The Circus

The Circus

7 July 2012

Today a third assistant came with Molly Maids to clean the house.  Usually there are two, always the same team and one, as you will know if you have been reading my earlier account of Mrs Gainsborough’s life here in No. 17, is clearly a favourite of Gainsborough’s ghost because he arrives to greet her, and disappears as soon as she leaves the house.

This morning, as she entered the room that used to be his studio the ghost, in his usual form of an unpleasant odour, was there.  The new member of the team entered the room, sniffed the air and came running downstairs to tell me that “that smell” sent her back to pre-school days when she used the glue pot with the brush fixed to the lid to paste pictures onto paper.  Unwittingly, she confirmed the opinion of my friend the former director of the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery who said, when he first smelled it, that the odour reminded him of the glue 18th C artists used to size their canvases before they applied paint.

When I went upstairs a moment ago Mr Gainsborough was still there.  Will he leave as usual when the Molly Maids depart?  

LATER:   Yes.  He did.