Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva (10 page)

‘I was about to send out a search party,’ Margery said as Kate walked through the front door. ‘I thought you were only going up the roadaren’t you meant to be going out at eight? It’s gone seven now.’

Without responding to this, Kate said to Findlay, ‘Go upstairs and start running the bath.’ Then, turning to Margery. ‘Why are you whispering?’

‘Robert’s asleep.’

‘Where?’

‘The lounge.’

As the sound of running water started coming from upstairs, Kate went through to the lounge where the curtains had been drawn, the gas fire put on and the lights dimmed.

‘He’s asleep,’ Margery hissed, following her in.

The TV was onwith the sound offand Kate watched, distracted, as two polar bears finished matingdid animals orgasm?and started killing a seal instead. The huge white bears collaborated with far more grace and ease over death than they had just a second ago when copulating.

Sighing, she turned the volume up and put the lights back on full.

‘What are you doing?’ Margery carried on hissingloudly now, to make herself heard above the TV. ‘He’s only just gone to sleep, bless him.’

Ignoring this, Kate put Flo, in her car seat, on the floor by Robert’s feet and, sweeping past Margery, went to retrieve a bottle from the fridge.

In the lounge, Margery grappled with the TV controls, finally managing to turn the volume down again. She was about to start tampering with the dimmer switches when Kate walked back into the lounge.

Without commenting on the TV’s diminished volume, she knelt down and unstrapped Flo, depositing her viciously in Robert’s lap.

Robert tried to pull himself up, knocking the bottle of milk off the arm of the sofa and onto the floor. ‘Shit, what was that?’ he said, blearily.

‘Here, give her to me,’ Margery said, nudging herself onto the sofa beside him and hauling Flo, who was frowning, out of his lap. ‘I told her you were asleep,’ she added.

‘I’m going upstairs to give Findlay his bath,’ Kate said, yelling, ‘Finn, you can turn that off now.’

Robert sat up, still stunned with sleep, and watched her leave the room before getting slowly to his feet and stumbling after her. ‘Kate—’

Margery listened to him walk unsteadily upstairs, slip on a tread, then carry on, calling out, ‘I’ll do Finn, you go and get yourself ready.’

She heard footsteps go through to the bedroom above her.

‘KateI’m so sorry about the boys. I just totally forgot.’

Kate didn’t respond.

Then, after a while, Margery heard Kate’s voice saying, ‘I think there’s something wrong with the cat. He’s limping. Robert? Come and take a look.’

At eight o’clock, Kate drove to No. 236 Prendergast Road because of the rainwith the tortilla on the seat next to herand parked behind the Burgesses’ new Range Rover that they had bought with the disappointingly small amount of money they’d made out of Miles’s mother dying.

She rang the doorbell under the taut gaze of the CCTV camera positioned in the corner of the porch, and Harriet’s husband Miles answeredall five foot eight of him, wearing a stained rugby shirt and old deck shoes. He had a small watering can in his hand and stared at her, smiling, his eyes shining behind the sort of spectacles that looked good on a German architect but that would never look good on Milesnot unless he got a head transplant. His head, as it currently stood, looked as if it had been dehydrated at some point in late childhoodthen rehydrated rapidly. As a consequence the skin on his faceas well as the rest of his bodyhad the same tonal range as that of a pre-miracle Lazarus. None of which was helped by the fact that Miles had spent most of his life so far trying to become something he had never been designed to become. Miles, like Jessica Palmer, worked
for Lennox Thompson Estate Agents, only he was manager of the Forest Hill branch.

‘Hi,’ he said to Kate’s breasts, ‘I was just coming out to water these.’

As he stooped over one of two semi-dead bay trees in the front porch, Kate saw Evie appear in the hallway over his back.

Honing in rapidly on Kate, she screamed, ‘I loooove your T-shirt!’

‘It’s one of yours,’ Kate managed to scream back, navigating the bulk of Miles blocking the doorway.

‘Thought I recognised itlooks gorgeous on you.’

