CONSTANCE AND A WINDOW CLEANER

The library gets his windows cleaned and reveals his own poor education.

It’s not often enough, but at least it happens, mused Constance as she watched the window cleaner set his ladder up against what was tantamount to being a wall of glass.

At home, and she lived in a semi-detached residence that had once belonged to the council and now belonged to her, she had her windows cleaned every fortnight but the library windows weren’t cleaned more often than about three times a year. It was down to costs, she was told when she asked a council official why that was.

So they can’t afford to keep the library windows properly clean but they can afford a wide range of paid official visits to the more interesting resorts on the continent, she had thought bitterly when she read how the Mayor was off for a study weekend in Prague at a time when she knew the mayoral son was enjoying a stag weekend in that same city prior to getting married a week later.

The stag weekend had happened accompanied by a chance collision with the mayor in a bar, but the wedding hadn’t because the bride-to-be managed, in Constance’s mind, to see sense. But that hadn’t helped her library’s windows, which had been getting grubbier by the day at the time. There weren’t funds for cleaning windows.

So on this particular day it was good to see a man with a rubber blade and supply of hot water up his ladder tackling the grime on the windows. He was the same man who came every time the windows were cleaned, a cheery fellow she knew as Bert. And as the library had barely half a dozen readers in, none of whom seemed to require her immediate assistance, she decided it would be only the kind thing to do was to offer refreshment to the window cleaner.

So she popped outside and looked up at where he was slaving away, cleaning the glass with broad sweeps of his rubber blade and humming a Queen melody to himself.

“Fancy a cuppa?” she asked.

“Is it the same cuppa as you gave me last time?” he asked.

“Probably,” she confirmed.

“Then would you mind if I brought my own tea-bag?” he asked, and apologetically, “you did your best but it’s the same stuff they serve up at the council offices when I clean there and it leaves me queasy.”

“Good idea,” she grinned back at him, “I wish I’d thought of that, but I’m slow on the uptake and still drink corporation poison!”

“I’ve got a spare tea-bag if you want a treat,” he shouted down, and

“That would be really nice,” she said.

“Half an hour and I’ll be done,” he said. “See you then.”

And Constance returned to her counter in the library and, in the absence of anything to stamp with her date-stamp she picked up a book she’d been reading on and off for the past week and concentrated on a love affair in which, coincidentally, a lovely young nurse was being wooed by her window cleaner.

Constance was inordinately fond of love stories in romantic fiction because, truth to tell, she didn’t have much romance in her own life. She knew why that was: a remnant of her childhood, a few wisps of thought had been planted by a widowed mother in her own young mind, had suggested that there was something innately wrong with the males of the species and they’re best left to rot in Mars whilst she enjoyed Venus. It probably had to do with her father, for a common feature of the little she could remember of him he was always in the company of women who weren’t her mother, and that seemed to lead to endless rows in which he asserted they meant nothing to him but a man has to do his thing, doesn’t he?

So he had soured her mother and, in turn, her mother had soured her.

Yet she loved romance. She loved the idea of two people falling for each other and she even loved the notion that there were things they might do together that were, to put it blatantly, private. The trouble was she only had the vaguest notion of what they might be.

So, as a means of subconsciously skirting round her emotional doubts, she had found herself subconsciously admiring men in uniforms, but that was as far as it went: admiring. But it was, she assured herself, a start which might lead to something more personal given half a chance. The trouble is, as soon as it did she fought to control herself, to fight against any inbuilt desires that might threaten to surface, and turned to romantic fiction as a surrogate. It was a substitute for reality, but not totally satisfactory.

She was deep into an unhealthy kind of introspection when the window cleaner came in, brandishing a packet a tea-bags.

“Lovely,” she said, “I’ll mash a couple of mugs.”

Adjacent to her work station was a tiny cubbyhole of a room which was big enough to house a small kettle, a tiny sink and a tap, and she squeezed herself in there whilst the window cleaner sat at a table and stared about him.

“There’s lots of books here,” he commented.

“Sshhh!” hissed a scowling little old lady in the Reference section.

“It is a library,” Constance told him, and she carried two cups to the table where he sat.

“Do many people come here?” asked Bert.

“Yes,” she replied, surprised by the question, “loads of people like to read,” she added.

“I can’t,” he said quietly.

“What? You can’t read?” That shocked her. She thought that everyone could read even if some people weren’t so good at it.

“I never went to school. Well, almost never,” he told her, “I was a sickly child and my old man said he would educate me at home., Trouble was, he couldn’t read either.”

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled, at a loss as to what to say.

“I did learn some stuff though,” he grinned, “I learned how to clean windows for a start, and I’m a wizard with a set of darts!”

“But reading can be...” she began, and trailed off. How can you explain to a man with no awareness of the written word the sort of pleasure she felt when she read of a doctor she was getting fond of despite his fictitious existence as he escorted a pretty young nurse into his bedroom?

“Tell me,” he asked.

“Well,” she began, “I love reading stories about people falling in love, but there are loads of other books without people falling in love in them. There are westerns with cowboys and Indians, there are science fiction adventures with heroes zooming through space to strange and unbelievable new worlds, there are all sorts of stories out there and on these shelves.” She indicated the many sections of the library with a sweep of one hand.

“There’s the telly,” murmured the window cleaner sipping his tea with relish.

“Yes, there is,” Constance said, “but sometimes a story is made extra special if you can imagine what the people in it are like in your own head and not because an actor plays them.”

“I like telling myself stories,” sighed Bert, “when I go to bed at night and I’ve seen things at work during the day I remember them and imagine what might have happened next! A window cleaner sees all sorts of stuff, though I’ve never cleaned a window with two folks having it off in the room I’m looking into like some blokes reckon they have! But people do some odd things, like the woman who thought it was a good idea to catch an escaped budgie with a vacuum cleaner! She didn’t catch the poor thing, thank goodness, but it was the sort of funny that starts off being horrifying!”

“If you learned to read you could write them down,” suggested Constance. “I’d read them!”

He looked her straight in the face, his expression deadly serious all of a sudden.

“Would you teach me?” he asked, “show me how to start learning how to read?”

And much to her own surprise she smiled at him and said in a voice that had about it the warmth of melted chocolate on a lover’s lips, “It’s an idea, if you like,”

He held her steadily with those blue window-cleaning eyes of his. “You mean that?” he asked.

She nodded. “I never say things I don’t mean,” she said and knew instantly that it wasn’t quite true, but what the heck, she never meant to. “I’ll tell you where I live and you can call once a week if you like, in the evening, and we’ll see what we can do.”

“You’re marvellous,” he said, almost choking in a way that made her believe that if she did nothing else worthwhile and good in her life but achieved something here then her days on Earth would be quite worth while.

“I hope so,” she replied, blushing.

© Peter Rogerson 12.01.18