Harold is depressed, he seems to have shrunk inside his navy suit. He seems less whiskery than usual, as if the hairs had to fight their way out of his skin, and it had tired them.

  ‘Darwinism is an unproven belief system,’ he complains. ‘At least devolution is a respectable political theory. They don’t mix and match at all, other than that the words rhyme, and it saves printing costs. You’ll stay, they like you: you can write jolly articles about the return of Lysenko and the inheritance of learned characteristics, which suits our masters, and three cheers for a vending machine in every school corridor, but what am I going to do? The Evolution editor Larry Jugg will get the job. And Debora is pregnant. Think of the school fees, and at my age. Women take what’s just talk so seriously, that’s the problem. And where were you yesterday morning, as a matter of interest?’

  ‘Domestic emergency,’ Martyn explains. ‘Our girl had a visit from Immigration and got upset.’

  ‘Not the one you dream about who made the chicken couscous with the marinated vegetables?’

  ‘That one.’

  ‘I don’t know how you can keep your hands off her,’ says his boss. ‘That bum. That mouth.’

  Martyn is taken aback. He had thought Agnieszka’s qualities too understated to be apparent to anyone but himself. ‘She may be deported,’ he says. ‘Couscous and all. She turns out to be Ukrainian not Polish. Some scumbag reported her!’ ‘That won’t do,’ says Harold. ‘That’s telling tales. It’s not as if she was an undesirable, not by any means. Who was it?’ Martyn says he doesn’t know and Harold promises to find out for him. He knows people in the Home Office.

  Martyn can’t help it. He says, actually it’s all irrelevant now. He’s going to marry the girl and give her citizenship. He’s not quite sure himself that he’s going to do it. Indeed, he half hopes Harold will tell him not to be a complete tosser but Harold does not. He just laughs and laughs and as he laughs seems to fill out and become hairier.

  ‘You’ll go far, lad,’ he says, ‘I knew you would. You just go in there and get her. I would.’

  Strange pains gnaw in Martyn’s belly. He’s hungry and anxious. What is he taking on? What is Hattie suggesting? Is she so far from loving him that she wants him to marry another, for the sake of getting to work on time? He feels angry with Hattie and that makes him feel he will marry Agnieszka just to pay Hattie out.

  ‘Mind you,’ says Harold, ‘these days you have to prove you love them, and not just for citizenship’s sake. And as, so far as I can see, you’re living with another woman and have a child by her there may be a problem at the registry office. But I’d think the au pair would be the best bet. She’s certainly the better cook.’

  ‘We’re marrying in church,’ says Martyn. ‘She’s a Catholic.’ The idea is firming up nicely in his mind. He would like a proper wedding, with a bride in a white dress, and a priest giving a blessing. His mother would want that for him, and it’s time he came down on his mother’s side and not his father’s. She might even come to the wedding. There is more to life than work, politics and principle. Hattie doesn’t see it, but at least she has the generosity of spirit to allow him this ceremony.

  ‘Debora started out as a Catholic,’ says Harold. ‘Now there’s the prospect of an abortion it’s all coming back to roost. I don’t want to pressure her either way, but please just don’t invite her to the ceremony.’

  ‘It will be very quiet,’ says Martyn. It is going to happen, he knows that now. He would quite like Kitty to stare at a candle and be christened, and that could happen too. The children of Catholics are Catholics. What is he thinking? Kitty is Hattie’s child, not Agnieszka’s.

  An email flashes up on Harold’s screen. He has got the job as editor of d/EvILUTION (but Harold hopes that’s a typo). Larry Jugg is out, Harold Mappin in.

  They go for lunch in the pub to celebrate. The barmaid is in the traditional style, with big boobs, big teeth and big hair. Harold admires her. At least, he says, if Debora stays pregnant she’ll get bigger boobs, even for a time, though his first wife’s shrank long-term.

  Martyn wishes Harold wouldn’t talk like this. He would rather have a less human boss: it is important to respect the man you work for. But looking at the barmaid, it occurs to him that the pneumatic joys of the female world are not confined to Hattie and Agnieszka, but that there are millions and millions more of them out there, all searching for true love, and somehow his vision had closed in. He has another whisky.

