by Robert Irwin
He pats me on the shoulder. ‘This is difficult for you, Marcia, I know –’
‘It’s not getting my carpet clean.’
‘But it is difficult for me too. I am having to think in terms of a new sort of Gresham’s Law where rubbish is driving out things that we regard as sensible – in terms of the continued survival and regressive development of the unfit. An analogy might help.’
‘Like a wave that is simple in its form as it rises, but which, as it falls, breaks into fragments … which the artist, try as he may …’ Leonardo’s contribution tails off vaguely.
‘What you are saying is like cornflakes’ (this is my attempt to find a suitable scientific model) ‘where the big unbroken bits stay on top, but the broken flakes as they get smaller drift down to the bottom of the pack.’
Darwin is suspicious, but Teilhard backs me up. Darwin and Leonardo would like to see these cornflakes. I add that in the case of tinned tomato juice on the other hand the thick stuff stays on top, while the thin stuff goes down to the bottom. Yes they would like to see that too. So back I go into the kitchen. I have to break into a new packet of cornflakes to find unbroken flakes. While I am still in the kitchen, the phone rings. So I go to the phone clutching my cornflakes and tomato juice.
‘Marcia?’
‘Yes, Philip?’
‘Just ringing to say that I haven’t got much on at the office today and I will be back early.’
‘How soon?’
‘Depends on the traffic. Twenty minutes or half an hour maybe.’
Further down the hallway the patch of mould that is Mucor is watching me with its solitary putrefied eye. It has said nothing since we started tea. It is biding its time. I am thinking that I am going to need a glass and a tin-opener for the tomato juice.
‘Marcia, are you all right?’
‘Yes, I’m fine. I was just thinking that I haven’t got anything out of the freezer for us to eat tonight.’
‘It doesn’t matter about the food. Don’t worry about that. Darling, when I get home, I think that there are some things we should talk about.’
Now De Hooch has started calling to me from the living room. He wants me to bring him two eggs – one boiled and one raw. He is an impatient man.
‘OK. We’ll talk when you get back. ’Bye, Philip.’ I put the phone down and I go back into the kitchen and start putting things on the tray, while the egg is boiling. I wonder why Philip didn’t ask about the coffee morning. There is quite a lot of noise coming from the living room now, muffled thumps and chuckles.
‘Hurry up, Marcia. We need you.’
By the time I get back into the living room, things have quietened down. Most of the geniuses are back on their chairs, and Teilhard and Darwin are having a fairly serious argument about whether dirt and its devolution are part of the Divine Plan. Darwin says no; Teilhard says yes. However elsewhere in the room there is an atmosphere of suppressed merriment. The geniuses are relaxed and Leonardo, vigorously backed up by Blake and De Hooch, politely suggests that I take my clothes off and unbend a bit.
‘I’ve got quite enough to worry about with this carpet, thank you.’
Darwin takes the cornflakes and having torn the cardboard box apart he starts shaking the inner packet about to show the stochastic patterns in the random descent of little flakes to the bottom. But, apart from Teilhard, everybody else is interested in what is going to be done with the eggs. The eggs were really for Leonardo, but being a bit shy, he got De Hooch to shout for them.
Leonardo takes the two eggs and sets them on their sides on the table and then he makes them spin. The two eggs spin out of phase with one another, and we can all see that the boiled egg (a soft-boiled three-minute egg) is spinning more slowly than the raw egg, and soon the boiled egg ceases to spin while the raw one continues to rotate slowly for quite a while longer.
‘Here, sirs,’ says Leonardo, ‘we see the vortex of life. The raw egg still moves, but the cooked egg has had its livingness boiled out of it.’
‘With respect, that is nonsense!’ cries young Galton. ‘What you have there is only an application of the principle of moments as it applies to fluids and to solids. Watch again!’
