The in-between husband, the sandalled writer with the hammer toes, prefers not to speak to me. I feel quite amiable towards him, but he is still sore and ruffled. I don’t know why. I neither asked him for money, nor tried to take the house. I just packed my bag and left, moved by that odd despair and panic women sometimes get – if she does not leave now there will be nothing left of her. She will be a shell, with nothing inside. A black dead mussel on a rock by the sea, its shell thickened by parasite barnacles, opened and empty but for a strand of slimy seaweed drifted in. It’s a terrible vision. He doesn’t beat her, or make her life a misery, she cannot explain the urgency to her friends: he is just wrong. It is dangerous. He is stealing her soul. It is an urgent and irrational feeling but one which needs to be respected.

  I daresay men feel it too, which is why they too will leave suddenly one morning and not come back. They haven’t gone to a mistress, they have just gone. It is something to do with sharing a bed, the way two people merge with each other in front of the telly, by the kitchen sink – it can make you panic, and rightly. Anyway, I walked out on Hammertoes like that and upset him badly, and my name, I hear, is never mentioned in his house. He married again, perfectly happily, to a lady script editor who could help him on in his career.

  Indeed, apart from the years when I pestered Charlie to help with Jamie, I have never expected financial help from men. I am too like my mother to enjoy being dependent. I remember her dictum – that men offer money and support to the woman in front of their nose: in the bed, at the stove, with the children. ‘Out of sight is out of mind.’ That’s why divorce laws exist. Because men and women take so different a view of what is right and natural. I have accepted lots of money from Serena over the years, but she’s my sister. If she thinks what’s hers is mine, I’m truly grateful and truly glad. And I define my life, as she does hers with me, over the telephone and now through email too. We get to see each other every month or so. She complains she writes so much fiction she can hardly remember who she is: she says I help her keep a sense of identity. I just like chattering and so does she. Neither of us shows any signs of losing our marbles.

  When we lost Susan to cancer – and it was as if a limb had been chopped off from the all-female family body, tightly interwoven as Wanda, Susan, Serena and me – we clung together as if only thus could we keep our balance. When between us we took over Susan’s three children, that served us as a kind of prosthetic limb with which we could get by. We were at least balanced again. When Wanda died I thought, at last she is free of the anxiety which crept out of her into all our veins: I am happy for her. Perhaps she should have done more to save us from it, but for all I know I too have passed anxiety on, down through the mitochondrial line. Lallie is riven by anxiety before performances. Perhaps Hattie just pretends to me that she finds the world a controllable place, free from surprises.

  This morning we talk about Hattie and the new au pair. Serena had called Hattie yesterday morning and been briefed. We talk about cotton buds and baby ears. Serena asks me what does this Agnieszka look like, and I say oddly enough no one has bothered to say. They just list her achievements. She must be a kind of ordinary-looking person.

  We go through lists of ordinary-looking people we know who have broken up marriages. There are quite a few of them. It is not necessarily the ravishing beauty who runs off with other women’s men. Sexual desire is not as compelling a motivation as one assumed when young. The wit, the soul, the politics, the ability to play the piano well, anything, even the plainness, can turn out to be the seductive factor.

  Beware most of all the spare woman at the dinner party, with lowered lids, quiet and sweet, dressed like a country mouse: those eyes can open wide, hungry and inviting while the hostess is not looking. Like Ann Footworth, who was all of fifty-five when she ran off with Serena’s married publisher. Ann was his dull secretary. His wife Marjorie took pity on Ann, she was so much alone in the world, and asked her to dinner – and it ended with Marjorie herself standing outside the publishing house throwing stones and shouting abuse up at his window, while he cowered under the desk with Ann, until the police were called and took the wife away. And no one forgets T. S. Eliot’s wife, the one he put in a lunatic asylum, who poured melted chocolate through the letter box of Faber & Faber.

