I woke this morning not to the alarm, nor to the light, but to a deep and rising hum from somewhere below me, which I have come to recognise as the sound of my wife at peace.

She owns a vacuum cleaner called a Rainbow. I am assured it is a superior machine; it draws the world’s dust down through a basin of water, so that what it takes it takes wetly, and afterwards the house holds a particular smell, clean and faintly mineral, like a pond that has been spoken to sternly. My wife does not so much operate this machine as commune with it.

I had assumed, when it entered the house, that it was for the floors. This was naive. She vacuums the floors, certainly; but also the furniture — which she has generally just finished moving, and now goes over in both its new position and its old — and the curtains, and the walls, and, on a hard day, very nearly anything that holds still long enough to fall under suspicion of dust. I have learned to keep moving. A man who sits too long in this house, lost in thought, runs a genuine risk of being mistaken for upholstery and addressed with the nozzle.

For her it is not a chore. It is what she does instead of weeping, or shouting, or telling the town precisely what she thinks of it. When some grief has come to her that she cannot mend — a sick friend, an ungrateful so-and-so, a wrong done to someone she loves — she does not sit with it. She takes up the Rainbow and advances upon the front room as upon an enemy; and by the time the basin runs grey and the walls have been stripped of their invisible offences, the trouble has been, if not solved, then at least thoroughly cleaned.

I can read her whole week in the machine. A short, brisk session is contentment. A long one, room after room, is sorrow being processed by horsepower. And when I hear her start in on the walls, I understand that someone, somewhere, has injured a person she loves, and is being dealt with in the one court that has never yet ruled against her.

I do not help. I offered once, early in our marriage, and was relieved of the nozzle with the gentle firmness of a surgeon recovering an instrument from a well-meaning bystander. The vacuuming is hers. It is, I have come to think, the single uncontested territory in a life spent tending everyone else’s — the one thing in the house that does exactly what she asks, the instant she asks it.

So I keep out of the way, and I keep moving, and I am grateful. When the hum stopped this morning the house smelled of the well-scolded pond, and she came up the stairs lighter than she had gone down, carrying the basin of grey water before her like a verdict. I could not have told you what had been troubling her. Only that it had been, and now was not.