What the window cleaner told me

“I’ve just been down at the old Macauley house” my window cleaner informed me the other day, in that way that window cleaners have of scattering intriguing pieces of information into the air, whilst positioning their ladders. “Hardly worth my while, actually. You’d need scaffolding, or a crane arm, to do a proper job down there – and the old lady’s certainly not forking out for that sort of thing!”

I was taken by surprise. I gathered that the house he referred to was the old mansion at the end of our footpath, but I hardly knew what kind of response to make, to what was after all, for me, a rather priceless little gem of information. I hadn’t even been aware that we had engaged a window cleaner, as a matter of fact. I had just happened to look out of the window at nine o’clock that morning and there he was, hauling his ladders down from the roof of a little grey transit van. I supposed he must have ‘come with the house’. Window cleaners tend to have that facility - attaching themselves to a house as steadfastly, after their fashion, as cats, or hidden subsidence.

I have to report that Bill had fled on sight of the man and his van. Bill has never met a window cleaner yet, he says, who wouldn’t rather be a poet or a philosopher. It's a curious fact, but it seems to go with the territory. It must have something to do, Bill thinks, with all that fresh air, and time for contemplation. This one had all the appearance of the armchair television pundit, besides. He’d given Bill a very knowing look - so that in no time at all, given half the chance, he’d have been leaning against his ladder wanting to talk Iraq.

I on the other hand, whilst recognising it for an ignoble impulse on my part, was unable to resist the temptation to draw him out a little further.

“Oh dear” I said, with all the appearance of genuine sympathy that I could muster; “The old lady wants good value for her money then, does she…?”

“Good value?” my new informant retorted. “Tell me about it! She’d challenge you over sixpence, if she thought she could get away with it! And her daughter’s just as bad… scared to death of the old woman, if you ask me. There must be a hundred windows down there, and that’s a fact. Give or take an attic or two - or ten. And I don’t do attics anyway; haven’t got the ladders for it. I can reckon on spending forty minutes down there, every time. More, if she takes it into her head to have the basements done. Or what she calls the Orangery…. A whopping great conservatory of a place, that is. Windows all over, ten feet tall. And she wants me to do the lot for a tenner! That’s the sort of thing you get, when people have a string of shops as long as your arm, and factories, and God knows what else, up there in Yorkshire or wherever it is, that Jack Macauley had his empire….. “

All this was manna of course, to my ears. Suggestive, too. It had required only the mention of Jack Macauley, for the old story to come tumbling back into my mind again, more or less verbatim. I knew it would probably have been prudent to have called a halt at this stage of the conversation. It never pays to encourage one’s window cleaner too much: one never knows what he might divulge about oneself, to his next client! He had told me most of what I wanted to know already, anyway. But there was just one vital piece of information still mssing, and so I risked a final feeler.

“And old Jack himself…. “ I ventured. “Sir Jack, as I think he was, or is – does he watch the pennies too?”

“Oh God no!” was his incredulous response. “Old Jack died, it must have been twenty years back - and it’s just been the two of them ever since. There was a son, another Jack, but he married long ago and went away. They went away themselves for years, the old girl and her daughter, after Jack died. They closed the old place up - you can see what kind of a state it’s got into. …… It was only a year or two ago that they came back at all. And even now, they’re away for half the year. They’re in Italy now – that’s where they go in spring. In summer it will be to some other old place they’ve got, down in Suffolk, I think……….”

He had reached the top of his ladder by then; he was rubbing away with his cloth at the attic window (ours being sufficiently low for his ladders), and the rest of his story was lost to me. I called to him to say that I would leave his money on the window sill, and went inside to make Bill’s morning coffee. I thought I had learned enough, for the moment. But I decided to go down that afternoon to have a look at the old Macauley house myself, just to see how much more of the old story I could bring to mind…