WHERE IS A BIRD OF PREY when you need one? Since early this morning, two pigeons have been sitting on the ledge outside my office window: on their first date, apparently. For an hour or so, the male seemed to be bowing to the female, making polite little waiterly dips in front of her. Well, I assume that’s the male, because the other one is the color of dishwater and lowers her head in a coy Princess Di way, while he has this magnificent ruff of feathers round his neck, emerald and purple with a petroleum sheen.
It wasn’t so bad when the male was whispering sweet nothings, but now he’s strutting about with his tail spread out in a fan, hissing and whistling to attract the female’s attention. The noise is unbelievable. Like having the entire percussion section of the LSO inside my ear. I give several sharp raps on the window to scare the birds away, but the courting couple only have eyes for each other.
I call over to Guy and tell him to get the Corporation on the phone right away and ask for some guidance on pigeons.
Guy puts on his Jeeves face. “Do you want me to arrange to have them shot, Kate?”
“No, Guy, they’ve got a hawk to take them out. Can you ask them when he’s making his next visit?”
It’s a little-known fact that the City of London employs a falconer who brings his sparrowhawk along every month to control the pigeon population. Last time he was here, Candy and I were on our way to lunch and my unshockable American friend was astonished to see a large countryman with a single leather gauntlet launching a feathered missile into the air above our heads.
“If you’ve ever wondered why the City has such clean pavements compared to the rest of London, there’s your answer,” I said.
“Oh, I get it.” Candy grinned. “That way they keep all the shit on the inside.”
To: Kate Reddy
From: Debra Richardson
How ARE YOU? Me so stressed after 3 days of half term wanted to check into the Priory. Do they do a work-withdrawal program for sad junkies like us? We went to a “child-friendly” hotel in Somerset. Felix got us banned after fusing electrics in the breakfast room. Plugged his Thunderbirds fork into the communal toaster and the whole place went dark. Ruby says she hates me.
Are we just causing our children short-term damage, do you think, or will there be major lawsuits later on?
Lunch on wednesday, right? Yrs in D-nial xxx
To: Kate Reddy
From: Jack Abelhammer
Subject: Japanese Banking Crisis
It is with some concern that your client notes the continuing upheaval in the Far Eastern sector. I understand Origami Bank has folded, Sumo Bank has gone belly up and Bonsai Bank has plans to cut back several smaller branches.
Can I get some direction on this, ma’am? xxxxx
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
Subject: Japanese Banking Crisis
Don’t you have a business empire to run, sir? Jokes about the plight of our oriental friends are in v. poor taste, although I did hear shares in Kamikaze Bank have nose-dived and 500 back-office staff at Karate Bank got the chop.
Katharine xx
To: Kate Reddy
From: Jack Abelhammer
Hey, I missed you. I’ve grown accustomed to your pace. How was the vacation? Hot and relaxing, I hope.
Saw this great movie the other night about a guy who lost his memory, so he has to write all the stuff he needs to remember on his body. I thought of you — you said you always had so much stuff to remember, right?
Jack xx
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
Not hot and not relaxing exactly. Still cold here — passed a guy on the ice rink outside the office this morning; he was doing these cool loops and swivels, as though he was writing his name on the ice. Or even someone else’s — how romantic is that?
Correct about the movie, though. Most of my body is covered in detailed notes already, but I have a spot left for you behind my left knee.
To: Kate Reddy
From: Jack Abelhammer
I skate a little — do you? We could try a few moves on thin ice one day.
As for the left knee, be right there. Just feathering my quill.
10:23 A.M. Now the damned pigeon has started clapping his wings together. Like he’s giving himself this big round of applause for being such a great lover. The female, meanwhile, is doing the birdy equivalent of lying on her back and waving her legs in the air. Completely intolerable. I manage to open the window and try to shoo them away. But love, it turns out, is deaf as well as blind.
So much to do am surprised that my head is not lolling to one side with the weight of activity in there. In two days, I will be attending a final in the US for a three-hundred-million-dollar ethical pension fund which I will be presenting with a twentysomething graduate trainee who has all the qualifications for the job — not white, not male — except being able to do the job. Between us, Momo Gumeratne and I will signal EMF’s passionate commitment to diversity, a commitment whose finest hour till now has been the inclusion of tacos on the cafeteria menu. Also, I have still not secured the services of an entertainer for Emily’s birthday party. Also, I must pick up clothes for the final from the cleaners. Also — there was definitely another also.
Damn. That’s all I need. A memo on my desk from Robin Cooper-Clark says there’s an internal investigation into some stock EMF sold that we didn’t actually have. I push the memo across the desk to Momo and tell her to go and put it on Chris Bunce’s desk. “But make sure he doesn’t see you, OK?”
The leaf-shaped eyes curl up at the corners as she scans the paper. “We sold stock we didn’t have and now there’s a claim against us and Robin wants to know who is responsible?”
“Correct.”
“So, we find out whose fault it is?”
“No, Momo. The aim is to keep passing the buck until you wear the others down. Are you familiar with the game Musical Chairs? Yes? Well, this is Musical Memos. The last person left holding the paper is in deep shit. So, if you could just deliver that to Bunce’s desk. Now?”
I am beginning to recognize the expression on my new assistant’s face — a sort of tremulous frown where high principle struggles with a fervent desire to please. “Sorry, Kate, but how do we know Chris Bunce is to blame?”
I swivel my chair away from her to stop me losing my cool. Outside on the ledge, the pigeon family tableau is framed by a crane like a giant set square. How to account for a man who in conversation unconsciously grabs at his crotch, as if to check his manhood is still there, or rubs it in excitement when he thinks he’s about to get the better of someone? Particularly me.
“Look, Bunce is a seat-of-the-pants artist who never does any of his admin and leaves it to conscientious girlies like you and me to do all the boring stuff that satisfies the authorities. If IMRO knew what Bunce got up to they’d be in here with a team of Alsatians. But Bunce is very good at getting away with it because he himself plays a mean game of Musical Memos. Am I making myself clear yet?”
“Sorry,” Momo says, as another person would say OK, and walks across the office, holding the memo out in front of her like a sapper with an unexploded mine.
“Are you going to be able to train her up?”
Candy is standing by my desk wearing a skirt so short it’s practically a text message. I didn’t even hear her come over.
“I don’t know. I’m trying to introduce Momo to the idea that not everyone is a nice person.”
“Omigod. We’re not talking about a functional childhood, are we?”
“’Fraid so.”
Candy shakes her head in wonder and pity. “Poor kid. She’ll never get anywhere.”
11:25 A.M. Determined to get my new personal organizer up and running. The Pocket Memory will revolutionize my life! The Pocket Memory will banish stress! The Pocket Memory will make my time work harder for me!
After ten minutes reading the Starter Pack leaflet, I discover that the Pocket Memory is not compatible with my computer. I call the help line. The school dropout at the other end delivers his prepared script with all the facility of a man translating from the Urdu.
“Have you got a large serial port in the back, madam?”
“Of me or the computer? How the hell should I know?”
“What you need, madam, is a Connect Kit.”
“No, what I need is to make my personal organizer organize.”
“You may order our Connect Kit now, madam. Should you wish to proceed—”
“Excuse me, is this part of your promise to simplify my life? Couldn’t I just go to a shop and get the kit?”
“There aren’t that many available, madam. People order them. It will take from five to ten days to arrive.”
“I don’t have five to ten days. I am leaving for the States in twenty-four hours.”
“I’m afraid we can’t—”
“Can’t is for pussies.”
“I beg your pardon, madam?”
“It’s an old Australian proverb meaning Tell your manager that I have several million shares in his company which are currently under review and that our market research reports are not showing them in a favorable light. Am I making myself clear?”
There is an audible swallow. “I’ll have to have a word with the supervisor.”
TUESDAY, 8:11 A.M. So it’s come to this. Richard and I actually lay in bed last night discussing whether we were too tired to have sex. Couldn’t quite remember what conclusion we reached until I got up this morning and noticed that inner thighs were lightly glued together with glacé icing.
Not a good idea before a major presentation. Sportsmen always say they never have sex in the run-up to a big race or match, don’t they? You never hear women athletes complain about it, but it must be the same for them, if not worse. There can be little to rival the female orgasm for knocking you out cold. Hours after the earth moves, a deep tentacular weariness is still trying to drag you under: coming, I mean really coming, makes you want to go and lie down till Christmas. I reckon it must be Mother Nature’s way of giving the sperm the best possible shot at the egg. (When you think about it, almost everything in female biology is Mother Nature’s way of making us want a baby or, when we have one, of making us want to protect it.) Up until last year, I suffered from mild PMT; not nothing, but nowhere near the crampy hell some women go through. Then, as soon as I hit thirty-five, it was war. Every month now, the hormones are out in the streets jumping up and down, waving placards and shouting “Save Our Eggs!” My body appears to know that time is short and the passing of each egg is mourned like the loss of a precious stone, a pearl beyond price.
But how can I have another baby when I don’t see the ones I’ve got? Have hardly been home these past few days. I look up at the office clock, and if it’s after 8:00 I know I’ve missed the kids’ bedtimes and — well, I figure I may as well push on for the night. Momo orders in a pizza or we have something healthy from the canteen in a Styrofoam box — always inedible — and we end up with our usual midnight feast: a bag of tortilla chips and a couple of Crunchies from the machine washed down with Diet Coke.
Picked up the phone when I finally got in last night at 11:55, expecting it to be Momo with some more figures. And who did I get? Barbara, my motherin-law. Couldn’t believe she was ringing that late.
“Tell me not to stick my oar in where it’s not wanted, Katharine, but I spoke to Richard earlier and he sounded very tired. I hope everything’s all right.”
She thinks he’s tired?
10:07 A.M. In a meeting with Rod, Momo and Guy. We are rehearsing the final for the third time, with Rod and Guy taking the parts of the clients, when Rod’s secretary, Lorraine, bursts in.
“Sorry to interrupt, Kate, but there’s someone for you on Line Three. He says you said it was urgent.”
“But who is it?”
Lorraine appears reluctant to say. She stands awkwardly in the doorway until finally, in a stage whisper, she volunteers, “It’s a Percy Pineapple.”
Guy rolls his eyes so languidly he’s practically looking backwards into his own skull. Momo gazes at her shoes.
“Who the fuck’s Percy Pineapple?” asks Rod amiably.
I decide to brazen it out. “Oh, yes, that’ll be Percy Pineapple, the entertainment stock, part of Fruitscape.com, which is coming to the market. Chairman is coming in to see me to discuss the float. Just his little joke.”
Dear God. Still no entertainer for Emily’s party. Have worked my way through the trusted favorites: Roger Rainbow, Zee-Zee the Clown and Katie Cupcake, who does the most marvelous things with Smarties and an air pump. All have prior engagements in Monaco or Las Vegas or are dancing attendance on some anal-retentive Mother Superior who had the paper plates and napkins picked out for Jocasta’s seventh birthday by the time her waters broke.
I am rapidly sliding down the food chain and have entered the small-ad territory of bearded loons whose mug shots have an uncanny overlap with those printed in the News of the World “Name and Shame” pedophile campaign. There was a flash of hope on Monday when Percy Pineapple of Gravesend said that for a hundred and twenty quid, no questions asked, love, he could drive up in his van and put on a lovely show for the little girl. But Percy’s leaflet came in the post this morning. It shows a chubby homunculus twisting Durex-pink balloons into worryingly priapic dachshunds.
Of course, what Emily really wants is a swimming party, but that is totally out of the question. At the pool you hire for such occasions, the water is tepid, bacteria-rich and, unlike most water, not transparent. Also, would have to take time off for bikini wax: cannot do public nudity with other parents.
11:19 P.M. Arrive home to discover the Pocket Memory Connect Kit on the hall table. Richard is shipwrecked on the sofa watching the Arsenal game. He has left me some pasta in the oven; it has the texture and smell of baked toes.
“Would it be totally out of the question for anyone except me to take stuff left at the bottom of the stairs upstairs?”
Rich doesn’t look up from the TV. “Ah, the great She returns. Is it that time of the month already?”
“Are you accusing me of having PMT?”
Rich yelps. “God, Kate, I look back to your premenstrual tension with nostalgia. These days, we have postmenstrual tension, intermenstrual tension. We have 24/7 tension. Can you switch off when you eventually come to bed or will you be issuing instructions in your sleep?”
I open the dishwasher and notice that the supposedly clean dishes have a tide mark of gray sediment. Damn machine must be on the blink. “It may have escaped your notice, Rich, but I have a major presentation—”
“For it to have escaped my notice, I would have to have been embalmed in Ulan Bator.”
“I do this for us, you know.”
“What us, Kate? The kids haven’t seen you since we got back from Wales. Maybe you should become a TV presenter. At least they’d catch you once a day on-screen.”
Standing in the doorway, watching my husband’s baffled misery from a long, long way off, I think how I know this situation so well and I know the ways out of it — either leave for the airport in the morning with a frost on the ground and hope it has melted by the time I get back, or take my clothes off right now and remind both of us that love is something you can make. Am so exhausted my body feels like a carcass; no, it feels like a living body carrying a dead one on its back. But I can’t bear to leave him like this, and some kinds of sex take less time and energy than others.
“Please be on my side, Rich,” I say to him, as I get to my feet a few minutes later. “It’s me by myself in the office, against them: I can’t be on my own at home as well.”
1:01 A.M. Have almost finished transferring all the information I need into the Pocket Memory when there is a cry from upstairs.
4:17 A.M. Emily up three times already. Wrestling with her duvet, damp hair drying in crusty tendrils on her pale cheek. Can’t tell me what’s wrong. How can she do this to me tonight of all nights? I have to leave for the airport in three hours.
Immediate stab of guilt for even thinking such a thought. Then, just when I’ve decided this is a preemptive punishment for leaving her — like a cat, Emily senses a departure before the suitcase is brought down — she finally moans, “Mummy, my wee-wee hurts.”
Pour her a large cup of cranberry juice and spend the next twenty minutes on the phone trying to get through to an emergency doctor. He suggests I give her Calpol and take a urine sample into the surgery first thing. Downstairs, I try to find the nearest thing to a specimen bottle — something watertight but big enough for her to pee into. Only thing I can find is Barbie flask. It will have to do. Back upstairs, kneeling next to the toilet, I have no luck coaxing a wincing Em to perform into the flask.
“Mummy?”
“Yes, love.”
“Can I have a swimming party?”
“Of course, sweetheart.” Flask is instantly filled to the brim.
NOON. JFK AIRPORT, NEW YORK. A hulking Customs inspector bearing a strong resemblance to Sipowicz in NYPD Blue rifles through my hand luggage. Totally unconcerned, I look on as he takes out my mobile, spare tights and Percy the Puppy book. Dips his meaty hand in a side pocket and brings out the Barbie flask. Omigod. Was supposed to leave that on the kitchen table. If flask is here, where is Pocket Memory?
Customs inspector unscrews Barbie container and sniffs. “Ma’am, how would you describe this liquid?”
“It’s my daughter’s urine.”
“Ma’am, I think you’d better come with me.”
Absolutely Bloody Everything.
WEDNESDAY, FAIRWEATHER INN, SHANKSVILLE, NEW JERSEY. Awake since 4:00 a.m., trapped in the revolving door of jet lag. Room service doesn’t start till 6:00 so I get a rank metallic coffee from machine in the hallway and add a slug of miniature from the minibar. Whisky gives a sustained top note to the hell brew. Catch sight of old woman in the bathroom mirror. Look away.
This morning, I dress for battle in full Armani armor — it is incredibly comforting pulling on a crisp white blouse and a digestive-biscuit-brown jacket and skirt with seams so sharp you could perform surgery with them. Shoes are fudge-colored LK Bennett pencil heels with white stitching and a groin-piercing toe. The look I’m aiming for is Katharine Hepburn Kicks Ass.
