Читать книгу Everything and Nothing - Araminta Hall, Araminta Hall - Страница 6

Begin Reading. . .

The tube spat Agatha into one of those areas where people used to lie about their postcodes. Although why anyone would ever have been ashamed to live here was beyond Agatha’s understanding. The streets were long and wide, with trees standing as sentry guards outside each Victorian house. The houses themselves towered out of the ground with splendour and grace, as if they had risen complete when God created the world in seven days, one of Agatha’s favourite childhood stories. They were stern and majestic, with their paths of orange bricks like giant cough lozenges, their stained-glass window panels in the front doors reflecting light from the obligatory hallway chandeliers, the brass door fittings and the little iron gates which looked as correct as a bow tie at a neck. They even had those fantastic bay windows, which looked to Agatha like a row of proud pregnant bellies. You never saw anything like this where she had been brought up.

The address on the piece of paper in Agatha’s hand led her to a door with an unusual bell. It was a hard, round, metallic ball which you pulled out of an ornate setting and was probably as old as the house. Agatha liked the bell; both for its audacity in daring to protrude and its undaunted ability to survive. She pulled the ball and a proper tinkling sound rang somewhere inside.

As she waited, Agatha tried to get into character. She practised her smile and told herself to remember to keep her hand movements small and contained. It wasn’t that she couldn’t be this person or even that this person was a lie, it was just that she had to remember who this person was.

The man who opened the door looked ruffled, like he’d had a hard day. A girl was crying in the background and he was holding a boy who looked too old to be sucking on the bottle clamped in his mouth. The house felt cloyingly warm and she could see the kitchen windows were all steamed up. Coats and shoes and even a bike lay across the hall.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Christian Donaldson, as she supposed him to be, ‘we’re in a bit of chaos. But nothing terminal yet.’

‘Don’t worry.’ Agatha had learnt that people like the Donaldsons secretly, or maybe not even secretly, liked to appear chaotic.

He held out his spare hand. ‘Anyway, Annie, I presume . . . ’

‘Agatha actually.’ His mistake unnerved her and she tried to save herself from instant rejection. ‘Well, Aggie really.’

‘Shit, sorry, my fault. I thought my wife said . . . she’s not home yet.’ His flustered response reassured her. They were just one of those families. He stood back. ‘Anyway, come in, sorry, I’m keeping you standing on the doorstep.’

The wailing girl was sitting at the kitchen table and the kitchen itself looked as though a small and mutinous army had attacked every cupboard, spilling all their contents onto every available surface.

‘Daddy,’ screamed the girl from the table, ‘it’s not fair. Why do I have to eat my broccoli when Hal doesn’t have to eat anything at all?’

Agatha waited with the child for the answer, but none came. She hated the way adults found silence sufficient. She looked at the man whom she hoped would employ her and saw a thin film of sweat on his face which gave her the confidence to speak. ‘What’s your favourite colour?’

The girl stopped crying and looked at her. It was too interesting a question to ignore. ‘Pink.’

Predictable, thought Agatha. Her daughters were going to like blue. ‘Well, that’s lucky because I’ve got a packet of Smarties in my bag and I don’t like the pink ones, so if you eat that one tiny piece of broccoli I’ll give you all my pink Smarties.’

The girl looked stunned. ‘Really?’

Agatha turned to Christian Donaldson, who she was relieved to see smiling. ‘Well, if that’s okay with your dad.’

He laughed. ‘What’s a few Smarties amongst friends?’

Christian couldn’t stand the girls who moved into his house to look after his children. He wondered what he looked like to this one. He wanted to explain that he was never usually home at this time, that it was only the result of a massive row he’d had with Ruth at the weekend. Something about his children and responsibility and the fact that she’d be sacked if she took another day, all of which simply boiled down to how bloody brilliantly self-sacrificing she was and what a selfish shit he was. Besides, after a full day of childcare he felt like his kids had flung him against a wall and he was too tired to think of anything to say. And where the fuck was Ruth anyway?

The girl didn’t want tea but she did allow Betty to lead her into the part of the sitting room overrun by plastic toys. Christian pretended to busy himself in the kitchen, shifting piles of mess which Ruth would properly home later.

Other people in his house always shrunk it for Christian. It became all it was in the eyes of guests. Two small rooms knocked together at the front and a kitchen unimaginatively extended into the side return. Overcrowded bedrooms and a space squeezed into the roof. It felt like a fat man who had eaten too much at lunch, gout ridden and uncomfortable.

When he had been fucking Sarah they had always met at her flat, for obvious reasons. But that had been worse. As he had lain on her creaking double bed, he would feel old and foolish surrounded by posters for bands he didn’t even recognise, stuck onto walls whose colour he knew hadn’t been chosen by anyone who lived there. He would find himself perversely longing for the subtle shades and carefully crafted beauty of his own house. And what a trick for his mind to play because he had so hated Ruth when she had cried over builders running late or been more excited by the colour of a tile than the touch of his hand.

There had been a park bench which had also reminded him of his wife during that time. Predictably, because don’t all affairs need a park bench, he would sometimes meet Sarah there and it had an inscription which read: For Maude, who loved this park as much as I loved her. He had imagined an old man whittling the letters to make the words, tears on his gnarled face, a lifetime of good memories in his head. All of which was of course crap as no one had good memories any more and the bench had no doubt been gouged by some council machine.

Not that it would have been enough to stop him anyway. Ruth had been so easy to fool it had almost cancelled out the excitement, and this annoyance had spurred him on. He had always worked unpredictable hours and his job in television had often led him far from home, so staying away over night was commonplace in their marriage. More than anything though he had felt vindicated. He told himself that Ruth had always smothered him, that she had repressed his true nature, that his real self was a fun-loving, carefree guy who had never wanted to be tied down. That ultimately someone like Sarah suited him far better.

She probably hadn’t, though. Although he still felt muddled, still found it hard to get any clarity around a situation that had descended into such stomach-churning detritus, it was hard to place any decent feelings. Two women pregnant at the same time and yet only one child to show for it. One strange little boy who still, at the age of nearly three, never ate, hardly spoke and followed your movements like eyes staring out of a painting. Christian worried that Hal had absorbed his mother’s misery in the womb in the same way that some babies are born addicted to heroin. A key turned in his front door and he realised that his hands had grown cold in the sink.

Ruth was always going to be late, but still she felt like a naughty child. Christian wouldn’t understand. She hadn’t even got the necessary words to explain why she had always known she wouldn’t leave the office at six, but had arranged the interview for seven. Not that she had been able to predict the rain, of course, which jammed the tube so you felt you would suffocate even in the ticket hall. It unsettled her; the way the rain lashed at the city nowadays, the way the clouds darkened so quickly and furiously, without any warning. She couldn’t remember it having been like that in her own childhood and she fretted over what she would tell her children about the world they were growing into.

She could tell the girl was already there, just as she could tell the house had sunk even lower. Ruth was used to leaving every morning closing her eyes to the tangled sheets falling off all the beds, the washing exploding out of the laundry basket, the food drying onto plates in the sink, the fridge compartments that needed cleaning, the dirty hand prints on all the windows, the fluff which multiplied like bunnies on the stair treads, the unre-turned DVDs scattered around the machine, the recycling which needed transporting from beside the bin to the boxes at the front of the house, the name-tags not sewn into Betty’s uniform. The magnitude of these tasks pulled at her back like a bungee rope all the way to her offi ce. But this evening she thought they might at last have tipped from mess to squalor. She wondered if Christian had done it on purpose to punish her for keeping him from his stupidly important job where he got to pretend that he was an indispensable person every day of the working week. Light household duties, she had written in her advert; she wondered what that might consist of and decided on the usual laundry so that at least they would look like they held it together to the outside world. And food shopping; they had to eat, after all.

From the hall Ruth could see the girl on the floor with Betty. She looked so young, they could almost have been playmates. On the tube coming home Ruth had been hit by panic. Going back to work after two weeks immersed in childcare had jolted her and filled her mind with doubts. The final showdown with their last nanny was also still lodged in her brain. The weeping girl standing in the doorway with her bags already packed and her mind resolutely made up, saying she couldn’t take one more night listening to Betty screaming. I have to get some sleep, she’d said, forgetting surely that Ruth was the one who got up to the little girl hour after bloody hour, scaling each night like a mountain climber.

Then last week she’d found herself checking Christian’s texts, something she hadn’t done in over a year. Worse than the checking though was realising that she almost wanted to find something. That it would be more exciting than washing another load of socks or trying to make supper out of whatever was in the fridge. And she was too old to still be a deputy editor, wasn’t she? It had been a terrible mistake to have refused the editorship Harvey had offered last year.

‘I don’t get it,’ Christian had said when she’d wept to him over her final decision. ‘What’s the big fuss? If you want the job, do it; we’ll get more help. No big deal.’

‘No big deal?’ she’d repeated, the tears straining again against her better judgement. ‘Do you think your kids are no big deal?’

‘What do you mean? Why are you bringing the kids into this?’

‘Because obviously I’m not refusing the job for me.’

He’d sighed. ‘Oh God, please not the martyr act again. Why is your refusing the job anything to do with the kids?’

Ruth felt consumed by an annoyance so intense she worried she might stab her husband. ‘Because if I take this job I’ll basically never see them.’

‘What, like all the quality time you spend with them now?’

‘How can you say that? Are you saying I’m a bad mother?’ Ruth had felt as though she was losing her grip on the situation.

Christian poured himself more wine. ‘I’m saying that we both made a choice, Ruth. We both decided to pursue our careers. I’m not saying we’re right or wrong. I’m saying you can’t have it all.’

‘You seem to manage it.’

‘No, I don’t. I’d love to see more of them, but we bought a house we couldn’t afford because you wanted it and we have a massive mortgage.’

‘It wasn’t only me, I never forced you into buying it.’

‘I’d have been as happy somewhere smaller.’

But the truth was that Ruth was sure Christian did have more than her. He pursued his career with a single-minded focus and, as a result, had done very well. He didn’t feel guilt at being out of the house all day and so he could relish the time he spent with their children. For some primeval reason it didn’t appear to be his role to know about when their vaccinations were due or even whether or not they should have them. He didn’t feel compelled to read endless parenting books or to worry that his working caused behavioural problems in his children. He never took a half day to attend Christmas concerts or sports days, but if he happened to be around and turned up everyone noticed and thought he was a great father.

