THE DILEMMAS OF HARRIET CAREW

THE DILEMMAS OF HARRIET CAREW

CRISTINA ODONE

To Edward Lucas

1

Driving a Merc is like wearing a push-up bra. Suddenly everyone notices you, and makes comments like ‘You look great, Harriet …’ As I park the hired S320L outside the dry cleaner’s, the Polish woman behind the counter gives me a thumbs-up sign; I only go there a few times a year but I’m suddenly worthy of the smile reserved for bankers who bring in their shirts and boxers every day. At the greengrocer’s, the doltish assistant, who usually slouches against the counter, rushes to carry my bags to the car. The rhubarb and pears which I was expected to carry easily when I was on foot are deemed too heavy for the driver of a high-performance sports car.

I turn out of the Tesco car park. Janet Miller, patroness of the charity I work for (HAC – Holidays Association for Children), stops her Range Rover Sport, rolls down the window and for the first time ever chats about children, schools and the holidays. Hers: a month in a villa, with pool, in San Gimignano; ours: a fortnight at my in-laws’ cottage, with coin-operated electricity meter, at Lyme Regis.

I’m in a rush but everything seems bearable as Guy has decided to use our upgrade vouchers, obtained after I complained when our last hired car broke down, to get this Mercedes rather than the usual Renault Scenic.

‘Your carriage awaits …’ Guy, with mock ceremony, hands me the keys after lunch. I feel like Cinderella – an impostor stealing away in a swanky set of wheels. But this way, I can run my errands in style:

Mario’s to get my hair cut and set up an appointment for my roots, which haven’t been seen to since May. Charlotte’s to return the drill, Foot Locker to buy Alex’s trainers, the greengrocer’s and Tesco’s for tonight’s dinner party.

It still strikes me as pure madness to have people for dinner tonight of all nights, but Guy insists that it’s the only date Oliver Mallard can do. Guy is convinced he will be the man to pull us out of penury. So I give in, thinking that at least I can use the car to lug around some heavy carrier bags. There are seven, to be precise, adding up to a whopping £93 – but that includes three bottles of quite decent Merlot.

Normally, I do the shopping on foot: a nightmare where Maisie’s pushchair doubles up as a pack-mule; I give my biceps and triceps a thorough work-out (who needs a gym when you can go to Tesco’s?); and progress is slow, with me constantly checking and repositioning the more precious items – handbag, wine, eggs, jars – lest they spill on to the pavement.

The Merc, instead, makes everything easy. I smile to myself in the rear-view mirror; as they say, I could get used to this. I’ve never thought of myself as materialistic. At home we always had enough, and if Dad’s car was no Merc (he drove a Rover which later gave way to a Peugeot), we never felt we were missing out on anything.

Mum had a wish-list of holiday destinations, but ‘next summer in the South of France’ became a family joke rather than a bitter disappointment. We had a comfortable bungalow in Kent, Dad’s dental practice flourished and Mum pottered about the house while Mel and I did our homework: I felt that I had the best possible start in life.

The rest, I would go out and get for myself – and if I really did want a Mercedes, by the time I’d grown up, I’d be able to afford it. Or my husband would.

Now, purchasing an S320L is absolutely unthinkable. As are foreign holidays, a home north of the river, taxi rides, restaurant meals, and regular sessions with Mario. It’s been years since I bought an item of clothing that was not second-hand or on sale; years since we decorated a room or bought theatre tickets.

Guy and I consider ourselves middle class. We earn better, travel more, and live longer than our parents and ancestors could ever dream of. And yet, throw into this happy mix two little words, and the result is an avalanche of debts, doubts and despair. ‘School fees’: the two scariest words in the English language. Our parents took it for granted that they would offer their children a better deal than the one they’d had, but we can’t do the same for our brood. Behind those crocodile rows of matching jackets and trousers or skirts lurks a sweaty-palmed, terrifying vision of huge bills and sniffy bursar’s letters. For what should be the best years of your life you can talk and breathe nothing but entrance and scholarship exams, gift tax, league tables, advance-fee schemes, instalments, catchment areas, fee-protection insurance in case you die, and a blizzard of acronyms and codewords: GCSE, AEAs, A-levels, the IB. Everything else must take second place.

I check my watch: half past two. I catch Mario and his minions watching me through the window. Mario usually has time only for the regulars who can afford to see him weekly: but, eyes on the silver Mercedes, he smiles. I step into the chrome-and-mirrors salon and immediately am welcomed with offers of Vogue and a cappuccino while I wait, Silvia doing my nails while Mario cuts my hair, and a menu card from which to choose any other treatment I might fancy. Given that usually I’m lucky if I get a worn copy of last month’s OK! and have never been offered so much as a glass of water, I bask in this temporary pampering.

While a young Japanese girl in a mini and platform sandals washes my hair I run my eyes down the glossy card in my hand: facials for £50, reflexology for £45, half-leg waxing for £25, Brazilian for £30 … I can’t afford any of them, either in time or money. Who can?

But even as I ask myself the question, I see before me, hair wrapped in tinsel foil, fingers and toes separated by cotton wool, Leo Beaton-Wallace’s mum. She is tall, blonde, and her husband runs a hedge fund: the living embodiment of all a Griffin mum should be.

I’ve been piloted to a chair behind her, but I can see her in the mirror. And vice versa, so I fervently hope Mario hurries over before she sees me with wet wisps of hair and no makeup. At thirty-seven, my natural look could have me banned by Health & Safety.

Peals of electronic children’s laughter erupt in the salon. ‘That’s my phone!’

Leo’s mum picks up a slim little mobile that has been sitting on the counter among the combs curlers and brushes. ‘Hullo …’ she twitters. ‘Oh, darling, what a thrill!! I’ll see you Monday at start of term? I’m getting myself ready as we speak – it’s practically a catwalk these days, isn’t it? … No, no, the works: colour, manicure, pedicure … I can’t bear not keeping it up. You see some scary visions out there … That clever boy’s mum, have you seen her? Lets her roots grow until she’s got black-and-yellow tiger stripes … That’s the one, Alex Carew …’

Me! I seize up with shame and duck under the counter, pretending to rifle through my bag. It’s so unfair. I’ve been trying my best, ever since Alex started at the Griffin, to put up an appearance of casual elegance. I’ve scoured the sale racks and those of the hospice shop for bargains that don’t scream ‘Last Season’s Left-Overs’. I’ve filed my nails before every gathering of Griffin parents (well, almost) and I’ve stepped up my visits here to Mario’s … but obviously it wasn’t enough. I’ve been spotted as the blackhead in the Griffin mums’ otherwise perfect complexion. I’ve been outed as the fake Yummy Mummy, the outsider who tried to smuggle herself in as ‘one of us’.

Oh, for the blissful ‘who gives a toss’ shrug of state schools, where parents sport pierced belly buttons, tattoos and shabby jeans without worrying about what little Leo’s mum will whisper to little Max’s mum. It’s almost worth putting up with the thirty-five-to-one child-to-teacher ratio, the twelve-year-old boys with knives and the twelve-year-old girls with child, the bullying, the swearing, and the terrible exam results.

I’m still crouched under the counter, determined not to be spotted by Leo’s mum. I’m at an awkward angle, hunched over, feeling the strain in my waist, and wonder how long I can hold this position. Sunglasses, that’s what I need. I’ll look odd – but anonymous. I fumble in my bag, sifting feverishly through keys, purse, loose change, sweet wrappers, a sticky half-eaten lolly and plasters.

‘The new car – I like it! Brava!’ Mario comes to my chair. I turn my head to look up at him, sleek and Latin and twirling a comb in his hand. Mario frowns. ‘I need you to come up from down there.’

I smile apologetically and just then, Hurrah!, my fingers make out the sunglasses and I triumphantly slip them on. Only to realize, as I sit up, that these are Maisie’s pink plastic star sunglasses, bought at Lyme Regis for a pound last July.

‘Hmmm … this pink –’ Mario shakes his head in the mirror ‘– it is not you.’

I leave Mario and the ghastly Griffin mum, marginally soothed by hair that is now more tabby than tiger. It’s three thirty. Just enough time to get to Charlotte’s and then Foot Locker. I head past the common; it’s been a wet summer, and the grass stretches as thick and green as a carefully tended lawn. The sky is a deep blue and the air sparkles.

But I feel the usual September melancholy: summer has ended, school looms. I shall take up once again the routine of chaotic breakfasts, school-gate encounters, office admin, hovering over homework and making supper.

Despite the daily check-up telephone calls from Cecily Carew, the maddening way the electricity meter ran out just as I curled up in bed with my Plum Sykes, and the boys’ breaking the springs on their beds, Lyme Regis suddenly seems a little corner of paradise. I miss the constant exposure to the children, the way all three, bronzed and bursting with loud energy, run in and out of the cottage and garden; I miss watching Guy scamper about with them, and take out his work only at sundown. In Lyme Regis, even school fees seem a manageable wave we can easily surf.

I turn into Charlotte’s crescent. Leafy and elegantly lined with white Georgian houses, road bumps protecting the stillness, this is a choice bit of Clapham. It’s south, and we’re north – and that works out at about £200,000 difference. Charlotte wants her drill back: ours burnt out as we tried to rehang the Carew medals in Guy’s study. Guy keeps them above the fireplace, in a glass-fronted mahogany box, pinned against blue velvet: a century’s worth of Cecils, Claudes, Berties, Reggies and Hectors honoured with enamel and ribbon. There are medals from India and Africa, an early Distinguished Flying Cross and, in pride of place, Great-Uncle Claude’s Victoria Cross.

Virtute non verbis: ‘Deeds not words’, the family motto, is carved into the wooden box, reproaching Guy as, seated at his desk, he wrestles with his prose. His worries about deadlines and narrative flow and realistic pictures seem pedestrian in comparison to his ancestors’ gritty valour as they survived malaria, starvation, rationing, and mustard gas. Or so he keeps telling me.

Charlotte lets out a wolf-whistle as I pull up. My best friend stands on the doorstep of her immaculately painted white stucco house. ‘Guy must have finally written his bestseller.’

‘Only hired for the weekend,’ I say, ignoring her put-down. Charlotte has never quite believed in Guy’s talent.

When I started going out with him, Guy was twenty-one and Lonely Hunter, a comic account of an African safari (featuring a hungry cheetah, a Masai warrior and two repulsive white British hunters) was a bestseller. He was much fêted and, to my eyes, grand and glamorous. I suspect that Charlotte, at Bristol with me, was a bit envious of my new boyfriend – a published author, at Cambridge and even profiled in Tatler. In our unspoken rivalry, he gave me the edge.

When we married, I was convinced that Lonely Hunter would be the first of a string of great successes. My future would be as Guy’s muse, inspiring the genius in his quest for the perfect travel tome. My life would be spent riding side by side with him across the Kalahari and over the Himalayas, the two of us braving perilous, intoxicating adventures.

This has not been the case, quite. Instead of trekking across the desert, a song on our lips and hair blowing in the wind, Guy and I can barely move under the burden of school fees, mortgage repayments, utility bills, taxes and those unforeseen ‘extras’ private schools lob at you like hand-grenades: uniforms, school trips, music lessons, birthday presents and, God forbid, extra tutoring.

‘It’s very nice.’ Charlotte’s eyes are still on our hired car. ‘Jack tried out that model before getting the Porsche.’

If we could afford a car at all I’d be happy, I think; but I say instead, ‘When we grow up, we’ll be fund managers, too.’

‘Well, you have all the fun: or at least Guy does, with all that travelling …’

I hand over the drill. I notice she is in her matching pink DKNY tracksuit and remember that on Saturdays she has her Pilates and tums&bums back to back. As opposed to Fridays, when she has her session with the Ashtanga yoga instructor; or Wednesdays, when it’s the personal trainer … I always hold in my stomach when we’re together.

‘Last weekend of summer.’ Charlotte deadheads a rose by her front steps.

‘I know,’ I sigh. ‘The Griffin starts on Monday already … Hello, school-fee headaches.’

Charlotte shakes her head. ‘If God had meant for your children to go to Eton, Harrow or Wolsingham, he would have married you off to an investment banker.’

Or at least to a man who doesn’t believe in the Carew Gospel: that it is a parent’s duty to send every male child to a top prep school, and then to Wolsingham, ‘their’ big school, and in this way ensure that they imbibe the virtues of courage and discipline and hard work, together with an excellent education, that will stand them in good stead in the challenges ahead.

‘There are plenty of good schools that cost less than the Griffin and Wolsingham,’ I plead with Guy.

‘The Griffin feeds into Wolsingham, and Wolsingham is part of the Carew tradition, Harry.’

‘So was the army, but you broke with that tradition.’

‘I know – and my father has only now started talking to me again.’

Jack is a successful hedge-fund manager, so it makes perfect sense for Marcus and Miles to move from St Christopher’s C of E primary school to Hampton House, a prep school that rivals the Griffin in its access to the big three – Eton, Harrow and Wolsingham.

But for us … Guy and I wake up at night worrying about the latest school bill. We lie there at three in the morning and outline different scenarios: Guy will develop a lucrative sideline writing coffee-table books about far-away places; I shall forget about my yearning to be the perfect stay-at-home mum and work full time at HAC; the children will learn to go up chimneys.

‘Coffee?’

I’m tempted, as always with Charlotte. I can glimpse the neat and gleaming kitchen, miraculously exempt from the scuff marks and greasy paws of unruly children, not to mention the ever-floating hair of an overly affectionate mutt. I can smell the chocolatey aroma of real coffee as opposed to the instant we keep on hand. And I can hear the soft strains of Classic FM uninterrupted by a screeching toddler or rowing boys. Charlotte has three children, who almost match mine in age, and yet her life shows none of the dents, scratches and handprints that cover my own. Amazing what a difference money makes.

Reluctantly I shake my head. ‘Afraid not, I’ve got to cook for you, remember?’

‘I know, I know. It’s the man behind those cruises for wealthy OAPs – Drake, isn’t it?’

‘Mallard. He’s launching a monthly glossy magazine called Travel Wise in January and he’s looking for an editor.’ I don’t need to say more.

‘Fingers crossed.’ Charlotte crosses her fingers and raises them.