Two hours before the final and Momo joins me in the room. She is wearing a blue silk suit, and her dark hair is scraped back and pinned up. She may be nervous within, but she looks so mysteriously serene that a religion ought to be founded in her name.
Today, I have to be confident for both of us, exuding the gale-force bonhomie of a game-show host who knows his contract is up for renewal. We’ve been through the presentation fifty times already, but there’s no harm reprising all the don’ts.
“If they offer you a drink, don’t take it, OK? Don’t call them by their first names whatever you do. This is an ethical fund; these people like to think of themselves as the kind of people who like to be Gregged and Hannahed, but if you try it they’ll suddenly realize how much they prefer to be deferred to. They’re thinking about trusting us with an awful lot of money, so it’s sir and ma’am all round. And remember, we are the suitors.”
Momo looks surprised. “It’s a flirtation?”
“Yes, only we don’t flirt. It’s like courtly love.”
“The one who was married to Kurt Cobain?”
“Courtly love, Momo. Courtly. Did you ever read any Chaucer at school?” She shakes her head. God, what are they teaching them these days?
“No? Well, we protest our undying devotion. Desperate to please the beloved, we’d walk a million miles for one of their files: that kind of thing. And the key is to keep reminding them that although we have hundreds of white guys behind us who practically invented banking, we also have an unparalleled commitment to diversity. Ethical funds want decent returns. They want diversity, but they don’t want Third World. So we can give them the best of British with a rainbow gloss, which is where you and I come in.”
“Isn’t that sort of unethical, Kate?”
Weeks of exposure to my radioactive cynicism and she can still ask that question? What am I going to do with this child? “If we told the truth, Momo, we’d lose, which would have the virtue of being extremely ethical. But if we bluff our way through and we win, then two women — one of them not white — will have landed a three-hundred-million-dollar account for Edwin Morgan Forster, which means diversity really does pay, and that means that one day, instead of being window dressing, we may get a crack at running the store. Which will be altogether ethical and also mean we can buy ourselves a lot of excellent shoes. Next question.”
“So, lying in a final isn’t wrong?”
“Only if you do it badly.”
Momo gives a laugh that is too big for her slight frame; it propels her back onto the bed, and one shoe slips off and thumps onto the floor. (Must remember to do something about her shoes: navy flatties, they do nothing for her feet, which are as tiny and articulated as a ballerina’s.) Lying there on the swirly orange counterpane, she looks up at me and sighs. “I don’t understand you, Kate. Sometimes I think you think it’s all the most terrific bullshit, and then it seems as though you really really want to win.”
“Oh, I really really do. Just watch me. When I was little I used to hide a Monopoly hotel down my sock. If I landed on Park Lane, I’d smuggle the hotel out. My dad caught me one Christmas and hit me with the nutcracker for being a cheating little cow.”
I can see Momo struggling to place this Dickensian episode in the polite well-ordered childhood that is the birthright of every middle-class girl. She hasn’t worked out that I’m traveling on a false passport — why would she? These days even I’d struggle to spot myself as the imposter in a City lineup.
When she responds, it’s as though the sun were in her eyes. “That’s awful,” she says. “Your father. I’m really sorry.”
“Don’t be. Be sorry for the losers. Now let’s run through that part where you hand me the list of clients again.”
The phone rings, and for a second neither of us recognizes its plaintive foreign bleat. It’s Rod with a few last-minute suggestions. When I’ve hung up, I turn to Momo.
“All right, guess what he said.”
She furrows her brow and pretends to be thinking before answering in her best crystal Cheltenham Lady, “Go out and kick the fucking tires?”
Suddenly I feel a lot less worried about her. “OK, you got the job. Rod’s not bad, you know, once you learn how to handle him. If you make him think everything you want to do is his idea, he’ll be happy as a clam.”
Momo frowns. “When you talk about the men at work, Kate, it’s as though we were their mothers.”
“We are their mothers. I have people hanging on to my skirt in the office and then I have them hanging on to my skirt when I go home. You’d better get used to it. Right, let’s try the beginning one more time.”
The phone rings again. It’s Paula, just calling to say she located my personal organizer in the salad drawer. Ben has started hiding things in the fridge. All the information I have needed over the past twelve hours has been with the celery. Meanwhile, Emily is on antibiotics for her urinary infection. Her temperature is still up, but she’d like to talk to me, if that’s OK.
Emily comes on the line, at once pipingly eager and breathily shy. Whenever I hear my daughter’s voice on the phone, I feel as though I’m hearing it for the first time; it seems implausible that something I grew inside myself so recently should be able to converse with me, let alone bounce off a satellite.
“Mummy, are you at America?”
“Yes, Em.”
“Like Woody and Jessie in Toy Story 2?”
“Yes, that’s right. And how are you feeling, sweetheart?”
“Fine. Ben got a bump. There was loads and loads of blood.”
At this, I feel my own blood just stop, as if someone took a flash photo of my whole being. “Em, can I speak to Paula again? Please ask Paula to come to the phone now, there’s a good girl.”
I try to keep my voice calm and raise the matter of Ben’s bump casually when what I feel like doing is appearing in a ball of fire in my own kitchen with maternal fangs glittering and a headful of hissing snakes.
“Oh, that,” Paula says dismissively. “He just hit his head on the table.”
The metal table with the retina-perforating corners I banished to the cellar in case Ben fell on it? That’s the one. Hey, but these things happen, Paula is telling me and, her tone says, Anyway, you weren’t here so who are you to criticize? Besides, she doesn’t think Ben needs stitches.
Stitches? My God. I clear my throat and try to find that sweet liberal register where an order sounds like a suggestion. Perhaps Paula could take Ben to the surgery? Just in case. A deep sigh and then suddenly she is telling Ben to put something down. At this distance, my children’s carer sounds sardonic, detached. Most distressing of all, she sounds like someone who is not me. I can just about hear Ben — he must be over by the window — making those yelps which sound like pain but are just his way of recording the fierce pleasure of discovery. Paula is saying there was something else. Alexandra Law called about a Parent Teachers meeting at school. Will I be attending?
“What?”
“Can you go to the PTA meeting?”
“I really can’t think about that now.”
“So I’ll tell her no?”
“No. Tell her I’ll call her. . after.”
To: Kate Reddy
From: Debra Richardson
Q: Why is it difficult to find men who are sensitive, caring and good-looking?
A: They all have boyfriends already.
How U?
To: Debra Richardson
From: Kate Reddy
Completely mental. Literally. Life of the body a distant memory. Am now just brain on a stick. About to pitch for $$$$$$ account with terrified trainee who thinks Geoffrey Chaucer is rap artist. Plus Emily sick and Ben nearly decapitated while Pol Pot busy listening to Kiss FM.
Don’t want to be grown-up anymore. When did we start having to be the grown-ups? K xxx
2:57 P.M. Our prospective client’s offices are decorated in a style I immediately identify as Corporate Cozy. Plaid wing chairs, a lot of teak and ethnic hangings bought by the mile. The look says: We mean business but, hey, you can do a yogic headstand in here if the mood takes you.
Momo and I are shown into the meeting room by the largest female I have ever seen. Carol Dunstan is clearly a major beneficiary of Workplace Diversity, Fattist Section. The walk from the lobby has made her breathless; just looking at her is to wonder what manner of distress it is that requires so much comfort eating. She makes the introductions, taking us through the eighteen faces round the table. I hear Momo decline a drink. That’s my girl. “And last, but certainly not least, our distinguished colleague from the Salinger Foundation. Mr. Abelhammer sits on the state board of trustees, Ms. Reddy.”
And truly there he is. In the farthest corner, marked out from the other suits by a posture of almost insolent relaxation and a broad grin. Simultaneously, the person I least want to see and the only person I want to see. Jack.
THE PRESENTATION GOES WELL. Too well, maybe. Halfway through and I can practically taste the healing sting of gin and tonic on the plane home. I have tried to ignore the fact that my e-mail lover is actually physically here in the room, although I have felt his presence as you feel the sun on your skin.
I talk our prospective clients through the booklet containing mug shots of the guys who manage portfolios back in London. It’s a gallery of City types pretty much unchanged for three hundred years: well-lunched Hogarth squires, thrusting runts. Men whose last wisps of hair have been blown dry to form a spun-sugar web over a pink saucer of scalp. Heart-attack candidates, their eager prep-school faces buried in the landslide of middle age. Young men with the waxy, stunned look that comes from long obedient hours in front of a screen. With particular pride, I point out hotshot manager Chris Bunce, whose coke habit has given him the eyes of a laboratory rat and the manners to match. At the front, there is a photograph of Robin Cooper-Clark — tall as a birch, quizzical, half smiling. He looks like God would look, if God had his shirts made at Turnbull & Asser.
Carol Dunstan clears her throat. “Ms. Reddy, New Jersey has recently signed up to the McMahon Principles. Would that be a problem to your asset allocation?”
OK, Kate, let’s not panic. Let’s think. Think! “No. I’m sure that if we were given a list of stocks that were governed by the Mc — um — Mahon Principles—”
“We don’t have a list, Ms. Reddy,” says the big woman curtly. “Naturally, we would expect Edwin Morgan Forster to provide a list that abides by the McMahon Principles. Principles with which you are, of course, familiar.”
Eighteen faces in the room fixed on me. Nineteen, including Momo, who looks up with trusting spaniel eyes. I have never heard of McMahon or his sodding principles. Seconds which normally pass silently, modestly, happy to go unnoticed, are suddenly long, loud and merciless. I can feel the blood surge to my throat and chest — a raspberry flush that can only be triggered by sex or shame. The exhalation of the air-conditioning unit sounds like a woman parted from her lover. No. Don’t think about lovers. Think about McMahon, whoever he is. Probably some self-righteous little Celt wanting to take his revenge on the Anglo-Saxon capitalist oppressors. I avoid looking down the far end of the table where Jack is sitting.
Carol Dunstan’s prim drawstring mouth is just opening again when a male voice speaks. “I think we can feel confident, Carol, that with Ms. Reddy’s wide experience of ethical funds she would be up to speed with the employment practices of companies in Ireland.”
Sudden rush of gratitude as heady as oxygen. Jack has flipped the emergency hatch and given me a way out. I nod in eager agreement. “As Mr. Abelhammer says, we have a team which screens for employment policies. On a personal note, I’d like to add that I am fully behind the McMahon Principles, being Irish myself.”
There is a crash behind me. Momo has dropped a file, but this calamity is lost in the general murmur of appreciation for my ethnic credentials. On a tide of goodwill, I move straight into the close. The close is the bit where you say Give us the money. But politely. And without mentioning money.
5:11 P.M. Momo and I are falling into the cab when there is a squeal of leather behind us.
“I’d like to say what a pleasure it was to witness such a performance, Ms. Reddy.”
“Why, thank you, Mr. Abelhammer. I was most grateful for your interjection.”
Caught in the static between Jack and me, Momo looks slightly perplexed.
He rests his hand lightly on the rim of the car door. “I was wondering whether I could interest you both in a drink. Perhaps take in the sights of Shanksville. I see the Sinatra Inn does a cocktail called Come Fly with Me.”
“Actually, Ms. Gumeratne and I are very tired.”
He nods his understanding. “Another time. Take care now.”
On the way back to the hotel, Momo says, “I’m sorry, Kate, but do you know that guy?”
“No, I don’t.” A truthful answer. I don’t know Jack Abelhammer, but I may be in love with him. How can you be in love with someone you don’t know? It’s probably easier, isn’t it, all things considered. A blank screen you can type all your longings on.
“He looks like George Clooney.” Momo sighs. “I think we should have that drink.”
“No. It would be unprofessional before they’ve made their decision. Anyway, we should have our own drink to celebrate. You were a complete star.”
“I’m sorry, Kate, but you were the brilliant one. I couldn’t do what you just did.” Momo permits herself a smile, and I suddenly see how tense her face has been. “I didn’t know you were Irish.”
“Just a little. On my father’s side.”
“Like McMahon?”
“Yes, only without the principles.”
She giggles. “What does your father do?”
“Same line of work as me.”
“He’s a fund manager?”
“No, but like us he gambles a lot on fancied horses, pretends it’s scientific and hopes to God they’ll come home, and when they don’t he leaves town.”
“Good gracious,” says Momo, so shocked she forgets to say sorry for the first time since I met her. “He sounds like a colorful character.”
WHENEVER I TALK ABOUT MY DAD to other people I hear myself adopting a different voice: detached, breezy, ironic. A voice you tell funny stories in. Colorful characters are wonderful in Dickens or as bit parts in movies, when they’re played by bloated ex-matinee idols who can be carried all the way to Best Supporting Actor on a wave of public sympathy; you just don’t want one in your life if you can possibly help it.
“Pretend we’ve got plenty of cash, Kathy duck,” Dad once instructed me. We were sitting in a pub garden at the tag end of a long gray line of northern towns. Julie and I sat on a bench with half-pint glasses of Dandelion & Burdock — a drink that tastes like Pepsi mixed with creosote but was believed by us to be the chosen nectar of sophisticated ladies. I was twelve years old, too dizzy from moving town every six months to know what stable behavior was, and far too in thrall to my father to protest. Of course there wasn’t any money, and when there was it would be spirited out of my mum’s purse by Joe for one of his schemes.
But I pretended we had money. Even then I think I could smell the disappointment settling like damp on my father and I wanted to protect him from it. Disappointment unmans a man so. The women around him have to go on pretending they can’t smell it, with him sitting there, hand shaking, using the other one to steady the glass and insisting that there’s everything still to play for.
Now here’s a funny thing. All the women I know in the City are Daddy’s Girls one way or another. (Candy’s dad walked out when she was five and I think she’s been trying to find him ever since; Debra’s ran a motor company in the West Midlands and was occasionally sighted by Deb and her sisters between rounds of golf at the weekend.) Daughters striving to be the son their father never had, daughters excelling at school to win the attention of a man who was always looking the other way, daughters like poor mad Antigone pursuing the elusive ghost of paternal love. So why do all us Daddy’s Girls go and work in places so hostile to women? Because the only real comfort we get is from male approval. How fucking sad is that?
I close my eyes and try to banish thoughts of my own wayward sire. Since he turned up at the office with that nappy design, he has called most days. The other night, he left a message on the answerphone, saying that the money wasn’t enough.
“How much did you give him?” asked Rich, his face draining.
I mentioned a figure that was about a third of the check I wrote that day in the pub, and Rich hit the roof.
“Christ, when will you learn, woman?”
A good question. There’s no statute of limitations on pity, is there?
8:18 P.M. Must have lain down on the bed and fallen asleep. Woken by the phone. It’s Richard. He sounds incredibly pissed off. Says he can’t find the detergent ball for the washing machine. Paula called in sick and Ben was running round without a nappy and there was an accident on the duvet. So he’s got the cover off and into the machine, but he can’t find the ball.
I tell him the ball will probably have got tangled up in the sheets; he should try the ironing basket.
“Where’s the ironing basket?”
The ironing basket is the basket full of clothes next to the ironing board.
“Rich, aren’t you even going to ask me how it went?”
“What?”
“The final.”
“I need you.”
“Oh, come on, Rich, you can manage the washing just this once.”
“Kate, it’s nothing to do with the washing, I just need you. Why can’t you fly home tonight?”
“I just can’t. Look, I’ll be on the first plane tomorrow.”
The phone again. I let it ring and ring. Richard asking about hamster food, presumably, or the location of the microwave or his children’s ears. Eventually, thinking there might be a genuine problem with the kids, I pick up.
“I was glad to learn that you’re Irish. For a moment there I was in danger of confusing you with the Katharine Reddy who runs my fund and told me she was French.”
“I did not say I was French, Jack. I said I had French blood in me.”
