Martyn calls home to say he will be late and Agnieszka answers with her soft familiar slightly exotic, slightly accented voice. Whenever he hears it he thinks of the muscles working beneath the soft thin skin of her belly, and has to blot the image out. No, Hattie isn’t home yet and Agnieszka needs to get to her English class. Kitty is bathed, in bed and asleep. But of course she’ll stay until someone gets back. Luckily he hears Hattie come in to the house with her normal ‘Oh my God, am I late again?’ and can get back to his work with a clear conscience. ‘Europe’s post-Christian society’ becomes ‘Europe’s multi-faith community’.

  If Harold would only put the paperwork in hand to get him some more money – Martyn is after all effectively doing Harold’s job – they could afford to let Agnieszka go. The trouble with Agnieszka is that she’s always so much there. He likes her to be there in one way, but he also doesn’t like the shock of pleasure when he hears her voice. He is confused. He really would like to be alone with Hattie sometimes. And of course with Kitty. But if Hattie not Agnieszka were to look after Kitty, Kitty would soon stop being a contented, non-crying, routine-adapted baby and turn into the bundle of demands and reproaches of the kind his friends spawn, and there would be no domestic peace anyway, and Hattie would become argumentative and mean again. So Agnieszka will have to stay.

  Meanwhile, at home in Pentridge Road, Agnieszka has left for class wearing Hattie’s dress, the red silk one which now sits too tightly on Hattie’s hips but looks really good on Agnieszka. Martyn won’t be back for an hour or so. Kitty is sleeping soundly. The baby likes her new stroller and it can be made really safe against wind and weather by a transparent plastic screen; this is just as well. Agnieszka thinks that rain needs to be ignored, and babies need fresh air and that changes of temperature do no harm. The winter is setting in and Hattie’s instinct is to curl up under duvets and turn the central heating high, but Agnieszka thinks it’s healthier to put on an extra layer of clothes and allow the body to adapt to the weather, rather than trying to adapt the weather to the baby.

  The house is quiet and still, and very neat. Even the pot plants seem to have been trained to grow straight: so many offshoots this side, so many that. Hattie goes into Agnieszka’s room. Kitty is lying on her back in the cot, asleep, bathed, pink and clean, little arms flung upwards in trust. Hattie decides to look for Agnieszka’s passport. She wants to know, exactly what she is not sure, but she wants to know.

  It is not in the drawer of the bedside table, not in the chest of drawers, not in the plastic folder marked ‘Documents’ – which mostly has membership of belly-dancing clubs and store loyalty cards and application forms for English classes folded neatly inside – it is under the mattress. Well, you’re not going to lose it there, are you, especially if you’re the one who turns the mattress.

  It’s a dark red document rather larger than the neat European one, positively handsome and proud, with a gold saltire crossing through the cover and words in Cyrillic script. Hattie opens it, and there is a photograph of Agnieszka, quiet and demure. What it reveals about her Hattie cannot say because she does not read Cyrillic script. She knows enough to tell that this is not a Polish passport but somewhere further east, outside the European Community. She imagines it will be the Ukraine, because of the stamp on the packet of chocolate prunes. She sees nothing that looks like an English stamp inside the document, that might go with a visa or work permit.

  Hattie decides it’s of no account. Hattie is on the side of the dispossessed, of asylum seekers, of victims everywhere. It was how she was brought up. She will defend Agnieszka to the death, or certainly from the Immigration Office. She knows Martyn will too, though she won’t tell him about the passport, as she didn’t about the Ukrainian stamp. He might start making a fuss. It is simply unfair that to be born five miles the wrong side of a certain border – it could be as little as a yard – can make a difference to where a person works or lives. She slides the passport back under Agnieszka’s mattress and makes herself a cup of really strong, really black coffee. Agnieszka doesn’t approve of coffee because of the caffeine but Hattie thinks she will treat herself. It is really nice to have the house to herself.

  Then the phone rings and her peace is shattered. It’s Babs in a state of hysteria. What shall she do? To terminate or not to terminate? that is the question. Babs is thirty-nine. If she doesn’t have this baby perhaps she can never get pregnant again.

  ‘You didn’t have much trouble this time,’ says Hattie.

