Almost angrily I said, “He has plenty of initiative! He keeps it for his hobby.”
“He has a hobby?” she asked, incredulous. With hardly a pause I said, “Yes — quantity surveying.”
“What on earth is that?”
Not knowing, I said, “I’ve no time to explain. Look it up.”
Henry and I might have continued comfortably like that for years had I not hit him with a new idea.
One night I asked, “Have you noticed that the cost of dining out, plus paying the agency to clean this house, comes to more than your wage?”
“Yes,” said he.
“So we would save money if you left the firm and did the… I mean became a…”
I hesitated before saying househusband because the word might offend him, and was still hesitating when he said, “Househusband. I wondered when you would think of that. But how will you manage at work without me?”
“As badly as I did before you came. But I would be used to it, and I hate you wasting your life emptying and filling boxes.”
He sat silent and frowning for so long that I grew worried and asked, “Are you annoyed?”
Said he, “No. I was thinking that before financiers and politicians grabbed our economy it derived from a Greek word for housekeeping. So does ecology. Thucydides said the most satisfying economy was seen in rows of full pots arranged cleanly on shelves. Your idea is excellent. I will be a good housekeeper.”
He was. After leaving the firm he rose each day at his usual 7 a.m., made breakfast for us both, and would have brought it to me in bed had not guilt made me rise an hour before my usual time and leave earlier for work. I never asked about his routines but the house was spotless when I returned. He put away clean clothes so neatly that I knew they had been ironed and told him housewives nowadays never bothered with ironing. He said, “They should. Clothes are better for it.”
I had never much noticed what I ate but our meals now tasted so nice that I asked if he bought special ingredients. No, said he, the ingredients were cheap and local, but he was learning to properly cook them. He began baking bread and brewing ale. On a patio off the kitchen, in warm days of the brighter months, we enjoyed the ale while overlooking the back garden. My neighbours paid gardeners to keep their lawns and flowerbeds pretty, and had given me dark looks because I had left mine to the weeds. Henry planted our back with neat plots of potato and other root vegetables, built a glasshouse for tomatoes, dug a pit for compost and surrounded it with gooseberry bushes. On what had been the front lawn he planted a herb garden with blackcurrant hedges. One evening at dinner he produced a bottle of wine saying the French believed that a meal without wine is not a meal.
“Is that why France has an alcohol problem?” I asked.
“Scottish alcoholism is worse than French,” he said, “and French alcoholism is only rife among those who drink the worst and cheapest wines.”
“So we are drinking expensive wine?”
“Just expensive enough to be good,” he said, “and one glass each with a dinner won’t impoverish us.”
I enjoyed that dinner so much that I stopped arguing. Not since early childhood had home been pleasanter than my time at work. Work was getting more difficult, and not just because Henry had left.
The firm had been founded by a man who sold first editions of Burns’ poetry, and had prospered and expanded until the late 20th century when I joined it. The owner was now someone I will call Sanker, who treated the business as a hobby he could leave to underlings. I thought him charming and aristocratic, partly because he made me boss of the orders department, partly from his eccentric terminology — he called me Mistress Maisie and pronounced John, Shon. Then he made someone I will call McGeeky the firm’s general manager. McGeeky had been a good manager of our biggest shop but knew and cared nothing about ordering books, and was put in charge of the firm because he always told Sanker it was doing wonderfully. Since McGeeky was now in charge of promotion all the senior managers became folk who saw nothing wrong with the firm. McGeeky imitated Sanker’s speech eccentricities, they imitated McGeeky’s, and at meetings I was the only one who did not, and was the only woman. I privately called them The Smug because they tolerated me as a joke — a grumbler whose words could be ignored. Without consulting me The Smug began telling members of my staff to do small jobs for them immediately, then complained to me when this slowed delivery of big jobs. Once I had overcome such problems by working overtime, but now the problems threatened to overcome me. New problems arose. The manager of technical book sales was put in charge of computerizing the firm and several hitches followed. He asked for and got two young assistants, each one of whom (I discovered) knew enough about computing to alone modernize the firm. That would have made their manager unnecessary, so he needed two assistants to play against each other, and the hitches continued. Then our works manager, though needed for heating maintenance, could seldom be found in his office or any of our shops. I suspected that, while paid by the firm, he was supervising the repair of Sanker and McGeeky’s private properties. All this was reducing our profits so The Smug sent the rest of the staff on expensive re-education courses which improved nothing. Then from my office invoices for large sums began mysteriously vanishing. Nobody in our building, or even out of it (I thought), had anything to gain by these thefts which caused nothing but pointless delay. Continual frustration sometimes made me weep because I loved my work.
One night I was later than usual in the building and heard someone enter from the lane. That did not worry me because only members of The Smug had keys, but I was surprised when Sanker opened my office door. He paused, obviously surprised by the sight of me, though I was delighted by the sight of him. For years I had never had a chance to tell him what was going wrong with us, and now the chance was here! For maybe a whole minute he listened then in a wonderful, condescending tone interrupted with, “What you should do, Mistress Maisie, is see more of Shon McGeeky. If you acquired some of Shon’s élan you would be a much happier woman. Goodnight Mistress Maisie.”
With wide open mouth and eyes I stared at his back as he left the office, then realised why he had come. It was he who had been furtively destroying invoices that would let me quickly pay what the firm owed. I was now working for a collusion of liars. I did not run after Sanker and resign my job then and there, because I had served the firm for twenty-five years — my whole working life — and could not imagine doing anything else.
Three days later, on Friday at half past four, a heavy cardboard box was carried in by the basement foreman and dumped on the floor by my desk. It held books flung in mixter-maxter, like a heap of bricks. I said, “Where’s the trolley?”
He said, “How should I know? That ****ing works manager took every trolley away in a van ten minutes ago.”
“Why?”
“For some ****ing reason that is not my business. My job is just to go on working in ****ing impossible conditions,” he said and left before I could ask him to place the box on a table. Instead of asking for help I tried to lift it alone. A sudden dreadful pain made me drop it and fall on top, unable to move or feel anything but pain. Assistants sent for an ambulance that took me to hospital, and I slept after an injection that made cessation of pain the loveliest thing in the universe. Henry was at the bedside when I wakened, holding my hand and looking so afraid I grew terrified. Then a doctor arrived who told us not to worry — I had burst a disc in my spine, and for a few days would be practically paralyzed, but would completely recover if I lay still in bed for a couple of months, or perhaps three or four. Recovery would be complete if I never again tried to lift big weights without assistance. There was no reason to expect complications.