‘And thanks for the drill: the family honour has been saved. Eight for eight thirty.’ I wave goodbye and rush back to the car. As I’m about to step into the Merc, a green van pulls up: Charlotte’s organic shopping.

Good for you, good for the environment: the motto is printed in bright red-and-yellow letters across a basket of fruit and veg. Bad for my purse, I think as I start the car.

It’s four thirty: getting late. I’m making an old favourite, pork belly with juniper berries and fennel seeds, and it needs at least three and a half hours in the oven. Working backwards, if we sit down at eight forty-five … damn, I don’t have time to do Foot Locker. I’m about to turn back, then with a pang realise I won’t have time to shop tomorrow as Guy has planned an outing to Richmond Park; and I think how Alex will get into trouble at school if he doesn’t have his trainers. As it is, Evie, the matron, keeps telling me that Alex doesn’t have the full complement of regulation grey flannel shirts:

‘Why don’t you order another from the school outfitters?’

It doesn’t occur to her that this would cost us twice as much as anywhere else.

Argh … I step on it, and am pleasantly surprised by the instant response of the Merc.

I’m cross with Alex for this needless trip and expense: only last week I got him the pair of black trainers that are part of his school’s absurdly elaborate sports kit, but somehow he managed to lose one.

(Me, voice rising in irritation: ‘Where could you possibly have lost one shoe, Alex?’ Him, ‘I dunno …’ Me, openly cross: ‘I’m going to deduct it from your pocket money.’ Him, shrugging with nonchalance: ‘You never pay me my pocket money anyway.’)

The shop is packed. I try desperately to catch the eye of now one assistant, now the other. Nothing. A host of harassed mums and gum-chewing pre-teens are ahead of me in the queue. Finally, I thrust the lone black trainer at a young assistant called Pawel, and ask for the matching pair at £18.99. Ten to five.

I rush back to the car, calculating: if I’m lucky the guests will arrive at closer to eight thirty than eight, so we won’t have too long to sit around trying to make polite conversation while waiting for alcohol or the discovery of a mutual acquaintance to loosen our tongues. If I work quickly without the usual interruptions (can I find Guy’s notepad, have I got Tom’s book, have I seen Alex’s fleece), I should be able to stuff the belly’s flap of fat with the herbs and stick everything in the oven by … say, quarter to six.

I pull up in front of the house and make out three figures in the kitchen. My heart sinks: the children will be demanding tea of Ilona. But our au pair can no more make a toasted cheese sandwich than wear a modestly cut dress. Slowly I start taking the carrier bags out of the Merc. I feel loath to trade this quiet interior, with its polished wood and ivory leather, for the chaotic yellow kitchen, with its peeling linoleum floor and scrambling family scene. I look up at the house. It’s never been a beauty, but when we first bought it I had visions of investing in a few well-chosen improvements that would work a magical transformation. We could rebuild the wooden door frame at the entrance, paint the grey brick white, maybe even consider a loft extension. All we needed was to wait until Guy had secured a good contract for his next book. That was twelve years ago, and nothing’s been done – and we have only forty years left on the lease.

‘Mummy!’ Maisie interrupts her drawing to stretch out her arms to me.

‘Mummy, can we have pizza?’ Tom peers into the carrier bags as I walk in.

‘Can’t we have spag bol, Mummy?’ Alex stands by the open refrigerator.

‘Darling,’ Guy wanders in, Rufus in his wake, ‘I can’t find chapter one.’ He scratches his head, peering hopelessly around the kitchen: he wears that expression of total absorption that takes over as he nears completion of a book. And God knows, Rajput, Guy’s on-going magnum opus about the warrior kings of Rajasthan, has been nearing completion for almost a year now. ‘I’m sure I left it here somewhere.’ Anything is possible: various parts of Guy’s books have routinely surfaced next to the toaster, in Maisie’s buggy, in my sewing basket.

‘Don’t keep the door open, the fridge is playing up. Sausages for your supper, but first I need to prepare pork belly for dinner. Check for Rajput by the radio, Guy; you had it in your hands when you were listening to Any Questions?’ I start unpacking the carrier bags, trying not to kick Rufus as he weaves in and out of my legs. ‘There’s still shopping in the car, please.’ A burst of feverish activity follows the chorus of protests.

‘Eureka! I knew it was here somewhere.’ Guy lifts the radio from a wad of typed pages and hugs his manuscript to his chest.

I preheat the oven. ‘Did you have a chance to look at the microwave?’

Our microwave door has refused to shut since before Lyme Regis, but Guy fancies his DIY skills and won’t let me replace it. Which is also his attitude to the kitchen-unit door (off its hinges) and the shower head (still drip-drip-dripping).

‘Not yet, but I have fixed the broken tap.’ He proudly points out a wodgy lump of brown masking tape around the cold tap, whose cracked plastic knob split in half last week. I know how it felt.

‘Mummy, look!’ Maisie holds up her drawing for me to admire. Then, as I haven’t jumped to her side in record time, she repeats in a reproachful tone: ‘Look, Mummy!’

I bend over her notebook. ‘Beautiful, darling – is that our house?’ I point to the large square with misshapen roof that sits in the centre of the page.

‘No, that’s Lily’s house. This is ours –’ Maisie points to the teeny-weeny box beside it. Oh gawd: even my three-year-old suffers from property envy.

‘That S320L is really cool!’ Alex is staring out of the window. ‘Can’t we keep it until Monday? You could drop me off.’

‘Afraid not: has to be back tomorrow night.’ Guy is tapping his fingers on his manuscript.

‘Da-ad …’ Alex wails, ‘you’ve got to make up for the time you came to the school gates in that Skoda.’

‘We’ve never hired a Skoda!’ Guy protests indignantly.

‘I was teased for a month. I’m the only boy at school whose parents don’t own a car.’

‘What the Griffin should be teaching you is that there are more important things in life than a set of wheels.’ Guy thumps the table decisively. His sons roll their eyes.

‘I’m off.’ Guy retreats to the downstairs loo. It’s his favourite room in the house, lined with framed photos of him in the Wolsingham boater and jacket; punting on the Cam; and the cover of the first edition of Lonely Hunter. These are the bits of the past that Guy seeks when he wants a haven from a hostile world of luxury cars, Poggenpohl kitchens and expensive holidays.

While Guy communes with his past, Ilona arrives. As she discards her tight-fitting leopardskin jacket, our au pair casts an approving smile in my direction.

‘Mrs Caroo, you have new car?’

The last time Ilona addressed me by my surname was when I interviewed her for the job. I can see now how to earn her respect. ‘Mehrtsedez –’ she points at the window with her thumb. ‘Booteeful.’ Without my having to ask her, she lays the table. Perhaps if I bought myself a pair of Jimmy Choos she might start cleaning Maisie behind the ears, and if I wore a Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress she might finally do the boys’ laundry.

‘Only a hired car, Ilona.’

‘Ah …’ Ilona’s sighs are always eloquent.

I rub salt into the pork and then put it in the oven. I turn my attention to the children’s supper.

‘Pete, he have Corvette.’ Her boyfriend of the moment, a tattooed butcher’s assistant from Essex, has a ten-year-old red Corvette that Guy calls the pimpmobile. They met through Blinddate.com – which has Ilona pinned to the computer for hours on end. ‘He coming for me now. We go to Empire Leicester Square.’ The charming thing about Ilona is she never asks anything of us but simply informs us of her plans.

Guy surfaces once more.

‘Is the Mercedes the most expensive car of all, Daddy?’ Tom’s face is still glued to the window.

Guy does mental arithmetic: ‘A car like this would be … more than two years’ school fees.’

The mere prospect is enough to crumple Guy, and he sits down with a sigh. Shirt collar frayed, shoes scuffed, he looks worn out by the effort to live up to his forebears, do the best for his offspring and keep up with his peers.

‘If only …’ he begins. The boys and I ignore him. We’ve already heard every possible dream that Guy could unfurl before us, and know that he will finish that sentence with one of the following: they make a film of Lonely Hunter (an option on the book did pay for our boiler last year, but we haven’t heard anything since); the Carew parents’ family home in Somerset is suddenly valued at ten times last year’s modest estimate; Rajput proves a sensation and sells millions.

There are unspoken hopes too. Aunt Sybil dies: ruthless, I know, but Guy’s widowed great aunt is apparently worth a fortune and allegedly considers him her favourite relative. So far, though, she has come to stay on countless occasions but has never so much as hinted at a legacy. Or that Guy’s agent, Simon, reverts to treating Guy as a great writer with a great future. He doesn’t need to take him out to the Ivy every week, which is how he courted him in the days when Lonely Hunter was a bestseller, but he could show more interest than the annual Happy Winter (‘Best Eid, Hanukkah, and Christmas wishes to all of you’) card.

CRASH! We all jump. The kitchen window rattles as if we’ve survived an earthquake. Before the boys can run to the kitchen door, Ilona walks in, her tattooed boyfriend and a string of expletives in her wake.

‘Some idiot has parked his Mercedes next to your house!’ Pete swaggers, vest tight over his chest. ‘He’ll have a right shock – nasty scratch all down the side. Cost him a pretty penny, that will, cheeky bugger. We’d better be off before he notices, Ilona …’

2

‘It was a disaster.’ Guy shakes his head as he lovingly dries one of the crystal tumblers that he inherited from his aunt Amelia. I’m standing at the sink, hands in foamy water, wondering, once again, what is the point of owning a dishwasher when half your crockery is so fragile that it has to be washed by hand?

‘It went well.’ I rinse the third tumbler. ‘Oliver made you an offer.’

‘Not the one I wanted,’ replies Guy bitterly. ‘In fact, it sounds daft.’

‘Nothing to be sniffy about.’ I remain stubbornly upbeat. ‘And despite the shock announcement, it was quite a success.’

‘Hmmm …’ Guy examines a tumbler against the light: mercifully, no chips.

‘“Hmmm” nothing,’ I snap, exasperated. ‘A job offer doesn’t happen every day. You didn’t even try to look interested.’

‘I’ll ring him, I promise.’ Guy sounds despondent. ‘And the pork belly was delicious, darling.’

Not just the pork, I think: the Merlot was excellent and for once I didn’t have to whisper ‘FHB’ (Family: Hold Back) to Guy in the kitchen. And the peculiar sea-buckthorn juice which he had brought back from his trip to Lithuania gave my trifle an almighty kick. In fact, Guy should be grateful because, once again, we have managed to pass off our threadbare household as a proper, middle-class one.

‘I don’t know …’ Guy sets down the tumbler on the tray with the rest. ‘Maybe it was the news that Pete’s not insured and that ours kicks in only for damage above £600. We don’t need another expense.’

‘We certainly don’t,’ I agree.

Five hours earlier, at eight o’clock, I find my one remaining pair of tights without a run hanging in the children’s bathroom. I sniff a strong, familiar scent: the Lynx ‘Africa’ antiperspirant which Alex insisted on buying during our last shopping expedition.

‘Alex?! Why are you putting on antiperspirant at night?’

My eldest pops his head through the door. ‘I never remember to put it on in the morning.’ He wolf-whistles as I wrench on my tights.

I rush back to our bedroom to get dressed, wondering if my thirteen-year-old is now too old to see his mother only partially clothed.

The doorbell goes.

‘Whaaaaat?’ I ask, disbelieving.

‘No … it can’t be …’ Guy is outraged. ‘Who shows up on the dot at eight when dinner is eight for eight thirty?!’

I sneak a peep from our bedroom window: the Mallards are at our front door. ‘Your guest of honour, that’s who.’

‘Harriet!’ Guy panics. ‘Get dressed!’ Still trying to fix his cufflinks, he rushes downstairs, three steps at a time.

Quickly, I zip up my navy-blue Paddy Campbell dress, a £14 find from the Sue Ryder shop on Clapham High Street last summer, and put on some mascara. I’m nervous: by the time the pork belly is crispy, we will have spent almost ninety minutes in one another’s company – and how can I be entertaining for that length of time? Guy manages these occasions as if they were a school play and he the enterprising and determined Head of Drama who knows how to get the best out of little Joey as Bugsy Malone. All those Carew clan gatherings, school debating societies and Cambridge sherry parties, all those trips to Uganda, Uruguay and Uzbekistan have prepped him to win over an audience – from the cantankerous old cow to the acid-tongued megalomaniac.

I, on the other hand, feel like the tone-deaf girl in the school choir: caught between faking it and hitting a false note. God, let the pork be ready before anyone finds out I don’t know the name of the dictator in Belarus, or what’s on at Tate Modern, and before I’m outed as the one who prefers to talk to her children rather than to a well-known entrepreneur.

I draw a deep breath and walk downstairs.

Our dinner parties, Guy always says, are more about trompe-l’œil than truffle oil: a candlestick hides the mend in the linen tablecloth; Guy and I have the sagging chintz-covered chairs; a drape covers the split sofa cushion. But in the candlelight, the drawing room, as Guy grandly calls our living room, looks inviting. The carpet, from a long-ago visit of Guy’s to Tehran, has withstood admirably the pitter-patter of tiny feet and paws; and the portrait of Great-Grandfather Hector in his major’s uniform smiles protectively upon the room. Even the Carews’ mahogany monstrosities, an over-sized dining table, a matching sideboard, and a chaise longue that cannot be sat on without first undergoing a medical check-up, gleam elegantly. Perhaps Guy’s vigorous weekly polishing, which he insists on carrying out with beeswax, makes a difference after all.

Once upon a time, I dreamt of a home with sleek and contemporary furniture, neutral walls and pale wood floors. It would be a mixture of Scandinavian and Conran, and bear witness to the smooth, serene family life unfolding within its neat confines. What I live with today is an inherited jumble of battered antiques and flowery fabrics, a mix of High Victorian pieces and low-cost foreign finds, a home that bears the brunt of three children, one dog, ever-changing au pairs, and a husband caught between copy deadlines and school fees. I sometimes feel there is too little of me in these rooms – a few photos, my silver christening cup, a painting by a friend who went to the Slade and then disappeared from sight. The rest is all Carew. Then the boys burst in, or I find Maisie cuddling Rufus on the chaise longue, and I realize they bear my imprint, even if the interiors don’t.

