Hattie calls up her grandmother and says the child-minding emergency is over: Agnieszka’s holidays will coincide with Dinton & Seltz’s Christmas break, and it is agreed that everyone will go down to stay with Serena for Christmas. Cranmer will cook some wild Christmas dinner – he disapproves of turkeys, but likes to bake hares and ducks and pheasants alongside each other in the Aga, so the tastes mix and meld; there will be a Christmas tree which Kitty will love, and a good and flavoursome and more spacious time will be had by all than it would at Pentridge Road or Frances’s cottage.

  Coming Over

  Serena calls me up and tells me she has a gap between deadlines; she can make time for a visit to Sebastian; will I come with her? She’ll get the tickets. We can go club class and stay at the Amstel Intercontinental which Serena says has all the trimmings, and she’s been around a bit.

  I point out that the Bijlmer has to have at least three days’ notice but she says she’s already called them up and wheedled them. She’s a known visitor and they have stretched a point, we can both go, and we’re on the list for Friday. A limo, she promises, will take us from Schiphol to the prison, wait the two hours it takes to get in and out of the place, and take us back to the Amsterdam Amstel.

  The visit itself is one hour – the rest is gruesome formalities, which involve finding names on lists, identification checks, on-the-spot photos, a lot of clanking doors, scanning irises, taking off shoes and belts for inspection, the inside of your mouth looked into to see if you have drugs stashed in a false tooth, finding out how to work the lockers into which all portable belongings must be placed, and waiting for the prisoner to be located and brought forward into the falsely cheerful room in which visits are conducted.

  I expect the whole world to be like the Bijlmer most of the time, that is to say tiresome with only occasional bits of it easy, so life falls into place in the pattern of my expectations. Serena has higher hopes of destiny so it obliges. If I call up the Bijlmer Visitors’ Programme I sound whiny and cry and nothing happens: it will be decided I have given too short notice for a visit. Serena is game for it all; she just bounces in and gets her way.

  After the visit, which will be emotionally exhausting, and I will cry a little, and Serena will bounce, for this is my husband, not hers, though she is fond enough of Sebastian to visit him as often as she can, why then we will retire to the Amstel and its glories. And I will be glad she did not listen to me when I said, ‘Oh no, I can get there and back by easyJet within the day; honestly, Serena, it’s easier. I will meet you there.’

  True, once we are in the Amstel we will probably not have the freedom to open the windows, since it is the tendency of too many guests to jump out of them; and we will be observed and talked about behind our backs by waiters and chambermaids, and the limo driver will tell everyone where we have been, but we will not be locked in, and out of the windows we will see the canals of Amsterdam and the plane trees that line them, and be conscious of history and of civilisation working slowly ever forward towards a destined future.

  We will not have to look out at concrete and wire and grey depression – it’s the ugliness of prisons that most depresses – or hear nothing but the sounds of clanging gates and the clatter of boots on uncarpeted floor, and the distant sound of a hundred televisions tuned to different stations, and the sudden echoey shouts and odd yells of the mad and almost mad.

  Rather, we will listen to the sound of Vivaldi from the TV as it welcomes us with our names – Welcome to the Amstel, Miss Hallsey-Coe, and Welcome Mrs Watt. It’s almost as if the TV itself knew and recognised and cared about us.

  Today, after the visit to the Bijlmer, a bellboy carries two of Sebastian’s paintings – oil, stretched canvas but without frames – up to our suite. The prison generously allowed us to take them out. We get a glimpse of them when we are going in, and are told we can take them with us when we leave. They have no doubt been inspected and screened for drugs. Such traffic can be outwards as well as inwards. One painting is of a black bed against a plain grey background. The other is a pink plastic moulded chair against more grey. These from Sebastian, who normally does riotous landscapes when he’s miserable and bold colour-field work when he’s cheerful. The paintings come as a surprise: I think I like them.

  ‘All I have to look at seems grey,’ says Sebastian, when he tells me during the visit that the paintings can come out even if he can’t. ‘It’s all I can paint, and a few objects interrupting it. I think my sight memory must be going.’ I remind him that Van Gogh painted a good chair or two.

