In those early days Serena thought of therapists as wise, good, people who knew the rules for successful living. She thought Dr Style must know what she was doing, and when she suggested Serena move out to give George ‘space’, that’s just what Serena did, out of Grovewood to a cottage a quarter of a mile down the road. In other words she did what no woman in difficult circumstances should do – left the matrimonial home. She would still slip back into the house though, at night sometimes, and into George’s bed where he seemed glad enough to see her.

  But reports came to her that a woman in a straw hat was in the habit of sitting sketching in the side garden which she and George had made, her stool set up in the shade by the fish pool with the antique fountain which never worked, being one of George’s. This was the very pool, Serena was fond of telling me, where every year she would help tadpoles on their way to frog-maturity out of the water onto rocks to take their first breath.

  Who could this young woman be? Friends told her. She was called Sandra. She had been in George’s life for years: Serena found it hard to believe. She started divorce proceedings in the hope of bringing George back to reason, in the spirit of ‘now see what you’ve made me do’. But all she had done was play into his hands. He answered with divorce proceedings of his own. Well, he would. He had someone else waiting and he (and Sandra) wanted the house and a generous stipend from Serena. And Serena had technically deserted him, an ill man. She’d behaved like an idiot. I don’t remind her of this. Better to take her side, and wait for the fit of distress to pass. She has Cranmer now, at her side. I don’t have Sebastian.

  The fit doesn’t pass. She tells me again, as she has told it many times before, how she shrieked her distress down the telephone, one Sunday lunchtime, after George had locked her out of her house, and he and Sandra had asked ‘friends’ round, who came willingly, and he sat with Sandra, at her dining table, with her children, and the friends who had betrayed her. And how George just waited for five minutes and then said, ‘I have switched the telephone onto the loudspeaker. Everyone in this room can hear you and your ravings.’ She put the phone down, she tells me, and sat on the edge of the bed staring into space for four hours, unable to move. They had been married thirty years. Her table, her pots and pans, her dishes, her friends, her children. Her husband.

  I make her tea and Marmite toast, and she cheers up. I like it that she’s come to visit me – more often it’s I who go over to her and Cranmer. But with Cranmer there she can’t go on and on about George the way she does when we’re alone. He would be hurt. He thinks George is safely in the past, and if Serena were more like me so he would be.

  It’s Sunday: the gallery is closed. We’re in my crowded little cottage, all mullioned windows, chintz chairs and steep and narrow stairs, and she can’t sweep around as she likes to do. If she does she’ll break something. Sebastian and I are used to it, as people who live in small spaces quickly become, but Serena’s rooms at home are high and wide. The mid-Victorians were expansive in their buildings, full of aspirations for the future. My predecessors in this house were peasants, who huddled against weather and dark, misfortune and pestilence.

  I can see that if Patrick had come to the house that evening it would have seemed far too small for him, used as he was to Alaskan forests and Italian palazzi. The only square inches of unoccupied space are in the studio where Sebastian worked, built as an extension out the back, which is high and spacious enough. And I couldn’t have asked Patrick there in case the ghost of Sebastian materialised.

  Serena’s car will collect her in three hours or so, she says. She asks for more Marmite toast and I give it to her. Her chauffeur wanted to go into Bath with his wife to shop, she tells me, so she obliged him by asking him to drive her to visit me, though I think her real reason is just to talk about George when Cranmer isn’t there.

  Serena maintains today that as George grew older he also grew out of his mind. Many men do, in my experience. Life does not come up to their expectations: they grow older, and disappointed. At fifty they realise others have passed them by, made more money, won more respect. Their sexual drive fades and the self-esteem that goes with it. They take to litigation and shake their fists at other drivers.

  It’s not exclusively a male trait. As women behave more and more like men, deny the physical distinction between female physiology and that of the male, take testosterone to make them assertive, defy their menstrual cycle, regulate their moods with drugs (doctors’ or otherwise) and join the career stakes, so will the same thing happen to them. They will sue for sexual discrimination, become aggressive on the road. It is more fun and rewarding than being timid and obliging.

