Martyn sees Agnieszka for the first time, and understands that to call her Agnes – which he had been planning in his head, as a last defiance – would be inappropriate. She is a careful person and needs a careful name. She smiles sweetly and with a degree of humility, and says she is pleased to meet him: ‘Mr Martyn, the man of the house.’

  Does he like an egg for breakfast, and if so, scrambled, fried or poached? Hattie is eating a boiled egg, the first of two, from an eggcup and not one of Kitty’s plastic rings. Kitty is in her high chair, well surrounded by pillows for safety. She is trying to manage a spoon and beams at her father, her mother and Agnieszka with equal pleasure. But Martyn and Hattie are new to babies: this amiability is symptomatic of the seven-month child. Soon she will become more particular and shield her face to any other than the favoured few, and weep if presented with anything unfamiliar.

  Hattie and Martyn believe they are raising an extraordinarily and peculiarly talented child, of course they do: really all they are doing is raising just another human being, but one who is going to shove them back into the past a whole generation. Already they are not the ones coming in but the ones going out.

  To Kitty, hard-wired to charm and annoy in equal measure the better to thrive, her parents are the means of her survival, bit-part players in her life, grand-parent fodder for the children she will have, if everything goes right. But she does love them. She loves what is familiar and those who do her bidding.

  Au Pairs We Have Known

  The first of the au pairs came to us in the winter of 1963. Her name was Roseanna. In those days I, Frances, and Serena pooled our child-care resources. If my children, Lallie and Jamie, were more often in the Caldicott Square house than hers, Oliver and Christopher, were in mine, it was because that was what the cousins chose. Her house was bigger, though mine was warmer.

  My house was tall and the staircase wide, only one room on each of the four storeys, and a bathroom squashed beneath the roof. Serena’s and George’s house was one of those late-Georgian pillared double-fronted affairs, not detached, but presenting a unified face around the Square. In those days they were dilapidated and unheated. The basements were damp because the Fleet River ran underground. My peculiar house, known as The Tower, had a curved brick façade, and was squashed in between the regular-looking buildings. Some speculative builder had miscalculated his measurements back in the 1820s, and a later one filled an unproductive gap.

  Serena and George owned their house. I rented, and Serena often had to help me with the monthly payments. I sometimes resented the fact that she saw me as some kind of extension of herself, and that what was hers by right was mine as well, but at least she never seemed to expect me to be grateful. Nor did George have to be consulted: Serena earned her own money.

  In those days it was assumed that the cost of child-care would be borne by the mother if she chose to go out to work, as would the cost of any domestic help needed to replace the vacuum left by her absence. It was not until the eighties that the dual responsibility of parents was taken for granted. Equality carries its own disadvantages. High-earning women today are still taken aback to discover that the departing husband is entitled to alimony – half her savings, half her earnings, half her pension. Serena was certainly astounded, thirty years into her marriage with George, to discover this to be the case.

  George not only wanted to go to the arms of a younger mistress, he wanted to take Serena’s assets with him. He died before the financial arrangements of the dissolution of the marriage were complete, thus saving dispute, but of course upsetting everyone dreadfully.

  The cousins, in the Caldicott Square days, liked one another, which was a help to whoever was in charge of them: they were always more likely to be found giggling than fighting. Jamie, I must say, was considered by all to be something of a nuisance. He was a charming enough, noisy little boy, whom we described as boisterous but now would be seen as suffering from attention-deficit disorder, and prescribed Ritalin. Lallie was even then playing her flute, the piano, the guitar and any other musical instrument she could lay her slender hands upon. If I do not speak much about Jamie it is because these days I so seldom see him. He lives in Timaru, New Zealand, where he runs a horse-racing casino and helps coach the local rugby team. His wife Beverley does not like him to have too much to do with me, especially now that Sebastian is in prison. Beverley is perfectly amiable, and wears enviable hats to race meetings, but finds her English relatives peculiar. I don’t think she would have married James, were he not in line for a baronetcy, not that any money or property went with it. Generations of profligate sons had seen to that. But Beverley will one day be Lady Spargrove and she likes that. Inherited titles are rare in Timaru, I gather.

