The Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva

Sighing, Findlay pulled it off and pushed it into Kate’s hand, turning his attention back to Arthur.

‘We need knives and forks,’ Arthur was saying, efficiently.

‘We have a no-masks policy at nursery,’ the woman said.

‘I forgot,’ Kate quickly apologised before virtually running along the corridor with Flo towards the Caterpillar Room, where she handed her over to her primary carer, Mary.

She got back to the car without running into anybody else she knew, and checked her phone. There was an ecstatic message from Evie telling her that Aggie was ‘in’, an almost identical one from Ros re. Toby Granger, and a message from Harriet telling her in a strangely officious manner that Casper had won a place—won?—and reminding her to bring a food contribution to that night’s PRC meeting. Kate hadn’t even given it a thought.

She drove the car round the corner to Beulah Hill and parked outside the property Jessica had told her about. The house had nets up at windows painted peach, and a dead laurel in the front garden. She got the letter out of her breast pocket and read it again, just to see if anything had changed since she put it in there. She reached the Yours sincerely, Jade Jackson—Head of Admissions at the end. Nothing had changed. She felt, irrationally, that Findlay not being offered a place at St Anthony’s had something to do with Jade Jackson being Jamaican.

We are writing to inform you of the outcome of your application for a Southwark primary school. Your child has been offered a place at Brunton Park. The school will be contacting you with further information shortly….

She watched a pit-bull urinate against the tree on the other side of the window, then tried phoning the Admissions line, knowing how hopeless it would be trying to get through on the day all the offers had gone out. She listened to the engaged tone until she was automatically disconnected, then tried phoning St Anthony’s instead, eventually getting through to a woman who told her the school was once again oversubscribed and how this year more than twenty-five places had gone to siblings.

The woman cut her off before Kate even got round to telling her that they attended St Anthony’s Church every Sunday—every Sunday—or asking whether the school had definitely received the Reverend Walker’s letter confirming this.

She pushed her head back roughly against the car seat and tried phoning Robert, who didn’t answer, so sat contemplating No. 8 Beulah Hill instead. She was going to be late for her first appointment, and didn’t care.

Chapter 4

At No. 22 Prendergast Road, Margery stood listening to Martina clean the bathrooms, then went back into the kitchen, humming a Max Bygraves song to herself as she started on the pastry for the corned beef and onion pie she’d decided to make for Robert’s tea that night. She watched her fingers lightly pull the mixture together in the way she’d been taught as a girl by her grandmother, who went mad playing the organ, and thought of all the different kitchens she’d watched her fingers do this in over the years, and how the fingers had changed—grown lines, knobbles, arthritic twists and turns and finally gone all loose; so loose that the few rings she had would probably have already fallen off if they hadn’t got caught in the loose folds of skin round the knuckles.

The litany of industrious sounds coming from upstairs comforted Margery as she rolled the pastry and lined the pie tin—Communists certainly knew how to clean. When she went to wash her hands, she saw the envelope Kate had left for Martina on the surface by the sink. She went into the hallway and listened. Martina had just started hoovering. Margery went into the lounge and took another envelope out of Robert’s desk drawer—it wasn’t actually Robert’s desk, it was Kate’s, but Margery always referred to it as Robert’s—and went back into the kitchen.

She quickly tore open Martina’s pay packet and pulled out a twenty-pound note. She stood there for a moment, brushing flour off her nostrils with the crisp new note and knew that, according to her calculations, there was no way Kate and Robert could stretch to eighty pounds a month on a cleaner. Margery knew the Hunters’ finances as well as any accountant because she’d spent the better part of yesterday morning going through their two fiscal files. The Hunters were, in her opinion, in dire straits—she didn’t know how they kept the show up and running or why they weren’t collapsing under the strain of their imminent financial ruin. She could only surmise that Robert was keeping it from Kate and bearing the burden alone. She didn’t understand her son’s marriage. It seemed unnatural to her; more important still, it was unsustainable. What was it Robert said to her all those years ago: ‘Wait till you meet her, Mum—she’s going to change the world—not just mine; everyone’s. Kofi Annan beware.’

