The Vanishing Princess

by Jenny Diski

  But none of this was unusual. It was what students’ digs were like, what most people’s homes were like. Things changed very slowly. And for Meg and her friends it was part of the fun of being independent at last. Waking up in the morning, dashing down to the bathroom, freezing feet, freezing water, a quick memorial swish with the toothbrush, it was all as they expected, and fun with it. Meg hadn’t developed the notion of the day-long bath at that point in her life, but she could, and did, make some changes. For one thing, she bathed only once a week, like everyone else (and like her filthy pig of a father) because no one could afford to feed the meter for more baths than that on a small student grant. But she did set aside enough money to buy herself a bar of Imperial Leather soap and, once a week, one squashy plastic sachet of vividly-coloured bubble bath. Nothing fancy, but she was prepared to risk her life with the immersion heater for long enough to cut the corner of the sachet and watch as the squeezed liquid turned the water blue, or green or pink, and, even in the slow stream of the immersion-heated water, began to form bubbles quite as luxurious-looking as in the advertisements.

  She lay, or tried to lie (the bath being too big and slippery), for as long as the bubbles lasted—which wasn’t long—in spite of the rapidly chilling water. It was a hint, at least, of baths that might be to come, just as a passionate grope, curtailed by a flatmate’s early arrival home, was an embryonic taster of long, languorous hours of love, once the circumstances made it possible. Whatever discomfort Meg and her friends put up with, it was with the unspoken assumption that their lives would develop, financially and socially, to the point where things would be just right and comfortable with it. But for now, at least there were no more Dettol baths.

  Meg couldn’t, however, remember that bath with much affection. It was the place where, in her last year at college, the mess that resulted from the combined effect of the bath (made extra hot with kettles of boiling water), the bottle of gin, and the dubious—but, as it turned out, effective—pills, came away from her. She hadn’t been very pregnant, no more than a particularly heavy period left her and turned the water pink and mucky, but, relieved though she was, her head reeled at the sight of what was supposed to become a baby swirling away, in a livid, turbulent whirlpool, down the plughole. She wished then, quietly to herself as her friends helped her out and dried her off, that she had a bottle of Dettol.

  Over the next few years of being a student and then a probation teacher, there were several more, only gradually improving, bathrooms of a similar kind. The only really notable one, the one out of the lot of them which remained in her mind’s eye, was as dingy and unwelcoming as all the rest, although it was enhanced by having one wall covered with mirror-like paper and a couple of posters of Jimi Hendrix that had curled at the edges from the damp. But it was where Meg learned not to hate washing her hair. Then, her hair was long, flowing—as it was supposed to do, like heavy, rippling liquid—down her shoulders to the soft, equally flowing lines of tie-dyed, Indian cotton, full-sleeved blouses and long skirts. It was an endless business, washing and drying her hair. Sometimes it would take Meg a fortnight to build up the necessity to the point where it was unavoidable. The bath did have a rubber hose attachment that could be pushed on to the tap, but crouching bare-topped in the cold bathroom was a dismal business, until the day she washed her hair while under the influence of LSD.

  Waterfalls poured on her upside-down head, tiny drops of wet light, fragmenting into colours of minute and jewelled brilliance so that her saturated hair twinkled messages like psychedelic stars in a multi-stranded universe. The feel of foaming shampoo squeezing through her fingers was indescribable, unearthly. When she rubbed her hair dry, the colours that had sparkled in the droplets of water jiggled inside her head as if her brain were a kaleidoscope, and the smooth wet strands were a beaded curtain that swished aside and let in shafts of light like a Cubist painting. All in all, a thoroughly excellent experience, and although she never washed her air on acid again, the memory remained.

