Today’s au pair wants a sex life, proper wages, to go to pubs and clubs and occasionally classes. Her imperatives are her own: her mother will have little influence on her. She will be the product of her own generation, not the one that came before. She will come from a country further east – Hungary, Romania, Poland are current favourites – and her habits may be more unexpected; we expect them to be like ours and they are not. She will be more desperate for survival: the cultures where men looked after women are vanishing fast. If she is from outside the new Europe she may well hope to marry an Englishman for his citizenship.

  It’s a two-way street, of course. Many a European man searches advertisements for a bride from the Far East who will cook, clean and fill a bed in return for her keep and a little pocket money, and sit quietly at dinner parties, thinking herself lucky. Russian girls have longer legs, but are dangerous. The man will choose according to nationality rather than character.

  The world manages, as Hattie has observed to Martyn, on the differential between those who have, and those who have not. There is nothing much to be done about it. But you never know. Things may change. Did not Martyn only recently remark, upon the hiring of Agnieszka, that there was a problem here? ‘Is it ethical?’ Wanda’s principles crop up in the oddest places. Nor can it be a matter of genetic inheritance, since Martyn is no blood relative. Perhaps Wanda simply haunts the family.

  Serena has always kept secretaries and maids, and sometimes a chauffeur, but has never felt truly entitled to them. Wanda, in her nineties, was given a ‘carer’ by Haringey Council – usually a bewildered girl from Botswana or Zambia – who would be asked by Wanda just to sit down and read a book until her time was up, while she got on with the housework and cooking. She liked her toast just so, and her bath just so.

  Susan, Serena and I, unlike Wanda, tended to put up with what we were given. We lived too much on the edge of emergency, all of us, to afford the luxury of being pernickety. This piece of toast will do: that too cold or too hot bath is just fine. But perhaps pernicketiness and employment are mutually exclusive: my mother went through only a few years in which she had to go out to work. For Susan, Serena and me it was a lifetime’s necessity – though Susan’s life was not long enough, I am afraid, to be able to quote it as a case in point.

  But we are all of the kind who cleans up before the paid help arrives: a habit that irritates Sebastian. If I fold up his clean clothes and put them in his drawers or tuck his socks into one another to keep them in pairs, he is as like as not to toss them all onto the floor for Daphne our cleaner to pick up and sort. ‘Why should you do that?’ he asks. ‘Isn’t that what we pay her for?’ Daphne, as a result, adores him, and just about puts up with me.

  Sebastian is an Old Etonian and sees no need to be approved of by the servants. It was customary amongst the English aristocracy to behave as if domestic servants did not exist. Their employers would defecate and copulate in front of them, pick their noses and eat the bogeys, as if the servants were simply not in the room. They have learned better since, of course, as demand for servants greatly exceeds supply.

  George And Serena’s Household

  The reason that Roseanna turned up on George and Serena’s doorstep unannounced was that the sea captain had appeared in her bedroom and started to get into bed with her along with a group of his drunken friends. With the wife’s assistance she had managed to keep the men the other side of the locked door, but with the dawn slipped out of the house, and sat on a bench on Primrose Hill, with her coat on over her nightie until she thought George and Serena might be up, and then knocked on their door. They of course took her in.

  George went round to the captain’s house and removed Roseanna’s few belongings. The captain’s wife was furious because Roseanna had walked out without notice. The captain was too hung-over to care. Roseanna slept on the sofa until the Caldicott Square tenant – a fund raiser for the ANC, one of the left-wing Jewish exodus from South Africa in the sixties – took pity on her and gave up her bed, going off herself to live with a Jamaican poet in an even damper basement.

  Those were the golden days of Caldicott Square. It was a warm, hospitable, untidy household. George and Serena were great party-givers. I was included within the generosity of their household, but I did feel rather like a poor relation. They were married, I was not, or only by default. To be into your thirties and without a partner then was a pitiable thing.