He laughs. “What next? Cherokee? You are a piece of work, Kate.”
Now I hear a voice — a responsible sober woman’s voice — telling her client quite firmly that under no circumstances does she want to try the Come Fly with Me cocktail in some cheesy roadside diner.
His reply comes straight back over the net. “No problem. They do a great ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.’”
A line from that song pops into my head and I sing it: “Horizontally speaking, he’s at his very best.”
Abelhammer lets out a low whistle. “So it’s true, you do know everything.”
“I don’t know the way to the Sinatra Inn.”
THE SINATRA INN has the determined gaiety of a fading showgirl. Red-velvet booths line the walls; fifty years of elegant dining have rubbed shiny saddle sores in the scarlet plush. The back wall is given over to photographs of the local boy who made good (Frank came from Hoboken, just down the road). There is a picture of Sinatra with Lauren Bacall; Sinatra at a rakish angle with the Rat Pack; Sinatra standing at a piano, caught in a cone of light, his skinny tie at half mast, his neck straining for some long-lost note; and Sinatra with Ava Gardner in the fifties, him looking famished, her insatiable. I can never see those two together without imagining them in bed.
Each booth has its own mini jukebox where you put in your quarter and take your pick of Frank’s Greatest Hits. So many titles, so many featuring the word you. Jack Abelhammer and I choose the corner seat under the poster of Frank as Maggio in From Here to Eternity. To the waiter, an eager, harassed man with a lot of veal to get rid of, we must appear to be a regular couple having fun over the cocktail list. (“Witchcraft” looks evil, so I opt for “Night and Day.”) In fact, Jack and I are in trouble. Like returning astronauts, we are struggling to make the switch from the weightless world of e-mail, where you can say what you like and mean it or not mean it, to the real world where words, being earthed by gestures, by arms and lips and eyes, have their own specific gravity.
I have never seen Jack out of a suit before. The effect is only slightly less alarming than if he were entirely naked. I laugh and drink and laugh and feel a needle of doubt threading through me. I know Jack Abelhammer the way I know a fictional character. I need him to exist to make reality more bearable, not to complicate it.
“So, what’s it to be, signora?” Jack is examining the menu. “Veal with marsala, veal with mascarpone or veal with our delicious chopped veal. You don’t likea da veal? OK, so we have a very gooda scaloppine à la limone.”
He slots a quarter into the jukebox, and his finger reaches out to press “Where or When.”
“No, not that one.”
“But it’s beautiful.”
“I’ll cry. When I heard Sinatra died I cried.”
“Hey, I love Frank too, but he was real old when he died. Why’d you cry?”
I’m not sure how much I want to tell this most familiar stranger, the version with the colorful character or the true story. My dad had a cache of Sinatra 78s he kept in the sideboard filed in their brown-paper sleeves in a big toast-rack thing. Julie and I were fascinated by them when we were kids. The brown paper smelled like old people, but the records themselves made everyone seem so young. They had that kind of ebony luster a cockroach has and a fabulous label in mauve with silver writing like an invitation to a ball. My father always did a great Sinatra impersonation at family get-togethers, standing on a table and spitting out “Schick-kargo, Schick-cargo, that toddlin’ town!” But the songs he liked best were the sad ones: “All the Way” and “Where or When.” “Frank’s the patron saint of unrequited love,” Dad said. “Will you listen to that voice, Katharine?”
“Kate?”
“Frank could make my parents happy,” I say, studying the menu. “Sinatra was always the truce music in our house. It was safe to come out if my dad put on ‘Come Fly with Me.’ I think I’ll try another cocktail instead of the veal. What d’you think would happen if you mixed ‘Love and Marriage’ with ‘Strangers in the Night’?”
Jack grabs the tip of the knife I am playing with, so we each have one end. “Nothing too terrible. Maybe a strange taste in the mouth. I’d say the worst was a bad case of remorse in the morning. What’s a bouncy castle?”
“What bouncy castle?”
“A bouncy castle. You have it written on your hand. I haven’t seen a girl write on her hand since fifth grade; Kate, you really should look into these great new things called diaries.”
I look down at the spider of Biro across my knuckle, a reminder about Emily’s birthday. So, here’s the rub: to tell him or not to tell him that I am a mother (surely, the only context in which this could be a shameful revelation).
“A bouncy castle is… it’s a blow-up castle you bounce on. For my daughter’s birthday party, I need to remind myself to hire one. I mean, it’s not for ages, but by the time I get round to remembering it’s usually too late.”
“You have a child?” He seems interested, not appalled.
“Two. Or so they tell me. I don’t see as much of them as I’d like. Emily will be six in June; she thinks she’s Sleeping Beauty. Ben was one in January and you can’t get him to stay still, he’s. . well, he’s a boy.”
Jack nods solemnly. “Amazing they’re still making us. Strictly, we men should have been phased out with the stegosaurus. But a few of us wanted to stick around and see what the place would be like when you were running it.”
“I’m not terribly good at being laughed at, Mr. Abelhammer.”
“That’ll be the German in you, Ms. Reddy.”
Later, after the veal — a flannel wrapped in a loofah of cheese — there is tiramisu, like shaving foam flecked with almonds. The food is so transcendentally terrible that we are already relishing the shared joke it will become. And then there is dancing, a lot of dancing. I seem to remember singing too, but that can’t be right. What kind of a state would I have to be in to sing in public?
“Still a voice within me keeps repeating, You You You.
Night and day you are the one,
Only you beneath the moon and under the sun.
Whether near to me or far,
It’s no matter darling where you are,
I think of you. Night and day.”
2:34 A.M. “Hello, Mummy! Mummy, come on, sleepyhead, it’s time to wake up now.”
Sit up in blind panic. Cover breasts with hands, then realize it’s dark. Emily? Here in New Jersey? Takes a few seconds to find the light switch, a few more to figure out the voice is coming from the alarm clock, the travel one with the recorded message that Emily gave me for Christmas. It must be getting-up time back in London. “Come on, Mummy, lazybones; you’ll be late.” Emily’s voice is tinged with pride in her assignment. When she’s bossy she sounds exactly like her mother.
Peer around the room for signs of adultery. My dress is on a hanger; shoes under the chair, underwear in a neat pile on top. Jack has carried me back, undressed me and put me to bed. Like a child. Suddenly, I think how unbearable it would have been if he’d been here when Emily’s voice sang out in the darkness, stopping us in our—
Oh, God, my head. Must get water. In bathroom, switch on light. Light like a drill. Switch off light. Drink one glass of water, then another. Not enough. Climb into shower with mouth open and let water gush in. On the way back to bed, I see that the top page of the hotel stationery has something on it. Switch on desk lamp:
“Some things that happen for the first time,
Seem to be happening again. .
But who knows where or when?”
Sleep well, love Jack
10:09 A.M. NEWARK AIRPORT. Plane is delayed forever. I am stretched out across a bank of seats in the Club Lounge. The fog outside the window is matched by impenetrable gloom inside my head. Think of last night while trying not to think of last night. Infidelity Reddy-style: all the guilt and none of the sex. Brilliant, Kate, just brilliant.
You get drunk with a client who carries you back to your hotel room, removes all your clothes and then politely takes his leave. Hard to know what to feel: outraged at the sexual invasion or mortified by the lack of it? Perhaps Abelhammer was repelled by nonmatching bra-brief combo or did he flee at sight of Reddy stomach which, after two pregnancies and an emergency cesarean, resembles one of her grandmother’s rice puddings — the top skin puckered over the granular slush beneath. One problem with being unconscious in presence of prospective lover is inability to pull belly button to spine as advised by personal trainer.
At the thought of Jack undressing me, my whole being feels like a stocking silkily descending a leg.
“Kate, are you OK?” Momo is back with black coffee and the British papers.
“No. Terrible. Anything in the news?”
“Just the Conservative Party killing each other. And working mothers all cracking up. It says that 78 percent would give up their job tomorrow if they could.”
“Can’t be accurate. Those of us who are really stressed out don’t have time to fill in stupid surveys. What are you thinking, Momo?”
She is doing that cute wrinkly thing with her nose. “I’m sorry, but I’m not going to have any. Kids. I really don’t know how you do it, Kate.”
“Compartments, that’s how. They go in one compartment, work goes in another, and you have to stop them leaking into each other. It’s tricky but not impossible. Anyway, you must have children. You’re beautiful and intelligent and there are enough gruesome morons reproducing out there.”
Momo shakes her head. “I like kids, I really do, but I want to go on with my career, and you said yourself how the City sees mothers. Anyway,” she says coolly, “I’m overeducated for looking after small children.”
How to explain to her? So many women of Momo’s age look at the likes of me, driven crazy by our double lives, and decide to put off having kids for as long as possible. I’ve seen it in my friends. They get to their mid-thirties, panic, pick the wrong guy — any sperm donor will do by then — find they can’t get pregnant and embark on IVF: painful and ruinous. Sometimes it works; mostly it doesn’t. We think we’ve outwitted Mother Nature, but Nature isn’t called Mother for nothing. She has her way of slapping us down, making us feel small. The world is going to end not with a bang but with a woman staring through a glass panel at her frozen eggs and wondering if she’ll ever have time to defrost them.
I try to shut out the noise of the airport and think of what Emily and Ben mean to me; then I gather what remaining strength I have and let Momo have it.
“Children are the proof we’ve been here, Momo, they’re where we go to when we die. They’re the best thing and the most impossible thing, but there’s nothing else. You have to believe me. Life is a riddle and they are the answer. If there’s any answer, it has to be them.”
Momo reaches into her bag and passes me a tissue. Is it the thought of the children that’s made me cry or the thought that last night I didn’t think of them at all?
8:53 P.M. FLIGHT FROM NEWARK TO HEATHROW. Adrenaline always gets you through a job, but on the way home the fact that I’ve been away kicks in like a hangover. Home. I feel both vital to it — how will they manage without me? — and painfully peripheral — they manage without me.
When I’m abroad, I sit in my hotel room in front of the laptop and call up my e-mails using Remote Access. You hear it dialing a long way off, somewhere at the far end of the universe. It takes a few seconds of bronchial static, then the bips do a tap dance off a satellite and come bouncing back. Remote Access. Isn’t that how I communicate with my children, dialing them up when I need to but otherwise keeping them at a distance? If I’m ever with Emily and Ben properly, for a few days and nights, I’m always struck by how shockingly alive they are. They’re not the shyly smiling girl and boy in the picture I just showed Momo, the one I keep in my wallet. Their need for me is like the need for water or light; it has a devastating simplicity to it. It doesn’t fit any of the theories about what women are supposed to do with their lives: theories written in books by women who never had children, or had children but brought them up as I mostly bring up mine — by Remote Access. Children change your heart; they never wrote that in the books. Sitting here in the front row of Club Class, nursing a large gin, I feel that absurd organ inside my chest, swollen and heavy as a gourd.
Momo is right next to me. Since the tears at the airport my assistant has been anxiously attentive; unnerved by this wistful stranger talking about the meaning of life, Momo wants normal Kate service to be resumed as soon as possible, and I’m pretty keen to get it back myself.
“Kate, I’ll swap you my Harvard Business Review for your Vanity Fair.” She offers me a supplement with a sober gray typeface.
“Does it have any pictures of Johnny Depp?”
“No, but there’s a terribly interesting article on the Do’s and Don’ts of Kinesthetic Presentation. Guess what point one is.”
“Undo two more blouse buttons than is strictly respectable?”
“No, Kate, seriously. ‘Ensure that your physical moves signal your intentions to the client.’”
“Like I said. Two blouse buttons.” (Why do I feel compelled to relieve this lovely solemn girl of her illusions? Perhaps I feel it’s better I get in first, before the men take them away.)
Across the aisle from us, a harassed brunette in a baggy pink sweater is trying to quiet a yelling baby. She stands up and jiggles her. She sits down again and attempts to pull the baby’s thrashing head into the cave of her shoulder; finally, she opens her shirt and tenders a breast. The suit in the neighboring seat takes one look at the mammary boulder and makes a bolt for the toilet.
There is a little-known Universal Law of Infant Crying: the greater the mother’s desperation and embarrassment, the louder the volume. Even without looking round, I can gauge the effect the mechanical howling has on my fellow passengers. The cabin crackles with the static of resentment: men who are trying to work, men who are trying to get some rest, women who may be savoring their last few hours of freedom and don’t want a reminder of what they can get at home, women away from their own kids and pricked by guilt.
The mother has a look on her face I know all too well. It’s two parts manic apology (“Sorry about this, everyone!”) to three parts defiance (“We’ve paid for our seat, just like the rest of you and she’s only tiny, what do you expect?”). Baby can’t be more than two or three months old; a pre-hair furze, fine as dandelion down, forms a corona around a skull that has the tensile strength and beauty of an egg. When she screams, you can see the pulse jump in the blue hollow at her temples.
“No, Laura, no, sweetie, that hurts,” the mother chides as the infant tugs furiously on her long dark hair. I get a sudden deep pang for my Ben. He does that when he’s overtired too: a baby’s frustration at not being able to enter sleep is that of an alcoholic locked out of a bar.
Momo looks on with a twenty-four-year-old’s horrified incomprehension. Under her breath, she asks me why the woman can’t shut the kid up.
“Because the baby wants to go to sleep, but the pressure in the baby’s ears is probably really hurting her. The only way you can equalize the pressure is to get her to drink something, but she won’t latch on to the breast because she’s too exhausted to suck.”
At the word suck, Momo gives a fastidious little shudder inside her Donna Karan gray wool and says she finds the whole idea of breastfeeding deeply weird.
I tell her it’s the opposite of weird. “In fact, it may be the only time in your life when your body makes perfect sense to you. I sat there in the delivery room and Emily rooted around and the milk started flowing and I thought, I am a mammal!”
“Sounds gross.” Momo does that wrinkly thing with her nose again.
“It wasn’t gross, it was comforting. We spend our whole life overruling what remains of our instincts and this one — how does that Carole King song go? ‘You make me feel like a nat-u-ral woman.’”
Shouldn’t have started singing. Pink Sweater overheard and clearly thinks I am being sarcastic about her doing the Earth Mother bit in public. I try to make amends by giving her a conspiratorial Don’t-worry-I’ve-been-there! smile. But I have forgotten that I’m in uniform. Seeing the suit and the laptop, she obviously mistakes me for the childless enemy and shoots me a twelve-bore glare.
I must try and get some sleep, but the thoughts are sparking in my brain like an electrical storm. When I think about Jack, I feel — what do I feel? I feel idiotic. Who is he, anyway, and what does he want with me or I with him? But mainly I feel excited, I feel ambushed. There are forces gathering around my heart and shouting at me to come out with my hands up. Sometimes I want to surrender. And then I think about my children, waiting like those owl babies in Ben’s book for their mummy to come home from hunting. I know the damn thing by heart.
And the baby owls closed their eyes and wished their Owl Mother would come. And she came. Soft and silent, she swooped through the trees to Sarah and Percy and Bill. “Mummy!” they cried, and they flapped and they danced, and they bounced up and down on their branch.“What’s all the fuss?” their Owl Mother asked. “You knew I’d come back.”
“Momo, d’you think we can get some more gin over here? I appear still to be in radio contact with my conscience.”
With the Atlantic below, I try to compose a message to Jack that will make things right again between us.
1:05 P.M.
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
Unaccustomed as I am to being undressed by a strange man while drunk —
No. Too flippant. Delete. Try business-as-usual approach.
1:11 P.M. Further to our recent meeting, I have been thinking of increasing the turnover of the fund temporarily. Should you have any further desire—
Should you need me—
I am most eager—
You know I would bend over backwards—
I have been considering some options which need to be put to bed—
Oh, hell.
1:22 P.M.
