Prologue. Clocking On
It was as if she were invisible, like she wasn't even there. Or, perhaps more accurately, like she didn't really count, not in any tangible sense, this mostly silent domestic cleaner with the broken English whose back was perpetually stooped over the vacuum cleaner, the dustpan and brush, the damp mop; someone who likely knew her way around the utility room better than the homeowners themselves.
Today, the wife was away on business, as she frequently was, but the husband wasn't here alone. The marital bed was not empty.
'A different woman,' she says. 'Younger.'
And he didn't hide this from you, wasn't embarrassed, ashamed of parading his affair so brazenly under your nose?
She shakes her head, and smiles tightly. 'No,' she says. 'No.'
She was seemingly in his confidence, then, but not through any prior agreement, a finger to the side of the nose, and nor was he paying her for her silence, her implicit complicity. 'I don't think he even considered me,' she says. 'Or my reaction.' She was merely part of the furniture, a once-weekly presence in the house who mutely got on with her work as she always did, over three floors, three bedrooms and two bathrooms: the vacuuming, the polishing, the dusting.
She had a name, Boglarka, and she was Hungarian, mid-thirties, here in London a couple of years now, almost fluent but shy with it. She had a bank account, a bike, an Oyster card; she flat-shared in one of the outer boroughs, and diligently sent money back home each month via PayPal. The wife knew her name, though would, like everyone else here, struggle with its hard consonants, but the husband offered no suggestion that he did. 'Hello' and 'goodbye' had been the full extent of their communications since her work here had begun a full year previously.
Right now, she picked up the clothes that had been discarded, pre-coitally the night before, on the bedroom carpet, disposed of the used prophylactic, and focused on the post-coital bed once she-the other woman-had at last got up to join the husband downstairs in the kitchen. More traces of the previous night's indiscretion were then dutifully wiped clean, the bed stripped, the sheets bundled into the washing machine, which she set to 60 degrees before pressing START. She cleaned the en-suite, the shower stall, and scrubbed the toilet bowl, which bore evidence of repeated use and little care and attention on the days she didn't come to clean. She hung his crumpled suit jacket back in the wardrobe, and liberated the clothes dryer of its smalls, his and his absent wife's, replacing them gently, respectfully even, in their appropriate drawers, his and hers, on either side of the matrimonial bed. The photograph of the both of them on their wedding day, confetti in their hair, sat in its usual position on the chest of drawers. She dusted it now, as she always did.
Working from the top of the house to the bottom, opening windows under the eaves in the attic and disturbing the dust, which took to the air and danced in a column of sunlight, she used Cif and Harpic, Domestos and Windolene, her rubber gloves slick with chemicals, her fingers inside clammy with sweat. Often, she was down on her hands and knees, because he liked the carpet beneath the bed swept, the floorboards underneath the sofa, too. Here, she found balls of fluff, probably the cat's, and curling sweet wrappers; she found odd socks, a random shoe whose lowheeled counterpart, she presumed, was secreted elsewhere in the house but not yet stumbled across. A bra: the wife's, or the other woman's?
If the bathroom had been reliably messy, the kitchen was worse. The kitchen was always worse. Woks and frying pans meant grease splattered north east south and west, the cupboards alongside the hob, the dust-encrusted extractor fan above. Mr Muscle Kitchen Cleaner, and lots of it. Plates were piled high in the sink, mugs with days-old tidemarks. A scouring pad somewhere beneath.
Next to the microwave, the coffee that he had made for her, that he made for her every Wednesday morning at 8 o'clock, was cooling, first ignored, then ultimately forgotten, coffee that she would, after he had departed for work, pour slowly down the sink in favour of the tall glass of water she needed to slake her mounting thirst.
She steered clear of the kitchen for now, taking her time in the living room, with its bookshelves, mantelpiece trinkets, the multiple picture frames, the Venetian blinds. She loitered here longer because they were still at the kitchen table, sharing a leisurely breakfast, her legs draped proprietorially over his. He had made her something complicated with eggs (his usual breakfast was a banana and slice of toast), and both of them would be late for work. From where she was in the lounge, deliberately not eavesdropping but overhearing everything anyway, she could make out kisses, lovers' giggles. She coughed loudly, deliberately. The ruse worked. The man looked over at the wall clock, noting the time. Shoes on, jackets, briefcase and handbag. Car keys. The front door opened, then slammed shut. Gone, leaving nothing but trails of aftershave and perfume in their wake.
She would likely never see this woman again, and next Wednesday the wife would be back in place, this woman to whom Boglarka would have to smile in greeting while maintaining an awkward silence, siding with the husband when, had she been given the choice, the option, she'd much rather have sympathised with the wife. But this was a line she was unable to cross, the ghost in the house who saw no evil, nor spoke it. Her presence in this soap opera might have been front row, but it was not her place to applaud or jeer.
But then, as she had long ago learned, this was an unwritten part of her job description. A domestic cleaner sees many things on any given day during the cleaning of houses; she-and more often than not it is a woman-tells no one. Or almost no one. She tells her fellow cleaners. Cleaners have much gossip to share, and plenty of war stories. And so while she sees everything, and sometimes bears the brunt of her employers' casual cruelties, she keeps shtum. She simply gets on with the task at hand, because there is always more work to do. Dirt has a habit of reproducing. Always more dirt, always more to clean.
Boglarka has also learned that while she would prefer to have a full grasp of English, some employers would like her tongue to remain semi-skilled. When one is not fluent in the language of the host country, her flatmates have explained, a barrier remains between employer and employee-a notable distance. The hierarchy is observed. Non-linguists can feel inhibited in such situations, so perhaps this is one reason why so many are employed in London today. Homeowners like the conviction that they are above, and cleaners below. The less likely cleaners are to answer back, the more the social order is maintained. In this way, our domestic help will keep themselves to themselves, and focus solely, and silently, on the task at hand. In this way, each can ignore the other's existence more easily, if not entirely, the physical presence of either party receding into a fuzzy background.
But our cleaners do take notice. Naturally and reflexively, they are cultural anthropologists. They hold the key to our real identities, to the people we really are, behind closed doors.
***
Domestic help, now so common, such a factor of everyday life, was once a comparative rarity in the UK, the preserve of the upper classes, those who lived upstairs and employed those who dwelt downstairs. By the early 1900s, the middle classes had begun to enjoy the benefits of cleaners, too, not merely because they also craved tidy homes that they did not have to toil over, but because employing domestic staff had become an indicator of sta…