Dot (Araminta Hall)

liked to think that she’d have made a good Buddhist.
    Clarice employed order. There was a relentless routine to her life which she followed every day. Same time to rise, same time to bed, with everything she needed to know in between. She rarely left the house and garden any more, finding nothing more fascinating than what occurred within her small realm. Not that she wasn’t interested in the world. She watched Channel 4 news every night and read the Daily Mail every day. She did the crossword and Sudoku to keep her mind active and loved it when Dot came home with a film or stayed in on a Saturday night to watch terrible game shows. She had breakfast and lunch at the kitchen table and dinner in the dining room. She had a cup of tea by the fire in winter and under the apple tree in summer at four o’clock precisely. She walked the garden in the mornings and spoke to Peter about the planting or the weeds or the vegetables. On Tuesdays and Thursdays she told Mary what needed to be done and had a cup of coffee with her at eleven, listening to Mary’s children and now grandchildren grow up. On Wednesday afternoons she put on her wellies and walked on Conniton Hill with Lillian and her dreadful dogs and on Sundays she went to church, not because she believed but because it was expected of her. And once a month on a Thursday evening she drove to Stella Baycliff’s house just outside Druith where a group of them played bridge and drank one or two sherries and exchanged news. She slept well each night, her mind untroubled by too many dreams, her body tired out enough not to let her stay awake.
    Sandra spent most of her time looking down. You had to keep your eyes down if you were going to spot all the dirt. There was no point in doing the washing up and staring out of the window or polishing a table and looking at the wall. And there was always more dirt; it was as if the others didn’t notice that everything they did disturbed something which caught a piece of dust or brought in a speck of mud. Sandra could remember Gerry saying to her a few years before, ‘What do you want us to do? Move out and seal you into the house so that it’s always perfect?’ She hadn’t answered but she had kept the thought neatly in a part of her mind so that she could always get it out and admire it like the china cats on the mantelpiece. She only had to shut her eyes to see her house wrapped in a giant roll of cling film, its insides gleaming and sparkling. She started upstairs every day, believing that the dirt would flow downwards. She made their bed and cleaned the bathroom. She put away any washing and tidied up clothes that Gerry might have left lying around. Mavis had put a lock on her door and so she couldn’t go in there, but as the door was always shut she could also pretend that the room didn’t exist. Next she did the sitting room, plumping cushions and dusting all the objects. She followed this with the dining room, polishing the table and chairs and again dusting anything on any surface. The kitchen always seemed to take the longest as there were so many chrome surfaces which needed washing and then rubbing down with oil and even when you’d finished there was always another streak. The dishwasher had to be emptied the second it was finished, as did the washing machine, and the ironing had to be tackled every day. The windows also needed washing every third day and the bed sheets had to be changed twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. The last thing she did was to hoover the house from top to bottom, changing heads to get into every corner. This alone could take up to an hour every day and often made her shake and sweat with the exertion. Finally she would wash the kitchen floor, emptying the dirty water down the loo so she could immediately replace the mop and bucket in the cupboard under the stairs. Sandra didn’t listen to the radio but worked in silence, often forgetting to eat and making do with a mug of instant coffee, which had to be washed as it was finished. Her hands were red and raw and her hair hung loosely round her face. And then Gerry or Mavis would come home and the mess started all over again.
    Over the years Gerry had found a nothingness in sex. Not with his wife, of course, whom he had last made love to sixteen years before, but with a succession of faceless women whom he barely registered as human. Since the Alice debacle and right up until Dot he’d kept these encounters professional. He was a