‘You are a hard-hearted bitch,’ he says. ‘Can’t you hear her crying?’

  ‘Polish girls do cry,’ says his partner. ‘They’re famous for it. It’s part of their culture. If she’s really so unhappy she can always leave. She’s only the au pair.’

  ‘She is my wife,’ says Martyn. He speaks loudly. Hattie is really awake now. She knows she has been talking but what has she been saying?

  In the next room Kitty starts to cry. Martyn must have woken her up. She can hear Agnieszka getting out of bed, taking Kitty from her cot and going into the kitchen.

  What does Agnieszka wear at night, Martyn wonders? He hasn’t let himself think about it before. Does she sleep naked or perhaps in one of Hattie’s cast-off nighties, the ones that are now too small for her, that she bought before she was pregnant with Kitty? Perhaps the one in almost transparent silky stuff, two parts, one in pale green, cut low to show the breasts, the darker jackety thing pretending a degree of modesty. Hattie doesn’t buy nighties like that now. He only half-liked it when she did. His mother would have been so outraged by the price, his father so scathing about the decency. Usually these days Hattie just pulls on a T-shirt if it’s cold, wears nothing if it’s not. He likes it when she wears nothing but he’s very accustomed to her body by now. It is soft, nice and familiar, and he loves it, and it bore him a child, but it does not bring with it a sense of future shock. He would like to know now what Agnieszka looks like naked. He remembers the time soon after she’d arrived when she demonstrated her belly-dancing skills. Has she gone on with her classes? He has no idea. She is his wife and he knows so little about her.

  Hattie pulls on one of Martyn’s T-shirts, which reaches down to her knees, goes into the living room and finds Agnieszka there with Kitty. Martyn follows her. Martyn, in the interests of decency, has put on an Indian kurta. The kurta, in white, thin cotton, suits him and reaches to his knees. It is a present Alastair brought back for Babs from India, thinking it was for women to wear, so Babs passed it onto Martyn. It looks good on his broad-shouldered slim-hipped frame. He has been going to the office gym. Cyrilla makes him. Agnieszka always launders the kurta separately, so it has kept its whiteness, and irons crisp and neat.

  Agnieszka is in a rather dull-blue velvet Marks & Spencer dressing gown. She is scraping a little bit off a blue tablet and giving it to Kitty on the tip of her finger. Kitty seems to like it and has stopped grizzling.

  ‘What are you giving her?’ asks Hattie: her mind is still blurry from sleeping pills.

  ‘A little scrap of vitamin B12,’ says Agnieszka. ‘Something woke her up and frightened her. In Poland we give it to babies: it is good for her nerves and she is teething. She is not very happy but she will be okay now.’

  Agnieszka looks directly at Hattie, and gives her a brilliant, reassuring smile. It is powerful and positive and in charge, but Hattie is glad that at least the tears have stopped. Agnieszka’s eyes are not puffy, either. She seems very wide-awake.

  ‘And how about in the Ukraine?’ asks Martyn. He thinks the Ukraine is the back of beyond and now they are married is not slow to let Agnieszka know it.

  ‘There too,’ says Agnieszka. ‘They are not so very far apart.’ And she smiles at Martyn, that same brilliant smile.

  ‘Since we are all awake, Agnes,’ says Martyn, ‘how about making us some cocoa?’

  Hattie wonders why Martyn is being so disagreeable to Agnieszka but Agnieszka doesn’t seem to mind. She seems to rather enjoy his bad temper. When he calls her Agnes, which she hates, she’ll try and get in a ‘Mr Martyn’, which he hates.

  Kitty is smiling now, eyes drooping and closing. Agnieszka puts her back in the cot and goes to the kitchen and makes her famous cocoa, boiling, sieving, frothing, pouring, finding a tray, taking the three mugs into the living room, where Hattie and Martyn sit next to each other at the table, in sleepy conspiracy. And there she drops her bombshell.

  ‘Why are you so unhappy?’ asks Hattie, unwisely, but it is the third time of asking. ‘Why do you cry all the time?’

  ‘Because I love Mr Martyn,’ says Agnieszka, ‘and I can’t have him and so I have to go away, because it is not fair to you, Hattie, and I love you too.’

  Hattie finds her hands are beginning to shake. She has to put down the cocoa. It’s very hot and very delicious.

