Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva (2 page)

Kate wasn’t convinced. ‘You’re sure you’re going to be
okay?’ she said again, feeling a sudden, unaccountable remorse at the sight of Margery’s swollen feet, bound purple with varicose veins, emerging from a pair of mauve slippers they’d bought her at Christmas.

‘I was thinking about doing some cleaning,’ Margery said after a while.

‘Cleaning?’

Margery tore off the rubber gloves she was wearing and strode purposefully to the kitchen door, standing on tiptoe and running her finger along the top of the frame. ‘Look.’

Kate stared at her.

‘Dust!’ Margery said and, as she said it, Kate had a sudden memory of Margery filling the indoor drying rack with baby vests and sleep suits after Findlay was born, saying, ‘You’ll be washing at least twice a day from now on.’ Stumbling blearily around the postnatal void and trying to come to terms with the fact that she had become two people, Kate had nothing at her disposal with which to defend herself against Margery’s prediction of infinite domestic drudgery.

‘I never knew you were meant to clean the top of doorframes.’

‘I had an electrical engineer round once, who complimented me on the top of my doorframes,’ Margery said, as if this settled the matter.

‘Well, Martina’s coming today.’

‘Who’s Martina?’

‘The cleaner.’

Margery digested this rapidly, staring at the dust on her fingertip. ‘I never heard Robert talking about a cleaner; he’s never mentioned a cleaner to me.’

For a moment, Kate thought Margery was going to cryit looked like her eyes were starting to water.

‘She’s a friend’s au pair.’

‘Where’s she from?’

‘Bratislava.’

‘Have you given her keys?’

‘Of course she’s got keys.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t…I just couldn’t.’

Margery was about to predict something apocalyptic when there was a banging sound from upstairs, followed by screaming.

‘What’s that?’ Margery yelped, her nerves shattered under the duress of the newfound information about the cleaner who’d infiltrated her son’s household.

‘ShitFlo.’

Was somebody breaking into the house to kidnap Flo? When she was a child and her mother lost her temper she used to say she was putting her out for the gypsies to take, but now it was the Arabs you had to be careful of. As everybody in East Leeke knew, there was a buoyant market for blond children in the Arab world. Were they coming for Flo herenow? The world was a terrifying place Margery thought, her mind full of Arabs scaling drainpipestoo terrifying sometimes.

Ignoring the strange whimpering sound that Margery, immobile, was making, Kate ran upstairs.

Flo was lying on her back on the stained carpet in their room, howling, and Findlay was kneeling beside her. When did Findlay come upstairs? She couldn’t even remember him leaving the kitchen.

‘I was waving at the face in the other house, then she fell,’ he said, waiting.

‘The face?’ Kate picked Flo up, tentatively feeling her head and looking out of the window. There were no faces at any of the windows in the house opposite, whichlocal rumour had itwas some sort of Albanian- or Russian-run brothel. ‘She’s fine,’ she tried to reassure him, as Flo started to calm down.

Findlay remained motionless. This wasn’t good enough.

He wanted to know why she had permitted such a thing to happen and it dawned on her, standing there cradling Flo, that he was angry with her. The eyes staring at her through the slits in the Spiderman mask, which he must have come upstairs and put on himself, were angry. She’d shattered an illusion he didn’t want shattered and now he knew that mothersin particular, his mothersometimes left their babies on beds and forgot about them, and sometimes the babies rolled off.

She tried to think of a comforting lie to tell him when she heard the post being pushed aggressively through the letterbox by the postwoman, who had some minor mentalhealth issues.

From the top of the stairs, she made out the red gas and electric, and the one from Southwark Council that would be their second and final reminder for overdue council tax. Between the recycling bag and piles of shoes that were beginning to look like something a UN forensic scientist might go to work on, was a brown A4 envelope that had to be the letter from Schools Admissions.

‘Was it okay to wave at the face?’ Findlay called out behind her.

Ignoring him, she stumbled down the stairs towards the letter.

‘How is she?’ Margery said, watching her.

‘Who?’ Kate couldn’t take her eyes off the brown A4 envelope.

