‘What’s a screenwriter doing in Krakow? The Polish Film School is in Lodz.’

  ‘Gran, I have no idea. I don’t even know where these places are.’

  She tells me now that Agnieszka is to have two weeks off over Christmas to go home, leaving her with three days uncovered for child-care.

  ‘So if you could possibly come and stay with us just to tide us over, Gran …’

  ‘But Kitty hardly knows me. I’ve only spent a few hours with her since she was born, and most of that time she was asleep.’

  ‘But you’ll have the same family feel, and smell, and the way of handling her that I do. You’re bound to. Kitty is in your direct line of descent. She won’t find it strange.’

  That girl will believe anything it suits her to believe, but I must say I am touched. I say I’ll see what I can arrange.

  ‘Agnieszka says it’s alright for Kitty to have a dummy. The feeding and the suckling function in babies are separate. Sometimes they have enough food and want to go on sucking, and vice versa.’

  It was hopeless. Hattie was beyond reason. Hugo was snuffling at the door wanting to get out, and I had been standing in the draughty hall. The mobile signal in Corsham is erratic. I said I had to go and she remembered to ask after Serena, Cranmer and Sebastian. I said they were all as okay as their circumstances would allow. I asked her if she’d heard from her mother and she said she had not. So what’s new?

  I did say that if she wanted to see her mother, Hattie would have to have Kitty christened, so Lallie could turn up for a photo opportunity, her face looking lovely in the candlelight with stained glass in the background. Hattie said what hypocrisy religion is: how can the baby have a christening if the parents are committed rational humanists? If they’re not even married in the first place? That seemed enough for the evening and we hung up.

  Child Support

  As a young woman I, Frances, did not have Serena’s appetite for work. I never quite accepted employment as an essential part in my life. I thought that Charlie the baronet should support me while I brought up Jamie, no matter how accidental and hurried a child he was. I was sure at the time of my first pregnancy that Curran, had he lived, would have turned up trumps and happily shared the contents of his cloth cap with me, but I daresay I was mistaken.

  If you love the father of your child you feel he has given enough. If you don’t love him all you want is his money. I didn’t love Charlie. So I wasted time and energy, once back in London, though calmed-down, de-toxed, and fortunately having failed to contract the diseases that so often go with a young, wild life, trying to wring money out of this hapless man of my choice. I had a dream that, like me, he would wear wildness out and settle down and I would learn to love him and that we would live happily ever after. But he was away hunting game in South Africa and hadn’t come home when he said he would, and seldom answered my letters.

  So I set up home in The Tower with Jamie, and asked Wanda if I could have Lallie back. The ease with which she handed over her grandchild did take me a little aback. She as good as thrust the child into my arms. I had expected a struggle.

  But there was always a remoteness about Lallie as if she related better to notes on the page or vibrating through the air than she did to people, as if it didn’t matter to her one jot who came and said goodnight to her, which I could see might be disconcerting to Wanda. And, as first I, then Susan, and then Serena had all at one time or another handed our babies to her to look after, I could see she might simply want to get out from under.

  Wanda must have felt that her own young were bent on punishing her for known and unknown crimes – perhaps for her leaving our father? I think that this indeed was what we were doing – forcing Wanda into recognising the consequences of her action, in an ongoing protest which surfaced in our almost wilful fertility and careless proclivity for sex. The trouble was we weren’t just re-acting, acting out, we were acting too: we all did like sex so. And Wanda just didn’t, or didn’t allow herself to. What she did have was a ferocious sense of duty towards her children, which we three daughters turned to our advantage.

  Once settled in The Tower, around the corner from Serena and George, and with Roseanna to help with the children, I found a job at the Primrosetti Gallery where I held the fort in the frequent absence of its owner Sally Anne Emberley. Sally Anne was a minor film star by whom a famous film producer had a child, a little boy, Lallie’s age. The child was always seen as the famous film producer’s son, and she by inference just a brood cow, rather than Sally Anne’s son by the famous producer, but that was the way the power relations of the day went. The famous film producer at least bought her the premises and some start-up paintings, and now she ran the gallery in a lackadaisical kind of way: thus, it was assumed, he kept her occupied and out of his hair. The gallery hung the works of local contemporary artists – some of whom then went on to better things: a handful even ended up in the Tate and the Metropolitan.