It was all these little injustices which wore away at Ruth until she felt as though her marriage was nothing more than a rocky outcrop being relentlessly lashed by the sea. And it wasn’t even as if she could articulate any of this to Christian, or he to her. And so they flailed along like blind bumper-car drivers, occasionally causing each other serious injury, but mainly just cuts and bruises.

‘You got her name wrong,’ said Christian as soon as Ruth walked into the sitting room. ‘It’s Aggie.’

Ruth sat down without even pausing to take off her coat because both Betty and Hal were trying to climb on her. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I must have misheard you on the phone.’

‘I couldn’t get away.’ Ruth realised she was apologising as much to Christian as Aggie. ‘You know, first day back and all that.’ She smiled at Aggie and mouthed over Betty’s head, ‘It’s been a nightmare.’ Who was she trying to be here?

‘Why don’t you put a DVD on for them?’ she said to Christian, and then felt the need to say to Aggie, ‘We don’t normally let them watch TV after five, but we’ll never finish a sentence if we don’t.’

The girl nodded, watching the children fight over which DVD they were going to see. In the end Christian lost his temper. ‘Look, I’m putting on Toy Story. It’s the only one you both like.’

Betty started to wail but they all kept their smiles fixed.

‘It’s either this or nothing,’ Christian shouted as he jabbed at the machine.

‘So.’ Ruth turned to Aggie. ‘Sorry about that. Right, well, let’s see. I suppose Christian has filled you in on us a bit.’

The girl blushed and tried to answer but nothing came out.

‘Sorry, Betty commandeered her,’ said Christian.

Ruth felt defeated before she’d even begun. ‘So you haven’t said anything about Hal yet?’

‘No, not yet, I was waiting for you.’ And there it was, the perfect get-out.

Ruth composed herself. ‘Sorry, Aggie, let me explain. Hal’s nearly three and he’s never eaten anything. Not ever. He lives off bottles of milk. I’ve taken him to the doctors but they say he’s perfectly healthy. Maybe a bit behind developmentally; I mean, he hardly speaks, but apparently that’s not overly worrying. We don’t know what to do next. I’ve got an appointment with a great nutritionist in a few weeks, but I guess our most important question to you is how you feel about food?’

Agatha looked at the back of Hal’s head. She liked the idea of looking after a freak. And she’d babysat and nannied for enough of these ridiculous women to know what to say. She imagined the Donaldsons’ fridge, all green and verdant and organic at the top, but beating in the cold heart of the freezer would be the fat-laden, salt-addled reality.

‘Well, I think what you feed kids is reflected in their behaviour. Obviously I try to get them to eat five fruit and veg a day and I only buy organic, but I’m not evangelical or anything. I think the odd sweet or biscuit is fine.’

Ruth nodded approvingly while Christian stared oblivious out of the window. ‘That’s pretty much how we feel, but we’ve had such problems with Hal. The doctor says we should go with it for now. She even told me to try giving him things like chocolate to get him used to the idea of eating. But that’s absurd, don’t you think?’

Agatha thought it sounded sensible. She had been brought up on a diet of frozen burgers, oven chips and chocolate. Pot Noodles, if she was lucky. And it hadn’t done her any harm. But of course she shook her head disapprovingly.

‘And what about discipline, where do you stand on that?’

‘I do believe in rules.’ Agatha could remember her last employer screaming at her children after telling Agatha in her interview that she thought a raised voice was a stupid voice. They were fucking priceless these women. ‘But I think they should be rules we’d obey anyway, like be polite and kind and don’t hit or snatch, those sort of things. And I don’t like to threaten anything I’m not prepared to carry out.’ Agatha wasn’t confi dent she should say this as Ruth Donaldson was in all likelihood another of those crazy women who wouldn’t be left in charge of their kids if they lived on the local estate but somehow got away with it because they lived in half-a-million-pound houses and knew a few long words. But then again these women were usually addicted to parenting programmes and so had a fair idea for how they should be behaving even if they couldn’t manage it themselves.

‘I put on the advert light household duties, are you okay with that? I meant a bit of laundry and keeping things a bit straight and maybe a bit of food shopping.’

‘Oh, absolutely, that’s fine. Of course I’d do that.’ That was the part Agatha liked the best. Putting everything into its right place. Sorting the house and making her employers marvel at her efficiency. She had been a cleaner many times in her life and she always proved herself indispensable. A lot of these families lived in near slum conditions. Agatha had learnt that they were the sort of people who you’d look at from the outside and wish you could be part of them. You’d covet their clothes and their house and coffee maker and £300 hoover and fridges in bright colours. But they couldn’t even flush their own toilets, most of them. They didn’t understand that the world had to be neat and that keeping things in order was very simple.

‘And as you know, Christian and I both work long hours. I try to be home for seven, but Christian never is. Are you okay with that? Maybe sometimes putting them to bed?’

‘Of course, I’m used to that.’ By the end of most jobs Agatha would have preferred it if the parents had disappeared; she liked to imagine them vaporised by their own neuroses. Handling children was always so much easier than adults.

‘So, Aggie, tell us about yourself.’

Agatha was used to this question now, she knew these types of people liked to pretend they cared, but it still roused a dread inside her. The other answers hadn’t really been lies. It wasn’t like she was going to feed the kids crap whilst hitting them and shovelling the dirt under the sofa. She was going to be a good nanny, but she couldn’t tell these people about herself. She had experimented with a couple of answers in the past few interviews, but she’d found that if you said your parents were dead they felt too sorry for you and if you said they’d emigrated they still expected them to call. This was the first time she’d tried out her new answer: ‘I was brought up in Manchester and I’m an only child. My parents are very old-fashioned and when I got into university to study Philosophy my dad went mad. He’s very religious, you see, and he said Philosophy was the root of all evil, the devil’s work.’ She’d seen this on a late-night soap opera and it had sounded plausible, or maybe fantastic enough to be something you wouldn’t make up.

Ruth and Christian Donaldson reacted exactly as she’d expected, sitting up like two eager spaniels, liberal sensitivity spreading across their faces.

‘He said if I went he’d disown me.’

‘But you went anyway?’

Agatha looked down and felt the pain of this slight so hard that real tears pricked her eyes. ‘No, I didn’t. I could kick myself now, but I turned down the place.’

Ruth’s hand went to her mouth in a gesture Agatha doubted to be spontaneous. ‘Oh, how awful. How could he have denied you such an opportunity?’ She was longing to say that she would never do anything so terrible to her own children.

‘I stayed at home for a while after that, but it was terrible. So many rows.’ Agatha could see a neat suburban terrace as she said this with a pinched man wagging a finger at her. The air smelt of vinegar, she realised; maybe her mother had been a bad cook or an obsessive cleaner, she wasn’t sure which yet. She wondered along with this kind couple sitting in front of her how he could have been so mean. ‘I left five years ago and I haven’t spoken to them since.’

‘But your mother, hasn’t she contacted you?’

‘She was very dominated by my dad. I think they’ve moved now.’

‘Do you have any siblings?’

‘No, it’s just me. I’m an only child.’

‘Poor you,’ said Ruth, but Agatha could already see her working out that they were getting a nanny who was clever enough to get into university, and for no extra cost.

When Agatha got back to her grotty room in King’s Cross she felt tired and drained. She was still trying to work out why she might have told the Donaldsons she was called Aggie when no one had ever called her anything but Agatha. She supposed it must have sounded friendlier and she’d have to go with it now. Her room-mate’s mobile was ringing. She answered with a curt hello and then started waving madly at Agatha. Lisa was prone to wild mood swings, so Agatha didn’t take any notice until she heard what she was saying.

‘Oh, she was amazing, we were so sad to lose her . . . yes, she had sole care of both of them, I work full time . . . No, it was because we decided to move out of London, to get the children a bigger garden.’ Lisa started to pretend she was sucking a massive penis as she said this which annoyed Agatha, she fucking had to remember the script. ‘In fact, we nearly stayed just to keep her.’ Fake laughing, Lisa miming sipping a glass of champagne. ‘Oh, it’s so hard, isn’t it, all that juggling.’ Lisa put her hand over the phone and mouthed fucking tosser at Agatha, who smiled obligingly. If Lisa fucked this up she might hit the stupid bitch. ‘No, no, ring anytime, but really, I couldn’t recommend her highly enough.’ Lisa threw her phone onto the bed and made a sucking noise with her teeth. ‘Man, those posh types are gullible. They almost deserve to be done over, innit?’

‘Thanks,’ said Agatha, fishing her last twenty-pound note out of her wallet and handing it over to Lisa. If you wish for something hard enough it will happen, someone had once told her, or maybe she’d seen it on a film. She didn’t care, all she cared about was wishing herself out of this hellhole and into the Donaldsons’ home as quickly as possible.

‘Do you want Indian or Chinese?’ asked Ruth as she rooted through the spare kitchen drawer overflowing with wrapping paper, old packets of seeds, a spilt box of pins, paint colour charts and numerous other bits of tat for which they would never again find a use.

‘Don’t care,’ answered Christian, pouring them both wine. ‘I’m knackered.’

The children had only been in bed for fifteen minutes and Ruth was sure Betty would be down any minute with some excuse like wanting a glass of water and then she’d lose her temper, which would mean the only real time she spent with her daughter would be about as far from quality as you could get. But how long could she be expected to go on surviving on so little sleep? It wasn’t a euphemism to say that sleep deprivation was a form of torture; there were doubtless thousands of people right now in prisons around the world sleeping more than she was. Christian had developed the ability to sleep through Betty’s crying and she’d long since stopped trying to wake him. Survival of the fittest, she found herself thinking most nights, dominant evolution. It was no wonder Betty cried all day; Ruth would do the same if she could.

Christian noticed it was nearly nine and couldn’t help feeling as if he’d wasted his day. He’d lied to Ruth earlier and told her he’d managed to get a bit of work done when all he’d accomplished was approving the advert for the new admin assistant for his department. He felt physically wrecked. Why did Betty cry so much? And why wouldn’t Hal eat? He knew they should talk about it but also felt too tired to bring up these explosive topics with Ruth. Because his wife always had the energy for a fight, if nothing else.

