The Twist in the Maid by Elizabeth Brennan

(First published in Lunate vol. 2)

Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid, c. 1690. National Gallery of Ireland

The lady sits at a table, absorbed in writing a letter. Her maid stands patiently behind her and to her right, her arms folded, presumably waiting to deliver the lady’s letter. The maid’s head is turned towards the leaded window to her right and she gazes out.

The room, typical of Vermeer’s paintings, belongs to someone of standing, an interior a contemporary viewer might have aspired to, ‘somewhat like the advertisements in today’s interior design magazines’ (Jonathan Janson, essentialvermeer.com, 2001–2021). Vermeer works hard to give his interiors depth and perspective, which he achieves through his positioning of furniture, the contrast of light and dark, and his use of the camera obscura, an instrument that projected an image through a lens onto a screen or page which he employed as a guide. As Marije Hubbard points out in Vermeer’s Observations of Women (1999), Vermeer pushed ‘the depiction of reality beyond what his precursors and contemporaries had achieved’ (94). His careful compositions delight in detail and texture, ‘the fall of a silk dress, a fur trim on a mantle, the gleam of a pearl necklace’ (Hubbard, 95). The eternal quality of Vermeer’s paintings lies in the beauty of his detail, yes, but also, and perhaps chiefly, in his ‘skill in depicting the intrigues of human relationships’ (Martin Bailey, Vermeer, 1995, 24).

They are going over the catalogue together, the one showcasing the company’s recent design projects. She, Charlotte, is sitting in the visitor’s seat at Anna’s L-shaped desk by the window. All of the managers here have access to the windowsills and Anna’s is lined with spider plants. The two of them are contained between two rectangle divides, the ones made of chipboard and covered with a kind of woven synthetic material that you can pin things to. There is a book shelf at the end of Anna’s desk, with books on design plus many of the company’s past catalogues, which juts slightly outwards leaving a door-sized gap. Sitting down here gives her the impression of being in a room. A room within a room. A den. A game of pretend.

As Anna goes through the catalogue in hard copy explaining her copious red marks – no, no, no, try this, try that, I’m not sure what you were thinking of here – she knows her body is doing the right thing. Her face is attentive, eyes looking at Anna’s face. She nods. She grimaces in response to Anna’s grimaces over her own work. When Anna’s blue eyes meet hers she concentrates so as not to let her own retreat, to meet Anna’s with full light.

When Anna spins around in her chair to flick through the catalogue on her large monitor, her eyes slide to the images Anna has pinned on the divide behind her desk. Photographs and magazine cuttings and postcards. There is a postcard of Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid. This is where her eyes rest; it is always where they rest, when they can.

Janson describes the maid in the painting as ‘a calm and columnar figure’ (essentialvermeer.com). In contrast, the lady’s shoulders and arms are tense as she writes. While the depiction of the maid is smooth and rounded, the creases in the lady’s sleeves are angular and stiff.

The scrunched-up letter lying on the floor in front of the desk, along with what looks like a small book and a seal, inserts some disarray into the ordered scene and reflects the turmoil of the mistress’s mind as she writes, mostly likely to a lover.

The presence of the maid in this scene would not be unusual in seventeenth-century Netherlands. A maid often acted as a confidante and go-between between a mistress and her lover.

On her first day working here Anna told her that she hired her because of her calm, collected way of dealing with the questions in the interview. She assumes that Anna knows she is the opposite of this and has basically hired a yin to her yang. At another level she understands very clearly what Anna expects of her.

Anna’s figure is neat; her clothes graze it without a pucker. Her movements are brisk, eager. Her voice carries. She holds herself with rigorous straightness. Her gaze is a lit square; it does not have shadows. She sees everything down to the tiniest error, the tiniest doubt in your eye. Around her the air compacts, grips, but is poised for the inevitable disturbance – for when she lets out theatrical sighs at her screen; when she laughs loudly and sardonically without apparent reason; when she snaps out of her chair to walk the aisle to another manager’s desk to whisper urgently. She would paint Anna in angles, with fiery oranges, reds, pinks, a streak of uneasy green.

