She May Not Leave
Be careful who you invite into the bosom of your home – she may never leave…A novel from Fay Weldon, the writer who knows women better than they know themselves.Hattie has a difficult if loving partner, Martyn, an absentee mother, Lallie, and a cynical if attentive grandmother Frances. She tries to do the right and moral thing in a tricky world, and always has. But she now has a baby, Kitty, which makes true morality rather harder to achieve. Somehow, money has to be earned. Into this household comes Agnieszka, from Poland, a domestic paragon. But is she friend or foe? And even if she is foe, and seems likely to bring the domestic world crashing down around their ears, can they afford to let her go? Well, no.Martyn works for a political magazine, Hattie for a literary agency. At work, too, integrity is suffering as the need for compromise becomes ever more pressing. And always in the background is Frances, tracing the family and social history. And not just family and society but the dwelling houses too; and all those girls and women (the au pairs, the child-minders, the cleaners) who've made Hattie what she is. Not to forget that hefty dollop of male genes which has also played its part – for Hattie's is a lively and none too respectable background – and now, finally, Agnieszka, come to claim her rightful heritage – which is, let's face it, everything. Will Hattie go to the wall? And poor little Kitty…Or will rescue come?
Читать She May Not Leave онлайн беплатно
She May Not Leave
Fay Weldon
Table of Contents
Martyn And Hattie Have Employed An Au Pair
Frances Presents Some Authorial Background
A Further Ethical Discussion After Supper
Agnieszka Comes Into Hattie’s Home
Frances Worries About Her Grand-daughter
The Effects Of Bricks And Mortar On Lives
Martyn On The Way Home From Work
Martyn Comes Home To Agnieszka
Glossing Over Inconvenient Facts
Men, Women, Art, And Employment
A Good Au Pair And The Promise Of Life After Death
Preserving The Peace Of The Home
Martyn Is Alone With Agnieszka
‘Agnieszka?’ asks Martyn. ‘Isn’t that far too long a name? If she wants to get on in this country she’ll have to shorten it. People are just not familiar with sshzk.’
‘But she won’t want to shorten it,’ says Hattie. ‘People have their pride, and a loyalty to the parents who named them.’ ‘If we pay her,’ says Martyn, ‘she may have to do more or less as we ask.’
Martyn is in conversation with Hattie in their economical, comfortable first-time-buyers’ house in London’s Kentish Town. Both are in their early thirties, handsome, healthy and educated, and for reasons of principle not lack of affection are not married but partnered. Baby Kitty, twenty-four weeks old, sleeps in her cot in the bedroom: Martyn and Hattie fear that she may not sleep for long. Martyn is just back from work. Hattie is ironing: she is unused to the task, and making a rotten job of it but she is, as ever, doing her best.
Hattie is my grandchild. I spent many years bringing her up and I am fond of her.
They have been talking about the possibility of employing an au pair, Agnieszka, recommended by Babs, a colleague of Hattie’s at Dinton & Seltz, Literary Agents. Hattie took maternity leave: now she wants to return to work, but Martyn is resistant. Not that he says so, but Hattie can tell because of his feeling that the girl’s name is too long. About Agnieszka they know very little, except that she has worked for Babs’s sister, the one with triplets, and left with good references.
In the circles in which Martyn and Hattie move as many babies are implanted as conceived, and so do often arrive in twos or threes. Kitty was an accident which served, after initial confusion and dismay, to make her the more precious to her parents. Fate had intervened, they felt, for the good. Man proposes, God disposes, and for once the result was satisfactory.
‘I don’t think it would be right to ask her to change her name on our account,’ says Hattie. ‘She might be offended.’ ‘I am not sure,’ says Martyn, ‘that we should define right as what does not offend.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ says Hattie. Her brow darkens as she comes to grips with what Martyn has just said. Surely not offending other people has a large part to play in what is defined as ‘right’? But since Kitty’s birth she is less sure than before about what is right and what is wrong. Her moral confidence is being eroded.
She can see it is ‘wrong’ to jam a comforter in baby Kitty’s mouth to stop the crying, as poorly educated mothers from the housing estates do. ‘Right’ would be searching for the cause of the crying and attending to that. If this is the case she chooses wrong over right at least five times a day. She can see she is also guilty of élitism, in not wanting to be numbered as one of the estate mothers. The family income may be currently below the national average, but even so the notion of her own superiority increasingly flits across her mind. Does she not read books about child-care, instead of waiting two weeks for the health visitor to turn up? Surely she is someone who controls her own destiny? But she has been so a-mush lately, so driven by hormonally based emotions, so much a prey to unaccustomed resentments and gratifications that she swings from conviction to doubt within minutes. She did wake this morning, leaning over to the crib beside the marital bed to put the comforter in Kitty’s mouth, with the comforting understanding that people are as moral as they can afford to be, no more nor less. She should not blame herself too much.
‘Then you should see why not,’ says Martyn. ‘Social justice can’t be achieved by simply letting everyone do what they want. A fox-hunter might well be offended if you pointed out that he was a cruel sadistic brute, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t say it. We should all be working towards the greatest good of the greatest number and sometimes hard words and tough choices must be made.’
