Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva (24 page)

‘Where is Robert?’ Beatrice asked.

‘Upstairs in bedexhausted,’ Margery said.

‘Migraine,’ Kate put in.

‘Exhausted,’ Margery said again.

‘Has there been any resolution with that boy?’

‘What d’you think, Mum? The school’s going onto special measuresnobody cares.’ She sighed. ‘I said I’d help put up the stalls.’

‘Well, off you gowe’re fine here,’ Beatrice said confidently.

Flo started to cry, and Beatrice walked over to the window with her and watched Kate disappear up the street.

‘I suppose we should go and start to get the cakes ready for the stall,’ Beatrice said after a while, peering through the window. ‘They’ve got a lovely day for it.’

Margery joined her. ‘Um,’ she agreed irritably.

‘I’m glad you’re here,’ Beatrice said suddenly. ‘There was something I wanted to talk to you about.’

Margery waited, interested.

‘They’re going through it at the moment, aren’t they?’

‘Who?’

Beatrice hesitated. ‘WellKate and Robert.’ Why was conversation with Margery like only being able to find reverse in a car backed up against a wall.

Margery didn’t say anything.

‘What with the house and everything…the incident with RobertI think they’ve “done” their London stint, don’t you? It’s time for some fresh air and more metres-square of real estate for their money, or who knows what might happen…’ Beatrice finished ominously as a van towing the council’s recycling centre drove slowly past the window. It had been booked by Ros and was handing out information on composters as well as a limited number of hessian ‘Bags for Life’. Ros was part of a local campaign to make their postcode the first plastic-bag-free-zone in the UK.

‘East Leeke,’ Margery said. ‘There’s a house for sale in East Leeke that would be perfect for them.’

Ignoring this, Beatrice said, ‘Okehampton School’s looking for a deputy head at the moment. I’m chair of governors there. Robert would be ideal…’

Margery stared blankly at her, trying to grasp what she was saying. London was bad for Robertshe didn’t need Beatrice to tell her that. But at least while they were still in London, there was the possibility that, when they left, which was now looking more and more inevitablethey would move to East Leeke. If they moved to Okehampton, they’d never come to East Leeke, and Margery would die alone.

Beatrice’s voice carried on. ‘D’you think there’s any way I could persuade him to apply? Or should I let Kate do that?’

Margery remained silent, lost in her own thoughts. Fate threw things at you that were either fair or unfair. You reacted against them and got luckyor unlucky. It had never occurred to Margery to attempt to control fate; to activate it. Margery was going to die aloneand Beatrice wasn’t.

Beatrice remained by the window holding Flo, who was now dropping off to sleep, waiting for Margery to respond to what she’d just said, while wondering if she’d even understoodwhether she wasn’t, after all, senile. ‘Margery…’

Margery was staring straight past her, her eyes fixed on the house opposite. ‘She’s still therelook.’

Beatrice followed her gaze. There was a woman in a Disneyland Paris T-shirt standing at an upstairs window, holding a sign: Pleese help 02081312263

‘She was there last time,’ Margery said.

‘Last time?’

‘Last time I was here. She was holding the sign then as well.’

‘What did you do?’

Margery hesitated. ‘Nothing.’

Beatrice swung round. ‘Nothing?’

Margery shook her head.

‘Did you go over and knock? Have you tried ringing the number? Here.’ Beatrice passed Flo gently to Margery, found her bag and came back with her mobile.

The woman remained motionless in the upstairs window of No. 21 as Beatrice stood in the downstairs window of No. 22 and rang the number.

‘Don’t,’ Margery said suddenly. ‘It might be a trap.’

‘What sort of trap? The woman clearly needs help…’ Beatrice broke off. ‘It’s ringing.’

‘Kate says it’s a brothel.’

Beatrice stared at her. ‘Hello? Hello, I’m phoning from Prendergast Road in London. Hello? A woman gave us this number. From Londonyes. It doesn’t matter who I ama woman gave us this number. I think she needs help. I don’t knowit’s difficult to tell. She’s got dark hair and…Prendergast Road. She’s inside a house on Prendergast Road. Waitthere may be more than onewe’re in south London; southeast London, and…’ Beatrice stared at her phone. ‘They rang off.’

‘Who were they?’

‘No ideaforeign. Sounded Eastern European, maybe Russian. I don’t know.’ Beatrice looked up at the woman again. ‘She’s pregnant. Look at the line of her T-shirt.’

Margery was just about to look when the silver BMW pulled up on the pavement opposite and the woman disappeared from the upstairs window. The same man and woman as before got out.

‘Nice car,’ Margery said pointedly, watching it pull up outside the houseas though the neighbours’ BMW somehow reflected well on Robert.