  That was the same bathroom where Doc used to shoot up, and where, as Meg sat on the edge of the bath, watching him perform his ritual, he told her one day, after the H had hit, that he had found an incredible cottage in Sussex they could share with another couple he knew, and what about getting out of London and the hassle of everything? It was near enough for him to get his supplies—the other couple were both addicts—and they could organise enough stuff between them to keep everything sweet. Meg, who did not use heroin, but who often washed out his syringes for him in a curious transformation of domesticity, appropriate to the time, stared at Doc. For a second, she imagined a cottage bathroom, roses on the wall, wooden towel rails, a pretty chintz curtain, a deep-grained oak window ledge with scented things for bath and body. Then, as she visualised it, she saw it littered with used syringes, smears of blood inside the transparent tubes and spots of it congealing on the tips of the needles.

  “No, I’m not going,” she said.

  Doc said nothing, but rolling down his sleeve, walked out of the bathroom, packed his small leather suitcase, took his books from Meg’s shelf, leaving curious gaps, and left. She never saw him again.

  With the passing of flower-laden peace, Meg’s life took a turn towards the more conventionally domestic. Marriage to Peter, who, like Meg herself, had also only been passing through a period of dissolution, provided a new bathroom. An entirely new bathroom. New walls, new floors, new ceilings, new everything. They bought a derelict house, and with the aid of a council grant—a piece of lost history, if ever there was—Meg and Peter carved a bathroom out of a large, unused cellar, just in time for the arrival of the baby.

  It was the largest bathroom of Meg’s life, square and roomy and designed for living in as much as for cleanliness. Either Meg or Peter would lie in the bath with the new baby beached, like a small, gurgling whale, on their chest, while the other parent sat in a wicker chair chatting about their day—Peter teaching, Meg indulging herself full-time in baby care—or reading snippets of the newspaper aloud. And when Florence was asleep in her cot, there was enough room on the floor of their bathroom for Peter and Meg to make love on a towel, after soaping each other in the cramped but friendly bath.

  Since the entire house had to be renovated, the grant—decent though it was—had to stretch as thin as strudel pastry. Living rooms and bedrooms got priority and were finished: white walls, bookshelves, brightly-painted furniture in the baby’s room, stripped pine everywhere else. But the kitty was empty just at the time when they were ready to decorate the bathroom. The bath and everything was there, plumbed in and working, the walls were smooth and pink from Peter’s remarkably effective plastering skills, but there was no paint on the walls, no covering on the cement floor, and, because it didn’t seem important, no door or doorframe in the empty rectangle prepared for them.

  No one minded. Certainly not the baby, who had no history of bathrooms, nor Peter or Meg. It was, in fact, the best bathroom Meg had ever had. It was warm, with two radiators as she had insisted, it was clean, and the water ran from the taps fast and hot. The lack of a door didn’t present a problem. After a few months of nappy changing, cleaning up baby vomit and scrubbing dried pulped food from the kitchen chairs and floor, privacy didn’t seem an issue, certainly not worth going into the red for. It was true that when the grannies came to visit they complained, and other people, though wishing to appear laid-back, took to whistling while they had a shit, but Peter and Meg weren’t bothered enough to do anything about it.

  But it was then that Meg thought about the day-long bath and realised, best bathroom of her life though it was, that here it was not possible. It was very rare for an ordinary bath to be uninterrupted by Peter popping in to chat, or ask what they were having for dinner. Even when Peter was at work, Florence would come crawling and beaming through the unfinished doorway, or worse, remain silent, forcing Meg to get out of the bath every ten minutes to make sure she was still playing quietly with her crayons in her bedroom.
Moreover, hot though the water was, there was no chance of keeping it that way for the hours she fantasised, because it took a whole tank to fill the bath, and then it was at least an hour before the water was hot again. Just not the right conditions, though Meg did develop her concept of bathtime. In her mind now, there were two kinds of bath: the working bath, where she soaped and scrubbed, washed her hair, shaved her legs. The business-like bath. The other kind had nothing to do with being clean. It was about lying submerged to the chin in scented, oiled water whose heat seeped through her skin and into the very marrow of her bones. Warmth was the point of this kind of bath, a warmth that didn’t seem available anywhere else; not in Peter’s arms, not in the baby heat of Florence against her breast. It was a private, solitary stoking of her fires, and one she began to wish she could prolong.