‘And you look amazing. Very…’ Kate took in the pair of cigarette-cut jeans that they’d all worn in their mid-teens throughout the eighties and that they were now expected to wear again in their mid-thirties; the formal sporting jacket, and the Bavarian hat, which cast strange shadows over Evie’s face. The overall effect was one of unhinged hysteria. ‘…Eva Braun,’ she finished.

Evie ran down the hallway on full throttle, obliterating Miles and grabbing hold of Kate, who just about managed to keep the tortilla balanced in her left hand. ‘That’s the nicest thing anybody’s said to me all day.’

Evie, who used to be a buyer for Top Shop and Oasis before the birth of Aggie, opened her own boutique‘Boutique’two years ago in the Bellenden area of Peckham, filling it with samples by graduate designers the High Street stores weren’t ready to take a risk on. One of the unwritten PRC rules was that on meeting nights you wore something from ‘Boutique’.

During the three seconds she spent nestled forcibly against Evie’s thorax, Kate tried to achieve the sort of energy levels being in Evie’s company demanded. Evie’s husband, Joelwho used to be a triathlon winner in his spare timenow
needed an entire pot of Viagra just to take a piss in the morning because Evie never stopped, and Evie on full tilt was as terrifying as seeing a battery-operated toy with its batteries removedstill running.

‘It wasn’t you who invited Jessica was it?’ Evie hissed suddenly while Kate was clamped to her still.

‘No,’ Kate lied.

‘God knows who did then. Harriet’s really pissed off about it, but it’s hardly like we can ask Jessica to just fuck off.’ She stepped backalarming, energy-sapping dimples in either cheek, her eyes shining. ‘Anywaymore importantlyFINDLAY’S IN.’

‘In?’

‘ST ANTHONY’S. Ros told me earlier. In fact, EVERY-BODY’S IN. Even,’ Evie lowered her voice, ‘Arthur Palmer.’ She executed a strange little movement, which consisted of her shaking both fists in the air before turning on her heels and walking off up the hallway.

Realising that there was no point even trying to match Evie’s euphoria, Kate followed her in silence, up the hallway and into the pseudo-Edwardian world of Miles and Harriet’s loungeunable to detect the faint whirr of the sensory camera in the corner, above the DJ Yoda remix of
Final Countdown
.

Every surface in the Burgesses’ lounge was covered in tortillawhich Kate had no choice but to add to, because everybody (apart from Jessica who had bought a jar of Sauerkraut) had made the tortilla featured in April’s
Waitrose Magazine
, which had come with everybody’s Ocado shopthat everybody had so far explicitly avoided referring to…until now when Kate walked in and Jessica said, ‘Shit, not more of the stuff.’

Ignoring this, Harriet smiled blearily at Kate as she entered the room, her thick, blonde hair pulled back in a schoolgirl
ponytail. The light in the room was bouncing off the nipple shield covering her right breast that was supposed to make the pain bearable as Phoebe fed. The velvet on the armchair’s left arm had been rubbed bald. Over the past week, having contracted mastitis, she’d resorted to expressing and giving Phoebe bottles, but for tonight’s PRC she wanted to be seen actively, successfully, breastfeeding her five-week-old daughtereven if it meant bleeding onto her sleeve as she took the nipple shield off.

Harrietlike Mileswas wearing a stained rugby shirt and old deck shoes, because she hadn’t lost the weight she’d gained with Phoebe yet, and Miles’s clothes were the only ones that fitted her. She sometimes cried when she looked at photographs of herself taken the summer before she became pregnant with Phoebe when she’d been just about able to get into a pair of low-rise jeans purchased from Boutique; even if the sensation of wearing them hadn’t been dissimilar to that of her body performing an involuntary hysterectomy on itself. And she
was
trying, but nothing she did seemed to shift Phoebe’s legacy. Not even the prambotics DVD released by her friend Polly, who used to live on Prendergast Road and was fast becoming South London’s postnatal exercise guru. So clothes from Boutique were out of the question.