‘So what did you think of her?’ she was asking.

‘Fine, how about you?’

‘I thought she was great and her referee couldn’t give her enough praise.’

‘Right.’ Christian sat down at their long wooden kitchen table, which had been designed for a much larger and grander house and made their kitchen feel as foolish as an old woman in a mini skirt. Ruth had bought it from an antiques fair in Sussex where they’d walked round a massive field filled with Belgians selling old bits of furniture which would be burnt in their own country but went for hundreds of pounds over here. He could remember the Polish builders laughing at Ruth when they’d been renovating the house and a pair of wall lights had gone missing and she’d asked the foreman if maybe one of the men might have taken them. To us, he had said, throwing his hands in the air, they are pennies. Christian had felt hated by those men. Actually not hated, more contemptuous. He knew they laughed at him in their own language, wondered at what mad man would spend thousands on a fucking house.

‘But do you think we should hire her?’

Christian tried to think of a reason to hire or not to hire. Their last nanny had seemed great until she’d left with no more warning than the time it had taken to say the words. He couldn’t even picture the new girl properly, but he did remember that she’d made Betty stop crying. ‘She seemed great. Do we have a lot of choice?’

Ruth looked grey. ‘No, but is that a good reason to hire someone to look after your children?’

‘Look, do it. If it doesn’t work out we’ll re-think.’ He put his hand over hers and got a flash of passion from the touch of her skin. She did that to him sometimes.

She tucked her hair behind her ears. ‘Okay, good plan, Batman.’ It was what she said to Hal and it sucked his desire right out of him.

Agatha’s room in the Donaldsons’ house was so perfect it made her want to cry. It was right at the top, which made her feel cocooned, all those people between her and the world. And it was painted in a light blue that she had once read was called duck-egg blue, which was a colour she could imagine cosy American mothers using. Jutting out of the far wall was a large white wooden bed festooned in squishy, fluffy cushions which gave the impression you were floating in the clouds as you drifted off to sleep. And her own little bathroom behind a door she’d thought was a cupboard, where Ruth had kindly put some expensive-looking lotions and potions. Best of all though the only windows were on either side of the roof so you couldn’t see the street and instead could stare at the sky in all its different guises and pretend you were in any number of countries and situations. It was the sort of room Agatha had dreamt of, but never imagined she’d inhabit.

Ruth and Christian seemed very concerned she had everything she needed and immensely grateful that she had agreed to take the job, when it should have been the other way around. She smiled and laughed all weekend, but was itching for them to leave on Monday morning so she could get stuck in. She had plans for the house and kids. First she would sort and tidy and then she would get Betty to stop crying all the time and finally she would get Hal eating. Life was simple when you set out your targets in basic terms.

The house was dirtier than she had given it credit for. The Donaldsons’ cleaner had been taking them for a ride because anywhere you couldn’t see had been left untouched for years. Under the sofas and beds were graveyards for missing items which Agatha couldn’t believe had ever been of any use to anyone. The inside of the fridge was sticky and disgusting and the lint in the dryer must surely be a fire hazard. All the windows were filthy and the wood round them looked black and rotten, but really only needed wiping with a damp cloth. The bread bin was filled with crumbs and hard, rotten rolls and the freezer was so jam-packed with empty boxes and long-forgotten meals that it looked like it was never used. There were clothes at the bottom of the laundry basket which smelt mouldy and which Agatha felt sure Ruth would have forgotten she owned, simply because they needed hand washing. Cupboards were sticky from spilt jam and honey, and the oven smoked when you turned it on because of all the fat that had built up over the years. Agatha would never, ever let her future home end up like this. She would never leave it every day like Ruth did. She would never put her trust in strangers.

‘How’s the new nanny?’ Sally, her editor, had asked as soon as Ruth had arrived at work that first Monday, to which she’d been able to reply truthfully, ‘She seems great.’ And at first she had, in fact still now, a week since Agatha had started, she seemed great. It was just that she made Ruth feel shit. Ruth suspected her feelings to be pathetic, but the girl was too good. Her house had never been so clean, the fridge never so well stocked, the food she cooked every night was delicious and the children seemed happy. It was a working-mother’s dream scenario and to complain was surely akin to madness; but before Aggie she had always found something perversely comforting in bitching about the nanny, in secretly believing she could do a better job. Ruth knew enough however to know that she undoubtedly could not have done a better job.

Ruth had given up work after Betty was born but she had only lasted a year and the memory of that time still resonated deep inside her. Ruth was a coper, sometimes even a control freak. She prided herself on her ability to get on with life, to run at it full tilt without wavering, not to be afraid to try, to not even be afraid to fail. But life with Betty had been different.

She had started so positively, with such high hopes and expectations. She was going to always have fresh flowers on the table, bake bread and cakes, read to Betty every day, take her for long walks round the park, teach her the sounds that animals made and smother her in kisses. At first it had been like the best drug she’d ever taken, pure euphoria accompanied her everywhere. It reminded her of the feeling she used to get lying on a hot beach and feeling as if the sun had penetrated her body, warming every organ. Before, of course, the ozone layer was wrenched apart and the sun became carcinogenic.

The warmth however came from within her and what she had achieved. There is a moment after giving birth when you have come through the shit and the blood and the vomit and the sensation of being split in two and turned inside out and the pure unadulterated terror when you realise that, like death, no one else can do this for you. And that moment is heaven. It is pure bliss. It is spiritual and yet earthy. You know your place and accept it for maybe the first time in your life. You are like other women and spectacularly set apart from men. And this feeling lasts, often for months.

But like every drug, it had its come down, a come down which took Ruth by surprise. She could remember the moment exactly. She had been cutting carrots in the kitchen, thinking about how she could save a bit of supper for Betty’s lunch the next day, when her brain shifted. She physically felt it, like a jolt in her skull. One minute she was in the moment and the next her hands were disconnected from her body. She watched them performing the mundane task of cutting and couldn’t feel them. She tried a different job, filling the pan with water, but it was the same. She thought she might faint and went running in to Christian, who was watching football on the telly and couldn’t understand what she was going on about. Why don’t you go to bed, he’d said, you must be knackered, what with all that getting up all night. I’ll do supper, bring it up to you on a tray.

But sleeping did nothing for her. She woke the next morning covered in sweat, her heart racing. When she sat up in bed her head spun and the room tilted when she went to the bathroom. She begged Christian to stay at home because she must be ill, but he looked at her as if she was mad and asked if she remembered that his new show was going out that night.

Ruth pulled herself together because babies hold all illnesses apart from their own in contempt, but the world remained distorted. From then on everything she had jumped and skipped to only twenty-four small hours before became as hard as leaving a new lover in a warm bed on a cold winter’s day. She started to feed Betty from jars, Christian’s supper was often absent, the cleaning went undone for weeks on end. She began to hate the park in the same way that she had once hated flying, something she couldn’t ever imagine doing again. Even the women whom she was starting to make friends with now seemed foreign, the language they spoke disconcerting and meaningless. She was never going to be as competent as they were, days were never again going to wash over her, fear was beginning to limit her every moment.

Ruth had felt as though she was disappearing. Her bones felt slushy in her body so that sometimes she was sure she was going to faint in the park or fall down the stairs while holding Betty. She worried constantly about what would happen to her precious daughter, who she loved as ferociously as a mother lion. She calculated that if she died just after Christian left for work that would be twelve hours Betty would have to spend alone. Certainly she’d be scarred for life if not seriously injured or killed. And when he spent the night away on a programme she couldn’t sleep for anxiety, feeling as if she was falling through the bed and into oblivion when in truth she was simply exhausted.

Things came to a head when going to the supermarket became terrifying. She recognised the irony. Here she was, a woman who had backpacked round Asia, spent a year at an American university, moved to London after meeting Christian only once and worked her way up a very greasy career ladder, now paralysed by the thought of a few aisles of food.

Ruth tried to grab onto the person she had been but couldn’t find herself however hard she looked. She remembered a confident woman, but it was like watching a film, the idea that she would ever climb back into that skin impossible. After nine months at home she realised that it was only going to get worse. She looked at all the women in the park and marvelled at their self-lessness. There was an army of women out there, she realised, who had made the ultimate sacrifi ce, themselves for others, and she had nothing but respect for them.

The Monday that Aggie started should have been insignificant for Christian. He prayed she’d work out because he couldn’t bear the eruption of stress from Ruth if she didn’t. They’d have to go through all those tedious conversations again about her staying at home when they both knew she never would. Full-time motherhood hadn’t suited her, but still she would flirt with the idea. He couldn’t understand why Ruth was so prepared to waste both of their precious time on arguments that had no answers or endings. She could worry about anything and nothing with equal importance, so that sometimes his head spun and he felt as though he was on a rollercoaster.

But Ruth seemed happy when he’d left and Aggie had already been in the kitchen fixing breakfast for Betty and ignoring the fact that Hal wouldn’t eat, something which he’d always silently believed to be the best policy. But Ruth would insist on fussing round him so much at every meal. He wondered how she had the energy and optimism to start every day thinking Hal would eat, to go to the trouble of putting food in front of him at every meal, to dance around him with the spoon, begging and pleading. If Christian had a say he’d have stopped offering Hal anything and then given him a few biscuits after a couple of weeks. It was odd how Ruth never considered that the GP might be right. But he never said anything because decisions like this were always Ruth’s remit. He was scared to get involved in the important stuff, not just because of the argument he could so easily cause, but also because he’d be setting a precedent and more would be expected of him in the future.

Carol, his production manager, reminded him they had the interviews for the new admin assistant when he got in, which sounded boring, but nothing too serious.

‘I’ve narrowed it down to three,’ she was saying. ‘Do you want to see their CVs before we go in?’

But he was already reading his emails. ‘No, thanks. Anything I should know? Any of them only got one leg?’

She laughed. ‘No, nothing like that. They all seem great.’

He had a meeting with the Chairman at ten who wanted to know how the contract with Sky was going, which took up two minutes, and then they spent half an hour laughing about the new reality show from the weekend. By the time he got out Carol was annoyed with him because their first interviewee had been sitting in reception for ten minutes and he’d obviously forgotten. Right, right, Christian had said as he’d grabbed a cup of coffee on his way in.

