by Rick Gekoski
Bronya is abrasive without knowing it. She has no sense of humour, is as capable of irony as an armadillo, takes everything literally. Lightness of touch? Not even with the dusters. I am surprised that the paintwork on the ceilings survives her attempts to clear the cobwebs. Should I point out these manifold truths, she would not know what I was talking about.
I feel invaded and bruised by her company, but she is all that I have. And, to be fair, she is also bright, hardworking, cheerful, inquisitive and anxious to learn. When she wormed out of me that I had been a teacher – of literature! – she wouldn’t let go of it. She was apparently well read in the classics of Bulgarian literature, and reeled off a list of -ovs and -ics, none of whom I had heard of.
‘I want to read books,’ she said, ‘improve English. Who is good writer?’
‘I’m frightfully sorry,’ I said, holding my hand to my ear, and making my voice louder. ‘Bad day for hearing. Not getting you at all.’
‘Want to read! You tell me books!’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, ‘you’re not getting through to me at all,’ and left her to my ironing.
Suzy had history with cleaners. She’d collected them over the years, bonding with one after another, though they frequently disappeared without notice or trace. You can’t count on cleaners. Not in London anyway. I think she was unconsciously nostalgic for country servants, like bleached ayahs, but instead all she got were unreliable refugees from old countries. She enquired of agency after agency for robust Indians or sturdy Bangladeshis – even Pakistanis at a pinch – but they were never on offer. Presumably most of them were employed by the NHS. They probably run the damn thing by now.
Fortunately I met almost none of them, as I was teaching on the days when they came. I made sure of that, staying late if necessary. But I heard their stories, which Suzy collected assiduously, as if they were raw material. I can remember, in no clear order, a Czech with herpes, a Polish mother of a toddler who accompanied her on her jobs, making a mess at one end as she cleaned at the other (she was fired when the brat started colouring in the Leech illustrations in my first edition of A Christmas Carol), a Sicilian with dodgy relatives, and a Ghanaian who claimed to know the location of a lost gold mine, needing only a few thousand pounds to mount an expedition to rediscover it. Very good investment, missus!
She rarely met a cleaner she didn’t like: she approved of cleaners, admired them, sucked their stories out of them ruthlessly.
‘The fact that some poor woman is working for a ghastly London cleaning agency for minimum wage guarantees there’s a compelling backstory. If you listen sympathetically and ask the right questions, they are anxious to talk about their lives. Telling ameliorates suffering, it helps you to right yourself.’
I think it ameliorated hers as well. She worked from home much of the time and was always grateful to be distracted from writing a review or editing a manuscript – tasks that she found increasingly stressful and uncongenial – to share a cup of tea, make a light lunch, or hunker down for a short gossip before Lucy came home from school.
She had a notebook in which she described each woman in detail. She was good at faces, practised looking with the intensity of a portrait painter, made notes on skin tone, nose formation, eye setting and colour, blotches, wrinkles, pimples, dry patches . . . There were notes about funny phrases the cleaner might use, anecdotes about their troubles. Further notes on how they dressed. Quite a lot – for God’s sake! – about their shoes. More and more and more.
The material just sat there in her notebook, gestating away as she was inwardly assimilating it, and eventually some of it made its way into a modest book of short stories that, according to a review in The Observer, ‘heralded a welcome return of a distinctive voice, and eye’.
Few of the cleaners lasted more than a year. When the anniversary of their coming loomed – which was rare, as most moved on within a few months – Suzy encouraged them to go. ‘It’s bad for these women to stay too long with one client,’ she maintained, though she never said why. What she meant was that it was bad for her to keep up a (one-sided) relationship with a poor woman from whom she had already extracted whatever might be useful to her, who then needed to be discarded like a squeezed lemon or pot of coffee grounds.