Jack, I just want to say how entirely out of character my behavior was the other night and I hope that temporary aberration will in no way alter our professional relationship which I value so highly. My memory of events is a little vague, but I trust that I was not too great an embarrassment when you kindly returned me to my hotel room.
Obviously, I hope this will in no way affect your future dealings with EMF, for whom you remain a most esteemed client.
Yours faithfully, Katharine
And that’s the one I send, as soon as I get home.
To: Kate Reddy
From: Jack Abelhammer
In the United States, when a woman kisses you on the mouth and invites you to join her on a desert island of your choice this does tend to “alter the professional relationship” somewhat, although maybe this is now part of standard client management techniques on your British MBA program?
The Sinatra Inn was a great evening. Please don’t be embarrassed about the hotel room: I kept my eyes closed at all times, ma’am, except when you asked me to take out your contacts. The left eye is greener.
When I got back to the apartment, Butch Cassidy was on TV. Kate, do you remember the end when Sundance and Butch are holed up with the Mexican army waiting outside? They know it’s no good, but they run out all barrels blazing anyway.
For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble.
Jack
Children, bouncy castle, rabbit molds for blancmange, husband.
You. You. You.
WHENEVER SHE APPEARED before the Court of Motherhood, the woman never seemed to do herself justice. It was hard to figure out exactly what went wrong. There she was, all the arguments on the tip of her tongue, the perfectly good reasons why she went out to work, the way it benefited both her and the children, the killer quote from Gloria Steinem about how no man has ever had to ask for advice on how to combine fatherhood and a career. And then, the minute she was standing in that dock, the justifications turned to ashes in her mouth.
She thought it was something to do with the way they always summoned her at night, when she was asleep, so obviously she wasn’t at her brightest. The courtroom didn’t help either. Airless, oak-paneled and lined with mournful wigged figures in black, it was like testifying in a giant coffin while the undertakers looked on, waiting for you to dig your own grave. And she loathed the judge. Must be at least seventy and very hard of hearing.
“Mrs. Shattock,” he booms, “you appear before the Court of Motherhood tonight charged with leaving a sick child in London while you flew on business to the United States of America. How do you plead?”
Oh, God, not that. “I left Emily in London with a temperature, that’s true, your honor. But if I’d pulled out of the final at such short notice, Edwin Morgan Forster would never ever have let me do another big pitch.”
“What kind of mother leaves her daughter when she’s ill?” demands the judge, peering stonily down at her.
“Me, but—”
“Speak up!”
“Me, your honor. I did leave Emily, but I knew she was getting the proper treatment, she was on antibiotics, and I did speak to her every day I was away and I am planning on organizing a swimming party for her birthday and I do genuinely believe women should be role models for their daughters and. . I do love her so much.”
“Mrs. Shattock.” The prosecuting counsel is on his feet now and pointing at her. “This court has heard how you confessed to your colleague, a Miss Candace Stratton, that you felt a surge of what you termed ‘almost orgasmic relief’ at leaving your family after half term and returning to the office. How do you answer that?”
She laughs, a dark, bitter laugh. “That’s incredibly unfair. Of course, it’s nice to be in a place where you’re not being followed around all the time by someone shouting ‘Mummy, poo!’ I don’t deny that. At least people in the office can see that you’re busy and don’t ask you for toast or lollies or to pull their knickers up. If it’s wrong to find that a relief, then I’m sorry: guilty as charged.”
“Did you say guilty?” The judge has perked up.
“In my defense,” she continues, “I’d like to have it taken into account that I did build three sand castles at St. Davids and I did let Emily plait my hair with the bits of crab she said were mermaid’s jewels. And I did all the songs and all the sandwiches. I made two kinds every day, even though they only ever eat the crisps—”
“Mrs. Shattock, please confine yourself to the charges!” roars the judge. “Guilty or not guilty? The business of the Court of Motherhood is not seaside activities.”
The woman cocks her head to one side and you can see something mischievous, almost mutinous, enter her eyes. “Is there a Court of Fatherhood, m’lud? Stupid question, really. Think how long it would take to process the backlog of cases. All those blokes who just popped into the pub on the way home and didn’t make it back for the bedtime story for, what shall we say, three thousand years?”
“Silence! Silence, I say. If you continue in this manner, Mrs. Shattock, I shall have you taken to the cells.”
“Sounds lovely. I could get some sleep.”
The judge pounds his gavel on the bench. He is getting larger by the minute and his old white face suffuses with scarlet like a syringe taking in blood. The defendant, meanwhile, is growing smaller and smaller. No bigger than a Barbie doll, she scrambles up onto the edge of the dock and balances there precariously in high heels. When she starts to shout at the judge, her voice is a gerbil squeak.
“All right, you really want to know the truth? Guilty. Unbelievably, neurotically, pathologically guilty. Look, I’m sorry, but I have to go. For heaven’s sake, just look at the time.”
CAN YOU SMELL treachery on your lover? I am convinced Richard can. He’s been all over me since I got back from New Jersey, perching on the edge of the bath while I tried to soak away the journey, insisting on washing my back, complimenting me on a hairstyle that hasn’t changed in three years. And staring and staring, as though trying to place something he can’t quite put his finger on, then looking quickly away when our eyes meet. For the first time, there is a shyness between us; as carefully polite as dinner-party guests, we will have been married seven years at the end of July.
While Rich is locking up downstairs, I jump into bed and simulate deep slumber to avoid reunion sex. Lying next to him with my eyes closed, a montage of guilt, work, desire and shopping flickers across my lids: bread, rice cakes, Jack’s smile, canned tuna, check cash level of funds, apple juice, Alphabite potato thingies — ask Paula, spreadsheets, the word kiss spoken in an American accent, cucumbers, blancmange rabbit, green jelly for grass.
At first light, when Rich and I finally make love — with the children starting to stir in their beds overhead — there is something driven and possessive about it, as though my husband were acting out some deep territorial impulse to plant his flag and reclaim me. And, in a way, I am grateful to be reclaimed; less scary than setting out for a foreign land with its curious habits, its unknown banners.
Richard is still collapsed on top of me when the children come shrieking into the bedroom. Emily’s first reaction on seeing that I’m back is of uncomplicated joy, complicated seconds later by a pout and an Othello-green stare. Ben is so delighted he bursts into tears and plumps down onto his nappy-cushioned bottom, that small body barely able to support the strength of his feelings. When the two of them climb onto the bed, Emily straddles Rich’s chest and Ben lies in the damp cruciform his father has left on my naked body. Face level with mine, he starts to point at my features one by one.
“Ayze.”
“Eyes, good boy.”
“Nows.”
“Nose, that’s right, Ben, clever boy. Have you been learning words while Mummy’s been away?”
His index finger, slender as a pencil, comes to rest between my breasts.
“And that, young man,” says Richard, leaning over and gently removing his son’s hand, “is the female bosom, of which your mother has a particularly lovely example.”
“Mummy looks like me, doesn’t she?” demands Emily, climbing aboard and budging Ben down onto the belly whose soft dome still carries the memory of carrying them both. “Me!” chimes Ben happily. “Me, me, me!” the children cry as the mother disappears under her own flesh and blood.
ANY WOMAN WITH A BABY has already committed a kind of adultery, I think. The new love in the nest is so voracious that all the old one can do is wait patiently, hoping for any crumbs the intruder does not consume in its cuckoo greed. A second child squeezes the adult love even harder. The miracle is that passion survives at all, and too often it dies in those early, early-rising years.
During the hours and days after I first get back from a trip, I always promise myself it’s my last time away. The story I live by — that working is just one of a range of choices I could make that will not affect my children — is exposed for what it is: a wishful fiction. Emily and Ben need me, and it’s me that they want. Oh, they adore Richard, of course they do, but he is their playmate, their companion in adventure; I’m the opposite. Daddy is the ocean; Mummy is the port, the safe haven they nestle in to gain the courage to venture farther and farther out each time. But I know I’m no harbor; sometimes when things are really bad I lie here and think, I am a ship in the night and my children yell like gulls as I pass.
And so I get out my calculator and do the sums again. If I stop work we could sell the house and clear the mortgage and the home-improvement loan that ran out of control when we first found rising damp and a bad case of descending house. (“You need underpinning, love,” said the builder. Damn right I did.) Move out of London, buy a place with a decent garden, hope Rich could pick up some more architectural work, see if I could work part-time. No foreign holidays. Economy-size everything. Bring the shoe habit to heel.
At times, I can almost be moved to tears by the picture of the thrifty responsible homemaker I could and would become. But the idea of not having an income after all these years makes me so fearful. I need my own money the way I need my own lungs. (“What your poor mum never had was Running Away Money,” Auntie Phyllis said, dabbing my face with her hankie.) And how would I be, left alone with the kids all day? The need of children is never-ending. You can pour all your love and patience into them, and when is it all right to say when? Never. You can never say when. And to serve so selflessly, you have to subdue something in yourself. I admire the women who can do it, but the mere thought makes me sick with panic. I could never admit this to anyone, but I think giving up work is like becoming a missing person. One of the domestic Disappeared. The post offices of Britain should be full of Wanted posters for women who lost themselves in their children and were never seen again. So when my two bounce on the body they sprang from shouting me, a voice within me keeps repeating, Me, me, me.
7:42 A.M. Complete hell trying to get out of the house. Emily reports that all three changes of clothes I have offered her are unacceptable. Yellow is her new favorite color, apparently.
“But all your clothes are pink.”
“Pink’s silly.”
“Come on, darling, let Mummy pull your skirt up. Such a pretty skirt.”
She swats me away. “I don’t want pink. I hate pink.”
“Don’t talk to me in that tone of voice, Emily Shattock. I thought you were going to be six next birthday, not two.”
“Mummy, that’s not a very nice thing to say.”
How are you supposed to deal with a child who within twenty seconds can drop her impersonation of John McEnroe in favor of the ethical rigor of Dame Mary Warnock? On the way out, I shout up to an invisible Rich, asking if he can get a man to take a look at the dishwasher. I hand Paula a list of stuff we need plus all of my cash and make sure to say please four times. Then, just as I reach the door, Emily crumples into tears at the foot of the stairs. From this end of the hall, she looks less like a winged fury than a very small sad girl. Feel my anger deflate into remorse. Go back and cuddle her, removing jacket first to avoid snail trail of snot.
“Mummy, did you go to the Egg Pie Snake Building?”
“What?”
“I want to go to the Egg Pie Snake Building with you. It’s at America.”
“Oh, the Empire State Building. Yes, love, Mummy will take you one day, when you’re a bigger girl.”
“When I’m seven?”
“Yes, when you’re seven.” And her face clears fast as the sky after a sudden shower.
To: Kate Reddy
From: Jack Abelhammer
Big consultants powwow here in May. Stop.
Urgently require presence of amazing British fund mgr. Stop.
Great oyster bar Grand Central Station. Stop.
Can you swallow a dozen oysters? I can’t. Stop.
2:30 P.M. At King’s Cross, I board the train to York for a conference. Am only allowing myself to think about Jack twice an hour, an act of incredible self-discipline slightly compromised by the fact that I have used up my allocation before we even pull out of the station. When I remember kissing him and him kissing me back at the Sinatra Inn, it has a molten effect on my core. I feel full of gold.
The train shudders and groans from its berth and I spread my stuff out on the table: for once I have a chance to sit down in peace and relax with the papers. Headline on page 2: WHY A SECOND BABY CAN KILL YOUR CAREER. Definitely not reading that. Since Emily was born, I swear to God that every month there’s been some new research proving that my child wrecks my work prospects or, more painfully, my work wrecks my child’s prospects. Go back to your job promptly and they say, “What kind of mother are you?” If you take your full entitlement of maternity leave and ask to go part-time, they say, “What kind of an executive are you?” Every way you look, you stand condemned.
Turn to Women’s Page instead and start to fill in something called a Stress Quiz.
Do you find you suffer from any of the following?
a. Sleeplessness
b. Irritability
For God’s sake, what is it now? Damn mobile. It’s Rod Task from the office.
“Katie, I hear the final with Moo Moo went great.”
“Momo.”
“Right. Think you girls should stick together, go after some more ethical accounts.”
Rod says he needs to access a Salinger file but he can’t get into my computer. Wants my password.
“Ben Pampers.”
“Pampas? Didn’t know you had a thing for the Argies, Katie.”
“What?”
“Pampas. South American grasslands, right?”
“No. P A M P E R S. It’s a kind of — er, cosmetic.”
When did you last find time to read a book?
a. Within the last month
b. Not since—
Mobile again. My mother. “Is it a busy time, Kath love?”
“No, it’s fine, Mum.”
I lie back on the headrest and prepare for a long conversation. Can hardly tell my mother that busy no longer means what busy meant in her day. Busy isn’t a morning with the washtub and a cheese sandwich for lunch before collecting the kids from school. Busy has got busy since my childhood; busy has gone global.
My mother thinks some disaster has happened if I don’t return a phone call from her within twenty-four hours. It’s hard to explain that the only chance to return the call will be when a disaster isn’t happening, stormy being the prevailing climate, with surprise outbreaks of calm.
Mum says she just rang to check how Emily’s getting on at school since her friend Ella left.
Bad moment. I had no idea Ella had left. Haven’t been in to school since I started preparing for the final. “Oh, fine. Really, she’s been great about it. And she’s doing brilliantly at ballet.” Enter a tunnel. Line cuts out.
The tightening knot in my stomach makes it hard to focus on the Stress Quiz. When did I start lying to my mother? I don’t mean the obligatory daughter-mother falsehoods—“Eleven at the latest; never tried it; three Cokes; but everyone’s wearing them; he slept on the floor; yes, a friend of Deb’s; no, not overdrawn; in the sale, yes, an absolute bargain; fine, couldn’t be better.”
Those lies aren’t really lies at all but mutual protection. When you’re young your mother shields you from the world because she thinks you’re too young to understand, and when she’s old you shield her because she’s too old to understand — or to have any more understanding inflicted on her. The curve of life goes: want to know, know, don’t want to know.
What I’m talking about here is the lies to my mother about being a mother. I tell her Emily has coped well with the departure of her best friend, even though I haven’t heard about it. I’d rather Mum thought I was a failure at work than a stranger to my children. She thinks I have it all and she’s so pleased for me. I can’t tell her, can I? It would be like finding out that after Cinderella got to live in the palace, the Prince put her back on hearth-cleaning duty.
7:47 P.M. THE CLOISTERS HOTEL, YORK. I ring my mother back. She sounds breathless. With a little gentle prompting from me she admits that, yes, she has been feeling a bit under the weather lately, which, translated from Motherspeak, means she has lost all feeling in her limbs and her vital organs are shutting down. Oh, God.
I don’t even bother to replace the handset before keying in the number of my sister, Julie, who lives just round the corner from Mum. Steven, Julie’s eldest, answers the phone. He reports that his mum’s watching The Street, but he’ll get her.
Julie’s tone still takes me by surprise: the adoring lisp of my little sister has been supplanted in recent years by something tense and grudging; whenever we speak these days, she seems to be spoiling for a fight about a grievance that’s too painful to have a name.
I got away and Julie didn’t. Julie fell pregnant and got married when she was twenty-one and had three kids by the time she was twenty-eight and I didn’t. Julie’s husband is an electrician and mine is an architect. Julie lives a mile away from our mother and tries to look in every other day and I don’t. Julie, who is good with her hands, brings in a bit of extra cash by making tiny curtains and bits of furniture for a local dolls’ house company and I, who am good with my head, don’t. (In fact, I probably invest my clients’ money indirectly in the Far Eastern sweatshops that are driving Julie’s employer out of business.) Julie has been abroad once — Rimini, unlucky with the weather — whereas it is not unknown for me to go twice in a single week. And none of this is anybody’s fault, but we exist now, my sister and I, in an atmosphere of guilt and blame.