Beatrice stared at her. It was difficult to know how to respond to these irrelevant and misjudged comments Margery
made, other than to put them down to something medical. ‘I’m going over there,’ she said.

‘You can’t.’ Margery was horrified. ‘You can’t,’ she said again, but by then Beatrice was at the front door and the next minute Margery was watching her cross the road and start talking to the Lithuanian woman.

They talked for about two minutes. The Lithuanian was nodding and smiling. Then Beatrice made her way back over to No. 22 as the man and woman disappeared inside No. 21.

‘She said the girl’s a cousin of hers. Her English wasn’t great, but she seemed to insinuate the girl was simple in the head or something.’

‘Oh,’ Margery said, relieved.

‘I didn’t like her,’ Beatrice announced. ‘And I didn’t believe her either. Did you notice the bag she was carrying? There was a ph indicator inside and swabs for taking blood tests.’ Beatrice paused. ‘Those are the sorts of things a midwife paying a house visit would carry.’

‘A midwife?’ Margery said in disbelief. ‘I had her down as a Lithuanian prostitutealthough she could probably pass as an air hostess. The landlord at the Fox and Hounds has a girlfriend who looks just like herand she’s Lithuanian.’

Beatrice turned to her. ‘Margery…’

Margery felt herself start to go dizzy as small black sunspots exploded in front of her eyes. ‘I think I’m going to have a stroke.’

Upstairs in No. 236, Casper was steering his remote control Raptor vehicle backwards and forwards across the floor under the bed while Miles tried to get dressed. Miles was a man who not only felt comfortable wearing a suit; he actually preferred wearing a suit to anything else. Monday to Friday, Miles got dressed in under ten minutes while at the weekend he came down to breakfast in the old three-quarter-length swimming trunks and oversized T-shirt he wore to bedand was often still wandering around in them at midday. He found a safety net of sorts in sourcing his entire ‘casual’ wardrobe from one labelit was Harriet who set him on this trackand for a lot of years, his steadfast casual label had been Hackett. But then a few weeks ago, while visiting a development of new-builds that Lennox Thompson were selling, he’d noticed that most of the builders on the site were wearing Hackett. There had been a man laying bricks in the exact same outfit he’d barbecued monkfish kebabs in the Sunday before.

So now he was in a post-Hackett, pre-anything-else casualwear limbo land. Sighing, he got slowly dressed in an old pair of jeans to the continual electronic snarl of Casper’s Raptor.

‘Be careful on the walls there, Cas,’ he said, as the back-flipping Raptor left two faint tyre tracks just above the skirting board.

‘Cas’ was Miles’s take on his son’s full name, which he didn’t like. He wasn’t entirely convinced by ‘Cas’neither was Casper, for that matterbut they were both going along with it because the intention was right.

He tried to keep his voice level, aware that he got snappy easily at the moment. In fact, ever since a fortnight ago, when Mr Jackson took No. 8 Beulah Hill off the market. He hadn’t said anything to Harriet, but he’d been thinking of buying it.

‘What was there before buildings and roads and trains?’ Casper asked suddenly.

Miles sat down on the edge of the unmade bed. ‘Well…there was forest.’

‘But were there people?’

‘Not very many, but there were people, yes.’

‘Where did they live?’

‘They lived in caves in the forest.’

‘Did the caves have doors?’

‘Nothey were just caves.’ Miles pulled a pair of socks on.

‘So how did they stop the burglars coming in?’

‘Well, there weren’t any burglars, there were just lots and lots of beasties.’

‘So how did they stop the beasties from coming in?’

‘Fire. They were terrified of fire.’

‘Why?’

Miles thought about this. In fact, Casper was the only person who made him think about anything. ‘Well, they were kind of racing each other, the men and the beastiesto see who would come up with fire firstonly they didn’t know it was a race.’

Miles had been touched, lately, by the way Casper came
to find him. At the weekend, he actively sought him out, and the nights Miles was home late, Harriet just couldn’t get him to sleep.

‘Dad?’

‘Um?’

‘Can you imagine if the beasties won the race?’

‘Nope.’

‘I can.’ Casper paused. ‘I don’t like my packed lunch.’ Then he started the Raptor up again, sending it out of the bedroom and down the stairs.

Miles got up and was about to start making the bed when he noticed the hard yellowish patch on the sheet on his side. He stared at it.

He must have come in his sleep again last night.