  I married James’s father Charlie more or less by accident – in the way that glamorous couples used to find themselves married in thirties Hollywood films, waking up astonished in the wrong bed with a wedding ring on their finger. We were in Las Vegas and both of us were drunk and high on God knows what. The legality of the marriage was always doubtful. I certainly almost never used the title – it seemed unfair to claim it in the circumstances, though it’s understandable Jamie wanted to; he had little enough from his father otherwise, God knows.

  After Curran’s death and Lallie’s birth I abandoned the street life for that of the artist’s moll. I modelled naked and slept around where the smell of turpentine was most intense, and had fun. And I dumped the baby on Wanda, most of the time, and then all of the time, when that particular patch of life came to an end and I went off America with Charlie.

  Here, for Charlie’s sake, I developed an interest in pole dancing, horse racing and gambling, and ended up pregnant with Jamie. I would not have an abortion. I could see that if I did there would be nothing to stop me from falling into the chasm of total self-destruction. I was near the edge often enough. And Serena found the money to bring me back home, and eventually to Primrose Hill.

  Please remember that when I left Lallie with my mother Wanda I was very young, very upset, and still in mourning for her father. I am to be excused, but all the same it is not wise to behave badly towards your children: you feel guilty all your life, and think how different he or she would be, how much better their lives, if only you had not done this, had done that. Forget the initial abandonment when I’d left her with my mother, if fifteen years later I hadn’t so hated driving, hadn’t been so fed up with getting Lallie to music classes and recitals against rush-hour traffic I probably wouldn’t have sent her to boarding school – no matter how progressive and musical – and she wouldn’t have got pregnant and had Hattie and then dumped her on me – and perhaps Lallie would have smiled a bit more during her life – but then we wouldn’t have Hattie and now Kitty – and so on and so on.

  New-age cosmologists tell us that there may well be, in infinity, alternative universes where the ramifications of all our actions are lived out. Stored, as it were, in some massive computer, are the other worlds in which Sebastian does not go to prison, Curran does not die, Lallie is born genial and has three babies by a banker, and for all we know we wake up in one world with the memories appropriate to the last. But I fear there are some unalterable truths: amongst them that good eventual results do not excuse bad behaviour or resolve guilt.

  Curran. Lallie’s father. I met him when Serena and I went to the Mandrake Club in Soho, back in 1953. She was twenty-one and I was twenty. Artists and poets and other bad hats sat in the half-dark and played chess, drank cheap wine and planned world revolution. She had little confidence and I had lots.

  Serena met David, who had an encyclopedic memory, played the guitar and sang sentimental songs, and who having once cast eyes on her pursued her until eventually she gave in and had a baby. She declined, haughtily, to marry him.

  And I met beautiful Curran, who I suppose was in his mid-twenties, and played chess in the evenings in the Mandrake and flute during the day on the Underground, his Irish cloth cap on the floor waiting for loose change, until moved on by the police, which happened, he complained, every hour or so.

  Curran was beautiful but perhaps a little mad. He had glossy black curly hair and a pale skin and blue eyes, and lots of cash in his pockets. I always liked that in a man. He was a favourite with the passengers: he played beautifully and I can’t hear The Rose of Tralee, Danny Boy or The Four Green Fields without wanting to cry. The mournful, lovely sound echoed through the murky subterranean warrens, above and below the rumble of trains, singing of lost lands, lost loves. I loved him so.

  He let me sit by his side on a blanket – it was the days before street people went round with dogs for company. The blanket was a McLean tartan, and from it I gathered such ineptly tossed coins as missed the tweed cap. Curran was killed in a pub fight when I was five months pregnant.

  I knew nothing about his family or home, and Wanda advised me not to try and find out. Men, dead or alive, were more of a nuisance than they were worth, unless they had proper homes, trades, professions and incomes. I had the baby in a Catholic home for lost girls and left it with Wanda, and went wandering within a month of Serena giving birth to David’s son and Susan to Piers’s. Poor Wanda: we didn’t leave her much of a life of her own.

