MONDAY, 5:57 A.M. “Aaaannnd open the world. Aaaand close the world. Open the world aaand close the world.”
I am standing in the middle of the living room, legs wide apart and arms above my head. In each of my hands I hold a ball, one of those squidgy ones that feels like a giant octopus head. With the balls, I am required to draw a circle in the air. “Aaaand open the world aaaand close the world.”
The person telling me to do this is a loopily cheerful fiftysomething woman with a crystal on a chain round her neck; she probably runs a protection league for animals that everybody else would be perfectly happy to see run over: rats, bats, stoats. Fay is a personal trainer hired to help me with my intensive new year relaxation and exercise program. I got her over the phone from the Juno Academy of Health and Fitness. Not cheap, but I figure it will save me a lot if I can get back into my pre-pregnancy clothes. Plus, it must work out as less expensive than joining gyms I never have time to visit.
“The only exercise you ever get, Kate, is lifting your wallet with all those health club membership cards in it,” says Richard.
Unfair. Unfair and true. According to conservative estimates, my annual swim at the most recent health club, sneaked between lunch at Conundrum and a new business pitch in Blackfriars, worked out at &Bembo.xa3;47.50 a length.
Anyway, there I was expecting Cindy Crawford in pink Lycra and what do I find when I open the door but Isadora Duncan in green loden. A windblown faery creature, my personal trainer was sporting the kind of double-decker cape previously only worn by Douglas Hurd when Foreign Secretary. “The name’s Fay,” she said dreamily and, from one of those carpet bags that Mary Poppins keeps her hatstand in, she produced what she called “my Chi balls.”
Rotating the Chi balls in slow patient circles is not exactly what I had in mind. I ask if we could possibly move on and do some work on my stomach. “You see, I had a cesarean and there’s this overhang of skin which just won’t go away.”
Fay shivers at the interruption, fastidious as a greyhound at a sheepdog trial. “My approach is to the whole person, Katya. I may call you Katya, mayn’t I? You see, once we have freed up the mind, we can move on to the body, gradually introducing the various parts to each other until we establish a harmonious conversation.”
“Actually,” I tell Fay, with as much harmony as I can muster, “I’m incredibly busy, so if we could just say, Hello, stomach muscles, remember me? that would be terrific.”
“You don’t have to tell me you’re busy, Katya. I can see by the weight of your head. You really have a very heavy head. A poor stressed head. And the neck ligaments. Loose! Loose! Looose! Barely supporting your poor head. And this in turn is bringing truly intolerable pressure onto the lower lumbar region.”
And there I was thinking you paid these people to make you feel better. After thirty minutes of Fay, I feel as though my next appointment should be with an embalmer. Now she suggests I lie flat on my back, extend my arms over my head and pretend I’m lying on a rack. Mind flicks to thoughts of traitors having secrets dragged out of them in the Tower of London at twenty-five quid an hour by ye olde personal torturer. According to Fay, this exercise will realign my spine, the spine that is one of the saddest and most misshapen Fay has ever seen.
“That’s it, that’s it, Katya, excellent.” She beams. “Now, bring your arms slowly forward over your head and repeat after me, If we compete, we are not complete. If we compete, we are not complete.”
7:01 A.M. Departure of Fay. Truly intolerable pressure lifts immediately. Treat myself to bowl of Honey Nut Loops; I cannot do exercise and self-denial in the same morning. Sitting at the kitchen table am suddenly aware of unaccustomed sound, a dry scratchy wireless hiss, and look round the room for its source. It takes a couple of minutes to track it down: silence. The sound of nothing is shouting in my ears. Have five minutes to myself, drinking it in, before Emily and Ben come whooping through the door.
After the holidays, I always sense a special edge to the children’s neediness. Far from being satisfied by the time we’ve had together they seem famished, as ravenous for my attention as newborns. It’s as though the more they have of me, the more they’re reminded how much they want. (Maybe that’s true of every human appetite: sleep begets sleep; eating makes you hungry; fucking stokes desire.) Clearly, my kids have not grasped the principle of Quality Time. Since we got back from Richard’s parents, every time I go out the door it’s like the Railway Children seeing their father off to jail. Ben’s face is a popped red balloon of anguish, and Emily has started doing that hideous coughing thing in the night — she hacks and hacks until she makes herself sick. When I mentioned it to Paula for reassurance, she said, “Attention-seeking,” with a quiet note of triumph. (Implying that attention is lacking, obviously.)
Then there are Emily’s nonstop requests for me to play with her, always at the most inconvenient times, as if she were testing me and at the same time willing me to fail. Like this morning, when I am desperate to get to a doctor’s appointment, she comes up and hangs on my skirt.
“Mummy, I spy with my little eye something beginning with B.”
“Not now, Em.”
“Oh, pleeese. Something beginning with B.”
“Breakfast?”
“No.”
“Bunny rabbit?”
“No.”
“Book?”
“No.”
“I don’t know, Emily, I give up.”
“Bideo!”
“Video doesn’t begin with B.”
“It do.”
“It does.”
“It does begin with B.”
“No, it doesn’t. It begins with V. V for van. V for volcano. V for violent. If you choose the right letter, Emily, it saves an awful lot of time.”
“Katie, give her a break, she’s only five years old,” says Richard, who has ambled downstairs, hair still damp from the shower, and is now carefully cutting out a Cruella De Vil mask from the back of a Frosties packet.
Glare across the table at him. Trust Rich not to back me up. He is so bad at presenting a united front.
“Well, if I don’t correct her, who’s going to? Not those all-spellings-are-equally-valid mullahs at school.”
“Kate, it’s I Spy, for God’s sake, not Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”
Rich, I notice, no longer looks at me as though I am merely mad. A certain sideways flicker to the eyes and corrugating of the brow suggests he is now weighing up how long he should leave it before calling the ambulance.
“Everything’s a competition for you, isn’t it, Kate?”
“Everything is a competition, Rich, in case you hadn’t noticed. Someone wanting to smash your conker, someone wanting a prettier special-edition Barbie, someone wanting to take your biggest client away just to prove you couldn’t handle it.” As I unload the dishwasher, I think of Fay and her daft mantra. What was it? “If we compete, we are not complete.” She should try that one in the offices of Edwin Morgan Forster. “If we do not compete, we are out on the street. In the sheet.”
“Mummy, can I watch a bideo? Pleeese can I watch a bideo?” Emily has climbed up onto the granite worktop and is attaching a Barbie slide to my hair.
“How many times have I told you, we don’t watch bideo — Jesus, video—at breakfast time.”
“Kate, seriously. What you need is to slow down.”
“No, Richard, what I need is a helicopter. I’ve got an appointment at the doctor’s for which I am going to be ten minutes late, making me even later for my conference call with Australia. The Pegasus minicab number’s on the board, can you ring? And tell them not to send that weirdo in the Nissan Sunny.”
RICHARD IS A NICER person than me, anyone can see that. But in suffering, in bitter experience, I am his superior and I carry that knowledge like a knife. Why am I so much tougher on Emily? Because I guess I’m scared that Rich would bring up our children to live in an England that doesn’t exist. A place where people say “After you” instead of “Me first,” a better and a kinder place, for sure, but not one that I have ever lived or worked in.
Rich had a happy childhood, and a happy childhood is terrific preparation — indeed, the only known apprenticeship — for being a happy adult. But happy childhoods are no bloody good for drive and success; misery and rejection and standing in the rain at bus stops are the fuel for those. Consider, for instance, Rich’s tragic lack of guile, his repeated undercharging of clients he feels sorry for, his insane optimism up to and including the recent purchase of erotic underwear for a wife who, since the birth of her first child, has come to the nuptial bed in a Gap XXXL T-shirt with a dachshund motif.
Children do that to you, don’t they? He is Daddy and I am Mummy and finding the time to be Kate and Richard — to be You and Me — well, it slipped down the agenda. Sex now comes under Any Other Business, along with parking permits and a new boiler. Emily — she can barely have been three then — once found us kissing in the kitchen and turned on her parents like Queen Victoria discovering a footman with his finger in the port.
“Don’t do that. It gives me a tummy ache,” she hissed.
So we didn’t.
8:17 A.M. Despite my specific request, Pegasus Cars has once again sent round the Nissan Sunny. The back seat is so damp you could start a mushroom farm in there. Tensing both thigh muscles and buttocks and hiking up my Nicole Farhi gray wool skirt, I do my best to squat an inch or two above the mildew.
When I ask the driver if he could possibly find a quicker route to the surgery, he responds by turning up the volume on the tape deck so high my cheekbones start to shiver in gale-force music. (Is this gangsta rap?)
After my attempt to be friendly to Winston before Christmas, I have no plans to talk to him again. But as I am fighting my way out of the car door, he turns round and, on an exhalation of yellow smoke, says: “I hope they got something strong enough in there to treat you with, lady.”
Bloody cheek. What does he mean by that? Things don’t improve when I get in to see the GP and ask for my annual supply of the Pill. Dr. Dobson taps his computer and the screen starts to flash a green hazard light as though I am some devious criminal mastermind wanted by the CIA.
“Ah, Mrs. Shattock, I see you haven’t had a smear test for… how long is it now?”
“Well, I did have one in ’96 and you broke the slide. I mean, they wrote and said it had broken in transit and could I come in again. But, obviously, I’d already been in and time is very tight, so if I could please just have my pills?”
“And there has been no time in the last four years when you could drop in for another test?” A basset hound in human form, Dr. Dobson has that wet-eyed solicitude common to dogs and caring professionals.
“Well, no. I mean you have to ring for an appointment and hang on for ages because they never seem to answer the phone, and…”
His finger moves to a date halfway down my notes. “And on one occasion you failed to cancel. March twenty-third of last year.”
“Taiwan.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I was in Taiwan. Hard to cancel when it’s the middle of the night in another hemisphere and you haven’t got an hour to hang on the phone hoping the receptionist in Drayton Lane will pick up out of idle curiosity.”
The doctor tugs anxiously on his tie — it is beige and apparently woven from Shreddies. “I see, I see,” he says, clearly not seeing at all. “Well, I don’t think it would be sensible for me to prescribe you another year’s worth of Microgynon until you’ve had your smear, Mrs. Shattock. The Government, as you may have heard, is taking a very proactive role in cervical health.”
“The Government thinks it would be better for me to have another baby?”
He shakes his head sadly. “I wouldn’t put it that way. The Government is merely keen to encourage women to avoid a life-threatening illness with a simple test.”
“Well, if I have another baby I really will be dead.” God, I can’t believe I just said that. What do you mean by that, Kate?
“There’s no need to get upset, Mrs. Shattock.”
“I am not upset,” I insist, rather too shrilly. “I’m just a very busy woman who doesn’t need any more children right at the moment if you don’t mind. So if you could please let me have my pills.”
The doctor takes a slow, careful note with an ancient Biro that has a clump of ink snot on its nose. It gives every word it writes a presmudged outline. He asks me if I have any other symptoms.
“But I’m not ill.”
“Are you sleeping properly? How is your sleep?”
For the first time since Loopy Fay arrived at six this morning, my features relax enough to form a smile. “Well, I have an eleven-month-old son with teeth coming through. Sleep doesn’t really go with the territory, does it?”
Dr. Dobson returns my smile, but with wary creases at the edges — creases that act like inverted commas around the smile. I realize that the look on his face can properly be described as long-suffering. Who is long in suffering if not a doctor? The amount of pain he must see. Anyway, he tells me to come in any time I feel I need to. Any time at all. Says he will ring down to the nurse right away and see if she can fit me in for a smear now. “You can surely spare ten minutes?”
I surely can’t, but I do.
9:06 A.M. OFFICES OF EDWIN MORGAN FORSTER. Arrive late and dying to go to the loo. Will have to wait. Need to submit nine fund reports, having talked to twelve different managers by Wednesday. Also must present in-depth briefing on Japanese Toki Rubber Company fiasco by Wednesday. Then Rod Task pitches up at my desk and tells me I have to go and salvage my career by giving blow job to Jack Abelhammer in New York on — why, Wednesday. Not sure the term blow job was actually used, but he definitely said “on your knees, honey.”
To: Candy Stratton
From: Kate Reddy
Terrific start to the day. Smear test. Like having sex with the Tin Man. Can’t they make that damn probe out of rubber, or would they just get sad women like me queuing up to have it done twice a week?
Got in here sixteen minutes late and Guy is at my desk telling everyone he’s Almost Certain that Kate will be in At Some Point. Felt like Mummy Bear and wanted to growl, Who’s been sitting in my chair? Said nothing. Wouldn’t give the little creep the satisfaction.
Plus I have to go to NYC to “placate” client. Have never met Jack Abelhammer, but I H8 him already.
To: Kate Reddy
From: Candy Stratton
Dear Desdemona, U shd watch Guy “Iago” Chase. Don’t drop that handkerchief, honey. He wants yr job so badly his gums ache.
PS: Have fckd brainless Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion (Sat night, Nobu), but never tried Tin Man. Able Hammer sounds prmsng tho.
To: Debra Richardson
From: Kate Reddy
Glad to hear you’re still alive after Xmas. Not sure I am. (How can I tell?) Sorry about Felix’s knee and Ruby’s ear infection. Can someone pls coin new word for holiday with children that doesn’t imply (a) holiday, (b) rest, (c) pleasure?
helliday? K xxxxx
2:35 P.M. Just as I am going into European Group meeting, Paula calls. Says she thinks she may have caught the sick bug Emily had over Christmas. Is it all right if she leaves early today?
Think: No, that is Absolutely Out of the Question, this is your first day back at work after two whole weeks off.
Say: Yes, of course, you poor thing, you sound terrible.