Sitting on the sofa next to Harriet was Roslooking preoccupied and showing uncharacteristically few signs of life. Her eyesafter an hour’s prambotics in the park with Polly, followed by Swim with Baby, followed by two hours in the kitchen making sweet potato tortilla (her own take on the
Waitrose Magazine
recipe), followed by another hour waiting for Martin to fulfil his promise to a) come home at all, and b) come home before midnight for the first time in over two monthshad no focus whatsoever.

Jessica was sitting on the sofa opposite and, next to her, an elderly male whom Kate didn’t recognise.

Kate took the armchair with the concealed recline function that Miles watched sport in.

‘Okay,’ Evie’s voice exploded into the room, high and loud, ‘now everybody’s here, I can introduce Labour councillor Derek Stoke, who’s kindly agreed to join us here tonight to talk about the proposed speed bumps on Prendergast Road, whichas you all knowwe’ve been campaigning for for nearly two years now.’

Derek, whose wild walrus gaze had been fixed on Harriet’s bleeding, lactating 36Ds, started and dropped the remains of his tortilla onto his lap, where he brushed it surreptitiously onto Harriet’s cream carpet, his lips sucking emptily at the air in anticipation of speech. He was too old for thisthat’s what he’d been thinking before he heard the blonde woman who wasn’t wearing a bra scream out his name. There was too much noise and these women terrified him. It was always him the local Labour party sent to these community meetings and he just wasn’t convinced he was up to it any more. John was too young; too full of mantras rather than ideas, which made two-way conversation limiting; Ruth had never been the same since her Congo trip and the only thing you could get her to talk about with any real clarity was female genital mutilation; Elizabeth was an ambitious Nigerian who only attended high-profile meetings, and Nigel was forever engineering positive publicity for local MP, Tessa Jowell. So there really was only himeven if he was so unashamedly old school he’d only ever thought of faggots as something you ate with gravy.

‘Speed bumps!’ Evie prompted Derek, turning DJ Yoda down and refilling her glass of wine.

This time, Derek launched automatically into the speech he’d prepared on the proposed speed bumps and 20 m.p.h. limit for Prendergast Road, which would not only increase road safety, but act as a deterrent to gangs of youths looking
for quiet side roads on which to race entire fleets of motorised scooters.

On cue, a fleet of motorised scooters made their way up Prendergast Road.

Evie screamed with laughter and turned expectantly to Derek, whocut off mid-flowlapsed into a sudden inertia that left him tugging subconsciously on his ear; the one in which he’d been hearing a low-pitched buzzing all evening. Looking up, he noticed a microscopic camera on top of the side cabinet between two china Staffordshire dogs. The camera was moving. Were they recording the meeting? If they were, shouldn’t he have been told earlier and asked to sign a disclaimer or something?

‘Are we donewith the speed bumps?’

Derek nodded dumbly, his mind entirely taken up with the possibility that he was being filmed without his prior consent.

‘We need to move onto the street party,’ Ros put in. ‘Only eight weeks left to go…’

‘Eight?’ Evie echoed, excited, as though the true properties of the number eight had just been revealed to her.

‘Well, so far we’ve got face painting confirmedthat’s Harriet. And Kate’s our cake and barbecue lady…’ Evie paused to draw breath.

Kate smiled dimly at nothing in particular.

‘We’ve also had confirmation from Ethnic Wind Chimeswho did the Goose Green Spring Fayre: they’re happy to do a stall…. And Ziggy the junk percussionist, who came to nursery at the end of last term. Ros, you’re happy to promote Carpe Diem that day and obviously Boutique will have a stall.’ Evie broke off to refill everybody’s wine glasses. ‘We thought about getting a bike surgery along, maybe in conjunction with South London Recumbants, and the council are talking about setting up a compost and recycling
awareness stall. I’ve spoken to the girl who has the jewellery stall on Northcross Road on a Saturday morning and they’re all getting back to me. Stalls are being delivered by 8 a.m. on the actual day.’

