Introspections And Creations

As housekeepers go, Karen is invaluable, but uncomfortable. The girl feels like a class traitor for even feeling this. How bourgeois does that feel? It’s not good enough to require Karen’s labour; her complicity must also be purchased too?

But the thing is, the house is so hard to manage. It really is. It’s used to having staff. It’s a lovely house, but it needs enrichment, stimulation, a healthy diet, exercise; it has to be kept clean; and that’s not losing sight of the maintenance, the attention, the affection it requires. it’s rewarding - it’s a good house! - but the girl has been doing a lot of thinking about class recently, and she’s feeling like she might be onto something here, about gender and women’s work.

See, if the house required some regular application of masculine skills and talents, or if it expressed masculine needs - if it required sacrificial virgin girls, or a mowed lawn, or if it was mechanical somehow - well, actually, the girl should just be simple and honest: if the house was a project. If the house was just a standard renovation project, requiring years of daily men in yellow plastic helmets to stand around making expert noises, that would be totally fine to pay other people for. Nobody would judge the girl for hiring help. They’d say, “you can’t possibly do that by yourself. Don’t be silly! Pay a man to do it.”

But when it comes to the maintenance and grooming of a very picky and enchantingly bloodthirsty house - a house with the temperament of a purebred cat that should never have been bred - it still feels like the girl is on the wrong side of the class war, paying Karen to help with the house. It feels like the girl should be able to do it all.

You can hire dog groomers and dog walkers to help with your dog. You can hire cat whisperers and put your cat in a cattery while you go on holiday. You can hire men to dig holes in your garden, or attach electrical wires to other things, despite knowing that you are perfectly capable of attaching wires or digging holes. You can pay a man to put a new screen protector on your phone. You can hire people to look after your children. You can pay someone else to make your dinner; you can pay yet another person to bring it to you. These are considered normal and healthy. But if you pay a lady to help look after your house… why does that feel so wrong? Why is housecleaning always to be done alone, by a virtuous girl, suffering in her lone virtue?

Puritans, the girl thinks, hiding on the landing. It’ll be the Puritans. She is hiding because doesn’t want to interrupt Karen. Karen is now scolding the house about the snake bones - its bad attitude about their disposal, its full knowledge that Karen hates snakes.

The house likes being scolded; it makes the house feel seen. It likes being filled with noise. It would like the girl to find some more people, and preferably to make some more people, to fill it with, so it can crouch around them pleasantly, full and noisy. Ideally, it would love five or six young children exploring it; it has rooms made for children to explore; admiring it and strengthening it, and then growing up to be writers. Failing children, it wants Christmases or coming-out balls or other large noisy holidays. Failing that, it just wants some life and excitement. It loves Karen, actually, which reduces the guilt of paying for the services of a housekeeper. It’s no worse than paying for a therapist for one’s dog, surely.

The girl thinks, women are supposed to serve houses always. We are supposed to serve the houses for free. This is why I’m not good at it. Before being landed with this house I was going to be quite a good counter-cultural revolutionary - a real leftist, a political activist. Now the house has landed on me, and I have to look after it, because it’s alive, but I don’t know how.

The girl feels guilty. (She is still in her very early twenties, as you can probably tell.) as she has not worked out how to reconcile the oppositional forces here - her unclear feelings about class vs. the material responsibility of the house - her feelings collide like waves, cancelling each other out. All she’s left with is guilt, the liberal guilt that stops one from knowing how to move. Everything is fraught with potential war: hiring Karen, getting a new job, finding a new supplier of the crushed oyster shells that the house consumes by the kilogram, for the calcium. Like a mouse, crouched, she waits guiltily for something else to happen. She is very young.

The mouse bones would be lovely for roses, she thinks wistfully, and tomatoes. Tomatoes benefit from a good whack of calcium. Keeps away blossom end rot. Blossom end rot is depressing. There’s nothing like losing your tomatoes, after all that waiting, because they didn’t get enough calcium. The house’s pellets would enrich a soil. But the house will not tolerate a garden. In addition to competing for its attention, it would never be persuaded not to lie down on the garden, or to eat the garden. The house’s preferred landscaping is a large open meadow with a few trees robust enough to scratch its stones against. The house prefers to be far from bus routes. Karen drives in, in her horrible little Fiat. Maybe she’d be able to afford a better car if the girl could pay her better; but the girl can’t leave the house for very long at a time. The girl is limited to remote working and unsteady pay. In theory, she’s a professional tutor. That’s one of the paradoxes of these big houses - they were meant to be run as the hub of self-sustaining businesses, extracting wealth from their vast estates. The house as alpha-beast, top of the food web, sucking up all the calories of the ecosystem. Perhaps, in its Tudor or Georgian past lives, this house was an apex predator. Houses like these eat money - even the normal ones that aren’t bloodthirsty. They can either be self-sustaining, or they can be purchased by someone with external wealth - some rich bastard - so that the wealth of London can be funnelled into their gullets. This is just another thing the girl isn’t coping with. No wealth, and no way to make the house pay.

She wants to leave the house - give it away - move to a nice flat and get a real job. But half the problem is that this isn’t a house like the houses in House of Leaves or Piranesi; it isn’t menacing. The house loves her. What do you do, when you have a living house that loves you like a dog loves its person?

Sometimes she thinks that she might donate it to the National Trust - but what would they do with it? What would anyone do with it? She had a bad dream once - perhaps one shared with the house; they can be hard to separate from one’s own - about the house being killed, shot down, finally bested by a greater hunter than itself. The house bleeding out, dying, lying down finally in one fixed place. And then, the terrible process of stuffing and mounting the house, the brutal efficiency of preservation: converting it into a normal dwelling. That would be terrible, worse than living in a normal house, to have been the person who killed a dead house, who let people kill it and preserve it and display it like taxidermy. A hollowed-out corpse house. Would the National Trust do that? How does one start that conversation?

What is your normal process for handling bloodthirsty - but very friendly - houses. No, not like Piranesi - smaller than the Piranesi hut. No, regrettably, a bit larger than Baba Yaga’s hut. Not quite like Howl’s Moving Castle. Howl, you’ll recall, had magic powers and a demon and an apprentice and a cleaning lady and a route back to Wales. I’m afraid it’s just me, and Karen on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

You’re not going to kill it, are you? Just - just let it run around, and stop it eating anything more complex than sheep. Pay attention to it and love it. Love it hard. Love it so that it doesn’t become a monster. Serve it, serve it forever, because you are so so lucky to have it. People would kill for houses like this.

There has to be some way out of this, the girl thinks, fuzzily starting to fit things together, and then once again overcome by the opposing waves; the motivation she’s built up collapsing once more into guilt. Maybe I can give the house to Karen.

But that would be kind of a horrible thing to do to Karen.

How do you flee something that loves you, loves you, loves you. Loves you like the moon loves itself in the glimmer of the harvest mouse’s eye. Loves you like the pond loves the geese moving over the water. Loves you like a dog loves the person who delivers the lethal injection. Loves you like people love the saints trapped in glass. Loves you and sometimes, if you slip, if your attention wavers, if you forget to kiss it goodnight, brings you a dead deer and leaves it by your bed. Loves you so much you can never have a garden. How do you walk away from that love, that responsibility, how do you leave this house.