Читать книгу The Rise and Fall of the Wonder Girls - Sarah May - Страница 13

Sylvia Henderson was between diets, and sleeping badly. She woke about thirty minutes after Bill Henderson left for work, and couldn’t see anything when she opened her eyes because of the black-out blinds she’d bought to ease her irregular but persistent bouts of insomnia. She knew, instinctively, that Bill wasn’t there. The smell of him in the bed was always stronger once he’d left it. After unconsciously processing this fact about Bill—that he’d left for work—she stopped thinking about him.

They’d been married too many years for her to think about him when he wasn’t physically present.

In fact, even when he was it was sometimes difficult.

Tomorrow night, Sylvia was having a poker party.

Nobody in Burwood had ever had a poker party before.

If only Bill would stop creeping and shuffling about, and start acting like the sort of man who was married to the sort of woman who held poker parties for forty people.

The Hendersons had been to hell and back, which wasn’t to say they’d been to the Congo, but was to say that Bill Henderson had lost his job—unexpectedly—and had a breakdown. Leaving Sylvia to conceal this fact from just about everybody they knew (including themselves) while simultaneously attempting to sell the 1.2 million London home in order to get rid of the 600k mortgage, pay Vicky and Tom’s final terms’ school fees (£8,500), and put together the Henderson re-location package.

She’d been looking for somewhere they could shine—after The Crash, the Hendersons needed to shine—and chosen Burwood after seeing an article in the Financial Times ranking it as fourth highest in the country for male life expectancy, and eighth lowest for teenage pregnancy. These figures spoke affluence, and with the proceeds from the sale of their London Life, the Hendersons bought number two Park Avenue—the largest house on the street—and set about making arrangements for their own Second Coming.

The house had been undervalued for a quick sale—messy divorce, the estate agent who showed her round explained, with as much polite regret as he could muster.

Bill got the job she persuaded him to apply for at Pinnacle Insurance after pumping him with Prozac until he was well over the limit, and in spite of the fact that he was holding out for a job teaching maths at a school in Malawi, which she knew he wouldn’t get because she’d shredded his completed application after promising to send it recorded delivery.

Sylvia’s rise to top of the pile here on Park Avenue had been—much like her daughter Vicky’s at Burwood Girls’—astronomical. Most of their neighbours had been easily won over by her Phoney Femme Fatale persona —everybody, that is, apart from the doctor’s wife at number five, who had an unsettling sense of humour, and the two retired diplomats who lived with their Down’s Syndrome daughter at number seventeen.

Both the doctor’s wife, however, and the two diplomats, had accepted invitations to her poker party.

Sylvia was going to win.