She May Not Leave

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‘Oh all right,’ she says, ‘go out and get us some fish and chips.’

Agnieszka Comes Into Hattie’s Home (#ulink_8c9ab701-54b2-5006-a3bd-fde89605e4b2)

A week later and Agnieszka rings the doorbell of the little terrace house at 26 Pentridge Road. Hers are strong, practical hands, the skin rather blotchy and loose and much lined upon the palm. They are not her best feature. She is in her late twenties and wears a brown suede jacket, a knee-length black skirt and a white blouse. Her face is pleasant, broad, high-cheekboned, her demeanour quiet and restrained, her hair cut in a neat, thick, brown-to-mouse bob. Apart from the slightly sensuous air imparted by the short, full upper lip she seems to present no danger to marital harmony. She is far too serious for sexual hanky-panky.

The doorbell needs attention. There is a loose connection somewhere and the buzzer seems in danger of giving up completely. Agnieszka does not ring a second time but waits patiently for the door to open. She hears the sound of infant wailing growing nearer and Hattie opens the door. Hattie’s hair is uncombed and she is still in a blue velvet dressing-gown, with dribbles of porridge down the front and what looks like infant vomit on the shoulder. It needs to go in the washing machine.

Agnieszka holds out her arms for the baby, and Hattie hands the child over. Kitty is taken aback and stops crying, other than for a few more gulping sobs while she gets her breath back. She looks at Agnieszka and smiles divinely, revealing a tiny little pink tooth which Hattie sees for the first time. A tooth! A tooth! Agnieszka wraps the child more securely in its blanket and hands Hattie her bag to hold. Hattie takes it. It is a capacious black leather bag, old but well polished. Hattie thinks perhaps Kitty won’t like having her limbs constrained but Kitty doesn’t seem to mind. Indeed, Kitty exhales a deep breath of relief as if she had at last found her proper home, closes her eyes and goes to sleep.

Agnieszka follows Hattie through into the living room, and lays the baby on its side in the crib. She folds crumpled baby blankets neatly, holding them against her cheek to test for dampness, putting those that pass the test over the edge of the crib and gathering up the damp ones. ‘Where do we keep the laundry basket?’ she asks. Hattie stands gaping, and then points towards the bathroom. The ‘we’ is almost unendurably reassuring.

Hattie, dressing in the first-floor bedroom, catches a glimpse of Agnieszka in the landing bathroom, sorting the overflowing washing basket. Whites and coloureds, baby and non-baby. All get filed into plastic bags before being put back in the basket. Nothing overflows. Soiled nappies go into a covered pail.

Hattie remembers Martyn’s strictures about the necessity of checking references, but to do so would be insulting. She feels she is the one who should be giving references.

Agnieszka asks if she can see her room. Martyn has piled his suits onto the spare bed before setting out for work that morning, and Hattie has not yet found space for them elsewhere – she has had a bad morning with the baby. Agnieszka says she is satisfied with the accommodation, but perhaps she could have a small table to use as desk? Would Hattie like Kitty to sleep in her cot in the spare room with Agnieszka, or stay in the bedroom with her parents? She is sleeping through the night by now? Good. Then the former will be preferable, because then she, Agnieszka, can get Kitty up and dressed and having breakfast before Mr Martyn, as she already calls him, needs the bathroom. Early-morning routines are important, she says, if a household is to run smoothly. While Kitty sleeps she, Agnieszka, will get on with her studies.

Agnieszka now picks up and carries a chair to the front door, climbs on it, and does something to the wires that feed the bell. Hattie had never noticed those wires existed. It certainly has not occurred to her that the bell can be mended. Agnieszka tries the bell and lo! it rings firmly and clearly, no longer hesitant and hard to hear.

‘Don’t wake the baby,’ says Hattie. ‘Hush.’

‘It’s a good idea to get baby used to ordinary household sounds,’ says Agnieszka. ‘If Kitty knows what the sounds are about she won’t wake. Only unaccustomed noise wakes babies. I was told this in Lodz, where I studied child development for two years with the Ashoka Foundation, and it checks out.’

She gets down from the chair and replaces it in its original position, and takes the end of a damp cloth and removes a little wedge of encrusted baby food where it’s been stuck for some time.

