None of the Grovewood animals were truly sought after: no one went out of their way to assemble them – they just turned up, like Sylvie. Animals are often rendered homeless – owners fall ill, die, get put in prison, run out of money, run off – and what happens next is usually the blow to the head, the bag in the river, unless soft-hearted people like Serena and George come along. The old lady who owned the Soay sheep died; a local farmer rounded them up – no easy matter: Soays like to run, and run fast – and dumped them in the Grovewood field, with a brief instruction as to how they were to be fed. They needed sheep-feed daily, and salt licks.

  The bustling hen-house started with two miserable hens rescued from a battery farm – sold off to passers-by as a profitable alternative to slaughtering. They lived at first in the back of the garden shed, terrified of light, suffering from agoraphobia, but eventually ventured out, and became brave, bold and bad-tempered, as if they were feminists trying to make up for their years of oppression. George brought in a cockerel, to return them to their natural state, and sure enough they turned into little bustling chirpy broody things, who quickly produced a new race of chicks. So a proper formal hen-house had to be built. Then it seemed only sensible to add extensions for unwanted geese, found wandering, or the ducks who just flew into the pond one day, and stayed.

  Poor little Sylvie, I must not be so resentful of her. I wouldn’t mind a puppy, but Hugo wouldn’t like it. Serena has no animals at all now she’s with Cranmer. Cats make him sneeze: dogs are a millstone. He is quite right. But ties, Serena argues, are a good thing. After the children have grown there has to be some shape to the day: animals provide it. Dusk comes, and the poultry has to be bribed or cajoled into the hen house for fear of the fox: food has to be put out in rain, hail or blizzard. The animal feed we fetched in sacks from the warehouse through the eighties, and put out morning and evening in the troughs, we later found out was foul stuff indeed. We thought it was innocent grain meal, but it turned out to be laced with ground-up animal corpses.

  A new regulation came into force. Sheep had by law to be dipped once a year: thoroughly doused, heads under and all, in a strange dark-metallic, bluey-green liquid provided in big cans by the Ministry of Agriculture, to prevent scabies and parasites. We couldn’t easily herd our half-wild creatures into a truck, to take them down to the official dipping centre, so we doused them ourselves. That is to say George dug a pit, lined it with concrete, poured in the mixture, got friends and family to catch the sheep one by one – four people and one dog to do each – and bring it to George who would hurl it into the pit and push its head under with a pole. There was a lot of splashing and shouting and cheering and the sheep would emerge shaking and furious.

  We would come over from twenty miles away, Sebastian and I, to help with the catching. George wore thick rubber gloves, but took very little notice of the skull and crossbones painted in red and black on all sides of the cans. He did not believe officialdom ever knew its arse from its elbow, and he was more right than we believed in those blithe days. The silvery-blue pool was almost neat organophosphates: it lay open to birds and bees, foxes and voles, until George got round to draining it and hosing it out into the water-table.

  Serena sometimes claims that it was contact OPs which drove George mad, damaged his heart, rendered him paranoiac, so that she his own wife became a focus of hatred not love and ate away into his moral being, so that finally he chose a mistress over her. I am not so sure. He was fairly difficult even before the OPs got him, though I daresay they didn’t help.

  I sometimes dream of that oily pool in the field at Grovewood, silky, dangerous and still, surrounded by green fronds, nettles and cow-parsley. Hattie dreams of it too, but at least I never let her go near it. I was responsible enough for that.

  The Christening

  Colleen’s baby Deborah is christened. Hattie calls me and reports on the ceremony. ‘It was so pretty,’ she says. ‘The priest held a candle and the baby watched it: its little face glowed. I’d forgotten how small really little babies are: just tiny scraps of life. Kitty’s getting so heavy and sturdy.’

  ‘Martyn went with you to a christening?’ I ask, surprised.