This sounds unsympathetic. To be fair, the cleaners liked and admired her, and were delighted to be the focus of her interest. Suzy was uncommonly decent to them, those wretched souls who were inured to being bossed about or ignored by their clients, or to cleaning empty homes, listening to the wireless, weary and demoralised. And there was Suzy – she hated being called Miss Moulton or, worse, Mrs Darke – who was genuinely and warmly interested. I’ll bet they missed her after she, mystifyingly, seemed not to need them any more.
I remonstrated with her about this, the arbitrariness of it, the unkindness.
‘A lot you know about it,’ she said tartly. ‘You hide in your study, never even make a cup of tea, don’t bother to learn their names. At least I engage with them.’
‘Exactly!’ I said. I may have pointed a finger in the air in triumph. ‘Just what I mean: you eat them up and then you spit them out!’
‘They’ll be fine,’ she said, ‘they’re survivors. I take something from them, and they get something from me. We’re good for each other for a while, then we both need to move on.’
At nine years old, Lucy announced she was a vegetarian, in the tone that a zealot might employ to say they had been born again. The Lord be praised! I don’t know who converted her. That cartoon girl on the telly with the star for a head, didn’t she give up meat?
‘It’s so unfair! Animals have rights same as we do!’ She glared across the table at the roast shoulder of lamb with braised leeks and roast potatoes in goose fat, that Suzy and I had cooked together, and attacked her tofu patty with moral fervour.
‘That’s fine, love. You don’t have to eat them.’
‘Neither should you! You’re a murderer! You eat innocent little lambs.’ Her eyes watered with grief and indignation.
I couldn’t resist teasing her. ‘Mmmm, lambs are the best. With gravy!’
‘I hate you!’ she cried. ‘I’m never eating with you again if you keep eating meat. My tofu is so delicious.’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard of tofu? What is it?’
‘It’s pronounced to-fu, not toffy! It’s made from soya beans. It’s ever so good for you! Mummy and I made it into burgers.’ She showed me her bun, which was filled with something crisply fried and brown – like some sort of bhaji – with ketchup on it.
‘Darling, I’m glad you like it. But we are all going to eat together, you in your way and us in ours. What are you going to do, have your own dining room?’
‘I’ll eat upstairs. I’m not going to sit with a cannibal! It makes me feel sick!’ She clutched her stomach dramatically, summoning a vomit.
‘Sweetie, cannibals eat their own sort – like a man eating a man.’
‘That’s better than eating a poor cute lamb! Who cares about men?’
‘So. You’d rather eat man-chops? Maybe Mummy could rustle some up!’
‘You’re not funny! You’re horrible!’
When Bronya took her lunch break the following Thursday, she unwrapped her sausages and pot of Russian salad, reached into her bag and took out a paperback. Ignoring me ostentatiously, she opened it, halfway through. I glanced at the title – how could I not, it was as if she were flashing her privates at me. Bronya was reading Oliver Twist.
Dickens! She had cleaned the study, Bulgarianed her way in, tut-tutting as she dusted, vacuumed and resisted the temptation to open the curtains.
‘You are not to touch the books,’ I said firmly.
‘Dusty!’
‘I prefer them dusty. Leave them alone!’ I had an absurd desire to gather them all, the many hundreds of volumes, into my arms, to hold them to my chest, muttering ‘my Precious’ – protective, obsessional, crazed.
I was pretending to w
rite in the burgundy crushed-morocco folder in which I keep my journal, but really I was monitoring Bronya, counting the minutes until she left me alone. The Hoover made a frightful noise, and the dust swirled. It was intolerable, but captains do not abandon ships when they fill with water and become uncongenial. I stood fast.
I had no reason to suppose she would have noticed my Collected Works of Charles Dickens, much less the double- and triple-decker first editions that filled a shelf and a half in the early Georgian break-fronted bookcase next to my desk.
They were collecting books, not reading books. More useful were my paperback Dickens novels, copiously annotated and underlined over the years, which were the building blocks for my longstanding, fruitless little project.
