‘Hang on a moment,’ said Hattie. ‘You didn’t tell me anything about this. I thought Agnieszka came to me straight after she’d left the triplets in France?’

  ‘She stayed with me a couple of weeks when she had nowhere to go,’ says Babs. ‘She was looking for a permanent job. She made all my new curtains and put them up for free. It would have cost thousands to have the shop do it.’

  ‘So why did she leave Alice? I thought it was because of her English classes.’

  Babs tells Hattie that Alice’s partner Jude, father of the triplets, had pinched Agnieszka’s bottom and Alice had seen and told him it was up to him, either Agnieszka went or he went, and while he was deciding Agnieszka said she had better go for the family’s sake.

  ‘She came to me in tears that same afternoon,’ says Babs.

  ‘Poor Agnieszka.’ says Hattie. ‘Alice should have thrown Jude out.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ says Babs. ‘Sometimes you just run into women like Agnieszka who want to destroy every marriage they encounter. Once they’ve got rid of the wife they lose interest. My therapist says it’s Oedipal. They’re in love with their fathers and hate their mothers.’

  Hattie decides Babs is talking about herself and not Agnieszka. Babs is projecting her own guilt about Tavish’s wife and needn’t be taken seriously. Martyn can be trusted not to fondle, pinch or otherwise molest a woman just because she’s in his house.

  ‘You’re so lucky having Martyn,’ says Babs, and Hattie is quite sorry for her.

  ‘Well, you’ve got Alastair,’ says Hattie. ‘And if you take my advice you’ll do what you can to keep him. And that doesn’t include trying to pass off another man’s child as his. Be glad that it’s gone.’ She speaks a little peevishly. She wants to get back to the office.

  ‘My life has just fallen to pieces,’ says Babs. ‘I’d like a little more support. You’ve got very odd since Kitty was born. I don’t want condemnation, I want pity. I probably don’t even have a husband any more: you’ve got everything and I’ve got nothing. Whoever thought it would end like this?’ And Babs snivels some more, as if exhausted with the effort of thinking about someone other than herself. ‘Please Hattie, do something about the skirt, just don’t make me sit here.’

  Hattie remembers there’s a kilt hanging up in one of the cleaners’ cupboards, left over from the Christmas party which had a Celtic theme. Hattie hadn’t been able to go to the party because she was too big with Kitty to move. She fetches it for Babs, and Babs wriggles out of the skirt and wades into the kilt. Babs tells her to throw the white skirt away because it’s going to be irredeemably stained but Hattie thinks probably Agnieszka will be able to save it. Hattie can hear the phone ringing in her office and Hilary picking up.

  ‘I need Alastair’s money,’ says Babs. ‘And I like being married to him. We had dinner in the House of Lords the other day and I was the best-looking woman there by a long way. And I do want a baby. But I just don’t want it to have Alastair’s paunch or thick neck or piggy eyes. I want a baby with Tavish’s eyes who’ll look up at me and adore me. I love the way little Kitty looks at you, Hattie. She worships you. That’s what I want.’

  She is in tears again. She looks terrific in the kilt if you ignore the state of her face. The kilt would look dreadful on most women but Babs has the long legs and small bottom to carry it off. Hattie wonders what the tartan reminds her of and remembers it’s like the blanket Frances keeps in Hugo’s smelly old basket.

  ‘I always get like this when I’m having a period,’ says Babs, cheering up quite a lot. ‘I expect Alastair will calm down. He usually does. But if Tavish has gone back to his wife who can I have a baby by? I expect Neil has quite good genes. Do you think he would be interested?’

  Hattie goes back into her office and Hilary says, ‘I just had a call from Jago at Javynski in Warsaw, which you weren’t here to take. Too busy gossiping with Babs. They want to change the name of ShitCockPissDog! to Another Way of Crying. They say it translates better. So I said that was okay.’