  ‘Yes, he did,’ she says, as if this change in his habits was of no account. ‘Agnieszka said Colleen’s baby was too small: the water from the font would be icy cold, but for once she was wrong. The baby didn’t cry one bit.’

  ‘Perhaps someone boiled a kettle in the vestry and added that,’ I say, wondering why Agnieszka had gone along too.

  But perhaps just to push Kitty in her stroller.

  ‘That doesn’t sound very blessed,’ says Hattie, shocked.

  Atheists are easily shocked when the religion of others is at stake.

  ‘I daresay it’s the thought that counts,’ I say. ‘Did Agnieszka enjoy the ceremony?’

  ‘I think so. Kitty did. She gazed at the candle as if it were meant for her. But then Agnieszka was holding her. If it’s me she just wriggles and dickers.’

  ‘I expect you still smell of mother’s milk,’ I say, ‘and she wants to get at it.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear that, Gran,’ she says.

  I am in her good books. Promoted from Great-Nan! She’s happier now she’s back at work. She doesn’t feel the need to be mean any more. When Sebastian gets out I wonder if he will be called Great-Grandpapa, as a special treat – a final acceptance of him into the family after twenty years – or at least Great-Grandpa, and I certainly hope not Great-Gramps.

  I am still reeling from the advent and disappearance of Patrick from my life. I may not have been giving my granddaughter the full attention she needed. More warning bells should have sounded in my head at what she told me next; not that I suppose Hattie would have taken any notice.

  ‘Agnieszka did something so strange and wonderful,’ Hattie says. ‘She took a piece of fern from the vase of flowers, and washed its stalk carefully and pinned it to Kitty’s dress before we went along. It’s an old Polish custom. It signifies rebirth.’

  ‘But it wasn’t Kitty that was being christened,’ I say. ‘It was your friend’s baby.’

  ‘I thought it was charming, and so did Martyn.’ Martyn thought it was charming: he who so loathes superstition?

  But Serena points out to me later that people who loathe things a lot can suddenly find they love the very same things a lot. It is not necessarily undue influence from Agnieszka. More likely it is simply a mild occurrence of a process Jung called enantiodromia. It is St Paul on the road to Damascus when a light falls from Heaven and the persecutor suddenly becomes the Christian. We wonder if Martyn the severe rationalist will turn into Martyn the new-age guru and laugh and decide it is unlikely, but he will have to be watched.

  Hattie chatters on about the christening and Father Flanahan, who was married: I said I didn’t know priests could be married and she says yes, if say they’re married Church of England priests who convert to Catholicism on matters of principle – like the women-priests issue – they can keep their wives. She, Martyn and Agnieszka and Father Flanahan had a conversation about this outside the church, after the ceremony. Martyn said he found all this a tiny bit hypocritical, but Father Flanahan didn’t seem to mind.

  ‘He seemed glad to talk about it,’ says Hattie. ‘How he talked and talked, and Agnieszka said she’d like to come along on Sunday mornings to Mass, if that was okay with us. We said, of course. What else could we say? You can’t stand between people and their religion, can you, not even if you didn’t know they had any, and had been brought up in a Communist country?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Not at the expense of the ironing.’

  ‘The funniest thing happened,’ says Hattie. ‘Father Flanahan asked Agnieszka when she and Martyn were going to bring the baby down for a proper christening. He’d just assumed she was the mother, because she was holding her.’

  ‘But you put him right?’ I ask, and Hattie says, well actually no, it had all been rather awkward, as well as funny.

  ‘I think Martyn was a bit freaked by it. He said to Father Flanahan probably the more married priests in the Church the better, because there’d be fewer bishops abusing little boys, and I had to hurry him away.’

  Hurrying Men Away

  If Serena kicks Cranmer under the table to stop him saying the wrong thing, when she thinks he’s on the point of making some social gaffe, or they’ve stayed too late, or he’s totally ignoring some plain woman on the other side of the table, he just asks loudly why she’s kicking him under the table. So she’s given up, and when it comes to it the gaffe is usually less than she assumed.