Well, personal finances were clearly below the likes of Kofi Annan, but Margery knew bailiffs—had had experience of bailiffs throughout her childhood, and she could smell them in the air now. Kofi Annan or not, when it was time they came for you and nothing could keep them from the door. They went where they were sent and didn’t discriminate. Margery stuffed the twenty-pound note into the new envelope as the hoover cut out upstairs, put it back on the bench by the cooker and opened two cans of corned beef that she’d bought with her from East Leeke. When she turned round, Ivan the cat was standing motionless on the kitchen floor, watching her, its back arched. She felt immediately nauseous; cats always made her feel nauseous. They brought her underarms out in a rash and gave her vertigo.

Then the phone started to ring in the lounge and she wasn’t sure what to do about it because Ivan showed no sign of moving, was in fact now sending out a hissing spit in her general direction. Even without Ivan, the phone alarmed her with its flashing lights and antennae.

‘You want me to get?’ Martina called out from the upstairs landing.

At the sound of Martina’s voice, Ivan relaxed and strolled past Margery towards his bowl, brushing her ankles.

Margery jogged quickly into the lounge and started to wrestle with the still ringing phone, eventually pressing the right button—because it might be Robert; it might always be Robert…

It was Beatrice, Kate’s mother.

‘Margery—how are you? I had no idea you were in town.’

Town? What town? ‘The cleaner’s here,’ Margery said, for no particular reason.

‘That’s nice,’ Beatrice said after a while.

So the cleaner was news to Beatrice as well. Margery relaxed a little. ‘She’s from Czechoslovakia,’ she explained.

On the other end of the phone Beatrice, unsure why they were talking about the cleaner, said briskly, ‘There’s no such place.’

Margery baulked. ‘What?’

‘There’s the Czech Republic and Slovakia, but no Czechoslovakia.’

‘Martina never said,’ Margery carried on, more to herself than Beatrice, ‘but they were Communists?’

‘While the Soviet Union was still in power—yes.’

‘I was going to ask her if she had any KGB stories.’

‘KGB?’

‘You know—the KGB—the secret police.’ Margery had withdrawn an abundance of material on the Gestapo and KGB from East Leeke Library’s well-stocked history section.

‘You must of heard about the KGB, Beatrice—how they used to come in the night while you were asleep,’ Margery carried on, breathless. ‘The footsteps on the stairs, down the hallway…knocking on doors, doors opening…people disappearing.’ She paused. ‘They came in the night,’ she said again, insisting on this.

After a while, Beatrice said lightly, ‘So does Freddie Kruger.’

‘He sounds German—was Czechoslovakia covered by the Stasi?’ Margery asked, interested.

‘Margery,’ Beatrice reined her in. ‘How long are you staying for?’

This brought Margery up short. Always sensitive to any hint of expulsion or the fact that she was outstaying her welcome, she said quickly, ‘Not long—it’s just while I’ve got the decorators in.’

‘What colour?’ Beatrice asked. She’d been to Margery’s East Leeke bungalow once—when Kate and Robert got married—and the only place she’d ever been to before that bore even the slightest semblance to the bungalow in terms of décor and overall atmosphere was a euthanasia clinic on Denmark’s Jutland coast.

‘What colour—what?’

‘What colour are you having the walls painted?’

Beatrice was shouting—Margery was sure Beatrice was shouting at her, and there was no need to do that; there was nothing partial about her hearing.

‘Magnolia,’ she said, surprised Beatrice had even asked.

‘What colour was it before?’

‘Magnolia.’

A pause. ‘Margery—is Kate there?’

‘She went out,’ Margery said, making it sound like she’d gone shopping and not to work as a clinical psychologist.

‘I was just phoning to see if Finn got into St Anthony’s—Kate said they were meant to hear by today.’

Finn—was Robert Rob or Robbie? ‘The letter came.’

‘And?’

Margery paused; suddenly thrilled by the notion that she had a small piece of the Hunter family’s future in her hands that Beatrice wasn’t yet aware of. ‘Well…’ she trailed off, provocatively. She could get Edith to the point sometimes where she was begging, her cheap dentures sliding around inside her mouth across saliva-ridden gums.

‘Did he get in?’