  Debora, from what Hattie tells me, is on that particular road. Live like a man, suffer like a man. Come fifty she will be bored by her career, will have failed to become managing director, write a novel anyone can remember, will have a niece and nephew or so to buy presents for if she’s lucky, not if she isn’t. Christmas dinner will be in an hotel with ageing friends and false jollity.

  A man in a similar position is at least likely to have a wife and children tucked away in a nice home, and can fall back upon their company and care in his old age.

  I asked Wanda once why she thought this was, and she said women spent so much time combing their hair, deciding what dress to buy and taking pills for their period pains they had no time to attend to their emotional lives. Like it or not, they were ruled by that hole in their middle, as my father, a doctor, once described the womb, which caused all kinds of trouble unknown to men. And if they get rid of it, perforce or by choice, they tend to get old before their time.

  Serena will have none of this gloomy talk today, unless it relates to her and George. She says I take an unbalanced view of women: they are people too, not just bundles of oestrogen. That it’s even worse to see someone in an old person’s home who has children who never come to see her, and the humiliation that goes with that, than someone childless who has a good pension. The armchairs will be better, the carpet less smelly. She says the sum of human happiness over a life adds up to what it will: some women prefer to take it at the end, some at the beginning. Some find fecundity to be a blessing, others a curse.

  I don’t tell her about Patrick’s eruption into my life and out of it so fast. I will in good time, but it’s too recent an event for me to have absorbed properly. And she’d probably only say, briskly, ‘Just as well, there’d be hell to pay when Sebastian comes out, and who needs it at our age?’

  And if I said ‘but it was Curran’s brother’, she’d probably have reacted as I did. It’s frightening when you realise that the circles of acquaintance and event that you thought were safely in the past turn out to be still circling and whirling and touching, coming nearer and bouncing apart like atoms in an overheated molecule.

  I’d say ‘but it’s Hattie’s great-uncle we’re talking about’, and she’d say Hattie has quite enough troubles and obligations at the moment, without having a great-uncle to add to them, especially if that great-uncle were to turn into yet another step-grandfather. Kitty’s great-great-nunky. Kitty’s great-gramps. Yuk.

  We speak of cooking disasters and humiliations we have known. We decide it has got far more difficult than it ever was to produce a meal acceptable to others. Not that it was ever easy. When Serena ran off from a husband back in the fifties, a friend of his – who ran a shop in Bounds Green, she remembers that detail – said, she heard, when told of her departure, ‘just as well, she was a lousy cook.’ She has not been past Bounds Green since and not remembered, and been ashamed.

  She remembers the meal she cooked for that husband fifty years ago. She remembers toiling away making mushroom soup out of real chicken broth, and a beef casserole, hoping for approval. She would have done better, I say, those being the times they were, to have opened a can of soup and added croutons, and roasted a chicken, both these recognised at the time as celebratory foods. She hopes that it was the friend’s taste that was at fault and not her cooking.

  ‘I’m sure it was that,’ I say.

  I remembered the lemon veal roast which I had made in the tiny kitchen in Rothwell Street, for George and Serena and a new male prospect of mine. I grossly undercooked it, so nervous was I, that it was interlarded with sheets of uncooked fat. Serena and George loyally ate theirs, but my suitor left his on the side of the plate and when he called next day to say how good the dinner was, and how pleased he had been to meet my interesting family, and could he take me to the theatre at the weekend I said sorry, I was going away for six months.

  These days I tend to serve baked potatoes and chicken and salad if anyone comes round. If the guests are in any-way special I bake the potatoes in the Aga, otherwise one goes for speed, not quality, and it’s seven minutes in the microwave.

  Hattie’s young, and has ambition and energy on her side, so if someone suggests that moules marinières is dull and scallops are better, she believes them. Still, nothing venture, nothing win. It didn’t work, but good for her.

  Hattie phones again in the afternoon, after the car has come to collect Serena. I ask her how Agnieszka is, and she says Martyn is giving her a lift to the church so she can do the flowers for Father Flanahan. Agnieszka seems to have given up her vegetable-growing friend in Neasden, and is now taking an interest in local parish matters. Hattie is all for it.

