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November

VIII. Inverted World

Pale as royals, the pair of them. Wouldn’t know a day’s work if it shone on them blazing. Put their backs into naught, far as I can see, except giving me gob.

Only this morning Spiv says to me, she says, “Don’t mind me, ma’am,” when I find her dangling her feet while she ought be cleaning the slops. “Don’t mind me, I’m only resting up on account of my courses.” Then, when I catch her putting the woolens through the mangle: “But, Mrs. Burns, this is how I did them in the last place, this is how the missuses are doing them.”

You come to London, get a nice home about you and—blight your innocence!—you think you’re over with the toils and the trouble.

The other one can hear me chiding from two flights up, and comes down in her night rail. “Don’t stand there, Pumps,” I says to her. And then, “For the love of Christ, Pumps, don’t stand there gawping,” for she’ll not hearken to something spoken only the once. “Make yourself useful and go do the grate, it’s a blind disgrace and needs blackening.”

She bobs a curtsy and goes, and I’m left relieved by how easy she’s toed, for on your regular day she’s the worse of the two, all her energies spent trying to get one over me and prove I’m not up to the dodge. With the passing of the moments, though, my relief turns to suspicion—the lass so yielding is a forecast for bad goings-on—so when I’ve done with Spiv and sent her into the kitchen to think about lunch, I go to the parlor to give it the once-over.

Just as I pictured: the grate still undone, the drapes covered with paw marks, and Pumps herself in front of the mirror rubbing black onto her face. Which is to say, it’s worse than I pictured, and we’re back to the usual.

“Pumps, what’s this?” I says.

“What’s what?” she says.

“This here, on the drapes.”

“That? Was there when I got here.”

“Why didn’t you get the benzene to it, then?”

“Thought you wanted it that way.”

“And on your face? Did you think I wanted you with whiskers as well?”

“Oh, this? I just thought you could use another man about the place.”

This, for the London missus, is life. Not the fancy ball you might have imagined, but this. Which only goes to show you can’t foreknow the shape of things to come. For if you’d told me this day twelvemonth how it was going to be—that my hours would be spent poking in nooks and sniffing in corners, running the finger and dancing at heels; that every day would be a scrub, and every week a starch, and every year a white; that tomorrow’s coals would turn to yesterday’s ashes, and time would burn my wick both ends—if this day twelvemonth you’d told me the God-glaring truth of it, I’d not have credited you. I’d have thought you unkept in your mind.

Get away with you, I’d have thought. It can’t be shabbier than Manchester, can it?

Yet nowadays I oftentimes think we oughtn’t have flown the old kettle at all. I oftentimes think the mill wasn’t so killing as this. Topsy thinking is what this is, but topsy is how it goes up here; topsy and wrongways.

Advice: if you come, leave your senses back where they were common.