‘Flo. What happened?’

‘Ohshe rolled off the bed.’

‘You left her on the bed?’

Kate swooped down on the letter from Schools Admissions, trying to decide whether to open it now or in the car.

‘What’s that?’

‘The letter from Schools Admissions.’

‘Well open it,’ Margery said, impatiently. She’d been in on most of the week’s conversations leading up to this momentand the rows; like the one that had resounded through the ceiling last night.

With Flo balanced awkwardly on her shoulder, Katenow nauseous with anticipationripped open the envelope and scanned the lines of the letter over and over again until she became aware of Margery watching her.

‘So?’

‘What?’ she said, stupidly.

‘Did he get in?’

Kate carried on staring stupidly at her and it was only when Margery said, ‘Well, that’s a relief,’ that she realised she must have nodded.

‘Your face,’ Margery said after a while.

‘My facewhat?’

‘It’s a picture.’

‘It’s gone bendy,’ Findlay put in from behind her on the stairs.

Margery, still watching her closely, didn’t look entirely convinced. ‘Don’t forget to tell Robert.’

‘I won’t,’ Kate said, automatically, with a sudden awful feeling that Margery was about to ask to see the letterwhen the doorbell rang, followed by the sound of keys turning in the lock. ‘Martina!’

Pushing the letter quickly into her suit jacket pocket, she ushered in Evie’s Slovak au pair who, Kate sensed, much preferred the Hunter family to Evie and the rest of the McRaes at No. 112.

‘Heyit’s Spiderman.’

‘Tell me about the pig,’ Findlay said, running up to her.

‘Not right now, Finn,’ Kate cut in, ‘we’re late for nursery.’

‘Her grandma made a football out of a pig’s head,’ Findlay said to the assembled adults.

‘For my bruvversit was Christmas,’ Martina said, resorting to the south London colloquialism she found easier to pronounce than the ‘th’ sound of received pronunciation.

‘Fascinating,’ Kate said vaguely, beginning to lose the day’s thread. ‘Finncome on.’ She was about to leave when she remembered Margery, framed ominously in the kitchen doorframe.

‘Martina, this is Margery.’

‘Hello Margery,’ Martina said cheerfully, entirely unaware, Kate thought with pity, of what the next few hours held in store for her.

Margery took in the tall skinny girl with bad skin in the bottle-green leggings and Will Smith T-Shirt, and grunted. Margery didn’t know who Will Smith was and wondered if Martina was some sort of activist. She’d always been under the impression that one of the things the Communists had going for them was that they didn’t like blacks.

‘Martinayour money’s in an envelope by the cooker,’ Kate called out, starting to make her way down the hallway towards the front door.

‘D’you want me to get anything for supper tonight?’ Margery called out after her.

Poised on the doorstep, Kate’s mind and stomach skittered rapidly over last night’s chicken chasseur assembled with the aid of a chicken chasseur sachet and some bestbuy chicken goujons. ‘It’s fineI’m out tonight.’

‘But what about the children?’

‘They get hot food at nursery and I’m only doing a halfday so I can get them some tea.’

‘And Robert?’ Margery tried not to yell. ‘What about Robert?’

Kate shrugged. ‘I guess there’s pasta and stuff in the cupboardshe can dig around and fix you both something.’

Margery was staring at her open-mouthed. She knew
things were bad, but not this bad; not only had Kate been sucking him of potential all these yearshis glorious, glorious potentialshe’d been starving him as well. Margery felt suddenly, almost crucially short of breath. Her poor, helpless boy.

‘I’ll shop,’ she gasped.

‘If you wantbut there is stuff in the cupboards.’

The two women stared silently at each other before Kate turned and made her way with the children to the Audi estate parked on the street outside next to an abandoned blue Bedford van that she would have seen on last night’s
Crimewatch
in conjunction with an armed robbery at the Woolwich Building Societyif she’d got round to watching any TV.

