Читать книгу The Rise and Fall of the Queen of Suburbia: A Black-Hearted Soap Opera - Sarah May - Страница 10

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By the end of the aerobics class, Dominique Saunders’ leotard was wet and the ‘D’ pendant on her necklace was stuck to her collarbone. She crouched down at the side of the hall where some orange plastic chairs were stacked, rocking back on the heels of her Reeboks while trying to regulate her breathing and not worry about the fact that Linda Palmer still wasn’t sweating.

Mrs Kline from No. 10 sat slumped beneath the Union Jack the Guides used for church parade, in a well-worn peach and turquoise tracksuit. The sort of tracksuit you put on, Dominique thought, to gorge and cry in. The sort of tracksuit she didn’t possess; not even as a secret. Mrs Kline was sitting with her legs stretched out across the brown carpet tiles that covered the floor of the Methodist Church hall, wiping sweat off her forehead and studying the palm of her hand.

Dominique wondered what had made Mrs Kline, who weighed sixteen stone and who had done the class barefoot, decide to take up aerobics. She didn’t strike her as the sort of woman losing weight meant anything to.

Linda knelt down next to her, her blonde perm letting off hairdresser-fresh aromas, and they watched as Mrs Kline put a pair of summer sandals on over some socks. It took her a while to get to her feet and when she did she walked unevenly towards where Dominique and Linda were sitting. Dominique realised, too late, that she was coming to speak to them, and that she should have said something before now anyway, given that they were all neighbours.

‘Haven’t seen you here before,’ Dominique said.

‘No. Well.’ Mrs Kline smiled shyly.

‘Thought you’d come along and give us a try-out?’

‘Well. Yes.’

‘Well. Great.’ Dominique hung back on her heels.

‘Well,’ Mrs Kline said, clutching the empty carrier-bag her sandals had been in. ‘Bye.’

‘What was she thinking of coming here?’ Linda said, realising that the story of Mrs Kline at Izzy’s aerobics class – that she could try out first on Joe when he got home – would go well with the gazpacho tonight. ‘Does somebody who’s murdered her husband and buried him at the end of the garden have the right to come to an aerobics class?’

‘That’s only rumour,’ Dominique said.

‘Well, I thought we were going to have to resuscitate her after the high kicks and that’s not fair on Izzy – having someone in the class she might have to administer first aid to.’

They watched the Reverend Macaulay talking to Izzy as she stacked the blue aerobics mats away.

‘What’s he doing?’ Linda said.

‘Telling her about the design for the new stained-glass window behind the altar.’

‘How d’you know that?’

‘There was something in the local paper about it.’

‘But how d’you know that’s what they’re talking about?’

‘That piece of paper he’s showing her.’ Dominique watched Izzy in her rainbow-coloured head and wrist bands, smiling at the Reverend Macaulay.

‘Is stained glass something she’s into?’ Linda asked.

Dominique shrugged. Mrs Kline was more of a problem for her. As much of a problem as the rapport between Izzy and the Reverend Macaulay and their mutual interest in stained glass was to Linda. Things that didn’t fit; things that broke up the rhythm they lived their lives to. ‘Right. That’s me. Everything.’

‘You off?’ Linda asked.

‘Mick’s taking me out to lunch.’

Linda didn’t want to think about lunch – she’d been on a liquid shake diet for the past fortnight. ‘Where’s he taking you?’

‘Gatwick Manor – and the snow’s stopped so we might actually make it.’

‘The snow’s stopped?’ Linda said, then called out, ‘See you tonight,’ as Dominique left the church hall in her new sheepskin hat. ‘Around seven thirty. Don’t forget.’

Through the windscreen of her two-seater green Triumph that was an anniversary gift from Mick, Dominique saw Mrs Kline, in sandals, waiting at the bus stop, which was banked in grey slush. She slowed down, trying to imagine Mrs Kline in the seat next to her with her empty carrier-bag and having to talk to her for the ten minutes it would take them to reach Pollards Close.

Mrs Kline watched the green Triumph pass, not bothering to back away from the kerb when the car’s acceleration sprayed the pavement with more slush as it sped up again.

Dominique told herself that Mrs Kline probably had shopping to do or friends to meet for lunch, but she knew this wasn’t true: Valerie Kline had an armchair lunch every day in front of Dr Kildare repeats. She’d seen her through the windows of No. 10 with her legs rolled up under her, a plate of food balanced on the arm of the chair and Richard Chamberlain on the screen.

She’d probably watched the series as a teenager when it first came out, Dominique thought, suddenly able to see – clearly – an immaculate room with antique rugs and cut flowers that somebody had been taught how to arrange, and an overweight girl sitting in it, alone with Dr Kildare. And into this room walked a young man … or rather arrangements had been made for a young man to walk into this room and turn the overweight, lonely young girl into Mrs Kline.

Five years into the marriage, Mr Kline had bought No. 10 Pollards Close, a four-bedroom executive house on Phase III of the Greenfields development, and moved Mrs Kline and their adopted son into it. Then he left for work one morning and never came back. He hadn’t been seen since, and nobody in Pollards Close really remembered him. Dominique had heard rumours during waxes at Sinead’s that Mrs Kline waited a fortnight before informing the police. Without really knowing why, she had a sense that the marriage had been brutal. She thought about Valerie Kline at aerobics that morning in her peach and turquoise tracksuit, and the way she looked standing at the bus stop in socks and sandals with an empty carrier-bag in her hands. Then she thought about the table in the bay window that Mick always booked when he took her to Gatwick Manor because it overlooked the gardens. She couldn’t have lived Valerie Kline’s life; she couldn’t have lived a single second of life as Valerie Kline.