  ‘Not moulded plastic,’ says Sebastian, rather crossly.

  He has another year inside to go. He looks pale and depressed and shifty-eyed. He says everyone gets to look like that because they’re always looking over their shoulder. Serena says later that the paintings look like Dutch Interiors, and we laugh a little nervously, because so they do. They’re detailed and careful. I won’t try to sell them in the gallery: we’ll keep them for his next exhibition.

  ‘Tell me,’ asked a suspicious immigration official at Schiphol airport the other day, putting up my name on his screen, ‘why do you keep making these short visits to Amsterdam and back?’

  ‘I go to visit my husband in prison,’ I say.

  ‘Good for you,’ he says and smiles in the most friendly fashion, and I am touched, and feel less disgraced.

  If Hattie were in my place she would have to say, ‘I go to visit my partner in prison,’ and it wouldn’t sound nearly so good. But of course she never would be in my place.

  Suspicions

  Babs has decided she can’t have the baby when she’s not sure who the father is. She has opted for a termination which Alastair doesn’t know about. Hattie hasn’t told Martyn because Babs has sworn her to secrecy, and because Martyn might just think it was his moral duty to tell Alastair what was going on.

  Hattie is horrified to realise that flitting into her mind and out as fast as she can push it is the realisation she doesn’t really want anything to stand in the way of Babs’s termination. If Babs has the baby she might try to poach Agnieszka back. But that surely is being absurdly paranoiac. Agnieszka is an au pair; Babs can afford a pukkah nanny. But Hattie can see that if she is to offer proper advice to Babs she will have to work hard at being impartial, and not let self-interest stand in the way of duty to a friend. ‘Oh Babs!’ she says. ‘That’s a terrible decision to have to make. You’ve got to be sure that’s what you really want to do.’ She is pleased with her own moral rectitude.

  Hattie has been out with Martyn to buy a ring. Now she is working they can afford one. Not an engagement ring, not a wedding ring – she gets furious when Martyn suggests it – just a ring to celebrate the fact that her hands are white and smooth and no longer red with housework and eczema-pitted from washing-up liquid. The ring is perfectly simple, costs about £100, and goes upon the middle finger of her right hand. Her promotion hasn’t come through: Neil says he has to get the paperwork together, but Hattie need have no worries it’s on its way.

  That evening, when Agnieszka is out at classes, Hattie notices an unusual stamp on some wrapping paper which has been torn up and thrown in the bin. It’s the rather inadequate packaging which went around the squashed box of chocolate prunes. The stamp is large, pretty and unusual. A rim of flowers surrounds a painting of an old monastery. ‘UKRAINA’, it says.

  Hattie puts the paper back where she found it. Well, she thinks, Aurek could have gone on holiday to the Ukraine. A busman’s holiday perhaps. Where exactly is the Ukraine? She is not sure. She looks it up on the Internet. No, it is not in the European Union. Warsaw’s just a little way from the Ukrainian border. The bus route might even take Aurek daily from one nation to the next, though there would be an annoying wait at the border. Or perhaps they just let buses through automatically? It’s not as if anyone was at war. Aurek, giver of prunes, posted the parcel in one post office rather than another, that’s all.

  Hattie goes to find the box, and sees that the allegedly ‘Polish’ chocolate prunes, posted in the Ukraine, come from the Czech Republic anyway. Supposing Agnieszka is lying when she says she comes from Poland? What difference does it make? Well, if she was born in the Ukraine she will have to have a visa. Does Agnieszka have a visa? Possibly not. Possibly Agnieszka is an illegal immigrant. Does she care? It would not be good for Martyn’s political career should the matter ever come to public attention. But perhaps it won’t, and in the meanwhile Kitty’s growing curls down the back of her neck. Miniature reddish ringlets. She will have Hattie’s hair.

  Hattie decides, no, she does not care. Agnieszka’s national status is Agnieszka’s business. No, she won’t tell Martyn. What you don’t know you can’t mind. If she hadn’t seen the stamp she wouldn’t now be worrying about these imponderables. Rewind, rewind, rewind, erase, delete.

