Loose Living by Frank Moorhouse Page B

coming very close to the face of the person to whom his curiosity is directed.
    When I say close I mean skin to skin. He stares into the eyes of the person from whom he is trying to solicit information. It is not a socially comfortable closeness but because I am beholden to him for his generous patronage of my leisured life in the arts, I have to put up with it, feudal though it may be.
    I have already mentioned the Duc’s problem with saliva management. I will not return to that.
    I am rather ill-placed to explain domestic life, having never really lived in what one would call a ‘household’. It is one of my fervent desires, which looks as if it is being granted, never to become what is known as a household ‘word’—it would be an ironic fate, given that since leaving home at thirteen I vowed never to wash another dish, mow another lawn, clean another bathroom, ‘put out’ another garbage bin or make another bed. And I haven’t.
    The Duc himself was not well placed to understandeither, given his aristocratic upbringing. We did the best we could by pooling our limited experience of the real world.
    I sketched out a floor plan of a typical Australian home and showed him advertisements of whitegoods to be found in the Australian home.
    As we pored over the plans and IKEA catalogues spread on the large oak architect’s desk (which was originally owned by Necker), I rushed to tell him that he must not expect to find cool rooms, cellars, pantries ( pain being the French word for bread), butteries (corrupted from the French word bouterie for a room for storing bottles), or larders (the French room for storing lard or bacon).
    By the way, when I say pored, I mean that the Duc’s eyeballs literally touched the lines of the plans, and for all I could see, perhaps also his tongue.
    The Duc became confused about the absence of proper food storage rooms. To escape from this information daze he changed the subject and asked me to explain ‘washing up’. What was it?
    Recalling as best I could how washing up was done, I told him of the diverse approaches to this activity in my own country.
    First I explained that, because of the heat and flies and the lack of refrigeration in earlier generations, the emphasis on ‘washing up’ had become rather acute. My mother, for example, began the washing up before the meal was over.
    This sensible attention to hygiene had carried overinto my generation as a form of frenzy. A frenzy which was to be found in all classes.
    I said that on my return a Dear Friend, whose life is far from conventional in other ways (!), had patiently tried to explain what she called ‘the zen state’ which accompanies washing up.
    She said that one became lost and absorbed in the art of washing up in a way that other tasks rarely achieved.
    One became a sud.
    Washing up, she said, was really living and that my strange fantasy life as a rémora in the châteaux of France was my way of hiding from life.
    â€˜Pardon?’ said the Duc, or noises to that effect.
    To put it another way, I said to the Duc, searching carefully for my words, one’s body became the washing-up sponge, and for the duration of the washing up no other world existed.
    I told the Duc that I myself found this a disturbing notion.
    The Duc muttered in perplexity, or what I took to be muttering, and what I took to be perplexity, although it could very well have been befuddlement.
    I went on to tell him that I had observed that many people in the homes I visited in Australia, all of whom were warm and generous towards me despite my rather dubious past conduct, seemed to see the washed-up-and-put-away condition of the dishes as the state of perfection. This I took to be a historical legacy.
    The more I thought about it—clean dishes, that is—maybe it was the very quintessence of our cultural heritage.
    It seemed in Australia that ‘dirty dishes’ were dishes in a