‘When is the actual day?’ Harriet asked.

‘June fifteenth.’

Nobody said anything for a while until Jessica said, ‘June fifteenth’s a Monday. It’s Parents’ Evening on the fifteenth.’

Evie turned to her. ‘Parents’ Evening?’

‘New Parents’ Evening at St Anthony’sthat’s what the letter said.’

There was a fraught pause that filled the entire room.

‘Well…’ Ros exhaled. ‘Let’s make it Saturday the thirteenth.’

‘Saturday the thirteenth,’ Evie’s voice said, rising about everything else. ‘Saturday the thirteenth?’ She appealed to Derek Stokes, without knowing why.

Ignoring this appeal, Derek leant forward. ‘Is this being recorded?’ he asked no one in particular.

At No. 22 Prendergast Road, Margery would look up from her plate every now and then and smile at Robert through the pair of candles she’d lit, before lowering her head again and letting out a series of small satisfied belches. She’d had trouble finding a tablecloth and in the end had to use the one she’d given them when they first marriedwhich looked as if it had been in the ironing basket since thenand whose edging she’d crocheted as a girl, in anticipation of her own marriage. Only she never had got married.

‘Guess who I saw the other week?’ she said, suddenly.

‘Tell me.’

‘Walked right into her coming out the Co-opnice as anything; recognised me immediately. “Margery,” she said.’

‘Mum, who was it?’

‘Had a beautiful new Range Rover parked just outside the shop on double yellows, but I don’t suppose she’d have any trouble with the traffic wardens looking like she did.’

‘Mum…’

‘Amanda Wakefield.’

‘Who the hell’s Amanda Wakefield?’

‘Sorrythat’s her married nameAmanda Snaiton. You remember Amanda Snaiton?’

‘Yeahshe got married, didn’t she?’

Margery nodded. ‘Got married, moved down to Surrey somewhere. Anyway, now she’s back and she’s not “Wakefield” any more. Told me everythingright there on the pavement over her shopping. Looks like she did well out of the settlement, what with the Range Rover and everything…’ Margery paused. ‘She’s got two kidsprobably moved to be near her mum.’ Margery paused again. ‘You do remember Amanda, don’t you, Robert?’

‘Sort of,’ he sighed.

‘You went out with her for
two
yearstwo years is a long time.’

‘I was seventeen,’ Robert said.

‘Well, she was asking after
you
.’

Robert tried to say something, but ended up choking.

‘Robert?’

‘Something…in my throat.’ He got to his feet, his eyes bulging.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Water…’

He left the room and a few minutes later the choking sounds stopped.

‘You all right?’ she said as he sat back down.

‘A hair got stuck in my throat.’ He held the hair up to the light.

‘Looks like one of yours,’ Margery said, recognising one of Ivan’s hairs that she must have overlooked with the tweezers earlier.

‘Christdon’t tell me I’m suffering from premature hair loss on top of everything else.’

‘What is it now?’ Margery said as he got to his feet again. ‘Sit downI’ll get you seconds.’

He shook his head. ‘It’s Flo.’

Margery listened, but couldn’t hear anything. ‘You sure?’

‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

‘She’s probably just dreaming.’

‘I’d better go and see. I’m worried about that bruise on her forehead.’

Robert was drunker than he thought and tripped over the bottom step before managing to haul himself the rest of the way upstairs. He pushed Flo’s bedroom door open just a fractionenough for light to find its way immediately into the blacked-out room and pick out a corner of wardrobe and the end of the cot. He couldn’t see his daughter from the doorthe light didn’t penetrate the darkness that farbut he could hear her rapid, busy breathing and that made him smile. The high-pitched moaning had stopped. Margery was rightshe must have been dreaming.

He stood staring vacantly at a spot of wood on Flo’s doorframe where the gloss had been chipped off, feeling a sudden, almost unbearable amount of tenderness towards his daughter at the thought of her lying unconscious in the dark, dreaming.