I ring Richard at the office. He is in a meeting about designing some Peace Pagoda for British Nuclear Fuels. Leave urgent message asking if he can get home and hold the fort soonest.
8:12 P.M. Squeak home in time for Emily’s bed. Bump into Richard in the hall. Says no, he hasn’t sorted out the new parking permit yet. Yes, they both had their hair washed. Run upstairs. Am desperate to make it up to her after this morning’s harsh words over I Spy. All milky warmth, my daughter curls my hair round her finger. “Who is your favorite Tweenie, Mama?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart.”
“Milo is the biggest.”
“Ah. What did you do at school today, love?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh, I’m sure you did. What did you do, Em?”
“I spy with my little eye something beginning with W.”
“Window?”
“No.”
“Wallpaper?”
“No.”
“Well, what could it be, I wonder. Wecorder?”
“Yes! You are clever, Mummy.”
“I try, darling. Really I do.”
Thank-you letters, dismember Christmas tree and hide in rubbish bags from bin men who won’t take trees away (Not part of our job, love), Check for Bouncy Babies class (94 quid a term — cheaper to enroll in astronaut training), Emily new ballet leotard (blue not pink), find osteopath to check out “heavy head,” ring Mum, return call from sister or she will be confirmed in view am posh cow who has lost touch with her roots—highlights! Passport expiry please God no. Ask cool friend what is gangsta rap. No cool friends. Make cool friend. Downstairs ballcock Richard? Baby-sitter Sat/Weds, pay newspaper bill/read back issues of newspapers, call nanny temp agency if Paula still ill, See amazing new kung fu film — Sitting Tiger? Sleepy Dragon? Trim Ben’s nails, name tags, dentist appointment, ring Juno Academy of Fitness and book personal trainer who will contract stomach instead of trying to expand soul, Ben birthday Teletubbies cake where? Pelvic floor squeeeze. Return Snow White video to library! Emily school applications get organized. Be nicer, more patient person with Emily so doesn’t grow up to be needy psychopath. Quote for new stair carpet. Call Jill Cooper-Clark. Social life: invite people Sunday lunch — Simon and Kirsty? Alison and Jon? Think about half-term plans. What, already? Yes, already. Swimming party on Sunday for “Jedda”—girl or boy find out? Empty bladder more frequently. Prepare to meet Jack Abelhammer.
TUESDAY, 4:48 A.M. There is a scream from Ben’s room. A Hammer Horror scream. Third time tonight — or is it fourth? Teething again. And we’re already over the legal Calpol limit. Will probably be exposed in News of the World as Monster Mum Who Doped Tot for Kip. They’re right to call it a broken night — cracked and unmendable. You crawl back to bed and you lie there trying to do the jigsaw of sleep with half the pieces missing. Perhaps he’ll go back by himself. Please let him go back. It’s always around now, when the dark is silvery with the first inkling of light, that you start cutting desperate deals with God. “Oh, God, if you’ll just let him go back to sleep, I’ll…”
I’ll what? I’ll be a better mother, I’ll never complain again, I’ll savor every grain of sleep I get from now until my dying day.
No, he won’t go back. Benjamin’s experimental are-you-there? yelps have given way to full-throated Pavarotti aria (“Nessun Dorma” means None Shall Sleep, doesn’t it?). The book tells you to leave baby to cry, but Ben hasn’t read the book. He doesn’t understand that after forty minutes or so of continuous crying, baby will settle down. The book says that Ben may have attachment issues; I think he’s just figured out that the Mummy who isn’t here in the day is available for nocturnal cuddles.
Brain is willing to get out of bed, but body lags behind like a morose teenager. Next to me, Richard lies on his back, hands folded across his chest, exhaling king-size sighs. Sleeping like a baby. (Where the hell did that expression come from?)
Climbing the stairs, legs feel encased in calipers. Through the landing window I can make out the terrace of houses at the bottom of our garden with their spooky sightless eyes. An early riser turns on a kitchen light and the room ignites with a saffron flare like a match. The windows offer a pretty good view of the wealth of the people inside: our area lies to the northeast of the City, so plenty of astute financial types like me have moved in here and ruined themselves doing up damp and peeling Victorian wrecks. Our houses are the ones with no covering at the window, their owners preferring to rely on expensively restored shutters while our poorer neighbors still comfort themselves with proper curtains or hide their business behind nets like veils. In the seventies, couples like us tore out all the old Victorian fittings — fireplaces, cornices, baths with a beast’s gnarled claw at each corner — in the name of modernity and now we, in the name of a newer kind of modernity, have paid a fortune to have them put back again. (Is it coincidence that we spend far more than our parents ever did on the restyling and improvement of our homes — homes in which we spend less and less time because we are out earning the money to pay for French chrome mixer taps and stripped oak floors? It’s as though home had become some kind of stage set for a play in which we one day hope to star.)
Upstairs, I find Ben rattling the bars of his cot. He grins and extrudes a thread of spittle that bungee-jumps off the end of his chin right down to the crotch of his sleep suit and shimmers there, twirling in the dark.
“Hello, you. What time do you call this, eh?”
I hoist him out and, overcome by the joy of our reunion, he tries a brand-new incisor on my neck. Ow!
I never wanted a boy. After Emily, I suspected my body could only make her kind, and anyway I was more than happy to have another girl — beautiful, self-contained, intricate as a watch. “Boys are like so over,” Candy announced to a lunch for female colleagues this time last year. My bump was so big the wine-bar manager had to fetch a chair, because I couldn’t slip inside the booth with everyone else. We all laughed. Nervous, insubordinate laughter, but tinged with triumph — the laugh of the Celts when they knew the Romans’ time was nearly up. But then, three days later, they handed him to me in the delivery room. Him! Something so small, faced with the vast and implausible task of becoming a man, and I loved him. Loved him like a shot. And he couldn’t get enough of me. Still can’t. A mother of a one-year-old boy is a movie star in a world without critics.
He’s so heavy suddenly, my baby: that lithe body is filling out with boyness. Thighs as dense and plump as a boxer’s glove. I carry him to the blue chair, hold his hand and begin to croon our favorite song.
“Lavender’s blue dilly dilly, lavender’s green,
When I am King dilly dilly, you shall be Queen.”
Mothers have been singing this for centuries and still no one has the faintest clue what it means. The singing of lullabies is a bit like motherhood itself: something to be done instinctively in the dark, although its purpose feels magically clear.
I sense every part of Ben relax, his weight shifting inside the Babygro like sand until he is evenly distributed across my chest. You have to judge the moment just right; you have to guess when doze has deepened into dream. I stand up and move stealthily towards the cot, not letting him drop down until the very last second. There. Hallelujah! Then, just when I’m thinking I’ve got away with it, his eyes snap open. Bottom lip trembles for a few seconds like Rick glimpsing his lost Ilsa in Casablanca, then the whole mouth forms a tremulous O and the lungs fill for a reprise of the scream.
(Babies never extend any credit. They have a tyrant’s disdain for fairness. They grant no time off for cuddles received, no parole for long hours spent nursing in the dark. You can answer that cry a hundred times, and on the hundred and first they’ll still have you court-martialed for desertion.)
“All right, all right, Mummy’s here. It’s OK, I’m still here.”
We go back to the blue chair. I hold Ben’s hand and begin the sleep ritual over again.
5:16 A.M. Ben finally flat out.
5:36 A.M. Emily asks me to read a book called Little Miss Busy. No.
7:45 A.M. Paula back today and feeling much better, thank God. Ask her to remember Teletubbies cake for Ben’s birthday on Friday — oh, and candles. And go easy on the biscuits in case the other mums are crazy Sugar Ayatollahs. (Last year, Angela Brunt issued a fatwa on raisins.) Paula asks me for a large amount of cash, sufficient to cater Buckingham Palace garden party, but don’t dare query.
8:27 A.M. So out of it by the time I get to Broadgate that I pick up two double espressos at Starbucks and down them like vodka shots. I read somewhere that people suffering from sleep deprivation are in what’s called a hypnagogic state — a sort of purgatory between sleeping and waking, where surreal images drift across the brain. Like being permanently stuck in a David Lynch movie. This could account for the fact that Rod Task is ceasing to come across as a merely annoying Aussie bully and is starting to resemble unblinking Dennis Hopper with madman’s laugh. I sit at my desk wearing the old pair of glasses I keep in the drawer to give an impression of intense cerebral activity; then I select the most mindless task available, one where making mistakes will matter least. So long as I don’t buy or sell anything I should be OK. I have twenty-nine e-mails. Can hardly believe the first one.
To: Kate Reddy, EMF
From: Jack Abelhammer, Salinger Foundation
Katharine,
I can’t tell you how relieved I am to have worked out the problem we ran into over the holidays. Clearly it was a bad time for you too.
It’s great news about Toki Rubber and the patenting of the unbreakable prophylactic. Amazing recovery of stock. I admire your coolness under pressure. Maybe we can celebrate when you get here on Thursday? Terrific new lobster joint down the street.
Best, Jack
To: Kate Reddy
From: Candy Stratton
What say we hit Corny & Barrw for bottle or 2 so we can get arrestd for disordly cnduct & miss fckg stratgy mtng?
U look wreckd. C xxxxx
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
I don’t have to be drunk to be disorderly. Need to go to bed for a week.
love and kisses K8 xxxxxx
To: Candy Stratton
From: Kate Reddy
URGENT! Tell me you just got that msg.
To: Kate Reddy
From: Candy Stratton
Wot msg?
To: Candy Stratton
From: Kate Reddy
About being drunk and disorderly. Quick. HURRY!
To: Kate Reddy
From: Candy Stratton
Srry, hon. U mst have sent to some other lucky gal.
To: Candy Stratton
From: Kate Reddy
To client in New York actually. Am dead woman. No flowers please.
To: Kate Reddy
From: Candy Stratton
Holy shit. Snd anothr Right This Minute.
Dear Sir, my evil depraved twin, also calling herself Kate Reddy, has just sent U a crazy and offensive e-mail, please ignore.
Anyway, don’t worry. Abelhammer’s American, right? Remember we have No Sense of Humor.
3:23 P.M. Team leaders start to file in for strategy meeting in Rod Task’s office. My eyelids are closing like a doll’s. Only thing keeping me awake is the thought that Jack Abelhammer will sue for sexual harassment. Yanks are obsessed with “inappropriate behavior.” Still no e-mail back from him. Hopes that he will put mine down to charming British eccentricity are fading as fast as the daylight. Lost in a nightmare reverie, I fail to notice the approach of Celia Harmsworth. Extending one bony finger, the head of Human Resources prods the place where Ben sank his teeth in this morning. Feels at least three lifetimes ago.
“Something on your neck, Katharine?”
“Oh, that. The baby bit me.”
A couple of guys seated at the table start to snigger into their Perrier. Celia gives the wintry smirk you see on the face of the wicked Queen when she’s handing the apple to Snow White. Make my excuses and shoot to ladies’ room pursued by Candy. Lighting is terrible in here, but the mirror reveals what appears to be a love bite left by a teenage vampire halfway down my neck. Try foundation. No use. Try face powder. Damn. Bite looks angry and foaming, like an aerial view of Mount Etna.
Candy comes in waving Touche Eclat Concealer and starts to dab it on my neck.
“Hey, did Slow Richard give you a hickey? That’s terrific, honey.”
“No, the teething baby did. My darling husband slept through it all. But I nearly bit him to wake him up.”
Back in Task’s office, my male colleagues are doing what they like doing best: they are having a meeting. If this meeting goes really well, if they drag it out long enough, then they can reward themselves with another meeting tomorrow. With luck, the lack of progress in Meeting One can be reviewed in Meetings Three, Four, and Five. When I first arrived as a trainee in the City, I assumed that meetings were for making decisions; it took a few weeks to figure out that they were arenas of display, the Square Mile equivalent of those gorilla grooming sessions you see on wildlife programs. Some days, watching the men maneuver for position, I reckon I can actually hear the bedside whisper of David Attenborough commenting on the beating of chests and the picking of nits: And here, in the very heart of the urban jungle, we see Charlie Baines, a young ape from the US Desk, as he approaches the battle-scarred head of the group, Rod Task. Observe Charlie’s posture, the way he indicates his subservience while desperately seeking the senior male’s approval….
Most women I know around here have a very low tolerance for this kind of politicking. For obvious reasons, we miss out on the willy waving that goes on at the corporate urinals, and seeking out some dandruffed drone to flatter him in a wine bar after work does not appeal— frankly, who has the energy? Like the good diligent girls we were at school, we still think that if we do our very best and get our work done on time, then (a) merit will have its own reward and (b) we can be home by seven.
Well, it doesn’t. And we can’t.
A light vibration from the phone in my jacket pocket tells me a text message has landed. I press VIEW. It’s from Candy.
Q: Hw many mends it tkto scrw ina lightbulb?
A: One.He just holds it& waits for theworld torevolve arnd him.
My snort of laughter attracts hostile stares from everyone around the table except Candy, who is pretending to take furious notes on Charlie Baines’s suggestions for something he calls organizational amelioration.
The review of monthly reports goes on and on. Am losing my battle with unconsciousness again when I suddenly notice that Rod’s computer is still displaying his Christmas screen-saver. It shows a snowman gradually disappearing in a blizzard. I think how restful it would be to be buried in snow, how delicious to slip into its cold accepting nothingness. Think of Captain Oates at the South Pole: “I’m going out now. I may be some time.”
“You’ve only just come back in, Katie,” snaps Rod, aiming his MontBlanc pen at me like a dart.
Realize I must have spoken thoughts aloud like crazy woman who wanders streets dressed in bin bags, giving running commentary of her paranoid inner world.
