Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva Read Free

been standing like that, but when she at last turned round, Margery was gone and the house was full of the smell of economy bacon frying in the water it had been injected with at the processing plant.
    Kate crossed the landing, walking through the toxic bacon fumes with Flo towards Findlay’s room. Findlay was up, kneeling intently on the floor. His bed looked as though it had barely been slept in.
    ‘I’m building a world,’ he said, without looking up from the piles of Lego he had heaped on the rug in front of himthe Lego obscuring the Calpol stains that raising Findlay for the first four and a half years of his life had cost her so far.
    ‘We need to get you dressed,’ Kate said vaguely, over Flo’s body draped across her shoulder.
    ‘Okay,’ Findlay agreed, standing up in a manner that was efficient rather than obedient, and that already lured her into confiding in him things about the world and the people in it that she wasn’t convinced he was ready to hear yet.
    ‘Should I wear my Spiderman suit?’
    ‘Oh, Finn…’
    ‘I should,’ he insisted.
    ‘But you’ve worn that nearly every day this weekit’s filthy.’
    He thought about this for a fraction of a second. ‘But I should,’ he said again. Then, ‘Is it okay?’
    Kate felt as though Findlay was prompting her, and when she finally nodded at him, he smiled back at her as if they’d just consented to take a huge leap forward in cross-cultural understanding.
    Unnerved, Kate made a show of efficiency, opening curtains, making the bedall with one hand. ‘But not the maskthey won’t let you wear the mask to nursery.’
    Findlay watched approvingly as she helped him into the Spiderman suit while listening to what was going on downstairs. Had Robert, who didn’t mind the economy bacon sandwiches as much as he pretended, finished making his way through the rashers leaking white residue, layered between Blue Ribbon margarine and two slices of Mighty White? She hadn’t heard him come back upstairs and he hadn’t brought her a cup of tea yeta ritual observed every morning since the first time they woke up together.
    Downstairs, Margery, who had been outraged when she’d discovered that Robert was expected to help himself to a bowl of cerealwhen there was anyat breakfast, before a full day’s work, was overwhelmed with pride that now she was here she could send him out into the world with meat in his stomach as well as a greasy chin and cuffs. That was one wrong in this marriage she’d been determined to set to rights.
    She trailed after him now to the front door, in a grey tracksuit she’d been given by American Airlines on one of her Florida trips when her luggage got lost, and waved frantically as he cycled off down the streetuntil he turned the corner, out of sight. Then she sighed involuntarily, stared threateningly at the innocent commuters passing No. 22 on their way to the station, and shut the front door quickly before the Jamaican next door saw her standing there and decided to rape her. According to the free paper they got at home, The New Shopper , these things happened in BROAD DAYLIGHT in London, and nobody lifted a finger to help.
    When she turned round, Kate was standing at the foot of the stairs, watching her.
    ‘He’s gone,’ Margery said, fairly certain from the look on Kate’s face that this was the firstor one of the first times, anywaythat Robert had left the house in the morning without saying goodbye. Had the Hunter marriage entered a new phase, and would sheas she’d always hopedlive long enough to witness her son rising like a phoenix from the ashes of a passion gone cold?
    Kate hid her face in her daughter’s back again, briefly shutting her eyes so that Margery couldn’t read in them the last two minutes spent at the bedroom window, watching Robert cycle off down Prendergast Road without so much as turning to look up at the house; without so much as even saying goodbye.
    When she opened them again, Margery had