Robert had loved both his children effortlessly from the moment they were born. He’d loved Kate when she was pregnant with them, so in fact he’d loved them before they were born even. He knew people who’d brought up two or more children without loving any of them, but this hadn’t been his experience of parenthood. It struck him as strange that at some deep-seated level of the social subconscious, love of your children was optional for fathers in a way it wasn’t for mothers. The possibility that a mother might not actually love her children was unspeakable…unthinkable. Still.

Robert veered away from this thought and went back downstairs.

‘Told you she’d be all right,’ Margery said as he sat down again. ‘Mind you, it’s a good job you checkedshe took a nasty fall today.’ She paused, draining her glass of Liebfraumlich. ‘Rolled right off the bed while Kate was downstairs.’

Robert sat down. ‘What?’

‘I said, she rolled off the bed.’

‘Mumshe bumped her head at nursery.’

‘Nursery?’ Margery snorted and slurped on her empty glass. ‘Get us another one, love.’

Roger hesitated then poured her another glass.

Even drunk, Margery was aware she had Robert’s attention. ‘Who told you that?’

‘Well, Kate, she…’

‘I told Kate she shouldn’t leave her on the bed like that when she’s starting to turn herself over.’

‘Whose bed did she roll off?’

‘YoursKate left her on your bed. We only realised when she started screaming.’

Ignoring the strange turn Robert’s face had taken, she looked down at her plate, surprised to see it emptythen up at him again. ‘You want some more?’

‘Nono.’

‘Another sliver of cheese and onion before pudding?’

Robert shook his head, preoccupied. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I haven’t put on that much weight, have I? Surely I can tuck away another small piece of pie without feeling guilty.’

‘I’m talking about Flo,’ Robert said.

‘Oh…that. Of course I’m sure. Ask Findlay.’ She smiled at him. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me what’s for pudding?’ When Robert didn’t say anything, she snapped, ‘Well, it’s apple.’

‘Apple what?’

‘Pie.’

‘I’ll have a bit more salad.’

Margery dug happily into the undressed layers of iceburg lettuce, tomatoes and spring onions.

‘She’s stressed, that’s all,’ Robert said watching her but speaking to himself.

‘Who’s stressedFlo?’

‘Kate!’

A strange sound emitted from Margery’s throat. ‘Stressed? About what exactly? The kids are in nursery; she doesn’t cookdoesn’t clean.’ Margery broke off. ‘You might of mentioned you had a cleaner.’

‘Mum…’

‘Nobody tells me anything. I was surprised, that’s allwhen that girl turned up this morning. And twenty pounds is a lot of money.’ Margery stopped suddenly, aware she wasn’t meant to know this. But one look at Robert’s face told her the transgression had passed him by. ‘I had to take you with me when I got that job cleaning at the old people’s homewhat else could I do? Then, when you started school, you had to get yourself home.’

‘That’s the problem though, Mum: Kate doesn’t have a jobshe has a career.’

‘You had to get yourself home,’ Margery said again in response to this, ‘and you couldn’t of been much older than Finn is now.’

‘I hated that,’ Robert conceded.

‘But what else could we do?’ Margery appealed to him.

‘I hated the empty houseyou not being there.’ He was aware of sounding childish, but his mind was suddenly full of the kitchen in the house they rented from a local farmer when he was a child, and the old stool he used to sit on by the window, waiting for Margery to come home. ‘Sometimes I thought you might never come back and that I’d end up in that children’s home at the end of the street. D’you
remember that kid there who only had half a head of hair? He terrified me.’ Robert’s mind ran on to other things he didn’t mention; things that seemed less easy to define and therefore less shareable…like the rabbits’ legs strung from the outhouse door where the goose lived. Part of the agreement they’d had with the farmer was that the goose, who did nothing but spit, got fed by them. Then there was the one-arm bandit machine in the lounge.

Margery said, ‘I always came home.’

‘I know you did.’