“Sorry, Rod, it’s Captain Oates. I was just quoting him.”
A roomful of fund managers swivel eyes in unison. At the far end of the table, within licking distance of Rod, my assistant Guy’s equine nostrils flare appreciatively at the first whiff of humiliation.
“You remember Captain Oates.” I prompt my boss. “The one who walked out of a tent to certain death on the Scott expedition to the South Pole.”
“Typical bloody Pom.” Rod snorts. “Meaningless self-sacrifice. What do they call that, Katie, honor?”
They’re all looking at me now; wondering how I’m going to get out of this one. Come on! Kate to brain, Kate to brain, are you receiving me?
“Actually, Rod, the South Pole expedition is not a bad management model. How about we apply it to our worst-performing fund, the one that’s sapping our resources? Maybe the worst fund needs to take a walk in the snow.”
At the suggestion of cost-cutting, Rod’s eyes take on a viscous piggy gleam. “Huh. Not bad, Katie, not bad. Look into it, Guy.”
Eyes swivel away. That was a close one.
7:23 P.M. Crawl home only to find Paula in a huff. A nanny huff can descend as suddenly as sea mist and be twice as treacherous. Can tell this is a bad one because she is actually clearing up the kitchen. What I really want to do is collapse on the sofa with a glass of wine and figure out if any characters I recognize are still alive in EastEnders, which I haven’t seen since June — enough time for entire dynasties to have fallen in Albert Square and for Phil Mitchell to have spawned at least two more love children with his late brother’s ex-wives. Instead, I have to navigate with extreme care around the events of the day. I praise the nutritious contents of Emily’s lunch box, I promise to pick up some name tags tomorrow, saying it’s really no trouble (as if); then I try blatant cultural suck-up by mentioning a soap star who has just given birth and is featured across seven whole pages in Paula’s new copy of Hello!
Two pregnancies have wrecked my short-term memory but left me with freakish instantaneous recall of the names of all celebrity babies. Knowing the offspring of, say, Demi Moore and Bruce Willis (Rumer, Scout, Tallulah) or Pierce Brosnan (Dylan; also the name of the Zeta-Jones/Michael Douglas first sprog and of Pamela Anderson’s second) may not be of any immediate professional use, but it has lifted my stock with Paula on several critical occasions.
“Dylan’s getting to be a very popular name now,” observes Paula.
“Yes,” I say, “but think of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow’s little girl. She was called Dylan and got to the age of eleven and wanted to change her name.”
Paula nods. “And they called the other one something stupid too, didn’t they?”
“Satchel!”
“Yeah, that’s it.” Paula laughs and I join her: the limitless folly of stars being one of the great democratic pleasures. Can see the huff is starting to lift when I stupidly push my luck and ask Paula if she managed to find a Teletubbies cake.
“I Can’t Remember Everything,” she says, and sweeps out with a swish of her invisible black cape. While the front door is still reverberating, I discover the cause of the huff lying open on the worktop. The Evening Standard has a story about how much London nannies are paid and their incredible perks: top-of-the-range car, private health care, gym membership, use of jet, use of horse.
Horse? Thought we were doing OK by letting Paula use my car while I take the bus. Whatever happens, I am not going to be blackmailed into paying out more money. We are at our absolute limit already.
8:17 P.M. Tell Richard we will have to give Paula a pay rise. Plus possible riding lessons. A terrible row follows in which Rich points out that, after we have paid her tax and National Insurance, Paula actually takes home more than he does.
“Whose fault is that?” I say.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Nothing.”
“I know your nothings, Kate.”
Over supper, we sit within a few centimeters of each other at the kitchen table, simmering quietly. Richard has cooked spaghetti and put together an avocado and tomato salad. We start a cautious conversation about the children — Ben’s huge appetite, Emily’s new fixation with Mary Poppins—and I am starting to like him again when, twiddling some spaghetti onto his fork, he casually mentions that he made the pesto himself this afternoon. This is simultaneously admirable and horribly demoralizing. I can’t bear it.
“How did you find time to make pesto? And the plates? I suppose you’ll be taking up pottery next. Why the hell can’t you do something that needs doing? How about replacing the parking permit, for instance?”
“The new parking permit is in the car,” he says, “if madam would take a few seconds out of her schedule to look.”
“Oh, we are the ideal husband, aren’t we?”
There is a screech of metal on wood as Rich scrapes his chair away from the table. “I give up, Kate. You ask me to do things to help out, and then when I do them you despise me for it.”
Somehow I can’t formulate a reply to this. It seems both an incredibly brutal thing to say and impossible to argue with. Women often joke that they need a wife to take care of them, and they mean it: we all need a wife. But don’t expect us to thank the men who sign up for the role of homemaker for taking it away from us.
“Kate, we have to talk.”
“Not now, Rich, I need a bath.”
STILL OUT OF BATH OILS, I find an old packet of lavender salts at the bottom of the airing cupboard. It promises to “soothe and motivate”: I add some of Ben’s Pirate Pete bubbles, which turn the water school-uniform navy.
Climb into the scalding blue lagoon and lie back with my favorite reading matter — in recent years, let’s be honest, my only reading matter. Better than any fiction, Jameson’s “Country Property Guide” is a glossy brochure crammed with photographs of desirable properties for sale around the British Isles. We could exchange the Hackney Heap for, say, a converted mill in the Cotswolds or a pocket-size castle in Peeblesshire. (Where is Peeblesshire? Sounds a bit far.) The pictures are fabulous, but what I really like are the specifications. On page 18, there is a house in Berkshire with annex study with a barreled ceiling and gardens full of mature fruit trees. What is a barreled ceiling? I’m not quite sure, but I want one. And mature fruit trees! I picture myself wafting through a wood-paneled library where there would be freshly cut blossoms in tall vases on the way to the country kitchen boasting a blend of traditional cupboards and up-to-the-minute appliances. Standing next to the Aga — not for cooking in, I would be using the Neff double oven for that — I would write dates on the labels of the jelly made from apples picked from mature fruit trees in extensive gardens while my children played contentedly in the recessed nook upholstered in tasteful fabrics.
“Kate’s porn.” That’s what Richard calls the Jameson’s brochure when he comes across a copy stashed guiltily under my side of the bed. He’s got a point. All the mouth-watering pictures, laid out for my viewing pleasure, allow you to take possession of those lives without having to go through the trouble of actually leading them. The more depressed I get in my own house, the more consuming my property lust.
Thinking of Rich reminds me of our pesto fight and I wince at my part in it. His very kindness and sanity are enough to inspire the opposite in me. Why? Richard thinks that I indulge Paula, that I let her get away with things no employee you give generous pay and conditions to should be allowed to get away with. He thinks she’s a reasonably bright twenty-five-year-old girl from Kent who, while being pretty nice to our kids, tries to take us for every penny she can. He thinks she’s lazy, moody and shrinks his socks if he asks her to do anything outside her job description. He thinks she has too much power in our house. He’s right. But Rich doesn’t worry about child care the way I worry; men think about child care with their wallets, women feel it in their wombs. Every twist in the relationship with the person minding your young is a tug on the umbilical. Phones may have become cordless, but mothers never will.
Me, I look at Paula and I see the person who is with my children all the hours I’m not, a person I have to rely on to love and to cherish and to watch out for the first symptoms of meningitis. If she leaves the place in a mess, if she makes a petty point of not putting the dishwasher on because it contains adult as well as junior crockery, if she never gives me the correct change from the supermarket and “loses” all the receipts, then I’m not going to make a fuss.
People say the trouble with professional women of my generation is that we don’t know how to behave with servants. Wrong. The trouble with professional women of my generation is that we are the servants — forelock-tuggingly grateful to any domestic help, for which we pay through the nose, while struggling to hold down the master’s job ourselves.
When I first went back to work, I put my four-month-old daughter into day care. There’s a nursery about ten minutes’ walk from us, and I liked the sunny, resilient Scotswoman who ran it. But gradually things started to get to me. The Baby Room was small and lined with twelve cots. I’d persuaded myself it was cozy when we first went to look round, but every day I dropped Emily off it looked more like a Romanian orphanage styled by Habitat. When I asked Moira how the little ones could take a nap with all the noise from the big kids next door, she shrugged and said, “Och, they get used to it in the end.” And then there were the fines. If you picked up your child any later than 6:30 from Children’s Corner, they charged you ten quid for the first ten minutes, fifty pounds for any longer. I was always later than 6:30. Shame sloshed around like bile in my stomach on the sprint from the Tube to collect her.
Surrounded by thirty other kids, Emily picked up every infection going. Her first winter cold ran from October through March and her baby nose was encrusted with verdigris. Having provided the bacteria for the infection, the nursery was always extremely keen that you keep your sick child at home, with no reduction in fees. I can remember hours on the phone at work pretending to be calling clients, talking to temp agencies or begging help from friends. (And I hate asking for favors: hate the feeling of being indebted.) Then, one bitter morning, I had to drop a feverish Em off at the house of someone who knew someone in my postnatal mother and baby group who lived in Crouch End. At the end of the day, the woman reported that Emily had cried constantly, save for an hour, when they had watched a video of Sleeping Beauty that seemed to comfort her. That day my daughter formed her first sentence: “Want go home.” But I was not there to hear it, nor was I at the home where she so badly wanted to go.
So, no, Paula is not ideal. But what is ideal? Mummy staying at home and laying down her life for small feet to walk over. Would you do that? Could I do that? You don’t know me very well if you think I could do that.
I GET OUT of the bath, apply some aqueous cream to scaly pink patches on hands, back of knees and ears, wrap myself in a robe and go into the study to check messages before bed.
To: Kate Reddy
From: Jack Abelhammer
Katharine, I don’t remember mentioning drink, but disorderly sounds great. Bed for a week could be a problem: may need to reschedule the diary. Perhaps we should make it an oyster bar?
love Jack
Love? From major client? Oh, God, Kate. Now see what you’ve gone and done.
Cut Ben’s nails, Xmas thank-you letters? also letter bollocking council about failure to remove Christmas tree, humiliate ghastly Guy in front of Rod to show who’s boss, learn to send txt messages, Ben birthday — find Teletubbies cake, present — dancing Tinky Winky or improving wooden toy? Dancing Tinky Winky and improving wooden toy. Emily shoes/schools/teach her to read, call Mum, call Jill Cooper-Clark, must return sister’s call — why Julie sounding so pissed off with me; only person in London not seen brill new film — Magic Tiger, Puffing Dragon? Half term when/what? Invite friends for Sunday lunch. Buy pine nuts and basil to make own pesto, cookery crash course (Leith’s or similar). Summer holiday brochures. Get Jesus an exercise ball. Quote for stair carpet? Lightbulbs, tulips, lip salve, Botox?
7:03 A.M. I am hiding in the downstairs loo with my suitcase to avoid Ben. He is next door in the kitchen, where Richard is giving him breakfast. I am desperate to go in, but tell myself it’s not fair to snatch a few selfish minutes of his company and then leave an inconsolable baby. (The book says children get over Separation Anxiety by two years, but no age limit given for mothers.) Better he doesn’t see me at all. Squatting in here on the laundry basket, I have time to study the room and notice swags of gray fluff drifting down the window, like witch’s curtains. (Our cleaner, Juanita, suffers from vertigo, and quite understandably cannot clean above waist height.) Also the mermaid mosaic splashback was left half-tiled by our builder when we refused to give him any more cash, so is all tits and no tail. In the Bible, Jehovah sent floods and plagues of locusts to punish mankind for their vanity; at the end of the twentieth century, he saves time and sends round a plasterer and a couple of brickies.
Through the closed door I can make out muffled brum-brums, followed by Ben’s gluey Sid James cackle. Rich must be pretending that spoonfuls of Shreddies are advancing cars to get him to open his mouth. A honk from outside announces the arrival of Pegasus.
Am slipping out of my own house like a thief when there is an accusatory “Woo-hoo” from the Volvo parked across the street: Angela Brunt, ringleader of the local Muffia. Face like a Ford Anglia, with protuberant headlamp peepers set in a triangular skull, Angela is heroically plain. It’s barely seven o’clock; what’s she doing out? Probably just back from taking Davina to Pre-Dawn Japanese. Give Angela thirty seconds and she’ll ask me if I’ve got Emily into a school yet.
“Hello, Kate, long time no see. Have you got Emily into a school yet?”
Five seconds! Yes, and Angela has beaten her own world record for Educational Paranoia. Tempted to tell her we’re considering the local state primary. With any luck will induce massive on-the-spot coronary. “I think St. Stephen’s is still a possibility, Angela.”
“Really?” The headlamps do a startled circuit of their sockets. “But how are you going to get her in anywhere decent at eleven? Did you read the inspectors’ latest report on St. Stephen’s?”
“No, I—”
“And you do realize state school pupils are two point four years behind the independent sector after eighteen months, rising to three point two by age nine?”
“Gosh, that does sound bad. Well, Richard and I are going to look round Piper Place, but it sounds a bit pressurized. What I really want is for Emily to — you know — be happy while she’s still so little.”
Angela shies at the word happy like a horse at a rattlesnake. “Well, I know they’ve all got anorexia in the sixth form at Piper Place,” she says brightly, “but they do offer a terrific well-rounded education.”
Great. My daughter will become the world’s first well-rounded anorexic. Admitted to Oxford weighing seventy-five pounds, she will rise from her hospital bed and take a dazzling first in Philosophy. She will then do a job for six years, become a mother, give up work because it’s all too much and spend her mornings in Coffee Republic decoding the entrance requirements for St. Paul’s over skinny lattes with the fluent Japanese-speaking housewife, Davina Brunt. Jesus, what is the matter with these women?
