The Mistressclass

by Michèle Roberts

  She enjoyed the transformation she effected. Long ago she’d discovered there was no point doing housework every day, the way she’d been brought up. Baths and sinks, perhaps, but the rest could go its own sweet way. You had to let a house get dirty in order to demonstrate and enjoy its metamorphosis from grubby hovel into sunlit airy space smelling of flowers and beeswax and soap. The house a palimpsest: layers of memories of what it was like before; its clotted grime and filth. Other people’s dirt always seemed worse than one’s own: there was an extra, aggressive pleasure in getting rid of it. Housework could also be enjoyably narcissistic: cherishing the house you cherished yourself. Catherine had found that out years back. The only annoying thing about housework was if you felt forced to do it and then taken for granted.

  Vinny did like the order and bareness she achieved: a big jug of white daisies set on a piece of lace-edged linen on the gleaming table, the neat piles of books, the shining mirrors. All very creditable and satisfying. But also she loved and remembered the mess and squalor that existed before: the spiders’ webs and dead flies and crusts of mud and tufts of fluff. The outdoors trying to come in and take over. She liked the way nature wanted to invade; to swallow up the house. She wanted to give it a good chance before she fought back. Who on earth aspired towards domestic sanctity, a perfect interior? Vinny did the important things and let everything else slide. But because Catherine and Adam were paying her to be conscientious she cleaned more elaborately for them than she did at home. In her novels Mrs Gaskell sang the pleasures of exquisite cleanliness; of old chintz much-washed; in her biography of Charlotte she commented approvingly on her friend’s tidy parlour. But Charlotte had had a servant to help her, and Mrs Gaskell several. Vinny almost achieved the Gaskell standard of perfection once a year, which was quite enough.

  By the end of Thursday, the sitting-room and kitchen were immaculate. The upstairs could wait. Vinny rinsed off her sweat and grime under the feeble shower Robert had had installed in the bathroom shed, put on her favourite long blue linen dress, poured herself a glass of pays-de-Loire Gamay. After her picnic supper outside, she lit a fire and set candles on the high stone mantelpiece. She left the front door open, so that she could watch the sky deepen to radiant indigo, the stars emerge, the moon rise. Darkness here was as friendly and good as your favourite black cat slinking in; you could let it flow into the house and not be too separate.

  She pulled up a basket-chair, kicked off her espadrilles, propped her bare feet on the brick hearth. She sat with her hands folded over the novel and the exercise-book in her lap. But she was not in the mood for reading or writing. Memories unfolded their wings and flew about like bats. That girl she’d been, standing in the moonlit garden smelling of fresh damp earth, peeping in. She saw that girl again, looking in from the outside; wishing passionately to belong somewhere; imagining an older self that might one day have a house and feel at home. She hadn’t quite managed it. No lover at the moment, either. No children. Impossible to have borne Adam’s child: he’d left her. And none of the men she’d loved since had wanted children. Yet she’d lived the writer’s life she’d aimed for when she was young. That was something. She’d made sacrifices. That was all right. She’d chosen them.

  She unrolled quilts onto a row of cushions, for a bed in front of the fire, as she’d done on the previous two evenings. When she fell asleep she dreamed of snakes roaming the upstairs rooms, slithering in through gaps in the eaves, rustling in the ceiling just overhead.

  She huddled next to the cold fire. Glad of the dawn scorching in through the open shutters, the cacophony of birds. She put her overalls back on and continued her cleaning. All day she worked, moving through the converted grenier. The roof up here was perfectly sound; no gaps to invite wriggling snakes. Nonetheless, she needed to exorcise something. From one of the sheds she took a ladder, a paintbrush, a pot of gold paint. She laid the ladder across the hole in the floorboards of the middle attic, then stood on it to paint a message in flowing gold script along the beam dividing the space in two. For love is as strong as death. Then she returned downstairs, picked up a cushion and a bottle of wine, and went outside.

