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engaged. When Ester visited, she spent most of the time in Ida’s kitchen, helping her with the cooking. It was a standing joke that Ida saw more of Ester than Conrad did.
    Being in Ida’s kitchen reminded Ester of cooking with Lotte, the au pair she’d had as a child while her mother was away from home, travelling for the toiletries company. Ester had been very fond of Lotte and some of her favourite memories were of being in the kitchen while Lotte was cooking, being given jobs to do such as peeling potatoes and greasing baking trays.
    Ester was no cook really, but she did like being in Ida’s kitchen, being Ida’s assistant, and while they worked, they talked.
    Ida told Ester about the off-the-rails boy she had dated before meeting the man she had married, Conrad and Bernard’s father, and Ester told Ida about a married man with whom she had been involved before Conrad. Ida told Ester how scared she had been when she first discovered she was pregnant with Bernard, when she was not yet married to his father, and Ester told Ida that she had been pregnant once, when she was with the married man, and that she had been very scared and had not in the end been able to go through with it.
    ‘Is that dreadful?’ she said to Ida who stood quietly stirring the gravy.
    ‘You were young,’ said Ida.
    ‘I don’t know,’ said Ester, ‘if I want children at all.’
    ‘You’re still young,’ said Ida, turning off the gas and emptying the saucepan into the gravy boat and carrying it through to the dining room where the men were waiting.
    On the day of the engagement party, while Conrad was getting drunk in the living room, Ester was in the kitchen with Ida, icing buns with an apron on and her high heels off, a spare pair of Ida’s slippers on her feet, when the doorbell rang. A delivery of flowers was expected, arrangements of pink roses for the party. Ester, dusting off her icing-sugared hands, said, ‘I’ll get that.’
    Walking towards the front door, she saw the figure of a man through the patterned glass, the sun behind him. She had never met Bernard, Conrad’s older brother, who did not live nearby and rarely visited, but when she opened the door she recognised the eyes which gazed at her, taking her in, and the mouth which smiled and licked its lips, and even something in the voice which said, ‘You must be Ester.’ She knew without needing to ask that this was Bernard, who moved towards her and then past her and stood in the hallway removing his coat and his shoes, while Ester stood holding on to the open door, the sun coming in.
    She could have sworn that it happened for both of them at that same moment. When, much later, he said that it had not happened for him until after that, it was like her having heard a fire engine or an ambulance going by as he stood there on the doorstep, and Bernard claiming to have heard it perhaps hours later when he and she and everyone else were outside on the patio. It had happened for him, said Bernard, while he was looking at her calves, slim and sleek between the hem of her dress and the ankle straps of her stilettos.
    Before the end of Bernard’s visit, Ester had taken up with him and broken off her engagement to Conrad. The first time Bernard came back to see her, they met at Ida’s house. Everyone, said Bernard, letting her in, was out for the day. As he no longer lived at home, and slept, when he was there, on a sofa bed in the living room, he suggested that they go into Conrad’s bedroom, but Ester did not want to. Bernard was less keen on using his parents’ bed but in the end he settled for that. Afterwards, while Bernard was in the shower, Ester stood looking through the things on Ida’s dressing table, admiring a hairbrush inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Hearing the front door slam, she dressed quickly and picked up her handbag, ready to go. But she was not sure what to do and stood for a while on this side of the bedroom door. Hearing nothing, she opened the door