  ‘But that was an illicit affair,’ says Babs, and she tells Hattie that women are much more likely to get pregnant if they’re not meant to be doing it. Something to do with excitement and emotional upset and eggs dropping down the Fallopian tube. It’s why rape victims get pregnant more than the national average for reproductive intercourse.

  ‘That may be too much information,’ says Hattie.

  Babs complains that Hattie is very bad at thinking about what she doesn’t want to think about, and that the likelihood of eggs dropping when she’s with Alastair is rather small. She’s very fond of him, he’ll make an excellent father – but he’s no egg dropper, and he’s bound to want her to stay home with the baby and proper help is so hard to find. Then Babs asks Hattie how she is getting on with Agnieszka and Hattie says just fine. Babs says, ‘Of course I may have imagined all that stuff about her playing footsie with Alastair under the table, I was in such a state at the time. Have you noticed how easy it is to suspect others of doing what one’s doing oneself?’

  ‘What, playing footsie with your lover under the table?’

  ‘It did happen once or twice,’ Babs admits. ‘While Tavish was editing the film. Alastair asked him round and it would have looked suspicious for me to turn him away. That was why Alastair got so upset. His own dinner table, that sort of thing. But he’s all right now. And I do owe the poor man something.’

  ‘Probably you do,’ says Hattie. She can tell which way Babs’s mind is going. If she does have the baby she will try to bribe Agnieszka to come to her. Babs has unlimited money and a splendid house. Hattie hopes Agnieszka would be loyal, but you never know. So she just says Babs had lots of time to think about it, and Babs says, well, no, at three months the soul comes in and then it’s too late, after that it’s murder.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ asks Hattie, surprised.

  ‘The doctrine of ensoulment,’ says Babs. ‘I was brought up a Catholic and the soul comes in at three months. President Bush says it comes in at conception so there can’t be any stem cell research, but I don’t think that’s true. Alastair thinks Bush is right, and we’ve had terrible rows about it. So whatever’s done must be done secretly. You don’t have to have a paternal consent form these days, do you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Hattie. ‘But if Alastair thinks it’s his and asks for a DNA test and goes to the Courts to stop you I daresay he could.’

  ‘Don’t go there,’ says Babs and Hattie agrees it’s best not to. Babs clicks off.

  Hattie goes and looks at the sleeping Kitty. She thinks of Wanda and Lallie and Frances and Serena and it seems a great shame to cut off a branch from the tree of life, Agnieszka or not. She calls Babs back.

  ‘Babs,’ says Hattie bravely, ‘I think you should go ahead and have the baby.’

  Babs fails to realise the degree of self-sacrifice in Hattie’s decision.

  ‘It’s all very well for you,’ says Babs. ‘All that childbirth stuff’s behind you and you have Agnieszka, and you never worried about clothes or how they looked. I can’t talk now. Alastair has just come in.’

  Hattie hears Babs welcoming Alastair home, with love and effusion.

  Animals

  While Hattie and Martyn were at work one day, Agnieszka heard something scratching and miaowing at the front door and opened it to a kitten. Now the family of four, Hattie, Martyn, Kitty and Agnieszka, has another member, Silvie. Hattie calls Serena, excited and pleased.

  ‘Somehow it closes our family up from beneath,’ she says. ‘Now there’s someone younger than Kitty. I’ve always wanted a cat. It’s so pretty and funny and hides and springs out at you, bounces on all fours in the air as if it thought it was a lamb, and I’ll swear it makes jokes.’

  Serena remarks that spare stray kittens used to be a commonplace but what with the animal centres providing free neutering they have become quite a rarity in London. She hopes they’ve put cards in newsagents’ windows to the effect that a kitten has been found and Hattie says actually not. Agnieszka loves it so. Agnieszka had a cat like that back in Krakow and it makes her feel at home.

  Serena calls me up to report the conversation with Hattie. ‘I’m really surprised, Frances,’ she says. ‘Once Martyn and Hattie wouldn’t have dreamt of not at least trying to find the rightful owner, no matter how cutesy the creature was. What’s happening to them?’

  ‘Keeping the au pair happy,’ I say, ‘has become one of their major concerns. All morality vanishes.’

