The Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva

Kate hid her face in her daughter’s back again, briefly shutting her eyes so that Margery couldn’t read in them the last two minutes spent at the bedroom window, watching Robert cycle off down Prendergast Road without so much as turning to look up at the house; without so much as even saying goodbye.

When she opened them again, Margery had disappeared into the kitchen.

‘You’re never wearing that to nursery,’ her voice exclaimed, outraged at the perversity of Findlay’s fancy dress when there was no occasion.

‘Mum said I could.’

‘You’ll get your eczema back if you wear that nylon suit in this heat.’

‘What’s nylon? I’m not hot anyway.’

‘You wear it day in, day out—it needs washing.’

This had been Kate’s point upstairs. Is that what she sounded like to Findlay? God.

Findlay didn’t respond to this.

‘You’ll be covered in eczema by this afternoon.’

‘I’m not hot,’ Findlay said again, beginning to sound tearful.

At this, Kate went into the kitchen.

‘The eczema’s got nothing to do with the heat, it’s stress related.’

‘Stress related?’ Margery stared at Findlay. ‘He’s five years old.’

‘I’m four and a half,’ Findlay said. ‘Can I have some fruit?’

Unable to bear it in the kitchen any longer and feeling suddenly displaced, Kate prepared Flo’s baby rice and took it upstairs, balancing Flo on their unmade bed among the pillows, and feeding her what she could. She got her dressed and was just getting into a pair of trousers when she heard Findlay, yelling distinctly, ‘I DON’T LIKE PINEAPPLE.’

Leaving Flo floundering on the bed, Kate ran back downstairs into the kitchen.

‘What’s going on down here?’

‘She’s giving me pineapple,’ Findlay said, pushing his face into his hands.

‘You like pineapple,’ Margery said petulantly.

‘I don’t,’ Findlay started to sob.

‘He drinks pineapple juice,’ Margery appealed to Kate.

‘I like pineapple juice, but I don’t like pineapple,’ Findlay sobbed.

‘It’s okay,’ Kate said, going up to him and stroking the back of his neck just beneath the hairline.

‘I’ve opened it now,’ Margery grunted. ‘It’ll go to waste.’

‘Opened what?’ Kate said, losing patience.

‘The can.’

‘Can of what?’

‘Pineapple.’

‘But we don’t have any cans of pineapple.’

‘I bought this yesterday.’ Margery held up the can with the can opener still clamped to the top, slamming it back down so that the syrup ran down the side over her fingers, which she started sucking on. ‘He said he wanted some fruit.’

Kate watched her, suddenly revolted.

‘He meant fresh fruit.’ She gestured aggressively towards the basket on the surface near the coffee machine, adding, ‘It’s not like we’re on rations or anything.’ She tried to laugh, but it didn’t work. She’d been waiting to say that for too long.

‘I know we’re not on rations,’ Margery said, thinking suddenly of a cousin of hers who’d fought in the war and been taken prisoner in Burma by the Japanese, ‘But real fruit’s expensive and it goes off in this weather—doesn’t keep.’

‘It doesn’t need to keep, it just gets eaten—and it’s only April,’ Kate said, her hand gripping tightly now onto Findlay’s neck.

Margery licked the last of the pineapple syrup off her fingers. She was drifting now, more concerned with the memory of her POW cousin than the preservative quality of tinned fruit.

She stared at Kate, trying to remember what on earth they’d been talking about, but in the end gave up and turned away from her, starting to wash the frying pan instead.

‘You’re sure you’ll be okay today?’ Kate said, finally letting Findlay go.

Findlay ran upstairs.

‘I’ll be fine,’ Margery responded, without turning round.

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 cry—it 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.

‘Shit—Flo.’

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 here—now? The world was a terrifying place Margery thought, her mind full of Arabs scaling drainpipes—too 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, which—local rumour had it—was 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 mothers—in particular, his mother—sometimes 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?’

‘Oh—she 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 moment—and the rows; like the one that had resounded through the ceiling last night.

With Flo balanced awkwardly on her shoulder, Kate—now nauseous with anticipation—ripped 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 face—what?’

‘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 letter—when 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.

‘Hey—it’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 bruvvers—it 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. ‘Finn—come 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.

‘Martina—your 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 fine—I’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 cupboards—he 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 years—his glorious, glorious potential—she’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 want—but 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 Society—if she’d got round to watching any TV.

Chapter 2

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 faces—that was what Findlay called it. Kate said it was a brothel—Margery wasn’t sure whether she was joking or not—and 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 smiled—she wasn’t sure what else to do—and continued to smile as the woman disappeared into No. 21. She looked—Margery decided—like the girlfriend of the landlord at the Fox and Hounds where Margery and her friend Edith had a spritzer on Fridays—and 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 Lithuanian—or worse—a 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 her—through pinched lips—that 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 Margery—bringing up an illegitimate child alone—was 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, but—as she was quick to point out—that wasn’t the point.

Edith said Andrew was going to buy Joy’s village and turn it into a tourist destination—the 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 fact—as far as Margery was concerned—that 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.

‘Please—try 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 that—especially 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 Slovakia—yes.’

‘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 car—yes.’

‘You’ve got more than one?’

‘We have two.’

A two-car family—and 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 least—as she discovered several minutes later—all 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 glazing—not 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 home—which she had ordered from the Bettaware catalogue along with Kate’s—and 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 well—something 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 on—like 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 sink—where Kate had thrown it—on 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 eating—like 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.

Chapter 3

Kate pulled up slowly in front of Village Montessori, checking to see if cars belonging to anybody she knew were parked in the nursery’s vicinity. Seeing Evie’s, she drove round the block slowly twice and after the second lap saw the tail end of the black Chrysler disappear into Hebron Road. It was safe.

Fading out Findlay’s monologue on the death of one of the nursery chickens, which were kept in a hut in the playground—bird flu?—she moved swiftly through the security gate with Flo on her and Findlay behind her towards the nursery entrance, past the Welcome to our Nursery sign in French, German, Spanish, Hebrew, Welsh, Gaelic, Arabic, Chinese, and Urdu. On the wall next to this was a montage of photographs taken by Sebastian Salgado of child labourers in South American mines that parents were beginning to complain to the Management Committee about.

‘Red rooster’s eyes went yellow and mushy when she died, like inside a wasp when you squish it, and Sandy who does music and movement said it wasn’t a fox,’ Findlay carried on as he hung up his coat, then added, ‘Martina’s grandma did make a football out of a pig’s head and it’s true. I’ve seen the film.’

Kate, who’d been on the verge of pushing him gently into the Butterfly Room, stopped. ‘Film?’

‘She’s got a film of it on her phone. Arthur,’ he yelled, then, turning back to Kate said, ‘is Arthur going to my new school?’

‘We don’t know what school Arthur’s going to—why don’t you ask him?’

Findlay ran over to the Home Corner where Arthur was kneeling in front of the oven, removing a large green casserole pot that he’d put a Baby Annabel doll in earlier.

‘What school are you going to?’

Kate waited.

Arthur was about to respond when one of the nursery staff went up to Findlay and said loudly, ‘Shall we give this to Mummy?’ tugging pointedly at the mask on his head.