‘Come on, let’s hide,’ whispered Chattie. ‘It’s awful old Arabella. She only turns up when Daddy’s at home.’

‘We can’t,’ protested Harriet, watching a tall girl get out of the car. ‘She’s seen us.’

‘Anyone at home?’ came a debutante quack from the hall.

The girl who strode into the kitchen was in her late twenties, very handsome, high complexioned, athletically built, with flicked-up light brown hair drawn back from her forehead.

‘Hullo, Chattie,’ she said breezily. ‘How are you?’ But before Chattie could answer she turned to Harriet. ‘And you must be the new nanny. I’m Arabella Ryder-Ross. Cory’s spoken about me, I expect.’ But before Harriet could answer the girl turned to William, who was aimlessly beating the side of his chair with a wooden spoon.

‘What a darling baba. Not another of Noel’s castoffs?’

‘No, he’s mine,’ said Harriet.

‘Oh?’ said Arabella. It was strange how someone could get four syllables out of that word.

‘Doesn’t your husband mind you taking a job?’

‘I’m not married.’

‘Oh, how amazingly brave of you.’ Arabella paused and looked at William again. ‘I must say Cory’s a saint, the lame ducks he takes under his wing.’

‘One, two, four, five. Bugger it. I’ve left out three,’ said Chattie, who was counting Ambrose’s kittens.

Harriet tried not to giggle. Arabella looked appalled.

‘Chattie, don’t use language like that. Run along and play. I want to talk to Nanny.’

‘She’s not called Nanny, she’s Harriet, and I don’t want to play, thank you,’ said Chattie. Then a foxy expression came over the child’s face. ‘Would you like a sweetie, Arabella?’

‘Aren’t you going to offer Nanny one?’

‘It’s my last,’ said Chattie. ‘And I want you to have it.’

‘That’s very kind of you, Chattie,’ said Arabella, popping the sweet into her mouth. ‘I get on so well with children,’ she added to Harriet. ‘People are always saying I’d make a wonderful mother.’

At that moment Cory wandered in and Arabella flushed an unbecoming shade of puce.

‘Hullo, Arabella,’ he said. ‘You look very brown.’

‘It fades so quickly. You should have seen me last week. I’ve just got back from St Moritz, or I’d have been over before. We’re having a little party next Friday.’

Cory frowned. ‘I think something’s happening.’

‘Well, we’ll have it on Saturday then.’

How could she be so unsubtle? thought Harriet.

‘No, Friday’s all right,’ said Cory. ‘I’ve just remembered. It’s Harriet’s birthday. It’ll do her good to meet some new people. Yes, we’d like to come.’

Harriet didn’t dare look at Arabella’s face.

‘Did you like that sweet, Arabella?’ said Chattie.

‘Yes thank you, darling.’

Chattie gave a naughty giggle.

‘Tadpole didn’t. He spat it out three times.’

Harriet scolded Chattie when Arabella had gone, but the child shrugged her shoulders.

‘I hate her, and Mummy says she’s after Daddy. I hope she doesn’t get him,’ she added gloomily. ‘She never gives us presents; she says we’re spoilt.’

‘She’s got a point there,’ said Harriet.

‘She’s just told Daddy he ought to give you the push, because we’re so naughty,’ said Chattie, picking up one of the kittens. ‘But he told her to shut up, and we’d never been better looked after. Goodness, Harriet, you’ve gone all pink in the face.’

Trees rattled against her bedroom window. She looked at the yellow daffodils on the curtains round her bed and felt curiously happy. William was getting more gorgeous every day. She was getting fonder and fonder of Chattie and Jonah. Sevenoaks lay snoring across her feet. She felt her wounded heart gingerly; she was not yet deliriously happy but she was content.

‘Happy Birthday to you,’ sang a voice tunelessly, ‘Happy Birthday, dear Harriet, Happy Birthday to you.’

And Chattie staggered in with a breakfast tray consisting of a bunch of wild daffodils, a brown boiled egg, toast and coffee.

‘Oh how lovely!’ said Harriet. ‘Shall I take the coffee off?’ She put it on the table beside her bed.

‘Daddy’s just finished feeding William,’ said Chattie. ‘And he’s coming up with all your presents. Oh, why are you crying, Harriet?’

‘Harriet’s crying, Daddy,’ she said to Cory, followed by Mrs Bottomley, as he came in and dumped William on the floor.

Cory saw Harriet’s brimming eyes.

‘She’s entitled to do what she bloody well likes on her birthday,’ he said. ‘Get off the bed, Sevenoaks.’

‘She’d better put on her dressing gown,’ said Mrs Bottomley, looking at Harriet’s see-through nightgown. ‘Happy Birthday, love.’

