by Robert Irwin
The bell rings again. It is the third time that the bell has rung. I rise, as from the bottom of some deep black pool. I pull myself up. I stagger half-fainting to the door and pull it open. It is Mrs Yeats.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘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 an
d 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.