‘In the Carpathians, I came across a mother wolf looking for food for her cubs …’ Guy is entertaining the Mallards. ‘She was medium size, with a dark longish pelt. We looked each other in the eye … I tried to explain that I was a parent too.’ Oliver, a big bear of a man, chortles appreciatively. He’s brought us a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and stands by the fireplace, champagne flute in hand, eyes taking in everything from the push-button television to the overdue bills glaring red on my desk by the window. Everything has confirmed Oliver’s image of his Cambridge friend being in need of his largesse, and he beams kindly in our direction.

Oliver’s wife Belinda, decked out in enough Dolce & Gabbana to start her own boutique, is something glamorous in PR. Before I can find out what, she has dismissed my fund-raising for HAC with ‘You are good’, which means frumpy and worthy. I can tell that she finds me unsettling: what she sees as my do-gooding, as well as my part-timer status and unfashionable clothes, make her as self-conscious as if I’d announced that I would be kicking off the dinner party with a Latin grace.

I nervously check the grandfather clock in the corner: it’s only eight thirty. Another hour to go. Belinda’s PR skills fail to conceal her dissatisfaction with the situation. Guy has dragged Oliver into the study for a viewing of the ancestral medals and I am scrabbling for a topic of conversation. I remember vaguely Guy warning me not to raise the subject of children with the Mallards – a terrible accident? A bitter custody battle? Belinda doesn’t look the gardening sort, or the country type. I can’t remember what’s on in the West End. What about books? I belong to a book club, after all.

‘Have you read …?’ I venture.

‘Oh, I haven’t read a book in ages. Simply don’t have the time!’ Belinda looks through me. Then, searching for a crumb of praise to cast my way: ‘Very nice glasses.’ She holds up one of Aunt Amelia’s crystal tumblers, half full of her G and T.

‘Yes … from one of Guy’s aunts …’ And I find myself babbling about Amelia Carew and life in Delhi during the last days of the Raj.

I realize how little I’ve engaged Belinda when she suddenly squeals, ‘There you are!’ and rushes up to the two men, who’ve surfaced from the study.

The doorbell goes: Hallelujah! Charlotte and Jack bounce in, looking lively and in a good mood. My friend’s haircut, manicure, and Marni jacket reassure Belinda that here at least is someone who understands.

Guy pulled a face when I suggested Jack and Charlotte be included. He is fond of Charlotte, but Jack makes him wince. ‘Sorry, HarrietnGuy, I know it’s rude,’ Jack will mutter as he dives for his ever-throbbing BlackBerry, ‘but this is a big one …’ And then, after a few minutes, he’ll explode: ‘Ben, boy! You’ve got yourself a deal!’ But we have to invite the Collinses because, as I reminded Guy, we owe them. They invited us to La Traviata at Glyndebourne last summer, which would have been a truly wonderful treat, had it not been that we had to buy them programmes at £20 each and champagne at £10 per glass. Guy and I had to pretend we were on a mid-summer detox and made do with tap water.

Jack is one of our few friends wealthy enough to impress Oliver: his bonus last year was five times our combined incomes. Despite the personal trainer Charlotte has signed him up with, who takes Jack out on the common twice a week like a well-trained dog, Jack remains stubbornly portly. Although Charlotte tries valiantly to derail his train of boasts tonight, within minutes he manages to work into the conversation the new Porsche and the Tuscan villa they rented for a fortnight last month.

‘Back in your box, Jack!’ Charlotte wags her finger as her husband is about to launch into the price of villa rentals in the Tuscan-Umbrian region.

‘Yes, love.’ Jack nods and bites his tongue.

Guy, I can see, breathes easier. Oliver, who had been asking a lot of questions about real estate near Florence, looks disappointed.

‘Now, tell me about your company – sounds so high-powered …’ Charlotte turns her large, awe-struck eyes on Belinda. A successful career woman is calculated to fill my best friend simultaneously with fear and fascination. We both left university with only the vaguest idea of what we’d like to do professionally: something in the arts – which translated into both of us waiting on tables at the Chelsea Arts Club for that first summer. The minute Charlotte married Jack and it became clear she wouldn’t have to work, she luxuriated in her status of stay-at-home wife as if it were a bath full of Aveda essential oils. But every now and then, when confronted with a tough-talking, high-gloss success story in heels, Charlotte feels a pang of dissatisfaction. These women talk knowledgeably about profit margins and annual returns on investments, but they also have two storybook children, can wear a sleeveless dress without fear, their YSL Rouge Velours is without chips, and they have read the latest bestselling biography of Stalin’s chef. Scaaaaareeeee, as Charlotte would say. Happily for her, Jack constantly reminds his wife that, in his book, career women are ball-breakers, and mums who work child-wreckers. He likes her, he assures her, just the way she is. And he shows his appreciation with countless expensive gifts, weekends away, and ‘second honeymoons’. Charlotte basks in these attentions, while I resent them as reminders that the last time Guy organized a weekend away, we ended up camping with the children in a muddy Devon field; and the last gift he gave me was a clumsily mounted and rather smelly wolf ’s head from Moldova.

The conversation proceeds like a school run: everyone sets off confidently if carefully, certain of where they want to get to and by what route. But little by little we are held up by other people’s dithering, or inconvenienced by their selfishness, and all propriety is ditched as we grow irritable, fearful, and aggressive.

The first to grow irritable is me.

‘HarrietnGuy, this will come as a bit of a surprise to you two,’ Jack practically does a little jig of delight as he tells us, ‘but we’re moving to Chelsea.’

‘Chelsea?!’ I gasp.

‘Chelsea,’ Charlotte confirms. She doesn’t meet my eye – she knows this is darkest treachery. We’ve always lived in Clapham, we’ve always joked about being a short bicycle ride from one another’s kitchen … and now … The clock’s brassy gong calls me to the pork belly.

‘Nothing like a man who wears his wealth lightly,’ Guy mutters as he brings a tray of dirty glasses to the kitchen. ‘A four-bedroom house in Chelsea!’

‘Chelsea is so yesterday,’ I whisper, trying to cheer him up. But in fact I am just as put out: Charlotte and Jack moving north of the river means they’re really out of our league. And to spring it on us – on me – as a surprise!

Guy is doing mental arithmetic: ‘That’ll be … oh, at least £1.5 million. Like putting five children through ten years of boarding school.’

Back at the table, Jack is beaming. ‘Never thought we could afford Chelsea … Pimlico, yes, just about …’

He drones on, and I find myself almost nostalgic for the Carew conversational code: no talk of money, religion, or women.

‘This pork is delicious, Harry.’ Charlotte is trying to steer Jack’s enthusiastic talk away from the move. ‘Organic?’

I know Charlotte too well to fall into her trap. ‘Of course.’ It’s an outright lie, but I have no remorse. Charlotte’s newfound zeal for the ‘natural way’ goes to such ridiculous ends that I have to ignore her diktats.

‘We’ve become Freegans –’ Guy gives ‘Manic Organic’, as he calls Charlotte, a wicked look ‘– we only eat food that’s free. Berries, mushrooms, a quick scour of the dustbins at the back of Safeway and Tesco’s, and’ – he prods the pork with his fork ‘– road-kill.’

Charlotte shudders in distaste: she never knows how to react to Guy’s teasing.

But I’m on Guy’s side. Charlotte drives half an hour in her Chelsea tractor to get to the Nature and Nurture Centre that sells wheatgrass at £35 a bundle, and buys faded, dimpled, wrinkly little fruit and veg at three times the price of their non-organic equivalents. This, despite her regular botox injections, eyelash tinting, and enthusiasm for very unnatural slimming powders.

‘Isn’t your son at Millfield?’ I turn to Oliver Mallard – and realize too late that this was out of bounds.

‘Don’t get me started,’ Oliver sighs, and shrinks into himself like a concertina.

‘Francis is having a rather mixed time,’ chips in Belinda warningly.

But Oliver cannot be stopped. Francis, he explains, is a ‘late developer’. Late developer is the ambitious parent’s favourite euphemism. Poor marks, insufferable behaviour, detentions, suspensions and expulsions: everything can be blamed on their offspring’s late development rather than sheer ineptitude. In Francis’s case, development is so late in coming that the school has told the Mallards that there is no point in his applying to Cambridge, even for Land Economy.

‘Never gave us a clue until now. Always led us to believe he was on track for Oxbridge …’ Oliver shakes his head, inconsolable. I can see he is still grappling with the shock that none of his brilliance has rubbed off on his only son, and none of his money can shoehorn the boy into Papa’s footsteps.

‘Shocking, the way the school handled it!’ Belinda barks indignantly. ‘And now, what are we supposed to do? Look at an ex-poly somewhere?’

You would have thought Francis faced a career as a plumber’s mate.

Guy doesn’t make matters any better by referring cheerfully to his cousin Bertie, who, having failed Oxbridge, went to a red-brick and is now a dope-smoking carpenter somewhere in Devon.

‘Exeter’s better than Oxbridge in some subjects, you know,’ Jack bursts out at one point, defending his alma mater.

Oliver doesn’t listen and goes on grumbling. Why is he paying £24,000-plus a year for a school that can’t deliver a place at Oxbridge? Why are the terms so short, and the breaks so frequent? ‘We end up seeing our children almost as much as their teachers do. It’s outrageous.’

As there is nothing like the failure of someone else’s child to reassure a proud but poor parent that their sacrifice is worthwhile, Guy is all sympathy and solicitude, eyes practically tearful as he asks Belinda if they’ve tried private tutoring.

The sympathy dries up instantly when she lets slip that her suntan, and Oliver’s, are due to a month in St Tropez. This turns the debate back into us-against-them. For some parents, school fees, like the St Tropez holiday, are just another expense; others are forced to live on what’s left.

But in Guy’s eyes there is no other option. Sending the children to private school allows him to hold his head high under the disapproving gaze of those ancestors on his study walls. Military and colonial to their bones, they would otherwise sneer at an heir who scribbles travel books for a living. And so Guy and I divide our lives into school terms: pre-paid, paid in part, paid in full. We earmark our work in terms of what it covers of the children’s schooling: Guy’s regular editing of manuscripts for his friend Percy’s publishing house pays for almost a full year at the Griffin; his article on Marrakesh for an in-flight mag paid for Alex’s and Tom’s second-hand uniforms; my three days at HAC cover – well, not even enough to contribute to the school fund, actually.

While Guy repeats the mantra, ‘Nothing is more important than the best possible education’, I’m often filled with doubts. Do I really believe that we should bankrupt ourselves and worry frantically before every deadline for paying school fees, in order for our children to study Greek and Latin among a host of Hugos and Isabellas? Do I really believe that their intelligence, confidence, health and moral compass will be compromised unless they attend the same establishment their Carew forefathers thoroughly loathed so many years ago?

Guy remains immovable: tradition is sacred, and good schooling a pillar of Carew faith. He really believes that a stint in a particular red-brick building will make all the difference in life, and that a dribbling old wreck called Podge Fitch, who taught Greek and Latin to Guy’s youngest uncle and Guy himself, will prove the ‘most important figure in Alex and Tom’s lives’.

‘They think you’ve married up,’ my mother likes to remind me. ‘They’, in our conversations, are always the Carews. ‘That means you have to take Podge Fitch with the Chippendale sideboard.’

No, I want to report: I’m stuck with Podge Fitch’s boring anecdotes about bygone boys and no Chippendale.

‘I think Oliver would be easy to work for.’ The guests have left, and we are clearing up.

‘A few blurbs on cultural tours.’ Guy stacks up the place-mats. ‘I thought I’d make a great editor for his mag, and he thought I’d make a passable writer of brochures.’

‘Never mind.’ My voice is resolutely cheerful. ‘Oliver said the brochures would be really well paid.’

‘Well, we certainly need it. I’ve only got half the school fees to hand over on Monday.’ Guy looks as crumpled as the tea towel in his hand. ‘But it means I have to take time away from Rajput, which I hate to do, because it pushes publication back again.’

‘Rajput can wait,’ I snap. I’m not letting Guy postpone indefinitely Oliver’s generous offer. As it is, I could see that Oliver was surprised that Guy didn’t jump at it. Was he in fact hinting at something, when he talked about ‘alternative employment’ for talented writers? Oliver described at length how some well-known authors wrote brochures for travel agents and tourist authorities, ‘humbled themselves and wrote for retail mags and hotel chains … Flexible, that’s what you need to be these days.’

Guy had hardly seemed to take this in, but I listened attentively. Since Guy’s last (or, more accurately, only) success, we have lived on promises. Or to be specific, we have lived off a modest legacy he had from the sale of an elderly cousin’s estate. We decided to invest it in buying time, so that Guy could work un-distracted on delivering another bestseller to a grateful public. Yet when, every two years or so, Guy does publish a new tome, the drum rolls, applause and cheers are conspicuously missing. He sometimes gets a good review, sometimes gets invited to sign copies at a local bookshop, and twice has been asked to speak at a women’s book club. But success, thus far, has proved elusive. Guy’s freelancing brings in dwindling amounts. The legacy is long gone and I had to go back to work far earlier than I wanted.

Oliver is right, and the time has come for Guy to compromise. To my husband this will sound like blasphemy – but blasphemy is preferable to bankruptcy.

‘I’m whacked.’ Guy hangs up the tea towel. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

He looks so worn out and disappointed, my frustration melts and I suddenly feel a twinge of love and compassion. ‘Darling,’ I begin. But before I can reach out to stroke his head, Guy is walking up the stairs.

On the landing I pick up a fat brown teddy and a sock with a hole (Alex’s? No, there’s no name tape: must be Tom’s). I tiptoe into Maisie’s room and place the teddy on her chest of drawers. Rufus lies asleep on her feet. I shoo him off. The children are forever sneaking him into their bedroom, but he knows he’s to sleep in his basket in the kitchen. Maisie stirs, stretches her arms out on the pillow above her head. I kiss her hot sweaty forehead.

In the boys’ room, chaos reigns. The DVDs of Lord of the Rings lie on a pile of dirty clothes and Alex’s books for next term teeter, like the tower of Pisa, in a corner. Alex, sleeping without his pyjama top and wrapped in a faint haze of Lynx ‘Africa’, lies sprawled on the top bunk. Beneath him, Tom lies curled up under his Tintin duvet, his face, uncluttered by spectacles, suddenly perfect.