  But when Florence was eight, the bathroom plaster had lost its bright pinkness and the cracks (Peter being a good, but not professional plasterer) had become too big not to notice. The lack of a door suddenly became something of a problem, although it took a while for Meg to understand this. Peter had always disappeared into the bathroom on a Sunday with a pile of colour supplements, but now he started to announce his visit.

  “I’m going to the loo,” he’d say.

  Meg was faintly surprised at first, because it didn’t need saying, but she gradually realised that what he meant was, “Leave me alone, don’t come wandering in and start reading one of the papers on the floor and discuss interesting recipes you’ve come across.” His announcement about visiting the loo was the same as bolting the door, had there been one. Meg shrugged and kept away after being snapped at several times.

  “Do you mind!”

  But then she noticed that for some weeks—or was it months?—she had been bathing after Peter had gone to bed at night, only getting out once she was sure he was fast asleep. Neither of them could say, “I want a door on the bathroom,” because it was obvious that it would be tantamount to saying, “I want a divorce.”

  The next bathroom was painted. It was white and had perfectly acceptable greyish vinyl tiles on the floor. It was the most civilised bathroom of her life. Small, efficiently designed, and when had she ever had a bathroom cabinet to keep—not Dettol—make-up, cotton wool, TCP and burn ointment neat and out of sight? The flat was big enough for just the two of them, Meg and Florence, and was a typical newly-converted, square, paper-thin walled series of boxes, but it looked nice enough. But the day-long bath was still out of reach, not just because she could not solve the problem of keeping the water hot, but because the idea of having the bathroom to herself for an entire day, or even an entire hour, was laughable.

  Between the ages of ten and fourteen, Florence made the bathroom her very own, as much her territory as her bedroom. It seemed a necessary part of her development. The mirror, the make-up (Meg’s), bath oil, shaving foam, razors, scissors, tweezers, became essential adjuncts to Florence’s daily life. Meg would try to point out that the bathroom was shared, and that her make-up was not, but Florence’s need for self-definition caused her memory to blank on the subject. Meg got used to using the bathroom in those odd moments when Florence had vacated it, collecting damp towels that had been strewn on the floor, saving lidless pots of creams and open wands of mascara from drying out, before she could run her bath.

  During the day she worked, back at teaching, because being a single parent she could not afford the luxury of choosing poverty and daytime access to her bathroom rather than earning a living. And although Florence spent every other weekend with her father, Meg still didn’t have the bathroom to herself, because that was the only private time she and Jack had together for unfettered love-making, what with the thinness of the walls and the compactness of the space. She didn’t feel she could tell him he couldn’t come round on alternate weekends because she wanted the bathroom to herself.

  Eventually, however, Jack had receded into amiable friendship, and Florence left home, successfully reared, disappearing into university life and travelling vacations. All the years of gazing at herself in the mirror, trying on alternative faces, different eyebrow shapes and lip outlines had, astonishingly, turned her into an elegant but thoughtful person clearly on her way to becoming a committed and successful lawyer. The day she announced that she was sharing a large house near her college with some friends, Meg put the flat on the market.

  She looked at numerous properties, but she could not make the estate agent understand that she meant what she said when she asked to see a flat in need of total redecoration. He assumed a woman of her age would want something nicer, but she explained that she had very special plans and could not afford to dismantle something that was already in place to put in what she wanted. But, the estate agent explained, for the money she had, she could get a decent place with everything in good order even if it wasn’t exactly the order she wanted.

  “But I’ve got very special plans,” Meg explained again, patiently.

  Eventually, with some distaste, the estate agent showed her a flat that was near-derelict in a dingy road of dreary terraced houses.

  “I can get you something much better,” he kept saying as they creaked up the stairs, Meg taking care not to catch her heels in the holes in the filth-encrusted carpet.