  ‘But you can’t leave us,’ says Hattie. ‘We need you. We depend on you. Kitty loves you. Agnieszka can’t leave us, can she, Martyn?’

  ‘It would be against her religion,’ says Martyn. ‘I am her husband. No she can’t.’

  ‘Your poor hands,’ says Agnieszka to Hattie. ‘Your poor voice! I would do anything not to upset you, but I have.

  You have been so good to me, Hattie, like an angel.’

  Agnieszka goes to the bathroom and comes back with a bottle and shakes out a little blue pill for Hattie.

  ‘What is it?’ asks Hattie. Martyn is getting through his cocoa, though it must be too hot for comfort.

  ‘It is a vitamin supplement,’ says Agnieszka. ‘It is not good when your hands tremble. You have a vitamin B12 deficiency, Hattie. In Poland we give it for the nerves.’

  ‘And in the Ukraine too, I believe,’ says Martyn. ‘They being not so far apart.’

  Hattie takes it. Martyn watches.

  ‘Take two,’ he says, and Agnieszka shakes out another pill. Hattie swallows it.

  ‘Let’s have a drink to all our futures,’ says Martyn, ‘whatever they are,’ and gets out the bottle of whisky and three glasses and pours out three tots and they all drink.

  ‘I must leave,’ says Agnieszka. ‘I cannot put you through this. I thank you, Hattie, and I thank you, Mr Martyn. And now I am going to bed and in the morning we will work out the detail of how it is best to be done, for Kitty’s sake.’

  ‘Shall we drink to that?’ says Martyn, and they all have another tot of whisky, and Hattie’s hands have stopped trembling, though how she is to manage without Agnieszka she has no idea. That doesn’t seem to matter so much now. She feels quite happy and fond of everyone.

  ‘Bedtime,’ says Agnieszka and yawns and stretches and goes to her room.

  ‘Another drink,’ says Martyn, and pours one and Hattie drinks it. Now she feels she has to go to bed; that’s where she belongs. So Martyn helps her to the bedroom and she rolls over and over luxuriously until she is against the wall. It is a good, wide, expensive bed, bought for them by Serena when they moved in together.

  Hattie sleeps. Martyn lies beside her and closes his eyes, and in a minute he is asleep, though this was not what he intended. He wakes to find Agnieszka moving towards the bed as in his familiar dream. A recurring dream, a thing foretold. She is wearing the greeny pieces of froth that once, long ago, Hattie wore. Did he buy it for her?

  Agnieszka takes off the top part, so her round small breasts are showing. He is suddenly wide awake. She smiles, and moves another piece of froth aside so her tummy shows and says: ‘I have an advanced certificate now. Do you want to see?’

  He nods and she moves her stomach muscles in an impressive manner, for all the apparent flatness of her midriff.

  ‘Touch it if you like,’ she says. Martyn looks at Hattie but she is asleep.

  ‘It’s like a bag of kittens,’ he says.

  ‘She’ll sleep through quite a lot,’ says Agnieszka. ‘She is perfectly happy and I am your wife. Kitty will sleep too. We can make as much noise as we like. You two are so quiet.

  It is very boring.’

  ‘What was the pill?’

  ‘A roofie,’ she says. ‘Didn’t you know that?’

  ‘Rohypnol? But I gave her whisky.’

  ‘All the better,’ says Agnieszka.

  He stretches out her hand to feel the stomach. The kittens move beneath his hand. He is not sure he likes that.

  ‘And after all, I am your wife and she is only the mistress, and so I am entitled to this bed. I have more right to it than she does. Mine is narrow and small: this is large and wide and room for three. If she does not like it she can go to sleep in my bed but I think if she were awake she would rather it was like this.’

  Agnieszka gets into the bed, and lies beside him. The green froth, for all its delicacy, is a little scratchy but he can put up with that. He turns away from her towards Hattie, who smiles in her sleep and reaches for him, and he lets his hand wander. She rolls onto her back and his fingers find her; she sighs with pleasure and murmurs a further invitation. Then he turns to Agnieszka and before he knows it he is on her, forcing her legs apart, pulling up her knees. Her legs are spread wide, and now tangled with Hattie’s and both women are his, which was what he wanted since he first set eyes on Agnieszka.

  That was Wednesday, the first night.