  My Labrador Hugo sleeps in a basket, on a tartan McLean rug, a direct descendent of that one long ago. Hugo misses Sebastian: so do I. He digs his nose into its hairy, familiar crumples and feels comforted, and I, watching him, feel the same. I miss Wanda, and I miss Susan, and so does Serena. I have no one to miss Curran with me. If I try to talk about him to Lallie she stops me. She says she is not interested in her origins.

  Lallie was born with her father’s looks and talent, which Wanda tried to tame by way of sheet music and scales, and Serena by paying the fees of a progressive school where musical talent was allegedly fostered, and where she promptly got pregnant by way of Bengt the Swede. So now we have Hattie and Kitty. Serena’s lot were all boys, as if to answer back.

  And now Lallie wows the concert halls of Europe, Japan and the Americas, as once her father wowed commuters on the Underground. His favourite station was Charing Cross, to which Martyn walks daily.

  Glossing Over Inconvenient Facts

  Hattie calls me. Hugo and I are watching a programme on the television. Hugo likes to watch house make-overs, when the owners go away for a time and when they come back everything is different. Sometimes they hate it, sometimes they love it. Hugo is very intelligent, and when he sees a dog on the screen he gets up and barks. Then, disturbed and uneasy, he will go to Sebastian’s studio to sniff around Sebastian’s old paint brushes, as if he suspects there’s a rabbit somewhere about. This is a Hugo face-saving device, because he too misses Sebastian and for all he knows he’s dead.

  ‘Gran,’ says Hattie, when I answer the phone. This is better than Great-Nan. She must be in a really good mood.

  ‘You’ve no idea,’ she says, ‘how wonderful Agnieszka is. Kitty adores her. She’s so competent and the house looks like a dream and Kitty is fine with her. She smiles at everyone and holds out her arms to Martyn when he gets back from work.’ And she tells me that Colleen has had a pregnancy crisis and they want her, Hattie, to start again at Dinton & Seltz the following Monday.

  ‘Isn’t this rather soon?’ I ask. ‘Shouldn’t you try this Polish girl out with Kitty for a month or so before rushing off?’

  ‘I need the month’s money. Au pairs have to be paid for. You’re getting to sound so like Great-Grandmama on a bad day,’ says Hattie. ‘A kind of built-in doubt that anything we wanted to do could ever be for the best.’

  ‘It’s called experience,’ I say. ‘What about breast-feeding? Is Kitty ready to go onto a bottle?’

  ‘It’s more than time. Agnieszka says we British overdo the breast-feeding thing. She says as babies get older mother’s milk may not have enough protein to satisfy their needs, especially in the evenings.’

  ‘How convenient,’ I say. She’s right. I am turning into Wanda. She tells me Agnieszka plays peek-a-boo with Kitty and Kitty loves it. Agnieszka believes that little minds need as much stimulation as they can get.

  ‘Can’t you do that, Hattie? Or even Martyn? Peek-a-boo is not very difficult.’

  ‘But it makes us so self-conscious,’ she complains. ‘We feel silly, Agnieszka doesn’t.’

  Well, what can I say? When Lallie was seven months old I was too eaten up with grief and drama to play much peek-a-boo myself. I left it to Wanda to do. And when Hattie was little Lallie left it for me to do, and I daresay I never learned because Wanda wasn’t the peek-a-boo kind. Lallie was always so busy, touring, playing, recording, enchanting everyone to tears, hard as nails herself. She had elegant, orchestral boyfriends, mostly from the back rows of the strings, rather than the front row, in the same way as some film stars seem to go for the cameraman rather than the director. They don’t like competition. And I can see Martyn’s mother probably wasn’t the peek-a-boo kind either. Too busy running out to the chip shop for a butty. Perhaps it will all be all right. Perhaps if Agnieszka plays peek-a-boo with Kitty a family curse will be lifted and Kitty will breed a race of peek-a-boo players. All may yet be well. But I can see I too may be guilty of wishful thinking.

  ‘Is Kitty sleeping through the night now?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes she is. And the crib’s in Agnieszka’s room, so Martyn and I can have some private life at last.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s feeding the baby opium?’