In this company, unlike those smaller operations she’d worked for before, people are answerable. The lights are fluorescent. The meeting rooms have glass walls. She took the part-time job here on the allure of timed meetings on shared calendars, toilets with cubicles, established breaks and Nespresso machines – rituals reassuring and magical. She does this job until 1pm every day. Then she does freelance work in the afternoon and in the evening after dinner she paints.

She has the impression that Anna assumes she has no experience – because she has not done this job for Anna before, she has never done it. She swallows her pride and her words; her throat tightens and seals them in. She does what Anna asks because this makes Anna predictable. Specifically she just wants Anna to pass her on probation so she and her husband can buy a house.

Sometimes Anna tells her about how awful it was before she joined the company, how much work she had to get through by herself. Anna puts her hand on her arm: ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you.’ She feels her rib cavity filling with uneasy pride, like a child being praised in a way that confuses her. She smiles. She doesn’t know what else to do.

To: Everyone
From: Jen Gilmartin
Subject: A New Era
Date: 10 May
Dear all,

Thank you for attending the company meeting this morning. As we explained, our partner Orwell Designs is turning their focus to their international markets, giving us the opportunity to develop as a stand-alone company in this exciting and dynamic era for design. We are excited by the challenges ahead, more so because we know we have your skill behind us!

Yours faithfully,

Jen

The large painting on the wall behind the women’s heads is The Finding of Moses, which depicts the story in Exodus where the infant Moses is found near the Nile by the Pharaoh’s daughter and her handmaidens. The same painting appears on a much smaller scale in the background of The Astronomer (1668. Musée du Louvre). Vermeer is not afraid to alter the details of reality, even other works of art, in order to achieve the visual effect he is looking for.

To: Everyone
From: Jen Gilmartin
Subject: Regretful news
Date: 25 June
Dear all,

It is with regret that we must announce the discontinuation of elements of our design portfolio due to our repositioning in the market. While our graphic design will remain our pride we are now, as you know, going to focus on Gilmartin Designs as a full service creative agency. Unfortunately this means we must say goodbye to some of our designers. They have already been informed. We would like to thank them for their valuable contribution to Gilmartin Designs over the years. We wish them all the best and have no doubt that they will find exciting opportunities elsewhere.

Yours faithfully,

Jen

The air around Anna seems to churn constantly. She leans on her elbows, body compelled towards her monitor, letting out her breath like steam. She raps her knuckles on her desk, scissors her nose between her index and middle finger and lets out more steam. Her chair snaps with the release of her weight several times a day and she goes to Marie’s desk which is along the window behind hers. Marie and her team are the designers being let go. Marie and Anna are friends. Good friends, judging by the snippets she, Charlotte, has caught of their chats over the time she’s been here. Been to each other’s houses. Know each other’s kids and husbands. They even look alike. Same height. Same colour of hair. Same high forehead.

She sits with Anna at her desk. Anna’s eyes are red. She peers at them while trying not to be seen – easy because they are averted. Yes, definitely red. This is Marie’s last day working here. She says, quietly, ‘I’m sorry about Marie.’ Anna looks at her and smiles. Nothing in the smile suggests a relenting. ‘Oh, Marie will be fine. Don’t you worry.’

She feels like a child being reminded that she is a child.

What were maids to their mistresses in seventeenth-century Netherlands? According to Janson, maids were considered ‘a sort of necessary evil’; as the subject of popular literature and plays they were depicted as outspoken and untrustworthy, ‘the most dangerous women of all’ (essentialvermeer.com). Vermeer’s maids, however, are mostly depicted in relatively impartial mode.

The relationship between mistress and maid in this painting is subtly intriguing. The maid, though trusted as being somewhat party to her mistress’s intensity, appears dutiful and passive and is, in this moment at least, clearly detached. Perhaps this detachment reflects her relationship to her mistress in terms of their relative social standing and roles – the maid can only wait for her mistress’s cues to engage.

