| Description | Be careful who you invite into the bosom of your home - she may never leave...The new novel from Fay Weldon, the writer who knows women better than they know themselves. Heather and Martyn are a decent, hard-working, ecologically-minded young couple - partners with a new baby, bickering over whether they should get married or not and how to arrange their lives in a morally sustainable way. Heather has given up work to look after baby Anna, but she is, frankly, bored by domesticity. They meet Agnieszka, a domestic Polish paragon who's married to a bus driver back home and is sending money back to her old mother and sister. Morally responsible couple that they are, Martyn and Heather take pity and invite her to live with them. Heather eventually succumbs to temptation and asks Agnieszka to baby-sit, and soon she's back at full-time work. In fact life is pretty much as it was before the baby came along, except the house is cleaner and better organized, and she's galloping ahead in her career. perfect as it is, thanks to the existence of Agnieszka, who is modest, docile, prepared to work for a pittance, and not even too pretty for comfort. And if she tells the occasional lie - the little sister turns out to be a child - and her social attitudes are atrocious, well, they can be overlooked. She'll learn our ways along with the English language. But soon, things begin to sour. Martyn and Agnieszka grow closer and it occurs to Heather now that baby Anna, given a choice, would choose Agnieszka over her. Her friends are warning her - but that's too vulgar for consideration. And their lives are by now hopelessly intertwined - it's too late. And so the downward spiral continues, as visas, a marriage of convenience and even her own friends and family conspire to force Heather out of her home and her partner's bed |
