The Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva Read online

  By the same author

  The Rise and Fall of the Queen of Suburbia

  Nudist Colony

  Spanish City

  The Internationals

  The Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva

  SARAH MAY

  This book is dedicated to all women who are either currently attempting - or who have in the past attempted - to raise children and pursue a career…at the same time. Whatever your bank balance… whatever your dress size…whatever the state of your mental health …you’re all DIVAS!

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The PRC

  Prologue

  April

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  May

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  June

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise

  By the same author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  - THE PRC -

  THE PRENDERGAST ROAD COMMITTEE

  CONTACTS LIST

  Name Address Tel.

  Harriet Burgess 236 Prendergast Rd 020 8369 4435

  Ros Granger 188 Prendergast Rd 020 8369 2311

  Kate Hunter 22 Prendergast Rd 020 8369 7866

  Evie McRae 112 Prendergast Rd 020 8369 4956

  Jessica Palmer 283 Prendergast Rd 020 8369 4221

  Prologue

  Deep in a valley in the heart of south London, Kate Hunter woke up suddenly among the kind of rumples only a nightmare’s sweat can give black sateen sheets. It was 4.52 a.m. She pulled the sheet up over her head, not wanting to see the early hours’ outline of their IKEA wardrobe, IKEA bed, or IKEA chest of drawers - in case she saw something else that wasn’t meant to be there; something that didn’t feature in the IKEA catalogue - excluding Robert.

  The only thing she could remember about the nightmare - and it was a vivid memory - was the feeling of water beneath her. She’d been floating effortlessly until she became aware that the dress she was wearing was beginning to pull her down - was in fact weighted in some way. As soon as she became conscious of the dress, her legs fell down through the water and she started to drown.

  She and Robert had argued the night before - or rather, she had argued and he had watched. This was the way they rowed these days. What had the row been about? She didn’t know any more - all she remembered was Robert sitting on the edge of the bed, looking sad and slowly undressing.

  For a moment she thought it had started to rain, but it was just a dry April wind brushing through the branches of the rowan tree outside.

  Peeling the still-damp sheet from her face, she watched orange streetlight and flat moonlight fall through the broken blinds and compete for space on the bedroom walls. Turning towards the unconscious hump of Robert’s back, she curled into his warmth, her fringe tickling his spine in a fragile apology as she let her nostrils fill with the scent of his skin - and drifted back to sleep.

  On the brink of losing consciousness, she thought she heard a strange, sobbing scream. Her body jerked momentarily awake. One of the children? Robert’s mother - Margery - asleep on the sofa bed downstairs? Whoever it was, she wished… she wished…her right leg slipped out of the side of the bed until her toes were hovering just above the floorboards. So that it looked as though she’d been dancing.

  At that moment, Robert Hunter woke up without meaning to, unsure whether it was the scream - which he’d heard in his sleep - or Kate’s hair and breath running up his spine that had done it. Rolling carefully onto his back and trying not to trap any of his wife’s hair under his shoulder blades, he listened. In his muddled, pre-dawn mind, he became convinced that Kate’s breath on his spine and the scream had conspired to wake him.

  The scream unsettled him and, not entirely convinced he wasn’t still asleep, dreaming, he took himself off to the bathroom and had a perplexed, early morning wank in the shower.

  Afterwards, he let his back slide down the tiles until he was crouching, hot water pounding on his bent head.

  Today he was teaching Jerome.

  On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, he taught Jerome - and today was a Thursday. He didn’t know when exactly it had happened, he was only aware that now he plotted his week mentally around when he did and when he didn’t teach Jerome.

  There were children who got to you and then there were children who got inside you. Every teacher he knew - apart from himself, up until now - had one, and his was Jerome. When he shut his eyes he could see Jerome’s face more clearly than he could see his own son, Findlay’s, and what terrified him more than anything was that Jerome was changing him in a way nobody else had; not even Kate, not even his children… and he hated Jerome for that. He’d never been afraid of teaching before, but he was afraid now.

  The dry April wind carried on making its way up Prendergast Road through the branches of winter-flowering cherries, silver birches, poplars and more rowans, past bay-fronted Victorian terraces whose drawn curtains were meant to conceal nothing more than healthy functioning families coping with life’s run-of-the-mill ups and downs. The wind knew better, but didn’t have anybody to tell.

  As it brushed past No. 112 (which had featured on TV’s Grand Designs only a fortnight ago), Evie McRae - in the grip of exhaustion-induced insomnia after having scored more than a line of cocaine in her garden office - left the house with her five-month-old daughter, Ingrid, and headed for the 24-hour Sainsbury’s where she did the McRae weekly shop.

  Ingrid was an abnormal baby.

