The sweet taste of revenge
Digby Durrant
MY CLEANER by Maggie Gee Saqi, £12.99, pp. 352, ISBN 086356565441 ✆ 11.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Letting out a shriek at the sight of gloomy Justin, unshaven and naked except for the amber beads around his neck, ‘his cock swinging round and semi-unfurling like a big soft lily’, Vanessa Henman wonders can this really be her son? Or is she just a rotten mother, unlike the woman to whom she has just written a desperate letter and whom Justin adored? Mary Tendo, now back in Uganda, who had been Vanessa’s cleaner 11 years before, is the only person who might cure Justin’s crippling depression, get him off Prozac, get him moving. Would Mary come back?
In Kampala, Mary has a good job, a university degree, an ex-husband and a son who lives with him whom she’s unlikely to see again, and a devoted boyfriend. She remembers Vanessa as a mean, sharptongued bully, but she loves London and money, which she will make Vanessa supply in buckets. Mary will go. Vanessa is thrilled. As a novelist and lecturer in Creative Writing at a new university she’s exceptionally busy and feels she needs Mary almost as much as Justin does, though when the pair fall into each other’s arms like reunited lovers she feels a sharp stab of foreboding.
Mary’s role is the same as it was when Justin was a three-year-old butting at her breasts and she’d suckled him with the milk she was giving her own baby at the time. Now every night he reaches out for her like a sick man as she lies beside him to caress him through his nightmares and ease him back to life with more of the same when he wakes. Vanessa must know this but turns a blind eye to anything that will help Justin. She’s far more troubled by the cost of the cleaner Mary insisted on having and the healthy Ugandan diet and the all-pervasive smell of unfamiliar herbs and spices she imposes on the household. Mary discovers that Justin ‘poos’ twice a week. It’s going to be twice a day. ‘I make these Londoners shit like Ugandans.’ Mary holds all the cards and plays them remorselessly, but Vanessa is learning not only that Mary is invariably right but also to see herself through Mary’s eyes and disliking what she sees. She is too selfish to nurse Justin back into the self-confidence Mary has given him and too snobbish to see that her ex-husband, Tigger, was more than a dim figure who mended dripping taps but an expert, much in demand as a plumber, electrician and all-round handyman who Mary sees could teach Justin to be the same. Soon he and his father will become business partners.
It’s when, by chance, Vanessa comes across some of Mary’s writing and sees it as superior to her own that she acknowledges she’s more than met her match and concedes defeat in an unusually imaginative and courageous way. She takes Mary to stay with her cousin in the country and while there shows her the cottage where she herself grew up until she’d escaped to Cambridge and academia. Mary looks in open-mouthed disbelief at a rotting hovel far meaner than her own childhood home in Uganda and Vanessa bursts into tears at the sight of it. ‘Bridges have been built, chasms crossed.’ The Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady gaze at each other.
It’s amazing how many details, characters, stories within stories Maggie Gee’s unquenchable exuberance crams into this comparatively short book. Though interesting enough, they get in the way of a very absorbing main story. It’s like being jostled from a tempting shop window on a crowded street or peering at a famous painting with too many heads between you and it.
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