  Cranmer is younger than Serena by a couple of decades, and our generation’s convention that you never discussed religion or politics over dinner is out of date and dull. What has replaced it is a new way of avoiding social embarrassment: so long as people of the same religious and political views gather together with others of like mind, and outsiders are kept out, why then existing opinions will be reinforced and social discourse will be agreeable. Guests can discuss anything over polenta or venison soup without fear of any unpleasantness.

  You do have to be more careful, of course, who you invite with whom: the host and hostess can be relied upon to grit their teeth and put up with other people’s views, but the same cannot be said for guests. All right for Babs and Hattie to be thick as thieves at the office, and Hattie has met Alastair on occasion, in his home, and Babs has met Martyn when he called by, but a dinner ensemble would be out of the question. Alastair’s on the right and Martyn’s on the left, and never the twain should meet. They have no desire to change their point of view.

  Cranmer’s also very much to the right in politics and I think Serena is drifting there too. She says reason is on his side, if not sentiment. I stay with the artists, who never notice anything that’s going on anyway, but by their very nature are on the left, and believe in the brotherhood of man and the abolition of Third World Debt. Who even when they are shut up in prison like Sebastian, with murderers, rapists and con men, who express themselves only through oaths, shouts and threats – ‘who are you looking at then?’ - still believe that human nature is innately good.

  On the whole, Serena maintains, women long for everything in the social and family world to be nice, for everyone to get along and love one another, and then surely all will be well. It’s catching: in the new feminised world men begin to feel the same. At Business School the focus is on elegant win-win strategies: zero-sum games are out of date. Harold will somehow forget the papers that deal with Martyn’s new post, but will speak highly and publicly of his abilities. Hattie hasn’t yet actually got her rise, though no one says an unkind word and she is obviously promoted in terms of what she’s responsible for. Babs is lost in an emotional muddle, but still hoping to upset no one. Only Hilary manages a nasty thrust or two, and she’s of the old world.

  Serena complains that aspiring writers these days get rave rejections: half a page enthusing about the submitted manuscript and only then the: ‘But I’m sorry, just not for us.’ Just let’s all get along and empathise with others, and upset no one or it will end in the Twin Towers. Martyn gets in his dig about the bishops, and Hattie has to hurry him away. She too likes things to be nice.

  In my early years I did little hurrying men away. They stayed, I went. It was the same with Serena, as she passed from home to home and bed to bed, either because we had been thrown out or couldn’t bear to stay. Longer than a weekend’s residence was unusual. Someone’s wife or permanent girlfriend was always coming home: or we had deadlines to meet, children to collect. Artists who painted me would want me to stay until the portrait was finished, but after that they moved on briskly to the next subject: and I’d pack up and go, out of the bed and onto the bare splintery boards of some studio floor, with its battered kelim rugs and oil-paint smudges; and the man still lying in the unkempt, often none too clean bed, his head already filled with visions of beauty other than mine.

  ‘In the beginning I used to tot up the number of men I’d slept with,’ Serena once said to me, ‘until I grew ashamed, and began to forget the names. I used to think you did not know what a man was like until you had been to bed with him, but I soon came to realise you’d never get to know him anyway, so that should not enter into your calculations. Not that there was ever much calculation: lust and love were motivation enough: alcohol loosened restraint – self interest did not enter in.’

  We agreed that Wanda, though so frugal sexually herself – going, we reckoned, at least fifty years without a man, from her forty-fourth year to her ninety-fourth – had somehow given us the idea that if a man wanted sex it was unkind and mean-spirited not to let him have it. And that to make emotional demands upon a man was somehow demeaning. You must not manipulate others. You must go along with what they want, because they probably know best and anyway you have better things to think about.

