And I tell her and she shows real interest and I think again how lucky I am. Poor Serena only has boys: she will never experience the down-pull of the female generations through the mitochondrial line. It will continue down from Frieda, to Wanda, to me and Lallie and Hattie and Kitty, and if Kitty produces a girl to her: and through Susan to Sarah, and down to Sarah’s two girls – but with Serena’s branch it stopped. She had only sons. It’s nice to feel sorry for Serena sometimes. But there is something bothering Hattie, there’s something wrong, I know it.

  She tells me.

  It’s the way Kitty burst into tears when Hattie came into the room after her difficult day at the office, her anxiety to get home. How Agnieszka had been so understanding, and said to take no notice; babies do go through a phase of this when they meet strangers. Just a week and it will be over.

  ‘You’re hardly a stranger,’ I say. ‘You’re the mother. How dare she say a thing like that! Even if she thinks it she shouldn’t say it. Of course you’re upset.’

  ‘She’s not English,’ says Hattie. ‘It’s only a question of communication. She got the wrong word for stranger. I don’t know why you’re so against her. You haven’t even met her. It’s just that Agnieszka’s with Kitty all day and I am not.’

  ‘That’s what happens when someone else looks after your child,’ I say.

  I’m a one to talk. Roseanna, Viera, Raya, Annabel, Svea, Maria, girls unlisted and unlimited, all looking in their time after Lallie. Lallie grown and giving birth to Hattie at sixteen.

  Who looked after Hattie when Lallie played the flute? I hardly know. Lallie wasn’t speaking to me at the time. I’d given her another stepfather, the one before Sebastian whom she resented greatly. I don’t have all that good a memory of him, either. He was a writer and we lived in the country and Lallie disapproved. I remember his sandals more clearly than anything else about him. He didn’t believe in socks. He had hammer toes with dirty nails, but he had a good literary reputation.

  It only lasted three years, and being free, I found myself looking after Hattie again. A woman with a small child does what she can. I have known women get married just to get away from their mothers, their children, their therapists, their jobs – just to have the excuse: ‘I can’t look after you in your old age, your illness, your art obsession, your desire to know my inner thoughts, to get up at six every morning to improve an employer’s profits, whatever – I AM MARRIED. I have another duty now.’

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ Hattie says, ‘is that she still stretches out her little arms to Martyn and smiles when he comes in. He doesn’t get the tears. Why should I be the stranger and he not?’

  She bends over to put half her avocado-and-watercress salad on another plate, to relieve herself, I suppose, of the burden of looking at it. She really does have anorexic tendencies. I am glad to hear about Agnieszka’s carrot pies and their pastry crusts. Men from various corners of the room are staring at Hattie. I have a vague nostalgia for the days they would stare at me. I am conscious, as Hattie moves, that she’s wearing scent. It’s not something we do in our family. Scent suggests that people are trying to hide the fact that they haven’t washed lately. Wanda told us this, and no one had forgotten it.

  ‘Are you wearing scent?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s called Joy,’ says Hattie. ‘It’s very expensive. Only a little bit.’

  ‘No wonder Kitty cries when you go near her,’ I say. ‘All the proper mother smell, the milk smell, is covered up. It’s not you she doesn’t like, it’s the bloody scent.’

  I say a stronger word than bloody. Another customer looks up from her sweet red-pepper soup in surprise. I am a bit diaphanous today: that is to say I have a pink-grey chiffon scarf floating round my neck. I am wearing a pale pink suit. I have a good figure for a woman my age, so long as I look at myself full on not sideways. My hair went white overnight, shortly after the departure of the man with the hammer toes. Since then it has been a joy to look after. Just dunk and go.

  I look rather like my mother at my age. Wide eyes and high cheekbones. I hope I have a jollier temperament than her. I certainly have a more forceful vocabulary. Hammertoes had a taste for swearing: a habit picked up by the upper classes in the sixties from the working class, with which I in turn have been infected. Hattie is silent for a little. She does not tell me that Agnieszka claims that Alice gave her the scent. She has not told me that Babs has implied that Agnieszka left her last job rather fast, and not on Joy-giving terms. Hattie does not know that soon Agnieszka will start to appear in Martyn’s dreams.