  ‘But the whole point,’ protests Hattie, ‘is that the book’s about Tourette’s Syndrome? I had enough of a struggle with the author as it was. He wanted just a line of asterisks and stars and shout-marks on the jacket, and his name, but I said you had to be able to read a title in order to talk about it on the radio and he eventually took my point. He’s not easy: he’s never going to accept Another Way of Crying. And really, Hilary, it’s a decision I have to make, not you.’ ‘We really need to get this sorted out,’ says Hilary. ‘With the best will in the world this doesn’t seem to be working out between us. Perhaps we should go and see Neil and see what he says.’

  ‘I’m easy,’ says Hattie, without the gravitas Hilary would have liked. ‘I think that would be a good idea. Get the air cleared.’

  ‘So you’re off now,’ says Hilary, as Hattie searches for her trainers, the better to stride off home. She can walk it in twenty minutes. But they are under her desk where she’s pushed them, and she has to get down on her hands and knees to retrieve them.

  ‘I’ll be staying until about eight,’ says Hilary. ‘There is so much to do. Couldn’t you stay on until I go through the emails with you? Or is the baby waiting to be bathed?’ ‘My emails are up to date,’ says Hattie, snappily. ‘And the Poles are an hour later than us. They’ll have closed down for the day. I’ll call Jago’s in the morning and we’ll talk more about the title and the money.’

  ‘I completed the deal,’ says Hilary, ‘I thought you understood that. I agreed we’d change the title and the money they offered was fine, considering the risks they were taking and their own financial situation, which is pretty dire. I can’t go back on the deal now. And ShitCockPissDog! is simply not the kind of book this agency, which has quite a literary reputation to maintain, should be taking on. Another Way of Crying is a much more informative title anyway.’

  ‘We’ll get Neil to sort it out,’ says Hattie, as calmly as she can.

  Hilary’s hair is thinning. Hattie feels almost sorry for her. She dabs a little scent behind her ears, to show that she is young and carefree. She doesn’t normally wear scent but Agnieszka gave it to her. It’s called Joy and is described as the most expensive in the world, so Hattie supposes it to must be okay. It was apparently a leaving present from Alice when the family went off to France. But Agnieszka isn’t a scent kind of person, so perhaps Hattie would like it? You can’t keep scent too long or it goes off, and the neck of the bottle, pretty though it is, gets sticky and gathers dust.

  So now Hattie keeps it in the office and if she remembers puts some on. Hilary sniffs the air when she does and gives some variation or other of ‘Good Lord, are you wearing scent? I thought au naturel was the thing these days: pheromones and all that.’ So Hattie, regrettably, does it all the more.

  Now Hattie calls by at Babs’s office and asks her if she’d like to share a taxi home but Babs says she has no home. Hattie doesn’t pursue the matter. She does indeed want to get back for Kitty’s bath time. Now she is away from Kitty she feels the physical absence of her more. It is as if a part of her is missing and she needs to be reunited with it quickly. She lopes home on well-cushioned feet but when she lets herself into the house and sees Kitty sitting well propped by tidy cushions in her high chair Kitty hides her face and cries.

  A Good Au Pair And The Promise Of Life After Death

  Roseanna had trained as a shop assistant in Austria, and it seemed to be in her very nature to fold fabric and arrange clothes and objects neatly on shelves. Clothes were colour-coordinated, and plates stacked in exact size order. Like Agnieszka she brought order wherever she went. The children, under her care, were groomed and clean, their hair cut and their nails clipped. As George filled up her basement room with chests with missing handles, tarnished silver, torn canvases, so Roseanna busily polished, repaired and nurtured them, as unobtrusively as she could, because George did so like things to stay as they were (not so much objects as ‘happenings’) in preparation for their departure to George’s emporium.

  The only time Roseanna’s courage failed or her temper snapped was when we all went on a camping trip to Brittany. That was at a time when the English saw virtue in living next to nature, crawling face down in the wet grass into green canvas one-person tents, cooking baked beans and sausages in a tin can over a Primus stove. French camping was a very different matter: their tents were big tough bright orange stand-up affairs, supported by metal struts of great complexity, within which you could hold dinner parties: the smell of pounded garlic wafted over the camp sites of the French. I think it was the humiliation as much as the discomfort that made Roseanna burst into tears and stamp her foot, thus astonishing us all. We packed up at once and travelled home early to running hot water and dry beds.