“Sorry, Angela, gotta run. Plane to catch.”
Still struggling to pull the minicab door to on its gouty hinges when Angela fires her parting shot. “Look, Kate, if you’re serious about getting Emily into Piper Place I can give you this psychologist’s number. Everyone’s using him. He’ll coach her to draw the right sort of picture at the interview.”
I take a deep grateful breath of the sweet ganja-rich air in the back of Winston’s cab. It takes me back to mellower days, a time before children, when being irresponsible was almost a duty.
“And what does the right sort of picture look like, Angela?”
The Brunt woman laughs. “Oh, you know, imaginative but not too imaginative.”
GOD, HOW I DESPISE myself after conversations with Angela Brunt. I can feel Angela’s maternal ambition getting into me like a flu bug. You try to fight it, you try to stick with your hunch that your child will do perfectly OK without being force-fed facts like some poor little foie-gras gosling. But one day your immune system’s a bit low and bam! Angela’s in there with her league tables and her average reading scores and her psychologist’s phone number. You know what’s really pathetic? In the end, I’ll probably put Emily down for Anorexia High: fear of what insanely competitive schooling will do to my child is outweighed only by fear of holding her back, of her somehow falling behind and its being my fault. And the race starts earlier every year; there’s actually a kindergarten in our borough with a wall devoted to the Impressionists. The mothers have reluctantly come round to the idea that money can’t buy you love, but they think that money can buy you Monet, and that’s good enough for them.
Exhausted working mothers helplessly enrolling their girls in academies of stress. It’s not the only way, but maybe it’s the only way we understand anymore. Stress. Success. They even rhyme.
9:28 A.M. “What’s that lady’s problem?”
“What?”
Winston is studying me in the rearview mirror. His eyes, so brown they’re almost black, are flecked with laughter.
“Angela? Oh, I don’t know. Urban angst, frustrated woman living vicariously through her kids, insufficient oral sex. The usual.”
Winston’s laugh fills the cab. Deep and grainy, it reverberates in my solar plexus and, just for a moment, calms me.
Traffic on the way to the airport is so heavy I have plenty of time to dwell on the forthcoming ordeal of meeting Abelhammer. When I talked to Rod Task last night he said, “Jack seems pretty excited about meeting you, Katie.”
“That’ll be because of Greenspan’s half percent interest-rate cut,” I improvised. Could hardly tell my boss that I have sent my client e-mail promising disorderly conduct and week in bed, not to mention love and kisses.
Can’t seem to stop scratching. Washed my hair last night with new shampoo: allergic reaction maybe? Or perhaps I’ve picked up some lower life-form in the back of Pegasus. Like a swamp, the prehistoric cab could easily be breeding ground for any number of invertebrates.
On the other hand, the music swirling round it hails from the opposite end of human development. The hot blare of trumpets and the syncopated snap of the percussion remind me of Rhapsody in Blue.
“Is that Gershwin, Winston?”
He shakes his head. “Ravel.” My cab driver listens to Ravel?
We are passing the Hoover factory when the slow movement starts. It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. Halfway through, a flute comes in and just sort of breathes over the piano; when I close my eyes I see a bird hovering over the sea.
3:00 P.M. EAST COAST TIME, OFFICE OF SALINGER FOUNDATION. Arrive with a spinning head at the office of the appalling Abelhammer just round the corner from the World Financial Center. Accompanied by my assistant, Guy, who shows no sign of jet lag. On the contrary, Guy is hideously up to speed and knows the Nasdaq fluctuations better than his own pulse.
Have picked out suitably offputting outfit for presentation to Abelhammer: chaste, charcoal, below the knee; Sicilian widow’s shoes. The look is Maria von Trapp before she cut up those bedroom curtains.
My resolve to keep tone of meeting a couple of degrees below zero melts when Jack Abelhammer walks in. Instead of the gray-haired Brooks Brothers patrician I had imagined, here is a languid close-cut jock, around the same age as me, with a slow-release George Clooney smile that reaches his eyes before the mouth is fully engaged. Damn. Damn.
“Well, Kate Reddy,” says the appalling Abelhammer, “it’s a real pleasure to put a face to all those figures you’ve been sending me.”
Huh. I update Salinger on performance of the fund over the past six months. Everything easy-peasy until one of Jack’s junior consultants — a scowling Agent Scully redhead — pushes wire specs up bridge of nose and says, “Can I ask, if your forecast returns for Japan are so low, why are you overweight in Japan?”
“Ah, now that’s a very perceptive question. One for you, Guy, I think.”
Graciously deferring to my assistant, I take a seat and sit back to watch the little creep try to wriggle his way out of that one. Casually check mobile.
Text Message from Paula Potts to
Kate Reddy
Emly snt hme
frm skool wiv
NITS. Hole famly
mst be treatd.
U 2!
cheers paula
I can hardly believe what I’m reading. Have traveled across the Atlantic importing lice like Colorado beetles. Excuse myself from meeting and hurtle to the loo. In the seasick-green light of the executive washroom, I try to examine hair, pulling strands away from head. What do nits look like? Can see cluster of eggs near parting, but possibly dandruff. Frantically comb hair.
It is impossible to get out of prearranged dinner with Abelhammer. Can hardly use emergency pest control as excuse.
7:30 P.M. BRODY’S SEAFOOD RESTAURANT. Over dinner, sit very upright like Queen Mary and some distance away from table. Vision of busy nits rappelling into client’s clam chowder.
“Can I offer you a lift back to the hotel, Kate?” asks Jack.
“Um, fine, but can we stop at a drugstore? I need to get something.”
His eyebrows rise in expectation.
“I mean shampoo. I have to wash my hair.”
“Now? You want to wash your hair right now?”
“Yes. Get London out of my hair.”
Attagirl. Imaginative, but not too imaginative.
1. Have not had legs waxed since Halloween.
2. Nits could parascend onto immaculate Harvard Business School buzz cut.
3. Major client, ergo unprofessional.
4. Am married.
Shouldn’t these points be in a different order?
FRIDAY, 6:02 A.M. Today is my son’s first birthday and I am sitting in the sky 3,000 feet above Heathrow. The plane is much delayed: poor visibility, crowded airways. We have been doing this for fifty-three minutes now, the altitude equivalent of treading water, and it’s making me nervous. Can feel my shoeless feet flexing under the blanket to try and keep us aloft. I think of all those jumbos whispering past each other in the fog.
Over the PA comes the voice of the pilot, one of those chummy call-me-Pete types. Heart sinks. At moments like this do not want pilot to be called Pete. Urgently want pilot to be chap named Roger Carter from Weybridge, Wing Commander, Battle of Britain type, mistress in Agadir, good friend of Raymond Baxter from Tomorrow’s World. Sort of cove who could bring us into land with one hand tied to his handlebar mustache, if necessary. You see, I have to stay alive. I am a mother.
Pilot tells us we will have to head for Stansted. We are running low on fuel. No cause for concern. No, none at all. Today is Ben’s birthday. I need to land safely to collect Teletubbies cake from bakery, also to dress my son for his first party in burgundy cords and soft cream shirt before Paula can put him in the Desert Storm khaki grunge she favors. Dying is totally out of the question. For a start, Richard could never bring himself to tell Emily about periods; he would delegate to his mother, and Barbara would give Em a brief talk about personal freshness before producing something called a sanitary napkin. And she would refer to sex as That Department, as in “there’s nothing amiss between Donald and me in That Department, thank you.” (In the great universal stores of life, I believe That Department is to be found on the floor between Ladies’ Separates and Domestic Appliances.) No, no, no. I have to live. I am a mother. Death wasn’t really an issue before; I mean, obviously you wanted to avoid it for as long as possible, but ever since having the children I see the Unsmiling Man with the Scythe everywhere and I jump higher and higher to avoid his swishing blade.
“Everything all right for you, madam?” In this, the dimmest possible cabin light, the flight attendant has become a letterbox of lipstick around an ice-white smile.
I address myself to the teeth. “Actually, it’s my baby’s first birthday today and I was hoping to be home by breakfast.”
“Well, I promise you we’re doing all we can. Can I get you some water?”
“With Scotch. Thanks.”
8:58 A.M., STANSTED AIRPORT. Refueled plane still sitting on the tarmac. Pontius pilot says it’s not his fault; we have to go back to Heathrow. Oh, this is just marvelous. As we gain height, two empty whisky miniatures skitter off my tray, nearly landing in the lap of the woman across the aisle. She bestows a languorous smile on me, readjusts her mint-green pashmina, then opens a Gucci travel bag. Takes out aromatherapy bottle and dots lavender onto pulse points, applies face spritz before taking thoughtful sips from a large bottle of Evian. Lets her lustrous nit-free head sink back onto dinky gray cashmere pillow. I want to reach over, tap her on the arm and ask if I can buy her life.
Once I’m sure the goddess is safely asleep, I furtively open my own bag. Contents:
Two emergency sachets of Calpol
Unwashed white medicine spoon with jammy rim
Spare knickers for Emily (swimming)
Nit comb purchased for self in NYC
Lone grubby Tampax
Hideous puce Pokémon toy from last weekend’s “crisis” McDonald’s visit
Orange felt tip minus top
Pongy Pete the Puppy book
Wad of Kleenex dyed orange by felt tip
Pack of Banoffee-flavor limited-edition Munchies (disgusting, but only three left)
Coco Chanel miniature Eau de Toilette (atomizer broken)
Little Miss Busy book which Emily pressed on me for the journey
Between my wallet and a wad of dried-out Pampers wipes, I find Jack Abelhammer’s card with home number and message scrawled on back: “Any time!”
At the sight of his handwriting, I get a sensation of claws scuttling across the floor of my belly: the sensation of far-off teenage crushes, of sex when it was still as much a puzzle as a thrill. Over dinner in New York, Jack and I talked about everything — music, movies, Tom Hanks (the new Jimmy Stewart?), the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth the First, Apollo 13, jelly beans, Art Tatum, Rome versus Venice, the mysterious allure of Alan Greenspan, even the stocks I am buying for him. Everything except children. Why didn’t you mention your children, Kate?
2:07 P.M. Back from Heathrow, dash into office to show my face. Create impression of intense activity by piling books and financial journals on my desk, then call my land line from my mobile and keep it ringing. Pick it up and have animated can-do conversation with myself about hot new stock before hanging up. Tell Guy I have to pop out and collect some vital research. Hail cab and get driver to take me to Highbury Corner and wait outside bakery while I leap out to pick up Teletubbies cake. Not bad: Po a little po-faced, perhaps, and Laa-Laa more mustard than yellow. Ten minutes later, pulling into our street, can see a blue balloon tied to the front door. As I walk into the house, Ben waddles into the hall, gives a yowl of recognition and starts to cry. Fall to my knees, gather him in and hug him tight.
This time last year, he was minutes old, naked except for a buttery coat of vernix. Today, dressed by Paula, he is in a red-and-white soccer strip with ADAMS emblazoned on the back. I do not let on how much this upsets me. Instead, when she leaves the kitchen, I calmly hand Ben a carton of Toothkind Ribena and watch as he upends it, drizzling purple flood from neck to navel.
“Oh, dear,” I say loudly. “Not juice all over your lovely football kit. Better go upstairs and get changed.”
Yesss!
4 P.M. Ben’s party is full of Paula’s nanny friends with their charges, many of whom I don’t recognize. They are part of his life without me. When these unfamiliar girls say his name and my son lights up with pleasure I feel a twinge of — what? If I didn’t know better, I’d call it remorse.
In the sitting room, a handful of nonworking mums are in animated conversation about a local nursery school. They hardly seem to notice their kids, whom they handle with an enviable invisible touch, like advanced kite fliers, while the Mothers Inferior like me overattend to our clamorous offspring.
There is an uneasy standoff between the two kinds of mother which sometimes makes it hard for us to talk to each other. I suspect that the nonworking mother looks at the working mother with envy and fear because she thinks that the working mum has got away with it, and the working mum looks back with fear and envy because she knows that she has not. In order to keep going in either role, you have to convince yourself that the alternative is bad. The working mother says, Because I am more fulfilled as a person I can be a better mother to my children. And sometimes she may even believe it. The mother who stays home knows that she is giving her kids an advantage, which is something to cling to when your toddler has emptied his beaker of juice over your last clean T-shirt.
Here in the kitchen, though, I find solace in the company of a handful of familiar women, the tattered remnant of my original postnatal mother-and-baby group. Amazing to think we’ve known each other for more than five years now. Judith, the plump brunette over by the microwave, used to be a patent agent. Went back to work for a couple of years, but then one day she discovered dog hairs in the back of the family Peugeot. Trouble was they didn’t have a dog. Told herself it was nothing to worry about, until the gnawing sensation in her stomach drove her to slip out of work. Parked outside her own house and trailed the nanny to a flat off the Holloway Road. Inside the unlocked door, she found Joshua fenced in a corner behind a fireguard, watched over by an Alsatian, while the nanny, Tara, amused herself in the next room with a boyfriend who had a Metallica tattoo on one of his pumping buttocks.
We all told Judith it was just incredibly bad luck, a single rotten apple in the wholesome nanny barrel. “But what if he saw something, Kate?” she sobbed down the phone.
“Josh didn’t see anything, Judy, he’s not even three. And they don’t remember a thing before they’re five.”
But Judith never risked child care again. We knew that she tortured herself with the thought of the dog’s jaw so close to her baby’s face because, back in those early days, we lacerated our consciences every time we got home and found a new bump or graze on our own infants. These things happened; it was the fact they happened off your watch that seemed to hurt. And then there was the secret never-to-be-spoken conviction that you would have got there sooner. Got to the table corner before her forehead struck, to the tarmac before his tiny knee. Awacs, isn’t that what the military calls it? Nature gives Mother an advance-warning system and Mother is convinced that no minder or man can match her for speed or anticipation.