  I ask Serena what kind of kitten it is, and when she says from what she gathers it has long silvery hair, a flat snub nose, a squashed-up face and big round orange eyes, I say, ‘That’s a Persian and they’re expensive. What’s more, they use litter trays not the back garden, they leave hairs everywhere, they’re not very bright and will probably give Kitty asthma. A pity they called Kitty what they did, in the circumstances. Didn’t they think that one day they might want a cat?’

  I point out that confusion between maid and mistress is bad enough but now there will be confusion between child and pet as well. Those coming to the house for the first time will assume Sylvie is the child and Kitty is the animal. I warm to my theme.

  Kitty will no longer wake to birdsong, I say, just the yowling of cats in the dank backyards of Pentridge Road. I am really quite cross. I am a dog person. I also know quite a lot about cats. Hammertoes’ mother bred Persians. Going to visit was an ordeal because of the smell, and the hairs, and the sense of living amongst aliens if there were more than three of the creatures in the room at any one time. Which there would be, and in various stages of pregnancy and moult. The only time I really warmed to Hammertoes was when he once said to me sadly of his mother, ‘She loved her cats more than me,’ and I had that rush of concern common to wives, when they want to make up to their husbands all the bad things that ever happened to them, and which almost amounts to love. But it didn’t last long enough, I’m afraid. It wasn’t true love. I just made more bad, or baddish, things happen to him. He grew depressed after I left and no one wanted his scripts.

  I call Hattie on Saturday morning and say, ‘I hear you’ve got a cat,’ and she can tell from the sound of my voice I am not pleased. ‘Don’t give me a hard time, Great-Nan,’ she says. ‘It’s only a kitten. She’s so lovely and such fun, and Kitty adores her. I know all that stupid stuff about songbirds and eye disease but she’s very healthy and there aren’t any birds round here anyway.’

  I think about Sebastian, where no birds sing, and marvel at how people make prisons for themselves when there’s really no need.

  ‘Agnieszka says she’s about three months old,’ says Hattie, ‘which is just right for a new kitten. We’ve taken her to the vet and she’s had all her jabs, and Agnieszka combs her every day.’ I hope she is trying to reassure herself or me, but decide it’s just me.

  ‘And there wasn’t a notice up in the vet’s about a lost Persian kitten?’ I ask.

  ‘No,’ says Hattie flatly.

  ‘So long as Agnieszka stays,’ I say, ‘it won’t be too bad. But what happens if she goes on holiday, or leaves, or starts her belly-dancing school or her midwifery course?’

  ‘I think Agnieszka is very happy with us,’ says Hattie. ‘She says we’re the kind of family she never had.’

  ‘Isn’t she supposed to have a husband hiding somewhere, and a mother and a sick sister?’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re so against poor Agnieszka,’ says Hattie. ‘There were communication problems when she first came to us – the husband isn’t a husband but a boyfriend, and that sort of thing, and he’s a bus driver as well as a scriptwriter, and he’s coming over here to live as soon as he’s sold his script which means Agnieszka can go on working for us for ages. You know what selling scripts is like. Kitty will be old before that happens.’

  ‘Easier in London than Krakow, I imagine,’ I say.

  ‘As for the mother and the sister, they’ve emigrated to Australia,’ says Hattie. ‘Things don’t stay static in the outside world,’ she adds, suggesting (perhaps) that I’m too old ever to be au fait with what goes on.

  ‘Did you meet the boyfriend when he came over for Christmas?’ I ask.

  ‘No,’ says Hattie, ‘because he missed his flight, there was a bomb at Heathrow and flights were cancelled. We’d gone down to Serena’s by the time he turned up. And he left before we got back.’

  ‘The busman’s holiday being over. The friend in Neasden with the carrots goes on being real, however,’ I say.

  ‘She doesn’t grow carrots any more,’ says Hattie. ‘There is such a thing as the rotation of crops. The ground needs a rest, and she doesn’t believe in artificial fertilisers.’

  ‘Carrot fly can be quite a problem,’ I say, ‘especially if you don’t like to use insecticides.’

