Nettle hides the lampshade and stays home to guard it

Nettle Cobb’s decision to hide the carnival glass lampshade and remain at home to guard it marks the point at which the object’s hold overtakes her ordinary routine. Afraid that Wilma Jerzyck might return and take or damage the shade, Nettle locks it away, calls in sick to Polly Chalmers, and spends the morning keeping watch with a knife in hand. Her choice turns a prized purchase into the center of an increasingly constricted world.

The threat and the choice

Nettle is meant to work that day at Polly’s, vacuuming upstairs while a telephone installer is expected to fit new touch-tone phones. The new phones matter because Polly’s arthritis makes ordinary use difficult. But Nettle cannot bring herself to leave: she imagines Wilma somewhere nearby, driving around, and fears that Wilma could harm Raider or the lampshade if Nettle were away. Raider’s presence, usually a prompt for Nettle to get moving, instead sharpens the conflict between her responsibility at work and her conviction that the shade must be protected.

The dilemma becomes difficult for Nettle to manage, and the narrative describes her thoughts as beginning to slip under the pressure. An idea offers a temporary way out: rather than carry the lampshade around or leave it exposed, she can lock it in the house. The solution secures the object but does not release her from its demands. It allows her to stay near it and keep watch, while requiring her to abandon the workday she had planned.

Locking away the lampshade

Nettle retrieves the key to the long cupboard in an armoire. The key has a specific, established place: she finds it by feeling along the armoire’s top, although the separate key for its drawers has been missing for years. She opens the cupboard and places the carnival glass lampshade inside, among accumulated dust and debris. Although she recognizes that it belongs in a better place, safety has become more important than display or care. She locks the cupboard, tests its door, and keeps the key in her pocket, planning to put it on a string around her neck when she reaches work.

The act of locking the cupboard brings Nettle a sudden sense of relief. Yet the key does not simply solve the problem; it becomes a means of maintaining access and control. When she checks the cupboard again, she still holds the key tightly. The small, practical safeguard makes her fear legible in action: securing the lampshade is not enough unless she can also ensure that no one else reaches it.

Staying home to stand guard

A telephone call interrupts Nettle’s watch. She has to leave the room to answer, bangs her shin on a footstool, and finds that the call she heard has already stopped. She then decides that she cannot go to work and names the task she has taken on: standing guard. When she calls Polly, she claims to have an upset stomach. The excuse initially accompanies her awareness that she is neglecting the scheduled vacuuming and the telephone installer’s visit; as the narrative notes, her claim of being unwell is no longer wholly untrue.

Polly responds with kindness rather than reproach. She says the installer is not due until two and explains that she had intended to leave early herself because her hands still hurt too much to work for long. She tells Nettle that she will let the installer in and assures her that she does not need to come in. This practical accommodation relieves Nettle of the immediate obligation, and Polly’s consideration moves her to tears. The exchange also makes the contrast plain: Polly is dealing with the real limits imposed by arthritis, while Nettle’s imagined danger has displaced the work and care she had intended to provide.

After the call, Nettle checks outside; the street is empty for the moment. She retrieves the lampshade from the cupboard, washes it in warm, soapy water, rinses it, and dries it carefully. Then she takes a butcher knife from a kitchen drawer and sits bolt upright in the dim living room, the lampshade in her lap and the knife in her right hand. She remains there through the morning. The phone rings twice, and she does not answer it.

Significance

The episode gives a concrete shape to the way Nettle’s purchase has narrowed her choices. A lampshade that she believes must be protected leads her to conceal it, retain its key, misrepresent her reason for missing work, and refuse calls. Her declared duty to guard the object is therefore both a response to her fear of Wilma and evidence of how thoroughly that fear governs her behavior.

The scene also draws a distinction between care and possession. Nettle cleans the shade carefully and acknowledges that it should be somewhere better, but her overriding concern is to keep it safe from someone she fears. She does not take it to work or entrust it to another person; instead, the locked cupboard and the vigil make her increasingly isolated. Her choice offers immediate relief without restoring her freedom to resume the day as planned.