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Hilary eats Sugar Puffs as she gathers her homework together, every now and then sprinkling more spoonfuls of sugar on the already sweetened cereal. Madeleine hasn’t the energy, indeed the desire, to stop her daughter destroying her looks. Why should she? Hilary is walking witness to Madeleine’s wrongs, Madeleine’s ruin. See, says Madeleine in her heart, regarding Hilary, see what has become of me. See what Jarvis has done?

      And Hilary stuffs and puffs, shovelling in fuel: for what? Resentment, boredom, anxiety, despair? Or gathering her reserves against the onslaught of the next weekend?

      During the week Hilary lives with her mother. At weekends she lives with her father Jarvis and her stepmother Lily, sleeping not in the spare room (which is kept for guests) but on a camp bed in Jonathon’s room. Lily means to slim Hilary down. It is her earnest desire. On Saturdays and Sundays Lily gives Hilary a breakfast of lemon tea with artificial sweetener, two boiled eggs and one slice of starch-reduced toast spread with low-calorie margarine. But such a breakfast, followed by equally austere lunches and dinners, cannot, alas, undo the damage done by Madeleine on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

      During recent months Hilary’s bosom has expanded alarmingly. Puffed wheat has become her favourite food; yes, she is altogether puffed out. Hilary stares out of pale eyes: has her mother’s sallow complexion, a puffy face, a double chin, a stodgy body, beautiful thick and golden hair tumbling on to graceless shoulders, and a sharp, sad mind.

      Madeleine is forty-four, and gaunt. Madeleine is like her daughter; she eats and eats Sugar Puffs by the jumbo-size packet, and tinned milk (cheaper than fresh) by the dozen cans – but Madeleine just gets thinner and thinner. Unlike her daughter, Madeleine is vain. Her ragged jeans, her old brown matted sweater, torn beneath the arm, proclaim her with a fine exactitude to the world. This is me, Madeleine, what I am, what I have become, what I have been driven to. By Jarvis.

      Wicked Jarvis. Madeleine goes to jumble sales, elbowing and stamping in order to achieve a yet more ragged pair of jeans, a yet more matted jersey by way of illustration. Madeleine will examine herself carefully in the mirror before leaving the flat: adjusting the armpit hole just nicely, so it hides the wisp of underarm hair, but not for long. Madeleine has a yellowing complexion and thick, rusty, vigorous hair, which tears teeth from combs. Madeleine’s cheeks are hollow; her huge brown eyes stare reproachfully from deep sockets. Madeleine’s voice is husky. Madeleine looks mean and hungry, which is what she feels.

      Madeleine and Hilary make their home in two basement rooms in a terrace house. It is all Madeleine can afford – or rather, all that Jarvis will afford. The front room has a barred window which looks out on to a white-painted basement area. This room is the kitchen. That is, there is a sink beneath the window, with a damply rotten brown wooden draining board and an electric hotplate with two burners, which stands on top of a hospital locker. Thanks to Hilary, who has saved and scraped and stolen the loose change which lies about her father’s house in order to buy her mother this splendid present, Madeleine also has the use of a rotisserie-and-grill. This appliance has not been fixed to the wall because the plaster will clearly not stand its weight, and so it stands, perforce, on the small pre-war refrigerator, bought second-hand in the market (on Hilary’s insistence). Madeleine does not much care for cooking, which in any case is an expensive and time-wasting occupation. Why have toast when bread and butter will do? But Hilary likes a kitchen to look like a kitchen.

      Poor Jarvis.

      A brown guinea pig in a cage on the table, staring and snuffling, eats every morning what Sugar Puffs Madeleine and Hilary leave. Hilary picks up old cabbage leaves and vegetation from the street market on her way home from school to provide his evening meal: so the pig can be said not just to cost little, but to save waste on a national level.

      Madeleine’s back room looks out on to a damp and sunless London garden, to which only the top floor tenants have access. In this room are Madeleine’s double bed and Hilary’s camp bed, and their wardrobe and their piles and piles of washing. Madeleine and Hilary are the recipients of countless articles of cast-off clothing, which they neither care to wear, let alone wash, or can bear to throw away.

      So they lie about in heaps ankle deep.

      Madeleine pays £5.23 a week rent (a sum fixed by the Rent Officer) and receives from Jarvis maintenance of £20 a week for herself and Hilary. Once this sum seemed lavish. Now inflation makes it a dubious means of support, although it still looms large enough in Lily’s mind. (Twenty pounds? Lily’s father the butcher brought home fifteen and that was at the height of his career as the best butcher in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand.) Madeleine should go out to work; Madeleine will not for ever be able to put off doing so. But why should she earn? To salve Jarvis’s conscience? To enable Lily to buy even more expensive little pairs of white French socks for baby Jonathon’s tender, much resented feet? No. And how can she earn? Hilary comes home from school, and needs a mother. Hilary’s school holidays last for four months of every year. Fathers such as Jarvis don’t stop work on a child’s account. Mothers such as Madeleine are expected to.

      Listen now, carefully, to their conversation. Madeleine and Hilary talk in riddles, as families do, even families as small and circumscribed as this one, using the everyday objects of life as symbols of their discontent.

      1 HILARY: Mum, I can’t find my shoes again.

      2 MADELEINE: (looking) They’ll be where you took them off. (Finding) Here they are.

      3 HILARY: Not those old brown things. My new red ones.

      4 MADELEINE: You can’t possibly wear these to school. They’re ridiculous. They’ll cripple your feet.

      5 HILARY: No they won’t. Everyone else wears platforms.

      6 MADELEINE: In that case, everyone else will be going round in plaster casts, and serve them right.

      7 HILARY: You only don’t like them because Lily bought them for me.

      8 MADELEINE: I don’t like them because they’re ugly and ridiculous.

      9 HILARY: I can’t find the other ones, and I’m late. Please, mum. They’re my feet.

      Which, being translated, is—

      1 HILARY: Why is this place always such a mess?

      2 MADELEINE: Why are you such a baby?

      3 HILARY: You know nothing about me.

      4 MADELEINE: I know everything about you.

      5 HILARY: I want to be like other people.

      6 MADELEINE: Other people aren’t worth being like.

      7 HILARY: I know all about you, don’t think I don’t.

      8 MADELEINE: You force me to tell the truth. Our whole situation is ugly and ridiculous and I despair of it.

      9 HILARY: Then let me find my own way out of it, please.

      So Hilary defeats her mother, as the children of guilty mothers do, and goes off to school wearing the red shoes with platform heels; she trips over them in the Humanities lesson and cricks her ankle, and pulls a video tape machine from a shelf to the floor in so doing, and does £115 worth of damage. The headmistress subsequently attempts to ban all platform heels from the school, and fails.

      Once Hilary has left, Madeleine goes back to bed, and half sleeps until half past ten, when she gets up, makes herself some instant coffee, sweeps the floors vaguely and washes up badly; and peers up through the area bars into the dusty brightness of the streets, wondering what there is in the outside world that others find so animating, and that keeps them so ceaselessly busy.

      Madeleine, sweeping and dusting, thinks, feels, hurts, tries. Listen. Madeleine’s inner voices cajole, comfort, complain, encourage, in equal measure.

       Oh, I am Madeleine, the first wife. I am the victim. I have right on my side. It makes me strong. I feed on misery. But I no longer have the strength to be unhappy, not all the time. It has been going on too long. Days drift into weeks, and weeks into months. Three years since Jarvis married Lily, two since she had her brat. Even so, every morning for an

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