  One-night stands – of which there were many – too seldom turned into lasting relationships. The men were rarely there the next morning, and if it was their place they would expect you to go before breakfast. Breakfasts between strangers were embarrassing. Those doe-eyed blank-faced girls of the sixties were as unhappy as they looked, in their tiny pointed victim shoes.

  But George and Serena had somehow found each other. It was fairly obvious to me that George would spend the occasional night with some other woman – he would return home in the early hours saying he’d ‘fallen asleep on the sofa’ or some such, and Serena always chose to believe him. She never could bear too much reality, and the more fiction she wrote, the less she could.

  She would suffer agonies while waiting for him to return, but she was easily reassured. And she would on occasion find herself in the wrong bed, those being the sixties, but she never counted that as infidelity. It was just something to do while waiting for George’s love to resume.

  Bad Chianti in wicker baskets was giving way to an acid Muscadet: it was not until the arrival of non-European wines in the eighties that the ordinary drinking stuff actually began to taste nice. But Serena would take her Berry Brothers catalogue and order the great clarets of the fifties and the sixties, Lafites, Latours, Margaux, for next to nothing: bottles which if only she had put down would now be worth hundreds, even thousands, and down the gullets of the appreciative and the non-appreciative alike they would go.

  Serena was on the whole one of the non-appreciative, though she tells of a time in the late seventies when, hired to write the love story of JFK and Jackie, she was researching their old haunts with a couple of TV producers, and struck one a blow in the name of good wine. The producers, Vietnam veterans, quarrelled a great deal, and would stop the car and throw punches at each other. Once the one who did the driving had his glasses broken, the other refused to drive, she couldn’t, they had to resume their journey with a man so short-sighted he failed to see red stop lights. The producers added a fictional baby and nanny to their expenses and charged for overnight stops at Hyatt Regencies, when actually they went to Holiday Inns. When, at a restaurant in Hyannis Point they ordered a bottle of ‘62 Chateau d’Yquem which the waiter said was the last not just in the restaurant but in the whole United States, they just slugged the transcendent liquid down their throats, she got to her feet and gave one a right hook. Europe’s honour was at stake. They came to heel after that. The programme was never made.

  The size of the Caldicott Square house was increasing. George decided to build an extension to his town house and restore and damp-proof the basement and incorporate the coal hole, down which once the Victorian coalman had poured his sacks of filthy, shiny coal, the better to house Roseanna, a piano for his talented niece Lallie and a proper bathroom. Hitherto the bath in Caldicott Square had been in the kitchen, and had a wooden lid which served as a sideboard. Before the bath could be used kitchen utensils and foods would have first to be removed, and space found for them elsewhere. In the early days Serena bathed the babies in the kitchen sink.

  As Serena’s income increased, the bath moved to a new bathroom, the space it left was filled by cupboards, a dishwasher was installed, washing could be done in a washing machine and not at the launderette. The house-front was painted, windows replaced, woodworm removed, even the basement was dug out and converted to a perfectly acceptable bright habitation.

  But Serena’s income did not come by accident; it did not fall like manna from heaven, it had to be earned, and she had to go to work, and while she worked much of the child-minding was given over to the au pairs. And the au pairs produced Lallie, and Lallie and I (mostly I) produced Hattie, and now Hattie and Agnieszka will produce Kitty and which of them will play the greatest part in the production who is to say.

  Hattie At Work

  Babs is in trouble. She is in floods of tears. She can’t work, she can’t think, she can’t even answer the phone. Her seductive eyelids are swollen and sore. She is one of the most beautiful women Hattie has ever known: they worked at Hatham Press when they were both starting out in publishing. Babs was then a rather gawky girl with a fleshy face but now she has turned into something controlled, shaped, sculpted and exquisite. Hattie uses her arms for balancing when she walks, for lifting babies and embracing Martyn: they’re usually covered to protect her from cold and the exigencies of life. Babs goes sleeveless, in the confidence of her perfect body, her unlumpy upper arms. When she gesticulates it’s not just with her hands but with her arms as well, so white, smooth and infinitely sexy. Since she married Alastair the Tory MP, who has inherited wealth, her clothes have been perfect, lovely, designed by fashionistas so remote and grand you hardly see them in the newspapers; though sometimes she descends to Harvey Nichols and can be seen vanishing into a changing room.

