The Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva. Sarah May

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       Chapter 2

      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, СКАЧАТЬ