‘The letter said he did.’ What did that mean? Margery wasn’t sure, but she felt herself scanning the lounge to see if Kate had left the letter anywhere. She wouldn’t mind a look at that letter.

‘Thank God,’ Beatrice breathed down the phone. ‘Kate was talking about home schooling if Finn didn’t get in…leaving London—the works,’ she carried on.

‘Leaving London?’

‘Well, now she won’t need to bother.’

‘Leaving London for where?’

‘I don’t know, Margery, you know those two—Kate was going on about America, and Rob…’

She called him Rob.

‘…was talking about New Zealand. They talked themselves into a taste for bigger things; who knows, maybe they’ll end up going anyway,’ Beatrice concluded cheerfully.

Margery was shocked. New Zealand? Robert never said anything to her about New Zealand.

‘I’ll try and catch Kate before she starts work—and you must come down here to see us—get a blast of fresh air.’ She paused. ‘Come on your own, if you like, I mean if you get sick of family life. I can always come and get you—just give us a bell.’

Margery didn’t respond to this; still hadn’t responded by the time Beatrice rang off. New Zealand. She tried phoning Edith, but Edith didn’t answer.

Martina appeared in the lounge doorway.

Margery stared helplessly at her before blurting out, ‘New Zealand’s on the other side of the world.’

Martina smiled and moved cautiously into the room with the hoover, watched by Margery. After a while she put the hoover away and disappeared into the kitchen. Margery remained in the lounge, staring at the phone.

‘I go now,’ Martina called out.

‘Already?’ Margery responded, involuntarily, walking slowly into the hallway.

Martina was at the front door, the white envelope in her hand. ‘Now I have much ironing to do for Mr Catano.’

‘Catano?’

‘A bit Korean, I think.’

‘Korean?’ Margery said as Martina opened the front door, thinking briefly of cousin Tom.

Martina pushed her bike past sunflowers that Kate had let Findlay plant and that Margery thought would look ridiculous by July when they reached shoulder-height.

‘I see you again next week.’

‘Maybe,’ Margery called out, unable to think about next week when she could barely keep her mind fixed on what was happening the rest of today—especially after hearing about New Zealand.

‘And please—I fed the cat.’

Margery was about to say something about the cat when she heard the door to No. 20—the Jamaican’s door—start to open. She went quickly back inside, slamming the door to No. 22 shut and going into the lounge where she watched carefully, through slatted blinds Martina hadn’t forgotten to dust, as Mr Hamilton moved slowly over to his recycling bin and put an empty milk carton in it.

The sun glanced off his gold wristwatch as he turned round, shaking his head at a private thought before looking up suddenly, straight at her, smiling.

Scowling, Margery backed away from the window, almost running into the hallway where she slid the chain across the front door as quietly as she could, then waited. No sound of movement on the other side. Then, after another minute, the front door to No. 20 was shut.

Scared as well as preoccupied, Margery went into the kitchen to pick up where she’d left off with the corned beef pie. She sliced an onion over the pastry base and went to get the corned beef out the cupboard before remembering that she’d already done that. There it was on the bench. Only the tins were empty. When had she done that? She looked from the empty tins to the empty pie case.

Where was the corned beef?

Slowly her eyes took a downward turn to Ivan’s bowl, which was full.

Chapter 5

Robert sat staring about the Ellington Technology College staff room waiting for Kate to call him about St Anthony’s—and whether Findlay had got a place.

The seat next to him was blue and covered in cigarette burns from the days when staff were allowed to smoke. A Swiss cheese plant belonging to Les Davies, deputy head—that had been there as long as Les—was on top of a filing cabinet behind him that nobody had opened for years, and that blocked out what little natural light had the heart to try and make its way into the room.

The bell had rung and the dust had resettled. An art teacher with a cold was snivelling in a corner and muttering at a memo Sellotaped to the wall while inadvertently slopping the sleeves of her jumper into her coffee. The memo was from the Metropolitan Police warning staff at the school of a new gang whose initiation ceremony comprised driving a car in the dark without putting the car’s headlights on. If another driver on the road flashed the car, the wannabe gang member had to pursue it and shoot the driver. Bettina, the new geography teacher from South Africa, was looking at a property investment magazine’s special Romania supplement, which was the only place in Europe on her salary where she could afford to buy.

