A House in Order Read Online Free PDF Page A

but I remember putting the brush in the water and starting stiffly to scrub the nearest pane – through which suddenly I saw the garden in its autumn colours for the first time, a glimpse of purple, gold, white and russet that I had never realized was there at all. This must have acted on me like a second wink, because I began to scrub steadily and methodically, slowly pulling away the black veil that lay on beds of astonishing colours.
    I scrubbed all that house, standing on my chair to do the roof, in the first hour of my three – and the water in the bucket already dense with black filth. When the guard came round again, I took the courage to step outside the door and do the outside, glancing at the guard for his approval. But he was a proper soldier and paid me no more attention.
    When I had brought my bucket in again and scrubbed the staging and its legs, I looked at the black remnant of water and remembered suddenly that I, too, must be washed and cleaned. Only then did it strike me that if I looked round the house I would probably find a tap – and sure enough there was an old brass one at my veryelbow. So I rinsed my bucket in the rusty water that trickled in and gave myself a good disinfectant wash – yet still, I reckoned, had a good hour of my time to go. So I brought out the disinfectant again and, mixing it with a fresh lot of red water, I went over the staging a second time, until the whole house smelt positively healthy.
    Now, I had time for the details – the shining-up the brass tap with a mud paste, the pulling of slivers of glass out of the hard putty, the searching for grubby crannies, the raking of the earth floor with the stiff brush. Wherever a whole pane was out, I blocked the hole pretty neatly with sheets from the old magazines and even managed to line the warped ventilators with strips from the stuff of the deck-chair. Indeed, the house heated up so much that I began to sweat and got afraid that they would kick me because I stank. But before I stopped work, I cleaned up the pot that had the house-leek in it and turned out the slimy green soil at the base of its stem, so that it stood on the staging looking almost debonair in the disinfected sunshine. Let me be perfectly honest and admit frankly that on this first inspection of it, I noticed nothing special about it. The evidence was there, plain to see, but it was no more seen by me than I, open and upright on my chair, had been seen by the scores who passed me on my first day.
    All the time I was doing these things I was trying not to distract myself by letting my eyes roam. But the temptation was extraordinary because the whole world round me had become incredible to see. There was light and brilliance everywhere: it poured through the clear panes and so sparkled on everything that I ran about like a zany whenever a patch of humidity appeared and rubbed it back to shininess. But the garden outside wasthe most incredible thing of all: for two or three years the plants in it had seeded as they pleased, and the only discipline they had had was exactly what one would expect under military direction – shrubs hewed to the ground or made to stand at attention, hoed rows running like geometrical lines as if the aim were to create a griddle: it was plain to see that once a fortnight a squad of boobies was ordered into it and given three hours to reduce it to stupidity. But my eye saw through the clear glass all the things that had escaped the boors’ attention: everywhere, there were little seedlings just ripe to be potted and brought into protection – why, little self-sown shoots of geraniums were growing by the score on the verge of the gravel path and, having escaped the blundering hacks of military discipline, would now turn black and die in the first killing frost. Evidently, there wasn’t one man in the world behind the verandah who had the least idea of what extraordinary good luck had been at work in that garden