  Two More Nights

  ‘In 1886,’ says Hattie to me, three days after the events I have described above, ‘Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, youngest member in the Gladstone Cabinet of the time, was found in bed with both his wife and the maid. The scandal ruined his career.’

  ‘That was then and this is now,’ I say, ‘and Martyn’s career in politics has only just begun.’

  ‘And besides,’ she says, ‘it was quite clear in those days which one of them was which. Which the wife and which the maid.’

  I do not say, as I am tempted to, and whose fault is that? Hattie is in a vulnerable state. She sits at my table, very early on Saturday morning. Her suitcase at her side. It is not yet unpacked. She needs to talk. She has told me about the wedding, about the visit to the cattery, about her promotion at the office and finally she gets around to good-night cocoa, and Agnieszka wearing her green teddy which Hattie now looks ridiculous in, and how Agnieszka was wearing it while in her bed. ‘I’m sure I never gave her permission to wear it,’ she says. ‘The cow.’

  I say this to me seems a fairly minor infringement of rights. ‘I do remember quite a lot. Rohypnol doesn’t blot everything out. It’s only a sleeping pill with the pleasure principle added. But I’d had two Temazepam as well, and then two roofies, plus some whisky as well, so it’s not all that clear.’

  I say she is lucky to be alive.

  ‘When I woke up properly on Thursday morning, Agnieszka was back in her own bed and Martyn sleeping there beside me, only I was on the door side of the bed not the wall side. I suppose she and Martyn thought I would remember nothing about anything, but I did. I might have thought it was a dream but half the bedclothes were on the floor and my green teddy which I never wear any more tangled up in them. The poppers were undone. I left everything as it was and went on down to the kitchen, and there was Agnieszka cutting slivers of apple for Kitty as if nothing had happened. She just seemed rather rosy and somehow smooth.

  ‘Martyn came down for his breakfast and had to get to the office early. He was just as grumpy as ever, and I didn’t know what to do, or what to think, but I remembered what my driving instructor said to me once, ‘if in doubt, don’t,’ so if they weren’t going to say anything, neither would I. I would pretend everything was normal while I worked out what to do.

  Martyn kissed me good-bye as if he really meant it, with an extra little twitch of my nipples through my office blouse, which is a nice thin material which Agnieszka had laundered and put out for me the day before. It has long sleeves which is just as well because the insides of my arms were really bruised. I didn’t know how badly until yesterday when the black-and-blue business started. But the little twitch, the pinch, went straight to my personal parts, you know how these things sometimes do?’

  She remembers my age and apologises, and I say I have some vague memories of how these things sometimes do.

  ‘Well, you wanted to know,’ she says, and I say that is so.

  She tells me that when she got upstairs again after coffee she found the green teddy gone, and the bottom sheet changed and the bed made, and Agnieszka vacuuming away, singing. Hattie was glad she was cheerful. There had been something the previous evening about her leaving but whatever it was it was over. It was going to be a hard day at the office and she certainly felt hung-over – but that was probably just the whisky, not the pills. She remembers the pale gold liquid glimmering in the glass: it had seemed to her so beautiful. Martyn had not been mean with the pouring.

  ‘But I was remembering things, more and more. I remember standing up bending over the bed and Martyn coming at me from behind and she had her tongue …’ she breaks off. ‘Do you think she’s a lesbian, Gran, I mean really, or just trying to please Martyn? Because I think she truly loves him. I’m not going into too much detail because it’s too rude for you; well, not to mention me actually – you’re not a young woman and it might shock you.’

  Good Lord, I thought, thinking of the artists and the three-somes and the foursomes, and the tyings up and the pinnings down, and the filmings and what went on in the clip joints, and the buying and selling of this orifice or that, as everyone tried to be at one with one another, even though the another came in twos or threes or more – and the pleasure of pain, and pole-dancing in Las Vegas, when we had to pay our way out of the hotel so Charlie could get to his rodeo – not that he was doing the dancing: he just took the money, lots of it. American girls are better at dirty dancing than the British: they put energy into it and are not ashamed. They see nothing wrong in promising everything, but fulfilling nothing. But I seemed to have a quality few others had: their sins were crude but mine were subtle, and they smiled too much; I was an artist’s model not a gangster’s moll and it showed. Everyone likes a bit of class, so I made money.

