reason Mark had allowed her to keep them; they were probably too insignificant to warrant his attention.
Over the years she had acquired and discarded many a set of lurid plastic pegs with fiddly little springs which often perished before the end of their useful life, but these long wooden splints with their bulbous heads and precision, hand-cut splits would outlive them all. She would in time hand them on to Lydia. The thought made her chuckle; she could imagine Lydia rolling her eyes at the prospect of inheriting a set of pegs. As a little girl, Lydia had shown an interest in them once, carefully selecting a random peg and using a big, fat, black felt-tipped pen to draw two dots for eyes and the upward curve of a smile. Kathryn had named that particular peg Peggy, and it still made her smile on a daily basis. Maybe when Lydia was older she would feel differently; goodness knows, her own views were now so very altered from when she had been her daughter’s age.
In the early days of her marriage, Kathryn remembered feeling comforted by the knowledge that she was probably the third generation to handle these funny little objects. She often considered the clothes that had been held fast; three generations of garments in which her family had slept, worked and loved. She would finger the end of the splint, wondering if it had touched her grandpa’s work shirt or her mum’s silk slip.
She often wondered if her mother and grandmother had derived as much joy as she did from a line strung full of clean laundry. The anticipation of gathering it in huge armfuls and inhaling its fresh, blown-dry scent was itself a unique pleasure. The folding and smoothing of clean garments was satisfying and used to give her a feeling of great contentment. The washing and ironing of clothes had been tangible proof of a family life lived in harmony.
The pleasure she used to take in doing the laundry had, however, been removed from her the day she got married, seventeen years and five months ago. These days there was no joy in this daily ritual, none at all. Apart from her two children, there was very little joy in her life, full stop.
Kathryn knew that her nickname was Mrs Bedmaker; she had known it for some time, having heard it muttered behind cupped hands and seen it scrawled in chalk and pen on various surfaces, including the underside of a desk and the back of a loo door in the junior common room. She was called it regularly by the more daring children, each hoping that she would not hear and would not comment. Of course she never did ‘hear’ or comment, giving them the confidence to continue. She didn’t mind too much; she had more to worry about than that on a daily basis, much more.
On better days, she could find humour in the fact that the rumour mill among the pupils had it laid down as fact that she was a sex maniac who insisted on indulging in a wild and frantic love life on a nightly basis. Why else would there be the constant need for the laundering of bed linen? Nudge, nudge, wink, wink… Saucy Mrs Brooker, lucky Mr Brooker. Was that why she always looked so exhausted, so weak, and he so happy, so smug?
She would sometimes stare at her reflection, pondering her skinny frame and nervous expression, her pale demeanour, the dark circles under her eyes, her cellist’s fingers with their square-cut nails and her blunt-bobbed haircut. Pulling her olive-coloured cardigan over her linen skirt, she would think, That’s me, a regular sex kitten.
Kathryn wandered back into the kitchen, reluctantly abandoning the warmth of the early-morning sun, and started to clear the breakfast things from the scrubbed pine table that dominated the room.
A marmalade-smeared plate and an empty coffee mug were the only evidence that her son Dominic still lived under their Georgian roof. Their interactions were minimal, so she welcomed these little reminders that he was still around, living in the same space, even if she hadn’t actually seen him. At the moment he appeared to be playing the role of a reluctant lodger who sought the solace of his own room at every opportunity. The truth, she suspected, was that he was probably sneaking off to the comfort of someone else’s room at every opportunity, someone in the girls’ dorm. She was pretty sure it was Emily Grant