Cristina Odone - The Dilemmas of Harriet Carew

Still, the Lady Chesham girls continued to haunt me, even at my first meeting with Guy’s parents.

‘Where did you go to school? Tonbridge? It must have been Lady Chesham – did you know the Lanchester girls?’

‘Actually, I wasn’t at Lady Chesham,’ I correct her. ‘I went to the Grammar School.’

‘Ah,’ said Cecily, after a pause. ‘How clever of you.’

‘Drove she ducklings to the water,’ yodels Guy.

‘Dad, pleeeeeeeeease!’ Alex hisses furiously. But what with the pedals pumping and the wheels whirring and other people’s cars rolling past us, Guy can’t hear his anguished plea.

‘Every morning just at nine!’ ‘Stop it, Dad!’ Alex shouts loudly.

Alarmed, Guy jams the brakes on, skids and hits the kerb. He falls. Alex and I stop on our bicycles immediately, and turn to watch as he slowly picks himself up: mud cakes his hands and a rip gapes at his knee.

‘Oh, darling,’ I moan – the ‘darling’ is for Alex, who looks devastated at the sight of his dad.

‘Nothing to fuss about,’ Guy calls out cheerfully, mistaking the object of my concern. He dusts himself off and mounts once again on his steed of steel. A huge silver Jaguar whooshes past us.

As we approach the school building, I see the same picture replicated all over the car park: large, imposing cars, perfectly coiffed and groomed women, sleek men in expensive suits, and uniformed boys in all shapes and sizes, standing around or running about.

‘We’d better clean off some of that.’ I search my handbag, which I’ve stuffed in the cycle basket, and hand Guy one of those wet-wipes I always keep on hand for Maisie. I remove my helmet and rake my fingers through my hair, trying to fluff it up. I’m about to be inspected, and I doubt I’ll pass muster as a Griffin mum.

We lock up our cycles not far from where a chauffeur leans against a Bentley. Guy unrolls his trouser legs, Alex checks his.

‘Hey, Alex!’ A blond boy waves our son over to his family’s Land Rover. Alex runs off without a glance in our direction. Guy and I slowly follow him up the path to the school; on the front steps, we are surrounded by boys sporting glowing tans who dart in and out of the door, talking loudly about their holidays in Panarea or Provence.

‘Ben: great hair cut – NOT!’

‘Theo, you’ve shrunk!’

‘Whoa! Alex, have you seen Johnny’s scar?!’

We pile into the school hall, a cavernous, gloomy, oak-panelled room, for a bracing service of hymns and pep-talk. Alex easily takes his place among his friends, and I see his dark head bob among a large group until he eventually becomes indistinguishable, one among many jostling uniforms.

I swallow hard; the ritual has begun, once again. Five days a week, from eight to four o’clock, our son is learning at the feet of some of the best and brightest in the land; 24/7, we are tightening our belts to provide this opportunity for him.

‘Lord, Behold us in Thy presence once again assembled here …’ I look around the whitewashed hall, filled with boys, parents and teachers; this is what we have sacrificed so much for.

We file out of the hall, in a crush of expensive scents and clothing. ‘I’ll see if I can pre-empt the bursar …’ Guy says, looking uneasy. He leaves my side and I can see him trying to make his way to Mr Cullen.

I spot a forbidding clutch of Griffin mums. My stomach churns and my ears ring with the contemptuous comment about my roots that I overheard at Mario’s. As usual, my efforts to fit in with my new Whistles skirt, bought on sale last month for £25, have come to naught: cycling has wrinkled the skirt, and Rufus’s pleading pawing as I walked out of our front door has given my smart white cardigan two black smears, right under my breasts.

Real Griffin mums fall into two categories – and both are always sure of a soft landing. The McKinsey mums run hedge funds or a chain of glamorous florists, and look as if they can crush the life out of any difficulty. The Boden belles married money and look as if life gets no worse than a milk spill on their Cath Kidston tablecloth. Neither group has any experience of the unsettling sensation of sliding further and further down the property and career ladders, irrevocably pinned down by the combined forces of school fees, mortgage payments, taxes, credit-card demands and bills. They worry about whether their children will get into the right school. We worry about their getting there – and our having to pull them out because we can’t afford the fees.

Stage fright fills me as I approach the group of mothers. I feel as if I am back at school, a plump swot trying to fit in with the popular girls. But without a boyfriend, C-cup breasts, or expensive clothes, I didn’t stand a chance.

Now, some twenty years later, I make a vain effort to smooth out my skirt and shake my hair into place as I approach another terrifying clique.

‘Hullo, Alex’s mum!’ A pretty blonde waves to me. Perhaps I needn’t worry, this is one day when every woman is only someone’s mummy, after all. Alex’s popularity makes up for my unglamorous wardrobe and borderline size-14 figure. ‘Julian was so disappointed that Alex didn’t come and stay.’

I recognize her now: Julian Foster-Blunt is one of Alex’s best friends, and invited him to stay with his family in Sardinia. Only £59 return on Ryanair, but there were also water-skiing lessons: Julian had one every morning, he told Alex, at £80 a time. ‘Outrageous!’ Guy had exploded. ‘A day’s safari in Botswana costs less than that!’

‘Maybe next summer?’ Julian’s mum smiles benevolently at me. ‘Xan and the children love the villa so much, we’re buying it.’

Before I can reply, another mother, in a Chanel suit, has jumped in. ‘Thank God it’s all over! It’s been non-stop sea-sickness, sunburn, hay fever, and even the youngest knows how to text now. You should see the mobile phone bill I’ve been landed with!’ I identify the Chanel wearer as a McKinsey mum, and she immediately proves my hunch was correct. ‘That’s it, that’s all I’m going to get from Goldman’s for holidays this year.’

‘American banks don’t do vacations, do they?’ Laura Semley, school governor, steps in. Laura used to run her own PR company, but has given that up to run her sons’ school, in the same fashion. ‘Well, another year begins.’ Laura waves a regal hand to encompass the school, boys and teachers. ‘I just hope –’ she lowers her voice conspiratorially ‘– that Merritt is as good at running a prep school as old Jellicoe was.’

‘Oh, he seems steely enough.’ Julian’s mother looks relaxed. ‘And the teachers are fab. Worth every penny, really.’ I doubt, somehow, she counts her pennies; but there is something so sunny about her, with her golden highlights, carefully screened tan and tasteful chains, that it is difficult to resent her the good fortune she obviously enjoys.

‘Hmph!’ Laura Semley eyes up McKinsey Mum as a kindred spirit. ‘Actually, it’s been under-performing for five years now. The results look OK, but they are tweaking it. When you drill down, those scholarship figures include all sorts of bogus “all-rounder” awards at places like Wellington College .’ She sniffs in disgust. ‘We used always to have at least one Queen’s scholar at Westminster, plus two at Winchester, and one at the other top-notch schools. But they’ve got the scholarship set all wrong. They are confusing stocks and flows: the point is not to make the most of what they’ve got, but to constantly select the cleverest ones and ditch the under-performers. We’ve got a governing body academic sub-committee open meeting on this. Maybe you should sign up for it?’ She is addressing herself exclusively now to McKinsey Mum. She can tell that Julian’s mother and I wouldn’t know a balance sheet from a duvet, and couldn’t drill down through data if you put the apparatus into our trembling hands.