Free A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr Page B

innocent gaze). ‘I mean how did you discover that such a job existed? Was it in the family?’
    (If she could have seen Dad in his office at the scented-soap factory, packing his Gladstone bag of samples!) ‘Well, yes, in a way it was, Mrs Keach. How clever of you to guess. We
were
in the cleaning business.’
    â€˜How very interesting! And did you travel around with your father to pick up the finer points?’
    â€˜Oh no – never. He couldn’t stand anyone with him when he was travelling. He found the work a strain on his nerves. Always came home in a foul temper. Didn’t speak. Went straight down the back garden. Didn’t even take off his hat. Cutting down things helped. My mother used to shudder for her roses. The first ten minutes were the worst; anything might happen. Temperament, you follow. All artists have it.’
    I was working up the three brothers (see Luke 16), blissfully heedless of the judgement to come. The second magnate’s cloak was a splendid garment – red outside and green lining. A very good red, the best in fact, no expense spared, sinoper haematite that is, not to be confused with what some fatheads call sinoper which, as often as not, is red earth, the stuff they used to bring in by the shipload from Pontus Euxinus (and don’t ask me where that was). That’s the red which darkens almost as soon as you turn your back on it: it survives and that’s all that can be said for it. In fact, on damp walls, it’s all that does survive. Well, back to this chap’s cloak. It was resin-based and that doesn’t ooze out, by the gallon; they found a scallop-shell with a caked deposit amongst rubble in the Gifford Chantry at Boyton.
    Well, there it is, you can’t get away from it, if you want quality you have to pay in one way or another. (Vinny had quality and I paid for it all right.)
    â€˜I can’t see much from down here, Mr Birkin. Please – what are you at now?’
    â€˜I’m valeting a gent’s overcoat.’
    â€˜Is it very soiled?’
    â€˜Very! You can’t beat tallow candles for laying down a nice grease base for other muck to stew in. You modern women don’t know you’re born.’
    (The thing that keeps you from screaming … well, that’s extreme … let’s say, it helps if you can guess how things once were. What I’m really getting at is that it’s not all that easy to find your way back to the Middle Ages. They weren’t us in fancy dress, mouths full of thees and thous, quoths, prithees and zounds. They had no more than a few entertaining distractions to take their minds off death and birth, sleep and work and their prayers to the almighty father and his stricken son when things got too awful. So, in my job, it helps if you can smell candles, guttering in draughts, petitioning release for souls in purgatory, if you can see their smoke trailing amongst images, threading nave arcades, settling on corbels and bosses, blackening stone too high for the cleaning women to get at.
    I suppose it all sounds airy-fairy but I stick to my point. If you can see or guess at the comings and goings from first daylight to dusk, crouching, nodding, stubbing breasts and heads with fingers just out of the cooking pot, grubby faces staring up at the only picture they’ll see till next they see it – well, then you put that bit extra into the job, you go at it with emotion as well as diluted hydrochloric.)
    â€˜Mr Birkin … Mr Birkin … is it an oil-painting or a watercolour or what is it for goodness sake?’
    â€˜It’s all sorts of things, Mrs Keach. Item – blew bysse at 4s. 4d. the pound, item – one sack of verdigris at 12d. a pound, item – red ochre, 3 pounds a penny, item – 3 pecks of wheat flour … I suppose you could lump it all as tempera. And let’s not forget the wall itself – down in the sinful south, plastered with