They sat at a Formica desk in a room which someone had designed to look jaunty by adding a couple of round windows framed in acid colours. Touches like this depressed him as he hated anyone pretending that work was fun. It wasn’t like he had a bad time, but he wouldn’t choose to be there. Which wasn’t what Ruth thought. Ruth constantly told him that he’d rather be at work than at home, that he was better friends with his colleagues than his actual friends, that he probably worked on programmes he didn’t have to only because he enjoyed it. Christian found the last accusation hard to fathom. Firstly, it wasn’t true and he wouldn’t do it, but secondly what would be so wrong about him enjoying something? Ruth seemed to live with a constant yoke of resentment around her neck and couldn’t bear it if he had more fun than her. Sometimes he considered compiling a fun chart like the children’s star charts and they could tick off the minutes they’d each enjoyed during the day and at the end of the week the loser would get an afternoon to themselves. The flaw in this plan was that they would both have to be honest and both have to have the same perception of fun. Ruth, for example, claimed that going out for lunch with Sally was all right, but because she was always on her guard it wasn’t exactly fun. Jesus, he wanted to say, take what you can.

The door opened and Sarah walked in. They were both thrown so immediately and physically off guard that Christian couldn’t pretend to Carol that he didn’t know her. He also couldn’t help but wonder if Sarah might have engineered the situation.

‘Do you know each other?’ asked Carol.

Christian stood up. ‘Sorry, I didn’t know you were coming in. Yes, we used to work together at Magpie.’

Carol, thankfully, was hard-skinned. ‘Well, I did say you should read the CVs.’

Sarah had changed. She was a lot thinner and her face was paler. She’d also let her hair revert to its natural colour, which was much darker than Christian had realised, and her clothes were more demure. She was much, much more attractive and Christian felt himself start to sweat. He couldn’t think what to say and let Carol do all the talking, which she enjoyed so didn’t notice his silence. Sarah stumbled over her answers and rubbed her blotchy, rash-covered neck, which made Christian remember things he shouldn’t.

As she left, Christian felt the air move and was relieved when Carol said, ‘Sorry, I misjudged her. She was so confident last time. That was awful. What was she like at Magpie?’

‘I can’t remember. We didn’t work directly together, I don’t think she was there long.’

Carol tossed Sarah’s CV into the bin. ‘I think we can forget that one then.’

The next girl was much better than Sarah and even the third, who had hygiene problems, would have been preferable. After they were done he told Carol he had a meeting and left the office. Christian walked towards the park, a dull pain building behind his eyes and rang Ruth.

‘You okay?’ he asked.

‘Not bad. Busy.’

‘Are you?’

‘No need to sound so surprised.’

‘I wasn’t, I just . . . ’ He searched for what he wanted to say, but there was nothing he could articulate. He wanted her to tell him he was being stupid.

‘Look, did you want something?’ she said now and he could see her perfectly, the phone wedged between her ear and her shoulder, her fingers tapping on the keyboard. ‘It’s just that I want to leave on time tonight, give the kids a bath.’

‘No, nothing. It’s fine.’ But even as he was pressing the red button on his phone he was thinking about Sarah.

April was Agatha’s favourite month of the year. It held all the promise without any of the disappointment. She had tried to get Betty to walk to school before, but the little girl had complained so ferociously about wet shoes and a cold nose and the wrong gloves that she’d given up. Now though she made it a fun adventure, through the park and along fairytale streets. Betty was not a hard child to figure out; she needed positive reinforcement, a term Agatha had learnt from one of the numerous child-care books she’d hidden under her bed. You had to pre-empt Betty. You had to watch her and that bottom lip and when you saw it begin to tremble you had to say something like, Don’t you hate that little girl’s boots, they are completely the wrong shade of pink? or, Did I ever tell you that Cinderella thought that eating two ice creams in one go was really greedy? or, Washing your hair makes it grow faster.

But nothing was going to be properly achieved until the girl was allowed to sleep. Agatha had lain awake most nights since her arrival at the Donaldsons’, listening to the pointless drama occurring on the floor beneath her. Betty woke at midnight every night, almost to the second, and yet her cries obviously pulled Ruth from a deep sleep as Agatha heard her bumping and banging on her way to her daughter’s bedroom. She’d start the night relatively tolerantly, but by the third or fourth wake-up she’d be shouting, saying ridiculous things to the child like she was going to die if she didn’t sleep soon and then expecting Betty to fall into a peaceful state. Sometimes she’d take her to the loo, turning on all the lights and making Betty wash her hands. It was proper madness and Agatha itched to be allowed to intervene; she reckoned she could have Betty sleeping through in a week.

The morning was warm; the air felt like a kiss on your skin and when Agatha opened the kitchen window she could smell the sap.

‘Would you like to plant a vegetable garden?’ she asked Betty and Hal, out of nowhere. She hadn’t planned on speaking those words, which scared her as Agatha believed she’d given up spontaneous speech a long time ago. She mustn’t let herself get too comfortable.

‘What’s a vegetable garden?’ asked Betty. ‘Well, it’s like an ordinary garden, but instead of growing flowers you grow vegetables.’

‘Why?’

‘To eat, silly.’ Agatha was starting to sweat, she’d only been there a month and re-planning the Donaldsons’ garden was too much.

But Betty was already brimming over with excitement. ‘Can we grow tomatoes? And carrots? And chips?’

Agatha laughed. ‘We’d have to grow potatoes and make them into chips. I tell you what, I’ll call your mum and ask if it’s okay and if it is we’ll do it.’

‘Can I call? Can I call?’ shouted Betty, already reaching for the phone.

The message Ruth listened to when she left the caverns of the tube was garbled and she couldn’t make out what Betty was saying. Something about growing carrots on the patio. Shit, not another school project she’d forgotten. She remembered how last year she had pinned the list of what Betty needed for the school nativity play to the fridge and then forgotten all about it. Gail had called on the morning of the play to say that Betty was hysterical because she needed a brown T-shirt and brown trousers by twelve o’clock that day. So instead of being able to make the editorial meeting she’d spent a frantic hour in H&M, crying when the shop assistant couldn’t find Betty’s size.

She dialled home now and Betty picked up, immediately pleading with her. ‘Can we do it, Mum? Please say yes.’

‘Say yes to what? I couldn’t hear you properly.’

‘Aggie is going to make our garden grow vegetables. That we can eat. But only if you say yes.’

Ruth had an image of Aggie digging up their whole garden, turning it into some sort of allotment. ‘Where in the garden, darling?’

Betty started to whine. ‘I don’t know. Please don’t say no, Mummy. You’re no fun.’

Ruth felt a strong surge of annoyance with Aggie. ‘Can you put Aggie on, sweetheart. I just want to find out where she wants to do it.’

‘I’m sorry, Ruth,’ Aggie said as soon as she got on. ‘I know I should have spoken to you first. It’s just that I opened the window this morning and everything smelt so fresh and I’ve been reading about how if you get children to grow their own food they’re more likely to eat it and so obviously that made me think of Hal and I’ve been meaning to mention it to you.’

Aggie’s enthusiasm rubbed off on Ruth and she immediately lost her annoyance. Besides, the appointment with the nutritionist that she’d had to re-schedule because of the advertisers’ lunch she’d forgotten about was only a few days away and wouldn’t that be a good thing to say. ‘It sounds like a great idea,’ Ruth said as she approached her office. ‘Get what you need and I’ll pay you back.’

Ruth thought she probably should call Christian and check that he liked the idea as well, but the day rushed at her as soon as she was by her desk. She tried to tell herself to remember to call him later.

Agatha felt pleased with herself. Her improvisation about getting children to grow their own food to make them eat wasn’t something she’d read, but it was something which should have been written down and, as such, it had been a good thing to say. Finding a garden centre in West London was hard, but not impossible. Agatha got the children to think about what they wanted to grow and then she wrote a list: tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, beet-root and celery. It seemed like a good, clean start. She got a cookery book down from a large white wooden shelf unit that looked like it should have gone on top of a dresser, but Ruth had fixed to the wall. The paint was flaking off it and Agatha had already mentally re-painted it. She showed Hal the pictures of the vegetables and explained to him that he would have to try whatever he grew because it was a miracle that you put a seed in the ground and it turned into a plant you could eat. He was interested enough to take the bottle out of his mouth.

Betty was impossibly good on the bus and in the garden centre. She behaved like a proper little lady all the way around and was so good that Agatha allowed her to choose an organic chocolate bar at the till.

‘It’s so fun, hanging out with you,’ she said, making the little girl beam with pride.

All the way home they talked about the best way to plant. Agatha had bought a cheap manual in the book section of the garden centre and she read to the children from it on the bus. It sounded like a fairytale anyway. You had to dig a patch of ground and mix in some compost. Then make rows and plant your seeds just under the surface and not too close together. You had to protect them from marauding insects and take good care of them with lots of water and even a bit of food. And then they would reward you with lots of juicy goodness that would run down your chin when you bit into them and make you glad to be alive. ‘All the best things are worth waiting for,’ Agatha repeated from somewhere when Betty asked her how long it would all take.

The spot they chose was in the bottom right-hand corner, because you could see it from the kitchen window and it wasn’t going to interfere with any precious plants. Agatha started by marking out the area and then digging a trench. It was much harder work than she’d anticipated, but now she’d started she was definitely going to finish. The children were so excited that they didn’t once ask if they could go in and watch TV. Hal brought his trucks into the garden and ran them through the disturbed soil so that Agatha could see how they were traversing mountains and building new futures. Betty took her little shovel from the shed and begun turning over the soil in the middle of their patch. It took two long hours, but by lunchtime there was a patch of virgin soil waiting to be cultivated.

Agatha made herself and Betty tuna sandwiches for lunch. She had decided to stop offering Hal anything for a while, even though this was exactly against Ruth’s instructions. She didn’t even question his requests for bottles. She had read in one of her books that making a child feel like eating was an issue was not advisable. The same went for children who wouldn’t go to bed. Apparently it was negative attention and because kids crave any sort of attention, however much they get, if you made a fuss about them not doing something they would continue not to do it just to get the attention. It made sense to Agatha and she planned to pay no attention to Hal’s not eating, but lots to anything he might put into his mouth that wasn’t a bottle. And if ever she was left alone with the children overnight she would let Betty into her bed and cuddle the girl all through the night.