  Hattie At The Cattery

  ‘Turns out,’ says Hattie to me in a phone call, ‘that Agnieszka’s mother and sister are living in Neasden.’

  ‘I thought you said they were in Australia.’

  ‘Agnieszka was covering her back, I’m afraid,’ says Hattie.

  ‘Fibbing. You can’t blame her. Our immigration laws are absurd. They take no notice of family love or human feelings.’

  ‘I am surprised,’ I say, ‘that you allow your child to be brought up by such an accomplished liar.’

  There is silence on the other end then Hattie says I’m sounding very like Wanda.

  ‘Nan! Stop it. The mother’s really nice: simple, peasantish and hard-working. She had an allotment and used to grow carrots and sell them but she had to give it up because the sister is really ill. She’s dying, Gran. She’s seventeen and she’s got bone cancer.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, and then because this does sound like a real sob story, and I am beginning to mistrust everything about this Agnieszka of theirs, ‘and you have actually been to visit her? She does exist?’

  ‘She exists all right,’ says Hattie. ‘Her name’s Anita and she’s thin and transparent but terribly sweet. She sits up in a wheelchair by the window and grooms the cats. That’s all she has the strength to do. But that family is so hard-working they just keep on.’

  ‘Grooms the cats?’

  ‘Agnieszka’s mother runs a cattery.’

  It sounds so unlikely. I am reminded of the belly-dancing shock. But those classes did exist, they weren’t fantasy, they were real enough, Hattie went along and came home with scarves and belts which I don’t suppose she ever wore, and gave up after a couple of lessons, as people do. Agnieszka kept going, or said she did. And Hattie has scratches on her hands to prove the kitten is real. So I suppose the cattery in Neasden is true enough.

  ‘The mother has to do something, Gran,’ says Hattie. ‘She can’t claim tax relief because her visa has run out so she breeds Persians in her back garden.’

  ‘That can’t be much fun for the neighbours.’

  ‘It’s quite a big garden.’ How Hattie does want everything to be all right! I fear for her.

  ‘So your kitten didn’t just turn up on the doorstep?’

  ‘Well, no. One of the Persians got out one night and the litter didn’t breed true. Sylvie’s head isn’t square enough and its tail’s too long so the mother couldn’t sell it for more than a tenner. So Agnieszka took it home to save it from being drowned. She would have told me the truth except she’d already said her mother was in Australia. And she knew I’d say yes.’

  I was put in mind of Hammertoes’ mother, and from Hattie’s description they seemed the same kind of person, pleasant and peasanty and tough as old nails, and with long, unplucked hairs coming out of the sides of their chins as if they were in sympathy with the cats. ‘She loved her cats more than me.’

  Poor Agnieszka. Perhaps that is what it has been like for her. And I remembered the smell of the cat-filled house, sweet and sour, like Chinese food left out too long in a warm place, mixed up with disinfectant, fumes catching the throat, or perhaps you were breathing in hairs, or the mites were floating down your open mouth. No wonder Agnieszka wanted to get out.

  I say I hope Hattie hadn’t kept Kitty in the house for long, what with the bone cancer and the litter trays. Hattie says they were there about twenty minutes only: she wasn’t too keen to go in the first place, but Agnieszka had wanted her to, been so contrite, had confessed and apologised, and her going to visit the mother had seemed to Agnieszka a token of acceptance, that everything was just fine again, back to normal.

  And still Hattie didn’t mention the supposed wedding. I had no idea. I think perhaps she too thought somehow it wouldn’t happen just because it had been arranged. It wasn’t that she wanted Martyn to marry Agnieszka; she was just somehow putting the whole institution of marriage, which had afflicted her family over generations, into its proper place, dishonouring it. As if it really didn’t matter. It made no difference to anything.

  Hattie says she must stop talking. Martyn and she are to go out to dinner. Agnieszka is babysitting. Kitty now seems to say ‘bye-bye and ‘love you’. That’s nice. It all still appears to be working smoothly, lies, cattery and all, and Kitty continues to be plump, robust and smiling, which is the important thing, so I must stop worrying. I do. As Serena says, parents are just bit-part players in any baby’s drama.

