She enters, as though once and for all, circumspectly deposits her vital paraphernalia beside the door, then crosses the room to fling open (humbly yet authoritatively) the curtains and the garden doors: there is such a song of birds all about! Excited by that, and by the sweet breath of late afternoon, her own eagerness to serve, and faith in the perfectibility of her tasks, she turns with a glad heart and tosses back the bedcovers: ‘Oh! I beg your pardon, sir!’ ‘A … a dream,’ he mutters gruffly, his erection slipping back inside his pajamas like an abandoned moral. ‘Something about glory and a pizzle — or puzzle — and a fundamental position in the civil service …’ But she is no longer listening, busy now at her common round, dusting furniture and sweeping the floor: so much to do! When (not very willingly, she observes) he leaves the bed at last, she strips the sheets and blankets off, shaking the dead bees into the garden, fluffs and airs the pillows, turns the mattress. She hears the master relieving himself noisily in the bathroom: yes, there’s water in the bucket, soap too, a sponge, she’s remembered everything! Today then, perhaps at last …! Quickly she polishes the mirror, mops the floor, snaps open the fresh sheets and makes the bed. Before she has the spread down, however, he comes out of the bathroom, staggers across the room muttering something about ‘a bloody new birth,’ and crawls back into it. ‘But, sir—!’ ‘What, what?’ he yawns, and rolls over on his side, pulling the blanket over his head. She snatches it away. He sits up, blinking, a curious strained expression on his face. ‘I–I’m sorry, sir,’ she says, and, pushing her drawers down to her knees, tucking her skirt up and bending over, she presents to him that broad part preferred by him and Mother Nature for the invention of souls. He retrieves the blanket and disappears under it, all but his feet, which stick out at the bottom, still slippered. She stuffs her drawers hastily behind her apron bib, knocks over the mop bucket, smears the mirror, throws the fresh towels in the toilet, and jerks the blanket away again. ‘I–I’m sorry, sir, she insists, bending over and lifting her skirt: ‘I’m sure I had them on when I came in …’ What? Is he snoring? She peers at him past what is now her highest part, that part invaded suddenly by a dread as chilling as his chastisements are, when true to his manuals, enflaming, and realizes with a faint shudder (she cannot hold back the little explosions of wind) that change and condition are coeval and everlasting: a truth as hollow as the absence of birdsong (but they are singing!) …
So she stands there in the open doorway, the glass doors having long since been flung open (when was that? she cannot remember), her thighs taut and pressed closely together, her face buried in his cast-off pajamas. She can feel against her cheeks, her lips, the soft consoling warmth of them, so recently relinquished, can smell in them the terror — no, the painful sadness, the divine drudgery (sweet, like crushed flowers, dead birds) — of his dreams, Mother Nature having provided, she knows all too well, the proper place for what God has ordained. But there is another odor in them too, musty, faintly sour, like that of truth or freedom, the fear of which governs every animal, thereby preventing natural confusion and disorder. Or so he has taught her. Now, her face buried in this pungent warmth and her heart sinking, the comforting whirr and smack of his rod no more than a distant echo, disappearing now into the desolate throb of late-afternoon birdsong, she wonders about the manuals, his service to them and hers to him, or to that beyond him which he has not quite named. Whence such an appetite? — she shudders, groans, chewing helplessly on the pajamas — so little relief?
Distantly blows are falling, something about freedom and government, but he is strolling in the garden with a teacher he once had, discussing the condition of humanity, which keeps getting mixed up somehow with homonymity, such that each time his teacher issues a new lament it comes out like slapped laughter. He is about to remark on the generous swish and snap of a morning glory that has sprung up in their path as though inspired (‘Paradox, too, has its techniques,’ his teacher is saying, ‘and so on …’), when it turns out to be a woman he once knew on the civil surface. ‘What? WHAT—?!’ But she only wants him to change his position, or perhaps his condition (‘You see!’ remarks his teacher sagely, unbuckling his belt, ‘it’s like a kind of callipygomancy, speaking loosely — am I being unfair?’), he’s not sure, but anyway it doesn’t matter, for what she really wants is to get him out of the sheets he’s wrapped in, turn him over (he seems to have imbibed an unhealthy kind of dampness), and give him a lecture (she says ‘elixir’) on method and fairies, two dew-bejeweled habits you can roast chestnuts over. What more, really, does he want of her? (Perhaps his teacher asks him this, buzzing in and out of his ear like the sweet breath of solemnity: whirr-SMACK!) His arm is rising and falling through great elastic spaces as though striving for something fundamental like a forgotten dream or lost drawers. ‘I–I’m sorry, sir!’ Is she testing him, perched there on his stout engine of duty like a cooked bird with the lingering bucket of night in her beak (see how it opens, closes, opens), or is it only a dimpled fever of the mind? He doesn’t know, is almost afraid to ask. ‘Something about a higher end,’ he explains hoarsely, taking rueful refuge, ‘or hired end perhaps, and boiled flowers, hard parts — and another thing, what’s left of it …’ She screams. The garden groans, quivers, starts, its groves radiant and throbbing. His teacher, no longer threatening, has withdrawn discreetly to a far corner with diagonal creases, where he is turning what lilacs remain into roses with his rumpled bull’s pizzle: it’s almost an act of magic! Still his arm rises and falls, rises and falls, that broad part of Mother Nature destined for such inventions dancing and bobbing soft and easy under the indulgent sun: ‘It’s a beautiful day!’ ‘What? WHAT—?! An answering back to a reproof?’ he inquires gratefully, taunting her with that civility and kindness due to an inferior, as — hiss-WHAP! — flicking lint off one shoulder and smoothing the ends of his moustache with involuntary vertical and horizontal motions, he floats helplessly backwards (‘Thank you, sir!’), twitching amicably yet authoritatively like a damp towel, down a bottomless hole, relieving himself noisily: ‘