Viv tidied a few things while Linda watched. The light-bulbs hummed. She smoothed a curtain. She had something important to ask. Talking to the cleaning lady, she had none of the commanding manner she adopted with Belinda. She seemed almost deferential.
‘Linda?’
‘Mm?’
‘You know how I depend on you?’ Viv laughed nervously. ‘I had a scare this evening. Did Belinda speak to you? You wouldn’t leave us, not after everything?’
But, as Linda turned a page and studied the pictures, Viv’s heart sank. She had hoped Linda would do the cleaning-lady equivalent of running into her arms. Instead, it was like asking, ‘You do love me, don’t you?’ and knowing after a few, short, vertiginous seconds that an affair was all over. The longer you have to wait for an answer to that sort of question, the more certain you can be that the answer is not the one you want.
‘How old is Stefan?’ asked Linda.
‘What? Oh, fifty-one.’
‘And you introduced him to Belinda.’
‘Yes. My sister met him at Imperial.’
Viv joined Linda to look at the album. It included fuzzy colour pictures from the old DramSoc days. Viv perused the page. Their faces were almost unrecognizable, but nothing had changed, really. At college, Maggie was disastrously involved with a succession of goaty lecturers. Belinda complained all the time about the timetable. And Viv organized an excellent summer outing, to which Jago brought along some useless dickhead they never saw again.
‘Are you going to Belinda?’
‘I thought I would, yes. Oh, Viv, don’t look like that. I’m so sorry. But at the end of the day, I’m only your cleaning lady!’
‘How can you say that?’ Viv gasped.
Linda took Viv’s hand and squeezed it. It would have been clear to any onlooker that the usual relationship between employer and cleaning lady (‘How are the feet?’ ‘We need more Jif’) had been long since outgrown.
‘It’s gone a bit mad here,’ said Linda.
Viv laughed. ‘You can say that again.’
She thought about it, took a deep breath, and resolved to be brave. ‘So. How are we off for J-cloths?’ she asked.
Linda smiled at her gratefully. ‘How the hell should I know?’ she retorted.
At which the two of them laughed and laughed in the small hours until they had to hold each other up. At three a.m., Belinda woke Stefan by turning the light on. She’d had a dream she needed to write down. And since he was now awake, she was quite keen to tell him about it, too. And also to treat him to an instant analysis, as she always did. In this dream, she said, she’d been bundled up in the bedclothes and placed in the washing-machine by an unseen hand. ‘It was an unseen hand,’ she said, significantly. ‘But I think we know whose it was. She was singing “I Should Be So Lucky”.’
Stefan shrugged.
‘Kylie Minogue,’ she explained. Belinda popped to the loo, and came back, over-confident that she had captured her husband’s attention. She shook him awake to continue.
Belinda often had premature burial dreams, but this one was different. No shovel, no grit. No bone-white fingers poking through the black earth. No, this was the opposite of the Gothic nightmare. Instead of feeling frightened and stifled in this one, she’d had rather a wonderful time. The water was warm and sudsy, something like amniotic fluid but with bright blue enzymes for a whiter white. And the rhythm was very comforting. ‘Slosh-to-the-right, two, three, slosh-to-the-left, two, three. Over, over, over, over, slosh, slosh, slosh.’ It reminded her of perhaps the greatest joy of her infancy – the bathtime game her father had played with her, safely cradling her in strong arms, then gently drawing her the length of the bath while singing the old music-hall song, ‘Floating down the river, on a Sunday afternoon’.
Stefan closed his eyes. As a scientist, he was more interested in the physiology of dreams than their nostalgic evocations.
‘No chance of you drowning, my dear? I say it helpfully, you understand.’
‘No, no. I didn’t even struggle. It was so cosy. Sloshing about. I just tapped on the milky glass from time to time – “Hello? Excuse me! Hello?” – because life was going on outside, and you were out there, Stefan, eating a bagel. You didn’t even seem to notice I’d gone.’
‘Which cycle were you on?’
‘Special treatments.’
‘Oh, good. I have always wondered what that was for.’
Belinda happily snapped shut her dreams notebook and turned the light off. ‘You know what this means?’
‘Something about the womb?’
‘No, it means Accept the Cleaning Lady. That’s good, isn’t it? Even my subconscious says it’s a good idea.’
‘Well, I’m going up,’ said Viv. ‘Thanks again for everything tonight. It will be odd not to make a list for you.’
‘It was all a sham, Viv. It’s time for you to admit it. You are Superwoman. We talked about this. We knew it couldn’t go on.’
Viv’s chin wobbled. ‘I’m not Superwoman,’ she said.
Linda put her hands on Viv’s shoulders. ‘Yes you are.’
And Viv jumped, as if she had been stung.
‘And what was the spin like?’ said Stefan.
‘Oh, that’s a point.’
Belinda turned on the light again as Stefan groaned.
‘What is it now?’
‘I woke up before the spin.’ She made a note. ‘Perhaps I’ll have to have the spin another time.’
When the lamps were finally out, they lay quietly in the dark for a minute. Stefan’s pre-sleep breathing had a little rhythmic squeak in it, a whistle in his nose. Belinda listened to it comfortably, happy. The room was otherwise perfectly still, perfectly quiet.
Hiring a new cleaning lady had been such a small decision, yet it had changed everything. On her way to the bathroom she had spotted a heap of laundry at the top of the stairs but it had not said, ‘Remember me?’ Instead it had asked rather excitedly, ‘When does she start? When does she start?’
Something else had changed, too, although at first she couldn’t put her finger on it.
‘Neville?’ she whispered, at last. In her abdomen, a spotlight swivelled around a deserted Big Top, finding only sand and sawdust, and bits of torn paper streamer. ‘Neville, are you there?’
Belinda was right to say that Maggie had her own agenda. In fact, Maggie’s agenda was about as well disguised as a Centurion tank in a hairnet. Thus, when she told her oldest friend Belinda, ‘You work too hard’, what she really meant was ‘You don’t spend enough time listening to my problems’. When she said to Stefan, ‘Belinda cares only about her work,’ what was clearly imported by this treachery was ‘I’ll always love you, Stefan, I want to have your babies, and it’s not too late’. Telling Leon she thought Villeneuve was a bridge in Paris translated as ‘You’re a dreadful motor-racing bore and I can’t believe I’m listening to this.’ Indeed, the paradox of Maggie’s life was that the more rudely she semaphored her real message, the more her friends felt it polite to take her words at face value.
When she woke on Wednesday in her Clapham flat,