  People now write books about the Primrose Hill Group; lucky were those who bought their work while they could. George, who had given up painting for Serena’s sake, was so dismissive of Sally Anne and all her works that Serena kept away from the Primrosetti and so missed the odd cheap Hockney or Auerbach. I once would have bought an Edward Piper but the washing machine needed mending. Sally Anne, though generous to her artists – she could afford to be – paid me so miserable a wage it was smaller even than Roseanna’s. Those who work in the arts are meant to work for the love of it.

  Roseanna earned £5 a week au pairing for George, Serena and me. I was paid four pounds fifteen shillings a week, without board, for showing, and even occasionally selling, paintings, doing the post, keeping the records, sweeping, dusting, polishing and cleaning the loos. I would have been better advised to train and study and get some professional qualifications, but this was the sixties, what did we know? It was the woman’s role to be supported, the man’s to provide, and if he failed as Charlie failed, the woman played the martyr, and I was good at that.

  This tendency to martyrdom in me would annoy my mother. ‘What do you expect?’ she’d ask. ‘Of course this Charlie of yours is not going to support you. Don’t waste your time hoping. Men only support women if they’re in front of their noses, filling the bed and cooking the food. I told you not to marry him.’ Though at least he made an honest woman of you and you were little better than a drunken drugged-out slapper at the time, she could have said, but kindly didn’t. I went through a bad hormonal patch in my early youth, or as bad as the early fifties could accommodate.

  Serena, venturing briefly into London’s boho underworld, picked up an adoring follower, who would be in touch with her all his life, and then hastened back home to Mother again. But I followed the lure of freedom and excess from underworld to Underground, and it took me years to get back home.

  Martyn And Hattie Have A Tiff

  ‘You can’t do this, Martyn,’ says Hattie. Kitty is asleep. ‘You can’t write an article in praise of the chip butty. You always told me it was chip butties which killed your father.’

  ‘My God, Hattie,’ says Martyn. ‘You are so literal when it suits you. Try to lighten up a little.’

  He’s a fine one to talk, thinks Hattie, who feels she has been putting up with Martyn’s super-seriousness ever since Kitty was born. It is Hattie’s second week back at work. Already, to Martyn’s eyes, she seems overeager with opinions and judgements. It is the pre-Kitty Hattie back again but he hopes it doesn’t go too far. He realises he’d got rather accustomed, and rather to like, her dismal version of herself.

  This evening both parents are home in time to help bath the baby while Agnieszka whisks up some kind of tuna and carrot pie – she uses carrots a lot: vitamin A, carotene and gentle roughage, which can go in the blender the next day for the baby’s lunch. Hattie is down to one early-morning feed, which these days she even looks forward to. Her breasts no longer feel sore and exploited. She and the baby can nuzzle and cuddle each other, and make little peek-a-boo jokes together when no one is looking, and Martyn doesn’t feel left out.

  They have to make love quietly because of Agnieszka in the next room, but that is oddly exciting, deliciously forbidden, like the early days. Not that anyone has ever forbidden sex to either of them, on the contrary, the spirit of make-love-not-war, which so absorbed their parents’ generation, no longer raises eyebrows. But in any generation untrammelled love freely expressed just seems too pleasurable to go unpunished.

  ‘But what’s happened to Devolution?’ asks Hattie. ‘I thought it was meant to be a serious publication. Why are they asking you to write rubbish all of a sudden?’

  ‘It’s not rubbish,’ says Martyn. ‘It’s good journalism. We’re changing tack. We’re concentrating less on what’s bad for you and more on what’s good for you, that’s all.’

  ‘I think you should refuse. Why You and the Chip Butty Can Be Friends. Everyone will laugh at you.’

  ‘No they won’t,’ says Martyn. ‘They’ll read me, even while they sneer. Harold’s offered me my own column. They really liked Skinflints and Killjoys. Apparently it changed quite a few minds at the top.’

