Martyn Comes Home To Agnieszka

      Martyn is not prepared for what meets him when he opens the front door: Hattie with her wild hair in order, in a clean, ironed shirt and fresh jeans. She smiles at him as if she were happy to see him, not, as so often these days, with a complaint and an argument ready to spring to her lips. He had forgotten how pretty she is. She is wearing a bra again, so she has two separate breasts not a kind of undifferentiated flesh shelf. Her figure is back to its prebaby state. It probably has been for months but no one, least of all Hattie, has paid it much attention.

      ‘Kitty’s asleep in Agnieszka’s room,’ Hattie says, ‘and supper’s on the table.’

      It is too, and like the old pre-Kitty days: delicatessen food, no longer boiled potatoes and cheap tough chops. Lots of spoons for sauces on the table and little jars of this and that which Hattie has lately derided as a wicked waste and empty calories. But no sign of Agnieszka, who it seems is out at her belly-dancing class.

      ‘A belly dancer! Our child is to be in the care of a belly dancer?’

      ‘Don’t be so sad and old-fashioned,’ says Hattie. ‘Belly dancing’s in, forget Pilates. Belly dancing teaches relaxation, muscular control and a healthy mobility.’

      Hattie tells him that Agnieszka hopes to become a qualified tutor: even start up her own school in London. She loves dancing. She was even in the Polish Dance Company for a time, on a day-release course during their equivalent of our sixth form. She’d been chosen over hundreds of applicants.

      ‘I thought she was meant to be learning English over here and then going home.’ Martyn is disconcerted. Perhaps Agnieszka is a figment of Hattie’s imagination? Perhaps she’s in Hattie’s head and nowhere else? It occurs to him that Hattie’s new appearance might be a symptom of a disordered mind. The madness is not in the disorder but in the order?

      But the food looks good and Hattie is still smiling and the room is tidy and napkins arranged by the plates, as his mother would do on special occasions. This is not imagination. A fairy god-mother has appeared and set everything right. Martyn’s mother never read fairy stories to her children as a matter of principle: ‘If they want to read let them do it for themselves.’

      ‘But what does she looks like?’ he asks. He feels that this is not a question he ought to ask, women’s looks are not up for discussion, and should not be taken into account in the work sphere, but he wants to know.

      ‘There’s nothing to tell.’ Hattie has to struggle for description. ‘She’s just ordinary. No busty beauty, no long-legged harpy. She looks pleasant enough. She has a flat tummy.

      Mine isn’t quite back to normal yet. I might go along to classes with her.’

      ‘Leaving me to look after Kitty?’ He speaks lightly but already he can feel himself lonely and left behind by two women.

      ‘A babysitter can look after Kitty if we’re none of us here,’ she says. ‘Once I’m back to work we can afford as many babysitters as we want – or Agnieszka and I could always go on different days.’

      This is Martyn’s moment to tell Hattie that he may well be getting a big hike in salary, and the financial imperative is removed from the issue, but he does not. If this is the new Hattie he wants her.

      Martyn goes into the spare room to check on Kitty and finds her sleeping peacefully in a cot in the space between the single bed and the wall. Her hair has been brushed and lies snugly against her cheek. She is a fair, round-faced, well-filled-out baby. He loves her intolerably.

      The spare room has been re-arranged to its advantage: the desk from the kitchen where it held nothing but out-of-date newspapers, run-out pens, elastic bands the postman left is now under the window, and a small bookshelf rigged up above it – English Language for Foreigners, Dancing Towards Self-Awareness and Child Development Studies – that one from the New Europe Press. He’d reviewed it for Devolution when he was in charge of the book pages. There’s a state-of-the-art laptop on the desk. How has she afforded that? His own is old and keeps crashing. This one obviously functions.

      Kitty’s clothes, neatly folded, and all the paraphernalia that goes with infant care and has previously littered the living room, are now laid out tidily along one set of shelves. Agnieszka’s own belongings seem to be minimal: he looks in the drawers and sees a few neatly folded undergarments and thin pastel sweaters. Nothing is black, nothing is fancy. Reassured, he goes back into the living room.

      ‘We could go to bed,’ he says, ‘before she gets back.’

      ‘All right,’ Hattie says to his surprise and follows him into the bedroom, as if it were once again the world before Kitty, before pregnancy. They have the bed to themselves: the clouds in his head clear. He groans, she moans. In the next room, the baby does not wake. They hold each other tight for at least ten minutes before the real world intervenes.

      Martyn wonders if he should tell Hattie about the article that Harold obviously wants: the endorsement of the chip butty – a soft white bread sandwich with fried chipped potatoes, well salted, for the filling – as a source of approved pleasure, the Government deciding its electoral advantage no longer lies in health and the self-abnegation that goes with it. He decides not to, because Hattie is hot on nutrition and will only bring up the subject of his father’s early death and the contribution paid to it by the chip butty, and he would rather she did not. They stay in bed and are asleep before Agnieszka returns.

      In the unaccustomed peace of the morning, Martyn sleeps longer than anyone else in the household. He reckons he made a full eight and a quarter hours. He bounces out of bed naked and remembers he must now put on a dressing-gown before going to the bathroom. The dressing-gown is not on the floor but on a hanger, and to hand. Putting it on adds a feeling of ritual and security to the day. He shaves. The washbasin has been wiped, and the taps polished and the little knot of hair where the basin drains has been removed, so the water leaves quickly and no soap scum or detritus is left behind. The drying washing is still over the racks in the bathroom but has been shaken out and pegged not just flung over the wires.

      Martyn sees Agnieszka for the first time, and understands that to call her Agnes – which he had been planning in his head, as a last defiance – would be inappropriate. She is a careful person and needs a careful name. She smiles sweetly and with a degree of humility, and says she is pleased to meet him: ‘Mr Martyn, the man of the house.’

      Does he like an egg for breakfast, and if so, scrambled, fried or poached? Hattie is eating a boiled egg, the first of two, from an eggcup and not one of Kitty’s plastic rings. Kitty is in her high chair, well surrounded by pillows for safety. She is trying to manage a spoon and beams at her father, her mother and Agnieszka with equal pleasure. But Martyn and Hattie are new to babies: this amiability is symptomatic of the seven-month child. Soon she will become more particular and shield her face to any other than the favoured few, and weep if presented with anything unfamiliar.