11
Once Kate had gone, Margery went upstairs to change in Findlay’s room—where some space had been cleared for her in the wardrobe and chest of drawers.
She chose carefully.
She was dressing for the meal with Robert that evening.
It took her over fifteen minutes to decide on the easy-fit bottle-green trousers and aubergine silk blouse, and she had just got into the trousers when she heard a drilling sound on the other side of the bedroom wall. Was the Jamaican drilling spyholes? How did he know that this bedroom was the one she used to get dressed in? Her eyes scuttled nervously over the wall as she quickly pulled the aubergine blouse on as carefully as she could—she’d already had to repair one underarm tear. She fumbled with the buttons while eyeing the wall opposite warily, expecting the drill to break through at any minute.
When the drilling stopped, the silence that followed was even worse, and Margery waited for it to start again—at least then she knew what the Jamaican was doing.
But the drill didn’t start again and, after a while, Margery found herself staring at the three pairs of shoes she’d managed to fit into her case and bring with her, trying to decide whether or not to christen the blue ones she’d bought with Edith in Leicester. Her shoes never retained their original shape for long—after a while they all ended up acquiring the same bunion-riddled silhouette as her feet.
She decided she would wear the blue ones and after this went into the bathroom to put her make-up on and spray her hair.
She smiled at herself in the mirror—the coy leer she always reserved for mirror gazing—and was about to go back downstairs when she saw Kate’s suit strewn across the bed. She turned automatically into the bedroom and picked up the suit. She didn’t view this as a transgression, although she was aware that her daughter-in-law would. Margery couldn’t abide mess, but this wasn’t her mess and it wasn’t her house. The discarded suit would be the cause of an argument between Robert and Kate—because Kate would see Margery going into their bedroom to hang up her suit as a transgression verging on the pathological. Robert would come to her defence and say she was only trying to help out. They would hiss and shout at each other behind the closed bedroom door—a pointless precaution given that Margery would be able to follow it word for word through the ceiling, while lying on the sofa bed downstairs.
In deference to the argument that hanging up the suit would provoke, she stroked the creases out once it was on the hanger—and felt a letter in the jacket pocket.
Again, automatically and with no sense of transgression, she pulled the letter out of the pocket. It was the St Anthony’s letter. She read it. Then put the envelope back, but kept the letter and was about to go downstairs when something caught her eye through the blind slats. A woman in the house opposite was holding back the curtains, staring straight at her.
Margery pulled the slats further apart.
She didn’t know whether the woman could see her or not until the next minute, she started to wave.
Margery waved quickly back—something she wouldn’t usually have done—then let the blind slats drop back into place and went downstairs humming something from an advert she’d seen on TV.
She put the letter in an inside pocket of her suitcase, then, still humming, went into the kitchen and made herself a sandwich out of WeightWatchers’ bread, cottage cheese and the tinned pineapple she’d opened that morning, and took this through to the lounge where she settled into the sofa in time for the Dynasty rerun she was following. Joan Collins thrilled her—had always thrilled her. If she was truthful, she’d put on her green and aubergine outfit, new blue shoes and make-up as much for Joan as she had for Robert.
Joan Collins and Margaret Thatcher made her proud to be a woman.
Parking beneath a bank of beech trees—the Hunters’ was the only car there—Kate got out and opened the boot, putting on one of Robert’s old jackets, the pockets weighed down with conkers he must have gathered months ago—back in the autumn before Flo was born.
Findlay, who was singing, ‘Happy birthday to me…happy birthday to me,’ refused to get out of the car, worried that the rain would shrink his foam musculature.
‘Okay, okay, but I want you to stay there in the back,’ Kate said. ‘I don’t want you going in the front or touching any of the controls. Findlay…are you listening to me? I said, ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME…Findlay?’ she yelled.
Ignoring Findlay’s stunned face, she slammed the boot shut, picked up Flo—who was chewing on her fist, asleep—and stalked off across the allotments towards the one they’d had their name down on a two-year waiting list for.
Keeping the plot—once assigned to you—was almost as hard as acquiring it in the first place. Letitia Parry, chair of the Allotment Committee, made a formal inspection of all the plots the first Sunday of every month, and if it wasn’t up to scratch you were dispossessed of it. Not a monthly inspection went by without a dispossession getting chalked up on the board that Letitia kept hung outside the committee’s old Nissen hut—a board that Giles Parry had spent a fortnight making a waterproof hatch for so that not even rain could wash away the incriminating evidence. Letitia was so harsh that families and individuals—once dispossessed—preferred to forsake tools and anything else they’d bought for their plots rather than face Letitia and get formally drummed out into the wilderness of the rest of the world where there were no allotments.
A man named Gordon, who used to have one of the full plots two down but was unable to keep it up due to the onset of Parkinson’s, tried to come back for tools given him by his dead wife on their last wedding anniversary. He left his car down by the golf club at around midnight and crept, shaking, through the orange London dark, past the old scout hut to the top of the hill where the allotments were. He’d brought his torch, but he didn’t want to use it—just in case. So he skirted the fringes of the allotments, winding his way through the halo of beech trees—all that remained of the prehistoric Great North Woods—until he reached his plot.
He’d been worried—all day—that the padlock on his shed might have been changed, but it hadn’t, and he hissed with relief when the key fitted. So he opened the shed door with difficulty because the key was so small…and there was Letitia, sitting on one of his deckchairs, pointing a torch with its beam on full at him. Before he was allowed his tools back, he had to stand there, shaking—at 12.22 a.m.—and listen to the whole lecture on neglect as a form of vandalism, and the impact it had on the ongoing battle the committee was waging trying to keep the land out of the hands of the local council—and all the time he was standing there in the shed, his arm held shakily across his eyes to shield them from Letitia’s beam, which she kept on full throughout, he was thinking…how did she manage to lock the bloody padlock FROM THE INSIDE?
Months of mental torment passed before Gordon found out that Letitia had asked Giles to lock her in—and not just the night Gordon turned up at midnight either, but every night since the dispossession notice had been chalked up on the committee board.
The Grangers used to have a plot, but Ros fell out with Letitia over ideas she had about permaculture and was finally dispossessed when she covered the entire plot in old carpet they’d had ripped up from their study floor—with the idea of replenishing the soil’s nutrients by leaving the plot fallow for six months. The carpet