  But that was rather rare and special. In the old days, we agree, men just had affairs and said they would leave home, but very seldom did. It was ‘wait until the children are out of nursery school’, and next thing it was GCSEs, then AS levels, then A levels – and then ‘until they’ve finished college’. It takes until then for her to realise he was probably never going to leave his wife and join her. And then the wife has a late baby and of course he’s been sleeping with her all the time. Women believe what they’re told if they want to enough. (I think of Serena and George.)

  We fear Hattie may have inherited the tendency to believe what she wants to believe, not what’s under her eyes. But then so many of the young do. They have been brought up on a diet of too much fiction, film, TV, novels – and they believe they are heroes and heroines of their own lives and everything will turn out well. What is worrying is that this Agnieszka may not share this delusion. She will have grown up with less fiction than we in the West: novels will have been in shorter supply, the TV will have been devoted mostly to exhortations or national folk dancing. She will know the world is hard and earnest and will behave accordingly. On the other hand, had Hattie and Martyn engaged an English girl she would have come with a weak superego, sat around in fast-food outlets feeding the baby with burgers to keep it quiet, or in the café in the supermarket teaching the toddler how to drink bright pink fizzy juice with a bendy straw. I’ve seen them.

  It is true, we agree, that men have been known to leave their wives for the mistress the day the children’s A-level results come through. That happened to Grace: Grace and Andrew the accountant were in the middle of their summer holiday in a gîte in France when the message came that the youngest had got three starred As, and Andrew just walked out the door and never came back. He joined the waiting mistress, the one Grace didn’t know about, holidaying, until then on her own, in the Bahamas.

  If that sort of thing happens far less nowadays it is because everyone is so guilt-ridden and self-conscious they can’t have a sexual relationship without thinking it’s the real thing and confessing all: scarcely are they out of the wrong bed than they’re determined to make it the right one and planning a divorce. All the parties involved talking about authenticity of feeling and agreeing that for the sake of the children everyone must be amicable and always come to Christmas dinner. And the children with another set of step-parents to take on, and the busiest Christmas Days ever, partners and children flitting here and there. Then the cycle starts again. The registry offices are full of people marrying second, third, fourth wives only because they’ve been taught that secrecy and lying are bad (inauthentic), and a flicker of feeling is registered as life-long emotion. Good Lord, in sexual matters secrecy is the only way society survives. Serena and I have really got each other going.

  At least when I left Hammertoes, I remind her, I didn’t leap straight into someone else’s arms. It was a year or two before Sebastian turned up, and very worrying ones too. I hate being without a man; I remember those early days back in Caldicott Square as part golden, but part alarming and despondent, when I had nothing and Serena had everything and I was cleaning the Primrosetti Gallery floor. But that may just be habit, and my generation. Since Sebastian’s been inside I’ve managed to get others to fit the garage door, plaster over the cracks in the bedroom ceiling, indeed have the whole place redecorated, pictures re-framed, settee re-upholstered. Sebastian did not like having workmen in the house. He felt it was a householder’s job to do these things – every man his own plumber – but he just never got round to doing them.

  ‘But what will he say when he comes out?’ asks Serena. ‘He won’t notice if the workmen aren’t still there,’ I say and we laugh.

  She says Sebastian and George had a lot in common. I ask her if she misses him and she says yes, of course: the longer people are dead the easier it is to remember the good times rather than the bad. But she still gets a pain in her stomach, and another one as if her heart was splitting when she thinks of his affair with Sandra, the rather plain and ordinary girl he left her for. Twelve years later and she’s still recalling incidents: the way he must have mocked her behind her back, took her round, all unknowing, to see the flat where his mistress lived – the betrayal and cruelty of it, when all she had done was love him.

  ‘Hang on, Serena,’ I say. ‘You had affairs too.’

  ‘They didn’t mean anything,’ she says, and then has the grace to laugh.

  Some flashy men rather like ordinary women, we agree. The ones you might think would have some glamorous trophy wife hanging on their arm occasionally go for truly dowdy partners, little brown mice who when it comes to it are bullies, requiring men to zip up their dresses and fetch their handbags which they could do perfectly well themselves; who occupy the moral high ground, reproach men for political incorrectness, put hands over their glasses and say ‘you’ve had more than enough’. We decide such women make a man feel secure, back in the nursery; only a step away from Miss Whiplash, with her high heels and whip, but socially acceptable.