They sat in a patch of sunlight on the patio, Agatha and Betty munching on their sandwiches and Hal slurping a bottle, surveying their new territory. Agatha imagined they were in America, pioneers carving out their own place in the world. Hal sidled over to her, placing his head on her lap, his signal that he was tired. Agatha stroked his head as he sucked and in minutes his eyes were closed and the bottle had fallen to the ground.

‘That’s handy,’ she said to Betty. ‘Now he’s asleep we can get on with the job.’

Betty beamed because there was nothing she liked more than being made to feel superior to Hal. Agatha picked him up, a dead weight of trust in her arms, and carried him into the house. She buried her face into his neck and smelt his peculiar scent of yoghurt and cotton. She laid him on the sofa and kissed his damp, red cheek. Something twisted in her chest.

Agatha never stopped until she had completed what she set out to do. Unfi nished tasks weighed heavily on her mind like her father’s pheasants hanging in his game store. Working for all the women who had left their children in her care over the years had proved to Agatha that when she had her own house and family she would not be able to work herself. Which presented a problem in that she would have to marry a man who earned enough to keep them all. She wasn’t sure where she would meet this man, as she didn’t have any friends and never went anywhere that wasn’t connected to the children. And even if she did, she didn’t much like men anyway.

By teatime the three of them were banging a miniature fence around their new vegetable patch, pretending to be giants standing over a country they had excavated for food. Agatha planned to cover it with a fine mesh she had bought earlier to guard against snails and birds. Betty and Hal were ecstatic that finally they were going to be allowed to plant the seeds they had bought so long ago. Agatha made the neat furrows they needed, not letting the children help, and then stood over them as they dropped their tiny offerings into the earth. Hal couldn’t be persuaded to keep to his row or to drop one seed at a time, but still Agatha felt proud with what they had accomplished. She let them watch TV while she finished off the labelling and the netting.

Christian tried to call Ruth on his way home because he’d found a message from Carol stuck to his computer when he got out of his monthly management meeting saying she’d forgotten about the MTS awards that night and wouldn’t be home till late. All he got was her voicemail. Very occasionally he wondered if she would ever pay him back by having her own affair. The thought of another man touching her made him nauseous, but he supposed he would have to be graceful about the whole thing if she did. He doubted that she would, though; even in revenge she was likely to be fair.

When he opened his front door he felt an air of calm which had settled like a fine layer of dust. There didn’t seem to be anyone in. He dropped his bag in the hall and went into the kitchen where he could see the remnants of Betty’s dinner. There didn’t seem to be a place laid for Hal, but Ruth could be trying a new technique so he hardly even registered it. He heard noises in the garden and made his way outside. Agatha, Betty and Hal were bent over a patch at the bottom of the garden and both the children were talking at once. Betty turned when she heard him and ran across the grass like a battering ram. She was filthy and he couldn’t stop himself from worrying about his suit as she hurled herself at him. Children, he had noticed, had no respect for personal boundaries. They often acted as though they would climb inside you if they could, pressing their face up against yours, fiddling with your clothes and speaking over your words. But he checked himself and tried to match her glee.

‘Come on, Daddy,’ she was screeching. ‘Come and see what we made.’

He followed the urgent pull of his daughter’s hand to a dirty patch of his lawn which he could have sworn had been grass when he’d left that morning but now was a mangy patch of earth surrounded by a cheap and ugly fence. He didn’t know what he was looking at.

‘We’re going to be eating them soon,’ Betty was saying. All Christian wanted was a beer. ‘Eating what?’

‘The vegetables, silly.’

‘Toms . . . ’ He strained to hear what his son was saying, but it got lost on the air.

Christian looked imploringly at Agatha and she laughed. ‘We made a vegetable patch. Ruth said it was okay. The kids decided what they wanted to grow and we went and bought the seeds and it’s taken us all day to make this.’ She held out her arm like a hostess on a game show. He was surprised that she didn’t say taa-daa.

‘Wow. That’s great.’ He knew his response was inadequate, but he could never be as enthusiastic as women seemed to need him to be.

‘I’ve been reading about kids who don’t eat,’ Agatha was saying now, ‘and there’s this one doctor who suggested that you should get them to grow their own food as it makes it more appealing. I thought it might be good for Hal.’

‘That’s a great idea. Makes loads of sense.’ Christian was genuinely impressed. ‘Well done.’

She blushed and he noticed how with the sun on her hair it was much more auburn than brown. She ruffled Betty’s hair. ‘And she was so helpful I literally couldn’t have done it without her.’

‘I was so good Aggie bought me chocolate.’

‘Anyway, you two, bath time,’ said Agatha, taking them both by the hands.

Christian knew he should want to give his kids a bath after not having seen them all day, or at least offer, but they both looked so happy trailing after Aggie that it was too easy to let them get on with it. If you could get rid of the guilt, he felt as he opened a beer and took it into the evening sunlight in his garden, this would be perfect parenting.

The vegetable patch was undeniably ugly and it rankled him in a way he knew to be stupid. He dialled Ruth’s number again, but it was still on voicemail.

‘I just got home,’ he said into the phone, ‘to find that the kids have destroyed the garden. You could have told me before you agreed to let them dig up our lawn.’ He pressed the red phone and immediately felt like his father.

Agatha appeared at the kitchen door. ‘They both want you to say goodnight to them. I’ve made chicken for dinner, by the way.’

Christian stood up. ‘Great. Oh, I forgot to say, Ruth’s out at some awards do. So I’ll probably eat in front of the telly. There’s a match on I want to watch anyway.’

‘Fine.’ Agatha had to keep her voice cheery. She felt a surge of resentment. Didn’t he realise how long it had taken to stuff that lemon-and-garlic mixture under the chicken’s skin without breaking it?

Ruth hadn’t been able to place the air of excitement in the office all morning. But then Sally had asked her if she thought the red or black heels were better and she had immediately remembered the awards ceremony that night. She had to rush out at lunch to buy a dress, which was infuriating because they couldn’t afford it this month and she’d already decided on what she was going to wear. Recently everything was slipping out of her mind; she felt as though life was getting faster and leaving her behind. Maybe she should see a doctor. Maybe she should get a bigger diary or just write in the one she had. Which reminded her that she hadn’t called the plumber about the fact that they kept on having to reset the boiler to get hot water.

The younger section of the magazine started raiding the fashion and beauty cupboards at four. By five they were drinking. Sally seemed to effortlessly be able to combine joining in with staying aloof, while Ruth remained glued to her computer, pretending she had some copy she had to finish. By the time she got into the loos to change it smelt like she presumed a brothel would. She didn’t look good in the dress, she had chosen it too quickly and the blue didn’t sit right on her olive skin. She tried tying her hair up, but felt she looked jowly. The expensive concealer did nothing to hide her bags.

They were getting a coach to Alexandra Palace where the awards were being held. The noise as she got on hit her like the sound generated by her children’s parties, so loud it almost took you out of your body. She wondered if Betty and Hal were in bed yet. Nobody had answered the phone at home all afternoon, which had created a little knob of panic deep in her stomach. She hadn’t been able to get hold of Christian either and now she had no reception on her phone, but Carol had assured her that she’d give him the message and, of course, Aggie was infi nitely capable. She’d find a payphone when she got there if her signal hadn’t come back.

Ruth sat next to Sally by the window near the front of the coach. Sally kept turning her back on her to listen and laugh at her team, as she called them all, which was fine with Ruth as a headache had settled round the top of her head, squeezing pain into her body. She rubbed her shoulders and could feel the tension nestling there like snarling dogs. It was going to be a long night.

Her signal had returned by the time they got there, so she hung back. She noticed Kate, the only other woman in the office with children, doing the same, a concerned frown on her face. She could hear her telling whoever was on the other end that the Calpol was on the top shelf of the third cupboard to the right of the cooker in the kitchen.

Ruth’s message symbol was bleeping. Christian’s voice came through, moaning about the garden. It stirred an immense anger in her that made her want to walk all the way home just to rub his smug face into the dirt he was complaining about. She jabbed a message out to him, not trusting herself to speak to him directly. If you were ever available to take calls about vegetable patches from your kids you would probably have said yes as well and then it would have been a great idea.

Christian received Ruth’s message as Arsenal equalised and he was finishing his third bottle of beer. He’d meant to send Ruth a text saying sorry for sounding so pompous, but after reading Betty three Charlie and Lola books he’d lost the will to live. ‘Did you know,’ he’d said to the cat after returning downstairs from Betty’s bedtime ritual, ‘that Charlie has a little sister Lola. She is small and very funny. Except of course she isn’t. She is annoying and precocious and due to total parental neglect has transferred all her negative attention complexes onto poor Charlie, who should get some sort of medal from Carol Vorderman.’ His outburst surprised him so much he had completely forgotten about anything other than lying on the sofa, shouting abuse at eleven men on a grassy pitch.

Ruth’s sanctimonious tone irritated him and made him glad he hadn’t apologised. He texted back: Get over yourself. It looks ugly. His phone bleeped: It’s not all about aesthetics. He wrote: Have a good time at your party. I’m too tired to argue, having just got our daughter to sleep. He nearly couldn’t be bothered to read the next text: Aren’t you wonderful. Don’t wait up. Arsenal scored again, but Christian couldn’t raise a cheer. Often his life felt pathetic.

Ruth knew she was drunk before she stumbled into the taxi and felt her head reeling. The jolts of corners taken too fast and a spicy smell she couldn’t place were conspiring to make her feel sick. The driver had a small symbol of an Indian god on his dashboard; it was shameful that she didn’t know its name, didn’t even know which religion it represented. Still though it comforted her, reassured her in some indefinable way. She looked at the tiny icon, cheap in its fluorescent plastic, and envied its sense of stability, its ability to inspire wonder. So many hopes and dreams and wishes had been prayed into that image, it made Ruth smile.