  Hattie Gets Promotion

  ‘Where were you yesterday?’ asks Babs. ‘All hell broke loose in here. The computers caught a virus. Marina Faircroft came round with a lawyer who was just to die for and said she was going to sue Hilary for breach of contract. Neil talked to Marina and she calmed down. Then she went to the hairdresser, and the lawyer took Elfie out to lunch. She’s the intern who makes a mess of the photocopying. She’ll be working at his place next, wait and see. She’s very pretty and not very bright. Your Tourette’s man came and sat in reception asking for you and refusing to go away unless they changed the title of his book to exclamation marks and asterisks.’

  ‘But we can’t do that,’ says Hattie. ‘He knows that. The publishers have gone to press. He okayed the title.’

  ‘Neil came down and said perhaps we could use the screamers and stars in the next book he wrote, and he went away happy. Neil had to make some compromise, Hattie. You can’t have an angry Tourette’s man in reception for too long. There are clients coming in.’

  ‘But he hasn’t even got Tourette’s,’ Hattie says. ‘He’s pretending. Tourette’s Syndrome isn’t a joke. It’s a tragedy for those who have it.’

  ‘If you’d been here you could have said that.’

  ‘I’ve had a domestic crisis. Visa problem,’ says Hattie, shortly. If she told Babs Martyn was going to marry Agnieszka in three weeks’ time the whole office would know, if only through the thin partition walls.

  ‘What, the divine Agnieszka? I don’t believe it.’

  Instead of going out to dinner with Martyn, Hattie babysat while he and Agnieszka went for an hour’s session with Father Flanahan in preparation for the marriage. Martyn came back banging his forehead, saying, ‘How can people believe this stuff?’ Father Flanahan was apparently under the impression that the sooner the couple was married the less time they would have to spend living in sin and Martyn had not disabused him. Time was of the essence, before Immigration went into overdrive. Agnieszka wanted a Mass with ceremony, hymns, and everything, which can go on for a long time, but Martyn has said no, the twenty-minute version would do.

  Babs has now begun to swell visibly all over; including her ankles, which Hattie is quite happy about. Alastair has booked a Norland Nanny, the very one who looked after him when he was little, which keeps it in the family, as it were, though the nanny is of course quite old. She will be given a young, strong nursery maid to assist her. Babs has lost, or seems to have lost, all interest in poaching Agnieszka.

  The true father of Babs’s unborn baby, Tavish the TV producer, turns up in the office from time to time. Hattie can see the baby’s parentage will soon become the subject of general office gossip, but perhaps Babs would be happy enough if it did. Babs does not like too quiet a life.

  All Hattie tells Babs is that someone has snitched on Agnieszka and her passport isn’t in order and Immigration is stirring up trouble.

  ‘Well, I wonder who would have done that?’ asks Babs.

  ‘I can’t believe it’s anyone we know,’ Hattie says.

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ says Babs. ‘Could be my sister. Alice was pretty cross after what happened with Jude.’

  ‘What exactly did happen with Jude?’ asks Hattie, not sure if she really wants to know.

  Babs gives an account of how Alice woke up in the night, and finding Jude not in her bed, went into Agnieszka’s room and found him there, half-way into her bed. Jude’s excuse was that he’d heard Agnieszka crying so he’d gone in to see what the matter was, and she’d practically pulled him in, like a credit card into the slot at the bank.

  ‘Alice believed him, more fool her,’ says Babs, ‘and Agnieszka took offence and walked out. So Alice was left with no one to help with the babies, and Jude went into a depression so bad he had to be hospitalised.’

  Garble, garble, thinks Hattie, gossip, gossip. How did Babs get the job she has? How does she keep it? But Hattie has noticed that Babs never doubts her own decisions. She went to an expensive girls’ school and likes to succeed without appearing to. Put any piece of paper under Babs’s nose and she will absorb what’s written on it in seconds, and within the minute will have responded to it, and put the matter out of her head. Then she has nothing to do but her nails. That’s the way she likes it. No work, no work, no work, and all of a sudden lots of work. Love-life: sex, men, drama, confusion, out of the way, back to the nails.