Judith didn’t object when her husband Nigel said that, as she was no longer working, she could get up for the kids whenever they woke in the night. And, as he was under such pressure at the bank, he would need to take a skiing holiday while Judith got on with the relaxing business of being at home with three children under four. (The twins arrived soon after the nanny left.) The Judith I first knew would have told Hubby where to get off, but that Judith had long disappeared.
The rest of us held firm for a while to the conviction that we had been educated for something better than the gentle warming of Barbie Pasta. But then, one by one, we stopped. “Giving up,” isn’t that what they call it? Well, I’m not calling it that. Giving up sounds like surrender, but these were honorable campaigns, bravely fought and not without injury. Did my fellow novice mothers give up work? No, work gave them up, or at least made it impossible for them to go on.
Karen — she’s spooning jelly into Ella’s mouth — found herself sidelined at her accountancy firm after it was made crystal clear, by the opaque route of nod and wink, that after having Louis she was no longer considered partnership material. Taking her eyes off the Career Path for a few months, she had found herself on what they call the Mummy Track. (The Mummy Track has the appearance of a through road; you can travel for many hundreds of miles along it before you notice you’re going nowhere.) Karen thought she could do her job in four days, one of those days at home; her boss agreed, and that was the problem. If Karen managed, he said, it would create “an unhelpful precedent.”
Funny thing is, when you’re starting out you assume their babyhood will be the hard part, that if you can just butch your way through those fuzzy first weeks then everything will return to normal. But it gets worse: at least at six months of age they can’t tell you it’s you that they want.
Five and a half years after the birth of our babies, only three out of our original group of nine still have jobs: Caroline is a graphic designer in advertising but based at home, so she gets to squeeze all her work in round Max’s school times. She couldn’t make it today because she was putting the finishing touches to a brochure for IBM. Alice — cute face, raven bob, leather gilet, over by the sink — went back to being a director of documentaries that won awards for rooting out corruption in high places and a particularly plangent kind of sadness in low ones. Every night when she got in late from the editing suite, Alice carried a sleeping Nathaniel into her bed. When else would she get to hold him? It was only for a little while, only while he was little. But Nat didn’t grasp that his lease on paradise was short: soon he was lying across the width of the bed, forcing his mother and father into narrow coffins at each side. When Jacob came along, Alice took him into bed too. Soon afterwards her partner, Don, left home, citing a nineteen-year-old researcher and irreconcilable sleeping arrangements.
I look at Alice now, gaunt as an addict. From a distance, she looks as youthful as when we first met, but up close you see how motherhood has stolen her bloom: the boys seem to have literally sucked her blood. She may have won a Bafta, but her sons are even needier by night than the talent she corrals by day, and how would she find the time to meet a new man, even if there was one out there willing to take on the bolshie scions of another male? Reading my thoughts, she says with a grim smile, “My only fix now is the boys, Kate.”
I place my hand on the golden orb of my own boy’s head. A clump of chocolate Rice Krispies is nesting in his left ear. Time to sing “Happy Birthday.” Paula produces a Zippo from her pocket to light the candles (Christ, she’s not smoking now, is she?). I carry the cake to the table. Ben’s eyes are watery with wonder, mine with regret at the fleetingness of it all. Is this the last time I’ll see a baby of mine turn one? And how much of that first year have I actually seen?
“Oh, Kate, you shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble,” says Alice, eyebrow raised and gesturing at the Teletubbies icing.
“Bad mother,” I mouth silently at her across the table.
Laughing, she whispers back, “Me too.”
Nits, cheese, Valentine’s card.
IT’S HARD TO EXPLAIN how my relationship with Jack began. I really wasn’t looking for anyone. I wasn’t happy, but I wasn’t unhappy either; I was in the gray survival zone where I imagine most of us live most of the time. When a badly injured patient gets admitted to Casualty, the hospital staff do what they call triage. Triage is the assignment of degrees of urgency to decide the order of treatment of wounds. I first heard the term one night when I was watching ER on Channel 4—it was that riveting period when we were all wondering how things would work out between Hathaway and Doug — and I thought how much triage sounded like my life. Daily existence was a constant assessment of who needed my attention most: the children, the office or my husband. You’ll notice I leave myself out of that list and that’s not because I’m a good and selfless person. Far from it. Selfishness just wasn’t an option: no time. Most weekends, on the drive home from the supermarket, I would look through the steamed-up windows of a café and see a couple, fingertips touching over cappuccino, or a lone man reading a newspaper, and I would long to go in there and order a drink and just sit and sit. But it was impossible. When I wasn’t at work, I had to be a mother; when I wasn’t being a mother, I owed it to work to be at work. Time off for myself felt like stealing. The fact that no man I knew ever felt that way didn’t help. This was just another area in which we were unequal: mothers got the lioness’s share of the guilt. So the last thing, the very last thing I needed was someone else to love — and then the e-mails started.
In the weeks that followed our first dinner in New York, Jack e-mailed me, first daily and then hourly. Sometimes we would reply to each other within seconds and it felt like one of those rallies in a tennis match where a great return spurs the other player to an inspired lob. I was cool at first, but he was so playful and persistent that natural competitiveness took over and I was soon running to the back of the court to retrieve the ball and return it with some topspin. So, no, I didn’t need him, but he created a Jack-shaped need in me, a need that only he could satisfy. Does the woman in the desert know how thirsty she is till they press the bottle to her lips? I started to look forward to the name Abelhammer dropping into my Inbox more than I have looked forward to anything in my life.
To: Kate Reddy, EMF
From: Jack Abelhammer
Nasdaq hit like Pearl Harbor. heavy casualties. Client seeks considered professional opinion of respected British fund manager: should I shoot myself now or wait till after lunch?
Jack
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
Rest assured respected fund manager has you constantly in mind. Awaiting interest-rate pronouncement from Al Mighty Greenspan.
Professional opinion: long-term recovery inevitable. Don’t shoot.
Unprofessional opinion: hide under desk till shelling stops, go out and see if any stock left standing. Eat turkey club sandwich. Then shoot.
Katharine xxxxx
To: Kate Reddy
From: Jack Abelhammer
Did you know Alan Greenspan’s wife said he was so oblique that when he asked her to marry him she didn’t even notice? That guy’s harder to read than Thomas Pynchon.
Hey, shouldn’t you be in bed? Middle of the night there, right?
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
I like the night. More time in it than the day. Why waste it in bed?
K xxxx
To: Kate Reddy
From: Jack Abelhammer
Bed not invariably a waste of time. Do you know that speech where the guy tells his lover he wishes that seven years were rolled into one night? Must be Shakespeare, right?
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
Seven years in one night sounds just about enough hours to pay off my sleep debt. Not Shakespeare. Marlowe, I think. That’s the unfair thing about Shakespeare, though — everything beautiful belongs to him whether he wrote it or not. He’s the Bill Gates of emotional software.
How come you read Marlowe anyway? Did the Wall St J predict a resurgence in Renaissance playwrights?
To: Kate Reddy
From: Jack Abelhammer
Unfair, milady, unfair. Don’t judge a man by his portfolio. Was once a poor struggling English major but had to find a way of financing my first-editions habit. Some men buy boats, I buy a first edition of Ulysses. What’s your excuse?
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
Was once a poor struggling English minor. Poverty, when it’s not being boring, is really quite scary. I didn’t want to be scared all my life. In Britain, there are plenty of people who will tell you money doesn’t matter; these are the people we call the middle classes.
Owning first editions such a boy’s own thing. Respectfully suggest, sir, you should spend your money on something really important, like SHOES.
K xxxxxxxxxxx
To: Kate Reddy
From: Jack Abelhammer
Do you realize you have now sent me exactly 147 kisses and I have not sent you a single one?
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
It had crossed my mind.
To: Kate ReddyFrom: Jack Abelhammer
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7:01 A.M. Ben has discovered his penis. Lying on the changing mat, he wears the rapt, triumphant expression of a being who has just found the on-off switch for the solar system. Small fingers curled tight around the original joystick, he is absolutely outraged and sheds fat warm tears when I confiscate his favorite new toy by trapping it in a Midi-Pamper and hastily sealing the Velcro flaps on each side.
“No, there’s a good boy. We have to put it away now and go downstairs and have our Shreddies.”
What is the correct mother-of-the-world attitude toward an infant son’s sexuality? Delight that the penis works, of course. Amazement that I could, in my own female body, have grown this caterpillar-sized miracle of plumbing and pleasure. But also strange shyness at evidence of early masculinity with all that it implies — tractors, soccer, other women. One day Ben will have females in his life who are not me, and already a splinter of ice in the heart tells me how that will feel.
Downstairs, I pick my way across the debris on the kitchen floor. Over by the bin, there is a hill of raisins; surely can’t be the same raisins that were there before Christmas? Must tell Paula to stop kids dropping them. (No use asking cleaning lady: Juanita has problem with cartilage and cannot kneel down.) I find Richard bowed in worshipful attitude before the TV. Unshaven, my husband is at his shaggiest and most primitive, like Ted Hughes left in a tumble dryer. Suspect he has developed a crush on children’s TV presenter — Chloe? Zoe? — and when I ask how come he has the kids’ show switched on before either of ours is even awake, he murmurs “very educational” in a gruff not-now-woman manner. Don’t think he has forgiven me since the Great Pesto Row.
I can’t help noticing that Chloe-Zoe is dressed for a Geordie hen night rather than a fierce February morning. She wears an orange sleeveless vest with HOW ABOUT IT? picked out in pink sequins over small but inquisitive breasts. When did children’s presenters start looking like jailbait rather than, say, the estimable Valerie Singleton?
“Richard?”
“Yes.”
“Ben keeps fiddling with himself — I mean, he’s only just one. Seems a bit early. Do you think it’s normal?”
Rich doesn’t even look up. “Happiest form of entertainment known to man. A lifetime’s pleasure ahead of him. Plus it’s free,” he says, cocking his head on one side and returning Chloe-Zoe’s gruesome chipmunk grin.
A gurgle of pleasure across the room makes me turn round. Ben has moved over to the fridge and yanked open the door and stands there upending an economy bottle of Toothkind Ribena over my shoes. Black currant hemorrhaging all over the place. Dive into action, attempting to stanch the slick like the exotic yet authoritative Nurse Hathaway in ER. Call for more kitchen roll. There is no more kitchen roll and Ben is now sitting in a puddle of purple glucose. He squeals when I pick him up by the collar of his pajamas and hold him under the tap.
I ask Richard how he could have failed to get kitchen roll as per my underlined (three times) request on Friday’s shopping list. Rich explains he was unable to find the specified Kitten Soft in the supermarket and simply couldn’t bring himself to ask for it.
“I don’t understand.”
“There are certain words a grown man cannot be expected to say, Katie, and Kitten Soft are two of them.”
“You won’t say Kitten Soft Kitchen Roll?”
“Not out loud, no.”
“Why on earth not?”
“I don’t know. I just know I’d rather eat a soft kitten than ask for one. Even thinking those words…”
With a theatrical shudder, Richard turns to the TV and makes a silent appeal to the melting chocolate-button eyes of Chloe-Zoe.
“But we don’t have any kitchen roll, Rich, and, as you may have noticed, we have the Exxon Valdez going on here.”
“I know, but I wasn’t sure if Kitten Thingy was the only option or if Absorbent Luxury Three-Ply Cushion stuff would do instead.” He lets out a moose-sized groan. “No, it’s no good, Kate. Don’t make me.”
For future reference, I ask my husband to give me some other words grown men cannot be expected to say. In no particular order they are: Toilet Duck, glade-fresh, rich aroma, deep-dish, filet o’ fish, Cheezy Dipper, wash’n’go, Bodyform, Tubby Custard, panty liner.
8:01 A.M. Got to dash. Major presentation to EMF directors today. A make-or-break career opportunity. A chance to impress with cool authority, matchless knowledge of world markets, etc. Swipe Ribena glaze off my shoes, leave note for Paula asking her to buy kitchen roll and please return Snow White video to the library. The fine now exceeds production costs on the original Walt Disney movie. Grab my bag and air-kiss sticky Ben, who hurls himself at me like Daniel Day-Lewis bidding farewell to Madeleine Stowe in Last of the Mohicans.
“Mum, what’s a suffer jet?” Emily is blocking my path to the door.
“Don’t know, darling. Have a nice day. Bye now.”
3:26 P.M. Presentation is going brilliantly. The managing director, Sir Alasdair Cobbold, has just praised my grasp of the problems of European integration. Up here in the boardroom on the seventeenth floor, with London spread out like a Lego village beneath me, for one giddy moment I feel as though I am mistress of all I survey.
I am just moving into the closing sequence when there’s a cough at the door. I look across and see Celia Harmsworth hovering in that fluttery don’t-mind-me way people who pretend they’re unimportant have of making themselves the center of attention. “So sorry to interrupt, Robin,” she simpers, “but there’s a drunk in reception causing a few problems for security.”
Robin Cooper-Clark raises an eyebrow. “And what has that got to do with us, Celia?”
“The thing is, he says he’s Kate’s father.”
THE PATTERN OF MEETINGS with my dad has not altered much in the last twenty years. For months on end I don’t hear from him, except for reports passed via my sister of scandalous excesses and a list of ailments you thought had died out with Lord Nelson — lockjaw, scurvy, Vesuvian boils. Then one day, when I’ve given up on him, when the tug that feels like a bell pull on the heart has gone away, he pitches up and launches into a conversation that draws on a relationship we never had. My dad has always confused sentimentality and intimacy. As far as he’s concerned, I’m still his little girl, although when I was a little girl he asked things of me that demanded a woman’s strength. Now that I’m grown he wants a child’s docility and is quick to anger when he doesn’t get it. Sometimes he has been drinking, you can never be quite sure, but always, always, he wants money.
