Susan, my elder sister, was the most beautiful of us three girls. She was dark-eyed and pale-skinned, quiet, grave and slender: Serena had a tendency to fat, thus shielding herself from painful nerve-endings which she maintained were on the outside, not the inside, of her skin by reason of some accident of birth. Her teachers complained that she talked and giggled too much, and never appeared to do any work at all. She would come second, or third in the class, whatever that class happened to be, dunces or high flyers, as if aware that to be unnoticed is safest while you bide your time to grow up. Do too well too young and the Fates might notice and push you under a bus.

  I think that I always put out more pheromones than the other two from the beginning. In the hot New Zealand nights, in the year before we left for England, Susan would study astronomy and look at the stars, Serena would do her homework, and I would lie awake, fingers in my private parts, thinking how extraordinarily wonderful it would be to be married and have some man lying in the bed beside me every night, every night.

  It was on that sea voyage to England that I lost my virginity to the ship’s purser. I was thirteen and he was twenty-four. We had some excuse. The ship’s engines had failed, there was a force nine gale and forty-foot waves. The stewards were going round with those calm yet panicky expressions you see on the faces of cabin staff when there’s a real likelihood an aircraft won’t make it. (I have seen it twice and that’s more than enough.) The purser, single-handed, was trying to swing out a lifeboat: white water surged over the rails, dark blue water towered above. I was trying to help him – he was very good-looking, and had brass buttons – and he kept telling me to get off the deck and back inside but I was too fascinated by the majesty of the sea and the way the foam was swirling over the decks, and indeed the purser, to be much interested in survival. Boldly and abruptly he tried to push me back inside with his body. As in the meeting of Hattie and Martyn, physical proximity worked its own magic. He was angry and I was defiant – it was like the moment with my mother and the scissors.

  Before we knew it we were writhing together in the shelter of one of the great phallic ventilation funnels those old ships sprouted from their decks. His thing hurt when it went in, but I didn’t look, I didn’t care. I had no idea what these ‘things’ looked like and I didn’t want to know. We could feel the engines thrumming back into life below, and the movement of the ship as it slowly headed back into the waves and we were saved. I think to this day it was I and the purser did it. The sacrifice of virginity is not without power. For the rest of the voyage we pretended we did not know each other.

  I felt very fond of him though, and when the nightmare voyage ended, and he was shaking hands with the departing passengers, he bent – he was very tall – and kissed my cheek. My mother was outraged. ‘You’re too young,’ she said. ‘You’re only a child. The way he looked at you! What am I going to do with you?’

  But she had no idea of what had happened and I certainly wasn’t going to tell her. I never told her a thing if I could help it. I knew in advance whatever it was she’d tell me to stop doing it, so why bother.

  Susan began to menstruate on the voyage; she was the eldest, but the slowest to mature – something, I believe, to do with body weight. Both Serena and I were substantial: Susan was wraith-like. The ship’s surgery held stocks of sanitary towels, which were innovative, and of which they were very proud. (Before that it was customary to use ‘rags’ – folded strips of cloth which like hankies had to be washed out and reused.) By today’s standards they were primitive. They would shred into little balls of scarlet paper when one walked – we girls would walk behind one another on the deck discreetly following the trail and picking them up for each other. It was rather a relief when the supplies ran out and we could return to rags.

  Frieda, my grandmother, who was with us on this voyage and was made miserable enough by the fact that we slept in dormitories, row upon row of tiered iron bunks down in the hold, with diarrhoea and conjunctivitis rife – there were 2,000 of us on a ship which carried 150 in peacetime – thanked God that she was beyond reproductive age. I of course, like Serena, still bleed. We have HRT now and neither of us ever observably reached the menopause. But neither do our limbs break or our libidos fade away. Oh fortunate generation!

  Agnieszka And Martyn Go Shopping

  Agnieszka has been with Hattie and Martyn for three months. Kitty is nine months now, and well into what Agnieszka refers to as the oral stage. Her course in child development was run on Freudian lines. When Kitty gets cross with an object she can’t quite control and tries to bite it to bits with her tiny new teeth – she already has two at the bottom and two at the top – Agnieszka observes that Thanatos, the death instinct, is surfacing in the normal way. That’s impressive. But then she says ‘just as well breast-feeding is behind us’, which annoys Hattie. Us?