  She slept through the night - often for more than twelvehour stretches - leaving Evie with very little to talk to other women about. So she’d woken Ingrid up - partly because she hated spending time alone and partly in the hope that by 8.00 a.m. she would have the same shadows under her eyes as everybody else she knew - and was now pushing her, screaming, down empty aisles towards the one open checkout.

  At No. 188, Ros Granger woke up in an empty bed. It was only 4.52 a.m. Martin was sleeping on the floor of his office at Curlew & Fokes where they were so stretched on the immigration case that most of the lawyers working on it were only getting a maximum of four hours’ sleep a night. After making sure the alarm was set for 6.30, she buried her face in the pillow that still smelt of him and waited to fall back to sleep.
‘I deserve to be happy,’ she said, through gritted teeth. ‘I do deserve to be happy.’

  At No. 236, Harriet Burgess woke up to eight-week-old Phoebe’s still newborn-sounding screams. She had been dreaming that Miles had grown breasts and was feeding their daughter. Probably because her sister had phoned last night to tell her she’d just found out that prehistoric Irish chieftains used to symbolically breastfeed their entire kingdom - men, women and children. What sort of person knew this kind of thing? What sort of person thought other people wanted to know this kind of thing? Hauling herself out of bed, she went through to Phoebe, the sensory-triggered security camera they’d had installed in the hallway training its lens on her as she plodded past.

  At the top end of Prendergast Road - beyond the crossroads with Whateley Road - Arthur Palmer, aged four and three quarters, woke up screaming. His mother, Jessica Palmer - only half awake - stumbled automatically into his room, tripping over a garage and farmyard, until her hand grasped the foot of Arthur’s bed where Arthur was sitting screaming, still asleep. He was having a night fright, the extremist form of a nightmare.

  Even in the half-light, Jessica could make out the muscles on his neck as his body took the strain of fear. He looked like he did when he was having one of his bad asthma attacks and she grabbed his inhaler off the bookshelves.

  As she sat down next to him on the end of the bed, closer than she wanted to, the screaming stopped.

  Arthur raised his arms weakly - one hand clutching his favourite Transformer, Burke - before sinking untidily back onto the duvet.

  Jessica waited, then yawned and got slowly to her feet, creeping out of the room.

  In the hallway, eyes nearly shut again, she walked into her sixteen-year-old daughter, Ellie.

  ‘Everything okay?’ Ellie asked.

  ‘Oh - everything’s…yeah, it was just Arthur, one of his…one of his…you go back to bed.’

  They eyed each other uneasily and, after a moment’s hesitation, Ellie walked unsteadily back into her room on her spindle legs.

  ‘See you in the morning,’ Jessica called out after her, hoping it sounded natural, then went back to bed herself, thinking she’d fall straight to sleep again; only she didn’t. She rolled around in the big empty bed that seemed to get bigger and emptier every night, then listened to the central heating coming on and - realising that she wasn’t going to get back to sleep until it got dark again in twelve hours’ time - got up.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, she stared at her day, plotted out in blue marker pen on the whiteboard next to the fridge.

  Her neighbour, Kate Hunter, was picking Arthur up from nursery at 4.30 and taking him to Swim School with Findlay then bringing him home, because Jessica had viewings booked throughout the afternoon. She yawned again as the wind changed direction outside and the fan in the kitchen window started to clack unevenly in its broken frame. When would she get round to mending that? Probably never.

  Turning round, she saw the pot of chrysanthemums on the windowsill that she’d bought because she liked the colour pink they’d been in the shop. When she got them home the pink seemed different, and she couldn’t work out why she’d bought them when she’d never liked chrysanthemums anyway. Now they were half dead, the leaves and petals shrivelled.

  She went over to the sink, filled an empty milk carton, and was about to water the plant when she stopped, suddenly pouring the contents of the milk carton back down the sink and lighting a cigarette instead.

  She stood by the windowsill, smoking and staring at the chrysanthemums, not thinking about anything much.

  APRIL

  Chapter 1

  When Kate woke up again, an hour later, the edge of her pillow was wet, and for no reason at all her first thought was that Robert had been crying. Only Robert wasn’t even in the bed.

  ‘Robert?’ she called out, anxious.

  ‘Here,’ he mumbled.

  Then she saw him, kneeling on the floor in front of the chest of drawers, the bottom drawer open.

  ‘I didn’t hear you get up.’ She didn’t like to think of Robert awake while she was asleep.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he said and carried on digging around in the drawer.

  Neither of them mentioned last night’s row; the sun was shining, a new day was beginning, and there just wasn’t room for it.

  ‘You’re wet,’ she observed.

  ‘YeahI showered.’

  ‘Already? I didn’t hear the shower.’ Kate carried on watching him.

  Robert scratched at his armpit then stood up suddenly.

  ‘What is it you’re looking for?’

  ‘I don’t knowI’ve forgotten. Christ…’ he added, ambivalently.