I ask Julie if she thinks Mum should go and see a doctor, and her sigh blows across the Pennines, flattening trees in its path. “Mum won’t listen to me,” she says. “If you’re that bothered, why don’t you get up here and tell her yourself?”
I’m explaining what my schedule has been like when Julie jumps in: “Anyway, it’s not physical. She’s had some bother with men coming round to the flat. Said they were after money Dad owed them.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
From my sister’s living room floats the mournful theme tune of Coronation Street. Julie and I both loved that soap when we were kids; there was a period when we fought furiously over the affections of Ray Langton, a mechanic with dark wavy hair, until he got squashed under one of his own cars. I haven’t seen it in twenty years.
“I’ve left a couple of messages on that machine, Kath,” says my sister, “but you’re never there, are you?”
8:16 P.M. The conference is for dot.com entrepreneurs, or what’s left of them. The guys who persuaded the City that they could read the future turned out to have been talking crystal balls. You wouldn’t believe how much venture capital has been thrown at firms who were going to sell designer clothes on the Net. But guess what? People prefer to go to shops and try stuff on. Women fund managers were a lot less badly burned in the meltdown: as always, we were better at evaluating risk — reward; we spent far less on untried stock than our male colleagues. People said we were lucky; I don’t agree. I think it’s innate. Women like to have some reliable staples in the cupboard, to keep those small mouths fed when the saber-toothed tiger is blocking the entrance to the cave.
Unpacking my suitcase before going down to dinner, I find a large envelope marked DO NOT OPEN TILL SUNDAY! in Richard’s handwriting. I open it: my Mother’s Day cards. One is a print of Ben’s hands in red paint. I half-smile half-grimace at the thought of the mess that must have attended its making. Emily’s has a drawing of me on the front. I am wearing a crown and holding a green cat and I am so tall I dwarf my nearby palace. Inside, she has written: I love my Mummy. Love is speshal it makes my hart sparKle and tresha appea.
I can’t believe it. Have forgotten Mother’s Day. Mum will never forgive me. Dial Reception. “Can you get me a number for Interflora?”
To: Kate Reddy
From: Jack Abelhammer
Will you come to NYC? Or should I. Stop.
Thinking about you. Stop.
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate ReddyDon’t.
Stop.
Get dishwasher fixed. Stair carpet? Fund transitions to be arranged — no fuck-ups! Call Jill. Application form for nursery for Ben? Emily schools NOW! Remind Rich to get cash out for baby-sitter. Pay JUANITA! Change computer password. Paula’s birthday, damn! George Michael tickets? Book spa treatment. Call Dad and tackle about his debts. Visit Mum! Buy Sinatra CD. Ginseng for better memory or ginko thingy?
3:39 A.M. Woken by the doorbell. It’s Rob, our neighbor from three doors down. Says he heard a noise and saw a group of lads by our car, but he shouted and they ran off. Richard goes out to inspect the damage. Side window completely smashed in, forked-lightning crack across the back one. Of course, the car alarm didn’t go off. The car alarm, usually triggered by a cat’s breath, is hopelessly mute when actual burglary is taking place.
Rich goes out to tape up the windows while I get on the phone to Prontoglass 24-Hour Service.
“Sorry, your call is held in a queue. Due to demand. Please hold while we try to connect you.”
Demand? What demand? It’s four o’clock in the bloody morning.
“If you know the extension you require, please press one. If you wish to speak to an operator, please press two.”
I press 2.
“Please hold while we try to connect you; your call will be answered shortly. Thank you for choosing Prontoglass! If you wish to speak to an operator, please press three.”
I press 3.
“Sorry, your call cannot be taken at the moment. Please try later!”
Think of all the time that must be wasted every day in those echoing antechambers where calls wait. Hell, contrary to what Sartre said, is not other people, hell is trying to get through to other people while listening to seven minutes of Vivaldi played on panpipes. I decide to get dressed and crack in early to some work. This is a good time of day to talk to Tokyo. But as I’m fumbling with my blouse buttons in the still-dark bedroom, there is a yell from above. When I go up, the baby is standing in his cot remonstrating with the monster who has dragged him from sleep. He jabs a debater’s accusing forefinger at his invisible assailant.
“I know, sweetheart, I know. Some bad men have woken us all up.”
Ben is so spooked he won’t go back to sleep. I lift him onto the sofa bed which is just next to the cot and lie down beside him.
“Roo,” he moans. “Roo.” So I get up and fetch the scruffy little kangaroo and tuck it under his arm.
Babies have this magic spot between their brows. If you stroke your finger down over it, and along the ridge of the nose, their eyes close automatically like a human roller blind. My boy hates sleep; it separates him from the life he relishes, but he starts to drift off, the indigo eyes emptying of thought. I lie there contemplating the cracks on the ceiling around the light fitting where bits of plaster are starting to peel off. Even my ceiling has stress eczema. I imagine a finger stroking my own brow and, clothes wrinkling around me, I tumble into a crowded dream.
6:07 A.M. Richard comes into Ben’s room to relieve me. Baby is splayed flat out like a puppy. We talk in whispers.
“I did say buying the Volvo was a bad idea, Kate.”
“Some little bastards break into our car and it’s my fault?”
“No, just that round here it’s clearly a provocation, isn’t it?”
“Come off it, Rich, even Tony Benn doesn’t think property’s theft anymore.”
He laughs. “And who was it who once said crime is the just punishment for an unjust society?”
“I never said that. When did I say that?”
“Shortly before taking possession of your first open-top Golf, Mrs. Engels.”
My turn to laugh. Encouraged, Rich starts kissing my hair and puts an exploratory hand down my front. Even when you’re not in the mood, startling how quickly nipples stiffen to iced gems. Rich is just pulling me down onto the Winnie the Pooh rug when Ben sits bolt upright, gives his parents a how-could-you look and then points to himself. (Did I mention that babies are antisex too? You’d think they’d have some nostalgia for the act that made them; instead they appear to have an alarm to see off the threat of rivals, wailing on cue as though their cry was wired up to your bra clasp.) Rueful Rich sweeps up his son and goes down to an early breakfast.
TRY TO DOZE OFF AGAIN, but I can’t sleep for thinking how Richard and I have changed. First time we met was fifteen years ago at university; I was picketing Barclays Bank and he was opening an account there. I shouted something about South Africa — How dare you invest in brutality? — and Rich walked over to our righteous huddle and I handed him a leaflet, which he studied politely.
“My, that does sound bad,” he said, before inviting me for coffee.
Richard Shattock was the poshest man I had ever met. When he spoke, he sounded as though Kenneth Branagh had swallowed Kenneth More. Forearmed with the knowledge that all public schoolboys were emotionally stunted berks, I was unclear what to do when it became clear that this one was capable of more affection than I had ever known. Rich didn’t want to save the world like my idealistic friends; he just made it a better place simply by being in it.
We made love for the first time six days later in his college room under the eaves. The sun was falling in a dusty gold column through the skylight as he solemnly unpinned my Cyclists Against the Bomb badge and said, “I’m sure the Russians will sleep more soundly, Kate, for knowing you have passed your Cycling Proficiency Test.”
Had I ever laughed at myself before? Certainly the sound that came out that night was rusty with lack of use, a stopped-up spring gurgling into life. “Your Bournville chocolate laugh,” Richard called it, “because it’s dark and bitter and northern and it makes me want to eat you.” It’s the sound I still like best: the sound of when we were us.
I remember how much I loved his body, but even more I loved the way my body felt in relation to his — for every straight edge a curve — the vertebrae down his back like rocky steps down into a cave of pleasure. By day we cycled across the Fens and shouted “Hill!” whenever we felt the slightest incline, but at night we explored another terrain.
When Rich and I first started sleeping together — I mean actually sleeping, not having sex — we would lie in the middle of the bed face-to-face, close enough to feel the gusts of each other’s warm nighttime breath. My breasts would be pushed against his chest and my legs — I still can’t figure this out — disappeared over and under his like a mermaid’s tail. When I think of us in bed back then, I think of the shape of a sea horse.
Over time we began to face outwards. You could probably date that, our first separation, to the purchase of a king-size bed in the late eighties. And then, with the arrival of our first child, the battle for sleep began. Bed became a place you sank into rather than dived into. We who had slipped in and out of consciousness as easily as we slipped in and out of each other — entrances and exits blurred by kissing — were now jealously guarding our place of rest. My body shocked me by bristling at anything that threatened to take away its remaining strength. A stray knee or elbow was enough to spark a boundary war. I remember starting to notice how loud Rich’s sneezes were, how eccentrically articulated. Har-chew! he went. Har-chew!
When we were still students we had traveled round Europe by train, and one night we wound up in a small hotel in Munich where we collapsed in giggles on the bed. It looked like a double, but when you pulled the cover back it turned out to be two mattresses, divided and united by a thin wooden strip which made any meeting in the middle an effort rather than an inevitability. It all felt so Teutonic. “You be East Germany and I’ll be West,” I remember saying to Rich as we lay there on our separate halves in the light of the streetlamp. We laughed, but in time I came to wonder whether the Munich arrangement was the true marriage bed: practical, passionless, putting asunder what God had joined together.
7:41 A.M. After breakfast, Ben, wearing a bib like a Jackson Pollock, is terribly clingy. Paula peels him off me when Winston arrives to drive me to work. “All right, sweetheart, it’s all right,” I hear Paula say as I pull the door behind me.
Sitting in the back of Pegasus, I try to read the FT to bring myself up to speed for my presentation, but I can’t concentrate. There is music playing, a jazz piano arrangement of something I can almost place—“Someone to Watch Over Me”? It sounds as though the pianist has smashed the tune into a thousand pieces and keeps throwing them into the air to see which way they land. The riffs are like a man shuffling a pack of cards, only instead of paper the cards are made of sound. Winston hums along, holding the main line of the tune and occasionally letting out a little whoop to salute the pianist for a particularly cunning resolution. This morning, my driver’s ease and pleasure feels like an insult, a rebuke. I want him to stop.
“Do you think we could avoid the New North lights, Winston, and cut round the back? I’m not convinced this is the quickest way.”
He doesn’t answer for a while but allows the track to finish. Then, with the final chord still thrumming in the air, he says, “You know, lady, where I come from it takes a long time to do things suddenly.”
“Kate, my name is Kate.”
“I know what your name is,” he says. “Way I see it, rushing around just a waste of time. Fly too fast, lady, and you pass your nest.”
The laugh I laugh sounds darker than usual. “Well, I’m afraid that is the more leisurely perspective afforded to the driver of the minicab.”
Winston doesn’t bite back at my snottiness, he just gives it a long gaze in the mirror and says thoughtfully, “You think I want to be you? You don’t even want to be you.”
That’s it. “Look, I don’t pay you for psychotherapy. I pay you to get me to Broadgate in the shortest time possible, a feat which seems increasingly beyond you. If you don’t mind, I’ll get out here. It’s quicker to walk.”
As I hand over the twenty and Winston digs into his pocket for change, he begins to sing:
“There’s a somebody I’m longing to see
I hope that he
Turns out to be
Someone to watch over me.”
8:33 A.M. OFFICES OF EDWIN MORGAN FORSTER. Shoot out of lift straight into Celia Harmsworth.
“Something on your jacket, dear?” smirks the head of Human Resources.
“Just back from the cleaners, actually.” I glance down at my shoulder to see a smeary mess, an epaulette of Ben’s banana porridge. No, God, how can you do this to me?
“I’m amazed how you manage this job, Katharine,” coos Celia, clearly delighted at further proof that I can’t.
(Celia is one of those spinsters who adored being the only woman in a man’s world; it was a license to feel pretty before girlies like me showed up and ruined her monopoly.)
“Must be such a struggle with all those kiddies,” she offers helpfully. “I was saying to Robin Cooper-Clark when you were away for — half term, was it? — I don’t know how she does it.”
“Two.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Two. All those kiddies. I have two of them. That’s one less than Robin has.”
Turn on my heel, walk over to desk, shrug off stained jacket, shove in bottom drawer. Incredible noise from the window. Out on the ledge, the pigeons have decided to move in together. The male is sitting there with a twig in his mouth looking faintly foolish and disbelieving. I recognize the expression. It’s the look Rich gives when I bring home a flatpack of shelves for self-assembly. The female, meanwhile, is busy forming a heap of other twigs into a raftlike structure roughly the size of a dinner plate. Oh, this is great, now they’re building a nest.
“Guy, did you get onto the Corporation about the hawk man? Damn pigeons are about to start a breeding program out there.”
I check my neck in handbag mirror for any Ben bites — no, all clear — and then I stalk coolly into meeting with Robin Cooper-Clark and other senior managers to begin my presentation. It goes remarkably well. All eyes in the room are glued on me, especially those of the bastard Chris Bunce. Am obviously starting to command serious respect: the tactic of behaving like a man, never mentioning the children, etc., is clearly paying off.
As I switch from slides to overheads, it suddenly occurs to me that I am the only person in the room without a penis. Not a good thought to have right now, Kate. Can we not think about dicks in a gathering of seventeen men? Talking of which, do they have to stare at me quite so intently? Look down. Am wearing red Agent Provocateur demitasse bra under white voile shirt, grabbed from chest of drawers in half-dark at 4:30. Oh, Jesus, I look like Pamela Anderson at the Oscars.
11:37 A.M. Sit in ladies’ loo with cheek pressed up against the cubicle wall to cool furious blush. Tiled in black marble riddled with white stars, the wall is like a map of the universe. I feel as though I’m being sucked into deep space and more than happy to go there. How about disappearing into a black hole for a few millennia till the memory of public humiliation fades? I used to smoke in here when things got desperate; since I gave up I sing under my breath. “I am strong. I am invincible. I am Woman.”
It’s a Helen Reddy song from when I was at school. I loved the fact that she had the same name as me and she sounded — well, just so full of it, so confident that you could deal with anything life threw at you. At college, when Debra and I were getting ready for a night out, we used to play the record over and over to psych ourselves up. Dance round the room, playing catch with Deb’s Action Man. (After his leg broke off, Deb said we’d have to call him Inaction Man “after all our useless husbands.”)
“Oh, yes, I am wise,
But it’s wisdom born of pain,
Yes, I’ve paid the price,
But look how much I’ve gained!
I am strong. I am in-vin-ci-ble.
I am Woman.”
Do I believe in equality between the sexes? I’m not sure. I did once, with all the passionate certainty of someone very young who knew absolutely everything and therefore nothing at all. It was a nice idea, equality — noble, indisputably fair. But how the hell was it supposed to work? They could give you good jobs and maternity leave, but until they programmed a man to notice you were out of toilet paper the project was doomed. Women carry the puzzle of family life in their heads, they just do. As a mother, I see that more and more clearly. Every night on the way home from the City, I watch the women scurrying along in the Lucozade light of the streetlamps, bags of shopping balancing briefcases, or twitching at bus stops like overwound clockwork toys.
Not long ago, my friend Philippa told me that she and her husband had drawn up a will. Phil said she wanted a clause stipulating that, in the event of her death, Mark would promise to cut the children’s fingernails. He thought she was joking. She wasn’t joking.
One Saturday last autumn, I got back from a Boston trip to find Richard in the hall, all set to take our two out to a party. Emily, hair uncombed, appeared to have a dueling scar on one cheek — it was ketchup from lunch. Ben, meanwhile, was bent double, wearing something very small and dotted in apricot that I didn’t recognize. On closer inspection, it turned out to be an outfit belonging to one of Emily’s dolls.
When I suggested to my husband that our offspring looked as though they were going out to beg on the Underground, Rich said that if I was going to be critical I should do it myself.
I was going to be critical. I would do it myself.