  Hattie is rather surprised that Babs still seems to regard Hattie as her best friend. What does one so extraordinary want with something so everyday as Hattie? But she does: she’s nice. Envy her as you may, Babs is still nice. And actually even in the month Hattie’s been back at work she too has begun to look a little more grand and groomed. She’s had a hair treatment or so and her eyebrows shaped, and her nails are growing.

  But today Hattie, who does Foreign Rights, is feeling a little frazzled. She has to keep running in next door to look after Babs and calm her down. In the meanwhile Hilary Renshaw who shares Hattie’s office is taking Hattie’s phone calls and Hattie is not sure that this is a good idea. Hilary seems to think that, though she does English Language Rights and Hattie does Foreign Rights, the latter is subsidiary to the former, though actually the two women have equal status. Hattie gets paid less for the moment but that’s because of maternity leave and the pay structure, not that her job is less vital to the agency’s interests: indeed, she expects within six months to out-earn Hilary.

  Hattie is expecting a call from Warsaw: she does not want Hilary lifting the phone and doing something stupid like closing a deal Hattie does not want closed, not yet: because Hattie is pretty sure the Warsaw publishers are prepared to offer more if pushed, and she plans to push. Hilary is stuck somewhere in the past and believes that the former Soviet states have no money: Hattie knows that their playing the poverty card no longer works: publishing in Poland is booming. Agnieszka has told her so.

  Neil Renfrew sits at a great oak desk on the top floor and presides over all that goes on below: film and TV agents, literary agents, fiction and non-fiction, processing what comes out of the heads of those strange people, regarded with mixed awe, disparagement and merriment, as ‘the writers’.

  The writers sit alone at computers all over the land, mining the insides of their heads for treasure, sometimes finding some, mostly not. The agent must persuade publishers, film-makers and newspapers that the gold is not fool’s gold but the real thing. Just sometimes it is, but there’s no knowing in advance. Gamblers all. Hattie will soon have to talk to Neil Renfrew about the delineation of responsibility, if she can ever get in to see him.

  Dinton & Seltz occupy the whole building and will soon have to move to bigger premises or buy the one next door, or somehow split its operations. Too many people work in too small a space. Unlike Martyn’s office this one is old, old, old. The building dates from the end of the eighteenth century, when it was built as a town house for a wealthy rural landowner. The rooms are high and gracious – until you get to the servants’ floors, which are mean and pokey. Computers, files and telephones sit oddly within the building, and no matter what kind of furniture they try it never looks right. The place seems to be waiting for something which will never quite happen. A lift shaft built fifty years ago makes the stairs and corridors, once so gracious and airy, feel crowded and wrong. Health and Safety will soon be after them, worrying about fire exits and wheelchair ramps. Neil’s new office, set back from the street frontage so it can’t be seen from below, is a mere five years old, and won its young architect an award or two. It only just passed Planning.

  All twenty-eight women on Dinton & Seltz’s staff and a percentage of the seventeen men are a bit in love with Neil who is good-looking and usually tanned from a recent holiday. He is happily married, goes sailing at the weekend and comes back to make decisions others shrink at, which is why he is in charge.

  Harold at Devolution belongs to the old school of idiosyncratic bosses, who rule by a kind of wild-eyed individuality and the making of unreasonable but often inspired decisions: Neil, of a younger generation, knows his management procedures, plays no zero-sum games, and likes his staff to be in a win-win situation.

  Hattie responds to a plaintive cry for help through the office walls: Babs has run out of tissues and can’t leave the office to find any because her nose is running, so Hattie fetches them for her friend. Babs would do the same for her. But still Hattie doesn’t want to be away from her office too long because of the expected Warsaw call, and the fear that Hilary will mess things up half on purpose, half unwittingly.