Agnieszka tells Hattie that she is married to a screenwriter in Krakow, and plans to be a midwife, but must first perfect her English. Yes, it is difficult being away from her husband, whom she loves very much. She would like ten days off over the Christmas period to visit him, and her mother and her younger sister, who is not well. She is very close to her family. She produces photographs of all of them. The husband has a lean, dark, romantic face: the mother is dumpy and a little grim: the sister, who looks about sixteen, is fragile and sweet.

‘Ten days seems rather a short time,’ says Hattie. ‘Make it two weeks and we’ll manage somehow.’

Thus, without further argument or discussion, Agnieszka is engaged. But first she says she must put the damp washing into the machine. Plastic bags are invaluable for sorting laundry in an emergency, she says, but she will bring her own cotton ones for household use in future. Sorting prior to the wash makes sure mistakes are not made: white nappies do not pick up colour from black underpants, or cotton jerseys stretch in the boiling wash. Hattie might like to look into the local nappy laundry: this collection/delivery service can work out cheaper in electricity and soap powder than a home wash, and is less strain on the environment.

Still the baby sleeps, smiling gently. Hattie’s life slips into another, happier gear. While Agnieszka keeps an eye on the white wash – Agnieszka has put the machine on its ninetydegree cycle, she notices, something she, Hattie, never does in case the whole thing boils over and explodes, but Agnieszka is brave – she goes round the corner to the delicatessen, ignoring the common sense of the supermarket, and buys two large pots of their fake but convincing caviar, sour cream, blinis and champagne. She must stop being mean, rejecting and punishing. She can see this is what she has been doing. Not his fault the condom broke. She and Martyn will live happily ever after.

Frances Worries About Her Grand-daughter (#ulink_d96379f7-0d7a-5284-a7d6-c9e61821e0e1)

I hope Hattie understands the complexities of having an au pair in the house. For one thing Hattie is not married, only partnered, which in itself is rash. ‘Partnerships’ between men and women, as everyone knows, are more fragile even than certificated marriages, and the children of such unions likely to be left without two resident parents. Any disturbance to the delicate balance is unwise. If introducing a dog or a cat into a marriage can be difficult, how much more so a young woman? Some kind of female rivalry is bound to ensue. And if it all goes wrong the decisions are the more painful. Who takes the dog, who takes the cat, who takes the au pair when couples split? Forget the children.

Martyn is a good enough boy in his terrier fashion, never willing to let go, and as a couple they are affectionate – I have seen them go hand in hand – and he is a responsible father, having read any number of guide books to parenthood, but I am left with the feeling that he has not yet arrived at his final emotional destination, and neither has Hattie, and that makes me uneasy.

They have their shared political principles to fall back upon, of course, and I hope it helps them. I am an upright enough person myself and a socially conscious one, and in my youth, once the wild years were over, kept the company of kaftanclad hippie girlfriends and bearded boyfriends with flares and sang along with Joni Mitchell. There was a time when all the men one knew in the creative classes had Zapata moustaches: it is difficult to know what a person with such a moustache is thinking or feeling, which may be why they were so popular.

That was in the sixties when women and men hopped in and out of each other’s beds with alacrity, trusting to luck and the contraceptive pill to save them from the consequences of broken hearts and broken lives, and before venereal diseases (now called STDs to remove the sting and shame) put a blight on the whole enterprise – herpes, Aids, chlamydia and so on – but I never urgently sought after righteousness or thought the world could be much improved by the application of Marxist theory.

In any case I had too little time or energy left over from successive emotional, artistic and domestic crises to concern myself with political theory. The creative gene is strong in the Hallsey-Coe family, and we tend to marry others like us, so lives of quiet respectability amongst them are rare. We end up writers, painters, musicians, dancers – not metallurgists, marine biologists or solicitors. In other words we end up poor, not rich.

Hattie, a linguist and a girl of high principle and political awareness, is fortunate enough to be born without a creative spark in her, though this can sometimes flare up quite late, and there may yet be trouble ahead. Serena did not start writing until she was in her mid-thirties: Lallie on the other hand was an infant prodigy, performing a Mozart flute concerto for her school when she was ten.

The Effects Of Bricks And Mortar On Lives (#ulink_c0877ec3-4ee5-53ac-be9b-1f88e8374c2d)

Let me tell you more about Hattie’s and Martyn’s house. Houses are not neutral places. They are the sum of their past inhabitants. It is typical of the English of the aspiring classes that they prefer to live in old places rather than new. They crawl into someone else’s recently abandoned shell and then proceed to ignore whoever it was who went before. Tell them they’re behaving like hermit crabs, and they raise their eyebrows.