By the time I have wiped off my make-up and brushed my teeth, Guy is snoring in our bed. I undress in the dark, slip on my nightgown and crawl in next to my husband.

‘Side,’ I tell him firmly. He rolls over obediently, and the snoring stops. I fit snugly against him – the only way for me to keep warm. And I fall asleep.

Three hours later I wake with a jerk to find Guy alert beside me. ‘I’ve been thinking …’ He stares up at the ceiling, one arm behind his head: what was once his favourite post-coital position is now a sign of money worries. ‘We could move to the suburbs. It would solve a lot of problems.’

‘And create new ones,’ I reply, full of visions of Norwood and Nunhead.

‘Cheap housing, great state schools, too, if it comes to the crunch,’ Guy continues. ‘And it’s a good time to sell here: house prices in Central London have gone through the roof. We could get half a million for this.’

‘I don’t think we could get anything like that,’ I resist. ‘There are only forty years left on the lease.’ Not to mention a series of ominous leaks and cracks.

‘There’s so little on the market right now, people are desperate.’ Guy has sat up.

‘They’re not blind.’

‘The thing is, even if I do accept Oliver’s offer, it’s going to be difficult to make up the rest of the school fees. I doubt he pays on delivery.’ He tugs at his chin pensively. ‘I suppose I could approach Dad.’

Guy and I long ago decided that begging money from his parents, who, though generous, are not well off, should be left for those exceptional circumstances when really nothing else was possible. But perhaps this is what we are up against now.

‘Is it that bad?’ I hardly dare ask.

‘Well … we could consider the country. Anywhere with grammar schools: Kent or Buckinghamshire. There’s a brilliant one in Devon.’

‘Oh, goody: we could live with my mum in Tonbridge.’

‘Wellies …’ Guy is lying back again, ‘cow pats, mud and lots of wife-swapping. That’s country life for you. We’d fit right in.’ He rolls over and pulls me towards him. ‘Except for the last, of course. Wouldn’t swap you for anyone.’

He pecks my hair. We are about to have a ‘marital moment’. We haven’t made love for over three weeks now. It’s probably my fault: I’ve started taking off my make-up in front of him, and my underwear, in Ilona’s not-so-tender care, has gone grey. I cast off my nightgown.

‘Mummy! Mummy!’ A little figure, teddy trailing, pushes open our door.

‘That’s it!’ Guy snaps crossly as I make room for Maisie on my side of the bed.

‘Forget suburbia, I want all three at boarding school asaP!’

3

‘In a cavern, in a canyon, excavating for a mine,’ Guy sings as we cycle across the common: first Guy, then Alex, then me. Alex refuses to join in his father’s warbling. It’s bad enough to arrive at the Griffin on a bicycle as opposed to in a Merc or a BMW, but to be caught singing in chorus with one’s parents is social suicide. My son is also, though he’d never admit it, slightly nervous. It’s only his second year at the Griffin, and it is more than twice the size of St Christopher’s, the C of E state primary school where he went and where Tom still goes. It is also twice as competitive. The competition is over school work, athletic prowess and parents’ wealth. Alex excels in the first two, to my deep and bursting pride, but when it comes to the third, Guy and I let the side down. There are Griffin parents who think nothing of taking over a river-boat for their son’s thirteenth birthday party, hiring a band and a caterer too. We take Alex and his friends bowling or ice skating and offer them Marmite sandwiches, crisps and Coke in a two-litre bottle. Most Griffin parents buy two or three brand-new sets of uniform jackets, trousers, shirts and socks, as well as regulation tracksuits and trainers, for their son. We buy the uniforms at the school second-hand shop, and count ourselves lucky if we find jackets that, more or less, reach Alex’s wrists, or trousers that more or less cover his ankles. Most Griffin families, the directory shows, live in Belgravia, Notting Hill and Chelsea – while we make do with an address on the unfashionable north side of Clapham.

But I feel for my eldest – especially today, as the Rolls and the Mercs and the BMWs roll slowly past our bikes as they make their way down the tree-lined avenue to the towering wrought-iron gates of the Griffin. We’ll arrive red-faced and slightly out of breath, Guy with his corduroys stuffed into his socks, me with my skirt wrinkled and my hair flattened by the bicycle helmet, and all of us mud-splattered because it rained this morning.

‘Couldn’t we hold on to the Merc, Mummy?’ Alex was pleading non-stop yesterday. ‘Couldn’t I do the first day of term in style?’

But Guy refused to keep the hired car. ‘At forty pounds a day? Ludicrous! We’ll begin as we intend to go on.’

The Merc was rather poorly repaired, in the end, by Pete’s chum Mike, for an astronomical £230 – ‘It’s Sunday, ain’t it?’ We had to forego our outing to Richmond Park, and Guy left it at the car-hire place yesterday at seven p.m. ‘The lighting in their car park is appalling, they won’t notice the paint job,’ he muttered hopefully, but every time the phone rings he jumps a mile, terrified that we’ve been found out.

* * *

The Griffin has occupied, for the past 130 years, ten acres of prime real estate in Wandsworth. The school’s three-storey red-brick building is surrounded by a trim green lawn, with tennis courts, rugby pitches, and two cricket fields within a ball’s throw. Once you have driven or, in our case, cycled, through the school gates, you find yourself in a pre-war world of calm, blazers, brogues, perfect manners and received pronunciation. There is no doubt, as you step into this quiet, regimented space, that the Griffin will offer its students some enlightenment; aspirations will be nurtured and ambition rewarded. By the time they leave its hallowed corridors, the young Griffin boys will exude the self-confidence of those who know their place in the world – and like it.

For Guy, this is familiar territory, a variation on the theme of public schools. He was at a very similar one in Somerset until he was thirteen and slipped seamlessly, with top marks in his Common Entrance, into Wolsingham – the school that generations of male Carews have attended. He has been brought up with similarly self-confident children, ancient buildings, sentimental school songs and extensive grounds.

For me, this world is as unreal as South Hams, where we holidayed when I was young: you left your front door unlocked, the car keys in the ignition, valuables on the beach as you swam, all in the confidence that you could trust everyone around you. Stepping into real life was a difficult transition.

It was all rather different at Bruton Grammar School, a squat modern building in Kent. We were the clever daughters of respectable doctors, accountants and lawyers – as well as bricklayers, plumbers and greengrocers. We all worked hard and the girls from Lady Chesham, the local private girls’ school, called us ‘swots’. It was true. They had horses and nannies, ‘places’ in France or Italy, and, later, their boyfriends had cars. Even their uniform was not the dull grey and navy we were stuck with, but a dashing turquoise. We were very conscious, as we prepared for our A-levels – in my case Macbeth and the Romantic poets, the English Civil War, and the art of Renaissance Italy – that we were the ones who got the most places at university, and the most girls into Oxbridge.

Still, the Lady Chesham girls continued to haunt me, even at my first meeting with Guy’s parents.

‘Where did you go to school? Tonbridge? It must have been Lady Chesham – did you know the Lanchester girls?’

‘Actually, I wasn’t at Lady Chesham,’ I correct her. ‘I went to the Grammar School.’

‘Ah,’ said Cecily, after a pause. ‘How clever of you.’

‘Drove she ducklings to the water,’ yodels Guy.

‘Dad, pleeeeeeeeease!’ Alex hisses furiously. But what with the pedals pumping and the wheels whirring and other people’s cars rolling past us, Guy can’t hear his anguished plea.

‘Every morning just at nine!’ ‘Stop it, Dad!’ Alex shouts loudly.

Alarmed, Guy jams the brakes on, skids and hits the kerb. He falls. Alex and I stop on our bicycles immediately, and turn to watch as he slowly picks himself up: mud cakes his hands and a rip gapes at his knee.

‘Oh, darling,’ I moan – the ‘darling’ is for Alex, who looks devastated at the sight of his dad.

‘Nothing to fuss about,’ Guy calls out cheerfully, mistaking the object of my concern. He dusts himself off and mounts once again on his steed of steel. A huge silver Jaguar whooshes past us.

As we approach the school building, I see the same picture replicated all over the car park: large, imposing cars, perfectly coiffed and groomed women, sleek men in expensive suits, and uniformed boys in all shapes and sizes, standing around or running about.

‘We’d better clean off some of that.’ I search my handbag, which I’ve stuffed in the cycle basket, and hand Guy one of those wet-wipes I always keep on hand for Maisie. I remove my helmet and rake my fingers through my hair, trying to fluff it up. I’m about to be inspected, and I doubt I’ll pass muster as a Griffin mum.

We lock up our cycles not far from where a chauffeur leans against a Bentley. Guy unrolls his trouser legs, Alex checks his.

‘Hey, Alex!’ A blond boy waves our son over to his family’s Land Rover. Alex runs off without a glance in our direction. Guy and I slowly follow him up the path to the school; on the front steps, we are surrounded by boys sporting glowing tans who dart in and out of the door, talking loudly about their holidays in Panarea or Provence.

‘Ben: great hair cut – NOT!’

‘Theo, you’ve shrunk!’

‘Whoa! Alex, have you seen Johnny’s scar?!’

We pile into the school hall, a cavernous, gloomy, oak-panelled room, for a bracing service of hymns and pep-talk. Alex easily takes his place among his friends, and I see his dark head bob among a large group until he eventually becomes indistinguishable, one among many jostling uniforms.

I swallow hard; the ritual has begun, once again. Five days a week, from eight to four o’clock, our son is learning at the feet of some of the best and brightest in the land; 24/7, we are tightening our belts to provide this opportunity for him.

‘Lord, Behold us in Thy presence once again assembled here …’ I look around the whitewashed hall, filled with boys, parents and teachers; this is what we have sacrificed so much for.

We file out of the hall, in a crush of expensive scents and clothing. ‘I’ll see if I can pre-empt the bursar …’ Guy says, looking uneasy. He leaves my side and I can see him trying to make his way to Mr Cullen.

I spot a forbidding clutch of Griffin mums. My stomach churns and my ears ring with the contemptuous comment about my roots that I overheard at Mario’s. As usual, my efforts to fit in with my new Whistles skirt, bought on sale last month for £25, have come to naught: cycling has wrinkled the skirt, and Rufus’s pleading pawing as I walked out of our front door has given my smart white cardigan two black smears, right under my breasts.

Real Griffin mums fall into two categories – and both are always sure of a soft landing. The McKinsey mums run hedge funds or a chain of glamorous florists, and look as if they can crush the life out of any difficulty. The Boden belles married money and look as if life gets no worse than a milk spill on their Cath Kidston tablecloth. Neither group has any experience of the unsettling sensation of sliding further and further down the property and career ladders, irrevocably pinned down by the combined forces of school fees, mortgage payments, taxes, credit-card demands and bills. They worry about whether their children will get into the right school. We worry about their getting there – and our having to pull them out because we can’t afford the fees.

Stage fright fills me as I approach the group of mothers. I feel as if I am back at school, a plump swot trying to fit in with the popular girls. But without a boyfriend, C-cup breasts, or expensive clothes, I didn’t stand a chance.

Now, some twenty years later, I make a vain effort to smooth out my skirt and shake my hair into place as I approach another terrifying clique.

‘Hullo, Alex’s mum!’ A pretty blonde waves to me. Perhaps I needn’t worry, this is one day when every woman is only someone’s mummy, after all. Alex’s popularity makes up for my unglamorous wardrobe and borderline size-14 figure. ‘Julian was so disappointed that Alex didn’t come and stay.’

I recognize her now: Julian Foster-Blunt is one of Alex’s best friends, and invited him to stay with his family in Sardinia. Only £59 return on Ryanair, but there were also water-skiing lessons: Julian had one every morning, he told Alex, at £80 a time. ‘Outrageous!’ Guy had exploded. ‘A day’s safari in Botswana costs less than that!’

‘Maybe next summer?’ Julian’s mum smiles benevolently at me. ‘Xan and the children love the villa so much, we’re buying it.’

Before I can reply, another mother, in a Chanel suit, has jumped in. ‘Thank God it’s all over! It’s been non-stop sea-sickness, sunburn, hay fever, and even the youngest knows how to text now. You should see the mobile phone bill I’ve been landed with!’ I identify the Chanel wearer as a McKinsey mum, and she immediately proves my hunch was correct. ‘That’s it, that’s all I’m going to get from Goldman’s for holidays this year.’

‘American banks don’t do vacations, do they?’ Laura Semley, school governor, steps in. Laura used to run her own PR company, but has given that up to run her sons’ school, in the same fashion. ‘Well, another year begins.’ Laura waves a regal hand to encompass the school, boys and teachers. ‘I just hope –’ she lowers her voice conspiratorially ‘– that Merritt is as good at running a prep school as old Jellicoe was.’

‘Oh, he seems steely enough.’ Julian’s mother looks relaxed. ‘And the teachers are fab. Worth every penny, really.’ I doubt, somehow, she counts her pennies; but there is something so sunny about her, with her golden highlights, carefully screened tan and tasteful chains, that it is difficult to resent her the good fortune she obviously enjoys.

‘Hmph!’ Laura Semley eyes up McKinsey Mum as a kindred spirit. ‘Actually, it’s been under-performing for five years now. The results look OK, but they are tweaking it. When you drill down, those scholarship figures include all sorts of bogus “all-rounder” awards at places like Wellington College.’ She sniffs in disgust. ‘We used always to have at least one Queen’s scholar at Westminster, plus two at Winchester, and one at the other top-notch schools. But they’ve got the scholarship set all wrong. They are confusing stocks and flows: the point is not to make the most of what they’ve got, but to constantly select the cleverest ones and ditch the under-performers. We’ve got a governing body academic sub-committee open meeting on this. Maybe you should sign up for it?’ She is addressing herself exclusively now to McKinsey Mum. She can tell that Julian’s mother and I wouldn’t know a balance sheet from a duvet, and couldn’t drill down through data if you put the apparatus into our trembling hands.