Once she passes her probation she and her husband buy a house. She fully expects that now she will start to speak up in her meetings with Anna. This is not even about defending her decisions in her work but asserting herself as an individual with a voice of her own. But her throat, once sealed, does not easily unseal. Speaking her mind, her heart, her soul would mean a breaking of the seal, and not only that but a tearing of the fabric of her own silence she has woven all around her. A lot of breaking and tearing. It wouldn’t just be Anna who’d notice that kind of violence; everyone would. She can’t stand the idea of being so suddenly visible.

Who cares anyway? She does not need to speak. This job is not what she really wants to do. It is a means to an end. She expresses herself in other ways, in her painting, to the people close to her. Sometimes she wonders what the hell she is doing working in design for marketing.

When she was a child, adults used to notice her drawings and she would occasionally win a class or a parish art competition because, my goodness, didn’t she capture what was there? She made the bald man bald, put the fag in the woman’s hand, gave the girl with the dirty face a dirty face. She was confused at why adults would giggle at her pictures or make some sort of sound in their throat before delivering praise.

In client meetings she stares out the window at the clouds and thinks of her fantasy installation at the Irish Museum of Modern Art consisting of ads by travel companies and SUV companies and Health Insurance companies, etc., billboards and posters and YouTube ads, and on each the intrusion of words in some form – depending on the medium – words, appearing and disappearing, half appearing: ‘This holiday will make up for the fact you have no time for your kids!’ ‘Purchase your contribution to the increase in global CO2 emissions!’ ‘Help our health system become like that in the USA!’ She would call it Dark Marketing.

Anna finds out that one of her, Charlotte’s, pictures has been shortlisted for an international art competition. It is a self-portrait. Anna calls across the aisle, almost a shriek, ‘Is this you?’ Anna has the website for the art journal running the competition up on her screen. Anna knows that she is an artist but they have never discussed it beyond her job interview. Now Anna gives the impression she has never been told, her surprise is so great.

‘Yes,’ she says.

Anna scrolls up. ‘This is the one that won?’

‘Yes.’

‘I can see why it did; wow, amazing.’

She feels angry with Anna; she wants to say, ‘Fuck you. Getting shortlisted for something like this is a big deal.’ But she is suspicious of her anger. Her anger would expose her ego, her desires, her pride. Her need for validation. Her need.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It’s so good, isn’t it?’

When you don’t speak, she realises, it becomes a kind of habit; after a while you lose the ability to use your voice and it ceases to exist, except in your head, but even there other voices are stronger, causing you to doubt your own. And then your voice confined to your head begins to take on what the other voices were saying, saying their things too, because these things seem more valid somehow. It occurs to her that perhaps her habit of not speaking began a long time ago. It is perhaps why she ended up working in design for marketing.

If the mistress could see the maid’s distraction like we, the viewers, can, what would she think? Would it disturb her, this clear lack of investment by her maid in her emotional life? Or would she simply accept it as normal, almost preferable?

The dresses Jen Gilmartin wears make her thin shoulders look even thinner. Her hair seems to weigh a lot and her head appears pulled backwards, so that her chin is permanently tilted and the thin bones in her neck show. Today she, Charlotte, meets Jen at the photocopier. They realise that they are both painting their new houses with the same brand of expensive upmarket paint. She tells Jen an anecdote about running out of paint while painting their bedroom, tapping into the ‘such a nuisance’ strain of the conversations she hears between women around the office. ‘Oh,’ Jen says, giving her a sidelong look. ‘Did you not buy enough paint? Were you being scabby?’

To: Anna, Charlotte
From: Jen Gilmartin
Subject: Wall art
Date: 2 September

Ladies,
Further to our meeting about our company values and the amazing new wall art in the main office, I just want to clarify that the company values for the colourful bubbles are: Dignity – Respect – Equality – Creativity – Resourcefulness – Flexibility. There is no hierarchy here – everyone offers these values. It would be super if the design could reflect this principle.