  Hilary has been with the agency twenty-seven years and must be the oldest woman in it. She wears tweed skirts, cardies and pearls. As nuns devote their lives to Jesus, so Hilary has devoted her life to Dintons. She has no children. The betting is that she’s still a virgin, though some say she had an affair with Mr Seltz, long deceased. The phone goes but it’s Babs again. Her period has come on early because of all the upset. And she’d so hoped she was pregnant. She daren’t stand up because she’s wearing a white skirt and it’s stained and will Hattie find her some sanitary towels and another skirt, size 6, quick, quick.

  Babs’s problem is that she has been having an affair with a young TV producer, Tavish, who came in six months back to film the office at work for a BBC documentary. Hattie has never seen him, but Babs has described him, and Hattie rather imagines him to be like the grandfather Curran she never knew, the street singer with the McLean blanket who ran off with Frances, procreated Lallie, and died.

  Babs, for all her beauty, loves Tavish more than Tavish loves her. Lots of women in the office have affairs, but seldom claim to be in love. It’s seen as a rather stupid, dangerous state for a woman to stoop to: if women weep it’s because of some frustration at work, or a fertility problem, or some callous remark from a partner, but on the whole at Dinton & Seltz it’s a ‘women have died and worms have eaten them but not for love’ kind of office culture.

  Babs is now apparently above all this; she lives on some entranced, old-fashioned plane. She is in love, thoroughly seduced, those white, white arms longing to embrace one man and only one, and he the wrong one for her career, her future, and her marriage.

  What’s happened is that Babs sent a compromising email intended to be picked up by Tavish at an Internet café and it went to her husband Alastair by mistake. You press the wrong key and your life falls to bits. I love you, I love you, I love you, see you at the café same place and he’s away at his beastly constituency so I can stay the night.

  Babs realised within seconds what she had done and took a taxi home hoping to delete the message before Alastair got back, and would have suceeded, only his secretary was working on his computer, saw the word ‘constituency’ and forwarded it automatically. Or so she says. Babs says she thinks it was done on purpose.

  ‘She never liked me. She kept telling Alastair how much I was spending on clothes so it didn’t get mixed up with party expenses, but that was just an excuse. What she didn’t understand, those kind of people never can, was that the more I spent the happier Alastair was. It turned him on. Something had to.’

  ‘Well,’ says Hattie. ‘No such thing as an accident. You must have unconsciously wanted Alastair to know. The guilt must be tremendous.’

  ‘A bit of guilt is really good for one’s business acumen,’ says Babs, who means one day to take over Neil’s position. ‘It doesn’t half help negotiate deals. You get mean and twisty and love secrets, and having something over other people. But now Alastair says he wants to divorce me and I can’t afford that.’

  ‘But mightn’t that be a good thing?’ asks Hattie. ‘Then you’d be free to go off with Tavish.’

  But Tavish has gone back to his wife and children in Scotland, not even waiting to find out if Babs is pregnant or not. They hadn’t always used a condom, there hadn’t been time, it had all seemed so important and urgent, and Babs didn’t like messing herself about with chemicals, implants or metal coils. Anything foreign you took into your body could do you harm. She’d made the mistake of telling him she loved him and that drove men away, everyone knew except her, apparently.

  She, Babs, was just an innocent. Babs had hoped to have a baby by Tavish and pass it off as Alastair’s. She was thirty-nine and the biological clock was ticking. How lucky Hattie was to have a baby, and a job, and a husband who wasn’t boring. The trouble with Alastair was that he was an old fart, landed gentry, and made her feel stupid because she hated horses and although he was no good in bed had an eye for girls and had started groping Agnieszka so Agnieszka had to go. Not that she, Babs, minded all that much. ‘All that carrot-pie stuff: one got so sick of them.’