  Hattie and I kiss each other formally when we part. One, two, three, cheek after cheek after cheek, the French way. I don’t know how these habits have arisen. Once people shook hands, rather lightly and formally: now lips touch cheeks. As if we’re all trying to get into one big bed together, demonstrate that no one’s afraid of catching anything. Which we are.

  Martyn Is Alone With Agnieszka

  Next day when Hattie is in the office she gives Babs the bottle of Joy. She does not tell Babs how it has come into her possession. She does not want Babs’s comments, she just wants not to waste anything so expensive. She tells Babs, truthfully enough, that Kitty doesn’t like it.

  ‘I wonder if I really want to have a baby,’ Babs says. ‘I don’t want not to have one but then I think of the reality and my heart sinks.’ Alastair has taken her back, on condition that they start a family. He has shown her pictures of himself as a child, and as a young man before his neck thickened, when he was really not so bad looking.

  After that Kitty does not cry any more when Hattie comes near her but beams and smiles and cuddles, and has learned to say ‘mama’.

  ‘I told you it would be all right,’ says Agnieszka. ‘I told you it was just a stage they all pass through. Something about finally cutting the metaphorical umbilical cord.’

  Her English is getting really good. She goes to two English classes a week, and one belly-dancing class. Two evenings a week Hattie and Martyn like to go out to friends or to a restaurant dinner, two days a week they stay home and just recuperate, and sometimes Agnieszka joins them in the living room and sometimes she studies.

  One evening Hattie goes off to join the belly-dancing class in Camden Town. The class runs from eight until nine o’clock. The approach is dismal. The police have moved the drug dealers and addicts up towards Kentish Town but the sense of graffitied peril and grimy chaos remains; she has to pass groups of hooded boys, who fortunately seem more engrossed in their affairs than hers. She hopes that will still be the case when she emerges. Before the lesson itself she is sold some rather lovely Egyptian scarves, belts and skirts which she does not need, and is then taught how to separate out her belly from the rest of her and how to move the hips to aid the movement of the stomach. It is rather nice and makes her feel quite sexy and free. The teacher, who is large and has a lot of belly which she moves round most dramatically, probably thinks Hattie is anorexic.

  Agnieszka was originally meant to come with Hattie and introduce her to the teacher, and Martyn was going to babysit, but she has to revise for her latest English proficiency exam, and Martyn has some more research to do into the fat content of beef-burgers, the better to argue that they’re good for you.

  Martyn and Agnieszka are alone in the house. Hattie does not let herself even think about this. Even if a scrap of what Babs said was true, Martyn is no Alastair. Alastair is an unreconstructed dinosaur from the old school: Martyn belongs to the new world, and though his grandmother would have assumed that a man and a woman alone in a house could only lead to one thing, sex, that is hardly the case today.

  However, at about half past eight Agnieszka comes into the living room, she and Martyn have a break from their studies and a cup of coffee, and the subject gets round to belly dancing. Martyn remarks that Hattie seems to have scarcely enough stomach to train, and Agnieszka says oh, that makes no difference, and she pulls down her jeans and her skinny jersey up to reveal a firm, hollowed white midriff, which she proceeds to make shift from here to there and there to here. He can see the muscles move beneath the very fine pale skin. It is perfectly decent: Agnieszka shows little more belly than many a teenager at the office with a gap between hipsters and T-shirt, but Martyn has to go into the kitchen for more coffee to hide the beginnings of an erection.

  Sheer force of will brings his body back to its senses, and he goes back to find her jeans and her sweater meeting again, and says perhaps he’ll go down and meet Hattie out of the class, since it sounds like a low-life area. Agnieszka says it is a bit, but it has never bothered her: she studied Aikido in Poland and it’s a skill which stops one being nervous in any city in the world. Perhaps Hattie should have classes too?