  ‘That’s not funny,’ she says. She tells me Agnieszka doesn’t believe children should be exposed to TV so she won’t have one in her room, but mostly sits in her room in the evenings and studies. She did a course in child-care in Poland.

  ‘I know about child-care in other parts of the world,’ I say.

  ‘When our Czech girl Viera was six Father Christmas came down the chimney and gave her a lump of coal instead of a present. She’d been bad: she’d wet the bed.’

  ‘You’re talking about years ago,’ says Hattie, which is true enough.

  Four decades back. Poor Viera, who at twenty-seven saw herself as too old to be marriageable. Her fiancé of seven years had jilted her on the eve of her wedding. She’d fled her mountain village, where Father Christmas came down the chimney with lumps of coal, because of the shame of it.

  She met a young Sikh boy when she was with us and wanted to marry him. Feeling responsible, I went to meet the boy’s father, a noble man in a white turban and a grey beard. He said it would be all right because they were both so dumb. They wouldn’t notice any cultural differences. He was right. They lived happy ever afterwards, Viera wreathed in sparkly saris.

  ‘You’ve checked she doesn’t just jump out the window after Kitty falls into a drugged sleep, and earn a little extra money in nightclubs?’ I ask.

  That was Krysta from Dortmund. Krysta would nip down to Park Lane by night to work as a croupier at the Playboy Club. She worked a four-hour shift from one to five a.m. What did we know? We thought she must be ill, she seemed so tired all the time. Then Serena found her fluffy white cotton-tail and black satin corset costume in the wash. The black had run in the hot water and everything in that load was permanently grey. It was ages before we fired her: the children really liked her. She said her mother was so proud of what she had achieved. Black satin was a sign of status in the Bunny world. I tell Hattie all this.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Gran,’ says Hattie. ‘You had one bad experience. But I did check, actually. I went in to ask if she wouldn’t like to watch TV with us – Martyn usually just falls asleep the moment he sits down and it would be nice to have company – and forgot to knock and she was sitting there with a book in front of her, copying notes onto her laptop.’

  ‘What was she studying? Immigration law?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ whispers Hattie. ‘I’m not as nosy as you.’

  She’s getting quite cross with me. She likes to have my permission. She wants me to say it’s okay to abandon her child to a girl she’s only known for a week and came on the recommendation of Babs. I have met Babs once or twice. She is a very persuasive creature of the new female breed, glossy-haired, ambitious and slim as a whippet, but she will always have some hidden agenda or other going on. But perhaps I am being unkind. Hattie seems to like her.

  ‘Why are you whispering?’ I ask. ‘Is Agnieszka listening?’

  ‘She’s out at an evening class,’ says Hattie. ‘I don’t want to wake up Martyn.’

  ‘And what is the course?’ I ask. ‘Police and the Asylum Seeker?’

  ‘Belly dancing,’ says Hattie. ‘Before you say anything it is a very sensible thing to be doing. It teaches stretch, relax and control. I’m going down to a class with Agnieszka myself soon. I’ve got to get rid of this bulge in my tummy somehow.’

  ‘Hattie, you’re so thin a bulge in your tummy can only be a half carrot you’ve just eaten.’

  ‘Agnieszka made carrot soup and a cheese soufflé before she went out, and I had some of each. And Kitty had a wee taste of both and smiled and seemed so grateful.’

  She tells me Martyn went to fetch the barbecue sauce but Agnieszka raised her eyebrows and he tossed it in the bin. Agnieszka has convinced Hattie that it’s barbecue sauce that has been making Martyn bad-tempered: it’s almost all acetic acid and sugar.

  ‘Carrot soup?’ I say. ‘Organic, I hope?’

  ‘Of course. Agnieszka has a friend in Neasden who grows her own vegetables, and she goes over there on her days off: she says she’ll bring back what she can.’

  ‘A female friend or a male friend?’ I enquire.

  ‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything,’ says Hattie.

  ‘She didn’t say. Anyway she has a husband and she loves him very much: he is a screenwriter in Krakow.’