  But it was just what she was looking for. The house had been left empty for several years as the owner, hoping to sell to a property company hungry for an investment, found himself stuck in the downward-spiralling house market of the late eighties. Eventually, he put each of the two flats on the market at a price which meant, even though Meg sold her flat at a loss, there was some money left over.

  Not much, not enough to repair and renovate the flat into something decent and comfortable to live in, but enough for what she wanted to do.

  “I’ll take it,” she said.

  The estate agent shrugged, happy enough to get any kind of sale, the way things were.

  Meg was not gifted with practical skills. The amount of money she had to spend on the renovations was small, but it was enough to employ a builder to do what she wanted. She found one in a local paper and showed him the job.

  He walked around the flat, digging his heel professionally into soft spots in the bare floorboards, and pressing his palm against ugly stains on the wall, muttering, “Dry rot, here,” and “Damp, I’m afraid.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Meg said, steering him past the uninhabitable rooms.

  He noticed, in one of them, a made-up mattress on the floorboards, and a metal clothing rail.

  “You’re living in this place?” he asked. “In this condition? Haven’t you got anyone you could stay with until the work’s done?”

  Meg was ahead of him and had reached her destination.

  “Here. This is what I want sorted out.”

  She handed him the sheaf of papers she was carrying.

  “I want it done exactly like this.”

  The builder looked at the drawings. They weren’t professional, but they explained well enough, and in minute detail, what the customer wanted.

  “Yeah, okay. This looks fine. And what about the rest of the flat?”

  “A boiler. Just a boiler.”

  “Central heating, you mean?”

  “Just a boiler,” Meg said again. “There’s no need for radiators.”

  The builder stared at her. “All right, then. Now, the rest of the flat?”

  “That’s all. The bathroom and the boiler. That’s what I want done. That’s all I’ve got the money to do.”

  “You can’t live like this,” he said, and concentrated hard on the specification she’d handed him. “You know, you could do this much more cheaply and there’d be enough left to get the basics done on the rest of the flat. You’ve got to have a kitchen, and the bedroom and living room aren’t habitable.”

  “I want the bathroom done exactly as I’ve explained.”

  The builder was about to argue and opened his mouth, but then thought better of it. This one w
as a crazy, he decided, and a job was a job, especially these days. He shrugged.

  “You’re the boss, mate,” he said. “When do you want me to start?”

  It had taken six weeks to level the floor, put in a damp-proof course, strip and replaster the walls, find a bath of exactly the required length and build it in, plumb in the other fittings and decorate to the client’s requirements. The longest job was the tiling—from floor to ceiling with four-inch glazed white tiles, and six-inch white ceramic tiles on the floor. It wasn’t a large space, but the tiler, near desperate towards the end of the job, worked out it had taken four thousand and seventy-three to cover the walls. He started on the floor with the light heart of a Cinderella who had only a few more beans to pick up before she could go to the ball. Then the fittings were put up. These were minimal. One chrome towel-rail, a glass shelf above the washbasin and another running the length of the bath. The small window was reglazed and the frame and ceiling were painted with four coats—no, three would not do, Meg had insisted to the painter—of white eggshell. Then the new boiler was installed—a combination boiler that harked back to the old immersion heaters of Meg’s past. It heated water directly from the mains as it was drawn through to the taps, needing no storage tanks. Meg, at last, had a good, constant flow of hot water to top up a cooling bath.

  The bathroom was finished just in time for the Christmas holidays. Florence was off to North Africa with a boyfriend and Meg announced to friends on the verge of inviting her to Christmas lunch that she was going away, too. There was very little money left, but she had costed the bathroom with great care, so there was enough for the final essentials. She did not, of course, mend the doorbell that didn’t ring when pressed (indeed, with the aid of the builders’ tools, she unscrewed the knocker that the builders—her only visitors—used to gain entry). Nor did she use any of her precious funds on installing a telephone.