  Martyn goes down to Camden and meets Hattie as, flushed and pleased, she leaves the class. He can’t tell her about the incident with Agnieszka; how could he possibly? He is convinced in any case that Agnieszka acted without seductive intent. She is oddly innocent, with her grave face and her short upper lip and her straight no-nonsense hair. It is he who is at fault.

  Later, much later – when he has had rather a lot to drink with his boss, celebrating his new promotion at Devolution, where Burgers and other Delights of the Flesh went down very well with its singular mixture of serious research and lively presentation – prompted by Harold’s usual bawdy talk, Martyn describes some exotic dreams which the belly-dancing incident has sparked. In which the au pair comes closer and closer to him with her bare tummy, and he is in bed with Hattie and the girl gets in too, and he is immensely relieved when he wakes up, with a start, just before consummation, to find it hasn’t happened in real life. (Harold tells Hattie and Hattie tells me. Harold – and his staff may be right about marginal autism – doesn’t understand quite the effect this information will have on Hattie.)

  Martyn compensates, when Agnieszka is out of earshot, by finding fault with her work: saying to Hattie that he’s sick of carrots, complaining that the girl’s careless and has put the black and white clothes in the wash together (actually it was Hattie but she doesn’t own up), or has tidied away the New Statesman so he can’t find it. This is mostly to reassure himself and Hattie that his relationship with the maid is perfectly in order.

  Another Country

  Martyn has his dreams, I have memories. The past is another country, but there are no children there. We look at it through adult eyes.

  But we three girls in the days of our teenage! The word had not even been invented. We were not a market. We had nothing to spend. We had two sets of clothes: one for school and one for out of school. Two pairs of shoes, one wet and one drying. Clothes were meant to cover and disguise growing bodies, not display them. No doubt there were paedophiles around but no one had heard of them. Certainly girl children did not dress to tempt, deny and defy men as they do now. Chance for us would have been a fine thing. Our hair was caught at the side with a metal clip to keep it out of our eyes. It was the most unflattering style that could be devised.

  I was rebellious. I refused to have my hair cut by my mother, I wanted to grow it long like Veronica Lake’s in I Married a Witch. I refused to believe that just because Veronica Lake’s hair was smooth and silky mine could never be like hers. There was a terrible scene once when I was ten. Wanda seized my head and chopped away at my hair. I grabbed the scissors and stabbed her bottom to make her stop. Susan and Serena were traumatised. I was so ashamed of myself I let Wanda cut my hair thereafter, whenever and however she wanted.

  Wanda, well read and informed, able to quote large chunks of obscure poetry at the drop of a hat, impressed us girls greatly by her ability to grasp abstract notions and fling them in the air. The pity was that since she had never been to school she took authority over-earnestly. We lived with her anxiety. If we walked on the grass when a notice said ‘Keep Off’ she wasn’t angry: she suffered. She gave us a stern heritage and a clear eye, and if anything later drove Susan mad, she being less devious than Serena or myself, it was our mother’s conscience.

  I went through one of those patches, between fifteen and eighteen, when hormones take over from reason and girls can take to drink, drugs and sex. We’d left New Zealand and come to London on the first boat out after the war. Wanda had inherited just enough money to pay the fare over for herself, her mother Frieda, Susan, Serena and me, an all-female family. Now there was nothing left.

  My sisters settled into their new penurious life in London well enough, studied, passed exams. They did mostly as they were told, biding their time, curbing their opinions, waiting to grow up. I didn’t. I was too angry. My mother had taken work as a live-in housekeeper – she had no real source of income until Serena grew rich – and had somehow to house and support us. Just as our au-pair girls once did, and now Agnieszka, she took refuge in some other woman’s more comfortable home and did the dirty work in exchange for her keep and a few pennies. Thus necessity makes servants of us all, or used to.