Viva had won Best Design and Editor of the Year, so the champagne had been flowing all night. Sally had been in her element and Ruth had felt an unsisterly stab of jealousy watching her old friend so graciously accept her award and make a funny speech about Roger asking her whether she loved him or Viva more. ‘I simply answered that he was my husband, but Viva was my baby. What I didn’t add was that women always love their children more than their husbands, don’t they.’ Sally didn’t have children.

Ruth’s phone was vibrating, but the message she saw was an old one from Christian. Did you call the plumber? There’s no bloody hot water again.

‘No,’ she said out loud. ‘I bloody didn’t.’

‘Excuse me?’ said the taxi driver.

‘No, sorry, nothing.’ Ruth threw the phone down next to her and stared out of the window at the grey streets, passing by like a dreary dream. She found it strange to think of all the sleeping bodies shielded behind all those front doors, encased in walls which felt so familiar and comforting to them, if they were lucky, but would be alien and frightening to her. It reminded her of going on holiday and how you walk into the apartment or cottage or room and feel so out of place you almost want to go home, but within days those new four walls suddenly feel cosy, like you’ve always lived there. Which in turn made her think about that old cliché, There’s no place like home, which she pictured as an appliqué scene in a wooden frame, sitting in her granny’s kitchen.

‘Thirty-four sixty,’ the driver was saying as they pulled up outside her front door. She shoved two twenties at him and only remembered her phone still lying on the back seat after she’d let herself in. She was too tired to feel upset.

Ruth went into the dark sitting room and saw Christian’s plate and four empty bottles of beer by the sofa. It roused a fresh spasm of defeat in her. She picked them up and carried them into the kitchen, wondering who he thought was going to do it. Her husband had a habit of leaving cupboard doors flailing, drawers open at hip-hitting height, wet towels languishing on beds, dirty pants multiplying on the floor. What did your last slave die of ? she’d shout, sounding like the sort of woman she had never wanted to be.

As Ruth stood up from putting Christian’s plate in the dishwasher she caught sight of the tiny fence circling what must be the new vegetable patch. She felt a complete desire to see it rush at her heart, making her open the back door and step into her garden made yellow by the light pollution of night in the city. The patch was a perfect rectangle and she could see the grooves of the beds under a fine meshing. At the end of each bed was a white plastic stick with writing on it. She squatted in the grass and worked her hand inside the mesh to pull out one of the sticks. Betty’s inexpert hand had written carrots and just below it Hal had scribbled something orange.

Her heart contracted so that she wondered if she might be about to die from all the alcohol and cigarettes she had uncharacteristically consumed. But really the problem lay with the image in her head; both her children as they had been as newborn babies, sucking at her breast. She would look down on them as they fed and marvel at the seriousness, the urgency, which accompanied their tugging. It used to feel like her breasts were attached to her heart by a series of thick ropes and that until that moment the ropes had lain slack and dormant. With each suck the ropes grew more taut, so that in the end her heart felt as though it had been pulled free, released like a sail on a ship. Both Betty and Hal had woken all night, every night, and when she had picked them out of their cribs, only half awake and smelling that indefinable scent only possessed by newborns, they had sighed with such contentment that she had sworn to never, ever let anything bad happen to either of them.

Then the wonder of it all. Watching a blank face smile for the first time must be more wonderful than the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or the pyramids; because don’t all wonders occur only within your own world, really there’s nothing else. Hearing a gurgle turn to a sound, feeling strength in limbs that only a day before had seemed so weak. You wait and wait as a mother at the start, wait for these minuscule miracles which make you writhe with excitement. But then those tiny bodies catch up with their whirling minds and all the things you’ve been searching for suddenly tumble out of them, so that you even miss some things. And then it stops being so precious and you forget, only for something like this to smack you right back to the impact of the beginning.

How had Ruth gone from falling so absolutely in love that she realised exactly where her heart was in her body, to missing the creation of something so fundamentally marvellous as this garden? Surely it was too mean of life to make her choose between herself and her children? The stick dropped from her hand and Ruth sat back heavily onto the already damp grass, covering her mouth with her hands to stop her sobs from waking anyone in the house.

Her crying didn’t last long; self-indulgence never sat easily with Ruth, she became too aware of herself. Instead she made herself stand up and get upstairs to bed. She was drunker than she’d realised and she tripped as she pulled her clothes heavily over her head, worrying already about how she would feel in the morning. Her pillow was cool but her head spun when she closed her eyes.

Christian rolled towards her and draped a hand across her stomach, something she still hated him doing. ‘Did you win?’ he asked.

‘Not personally. Sally did though.’

‘So you celebrated.’

Ruth knew what he meant. ‘Don’t lecture me about drinking.’

‘I’m not.’ His hand moved down her body, stroking her thigh. ‘I like it when you’re drunk.’

Ruth knew how easy it would be to roll into him, to let go and feel good for a moment, but a sickness that existed both physically and mentally had taken hold of her. It seemed like too much of an effort; recently she’d even begun to see it as too much of a relinquishment, although she wasn’t sure what it was that she was losing. She pushed his hand away. ‘I’m knackered.’

Christian turned heavily from her and Ruth was sure she heard him sigh.

Christian had an early meeting so he was up and out before anyone had woken up. He found Ruth’s mobile phone on the door mat with a card from a taxi firm. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to work out what had happened and it annoyed him that she should always get away with her drunken nights out when he was made to feel like an alcoholic home-wrecker whenever he came in the worse for wear.

It was a beautiful spring morning but Christian had a headache and the sunlight glinting off all the expensive cars made him feel woozy. He’d been feeling peculiar since his disastrous interview with Sarah. The whole encounter had left him off balance. The difference in their circumstances had been so marked as to be grotesque. In the three years since they’d last seen each other he had a smart new job, a beautiful son to go with his amazing daughter and put a floundering marriage back on track. Sarah, on the other hand, was applying for a position beneath the one she’d had when he’d known her and looked as if she’d had some sort of breakdown. He’d checked her CV and it said single. He was not enough of a shit to feel good about any of it.

Then two days ago she’d phoned him. She’d sounded so faint and weak that when she’d asked if they could meet up, nothing serious, but it had been odd to see him in those circumstances and she didn’t want to leave it like that, he had said yes. Christian had desperately wanted to decline as the whole situation seemed too dangerous, but he felt oddly responsible for how she had turned out and so had agreed. He was due to meet her the next day.

Christian was unused to feeling confused; normally he got on with things or asked Ruth what she thought. He texted Toby, the only school friend he still saw regularly and asked if they could meet for a drink that evening. He was relieved that the reply was yes and didn’t even care that Toby suggested an impossibly trendy Notting Hill pub in which he’d feel completely out of place.

The day dragged. He had a long and boring phone conference with some stiff Americans, one of his staff called in sick for the third time that month, Carol was in a bad mood and the sushi he had for lunch was over-priced and tasteless. He called Ruth at four to say that Toby had rung because he was having a crisis with his latest girlfriend, so he was going to meet him for a drink, knowing she couldn’t shout because of what she’d done the night before.

Toby was already at the bar when Christian arrived, looking like he owned the place and knew everyone there, which probably wasn’t far off the mark. It was bad luck, Christian felt, that his best friend should make him feel so inadequate with his ridiculously glamorous lifestyle. He couldn’t remember how or even when Toby had got into the music business or why he had made such a success of it. Either way, standing by the curved bend of the polished wooden bar, ordering two pints of Guinness from the barmaid, he felt wrong and out of place in his suit.

Toby was texting furiously on his iPhone. ‘Fuck, I’m going to have to run in about an hour. We’ve got a band showcasing tonight and it’s all gone tits-up.’

‘Right.’ Christian resisted an urge to ask himself along.

‘Anyway, what’s up? Why the urgency?’

Christian didn’t know who Toby was sleeping with at the moment, but he’d lay money on her being as fit as a butcher’s dog, as Toby would say. Life sometimes came too fast, you couldn’t be sure if you were right or wrong, stupid or wily, pathetic or sophisticated.

‘D’you remember Sarah?’

‘Of course. Please don’t tell me you’re seeing her again.’

Christian waved from behind his pint. ‘No. No. But this really weird thing happened . . . ’

‘I need a fag for this,’ said Toby, standing up. They shuffled onto the pavement, no longer pretending at what they were doing to their bodies. Christian helped himself to one. ‘Thought you’d given up.’

‘Only when Ruth’s around.’

‘So?’ His friend leant against the grimy wall of the pub and Christian momentarily wondered what he was doing there.

‘She came for an interview at my work.’

‘Shit. What, you were interviewing her?’

‘Yeah, and I hadn’t bothered to check the CVs, so I was totally unprepared when she walked in and Carol was in the room and it was fucking awful. She looked terrible.’ Christian flashed an image of Sarah in his mind. Sometimes he felt as though he was watching his life on TV and that nothing really mattered. ‘No, she looked amazing. But, sort of, I don’t know, wasted.’

‘What, drugs?’

‘No, more like life hadn’t been good to her.’

‘And I suppose you’re thinking that’s your fault? That she’s been spending these last three years pining after you?’

‘No, but you know, what with the baby and everything . . . ’

Toby’s phone bleeped again. ‘Sorry, I have to get this.’ He answered and walked to the kerb, balancing on the rubbish-strewn lip of the pavement as a child might. Christian checked his phone for something to do and saw that Ruth had texted, asking him to get milk on his way home.

‘Sorry about that. Let’s go back in,’ Toby said as he returned.

They sat at the round table they had been at before, their own puddles of spilt beer still reflecting the lights from the bar. Christian hoped they would have been cleaned up.

‘She called me a few days ago and I’m meeting her for lunch tomorrow.’

‘Are you mad?’ Christian was surprised to see anger on his friend’s face, in the turn of his mouth before he could hide it. ‘You know Ruth will leave if you do it to her again. Fuck knows how you got her to stay last time, but she’s not going to take it a second time.’

‘I’m not planning anything. But I couldn’t say no. I feel guilty.’

Toby rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. Christian wanted another cigarette. ‘Look, it’s not like she didn’t know what she was doing. It was shit, but shit happens. People have miscarriages every day. I can’t believe that three years on she’s still upset about it. My guess is that she’s seen a chance and decided to take it. And you, my friend, should politely decline.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think she’s like that.’

