze of Mrs Mumford (who always managed to be flicking a duster around the hall at just this hour) she set off for work.
“Well, goodbye, Mrs Mumford,” she would say, as she unbolted the front door: and, “Ta ta,” Mrs Mumford would reply if she was in a good mood, and, “Goodbye, Mrs Barnes,” if she was not. Either way, she always added, “Back at the usual time, then?”
How lovely, already to have a usual time to be back at!
“Yes!”—Milly would cry jubilantly: and then, off into the icy winter morning.
She loved this morning walk to Mrs Graham’s: she loved the cold, salty air on her face, and the sensation in her limbs of not being tired yet. This was now a positive, joyous sensation such as she had never before experienced: but then she had never experienced, either, the leaden, desperate tiredness that regularly assailed her in the middle of her working afternoons. Since taking up manual work, she seemed to be living in a new dimension of physical awareness: every muscle in her body seemed to have come alive, to be alert to the stresses and joys of movement; and she was conscious, as never before, of herself in charge. It was she, and she alone, who could give the order—“Move!” to an exhausted limb—and it would move.
But at this time, in the bright morning time, nothing of this sort was necessary. Her rested body would swing along through the low mist, or maybe the gleams of struggling sunshine, like the body of a dancer. That’s how it felt, anyway; and if it looked more like the body of a middle-aged woman in a head-scarf plodding off to work, what cared Milly? The more unremarkable she looked, the better she was pleased. Then no one would bother to notice the way she always stopped for a few moments at the newsagent on the corner, glancing along the headlines, turning a page here, giving a quick look at the back of a copy there, as if trying to decide which of them all to buy … and then moving on, with a new bounce in her step, a new assurance in the set of her shoulders, without having bought any of them at all.
And as the days passed, and the headline Milly was dreading never appeared, the morning ritual became gradually more and more perfunctory until, by the fourth week, her assurance had become so great that she hardly bothered to look at the papers at all. Now, she pranced past the newsagent with only the most cursory glance. Yes, they were still on about the London bus strike—as if anyone cared—where was London, anyway? She felt remote from it all, and marvellous, and at last totally secure. Nearly a month now, and still nothing about her at all! She must have got away with it—though how, she could not imagine.
And it was then that the first signs began to appear that all was not quite as she hoped.
The day had started just like any other day. She set off for Mrs Graham’s in as carefree a mood as ever, with no weightier problem on her mind than the question whether Mrs Graham would, or would not, be going to the library this morning. It was Mrs Graham’s habit, once or twice a week, to spend a morning at the University library looking up the current sociological journals, leaving Alison in Milly’s care. On these occasions, she evinced so much maternal anxiety, and gave Milly so many instructions, that anyone would have thought that Milly didn’t always look after Alison anyway. Because by now it was part of the routine of Milly’s mornings that at eleven-fifteen, just as Milly and Mrs Graham were settling down with their coffee, Alison would start crying: and Mrs Graham would frown, and set her cup down, and stare at Milly in a dazed sort of way.
“But she never wakes up till lunch time!” she would exclaim, incredulously. “She always sleeps through! Look, Mrs Er, would you mind, just this once …?”—and Milly, just as on all the other mornings, would reluctantly gulp down the rest of her coffee, go and get Alison out of her cot, change her, and thereafter endure her unrelieved company for the rest of the morning, while trying to get the work done.
The only difference about the library mornings was that the drama began earlier. At half past ten, or thereabouts, Mrs Graham would start scuttling softly about the flat, glancing at the clock, stuffing papers secretively into her briefcase, speaking to Milly in whispers … for all the world as if she was plotting an escape from the Tower. What she was really plotting, of course (as Milly soon realised), was to make her getaway from the flat before Alison began crying. She liked to be safely out of the front door and calling over her shoulder…. “And Alison will sleep till lunch-time….” before the first wails rent the air.