  This was in the late 1940s, just after the war; and the drink was rum and cider, the drugs were unsophisticated – Benzedrine mainly, army surplus – and the sex, though plentiful, was straightforward and mostly in the missionary position. The body was still the temple of the soul. That there were such things as blow jobs did not enter our young comprehension. Sodomy was unthinkable. Pornography no doubt existed but not any we had ever seen. Brief flares of love and emotion, translated into lust, could lead – if you were me – to one-night stands in shoddy hotels with exciting strangers, but seldom down alleyways on your knees in exchange for money. By the mid-fifties all that had changed. Everyone knew everything.

  But as the forties turned into the fifties our home was in a basement flat, dark, damp and with barred windows, beneath the grand house where my mother was the servant. I was humiliated. I thought that to live in such a place was beneath me: I missed my father. I thought my mother had no business taking us away from him, making him lonely, so that he had married again and started another family as if his existing daughters didn’t matter.

  I rejoiced in my hatred of my mother and played truant, went to nightclubs, stayed out all night, sold myself for pocket money if I needed to buy clothes; left school early with no exams, worked as a (bad) waitress and a (worse) cleaner, got myself pregnant with Lallie by way of the vanishing Curran, gave birth to her in a Catholic home for unmarried mothers where they made you scrub stairs because it was good for the stomach muscles and your soul. Then I handed the baby over, on and off, to my poor mother and went on my adventures again.

  I drifted into the world of the arts. I liked paintings and artists and the smell of oil paint turned me on, though like Serena and unlike Susan I couldn’t draw to save myself. I turned myself from an artist’s moll into an artist’s model, was painted by William Gear, RA, and others of note. Joe Tilson painted my teeth. My face and my body appear on various gallery walls and versions of me I have quite forgotten turn up from time to time in retrospectives. But finally, after becoming something of a legend – I was quite beautiful, I think, and must have been very bright for a bad girl – I was shocked into some kind of sense.

  I moved in circles which brushed up against Christine Keeler’s. Stephen Ward, who befriended us all, killed himself when accused of living off immoral earnings. He was drawing me the week before he chose to die. Ward was a nice, foolish, proud man, a talented osteopath, a good portraitist, hounded to his death by the newspapers. We weren’t immoral, we girls. We were just having a good time and he helped us. But we got too near the centre, and it had to be stopped before the scandals touched the really powerful.

  Through these connections I met, ran off with, finally married and had a baby, by Charlie Spargrove, playboy and baronet. Out of the frying pan into the fire, though he didn’t have an artistic bone in his body. Las Vegas was wilder and nastier than London. So I took the baby home to where it would be safe.

  I had stopped hating my mother. I could see that a woman had to do what she had to do. I think I married Charlie to stop Wanda worrying about me, and to bring us all back by virtue of his title into that class of Old Etonians and Royal Academicians into which my mother had been born, and from which the family had been untimely flung by war and divorce. I can think of no other reason for my having married him. Why I’m so beastly about poor Beverley, Jamie’s wife, I don’t know. She is no less of a snob than me.

  And Serena did the same, and became famous, just to ease Wanda’s pain. And between us we have ensured that our children and our children’s children join the world that she so nearly lost for us, and Hattie can find her level wherever she goes.

  My poor mother! She had schlepped us virgin girls across the world from New Zealand, after the war, in the hope of recovering for herself and her daughters the bright, intellectual life of the kind to which she was born. Instead she found herself working as a housekeeper, with one wayward daughter, me, one who was seriously withdrawn, Susan, and one frivolous chatterbox, Serena; all clever and talented, but with no apparent prospect of making a success of their lives, and no context for herself in the shabby post-war world to which she had returned. She was too ashamed, I think, to take up the threads of the old life. She could not bear being pitied, or being seen as déclassée, or having to be grateful.

  And, as one by one her daughters handed over to her their unplanned and unfortunate babies in full confidence that she would look after them, she blamed herself. She should not have returned to England. She should have somehow kept her marriage together and not let her husband divorce her. Had she only stayed in New Zealand, Susan would have turned into some kind of functioning poet, Serena would have been a farmer’s wife, and I might have stayed on the rails and married someone with a regular life and income. Serena and I would reassure our mother in our later years - see, you did the right thing, we turned out okay - but she never quite believed us.