In the chrome and white lobby of Edwin Morgan Forster, Joseph Aloysius Reddy stands out like a creature from a more provisional primitive age. Visitors in suits can’t take their eyes off him. The disbelief he arouses is so strong he might as well be a bad smell. With a third hand herringbone coat and a skein of gray hair, he’s like a tinker come to sell his pots and pans to the crew of the Starship Enterprise. Two security guys with crackling walkie-talkies are trying to persuade him to move, but Joe is planted mulishly on one of reception’s perforated steel benches, a white plastic bag slumped at his feet. He has the drunk’s huffy dignity. Catching sight of me, he uncrosses his arms and points a triumphant finger. “There. There’s our Kathy. What’d I tell you?”
“Thanks, Gerald,” I say quickly to the guard. “My dad’s not himself today. I’ll take over now.” Steer him to the door, making sure to look straight ahead to avoid the pitying smiles that have been the Reddy family’s constant companions for almost as long as I can remember.
Once we’re safely outside, I mention a Cheap side coffee shop far out of the orbit of my colleagues, but Dad pulls me down the steps towards the King’s Arms. A pub that Dickens knew, it has sawdust on the floor and a teenage barmaid with white skin and a studded tongue. We sit at a corner table under the portrait of a red-cheeked earl, my father with a double Scotch and a maxi pack of peanuts and me with a bitter lemon. Bitter lemon was always my mum’s drink. First it was a nonalcoholic beverage; only later did it become a state of mind.
“’Ow’s little Emma then?” asks my father. His breath is a powerful mixture of Johnnie Walker and boiled eggs.
“Emily.”
“Aye, Emily. Must be going on seven now.”
“Six. She’ll be six in June, Dad.” He nods decisively, as though six is close enough to seven to make no difference.
“And the little lad? Julie says he has a look of me about him.”
Jesus, there really is no parent so bad or so absent that he can’t get a kick out of his genetic legacy. I stare furiously into my sour fizz. The mere idea that some ribbon of DNA with Joe Reddy printed on it is unfurling inside my darling son! “Actually, Ben looks like me, Dad.”
“Well, we were always alike, you and me, Kathy duck. Both lookers, good with figures, both with a bit of a temper on us, eh?” He snatches a swallow of whisky and throws a handful of peanuts into his mouth. Everything in immoderation, my father; in that at least we are the same.
“Well, aren’t you gonna ask your dad how he’s going on, then? Come all this way to see you.”
The accent is northern, so thick you could cut it like fruitcake, but there is an echo of a lilt from his mother’s native Cork. Did I really used to talk like that? Richard says that when he first met me I sounded like something out of Monty Python. That was when I still said baff for bath; before I learned that class rhymes with arse. Although no one says arse, down here; they say bum or bottom. I say bottom to my children now and each time I falter on its plump, prissy contours. My tongue feels like that barmaid’s: heavy with foreign objects.
I know that Dad wants me to make it easier for him to ask for what he’s come for. But I won’t make it easy. I can still remember him standing outside the Abbey National in Holborn when I’d got my first paycheck and licking his finger to count the tenners I handed him. My own father. If he wants my money let him ask for it.
“Same again?” The barmaid has come over to clear our glasses.
“No.”
“Aye, same for me and get one in for yourself, love.”
Dad smiles and the girl flushes and straightens up in a way I have seen women do before in his presence. He was once a beautiful man, my father — beautiful rather than handsome, and therefore doomed not to ripen but to rot. “Tyrone Power,” my grandmother used to murmur fondly when she saw him, and I, being young and not knowing any old Hollywood stars, assumed that Tyrone Power was the electric effect my father had on people rather than a proper name — an unruly but irresistible force of nature. I look at him now and try to see what others must see: face the shape of a swollen heart, the nose and cheeks stippled with red routes like the delta of some rusty river. Long lashes fringing what my mother claims were the most remarkable blue eyes you ever saw: indigo pools where all that charm and intelligence drowned. A ladies’ man, my first boyfriend called him. “Your dad’s a bit of a one for the ladies, Kath. Should have seen him down the club with that Christine on Saturday night.” How I flushed to hear mention of his sex life so close to mine.
“See what you reckon to this.” My father fumbles under the table and out of his carrier bag produces a black box file and from that several well-thumbed sheets of graph paper. There is a drawing of something snouty and padded with squared-off wings at the side. Pigs might fly? I turn it the other way up.
“What is it?”
“The world’s first biodegradable nappy.”
“But you don’t know anything about nappies.”
“I do now.”
My dad, you should know, has a history in this area. One of the world’s great undiscovered inventors, there is very little that he himself has not discovered. When Julie and I were still small he cooked up moon rocks, powdery lumps of resin that were sold as souvenirs from the Apollo 11 landing off a market stall in Chesterfield. “Just think, madam, your hand is holding the very rock that Neil Armstrong held in his!” They bombed, did the moon rocks, and later, when space travel lost its luster, they had another incarnation as fancy pumice stones for the hard skin of the ladies of Worksop.
Next came a cat flap that prevented pets bringing prey into the house — a good idea, but the cats kept getting garroted in the springback mechanism. Sometimes Dad’s inventions had been invented already, like the blindfold he devised for in-flight passenger naps without having been on an airplane.
“Joe,” said Mum cautiously, “I understand that they have eye shades on planes,” but he refused to let such womanly nitpicking get him down. In our house, Dad was the one for the broad sweep; Mum picked up the bits with a dustpan and brush. On his card, my father describes himself as an entrepreneur.
As I skim through his business plan for Reddy’s biodegradable nappy, he says happily, “I’ve had a lot of interest, you know. Derek Marshall at the Chamber of Commerce says he’s never seen anything quite like it. But I’m a bit stuck for capital, love, and that’s your line of work. What do they call it, adventure capital?”
“Venture capital.”
“That’s the one.”
Dad says we’re not talking big sums this time: seed money, that’s all.
“How much?”
“Just enough to get production up and running.”
“How much?”
“Ten grand plus development costs; then there’s packaging. Say thirteen and a half. I wouldn’t ask, love, only cash flow’s that tight at the minute.”
I’m not aware of my expression having altered, but it must have, because he shifts in his chair in a manner which, in another man, you might take for discomfort. For a moment, I think it must have occurred to him how sick these transactions make me feel. He reaches across the table and places his hand on mine. “Don’t worry, love,” he says. “If you’re pushed I’ll take a check.”
I leave my father at Old Street Station. From there he can get the Northern Line directly to King’s Cross and take a train home. I give him money for the fare — a crazy amount, it’s cheaper to fly to Boston than to go to Doncaster these days — and extra for a cab at the other end. Dad is a bit vague about where he is living at the moment — for which read who he is living with — but he promises me that he will go there directly. I stand outside the station, round the corner by the photo booth. When I look back inside a few minutes later he has engaged a young busker in conversation. Casually, magnanimously, he flicks one of the tenners I have just given him into the boy’s open guitar case, removes his coat, lays it gently over the busker’s sleeping dog and now, oh, dear God, he is going to sing.
“The water is wide, I cannot get o’er,
And neither have I wings to fly.
Give me a boat that will carry two
And both shall row, my love and I.”
It’s his favorite ballad, a Reddy standard along with “Down by the Salley Gardens.” The passing suits, scurrying for the escalator, stop and turn their heads, startled by the beauty of the tenor voice, the thwarted yearning Dad does so well. A woman in a camel coat bends to deposit some coins in the case and my father tips an invisible hat to her.
I can hear my mother’s voice now, an angry descant piercing the sad tune. “He can wrap you round his little finger.”
“No he can’t.”
“Yes he can. Always could. If he’s so bloody marvelous, your father, go to him. Go on, go to him.”
“I don’t want to go to him, Mum.”
“You always were his. Daddy’s girl.”
I plunge back into the noise of the street, buy a copy of the Standard to have something to hold in my hands and head in the direction of the office.
A child’s love for a parent is well-nigh indestructible, but down the years the drip, drip, drip of disillusion can corrode it. The first feeling I remember having for my father was pride, a soaring burst-your-lungs gratitude that he was mine. Better-looking than anyone else’s dad, he was so clever he could do any sum he liked in his head and recite the football results back as soon as they’d been read out on the telly on Saturday afternoon without a single mistake: Sheffield Wednesday, Partick Thistle, Hamilton Academicals. Saturday mornings, Julie and I would be allowed to accompany him to the bookie’s, where we would cling to his hero’s legs. I remember the sense of being small down there in the forest of trousers and the smell of felt hats in from the rain. Years later, at university, I watched the middle-class fathers trudging back and forth from their family saloons carrying tea chests and kettles and china mug sets hanging from pine trees, and I longed for their dull embrace.
One winter, it must have been ’75 or ’76, Dad took us sledding out in the Peak District. Other families had shop-bought sleds: raised off the ground with a lattice of wooden struts to sit on, they had the grandeur of an old-fashioned sleigh ride. Our sled lay flush with the ground; Dad had hammered it together out of split logs and had added metal runners on the underside which he ripped from the lip of an abandoned car door. “Give it a bit of go!” he said, rubbing his hands together.
On the first run, Julie fell off right away and the sled completed the descent by itself. Dad told her not to be such a baby. Now it was my turn, and I clung on, determined to prove that our sled, the sled our dad had made, was as good as anyone’s. But halfway down the hill, it hit a ridge and veered sharply to the right, slicing towards a steep drop fenced off by a low curtain of barbed wire. The metal strips, added to give a bit of go, made the sled unstoppable; it slammed under the fencing and the two front prongs dangled over the drop while I lay at the back, two feet from the edge, tangled in wire. He was panting so hard when he got to me I thought he would die, but he knelt down on the end of the sled to hold it in place and picked the wire thorns out of my anorak, out of my hands, out of my hair. As the last piece of wire was unsnagged, he pulled me clear and the sled shot forward. It was a couple of seconds before we heard it crack on the road beneath. I used to think that I remembered that day so well because he had saved my life; now I think it’s because it was the only time in our years as father and daughter that he did anything to protect me.
But Dad was my first love and I always took his side even when my mother’s hazel eyes disappeared in big raccoon circles and she started wearing those brushed-nylon keep-out nighties and laughing in the wrong places. One day at the VG stores, a man knocked over the pyramid display of Ideal Milk, the little blue-and-white cans went tumbling everywhere, and Mum laughed and laughed until Linda behind the counter had to fetch a glass of water from out back. But daughters don’t want to pick up the signals of their mother’s unhappiness; it might mean their father isn’t perfect.
Years after it became clear that Joseph Aloysius Reddy was an unsuitable crush, I still couldn’t break it off. How much evidence did I need? There was the day he brought the sheets home from the bed he shared with his new girlfriend for Mum to wash. And the night he carried me downstairs, blinking from sleep, to tell the copper standing in the front room that he, Joseph Reddy, had been at home on a date I had to swear I could remember. And I swore.
“She’s got this photographic memory, has our Kathy,” said Dad to the policeman. “Haven’t you, love? Now where’s that lovely smile?”
A father is the template of a man that Nature gives a girl, and if that template is broken or disfigured, well, what then?
Walking through the front door of Edwin Morgan Forster, I am grateful for its cool echoing spaces, for the clip-clop of marble underfoot, for the way the lift welcomes me without protest to its mirrored interior. I prefer not to look at the woman in the reflection: I don’t want her seeing me like this. When the door opens on the thirteenth floor, I have my excuses ready, but Robin Cooper-Clark is standing right there.
“Excellent presentation, Kate,” he says, placing a hand awkwardly on my shoulder. “Absolutely first class. Just need to tie up a couple of loose ends. No hurry. In your own time. No real problems with the family, I trust.”
Hard to imagine what the Head of Investment would say if I told him the truth. The Cooper-Clarks have become friends since Jill and I bonded in horror at some corporate pheasant shoot. Richard and I have been to their place in Sussex several times, but I have never mentioned my father to Robin. I want his respect, not his pity. “No. Everything’s fine.”
“Splendid. Talk later.”
The screen tells me that in the three hours since I last looked, the FTSE is up 50, the Dow is down 100 and the dollar 1 percent. So steadily, and with great deliberation, I make the calculations I need to make to hold my funds on course.
All I knew was that I wasn’t going back there: to the scams, the evasions, the holding your breath in the dark hall.
JET LAG HAS ITS OWN microclimate: gray, sticky, Singaporean. I move through the stinging February rain with almost tropical lethargy, step out into Long Acre, straight into the path of a courier. Through the visor, I can see eyes full of hatred.
“Yew stew-pid cow,” he spits out. “Cancha fuckin’ look where ya goin’?”
Fourteen minutes to spare before Rod and I have a meeting with consultants in Covent Garden, just off the piazza. Enough time to run into LK Bennett 50 % Shoe Sale.
I think I’ve forgotten how to shop for pleasure. No lingering foreplay for me, no harmless flirtation with chenille and silk before getting off with aloof linen or gorgeous cuddly alpaca. These days I shop like a locust: famished, ruinous, hoovering up anything I need and things I definitely won’t need but deserve anyway, because I never have time to go shopping. Grab a pair of fudge pencil heels — good for treading on Guy’s toes — and calf-length caramel-soft boots. As an afterthought, I pick up some black slingbacks patterned with so many punch holes it looks like braille for foot fetishists. Funny how two pairs of shoes feels extravagant but three’s a bargain.