To: Candy Stratton
From: Kate Reddy
Simply marvelous day so far. Have just shown breasts in error to head of investment & the troops. Chris Bunce came up to me afterwards and said:
“You were a total pro in there, Kate, with knobs on.” Laughed like a drain and said something about putting me on his website. WHAT WEBSITE??
Plus Abelhammer has invited me for rendezvous in New York.
Why men all bull and cock?
To: Kate Reddy
From: Candy Stratton
Hon, don’t worry, U hve trrifc tits. Penis Envy is So Yesterday. Hallo Boob Envy!
Bunce is piece of shit. His website will be Jerkoff Central.
Hope U R going to meet up with the Hammer Man in NYC. He sounds Gr8.
I H8 U when U act British. Candida Thrush xxx
1:11 P.M. Lunch with Robin Cooper-Clark and a new client, Jeremy Browning, at Tartuffe. Located in the penthouse of a building overlooking Royal Exchange, the restaurant has the kind of hush that, outside a monastery, only money can buy. This must be the silence they call golden. The low seats are scooped out of toffee leather and the waiters arrive on castors. The menu is my least favorite kind: chops for chaps with no concessions to the female palate. When I ask our waiter if there’s a salad I could have he says, “Mais oui, madame,” and offers me something with gésiers in it.
I nod uncertainly and Robin gives a little cough and says, “Roast throat, I believe.” How can anyone swallow a throat?
I say that I’d like the salad, but could they please hold the throats. On Robin’s lips there is an Alec Guinness ghost-of-a-smile, but the waiter is not amused. Red blood is the currency of the neighborhood.
“Any relation of the Worcestershire Reddys?” Jeremy asks, as Robin consults the wine list. Our client must be in his early fifties, but he’s in good shape and he knows it: ski-bronzed from the neck up, gym-bulked shoulders, succulent with success.
“No. I shouldn’t think so. I’m from a bit farther north.”
“The Borders?”
“No, more Derbyshire and Yorkshire. We moved about.”
“Ah, I see.”
Having established that I am no one worth knowing and no one who will know anyone worth knowing, our new client feels safe to blank me. Over the past decade, my country has become a classless society, but the news has been slow to reach the people who own it. For men like Jeremy, England still ends at Hyde Park, and then there is Scotland, where they go to kill things in August. The North, that great expanse of land between SW1 and Edinburgh which is best crossed by plane or at night in the sleeper car of a fast train, is a foreign country to them. Jeremy Browning’s forebears may have conquered India, but you wouldn’t get them going to anywhere as remote as Wigan.
Robin would never — could never — treat me as Jeremy does, but then he’s spent the last twenty years with Jill, who knows in her bones that snobs are a joke and that, in every sense, women mean business. I get a real kick out of watching my boss on these occasions. Convivial, clubbable and effortlessly smarter than any of his clients, he nonetheless has a way of making them feel as though they’re the captain of the winning team. Seeing me sidelined by the Browning version of events, he gently but firmly tries to draw me back into the conversation. “Now, Kate here is the high priestess of monetary policy; she’s really the person you need to explain the mysterious workings of the Federal Reserve.” And then, a few minutes later, when our guest has a mouth full of squab: “Actually, Jeremy, Kate’s funds delivered our best returns in the past six months, at what’s been a pretty bumpy time for equities by any standards, wouldn’t you say so, Kate?”
I love him for it, but it’s no use. There are some men who will always prefer to deal with another man, any man, rather than a woman, and Jeremy Browning is one of them. I can see him struggling to place me: I’m not married to him, clearly I’m not his mother, I didn’t go to school with his sister and I’m sure as hell not going to go to bed with him. So what, he must be asking himself as he chews on his pigeon, is this girl doing here? What is she for?
I’ve been observing this for more than ten years now and still I’m not sure I understand. Fear of the unknown? After all, Jeremy was packed off to a boys’ school at the age of seven; he went to one of the last all-male colleges; his wife, call her Annabel, stays home with the sons and heirs and, privately, he thinks anything else is some kind of crime against the natural order of things.
“Sorry, could I possibly have my wine back?”
Jeremy is tapping me on the sleeve. I realize that I have been pushing my neighbor’s glass towards the center of the table to prevent accidental spillage: a reflex from being with Emily and Ben.
“Gosh, I’m terribly sorry. When you have children you always think people are going to knock things over.”
“Oh, you have children?”
“Yes, two actually.”
“Not planning any more, I hope.”
This hangs in the air — this presumption that my fertility is part of his fiefdom, that he’s paying me to be his alone, not to be carrying the young of a rival male. I feel like returning the compliment and kicking him so hard under the table that he’s unable to have any more kids of his own. But the phrase “crushed balls” tends not to look good on the client report.
“Naturally,” I say, clearing a throat from my lettuce. “You will be my top priority, Jeremy.”
To: Kate Reddy
From: Jack Abelhammer
Further to your communication on borrowing limits, I attach some thoughts on LOANS. Not my thoughts, I’m afraid, although they come pretty close to some of my own about the person who manages my fund.
It is no gift I tender,
A loan is all I can;
But do not scorn the lender;
Man gets no more from man.
Oh, mortal man may borrow
What mortal man can lend;
And ’twill not end tomorrow,
Though sure enough ’twill end.
If death and time are stronger,
A love may yet be strong;
The world will last for longer
But this will last for long.
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
Thank you for your thoughts about the LOAN. As your fund manager, I should point out that the value of your investment can go up as well as down. The market is quite depressed at the moment, but I will be in the US soon and may be available to discuss raising levels of exposure.
It’s a beautiful poem. K xxxxx
3:44 A.M. Have left the children alone asleep in the house and just popped in to work. Stuff to do. It can’t wait. I won’t be long. Twenty minutes, maybe forty tops. They won’t even notice I’m gone.
The office is silent except for the sighs and shunts of machines making machine love to each other in the half-light. With no distractions, I work with great efficiency; figures swarming beneath my hands, an army of ants marshaled into platoons. File quarterly fund report, put screen to sleep and steal back out of the building. Outside, the City is in a postnuclear dawn — a warm gust of wind, some dancing litter, sky the color of saucepan. Spot a cab, fuzzy yellow light on the horizon. I wave as it approaches. It does not stop. Another cab sweeps past, blank as a hearse. Frantic now. Third cab nears. Step out into the road to make it stop. He swerves to avoid me and I see his big pocked mushroom face mouthing through the glass. “Yew stew-pid cow,” he spits out. “Cancha fuckin’ look where ya goin’?”
Sitting on the curb, weeping with frustration and self-pity, when a fire engine streaks up the street with an inconsolable wail. The engine stops and the guys let me clamber aboard. I’m so grateful for the lift, I forget to tell them where I’m going, but we move swiftly through familiar roads till we reach my own. As we get close to our house, I can see a knot of people standing outside.
Smoke purls out of a bedroom window. Emily’s window.
“Stand back, miss, we’ll handle it,” a man says.
I am slapping my hands against the door. I am calling the children’s names, but I can’t hear for the siren. Can’t hear myself scream. Turn the siren off. Please could somebody please turn that fucking siren off—
“Kate! Kate, wake up. It’s all right. It’s all right.”
“What?”
“It’s all right, darling. You’ve had a bad dream.”
I sit up. My nightie is a shroud of sweat. Inside my rib cage, there is a bird scrabbling to get out.
“I left the children, Rich. There was a fire.”
“It’s OK. Really, it’s OK.”
“No, I left them by themselves. I went in to work. I left them.”
“No. No, you didn’t leave them. Listen, that’s Ben crying. Listen, Kate.”
It’s true. From upstairs comes the siren call: the inconsolable wail of a teething baby, a one-man fire brigade.
DAY OF REST, otherwise known as day of ceaseless manual labor. Chuck out extinct ready-meals from fridge. (“Reddy meals,” as my sister-in-law Cheryl likes to call them.) Swab down curious algaelike residue from glass shelves. Discard knuckle of Parmesan which smells of old people’s home. Get rid of disgusting antibiotic-enriched Happy Chicken Shapes that Paula feeds the children and make sure to hide right at the bottom of bin bag. For my vulnerable young, only free-range. How many times must I tell her?
Fill and empty washing machine three times. Cleaning lady, Juanita, has chronic back problem (three and a half years) and quite rightly cannot be expected to carry heavy laundry around the house. Adult washing is outside nanny’s duties, although Paula does occasionally break strict demarcation to put in one of my hand-wash-only sweaters. (I always consider complaining about this, but file instead under Pending Paula Grievances: Volume 3.)
Today, I have invited Kirsty and Simon round for a “relaxing” lunch. Important to see friends, remember there is more to life than work, weaving of social fabric that strengthens sense of community, etc. Also important for children to see Mummy at ease in domestic context, build up glowing childhood memories, instead of woman in black running out of door yelling instructions.
Everything is totally under control. The recipe book is open like a Bible under the clean plastic lectern, ingredients are in pleasing formation. Very dinky bottle of olive oil with Siennese silk ribbon. Am wearing charming Laura Ashley apron with retro floral print which gives an ironic nod to the role of fifties homemaker while signaling jokey distance from appalling domestic servitude of women like my mum. Possibly. Also have planned casual weekend hostess outfit to change into seconds before guests arrive: Earl jeans, pink cashmere Donna Karan. Try to follow instructions for Salsify, Leek and Blue Cheese Filo Tart, only Ben keeps rock-climbing up my legs, using uncut nails as crampons. Every time I put him down, he gives a car-alarm wail.
There are those who make their own filo pastry, but they are like people who go in for bondage in the bedroom: you admire the effort and technique without necessarily wanting to do it yourself. I unwrap the pastry from its packet and brush one sheet with melted butter. Place another sheet on top. Very restful. Enter Emily with bulbous lower lip: “Where’s Paula?”
“It’s Sunday. Paula doesn’t come in today, sweetheart. Mummy and Emily are going to make some lovely cookies together.”
“Don’t want to. I want Paula.” (The first time she said that I swear I could feel the skewer going into my heart, and there is still nothing to rival it, the pain of your firstborn’s infidelity.)
“Well, I’d really like you to help me with the biscuits, darling. It’ll be great fun.”
Through her great gray eyes, Emily weighs up the sight of her mother playing at being her mother. “Daddy said I could watch Rugrats.”
“All right, you can watch Rugrats if you put your blue dress on by the time Kirsty and Simon get here.”
11:47 A.M. Everything under control. Return to recipe. Stir lemon juice and blue cheese into cold bechamel sauce. What bechamel sauce?
Turn page. For bechamel sauce recipe see page 74. What? Now they tell me. Mobile rings: it’s Rod Task. “Bad time, Katie?”
“No, absolutely fine. Ow! Ben, don’t do that. Sorry, Rod. Go on.”
“I’m faxing through details of tomorrow’s meeting, Katie. We need you to be up to speed on performance, asset allocation, attribution, and strategy outlook. Your kind of stuff. Guy Chase was singing your praises Friday night, said how great you managed, considering.”
“Considering what?”
“Oh, you know how blokes get talking over a curry.”
No, I do not know. Would love to go out with Rod and the team for the Friday-night Indian, if only to keep that creep Guy from stalking my job, but had to get home to read Harry Potter.
Sudden ominous smell from oven. “Don’t worry, Rod. Everything’s under control. See you tomorrow.”
“Take it easy, sweetie!”
Open oven door to reveal disaster. Filo pastry case has become a petrified forest. Don’t panic. Think, Kate, think. Run out of door yelling instructions. Can Richard please dress Ben and tidy the kitchen?
12:31 P.M. Back from the supermarket. Ben is dressed but kitchen looks like a scene from Disney Goes to Dresden.
“Richard, I thought I asked you to tidy up?”
He looks up from the paper, amazed. “I have been tidying up. I’ve already put the CDs in alphabetical order.”
Kick Brio train track under sofa, hurl rest of toys into utility room and jam the door shut with a drying rack. Substitute M&S spinach quiche for salsify-and-Gruyère catastrophe. Now to make the dressing. Dinky bottle of olive oil has immovable crimson wax stopper. Try to pull out stopper with bottle opener but merely shred flakes of red rind into baby leaf salad. Use teeth. No use. Bugger. Bugger. Attack stopper with sharp knife. Miss bottle and slash back of hand instead. Looks like drunken suicide attempt. Search first-aid drawer. Can only find one plaster: Mister Bump. Run upstairs to change into relaxed hostess attire. Wriggle into new jeans, but no sign of Donna Karan pink cashmere sweater. Why is nothing ever in the right place in this house?
12:58 P.M. Find pink cashmere. Paula has hidden it at the back of the airing cupboard, and no wonder. Plainly it has barely survived kids’ wash. Now so shrunken would only fit Mrs. Thomasina Tittlemouse or Ally McBeal. Go downstairs to discover Ben posting remaining blue cheese into the video. Emily screaming because Rugrats has jammed. No sign of Richard. Doorbell rings.
Kirsty and Simon Bing are architect friends of Richard. The same age as us, they have no children but only one exquisite gray-blue cat that drifts like smoke through the Japanese porcelain in their Clerkenwell loft. When we go to visit the Bings, I spend a lot of time shouting as Ben crawls up the open-plan staircase without any banister and peers gleefully into the abyss. There is an unspoken strain between the childless and those of us bowed down with infants. Before Emily was born, we rented a villa outside Siena with Kirsty and Simon, and our cooling relationship is occasionally warmed by memories of that week in the sun. These days, Rich and I, if we socialize at all, tend to hang out with people with kids. Because they understand. The sudden need to produce pizza and tissues, often simultaneously; the unpredictable smells and naps. The moods that arrive like tanks.
Kirsty and Simon always seem glad to see us, but I think it’s fair to say that their goodbyes are particularly effusive, a prelude I always imagine to their explosion of shared relief as the door shuts on us and they can adjourn to their snot-free sofa. But today they have come to our place, where every piece of furniture is essentially a large handkerchief. Compared to how it usually looks, the kitchen is immaculate, but I see Kirsty direct an understanding smile at the single toy left in the middle of the floor and, quite unreasonably, I want to slap her.
Lunch goes fine and I accept compliments for the M&S tart with surprisingly little shame — well, I did make a huge effort to get it. The Bings’ conversation ranges widely. Was it really a good idea to have the Great Court of the British Museum open in the evening? “A failed experiment,” according to Simon, who would be taken aback to learn that I have forgotten where the British Museum actually is.
Then we’re on to the stagnant state of current cinema. Kirsty and Simon have seen some French film about two girls working in a factory and were totally blown away by it. Rich reveals that he has seen it too. When did he find the time to do that?
“Kate worked in a factory, didn’t you, darling?”
“Oh, how fascinating,” says Simon.
“Not really. Plastic caps for aerosol cans. Very boring, very smelly and very badly paid.”
The mildly awkward silence that follows is broken by Kirsty. “So, how about you, Kate?” she asks brightly. “Seen any good movies?”
“Oh. I enjoyed Crouching Tiger.” I pause. “And Crouching Dragon.”
“Hidden,” murmurs Rich.
“Hidden Tiger,” I say. “I loved the, er, Chinese bits. Mike Leigh’s very good, isn’t he?”
“Ang,” murmurs Rich.
“I like Mary Poppins,” chimes in Emily, God bless her, running up from the other end of the kitchen, naked except for her Little Mermaid green silk tail. “Jane and Michael go to work with their daddy at the bank. It’s near my Mummy’s work and there’s lots of pigeons.” She begins to sing loudly and tunelessly, with a child’s open-faced fearlessness: “‘Feed the birds, tuppence a bag, tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag.’ Do you feed the birds, Mummy?”
No, I try to get men to come and kill them. “Yes, of course, darling.”
“Can I come to your work?”
“Certainly not.”
Kirsty and Simon laugh politely. Kirsty picks at the sliver of orange Play-Doh stuck between the prongs of her dessert fork and wonders whether they shouldn’t be starting to make a move.