  Tonight she was due to have supper down the road with Jeanne and her husband, Lucien. Two of her oldest friends. She needed a shower, to wash her hair, change her clothes. First of all, though, grubby and sweaty as she was, she lounged on the front step, sipping a glass of Muscadet. This was her favourite place, she had discovered, half in and half out of the house, half in and half out of the garden. You hovered, part of both. Able to enjoy both at the same time. The house braced her back and the garden opened before her.

  Laziness. No need to move. She looked dreamily down the lane. No-one around. The self could be let go, could dissolve, flow out, merge with the landscape. Looser, larger. A sort of hovering attention that floated like a net. Smell of cut grass ripening to hay. The sun of early evening washed the air with gold and warmed her face. Three cows lay in the meadow opposite under an apple tree. Very faintly, borne on the breeze from the village, came the sound of the church bells ringing the Angelus. A cockerel crowed.

  A flicker of blue. Someone was moving about down in the orchard.

  She stood up, in order to see better over the low hedge.

  Adam. He was making his way slowly through the tousled fringes of grass, like a swimmer, just as she had, three days earlier, when she first arrived.

  He hadn’t noticed her. He was wearing his old blue jeans, a blue T-shirt, a soft tweed jacket. His hands were shoved into his pockets.

  She could not move or speak. Why had he come unannounced to France? Perhaps he regretted allowing her into the house, thought her an intruder, an interloper? Perhaps he’d come to berate her for her behaviour five days ago? She hadn’t yet felt brave enough to ring and apologise. No use doing it too soon, falsely, just to get yourself out of trouble. Besides, what did you say? The words might be stored somewhere deep down; but they had not yet surfaced. That conversation might have been killed stone-dead. She wasn’t sure.

  He didn’t look angry or hostile in the least. The expression on his face was puzzled. He seemed older, and fragile, as though he’d been ill. Perhaps that was it. Perhaps he’d suddenly felt the need for escape, for some sort of holiday.

  She wanted to start forwards and call his name but she was afraid of startling him. As though he were a deer stepping quietly out of the woods onto the road and you must freeze or he’ll leap away. She held her breath and stood stock still.

  Adam looked up and saw her. His face broke into a faint, abstracted smile. Surprised, she greeted him.

  —Hello.

  He did not reply. He looked back at her patiently. Hello, yes, you are there, but I’m busy thinking, please don’t interrupt. Vinny thought: am I dreaming this? Her mind, darting to and fro, clutched at a solution. He must have parked the car down the lane, out of sight of the house, immediately fallen asleep after his long journey, and begun dreaming. Something earlier on must have upset him and so now he was sleepwalking.

  You were not supposed to waken sleepwalkers. Perhaps she could coax him back towards the house.

  Adam averted his gaze from hers and moved forwards again, wading through the green waves rippling about him. Then he stopped under the wild hawthorn in the centre of the orchard. His eyelids shuttered down. The blue flash of his eyes was gone.

  She hesitated. Surely she should go down to him. Try and get him to come back up to the house.

  Something caught her by the arms and immobilised her. Telling the tale to Jeanne and Lucien over supper, later that evening, she tried to describe the forbidding impulse, its authority and power. Like that story in the Bible of wrestling with the angel. You want to move forwards but he won’t let you. An angel’s grip is so much stronger than your own.

  Seeing her friends’ shrugging incomprehension she tried again. Like being an escaped heifer, backed into the corner of the lane, then tapped with long sticks to run in the direction the farmer wan
ts. Your own will, however imperious, doesn’t matter nearly as much as the skill of the other to thwart you. Like having a halter flung over your head. Being lassoed suddenly. Caught by invisible bonds; constrained.

  He must be in some sort of trouble. She shifted from foot to foot. She felt her hands lift into the air, reach out towards him. Some physical force wanted to spill out of her, flow across the orchard, and gently touch his face. She pulled her hands back. Down to her sides. She forced them to hold on to her overalls.

  Adam shimmered in the heat. Slowly he began to dissolve. Then he vanished.

  —You mean it was like one of the little ones having a dream, Jeanne said: waking up, not knowing it’s not real.

  —This is real, Lucien said.

  He poured Vinny another glass of wine.

  After supper she kissed them both good night and walked back to Les Deux Saintes. She perched outside on the front step in the moonlight and thought about Robert.