‘With boys like these, Common Entrance results should certainly be better too,’ chimes in McKinsey Mum. Her mobile interrupts her. ‘Yes? No. Of course I will. Absolutely. Just getting petrol now, will be there within the hour.’ She switches off and frowns. ‘Can’t afford to remind them that I’ve got children, let alone that I sometimes drop them off at school.’ She looks suddenly deflated: her shoulders stoop, her chin drops, even the pearl buttons on her blue Chanel suit seem to have lost their sheen. ‘I’d better go. Max! Max!’ she shouts, and waves at a boy running past us. She sets off after him.

‘Oh, look at that – Molly Boyntree!’ Julian’s mother points, excited, at a tall brunette in a boxy trouser suit. ‘She writes for the Sentinel, doesn’t she? We never get it at home because Ollie says it’s too lefty, but I’ve seen her on the telly.’

‘Oh yes, I recognize her.’ I turn to take in the well-known journalist. ‘She was on Question Time last Thursday.’

Laura Semley snorts her derision. ‘She earns a hundred grand a year attacking the establishment and then sends her children here; the oldest is at Eton. The hypocrisy!’

‘Arabella?!’ Julian’s mother peers at an Amazonian blonde nearby. I recognize Leo Beaton-Wallace’s mum, the one who had me down as a tiger. I roar, silently, at her.

Laura Semley raises an eyebrow. ‘What are you doing, Harriet?’

‘Nothing,’ I whisper back.

‘Arabella Roslyn! My goodness, I think I’ve just seen someone I was at Heathfield with!’ Julian’s mum rushes off, and I watch as the two women hug enthusiastically.

‘It’s extraordinary, really, how many of us discover connections with this school.’ Laura Semley beams benevolently at the reunion. ‘Either I was at school with someone’s mum, or my husband works with the dad, or we’re neighbours in the country, or our families were. It really is a small world.’

I say nothing, but hear a scream of laughter as the Heathfield old girls obviously share some fond memory: caught smoking on the roof? Carpeted for staying out too late with an Etonian boyfriend? I try to imagine what boarding school life was like among girls of this kind.

‘Don’t you think?’ Laura is asking me. I don’t know if she’s still referring to the cosy little circle of Griffin parents, but I do know I want to escape.

‘Ah, Guy has found Mr Cullen. Better go. Bye bye!’ I make my way quickly towards Guy. He is standing in one of the building’s side entrances, talking under an ivy-covered archway with the bursar.

Unfortunately, the conversation I join is even more awkward than the one I’ve left behind.

‘Well, it’s simply that …’ Guy looks flustered beneath the bespectacled gaze of Mr Cullen. ‘I don’t think we … will be able to pay the full amount at this point …’ Guy shifts his weight from foot to foot while Mr Cullen fixes him with a glacial stare; he has spotted the torn trouser leg, and his eyes sweep from my husband’s face to his knees and back again. ‘I’m expecting to come up with the whole lot by the end of this month.’

‘I’m afraid I shall have to apply the penalty charge, Mr Carew.’ Cullen shakes his head slowly and I can almost hear the mournful sound of a bell tolling a funeral. ‘I can’t extend the deadlines at whim, you will appreciate. Some parents make the most extraordinary efforts to pay on time, and it wouldn’t be fair on them.’

‘Of course, of course … It will be in by the end of the month,’ Guy stutters. ‘Alex is in the scholarship set; we’re very very keen for him to stay on and do well.’

We certainly are; if he passes his scholarship exam this summer, the otherwise unaffordable fees at Wolsingham shrink by a quarter.

I feel torn: my sympathy is with Guy because poker-faced Mr Cullen seems to be enjoying the humiliation of a hard-up parent; yet surely we aren’t the only family to find it difficult to pay £15,000 a year for our son’s education? I know that on our way home Guy will spend the entire time working out what commission, ghost-writing or speech-writing he can embark on between now and the end of the month. On the other hand, Guy’s difficulty is self-inflicted: the Griffin is important to him; I don’t have a tradition to keep up, only three children to educate as best we can.

‘Mum! Dad!’ Alex bounds across to us. He recognizes Mr Cullen, and, guessing that money talk is taking place, falters momentarily. Then he quickly bounces back. ‘I wanted to show you my new classroom.’

Even Mr Cullen melts a little at the sight of such boyish excitement. ‘Well, you’d better go with your son,’ he tells Guy. ‘I shall have a word with the Head. But the end of the month please – no later.’ Mr Cullen disappears through the archway into an inner courtyard, and Guy blows out a huge sigh, as if he’d been holding his breath all this time.

We follow Alex out of the main school building. I marvel as ever at the polished brass, the cupboards packed with silver cups, the shiny black-and-white tiles, the portraits of solemn men who look down on this budding grove of academe: yesterday’s life of learning, at today’s mad prices.

Alex shows us his classroom. Large, sun-filled, and with twenty battered iron-framed oak desks, their flip-tops etched with the names of past generations of Griffins. Guy scoots around, turning off the radiators and shutting the windows, muttering savagely, ‘Talk about burning money!’ At home he won’t let me turn on the heating until the end of October.

‘Well, that’s that, then.’ Guy squeezes my hand as we descend the stairs. I hug Alex. ‘Good luck, my darling.’ Guy does the same. After seeing Guy hug and kiss his eldest goodbye, Grandpa Carew once muttered, ‘Must you slobber over the boy?’ I watch the two of them smile bravely at one another: the son fears the school year ahead, the father, the bills in its wake. I am struck once again by how similar they are, with their dark floppy hair, lanky frame and eyes shiny with curiosity. My heart fills with tenderness. Then, in a flash, Alex is out of his father’s embrace and running back to his classroom where the first registration of the school year is already taking place.

Guy and I make our way back to our bicycles through the straggling parents still chatting or waving goodbye on the tarmac. Slowly, I put on my helmet and mount my bicycle. I look back at the gracious façade: is this really what is best for my children?

‘I’m going to ring Percy and see if I can edit a couple of extra manuscripts,’ Guy says as he tightens the strap of his helmet under his chin. ‘If he can pay me up front, then we’ll have the money by the end of the month.’

My husband has no doubts: we must do everything we can to ensure our children a place in this world.

‘Ye-es,’ I say automatically. And then I wonder if I shouldn’t be thinking of asking Mary Jane Thompson for five days instead of three at HAC. I’d sworn to myself that I would get the balance right between work and home, that I would hold down a satisfying job but somehow manage to be on hand with a tissue or a plaster, ready to help out with schoolwork or a misunderstanding among friends. How realistic is it now, when soon we’ll have two sons at an unaffordably priced school?

‘Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda,’ Guy intones as he pedals.

‘Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?’ I sing along, trying to still my doubts.

4

‘This is Harriet, our fund-raiser and fixer, and this is our receptionist, Anjie.’ Mary Jane Thompson, Secretary of HAC (South London branch), introduces us to a potential donor. The pin-stripe suit, clean-shaved face and confident expression suggest a City man. Mary Jane’s syrupy tone confirms his net worth to be in the six-figure range; she doesn’t do niceynice unless at the prospect of a big reward.

‘Oh, hullo.’ City man bestows a benevolent smile at us underlings before following the boss into her office.

Mary Jane calls her tiny office the ‘inner sanctum’. We call it Fortress Thompson, as she could barricade herself inside and survive for days, lobbing deadly questions and put-downs all the while in our direction. Inside, she keeps a personal kettle because she complains that the one Anjie and I share constantly needs descaling; a small fridge to keep the Cokes cold for her contacts; and a digital radio tuned to Radio 4 at all times. She has Tippexed ‘MJT’s chair’ to mark her ownership

of the only decent chair in the office.

Mary Jane doesn’t talk; she dictates memos.

As in, ‘Team spirit can only thrive when negativity is replaced by positive feedback.’ In other words, any criticism of the way Mary Jane does things is not welcome. And, ‘Privacy is key to creating the mood of trust and competence necessary to secure a big donation.’ Which means, leave me to deal with the rich, important men over lunch or behind closed doors.

Before she shuts the door behind her latest visitor, we hear her opening gambit – the one we have come to know wordfor-word: ‘Ah that?’ she exclaims, as if surprised that the visitor has spotted the one and only photograph hanging on her wall. ‘It’s me and Gordon on the steps of Number 11 – back in 1998, when they chose me as one of the ten recipients of the Inner-City Community Workers’ Achievement Award. I was really very chuffed, though of course I’d never expected to be honoured in any way … I like to get things done and … well, I think I can honestly say I do get them done …’ She issues a self-deprecating chortle. ‘Well, as Gordon said to me as he handed over my award …’ Here, as always, she shuts the door – so that Anjie and I have never heard the memorable exchange between Gordon Brown and our boss.

Anjie begins to sort the post, I check my emails.

Anjie is a beautiful, voluptuous Jamaican, with two perfect children who smile on her desk, photographed in their St Peter’s C of E Secondary School uniform. Anjie’s husband, whom she calls ‘his nibs’, works as a builder. ‘His nibs got so much cash out of those sheds he built, he’s been showering me and the children with presents.’ Anjie rolls her eyes. ‘Girl, he’s given me a bottle of scent and a hat – have you ever seen me wear a hat?! And Paula got a new dress and Luke got a scooter … I say to him, “Why don’t you save, William Jones, why don’t you put some money aside for the rainy days ahead?”’ She sighs, takes up a paper knife to slit open an envelope. ‘Does he think money grows on trees, I want to know.’ And then her usual refrain: ‘If I’d known then what I know now …’

But I know she doesn’t mean it. William, a slim, sleek man with a beaming white smile, drives his wife home from the office every evening – and just before five thirty Anjie takes over the teeny bathroom we share, applying another coat of lipstick and mascara.

The South London branch of HAC has its office on the second floor of a shabby Victorian building, above an Indian take-away. By mid-morning, a pungent curry smell fills our two rooms, and we can hear the owner yelling in Bengali at his cooks. We are on Clapham High Street, and from our windows we can see brand-new banks and fast-food chains, old unkempt houses and cafés, shops and a criss-crossing of buses, cars, pushchairs and passers-by.

I sit under the poster Mary Jane brought in last summer: a bespectacled bumble bee at her computer. The caption underneath reads, Worker bee. ‘Isn’t it fun?!’ Mary Jane had squealed with delight at her purchase. ‘Though, in your case,’ she had added archly, ‘it should say “part-time worker bee”.’

Mary Jane cannot forgive me for being here only three days a week. To her, part time means half-hearted. ‘I suppose the brood is baying for its tea?’ she’ll ask sarcastically when I start clearing my desk and showing signs of an imminent departure. Or, ‘Trouble at the homestead?’ when I am on the telephone trying surreptitiously to ascertain that Guy and Ilona have tea, schoolwork or Calpol dosage under control. For Mary Jane, a divorcée with no children, my priorities are all wrong. ‘Work gives you back what you put into it. Families wring you out like a tea towel,’ she likes to warn, ‘and then drop you when they realize they’ve got something they’d rather do.’ We gather from this that Mr Thompson left his wife for someone else. But Mary Jane does not confide in us, and Anjie and I have no wish to press her.

‘We’ve got trouble on our hands.’ Anjie holds up an official-looking letter. ‘Social Services want to know why we refused to take on Jesus Jones again. Wasn’t he the thug from Camden?’

‘He was …’ And I start cataloguing young Jesus’s sins on my fingers: ‘He spat at the counsellor, he punched one of the boys on the holiday, seduced one of the girls and tried to set fire to the barn at Hadley House. Hardly an HAC success story, I’d say …’

‘And they called a demon child like that Jesus – heavens!’ Anjie, a born-again Christian, is incensed.

‘Yes. Parents with a sense of irony but no notion of discipline. I’ll write to Social Services today.’

I check my emails. A City banker I’d approached for a corporate donation asks for yet another meeting. An advertising big shot turns down the chance to sponsor our annual fund-raiser: ‘Your celebrity-punch is good, but not great: you can’t deliver Jeremy Clarkson, Rory Bremner or Ian Hislop. These are the names you need to get people like me on board.’

A local printer refuses to charge ‘your excellent charity’ for his work on our forthcoming brochure – yikes! I remember that I am supposed to be finalizing said brochure this week with Mary Jane. And a handful of retired professionals, prepared to put up with Child Protection checks and foulmouthed disadvantaged youngsters giving them lip, volunteer to help us staff the holiday projects, which consist of a week in our homes in Devon and Suffolk.

I steal a look at the big planning diary on my desk, and the red circled dates stand out like chicken pox spots: they warn me when the Griffin school fees are due. The thirtieth, only a week away. Can we make it? Guy’s chum Ken Wright needs a speech-writer for his forthcoming presentation to a leisure firm: that should bring in a fair amount, and Ken is usually quick to pay. The bursar was quite clear that, if we missed the deadline, he would need to bring the matter up with Merritt, the headmaster – and, who knows, maybe the Board of Governors? The thought of those Griffin parents, well-off and smugly confident that their children have the best of everything, makes my heart sink. I’d rather spend every weekend stacking shelves at ASDA than face their pity.

Indeed, I wonder whether shelf-stacking might not be better paid than working for a small charity. I had never dreamed of becoming a Lady Bountiful. I had met a few among my mother’s friends, and they struck me as middle-class, middle-aged women who liked the sound of their own voice. They welcomed the opportunity to do good, but above all to organize other people’s lives – or at least coffee mornings and bingo evenings, raffle sales and the collection of second-hand books.

I was determined to work in an art gallery and maybe one day organize exhibits of contemporary figurative painters.

Before Alex was born, I’d managed to find a job at a small gallery in South Kensington. But Alex’s arrival swamped me: I found I had no strength and no wish to leave my home. The gallery owner found someone else to help out, and I get a pang of dissatisfaction every time I find myself in a certain corner of South Kensington.

When I heard about HAC from a mother at St Christopher’s two years ago, I was only half interested in the charity that gave disadvantaged children a holiday. The main attraction was the schedule: ‘Three days a week with potential to increase to full time.’