Avoid any social engagements which require clean clothes or clean furniture. Packing list for EuroDisney. Bread. Milk. Calpol? Stair carpet. Call Dad. Application form for Ben nursery. Call Jill Cooper-Clark!! Thorntons chocolate ducklings!
WEDNESDAY, 10:35 P.M. Debra calls me at home, which is weird because we scarcely talk these days, only e-mail. Hearing her voice, I know instantly that something’s wrong. So I ask, How’s things? And with one deep breath, she’s off: Oh, just the usual; Jim will be away over Easter tying up some deal in Hong Kong and she has to drive the kids to Suffolk to stay with her family and her father’s had a stroke and her mum’s pretending to cope but can’t, and they don’t like to bother Deb because she’s so busy and important and, of course, she’d like to be bothered but she’s too busy at work where they’re still holding out against giving her a full partnership because that bastard Pilbutt says there’s “a question mark over my commitment” and she’s bloody earned that partnership, she really has, and then Anka, the nanny she’s had since Felix was one, has been stealing from her. Had she mentioned the stealing?
No, she hadn’t.
Well, if she’s honest, she’s known about it since last summer but not allowed herself to know, not wanting to know. First, it was just small amounts of cash she thought she’d left around the house and couldn’t put her hands on. After that, other stuff went missing — a Walkman, a silver picture frame, that dinky digital camera Jim brought back from Singapore. The whole family — well, they’d just joked about their pilfering poltergeist and Deb had some better locks put on the doors. Because you never know. And then, just before Christmas, she mislaid her leather jacket, the lovely buttery one from Nicole Farhi she couldn’t possibly justify buying, and she could swear she hadn’t left it anywhere. Called all the restaurants she’d been to, emptied her wardrobe: nothing. Joked bitterly to Anka that she probably had early-onset Alzheimer’s, and Anka made her a cup of tea with three sugars — no wonder Slovakians have no teeth — and said sweetly, “You are a little tired only, I think. Not mad.”
So Debra would never have found out if she hadn’t popped home one afternoon between client meetings. Fiddling with her keys at the front door, she turned and saw Anka walking down the street pushing her daughter in her buggy and wearing her leather jacket. Said she felt so weak she could hardly move, but managed to get behind the dustbins and hide so Anka didn’t spot her.
Then, last Saturday, when Anka was away, Deb had gone into her room, like a burglar in her own home. And there in the cupboard, not even hidden at the back, was the jacket and a couple of Deb’s better sweaters. In a drawer, she found the camera and her grandmother’s watch, the one with the silver fish for a long hand.
“So what did you say to her?”
“Nothing.”
“But, Deb, you have to say something.”
“Anka’s been with us for four years. She brought Felix to the hospital the day Ruby was born. She’s a member of the family.”
“Members of your family don’t generally nick your stuff and then sympathize with you about it.”
I’m shocked at the flatness of my friend’s voice: all the fight ironed out of it.
“I’ve thought about this, Kate. Felix is anxious enough already, with me being away all the time. His eczema gets so bad. And he loves Anka, he really does.”
“Come off it, she’s a thief and you’re her boss. You wouldn’t put up with it at work for a minute.”
“I can live with her stealing from me, Kate. I can’t live with the children being unhappy. Anyway, that’s enough of me. How are you?”
I take a deep breath and then I stop myself. “I’m fine.”
Debra rings off, but not before we’ve made another lunch appointment we won’t keep. I put her name in my diary anyway, and around it I draw the dumb smiley face Deb always drew in the margin next to mentions of Joseph Stalin in our mutual European history notes in 1983. (One of us got to go to the lecture; the other got the lie-in.)
What is the cost when you pay someone else to be a mother to your children? Has anyone calculated it? I’m not talking about money. The money’s a lot, but how much is the other thing?
THURSDAY, 4:05 A.M. Emily wakes me to tell me she can’t sleep, so now that makes two of us. I check her forehead, but the fever turns out to be excitement over Disneyland Paris, where we are all heading later today, if I can get my jobs done in time. My daughter has wanted to go to Disneyland ever since she figured out that the Sleeping Beauty castle at the end of all her videos was a real place.
Now she climbs into bed beside me and whispers, “Will Minnie Mouse know my name, Mummy?” I say, Of course she will! and my daughter burrows marsupially into the small of my back and drifts off, while I lie here, more awake by the second, trying to remember everything I need to remember: passports, tickets, money, raincoats (obviously, it will be raining, it’s a holiday), jigsaws/crayons/paper in case we get stuck in Channel Tunnel, dried apricots for nourishing snack, Jelly Babies for bribes, chocolate buttons for total meltdowns.
Didn’t Mrs. Pankhurst say something about women needing to stop being a servant class for men? Well, we tried, Emmeline; boy, did we try. Women do the same jobs now as men and do them equally well. But all the time, women are carrying around the information. The information that won’t leave them alone. I reckon that inside a working mother’s head, every day, is the control tower at Gatwick. MMR vaccinations (to jab or not to jab), reading schemes, shoe sizes, holiday packing, child care — cunningly assembled from wings and prayers — all circling and awaiting further instruction from air traffic control. If women didn’t bring them safely in to land — well, the whole world would crash, wouldn’t it?
12:27 P.M. The pigeon has laid two eggs. Elliptical in profile, they are startlingly white with a faint blue tinge. The mother and father appear to be taking it in turns to sit on them. Watching them reminds me of the shifts Rich and I do with the kids when one of them is sick.
By the end of today, I need to have written four client reports, sold a vast number of shares (with the markets melting down, company policy is to have more cash) and bought a flock of chocolate ducklings from Thorntons. Plus Momo and I are working on another pitch for an ethical account in Italy. And I haven’t even heard from Jack this morning and I long to see the little envelope appear in the top right-hand corner of the screen that tells me he’s out there thinking of me as I am thinking of him.
(What did it feel like before? Before I was waiting for his messages. Waiting and waiting. Either waiting or reading his last message or composing my reply and then waiting again. No longer in a state of living but in a constant state of waiting. The impatience like a hunger. Staring at the screen to summon the words into existence, willing him to speak.)
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
Jack, are you there?
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? Speak, dammit!!
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
Did I say something wrong?
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
Hello?
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
What could you POSSIBLY be doing that’s more important than talking to me? xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: Kate Reddy
From: Jack Abelhammer
Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do till you require.
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
OK, you’re forgiven. That’s lovely. Sonnet by Bill Gatespeare, right? But let’s get one thing clear: any more silences that long and you’re in Big Trouble. In fact, you’re a dead man.
That’s a promise xxxxx
To: Kate Reddy
From: Jack Abelhammer
Bill Gatespeare, I find, has the emotional software to fit any occasion. . As far as you’re concerned, Katharine, I’m already in Big Trouble. If killing me means I can look forward to a personal appearance from my fund manager, then I’m prepared to die like a man.
I knew you were going to Disneyland with the kids, so I figured you’d be caught up in the preparations and not welcome my msgs. I try to think of you being happy without me, without letting it make me unhappy.
Nor dare I question with my jealous thought
Where you may be or your affairs suppose,
But like a sad slave stay and think of nought
Save where you are, how happy you make those.
You write so lovingly about the children — Emily’s reading, the way Ben tries to talk to you — that I know you’re a great mom. And you notice so much. My mom stayed home and played bridge and drank vodka martinis with her friends. She was there all day and never really around for the three of us. Don’t go romanticizing the stay-home parent — you can screw up whether you’re near or far.
Because you live in my head, you’re very portable, you know. I find myself talking to you all the time. The worst thing is, I’m starting to think you can hear me. Jack xxxxxxx
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
I can hear you.
SATURDAY LUNCH, TOAD HALL RESTAURANT, DISNEYLAND PARIS. Enthusiastic French kiss and passionate hug from a tall dark stranger. Regrettably, his name is Goofy. Overcome with shyness at meeting her favorite cartoon characters, Emily hides behind her mother’s legs and refuses to say hello.
Seconds later, Paula enters the restaurant like a struck gong, reverberating with resentment. She “agreed” to accompany us to EuroDisney in much the same way the British “agreed” to give back India. I just know the short-term relief of having her here to help out will not be worth it for the long-term tactical disadvantage.
I feel I have to spend the entire time apologizing profusely for things I haven’t done. Sorry Ben woke everyone up last night with his snoring, sorry room service is so slow, sorry French people don’t speak English. Oh, and I forgot to apologize for the rain. For that I am truly sorry.
Meanwhile, Paula sits back and observes my mothering skills with the fat contented air of a driving instructor guiding a know-it-all pupil towards the inevitable prang.
After fifteen minutes of queuing for lunch in Toad Hall — mock baronial, gargoyles made of gray polystyrene — we reach the counter and Paula orders chicken nuggets for herself, Emily and Ben. On the grounds that the chicken is more likely to be antibiotics in bread crumbs, I decide to take a stand. Suggest that it might be nice for children to have quiche instead, on the off-chance it will be made of ingredients from a farm rather than a test tube. “If you say so,” says Paula cheerfully.
At the table, when I present Ben with quiche, his tiny almost prim mouth contorts into a gash of grief. He starts those hiccupy sobs where he can barely take in air quick enough. French families sitting nearby, all with enfants in navy or gray linen sitting up straight eating haricots verts, turn and glare at barbarous Anglo-Saxons. After one mouthful, Emily announces that she doesn’t want quiche because it tastes like egg. She wants chicken nuggets. Paula does not say I told you so. Instead, she gives Ben one of those extra-reassuring never-mind hugs and feeds him fries off her own plate.
(Sometimes when I’m with Paula and the kids, I get that feeling I had at school when three girls in my group got closer, apparently overnight. How had I missed it? I, who had always been allowed to link arms on the way home with the fabulous popular Geraldine — Farrah Fawcett blonde, ankle bracelet, breasts — was bumped to the outside of the line, where I was expected to take the elbow of Helga — glasses, alp-tall, Austrian. I was still a part of the group but excluded from the inner core and its giggles, whose target I increasingly, achingly, took to be me.)
“Stop that, Emily, please.”
Em is decapitating paper batons of sugar and pouring them all over the table. We do a deal: she can make a sugar mountain for her Minnie Mouse key ring to ski down, but only if she eats her quiche and three green beans. No make that five green beans. OK?
I wish I could relax more, but a buzzing in my brain tells me I’ve forgotten something. What else? What else?
7:16 P.M. At bedtime, an overexcited Emily wants to discuss the Easter story one more time. She has been obsessed with it since she figured out last week that the Baby Jesus she sang carols about at Christmas grew up to be the man on the cross. It’s one of those occasions when you wish you could press a button and the Fairy Godmother of Explanations would appear and wave her wisdom wand.
“Why did Jesus get killed?”
Oh, God. “Because — well, because people didn’t like the things he was saying and they wanted to make him stop.”
I can see Emily searching her mind for the worst crime she can imagine. At last, she says, “They didn’t want to do sharing?”
“In a way that’s right, they didn’t want to share.”
“After Jesus died he got better and went to Heaven.”
“That’s right.”
“How old was he when they crossed him?”
“Crucified. He was thirty-three.”
“How old are you, Mummy?”
“I’m thirty-five, darling.”
“Some people can be a hundred years old, can’t they, Mummy?”
“Yes, they can.”
“But then they die anyway?”
“Yes.” She wants me to tell her I won’t die. I know that’s what she wants: the one thing I can’t say.
“Dying is sad because you don’t get to see your friends anymore.”
“Yes, it is sad, Em, very sad, but there will always be people who love you—”
“Lots of people are in Heaven, aren’t they, Mummy? Lots and lots.”
“Yes, sweetheart. Millions.”
As Sunday lie-in agnostics, Richard and I decided that when we had children of our own we would not give them the false consolation of a guaranteed afterlife. No angels or archangels, no harps, no Elysian Fields full of those people you couldn’t stand at college in dodgy footwear. That resolve lasted — oh, approximately three seconds after my daughter first said the word “die.” How could I, who wouldn’t let her have Roald Dahl stories on the ground that they were too cruel, open a furnace door and invite her to contemplate the extinction of everyone she would ever know and love?
“And the Easter Bunny is in Heaven?”
“No, the Easter Bunny is not. Absolutely not.”
“Sleeping Beauty is, though.”
“No, Sleeping Beauty is in her castle, and we’re going to see her tomorrow.”
EMILY’S QUESTIONS OFTEN SHOCK ME, but not as much as the fact that I’m allowed to give her any answer I like. I can tell her there is a God or that there is not a God, I can tell her that Oasis were better than Blur, although by the time she’s old enough to buy albums there won’t be albums anymore and Madonna will be as distant as Haydn. I can tell her that Cary Grant is in a dead heat for the title of Greatest Englishman with William Shakespeare, I can encourage her to support a football team, or I can tell her sport is incredibly boring, I can advise her to be careful who she gives her virginity to or I can give her brisk early advice on contraception. I can suggest she start paying a quarter of her annual income into an index-linked pension as soon as possible or I can tell her love is the answer. I can tell her any damn thing I like, and that freedom feels both amazing and appalling.
When they sent a baby girl home from the hospital with us almost six years ago, they forgot to hand out a Meaning of Life Manual. I can remember Richard carrying her in from the car in her little seat with the big handle and setting her down with extreme tentativeness on the living-room floor. (At that stage, we still believed we might break her; not knowing it was more likely to be the other way round.) Rich and I looked at our daughter and then at each other and we thought: What now?
You needed a license to drive a car, but with a baby you were expected to pick it up as you went along. Becoming a parent was like trying to build a boat while you were at sea.
What the hospital did give us was a thin booklet in a blue plastic binder with several cartoons to the page, each starring two stick-figure parents. There were stick-figure parents tentatively dipping their angular elbows into baths or trying out the temperature of milk on the back of their stick hands. There was a feeding timetable, tips on the transfer from formula to solids and, or so I seem to recall, a list of common rashes. But there was definitely no word on how to prepare your child for the fact of your own death.
As I look down at Em’s face, at once radiant and perplexed, I get that breathless feeling you get every so often as a mother, the pressure of hundreds of millions of mothers before you, all fighting tears as the child poses the most ancient of questions.
“Are you going to die, Mummy?”
“One day I will. But not for a very very long time.”
“How long?”
“Not for as long as you need a mummy.”
“How long?”
“Not until you’re a mummy yourself. Quick now, Em. Eyes shut.”
“Mu-um?”
“Go to sleep, love. Sleep now. Exciting day tomorrow.”
Well, did I handle it right? Is that how you tell them? Is it?
SUNDAY, 3:14 P.M. Em and I together on the Circus Roller Coaster, our screams riding shotgun with our stomachs. I close my eyes and take a Polaroid for my memory: I am having fun with my wonderful child. Her hair in the wind, her hand tight in mine. But even here I can’t escape: there’s something about this ride that says work. Equity markets going up, up, up, then whump! the trapdoor in your belly opens.
Oh, Kate, you stupid, stupid, unbelievably brainless woman…. God, no…. Forgot to place trades on Thursday. Needed to sell 5 percent of fund — Edwin Morgan Forster house policy is to have more cash, less equities with the markets melting down. As we crest the hill, northern France and my entire career flash before my eyes. EMF already has a recruitment freeze. Redundancies next. And who will be prime candidate? Step forward the fund manager who forgot to sell her clients’ shares because she was buying chocolate bloody Easter ducklings in Thorntons.
“I’m sacked.”
“What?” Richard is there to meet us as we clamber out of the little train.
“I’m fired. I forgot. I was trying to remember everything and I forgot.”
“Katie, slow down. Just tell me slowly.”
“Daddy, why is Mummy crying?”
“Mummy’s not crying,” says Paula, who has appeared out of the crowd and picked Emily up. “Mummy’s having such a great time she laughed till the tears fell out by themselves. All right, who wants to get a crepe? Do you want jam or lemon? I’m having jam.