‘You don’t want to think she’s like that.’

Christian didn’t know what he thought. It was possible Toby was right. ‘Do you sometimes wonder if you are who you really are?’

‘No. Yes.’

Christian felt angry, not necessarily with Toby, but he was there. ‘You don’t understand.’

‘Please, don’t start telling me how hard married life is. All that shitty love, friendship and children.’

Christian squeezed his hand round his glass. ‘No sex, constant rows, massive mortgage.’

‘It’s not that bad.’

‘What, and I suppose you’d swap your life for mine at the drop of a hat?’

‘I’m not saying that, I’m just saying that Ruth and the kids are fantastic and sometimes I leave your house and feel a bit, I don’t know, empty.’ Christian laughed. ‘Look, I’m not trying to say that my life’s crap and all I’ve ever wanted is to settle down, but from where I’m sitting, yours doesn’t look too bad either.’

Christian sat back. He felt battered. How could he and Toby be the same age, from the same background and yet at such different points in their lives? Everywhere there were all these choices, how could you possibly ever tell if you’d made the right one? ‘D’you want another?’

‘No, I’ve got to go.’ Toby stood up. ‘You were like this at school, always worried that so and so was doing better than you, or that the party you didn’t go to was the best of the year. No one has it all. We’re grown-ups now and grown-ups have it hard. None of us are out there having non-stop fun, in fact most of us are lucky if we’re having even a bit of fun. I’d cancel Sarah and take Ruth out for dinner.’

Agatha had wanted to get Hal at least interested in the concept of eating before Ruth took him to see the stupid nutritionist on Friday. But half-term had been so busy with the vegetable garden and the trip to the museum and swimming that she hadn’t done anything. Still, she doubted the doctor would have much effect anyway.

Ruth looked drawn and tired when she came down for breakfast on Friday, casual in jeans and a shirt, but she made a great play about how excited she was to have the day off. Agatha could have told her this was a stupid thing to say and, sure enough, Betty’s lips were trembling over her Rice Pops.

‘I want to come, Mummy.’

‘But it’ll be so boring. Hal and I are only going to the doctor’s.’

‘I like the doctor’s.’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘I do.’

Betty was crying now, working her way up to full-blown hysterics. ‘It’s not fair. Hal gets to spend a whole day with you. I never spend a day with you.’

Ruth put down her cup of coffee and for a moment Agatha wondered if she was going to cry. ‘I’m sure Aggie’s got something great planned for the two of you today.’

‘I don’t want Aggie. I want you.’ Agatha told herself not to be offended by this as children always said things they didn’t mean. She started to load the dishwasher and, even with her back turned, felt the atmosphere shift. Ruth was about to capitulate. As far as Agatha could see, situations like this were yet another reason not to work after you had children; you felt so guilty you never said no and your kids knew they could get away with anything if they moaned enough. If Ruth had been the one planting vegetables and looking at dinosaurs and marvelling at two strokes of doggy paddle swum without armbands she would now be able to say no.

Betty’s screaming was becoming incessant, drilling into all of their heads, so that even Hal had covered his ears.

‘Okay, okay,’ Ruth shouted over the maelstrom. ‘All right, you win, come with us.’ Betty immediately stopped crying and climbed onto her mother’s lap, planning their day with intricate precision.

Ruth looked over her head to Agatha. ‘You could probably do with a day off, Aggie. And it would be lovely to spend some time with them both. We could go and have lunch in Hyde Park after the appointment, feed the ducks maybe.’

‘I’ll make supper for when you get back.’ Agatha grabbed at strands of usefulness.

‘No, please, I insist. Take the day, go and meet some friends. You’ve been working like a Trojan since you got here, you must think we’re slave drivers.’

Agatha smiled, but she felt like crying. She had begun to allow herself to believe that the Donaldsons weren’t ever going to notice that she never seemed to want a day off, never got a phone call, never met anyone. Now she would have to go through all the stupid pretence again of getting another mobile so she could ring herself, only to go and sit on her own in cinemas.

It wasn’t that Agatha had never had friends. She’d had a couple of serious and intense relationships, friendships which she’d thought were the answer to her prayers and would never end. But she had always misjudged the other girls; they never understood her like she thought they had.

The best friend she’d ever had was a girl called Laura who she’d met at the cleaning agency she’d joined when she’d first got to London. From the moment she’d seen her in that spick and span offi ce in Kensington she’d known they’d be friends for ever. There was something so sophisticated about her blonde highlighted hair and upturned collar and cut-glass accent that made Agatha want to possess her like some fabulous vase you’d put on a high shelf and never get down.

Agatha had managed to refine her Northern drawl in the time it took to cross the offi ce and even she was impressed with the sound that came out of her mouth. She had steeled herself to seem super confident and gave a convincing story about needing money to fund her trip to Argentina which she was planning for the second half of her gap year. And wouldn’t you know it, but Laura was also working for gap-year travel, except she was going to America. And with friends.

It was easy to find excuses to go into the office and even easier to make Laura laugh or exclaim over their similarities, when really you could read so much about a person just by looking at what book they were reading or what they ate for lunch or the magazine they read. Pride and Prejudice, Pret’s no-bread tuna sandwich and Heat, respectively.

Agatha’s mother and father were cruising in the Bahamas and her brother was at St Andrews and never came home. Agatha hated going to their house in Oxford without them and so she was sleeping on a friend’s floor while earning some money. She would love to ask Laura round, but her friend’s mother had depression and spent most of the time in bed and was really funny about dirt, so she couldn’t risk it. In fact, she confided to Laura over coffee one day, her friend was starting to irritate her as she had a new boyfriend and seemed to have forgotten about everyone else’s existence. Which was such a bummer as almost all her other friends were away.

Tell me about it, Laura had said, this summer was turning out to be so tedious she half wished she was going to Bristol in September. Bristol, that’s funny, I’m off to Exeter, which is quite nearby, said Agatha. And at that moment she believed whole-heartedly that by next September she might have got herself into that very university because, when she stopped to think about it, that was what she had wanted to do all along.

Laura knew interesting people and went to amazing places and she started taking Agatha. Agatha was aware that to fit in properly she was going to have to be fun and available and always say the right thing. The problem was that it soon became clear that saying the right thing was knowing all the other people they were always talking about. Laura and her friends seemed to begin every conversation with the words, Do you know . . . or, As Connie was saying . . . or, When I was last at Tom’s cottage . . . These phantom presences began to loom large around Agatha, they even invaded her dreams. It grew tiresome not knowing anybody and Agatha could feel people begin to lose interest in her as she showed her ignorance again and again. And it was almost like she was getting to know them all anyway, they all sounded the same and none of them ever materialised. So, one night, when maybe she’d had one glass of Chardonnay too many, she was amazed to find out that she did know Vicky, Vicky from Hammersmith who had been travelling round Europe all summer and whose parents lived in Hertfordshire. With the long blonde hair and amazing body, yes, how weird.

Except, wouldn’t you know it, bloody Vicky turned up a week later, all bronzed and amazing, exactly as everyone had said. And she didn’t know Agatha from Adam, had never even seen her. It was awful as Agatha had spent a whole evening telling anyone who would listen about their family holidays to Cornwall and their shared love of three-day eventing. Laura stopped calling after that.

It reminded Agatha of Sandra at school who had stopped talking to her when she’d asked Agatha’s mum if she really did know Billie Piper. Her mother hadn’t even known who Billie Piper was, which just about summed up the stupid woman. But even after she was found out, Agatha had wanted to scream that she did know her. She had read every single word ever written about her, she had followed her since before she was properly famous, certainly before stupid Sandra had heard of her. And then she’d had to listen to Sandra going on about Billie’s eating disorder in the playground and she’d felt like she had to put her straight or hit her. But nobody would listen, so she’d said that Billie’s mum was her mum’s best friend and she’d known Billie since they were babies and she didn’t have anorexia. And, you know what, even now she would be hard pushed to admit that it wasn’t true.

Ruth began the day out with her children so positively. It had been a good idea of Betty’s and Ruth was ashamed she hadn’t thought of it herself. Unusually the monotony of grey which seemed to always sit over their heads had been replaced by a perfect sun resplendent in a baby blue sky. If you ignored the fact that they had to begin the day with a visit to a £120-an-hour nutritionist because her son wouldn’t eat, you could imagine it was going to be perfect. And Ruth was going to make it perfect. She might have missed the vegetable garden, but surely special times could be found in lots of places.

On the way to the tube she thought it wise to remind Betty where they were going. ‘You know you have to be really, really good in the doctor’s office, don’t you?’

‘Of course I do, Mummy.’

‘You have to sit completely still and let me talk to him. Do you understand? Absolutely no funny business. Because it’s very important that Mummy gets to hear everything he says. And then we can go to the park and if you’ve been an extra good girl I’ll get you the biggest ice cream you’ve ever seen.’

Ruth always got a stab of anxiety going into the tube with her children. She ran through countless scenarios where a terrorist would let off a bomb or both her children would try to jump in front of a tube at the same time or someone would snatch Betty but to get her back she would have to leave Hal alone. Plus of course all the usual problems, like the fact that hardly any of the stations had lifts and no one ever helped with the buggy. She tried to visualise Christian in his day to calm these anxieties and then laughed at herself. It was odd how he still remained her constant, like a talisman that could be worried in her pocket.

The tube roared into the station with a rush of warm air which made Ruth want to shut her eyes and pretend she was standing on an African plain. The platform felt old and worn beneath her feet and there was an awful lot of day to get through before they could make their way back to this station. She worried that time with her children always going to be like this, a series of events that needed to be got through before you could legitimately put them to bed.

‘Come on,’ she was shouting now, pulling Betty onto the tube and in the process squeezing her hand too hard against the metal buggy handle and making her cry.

‘My Brat,’ screamed Betty as the doors whipped shut.

Ruth spun round in time to see the grotesque plastic doll fall under the train.

‘We’re going to kill my Brat,’ wailed Betty as the train crunched off.