But soon I found myself engaging with the work. There is the challenge of ensuring that the professional ‘facilitators’ and their three supervisors manage a week’s break for a dozen children without them running amok or wreaking devastation on our houses; making sure that the GP or social worker is promoting the right child for the experience, rather than fobbing off on us countless Jesus Jones types who turn a holiday into hell; finding generous sponsors who will keep us going. And there is the reward of receiving postcards and letters, in childish scrawl, from the children. Many of them have never had a holiday in their life, and pack their toothbrush, spare pants and T-shirt in a bin liner because they don’t have a case. Their gratitude repays every effort we make.

Still, in between the holidays themselves, routine work at HAC can be dull, and Mary Jane Thompson’s presence overbearing. All too often, I find her straying into my territory.

‘I think when it comes to the bigger sponsors, Harriet,’ she repeats to me, as she returns from yet another expensive lunch, ‘you should leave it to me: I have a way with rich men who need to be parted from their money.’

Then I find myself looking on this job as purely a way to make ends meet, even though the salary is only £15,000; and I think wistfully of the exhibitions I would have loved to curate, and the art gallery I would have loved to run.

The phone rings.‘’Arriet?’

It’s Ilona, and I immediately expect the worst: Maisie’s hurt, Maisie’s got a roaring temperature, Maisie bit another child at nursery. Then Ilona remembers what I taught her about telephone communication and pre-empting maternal fears: ‘Maisie is OK.’ Ahhhh, I sigh, and then instantly am besieged by another set of images: Ilona wants to leave us for one of her Internet beaux, Ilona is being stalked by one of the same, Pete is offering to make an honest woman of her …

‘Someone wants to speak with her mamma,’ Ilona says, before handing over the telephone to Maisie.

‘Mummy!’ My baby is tearful down the phone, and I feel ready to bolt back home, take her in my arms and snuggle up with our worn copy of We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. ‘I want youuuuuuuu,’ she wails, and I can tell Ilona is having to pull the receiver from her hand.

For the umpteenth time I decide to postpone asking Mary Jane for a full-time position. I’m pretty sure five days a week would bring in £25,000, but does the difference in salary really make up for the time missed with my children? Motherhood – and this is an admission, like fancying my cousin Will when I was fourteen, or being disappointed about not getting into Oxford, that I will make only to myself – has put an end to my modest professional ambition. It hasn’t just poured water on the flames; it has sprayed fire-extinguishing foam on them, then beaten the embers with a spade for good measure.

‘Why do we always have to be the ones to compromise?’ Charlotte sighs every time I mention working at HAC. I ask myself what kind of compromise my best friend thinks she’s been forced into: she has a devoted and wealthy husband who keeps her in a style far grander than anything she and I grew up with; three perfect children and a nanny to keep them in line; and no call on her time between nine thirty and four. That’s the kind of ‘compromise’ I could live with.

‘You were brilliant at that gallery – you always had an eye for good paintings … And here you are, trying to shoehorn feral children into a holiday environment.’ Charlotte snorts.

‘They’re not feral, they’re damaged.’ I always jump to my charges’ defence. ‘They’ve had the worst possible start in life.’

‘And you’ll come to the worst possible end, if you don’t watch out. Those kids give me the heebie-jeebies.’ Charlotte’s brown eyes widen in dramatic fear. ‘I hope Guy appreciates what you’ve taken on so that he can try his hand at travel books!’

In Charlotte’s eyes, Guy staying at home to write somehow doesn’t count as a proper job. ‘Be honest, Harry, how many copies does he sell? I bet it’s not enough to keep the kids in school uniforms, let alone in school.’

‘He has his fans, you know,’ I reply defensively. ‘And one of them is a telly producer who thinks Lonely Hunter would make a fabulous documentary series.’

Strange but true. Last weekend we went to Waterstone’s to look for a book that Maisie could take to Theo Wallace’s birthday party. As usual, Guy was scouring the Travel section for copies of his books. ‘They’ve got only one copy of Lonely Hunter and none of White Nights. And a whole row of Crispin Kerr. Preposterous! I’m going to complain …’ He was about to make off in the direction of the bespectacled boy at the till when the pretty redhead leafing through the volumes on the table turned to him. ‘Lonely Hunter? It’s great, isn’t it!’

‘Er …’ Guy puffed up with obvious pride. ‘I wrote it.’

‘You wrote it? You’re Guy Carew?’ Wide eyes and a wider smile turned on Guy with undisguised admiration.

Guy nodded. ‘Er … yes.’ He studied his fan with something like suspicion: this had not happened in a long, long time.

‘But your books are brilliant! I loved the campfire scene in Desert Flower!’ Guy began to melt in the heat of her admiration. ‘I came to that lecture you gave at Essex University last year: fascinating!’

For the next ten minutes, Maisie, the boys and I were ignored as the stuffy library air of the bookshop resounded with ‘Kalahari!’ ‘Masai!’ ‘Nairobi!’ and peals of laughter.

‘Her name is Zoë Jenning and she’s a producer for Rainbow Productions, some independent TV company.’ Guy could hardly contain his excitement as we pushed the buggy and the boys out of the shop. ‘She thinks Lonely Hunter would make great telly!’

‘Daddy’s gonna be on telly! Daddy’s gonna be on telly!’ Alex and Tom chanted down the pavement.

‘Don’t hold your breath’ Charlotte warns me: ‘Most of these independent television companies are dodgy cowboy outfits. They milk you for information by promising you a series of your own, and then they drop the show but steal your idea.’

‘He’s very excited.’

It’s an understatement: Guy has been waiting for Zoë’s phone call ever since, and will not listen to caution. ‘You’ll see, Harriet; a whole new career beckons!’

I sigh. The ‘old’ career was bad enough. It consisted of long sessions at the computer in his study alternating with even longer sessions daydreaming about the future success of the project at hand. Guy believes wholly, and without reservation, that he will write a great bestseller, a Richard and Judy selection that will also appeal to the intellectual elite; a magnum opus that will secure his place among literary giants. And despite the obvious scepticism of his agent, Simon, who grows ever more distant, and of friends like Charlotte and Jack; despite the countless times I have voiced our financial worries; and despite the prospect of spiralling school fees for three children, Guy won’t be deflected.

He scours the book pages of the Telegraph and the TLS, studying the reviews, latest publications and bestseller lists, and scoffs at ‘the competition’. ‘I don’t believe it, Harriet! Look here – Francis Bolton has managed to get something published. A biography of Diane de Poitiers … I mean, who’s going to buy that? She’s French, for a start; and she didn’t do anything, really, apart from having an affair with a man half her age who happened to be King of France.’ Such acerbic observations will be followed, a few weeks later, with outrage: ‘Can you believe it, Harry – that silly book by Bolton is number two on the bestseller list. I swear to you, that man is incapable of doing proper research – it’ll be just a cut-and-paste job. What is the world coming to?’

Guy’s most vicious attacks are reserved for the authors who dare stray into the rather far-flung area he considers his patch: ‘What?! That idiot Crispin Kerr – the one who looks like a shampoo advert with all that blond hair – he’s got a book out on the Gobi Desert. What does that ignoramus know about the Gobi? Nothing, nada, niente! How could anyone be fooled by that man!’ And, ‘Ha! Did you see what’s happened to Seb Colley? That pathetic TV series of his on the last maharajahs has bombed. That brilliant TV critic, the one on the Sunday Tribune, L. L. Munro, he’s really put the boot in. Calls it “Curry kitsch” and a “sorry sari saga”.’

I admire my husband’s single-minded pursuit of his objective – but I sometimes yearn to remind him that the ‘idiot’ Crispin Kerr’s books and documentaries and Francis Bolton’s ‘silly’ biography must be nice little earners.

It’s almost lunch time. ‘Does she have a lunch today?’ I ask Anjie hopefully. Most days, Mary Jane takes out, or is taken out by, some bigwig, allowing us a breathing space that I usually fill with running errands and Anjie with catching up on the stars in her secret stash of Grazia and Heat.

‘Yup.’ Anjie gives me a happy wink.

‘Good.’ I have been meaning to check out the hospice shop for a winter coat. My old black one from Hobbs, which has stood by me as long as Guy has, is embarrassingly threadbare.

Mary Jane emerges from her office, visitor in her wake. As usual, her expression is impenetrable, and it’s impossible to gauge whether HAC has just received a donation of a quarter of a million pounds or a ticking off for a poor performance.

‘It was a pleasure, thank you ever so much.’ Mary Jane puts on the gracious hostess act. ‘Would you like Anjie to order a minicab for you?’

But the moment the City man disappears, shocking Mary Jane by preferring tube to taxi, our boss reverts to type:

‘I’ve got a lunch.’ She stands by Anjie’s desk and looks down her nose at her. ‘I’m expecting a couple of important calls. I hope it’s not too much to ask that you put the answering machine on when you go for lunch.’

‘Will do,’ Anjie answers breezily, looking up from her screen for a nanosecond.

Mary Jane turns to me with an appraising look. ‘There’s someone I want you to meet. He’s a big potential donor. A property developer who’s ruffled a few feathers, so he’s trying to win brownie points by helping local charities … We’ll check dates when I come back.’ With that, she’s off.

Out comes Grazia: ‘Oh dear, I think Liz is getting too thin,’ Anjie worries over a photo of Liz Hurley looking gaunt.

‘I’m off to the hospice shop. See you in about an hour.’

‘Don’t rush back, girl. I’m meeting my William for a sandwich,’ Anjie answers, immersed in Brangelina’s latest exploits.

* * *

The hospice shop is on the High Street, a few minutes’ walk from HAC. I enter, and find myself surrounded by rows of sagging paperbacks, with Polo next to Crime and Punishment next to Forever Amber; musty fox collars; and chipped, incomplete china sets. A tiny, bent woman, laden with carrier bags, is scouring the shelves. Unkempt grey curls escape her rain hat and mumbled words escape her lips.

I toy with the thought of buying the ancient porcelain doll that sits, staring in blue-eyed surprise, above a dented Lego box and a plastic Christmas tree. Maisie, for Christmas? But then remember my mission and set it down again on its ledge.

I pick my way past the counter that displays gaudy paste jewellery and silver cigarette lighters and christening cups, and make for the rack of second-hand clothes.

Guy calls the hospice shop the ‘bankrupts’ boutique’. Bankrupt is right. Alex came rushing in after school yesterday with the joyous news that he has been chosen for the First XV. Guy and I delighted in his achievement – until he explained he would now need a First XV blazer that costs £79.99, a tie for £12.99, and rugby shirt at £19.99, not to mention new boots and a proper kitbag with school logo.

‘A kitbag?’ Guy can’t hide our mounting despair. ‘Is that strictly necessary?’

‘Da-aaaaaaad! I don’t want to be left out when the others all have one.’ Alex throws us a look of such wretchedness I swallow my reservations and hear Guy do the same. ‘OK, OK, we’ll see what we can find at the second-hand shop.’

Alex smiles and then stuns us with: ‘And guess what? Mr Farrell says we’re going on tour to South Africa at Christmas!’ Alex punches the air. ‘Cape Town here we come!’

The trip to Cape Town, coupled with the discovery that the Griffin’s second-hand shop doesn’t have a blazer that fits our son, means I have no choice but to get myself a coat here. I had hoped to buy the charcoal wool one I had seen in Debenham’s pre-season sale, but that would mean condemning Alex to a hopelessly short-armed rugby blazer.

At Bristol as an undergraduate I bought all my clothes at the Oxfam shop. As did Charlotte: we had a spectacular array of flapper dresses for our evening wear, and some very pretty cropped beaded cardigans and flouncy skirts for everyday. My Oxfam bargains amused James, my then boyfriend: ‘Ooooooh, a bit unconventional, isn’t it, to wear someone’s granny’s cardigan?’ But as I was doing English, with lots of Keats and Coleridge and the Gothic novel, and Charlotte, Art History, our romantic taste in clothing matched our subjects.

‘Who wants to be like those dreary Sloanes?’ Charlotte would pout prettily as she donned an Oxfam cardy and gypsy skirt. ‘All those silly Laura Ashley pastels and bright-coloured cords?’

Never in a million years did I suspect that I would continue shopping at Oxfam. It was fine for a cash-strapped eighteenyear-old, but the sight of shabby elderly women browsing among the bric-a-brac nowadays sends a little shiver of anxiety down my spine. Will I be the same in my sunset years? Badly dressed, hunched under the weight of debts and family burdens, myopically searching for something ‘nice’ to cheer up the house, or the grandchildren. Penury in my thirties is one thing, but I really don’t want to be still hand-to-mouth when I’m in my sixties.

Guy refuses to address the issue of our retirement. I’ve told him how Charlotte and Jack plan to buy a farmhouse in France when Jack retires, because the living is cheaper and the French state health-care better than the NHS; and how my mother’s neighbours have moved to Spain because of the sun and the fact that they can live in a villa by the sea for the price of their little house in Tonbridge.

But Guy infuriates me by refusing to even consider making plans. ‘Oh, Harriet, you needn’t worry: things are going to get better. Just you wait: I have a very good feeling about Rajput – it’s like Bollywood meets Dad’s Army.’

I, however, am not convinced that those bickering maharajahs are going to be our meal ticket.

I resign myself to the prospect of being a regular client of this hospice shop for many years to come. Apparently, this is not as shaming in Guy’s circles as it is in mine: Guy’s mother was very open about buying her tweed suits at the charity shops in Gosport. I had assumed the Carews would consider buying second-hand clothes as demeaning as buying their own furniture. Instead: ‘Spending money on frocks is such a waste.’ Cecily Carew eyes me up and down as if I were a clothes-horse. ‘School fees and the house: those are our family’s priorities.’

For my part, I don’t want to be caught scouring the racks of clean if slightly musty clothes that someone better-off has set aside for the ‘less fortunate’, so I plan each foray to the hospice shop with precision. A) Fold one of my oldest skirts into a carrier bag. B) Step into the shop with said carrier bag. C) Look around: if I see someone I know, I smile, hand in the cast-off, and retreat. D) If the coast is clear, I pick what I want and slip behind the curtain to try it on. Then I buy it and sneak out of the shop.

In this fashion I have bought a Donna Karan skirt (£8) a MaxMara jacket (£18) and a Whistles linen dress (£12).

From the cash register, a middle-aged woman, head nodding out of time with the Classic FM on the radio beside her, smiles at me: she recognizes me from previous visits. Depressing or what?

