Sarah May - The Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva

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.

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.