Pentridge Road was built towards the end of the nineteenth century, rooming houses for the working classes, few of whom ever grew to optimum size or lived beyond fifty-five. The young couple see themselves as somehow set apart from the heritage of bricks and mortar in which they live. They feel they have sprung into existence ready-formed and into a brand new world, blessed with more wisdom and sophistication than their predecessors. Tell them they inherit not only the genes of their forebears but the walls and ceilings of those socially and historically related, and they look at you blankly.

Some things do happen which are an improvement – facts are certainly easier to come by in the twenty-first century than in the age of the printed page. News of the outside world flows like chlorinated water from radio and television: houses are better warmed and food cupboards more easily filled, but those who live in them are as much as ever at the mercy of employers and whatever rules of current cultural etiquette apply, whether it’s the obligation to fear God or to own an iPod.

Tear off the old wallpaper – as Hattie and Martyn did when they bought the house – and find yellowed scraps of newspaper beneath – accounts of the Match Girls’ Strike, the force ten gale which brought down the Tay Bridge, the costumes worn at Edward VII’s coronation. Hattie and Martyn scrape them all ruthlessly into the bin, scarcely bothering to read. I think the otherness of the past disturbs them too much: they like everything new and fresh and startagain.

The plaster walls are painted cream, not papered dark green and brown, and the paint at least does not poison you with lead – though traffic pollution may serve you worse. But very little changes in essence. Other generations lay in this same room at night and stared at the same ceiling worrying what the next day held.

In my sister Serena’s solid early-Victorian house in a country town, the stone stairs from the basement are worn down in the middle from the tread of countless servants, up and down, up and down. You’d think their tired breath would haunt the place but it doesn’t seem to. Serena’s mother-in-law died in the room where Serena now has her office but the fact only very occasionally affects her, though she claims her ghost walks on Christmas Eve. That is to say she once saw the old lady cross the passage from spare room to bathroom, and looking twice there was no one there. Her mother-in-law left a benign presence behind her, Serena claims. When I say, ‘But I have seen the ghost of the living Sebastian in his studio,’ she does not want to believe me. She likes to be the only one in touch with the paranormal. She isn’t.

I live in a small farmhouse which has been a dwelling for the last thousand years at least. The hamlet, outside Corsham in Wiltshire, is mentioned in the Domesday Book. Its occupant would have been fairly low down the social scale: a sub-tenant perhaps. Originally it was a single room for family, animals and servants. Then an outside staircase was built and a couple of rooms above. The families moved upstairs, the servants and animals stayed below. Outhouses were built: animals were separated out from servants. The original barn was long ago converted to a dwelling. A studio was built out the back where Sebastian now paints, in ghostly form, and I hope will again, less spectrally.

Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night, seized by the fear that he will behave like an ageing man after a heart operation, and try to change his life, and the change will include separating out from those that love him. It happened to Serena and it could happen to me. In these wakeful nights the house creaks and groans and sighs, from sheer age or from the spirits of those who went before, including pigs, horses, sheep, servants, forget the masters and mistresses. Oh believe me, we are not alone. The central heating gurgles like a mad thing at night.

But back to the young, the loving, the breeding and the present, that is to say Hattie and Martyn. Martyn, to give him credit, is more conscious of the past than many, if only as a contrast to the benign Utopia he and his friends hope to achieve. Martyn has explained to Hattie, as she sits trapped in her nursing chair (an antique, which Serena bought her as a present) feeding Kitty, that the terrace house they live in – two up, two down – was designed for the wave of Irish navvies brought in to complete the earthworks for the great London stations which served the manufacturing North, the land of his roots. St Pancras, King’s Cross, Euston, Marylebone – every shovelful of earth and rock had to be moved by hand, and now forms Primrose Hill.

Hattie would like to live somewhere larger, even if less historical, but they cannot afford it and in any case, says Martyn, they should be grateful for what they have.

The navvies lived six to a room in what is now home for two grown-ups, one baby and now the maid. There is still an old coal fireplace in the top back bedroom where once, over coals scavenged from the King’s Cross mustering yards, meat and potatoes were cooked. A puny extension for the kitchen and bathroom was built in the 1930s and takes up nearly all the sunless yard. Agnieszka is to have the small back bedroom, next door to the one where currently Martyn, Hattie and Kitty sleep.

