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keep her at home. She told Joseph that if Anna went out at night she would lose her energy for polishing.
    Joseph suggested a cook as well, but Vera asked why did they want someone to mess the place up. She would however like a daily woman to do the heavy work so that Anna and she could be free to do the finer chores.
    The cleaning woman came five days a week. She thought Vera was daft and told her so. Vera didn’t even listen. She certainly didn’t feel insulted.
    ‘If you don’t like the job and the money, I’ll getsomeone else,’ she said reasonably, without any offence in her voice.
    The cleaning woman was called Mrs Murray, and she lived in a block of flats not at all unlike the ones where Vera had grown up. Sometimes Mrs Murray feeling a bit sorry for this poor madwoman she worked for, would tell tales of Life in the Buildings. Vera’s face contorted with near spasms. She almost ran from the room if Mrs Murray began to evoke the life and sounds.
    ‘Please, Mrs Murray, I beg you, go on with your work. I don’t want to delay you. Another time.’
    Behind her back Anna and Mrs Murray pointed to their own foreheads and shook their heads.
    ‘I think she must have had nothing when she was young,’ said Mrs Murray one day in a burst of confidence to Anna.
    ‘I always think she very wealthy lady,’ said Anna.
    ‘Wouldn’t you feel sorry for her old man?’ Mrs Murray went on. ‘He’d be better off down with us, coming in to a bit of a laugh and a good meat pie, and a block of ice cream with a glass of port after it, and his slippers. I think that’s what he’d prefer, to tell you the God’s honest truth.’
    Anna gave it some thought.
    ‘Yes, and when I think of my family back in Manilla . . . where there is little money . . . and little food and little furniture . . . but when the fathercomes in . . . all stops and there is smiling and welcoming and he is an important man.’
    Mrs Murray nodded sagely.
    Outside the door, where she had paused, not to eavesdrop but to polish the corner of a picture frame which had escaped them all, Vera stood and listened. Her body was flooded with a great pity for them. Two poor women, not much older than herself. One from a drunken Irish family, living now in slum conditions in a London council flat, one a poor Asiatic whose family and country were so wretched they had to export her to clean floors and send them back her wages.
    And these two women pitied her. Vera gave a high-pitched little laugh at the wonderful way that nature allows people to bear their burdens so easily by considering themselves better off than others. Happily she moved from the door and knelt down to examine the ball and claw feet of the table which were known for their ability to trap dust.

HIGHBURY & ISLINGTON
    ‘I hope you’ll like them all,’ he said for the fourth time.
    ‘Oh, I’m sure I will,’ said Heather without looking up.
    ‘I think you’ll get on with them,’ he said, anxiously biting his lip.
    Heather raised her eyes from the magazine.
    ‘I said I’m sure I will, funny face. Even if I don’t it’s not the end of the world. They don’t have to live with me, I don’t have to live with them.’ Cheerfully she leaned over and kissed him on the nose. Then she took off her shoes, settled her feet in his lap and applied herself seriously to her magazine. A very colourful looking one with a lot of Sin and Passion and Frenzy in capital letters on the cover.
    Adam hoped that she might have finished the magazine and, better still have thrown it away before they got home. He could see his mother’s amazement – Frenzy and Sin magazines weren’t forbidden athome, it was just that nobody would contemplate buying them. He could imagine his sister’s sarcastic comments. Louise was always a little sardonic about strangers but he felt unhappily that Heather might give plenty of ammunition.
    ‘
A trifle bookish I see, your Heather?
’ Louise would shout as she retrieved the offending