  ‘I suppose they have minds,’ says Hattie. ‘Where’s the deep seriousness, the mission to change the world, of all our youths? Why are you colluding in this?’

  Martyn confesses that the alternative to writing up chip butties and a casino on every street corner seems to be a transfer to Welfare Reform, and points out that his prospects both parliamentary and financial will be best served by his fostering his journalistic career, rather than burying himself in statistics.

  ‘They’ve bought you!’ says Hattie. She’s wearing a red suit which Serena bought for her as part of her back-to-work wardrobe and it looks really good on her. It’s Prada. Hattie has filled out just a little because of Agnieszka’s dinners and breakfasts and perhaps because of the lunchtime glass of white wine she has at the sushi bar all but next door to the office, and she’s stopped looking gaunt. She looks fabulous.

  ‘I don’t think you should say that,’ says Martyn. ‘Statistics show that the body absorbs nutrition more efficiently when it is enjoyed than when it is not. The occasional chip butty does no one any harm. On the contrary it does people good.’

  ‘You mean it wins elections,’ says Hattie. ‘Particularly in the north. Northern man’s body lies mouldering in the grave but his soul is withering away.’

  ‘And I rather begin to wonder whose side you’re on,’ says Martyn. ‘If a couple of weeks at Dinton & Seltz can do this to you, God help the working class. A literary agency is the most capitalist of all capitalist institutions. It creates nothing, improves nothing; it just passes on profit. And what is this book you are trying so hard to sell in Poland – ShitCockPissDog!?’

  ‘It’s a book by a man with Tourette’s Syndrome,’ says Hattie.

  ‘It’s done very well in North America. Tourette’s is a terrible condition, and people need to know about it. The fact is, Martyn, that you’re putting career above principle and you swore you’d never do that.’

  At this point Agnieszka comes smiling through the door. She hands Hattie a plain skirt and jumper and suggests she changes before supper’s ready so that Agnieszka can hang her work clothes before they get stained or crumpled, and says she’s looked out a pink cashmere sweater and short grey skirt for Hattie for the next day.

  ‘You don’t want to wear the same thing two days running,’ says Agnieszka. ‘You need to give the impression you have an infinite wardrobe of lovely things.’

  ‘Does that apply to men too?’ asks Martyn.

  ‘No,’ says Agnieszka decisively. ‘Men shouldn’t look as if they took too much notice of their appearance: that they have more important things to do.’

  ‘That’s a bit sexist,’ says Martyn, and Agnieszka looks puzzled. What can he mean?

  But she is taking the tuna and carrot pie out of the oven. It is topped by a light cover of shop-bought golden, well-risen pastry. She is not against puff pastry sheets bought from the shop, but that is about as far as her approval of convenience food goes. Martyn is still bristling a little. He feels the need to appeal to Agnieszka.

  ‘Do you think,’ he asks, ‘that a man’s primary duty is to his family or to the society around him?’ Hattie frowns a little. This is surely too abstract a question to put to an au pair, and why is he not asking her, Hattie, not Agnieszka, but Agnieszka does not hesitate.

  ‘They used to ask us that kind of question in school,’ she says. ‘The proper answer in the old Poland was the last, but now we all know better and the answer is the family.

  Of course if you have a talent, as you do, Mr Martyn, you also have a duty to that. And when opportunities come along for the artist, it is foolish not to take them.’ ‘There you are, Hattie!’ says Martyn triumphantly. ‘I foster my creativity, while writing about the beauty of the butty and you publish help-yourself-towards-Tourette’s, and at this rate we might all be able to take a proper holiday in the summer and now we can all have dinner out whenever we feel like it.’

  And he laughs and embraces Hattie as she slips off her suit and puts on the old jersey and skirt. She is perfectly decent while she changes, in pants, bra and even slip, which Agnieszka seems to think all women should wear, but Agnieszka seems slightly surprised, as if she thinks Hattie should have gone into the bathroom first. Hattie feels a kind of pang: she wants her privacy back: she wants not to be observed, not all the time. But the pie, with its strange ingredients – who ever thought of tuna plus carrots plus pastry – smells delicious and she is hungry, and shakes the uneasiness out of herself.