  ‘But I don’t really see Alice having the time or strength to write to the authorities,’ says Babs, ‘so it was probably Hilary. Hilary the well-known snitch.’

  ‘But why would Hilary do that?’ asks Hattie, taken aback. ‘She hasn’t even met Agnieszka.’

  ‘She’s heard about her. And she wants your job as well as her own; without Agnieszka you’re sunk. She’d like you to sink in a welter of clinic appointments, visa problems, and time off for domestic emergencies.’

  ‘But people aren’t so petty,’ protests Hattie. ‘Not people like us.’

  ‘People like us!’ mocks Babs. ‘You sound just like Alastair.’

  She calls Neil on his extension and Neil actually picks up his own phone. Hattie leaves.

  That afternoon Neil calls Hattie up to his office. It’s like having an audience with the Prince of Wales. He carries power with him, though it sits uneasily on his shoulders, like an illfitting overcoat. Neil sits with his back to the window, and his shadow falls forward across the desk which no one can look at without wondering whether Hilary and old Mr Seltz did or did not. His is the shadow of authority, able to make you or break you at whim. Hattie ought to be nervous but she is not. She knows she is doing her job well enough. True, she was out of the office at a bad time but Neil has children too. What she feels mostly is that her strength is as the strength of ten because her heart is pure. Nothing will go wrong. She is blessed. She has given up something valuable and great for Agnieszka’s sake. Agnieszka will become Mrs Agnes Arkwright; her mother, her sister and the cattery will stay in the country. Hattie will stay Hattie Hallsey-Coe. Hattie is a good person and good things happen to good people.

  Neil says that Hilary has been transferred to the Frankfurt branch of Dinton & Seltz. Hilary is to manage the new office there: a great opportunity to prove herself. Which means that if Hattie is happy to take on both jobs for the time being – domestic and foreign rights are to be amalgamated – so is he. She will need an assistant, of course – she might consider Elfie, who is very bright and undervalued. There will be more money in it, and the prospect, in time, of a place at the directors’ table with share options.

  Neil’s phone rings. He puts a white leather cushion over it. He says he will put it all in an email and they’ll talk more later. Hattie’s audience is at an end. But as she goes he says: ‘God, that Hilary was a bitch. Babs told me – grassing on your au pair like that. We family folk must stick together.’

  Hattie is vindicated. She was right. Good things come to the good. Neil takes the cushion from the phone, hurls it across the room so it strikes the window with a thud, to scare off a pigeon which is crapping on the window ledge. He is lucky it doesn’t break the glass. The cost of replacing so large a pane would be phenomenal. But the phone is still ringing so Neil has no option but to pick up the receiver.

  And Hattie leaves the newly designer-built brightness which is Neil’s penthouse for the older part of the building, down the narrow winding stair towards her office, and feels the breath of countless past employees on her cheek, chilling her, undermining her pleasure. One person’s promotion is another’s demotion. She has got what she wanted, but she feels she is no longer good.

  By the time she gets back to her office the ghosts have gone. Babs does work fast. Did Neil really transfer Hilary because of what she said? Well, that did no harm, and Hilary will hate the new Frankfurt office, where all they do is prepare all year round for the Book Fair. Hilary has no partner or children to offer as an excuse for not going.

  Two Weddings And A Funeral

  The wedding was lovely. I hear about it later, weeks later. Agnieszka wore a cream dress in which she looked young and delightful and wonderfully happy, and Hattie was a bridesmaid in a pink dress also made by Agnieszka, who is so handy with a needle. Actually pink is just not Hattie’s colour: it makes her bountiful hair look red rather than golden.

  Agnieszka’s sister is the other bridesmaid, the one with cancer, now apparently in remission, and out of her wheelchair. The pink suits her pale fragility very well. Martyn wears a new suit and a tie, which makes him look as if he were soon going to make a lot of money, and could be trusted with it. Agnieszka’s mother holds Kitty, who settles very well into her bountiful lap, absorbed in trying to take the whiskers out of her minder’s chin. Martyn’s boss Harold is best man, and his partner Debora, entering the church, can’t at first decide whether to sit on the bride’s side of the church or the groom’s, and settles for the groom’s, for which Hattie darts her a grateful look. Debora may not be so bad after all.