The Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva

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‘I thought I might go up to the allotments.’ She paused, and with an effort added, ‘Why don’t you come with us?’

‘It’s raining.’

Kate glanced out through the kitchen window but didn’t say anything.

‘You don’t want to take them up there in this weather. Findlay won’t want to go,’ Margery insisted, raising her voice so that Findlay who was playing in the lounge would hear.

‘What are you talking about me?’ he called out. ‘Where won’t I want to go?’

‘The allotments,’ Margery shouted back.

‘I don’t want to go to the allotments,’ Findlay moaned.

Margery’s eyes skittered triumphantly over Kate as Findlay appeared in the kitchen doorway, his shoulders pushed forward and his arms hanging loose—a posture he often assumed to denote despair.

‘Half an hour, that’s all—I need you to help me dig.’

‘Digging stinks.’

‘Findlay…’

‘I don’t want to go—my suit’ll get wet like it did last time then it won’t fit.’

‘He can stay here with me,’ Margery put in.

‘Yes, yes,’ Findlay started to shout, gripping onto the doorframe and using it to jump up and down.

‘Findlay, calm down—if you stay here there won’t be any TV.’

The last time she’d left Findlay with Margery for an afternoon they had watched a documentary on the Milwaukee cannibal.

Findlay stopped jumping.

‘He can help me with my Tom Jones jigsaw.’

Findlay remained silent, considering this, as Flo started to cry.

‘What’s wrong with her?’ Margery said, irritably.

‘Hungry. Could you heat her up a bottle?’

Margery grunted something Kate chose to ignore as she made her way upstairs, running the rest of the day’s schedule through her head. She couldn’t stay up at the allotments for more than an hour—she had to leave herself time to pick Arthur up from nursery, take him and Findlay swimming then get back to make the tortilla. Pausing at the top of the stairs, she made another mental note to phone Robert and remind him to pick the boys up, before disappearing into the bathroom and swallowing 400 mg of Nurofen.

She took a quick shower in the Philippe Starck shower room they’d remortgaged the house for—along with the Philippe Starck en-suite—before it finally dawned on her that nobody they knew would know the fixtures and fittings were Philippe Starck…unless she told them.

On the way to the bedroom she stuck her head over the banister as the microwave she’d finally capitulated to—which Margery had brought in triumph at Christmas when Flo was barely two months old—let out a resounding bling. The constant bling, bling, bling of the microwave had become one of the signature tunes of Margery’s brief Christmas reign at No. 22 Prendergast Road. The entire Christmas, in fact, had been a nonstop triumph for Margery, who found her usually challenging daughter-in-law captive in a postnatal world where sleep deprivation and hormone imbalance sent her careering between vegetative trances and hysterical ranting. For the first time in their relationship, Margery had been able to control Kate. Robert no longer knew how to and, anyway, needed all the help he could get when he realised that the two weeks’ paternity leave granted him by the government wasn’t nearly long enough to construct the illusion that the Hunter family was a happy, thriving unit.

The Christmas dinner Margery insisted on buying was entirely microwaveable. Everything, including the turkey, was nuked—the bell kept blinging, the door kept opening and shutting and there was so much packaging stacked against the kitchen window that it blocked out entirely the drab, drizzling festive daylight.

Kate only finally came alive to the fact that Margery’s selfdefined role as douala was a smokescreen for total takeover when Robert started mumbling something about getting the spare room properly fixed up so that Margery could be on hand to give round-the-clock help. Enough was enough. Margery was dispatched swiftly but messily back to Leicestershire. This was the first time since the post-Christmas dispatch that Margery had been to stay at Prendergast Road.

In the bedroom, Kate changed into jeans and her new boutique wellies by Marimekko—black daisies on a white background—that Evie had insisted she had to buy on one of their shopping trips, and that Kate had only been able to afford because the family allowance had just gone into the account. Sometimes it felt as though her libido had been sacrificed to Marimekko, Orla Kiely, Philippe Starck…along with the Reverend Walker’s Sudanese orphans and other people she didn’t know.

Dressed in the postcode’s requisite uniform for young mothers, which basically consisted of suggesting rather than revealing your female anatomy, she sat down on the bed and thought about having two minutes’ lie-down, but knew if she did that she’d never get up, so straightened out the creases she’d made on the throw and stood up again.

Through the broken blinds, she saw a woman standing at the same window as her in the house opposite. She was wearing a Disneyland Paris T-shirt, but didn’t look as if she’d ever been to Disneyland. She was holding back the curtains that were usually drawn and was staring intently at the Hunter house. Kate made out black hair hanging down either side of the woman’s face, then she started to flap her right hand.

It took Kate some time to decipher the flapping hand.

The woman was waving at her.

Kate was about to wave back when she remembered the St Anthony’s letter, Harriet and Evie’s ecstatic voicemails, hugging Ros—and was overcome with a sudden nausea she didn’t think she could control. Everybody was in apart from them, and it had something—she was convinced—to do with the woman waving at her from the house opposite. The brothel. Evie, Ros and Harriet didn’t live opposite houses whose curtains remained permanently shut. The woman opposite, still waving, was the flaw in their lives.

