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pass this on. I haven’t told any of the girls because I didn’t want Peony telling Mrs Capstone. Toby and Deborah are such friends, you see. It might be awkward. But there’s every chance my daughter-in-law will be the Labour candidate at the next election.’
    The Miss Poppy! look was back.
    â€˜Oh, it’s all right,’ said Poppy. ‘We’re terribly respectable, I promise you. I’ve even joined the party, though I’ve voted Liberal all my life. As a matter of fact my daughter-in-law did it all for me first time, but we aren’t all mad Militants, I promise you.’
    â€˜There’s some of them will rob you blind,’ said Laura, one of those mysterious, dark, nursery warnings to which old-fashioned nannies give utterance, carrying all the force of generations of wrong knowledge. Poppy was beginning to wonder whether the convenience of having Laura to look after Toby on Saturdays would be outweighed by the resulting culture confusion inside that small skull when Nick, who had been quietly toeing one of the play-centre trikes up and down the path in front of the bench, left it with his usual and rather frequent whining whimper and ran to Laura. Poppy looked and saw Deborah coming down the path.
    Poppy had been half-watching Deborah’s activities while she was talking to Laura. A few yards further along the path there was a structure known as the Wendy House, cuckoo-clock-shaped, with big eaves, painted blue and yellow. It stood near the bottom of a slope in the path, down which toddlers more adventurous than Nick used to free-wheel on the trikes. Deborah had commandeered the hut, and just as each child came to a halt she was darting out like a trap-door spider, seizing the trike and stuffing it through the door.
    According to Janet, Mr Capstone was some kind of mysterious middle-European entrepreneur, so perhaps this was hereditary behaviour, an attempt to corner the trike market. Peony was nowhere in sight, though it was accepted that all minders had a duty to control the anti-social drives of their charges. Deborah had successfully bullied two tots off their machines with no more than the threat of a scream, and now, with a lull in the use of the slope, was ranging further afield for prey. Poppy rose from the bench and intercepted her.
    â€˜Hello, Deborah,’ she said. ‘Have you seen Toby? Where’s Toby? I’ve lost Toby? Where can he be?’
    Deborah didn’t answer her smile. Her calm blue eyes stared back in disdain at the obviousness of the subterfuge, then glanced beyond Poppy to where, by the sound of it, Laura was reassuring Nick of his rights to the tricycle. She hesitated. They’d had a really successful game of hide-and-seek round the climbing frame and in and out of the open-ended barrels only yesterday afternoon. Happy and involved, Deborah could be a perfectly reasonable, likeable child.
    â€˜Oh, look,’ said Poppy. ‘There he is!’
    Deborah gave in and followed her pointing arm. Toby had finished with the climbing frame and was rolling one of the barrels along the grass. He’d put a beach-ball into the barrel, and was trying to study its movement at the same time as trundling the barrel forward, but his co-ordination wasn’t up to the complexities of the posture and as Poppy watched he fell flat on his face. Deborah forgot about the tricycle and scampered across to help.
    The empathy between them was extraordinary. Though both, for different reasons, had previously tended to behave as natural solitaries, there was a bond between them whose nature Poppy didn’t fully understand. Perhaps Deborah recognised that Toby was somehow not in competition with her, that his interests were such as she could not dominate, nor would he want to dominate her, while she for him had the fascination of glamour and strangeness. It wasn’t a unique relationship, of course—a kindergarten version of Arthur Miller and