  I don’t know why I am hopping mad with her, but I am. Then she says she has to go, Agnieszka is putting lunch on the table. It’s the nearest I’ve ever got to actually having a row with her, and I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what it was about.

  I phone Serena. She suggests I come over for lunch. I say I can’t because I’m in the gallery, and she’s a forty-minute drive away. She asks how many customers I have had in today, and I say only two and they were ‘just looking’ – times are quiet – but one punter is definitely in the market for a William Bates print at £750 and will decide tomorrow. Serena says put a note in the window saying ‘Gone to Lunch’, which is nothing but the truth, and come on over, so I do. Most of my clients are regulars, and have my mobile number anyway.

  Serena is better at animals than me. After she moved to Wiltshire with George the family had a smallholding. They kept Soay sheep – seven of them, small, neat, deer-like creatures whose native habitat was the Scottish Highlands. They had an elaborate family structure – top ram, second ram, favourite wife, second, third and fourth wives, grandmother. They lived in the acre field next to the farmhouse and stood upon a mini Primrose Hill in the middle of the field, made from grassed-over stone rubble from old farm buildings and soil from where space was made for the underground septic tank. Top ram would stand proudly on the summit, the others ranged behind. Top ram had impressive, strong and curly horns; second ram’s were feebler and smaller as befitted his lack of status; first wife preened and primped, second, third and fourth sulked; grandmother was allowed to tag along.

  After that Serena and George accumulated geese, hens and ducks, and at one time fattened and ate – with great reluctance – two pigs. They had three dogs and two cats and at one time tropical fish. When they needed to go away together, I would be asked to come and live in and ‘look after the animals’ and such children as were still at home. And I did, but never with great enthusiasm.

  Serena had a late baby with George just after they moved out of London to the country: it was if the house was waiting to be filled. The new baby cemented the relationship all right – but the cement was not necessarily what George wanted. He’d rather have freedom and flexibility. He was fifty-five by then and had had enough of children. She was forty-six. She asked her doctor whether it was safe to have so late a baby, and he said his mother had been forty-eight when he was born and age had nothing to do with anything. So that was that.

  Like so many city dwellers in the panicky early seventies, George had wanted to get out of the city – the nuclear threat was building. OPEC had got its act together, the price of petrol was approaching 50 pence a gallon, there’d been a three-day week – during the course of which productivity paradoxically increased – and a firemen’s strike – again, the number of fires reported was cut by a third – and rumour had it that ration books were being printed.

  And as Serena had observed to George’s fury, in Harrods’ hosiery department there were only two shades of tights on sale. Mention of Harrods always infuriated George, as it does Martyn today. Same fury, against the capitalist evil, against sumptuary sin. The wish was to be associated with the wretched of the earth not the rich and powerful. A Harrods bag was seen as an offence against humanity, and Serena had quite wilfully got herself a Harrods account card. Hattie, having more conscience than Serena, would not dream of owning such a thing, even if her credit rating allowed her to.

  George had fled to the countryside, to Grovewood, a farmhouse, still with its old barns and chimneys as in a child’s drawing, creepered and rose-covered, an ideal home set amidst open fields. Serena had followed him. It made little difference to her whether the desk she wrote upon was in the town or in the country. But it was nice if it was not whipped from under her pen and sold to a stranger. That was less likely to happen now. George wanted to give up the antique business, live next to nature, own and till his own land, have animals, start painting again – and where George went Serena would go too, without argument. She wrote, and the cheques flowed in.

  He had just not expected, any more than she had, to have another baby. It meant for George the end of a peaceful daydream of rural life. Now it was all bottles and breastfeeding and baby chatter and another round of au pairs and household helps. There was Maureen Parks, the seamstress, who came in to turn the sheets sides to middle, and ended up dressmaking for Serena, as talented as anyone you would find at a Paris couturier. There were the country girls, busty and dumpy, Mary, Judith, Anne, Jean – local girls with local foibles, which included pederast boyfriends, kleptomania, narcolepsy – let no one think the countryside is less eventful than the town. That has never been my experience, nor Serena’s. She and I both live in small towns now, not open countryside. This way you get a kind of median existence, the synergy of boredom and too-much-happening divided, flickering from one to the other.