It was the same dream every night. An alley…in the dark…rain…Jessica Palmer dressed in the grey pinstripe suit she had that looked so good with the yellow blouse under it…pressed against a wet wall. She was covered in bruises, cut up, her clothes torn. She’d been seriously roughed up and he couldn’t work out whether it was him who’d done it to her or somebody else and he’d got to her just in time. In fact, she was so badly roughed up it was as though she’d only just got to her feet again. Her right cheek was completely swollen, her lips were doubled in size and her right eye was almost closed.

He went to get a sponge from the bathroom to clean off the stain, sponging it down as best he could before making the bed and following Casper downstairs.

Downstairs, Harriet and her mother were sitting at the kitchen table, so alike from behind that he couldn’t tell the difference.

Harriet’s mother, Caroline, had arrived a fortnight agoostensibly to help with Phoebe, who was going through a bad patch at nights, but really to look after Miles who was,
Harriet had clearly indicated to Caroline, going through his own bad patch.

It wasn’t until Caroline arrived and Miles saw her in action that he realised just how much Harriet had inherited her mother’s tendency to treat him like a child. In their eyes, he was playing up at the moment; suffering from a lack of attention following Phoebe’s birth. Every time Caroline called out, ‘Tea time, boys,’ he felt a surge of rage. Or when him and Casper were talking and he pushed Casper to argue his case, Caroline would scold them both waggishly with, ‘Stop the fighting now, boys.’

She had moved tea time forward so that they all ate together with the children, which not only meant they had time in the evening to watch even more TV than usual, but that he didn’t get his first proper drink of the day until eight o’clock.

The other night they had all been sitting round the table when Casper had said suddenly, ‘Where did Grandma Burgess go?’

There’d been a pause. The women had looked unusually incapable of answering this. So Miles had stepped in with, ‘She’s in the sky.’

‘What’s she doing up there?’

‘Sleeping.’

‘How did her bed get up there?’

‘Well…’ Miles had thought about this, pushing his fork around his plate of kiddie food. What had possessed Caroline to cook dino burgers for all of them? ‘She doesn’t need a bed because…because just before going up in the sky you turn to dust.’

‘How d’you turn to dust?’

‘Casper, eat up,’ Caroline put in, starting to panic.

Miles could hear it in her voice. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘they burn you.’

‘They burn you?’ Casper looked horrified.

Caroline and Harriet looked horrified.

‘But if they burn me that would hurt so much. I don’t want to go up in the sky.’

‘Well, you won’tnot for a long, long time.’

Then, not only to distract Casper, but also himselfhe was, he realised, close to tearshe’d changed the subject, turning to Harriet again and saying, ‘Have you got any idea why Martin Granger would call round here at eleven o’clock at night?’

‘Martin Granger?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Martin GrangerRos’s husband?’ Harriet had said again, slower and more heavily this time.

‘I was running through last month’s CCTV footage and there he wasmust have been about four weeks ago.’ He didn’t mention how struck he’d been by the expression on Martin’s face.

‘At eleven o’clock.’

‘At eleven o’clock,’ he confirmed.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever answered the door to Martin Granger.’

‘Neither have I.’

‘So who did? Wait a minuteit wasn’t the night we went to The Phoenix, was it?’

They’d stared at each other.

Caroline had stared at them staring at each other.

‘Martina,’ he’d said, interested.

‘Martina,’ Harriet had echoed, worried.

That had been last night.

Now, he ambled over to the bench, extracted two slices of breads from the debris, and put them in the toaster. While these two pieces were toasting, he pulled out another two pieces and ate them, his eyes flickering over the newspaper in front of him:

ANGRY CHEF KILLS LOVER, CUTS HER UP IN PUB KITCHEN AND PUTS REMAINS IN WHEELIE BIN…

Half-interested, he read through the piece, shaking some orange peel from the last paragraph.

‘Did you see it?’ Harriet asked.

She must have been watching him.

He quoted the article he’d been reading. ‘Angry chef kills lover, puts her in pub kitchen—’

‘No,’ Harriet cut in quickly, ‘Not thatthe house.’

Miles picked up the newspaper. ‘What is this?’

‘Mum’sshe brought it with her. Go to the Property section.’

Miles flicked throughWOMAN DRIVES CAR INTO DISUSED QUARRY WITH DEAD HUSBAND BESIDE HER. He started to read again, fascinated by the idea that there were still people out theremost of them in Buckinghamshire by the looks of thingswho quite literally loved each other to death.

‘Not therethe back,’ Harriet’s voice commanded as he read how Mrs Milbank had driven the car over the edge of a quarry with her dead husband beside herHarold Milbank, aged 52, had died of a heart attack forty-eight hours previously.