  Wanda spent years writing a book in tiny, tiny handwriting about the nature of the aesthetic experience and its relation to religion. My niece has it now, the papers yellowed and the edges ragged, tied up in a bundle with old-fashioned string, in a box under her bed. Perhaps someone one day will have the courage to take it out and inspect it. It may contain the world’s wisdom, who is to say? I would not be surprised.

  We talk about driving. Serena is a nervous driver and has been since her divorce from George. When she lost her faith in the destiny which had brought them together she also lost her faith that she would never be involved in a traffic accident. She began clipping kerbs and not knowing when to overtake. She has become an even more nervous passenger than driver. Her first husband’s driving techniques come back to assault her as trauma in her later years – he liked to frighten other drivers by overtaking on bends in his souped-up little Ford Popular, and teach others not to tailgate by slamming on the brakes.

  Serena relates how George once went down a motorway at 120 miles an hour, with Cranmer following in the car behind. She was Cranmer’s passenger. At the time she thought George was trying to compete with Cranmer as a rival: now she thinks George was simply trying to get away from her, not be associated with her, source of his guilt, the well-known writer and the publicity that went with her. The fact was that George had become so reluctant to be seen in public with her that 120mph was nothing. She is becoming distressed, as we still do when she talks about George, and our conversation is fifteen years on after that particular motorway incident.

  I veer the subject round to less painful topics. We talk a bit about how if you ask men not to go so fast they go faster, especially if you are married to them. You remind them of their mothers, with their ‘don’t do that, darling!’ I drive with easy confidence, except in London, where I keep looking in my back mirror, as country drivers do, and am terrified and confused by what I see behind me. How to make sense of all of that stirring, heaving traffic, with no one’s bonnets pointing in the same direction? Outside London it’s just fine: you sit in the driver’s seat and go, or sit in the passenger seat and hope the driver doesn’t ask you to navigate.

  We agree that men travel fast and nervously towards any social engagement, and more slowly on the way back. They head out as into battle, while the women prefer to appear on the step composed and unflushed, as at a Victory Ball, with their pulses beating at the normal rate.

  We further agree that Hattie and Martyn’s determination not to own a car for the sake of the planet shows their nice natures but not necessarily their common sense. They have worked out that it is cheaper to take taxis than to own a car, but the inhibition against taking taxis is very great, and until lately, anyway, Martyn’s feeling that to take a taxi is prohibited other than in dashes to the hospital or the slower progress to a funeral has been catching. Serena sometimes laments that if only she had all the money she had handed over to taxi drivers, since her psychoanalyst suggested to her that she was entitled to take taxis and she became an almost fanatical hailer of cabs even for the shortest journey, she would be unassailably wealthy.

  We talk about Agnieszka at the christening and how the priest mistook her for Kitty’s mother and Serena says, ‘The au pair’s up to something but I don’t know what.’

  I say that when the maid is mistaken for the mistress it is time for the mistress to ask the maid to leave.

  Serena says: ‘She may not leave.’

  The Boss Comes To Dinner

  Well, not exactly dinner, which sounds too candlelit and formal, and the kind of thing they do in Islington, but ‘round for a meal’. Harold lives with Debora, who is as right-thinking a person as her partner. She is a contract lawyer for the Welfare Reform Initiative – not a very exciting job but one that is exacting and responsible. They do live in Islington, not through any choosing of their own, they claim, but sheer happenstance. Debora is thinking of having a baby and would like to take a look at Hattie’s before she takes the plunge. She has had very little contact with babies to date, and although Harold has two boys from an earlier marriage they are now grown up, and have nothing to do with their father since they took offence at his leaving them when they were sixteen and seventeen.

  This estrangement from his children is a source of some distress to Harold, but not a great deal. He views himself and his life with a kind of bemused detachment, as if actually it wasn’t much to do with him at all. If Debora wants to have a baby he will go along with it, and try and get it right, and he even plans a newspaper column in which he will chart the course of new fatherhood at a later age. It is not quite right for Devolution, though a year or two down the line who can say?