  As we lived through them, those days when the children were small seemed trouble enough: looked back upon they were a delight. We were young: energy abounded: change was always around the corner: we thought we knew better than our elders and our children had not started to argue with us. If they were in danger we tucked them under our arms and walked away. Later they made their own decisions as to where danger lay, and the girls said ‘oh Mum, don’t be silly, you can trust me’ and when the boys said ‘ha ha, I’m just running down the road for a fix’ you didn’t know if they were joking or not.

  Serena somehow juggled work, motherhood and wifedom. I juggled motherhood and work, and found that difficult enough. I missed the permanent companionship of a man in my bed, the familiar warmth on winter nights – I am sure marriages lasted better in the days before central heating – but I could see the advantages of a single life.

  Bliss it may have been with George in those early days, though later, with her worldly success, it was all to turn sour, but he was not an ‘easy’ man, even by the standards of the times. He would control her by withdrawing his approval: days would go by when he sulked – seldom for anything she did, but for what she was, frivolous, untidy, ignorant of art, buying too many shoes, too much bound up in her family. Things she could do nothing about – being too ready to forgive, or too little interested in politics, too like his mother. Anything would do, I sometimes thought, as a stick to beat her with – then, as she and he suffered, her whole house became sad, friends avoided them, the children whickered and wept and caught colds. It was as if a cloud passed over the sun. Then it would clear: George would be himself again.

  Roseanna went home to Austria as soon as she had her English proficiency certificate, which took over a year, leaving a friend, Viera, in her place – the one who was to marry a Sikh boy and live happily ever after. Roseanna wrote to Serena and George, and to me, for years: gradually we drifted into mere card exchanges at Christmas and then finally silence, after the manner of these things. She married and had children, I think. She will be well on in her fifties now but I can still see her quiet, sweet, pretty face, and the skill of her hands as she beautifully if obsessively washed, ironed, folded every piece of available fabric. I suppose it is possible that she has died – forty years is a long time, even in this healthy age – but I don’t want to consider that.

  Serena reports a classic near-death experience under anaesthetic. She travelled along a warm dark corridor towards a great light, and from all the way down the corridor doors opened and people appeared, friends and family – not exactly people in flesh and blood, more their spirits – encouraging her on. Some were still in the world: some were not. There was a feeling of great love and warmth, understanding and welcome. ‘Roseanna was there,’ she said, ‘and Austrian Viera in her sari, and all the people who have ever helped in the house. Wasn’t that strange? Even Mrs Kavanagh the cleaner with her hairy warts and straggly hair, and her tales of how she tied her little daughter to the table leg and made her eat from the floor when once the child used her fingers not her knife and fork. (Eat like an animal, get treated like an animal.) She was only three.’

  ‘I expect Mrs Kavanagh thought she was doing it for the best,’ I said, ‘though I never liked leaving Jamie and Lallie in her care. You were always more sanguine than me: you thought Oliver and Christopher would be all right. But I’m glad to know that even the worst of us can be forgiven.’ ‘Everyone was there,’ promised Serena. ‘We were all part of the same thing. Part of the one-ness, I suppose, though I hesitate to use so new-age a term. The wholly bearable lightness of being. And then I had to come back, it was not my time, and I was so disappointed. But I haven’t been afraid of death since.’

  But my father died, and Wanda died, and Susan and George died, that I know: it is to be expected by the time you get to your seventies that your circle will be somewhat diminished, but all those girls who came to us and were part of our lives, and ours of theirs, what happened to them? Do they talk of us, as just occasionally we talk of them when someone like Agnieszka turns up and stirs the pool of memory? Will we all be together in some pleasant afterlife of the kind Serena describes? I think that can only be some excitation of the brain as the result of anaesthesia: I do hope so. I don’t want to meet my second husband, who had hammer toes and whose name I forget, in the afterlife.