  I am sorry about Hattie’s bruises, which are stiffening up. I help her unpack in the spare room.

  ‘So Agnieszka has taken the lot,’ I say. ‘She’s got the husband, and the house, and the baby, and Martyn as her meal ticket for life, and status in the world as his wife, and what have you got? Nothing! Can’t you even be angry with her?’

  She thinks about this a little.

  ‘Okay,’ she says, ‘Supposing you’re right. That was no au pair, that was a shit and a thief and a confidence trickster – and a slut too. She set out to do what she did, every step of the way she knew what she was doing. Even to giving a scraping of roofie to Kitty so she wouldn’t wake and be frightened by the noise – so she loves Kitty, then.’

  No, I say. That was the worst thing she did.

  ‘I daresay I was very noisy,’ she goes on. ‘But I don’t remember that, and Martyn too, I expect, after all those months of doing it silently because of her in the next room. It was to be expected. Martyn went at it like some guy in a porn film. Perhaps he’s missed his vocation.’

  I ask her what happened yesterday: she went to work, and it was an ordinary day other than that Babs’s Tavish tried to chat her up, because sex, other than normal one-to-one sex, is catching; it hangs round you like an aura and some people pick it up.

  ‘And to tell you the truth,’ she confesses, ‘I felt so nice, so properly and thoroughly seen to, I wanted to get back into a bed and lie in it and wait for something to happen. Actually, anybody’s bed would have done. That’s the terrible thing. Anybody’s. But even I could see Babs’s Tavish in the Dorchester for lunch would be a great mistake.

  ‘Around five o’clock I took a taxi home, and Martyn was there before me. Agnieszka was putting Kitty to bed; Martyn and I both helped bath her and still nothing was said. I felt like saying to them both, ‘I haven’t necessarily forgotten everything: you’re both very naïve if you think that.’ But I didn’t have the energy. So we just all went to bed early in our usual beds. Martyn next to the wall as usual, and I fell asleep at once, and I think Martyn and Agnieszka must have too. And I am sure she did not cry herself to sleep, she just slept.’

  That was Thursday, the second night.

  It was impossible, I told Serena, not to admire the way Hattie’s suitcase was packed. All her best things were laid flat between sheets of tissue paper: ironed knickers were neatly folded, shoes had been put in fabric bags one by one. Every jar of cream, every stick of cosmetic, had been wrapped in cling film and tucked in wherever there was a space to fill. I assumed Agnieszka had done the packing.

  ‘And the next day breakfast was as usual,’ Hattie goes on, ‘and Martyn kissed me good-bye at the door, and he went one way and I went another, and Agnieszka and Kitty waved from the door. I saw she had a plain gold ring on the fourth finger of her left hand. But I didn’t want to be late so I said nothing: Marina Faircroft was coming in to discuss her next novel. She works hard. No sooner is one finished than the next one begun. That is why she can afford to travel with lawyers, even though those lawyers ask the intern to lunch. It may be that Elfie is still seeing him. She comes back after lunch looking so happy.

  ‘But it was a good day and I felt fresh, though I suppose a little numb. And supper was as usual, except the atmosphere was a bit strained. There was the wedding ring, and no one mentioned it. I supposed that Martyn had bought it for Agnieszka, but I didn’t like to ask for fear of the answer.

  ‘Bedtime passed, and no one made any attempt to switch off the television, and we gazed as if we were watching it but we weren’t. Then Martyn switched it off and poured the three of us some whisky, and the sight of it golden in the glass made that same kind of quiver run through me. Then Martyn spoke – he has a nice voice, don’t you think, Gran?’

  I say I haven’t registered his voice particularly. Actually I have always thought it had a rather harsh Northern quality to it, a bit chippy, as if registering a daily protest against the world. But I daresay his recent successes at work and a new boss and a new marriage have softened it somewhat. It might even by now be mellifluous and inviting, as are the voices of those who are pleased with themselves. Hattie continues.

  ‘Martyn put his hand on my arm and asked me if I remembered anything about the other night, the night before last, and Agnieszka put her knuckles up against her mouth and kind of licked the wedding ring, savouring it.

  ‘“Wednesday night?” I ask. “No, why should I? Except I remember Agnieszka made us some of her cocoa and I slept like a log as a result. She makes good cocoa.”