Her by Harriet Lane

into my leg and mumbles something indistinctly.
    ‘Yes, well,’ I say, unzipping his coat. ‘It’s very kind of you to ask us round.’
    She takes the coat, hangs it up, and then steps forward and puts her hands on my elbows and kisses me. Her hair brushes my face. A smoky sort of scent, figs and spices, sweet and complex and insistent. I’m not sure I entirely like it, but I imagine that’s the point. ‘It’s a pleasure,’ she says. ‘It’s nice to see Christopher again. Do you remember Henry, Christopher? He’s in the kitchen. He’s excited about seeing you again.’
    Who’s Henry? Christopher pulls his head away from my leg and glances down the hallway. ‘He’s waiting for you,’ she says, and he looks up, doubtfully, so I say, ‘Yes, go,’ and then miraculously he’s releasing my thigh and inching away.
    ‘Cat,’ Nina explains. ‘You probably heard, Christopher was sitting outside my house when I found him, with Henry, the two of them just sitting on the step. So of course I stopped and asked him his name and rang the police straightaway. I can’t begin to imagine what you must have been going through.’
    I can’t think of anything to say to that, so we stand around the buggy in silence for a moment; and then I say, ‘I’m sorry, I really must change her, her timing’s terrible,’ and Nina laughs and shows me into the loo, which has one of those wanky yet also somehow desirable overhead china cisterns with a long chain flush (probably reclaimed at vast expense from a boarding-school refurb), and an antique blue-patterned sink, and a row of huge chemists’ bottles on the windowsill. Cecily lies on the dresser, bathed in the red and green light cast by the giant flagons, staring up at them as I attend to her. I lean forward and we rub noses and she giggles, and then I pop her on the floor and wash my hands, using the French soap in a proper soap dish, a chunky white bar carved with a little sailor boy. While I’m rinsing my hands, I look at myself in the mirror, and see how flushed I am, and so I dab some loo paper over my face and into my armpits, blotting the evaporating sweat. It’s not just the humiliation of arrival; the house feels a little too hot. Then I fit Cecily on my hip and go down the corridor.
    It’s huge, the kitchen, but more welcoming than I’d expected. Not quite so pared-back. Not quite as oppressively tasteful as I’d feared. Old tawny floorboards dimpled with the imprints of furniture scrapes and dropped pots, and blackly freckled with ancient woodworm. A rather beautiful modern rug in greens and golds. A linen press full of antique etched glassware. A pale grey jug filled with white freesias, petals translucent in the sunlight spilling over the table. A glass dome on a dish of decorated cupcakes: sugar flowers, hundreds-and-thousands, edible glitter. Radio Three, down low: Liszt or Chopin, maybe.
    A large painting – a dim-coloured landscape of some sort – hangs over the fireplace at the far end, probably one of Nina’s, but I can’t get a good look at it from here. Christopher is on the floor, carefully stroking a black and white cat, who is reclining there like an emperor, just about tolerating the attention for now.
    ‘And this is Sophie,’ Nina says, ‘My daughter.’
    Glancing up from the iPad, she half-rises from the table, politely lifts a hand, says, ‘Hi.’ Tall, loose-limbed, in skinny jeans and stripy socks, a hoodie with lettering on the front: I recognise the logo of a store that I’d be too intimidated to enter.
    ‘Do they let you out for lunch?’ I say, and she looks at me blankly, and Nina says, ‘Oh, it’s half term.’
    Of course, she goes to the private school further up the hill. I’ve seen the kids streaming in and out of the wrought-iron gates in their yellow-trimmed blazers, in intimate confiding pairs and trios, or in larger, more febrile packs. Clumsily, because girls this age frighten me – I remember how unwaveringly