There is gas-fired central heating but the gas comes from under the North Sea and no longer from the coal mines. It’s cleaner, but it’s expensive and Martyn and Hattie dread the bills. Though at least everyone on the way from the oil rigs of the north to the man who reads the meter – or rather leaves his card and runs – is decently paid. Or so says Martyn. Martyn’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather fought for this prosperity and justice and achieved it. No one now who can’t afford a lottery ticket!

Martyn has recently been asked by his employers to write two articles explaining to a doubtful public that casinos are a good thing, bringing pleasure to the people, and he has, although he is not quite sure that he agrees. But he bites back argument as he writes. There is, as always, a case for both sides and it is not sensible to overturn too many apple carts in pursuit of a principle, this being a relativist age, and Hattie not earning, and so early in what he hopes eventually to be a parliamentary career.

Morality, as Hattie recently discovered, is a question of what one can afford. She can afford less than Martyn. Even so, putting the comforter in the baby’s mouth, plugging its distress, Hattie feels guilt. Guilt is to the soul as pain is to the body, a warning that harm is being done. Gender comparisons are odious, as Hattie would be the first to point out, but it is perhaps easier for men to override the emotion than it is for women.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have given Hattie permission to go back to work. Along with the child-care comes guilt, in the form of another pair of hands to soothe Kitty’s brow, another voice to lull her to sleep. Bad enough for Hattie to have bred a baby – and guilt is to motherhood as grapes are to wine – now she must worry about how Agnieszka will react to the baby and the baby to Agnieszka and both to Martyn and back again.

Hattie will have to develop the art of diplomacy fast. Wouldn’t it just be easier to put up with the boredom of motherhood and wait for Kitty to grow up? I feel like phoning Hattie and saying ‘Don’t, don’t!’ but I desist. The girl is not cut out for domesticity. But will Agnieszka influence Kitty’s character, mar her development in some way, teach her how to spit out food and use swear words? I am Kitty’s great-grandmother. I worry. The guilt outruns the generations.

Learned Characteristics (#ulink_28208267-f217-5be2-ac2d-df5591b5022a)

Back in the sixties when we were in our early thirties, living round the corner from each other in Caldicott Square, Serena and I passed au pairs around like hot cakes. Nearly all of them were good girls, just a few were very flawed. But they all made their mark. I am sure some traces of various learned characteristics remain in my children, and in Serena’s too, to this day.

Roseanna, Viera, Krysta, Maria, Svea, Raya, Saturday Sarah – all will have had some input into what they became. Ours may have been the predominant influence, but I’m sure my Jamie learned from Viera how to get his way by sulking and from Sarah how to love in vain. It was from Maria that Lallie the flautist learned to despise us all, but from Roseanne how to value and respect fabrics. Lallie may be falling into bed with a lover but she won’t fling her clothes on the floor. She will place them neatly on the back of a chair, or indeed on a clothes rail. She is prepared to spend hours washing by hand, while I just bung things in the washing machine and hope for the best.

In the days of the many au pairs, I was working in the Primrosetti Gallery for a pittance, Serena was beginning to earn well as an advertising person, and George her new husband had just started his antiques shop. Serena and George lived in a big house in Caldicott Square. The girls lived in the basement, for I had no spare room for them, and though the basement was in its raw early-Victorian state, all damp walls and loose plaster, they did not seem to mind.

I have never been jealous of Serena, she is too amiable and generous for that, and takes her own position in the world lightly, thus obviating envy. She is also, frankly, fat and maintains that this is what has enabled her to survive as well as she has in a competitive world. ‘Oh, Serena!’ people say, ‘Sure she seems to have everything: money of her own making, a nice home, an attentive husband, her name in the papers, creativity, reputation, children – but isn’t she fat!’ And they can’t be bothered even to throw the barbs.

Back then in the sixties, working in advertising as she was, weighed daily by an expensive doctor in Harley Street and injected with some terrible substance made of pregnant mare’s urine, or some such, plus a daily dose of a crude amphetamine, Serena was thin and glamorous enough. Then indeed, yes, I was envious. Why is it so easy for her, I’d wonder, so hard for me? But then I’d think, well, my twenties were wildly good for me, in a desperate kind of way; hers, until she took up with George, were boring and anxious.