  We get back to Martyn and Hattie, and we think their partnership is sound enough, and Agnieszka is probably the treasure they think she is, and we just a pair of sceptical old biddies. We have noticed, though, that since Martyn got his promotion and Hattie went back to work, he and she no longer have their long tetchy conversations about politics and ethics, but talk mostly about food, strollers and cotton buds. Perhaps with prosperity principle goes out the window: perhaps ideas need a background of poverty if they are to flourish. Comfort and lack of conviction go hand in hand.

  We quote Yeats, as our mother Wanda would have. That rough beast slouching towards Jerusalem, waiting to be born. We shiver.

  ‘The best lack all conviction,’ says Serena.

  ‘While the worst are full of passionate intensity,’ say I.

  We both wish Hattie and Martyn would get married. Not that we have set them much of an example, doing it so often. They must look at us and think why bother?

  ‘The reason our generation used to get married,’ says Serena, ‘was that it made it less likely the other one would get away.

  We couldn’t take the risk.’

  ‘But everyone’s so interchangeable these days,’ I say, ‘it hardly matters if they do. Lose one partner, find another.’ She tells me not to make such sweeping statements. People probably suffer as much as ever. I say not. If they have an uncomfortable feeling they go to a therapist and get it ironed out.

  ‘At least,’ I say, ‘you and I will have to settle for what we have: it’s pass the parcel. Cranmer for you, Sebastian for me. The one we were left with when the music stopped.’ ‘Speak for yourself,’ says Serena after a long pause.

  Chocolate-Covered Prunes

  Agnieszka hands round another box of chocolate prunes. They’ve come through the morning post, rather squashed together in their royal blue and gold cardboard box, and slightly melded together but at least separable. She won’t let Kitty have a taste. She says prunes are ‘too severe’ for baby digestions.

  When Agnieszka has finished handing round the prunes she washes her hands and takes up her sewing again. She is putting a button back onto the waistband of Martyn’s best trousers. It seems a little personal to Hattie. There’s something intimate and slightly seedy about the white banding that strengthens the flies of expensive-label suits: jeans just have zips and one button and that’s that. But it’s good to have the mending done. Agnieszka is using a thimble which seems to fascinate Martyn. He hadn’t even known what it was for, let alone called, until now.

  ‘So everything’s okay with your husband now?’ asks Martyn. ‘The supply of prunes is flowing once more?’

  Agnieszka giggles and says her husband’s little friend has been fired anyway, and she will be going home for Christmas as planned. Martyn asks if he can help arrange her ticket, but Agnieszka says no she can do it through a travel-agent friend she knows in Neasden.

  Kitty is asleep in her crib. Agnieszka keeps a firm routine. Nothing must disturb it. Some of Hattie’s friends take their babies along to dinner parties: this shocks Agnieszka greatly. They should be sleeping peacefully in familiar cots. As for toddlers playing under the table when adults are eating: she’d have the parents put in prison if she could.

  The three of them sit in front of the television with the mute on, waiting for some bearable programme to start, when the sound will go up again. They feel like a family.

  ‘I’d imagined Aurek worked from home,’ says Hattie. ‘Most of our scriptwriters do. Sitting in an attic writing films which’ll one day make him famous? And either you’ll go over there and be a midwife, or he’ll come over here and you’ll run belly-dancing classes. Isn’t that the plan?’

  ‘So many plans,’ says Agnieszka. ‘So many choices. Aurek drives for a bus company by day. In the evenings he writes. We both work hard. In Poland that is not unusual. The girl I didn’t like was one of the conductors. A really cheap dyed blonde who chewed gum. She was stealing from the passengers. Can you imagine? A little skilled pick-pocket as a bus conductor?’

  ‘I didn’t somehow picture Aurek as a bus driver,’ says Hattie, taken aback, and Martyn shakes his head slightly. Hattie’s snobby origins are showing.