‘Always.’

‘I know that, but I didn’t know that then. And we weren’t like everyone else and it made me lonely.’

‘Well, you never really know what goes on behind closed doors and anyway, we were better than a lot of people,’ Margery concluded.

They eyed each other drunkenly; nervouslyas if they’d just hit a clearing in the forest they hadn’t really been looking for in the first place and, after being used to shadow for so long, were suddenly able to see more than they’d anticipated. More than they’d ever wanted.

And it wasn’t as though either of them was trying to gain the upper hand because there was no upper hand to be gained. The joint, overriding memory they both had of Robert’s childhood was one of survival, and right now they just needed to reassure each other that they
had
survived.

Margery looked away at the crumbs on the tablecloth, trying to work them into some sort of pattern while thinking of the looks she used to get from shopkeepers on the High Street when Robert was only months old and she pushed the pram in. They served her, but the looksshe’d never forget the looks.

‘The look on their faces,’ she said out loud. ‘Nothing would
break their facesand you were such a beautiful baby, Rob. And that was the late sixties, for Christ’s sakeyou’d think people might of lightened up a bit after a world war. Not the bloody English; not bloody likely. I nearly moved to Londononce; didn’t think I could stand it any more.’ She smiled timidly at him. ‘Wonder what would of happened to us if I’d of done that?’

When he didn’t answer, she got up and started to clear the table.

Robert sat and watched, aware that her hands found it difficult to grip the plates as she tried to pull them towards her. He knew he should help, but he was angry with hertoo angry to offer to helpand he didn’t know why.

She came back in with the apple pie and a jug of cream, behaving deferentially towards the cream as she did all items she considered a luxury.

‘It’s off,’ Robert said after the first mouthful.

‘It can’t be offI just bought it.’

He took another mouthful, more wary this time, wondering whether he’d drunk so much beer it was curdling the cream as soon as it hit his stomach. ‘Definitely off.’

Margery smelt the jug, then dug her spoon in and slurped it up. ‘It’s not off.’

‘It tastes funny,’ Robert insisted.

Margery shunted her chair back, angry herself now, and came in with the empty cream carton to show him the sellby date.

Robert stared at her. ‘That’s why.’

‘That’s why, what?’

‘It’s UHTMum, you bought long-life cream.’

‘It’s Elmlea, it’s what I always buy.’

‘But it’s long-lifewhy d’you buy long-life?’

‘It’s cream,’ Margery insisted.

‘Long-life cream.’

‘Robertyou’re shouting.’ She stared at him. ‘Are you not eating yours now?’

‘It’s fineI’ll eat it.’

‘Well, don’t if you don’t want to.’

‘I’ll eat it,’ he said, trying not to raise his voice again.

Robert’s voice was impatient, unkind. ‘I don’t know about KateI think you’re all stressedthe whole lot of you.’ She paused, knowing that now would be the ideal time to bring out the letterKate wasn’t here; she had Robert to herselfbut somehow she wasn’t ready to part with it. It was starting to feel like a very valuable insurance policy that she wasn’t ready to cash in just yet.

She thought about how she’d come across the letterin Kate’s suit jacketas though she’d been meant to find it. Somebody
was
looking after her. Maybe she did have a guardian angel. Tom used to believe in angelsthought everybody had one. He used to say he could feel his angel’s fingers all over his shoulders and back.

‘A woman waved at me today,’ Margery said, without thinking.

Robert looked up at her, then carried on eating.

‘She was standing at the window in the house opposite. Couldn’t of been more than twenty-one.’ She paused, but Robert still didn’t have anything to say. ‘Their nets are nice. It’s nice to see a house with nets up at the windows, especially living as close as you all do to each other. In London.’

Robert looked as if he was having trouble swallowing the last mouthful.

‘Mumit’s a brothel.’

‘A brothel.’

‘The house oppositeit’s a brothel; got to be.’

‘I thought Kate was joking. Are you sure?’

Robert shrugged.