I stop the self-pity when I spot two coats in sizes 12 and 14. As I step into the makeshift dressing room, I ask myself who else knows about my struggle to keep up with my middle-class friends on half their salary? I look in the mirror. Well, does it matter if I can’t keep up the appearance of being self-confident and solvent?

It matters rather less, I decide, than the fact that the size-12 coat, a camel-haired and deliciously cosy number from Ronit Zilkha, is definitely too tight. I’m going to have to start the Modified Atkins that I read about in Vogue at the dentist’s last spring. Why did my mother have to burden me with her classic English pear shape? The coat fits my top but hugs my hips and bottom too snugly. Regretfully, I slip it off and try on the size 14, a navy-blue Jaeger in plain wool: it’s a perfect fit and at £24 it is a steal.

I walk my bargain to the cash register, and as the cashier gives me a complicit smile, I suddenly see, standing ram-rod straight in a boxy designer-looking twill suit, Mary Jane Thompson. She sees me too – and the coat.

‘Harriet! Find anything nice?’ My boss smiles condescendingly. ‘I’m just dropping off two jackets from last winter, a bit worn around the cuffs.’

Shame contracts my throat. Then inspiration strikes: ‘It’s for Alex. They’re doing Bugsy Malone.’ I beam. ‘The drama head at the Griffin couldn’t find anything that fit him.’ I wave. ‘See you in a tick.’

I step outside. Social humiliation avoided – just.

5

‘Oh, what do you care?’ Charlotte giggles when I tell her of the encounter. ‘Maybe if she thinks you’re really hard-up, she’ll give you a rise!’

We’re sitting in my kitchen, a teapot and two mugs on the table between us.

‘Ha! Mary Jane’s idea of compassion is to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre on you when you sneeze and offer you a hanky when you choke.’

Our eleven o’clock coffee has given way to a pot of organic tea. Manic Organic prefers very expensive organic green tea which she buys for me at Nature and Nurture and assures me will make me live longer.

‘I don’t want you to think I’m being ungrateful,’ I moan, ‘but who wants to live longer when you have no money, second-hand clothes, and soon three kids at public school?’

A piercing scream reaches us from upstairs. ‘No-no-no-no, Mr Caroo!’

‘Omigod!’ Charlotte’s eyes widen in alarm.

We hear Guy’s footsteps running down the stairs.

‘She’s barking!’ He comes into the kitchen. ‘Hullo, Charlotte. Our au pair is absolutely barking!’

‘What’s happened?’ I ask. I don’t care if she’s barking; as long as she doesn’t eat children, steal money, or shrink my one and only silk blouse, I want to keep Ilona as long as she’ll have us. ‘Why did she scream?’

Guy holds up his best white shirt, now a dismal shade of pink. ‘I told her if she doesn’t check the children’s pockets for pens, I’m going to ban the computer from her room.’

‘Oh, Guy, that’s cruel,’ I begin.

‘Is she into Internet dating, Facebook, or computer games?’ Charlotte asks.

‘So far we only have evidence of the former. We’ve had a catwalk of Essex men, Cubans, Poles, Russians and one very odd American who claimed to be the reincarnation of James Dean. But I’ve worked out that what she’s really interested in is their cars. Ilona doesn’t do public transport.’ Guy shakes his head. ‘Women are tricky beasts.’ He disappears back into his study.

Charlotte laughs. ‘He sounds like our Italian count, doesn’t he?’

I immediately re-live our trip to Italy when we were nineteen, and our encounter with the Roman count who, seeing us salivate over a menu card outside an expensive restaurant, bought us dinner – at the price of listening to his reminiscences of English girlfriends.

There was also the lifeguard who came to ‘save’ us when we were bathing in the Med, although we had never cried for help and all he did when he reached us was rub his hands up and down our bodies. By the end of our Italian trip, Charlotte and I had sealed our best-friendship, and were relieved to return to the relative safety of Bristol, and our boyfriends – Jack (Charlotte’s) and James (mine).

I study my best friend now, with her glossy dark hair, her carefully assembled casual look and bright eyes. We have different schedules, have married very different men, and see each other no more than once a week. But I cannot imagine life without Charlotte, and her living only a few minutes’ bike ride away has been one of the perks of this shabby house in this run-down area. Which is one reason why her proposed move to Chelsea has shocked me so. But as I watch her, at home in my messy kitchen, among half-empty bottles and tins that haven’t been put away, giggling about our past as she strokes Rufus at her feet, I know that not even an upmarket move will upset our friendship.

I look out of the rain-washed window. The garden looks bare already and the ground muddy and unkempt.

‘Biscuits?’ I ask as I take down a tin from the cupboard. Maisie’s latest autumnal composition comes unstuck from the cabinet door, leaving four little pebbles of Blu Tack.

‘I shouldn’t …’ Charlotte shakes her head as she stretches out her hand for a biscuit.

I notice a big new gold ring on her third finger. ‘Gosh, is that new?’

‘Yes.’ Charlotte smiles down at it. ‘Jack bought it for me. It was for our fourteenth anniversary and …’ She stops, blushes prettily and gives me a quick look. ‘He is soooo romantic, Harriet. He really is a Romeo at heart.’

I ask myself when was the last time Guy acted like Romeo, and decide it was when he stood under my window, slightly the worse for wear, calling up to me in the middle of the night because he’d locked himself out.

‘It’s as if we’re living through a second honeymoon – he’s so considerate and sweet and –’ Charlotte gives me a wicked grin ‘– passionate.’

I sink my teeth into a biscuit.

Charlotte’s and Jack’s very demonstrative relationship has always been a source of amusement for Guy. ‘Flirting with your husband is in bad taste, Charlotte,’ he likes to tease her. But it has always secretly irked me. I can’t help but wonder if the Collinses really do have vast quantities of great sex. How often do they do it a week? Twice? Three times? More? I feel at once envious and guilty. Half the time, when Guy snuggles up with intent, I stop him with an, ‘Oh, darling, I can’t.’ I’m so exhausted by the endless clucking and feeding, answering of children’s questions, office work and shopping that, by the time I make it to bed, the last thing I want is communion with another person.

But surely this is only normal, after fourteen years’ marriage. Isn’t it?

The doorbell stops my dissection of conjugal sex. It’s Lisa, our American neighbour, with her house keys: she sets off for Barbados tonight.

‘Barbados: isn’t she lucky!’ I say to Charlotte as Lisa follows me into the kitchen.

‘You’re lucky not to have to work.’ Lisa never seems to take on board that I do work, even if part-time.

‘I do,’ I object.

‘Oh, I know, I know,’ Lisa holds up her hand to stem my protest. ‘There’s all that picking up after the munchkins and buying enough cotton buds and loo-paper rolls, and checking your husband’s got a clean shirt. I know that’s important, but I have to worry about how China’s exports are doing, and which country has the most solid manufacturing base.’

Yes, Lisa has the luxury of thinking about grown-up issues. But motherhood is like a washing machine that only has one setting – the hottest – and shrinks your interests from reading Italian art critics to getting the Stain Devil on your skirt before the jam from Maisie’s toast sets in; from analysing the pre-Raphaelites’ technique to checking that the stench emanating from Tom’s book-bag is not last week’s packed lunch rotting away. Motherhood means the almost total suspension of big thoughts and big books, exhibits, theatre outings, even reading the newspaper from start to finish. You promise yourself every day for fifteen years that, next year, it will be different; you’ll finally be free of bedtime schedules, school runs, homework, and Yoga for Twos. But every year you also acknowledge that Maisie wants more attention than you give her; that Tom is shy and needs you to bring him out; that Alex doesn’t take his work seriously enough and needs constant monitoring; and that your place is unquestionably with them.

‘It’s harder than it looks,’ Charlotte sulks as Lisa strikes a pose against our refrigerator.

She looks slim even in a baggy white tracksuit. Charlotte sets down the biscuit she was nibbling.

‘Such a blessing,’ I tell Lisa, ‘to be free of the school schedule.’

‘You’d better believe it.’ Lisa tosses her glossy highlights. ‘I wouldn’t be caught dead in a hotel with kids around. They make a racket and pee in the pool. Gross.’

‘Tea?’ I offer, but Lisa shakes her head. Of course: she only does H20 and Dom Pérignon. ‘Doesn’t your mother live there now?’

‘Barbados? No, Bahamas. Down, dog, down!’ Lisa pushes Rufus’s snout away from her all-white outfit. ‘Lives with her analyst. I hope he gives her a discount!’ Lisa laughs. ‘Anyway, it lets me off the hook!’

‘Oh, hullo!’ Guy’s radar for Lisa’s infrequent visits is foolproof; the hermit who can’t be prised from his refuge when Charlotte, Ilona’s boyfriends, the gas man or the postman are at the door, pops out the moment our leggy neighbour drops by.

‘Hi there!’ Lisa automatically shifts into testosterone response: her eyelids flutter, mouth puckers in a pout, and her breasts lift as if suddenly fitted into a balcony bra. No male is exempt from her full blast. I’ve even caught Lisa fluttering her lids at Alex and Tom.

Guy’s eyes are on Lisa. ‘Are you off then?’

‘Yup. Can’t wait. Need my sun.’

‘Some people have all the luck.’ Guy flicks the switch on the kettle. ‘If you’re ever in need of a chaperone, I’m willing. I mean, lying in the sun sipping daiquiris next to half-naked women will be burdensome and unpleasant, but someone’s got to do it.’

‘I thought you were a hard-working writer, tied to his desk?’ Lisa teases with a flick of her hair. So did I, I think sourly.

‘For that kind of assignment, I think I could put Rajput on hold.’

But Lisa is checking her BlackBerry. ‘Hey, it’s eleven o’clock! I’ve got to go to my threading. Listen, I really appreciate it. I’ll get the kids a T-shirt.’

I see her off, then slump in the kitchen chair.

‘Please don’t tell me what threading is.’ Guy shakes his head as he takes his mug and retreats to his study.

‘God, I would NOT like her next door. She’s a living reproach, isn’t she?’ Charlotte shoves the rest of the biscuit in her mouth.

‘I know. And all three males in this house hyperventilate in her presence.’

Rain spots the window pane, it’s chilly despite my cardy, and before me stretches a decade of noisy kids, peed-in pools, and humdrum holiday destinations. Even Charlotte and Jack, who can afford it, can’t go away during term time, and in the holidays they have to bear in mind Charlotte’s father, a widower in Staffordshire, who complains of dizzy spells.

‘Typical no-com,’ Charlotte mutters.

Charlotte’s theory is that the world is divided between the no-commitments like Lisa, and the over-committeds like us. No-coms can spend hours on threading, St Tropez tans and Brazilians, without worrying about robbing children or elderly parents of quality time. Over-coms can’t. No-coms can spend their holidays without the in-laws and Christmas without some batty aunt, and they can stay late at dinner parties without fearing the au pair’s sulk the next day. Overcoms can’t. No-coms can be spontaneous about cinema and sex. Over-coms can’t see the latest George Clooney or lock the bedroom door without first ensuring that the kids, Ilona and Rufus are safely occupied. In fact, over-coms cannot move for fear of failing someone in our lives.

I pour another cup of tea. Charlotte looks positively depressed.

‘Cheer up!’ I smile reassuringly. ‘Once Lily and Maisie are about … oh, sixteen, I reckon we can be more like no-coms. Only thirteen more years to go.’

‘There’s something I haven’t told you.’ Charlotte has turned puce. ‘I’m pregnant.’

‘But she’s the same age as you!’ When I ring my mum with Charlotte’s news, she sounds genuinely, and rather insultingly, shocked. ‘Isn’t that dangerous?’

‘Well, maybe … But that’s not the point!’ I cry. Though I am not sure what is the point. Is it that it’s proof that Jack and Charlotte really do have a very active sex life, as opposed to my dormant one? Or is it that I’m feeling broody but know that there is no way Guy and I could afford to add to our present financial woes? Or am I worried about growing older? My mother’s shock at the prospect of Charlotte being pregnant makes me think that I’ve reached an age already when people think I’d be better off taking up bridge rather than being with child. Charlotte’s pregnancy proclaims to the world that she is still fertile, fecund, womanly; while I am just beginning to feel … well, almost middle-aged.

‘What a thing to do!’ my mum continues. ‘Though I suppose Jack can afford to have a big family. Have they moved to the house in Chelsea yet?’

‘Oh, Mum, it’s not always about money,’ I remonstrate. But I know it is. When I discovered that I was pregnant with Maisie almost four years ago now, Guy’s reaction struck me like a slap:

‘My God, Harriet, we can’t afford another £120,000 in school fees! And that’s without counting the rest – food, clothes, bigger house, all those soft toys, train sets, let alone the computers they demand.’ While I sat mute on a kitchen stool, stroking my stomach and its gentle swelling, my husband pulled at his hair. ‘Where will we put him? There’s no room as it is. We’d have to give up on the au pair’s room, and then it’s just when you were thinking of going back to work and …’

I just listened, frozen with shock, and suddenly Guy must have seen my expression, because he rushed over to me guiltily, and pulled me into his arms.

‘Oh, Harry, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, darling, of course we’ll find a way, of course we’ll make room. And you know how I adore the boys, another one will be fab!’

In the end, it was not a baby boy but a girl, and Guy truly was adoring, walking with Maisie stretched, tummy down, on his forearm, showing her off to anyone who dropped in. ‘My little girl, just look at her!’

But his reaction had been a warning: our finances cannot cover surprises. So that even last winter, when I was giving away all the baby paraphernalia we’ve had about the house since Alex’s birth – the high chair, the crib, the pastel Beatrix Potter mobile, the baby steamer and plasticated bibs – I felt

only a little twinge of regret. A fourth child is not an option.

‘Harriet? Harriet, are you still there?’

‘Yes, yes, I am.’ I’m staring at the ominous damp patch on our bedroom ceiling. Only a week ago, it looked like a cricket ball; after five days of wet weather it has swollen to the size of a pumpkin. Please, please don’t let this mean we need to have the roof seen to. The most recent estimate would have covered two terms’ tuition at the Griffin. Where would we get the money from?