  Preserving The Peace Of The Home

  Most men behave well enough when they are in a position of authority and responsibility. A good modern family man, husband or long-term partner, will not let his sexual fantasies turn into reality. He may dream of the busty Macedonian au pair who bends over his chair at breakfast time, or of the pretty hands of the Irish girl who hands him his car keys when he has lost them, but he will wake with a start before consummation occurs. Self-interest is at work in both master and mistress. He does not want trouble: he does not mean to foul his own nest. She wants someone to share the dreary tasks of housewifery and child-care, so they can concentrate on higher, lighter and brighter things.

  Martyn wants to think about the role of gambling and the food people want to eat, but kills them if they do, in the new society he hopes for. Hattie wants her writers to get a fair whack of the deal in all non-Anglophone territories, and to get Hilary under control. These are things Agnieszka either can’t or doesn’t want to do. What goes on in Agnieszka’s head is not quite clear at the moment to her master and mistress. They prefer to ignore tiny minor signs, like the matter of the screenwriter husband in Krakow, which does not quite ring true, and the reasons she left her previous employment, which begin to seem slightly other than they had believed. Her future plans are a little obscure – is it belly dancing in London or midwifery back home? – but really what they hope is that she will never ever leave.

  And surely, in any case, unless the mistress of the house is singularly unpleasant or plain, she will be preferred to the maid. The mistress, being in a higher social and financial category, is likely to be brighter, have more energy and better looks than does the help. The maid is likely to be younger – but only in really frivolous men will that be any particular inducement to infidelity.

  But certainly any woman who invites a younger one into the house should beware of two things: a girl of the kind to inspire romantic love, a poetry reader, say, fragile and beautiful, or one who feeds upon the protective instinct of the male by turning up to work with a black eye and tales of boyfriend cruelty. The master may feel the need to go to her rescue and that can become difficult. Happily for the mistress, low-born maids seldom inspire romantic love: that happens in fairy tales, when the prince marries the dairy maid, or in novels like Pride and Prejudice in which little Miss poor-but-quirky Bennett snatches Mr Darcy from better-born, better-heeled Miss Bingley.

  True love needs its inducements. George did not marry Serena until she was making good money, though I never say that to her. We are talking about forty years back and she still believes it was love at first sight. And as for riding to the rescue of a damsel in distress that is not so common as it was. The Benefits Agency and support groups take the place of knights in shining armour. Why should the latter bother?

  Hattie is wise, all the same, to have done the choosing. When the man hires female help another element becomes involved. She is the slave he brings back from battle: she is the booty of war and her body is his by right. As it is Agnieszka becomes Hattie’s maidservant, and her loyalty is to the one she first set eyes on, in this case the female mistress, not the male conqueror. Hattie abhors biologism – indeed, both she and Martyn laugh heartily at the absurdities published in the name of science in Devolution’s sister magazine Evolution – and I don’t put any of this to her. She would scoff.

  But so far, so good, for Hattie and Martyn, and for baby Kitty, who loves routine and the calm presence of Agnieszka, and tends to love most the person who puts food into her mouth and makes her comfortable and plays peek-a-boo. Bath times are all right, with parents present: it’s more fun, but they get soap in her eyes, and let her slip beneath the water so it panics her. She prefers Agnieszka.

  Dream On

  I meet my grand-daughter Hattie for lunch at a Pret à Manger in the Gray’s Inn Road just round the corner from her office, and she’s looking wonderful: everything shines, eyes, hair, nails. I am pleased to have so splendid a grandchild, and think I’ve not done so badly after all. She talks non-stop about Martyn’s job, about Babs’s crisis, about Hilary at work – they are still waiting to see Neil – and the problem with ShitCockPissDog! and its difficult writer, and takes a breath and puts her hand on my arm – she has been to a manicurist – and stops mid track and says ‘Gran, I’m sorry, it’s all me, me, me, isn’t it, I’m just so full of everything all of a sudden. Having been nothing, nothing, nothing since Kitty. How are you and how is Serena and Sebastian and prison and everyone?’