with you?’ she asked, suspiciously
‘From Slovakia—yes.’
‘You can get hold of that sort of thing there then?’
‘Of course,’ Martina said, lifting her cup. ‘You like?’
Margery didn’t respond to this. ‘Did you have to queue a long time for the tea?’
‘For this tea? I don’t know. My mother bought it at the supermarket. There are always queues at the supermarket.’
Margery put her cup of tea down on the kitchen surface. ‘You have supermarkets?’
Martina nodded, blowing on her tea. ‘I take my mother in the car one time a week.’
‘Car?’
‘My car—yes.’
‘You’ve got more than one?’
‘We have two.’
A two-car family—and there was Robert having to either cycle to work or get the bus because Kate needed the car. Margery glared at Martina, as if her car, the Krasinovic’s second car, parked outside their block in Blac, was somehow denying the Hunter family their second car.
At least—as she discovered several minutes later—all the Krasinovic family lived in a flat; unheated, she presumed, until Martina set her straight on this as well, informing her that the Krasinovic apartment in Blac not only had central heating, but double glazing as well.
Margery’s eyes skidded, mortified, over the rotting, peeling sash windows in the Hunter’s kitchen that Kate refused to replace with new uPVC double glazing—not even after one of Margery’s insurance policies came off and she offered to pay for the double glazing herself.
Presuming the conversation over, Martina retrieved the Carry-It-All that Margery had bought Kate at Christmas from the cupboard under the sink. The Carry-It-All was a turquoise plastic container with a handle that you could use to transport your cleaning arsenal round the house.
Margery had a lilac one at home—which she had ordered from the Bettaware catalogue along with Kate’s—and it gave her a huge amount of pleasure, on a Monday morning, to make her way round her East Leeke bungalow with it. It was dishwasher proof as well—something she’d pointed out to Kate when Kate hadn’t shown quite the right amount of enthusiasm or appreciation of the carefully chosen Carry-It-All. ‘It’s dishwasher proof,’ she’d said, pointedly, and Kate had given her that lopsided grimace she thought passed for a smile, followed by that look she put on—like she was the only person on the planet who’d ever had to forsake their dreams.
Margery found the Carry-It-All at the beginning of this visit, at the back of the cupboard under the sink—where Kate had thrown it—on its side with part of its handle discoloured where bleach had dripped onto it. Its abandonment felt more intentional than careless and this fact had moved her almost to tears when she’d discovered it on her first morning here, in an empty house. She’d since washed it, replenished it with a selection of cleaning products bought with her own money, and left it at the front of the cupboard.
Someone was talking to her. She’d got lost in herself again and hadn’t heard; one day she’d get lost in herself and never come back and Robert and Kate and the children would put her in a place that smelt perpetually of food nobody could remember eating—like that place her and Edith went to visit Rose in when Rose came down with Alzheimer’s.
‘What’s that, dear?’ she said to Martina. The ‘dear’ surprised her, had slipped through usually tight lips without her even thinking about it. She said it sometimes, to waitresses when she was out with Edith, or to young cashiers at the Co-op. She only ever said it to strangers, and it always caught her unawares.
Whether Martina understood the endearment or not, her face lost some of its wariness.
‘I must clean now,’ she said, the Carry-It-All in her hand.
‘Yes,’ Margery agreed vaguely, suddenly shouting, ‘wait!’ Martina was going upstairs to clean. What if she’d forgotten to flush the loo? She pushed upstairs ahead of the au pair, breathing heavily, until she was standing, panting while staring down the toilet bowl. She had flushed the loo, but flushed it again anyway for good measure. Watching the flush, she thought fondly of the streams of luminescent blue that flooded her toilet at home as the flush passed through her new toilet bloc, clipped to the rim. She thought about how she’d stood in the new ASDA store where the mobility bus dropped her off and debated for at least five minutes over whether to choose the green or blue toilet bloc. There was nothing so colourful about the flush at No. 22 Prendergast Road; nothing to wipe away the memory of necessity.
For a moment Margery forgot what she was doing up in the bathroom, staring down the loo, then at the tread on the stairs, she remembered. They really were going to put her in that place alongside Alzheimer’s Rose if this didn’t stop.
Kate pulled up slowly in front of Village Montessori, checking to see if cars belonging to anybody she knew were parked in the nursery’s vicinity. Seeing Evie’s, she drove round the block slowly twice and after the second lap saw the tail end of the black Chrysler disappear into Hebron Road. It was safe.
Fading out Findlay’s monologue on the death of one of the nursery chickens, which were kept in a hut in the playground—bird flu?—she moved swiftly through the security gate with Flo on her and Findlay behind her towards the nursery entrance, past the Welcome to our Nursery sign in French, German, Spanish, Hebrew, Welsh, Gaelic, Arabic, Chinese, and Urdu. On the wall next to this was a montage of photographs taken by Sebastian Salgado of child labourers in South American mines that parents were beginning to complain to the Management Committee about.
‘Red rooster’s eyes went yellow and mushy when she died, like inside a wasp when you squish it, and Sandy who does music and movement said it wasn’t a fox,’ Findlay carried on as he hung up his coat, then added, ‘Martina’s grandma did make a football out of a pig’s head and it’s true. I’ve seen the film.’
Kate, who’d been on the verge of pushing him gently into the Butterfly Room, stopped. ‘Film?’
‘She’s got a film of it on her phone. Arthur,’ he yelled, then, turning back to Kate said, ‘is Arthur going to my new school?’
‘We don’t know what school Arthur’s going to—why don’t you ask him?’
Findlay ran over to the Home Corner where Arthur was kneeling in front of the oven, removing a large green casserole pot that he’d put a Baby Annabel doll in earlier.
‘What school are you going to?’
Kate waited.
Arthur was about to respond when one of the nursery staff went up to Findlay and said loudly, ‘Shall we give this to Mummy?’ tugging pointedly at the mask on his head.
Sighing, Findlay pulled it off and pushed it into Kate’s hand, turning his attention back to Arthur.
‘We need knives and forks,’ Arthur was saying, efficiently.
‘We
