Free Aphrodite's Hat by Salley Vickers

shy little girl didn’t cry one bit when her mother left her with their neighbour at number seven. Perhaps not enough, even, for Susannah’s sense of her own importance to her daughter, though it went without saying that she was grateful for Nan’s kindness.
    When it was time for Kitty to start school, it made sense for Nan to collect her at the end of the day and give her her tea and keep the child round at hers until Susannah came home from work. And it made sense, too, that Kitty went to Nan’s over half-term and in the school holidays. Kitty seemed not to miss her home or her parents during these periods and quite often spent the night in the brass bed, not quite a double but certainly wider than the usual single, which had once belonged to Nan’s daughter, Bella, and then had been the province of Bella’s twin girls. The twins were grown up now and had gone to New Zealand where one had married an oncologist and the other an ear, nose and throat specialist, keeping, as Nan liked to remark, on twin lines. On the head of the bed, Nan had painted a field mouse’s nest with tiny curled field mice babies and beneath it, watching, a weasel with a predatory look in his black beads of eyes. These animals, the mouse family and the weasel, were among the cast of creatures woven into the stories which Nan told Kitty as she fell asleep on the nights her parents were out or it just seemed so much simpler for Kitty not to go home.
    From time to time, Susannah worried about Kitty’s attachment to Nan but Geoff would reassure her. ‘She doesn’t love us any the less for loving Nan,’ he would say. ‘Anyway, it’s good for kids to have an extended family. Your parents are no use. Nor are mine, if it comes to that.’
    Geoff’s parents had been killed in an air crash before Kitty was born. Susannah had been born to her parents late in life and had been brought up on stern lines. She loved her daughter deeply, but the habits laid down in our childhood will noiselessly inform our adult behaviour and more of Susannah’s parents’ philosophy had rubbed off on her than she would have recognised or wanted to own.
    One half-term holiday Kitty was staying over at Nan’s and she had a nightmare. She got out of bed and ran to Nan’s room where, hardly seeming to surface from unconsciousness, Nan had said soothingly, ‘Hop in with me, pet, and snuggle down here.’
    When she woke in the big bed which smelled of Nan’s
Coty
talc, Kitty said, ‘Mummy doesn’t let me get into bed with them if I have nightmares.’
    Nan said, ‘Oh, there, Kitten. I’m sure she will if you ask her.’
    Two days later Susannah called round to see Nan. After some awkward conversation about local events she said, ‘Nan, Geoff and I want Kitty to learn to sleep alone. We’d prefer that when she stays here you don’t allow her into your bed.’
    Nan for a moment spoke her mind. ‘That’s cruel if the child is scared.’
    Susannah’s face took on the expressionless look of which Geoff, had he thought about it, had grown afraid. ‘I don’t want this to become an issue, Nan.’
    The next time Kitty had a nightmare while staying at Nan’s, Nan said, ‘Go back to bed, darling,’ and when Kitty began to wail piteously, ‘Don’t cry, my pet. I’ll come and sit with you.’
    Kitty, through tears, sobbed, ‘But you let me last time …’
    â€˜I know, lovie.’
    Nan sat by Kitty’s bed till she fell asleep, her face still damp with tears. By then it was hardly worth going back to bed herself. She went downstairs and made a cup of tea and watched the dawn come up with a pain in her side.
    After that, every time Kitty had a bad dream while staying at Nan’s the child would beg to come into Nan’s bed – and Nan, hating herself, refused. But one half-term, when Nan had not been feeling