  Kitty has been making ‘ma-ma-ma’ noises at Agnieszka, and Martyn says jokingly to Hattie: ‘You’d better be careful or she’ll begin to mistake Agnieszka for Mummy. Pure self-interest on Kitty’s part. Agnieszka is a long name for a baby to get its head around. You should have gone for Agnes.’ This makes Hattie crosser still.

  Martyn is feeling mean because Hattie has been late home once or twice lately, staying on at work to keep up with some promising new openings in the Ukraine, and what with Agnieszka having to go off to classes, he’s had to bath Kitty by himself and she played up. Also Hattie stayed on a little after work to have a celebratory drink with Colleen, who has just had a baby boy and come in to the office to show him off. Colleen asks if Hattie and Martyn will come to the christening and Hattie says yes of course she will, though it’s years since she’s been in a church and Martyn probably never has. But she liked singing hymns at school.

  The sight of Colleen’s baby, oddly enough, has made Hattie feel quite broody. She’d like a little boy but it’s out of the question; she’s got more than enough on her plate as it is. She’ll tell Martyn about the christening later. In the meantime he needs soothing. Placatory as ever, she points out that at least Kitty said da-da-da before she said ma-ma-ma, and Martyn should be pleased to be the first parent claimed. Then Agnieszka interjects and points out that that da-da-da always comes before ma-ma-ma: this is normal in infant development. The hard sounds come before the soft. Hattie is seized by irrational anger. She wants Agnieszka out of her life and her baby back.

  She also knows that on this Saturday morning, when she and Martyn are still drinking their freshly roasted newly ground coffee, and the low late-autumn sun is shining through the windows – which Agnieszka cleaned a couple of days back – the girl has already cleared and re-stacked the dishwasher, run round to the dry-cleaner, hung Martyn’s suits in the wardrobe, changed and dressed Kitty and checked for nappy rash (just a patch showing after a couple of nights being bathed and put to bed by Martyn) and cleaned Kitty’s ears out with a cotton bud. So she bites back irritation. Kitty is going to be very pretty, everyone agrees. She has great big blue eyes and is very smart and happy. She sits in her high chair and bangs her cereal with the flat of her spoon and Agnieszka says calmly and reasonably ‘don’t do that, Kitty,’ and Kitty just doesn’t. There is no way Hattie can do without Agnieszka. It’s too late.

  Great-Aunt Serena rings to ask how everyone is doing, and if there are any problems with this month’s mortgage. Hattie says no, everyone’s managing very nicely now Hattie is back to work and when she gets her rise in six months’ time things will be better still. She has an office of her own now: she had been sharing with a rather difficult older woman called Hilary but it’s all been sorted out.

  ‘Hum,’ says Serena. ‘You have to be careful of older women. They haven’t survived for nothing.’

  ‘Oh Good Lord,’ says Hattie, ‘there’s nothing tooth-and-claw about where I work. It’s all publishing and agenting.’

  Serena, who has published thirty-two books, laughs a little hollowly. She asks Hattie about the baby, and Hattie, ashamed now of feeling so mean about Agnieszka, lists the girl’s accomplishments in the last two hours.

  ‘A dream,’ she concludes.

  ‘Sounds a bit dreamish to me,’ says Serena, ‘but she shouldn’t really be using cotton buds. Take them away from her. If you use them in baby ears they can puncture the membrane. Just wipe the ears out with a soapy cloth, and be careful to dry the folds behind them.’

  Serena is full of advice, about everything from how to cure thrush, how to survive a divorce, how to write novels. She feels that if she knows things others don’t it is her duty to pass them on. Many of her sentences begin with ‘Why don’t you -?’

  Hattie passes the advice onto Agnieszka, and Agnieszka snaps back that everyone uses baby buds in Poland and so far as she knows there’s no particular problem with deafness in the population. Hattie is startled. She has not known Agnieszka react like this before. Agnieszka sits down with a noticeable plonk rather than her usual graceful glide and buries her head in her hands. She is crying.