  ‘Agnieszka is in a strange country and must sometimes feel quite lonely. And it’s good that she wants to integrate.’

  She seems to have either forgotten or forgiven Agnieszka’s involvement in the scallop incident. I ask her if Agnieszka wears her own clothes or Hattie’s to go to church, and Hattie says:

  ‘Don’t be so bitchy. Actually, she’s wearing my jeans because I can’t get into them any more. But her own T-shirt.’

  I can hear her munching. I ask her what she’s eating and she says a carrot and hazelnut cookie, made by Agnieszka.

  Agnieszka And The Internet

  ‘Babs,’ says Hattie to her friend and colleague, the next morning at Dinton & Seltz. ‘I’ve got to tell you what happened. I went into Agnieszka’s room last night when she was at belly dancing, and opened her laptop. It came on by itself and it had porn all over it. Real hard core: girls with big boobs doing all kinds of things to one another, and three men to one girl, that kind of thing, all in garish colours, leaping around as if trying to get out of the screen. And Kitty was sleeping in the same room.’

  ‘I don’t suppose Kitty could make sense of it,’ Babs says, ‘even if she woke. Once that sort of thing gets onto your screen it’s almost impossible to get rid of it. It surfaces unasked.’

  ‘So you don’t think I should ask Agnieszka about it?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ says Babs. ‘She’d only be embarrassed or take offence and leave, the way she left Alice.’

  Babs is buffing her nails. She is not suffering at all from morning sickness: she has an elegant little bump between her short cropped jacket and trousers, just where the merest, sexiest sliver of naked skin appears if she stretches up her arms, well-contained and disciplined by good muscle tone. Not for Babs the all-over swelling which afflicted Hattie when pregnant with Kitty. It occurs to Hattie that Babs has sold her soul to the Devil. Babs has now decided with Tavish that no mention will ever be made of the paternity of the coming child: it will be attributed to Alastair, who is already putting his name down for good schools. She doubts that she is the only one in whom Babs has confided her secrets. Hattie has already told Martyn. But somehow Babs will get away with it. Luck will be hers because she assumes it will be.

  ‘But won’t it be obvious from the scans that the date isn’t right?’ asks Hattie. Babs assures her that Alastair is not interested in medical matters, and she’ll be lucky if he so much as takes her to the hospital when it comes to the birth. She may have to call a taxi. Hattie says she rather wishes she had done just that when she went into labour with Kitty. Martyn quarrelled with the ambulance men about the quickest way to get to the hospital. The ambulance men had warned the hospital that there was an agitated father on his way and fifteen minutes after Hattie was in the labour ward Martyn was still arguing the toss. A kindly nurse assured Hattie that this kind of thing was not all that unusual. Anger is a great cure for fear. Kitty appeared feet first and Martyn felt this too was somehow the hospital’s fault, and felt it noisily. All the same, everyone lived.

  ‘Men!’ both agree.

  Babs and Hattie talk about a new woman writer who has written a brilliant and saleable book but has the bulging eyes of a fish and the double chins of a bulldog, and wonder who best to send the manuscript to for possible publication – an all-woman publishing team or one dominated by men? They decide she will get better treatment from the men.

  Hilary calls through to Babs’s office and says she picked up Hattie’s phone because it was ringing and ringing and had been left unattended, and that the au pair had apparently been trying to get through to Hattie. She’d suggested to the au pair that if there was a panic she should call the father: in the current climate surely the father was as significant a parent as the mother. She personally thought it was a bit much that firms should give paternity leave as well as maternity: those who chose to be childless were discriminated against. All these new government initiatives just added up to extra holidays for a few for which the taxpayer paid. But Hilary was talking to thin air.

  Hattie was on her mobile, outside where the reception was good, calling home. Martyn answered. Kitty was fine, playing happily in her playpen, it was just Agnieszka who was in a state. She’d had a visit from the immigration authorities, and was in tears. No, Hattie need not come home. It was certainly inconvenient, but Devolution could manage for half a morning without him: they’d agreed before Kitty was born that they’d both do equal parenting, and this surely was it. He was halfway through an article on Religion, Ethics and Politics which didn’t have a single funny line in it, and he was glad enough to leave off.