Across the shop, I glimpse a glossy brunette, a triumph of Botox over gravity, swaddled in dove-gray cashmere. She is considering each shoe like a judge at a flower show. Can tell she has time as well as money on her hands. I see a whole day of browsing stretching ahead of her — a prairie of possibility, dotted with skinny lattes and a delicious light lunch. I notice her eyes land on a pair of zebra mules on the size 6 rack. She must be stopped. Execute Charlie’s Angels pirouette and get to them just in time.
“Excuse me, I was picking those up.” Her voice is peevish — as aggrieved as someone that languid will allow herself to be.
“Sorry, I was here first,” I say, jamming toe into zebra.
“No need to be aggressive.” She smiles and trails away, leaving a slipstream of Jo Malone Tuberose. Is she not fragrant? Certainly. Does one not want to strangle her eerily wrinkle-free neck? You bet.
At the till, the assistant pauses when she gets to the zebra mules and turns them over. “These aren’t your size, madam.”
“I know. I’m taking them anyway.”
The credit-card machine chunters busily and then gags. “Sorry, madam, your card has been rejected. I’ll have to make a call.”
“I don’t have time for you to make a call.”
The assistant smirks. “Shall we try another card?”
10:36 A.M. Six minutes, thirty-five seconds late for meeting. Enter room full of suits, trying to hide gleaming carrier bag behind knees. Rod Task looks up from his notes with a shark’s grin. “Ah, when the going gets tough the ladies go shopping. Good of you to join us, Katie.”
12:19 P.M. Four days to go till Emily’s half term but am way too busy to have booked a relaxing break. Paula is off to Morocco for the week. When I tentatively inquired this morning if there was any chance of her ever taking a holiday to coincide with ours, she shot me her Joan-of-Arc put-those-matches-down look. So I offered to pay for her flight. Weak, Kate, very weak.
Pretend to be checking fund valuations while making call to travel agent.
How about Florida?
Hyena cackle at the other end of phone. “Fully booked since October, sorry.”
“Disneyland Paris?”
Non. Eurostar apparently groaning with loathsome forward planners. It would be wise to book for Easter now, the agent says; he still has a few spaces left for Easter.
“Have you thought about Centerparcs, Mrs. Shattock?”
Yes, I have thought about Centerparcs: like going to hell in a Tupperware container.
I try Cornwall, Cotswolds and the Canaries. All full. Eventually get through to some firm called Cymru Cottages. Valda says, miraculously, she has a cancellation outside St. Davids. “On the cozy side, mind, but you can’t go wrong with an open fire, can you?”
Am just getting ready to leave for lunch when the postroom lad arrives at my desk looking rather sheepish: he is carrying two bunches of valentine flowers. One — gardenias, lilies, white roses as big as a hand — looks like Grace Kelly’s wedding bouquet; the other consists of garage-forecourt tulips padded out with funeral-director fern. Open the cards. The tulips are from my husband.
To: Kate Reddy
From: Debra Richardson
Don’t be freaked out about nits. Nits are now very middle class. Felix’s school just had Nits Day to “remove the stigma of nits”!
How was your Hammer man in New York?
The only good thing about our situation is that we are Far Too Knackered to Commit Adultery.
Lunch thursday, right? Deb xxxx
To: Debra Richardson
From: Kate Reddy
Good to know nits have become oppressed minority group with their own EU funding rather than pest you have to comb out of groaning child’s hair every night. (Tried tea-tree oil — stank, but no use — now onto chemical stuff brewed by Saddam Hussein. But will it kill the kids before it kills the nits?)
Sorry, can’t do lunch: forgot it was half term.
Think the Hammer man just sent me major valentine bouquet.
To: Kate Reddy
From: Candy Stratton
Bad news, hon. Slow Richard rang while U wre out and stoopid secrtry said, “Oh, your flowers are SO much nicer than those tulips she got.”
pretend U hav florist stalker. Prefrbly GAY florist stalker.
PS: Thnx for crazy zebra shoes. Did you shoot them yourself?
To: Kate Reddy
From: Debra Richardson
Kate, we are too tired for adultery, AREN’T WE? xxxxx
To: Kate Reddy
From: Debra Richardson
Don’t do anything disgusting and amoral.Without telling me EVERYTHING. D xxxx
1:27 P.M. Half an hour for lunchless lightning browse in gleaming electronics emporium near Liverpool Street. The atmosphere in the shop is delirious, malarial. Everyone in here has too much money and not enough time to spend it. I spot a guy from our tech team reverently cupping a digital camera as if it were a chunk of the true cross.
It only takes a minute to find exactly what I’m looking for: the latest dinkiest personal organizer. A truly gorgeous thing — implausibly light, but with a pleasing scientific heft, and witty too, like a fifties drinks coaster. The Pocket Memory comes with an impressive raft of promises:
It will simplify your life!
Banish stress!
Pay your bills!
Remember your friends’ birthdays!
Have sex with your husband while you
finish that Carol Shields novel you started
some weeks into your first pregnancy!
I say I’ll take it. I don’t even ask how much. One way or another I’ve earned it.
2:08 P.M. Rod Task approaches my desk like a marine storming a beach. “Katie, I need your help,” he hollers. Then, ominously, he parts his lips and clenches his teeth to form what he thinks is a smile. (Rod is only really scary when he’s trying to be nice.)
Playfully cuffing a daffodil in the vase on my desk, he tells me he wants me to do a final for a three-hundred-million-dollar ethical pension fund account. Finals are a sort of beauty contest in which rival investment managers vie to convince a prospective client that they are the most responsible gambler in town. Oh, and Rod forgot to mention the final when he heard about it, so I have only twelve days to prepare, although this is now my fault, because if it wasn’t my fault it means Rod made a mistake. And Rod is a man, so that can’t be right.
I can hear myself starting to protest a long way off — a watery wail of injustice — but Rod bulldozes on. “They want us to field a team that reflects EMF’s commitment to diversity,” he says, “so I reckon that’s gotta be you, Katie, and the Chinky from Research.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Moma, right?”
“Momo is not Chinese. She’s Sri Lankan.”
“Whatever.” He shrugs. “She looks pretty fucking diverse to me.”
“Rod, I simply can’t. Momo has absolutely no experience. You just can’t—”
My boss has the daffodil by the neck now, and the dejected bloom is weeping yellow ash onto the gray carpet.
“Hey, we don’t do can’t, sweetie. When did we start doing can’t? Can’t is for pussies.”
WAS I SHOCKED by the way Rod talked to me? Actually, you’d probably be shocked by how unshocked I was. Chauvinism is the air I breathe — a bracing blend of Gucci Envy and salty gym residue. Like one of those cuboid amber air fresheners Winston hangs in the minicab, the smell stuns you as soon as you enter the City; it lays waste to your septum before curling into your brain. Soon it becomes the only smell in the world. Other odors — milk, apples, soap — seem sickly and feeble by comparison. When I first came to the City I smelled the smell and recognized it immediately as power.
Truth is, I don’t mind: let them comment on my legs if those legs help keep my children in shoes. Being a woman doesn’t get you what you want within Edwin Morgan Forster, but it enables the firm to get what it wants outside — accounts, a reputation for “diversity”—and they owe you for that. It’s the oldest trade of all and it’s good enough for me. Sometimes I mind for other women, though. For the older ones like Clare Mainwaring in Operations, whose gray hair puts them among the firm’s Disappeared, and for the kids like Momo who think that having an MBA means that guys won’t look up your skirt.
Round here, there are only three kinds of women. As Chris Bunce once explained to me over a drink in Corney and Barrow, back in the days when he was still hoping to get into my knickers, “You’re either a babe, a mumsy, or a grandma.” Back then, I qualified as a babe.
And the equal-opportunities legislation? Doesn’t make it better, just drives the misogyny underground, into the dripping caves of the Internet. Women make jokes about men on the Net all the time — wry, helpless, furious jokes — but the stuff some of the guys send? Well, a gynecologist would need to go and lie down. Let them pass as many laws as they like. Can you legislate for the cock to stop crowing?
The way I look at it, women in the City are like first-generation immigrants. You get off the boat, you keep your eyes down, work as hard as you can and do your damnedest to ignore the taunts of ignorant natives who hate you just because you look different and you smell different and because one day you might take their job. And you hope. You know it’s probably not going to get that much better in your own lifetime, but just the fact that you occupy the space, the fact that they had to put a Tampax dispenser in the toilet — all that makes it easier for the women who come after you. Years ago, when I was still at school, I read this book about a cathedral by William Golding. It took several generations to build a medieval cathedral, and the men who drew up the plans knew that not their sons but their grandsons, or even great-grandsons, would be around for the crowning of the spire they had dreamed of. It’s the same for women in the City, I think: we are the foundation stones. The females who come after us will scarcely give us a second thought, but they will walk on our bones.
Last year, during the photo shoot for EMF’s corporate brochure, they had to “borrow” workers from the sandwich place in the basement to fill in the blank spaces where the women and ethnic minorities should be. I sat in some ludicrous fake meeting opposite a Colombian waitress. Eager and uncomprehending, she wore Celia Harmsworth’s red Jaeger jacket and was instructed to study a fund report. The photographer had to turn it the right way up.
Later, going downstairs to pick up a bagel, I tried to catch the waitress’s eye across the counter, to share a look of girly complicity — Men! What can you do? — but the woman didn’t even glance up from her tub of cream cheese.
4:53 P.M. Got to start work on the pitch for the ethical fund, but distracted by thoughts of Jack, and then there’s Emily’s birthday. Three and a half months to go and my daughter is already counting the seconds. (The desire to get to a birthday when you’re five is as urgent as the desire to miss one when you’re thirty-five.) Feeling like proper organized mother for once, I put in a call to Roger Rainbow, a clown of high repute among the Muffia. Roger’s answerphone informs me he is absolutely chocker every weekend but still has some slots left for Halloween. Bloody hell, it would be easier to book the Three Tenors. Trust me to become a parent in the era when birthdays finally became a competitive sport.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Excuse me. Kate Reddy?”
“Yes?” I look up, and standing by my desk is the beautiful young woman who pressed me so hard at the trainees’ induction before Christmas. Now, as then, she is blushing but there is nothing frail or floundering in her shyness; her reticence seems to have been cast from some fine but resilient metal.
“Sorry,” she says again, “but I understand we’re going to be working together on an — um, final. Mr. Task said he felt I had an important contribution to make.”
I bet he did. “Oh, yes, Momo. It is Momo, isn’t it? I didn’t imagine we’d be working together so soon. It’s certainly going to be a real challenge.” Come on, Kate, give the poor girl a break. It’s not her fault she’s been dumped on you. “I’ve heard so many good things about you, Momo.”
“And vice versa,” she says gratefully, taking a seat. “We all — well, all the women — she gestures across the sea of suits — we don’t know how you do it. Oh, is this yours?”
Disappearing under my desk for a second, she comes back up holding a daffodil.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. It’s broken.”
Thank-you letters, ring Mum, ring sister. HIGHLIGHTS! Complete IMRO forms. See amazing new film — Sitting Tiger? Sleepy Dragon? Trim Ben’s nails, ring Juno Academy of Fitness and book new personal trainer, Pelvic floor squeeeze. Momo list “to do” Emily school applications GET ORGANIZED. Father-in-law’s 65th birthday — tickets for Lion King? Call Jill Cooper-Clark. Social life: invite people Sunday lunch — Simon and Kirsty? QUOTE FOR STAIR CARPET! Note for Juanita. Packing for half term: Roo! Extra towels, nappies, portacot, wipes, Aromatic Anti-Stress pillow, Wellies.
“KATE, I AM NOT HAVING an argument with you about Wellies.”
“Well I’m having an argument with you about Wellies. Emily is soaking wet. Just look at the state of her trousers. I have to remember everything. Every single thing. And I swear to God there’s no room in my brain for any more information, Richard. I remembered to ask you to check the Wellies were in the car.”
“I’m sorry, I forgot. It’s not a big deal.”
“No, you’re not sorry. If you were sorry you’d have remembered.”
How much do you think the human brain can bear in the way of remembering? I read somewhere that our long-term memory is basically this giant storehouse where all the people and places and jokes and songs we’ve ever known are laid down like wine, but if you don’t visit a memory often enough the route to it is lost, briared over. Like the approach to Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Is that why all fairy tales are about trying to find the way back?
Anyway, my memory’s not what it used to be, but I have to try and remember. Someone has to. What’s that awful word? Multitasking. Women are meant to be great at that. But Rich, if you ask Rich to hold more than three things in his head at once you can see smoke start to come out of his ears; the circuits have blown in there. I’ve heard women on the radio arguing that guys play up how useless they are in order to avoid doing stuff. Unfortunately, extensive scientific trials in the Shattock home have revealed that the inability to remember the dry cleaning and the dishwasher tablets plus the film for the camera is, in fact, a congenital defect, like color blindness or a dicky heart. It’s not laziness, it’s biology.
On the endless drive to Wales on Saturday, I was watching Richard, observing the way he can screen out the kids when he needs to, when there is a destination he has in mind. Life is a road for a man; for women it’s a map — we’re always thinking about side roads and slip roads and doubling back, while they simply plow on in the fast lane. Their only diversion is an occasional brilliant idea for a shortcut, most of which turn out to be longer and more treacherous than the original route.
Is that why men can live in the moment so much better than we can? Posterity is full of men who seized the day while the women were planning for a fortnight on Tuesday.
So many of the rows Rich and I have nowadays are about remembering or forgetting. Like the one we had when we got to the beach in Pembrokeshire that first afternoon of the half-term holiday, and it turned out that Rich hadn’t packed the children’s Wellingtons. I don’t know what made me go so berserk. Yes, the kids’ feet were soaking, but they were having a lovely time.