He grabs the two eggs and makes them spin. Unfortunately … unfortunately he does it rather wildly and the raw egg spins off the table and smashes on the carpet. There are already a few cornflakes there, for in the meantime Darwin’s bag has split open. I am about to tear a strip off them all, but at this point two things happen. The phone starts ringing again and De Hooch keels over on to the floor. Well! At first I think that the excitement with the eggs must have been too much for him and he has simply fainted. But do you groan so terribly before you faint? He lies very still on the floor. I think that he must be dead. The phone keeps ringing. Was this all too much for his great heart? Or has he poisoned himself with a bit of Darwin’s mouldy cake? Seeing the consternation on my face, the other geniuses are convulsed with mirth. At last Teilhard lets me out of my misery:
‘Killer Wink. Do you know Killer Wink, Marcia? The taxonomy of dirt and the reconceptualization of decayed thought-patterns, they are big problems, yes, but with the power of our combined minds the preliminary answers at least come fairly easy. So it is boring for us, no? So we decide while you were out in the kitchen, that we will play Killer Wink to amuse ourselves while we continue to advance towards the solution of these problems.’
I wish that bloody phone would stop ringing. Teilhard goes on to explain about Killer Wink. His voice seems to blend in with the ringing of the phone, high and insistent. Dickens had actually wanted to play Are You There, Moriarty?, a rather jovial game where two people lie on the floor beside one another, blindfolded, holding the partner’s hand with one hand and clutching a rolled-up newspaper in the other. Then one calls out, ‘Are you there, Moriarty?’ and the other tries to swat him over the head with his rolled-up newspaper. However, the two baldies in the group, Leonardo and Darwin, vetoed this. So they settled on the less disruptive Killer Wink. In Killer Wink secret lots are drawn to determine who is going to be the Killer. Then, while all the normal chat is going on the Killer strikes at his victims by surreptitiously winking at them. The victim is then honour-bound to collapse and expire with realistic groans, and, in doing so, not to make it obvious who it is who has winked at them. The rest of the group, a diminishing group, try to detect the winker.
I listen to all this with some incredulity. Teilhard stops talking and the phone stops ringing at the same time, and I start laying into them:
‘The power of your combined minds for whom no problem is too great – or too small! All that I can see you have achieved so far is an almighty mess on my carpet. Don’t bother to tell me what you want the tomato juice for as well. Solving problems and playing games serenely above it all while your handmaid bustles about you cleaning up! Three thousand years of art and science, of electron telescopes, elegies, cantilever bridges and frescoes, but is the lot of the common housewife any easier than it was three thousand years ago? I am speaking about almost half the world’s population.’
‘Science has given you the Hoover,’ Teilhard is reproving me.
‘But my cleaning still takes me at least as long as it did my grandmother, and she had no Hoover. And, besides, my Hoover is bust. You lot are no good. I thought you were my friends.’ I am conscious that I am beginning to sniffle. ‘My last hope is the Institute of Whiteness.’
‘What is the Institute of Whiteness?’ Blake is both solicitous and genuinely interested.
‘The Institute of Whiteness is a body of men and women dedicated to helping housewives combat dirt and evil. They do research and things.’
I have a vision of the Institute – big and gleaming and white – all test-tubes, flow-charts and computer interfaces. All that, but not divorced from the housewife. The Institute is no Shangri La locked away in the Himalayas. It responds directly to the housewife and is dedicated to helping her make her home a better home to live in, up to
a hundred per cent more clean. It is the opposite of the Temple of Evil really.
Blake too has a vision of the Institute. It is less favourable than mine.
‘Put not your trust in a dead thing, my Angel. Your Institute could only be a cold tomb, a phantastical pyramid built by men whose minds are indexed in marble.’
‘Fantastical indeed!’ Dickens joins in. ‘I do not believe that this Institute exists.’
The others all agree. I, it seems, am the only one ever to have heard of the Institute of Whiteness.
‘What evidence for it do you have?’
I tell Darwin about my visit from Dr Hornrim and how interested Dr Hornrim was in my work.
‘Did this Hornrim actually say that he was from the Institute of Whiteness?’
‘Well no, he didn’t, but he was very interested in my work, and what else would he have been doing in my bathroom if he wasn’t from the Institute? Oh, and it turns out that his name wasn’t Hornrim.’
Darwin taps his nose thoughtfully. I have persuaded no one. Teilhard has a suggestion.
‘The existence or not of the Institute of Whiteness is a verifiable hypothesis. Let us look in the London telephone directory.’