  Hattie said she was coming home anyway: she’d had such a fright about Kitty that she felt quite sick and trembly. She goes back inside to gather her things and change her shoes, and finds Neil looking particularly suntanned and equable in her office – with Hilary, who is leafing through the papers on her, Hattie’s, desk.

  Hilary says, ‘Home emergency, I take it. But we really do need to get at the German contracts. I can’t find them in the file. You know, the ones for Miss Fishface. Neil isn’t inclined to let them have the rights, but apparently you’ve started negotiations.’

  Neil protests that it might be wise not to call the client Fishface behind her back, in case she accidentally does it to her face one day. Hilary says haughtily, ‘I am not as stupid as you think, Neil.’

  Neil came into the office as Hilary’s junior and now runs the place. It is Hattie’s opinion that Neil is intimidated by Hilary, and Hilary despises everyone who has worked for Dinton & Seltz since the days when she was old Mr Seltz’s protégée, and had, or had not, carnal knowledge of him across the big shiny desk.

  Neil just says the German contracts can wait well enough until tomorrow, Hilary. ‘You’d better get back home straight away, Hattie. I can see you’re in emergency gear, I know what it’s like,’ and Hattie flees.

  It is not a fortunate encounter, but not so unfortunate either. Neil has come down on her side. But then, perhaps it was like the rave rejections everyone was now so good at: ‘We like your style, looks, demeanour, friendliness and spirit of cooperation: we fully understand your need to be a mother as well as an employee, but’ – skim the eye down the letter, or the fax, or the email, looking for the but – ‘just not for us.’

  Maternal Panics

  Were we born panicky, Serena and I, or did we learn anxiety at Wanda’s knee? Wanda, faced with a problem, would lie awake in the early morning worrying, solve it by seven, and have us all out of bed by eight to hear her plan of action. We would have to move house to get away from the neighbours; Susan would leave school because it made her unhappy; Serena would be barred from seeing her friends because she was turning into a lesbian; I would be sent to board in a convent because I was meeting boys on street corners; we would all have to ship out to England because we were developing New Zealand accents. There was no deflecting my mother from her brainwaves, and they were all disastrous.

  The worst, I suppose, was when after lying awake all night agonising because my father was with another woman, she decided to have an affair herself and so bring him back to his senses. The ‘affair’ lasted one night, and she didn’t enjoy it a bit. My father found out and divorced her. That was the way things went, in those days. And she loved him.

  When Serena got pregnant by David nothing would do for Wanda but she change her name by deed poll and give up her job the better to avoid social disgrace; I was to marry Hammertoes because how else was I to support Lallie and James? – and so on and so on.

  If Wanda were alive today she would be in a fine old state about Hattie taking in a long-haired kitten: what about asthma? Isn’t it unfair to have solitary pets? Shouldn’t they be acquired in twos, so as to keep each other company? Wanda’s early-morning solution this time would be to add a puppy to the ménage at once, because dogs and cats got on well if they were reared together and Kitty would be more likely to pat the dog than stroke the cat, thus avoiding asthma.

  Wanda’s anxieties were always for other people, never for herself. Serena and I are like her in this, though our solutions are, I hope, less doolally. A pain in the heart for us is just a pain in the heart: we may take it to the doctor’s, but if it’s inconvenient or there’s work to be done, we may not. We will wait for it to go away, and it probably will. But for our children, our spouses, our family – that’s different. The child with a bleeding nose: is it a brain tumour? A pain in its stomach: quick, to Casualty, it’s appendicitis, it will burst! Late home from school: waylaid, ravaged! Late home from the party: ditto. The boy’s bought a motorbike: broken and bleeding, he will die. Careful, as I heard Serena say once, of that champagne cork: you know four people a year lose an eye through flying champagne corks? Oh yes, we’re anxious enough.