When Serena met George around her twenty-ninth birthday, it was as if some curse had lifted and all the jagged pieces of her life so amazingly and unexpectedly fell into place.

Before that she was a hopeless misfit, suffering from what they now call low self-esteem and an over-placatory nature.

The curse moved over from her to me – perhaps this is the fate of sisters – and it was my turn to endure a decade of blighted life as a single mother, trying to bring up two children – one a sports fanatic, the other, stunningly talented but basically unfriendly. Until then, I was the one who was enviable. I was thin and she was fat.

I daresay if you add up the anxious, tearful, tormented days and nights we have had throughout life, the pair of us, they come to about the same. I clocked up a good few in my seventy-first year, when Sebastian was held incommunicado in a Dutch police cell, and later in prison, but I don’t think as many as Serena did, flailing and wailing and staring into space, when George betrayed her, turned against her, locked her out of her home, around the time of her sixtieth birthday. She married again soon enough.

Martyn On The Way Home From Work (#ulink_6cbccbb5-467f-5dfd-bac2-ca31faf6bdff)

New Century House, where Martyn works as a statistical journalist for Devolution, is newly built and well funded: it stands all glass, steel and shininess, in a block of small rather mean streets between Westminster and Petty France. It is pleasantly decorated and has effective climate control. There was a Legionnaires’ Disease scare when the building first opened – stagnant water had been circulating in the ‘veins’ of the building, its opening by the Prime Minister having been delayed for more than a year – but the source of the epidemic was quickly detected and put right and only a janitor died. A Feng Shui expert was called in to help with the foyer. As a result the entrance to Starbucks is at an angle calculated to welcome customers and revitalise takings. It seems to be working. The noise from cheerful non-smoking coffee drinkers floats up the escalators until well after ten each morning: the elevators smell of hot chocolate croissants.

Each of the seven floors has a dedicated rest room for stressed staff, with a good supply of fresh towels for showers, and for a small fee pillows are available for those who need to sleep. Research shows that nothing improves productivity like the short power-nap. Since Kitty arrived Martyn has made good use of these rooms. The baby sleeps well by day but not by night, no matter how often Hattie takes her to the breast, and it is impossible for Martyn to sleep through the wrigglings and moanings of both mother and child.

As well as serving as the offices of the sister magazines Devolution and Evolution, the building houses the headquarters of three think-tanks or public policy research institutes – the Centre for Post-Communist Economic Development, the Policy Coordination of Welfare Reform Initiative, the Institute for Social Commentary – and two quangos dealing with societal management and measurement.

There has been some talk of Martyn being seconded part-time to the Welfare Reform Initiative under the new Moving and Growing Human Resources Plan, which deals with unemployment issues, but Martyn is manoeuvering so this won’t happen. The pay is more, but Martyn sees his future in political journalism and indeed in politics itself. He is more likely to be selected as a candidate out of a journalistic background than from one more concerned with statistical research. He needs visibility.

Martyn is taking a nap in the fourth-floor sanctuary. It is a pale green room with pink features; rather hard on the eye but the colours are recognised to foster sleep. At home Hattie and he have strong, dark, powerful colours on the walls and they have painted the furniture red: Kitty’s cot is yellow to maximise her synaptic responses. Hattie scorns the New Age – crystals and horoscopes and so on – but has a belief in the power of colours to influence mood which Martyn finds endearing. His own upbringing was so practical and no-nonsense he sometimes finds himself hungry for Southern whimsicality.

Martyn is joined by his editor and immediate boss Harold Mappin, who collapses on an adjacent couch (modelled on one from a first-century Roman fresco) saying ‘they’ve junked almost the entire edition. Except for your Skinflints and Killjoys piece, which went down a treat. How can they call this living? If I don’t have a bit of shut-eye I shall kill myself. Debora’s wearing me out. God save us from younger women.’

There has been some policy change at the top: new health initiatives are proving too expensive for the Treasury: research is showing what Martyn had always suspected – that the more you asked young healthy people to look after their health the less inclined they were to do it: only the already ailing and the elderly bothered. The focus of the autumn issue is now to be devoted to good news rather than grim warnings. Also, circulation is falling – even the Government departments amongst which Devolution is read, themselves victims of spending cuts, are no longer taking the magazine.

