Read Online The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach - Free Book Online

missed something? People seemed to have pulled up the drawbridge and retreated into their own solipsistic little lives. Half of them didn’t even bother to vote. In a way, Dorothy couldn’t blame them. The rot had started with Mrs. Thatcher, there’s no such thing as society , but a worse betrayal was committed by her own party, which had mutated into something so repellent that she was tempted to up-sticks altogether and leave the country. Even the BBC, once so familiar, was now unrecognizable. The phrase “market forces” had, like a cancer, eaten into the organization she had most loved. That it was elderly to think this way only made her more irritable. Newspapers were full of interviews with people she had never heard of, famous for being famous, famous for being celebs; what had they done, what was the point of it all? No doubt Tussaud’s was full of them now. At some defining moment a sea change had occurred—around the time when train passengers were renamed customers, when ordinary dogs disappeared overnight, to be replaced by pit bull terriers. It was as if she were performing in a play and realized, quite suddenly, that the cast had been replaced by actors she had never seen before.
    Dorothy started making breakfast. No oranges. Yesterday she had hobbled out to her local greengrocer’s only to find it had turned into a Snappy Snaps. Her own face, in the mirror, had been replaced by that of an old woman.
    It was the rush hour. Outside, the traffic was at a standstill; even here in the kitchen she could smell the exhaust fumes. She knew that she was struggling against her own irrelevance. August had been miserable; the queue along the pavement was a hunched row of anoraks. On Radio 4 they were broadcasting an item about care home closures: “… squeezed out of existence by regulatory overload and starved of funding by social services …”
    Dorothy tried to unscrew the percolator. What will happen to me, she wondered, when the time comes? Her BBC pension would hardly stretch to a private place, not for more than a few years, and her lease was soon to expire; a Hong Kong company had bought the block of flats and planned to refurbish the place and sell it off at a no doubt extortionate profit.
    “A spokesman said, ‘Unless the government makes £1.5 billion available immediately, the sector will collapse and the NHS could be left with a bill for £15 billion.’ ”
    Dorothy was seventeen when the NHS was created. Now it was cheaper to send people to France for new hips. They returned, glowing with praise and with a taste for red wine at lunch.
    The phone rang. It was Adam Ainslie, one of her protégés at the BBC.
    “Are you all right?” he asked.
    “No. I need somebody to unscrew my percolator. I may be reduced to many things, but not to instant coffee.” Dorothy’s joints ached. She thought: I need new hands. Maybe I could fly to France and get them fitted.
    “Shall I come round?” he asked, overbrightly.
    “Don’t be silly. All the way from Fulham?”
    She thought: I need a servant. After all, my parents had them. Sod socialism.
    “Can I send you a video?” asked Adam. “It’s only a rough cut, but I’d love your opinion.”
    “What is it?”
    “It’s a program I’ve made about what happens to people after they’ve been on a chat show. You know, fifteen minutes of fame and all that.”
    Dorothy’s heart sank. Outside, the queue shuffled forward. “Too Big to Wipe,” she said.
    “What?”
    She seemed to have spoken out loud. The last time in New York—years ago, when was it?—she had switched on Jerry Springer . Those were his guests: Too Big to Wipe.
    “I’d really appreciate your input,” said Adam. “I owe everything to you. A lot of us do.”
    He was flattering her, of course. But she had given Adam his first job and he remained loyal. She would watch his awful video and try to be kind.
    I t took Dorothy half an hour to get the damn Jiffy Bag open. Adam had trussed it