Margery carried on standing on the doorstep to No. 22 until the Audi had turned the corner out of sight. She was about to go back inside when a BMW pulled up on the opposite kerb, the doors clicking smoothly open as a smart young woman got out and walked towards the house with the red door and nets (at least somebody on this street had the sense to have nets)No. 21. The house with facesthat was what Findlay called it. Kate said it was a brothelMargery wasn’t sure whether she was joking or notand Robert thought Oompa-Loompas lived there because, apart from the smart young woman and short man in a suit now following her, nobody ever went in and nobody ever came out.

As Margery continued to watch, a face did appear at a first-floor window. The smart young woman who was at the front gate looked instinctively up and the nets fell back into place. She turned round and said something to the man, and it occurred to Margery that the man was afraid of the woman, now framed in the doorway to No. 21 and glancing across the street at Margery.

Margery smiledshe wasn’t sure what else to doand
continued to smile as the woman disappeared into No. 21. She lookedMargery decidedlike the girlfriend of the landlord at the Fox and Hounds where Margery and her friend Edith had a spritzer on Fridaysand she was Lithuanian. Darren, the landlord, had intimated softly to Margery and Edith that Lithuanian girls really knew how to look after men.

Edith always used to say that Robert would end up with someone like that. A Lithuanianor worsea Rastafarian. Margery wasn’t even sure if there
were
female Rastafarians, which made the insult even worse. Was Edith implying that Robert was gay? She’d got East Leeke library to order a biography of Haile Selassie in order to get to the bottom of the matter, and had been halfway through it when Edith informed herthrough pinched lipsthat her son, Andrew, was marrying a girl called Joy, who was Thai.

Up until Joy, Edith and Margery’s friendship had a formula. It was understood that Edith had things and people in her life that Margerybringing up an illegitimate child alonewas expected to envy. That’s how their relationship had always worked, and Margery had put up with a lot from Edith over the years because Edith was all she had and her son, Andrew, all Robert had.

Joy changed everything.

Edith had been all the way to Thailand to visit her. Joy lived in a village with no running water, but they’d gone to a restaurant for Edith’s birthday where you paid for the glass and could then refill it with Coca-Cola as many times as you liked. Not that Edith liked Coca-Cola, butas she was quick to point outthat wasn’t the point.

Edith said Andrew was going to buy Joy’s village and turn it into a tourist destinationthe Genuine Thai Experience. She also gave Margery some lurid and unasked-for details about Andrew and Joy’s sex life that Margery was unable
to fathom how she’d come by. None of this sex and commerce, however, detracted from the factas far as Margery was concernedthat Andrew had married a mailorder Thai bride because he couldn’t get himself a decent English girl.

Since their sons’ respective marriages, the balance of power had shifted in the relationship between Margery and Edith.

While Margery might not exactly get on with Kate, Kate did at least speak English.

‘Do you like tea?’ a foreign voice called out from somewhere in the house behind her.

‘Tea?’ Martina asked her again, from the kitchen doorway this time.

Margery nodded, shutting the front door tentatively behind her and staying where she was, listening to the clink of china in the kitchen. So the au pair knew how to make her way round the kitchen then; knew how to help herself.

‘Pleasetry this,’ Martina said, reappearing in the hallway and handing Margery a cup of scarlet-coloured tea.

‘What’s this?’ Margery asked, sniffing at it.

‘Raspberry. I drink it three times a day,’ Martina said.

Margery had no intention of drinking the tea. Not after the article she’d read in
CHAT
last week about the cleaner who’d given an elderly woman like her a drink with a paralytic in it that had paralysed her from the neck down. Once the woman was paralysed, the cleaner performed an autopsy on her WHILE SHE WAS STILL ALIVE, filmed the whole thing and put it on the Internet. Nobody was catching Margery out like thatespecially not a communist. Nobody was performing an autopsy on Margery without her permission.

She followed Martina back into the kitchen, noting the carrier bag on the bench with the box of tea bags inside that Martina must have brought with her.

‘You bought these all the way from Czechoslovakia with you?’ she asked, suspiciously

‘From Slovakiayes.’

‘You can get hold of that sort of thing there then?’

