Читать книгу The Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva - Sarah May - Страница 19

Once Kate had gone, Margery went upstairs to change in Findlay’s room—where some space had been cleared for her in the wardrobe and chest of drawers.

She chose carefully.

She was dressing for the meal with Robert that evening.

It took her over fifteen minutes to decide on the easy-fit bottle-green trousers and aubergine silk blouse, and she had just got into the trousers when she heard a drilling sound on the other side of the bedroom wall. Was the Jamaican drilling spyholes? How did he know that this bedroom was the one she used to get dressed in? Her eyes scuttled nervously over the wall as she quickly pulled the aubergine blouse on as carefully as she could—she’d already had to repair one underarm tear. She fumbled with the buttons while eyeing the wall opposite warily, expecting the drill to break through at any minute.

When the drilling stopped, the silence that followed was even worse, and Margery waited for it to start again—at least then she knew what the Jamaican was doing.

But the drill didn’t start again and, after a while, Margery found herself staring at the three pairs of shoes she’d managed to fit into her case and bring with her, trying to decide whether or not to christen the blue ones she’d bought with Edith in Leicester. Her shoes never retained their original shape for long—after a while they all ended up acquiring the same bunion-riddled silhouette as her feet.

She decided she would wear the blue ones and after this went into the bathroom to put her make-up on and spray her hair.

She smiled at herself in the mirror—the coy leer she always reserved for mirror gazing—and was about to go back downstairs when she saw Kate’s suit strewn across the bed. She turned automatically into the bedroom and picked up the suit. She didn’t view this as a transgression, although she was aware that her daughter-in-law would. Margery couldn’t abide mess, but this wasn’t her mess and it wasn’t her house. The discarded suit would be the cause of an argument between Robert and Kate—because Kate would see Margery going into their bedroom to hang up her suit as a transgression verging on the pathological. Robert would come to her defence and say she was only trying to help out. They would hiss and shout at each other behind the closed bedroom door—a pointless precaution given that Margery would be able to follow it word for word through the ceiling, while lying on the sofa bed downstairs.

In deference to the argument that hanging up the suit would provoke, she stroked the creases out once it was on the hanger—and felt a letter in the jacket pocket.

Again, automatically and with no sense of transgression, she pulled the letter out of the pocket. It was the St Anthony’s letter. She read it. Then put the envelope back, but kept the letter and was about to go downstairs when something caught her eye through the blind slats. A woman in the house opposite was holding back the curtains, staring straight at her.

Margery pulled the slats further apart.

She didn’t know whether the woman could see her or not until the next minute, she started to wave.

Margery waved quickly back—something she wouldn’t usually have done—then let the blind slats drop back into place and went downstairs humming something from an advert she’d seen on TV.

She put the letter in an inside pocket of her suitcase, then, still humming, went into the kitchen and made herself a sandwich out of WeightWatchers’ bread, cottage cheese and the tinned pineapple she’d opened that morning, and took this through to the lounge where she settled into the sofa in time for the Dynasty rerun she was following. Joan Collins thrilled her—had always thrilled her. If she was truthful, she’d put on her green and aubergine outfit, new blue shoes and make-up as much for Joan as she had for Robert.

Joan Collins and Margaret Thatcher made her proud to be a woman.