The “light housework” never, in fact, came into it as a woman came in to clean and put the washing in the machine. Liv would much have preferred housework to child care. This woman must have been rather like Beryl, cheerful, chatty, hard-working, and herself the mother of a family, and she had been coming in three times a week since before Cyrus was born. Liv said, though not quite in these words, that this woman was the only permanency in the children’s lives, the only human being they could be sure of regularly seeing. It was she who hugged them and talked to them and called them “darling.” If their parents ever did these things, it must have been in the night, and Liv had neither the time nor the inclination. She came to hate them and this made her feel guilty and ashamed. But she had so much to do.

The school run was a recurring nightmare, especially as she was afraid of the Range Rover and never in perfect control of it. Both the baby and Marcus had to be strapped into child seats in the back and unstrapped and lifted out to accompany her if she needed to shop. Once Marcus lay on the supermarket floor, screaming and kicking. He often did this at home, he seems to have been a deeply disturbed child, and there she tried to ignore him, for she was afraid that otherwise she would strike him and do him a serious injury. Another time, while Cyrus was at school, she left Marcus and the baby strapped into their seats while she went to buy milk, bread, and baby cereal. When she came back to the locked car a crowd of angry people were around it, some of them shouting at the children not to be afraid, it was all right, and where was their mummy. Both were screaming and Marcus was beating on the door with his fists. The terrible thing was, Liv said, that while she was in the shop she had half-hoped someone would come and abduct them.

Why didn’t she make a fuss, say this wasn’t what she was engaged for? She seldom saw Claudia or James, even at the weekends they were mostly out, saying they needed “space,” they needed “a break.” But of course she sometimes saw them and then she did complain. She said it was too much for her, she wasn’t qualified to be a nanny and had no experience.