After staring for another second, transfixed by a ripped corner of carpet tile the same helpless blue as the chairs, Robert hauled himself to his feet. Bettina looked up from the computer-generated image of a Romanian shepherd’s hut after modernisation, and stared—distracted—at Robert.

‘I’m meant to be teaching now,’ he said.

Bettina didn’t say anything to this; she just nodded and went back to the modernised shepherd’s hut.

The art teacher carried on muttering and Robert left the room, the smell of burnt coffee, frustration and despair replaced immediately by the smell of the next generation—whoever they were.

When he got to his classroom, the door was open and the kids were inside, unaccountably silent, until Robert realised that the squat man in the corridor outside, staring through the window opposite the door, was Les the deputy head. Despite bearing an uncanny resemblance to Goebbels, he was the only incorruptible thing in the school and, because of this, the children were terrified of him. Les was from the Rhondda Valley and used to get heavily involved in school musicals—when they used to have school musicals…when they used to have a music department.

Most people found Les aggressive; some of them even found him tyrannical, but Robert and Les shared a mutual, hard-earned respect for each other, and Robert always found him protective.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said to Les’s back, jerking his thumb at the classroom full of children and suddenly aware that he was out of breath even though he hadn’t been running. ‘I got caught up, and…sorry,’ he said again.

Les sighed, but didn’t turn round.

He carried on standing, motionless, as if he had finally come to the conclusion that while he didn’t have a life, he did have an existence and an existence, if nothing else, did at least provide respite from having to decide whether he was alive or in fact dead.

‘What are you doing with them?’ he said at last, still without turning round.

‘Seamus Heaney,’ Robert said, automatically.

‘I never did like Seamus Heaney—I think I tried to. Anyway, I unlocked the classroom and got them in for you.’

‘Thanks—thanks for that.’

‘I was passing and Keisha was banging Shanique’s head repetitively against the wall.’

‘Yeah, Keisha does that.’

‘Ellie Palmer’s in this class,’ Les said, suddenly changing the subject.

‘Ellie’s—’

‘A brilliant and messy girl,’ Les finished quietly for him. It was Les and Robert, jointly, who were behind getting Ellie to apply for the St Paul’s sixth-form scholarship. He turned round suddenly, staring at Robert. ‘Are her and Jerome Simmons still going out?’

Robert shook his head slowly. ‘Don’t think so.’ He didn’t have the perverse interest in the students’ love lives that a lot of the staff had.

The two men watched each other, Robert fighting hard against his instinct to tell Les that, for the first time in his professional life, he was terrified of walking through that classroom door because of Jerome Simmons. That up until this moment he’d always felt that the job needed him as much as he needed the job, but now he was starting to believe he was in the wrong place and that somebody else should be doing this. He wasn’t sure he wanted Les knowing this because this would make him, Robert, just like every other teacher in Ellington and the kids already knew… were already onto him with the instinct of a pack, systematically rooting out weakness because children can’t abide weakness.

‘What’s he doing?’ he said instead to distract Les, pointing at Simba, the caretaker, who was out on the flat roof just below.

‘What’s that?’ Les turned slowly away from him to stare at Simba. ‘Oh—pigeons. He’s been trying to perfect some sort of acid glue he can paint on the roof to discourage them from landing.’ Les let out another sigh. ‘The acid in the glue burns their feet off if they do land—apparently.’

Robert didn’t comment on this.

The murmur from the classroom behind them was getting louder and interspersed with distinct screams, shrieks and rhythmically choreographed abusive exchanges. Robert recognised Jerome’s voice and knew his face had changed and knew that when Les turned round he wouldn’t be able to disguise the fear his face was full of.

So he turned quickly to the window again, staring out over Simba’s bent back and the edge of the roof to the only piece of green in sight; an inexplicable mound about the same shape as a small Iron-Age fort that was known among staff and students alike simply as ‘The Clump’. Beyond The Clump was the Esso garage the council had sold the school’s last playing field to and, beyond that, the Elephant and Castle.

Local press abounded with mythical promises of regeneration, but at the moment the panorama on offer was a four-lane super-roundabout with exits leading to some of London’s most destitute spinal cords—and a Soviet-era shopping centre, which was quite a feat of urban planning in a country that had never had its own Soviet era.