  Martyn says ‘I love you anyway,’ and Hattie says ‘I love you too,’ and they all settle down to eat. Martyn is really pleased that Agnieszka came down on his side.

  Men, Women, Art, And Employment

  With the coming of Roseanna to Caldicott Square, and the general easing of domestic pressure, came a stirring in me to develop a little ambition and stop grizzling about Charlie.

  I asked Sally Anne for a rise – she grudgingly put my wages up to £6 a week, agreeing that really I ought to earn more than the au pair. If you don’t ask you don’t get, especially if you are a woman: it is also surprising how much you do get if you do ask. Serena, by then flourishing in her advertising agency, said female colleagues seldom asked for rises: they felt they could only be getting what they deserved, and management must know what it was doing. Men colleagues would go in and bang the boss’s desk and make demands. Women writers, she complains, are pathetically grateful if a publisher decides to publish them: men take it as their natural right, and can be quite violent if thwarted.

  Thanks to Roseanna I could now find time to look at what artists, then and now, were actually painting. The model takes a bird’s eye view of what goes onto the canvas and it is a very limited eye. Being painted sucks something out of your very being – as mediums complain happens when they channel the spirits of the departed for the benefit of those still on the earth. It’s an exhausting business. You are left with what’s over when the essence of you has gone into the painting and the better the painter the less left of you there is. That is what makes one a pushover sexually. But now I actually looked and learned. I frequented the major art galleries and the big auction houses and the galleries up and down Cork Street and I got my eye in.

  My mother, Wanda, trained at the Slade and was no mean painter herself, though so much of a perfectionist it took her six months to do one painting. But she seemed to resent my new habit of art-going: I would do better to stay home and look after the children.

  Wanda thought the Wallace Collection was vulgar: all that tasteless ormolu: all those paintings in the wrong frames hung any old how. She really hated Fragonard and Boucher: though she had quite an eye for a Turner in the Tate. She wanted to be the only one to Know.

  George was much the same where Serena was concerned. He preferred to look at art on his own, while she longed to know what he knew, but if she asked questions he became irritated, dog-in-the-mangerish, and suggested she go and have a cup of coffee in the café and wait for him there, and not talk about things she knew nothing about. She should stick to advertising. The cobbler thinks others should stay away from his awl, I suppose.

  Roseanna came to us by accident like a kitten turning up on the doorstep shivering and hungry. Far from spending her time dressed in a white starched cap and pinafore and opening some grand front door to the English gentry, as her mother in sending her off had imagined, Roseanna found herself living in the household of an emigré Polish sea captain and his wife above a wool shop in Primrose Hill. She was working a twelve-hour day in exchange for her keep. She was a pretty, gentle little thing, but she was practical and determined, and worked out that if she slept for six hours out of every twenty-four, that still left her six hours’ spare time. She put a card in a shop window offering her services as a cleaner. Serena responded.

  Ours was not a family accustomed to employing others – at least not since the mid 1920s. In her young days my grandmother Frieda had employed a cook and a maid of all work, but by the thirties she was divorced, and off to California where only the very rich had servants. When her daughter Wanda was twenty she went with her husband Edwin to New Zealand, a pioneering land where servants did not enter into the social equation at all. After that divorce, when the all-female family – mother, grandmother, Susan, Serena and myself – came back to London in 1946, after years of war exile, the domestic structure of society had broken down. The servant class had disappeared – who would scrub other people’s floors when you could get twice the money for half the work in a munitions factory? Or go into the WRENS and meet men?

  The fifties stayed largely servant-free. In the sixties, with increased prosperity and in a more adventurous age, came the first flocks of au pairs, nice girls from abroad who would live in and help out. They came to learn English, and were on the whole virtuous, honest and clean and did not expect to have boyfriends or anything other than minimal wages. Since few mothers were out at work, the au pair was seldom left in sole charge. They were treated as one of the family. In certain circumstances, as with Roseanna and the Russian sea captain, the word ‘family’ was open to interpretation. Stories of the husband who ran off with the au pair abounded; but by and large that instinctive ‘duty of care’, as we now call it, towards the helpless and the vulnerable – the ‘taboo’ as Freud named it – was normally observed.