We do. My eye anxiously runs down the columns. Institute of Urology. Institute of Welfare Officers. Institute of Woodwork. There is no Institute of Whiteness. It is not possible that they would not have a phone. It is not possible that they would not have a London office. They do not exist. How was it that I was so certain that they did exist?
‘So I am on my own, then?’
‘We are still with you.’
A hopelessness settles in upon me. The geniuses don’t in fact seem to be quite all there in any sense. Their silly game apparently won’t stop and while Teilhard and I have been consulting the telephone directory Galton has fallen to the floor groaning realistically. Uncle Darwin pontificates about the wink and the blink or the deliberate non-verbal unit of communication versus the protective reflex action, and about how Killer Wink trains one to make correct deductions from minute signs, which is what science is all about. Blah, blah, blah. Everybody looks distinctly foggy – no, indistinctly foggy, I suppose I mean. They also look frightened. Blake tries to tell me something:
‘I saw Bedlam once in the shape of a dish of rotten meat. Then I saw that its doctor had the soul of a blow-fly. It dropped his eggs into the meat. Beware of your doctor, my Angel. Philip is –’
Blake clutches his eyes and slumps backwards.
‘Confound me!’ cries Dickens. ‘I had just decided that it was Blake.’
The four remaining geniuses grin nervously at one another.
‘Is it Teilhard, then?’ Leonardo hazards.
‘Not I,’ Teilhard affirms.
‘But you would say that, wouldn’t you?’ Dickens points out.
We are silent, thinking and sniffing. Sniffing. There is a funny smell coming from the corner of the room where De Hooch lies. Suddenly I realize what is going on.
‘Let me tell you about the Brothers Karamazov!’ I cry. ‘Let me tell you how they end.’
And I do …
‘Well, that is the missing sequel to The Brothers Karamazov,’ I conclude. I could have been talking to myself for all the impression it makes. At length Dickens reluctantly ventures an opinion.
‘Marcia, my dear. It is not very good. With all due modesty I must say that it is derivative. Indeed it seeks to imitate my own work, but there is far too much melodrama. This Russian fellow has too little genuine sentiment – if indeed it is by a Russian fellow?’ He looks at me inquiringly.
‘Oh, you are missing the point. Don’t any of you see?’ I did not think that they could be so slow. ‘I didn’t write it and neither did Dostoevsky. Mucor finished Dostoevsky’s novel for him, just as he finished your Edwin Drood for you. Mucor is a parasite on real literature. He grows on it like dry rot. And now events in this room are following the pattern of events in the ending of The Brothers Karamazov.’ I point to De Hooch. His corpse is in an advanced state of decomposition. It is decaying far faster than Grushenka’s or Zosima’s. When a cluster of maggots pops out of an eyeball, I am forced to turn away. ‘Do you still not see? You have an extra player in your game and it is no game at all. Mucor is killing you off one by one.’
‘I think it is time for us to meet this Mucor.’ Darwin is decisive. ‘He is a common household mould, I gather?’
‘There is nothing common about Mucor.’
But yes, let us leave this room with its mess of egg, cornflakes, machine oil and corpses – and its stink. My geniuses are fading fast. I want to hurry them on to Mucor, but in the hallway Leonardo is detained by the Hoover. He is fascinated by it and wants it to be explained to him. I tell him that it is broken and that I am too tired and stupid to explain it to him now. But he is not to be put off. He is sure that he can repair it, if only its general principles are explained to him. Dickens is quicker to get the general idea. He is demonstrating how the Hoover works to a baffled Leonardo. In the growing darkness of the hallway I can just make Charles Dickens out. He is crawling along the carpet pretending to suck the dust up with his mouth. Then some dust seems to catch at the back of his throat and, faintly coughing, he expires.
At last Darwin is successful in persuading Leonardo to hurry on towards Mucor. As they kneel over Mucor, a whispering rises from the carpet:
‘Death, corruption and turning to dust are the final and therefore the highest forms of humanity.’