She lowered the book an inch or two, to meet my eye. She had a lovely smile, and I was seeing more of it as she relaxed and got used to my grumpy ways. God knows she would be used to such responses. All Eastern Europeans are grumpy. Bronya probably mistook my recurrent surliness for normal intercourse. I might soon become an honorary Bulgarian.
‘Is a little hard to understand,’ she said. ‘But funny!’
Bulgarians do funny? And Dickens? Surely the dialect, often difficult even to a modern English ear, twisting syntax and exuberant run of sentences, much less the critique of English Victorian values, would be impenetrable to her? But, now I thought of it – and I sincerely did not wish to, the thoughts simply came unbidden, as my old teacherly reflexes kicked in – there was a lot there to which she might easily relate. Dickens is a champion of the poor, he gives them stories and voices and entitles them to respect. And Oliver Twist was a reasonable choice: the children, the poverty and need, the pathos of the workhouse, the clear-cut distinction between good and bad, innocent and depraved.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘tell me what you like about it.’
She had neither the language nor any familiarity with the period, but she was engaged and comfortable in the company of a book.
‘I like,’ she said, ‘very much. Good stories, and he is on right side. Is good man.’
‘Yes, he is. Very good.’
She paused for a moment. ‘You too, I think. You are good man also.’
God knows why she should have thought so, but I was alarmed none the less, and during her next few visits kept my distance.
A month later it was Hard Times – ‘I go to school like this, bad teacher,’ she said.
‘When you were a girl?’
‘Of course.’
‘Was that in Sofia?’
‘Yes.’
We were both uncomfortable, entering this mildly personal new ground.
‘Your parents live there now?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do they do?’
‘Father university teacher. Languages. Retired now. They have no money, pension in Bulgaria only £40 a month. Not enough. I help them.’
She can hardly have made £10 an hour from her agency. If she was sending money home, it was hard to imagine how she lived on the rest.
‘Hard times,’ I said.
‘Always,’ said Bronya. ‘What else?’
Some weeks later she was reading Bleak House, as if seeking legal redress for the many problems of the world.
I approved, it is my favourite Dickens text. ‘It’s a wonderful book! It shows that justice is a farce, and the law is an ass.’
She looked shocked. ‘Is an arse?’
‘No, like a donkey or a mule: slow, plodding and stupid. Human life is too complicated to be governed by such a blunt instrument. It shows how absurd the legal system is, and how cruel.’
She nodded, as if forgiving the crudely mixed metaphors. ‘Is like Kafka,’ she said.
We were eating quail’s eggs, which she initially supposed to come from a miniature chicken, and wild smoked salmon, which I slice with my Yanagi sashimi knife. Bronya asked to try, and I was reminded again, with increasing alarm, that once you lower your guard and ease your boundaries, an intruder comes storming through.
I repeated my mantra – ‘he who forms a tie is lost’ – but I was in danger of capitulating. It was curiously agreeable to talk about Dickens again.
‘Perhaps the other way round,’ I said.
She looked puzzled.
‘Kafka is like Dickens. Because Dickens came first.’
‘All books,’ she said, ‘come at same time.’
It kept me awake, that line. I don’t know, quite, why it should have intrigued and irritated and astonished me that Bronya should make such an observation. Perhaps I was embarrassed not to have made it myself?
She was right. We teachers and students of literature consult our chronologies, map out influences and continuities, talk about the periods of literature as if they were discernibly distinct. But in the very reality of reading and of talking about books, it is all glooped up together. Chaucer side by side with Dickens, Shakespeare with Ted Hughes. Like with like-ish, one text, or moment, or sentiment, stimulated by the other, like passengers on the same train, however disparate they look, moved by the same impulse, heading in the same direction.
That’s not quite right. I’m not sure I can get this right. T.S. Eliot said something similar, though not so elegantly or concisely as Bronya’s single phrase, which she tossed off without ceremony, as if wishing me a good afternoon. It was something she knew, about which she didn’t need to make a fuss. Surely everybody knows that? All books come at same time.