  On the other side of the bedroom door they could hear Margery, who was staying with them at the moment while she had her Leicestershire bungalow repainted, irritably attempting to make a pot of tea. Everything about No. 22 Prendergast Road irritated Margeryprimarily because she couldn’t believe what Robert and Kate had paid for a terraced house with neighbours on one side who weren’t even white.

  The kettle started shrieking on the hob. The kettle irritated Margerywhy didn’t they get an electric one? Even the water coming out through the tap irritated her, and the irritation was so intense that Kate, lying upstairs in bed, could feel it as Robert walked towards her through bars of early morning sunlight.

  ‘I heard someone screaming last night,’ she heard herself saying as the smashing sounds carried on downstairs. ‘I thought it might have been your mum.’ Why had she said that? She hadn’t meant to say anything about the scream in the night.

  Robert, who had been about to sit down on the side of the bed and kiss her, stayed standing instead.

  ‘She used to do that when I was a kid,’ he said, suddenly remembering.

  Still propped on her elbow, which was sinking deeper and deeper into the pillow, Kate waited for him to carry on, but he didn’t. Unexpectedly, at 6.10 on a Thursday morning, the clouds had parted and Robert had given her a picture of a small child standing outside a shut bedroom door on a cold landing in the early hours of the morning, waiting for the woman on the other side to stop screaming; hating himself for not having the courage to open the door and walk in and comfort her when he knew he was all she had.

  Kate and him stared at each other, momentarily stunned. Robert never talked about his childhood. He never talked about it with Margery or other people who had been there, so why talk about it with people who hadn’t? For him, it was time that had passedand anyway, now he was healthily involved in the direct manufacture of his own children’s childhoods.

  He shrugged uncomfortably at his own transgression, then said cheerfully, ‘Sowhat’s on for today?’

  ‘Today’s the day.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Robertyou can’t have forgotten.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘St Anthony’s. Today we find out…whether Finn’s got a place at St Anthony’s.’ That’s what the row had been about last nightnow she remembered and, pulling the pillow out suddenly from under her elbow, threw it at him.

  Robert ducked and the pillow went crashing into the already broken blind, breaking another three slats.

  ‘God, I hate those fucking blinds.’

  Kate was trying to decide whether he was genuinely angry or not when she heard Flo, on the other side of the bedroom wall, starting to cry.

  ‘Princess is up,’ Robert said.

  Ignoring this, Kate hauled herself automatically out of bed and said, ‘Well, let’s hope we don’t have to sell the house or anything.’

  ‘Why would we need to sell the house?’

  ‘It’s the only viable option,’ she carried on.

  ‘Viable option for what?’

  ‘Getting Finn into St Anthony’s. This end of Prendergast Road isn’t guaranteed catchment area.’

  ‘But isn’t that why you’ve been dragging him to bloody church every Sunday since before he could talk, and why you—’

>   Kate started to speak over him. ‘Beulah Hill’s guaranteed. Jessica’s been telling me about this place that’s been on the market for over a month nowand it’s a hundred and twenty thousand cheaper than what we’d get for this so we’d actually make some money,’ she said, realising as she looked at Robert’s face that this was the first time either of them had openly acknowledged that they needed to. ‘What d’you think?’ she said after a while, over Flo’s increasingly loud and peculiar bleating sounds. Even after six months, the bleating still sounded odd to Kate.

  She smiled absently at him as he walked over, put his hands on her shoulders, eventually kissed her and said quietly, ‘I think that’s fucking nuts.’

  ‘But, Robert—’

  ‘If we need to talk about our finances—’

  ‘Our finances?’ Kate started to laugh.

  The laughter was ambiguous. Now he was anxious and over the past six months, which had been difficultalthough the word ‘difficult’ didn’t do justice to their marriage so far, so he’d avoided using the wordanxiety had become the third person in their marriage, making it an unpredictable ménage à trois.

  There was a scratching at the door and Margery’s voice, ‘Flo’s awakedo you want me to feed her?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Kate said, ‘I’m just coming.’

  How long had Margery been there? It was difficult to tell; she’d perfected the art of creeping soundlessly around the house. Sometimes, when Kate came back from work, she thought the house was empty until Margery appeared at random, framed in a doorway Kate was about to walk through, claiming to have been asleep.

  ‘She’s really working herself up.’

  ‘Mumit’s fine,’ Robert cut in.

  Margery paused. ‘Morning, love.’

  ‘Morning, Mum,’ Robert called back, watching Kate pull on some black pants that had gone threadbare at the back.

  ‘D’you want teaI’ve just made some?’

  ‘We’re fine.’

  ‘There’s plenty in the pot.’

  ‘It’s okaywe’re coming down now.’

  When Kate appeared five minutes later, Margery was still hovering on the landing.