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  The girls in the office often spoke about her quietly, wonderingly. However does she manage to be so well-turned out, so unflustered, so even-tempered, they asked each other? How does she cope with a child and a boyfriend and a job?

  They had heard all about her little daughter, Jennie. Jennie was six years old, and went to a good school in Wimbledon near the girl’s house. She had straight, shiny perfect blonde hair, like her mother, and round blue eyes, like her mother. They hadn’t seen a photograph because she kept forgetting to bring one in. They forgave her this because she obviously had a lot to think about. She had an excellent nanny, who was a friend of hers, and she spent the weekends and evenings with her daughter and her boyfriend, who adored the daughter too. They must make a lovely couple, the other girls said enviously. So attractive, so shiny, so perfect.

  They had not met the boyfriend because he worked different hours and so could not spare the time to come and pick her up from work but they had heard all about him, oh yes. His job at the fitness centre, his paternal values, his enthusiasm to do the washing-up and the ironing and how he had been the first to leap out of bed and change nappies when Jennie was a baby. Was it a difficult birth, they had asked her, thinking into the future? She had blushed and said no, and they had noticed that she was reluctant to talk about … well, personal things.

  They thought of her as a girl but she was really thirty- two years of age. But her hair was so girlishly, charmingly tied in a ponytail, so gleamingly, brushingly pulled back, revealing her shiny, youthful skin, her small, neat, perfect ears, her round blue eyes, her neat, small, rosy mouth, that they always thought of her as a girl. Her boyfriend didn’t believe in marriage, she said, apologetically, carefully, in their lunchtime chats over a tub of cottage cheese turned pink with salmon flakes. He felt that their relationship was stable and perfect already and why change it? Why indeed? The girls nodded. Why change such a perfect thing, why risk it, why alter the smooth balance for, after all, no good reason?

  She kept herself to herself in the office and the girls understood this. After all, she had a lot to cope with. Sometimes she took days off to go to her daughter’s school play, or the parents’ evenings. Or to take Jennie to the dentist. They thought of her as a role model; they could imagine themselves in her in five years’ time; so neat, so shiny, so organised.

  One day the girl got up and, according to her usual routine, put on the coffee percolator, stood in the shower, dressed immaculately – no snagged tights here – and sat in front of her Ikea pine dressing-table putting on her Beauty Without Cruelty make-up. The natural look, just enough, but not too much. No. That would never do.

  And then the phone rang. Now, at eight o’clock in the morning, this was very unusual.

  ‘May I speak with Miss or Mrs Hardy?’ said a timorous voice.

  ‘Speaking,’ said the girl. ‘Who’s calling, please?’

  She’d sometimes forget that she wasn’t at work because the phone hardly ever rang at home. She had a few very close friends and they were mostly girls at work.

  This is your daughter speaking,’ said the strange little voice. ‘Remember me?’

  On the tube the girl went past her stop and had to catch the tube back again. She went up the ‘Down’ stairs and rushed out of the station unusually flushed.

  At work she managed to mangle up the photocopier, set the franking machine for the wrong date and spill coffee over the MD within the first half-hour. Everyone was very surprised and unnerved, because the girl was never late, never hurried, never out of place. Her hair was loose and uncombed and her eyeliner seemed to be crooked.

  At lunchtime she flew out of the office, knocking over a pot-plant in her wake. This was also unsettling because she tended to all the office plants and indeed cooed over and cosseted them rather lovingly.

  She sat in the café waiting for her daughter to come to meet her. The girl who eventually turned up was not at all expected. She didn’t have neat shiny hair or smooth, ironed, neutral clothes. She stormed in rather noisily, wearing a bright purple fringed dress which covered her bottom – but only just – and thick black tights and enormous shoes like big boats. She wore aggressive make-up and her hair was fixed on her head like a cockatoo. Her first words were, ‘Why did you abandon me?’ She sat down fiercely and waited for the answer.

  ‘Oh, Jennie …’ said the girl, her head in her hands.

  ‘I’m not called Jennie. I’m called Andrea,’ said the new daughter.

  ‘Oh, Andrea,’ said the girl. ‘I was sixteen. I was – your age. I wasn’t allowed to keep you, you see.’

  The new daughter sat thinking for a minute or two. Then – ‘I would have fought like hell, to keep a child. I’m dying for a child. I wouldn’t do that to anybody, leave them in the care of the world.’

  Then – ‘Have you got other kids? Ones that you did keep?’

  The girl swallowed and said, ‘No.’

  ‘Have you got a husband? Or a boyfriend?’

  No.

  ‘What do you live like? Have you got a house, or a flat? Do you go to work? What do you do?’

  Stop, please stop! I don’t have a life. I have a nice pine house, a little house at the end of the world and I don’t have a life.

  Would you like to see my house?

  Back on the tube to Wimbledon, the last outpost of humanity. The door opened smoothly. The pine floors, stripped over and over again free of any life. The smooth, white, painted walls, sterilised of any colour. No house room for mistakes here.

  The brand new daughter walked all around the little house. ‘Isn’t it neat?’ she cried. ‘Is it not tidy, shiny, tasteful?’ The girl had no answer for she was watching her huge, boisterous new daughter, who had the shoulders of a bruiser and the wild energy of discovery,

  ‘I can see why you gave me away,’ said the daughter at last. There simply isn’t room for me here. I am not tidy, nor shiny, nor should I ever wish to be.’ And with that she left the small house noisily, clumpingly.

  The girl sat there for a long time and then she stood up. She straightened a print that the daughter had knocked awry in her wake and she smoothed down the covers on the sofa. She swallowed.

  THE CASE OF THE PARR CHILDREN

  Antonia Fraser

  ‘I’ve come about the children.’

  The woman who stood outside the door of the flat, her finger poised to ring the bell again, looked desperate. She also looked quite unknown to the owner of the flat, Jemima Shore. It was ten o’clock on Sunday morning; an odd time for anyone to be paying a social call on the celebrated television reporter. Jemima Shore had no children. Outside her work she led a very free and very private existence. As she stood at the door, unusually dishevelled, pulling a dark blue towelling robe round her, she had time to wonder rather dazedly: Whose children? Why here? Before she decided that the stranger had rung the wrong bell of the wrong flat, and very likely the wrong house in Holland Park.

  ‘I’ve come about the children.’

  The woman before her was panting slightly as she repeated the words. But then Jemima Shore’s flat was on the top floor. It was her appearance which on closer inspection was odd: she looked smudged and dirty like a charcoal drawing which had been abandoned. Her beltless mackintosh had presumably once been white; as had perhaps her ancient tennis shoes with their gaping canvas, and her thick woollen socks. The thin dark dress she wore beneath her mackintosh, hem hanging down, gave the impression of being too old for her until Jemima realised that it was the dress itself which was decrepit. Only her hair showed any sign of care: that had at least been brushed. Short and brown, it hung down straight on either side of her face: in this case the style was too young.

  The woman before Jemima might have been a tramp. Then there was the clink of a bottle at her feet as she moved uneasily towards Jemima. In a brown paper bag at her feet were the remains of a picnic which had clearly been predominantly alcoholic. The image of the tramp was confirmed.

  ‘Jemima Sho