  They’d talked one afternoon at the hospice, when Robert was alone and Vinny had looked in on him as she was passing. She sat with him for a while. He was fiddling with his tape recorder, swearing because it wasn’t working properly. He ended up talking to her instead. He abandoned the machine and lay back against his pillows.

  —She was a good model, your sister, he said: she could hold a pose well, she was strong, and she was so beautiful. She was proud of how beautiful she was. She loved taking her clothes off for me. She was in it too, as much as I was. I adored her. I’d never have hurt her.

  He had his eyes half closed. The lids were drooping and lashless. The hands dropped on the turned-back edge of sheet were covered in brown spots.

  Vinny said: I looked in through the studio door one day and saw you both. I was curious, because you never allowed us in. So I decided to have a look.

  A hot afternoon. Adam had slumped asleep in a knot of sheets. She had pulled on clothes, gone downstairs, wandered through the garden in search of her sister. Seeing the studio door ajar, she had crept forwards to peer round it. She remembered the absolute, silent concentration of the man and the girl. Her sun-reddened knees. The white fire of sunlight burning through the muslin blinds onto the back of his head, burnishing his curls. A fly buzzing. With a great effort of will she stopped the picture moving. She reduced it to a flat image in two dimensions; a study in shadows. What she had seen was private. She didn’t mention it to Catherine afterwards. She had slunk away and gone into the dark kitchen to fetch a beer.

  She and Robert sat together in silence. The room was very warm. Vinny was sweating. The plastic seat of her chair stuck to her jeans. Robert whispered that he was tired. Soon he fell into a doze. He was mumbling. The words drifted together; incomprehensible. His hands lifted and played in the air. The morphine did that.

  Vinny remained beside him for a while, not wanting to disturb him by moving away too quickly. His hands looked as though they were searching. Like the hands of the trapeze artist as he launches himself towards the swinging rope opposite, on the other side of the whistling empty air. As though he wanted to fly off and just go.

  No, Vinny thought. That’s me. Wanting to be done with all this. Selfish cow. Whereas, more uncomfortably, death came in fits and starts and could not be rushed and sitting with the dying that was what you learned. You suffered because they suffered but that was your problem; to be held back. They needed you to walk along with them, and fit in with them, and let them take their required time. Their hard journey was theirs and you should not interrupt it. Your own sorrow could get in the way. You had to take sorrow off, like a child screaming and kicking in your arms, and deal with it elsewhere. The dying simply needed you to be a witness; a companion. They were not there to cheer you up and apologise for dying. They concentrated. They had a job to do and wanted you to let them get on with it. Sometimes, in this hospice where pain relief was so skilfully administered, this job involved talking and telling stories. Sometimes your job was to help the dying people feel connected with all those who had gone before, and all those who were left. One of the roles of the poet was to reconnect with the past; with history. But mostly you just had to be there; shut up and listen; prompt only when required. People dying were not on stage; did not make beautiful heartrending speeches. Their last words were about ordinary things. That was the point.

  Robert’s forehead gleamed. The dome of the skull lifted the stretched skin. Elsewhere the mottled flesh sagged. Collapsed cheeks; loose jowls. His body seemed wrinkled away. Little and shrunken. How incongruous to see him like this, an old man in pyjamas, captured by illness; when in her memory he had remained that sunburnt, burly god; erupting out of the studio bullying and bellowing; that curly-haired host shouting for more wine; laughing. She’d found him sexy as well as overbearing. She hadn’t been able to admit that to herself then. She had felt too frightened. Catholic girls didn’t fancy father-figures; you were supposed to sublimate sexy feelings into loving God. Incestuous desires were the worst of all. You were lost. You were the whore. All terribly dramatic stuff. Ridiculous. She wanted to laugh. She wanted to cry. She wanted to take that anguished adolescent she’d been, that awkward twenty-five-year-old, into her arms, and caress her, comfort her. It’s all right, darling. Lark about a bit. Have some fun. Go on. It’s allowed.

  Vinny’s mobile beeped behind her in the house. She jumped up and ran to answer it.

  Catherine’s voice was unusually flurried.

