Janet will be home at seven; she’s finishing a game. Then I run the bath, and fill the bathroom with steam, and bathe, with pleasure, slowly. Afterwards I look at the black and white dress, and see that the collar is slightly grimy, so I can’t wear it. It irritates me that I wasted that dress on the office. I dress again; this time wearing my striped gay trousers and my black velvet jacket; but I can hear Michael say: Why are you looking so boyish tonight, Anna? — so I’m careful to brush my hair so that it doesn’t look boyish at all. I have all the fires on by now. I start two meals going: one for Janet, one for Michael and me. Janet at the moment has a craze for creamed spinach baked with eggs. And for baked apples I have forgotten to buy brown sugar. I rush downstairs to the grocer’s, just as the doors are closing. They let me in, goodhumouredly; and I find myself playing the game they enjoy: the three serving men in their white coats joke and humour me and call me love and duck. I am dear little Anna, a dear little girl. I rush upstairs again and now Molly has come in and Tommy is with her. They are arguing loudly so I pretend not to hear and go upstairs. Janet is there. She is animated, but cut off from me; she has been in the child’s world at school, and then with her little friend in a child’s world, and she doesn’t want to come out of it. She says: ‘Can I have supper in bed?’ and I say, for form’s sake: ‘Oh, but you’re lazy!’ and she says: ‘Yes, but I don’t care.’ She goes, without being told, to the bathroom and runs her bath. I hear her and Molly laughing and talking together down three flights of stairs. Molly, without an effort, becomes a child when with children. She is telling a nonsensical tale about some animals who took over a theatre and ran it, and no one noticed they weren’t people. This story absorbs me so that I go to the landing to listen; on the landing below is Tommy, also listening, but with a badtempered critical look on his face — his mother never irritates him more than when with Janet, or another child. Janet is laughing and sploshing the water all around the bath, and I can hear the sound of water landing on the floor. In my turn, I am irritated, because now I shall have to wipe all this water up. Janet comes up, in her white dressing-gown and white pyjamas, already sleepy. I go down and wipe up the seas of water in the bathroom. When I return, Janet is in bed, her comics all around her. I bring in the tray with the baked dish of spinach and eggs and the baked apple with the clot of crumbly cream. Janet says, tell me a story. ‘There was once a little girl called Janet,’ I begin, and she smiles with pleasure. I tell how this little girl went to school on a rainy day, did lessons, played with the other children, quarrelled with her friend … ‘No, mummy, I didn’t, that was yesterday. I love Marie for ever and ever.’ So I change the story so that Janet loves Marie for ever and ever.