All this Harold delivers to Martyn, who is pleased and flattered to be taken into his confidence, while arranging his pillows. More significantly still, he also says that he has changed his mind about transferring Martyn to the Welfare Reform Initiative. ‘Much too dull for a dude like you. We need you in the team. What about a positive piece on the new cholesterol research? What this country needs is good news.’

‘You mean something like Why You and the Chip Butty Can Be Friends?’ asks Martyn. He is speaking ironically but Harold just says, ‘Exactly’ and falls asleep, not waiting for further comment, arms flung above his head like a small child.

Harold is a large, noisy, hairy man in his fifties, with shrewd eyes. His staff put it about that he is autistic, or at any rate has Asperger’s: they look up the symptoms on the Internet, hoping for grounds for their belief that his communication and social interaction skills are so minimal he can be described as mad, and they can ignore him. Martyn has always got on with him perfectly well.

Martyn goes home encouraged and cheered. He walks to Trafalgar Square and takes the Barnet branch of the Northern Line from Charing Cross back to Kentish Town Station. Many a Westminster worker has taken exactly this route home to Kentish Town since the line was built, a hundred years ago. You walk a little first, both for the exercise and to save the trouble of changing at Embankment. And like so many before him he approaches home with a mixture of emotions: desire to see his family conflicting with a kind of terror that they exist at all. The waiting family is the source of all pleasure and the source of all dread. Once he was young and free: now he has obligations and must not be selfish.

If he is promoted as he can see he might well be, from editor to commissioning editor, his salary will jump by some £6,000 a year. That would mean Hattie could stay home with the baby, and they would no longer need to have an au pair. He wants his house to himself. Hattie, being flesh of his flesh, doesn’t count as another person: Kitty’s arrival had been an upset but she too now feels like an extension of himself, not a foreign body to be eased out.

Privacy had been dearly earned in his growing years – the lad Martyn would sit by himself in the cold in the outside loo and read, just to get a bit of peace – and not even reading had been private: you read the book your teachers said you should read and had to discuss it afterwards, otherwise you didn’t pass your exams and then what became of you? To the man Martyn the idea of a stranger living at close quarters, sharing his table, sharing his television, knowing his secrets, feels nightmarish. Surely the value of money lay not in the things you bought, but in the time, space and privacy it earned for you?

At home, there was at least the peace of familiarity, although currently disturbed and messy and Hattie mad and the baby crying and no food in the fridge. But this peopled privacy was what he had chosen, and what he wanted; it was his delight. His domestic happiness was like a Russian doll, securely weighted at the base. Sleepless nights, wailing baby and wranglings with Hattie about this and that, made it lean so it seemed bound to fall, but then it was certain to bounce back again.

But now Hattie has called him on his mobile, excited and pleased, to tell him the Polish girl is already installed in the spare room – his time, space and privacy has wilfully been breached, and by Hattie, who is meant to be on his side, thinking only of her self-interest. He disciplines his thoughts. He will not think like this. All will be well. No use being a loner in this sharing and caring age. He will go home, fit in with everyone, and behave.

Martyn Comes Home To Agnieszka (#ulink_823e1317-580d-59df-9090-7bbc70031aee)

Martyn is not prepared for what meets him when he opens the front door: Hattie with her wild hair in order, in a clean, ironed shirt and fresh jeans. She smiles at him as if she were happy to see him, not, as so often these days, with a complaint and an argument ready to spring to her lips. He had forgotten how pretty she is. She is wearing a bra again, so she has two separate breasts not a kind of undifferentiated flesh shelf. Her figure is back to its prebaby state. It probably has been for months but no one, least of all Hattie, has paid it much attention.

‘Kitty’s asleep in Agnieszka’s room,’ Hattie says, ‘and supper’s on the table.’

It is too, and like the old pre-Kitty days: delicatessen food, no longer boiled potatoes and cheap tough chops. Lots of spoons for sauces on the table and little jars of this and that which Hattie has lately derided as a wicked waste and empty calories. But no sign of Agnieszka, who it seems is out at her belly-dancing class.

‘A belly dancer! Our child is to be in the care of a belly dancer?’

‘Don’t be so sad and old-fashioned,’ says Hattie. ‘Belly dancing’s in, forget Pilates. Belly dancing teaches relaxation, muscular control and a healthy mobility.’