  —Were you in bed? I know it’s an hour later in France than here. But I thought you ought to know.

  Vinny had to wrestle her mind around, back into the present. The standard lamp burnt very bright. Moths clattered against the shade. She flinched back, away from their fat furry bodies and propeller wings.

  —Adam’s had an accident, Catherine said: earlier this evening. Don’t laugh. He fell into the river.

  Adam had been taken by ambulance to Bart’s, where he was staying overnight, recovering from having swallowed a lot of Thames water and Thames mud, being tested for waterborne diseases. Catherine had just got home, having been allowed to remain with him until late.

  —He was pissed, she said: fooling about. That’s all. He’ll be fine. Don’t worry.

  Vinny’s mind seized up.

  —What about you? Are you all right? she asked.

  —I suppose so, Catherine said: I don’t know really.

  Vinny paused, listening to both of them breathing.

  —Actually I’m terribly fed up with everything, Catherine said: I’d like to talk to you about it. But not tonight. I’m too shattered. I’ll ring you tomorrow.

  Late next morning Vinny went back to visit Jeanne and Lucien. Over an aperitif she reported the news of Adam falling into the river. They listened to this second instalment of the story with calm; a certain pleasure.

  They were used to strange happenings. Over the years they had revealed to her the existence of witches and wizards in surrounding villages, still believed by some to help with everything from love affairs to childbirth. They had recounted the local legends of the Devil’s Table in the forest, of the human sacrifices supposedly once performed there. Vinny knew her probing for details was touristic bad manners, but she had persevered nonetheless. Lucien told her, grinning, that the rumours of diabolical influence up on the hillsides functioned to make safe love nests among the boulders for the local youngsters to do their summer courting in. What else did she expect? Robert had been seen taking girls up there from time to time, years ago. People didn’t approve of that: he had plenty of space at home, surely. Lucien showed her the caves outside his house, opening out of the granite cliff. Yes, of course, these lead to tunnels that go all through the forest, underneath it, and eventually join up with the crypt of the village church. They were used in the wars of religion, and again in the Revolution. Priests holed up in the fortified church and felt safe, because they knew they had an escape route. Jeanne was even more matter-of-fact. Those tunnels are all sealed up now, you can’t explore them, a
nd the caves are full of grass-snakes. If I see one I beat it to death with my stick.

  Vinny slept well. No dreams of snakes. No ghosts. She had breakfast in the garden. The house was so clean she felt it ought not to be disturbed. She crept across the shining floor of the kitchen, erupted on to the steps. She wandered about outside with her cup of coffee, trampling down the grass to make herself a little space for sitting in. She perched in a deckchair, looking at the heap of rubbish she had piled outside one of the sheds. She would build a bonfire later on and burn it.

  She wanted to take some time off, go for a drive perhaps, but Catherine, in her phone call early that morning, had warned her to expect a visitor. Charlie would be arriving sometime today with a rented van to pick up all Robert’s paintings and take them back to London.

  —But I was going to photograph them for you, Vinny said: won’t that do?

  —He says he’s got to see the real thing, Catherine said: he’s really impatient to see all the work. Just let him get on with it.

  —OK, Vinny said.

  —When everything’s sorted out, Catherine said: a bit later on in the summer, I’ve decided that I’m going to go to India. Perhaps meet up with the boys. I need some time away. Would you like to come with me?

  —Oh Cath, Vinny said.

  If you haven’t got enough money for the airfare I could pay for you, Catherine said.

  —I’m not travelling on the proceeds of your novellas, thanks, Vinny said: if I come I’ll pay for myself.

  —Think about it, Catherine said.

  Charlie phoned in the early afternoon, asking for directions from Sainte-Madeleine.

  —I’m staying at the hotel in Sainte-Marthe. Is it all right if I come over right now?

  * * *

  They found the shed key eventually, in the most obvious place, hung on a nail just inside the back door. They unlocked the shed and took turns bringing the paintings out to show each other. First Vinny sat on the step while Charlie paraded canvases past her. Then they swapped round. He sat down to watch and she carried the next few pictures, one by one, up and down the path.