Swaddled in three layers of clothing, Ben and Emily play contentedly by the milk-chocolate channel that emerges from the hillside at the back of Whitesands Bay and foams over stones down to the sea. She has been building a Sleeping Beauty castle with water gardens and a fountain made out of a razor shell, while he picks up a pebble, carries it to the water’s edge, drops it in and then goes back to fetch another. They are as happy and intent as I’ve seen them. But the weather has got worse. Of course the weather has got worse. We are on holiday in Wales, why didn’t I remember? Wet Wales. The sun broke through earlier, just long enough to see the freckles begin to swarm over Emily’s face, but now the sky is pewter with rain. We decide to cut our losses and take the kids back to the cottage I have rented a few miles inland. Getting them away from the water and into the car takes roughly fifty minutes: requests give way to threats, and when they don’t work we fall back on bribes.
I promise Emily that Mummy will finally get around to reading Little Miss Busy to her, so after I’ve stripped off their wet clothes, given them their tea, bathed them in the tiny freezing bathroom with the wall heater that smells of burnt air, and persuaded Ben to lie in his portacot, my daughter and I settle down next to the open fire — two resentfully smoldering logs.
“‘Little Miss Busy loved nothing more than to be hard at work, keeping herself busy. Every day she would get up at three o’clock in the morning. Then, Little Miss Busy would read a chapter from her favorite book. It was called Work Is Good for You.’”
“Can’t we read something more fun, Em?”
“No. I want that one.”
“Oh, all right. Where were we? ‘Miss Busy wasn’t happy unless she was busy working.’”
“Mummy, you came to Ben’s birthday party.”
“Yes, I did.” I can see her thinking. Five-year-olds’ thoughts are naked; they haven’t learned to cloak them yet. This one ripples across Emily’s brow like a breeze over a dune.
“Did the teacher say you could leave early?” she asks at last.
“No, sweetheart, Mummy doesn’t have a teacher. She has — well, she has a boss, this man who’s in charge. And she has to ask him if she can leave.”
“Could you ask that man if you could come home early other days?”
“No. Well, yes, I could, but I can’t do it too often.”
“Why?”
“Because Mummy has to be in the office or…otherwise people might get cross with her. Let’s finish the story, Em. ‘Little Miss Busy—’”
“Could you come home early and take me to ballet on Thursdays? Please can you, Mama?”
“Paula takes you to ballet, darling, and she says you’re really really good at it. And Mummy promises to try and come to your show at the end of term this time.”
“But it’s not fair. Ella’s mum takes her to ballet.”
“Emily, I really haven’t got time to argue with you now. Let’s finish the story, shall we?
“‘And Miss Busy didn’t rest all day long, not for a minute, not even for a second.’”
WHEN THEY WERE BOTH asleep upstairs, Rich accused me of not being relaxed and I got incredibly upset. I’d done three solid hours of Lionel Bart’s Oliver! in the car on the way down, hadn’t I?
“‘Wh-e-e-e-e-e-ere is love? Does it fall from skies above?’”
Does it, hell. Mark Lester was so desperately beautiful as Oliver, and I read the other day that now he’s an osteopath in Cheltenham or somewhere. I mean, that can’t be right, can it? Like the breaking of a magic spell.
And after Oliver! we sang twenty choruses of “The Wheels on the Bus,” which I did most cheerfully, even though that song drives me absolutely nuts. Then, when Ben threw up in the car outside Swansea, I got him into the service station, washed him in the basin, dried him somehow with the one dry paper towel and changed him before buying all the basics we’d need when we got to the cottage — tea bags, milk, sliced bread for toast. I was doing a pretty good impersonation of a mummy on holiday, wasn’t I?
But Rich was right. Thoughts of the upcoming final that Rod had sprung on me were keeping me awake at night. I’d left Momo to do the research into the ethical pharmaceutical sector while I was away, but she simply didn’t have the experience to hack her way through the material in time. Twice a day, I called her from a phone box in a high-hedged lane or by some rasping pebbled shore — my mobile signal came and went like the tide. And of course I told Momo where to find stuff, but it was like asking a skateboarder to dock a space station. Specifically instructed Guy to help her out too, but while I was away he would be otherwise engaged, having his bony Machiavellian arse measured for my chair. No way was Guy going to do anything that would put me in a good light.
Plus, as the cottage’s phone connection was practically steam-powered, I couldn’t pick up my e-mails. Being out of contact with Abelhammer for four days made me realize how much I relied upon him as a safety valve. Without his soothing attentions I was ready to explode.
THURSDAY, A CAR PARK, ST. DAVIDS CATHEDRAL. 3:47 P.M. Am unloading Ben’s buggy from the boot of the car when the downpour starts: joke rain, crazy rain, Gene Kelly Singing-in-the-sodding-Rain rain. Try to wrestle the baby into the buggy straps, his body stiffening as my impatience grows. I feel like an asylum orderly putting a straitjacket on a madman. Richard has fetched the buggy rain cover and hands it over; it’s a fiendish combination of cling film and climbing frame.
Boldly loop big hoop over Ben’s head and try to fasten the clips, but I cannot get them round buggy handles so attach to the fabric instead. Seems OK, but I’m left with two elastic loops. What the hell are they for? Drape remainder of cover over the baby’s feet, but the rain snatches it and whips it up into my face. Damn. Start again.
“Come on, Kate,” says Richard. “We’re getting soaked here. Surely you know how to put that cover on.”
I surely don’t know. How would I know? Only contact with wretched thing was handing over Visa card in John Lewis thirteen months ago and, when the assistant tried to demonstrate the rain cover, snapping at her, “I’ll just take it, thanks.” (Can hardly call Paula in Morocco and ask how to use own child’s equipment.)
Ben is howling now. Drops of rain join the tributary of snot running over his lips to form a cataract of misery. Have you noticed how all baby equipment comes with the promise of “easi-assembly”? This is industry shorthand for: only those with NASA training need attempt.
“For Chrissake, Kate,” hisses Richard, who will put up with anything except embarrassment in public.
“I’m trying. I’m trying. Emily, don’t go near the cars. Emily, come here this minute!”
A coach has pulled up alongside us and disgorged a tour party of seventysomethings: Ladies of the Valleys with freshly baked perms and short padded coats that give their trunks the appearance of boilers lagged to save on fuel. As one, they dive into their handbags and produce those slithery packets that open out into instant see-through sou’westers. There they stand, twittering companionably and observing my struggle.
“Aw, poor dab,” says one, gesturing towards my bawling son. “Getting wet iz ’ee? Nevah mind. Mammy’ll ’ave yew right in a minute.”
My fingers are blunt with cold. Can barely hold the bloody clip, let alone open it. Under the wrong piece of plastic, an enraged Ben is as puce as packaged beetroot. I turn to the ladies. “New pram,” I say loudly. And they all nod and smile, eager to be drawn into womanly complicity against the hopeless man-made machine.
“They make stuff so stiff, now, don’t they?” says one woman in check trews, taking the rain cover from me, nimbly flipping it over the buggy and fastening it with practiced clicks. “My daughter’s juss the same as yew,” she says, briefly laying a hand on my shoulder. “Doctor up Bridgend way now, she is. Two little boys. Hard work, mind. Yew don’t get no holidays, do yew?”
I shake my head and try to smile but my lips are rigid with cold. The woman’s hands are raw and bony, the tendons like red ropes. A mother’s hands — one who did the washing-up three times a day, peeled the veg and stirred the terry nappies in their scummy cauldron. Hands like that will die out in another generation, along with waist pinnies and the Sunday roast.
Bowed double against the rain, Richard pushes the buggy along the little road to the cathedral. Emily is so drenched she has made the transformation from child to water sprite. “Mummy?”
“What is it, Emily?”
“Baby Jesus has got a lot of houses, hasn’t he? Is this where he comes on his holidays?”
“I don’t know, sweetie. Ask Daddy.”
Cathedrals are built to inspire awe. Sacred fortresses, they always look as though they have been lowered from heaven onto a hill. St. Davids is different. It sits on the edge of a small Welsh town — a city in name only — hiding its virtues in a valley so perfectly designed it feels like an engraving. Cattle graze almost up to its walls.
I love this place. The ancient chill that fills your lungs when you push open the door — the trapped breath of saints, I always think. I must have been seven or eight the first time I came here, candy floss from Tenby on my lips. Licking them now I can still taste its cobwebby sweetness. I have seen grander cathedrals since, of course: Notre Dame, Seville, St. Paul’s. But the greatness of this church lies in its smallness, barely bigger than a barn really. You wouldn’t be surprised to find an ox and an ass by the font.
St. Davids is one of the few places that bids me be still. And here in the nave I realize that, these days, stillness is an unaccustomed, even an uncomfortable sensation. The cathedral is timeless, and my life…my life is nothing but time. Rich has taken Emily and Ben to explore the gift shop. Left alone, I find my mouth forming words no one can hear: Help me.
Asking a God I’m not sure I believe in to get me out of a mess I don’t understand? Oh, very good, Kate, very good.
On the far wall, there is a slate tablet commemorating a local grandee. In memory of Somebody Thomas and of his relict Angharad. Relict. Same as relic? Will have to ask Rich, he’s good at Latin. Had a proper education, not the comprehensive shambles I had to put up with.
Outside, a vertiginous gingerbread staircase links the cathedral to the tiny city on the hill. I haul the buggy backwards up the steps, feeling each bump in my lower vertebrae. Rich carries a squally Emily on his shoulders. She and Ben badly need their tea. Guilty bad mother. I always forget children are like cars; without regular injections of fuel they judder and stop.
We walk down a street full of cafés and peer through the windows, inspecting each one for child-friendliness. Is there room for the buggy? Are there older people in there who would rather not share their toasted crumpets with a dribbly Ben? Britain is still no country for young children. Venture too far from Pizza Express and you find the same resentful sighs I remember from when Julie and I were kids.
We settle on a chintzy establishment full of other holiday parents, as spooked and unrested as us, and make for the farthest corner. Draped over the backs of chairs, our wet coats steam like cows. I read out the menu and Emily announces loudly that she doesn’t want anything that’s on offer. She wants pasta.
“We can do ’oops from a tin, like,” offers the kindly waitress.
“I don’t want hoops,” wails Emily. “I want pasta.”
Metropolitan brat. All my fault for giving her everything so young. I didn’t taste my first pasta till I was nineteen years old. Rome. Spaghetti alla vongole—clammy in both senses, a shaming ordeal of alien shells and unmanageable strands.
Sometimes I worry that I’ve traveled this far, done this well in life, only for my kids to grow up as jaded and spoiled as the people I was patronized by at college.
As Rich cuts up the children’s Welsh rarebit, there is a little twiddly beep from my mobile. It’s a text message from Guy.
TurkE crisis.
Rod & R C–C away.
Devaluation?
Turk shares collapsing.
Wot do?
Oh, hell. Jump up, barge past other families, trip over labrador, run into street. Try mobile, but this time it’s making another kind of beep telling me the battery is low. Can’t get a signal. Of course I can’t get a signal, am in Wales. Run back into the café.
“Have you got a phone I can use?”
“’Scuse me?” The waitress looks blank.
“A pay phone?”
“Oh, yes, but it’s not working like.”
“A fax?”
“Facts?”
“A facsimile machine. I need to send an urgent message.”
“Oh. They might ’ave one over the paper shop.”
Newsagent has no fax; he thinks chemist has fax. Chemist does have fax. Fax needs paper. Back to paper shop. About to close. Bang on door. Beg. Have to buy brick of five hundred sheets, of which I need precisely one. Back to chemist. I scrawl a note to Guy using the prescription pen which is tethered to the counter:
Guy, MUST weigh up risk of Turkish trade failing and being charged interest rates of 2000 percent — could cost us shedload of money — versus loss in value of shares if currency devalues.
1. How much have we got in Turkey?
2. What’s market doing — knock-on effect other regions?
Answers on my desk tomorrow 8:30 a.m. Coming Back Right Now, Kate
9:50 P.M. There are huge jams in both directions on the M4. The headlights form a three-mile diamond necklace. From the driving seat, Rich shoots me inquiring, sidelong glances. I am grateful for the dark; it means I don’t have to pick up his distress signals until I feel ready.
Finally he says, “I still think it’s a bit odd, Kate, you sending yourself those flowers on Valentine’s Day. Why did you do it?”
“As a morale boost. I wanted people in the office to feel I was the kind of person who got flowers on Valentine’s Day. And I wasn’t sure you’d remember. Pathetic, really.”
Easy to lie when you try. Easier than saying that the flowers came from client with whom I have recently dined, client who has since occupied much of my conscious mind as well as rudely gate-crashing my dreams. Time to change the subject.
“Rich, what’s a relict? I saw it on a tomb in the cathedral today: AND HIS RELICT ANGHARAD.”
“Widow. It means literally what is left behind.”
“So the wife was the remains of the husband?”
“Exactly, Kate.” He laughs. “Of course, in our marriage, I’d be what was left of you.”
It’s said with enough love to sting. Do I really make him feel that way? That small? Over the miles to come, I embroider any number of plans, strategies to make things better between us. Put things right. But three hours later, as we pass Reading, I start to feel the gravitational pull of London, and the resolve to change my life burns up on re-entry.
1. Better quality of life.
2. Can buy mansion with en-suite minstrels’ gallery for cost of Hackney heap.
3. Chance to be real mother who has time to love husband, learn secret of children’s hearts and discover how bloody buggy rain cover works.
1. Would go mad.
2. See above.
3. See above.