Free Appointment with Yesterday by Celia Fremlin

continued:
    “You see, I happen to have a degree in Sociology, and if a woman has had any sort of higher education I feel she has an obligation to use it, even after she’s married, don’t you agree, Mrs Er? It’s difficult, though, working at home: people seem to think that just because you’re at home, they can interrupt you just as much as ever they like. They think they can come in and out bothering you about every tiny thing! My other woman was like that.”
    Her voice trailed off into a deprecatory little laugh, and she shot an anxious glance at Milly. Clearly, she wanted to make sure that the point had got across, but was fearful lest it might have offended her new Mrs Er in the process. Milly suppressed a tiny smile and was agreeably aware of the first stirrings of a sense of power. Mrs Er’s were few and far between.
    But after Mrs Graham had gone, and she found herself alone in the messy, alien kitchen, the brief feeling of confidence left her, and she felt something approaching panic. Where should she start? Where was everything supposed to go? Where was the Vim … the washing-up liquid …? In the weeks to come, she was to learn that this attack of panic when confronted by a strange kitchen was one of the occupational hazards of being a Daily: and she was to learn, too, how quickly it passed: how, if one set oneself quietly to doing just one thing, however trivial, the other tasks would mysteriously sort themselves out andbecome manageable while one wasn’t looking. But this morning, in her very first job, she didn’t know any of this: she thought it was herself, her own inadequacy, that was to blame.
    I can’t! she thought, I can’t! Her hands were trembling, and her mouth was dry, exactly like someone about to make a public speech for the first time: yet even while she panicked, she began, whether by good luck or instinct, to do the right thing. That is, to do something. She began blindly pulling the pans out of the sink and stacking them on the floor beside her.
    And suddenly, wonderfully, she found that a miracle had happened! She had done one thing! She had cleared the sink! Now all things were possible.
    Humming a little tune in sheer relief, she turned on the hot tap to its fullest extent, and as it surged clean and steaming against the stainless steel, she began with real enthusiasm to select an assortment of objects to begin on: she was now positively enjoying the enormity of the mess confronting her. She had joined battle with it, and she was going to win!
    But here came the next setback. No dishcloth. Not just that she couldn’t find adishcloth: there simply wasn’t one. Not anywhere. Nor a floorcloth either, nor any rag of any kind. How on earth was she to wash up all this stuff without one—not to mention the wiping of all these streamlined labour-saving surfaces, now revealed as a mass of grease, old tea-leaves, and smears of gravy? Milly’s fingers itched to get at it all with a lovely, hot, well-wrung-out cloth: and for a moment she stood motionless, surveying the smears and spills, weighing them up against Mrs Graham’s degree in Sociology.
    Then, her decision made, she marched boldly out of the kitchen and knocked firmly on the sitting-room door.
    “No dishcloth?” Mrs Graham was blinking, vaguely, as she looked up from her typewriter, like a kitten just roused from sleep. “No dishcloth ?But of course there isn’t a dishcloth. We have a dishwasher—I showed you, Mrs Er—and so we don’t need a dishcloth. It’s an automatic machine, don’t you see? The washing up is done automatically. ”
    She spoke wearily, as if it was the twentieth time she had had to repeat this same elementary fact. You could see her visibly resigning herself to the idea that Mrs Er was going to prove just as stupid as My Other Woman.
    “It’s an automatic dishwasher,” she repeated, stealing an impatient glance down at her typewriter: but Milly stood her ground.
    “It’s all those saucepans,”