It was worth losing sleep over. Anyway, I can’t sleep, and Bronya’s aperçu, and my vain attempt to generalise from it, were welcome replacements for my usual, harrowing night-time obsessions.
I sit up much of the night. I can’t be bothered to read any more, and most of the time I can’t write either, though I try, strain, and produce little lumps. It makes me feel worse – bloated and unreleased. I thought I could write my way out of this, but I’m just writing my way further in.
Suzy said sometimes you have to hit rock bottom, but bottom for her wasn’t all that low, she had no aptitude for genuine misery, her former depression now seems thin and histrionic.
I’m a lot lower than that. And still descending. The earth is over my head, the light dimmed, the suffocating void descending.
‘Tell me about him. Is married?’
Bronya was becoming more and more interested in Dickens the man.
‘He had a poor background, hardly any education. His father went to debtors’ prison.’
‘What is that?’
‘If you did not pay your debts, you were sent to gaol until you did. Often your whole family went with you. It was a most appalling institution, because it treated debt as if it were a felony and not a civil offence.’
It was not clear if she understood this, but she nodded for me to carry on.
‘Anyway, he married too young, to a rather simple woman named Catherine, who bore him ten children . . .’
‘Ten! Is a Catholic?’
‘No, most Victorians had large families. A compliant wife was very useful to Dickens, for a time. He had his work to do, travelled widely, worked like three Trojans, supported charities, gave public readings of his works. He was amazing. But after they’d had all those children – he only ever wanted three – he got fed up with Catherine, who was often ill, never very good company, and had grown fat and indolent.’
‘So what? She had hard life.’
‘He eventually left her, and carried on with a girl actress, though very discreetly. He was in the public eye, but Victorians were good hypocrites and dissemblers. He couldn’t be seen in the company of an eighteen-year-old.’
‘Eighteen!’
‘There’s no need to be so rigid. He was a genius.’
I was astonished to be talking so frankly with her – indeed, to be talking at all. Of a sudden the barriers were if not down, at least eased. I was anxious to educate her, and she was proving surprisingly recalcitrant and provocative.
‘Now who is stupid? I know mens . . . He leaves ch
ildrens and fat mother. Is wicked behaviours.’
‘Is not! Needs a little understanding. He was a man of remarkable and relentless energy. No doubt he had his faults . . .’
She nodded. ‘In Bulgaria we say, “there are no heroes without wounds”.’
‘Exactly!’
‘But he is causing wounds, not receiving them. Is no hero!’
It was more than exasperating having Dickens – Charles Dickens, for goodness’ sake! – abused by my semi-literate cleaner.
‘Perhaps your not being English makes all this a bit difficult?’
‘What? What you say? Bulgarians don’t know good from bad? You are crazy and rude and stupid.’
‘You’re right, I’m sorry.’
‘I go now!’ she said, and walked from the kitchen, slamming two doors on her way out.
The next week the agency emailed to inform me that Bronya had called in sick, and that they could send a substitute if I wished. I did not. I wanted Bronya. I was not fond of her, I was used to her. I knew more or less how to use her, and had no desire to train someone else, even for a day. Unlike Suzy, I don’t trade in my cleaners for new models.
And here’s a bad sign, or perhaps it is a symptom, though I don’t know of what. In her absence I started reading Bulgarian poetry. Or, not to be entirely alarmist, I Googled ‘Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry in Translation’, and was offered more of the stuff than I would have thought possible. But people, even Bulgarians it appears, will go on writing their poems, no matter how hard their schoolmasters (if they are any good) attempt to dissuade them. Composing verses is a reprehensible and self-regarding activity, likely to lead to the most appalling psychic inflation: I am a poet! As if the moniker established a kind of wisdom, or enticed more partners into your bed.