‘I just wanted to know what would happen, what he would say.

  ‘“Actually you didn’t sleep all the time,” he says. “It’s only fair to let you know. Agnieszka was with us in our bed. Now I don’t want you to get upset, but Agnieszka and I are married, in a church under God’s eyes, and you have to realise that. I have a duty to her. She can’t just be left to cry herself to sleep at night. It isn’t ethical.”

  ‘I say, “I don’t see what someone crying themselves to sleep at night has to do with ethics. It seems to me to belong more to the emotional realm.”

  ‘“Then you should see,” he says. “God, you are so argumentative, Hattie. But I do still love you, in spite of everything. And Agnieszka loves you too.”

  ‘I say nothing.

  ‘Then Agnieszka says: “You have the most beautiful body, Hattie. Nicer than mine. And I wish I had your hair.”

  ‘Bet you do, I thought. What do you want now? I could cut it off and make it into a wig and you could wear it. My partner, my child, my baby, my home, my clothes, now my hair? And the thought makes me laugh, the merest giggle. Sylvie the kitten jumps up and pats my cheek with her paw, rather sweetly. We are friends again now. Indeed, I am her favourite person.

  ‘“I’m glad you can take this so lightly, Hattie,” said Martyn, losing patience with me. He stands up. ‘“So how are we going to work this? Is it to be all three, or one at a time, or you and Agnieszka some of the time, or a rota or what? We need some decisions here.”

  ‘And that’s when I packed my suitcase but Agnieszka took over and did it properly. Martyn drove me to the station. I made the last train to Bath; and here I am.’

  She is brave but trying not to cry. I find her some Nurofen for the pain in her arms – she has bruises on her thighs too – and she swallows them obediently.

  ‘Can I stay here for a while, Gran?’ she asks. ‘I can commute to the office every day from Bath. I can read manuscripts on the train. People do it all the time. In fact it would be very practical for me.’

  ‘Of course you can,’ I say. ‘Until Sebastian gets out. Then we’ll think again.’

  She gets into bed: fresh white sheets, plumped up pillows, red-gold hair all over them.

  ‘I expect he’s in bed with her now,’ she says. ‘Our bed.’

  Her mouth puckers as she tries not to cry. Little Kitty does that too. They’re both brave. Hattie sleeps.

  I call Serena, though it’s a bit late.

  ‘Just as well,’ she says. ‘I never liked him. I’d rather have wicked people who know they are wicked than wicked people who believe they are good. And you have to hand it to Agnieszka. We English are a nation of pushovers.’

  We run through lists of au pairs we have known, and how most were so good, and a few were so bad. And how in nature there is one carnivore to eleven herbivores and it’s just your bad luck when you run into a carnivore. There you are, happily munching the leaves; there’s a squeal in the night and someone’s gone in the morning, but the waters of wishful thinking soon wash over memory. Agnieszka is a carnivore. At least Hattie’s safely in a family bed, and still has her hair. We agree it was the last straw, Agnieszka wanting the hair, not just Martyn’s rota.

  We remember a time in the history of Grovewood, when Serena fled to London with the children, George having done something dreadful, she can’t remember what. There was a succession of Australian girls: Narelle, Abby Rose, Ebony Jo; so sensible and practical they made her moaning about her fate seem a waste of time, so she stopped sulking and went home to George. Narelle taught Lallie, who must have been staying with Serena, the didgeridoo. Where was I at the time? I can’t remember. I was a terrible mother.

  And now what about Kitty?

  Serena says she’d better stay with Martyn and Agnieszka, who’s a good mother. Better a friendly carnivore than an unwilling herbivore. Hattie can visit. When Kitty’s old enough she can make up her own mind. Childhood goes so fast.

  We decide we should go to bed. We don’t have the energy we did when we were younger, and just as well, or we’d have been round at Pentridge Road tearing the place apart and upsetting everyone. What you lose in strength you gain in wisdom.

  Starting on the Monday Hattie commutes daily, taking with her a smart leather briefcase heavy with manuscripts, clear-eyed when she leaves, but red-rimmed by the time she gets home. She allows herself to cry on the way back, never on the journey out. Martyn rings from time to time but Hattie won’t speak to him. I ask her about Kitty.

  ‘It’s astonishing,’ she says, ‘how quickly you forget children if they’re not under your nose.’

  ‘I’ve heard men say this, never yet a woman,’ I say.

  ‘I read it in a book,’ she says. ‘Let them just get on with it, if it’s what they want, and at least Kitty can have a room of her own.’

  At the weekend she helps me in the gallery. Somebody buys Sebastian’s chair painting the minute I open. In ten minutes the table has gone too.

  ‘Keep this up,’ says Hattie, ‘and you’ll be as rich as Serena.’

  Hattie thinks she’ll get a flat in London. She can just about afford it. She says she cried for a week in outrage, loathing, disappointment, shock at her own folly; and because she didn’t have Kitty. But it didn’t seem to be at all for lost love of Martyn. She’d thought he was one kind of person and he turned out to be another. Martyn won’t help support her. Why should he? They were never man and wife.

  She’s earning, and can look after herself and he has the responsibility of Kitty.

  They’re sharing the mortgage payments. She has a financial interest in the house, but it has gained equity which she could use as savings, or collateral. Martyn will have his work cut out supporting Agnieszka and Kitty, because Agnieszka will see her future in the home, not out of it. Martyn will have to write articles for d/EvOLUTION for ever, selling his soul and charming Cyrilla. Let Agnieszka worry about that. Change one woman, change another.

  We walk home from the gallery across Pulteney Bridge and sit for a while in Parade Gardens and watch the River Avon go by. The sun is setting. Swans swim up and down; tourists feed them unhealthy white bread.

  ‘Actually, Gran,’ says Hattie. ‘I did kind of help this situation on its way. I took Agnieszka along to the christening and pushed Father Flanahan under her nose. I wrote the letter to Immigration. I knew what would happen next. I suggested the marriage. I knew perfectly well what that little blue pill was, and what Martyn had in mind, and even took two. The truth of the matter is, I can’t stand domesticity. Any man will do, when you want one, if it comes down to it. I just wanted to get out from under.’ I am speechless.

  ‘I did it honourably. Be happy for me that I am happy,’ says Hattie. She lifts her white, strong arms – the bruises are fading fast – and stretches her whole body towards the sky, and the sun catches her Pre-Raphaelite hair as it turns to gold. She is a vision, coming from the past into the future, sealed for just this moment like a snapshot of a goddess.

  I open my mouth in protest, but I think of Wanda, and myself, of Serena, and Susan and Lallie, her direct antecedents: of Roseanna, Viera, Svea, Raya and Maria, Saturday Sarah and Abby Rose, and all those others, unnamed and unaccounted for (for reasons of space as much as my forgetfulness) who had a hand in her creating. And I think of Hattie’s baby Kitty and of Agnieszka the minder, next in line – and I close my mouth.

  ‘I am happy that you are happy,’ I say, and I am.

 

 

  Fay Weldon, She May Not Leave

 

 

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