Harriet couldn’t believe her eyes when she opened her presents. Ambrose and Tadpole had given her a rust silk shirt. Sevenoaks was broke and had only given her a pencil sharpener. Chattie gave her a box of chocolates, several of which had already been eaten.

‘I just had to test they were all right,’ said Chattie.

There was also a maroon cineraria from Jonah, which he had chosen himself and bought with his own pocket money, and a vast cochineal pink mohair stole from Mrs Bottomley, which she’d knitted herself, because Harriet never wore enough clothes. Cory gave her a grey and black velvet blazer, and a pale grey angora dress.

‘But they’re beautiful,’ she breathed. ‘I’ve never seen anything so lovely.’

‘Sick of seeing you in that old duffle coat,’ said Cory.

‘Daddy loves giving presents,’ said Chattie, ‘and he hasn’t got Mummy to give them to any more.’

When she’d eaten her breakfast, she got up and went to look for Cory. She found him in his study flipping through the pages of the script he’d written yesterday.

Harriet cleared her throat.

‘I just want to thank you for everything,’ she said, blushing scarlet. ‘For making me feel so happy here, and for all those heavenly presents. I really don’t deserve either, what with Sevenoaks and all the messages I forget to pass on and all that.’

And, reaching up, she gave him a very quick kiss on the cheek and scuttled out of the room.

‘Sexy,’ said Chattie, from the passage.

As the hour for Arabella’s party approached, Harriet grew more and more nervous. She’d been a disaster in the singles bar. What likelihood was there that she’d be any better with the hunting set? She must remember to say hounds instead of dogs.

She was sitting wrapped in a towel, putting her make-up on, when Chattie banged on her door.

‘Come on. I want to show you something. Keep your eyes shut.’

‘It can’t be another present,’ thought Harriet, feeling the thick carpet under her feet as Chattie led her towards the stairs, then turned sharp right into Jonah’s bedroom. She shivered as a blast of icy air hit her.

‘Don’t look yet,’ said Chattie pushing her forward, ‘Now you can.’

Through the open window above the elm trees, at the bottom of the garden, Harriet could see a tiny cuticle of new silver moon.

‘Now wish,’ said Chattie. ‘It doesn’t work if you see it through glass. Wish for the thing you most want in your life. I’ve already wished for some bubble gum.’

Harriet, listening to the mournful cawing of the rooks, suddenly felt confused.

For the first time in months, she didn’t automatically wish she could have Simon back. He was the fix, the first drink, that would trigger off the whole earth-shattering addiction all over again. She didn’t want her life disrupted. Her thoughts flickered towards Cory for a second, then turned resolutely away. Please give William and me happiness and security whatever form it takes, she wished.

She turned round and found Cory standing in the doorway watching her. She couldn’t read the expression on his face.

‘I hope it’s a sensible wish,’ he said acidly. ‘Like making your dear friend Sevenoaks less of a nuisance. He’s just eaten the back off my only pair of dress shoes.’

He kicked Sevenoaks who slunk towards Harriet, rolling his eyes and looking chastened at the front, but waving his tail at the back.

Chattie flung her arms round him.

‘He’s so clever, Sevenoaks,’ she said. ‘He’s eaten your shoes because he doesn’t want you to go out.’

‘He’s definitely an asset, Daddy,’ said Jonah, who’d just arrived for the weekend.

‘He’s a very silly asset,’ said Cory.

‘Ryder Cock Ross to Banbury Cross,’ said Chattie.

The Ryder-Ross’s house was large, Georgian and set back from the road at the end of a long drive.

Women were clashing jaw bones, exchanging scented kisses in the hall. One of them, in plunging black and wearing so many diamonds she put the chandeliers to shame, was Sammy’s boss, Elizabeth.

When Harriet went upstairs to take off her coat, the bed was smothered in fur coats.

She was wearing the dress Cory had given her for her birthday. She examined herself in Arabella’s long gilt mirror. It did suit her; it was demure, yet, in the subtle way it hugged her figure, very seductive. Oh please, she prayed as she went downstairs, make someone talk to me, so I’m not a drag on Cory.

He was waiting for her in the hall — tall, thin, remote, the pale, patrician face as expressionless as marble.

As they entered the drawing room, everyone turned and stared. A figure, squawking with delight, came over to meet them. It was Arabella, wearing a sort of horse blanket long skirt, a pink blouse, and her hair drawn back from her forehead by a bow.

‘Cory, darling, I thought you were never coming!’

She seized Harriet’s arm in a vice-like grip. ‘I’m going to introduce Nanny to some people her own age.’