The old woman had a mania for cleaning. Despite the servant with his tidying and me with my work, she would call in contract cleaners once a month, people who arrived like the fire brigade, complete with ladders and strange machines, who washed and scraped and fumigated just about everything. We also had a regular window cleaner whose one job was to wash and wipe the windows that we, the resident staff, had already washed. The smell of the laundry room was like an operating theater where they destroy the germs by radiating the place with blue lamps. You’ve never seen such a superior laundry room! You might have taken it for an expensive, upper-class funeral parlor. I never entered it without a sense of faint religious awe. I was only allowed in when Her Ladyship told me to help the laundress, who washed, ironed, and folded linen. She reminded me of those women back home that wash the dead and sort out dead men’s clothes. The family wasn’t about to trust me, you can be sure of that! I was a slattern by comparison with the delicate professional summoned to perform the great annual wash! … This special laundress used to be summoned by Her Ladyship with an open postcard announcing the joyful news that the dirty washing was waiting for her! … And of course she came immediately, delighted to be of use. My help was limited to helping her run the finest shirts, underwear, and damask tablecloths through the mangle. On no account would they trust me with the washing itself! There came a day when the laundress did not appear to summons. Instead there was a postcard written by her daughter. I remember every word of it, since I was the one who took the mail upstairs and, naturally, I read whatever was not in an envelope. This was what the laundress’s daughter wrote: “Dear Madam, I regret to inform Your Kind Ladyship that my mother can’t come to do the washing because she is dead.” She signed it: “Your humble servant, Ilonka.” I remember the way Her Ladyship wrinkled her brow as she read the card. She looked cross and shook her head. But she didn’t say anything. At that point I stepped forward and volunteered to do the work, and for a while they let me do it, at least until a new laundress was found, one who was a laundress by calling and had the advantage of still being alive.
Everything important in that household was done by qualified tradesmen. “Qualified” was one of their favorite words. If the doorbell broke, it wasn’t the manservant who fixed it but a qualified tradesman called in for the occasion. They trusted no one but qualified tradesmen. There was one fellow who came regularly, a man with a ceremonial air, wearing a bowler. He looked like a university professor called out to a council meeting in the provinces. His job was to trim corns. But he wasn’t just any old trimmer of corns, the kind people like us sometimes visit in town, slipping off our shoes and extending our feet so they can slice the corn or an extra growth of hard skin away. Heaven forfend! He wasn’t even the usual kind of home chiropodist — we would never have allowed one of those in the house. No, this man had a proper business card and you could find his telephone number in the directory. What it said on the card was “Swedish Pedicure.” We had a Swedish pedicurist come to the house once a month. He always wore black and handed over his hat and gloves with such ceremony when he entered that I felt quite overcome with awe: I almost kissed his hand. My own feet were frostbitten, on account, as you know, of those damp winters in the ditch, and I had corns and bunions and ingrown toenails that were so painful I could hardly walk sometimes. But I would never have dreamt of asking this foot artist to touch my foot. He brought a bag with him, like a doctor. He put on a white gown, carefully washed his hands in the bathroom, as if preparing himself for the operation, then took an electric gadget from his bag, something like a small dentist’s drill, sat himself down by Her Ladyship or the old man, or my husband, and set to work, shaving away the hardened parts of their ineffable skin. So that’s our corn cutter. I must say, darling, one of the high points of my life was when I was lady of that refined house and ordered the maid to call the “Swedish pedicurist.” I desired to have my refined corns treated. Everything comes to you if you wait long enough. As did this.
There was also the reading. The reading started the moment I brought the old man his orange juice. He lay in bed with the bedside light on and read an English newspaper. The Hungarian papers, of which there were a great many in the house, were only read by us servants, in the kitchen or in the toilet when we were bored. The old woman read the German press; the old man the English, but mostly only those pages that were full of long columns of numbers, the daily updates on foreign stock markets, because while he wasn’t a great reader of English, the numbers did interest him … As for the young gentleman, he read now the German, now the French papers, but as far as I could see he only read the headlines. I expect they thought these papers were better informed than ours, made a louder noise, and could tell bigger, more whopping lies. I liked reading the papers myself. I’d gather up whole bedsheets full of foreign papers in the various rooms and read them, nervous and awestruck.
There were many qualified tradesmen to see. After the orange juice, if it wasn’t the Swedish pedicurist, it was the masseuse. She wore a lorgnette and was quite rude. I knew she stole the bathroom creams and cosmetics. But she pinched cakes too, and the exotic fruits left in the parlor from the day before. She’d quickly stuff her face with two mouthfuls, not because she was hungry but just to deprive the house of something. She simply had what we called sticky fingers. Then she’d enter Her Ladyship’s room and give her a thorough pounding.
The gentlemen got massages too, administered by a man they referred to as “the Swedish gymnastics instructor.” They went through a few exercises in swimming shorts with him, then the instructor prepared a bath and stripped down so he could splash my husband and the old man with alternate cups of hot and cold water.
I can see you have no idea why he should do this. You have a great deal to learn, sweetheart.
The idea behind the instructor switching between hot and cold water was to improve their circulation. They couldn’t have set about their day with the necessary energy required without it. Everything in the house was approached with an eye to order and to scientific rigor. It took me a long time to understand how all these rituals related to each other.
In summer the coach would come three times a week before breakfast to play tennis with them in the garden. The coach was an older man, silver haired, very elegant, like the picture of the English thinker on that old copper engraving in the museum. I’d sneak a surreptitious look at them playing from the window of the servants’ quarters. It touched me to see this deeply moving spectacle of two old gentlemen, master and coach, engaged in a courteous game of tennis, discoursing with ball, as it were, rather than with words. My employer, the old man, was a powerful, sun-bronzed figure … he kept his tan even in the winter, because every afternoon after lunch he took a siesta under the sunlamp. Perhaps he needed a tanned face to inspire greater respect at work. I don’t know, it’s just a guess. At his advanced age he was still playing tennis, like the king of Sweden. The white trousers and the bright knit sleeveless jumper really suited him! After tennis they’d take a shower. There was a special set of showers for tennis, down in the basement in a gym with wooden floors, where there were all kinds of gymnastic equipment, including wall bars and some idiotic rowing boat — you know, the kind that has only a seat and oars on springs. They practiced rowing on it when the weather was bad and they couldn’t go down to the clubhouse to take a canoe down the Danube. So the Swedish pedicure man left, then the masseur-cum-gym-instructor then the tennis coach … or whoever came next. Then they got dressed.