Kate was about to turn and leave the bedroom when she saw that the woman was now holding up a sign—plees help 02081312263—written in blue on what looked like the inside of a cereal packet.

Kate, startled, stood back and let the blinds fall.

Forgetting about the discarded suit, still on the bed, she went downstairs.

Margery was nursing Flo awkwardly in the crook of her arm, and Findlay was shuffling the pieces of the Tom Jones jigsaw.

‘I don’t want to get my suit wet,’ he said morosely.

‘Well, if you don’t come to the allotments, you won’t be able to go swimming.’ She paused.

That stumped him.

‘Why?’

‘Because after the allotments we’re going to pick Arthur up from nursery and then I’m taking you both swimming. So…if you don’t want to go swimming with Arthur you can stay here and finish that jigsaw.’

Findlay looked up, flicking his head between his mother and Margery, aware that they were both waiting.

After a while he dropped the piece of jigsaw he was holding and followed Kate out to the car. She pulled the seat belt over his bulging foam abs and pecs, then got into the car herself and was about to start the engine when Margery appeared in the front garden with Flo over her shoulder.

‘That’s my sister,’ Findlay said.

Kate got back out of the car.

‘I thought you’d gone without her,’ Margery said.

Without commenting on this, Kate retrieved the car seat from the kitchen. ‘I’ll be home around five,’ she called out, making her way back to the car—with Flo this time.

‘What time’s Robert back?’

‘I don’t know, he didn’t say, but he’s picking the boys up from swimming at six.’

Margery nodded, then slammed the front door quickly shut.

Five minutes later, Kate was driving at high speed down Prendergast Road towards the allotments, through rain that wasn’t letting up.

Chapter 11 (#ulink_3b7225d3-d44e-584a-8708-c2be29b1b124)

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.

Chapter 12 (#ulink_924afff1-6691-5b51-80f5-e03e3ea7ee7a)

Parking beneath a bank of beech trees—the Hunters’ was the only car there—Kate got out and opened the boot, putting on one of Robert’s old jackets, the pockets weighed down with conkers he must have gathered months ago—back in the autumn before Flo was born.

Findlay, who was singing, ‘Happy birthday to me…happy birthday to me,’ refused to get out of the car, worried that the rain would shrink his foam musculature.

‘Okay, okay, but I want you to stay there in the back,’ Kate said. ‘I don’t want you going in the front or touching any of the controls. Findlay…are you listening to me? I said, ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME…Findlay?’ she yelled.

Ignoring Findlay’s stunned face, she slammed the boot shut, picked up Flo—who was chewing on her fist, asleep—and stalked off across the allotments towards the one they’d had their name down on a two-year waiting list for.

Keeping the plot—once assigned to you—was almost as hard as acquiring it in the first place. Letitia Parry, chair of the Allotment Committee, made a formal inspection of all the plots the first Sunday of every month, and if it wasn’t up to scratch you were dispossessed of it. Not a monthly inspection went by without a dispossession getting chalked up on the board that Letitia kept hung outside the committee’s old Nissen hut—a board that Giles Parry had spent a fortnight making a waterproof hatch for so that not even rain could wash away the incriminating evidence. Letitia was so harsh that families and individuals—once dispossessed—preferred to forsake tools and anything else they’d bought for their plots rather than face Letitia and get formally drummed out into the wilderness of the rest of the world where there were no allotments.

A man named Gordon, who used to have one of the full plots two down but was unable to keep it up due to the onset of Parkinson’s, tried to come back for tools given him by his dead wife on their last wedding anniversary. He left his car down by the golf club at around midnight and crept, shaking, through the orange London dark, past the old scout hut to the top of the hill where the allotments were. He’d brought his torch, but he didn’t want to use it—just in case. So he skirted the fringes of the allotments, winding his way through the halo of beech trees—all that remained of the prehistoric Great North Woods—until he reached his plot.

He’d been worried—all day—that the padlock on his shed might have been changed, but it hadn’t, and he hissed with relief when the key fitted. So he opened the shed door with difficulty because the key was so small…and there was Letitia, sitting on one of his deckchairs, pointing a torch with its beam on full at him. Before he was allowed his tools back, he had to stand there, shaking—at 12.22 a.m.—and listen to the whole lecture on neglect as a form of vandalism, and the impact it had on the ongoing battle the committee was waging trying to keep the land out of the hands of the local council—and all the time he was standing there in the shed, his arm held shakily across his eyes to shield them from Letitia’s beam, which she kept on full throughout, he was thinking…how did she manage to lock the bloody padlock FROM THE INSIDE?

Months of mental torment passed before Gordon found out that Letitia had asked Giles to lock her in—and not just the night Gordon turned up at midnight either, but every night since the dispossession notice had been chalked up on the committee board.

The Grangers used to have a plot, but Ros fell out with Letitia over ideas she had about permaculture and was finally dispossessed when she covered the entire plot in old carpet they’d had ripped up from their study floor—with the idea of replenishing the soil’s nutrients by leaving the plot fallow for six months. The carpet had Letitia yelping at Ros from inside the huge body warmer she wore, summer and winter, which was covered in manure stains long since gone shiny—not only because it desecrated the plot, but because Letitia and Giles had just had exactly the same carpet put down in their sitting room.