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‘Mutton dressed as lamb, I know me duck,’ she says cheerfully, though I wouldn’t say lamb exactly. She likes spiked heels and patent leather mini-skirts, tight neon-coloured satin blouses. She wears her hair in an orange beehive and her legs are sensational. She has a stream of lovers, thirty years her junior at least, whom she treats kindly – ‘I give them the time of their life, darling’ – and then in the nicest possible way discards before they become attached. Her voice is a deep sexy purr and we fight constantly but amicably over the Gauloise she will smoke from a long tortoise-shell holder so that the clothes, when you shake them out, all have a faint reek of France.
    My working life is markets and motorways, the shop and Connie and clothes. Image. It is all surface, unlike Foxy’s working life which is earnest and burrows beneath the surface. But clothes are important, they are part of it, Foxy says so herself. She likes to get her subjects to talk about their clothes, the fashions, the costs, the difficulties, it is a rich seam to mine, she says. Oh Foxy. She is glamorous – even naked. The clothes she wears are severe, her spectacles too, stern ovals, but her chestnut hair, that is long and slippery. She wears it in a French pleat that will not stay properly in. She is often to be seen, both hands behind her head, her mouth full of hair-grips, recapturing it. She wears too much lipstick and it never quite matches the shape of her lips. It is always bright – vermilion or cherry or scarlet – and always too big, slipping over the edges of her mouth. It is her only design fault and I love it. All our cups and glasses have red grease-marks on the rims, because unless you scrub, it will not come off. Still, I don’t mind, I like to drink from the very place where her lips have been. God, I am besotted! No wonder she wants … no! She has not said she wants to go and she is sleeping so sweetly beside me, how could she sleep so sweetly if she was not happy? If she did not want me beside her?

4
    My mother has met Foxy, although I did not introduce her as Foxy. That name too pungent and feral to be taken into my family. My friend, I called her, my friend Sybil. It makes me laugh that she is really called that, Sybil – prophetess, fortune-teller, witch. She is none of those things – except in her capacity to bewitch me. She is the most rational and pragmatic of beings. Sybil Fox. It is only me who calls her Foxy, to most of her other friends she is Syb, quite inappropriate: a numb little snippy snub of a name. And she calls me Zelda. She has made me Zelda, a desirable grown-up woman when before I was a child, Griselda, known to my family, and even a lover or two, as Grizzle.
    I have never told my mother, in so many words, that Foxy, Sybil, is my lover, but I know she knows. She is not shocked. She has an open, Scandinavian, streak in her. She has visited me, us, three times in this flat. Christmas shopping in York has become a new ritual. We wander round the shops until our feet are aching and then have lunch followed by tea and wicked cakes in Betty’s, her treat. It is the most mother-and-daughterish thing we do.
    She has seen the bedroom with the double bed, the double wardrobe, the two pairs of slippers on the floor. Foxy’s study has a single bed where she sometimes snoozes in the afternoons among her papers so Mummy might think she sleeps there, if she wants to think that then she can. But I know she knows we are a couple because last year her Christmas card to us read: To Griselda and Sybil with love from Mum and Dad as if we are a married couple.
    Mum and Dad . That is the last time and I did not treasure it. This year the card will read only love Mum to her family, love Astrid to everyone else. How will she do it after forty-two years? How will she stop her hand writing and Dad or and Ralph ?
    I wish I had got through to her tonight. Why was