I know that you will blow us all away (no pressure!).

Yours faithfully,

Jen

Anna beckons her over to her desk. ‘Listen,’ she says, ‘I’d like you to take on the office wall art.’ Anna’s tone is warm and her eyes are sparkling. She understands that Anna is taking a big step here, entrusting something so important and creative to her. She should respond with gratitude and excitement. Her feeling of these things is more muted, but it is still there. It is a nice project. Anna trusts her. She will push herself to do the best she can. She almost believes that the company embodies these values.

It is possible, as Dorothy Harpinger points out in Domestics: Servants, Slaves and Maids in Western Art (2009), that the maid in the painting ‘simply has a professional attitude and knows her place in the household and the world at large’ (123). It is possible she is staring out the window thinking of nothing more than her next meal.

It is a struggle to get out of the office within an hour of her offical finishing time of 1pm. Her and Anna’s work is piling up. These days it is often 2pm by the time she leaves. She works as fast as she can, running down to the canteen mid-morning to grab a coffee to take back to her desk. She is racing against herself, challenging herself to finish at 1pm or even 1.30pm today. But it never happens. She begins to sweat as the clock on her computer slips from 14.00 to 14.01. Her eyeballs are sore from concentrating on her screen. When she eventually stands up to go her body feels stiff with tension. Coming home late means her freelance work runs until later in the evening, which leaves little time for her painting. When at last she goes to the small room in their house where she has her easel and her materials it is like being drawn back to something calm and right-smelling, a baby to her mother’s arms. But there is no natural light by then; it is October and it is dark by eight.

Let’s imagine the maid is thinking of her next meal – is it possible that she is hungry? Perhaps she had to skip her lunch to be on hand for her mistress in her fervent exchange of letters. Maybe she needs the chamber pot. Perhaps the look she casts out the window is to distract her from her frustration with her mistress who is so oblivious to her needs.

Anna tells her that she is leaving the office late in the evenings, at eight, sometimes even nine. Anna grabs her arm as they pass in the aisle of the open plan. Her grip is strong; her eyes are bright. ‘Tell me if I say this too much, but I do not know what I would do without you.’ And she cackles with sardonic hysteria. Her own laugh sounds thin, nervous.

She is not getting time to do the wall art. It is not something that needs doing now so it must wait. When Jen asks about it Anna fields her question. ‘Thank you,’ she says to Anna after. Anna continues to look at her monitor. ‘We’re not superhuman,’ she says.

Her husband says, ‘You’re basically working for them for free when you stay late.’

‘But everyone’s doing it. It’s the culture of the place.’

‘The people doing it are getting paid a lot more than you and are full time.’ She doesn’t say to him that she can’t bring herself to do it to Anna. He wouldn’t understand.

‘At least ask them about the pay rise you’re due,’ he says.

When she summons the courage to ask about her pay rise Anna says, ‘Of course. Let me look into that for you.’

What are the maid’s needs, her priorities? In the painting she is attending her mistress. Her mistress must have gained her maid’s investment in this important exchange of letters – given her urgent letter writing she would not want her maid to dawdle on the street. On the other hand, if she let her maid know more about the letter she is writing and her own emotions about it she would be inviting an equality that she cannot afford. If her maid is free with her and feels able to express herself and her needs then she would lose her use. A maid is there for the convenience of her mistress, so the mistress, while needing to draw her in, would have to know when to stop – a balancing act indeed and one only perfected, presumably, by the shrewd or experienced mistress.

She is sitting with Anna working through something and she notices that Anna’s hands are shaking; it is almost imperceptible. She looks at Anna’s face. She is pale and she has bruise-like marks under her eyes. Her voice is hoarse and she keeps clearing her throat. Occasionally she loses her place in her notes and asks for a minute. She wants to ask Anna if she is alright but she doesn’t. When she stands to go back to her own desk, Anna blinks up at her smiling. ‘Thank you,’ she says.

