Читать книгу The Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva - Sarah May - Страница 10

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.