  ‘I am all alone in a foreign country and no one cares about me. My husband will find someone else if I am away so much. I had the letter from him which I did not like. If I could only telephone more but it is expensive, and I cannot use your phone.’

  Martyn comes in carrying Kitty on his shoulder, finds Agnieszka in tears, hears what she says, and is mortified. He says it is sweet of Agnieszka to worry about the cost but she really must phone her husband whenever she wants. ‘But Serena may be right about the cotton buds and a flannel being best,’ he adds.

  Hattie is grateful for this last at least. She realises that Martyn has managed both to placate Agnieszka and please her, and feels a pang of sheer pride in him. He is developing a real talent for managing other people. She was already feeling bad about the phone. Babs had advised Hattie to tell Agnieszka that she must ask before she phoned abroad: but Agnieszka surely deserves to be able to run her emotional life with some kind of privacy, and Martyn realises this too.

  Martyn has taken to wearing contact lenses since his promotion to Assistant Editor and Hattie notices that he has beautiful blue eyes, and wonders why it has never occurred to her before. Perhaps there just hasn’t been the time. Circulation of Devolution is picking up after only two issues which feature the new thinking, and Harold says Martyn’s article on junk food, Fancying a Little, Gaining a Lot, made a big contribution.

  ‘You have to entertain as well as instruct, or you go to the wall,’ Harold says, and Martyn clearly has a knack for doing just that.

  Martyn is Hattie’s protector and her strength, her ally and her friend. He looks very good and handsome and positive, and his cheeks are filling out from carrot and tuna pie and the other delicacies which turn up upon the family table. Agnieszka now serves borscht, a kind of beetroot and sour-cream soup which is strange and delicious. Kitty is allowed a spoonful every now and then. It is important to stimulate a baby’s palate with new tastes. Agnieszka also produces boxes of chocolate-covered prunes, which her husband Aurek sends through the post; they look uninviting, but taste exquisite.

  If Kitty hadn’t been born, if Agnieszka wasn’t around, they could go to the bedroom and make love, or even right there upon the sofa as once they had. But this is now and that was then and that is that.

  Usually Hattie and Martyn go shopping on a Saturday morning, which is more fun now there is a little money to spare. Agnieszka babysits. They look round the markets and check what’s new in at the organic food store. But today she has manuscripts to read and so Martyn was going to go alone.

  ‘Tell you what, Agnieszka,’ Hattie says, ‘why don’t you go shopping with Martyn and I’ll look after Kitty? You need to get out of the house more. All you ever do is work.’

  ‘I go to belly dancing,’ says Agnieszka. ‘That’s frivolous. Frivolous is a new word for me I like very much.’ And a smile breaks through and she looks really pretty and grateful.

  Martyn looks slightly put out but says: ‘Yes, why don’t you? Come too, Agnieszka. Though it’s rather dreary. I’m only after oolong tea which means going in the Chinese supermarket direction.’

  So Agnieszka and Martyn go shopping, not to the trendy market, but along dusty, dirty streets, where wandering drug addicts shake their fists at the sky. At home Kitty is tetchy and troublesome and has to be jigged about and entertained so Hattie doesn’t get much work done.

  Babs rings. Hattie had a drink with her only yesterday, along with Nisha, who’s now covering the Indian subcontinent – books are still mostly pirated, but responsible publishers are beginning to translate, and even pay – and who has just joined Dinton & Seltz and needs to get to know everyone. Babs has news. She says that she is indeed pregnant, the non-pregnancy was a false alarm, and it’s Tavish’s baby, and now what is she to do? She and Alastair have been really trying to conceive but she’s sure it’s Tavish’s. In the old days she could just have covered up the dates and had an early baby but in these days of scans you can’t do that: babies are really and truly monitored before birth. She sounds panicky.

  Hattie has a terrible feeling that whatever she suggests Babs in her current mood will do. So she says, ‘When in doubt do nothing,’ and then, ‘Let’s talk about it on Monday,’ though Monday is packed with meetings, and ShitCockPissDog!’s writer is now annoyed with her because someone should have told him in the first place that the title was unfortunate. He wants to be represented by Hilary, not Hattie, abroad as well as at home. Had he not definitely told Neil that the Tourette’s community have to be taught what’s offensive and what isn’t, through behavioural psychotherapy? No one but Hilary, he complains, had bothered to point it out to him. Babs tells Hattie she’s beginning to think the Tourette’s is a sales gimmick anyway, the writer fears he’s going to be exposed as a fake and is getting cold feet. Babs has a way of compartmentalising her problems which Hattie rather admires.