All the same, Milly preferred the library mornings, on the whole. For one thing, it meant that she could plan her coffee-break to suit herself—if necessary leaving Alison to scream for five minutes while she reclined in luxury, sipping coffee that she had made exactly as she wanted it, with exactly the right amount of sugar. For another—and this was the big thing—it meant that she didn’t have to use any of the labour-saving equipment in the kitchen at all, and could get on with the work as fast as she liked. On the mornings that Mrs Graham was at home there was always the risk that she would grow bored with the correlations, and come wandering in to say: “But Mrs Er, why aren’t you using the …?”—dragging from its hiding-place yet another bulky, grease-caked contraption for making a simple task complicated. And by the time that had happened, there was never any going back. In general, and for most of the time, Mrs Graham was as vague and abstracted an employer as one could hope to find, drifting through her housewifely duties with her degree in Sociology clinging about her like a mist, blurring her awareness of any but the most glaring deficiencies on Milly’s part. But once she had a labour-saving appliance in her hands she was like a gangster with a gun, nothing could turn her from her purpose. On such occasions she would quite forget how busy she was, and how nobody ever gave her any peace, and would ungrudgingly devote half a morning to following Milly about making sure that she used the Dust-Rite instead of a duster: and while the dust puffed leisurely this way and that around the rooms, and the correlations languished un-cared-for in the typewriter, Mrs Graham would deliver long lectures to Milly about the principle of suction, and how the furniture wasn’t really clean unless you’d used the Dust-Rite. Nor really dirty unless you hadn’t—this last provoked by Milly’s incautious demonstration of how much less dusty the table looked after she had done it with an ordinary duster.
So the game, as Milly saw it, was to get the dusting finished before Mrs Graham got around to noticing what she was doing: to get the potatoes peeled with the nice little sharp knife before Mrs Graham came and unearthed the potato-peeler: to wrap the resultant peelings in newspaper and rush them out to the dustbin before Mrs Graham wandered in and caught her not using the waste-disposal unit. She had caught Milly thus on her second morning: and snatching the newspaper-full of peelings just as Milly was about to put it in the dustbin, she had tossed the whole lot triumphantly into the sink.
“There, Mrs Er!” she had exclaimed. “No need to bother with the dustbin! It all just goes down the sink! See?”—and at the flick of a switch an awful whirring noise filled the room. The potato peelings stirred faintly, as if in their sleep, and then settled down again.
“Sometimes it needs both taps on!” Mrs Graham screamed into Milly’s ear, above the racket: and they both leaned over the sink and watched the water cascading down among the potato peelings. They were moving around nicely now, and Mrs Graham and Milly leaned over further
still. The suspense was awful.
“Look, look!” Mrs Graham cried excitedly. “See? There’s one going down! But you have to work them towards the outlet, Mrs Er, don’t you see? … Isn’t there a stick, or something?”
An old mop handle was pressed into service; and after that a wooden spoon; and gradually, with coaxing and prodding from both women, the mound of potato peelings began to diminish. Presently there were only a very few, very obstinate ones left, and Mrs Graham’s exultation knew no bounds.
“See?” she screamed, at the top of her voice, in order to be heard above the uproar: “See that, Mrs Er?”—as she spoke, she switched off the machine, so that the final syllable gouged into the sudden silence like a pneumatic drill—“See? They’re almost all gone! No need to bother with dustbins in my flat, Mrs Er! Everything goes down the waste-disposal!”
But not dead matches. Or milk-bottle tops. Or paper bags. Or chicken-bones. And so each day, when she arrived, Milly’s first duty was to extract these and similar items from the horrible mush that Mrs Graham always had waiting for her in the sink. With the sort of unquestioning faith that an Early Christian might have envied, Mrs Graham hurled everything, including rancid fat, into the precincts of her waste-disposal unit, and then waited, in total trust, for the magic to begin.
Which it did, of course, punctually every morning when Milly arrived. Since there was no way of scooping it out at this stage in the process, Milly usually spent the first twenty minutes of her working day poking and prodding at it with assorted implements, with taps and machinery all on at full blast.
Mrs Graham loved it. Often she would leave her typewriter and come and watch, screeching advice and encouragement like a supporter of Manchester United; and the longer it all went on, the better she was pleased. She seemed to feel that having the thing on for twenty minutes was somehow twenty times as labour-saving as having it on for only one.
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