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was earning £7 an hour chatting to him in this way – if he was happy, I was happy.
    I walked him through the flat to the back stairway. We were on the first floor and in the garden I could see Mr Scott, my landlord and my dentist, doing his strange exercises – waving his arms, stamping his big feet – before another patient arrived in his surgery down below us.
    Hugues said goodbye and I sat down in the kitchen, leaving the door open, waiting for my next pupil from Oxford English Plus. This would be her first day and I knew little about her apart from her name – Bérangère Wu – her status – beginner/ intermediate – and her timetable – four weeks, two hours a day, five days a week. Good, steady money. Then I heard voices in the garden and stepped out of the kitchen on to the landing at the top of the wrought-iron staircase, looking down to see Mr Scott talking urgently to a small woman in a fur coat and pointing repeatedly at the front gate.
    'Mr Scott?' I called. 'I think she's for me.'
    The woman – a young woman – a young oriental woman – climbed the staircase to my kitchen. She was wearing, despite the summer heat, some kind of long, expensive-looking, tawny fur coat slung across her shoulders and, as far as I could tell from an initial glance, her other clothes – the satin blouse, the camel trousers, the heavy jewels – were expensive-looking also.
    'Hello, I'm Ruth,' I said and we shook hands.
    'Bérangère,' she said, looking round my kitchen as a dowager duchess might, visiting the home of one of her poorer tenants. She followed me through to the study, where I relieved her of her coat and sat her down. I hung the coat on the back of the door – it seemed near weightless.
    'This coat is amazing,' I said. 'So light. What is it?'
    'It's a fox from Asia. They shave it.'
    'Shaved Asian fox.'
    'Yes… I am speaking English not so well,' she said.
    I reached for Life with the Ambersons, vol. 1. 'So, why don't we start at the beginning,' I said.
     
    I think I liked Bérangerè, I concluded, as I walked down the road to collect Jochen from school. In the two-hour tutorial (as we came to know the Amberson family – Keith and Brenda, their children, Dan and Sara, and their dog, Rasputin) we had each smoked four cigarettes (all hers) and drunk two cups of tea. Her father was Vietnamese, she said, her mother, French. She, Bérangère, worked in a furrier's in Monte Carlo – Fourrures Monte Carle – and, if she could improve her English, she would be promoted to manager. She was incredibly petite, the size of a nine-year-old girl, I thought, one of those girl-women who made me feel like a strapping milkmaid or an Eastern-bloc pentathlete. Everything about her appeared cared-for and nurtured: her hair, her nails, her eyebrows, her teeth – and I was sure this same attention to detail applied to those parts of her not visible to me: her toenails, her underwear – her pubic hair, for all I knew. Beside her I felt scruffy and not a little unclean but, for all this manicured perfection, I sensed there was another Bérangère lurking beneath. As we said goodbye she asked me where was a good place in Oxford to meet men.
    I was the first of the mothers outside Grindle's, the nursery school in Rawlinson Road. My two hours of smoking with Bérangère had me craving for another cigarette but I didn't like to smoke outside the school so to distract myself I thought about my mother.
    My mother, Sally Gilmartin, nee Fairchild. No, my mother, Eva Delectorskaya, half Russian, half English, a refugee from the 1917 Revolution. I felt the incredulous laugh clog my throat and I was aware I was shaking my head to and fro. I stopped myself, thinking: be serious, be sensible. My mother's sudden revelatory detonation had rocked me so powerfully that I had deliberately treated it as a fiction at first, reluctantly letting the dawning truth arrive, filling me slowly, gradually. It was too much to take on board in one go: never