  ‘In Poland we earn a living how we can,’ says Agnieszka.

  ‘The road sweepers are trained accountants, the station porters are doctors. There is much training and little work. That is the legacy of the Soviet Union. And that is why I am here, looking after Kitty, not at home.’

  Hattie feels a little cheated. A bus driver! She has been misled. There’s been no mention of the mother or the sick sister lately, either. Hattie has checked Agnieszka’s post-office savings book. She saves: she does not spend. There are quite a few thousands in it. Once you secretly read someone else’s letter there is no end to what you may go on to do. Sometimes Hattie even slips into Hilary’s office if Hilary is out of the building and runs through her emails. But Hilary seems to be behaving herself. Her favourite Internet sites, according to Google, are mostly to do with Tourette’s and dating agencies. Poor Hilary!

  ‘It’s hard for writers here too,’ says Martyn.

  ‘True enough,’ says Hattie. ‘People can spend years of their lives writing a book and then not be even able to sell it.’ ‘Then they are fools,’ says Agnieszka, briskly. ‘But I like Aurek to be writing a film script because it keeps him out of mischief in the evenings. One day he will finish his script and we will get married.’

  ‘I thought you were married already,’ says Hattie and even Martyn looks startled. ‘We are married in the eyes of God and our friends,’ says Agnieszka. ‘That is all that matters.’

  ‘But you told us you were married,’ Hattie protests. It’s one thing to offer free phone calls to Poland for a husband, but for a boyfriend it doesn’t feel right.

  ‘You two live as if you are married,’ says Agnieszka, ‘but you are not, so you know how it is. A certificate makes no difference, except to immigration authorities.’

  And she hands round more chocolate prunes, though it means she has to put down her sewing. She offers to make hot chocolate for everyone. She is very good at hot chocolate. She uses cocoa powder which she boils with sugar and water in the bottom of the pan until the starch is cooked and only then pours on hot frothy milk. Martyn’s cheeks are positively plump these days, and Agnieszka has been out with Hattie and together they bought Hattie some size 10 skirts, though the size 6 blouses seem still to fit. Breast-feeding has altered her shape. Perhaps she didn’t stop gradually enough: she had to take pills to dry up the milk.

  Hattie has given Agnieszka a couple of dresses which no longer seemed to hang properly on her. Agnieszka doesn’t wear them in the house – she says she doesn’t want Kitty getting confused – she puts them on when Kitty is asleep and before going to classes, if there are classes. But she goes out with exercise pads and textbooks and comes back with them so to think anything else may be paranoiac.

  But while Agnieszka is out in the kitchen Hattie can’t help saying:

  ‘That’s a bit unsettling. Perhaps she goes out to visit a boyfriend and doesn’t go to classes at all?’

  ‘Well,’ says Martyn, ‘it wouldn’t be the end of the world if she did. She does her work perfectly well.’

  But Hattie is still not reassured. She wants Agnieszka to give Kitty all her emotional attention. Looking after Kitty can’t be just something Agnieszka gets paid to do: it needs to be her life’s work. But Hattie can see she’s being absurd. If Agnieszka has a boyfriend then at least it’s unlikely that she will make a play for Martyn, or Martyn will be tempted to make a play for her. She is shocked to find such a thought even crossing her mind. It’s primitive.

  While they are dressing Kitty one morning – Agnieszka puts on one sock, Hattie the other: it’s a game Kitty loves – Hattie asks casually after Agnieszka’s Christmas travel arrangements, and Agnieszka looks sad and says she won’t be going to Poland after all. Her mother and her sister are flying out to live with her aunt in Sydney, where the climate will be better and the medical care is very good. They have got residential visas on compassionate grounds. She will miss going home to see her friends and the rest of the family, but her boyfriend will be coming over to see her instead, just for a few days. So she’ll only need to take one week off after all. Hattie says boldly that the boyfriend can stay with them if they’re stuck, though they’ll be rather crowded. Kitty’s cot can go into hers and Martyn’s room for a change. But Agnieszka says it’s okay, they can go to her friend in Neasden where there’s more space.