For a moment the great bushy white eyebrows of Leonardo and Darwin seem almost to lock together as they stare at each other in wild surmise. Then the great eye of Mucor winks once and these two ghosts of Western culture are blinked out of existence. Everything is fading. Even the corpses and the stink are vanishing. My powers of invention are flagging, failing. I made up these fantasies to get me through a day of boring housework. But soon Philip will be home and I can’t take them seriously any more. Even Mucor, still sizzling and hissing away, seems at most a sinister clown. He has never done me any real harm – nor has he been in any position to do so. Boring, all terribly boring. The bed is made, most of the washing up done, half the hall was hoovered, I had a coffee morning (one coffee morning), the living room is more or less tidy. I managed … as I shall have to manage tomorrow and the day after. I sag against the wall and descend to the floor. I begin to cry.
Mucor is still trying to keep me company, like a faithful old family pet on its last legs:
‘Marcia, talk to me. I am your son. I mean it. I am your kith and kin. Listen to me, Marcia. Don’t you recognize me? I love you, Mummy. Mummy, did you know that skin flakes are a major component of household dust? I have got your skin flakes in me, you know – and the little mites that feed off your skin flakes. Did you know that in every handful of household dust, there are five thousand such mites? Isn’t that interesting, Mummy?’
Piss off, Mucor. That is not what it is all about. I am sitting crying in my house. A leaky faucet is making a tap drip. I can hear it. And the creak of a board as it weakens and settles under the onslaught of woodworm. And flies buzzing over an open jar in the kitchen. There is a carpet-grub in the living room. I didn’t imagine that. I know there is wet rot under one of the window-sills. I hope there is no dry rot. Why I should care about these things I do not know, but I cry and I cry. It seems like my own death.
‘There is a lot of Philip in me too. Listen to me please, Mummy. Remember that Saturday when Stephanie came round, and you had to go out to the shops and you left Stephanie with Philip in the house? Well, they couldn’t even wait to get to the sitting-room sofa. They had it off standing up here in the hallway, and I got some of Philip’s semen. All fungi need lots of moisture. Isn’t that interesting?’
Enough, Mucor. Enough.
‘Please, Mummy. I am talking to you. This is serious. Philip and Stephanie’s affair has been going on for ages. Didn’t you suspect anything? And yesterday Philip went round to a GP to find out how to get you c
ertified. They are going to put you away, so that they can have the house to themselves. But I’m on your side, Mummy.’
Mucor begins to recite from the missing final stanzas of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. It is very faint and it sounds as though he is trying to keep his courage up.
‘… to be behoven,
The Genius fell for Mucor’s stroke was lustie.
Greisie, drearie, wearie, mustie, rustie,
In darkling night she lay in Castle Sloven,
Whylome her paramour Philip was not trustie.
Whyleare with hands so softe they did not dishes
Seemingly, she beat upon the Sauvage Carpet as it was hight,
And as she bate, so she despeired at the messe upon
its stitches,
For there it spread its filthe in Heaven’s despyte,
Performing dwarfish antic Marcia to affright.
Thought the drudge in the Chambered Mind
Toiling allwhyles at Dark Mucor’s delyte.
Seek out the hallway and ye shall find
Household mould and maide entwyned.
Now hear the clamour of the dolorous stroke …’
It is one work of literature he will not finish. There is a bell ringing. My eyes are such a blur that I can hardly see to reach for the phone. No, it is not the phone. Someone is at the door. The ringing has stopped and there are fumbling sounds. The lock is turning.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
‘Sorry, dear. I couldn’t find my key for a moment.’
‘Ooooh, Philip!’ I reach out my arms to hug him and draw him down on to the floor, but he pulls away and through the mist of my tears I see that Stephanie is standing behind him, and then I see that ‘Dr Hornrim’ is with them too. Are those meant to be reassuring smiles?
‘Don’t cry, my love.’ Taking one of my hands, Stephanie settles herself down on the hallway carpet beside me. More oddly, ‘Dr Hornrim’ takes the other hand and lowers himself down on my other side. Philip towers above us. He does not seem to know where to look. He takes a fleck of dandruff from his jacket shoulder and affects to contemplate it with minute attention, but I can see that, under his lids, he is watching me watching him. Stephanie gives my hand a squeeze, but I turn the other way.
