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back into it. James was born with difficulty and didn’t seem to like life outside Alice when confronted with it. Cecily dispatched a New Zealand girl, from a London agency, to help Alice, and Apple Tree Cottage strained at the seams under the impact of her capable outdoorsy personality. She certainly worked, and Alice could rest in the afternoons and send Natasha off to nursery school every morning in clean dungarees not laundered by herself, but the privacy of their lives was quite gone. Jennie was only with them for four months, but when she left, in a gale of good will, for a family in Pelham Crescent, she left behind her the constraint between Alice and Martin that they had adapted to encompass her in their lives. Friendly and good-mannered towards one another, they moved through the rituals of Martin’s job and Natasha’s school runs and James’s demands, and supper parties (small), and children’s tea parties (large), without somehow either coming together or moving forward.
    Alice pretended not to notice that she didn’t want to paint. Her friend, Juliet Dunne, whose husband Henry was agent at Pitcombe Park and who was blessed with a sharp tongue and keen percipience, made no bones about pointing this out.
    â€˜It’s no good hiding , Allie. This awful baby business doesn’t last long, and if you aren’t careful you’ll end up like my mother saying why is it every day takes a week. It doesn’t matter if you don’t want to paint. You just have to.’
    â€˜I do want to—’
    â€˜No you don’t. You just want to want to. You won’t get real wanting back unless you kick yourself into doing something. Look at our useless husbands. They’ll never get anywhere much because they couldn’t make themselves if you paid them.’
    â€˜Why did you marry Henry?’
    â€˜Oh,’ Juliet said, scraping apricot pudding off her newest baby’s chin, ‘he was so suitable and so keen and everyone else in my flat was getting married. I quite like him, though.’
    â€˜You mean love him.’
    â€˜Yuk,’ said Juliet.
    Alice did try to paint after that, and it bored her so much she was quite alarmed. She took out some things she had done before James was born and they looked to her the desirable achievements of a total stranger, so she put them away again, hurriedly, before they should demoralize her. She had, she told herself, plenty to do in any case and she did it all – a touch of pride here – without any help at all. None of her friends managed their houses and families with no help at all. Cecily was always offering her some, but she said the cottage was too small, and in any case she liked her privacy.
    Small things happened. Martin was made a junior partner, Natasha started at a little private school in Salisbury – the children wore checked smocks and had to shake hands, smiling , with their teacher each morning – they built on a playroom and another bedroom at the cottage. In the late winter, Alice and Martin went skiing (Alice discovered, rather to her satisfaction, that she liked frightening herself), and in the summer Cecily rented a cottage for them on the north Cornish coast where the children could play on the calm sands of the Camel estuary. Alice began to read, hungrily, novel after novel, carrying lists of them around in her bag along with the purse and cheque books and cash cards and paper handkerchiefs and tubes of Smarties and clean knickers and sticking plasters that formed her daily battle gear. Titles like And Quiet Flows the Don stuck in her mind like burrs. She chanted them to herself in the car, while in the back the members of the school run bullied the most tearful, sucked their thumbs and surreptitiously took their knickers off in order to amaze the others with their wicked daring.
    When she discovered she was pregnant with Charlie, her first reaction was relief. She felt a great gratitude