The Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva. Sarah May

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       Chapter 4

      At No. 22 Prendergast Road, Margery stood listening to Martina clean the bathrooms, then went back into the kitchen, humming a Max Bygraves song to herself as she started on the pastry for the corned beef and onion pie she’d decided to make for Robert’s tea that night. She watched her fingers lightly pull the mixture together in the way she’d been taught as a girl by her grandmother, who went mad playing the organ, and thought of all the different kitchens she’d watched her fingers do this in over the years, and how the fingers had changed—grown lines, knobbles, arthritic twists and turns and finally gone all loose; so loose that the few rings she had would probably have already fallen off if they hadn’t got caught in the loose folds of skin round the knuckles.

      The litany of industrious sounds coming from upstairs comforted Margery as she rolled the pastry and lined the pie tin—Communists certainly knew how to clean. When she went to wash her hands, she saw the envelope Kate had left for Martina on the surface by the sink. She went into the hallway and listened. Martina had just started hoovering. Margery went into the lounge and took another envelope out of Robert’s desk drawer—it wasn’t actually Robert’s desk, it was Kate’s, but Margery always referred to it as Robert’s—and went back into the kitchen.

      She quickly tore open Martina’s pay packet and pulled out a twenty-pound note. She stood there for a moment, brushing flour off her nostrils with the crisp new note and knew that, according to her calculations, there was no way Kate and Robert could stretch to eighty pounds a month on a cleaner. Margery knew the Hunters’ finances as well as any accountant because she’d spent the better part of yesterday morning going through their two fiscal files. The Hunters were, in her opinion, in dire straits—she didn’t know how they kept the show up and running or why they weren’t collapsing under the strain of their imminent financial ruin. She could only surmise that Robert was keeping it from Kate and bearing the burden alone. She didn’t understand her son’s marriage. It seemed unnatural to her; more important still, it was unsustainable. What was it Robert said to her all those years ago: ‘Wait till you meet her, Mum—she’s going to change the world—not just mine; everyone’s. Kofi Annan beware.’

      Well, personal finances were clearly below the likes of Kofi Annan, but Margery knew bailiffs—had had experience of bailiffs throughout her childhood, and she could smell them in the air now. Kofi Annan or not, when it was time they came for you and nothing could keep them from the door. They went where they were sent and didn’t discriminate. Margery stuffed the twenty-pound note into the new envelope as the hoover cut out upstairs, put it back on the bench by the cooker and opened two cans of corned beef that she’d bought with her from East Leeke. When she turned round, Ivan the cat was standing motionless on the kitchen floor, watching her, its back arched. She felt immediately nauseous; cats always made her feel nauseous. They brought her underarms out in a rash and gave her vertigo.

      Then the phone started to ring in the lounge and she wasn’t sure what to do about it because Ivan showed no sign of moving, was in fact now sending out a hissing spit in her general direction. Even without Ivan, the phone alarmed her with its flashing lights and antennae.

      ‘You want me to get?’ Martina called out from the upstairs landing.

      At the sound of Martina’s voice, Ivan relaxed and strolled past Margery towards his bowl, brushing her ankles.

      Margery jogged quickly into the lounge and started to wrestle with the still ringing phone, eventually pressing the right button—because it might be Robert; it might always be Robert…

      It was Beatrice, Kate’s mother.

      ‘Margery—how are you? I had no idea you were in town.’

      Town? What town? ‘The cleaner’s here,’ Margery said, for no particular reason.

      ‘That’s nice,’ Beatrice said after a while.

      So the cleaner was news to Beatrice as well. Margery relaxed a little. ‘She’s from Czechoslovakia,’ she explained.

      On the other end of the phone Beatrice, unsure why they were talking about the cleaner, said briskly, ‘There’s no such place.’

      Margery baulked. ‘What?’

      ‘There’s the Czech Republic and Slovakia, but no Czechoslovakia.’

      ‘Martina never said,’ Margery carried on, more to herself than Beatrice, ‘but they were Communists?’

      ‘While the Soviet Union was still in power—yes.’

      ‘I was going to ask her if she had any KGB stories.’

      ‘KGB?’

      ‘You know—the KGB—the secret police.’ Margery had withdrawn an abundance of material on the Gestapo and KGB from East Leeke Library’s well-stocked history section.

      ‘You must of heard about the KGB, Beatrice—how they used to come in the night while you were asleep,’ Margery carried on, breathless. ‘The footsteps on the stairs, down the hallway…knocking on doors, doors opening…people disappearing.’ She paused. ‘They came in the night,’ she said again, insisting on this.

      After СКАЧАТЬ