  Meanwhile, in Martyn’s dreams Agnieszka looks less of an abstract version of the household help, and more and more like the real Agnieszka. It doesn’t stop there. One night she comes towards the bed where he lies with Hattie. She wears no clothes. Her little breasts bounce. She picks up the ring which Hattie takes off before she goes to bed and slips it on her own finger. Even in his dream he can tell it is the third finger of the left hand. His mother wore a wedding band, his father did not. His father thought rings for men were dangerous, they might catch in machinery. His father had known it happen and the firm concerned would not pay compensation. They claimed if employees wore rings it was at their own risk, and the Courts backed them up. Martyn realises he is awake again. What is the matter with him? He turns towards Hattie and strokes her thigh and she sighs and almost without waking opens up for him. It is Hattie he loves, and after Hattie, Kitty. The rest is nothing.

  They have to be quiet, because Agnieszka is just the other side of the wall, but they’re used to that.

  Frances In Love

  Something quite extraordinary and unexpected has happened. I am in love. It is absurd and ridiculous and to the young will even seem rather revolting, but nevertheless it has happened. All the old signs are there, the sense that you are breathing some different, fresher air, that the trees and the leaves and the clouds are involved in some cosmic, hilarious game which suddenly includes you, the intimation of infinite possibility, the awareness that you are only fully alive in the loved one’s company – trust and doubt, fear and conviction, all mixed up together and exhilarating. It would be pathetic if it wasn’t mutual. But it is.

  Not that the word ‘love’ has passed between us: it is too easy a word, and wrongly used so much of the time. He hasn’t said so, I haven’t said so, we both just know it. He seems to assume I will live with him for the rest of our lives. He doesn’t know how old I am: he has not asked and I haven’t told him. Nor do I have any idea how old he is. It seems irrelevant. He is grizzled, like some bear, that I do know. He comes from Canada, also like a bear. He is not like anyone else. He is larger, for one thing. Six foot four, I would imagine and wide with it. He lumbers. He fills my small gallery with his presence. I am afraid if he moves something will break. I have some nice spun glass pieces on a display table, and they are fragile. Sebastian started out at six foot but age and trouble have taken away two inches at least. I am five foot four and on a different scale from him, so I don’t think the detail of me is particularly noticeable to this bear, which is probably helpful.

  His name is Patrick. He is of Irish extraction. He emigrated to Vancouver in the fifties. He made a fortune logging in Canada. He owned and destroyed probably as many trees as Susan could see stars when she looked through her wrongly focused telescope in those last days in New Zealand, while Serena studied, and I played childishly with my private parts and longed for this man of all men, it now becomes clear.

  He tells me he lives in a log cabin but I think he probably overplays its loggishness. He also seems to have a palace in Italy which houses lost children. I think he feels bad about all the trees he has cut down, and now that he is bored with the business, and anyway the government is taking too much interest, he tries to make amends, but he would not dream of saying so. He is not the kind to talk about his feelings or expect too much respect for them. They are his own: he will put up with them.

  He came into my gallery in Bath at eleven o’clock on Tuesday morning and tried to buy it. Not just the paintings but everything, buildings, fittings, fixtures, goodwill and all. He said he was bored with trees, nature’s handiwork, and wanted to look at paintings, man’s handiwork. And woman’s too, he added, looking at me sideways in case I was a feminist sensitive. He was quick, very quick. He knew what went on in the world.

  He liked Bath: a noble city. If he bought he would hang the paintings of local artists for free. I am reminded of Sally Ann Emberley and her film producer and how everyone laughed. Perhaps the world has grown up and no one will laugh.

  He proposes to buy me out lock stock and barrel for £550,000. That would certainly get Sebastian and me out of trouble. He was very precise as to the sum. It was just about its market value: he was giving nothing away. He sat there in my gallery and made these extraordinary propositions, and broke the chair he was sitting on. It was a ridiculous spindly thing.

  We talked about our life and loves and fortunes through lunch and through tea and on to supper time when he looked at his watch at seven o’clock and said it was late and he would be back in the morning. I locked up and he helped with the grille and he walked me to the door of the Royal Crescent Hotel where he was staying and sent me home in a taxi. In a perfect world he would have seen me home but it is not a perfect world: he sent me home.