  Hattie expects Martyn and Agnieszka to come back any moment, but by midday they are still not home. She would like to be out with Martyn. They spend little enough time together as it is. Why on earth did she suggest Agnieszka went with him? Why does Agnieszka have to be kept happy at all costs? She goes into Agnieszka’s room and looks around. She has been too honourable to do this before. There is an official-looking letter in a brown envelope from the local educational authority, opened for some time from the look of it. She takes it and reads. What has she come to? The letter is more of a form than a letter, in the smudged dark ink and cheap paper of officialdom. It is from the registrar of a further education college saying Agnieszka has missed so many classes she has been removed from the tuition roll. ‘There is a very great demand for places and such measures are sometimes necessary.’ Hattie puts the letter back in its envelope just in time: Martyn and Agnieszka are struggling in the front door with a brand new very expensive stroller. It is bright red and pink, stuffed and studded and truly beautiful. Hattie is outraged. She should have been there with Martyn buying that for Kitty. ‘I couldn’t help it,’ says Martyn, ‘we saw it in the bicycle shop and I couldn’t resist it. There was a sale. Only £220, reduced from £425.’ £220 – it’s madness. What’s he thinking of? Fancying a Little, Gaining a Lot? The opposite is true.

  ‘What do you think? Agnieszka said it was just right for Kitty. Properly sprung and with good back support.’ He sees Hattie’s face and looks worried, and realises he’s done the wrong thing.

  ‘I wished you’d been there with me, darling, so we could have bought it together, but I just couldn’t bear anyone else but Kitty to have it, so I went ahead.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ says Hattie and goes back to her manuscripts and sulks, but not before seeing Agnieszka and Martyn look at each other as if Hattie had rained on their parade.

  She does not tell Martyn about the letter from the college. She’s too cross with him about the stroller. She remembers the pleasures of sulking when she was a little girl and Lallie would go on concerts and leave her behind for Frances to look after. ‘But I’m grown up now,’ she thinks. She wonders what Agnieszka does when she says she’s at English classes and isn’t. But perhaps she’s just switched courses and is at another college anyway? If Hattie tells Martyn he will make some kind of fuss and upset everyone again. Hattie doesn’t know what to do next, and remembering her own words thinks, When in doubt do nothing.

  She goes into the kitchen and helps Martyn and Agnieszka unpack the day’s goodies, with little cries of appreciation and delight, and Kitty makes little cooing noises in the background. Really she is the best baby.

  Ordinary Women

  I, Frances, get a phone call from Serena. We speak to each other, I suppose, once or twice a week. It’s very agreeable to be in close touch with someone who has known one all one’s life and still puts up with one. This is not necessarily the case with husbands. I have nothing to say to Charlie Spargrove, though we exchange Christmas cards and once, way back, when our son Jamie was attacked by a crazed horse and ended up kicked almost to death in Timaru hospital, he did call me and tell me, and asked after my welfare in kindly and forgiving terms. Beverley had been in touch with him first, not me, of course; I’m only the mother. Charlie has the money and the title. Charlie these days owns a racing stable and has two grand-daughters who used to be sweet little pony-club things but whom I now see in the gossip columns waving their long legs about and giggling drunkenly. I expect they’ll grow out of it.

  But I was the one who flew out to be with Jamie then, not Charlie. Charlie just wanted to be kept informed. By the time I had made the journey Jamie was sitting up in bed, still much-bandaged and attached to drips, but cheerful and about to go home. He had always been a terrifically healthy child: I thought of the early days of his upbringing, and decided that Serena and myself, and Roseanna and Viera and Maria and Raya and Sarah and the others whose names I can’t remember, had done a pretty good job on this stranger. We must between us have managed to feed him on something other than fish fingers, chips and peas. I think Beverley hoped Charlie would fly over, not me, not the mother-in-law from hell with her multitudinous husbands, disreputable past and gossamer scarves.