Morag Joss: Half Broken Things

I felt that way about the objects even before the teapot. And also before the teapot, there was another thing. I felt, walking through the house, that time itself had stopped passing or rather, since that is impossible, that its passing had begun to seem irrelevant in the way that a war fought in another country becomes, eventually. For it seemed to me that in this house the only purpose of time, before it grew dark, was to let something beautiful happen to the light that was coming in through the windows. The hours of those first afternoons just moved over and made space for me to be quietly entertained by the light entering, fading and then leaving us, the things and me. I thought it was the kindest present I had ever been given.

I tested this second feeling for the first few days and reached an accommodation with it. I realised that in a house like this time passes so gently it seems not to be doing so at all unless you pay attention to the way light changes. Time had stopped pulling me along the way it had begun to, with that letter. It was as if time would let me linger for as long as I wanted, would even linger along with me, but so quietly that I would not notice it at my side.

All this is the wisdom of hindsight, of course. I couldn’t have put it into words at the time. All I could have said for certain back in January was that I was happy in a beautiful house. Also that I saw, for certain, that people are mistaken when they say that joys are fleeting. It’s the opposite. I had arrived thinking, worrying, really, that it wasn’t long until September. But in the first week here I learned that a part of joy is the apparent infinity of it. When you are happy, happiness stretches out ahead of you, its end forever receding even as you suspect that something this good can’t last. But it does. It goes on, and you’re confounded, you ought to be expecting it to finish, and it doesn’t. Then something quite giddy gets into you, and then you start to think you need it to go on. And it does, it does. It’s one of the things about it. Suddenly, because I was happy, the time until September was so, so far away. Happiness surrounded me like trees so I couldn’t see September, waiting.

She had not told Shelley the half of it about the teapot. When it fell and shattered on the dining room floor after what seemed the merest push from the feather duster, it had spilt keys. Several, perhaps forty of them, had skittered and skidded across the flagstones like enamelled seeds from a spent case. Jean was at first offended by the accident, feeling that she had been almost forced into it. The owners’ list had commanded, ‘Use the feather duster. Do not lift objects to dust them’ and Jean had so far been obedient. So really, the breakage could be said to be their own fault, for if she had been using a cloth, or if she had been holding the teapot instead of pushing the stupid feather thing at it as it sat on the sideboard, it would not have slid off and smashed.

But the broken teapot ceased to matter when she picked up the keys from across the floor and considered them, for this was a house with a great many locked doors. Householders varied, Jean had found. Some encouraged a house sitter to move in and treat the place as their own, proffering so much access that it was embarrassing. In her time Jean had been invited to use computers, drinks cupboards, dubious videos, occasionally a sauna and once the client’s electric hair rollers. Others were less profligate but still welcoming, sometimes dust-sheeting and closing unneeded rooms as much for the house sitter’s convenience as their own. But few locked rooms the way these people had, without explanation, but still leaving open four empty bedrooms upstairs and all the downstairs rooms that Jean was supposed to clean and maintain but not use. They had also locked what they called, in their instructions, the pool pavilion, the garages, the potting sheds and implement store. Desk drawers and small cabinets throughout the house also had been locked and the keys taken away. And had been placed in the blue and white teapot at the back of the sideboard, Jean now supposed, lifting and dropping handfuls of keys, letting them clank softly in her palm. Or to be more accurate, placed in the teapot so that they would be hidden from her. Her vague offence over the owners’ behaviour was warming into resentment. They were practically saying they did not trust her. Did they assume that a humble house sitter would be unable to resist the temptation to sully their beautiful and valuable possessions?

The keys that were obviously for cars were of no interest to Jean, who had never learned to drive. Nor did she think she would ever need or want to operate garden machinery using the keys with paper tags marked mower, old saw and new saw . But the largest mortice keys would surely open the locked doors upstairs. They would show her the rooms that were thought too good for her, which would offer up their spaces, grateful that she had come to claim them. The smaller keys, she guessed, would be for cupboards. They would reveal even finer things that would console her for the destroyed teapot, treasures yet more precious, even now waiting to be brought into the light. And the smallest keys would surely turn the locks of some of the carved boxes, of hidden drawers in exquisite cabinets; they would yield with scarcely a click and she would pull out tiny handles and lift lids on secrets that these people, in their insulting way, had thought to keep from her. Next to these pewter-coloured keys, whose dullness merely disguised the scale and richness of what they protected, the bright blue and white, silver-mounted teapot was already losing its glamour. Jean retrieved the porcelain shards, now as discarded and irrelevant as shed skin, and put them in a bag.

You might think it’s a perfect recipe for bitterness, living all alone in the house of somebody much richer than you are, but I don’t think I have ever fallen into that particular trap. Besides, this house isn’t the biggest place I’ve done or the most luxurious, nor did I mind not having neighbours. It’s a solitary job anyway, you accept that, and a mile from the village isn’t really that far. Thinking about it I’ve been much more solitary in towns, behind electronic gates in huge opulent houses full of expensive trash, usually in places that are both popular and disgusting, like Bournemouth. Or Wilmslow. I could never be anything other than solitary in places like that. Those houses have carpets so thick you think you’re walking on squashed animals, and big upholstered chairs with huge cushions, like corpulent women in tight dresses in too young a colour. Most often it’s peach. In places like that you are lonely, comfortable and revolted all at the same time.

So, this house, the fifty-eighth, is not the biggest, nor the loneliest nor the richest. It is the most gracious. Put simply, it is beautiful. From the first, I knew it was the first truly beautiful house I’d ever seen, because I could imagine really living in it, as distinct from just staying a while. It’s beautiful in the old way, quietly. I don’t think I’m a snob but there’s such a thing as good taste- though there’s more to it than that. I never really associated this house with its owners. It seems strange even to call them that. I thought about them, a little, in the first week or so, but gradually less, and hardly ever after Michael came.

When I arrived, three of the rooms upstairs were locked. So was the door to the cellar, various other cupboards around the place, and the garages and outbuildings. I was a bit cross about that, clients shouldn’t do that. First of all, one of my jobs is to keep rooms aired and how can I if they’re locked? Second is the fire risk. What if there’s an electrical fault, and a fire starts that you can’t get to? You’re wondering all the time what could happen behind the door and all you can do is rattle the handle and pray that everything’s unplugged. People just don’t think about that, not until they’ve experienced a house fire for themselves. The irony was that on that very long list of things they wanted me to do or not do, they’d put ‘avoid any fire risks’! So, no candles, no open fires, unplug the television. I could have taken that personally, but I kept reminding myself they knew nothing about me and fires and houses. They couldn’t, because Town and Country Sitters didn’t; if they had I should never have been taken on at all. No, the ‘owners’ were just being cautious in case I was as stupid as they were afraid I’d be, being only a house sitter.