  I told myself the man’s mad, and who could live with such a talkative man, and anyway I was Penelope to Sebastian’s Ulysses.

  He was there when I opened up, soon after ten. He said I was ten minutes late and that was no way to run a business, he’d better buy it from me and then I could stroll in whenever I liked. I said no. He went on talking until eleven o’clock, twenty-four hours after we’d first set eyes on each other, when he said ‘that’s enough talk’ and stopped and we just sat there and I pottered and saw a few customers, none of whom bought anything, and he watched me and occasionally smiled and I thought who could live with such a silent man? Already we had assumed that ‘living with’ was an option.

  He had been married once: she had died. That was twelve years ago to the day. That, he thought, was appropriate mourning time after a marriage of thirty-two years. This man made instant decisions. ‘This is the day!’ and it was. ‘The tree will fall that way!’ he’d cry and point and they’d jump and it would, and just as well or they’d all be dead. That I suppose is the art of successful logging. That and jumping from trunk to trunk as the logs tumble down the river to the port. He had a limp in one leg and a crook in his arm from being crushed between floating tree trunks.

  And he’d walked into this small art gallery in Bath and seen a woman with white hair in a Pre-Raphaelite cloud, and a good figure, and gauzy scarves, and just assumed she had been sent to join his life because the time was ripe. Why me? I have no idea. Were we meant?

  Something else extraordinary. You know I said he was of Irish extraction. He told me about his brother Curran who had died in a pub brawl way back. He’d been a great musician with bow and fiddle. Patrick himself had gone off to Vancouver and made a fortune. The brother had gone to London and sung in the Underground, Charing Cross Station mostly, and died. A strange world, he said.

  Yes, I said, a strange world, and I was so frightened I refused to see this Patrick the next day or the next or the next. I cannot bear the patterns life makes, so that nothing is ever over. Do I have to tell Lallie she has an uncle? ‘I don’t think I can find the time to see him,’ is all she’d say. ‘I have a concert.’ She moves in this world of liquid sound: it doesn’t seem to have much to do with the rest of us.

  I take it back. I am not in love. I have been shocked back into sanity. I am Sebastian’s wife and that is how I will stay. I am so sorry, everyone.

  I did take his card, though, as I sent him on his way.

  Agnieszka’s Passport

  Christmas has come and gone. There were twenty-three round Serena and Cranmer’s table; crackers, jokes, and gifts around the Christmas tree, and every bed and sofa in the house occupied. Martyn feels less out of place than once he did. He’d begun by finding Hattie’s family noisy, self-opinionated, socially suspect and wholly out of touch with reality. Serena’s money has cushioned the lot of them and made them soft. Now he feels he is one of them: he would like to be married and have more children.

  He would like to have a family wedding with Hattie in a white dress, and speeches, but he can see this is out of the question. Want must be his master, as his mother was fond of saying. ‘Want this, want that. Want must be your master.’ Martyn’s mother came from a Catholic background, and Martyn’s father was an atheist and went to his own wedding in a state of protest, refusing to join in the prayers, kneel or sing the hymns, though putting on the bride’s ring and allowing himself to be blessed. So the Arkwright family story goes.

  Martyn is staying late at the office. It’s a Friday night. This month’s issue of Devolution goes to press in a couple of hours. He is re-writing a colleague’s article on Europe. There is no time to ask the colleague, Toby Holliday, to do it himself. Toby is one of those writers who deliver at the very last moment and then switch off their mobiles in case they are asked for re-writes. If the article goes to press with unapproved alterations Toby will storm about and shout and demand that someone’s balls become garters. In this case it will be Martyn’s balls, but Martyn has no choice, the responsibility rests with him: Harold has gone on a two-week ‘sabbatical’. Toby’s piece is a eulogy to the New Europe, which is fine – Devolution is pro-Europe in word, thought and spirit – but needs to be done with more subtlety or the text just becomes laughable. Martyn is racing through the lines, changing words like ‘total’ to ‘somewhat’, ‘fabulous’ to ‘pleasing’ and ‘triumph’ to ‘positive outcome’.