A couple of boys—possibly students—pushed a moped across the empty playground.

‘In the beginning,’ Les said suddenly, ‘somebody somewhere had a vision, that’s all.’ He sounded elegiac—as though he’d decided right then and there that he’d lived one life too many. He clapped Robert warmly, forcefully, on the shoulder. ‘You’ll be all right.’

Robert nodded.

Then, with Les’s footsteps still ringing down the corridor, he walked into the classroom and the crescendoing, unavoidable, ‘Yo, sir! Yo, sir!’ There in front of him was the mob.

His eyes hit Ellie because she was sitting at the front of the class to the right-hand side of his desk and was the first thing in his line of vision. He hadn’t meant to look at her in particular, and certainly never intended to look at Jerome after that. But he did—and saw that Jerome had seen him looking at Ellie.

He’d been caught off guard, but then it had been so long since anybody had looked at him in the way Ellie had when he walked into the room. When was the last time he’d caused anybody so much pleasure, simply by walking through a door?

Her eyes opened so wide he felt he could have just carried on walking straight into them.

He came to a halt behind the desk, pressing his fists down hard into the surface. This was wrong. The wrong way to think and the wrong direction to start walking in—no matter how wide her eyes opened.

Chapter 6

At No. 22 Prendergast Road, Margery was on all fours crying with rage over Ivan’s bowl, which was full of corned beef. She’d seen it, smelt it and tasted it—and it was definitely corned beef.

When Ivan came creeping back into the kitchen, his shoulder blades rolling smoothly as he sniffed at the floor around his bowl, Margery screamed at him, still sobbing, ‘Bugger off, just bugger off.’ She elbowed the white cat away, anger replacing fear, but Ivan came back, nonplussed by the elbow in his flank—and gave the corned beef a few aggressive licks.

Margery staggered to her feet and kicked him across the kitchen.

After bouncing off the fridge, he landed with a whine, paused, licked at a back paw then padded quietly into the hallway where he sat and waited, letting his posture insinuate that his dignity, at least, was intact.

Panting, Margery slammed the kitchen door shut, decanted the corned beef from Ivan’s bowl into a plastic mixing bowl and, taking a pair of tweezers from her handbag, which she always kept within close range, started to painstakingly pick Ivan’s hairs out of the corned beef.

Chapter 7

Jessica Palmer was inside No. 8 Beulah Hill doing a viewing with a young, top-of-the-range couple when her mobile rang. She didn’t usually take calls during viewings—not unless it was Ellie or the nursery—but she took this one because it was Kate Hunter, and Kate was meant to be picking Arthur up from nursery and taking him to Swim School. In fact, Kate Hunter was her childcare lifeline.

The top-of-the-range young couple drifted upstairs.

Beulah Hill, like the rest of the streets in the postcode, had gone from destitute to up-and-coming to boom as generations of Irish and Jamaicans started selling up and moving out, and young couples started selling flats in Battersea, Putney and Clapham and moving in; taking out extra-large mortgages in order to pay for the reinstallation of sash windows the Irish and Jamaicans had replaced with uPVC double glazing. Once the sash windows were reinstalled, they moved onto the floors, replacing carpet with solid wood flooring. Sea green and lilac bathroom suites were ripped out, along with any dividing walls—to create living spaces that allowed lifestyles to circulate more freely. Some of the houses—like the McRaes’—got to feature on TV makeover programmes.

No. 8 had yet to be made over.

‘Kate?’ Jessica whispered into the phone.

‘Hi, Jessica?’

‘Hi…’

‘Why are you whispering?’

‘I’m doing a viewing on Beulah Hill.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I said, I’m doing a viewing on Beulah Hill.’ There was a pause. ‘Kate?’

‘Beulah Hill? You’re there at the moment? Has anyone put an offer in yet?’

‘No.’ Jessica scanned the green shag-pile carpet and green leather three-piece. The light coming through the double layers of net at the windows made the room seem as though it was under water, and had the effect of making Jesus, with his arms outstretched, executed in oils and framed on the wall above the mantle—look as if he was floating.