‘Of course,’ Martina said, lifting her cup. ‘You like?’

Margery didn’t respond to this. ‘Did you have to queue a long time for the tea?’

‘For this tea? I don’t know. My mother bought it at the supermarket. There are always queues at the supermarket.’

Margery put her cup of tea down on the kitchen surface. ‘You have supermarkets?’

Martina nodded, blowing on her tea. ‘I take my mother in the car one time a week.’

‘Car?’

‘My caryes.’

‘You’ve got more than one?’

‘We have two.’

A two-car familyand there was Robert having to either cycle to work or get the bus because Kate needed the car. Margery glared at Martina, as if her car, the Krasinovic’s second car, parked outside their block in Blac, was somehow denying the Hunter family their second car.

At leastas she discovered several minutes laterall the Krasinovic family lived in a flat; unheated, she presumed, until Martina set her straight on this as well, informing her that the Krasinovic apartment in Blac not only had central heating, but double glazing as well.

Margery’s eyes skidded, mortified, over the rotting, peeling sash windows in the Hunter’s kitchen that Kate refused to replace with new uPVC double glazingnot even after one of Margery’s insurance policies came off and she offered to pay for the double glazing herself.

Presuming the conversation over, Martina retrieved the Carry-It-All that Margery had bought Kate at Christmas from
the cupboard under the sink. The Carry-It-All was a turquoise plastic container with a handle that you could use to transport your cleaning arsenal round the house.

Margery had a lilac one at homewhich she had ordered from the Bettaware catalogue along with Kate’sand it gave her a huge amount of pleasure, on a Monday morning, to make her way round her East Leeke bungalow with it. It was dishwasher proof as wellsomething she’d pointed out to Kate when Kate hadn’t shown quite the right amount of enthusiasm or appreciation of the carefully chosen Carry-It-All. ‘It’s dishwasher proof,’ she’d said, pointedly, and Kate had given her that lopsided grimace she thought passed for a smile, followed by that look she put onlike she was the only person on the planet who’d ever had to forsake their dreams.

Margery found the Carry-It-All at the beginning of this visit, at the back of the cupboard under the sinkwhere Kate had thrown iton its side with part of its handle discoloured where bleach had dripped onto it. Its abandonment felt more intentional than careless and this fact had moved her almost to tears when she’d discovered it on her first morning here, in an empty house. She’d since washed it, replenished it with a selection of cleaning products bought with her own money, and left it at the front of the cupboard.

Someone was talking to her. She’d got lost in herself again and hadn’t heard; one day she’d get lost in herself and never come back and Robert and Kate and the children would put her in a place that smelt perpetually of food nobody could remember eatinglike that place her and Edith went to visit Rose in when Rose came down with Alzheimer’s.

‘What’s that, dear?’ she said to Martina. The ‘dear’ surprised her, had slipped through usually tight lips without her even thinking about it. She said it sometimes, to waitresses when she was out with Edith, or to young cashiers
at the Co-op. She only ever said it to strangers, and it always caught her unawares.

Whether Martina understood the endearment or not, her face lost some of its wariness.

‘I must clean now,’ she said, the Carry-It-All in her hand.

‘Yes,’ Margery agreed vaguely, suddenly shouting, ‘wait!’ Martina was going upstairs to clean. What if she’d forgotten to flush the loo? She pushed upstairs ahead of the au pair, breathing heavily, until she was standing, panting while staring down the toilet bowl. She
had
flushed the loo, but flushed it again anyway for good measure. Watching the flush, she thought fondly of the streams of luminescent blue that flooded her toilet at home as the flush passed through her new toilet bloc, clipped to the rim. She thought about how she’d stood in the new ASDA store where the mobility bus dropped her off and debated for at least five minutes over whether to choose the green or blue toilet bloc. There was nothing so colourful about the flush at No. 22 Prendergast Road; nothing to wipe away the memory of necessity.

For a moment Margery forgot what she was doing up in the bathroom, staring down the loo, then at the tread on the stairs, she remembered. They really were going to put her in that place alongside Alzheimer’s Rose if this didn’t stop.