The Limits of Vision Read online

  2. Organize your day. It is a good idea to draw up a plan and tick things off when you have done them. Better yet make a chart with all the hours of the day squared off. Then fill in the squares as the tasks allotted to each hour are done. Gaily coloured crayons can be used.

  3. Try to do most of the housework in the morning when you are at your best. That way you can have some of the rest of the day to yourself.

  4. Always wear rubber gloves.

  5. Avoid wasteful motion. Genius economizes and finds new uses for old material.

  6. Make sure the equipment you buy is suitable for the use for which it is intended.

  7. There are various kinds of dirt. How you get rid of it will depend on the kind of dirt it is.

  8. If you have a problem regarding the cleaning of your house, whether in regard to the dirt or in regard to the equipment needed to remove it, go to a reputable dealer or qualified authority. He will be only too pleased to help.

  9. Be safety-conscious. Do you have exposed wiring, dangerous medicines or loose carpet-fittings in your house? The old, the young and the drunk are all at risk from these things. Keep them out of your house.

  10. Be economical. In cases where a cheaper cleanser is just as effective as an expensive one, buy the cheaper cleanser.

  11. Aim for variety in your meals. Don’t serve a dish of all meat one day and then next day a meal that is all vegetables. Aim for a mixture of foods in your meals.

  12. Make lists of everything in the house. That way if you need something, but have forgotten where it is, you will know where to look. Keep these lists up to date.

  13. Be careful about strangers calling. Always check their credentials before letting them into your house.

  All right, it is simple, but it is only the beginning of the book and I like its plain workmanlike prose and the absence of superfluous adjectives. I can see that Dostoevsky was trying to say something about God, suffering and society, but I am not very clear what. Surely it would have been better if he had put his ideas down straightforwardly in numbered paragraphs, rather than trying to put these ideas all larded up in novels, where actresses, policemen, monks and whatnot spout them in a jumbled-up fashion? Anyway I have a shrewd suspicion that Baxter’s ideas are more useful. I don’t want to spend my days mooning about the house wondering if I am the world’s greatest saint or sinner. The truth is that I am just ordinary.

  Now I see that I have been a bit too successful with the breadcrumbs. The grease-mark has gone all right, but now that patch is much paler than the rest of the wallpaper. That is the trouble with trying to clean just a part of the wallpaper. It’s turning chilly again. I really ought to put something on. Like many women I like doing the housework in the nude – sometimes. I believe in taking risks in life, and working in the nude gives me a frisson. On the other hand, sometimes I like to be not only dressed for my housework but even overdressed. It’s all a matter of mood, of impulse. That’s the kind of creature I am – sometimes business-like, sometimes dreamy, sometimes larky, sometimes a little triste. Just because I am one person it does not mean that I have got only one personality.

  So up I go to the bathroom. Mucor hisses welcomingly. Well, it’s not much of a welcome; more threats. I pretend to pay it no attention and pick up the clothes I left lying about on the floor, and Mucor reverts to muttering to itself. It’s a sort of witter really, but a sinister witter. Mucor is possessed by the idea that I have something that belongs to it and the Forces of Evil behind it – some little fleck of dirt, I gather. If someone wanted to hide a fleck of dirt, where would they hide it? In a desert? But Mucor has counted its way through the grains of sand in the Gobi and has not found it … It must be in my house somewhere.

  I am putting back on the clothes I was wearing for the coffee morning. I can’t get interested in Mucor’s lost little bit of dirt. As I say, I sometimes like to be overdressed for the housework. I am a bit of a heretic about this. I am not one of those Moping Monas who believe that one has to be drably dressed to do the cleaning. Putting on clothes is like putting on a performance I always think. Also I believe in sometimes aiming for what I think is known as an alienation effect. At the moment I am pulling on a white straight skirt, slightly more than knee length. There is a single-breasted jacket to go with it. It’s dressing against type really – maybe that’s why Rosemary and Stephanie kept looking at me this morning? The suit is quite tight and if I am to kneel down, to do some scrubbing say, the jacket will constrict my movements and the skirt is liable to ride up. This sort of thing has the effect of alienating me from my labour. I mean that it allows me to stand back, so to speak, and think about who I am and what is the nature of my work. It makes me more aware – like pretending to be a cripple doing the washing up.

  Obviously I am quite fashion-conscious. I look at the fashion pages in Cosmopolitan when I can, and reading Roland Barthes’s Elements of Semiology has been quite an eye-opener for me. It has made me see my dressing as operating within a code and setting up oppositions within that code. For instance the formality of the suit I am putting on is opposed to the free-ranging, open-ended nature of housework, and its whiteness is opposed to the dirt I am combating. Getting dressed is quite a consciousness-raising thing.

  Well, now to finish the washing up and maybe fix myself some lunch, though it’s really much too late for lunch already. Oh, but there’s someone at the door!

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  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 th
e 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 M
ucor 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?