In the canteen later she overhears two managers saying that Anna’s mother isn’t well. Is in hospital. She had planned to ask Anna about her pay rise again but feels that now she cannot.

As the days go on it is clear to her that Anna’s mother isn’t getting any better. She reckons this from the whispered conversations between Anna and the other managers, from Anna’s red-rimmed eyes and mysterious disappearances from her desk. Yet at the same time she must not say what she knows. Cannot cross the line that Anna set. Instead she works as hard as she can. Works on even later, until 3pm or even 3.30pm. ‘You’re crazy,’ her husband says. But he doesn’t get it. His work isn’t time sensitive or needed now, now, now. His boss’s mother isn’t dying. She ends up working on her freelance projects late into the evening and is too exhausted to paint.

One day after work she feels a perceptible tingle at the right corner of her lip; she looks it up on the internet and finds Bell’s palsy. She calls her doctor who says she would be very surprised if it is Bell’s palsy; it’s probably nothing to worry about. By dinner time the tingle has spread across the entire right side of her face. She lies in bed that night feeling it and doubting it at the same time. Is she somehow making it up? Eventually she sleeps and the following morning the whole right side of her face feels numb. She smiles at herself in the mirror. One half of her face doesn’t move. What the fuck is this? She calls Anna, keeping down her panic, and tells her she has to go to A&E. ‘I just want to get something checked out.’ In A&E they tell her she has Bell’s palsy. No one knows what causes it really, the doctor says with a shrug – although the internet says it is linked to stress – but it should start to recede within a few weeks.

The following day she goes to work. It’s OK, she tells her husband and herself. It’s only Bell’s palsy.

‘Do you feel OK to be here?’ Anna says.

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me if you need rest or if you have to take time OK?’

Anna doesn’t comment on her face and she wonders if it is actually apparent at all until she bumps into a colleague in the hall. ‘Oh Jesus, did you have a stroke?’

She hopes it will be easier to leave the office closer to when she is meant to now. She hopes Anna will say to her at her finish time, ‘Go now. Mind yourself.’ But as she works beyond 1pm, beyond 2pm, Anna’s eyes stay locked on her screen. When she is leaving Anna turns and smiles. ‘Thank you. Get some rest now.’

The following day she meets Anna in the stairwell. Anna is standing still. Her face is red and there are tears on her cheeks. This is shocking. ‘Are you OK?’

‘My mother is dying and I can’t be at her bedside because I am needed in here.’

‘I’m so sorry, Anna.’ She puts her hand on Anna’s arm. Anna looks at it.

‘Does Jen know? Can you take some time off?’

Anna’s smile is unreadable. ‘Yes, of course. But there’s no one else to do the work. It’s as simple as that.’

In this painting the maid is central. Although the vanishing point in the painting is on the lady’s left eye, the maid is standing right in the middle. She is the link between the world of this room and the world outside, in terms of her role as the go-between but more immediately in how she is standing, her body, dutiful and submissive, turned towards her mistress, her head turned to the greater world outside the window. It is this twist in the maid that commands the viewer’s attention more than the ardent writing of her mistress. Her mistress’s needs do not occupy the maid’s mind here. She is a reminder of the freedom of the mind to go where it will – a truth unsettling to all hegemony.

That evening her husband says that he thinks she should take some leave to rest. They have been down this road a number of times over the past couple of days but now she feels his words entering her mind and taking on weight and meaning.

She decides to put in for the annual leave she’d been holding off on taking. When this finishes up she puts in for sick leave. She avoids thinking about how stressed and upset Anna must be, but a part of her, strangely, does not care. While she is off Anna’s mother dies. She sends her some flowers but she doesn’t go to the funeral. Her Bell’s palsy is receding with complete rest and she doesn’t want to jeopardise that.

When she comes back to the office it is as if nothing has happened. Anna buzzes about, fretting about the work and the upskilling courses she’s being sent on. But every time she looks at Anna now she sees a woman crying in a stairwell.

‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ she says when she is sitting in the visitor chair at Anna’s desk.

