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also be doing her a good turn. The poor thing is desperate .
    Lidia (yes, the second letter an ‘i’, not a ‘y’ as he had at first supposed) was a Hungarian. She and her husband, a dark-skinned Brazilian waiter in a Pall Mall club, lived with their infant son in the flat next to Elsie’s. That was long before Elsie and Melanie had met and had moved into a mansion flat of their own overlooking Holland Park. This was a poky one, rented not bought, in Hackney. The couple were constantly fighting, with doors reverberantly slamming and voices exploding upwards, in jagged splinters, from the dank well. Elsie at first complained, something for which she had a talent, and then comforted, something for which she had less of one. Would she have done the second of those things if the young mother had not been so appealing in her woebegone fragility?
    The man’s clearly a brute. I can’t imagine what she sees in him .
    He smiled slyly. Perhaps he’s wonderful in bed ?
    Elsie pulled a face. She didn’t care for the idea of that.
    There were feeble excuses for the bruises and lacerations – a trip over a carpet, a kitchen cupboard door inadvertently left open. Then, one night, there was the hammering on the door – Please, please let me in ! – and Elsie in pyjamas was confronting the couple, the girl with the baby tucked in the crook of an arm and that brute gripping her shoulder and shouting ‘Come back! Come in!’ With a hiccup of a sob the girl suddenly obeyed him. As she did so, the baby, previously so silent that he might have been dead, began to wail. Elsie shouted at their retreating backs: ‘I’ll call the police if there’s any more of this!’
    It was when the Brazilian, a fanatical supporter of Arsenal, was away in Belgium for two days to attend a match, that Elsie hatched her plot. It’s the perfect solution for you, father. She worked as an au pair for some lawyer and his wife in Hampstead. She’s a sweet child. And the baby won’t be any trouble if you put them in the basement flat. You need someone like that. And you’ll be doing her a good turn . She had difficulty in persuading him; but, as so often in the past, her tenacity eventually overcame his reluctance.
    He had never cared for young children. But he had had to admit that the baby was no trouble at all. Lidia never let him out of her sight, as she energetically pushed and dragged the antiquated Hoover around room after room, made the vast double bed in one corner of which he would sleep late into the morning, or prepared one of her delicious Madeira cakes. At dinner parties, she would often be carrying the child on her back as she steered her way around the table. ‘Are you offering me a choice between the potatoes and your baby?’ one guest once jokingly asked.
    That combination of sweetness and strength. It’s irresistible. I’m so glad that you thought of the idea. It’s the best thing that’s happened to me since your poor mother died .
    He never felt closer than when he and Lidia would venture out together with the pushchair. I really must buy you a new one . But she was always careful even with money not hers. Oh, no. It’s fine. Fine . She had bought it from another of her London neighbours, whose child had outgrown it. He would feel suddenly light-headed and, yes, inexplicably happy, as he helped her lift the pushchair up the steps or stood with it on the sea-front, smiling down alternately at the child and at the gentle, sunlit waves, as she scuttled across the road, short-cropped blonde hair glistening, to buy him his evening paper. Oh, no, no ! He could still hear her protesting, so many years after she had vanished from his life, against his purchase of yet another present for the child. You spoil him . So far from spoiling Elsie, he had always been strict with her.
    Strangely, when he had opened the door and seen the tall, dark,