Au Pairs We Have Known

      The first of the au pairs came to us in the winter of 1963. Her name was Roseanna. In those days I, Frances, and Serena pooled our child-care resources. If my children, Lallie and Jamie, were more often in the Caldicott Square house than hers, Oliver and Christopher, were in mine, it was because that was what the cousins chose. Her house was bigger, though mine was warmer.

      My house was tall and the staircase wide, only one room on each of the four storeys, and a bathroom squashed beneath the roof. Serena’s and George’s house was one of those late-Georgian pillared double-fronted affairs, not detached, but presenting a unified face around the Square. In those days they were dilapidated and unheated. The basements were damp because the Fleet River ran underground. My peculiar house, known as The Tower, had a curved brick façade, and was squashed in between the regular-looking buildings. Some speculative builder had miscalculated his measurements back in the 1820s, and a later one filled an unproductive gap.

      Serena and George owned their house. I rented, and Serena often had to help me with the monthly payments. I sometimes resented the fact that she saw me as some kind of extension of herself, and that what was hers by right was mine as well, but at least she never seemed to expect me to be grateful. Nor did George have to be consulted: Serena earned her own money.