‘Was it okay to wave at the face?’ Findlay called out behind her.
Ignoring him, she stumbled down the stairs towards the letter.
‘How is she?’ Margery said, watching her.
‘Who?’ Kate couldn’t take her eyes off the brown A4 envelope.
‘Flo. What happened?’
‘Oh—she rolled off the bed.’
‘You left her on the bed?’
Kate swooped down on the letter from Schools Admissions, trying to decide whether to open it now or in the car.
‘What’s that?’
‘The letter from Schools Admissions.’
‘Well open it,’ Margery said, impatiently. She’d been in on most of the week’s conversations leading up to this moment—and the rows; like the one that had resounded through the ceiling last night.
With Flo balanced awkwardly on her shoulder, Kate—now nauseous with anticipation—ripped open the envelope and scanned the lines of the letter over and over again until she became aware of Margery watching her.
‘So?’
‘What?’ she said, stupidly.
‘Did he get in?’
Kate carried on staring stupidly at her and it was only when Margery said, ‘Well, that’s a relief,’ that she realised she must have nodded.
‘Your face,’ Margery said after a while.
‘My face—what?’
‘It’s a picture.’
‘It’s gone bendy,’ Findlay put in from behind her on the stairs.
Margery, still watching her closely, didn’t look entirely convinced. ‘Don’t forget to tell Robert.’
‘I won’t,’ Kate said, automatically, with a sudden awful feeling that Margery was about to ask to see the letter—when the doorbell rang, followed by the sound of keys turning in the lock. ‘Martina!’
Pushing the letter quickly into her suit jacket pocket, she ushered in Evie’s Slovak au pair who, Kate sensed, much preferred the Hunter family to Evie and the rest of the McRaes at No. 112.
‘Hey—it’s Spiderman.’
‘Tell me about the pig,’ Findlay said, running up to her.
‘Not right now, Finn,’ Kate cut in, ‘we’re late for nursery.’
‘Her grandma made a football out of a pig’s head,’ Findlay said to the assembled adults.
‘For my bruvvers—it was Christmas,’ Martina said, resorting to the south London colloquialism she found easier to pronounce than the ‘th’ sound of received pronunciation.
‘Fascinating,’ Kate said vaguely, beginning to lose the day’s thread. ‘Finn—come on.’ She was about to leave when she remembered Margery, framed ominously in the kitchen doorframe.
‘Martina, this is Margery.’
‘Hello Margery,’ Martina said cheerfully, entirely unaware, Kate thought with pity, of what the next few hours held in store for her.
Margery took in the tall skinny girl with bad skin in the bottle-green leggings and Will Smith T-Shirt, and grunted. Margery didn’t know who Will Smith was and wondered if Martina was some sort of activist. She’d always been under the impression that one of the things the Communists had going for them was that they didn’t like blacks.
‘Martina—your money’s in an envelope by the cooker,’ Kate called out, starting to make her way down the hallway towards the front door.
‘D’you want me to get anything for supper tonight?’ Margery called out after her.
Poised on the doorstep, Kate’s mind and stomach skittered rapidly over last night’s chicken chasseur assembled with the aid of a chicken chasseur sachet and some bestbuy chicken goujons. ‘It’s fine—I’m out tonight.’
‘But what about the children?’
‘They get hot food at nursery and I’m only doing a halfday so I can get them some tea.’
‘And Robert?’ Margery tried not to yell. ‘What about Robert?’
Kate shrugged. ‘I guess there’s pasta and stuff in the cupboards—he can dig around and fix you both something.’
Margery was staring at her open-mouthed. She knew things were bad, but not this bad; not only had Kate been sucking him of potential all these years—his glorious, glorious potential—she’d been starving him as well. Margery felt suddenly, almost crucially short of breath. Her poor, helpless boy.
‘I’ll shop,’ she gasped.
‘If you want—but there is stuff in the cupboards.’
The two women stared silently at each other before Kate turned and made her way with the children to the Audi estate parked on the street outside next to an abandoned blue Bedford van that she would have seen on last night’s Crimewatch in conjunction with an armed robbery at the Woolwich Building Society—if she’d got round to watching any TV.
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,