For the first couple of hours she busied herself emptying the dishwasher, putting the clothes in the washing machine, and doing the ironing. I heard her hoovering the drawing-room and dining-room carpets. But what I also heard, sometime just before noon – she must have brought a wireless with her – was the sound of music, blaring, inane, peace-destroying. Pop music, accompanied by the grating voice of an adenoidal presenter whose every utterance required an exclamation mark.
I had every intention of hiding away. I had no desire to meet, only to evade her. I did not even, at this point, know her name. Or perhaps I had forgotten it. But she had been sent to try me and I rebelled. I unlocked the door and shouted down the stairs. ‘Will you turn off that bloody wireless!’
This may have been a bit loud, and sounded, well, demented, perhaps. I needed to be heard above the din of both Hoover and music, and perhaps I bellowed. It must have given her a considerable fright.
Both of the offending objects were soon silenced. She started up the stairs, determined to meet and presumably to pacify her new employer. Her footsteps sounded sturdy.
She soon appeared on the landing, flushed and unembarrassed, martial, facing the enemy. I must have frightened her, and I had spoken to her rudely. She had every right to be cross. I didn’t care.
‘I cannot abide loud music in my house. There is to be no wireless playing.’
‘I did not know. They say no one is here.’
‘Well, you know now.’
‘I return now to cleaning.’
Her face had the oval quality of the Slavs, without defining planes, with a pronounced forehead that did not suggest extra brains – a face that in repose looked vacuous, but animated when lit by feeling, as it was now, simmering with irritation. She was probably in her mid-forties, tall and slim, her bare arms wiry with sinewy muscle that ran from her shoulders down to her wrists. Some sort of athlete, perhaps, or a gym rat, or perhaps just designed that way. She turned to descend the stairs, with an oddly graceful whirl, as if she were about to throw a discus, and made a quickstep retreat. Her smock, vulgar but not unclean, swished around her waist, and her too-tight jeans, quite inappropriate for cleaning duties, showed off a bottom crisp as an apple as she descended.
Anxious to re-establish my supremacy, which had slipped alarmingly, I followed her downstairs into the drawing room, to be met by another horror. The curtains and windows had been opened wide. There was a soft breeze blowing, and outside the sun was shining as brightly as ever it can in this godforsaken country, the skies were pretty well unclouded, pretty much blue.
I’ve never been a great admirer of weather. It has no integrity, it teases and promises and disappoints. You can’t count on it in England, and in those places where you can, it’s even more irritating and oppressive. I have exiled weather, and the relief is palpable. Fuck it. I don’t much like natural light either. Give me 150 watts any day.
Which is to say I hate nature? Not at all. I couldn’t do without it. I just don’t want to be plunged into its unregulated midst. I commend my fish and my fowl, praise my beans, leaves and grapes, transformed by human ingenuity into a well-cooked Dover sole or roast pheasant, a demitasse of dark roast espresso, a Montecristo No. 2, a bottle of Bâtard-Montrachet or glass of Krug: nature still and sparkling, nature methodised.
‘Close those windows and draw the curtains please!’
‘But,’ she remonstrated, ‘is hot and dark. Not nice to work. And dusty. Bad smell. How you say – ?’
I can’t resist a word game. ‘Stuffy?’ I suggested.
She looked puzzled. ‘No.’
‘Yes! Stuffy! I love stuffy!’
She looked mildly alarmed. Was I propositioning her?
‘I clean some more now,’ she said firmly.
I went on a tour of inspection. The curtains in the kitchen, dining room and downstairs study were pulled back, the windows opened wide. The sunlight infiltrated my interiors alarmingly. I went round hastily, closing and drawing, re-establishing the gloom. You can’t study the darkness by flooding it with light.
She followed me, puzzled. ‘I am Bronya,’ she said. She did not offer her hand, thank God.
‘I am – ’
‘I know. Mr Dork.’
‘Darke,’ I said.
‘Yes, Mr Dork.’
When I’m not desperate, I’m bored.
I spend a lot of time in bed on the desperate days, and in my comfy armchair on the bored ones.
But I am not inflexible with regard to my emotional states and sites, and can make do in either place in either mood. But then I get bored being in bed, or desperate in the awful comfort of my chair.
Being bored makes me desperate, and being desperate is boring.
I am a double helix of human emotion, and its absence. Over-filled, then empty. Up, then down. Only without the up.
*
The pleasure of my daily rituals is that I have no one to share them with. I wake slowly, make my first cup of coffee and return to bed, read for an hour or so before showering and shaving. Though I have no one for whom to look good, I take care with my appearance, as I never feel whole unless I am dressed well. I am aware that this sounds foppish, or foolish, or perhaps just sad, but I wear a clean white shirt every day, and a casual cashmere jacket. My moleskin trousers are pressed, my shoes shined. My scruffy colleagues – most schoolteachers lose their self-respect quickly, and end up mooching about, whiffy and rumpled – teased me about my fastidiousness. I didn’t mind. I looked better than they did.
I feel imposed upon by the mere ringing of the doorbell, much less by the person that it may herald. And so I have – I thought rather cleverly – made Bronya’s regular Thursday hours (between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m.) the time at which my various deliveries appear. She can then receive and unpack whatever shows up. The Waitrose order comes in the morning delivery slot, and Bronya has been instructed never to accept substitutions. They once offered a jar of pickled Jewish cucumbers when I ordered cornichons!
She turns out to be competent in many ways, and I am delighted that her English is too rudimentary for sustained conversation, else she would no doubt impose her life history on me. I pretend to be very hard of hearing, though I slip up too often. She has proved biddable in all respects save her insistence that the curtains be opened while she works downstairs, and having admonished her about this, her innate intractability set in and she threatened to quit.
‘Is not healthy. I rather work someplace else.’
You have to pick your issues with Bulgarians, and had she resigned, who knows, I might have done much worse. A surly Latvian perhaps, or a talkative Pole. After all, I could stay upstairs – as she was quick to point out – while she worked downstairs. And when she came up to do my bedroom, bathroom and study, I could retreat to the drawing room and close the curtains.
This small domestic tiff having been settled, we are consequently getting on adequately: she knows how to programme the dishwasher, do the week’s washing and ironing, and (which took some time) learned where everything goes: wine glasses here, dinner plates there, silver – not to be put in the dishwasher! – in the drawer in the sideboard, sauces on this shelf, seeds on that, pickles and chutneys on the second shelf at the rear of the fridge. I like things in their places. I am by nature what I call orderly and Suzy deemed obsessional.
I’d come into the kitchen to make a second cup of coffee, though Bronya had offered to make one and bring it up to me. I interrupted her search for the Nescafé (!) and said I would do it myself. She’d seen Gaggias in cafés, but was astonished that a private person could own one, and watched me carefully as I made my cup.
‘Smells