He gave up trying to read the article and turned to the Property section. Harriet was standing beside him. He couldn’t be sure, but it felt like she was making a point of rubbing against him. She’d been, he noticed, a lot more physically demonstrable since the arrival of Caroline, who had clearly been lecturing her daughter on her lackadaisical attitude towards her wifely duties. Harriet had taken her mother’s advice to heartas she always didand was attempting to be more proactive in that area, but there was nothing inherent about it and, as a consequence, this renewed effort had the adverse effect on Miles. The other night, as Harriet rolled
onto her backon Caroline’s ordershe couldn’t even get it up, while later, in his dreams, he raped Jessica Palmer down the alley in torrential rain again.

He couldn’t bear the thought of the mother/daughter exchange that would have taken place when he’d gone to work the next day. Caroline probably already had the pot of Viagra to hand. For all he knew, they could have been crushing it up and adding it to his food for days now.

Marriage mattered a lot to Caroline, especially her daughter’swhich had, in her opinion, been far too long coming.

She knew all about the death of the libido, the exhaustion, butas she told Harriet time and time againthere was no point explaining all this to a man who was no longer counting the days, or even the weeks, but the months since he’d last had sex.

‘If nothing else, you could at least, you know go down there and…before nodding off,’ Caroline had pointed out over coffee the other morning while Phoebe was feeding.

At which point Harriet had completely flown off the handle at her, letting out a stream of nonsensical outrage, finally culminating in an explosive, ‘Why would I start that now?’ Which sent Phoebe into hysterics.

Caroline, incredulous, had said, ‘You mean you’ve
never
given Miles a blow job?’

‘For Christ’s sake, I’ve never given anyone a blow job.’

‘But you’re thirty-nine!’

It was worse than Carolinetaking call after call in her Buckinghamshire kitchen from a sobbing Harriethad ever imagined. Well, it was all Charles’s fault for over-educating her like he did: ruining her, in Caroline’s opinion. No wonder it had taken her so long to get married.

‘Keeper’s Cottage,’ Harriet said softly to Miles, leaning over to point out the picture of an eighteenth-century cottage
semi-masked in an abundance of flora and fauna. ‘LookI never realised they had a paddock as well. That’s the cottage I’ve dreamt of living in since…since forever.’

‘But it’s in Little Widdrington,’ Miles said, trying to imagine himself holed up with Harriet in an eighteenth-century cottage in the middle of some woods in the middle of Buckinghamshireand shrinking from the idea. What would be the chances of spotting Jessica Palmer from behind the lead mullion windows of Keeper’s Cottage in Little Widdrington? Nil. Nada. Zero. Zilch. Fortunately, Harriet couldn’t see his face.

Unfortunately, Caroline could.

He looked quickly away.

‘And Mum says the Fishers were thinking of selling their estate agency,’ Harriet carried on, bringing the whole package together and presenting it to Miles.

‘Would you seriously contemplate moving to Little Widdrington?’

There was nothing, as far as Harriet could see, that needed contemplating. Casper not getting into St Anthony’s…Keeper’s Cottage
and
the Fisher Estate Agency coming onto the market…it was fate. The planets had aligned. ‘I’ve always dreamt of living in Keeper’s Cottage,’ Harriet said again. ‘I can’t believe it’s actually for sale.’

‘It’s only the second time it’s been on the market since we moved to Little Widdrington,’ Caroline put in.

‘And look at the price,’ Harriet said, speeding up, allowing herself to get excited now. ‘Look at the price, Mileswe’d reduce our mortgage by half. And the gardenthe garden, for the children.’

‘The Fishers want a quick sale on their businessthey’ve bought land in Spain they want to build on.’

‘They’ve still got the original flagstones downstairs,’ Harriet said.

His eyes scanned the ad. ‘How d’you know about the flagstones? It doesn’t say anything about flagstones here.’

‘Mum went to have a look.’

‘You’ve been to see it?’ Miles said, turning to Caroline, who was pretending to wash up. ‘Whatlike a viewing?’ He was aware, as he said it, that his tone wasn’t pleasant, but didn’t care.

‘Oh, Milesjust imagine it,’ Harriet gushed, giving in to her ecstasy.

They were closing in on himhad been closing in on him for goodness knows how longand he hadn’t seen it coming. The relocation to Little Widdrington was being presented to him as a
fait accompli
. There was no escape. He was being sucked into the black tunnel that was Little Widdrington. If he didn’t do something they were going to bring him to closure on thisright here, now, on a Saturday morning over a couple of slices of burnt toast.

Yellow blouses, yellow roses…all receding; barely visible now at the end of the tunnel.

Caroline and Harriet were staring at him, worried, as if they were about to bind and gag him right then and there and start driving to Little Widdrington with him in the boot.