Anna’s eyes flick to hers. ‘Thank you.’ Then, ‘I’m glad to see your Bell’s palsy is gone. Just so you know I think you were right to take the leave. As it happened admin took a lot of your work and we just prioritised. All was well.’

‘I’m glad to hear that.’ She means it in this moment but it makes her wonder what on earth she was working so much for, over her hours and for no extra pay. Making herself ill. She feels foolish and resentful but also in some way released from something. She feels relief.

It is worth comparing the dynamic between mistress and maid in Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid with the one in The Love Letter (c. 1669–70. Riijksmuseum, Amsterdam). In The Love Letter the lady is at the centre, seated with an instrument. Her maid stands behind her, hand on hip, holding out a letter for her to take. The two women share a look and a kind of energy passes between them. The maid has an easy, knowing, almost smug, expression on her face. The mistress looks wary, nervous. It seems, as Janson points out, that the maid ‘most likely knows something more about the contents of the letter than she’ (essentialvermeer.com). In this moment she has a perspective on events that the mistress does not have. Despite this tension mistress and maid are brought together by the letter; they converge in the centre of the painting, almost touching, their eyes connected.

She hands in her notice by email to Anna and Jen. Jen does not respond. Anna swipes her into an empty office. ‘This is such a shock, Charlotte. I am going to need time to get my head around it. But don’t worry about me! I am just genuinely sorry you are going. I am. I enjoy working with you. I think we work very well together. Do you know your pay rise was coming too; I was looking forward to telling you. What a pity! But I’ve got to get my practical hat on now. Could you write up your job description and we’ll get it out? God, I’ll need time to get my head around this! Why are you going again? Your art, is it? And your freelance work?’ She makes an exaggerated self-effacing expression. ‘I thought they might be a problem when you started. As in you wouldn’t be fully present here, if you know what I mean.’ She wags a finger. ‘But it’s of course up to you. I wish you all the best. I really do.’ She exhales steam and leaves the room. She comes back. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do without you.’ And she squeezes her eyes shut.

In contrast, the dynamic between the maid and mistress in Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid portrays disconnection. They are facing away from each other. Although the maid is standing close to her mistress, ‘they remain divided both on the picture plane and in thought.’ (Janson, essentialvermeer.com).

She does not see Jen until her exit interview. Jen sits across from her at the small round meeting table in her office with an A4 sheet in her hand, pen poised. ‘Is there anything you’ve been dissatisfied with?’

Her voice speaks into the silence. It sounds strange, too loud, too monotone. It keeps going as Jen writes. She talks about working over her hours and it never being acknowledged. About how she and Anna were always swamped with work. Jen crosses and uncrosses her legs.

When she gets to her Bell’s palsy and Anna’s dying mother, Jen stops writing and looks up. ‘I’ll have to stop you there. Thank you.’

She feels the snap of reprimand. Her body automatically fills with doubt and shame.

Jen goes to the next question on her sheet. ‘Would you recommend this company as somewhere to work?’

‘Yes,’ she says without hesitating. She feels disorientated. She says it to make the question go away. But it is true that this company would suit some people, clearly does suit them. It is true that she is the one leaving voluntarily. Perhaps this makes her the problem.

In the silence of the room – apart from the sound of the mistress’s pen on the page – each woman is enveloped in her own thoughts. One is focussed, her gaze narrowed on on a page, choosing and writing words, her mind on something at stake; the other, her eyes to the great wide world outside, maintains the poise of perspective.

She looks out the grubby window at the carpark. She allows herself to not care. She allows the chasm of godly, dangerous indifference to open within her.

‘Yes, of course,’ she says.

Elizabeth Brennan’s work has been published in TOLKA, Profiles, Prole, Crannóg and The Irish Independent, anthologised in the Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction edited by Dermot Bolger and Ciaran Carty, and broadcast on RTÉ’s The Book on One. She is a current mentee on the Words Ireland National Mentorship Programme. She is working on a collection.

Twitter: @Eliza_Brennan