‘Don’t worry, sweetheart, I’ll get you another one,’ said Ruth, secretly pleased because those dolls could give women a complex all on their own and yet Ruth was sure she’d read they were the bestselling toys out there. They made Barbie and Sindy look like nuns, with their ridiculously provocative bodies that could only have been dreamt up by a fetishist. And their facial features were no more than an advert for plastic surgery, not to mention their clothes, which would make a street-walker blush. One day she would muster the energy to explain to Betty why it was neither clever nor cool to own such toys, why being a woman was about so much more than how you looked, why . . . God, she couldn’t think straight against the unrelenting screech of Betty’s hysterics.

Christian knew Toby was right about Sarah, but he’d also known that he would find it impossible not to meet her for lunch. He arrived first at the Italian restaurant a few roads away from his office and chose a table at the back. The table was too small and intimate, with its depressing red-and-white checked plastic tablecloth and obligatory vase of breadsticks. Ruth would laugh at the framed photo of the Pope above the entrance to the toilets; he could imagine her saying that it didn’t bode well for the food.

Sarah was an acceptable ten minutes late but she arrived looking embarrassed and flustered. She turned to the side as she squeezed into her seat opposite him and he could see how much weight she had lost, she almost looked like one of those models in Ruth’s magazine. Today she was wearing black trousers with a black T-shirt and a leopard-print scarf tied round her neck. Her once blonde hair hung loose around her shoulders and there was only the faintest trace of make-up on her eyes. He knew it was wrong to find her as attractive as he did.

‘I’m sorry to have called,’ she said immediately. ‘But it was all too weird.’

‘No, it’s nice. It was the right thing to do.’ Christian pointed to the bottle of wine he wanted, it seemed unlikely that he could get through this without alcohol.

Sarah was nervous, he realised; she kept on re-adjusting her scarf and he noticed the red rash creeping up under her chin like some sort of rampant ivy.

‘Anyway,’ she said, breaking a breadstick but not eating it, ‘new job?’

‘Yeah, I’ve been there nearly two years now.’

‘And it’s okay?’

‘Well, you know, as okay as jobs ever are.’

‘But you’ve done well.’

Christian tried to hear a note of sarcasm in her voice, but couldn’t find it there. He nodded and knew that he had to return like some semi-pro tennis player. ‘And what about you, what have you been up to?’

‘Well, I’ve mainly been living in Australia.’ She looked down and crumbled more of the breadstick. Their wine arrived and Christian poured them both a glass.

‘Australia. Wow.’ He wanted to leave. He had always hated anyone who went to Australia for anything other than a holiday.

‘Yeah, it was great.’ He could tell she wanted to say something and so he let the silence build. Sarah tucked her hair behind her ears incessantly. ‘After the, you know, miscarriage, I went back to my mum and dad’s for a while and then I thought, fuck it, I’m going to get on a plane, and I ended up in Sydney and I met someone and stayed for two years.’

Christian liked the sound of someone, it had been foolish to imagine she’d been pining after him. ‘Great. Did you work?’

‘Only bar work and stuff. It’s much easier to get by over there.’

Sarah chatted on about the weather and the standard of living and the beaches, stuff Christian had heard countless times before. It seemed implausible that he had nearly left Ruth for this woman. With the flip of a dice life took you on the oddest ride, up some ladders, down too many snakes. He could have had a whole life with Sarah, they’d have a two-year-old by now, probably living in some tiny flat somewhere because he had to give most of his money to Ruth, who would legitimately hate him. She could have even met someone else and he would feel lonely and jaded because of course most of their friends and relatives would have sided with her. He’d have two children he hardly knew, one who he’d never lived with, and he would have to take them on terrible days out to the zoo where they would all feel like crying. And then when Betty got older she would say to her future boyfriends that she didn’t trust men much because her father had got some girl pregnant when she was three and left her mother to bring her and Hal up alone.

And nothing would have been different with Sarah. He could see that as clear as the sun shining through the window from the street. They would have spent the past two years arguing about whose turn it was to take out the rubbish, or why he watched so much football, or who was more tired. It was sad to realise that no one was unique and who you ended up with was more down to circumstances than design. He longed to be at home, sitting on one of the uncomfortable sofas he always teased Ruth for buying only because they’d looked good, with Betty and Hal fighting and him and Ruth looking at each other and feeling for one tiny second like they were in complete agreement.

‘So what did you have?’

Christian hadn’t been paying enough attention to what Sarah had been saying. His pasta was offputting; there was too much of it in too small a plate, making it seem sticky when really it was perfectly well cooked. ‘Sorry, what did I have what?’

‘Boy or girl?

The question was appalling to him and Christian couldn’t imagine why she would want to know. ‘Oh, right. Sorry. Boy.’

‘To go with your girl. How perfect.’ The sarcasm was there this time. Should he apologise? Should he bring up everything that had gone on? Was that what she was expecting? He felt weary, it all seemed so pointless, nothing was going to be changed by ranting and raving, but maybe she needed to get something off her chest. Sarah, however, seemed to have had second thoughts and now she smiled. ‘Sorry, I am pleased for you.’

Christian toyed with the idea of telling her that Betty still never slept through the night or that Hal had never eaten one morsel of food even though he was nearly three and existed on an average of about twenty bottles a day. But it seemed too much of a betrayal to his family, as if sitting with Sarah wasn’t enough.

‘Anyway,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘It’s been great, but I’ve got a meeting at three and, you know . . . ’

‘Oh yes, okay.’

It was awkward leaving. Neither of them knew how to end it. Christian saw a pigeon with a broken leg in the gutter as they were saying goodbye and it looked so miserable he wanted to find a brick and bash it over the head. Its grey feathers were matted and it had a bald patch on its back and he worried that it had been abandoned by the other pigeons. As he watched Sarah walk away self-consciously he hoped she was leaving his life.

On his way back to his offi ce Christian checked his phone and saw he had three missed calls from Ruth. There would be a certain irony to something bad happening to a member of his family while he was having a disastrous lunch with his old affair. He called her back immediately and she answered in two rings.

‘Ruth, what’s wrong?’

Her voice cracked as soon as she heard him. ‘Oh God, it was awful. I’ve been trying to get hold of you for ages.’

‘What was?’ Panic rose like bile in his chest as he depicted terrible fates befalling his children, each racing heartbeat showing him a different image of terror.

‘The nutritionist.’

He relaxed. ‘Oh, of course, what did he say?’

‘I can’t talk now. You know, little ears and all that.’ Her voice shook and he could almost see her trying to hold herself together for the sake of the kids. She’d done a lot of that when Hal was a newborn baby. ‘I wish I hadn’t gone, though. The whole day’s been a disaster. I don’t know if I can do this any more.’

‘Do what?’

‘Be a mother.’

‘Come on, Ruth, calm down. Why don’t we go out to dinner tonight and talk about this properly, see if Aggie can babysit?’

‘I’m so tired, I don’t know if I’ve got the energy.’

‘Come on, just somewhere local. It’d be good for you.’

Ruth sniffed heavily down the phone. ‘All right.’

The death of the Brat had been a bad omen. Betty’s hysterics had only gathered momentum the further they got away from the scene of the crime. Nothing Ruth could say would calm her down so that by halfway there Ruth thought she might have a panic attack. The walls of the tube were too tight a fit and she was acutely aware of the bumps and grinds of the tracks. She wondered what she was doing, taking her children on this hurtling mass of metal deep underneath London. Everything seemed terrifying.

Betty had reduced herself to dull whimpering by the time they arrived in Oxford Circus but she was petulant and stroppy and hung off the buggy like a damp rag. The street was thronged with young girls waltzing carefree into Topshop, their skinny hips unscarred by child-bearing. Any of them could have been Viva models and yet the magazine was aimed at women like her. Well, not like her. Viva women juggled everything successfully, whilst also looking flawless.

The nutritionist’s offi ce was in a thin, tall building between Oxford and Regent Street and looked as imposing as a giant headmaster. Ruth had expected to press a buzzer and be shown up to a floor, but she was able to walk straight in and up to the reception desk because the nutritionist seemed to command the whole building. The receptionist gleamed, like a woman in a cosmetic surgery advert in the back of a magazine. Ruth felt grimy and under-nourished as she said Hal’s name.

Dr Hackett’s offi ce was bigger than her sitting room and furnished in a parody of the image of a successful private doctor, with gilt-framed paintings, a large well-polished wooden desk and two deep leather armchairs positioned on either side. He sat in front of two floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over a private garden which seemed an impossibility in the middle of the city. Ruth couldn’t hear any traffic noise.

Ruth had fixed Dr Hackett in her mind as a friendly, slightly hippyish but very posh man with longish grey hair and gangly legs which he would cross and uncross incessantly. Never had he been a paunchy older man with spectacles on the end of his nose and a ludicrously expensive-looking three-piece tweed suit. He also shouldn’t have been sitting on the other side of a heavy desk and he shouldn’t have looked so bored by the whole encounter.

As she sat down, Ruth could see herself and her children through his eyes so exactly the recognition hurt. Betty’s face was smeared and dirty and blotchy from the excess of tears; Hal looked nonplussed, stuck to her hip with a bottle in his mouth; and she looked too thin, with straggly hair and an air of neurosis resting on her like most women wore perfume. I’m not really this person, she wanted to say, you’ve just caught me on a bad day.

‘So, Mrs Donaldson,’ he said, ‘what seems to be the problem with your son?’

Ruth immediately felt defensive. ‘I don’t know if it’s a problem.’

The doctor sighed. ‘If it’s not a problem, then can I ask what you’re doing here?’ He made her feel stupid just as she supposed he’d meant to. She wondered how on earth he had ended up being a nutritionist.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean that. I just meant we don’t know what to think.’

‘Please, put that down.’ Ruth jumped, only then noticing that Betty was pushing an enormous glass paperweight perilously close to the edge of the desk.

‘God, Betty, what are you doing?’ she shouted. Betty’s lip started to tremble. ‘Sorry,’ she said to the doctor. ‘Hal has never eaten anything solid. Ever. He lives on bottles of milk.’

‘How many does he have a day?’

The truth seemed suddenly untenable in this pristine office and so Ruth pointlessly lied. ‘About ten.’

‘At least they’re sustaining.’

‘Yes, but he’s nearly three.’

The silence was broken by the sound of Hal’s sucking. It could have been funny.