Marina Lewycka: The Lubetkin Legacy

In terms of clothes shops the area is disappointing, but there are plenty of cafés and eateries with cheap and interesting menus, two supermarkets — Lidl close by and Waitrose a bit further away. She stocks up in both places, spending freely, especially on treats for herself. She buys a kettle in a quaint little hardware store halfway up a side street, where she also splurges on a cafetière. As an afterthought she buys a blue plastic bucket with a mop, a dustpan and brush, some rubber gloves and detergent, just in case the agency cleaner never shows up.

By the time she’s unpacked her shopping there’s still no sign of the cleaner, and she is resigned to doing it herself. But first she plugs in the kettle to try it out, and spoons coffee — Kenya AA of course — into the cafetière.

Just as she pours on the water and breathes in the dark aroma, the doorbell rings. A young black girl is standing there, so young and skinny she looks like only a kid, wearing a blue overall and carrying a mop and bucket, a brush and some rubber gloves. Violet peers at her name badge: Homeshine Sanitary Contractors. Mary Atiemo. That’s a Kenyan name.

‘Cleaning contractor,’ says the girl with a broad smile. Her front tooth is chipped. Violet’s grandmother Njoki used to say that dental deficiency is a sign of untrustworthiness. She was full of funny ideas like that.

‘You’re late,’ says Violet. ‘I was just going to do it myself.’

‘Sorry, please,’ says the girl. ‘No bus. Please, let me clean it for you. No clean, no pay today.’

Tears well into her eyes. Violet hesitates. She looks a bit useless, lost in her too-big uniform, twig thin, smaller than the mop she’s carrying, this scrap of a girl standing on the grey concrete walkway, with a grey thundery sky looming behind her.

‘Where are you from?’

‘Kenya. Nairobi,’ Mary Atiemo says. ‘Kibera. You know Kenya?’

‘I was born in Nairobi,’ she replies. She remembers Kibera; it’s a slum not far from her grandmother’s house. Once or twice she glimpsed its dirty twisted alleys from the back seat of the car and shuddered. How has this slum girl from that wretched insanitary place got to be a ‘sanitary contractor’ in London, standing here on her doorstep just as she’s standing on the doorstep of her exciting new life? It seems a bad omen, as if the past won’t let her go.

‘My mother is Kenyan,’ she adds, to put the girl at ease.

The girl’s smile widens till it takes up half her face. ‘ Shikamoo .’

‘ Marahaba ,’ Violet replies, cringing at the deference in the girl’s voice.

Suddenly a clap of thunder rattles the rooftops, and rain sheets down like a monsoon.

‘You’d better come in. I’ve just made some coffee. Would you like some? It’s from Kenya.’

Mary Atiemo nods. ‘That would be fine. In my home we only used to drink tea.’

Despite her small size, Mary Atiemo is a wizard of a cleaner. She sweeps the floors, bags the garbage, then fills up the bucket at the sink, squirts in some detergent, sloshes it around the floor, and chases it furiously with the mop. Scraps of food, shreds of grime, cigarette butts, every type of filth, all float up on the frothy water to be captured in the strands of the mop, swirled into the bucket and flushed down the loo. She cleans the grey fingerprints off the woodwork, the grime off the cooker, the yellow stains off the toilet, and the black ring around the bath. Just watching makes Violet feel exhausted and she thinks, with her new salary, it would be nice to have a cleaner to come in once in a while.

‘Do you have a phone number?’ she asks the girl. ‘Maybe you can come and clean another time.’

The girl looks embarrassed. ‘We’re not allowed to have a phone. Mr Nzangu doesn’t let us work for somebody else. But give me your number, please, and I’ll get in touch when I can.’

She writes down her name and number on a bit of paper. The girl slips it into the pocket of her overall, gathers up her cleaning things and disappears out into the rain.

Mrs Penny, the Council’s housing officer, was twenty minutes late. I’d tried to telephone to cancel her visit of course, feeling too devastated to do battle with the tentacles of bureaucracy so soon after Mother’s sudden death, but the Town Hall phone was constantly engaged and I gave up in the end. Well, it was probably best to get the tenancy business out of the way sooner rather than later. At last the doorbell rang. Ding dong!

‘Ding dong! First of March, 1932! Ding dong!’ Flossie chimed, to make absolutely bloody sure I’d heard.

Mrs Penny stood on the doorstep, reaching out her hand.

‘Mr Madeley?’

Should I correct her? I let it pass, and took her pale manicured hand. It was like shaking a lettuce leaf out of the fridge — cold and limp, not what you’d expect from such a warm solid-looking woman.

‘Come in. Come in. I appreciate your …’ What exactly did I appreciate? ‘Your hair.’

Her hair was shiny and a slightly unnatural copper colour, swept up in a curled ponytail with a deep fringe and long curled sideburns, sort of country-and-western singer meets rabbi. She ignored my comment and advanced into the entrance hall, releasing a powerful floral perfume in her wake. Was she my type? She was in her fifties, I guessed, not unattractive for her age, but way too old for me. She was a bit plump, too, though her high-heeled shoes made her legs look shapely. A saucy pink silk scarf was tucked into the lapels of her municipal-colour raincoat.

‘It’s ages since I’ve been in one of these big old family flats.’ Her voice was pleasant and low, with a slight hesitation, not quite a stutter, that at once disarmed me. ‘There’s not many left with the Council now. They’ve mostly been bought up and sold on under Right to Buy. I’m surprised this one wasn’t. It would have been quite an —’ she stopped, aware she was committing a faux pas.

‘Investment. Mum didn’t agree with it.’

Mother could have bought the flat for £8,000 back in 1981, after the Right to Buy came in, but she had refused. ‘I told them to stick their offer where the sun don’t shine,’ she’d told me. ‘I said it belongs to the people of this borough and it ain’t yours to sell.’

I’d already left home by then, and it never occurred to me that I would return one day, let alone seek to inherit the tenancy, so I was mildly amused at Mum’s fury. Needless to say, when Eric Perkins next door — now resident in the South of France — resold his for £38,000 a few years later, she was regretful and envious. But by then she had divorced Lev Lukashenko, and he’d disappeared with all her cash.

Mrs Penny peered in through the open door to my mother’s bedroom, where the assortment of crumpled lingerie was still strewn on the floor.

‘You do sometimes wonder,’ she said cryptically, making a note.

She also noted down that my mother had lived in the flat since it was built, and that I had lived there from birth until I went to university, and then again for the last eight years. She didn’t ask why I had come back eight years ago, and I wondered whether, if she had, I would have told her the truth. She asked about siblings, and I explained that my half-brother from my father’s previous marriage had moved out many years ago.

‘Mmm. I always longed to live in one of these big modern flats. I grew up in a poky terrace in Hackney. It’s nice that you can support Mum, and help her keep her independence in today’s challenging environment.’

There was something so sympathetic in her manner that I was on the point of pouring my heart out, telling her about my daughter Meredith’s death and the bear pit of depression, the split-up with Stephanie, the stutter, the dead end of my career, the eviction from my bedsit, the hospitalisation, the valiant way I had fought back with Mother’s help against the bloody injustice of life.