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and used the roller on it for weeks.
    ‘You might as well do things properly if you’re going to bother to do them at all,’ he used to say, fairly often.
    On the few days it was warm enough for Poppy to toddle outdoors I struggled to keep her on the patio, for Graham’s hard-working sake.
    We made an earnest pair, Graham and I, so proud of our house; but Martha’s attitude was undermining, she was so unconcerned about hers. It made us look so uptight and conventional, so materially obsessed, forever fiddling with curtains and mats, and I suspected that Martha found my loo-seat cover amusing. We weren’t like that – not really.
    But we were certainly going wrong somewhere because the atmosphere in her house was so much easier, while ours still smelled of new paint no matter how often I opened the windows.
    In the evenings, later, when the kids were safely in bed and we went round for a slapdash supper at Martha’s warped and crayoned table, her hysterical kitchen of half-burned candles and battered pine – with its baggy cushions, chipped china, bright yellow walls and cats on the Aga – managed to give out an ambience of sophisticated French cafe life which we could never achieve with our matching candles in our beige dining room.
    My little triumph.
    Against all the odds my children were bigger and heavier than hers. Probably because they were used to regular meals and not fed scrapings out of the fridge at whatever time was convenient for Martha. And, in my opinion, the bottle gave them a better start.
    ‘I thought mine would be giants like me,’ said Martha rather ruefully. ‘Not scruffy street urchins with lanky loins, like a Dickens illustration.’
    ‘Martha can be far too casual,’ I gloated to Graham self-righteously that day. ‘It’s all very well her telling me to relax, saying I do too much or I worry too much, but you can see how it pays off in the end.’
    ‘Martha’s a slut,’ said Graham.
    ‘But nice with it,’ I had to say.
    ‘Yes, a very nice slut,’ he agreed.
    ‘Do you sometimes wish I was more like Martha?’
    ‘Christ, no, why would I? She is melodramatic, loud and lazy. She would drive me demented. I couldn’t live with her for a second, and you couldn’t live with Sam.’
    Would he like to screw Martha? I wondered.
    Men looked at Martha, men were enamoured in spite of the hair under her arms.
    I was too stiff. It was hard to bend. Compared to the voluptuous Martha who admitted she preferred sex in the kitchen I felt like a frump, although I was not yet thirty. People have called me aloof, mistaking my shyness for haughty disdain, and the way that my nose turns up doesn’t help.
    ‘But as we’re going on holiday together,’ said Graham with a sigh of gloom, ‘we’d better just hope that we all get on.’
    As the months sped by, we proud mothers watched as our little girls smiled their first smiles, grew their first teeth, gurgled their first words and crawled their first few yards. Those were the days. The best of times.
    But eight years on and the tables were turning.
    The bullying had been going on for weeks before I found out about it.
    Thinking back, yes, Poppy had been quieter, but then she’d had more homework to do as she came to the end of her last year at junior school and I knew she was dreading the move to the comp.
    I was frantic and frightened when I discovered her skiving off school. Thank God I did find her and managed to stop it happening again before it became a dangerous habit. I came across her in the mall, sitting among a gaggle of wrinklies on a bench outside Marks & Spencer.
    At first I couldn’t believe it. I assumed she was on some project. I even smiled to see her there. ‘Poppy! What’s going on? I didn’t know you did this on a Wednesday.’
    But where were all the others? Why did she look so pale?
    She hung her head, empty of answers, and then her blue eyes filled up and she began to cry.
    ‘Whatever’s the matter?’ I fished for a