‘How’s Guy? Has he finished the Indian book?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Now there’s a surprise,’ my mother says drily. ‘I love Guy dearly, but you both would be a lot happier if he’d settled down in a proper profession a long time ago.’ My mother pauses, then, at my silence, changes tack: ‘How’re the children?’

‘Brilliant. Alex got into the First XV, did I tell you?’

‘That boy would do well anywhere,’ my mother points out. ‘He doesn’t have to go to a prep school that costs fifteen grand a year.’

‘We can’t skimp on the children’s education. You and Dad were always saying how important good schooling was.’ I look at the photo of my dad: small and wiry, he grins at the camera with total confidence. Yet only a few weeks later he was dead of a sudden stroke – leaving Mum broken-hearted and me floundering, in my second year at Bristol. Brief, sleepless nights gave way to interminable days punctuated by weeping fits and long calls home to Mum and Mel. After all this time, my eyes still fill when I look at his photograph, though now my tears are accompanied by the warm realization that Tom resembles him like a son.

‘Those were different times. Sending a child to prep school did not mean you had to take out a second mortgage.’

‘They were different times,’ I say patiently, ‘because sending your children to state schools didn’t mean they’d end up in gangland, or dealing with teachers who won’t tell off a student because they might get beaten up by his parents after school. There are schools in London where half the kids can’t speak English. And the other half, you wish they couldn’t,’ I sigh. ‘And house prices near the decent schools are way beyond us.’

‘Then the obvious solution is for you to move. We have excellent schools here. And I’ll baby-sit every night for free if you move down here.’ My mum’s words rush out of her, and I feel a wrench. She lives alone, my sister is far away, and she dotes on my children. Would moving out of London be so bad? Guy was talking about it again last night. It’s not just the bill for the Griffin’s second term looming; we’re £1,200 over our overdraft limit.

‘It’s a lot greener and quieter than London,’ my mother continues.

‘I know, Mum. I am tempted. Even though I’d have to give up HAC.’

‘You wouldn’t need to give up working, though. We’d find something else for you here.’ My mum, who has never done a day’s work in her life, is proud of my job, even if it is only part-time. ‘Buys your independence,’ she always says, ‘builds your self-confidence, keeps your wits sharp. I only wish I’d had the courage to do something myself.’

‘But it would be hard on Guy. He has his heart set on the boys following in his footsteps, and about a hundred other Carews before him, and going to Wolsingham.’

‘Oh, those Carews! They have all the wrong priorities,’ my mother sniffs. ‘Army families always spend their lives looking backwards and then are surprised when they fall flat on their face.’

‘I think if we threatened not to send the boys to Wolsingham, Archie and Cecily would sell their house and the cottage in Lyme Regis to cover the fees.’

‘Then they’re truly mad. Penury for posh classmates – it’s nonsense.’ My mother sighs. ‘I know I’m wasting my breath. Mel rang …’ My older sister, who married an Australian architect, lives in Sydney. ‘Did I tell you Kim’s firm has been commissioned to do Sydney’s new library?’

‘Yes, I think you mentioned it last time you rang.’ You bet she did. I was the youngest, my father’s favourite, and the one who got the better marks. But Mel always had twice the self-confidence and ambition. She ended up moving to Australia and starting up a business in gourmet baby food, which she sold three years ago for a tidy profit. Her husband Kim is a highly sought-after architect, who according to my mum designs half of Sydney these days.

My mother may be saintly, but she cannot resist stirring up a bit of sibling rivalry.

‘Mel’s done very well for herself.’

‘Yes,’ I agree meekly. ‘Better go, Mum – the kids will be home from school soon.’

I get off the phone and vow that I will not lose sleep over my pregnant BF or my wealthier and more successful sister.

But it is neither Charlotte or Mel who keep me awake that night. Footsteps resound on our stairs, then someone stumbles and cries out ‘Kurva!’ I look at the clock on my bedside table: three a.m. What on earth!? I get up, still half-asleep, and tiptoe, so as not to wake Guy, to open the door. It isn’t one of the boys, as I had feared, but Ilona who is weaving up the stairs, certainly not stone-cold sober, followed by a thick-set man with a ponytail. I withdraw into our bedroom, shut the door and slip back into bed beside Guy. That’s it. This is worse than her ruining Guy’s best shirt, worse than her handing out Rufus’s dog biscuits with cheese to the children, worse than her looking me up and down when I wear one of my charity-shop finds, worse even than the day she clogged up the sink with red hair dye.

But how on earth can I get rid of Ilona and still go out to work? It’s Ilona who takes Maisie to nursery, then fetches her again at one. On the days when I’m at HAC, it’s Ilona who gives Maisie, and sometimes Guy, lunch; she who plays with my three-year-old or takes her to her playgroup. And it’s Ilona who picks up Tom from St Christopher’s when Guy or I can’t, and Ilona who watches over the boys when they have their tea, and stops them from downing entire jars of Nutella, reading at the table and leaving their chocolatey prints on every surface.

I feel depressed at the thought of what the ponytailed visitor dooms me to. Hours on Mumsnet and Gumtree.com, placing ads and answering them; endless chats with the lonely Pakistani newsagent who posts Polish and Latvian girls’ ads in his windows; and possibly a long, horrific drive in yet another hired car to Stansted, Heathrow, Gatwick or Luton, hoping against hope that this one, finally, is a good one.

Next morning, I have resolved nothing except that I must have a good night’s sleep soon or lose my mind completely. At breakfast Ilona surfaces in one of her more clingy tops, and I snap at her to put something warmer on. Is Ponytail upstairs, under the duvet, waiting for last night’s date to sneak him toast and tea? Or did he manage to tiptoe down the stairs and out the front door at the crack of dawn?

Maisie spills cereal on the table and I scold her, setting off a tantrum. Tom has lost his maths notebook, Alex is running late, and Guy can’t find some crucial book on some sixteenth-century maharajah of Jodphur. I feel as if I want to crawl back to bed. Ilona gives me a long, cold look which manages to tell me simultaneously that she thinks I’m pre-menopausal, jealous of her pert figure, wearing the wrong clothes, and a nag.

For once, HAC seems a refuge. Mary Jane is locked in Fortress Thompson all morning, and Anjie is surreptitiously reading Heat from cover to cover. ‘Poor Ulrika, she just can’t get it right, can she?’ And ‘Robbie needs a nice girl to just come and save him, doesn’t he?’

By lunch time, when Mary Jane surfaces, I’m up to speed with the love-lives of half of Hollywood and most of the EastEnders’ cast.

‘I’ve been trying to get a few dates out of you …’ My boss stands in front of my desk. ‘Can you check your diary now, please?’ She is wearing a pretty cherry-red, light wool suit that I’ve never seen before and her trademark red-rimmed spectacles are nowhere to be seen. Mary Jane’s in a good mood, and tapping her fingers on my desk to hurry me through my diary. ‘That property developer – he could be very important. What can you do? Eleventh, twelfth, say? Morning?’

‘Yes, whatever suits.’ I can tell the donor has impressed my boss.

Mary Jane takes out a small powder compact and dabs at her nose. ‘I’m going to soften him up for you: we’re having lunch. Well, speak of the devil!’ She emits a weird, girly giggle. Anjie and I stare at each other: Mary Jane Thompson is trying to flirt!

I swivel in my chair to see the object of her attentions – and find myself face to face with James Weston.

I can’t believe it: James, my first ever boyfriend. James, the man I once thought I would marry.

‘Harriet Tenant!’ He smiles down at me. ‘You – here!’

I sit as if turned to stone – or back to the shy eighteen-year-old who all those years ago felt herself being watched by a handsome student across the crowded cafeteria.

‘You know her?’ Mary Jane sounds amazed.

‘We haven’t seen each other in fifteen years.’

I feel myself blush under his gaze: ‘Ye-yes, something like that.’

His eyes move up to the wall behind me and I am painfully aware of the Worker Bee poster. Then, seeking my gaze: ‘You look exactly the same.’

I smile, unconvinced. ‘You too.’

‘Do you live around here?’

‘Yes. I, we, live on Elton Road. It’s Clapham North. The less expensive bit.’ I feel I’m babbling, betraying my penury and my husband’s failure to keep me in style.

‘We should catch up – what about a coffee next week?’

I nod and try to smile.

‘James –’ Mary Jane is impatient ‘– we’d better go, they don’t hold reservations long.’

‘I’ll ring you.’ James waves me and Anjie goodbye as he follows Mary Jane. At the door he turns back to me: ‘I suppose we’ll be seeing a lot of each other now.’

Only when the door has shut behind him do I remember that, the last time we met, James told me I had betrayed him and he never wanted to set eyes on me again.

6

‘You’re better off without these people.’ Igor, Ilona’s new boyfriend, looms menacingly over our threshold. ‘You can stay at my place until we get you sorted.’ With his long black hair loose on his shoulders, his bomber jacket and big knuckle-duster hands, he looks scary and the boys are wide-eyed with nervous excitement.

Ilona stomps up and down the stairs. ‘She is angry because she have no sex life,’ she sobs, looking daggers at me. ‘She jealous of me.’

I say nothing and try to quash a sneaking suspicion that there may be an element of truth in my over-sexed, man-eating au pair’s accusation. Her stream of admirers has certainly brought home to me my flagging sex life.

Guy remains oblivious to these attacks on our conjugal life. He is eating his porridge while reading to Maisie. Mercifully, our toddler seems to be listening to The Little Red Engine rather than her au pair’s sobs. I stand, helpless, humiliated and slightly guilty, by the door, trying not to study the tattoo that snakes its way up Igor’s neck. Ilona gives me one last look of contempt, and then they’re gone.

Within twenty-four hours I’m a wreck. I’ve met Ludmila, who speaks two words of English: ‘No understand’; Andrea, who is allergic to Rufus; Anya, who won’t look me in the eye; and Sacha, who wears a stud in her nose and some strange metal staple in her cheek.

I’m almost tempted to call the whole thing off and promise Ilona and Igor a white wedding if she’ll come back.

What’s worse, the roof has started leaking in earnest, and the man from the roofing company came down the ladder shaking his head, and asking what ‘cowboys’ were responsible for ‘that lot up there’. We’re still waiting for his estimate.

And it’s half-term. The boys start off cheerful and buzzing with energy and plans. They spend most of breakfast reading the job ads at the back of the papers.

‘Mum, look! You could be Head of Human Resources at the Schools Trust – seventy thousand pounds starting salary.’ ‘Dad, there’s an ad for Development Director of the White Hart Theatre Company – thirty thousand pounds. It says writing skills required. You’d be brilliant!’

I watch my sons vie with one another to come up with the most appealing post and feel guilty that their parents’ financial difficulties should be so obvious to them. When I was growing up, I don’t remember ever hearing my parents discuss money, and I didn’t realize it could be a subject of tension and conflict until my father’s death and the question marks over his will. But here are my boys, trying to find something remunerative for their parents to work in. I feel I have failed to protect their childhood from the harsh realities of our financial straits.

Guy, however, seems to think it normal that our children should take an interest in our income stream. ‘It would be brilliant, boys,’ he says, looking over their shoulder at the papers. ‘But, frankly, I don’t think drama is my strong suit. Let’s wait and see if that nice television lady rings.’

The job-seekers game soon palls, in any case, and Alex and Tom sink into a sulk. Alex, because Louie, his new best friend at the Griffin, whose invitation to Tuscany we had to turn down, has emailed him boasting about water skiing. Tom is in a foul mood because Alex is bragging about being in the First XV and the excitements of boarding school.

Both are cross, too, because we have to forgo the traditional half-term in Somerset with the Carew grandparents: I have to be here to interview Ilona’s would-be successors.

This has not gone down well with the grandparents.

‘But the children need fresh air! Can’t you stay on your own and interview these girls?’ Cecily Carew says crossly.

Guy, too, feels cheated of his break at the homestead. He only cheers up when, just before lunch, Archie rings.

‘Hmmm, is that Harriet? Archie here. Yes, yes, Cecily and I were just wondering: we’re coming up for a funeral next week … No, no, old friend from army days. We could, of course, stay at the club, but …’

I gulp. Oh no, not the in-laws! Not here, when we have no au pair, the children are running wild and the roof is leaking. But I look at the boys, spilling cereal on to the tabletop, and at Guy, immersed in the paper. I’ve cheated them of their grandparents because of the search for Ilona’s successor, and I know they’re disappointed. So I swallow my reservations and take my cue.

‘Of course you must stay with us. Which night did you say?’

‘Yippee!! Grandpa and Granny!’ The boys reward me with a cheer.

‘Darling, you’re a star, you really are.’ Guy rewards me with a kiss on the cheek and the promise to take the boys to the Laser-Quest in Tooting Bec.

This leaves me with Maisie, who is easy and pliable and as yet unaware of the change in her life. We read after lunch, and then, as soon as she takes her nap, I’m free to think about James Weston.

Is he married – and to whom? Does he really think I looked the same, or at least, not that different? Does he live around the corner? The prospect of bumping into my ex at Tesco’s gives rise to horrific visions. Me, hair greasy and roots showing, wearing the size-12 jeans that really are a bit too tight, and the T-shirt that has a magic marker squiggly on the left breast, being spotted by a shocked-looking James. Or Guy and me, standing in the frozen meats aisle, arguing over what to buy while James rolls past, his trolley filled with champagne, exotic fruits and an expensive box of chocolates. Or the children and me – Maisie in her buggy, the boys acting up on either side of me – taking up most of the pavement on the High Street, and drawing attention to ourselves as Alex and Tom bicker and demand a gizmo they’ve spotted in the shop window.

‘Oh, are they yours?’ James asks me with a raised eyebrow.

* * *

‘Hi.’ I ring Charlotte. ‘Can you talk?’

‘Ooooooooooooh, I’d forgotten how awful you feel at the beginning,’ Charlotte moans. ‘I’ve been sick every morning and the homeopath I’m seeing can’t do a thing for me and we’re supposed to fly to Positano tomorrow and …’

I let her go on for a few minutes, then: ‘Guess who I saw the other day.’

‘Joanna Lumley in her amazing cape again?’

‘No.’ I pause for effect. ‘James.’

‘What?!! James Weston? The James?’ Charlotte’s excitement is gratifying.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.