Hattie tells him that Agnieszka hopes to become a qualified tutor: even start up her own school in London. She loves dancing. She was even in the Polish Dance Company for a time, on a day-release course during their equivalent of our sixth form. She’d been chosen over hundreds of applicants.

‘I thought she was meant to be learning English over here and then going home.’ Martyn is disconcerted. Perhaps Agnieszka is a figment of Hattie’s imagination? Perhaps she’s in Hattie’s head and nowhere else? It occurs to him that Hattie’s new appearance might be a symptom of a disordered mind. The madness is not in the disorder but in the order?

But the food looks good and Hattie is still smiling and the room is tidy and napkins arranged by the plates, as his mother would do on special occasions. This is not imagination. A fairy god-mother has appeared and set everything right. Martyn’s mother never read fairy stories to her children as a matter of principle: ‘If they want to read let them do it for themselves.’

‘But what does she looks like?’ he asks. He feels that this is not a question he ought to ask, women’s looks are not up for discussion, and should not be taken into account in the work sphere, but he wants to know.

‘There’s nothing to tell.’ Hattie has to struggle for description. ‘She’s just ordinary. No busty beauty, no long-legged harpy. She looks pleasant enough. She has a flat tummy.

Mine isn’t quite back to normal yet. I might go along to classes with her.’

‘Leaving me to look after Kitty?’ He speaks lightly but already he can feel himself lonely and left behind by two women.

‘A babysitter can look after Kitty if we’re none of us here,’ she says. ‘Once I’m back to work we can afford as many babysitters as we want – or Agnieszka and I could always go on different days.’

This is Martyn’s moment to tell Hattie that he may well be getting a big hike in salary, and the financial imperative is removed from the issue, but he does not. If this is the new Hattie he wants her.

Martyn goes into the spare room to check on Kitty and finds her sleeping peacefully in a cot in the space between the single bed and the wall. Her hair has been brushed and lies snugly against her cheek. She is a fair, round-faced, well-filled-out baby. He loves her intolerably.

The spare room has been re-arranged to its advantage: the desk from the kitchen where it held nothing but out-of-date newspapers, run-out pens, elastic bands the postman left is now under the window, and a small bookshelf rigged up above it – English Language for Foreigners, Dancing Towards Self-Awareness and Child Development Studies – that one from the New Europe Press. He’d reviewed it for Devolution when he was in charge of the book pages. There’s a state-of-the-art laptop on the desk. How has she afforded that? His own is old and keeps crashing. This one obviously functions.

Kitty’s clothes, neatly folded, and all the paraphernalia that goes with infant care and has previously littered the living room, are now laid out tidily along one set of shelves. Agnieszka’s own belongings seem to be minimal: he looks in the drawers and sees a few neatly folded undergarments and thin pastel sweaters. Nothing is black, nothing is fancy. Reassured, he goes back into the living room.

‘We could go to bed,’ he says, ‘before she gets back.’

‘All right,’ Hattie says to his surprise and follows him into the bedroom, as if it were once again the world before Kitty, before pregnancy. They have the bed to themselves: the clouds in his head clear. He groans, she moans. In the next room, the baby does not wake. They hold each other tight for at least ten minutes before the real world intervenes.

Martyn wonders if he should tell Hattie about the article that Harold obviously wants: the endorsement of the chip butty – a soft white bread sandwich with fried chipped potatoes, well salted, for the filling – as a source of approved pleasure, the Government deciding its electoral advantage no longer lies in health and the self-abnegation that goes with it. He decides not to, because Hattie is hot on nutrition and will only bring up the subject of his father’s early death and the contribution paid to it by the chip butty, and he would rather she did not. They stay in bed and are asleep before Agnieszka returns.

In the unaccustomed peace of the morning, Martyn sleeps longer than anyone else in the household. He reckons he made a full eight and a quarter hours. He bounces out of bed naked and remembers he must now put on a dressing-gown before going to the bathroom. The dressing-gown is not on the floor but on a hanger, and to hand. Putting it on adds a feeling of ritual and security to the day. He shaves. The washbasin has been wiped, and the taps polished and the little knot of hair where the basin drains has been removed, so the water leaves quickly and no soap scum or detritus is left behind. The drying washing is still over the racks in the bathroom but has been shaken out and pegged not just flung over the wires.

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 (#ulink_ec94dccd-e885-5b33-ad33-a8913526157c)

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.