Birgid had extraordinarily long and narrow eyes of an unearthly pale green colour. Her hair was pale too – almost white – and in the candlelight her skin had the seamlessness and solidity of marble. I asked her where she was from and she said that she had been born and brought up in Sweden, but had lived in this country since she was eighteen. She had come here to university and had met her husband – a fellow student – in her first term. They had got married during the university holidays and had returned, much to the bewilderment of their student peers, man and wife. Jonathan had been unable to come this evening, she added. He had too much work to do, and also he thought it would be good for her and Ella to take the trip together. She had decided not to drive because she had never driven anywhere alone with Ella before. Instead they had taken the train.
‘That’s why I asked if you had driven,’ she said. ‘I was afraid to drive.’
I said she had been right to be afraid and she listened to me with an inflexible composure, shaking her head.
‘When you are afraid of something,’ she said, ‘that is the sign that it’s something you must do.’
She herself had always lived by this philosophy, she added, but since the birth of Ella she had observed herself repeatedly failing to adhere to it. Jonathan and she had waited a long time to have a child: she had found out she was pregnant on her fortieth birthday. You could say, she said, that we waited until the last possible moment. It wasn’t biologically impossible, of course, for her to have a second child – she was forty-four now – but she had no wish to. It had been hard enough to accommodate Ella in their lives, after more than two decades of it just being the two of them. They were no longer fluid, as they had been at eighteen. To introduce a new element into something that has already set is extremely difficult. Not that Jonathan and I were fixed in our ways, she added. But we were very happy as we were.
She reached out for her champagne glass and took a slow mouthful. Behind her, the fog stood blankly at the windows. I was surprised by her age, which I would have guessed to be at least ten years younger, though hers wasn’t the strenuous youthfulness of active self-preservation; rather, she merely looked as if she had avoided exposure, like a fold in a curtain that remains unfaded because it never sees the sun.
I asked how often she went back to Sweden.
Very rarely, she replied. She spoke a little Swedish sometimes with Ella, but otherwise her links with that past were few. Her husband – Ella’s father – was English, and as they had married so young she almost felt that Sweden represented childhood, while England was the scene of adult life. Her father still lived there, and some of her siblings – there had been five children in the family – but her work schedule was such that she didn’t have much time for family visits. If she and Jonathan took time off they preferred to go to warm, exotic places – to Thailand or India – though of course now that they had Ella those trips were impractical. But also, she didn’t like to be reminded of how much her family had changed: she preferred to remember her childhood the way that it was.
Some sort of disagreement had broken out at the other end of the room. One of Eloise’s sons was crying; the other was wrestling with Lawrence’s daughter for possession of a toy that came apart as they pulled it between them, so that Lawrence’s daughter fell backwards and began to cry too. Birgid’s daughter started rapping the older boy in punishment with her plastic wand. The girl in the red dress remained motionless in her chair, watching the scene with a wide-eyed, expressionless face. She held her head with its sheet of red hair very still. Her hands were folded in her lap; she kept her long, bare legs in their high-heeled shoes tightly together. Though her clothes were scanty, she looked as though she were imprisoned in them.
Eloise got up to intervene and seconds later was being mauled from all sides, her younger son hanging from her dress, the older one thumping her hip with his small white fist, all of them shouting in high-pitched voices to give their side of the story. The woman in the leopard-print dress turned on the sofa, champagne glass in hand, and addressed the red-haired girl from across the room, in a voice that was startlingly loud coming from her narrow body.
‘Henrietta!’ she called. ‘Henrietta! You’re meant to be looking after them, darling, aren’t you?’
Henrietta gazed at her, her eyes widening even further, and turned her head slowly towards the children. She appeared to say something, her lips barely moving, but no one paid any attention.
‘Honestly,’ the woman in the leopard-print dress said, turning away. ‘I don’t know why I bother opening my mouth.’
Lawrence was sitting back on the sofa, legs crossed and glass in hand, appearing not to notice Eloise’s struggles at the other end of the room.
‘Lawrence,’ Birgid said, watching him, ‘go and help her.’
Lawrence gave her a slightly menacing smile.
‘We agreed that we don’t get involved in their fights,’ he said.
‘But you can’t just leave her to cope with it all,’ Birgid said.
‘If she chooses to break the agreement,’ Lawrence said, ‘then it’s up to her.’
Eloise’s son had removed his feet from the floor so that he was hanging entirely from Eloise’s dress. The soft material instantly gave way and tore right across the front, revealing Eloise’s pale breasts in their lacy, mauve-coloured bra.
‘This is terrible,’ Birgid murmured, turning away.
‘She’ll have to deal with it,’ Lawrence said, tight-lipped.
Eloise came pattering past in her high heels, clutching her dress across the front. She returned a few minutes later wearing a different dress.
‘That’s nice,’ the leopard-print woman said, leaning forward to finger the material. ‘Have I seen that before?’
As soon as Eloise sat down Lawrence rose, as though to distance himself from her conduct by doing the opposite of whatever she did. He went to the fridge and took out another bottle of champagne and began to open it.
‘He is a proud man,’ Birgid said to me, watching him. ‘And in a way,’ she added, ‘he’s right. If they start to become sentimental about their children, their relationship will be ruined.’
Her own parents, she said, had been a real love story: they had never wavered in their attention to one another through all the years of their marriage, despite the fact that they were bringing up five children so close in age that in the family photo albums her mother had appeared to be continuously pregnant for several years. They were young parents, she added, and tirelessly energetic: her childhood had been one of camping trips and sailing expeditions and summers in the cabin they had built with their own hands. Her parents never went off on holiday on their own, and treated all family occasions with great ceremony, eating with their children every night around the kitchen table, to the extent that she could not remember a single evening meal when they were absent, which must have meant that they rarely, if ever, went out to dinner together. While Jonathan and I, she added, eat in restaurants nearly every night. She left for work so early and returned so late, she went on, that she almost never saw Ella eat at all, though of course the nanny fed her the correct food, as Jonathan and Birgid had instructed her to. To be perfectly honest, Birgid said, I actually avoid Ella’s mealtimes – I find myself things to do in the office instead. Since Ella’s birth Jonathan had started to make roast meat and potatoes for lunch on Sunday, as it was a tradition in his family and he thought they should repeat it for Ella’s sake.