Maggie Gee - My Cleaner

“I must say the family seemed rather reluctant. And almost suspicious of my motives. I mean, it was my therapist told me to go. Of course I couldn’t tell them that. But anyone would think I was after Grandma’s money. I admit she has rather a lot of money, but for heaven’s sake, there are ten of us grandchildren, and all the others have done better than me, they have all podded, there are scads of great-grandchildren. I am hardly competition for them. In any case, I am a grandchild. I do have a right. I have a right to a family.”

Vanessa pretends to fall asleep. Fifi is tiring when she talks about rights. Besides, Vanessa needs time to herself, she needs to drink deep of her own story, the bittersweet time-warp of her days in the village…it’s like sipping medicine, remembering Miss Tomlinson. The things the woman said about Vanessa’s parents.

The sour dark house where Vanessa grew up. Yesterday it looked so cramped, so poor.

Mum’s poor strangled garden, Vanessa thinks, remembering the nettles, the rusty wire. But then, Mum could never look after herself. Which meant we had to look after her. Dad’s awful, clumsy tenderness. I despised him because my mother did. It wasn’t comfortable, despising my father.

Then later, having to get away. Being forced to reinvent herself. The difficulties when she came home from Cambridge, and Lucy and the others laughed at her new accent, which she herself wasn’t even aware of.

Forty years later she’s still hot with shame.

“Vanessa, you’re not listening!”

She forces her lids open on the flat French countryside, the nondescript land between Lille and Paris, and tries to listen, but inside her head she is remembering the cleaning, always the cleaning, before school in the morning and when she came home, the only way to keep her mother’s nerves at bay, since Dad or Stan used to tramp the mud in, the floor in the kitchen was usually swimming, the old chipped sink bloomed with vile yellow stains…Her mother’s pale fretful eyes would be searching, restlessly looking for mess and dirt, more proof that life on earth was a nightmare, a hellish test she could not survive. Vanessa had to work hard to save her, for without her mother she knew she would be finished, since Mum was the only one who knew she was clever, too good to be a farmworker’s daughter.

I tried to make everything different for Justin. Only the best was good enough. He had every chance that money could buy.

Somewhere along the way, it went wrong.

“So, did you enjoy your little trip to the country?” Fifi asks her, as they draw into Paris. “Wasn’t it awkward taking Mary?”

“No. In fact, Mary was rather a hit. Everyone wanted to dance with her. My Uncle Stan was very taken.”

Vanessa tries not to think about the fart. She would rather die than tell Fifi that. And it wasn’t important, in the longer view. Bridges had been built, chasms crossed.

And, left on her own, while Fifi goes to see her family, in the tall, stuffy house where Fifi’s grandmother lived, Vanessa feels renewed, and hopeful. She sits down at the desk in the bedroom with her notebook. What she has learned will surely bear fruit.

But in fact, for some reason things go against her. That weekend there’s a miniature Indian summer. The thick heat of August returns, and clings. Most of the windows are impossible to open, the wood dried and twisted in an airless clinch, and when she finally attacks one with a knife, prising at the frame with fierce determination, the paint flakes off, and then the wood splinters, and she cuts her hand before she gives up. Small beige moths flutter out of tall cupboards like rags and tatters of exploded lace. The polished walnut swirls uneasily with faces. On the dressing-table that was once Fifi’s grandma’s, a cloudy cut-glass bowl of pink face powder sits uncovered, breathing at her. Vanessa feels she is inhaling human dust.

When she looks for respite at the walls, almost every centimetre is covered with photographs, framed and unframed, large and small, curled photographs of smiling children, proud parents, sprinting dogs, a crowded world of happy strangers that is slipping very slowly into the past. This family’s life seems like a long, sunlit picnic; they meet up in parks, in woods, in gardens, there are always at least half a dozen of them, and they dance and prance for the photographer, they hug each other and play leap-frog, they hold up small babies and exquisite toddlers, they ride donkeys or have swimming parties, cut big cakes or raise a diadem of glasses.

However, when Fifi briefly returns, it is to complain of being snubbed or excluded. “You know what they’re like, Parisians! They pretend they don’t understand a word, when as you know I am practically fluent, you heard me talking to that taxi-driver…And they expected me to pay for myself. In any case, the restaurant was filthy. And Tante Clothilde was rude about my mother. Now I see why she wanted to escape her family!”

When she leaves again, Vanessa stares at the walls. Those happy childish faces haunt her. Movies that have turned into still photos. Colour that is fading towards black-and-white, so she can never quite get to the reality of it, never find out if Fifi is right—

But it’s painfully different from her own lost life, locked up in that low, dark house in the village.

She thinks, it’s not that I’m envious, exactly. It is just that haunting sensation of other lives. We only live once. Has my life been all right? Have I really done my best for Justin? Did he have enough friends, enough happiness? Did we ever go for sunlit picnics? I wasn’t a great one for seaside holidays. I never let him keep a dog or a cat. I was an only child, so he has no cousins…

Their life seemed thin, empty, cold, compared to the frieze around these walls, the children feasting on life’s banquet.

Vanessa is crushed and stifled by ghosts. They brush at her consciousness like bruised moth-wings as she tuts and sweats in the warm soft heat, writing, or not writing, because the pen moves slowly, and she starts to imagine she hears childish voices, a high silver humming that torments her ear, but when it finally drives her out into the kitchen she realises it is just something electric, but she still cannot find it to switch it off, so it goes on vibrating like a thousand crickets as the sky outside the shutters turns indigo, a thousand insects or a swarm of lost children, the ghosts who should have played with Justin.

I should have played with him more , she thinks. I shouldn’t have handed him over to Mary. But I had to work to pay the mortgage. I still have to work to keep my son.

She stays there, grimly. She is a professional. “Bums on seats,” she always says to her classes. “If you sit there long enough, the writing will come.” But she sits there, solidly, and nothing happens. Outside the window, Paris calls to her, grey and silver, infinitely delectable, singing come on, you are still young, dance with me, dance, Vanessa —

But Vanessa closes her ears, and sighs, and makes another wretched cup of instant coffee, though outside the doors there are glorious cremes , in wonderful cafes, and kir , and frites . She will not give in. She can sit this out. Like a terrier, she digs in, and waits.

On their last evening, Fifi returns upset. “Today she did actually recognise me, Grandmaman , and she was sweet…But now Grandpa is dead, she will never come home. She thinks she will, she talks as if she’s going to, but her daughter Jeanne said to me it’s impossible, the stairs are too dangerous, she can’t live alone…So tell me, what is the point of all this? All the books and pictures and music and photos? All the objets she’s chosen with such exquisite taste? Just to end up in some wretched almshouse. By the way, darling, how has your writing gone? Why didn’t you go off and see the Louvre?”