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Totty managed to maintain such impressively long and manicured nails. Perhaps she had an assistant. For her part, Totty had asked Emma what part of Eastern Europe she had come from.
        "None. I'm from Yorkshire," Emma had answered, looking Totty steadily in the eye.
        "Oh, God. Sorry!" Totty had clapped a hand with long manicured nails to her lipsticked mouth and squealed with laughter.
        The children were now coming out of the auditorium, but only Hero and Cosmo looked pleased to see their nanny.
        "Woo woo!" chortled train-mad Cosmo, steaming across the carpet beneath the huge and brilliant chandeliers. Hero, meanwhile, lispingly informed Emma that the orchestra had played her favourite film tune.
        "'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!'" exclaimed Emma delightedly.
        There was a scornful noise from behind. Emma turned to find herself staring into the tiger-yellow, much-mascara'd eyes of Totty de Belvedere. "What is it about kids and 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang'?" Totty swung back her striped blonde hair scornfully. "Hengist's obsessed with it too." She shot a look of deep dislike at her charge, who was shuffling unhappily along beside her.
        "Poor Hengist," Cosmo remarked as they walked out into the sunlight of the piazza. "I don't think he likes Totty very much. She isn't very nice, is she?"

Chapter Seven

    "Are you on Facebook, darling?"
        The voice came from the other side of Orlando's bedroom door. As it happened, he was watching morning children's television. A pair of chirpy northern presenters with gelled hair were sitting on a purple sofa and bantering with someone dressed in a bright-yellow chicken suit.
        The door opened, and his mother came in. As usual, she was dressed in clothes designed for someone several decades younger than she was. Georgie was small and thin and proud of the fact she could get into Miss Sixty jeans like the slimmest of teenage girls. She was wearing them today with a flimsy purple blouse. Her make-up, as always, was immaculate. Georgie's face was thin and rather rabbity with over-plucked eyebrows, but she made the most of what she had, as she believed everyone should.
        "Oh…you're not on Facebook…" Georgie sounded disappointed as she stumbled in her high-heeled sandals on the piles of trainers and hooded tops that lay scattered over Orlando's bedroom floor.
        Facebook. Orlando groaned silently. Georgie was obsessed with the social networking site. She kept up with fashion and trends with an energy that amazed her son, who did neither, but Facebook was a special interest, with its opportunities for demonstrating social one-upmanship. His mother was a hopeless snob, Orlando knew, but hopeless in the positive sense that she was too kind-hearted, too spontaneous, and too nervous to make a real success of snobbery, as well as utterly lacking the visceral instinct that made the flint-eyed parents of some of his school peers so terrifying, and, in some cases, the peers themselves.
        Nonetheless, Georgie had badgered him mercilessly to get his own Facebook page, sending him endless "Georgie Fitzmaurice has invited you to join…" messages from her own account and making her friends, also in their mid-fifties but all keen Facebookers, do the same.
        Orlando secretly thought Facebook a boring waste of time, the acme of insincerity, a magnet for neurotics and the socially insecure. He held out as long as he could, but his email inbox had become so choked with invitations from mature ladies that the site crashed every time he launched it. He had had to give in.
        After that, whenever curiosity got the better of him and he was actually on Facebook, Georgie seemed miraculously to know and would appear, as she had done now, lean over his shoulder, and try to catch a glimpse of who his cyber-friends were.
        "Orlo!" she would exclaim. "You've only got ten friends! And half of them are mine! Shouldn't you have