“OK if I take them, Kate?” Paula says quickly. And I nod because, obviously, I can’t speak. And with Ben in the buggy and Emily skipping along beside her, Paula takes the children away. How would I manage without her?
4:40 P.M. Calmer now. The calm of the condemned woman. Absolutely nothing to be done. It’s a Bank Holiday tomorrow; can’t sell anything till Tuesday. No use spoiling the rest of our trip. I am climbing out of one of the Mad Hatter’s Dancing Teacups when I notice a man in the queue trying to place me. It’s Martin, an old boyfriend. You know that weird sensation seeing an ex can induce? I feel it now. The ghost of a passion, a silk handkerchief being pulled out of the heart. I turn away quickly and secure Ben’s already tight buggy straps.
a. Am wearing yellow plastic rain poncho, purchased from Disneyland Universal Stores, which is decorated with Mickey Mouse logo and smells of lightly rolled condom.
b. My hair, dried this morning with gnat’s buzz of a hair dryer in the hotel bathroom, lies basted to my skull like threadbare helmet of old lady in retirement home.
c. Am about to be fired, therefore poorly placed to show how sensationally well my life has gone without him.
a. He doesn’t recognize me. He doesn’t even recognize me. Am hideously changed and shriveled and no longer desirable to man once sexually obsessed with me.
Across the pastel blur of spinning teacups, I meet the eyes of the man. He smiles at me. It’s not Martin.
8:58 P.M. We take the Eurostar home to London. Ben is lying on his back across me. His eyelashes are long, his hands still chubby baby hands; the dimples along the knuckle are like air bubbles in batter. When he’s big, I won’t be able to tell him how much I loved his hands. Maybe I won’t remember. I stretch to reach my laptop, but baby turns and sighs as if to wake. Don’t want to check e-mail, anyway: probably nuclear bollocking from Rod and gloating “commiserations” from the ghastly Guy. Will prepare for my fate as penniless stay-at-home mother, purchase penitential Gap sweatshirts in khaki, try to remember the words to “Eency Weency Spider.”
So you see that was why I didn’t pick up the e-mail from Rod that evening, the one that told me everything was OK. The one that told me things were much much better than OK.
To: Kate Reddy
From: Rod Task
Kate, WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU? Fed cut the rate again. Rest of team liquid up to their necks. You the only one who didn’t sell. What’s your secret, genius? Are you shagging Greenspan?
Push the old guy off you and come back. Buy you a beer.
Cheers, Rod
TUESDAY, 9:27 A.M. OFFICES OF EDWIN MORGAN FORSTER. Hallelujah! I am a guru. My superb market timing — otherwise known as forgetting to place several trades and being saved by a surprise rate cut — has granted me temporary office goddess status. I hang around at the coffee machine receiving tributes from grudgingly awed colleagues.
“You must be the only person to have anticipated the Fed cut and the market recovery, Kate,” marvels Dandruff Gavin. I compose my features into what I hope is an impersonation of humility and quiet pride.
“Shit, I was 6 percent liquid. That cost us a few basis points,” groans pink-faced Ian. “And Brian was 15 percent liquid. That’s another nail in his coffin, poor sod.” I nod in sympathetic condescension and say casually, “I only had 1 percent cash, actually.” Tasting success, enjoying its champagne tang on my tongue.
Chris Bunce walks past on the way to the Gents and can hardly bear to meet my eye. Momo comes up and gives me a dry little kiss which lands on my cheek around the same time that Guy’s dagger look harpoons into my shoulder blades. Across the office, I see Robin Cooper-Clark approaching with an amused smile as if he were a bishop and I a jammy young curate.
“And on the third day she rose again,” says Robin. “Well, well, Miss Reddy, who says Easter is drained of all meaning?”
He knows. He knows. Of course, he bloody knows. Brightest man in the solar system.
“I was extremely fortunate, Robin. Alan Greenspan rolled the rock from the tomb.”
“You were very fortunate, Kate, and you’re very good. Good people deserve their good fortune. By the way, did Rod tell you we need you to go to Frankfurt?”
When I sit down at my desk, am so buoyant I practically don’t need a chair. Scan the currencies, check the markets, then call up my e-mails. Smile when I see that at the top of the Inbox are two from my dearest friends.
To: Kate Reddy, EMF
From: Debra Richardson
Desperately trying to recruit new nanny. Anka stormed out after I confronted her over the stolen property. Jim’s mum has come up from Surrey to cover for a bit, but she has to go back Friday. Help!!!! Any ideas? Most candidates seem to require a car, all the rest are 37 w severe personality disorder demanding salary equal to editor of Vogue.
Reason to Give Up Work: Because I can’t afford to go out to work anymore!
When do we get to the fun bit of our lives? The bit where you say, “Ah! so this is what the struggle and pain was all for!”
Lunch Thurs?????
PS: Must try to put more positive spin on life. I do know there are people out there living in abject poverty w no shoes etc.
To: Debra Richardson
From: Kate Reddy
Well, I’m GLAD she’s gone. Good for you confronting her. You’ll find someone soon — don’t panic! Aussie girls are very good, I hear. Will send numbers of agencies and ask Paula if she knows anyone looking for job. Today am top dog in office. Total fluke.
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And sell the second as though it were the first
— THEN you can be a Woman, my girl!
And my reward? Trip to Germany on cut-price flight — airline called Go or Slo or No or something.
Auf Wiedersehen, pet. Can we rearrange lunch? Sorry, all love K xxxxx
To: Kate Reddy
From: Candy Stratton
O fuck. Am pregnant.
I immediately look across the office to where Candy sits. Sensing my glance she looks up from her work and gives a little wave. It’s like a child’s wave, funny and sad at the same time.
CANDY IS PREGNANT. Not just late, but pregnant. Four and a half months gone at least, according to the clinic in Wimpole Street where she went yesterday. Her cycle had been pretty irregular for a couple of years — the drugs, most probably — and she hadn’t noticed anything unusual, except a little extra weight and a tenderness in her breasts which she put down to some ambitious sex with Darren, the black-run specialist from Treasury, on her recent skiing trip.
“I’m gonna get rid of it.”
“Fine.”
We are in Corney and Barrow, perched on our usual stools overlooking the arena where the ice rink sits in winter. Candy has a flute of champagne, I have a bottle of Evian.
“Don’t do that agreeing shit when you don’t mean it, Katie.”
“I’m just saying I’ll support whatever decision you take.”
“Decision? It’s not a decision, honey, it’s a fucking disaster.”
“I just think — well, a late abortion, it’s not much fun.”
“And bringing up a kid by yourself for twenty years, that’s fun?”
“It’s not impossible, and you’re thirty-six.”
“Thirty-seven on Tuesday, actually.”
“Well, you’re running out of time.”
“I’m getting rid of it.”
“Fine.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“I know your nothings, Kate.”
“It’s just that I think you could really regret it, that’s all.”
She grinds out her cigarette and lights up another. “There’s this place in Hammersmith. Not cheap, but they do them real late, no questions asked.”
“Fine. I’ll come with you.”
“No.”
“Well, I’m not letting you go by yourself.”
“It’s not a baby shower, it’s a fucking abortion.”
I study my friend’s face. “What if it cries?”
“What are you, Katie, some kind of pro-life nut?”
“It has been known for a fetus to cry at that stage of development. I know you’re tough, but that would kill me.”
“Can we get another glass over here?” She gestures to the barman. “So, go on, explain it to me.”
“What?”
“Kids.”
“I can’t. You have to feel it for yourself.”
“Come on, Kate, you can sell anything to anybody. Try.”
The look on her face. Such a Candy look, defiant and bruised at the same time, the look of a seven-year-old who has fallen out of a tree she’s been told not to climb and doesn’t want to cry even though it really hurts. I want to put my arms round her, but she’d bat a hug away rather than let on how much she needs it. The only way to get her to buy anything is to make it sound like an opportunity she’d be a fool to turn down.
“You know the two days when I gave birth to my babies?”
She nods.
“Well, if I could only keep two days from the whole of my life, those are the days I would keep.”
“Why?”
“Awe.”
“Awe?” Candy detonates one of her big bad laughs. “You can’t drink, you can’t smoke, you can’t go out nights, your tits look like two dead rodents, your pussy’s stretched wider than the fucking Holland Tunnel and she offers me awe. Jeez, what are the other highlights, Mom?”
No deal. “I have to go now, Cand. E-mail me the date and time and I’ll meet you there.”
“I’m getting rid of it.”
“Fine.”
7:41 A.M. “Okay, Emily, let’s go. Quick now. Mummy’s going to be late. Lunch box? Good. Library books? No. No, you can’t have plaits. Just no. Teeth? Oh, for heaven’s sake. Quickly do teeth please. Hurry up. And take the toast out of your mouth first. It’s not toast? I don’t want you eating Easter egg. . Well, Daddy shouldn’t have said that. I am not horrible. OK, let’s go.”
First day back after the school holidays and the children are as bolshie and febrile as ponies before a gymkhana. Emily is using that goo-goo baby talk she regresses to when I’ve been away or am about to go again. It drives me mad.
“Mama, who’s your best character in Bear an da Big Blue House?”
“I don’t know. Er, Tutter.”
“But Ojo is my bestest.” Emily crumples in disbelief at my treachery.
“People don’t have to like the same things, Em. It’s good to like different things. For instance, Daddy likes silly Zoe on breakfast TV, and Mummy really doesn’t care for Zoe at all.”
“She’s not called Zoe, she’s Chloe,” says Rich, not bothering to look up from the TV. “And for your information, Chloe has a degree in anthropology.”
“Is that why she feels the need to go naked from the waist up?”
“But why don’t you like Ojo, Mama?”
“I do like Ojo, Em, I think he’s totally fantastic.”
“She’s not naked, she just has remarkable self-supporting breasts.”
“She’s not a boy. Ojo’s a girl.”
8:01 A.M. I am bundling Em out of the house when Rich, who is still in a T-shirt and boxers, mooches into the hall and wonders when it would be convenient for him to go on a five-day wine-tasting course in Burgundy.
Burgundy? Five days? Leaving me alone with the children and the markets bucking like the Disneyland roller coaster?
“I can’t believe you’re asking me that now, Rich. Where on earth did you get such an idea?”
“You. You gave it to me for Christmas, Katie. My present, remember?”
Oh, God, it’s all coming back to me now. A moment of intense guilt masquerading as generosity. Must learn to suppress those till the impulse passes. I tell Rich that I’ll think about it, smile and file under TO BE FORGOTTEN.
In the car, Em kicks the back of the passenger seat with absentminded fury. No point telling her off; she barely knows what she’s doing. Sometimes a five-year-old’s feelings are simply too big for their body.
“Mama, I gotta idea.”
“What’s that, sweetheart?”
“How about if da weekends were weeks and da weeks were weekends.”
As I wait for the lights to change, I have a scratchy sensation in my chest, as though a bird were in there trying to escape.
“Den all da mummies and daddies could be wid dere children more.”
“Emily, will you please talk properly? You’re not a baby anymore.”
In the rearview mirror, I catch her eye and look away.
“Mummy, my tummy hurts. Mummy, will you put me to bed tonight? Are you putting me to bed tonight?”
“Yes, I promise.”
I CANNOT IMAGINE what I was thinking when I let Alexandra Law, Abbess among Mother Superiors, sign me up for the Parent Teachers Association. No, that’s not true, I know exactly what I was thinking: I was thinking that just for one hour in some underlit overheated classroom I could pretend that I’m like any other mother. When the chair makes a reference to the absentee caretaker, I want to give a knowing little smile. I want to groan when someone brings up the matter of the summer fete — that time of year again already! — and I want to breathe that fuggy companionable air. And afterwards, when we’ve voted on a computer levy and plans to improve the sports facilities, I want to clasp my fingers round a white plastic cup containing a boiling orange beverage and I want to refuse a Hobnob, patting my waist significantly, and then I’ll say, “Oh, go on then!” as though succumbing to a chocolate biscuit was the most reckless, heady thing I’d done for a very long time.
But, realistically, what were the chances of my making the PTA meeting at 6:30 on a Wednesday night? Alexandra described 6:30 as “after work,” but what kind of work lets you go before 6:30 these days? Teaching, obviously, but even teachers have Himalayas of marking to do. When I was a child, there were fathers who still came home in time for the family’s evening meal, dads who, in the summer months, would mow the lawn while it was still light and water the sweet peas in the dusk. But that age — the age of working to live instead of living to work — feels far away in a land where district nurses arrive by Morris Traveller and televisions glow like embers at the back. I don’t know anyone at the office who eats with their kids during the week now.
No, it really wasn’t realistic to sign up for the PTA, and three months after joining I have yet to attend a single meeting. So when I drop Emily off at school I try to avoid bumping into Alexandra Law. Easier said than done. Alexandra is harder to avoid than the NatWest Tower.
“Oh, Kate, there you are.” She barrels across the room. Her dress this morning is so densely floral it looks as though she has run into an armchair at speed. “We were thinking of sending out a search party. Ha-ha-ha! Still working full-time? Gosh. I don’t know how you do it. Oh, Diane, I was just saying, we don’t know how she does it, do we?”
Diane Percival, mother of Emily’s classmate Oliver, extends a thin tanned hand with a sapphire the size of a sprout on the second finger. I immediately recognize the type. One of those wives, tensed like longbows, who have a full-time career keeping in shape for their husbands. They exercise, they get their hair done twice a week, they wear full makeup to play tennis and, when that is no longer enough, they willingly submit to the surgeon’s knife. “Those rich stay-home mums are jogging for their lives,” Debra says, and she’s right. These women are not in love, they are in fear — fear that the husband’s love will slip away and land on some replica of their younger selves.
Like me, they are in asset management, but my assets are most of the world’s resources and their asset is themselves — a lovely product but threatened with diminishing returns. Don’t get me wrong. When the time comes I’ll probably have my neck lifted to the back of my ears and, like the Dianes of this world, I’ll have it done to please someone; the difference is, that someone will be me. However much I sometimes don’t want to be Kate, I really really don’t want to be Diane.
I have never actually spoken to Diane Percival before, but this does not stop me going cold at the very thought of her. Diane is the mother who sends notes. Notes to invite your child to a play date, notes to thank your child for coming to a play date (It was nothing, really). Last week, in a spectacular burst of note one-upmanship, Diane actually sent a note from Oliver thanking Emily for an invitation to tea. In what kind of life is it possible to send a note acknowledging an event of almost no significance, which will feature fish fingers and peas and has yet to take place? Deprived of office hierarchies, many of the mothers at my daughter’s school have set about inventing meaningless tests whose sole purpose is that other mothers with better things to do can be seen to fail them.
“Thank you for your thank-you note. I look forward to receiving your note acknowledging receipt of my note. Thank you and get lost.”
8:19 P.M. NOVALIS HOTEL, FRANKFURT. Shit. I won’t be able to put Emily to bed tonight after all. Meeting with German client was brought forward and I had to get on the next plane. It went as well as can be expected. I blagged and blagged and I think I bought us a couple more months, by which time we may have been able to turn around the fund’s performance. Back at the hotel, I pour myself a large drink and have just got into the bath when the phone rings. Christ, what now? For the first time in my life, I pick up the bathroom extension: a cream phone in its cradle on the wall next to the towel rail. It’s Richard. There is something different about his voice. “Darling, I’m afraid I have some sad news. Robin just rang.”
JILL COOPER-CLARK DIED PEACEFULLY at home in the small hours of Monday morning. She was forty-seven. Diagnosed just after the children broke up from school last summer, the cancer swept through her like a forest fire. The surgeons went in first, and after them a SWAT team of pharmacologists and radiotherapists, all trying to contain the blaze. But the cancer was unquenchable: breasts, lungs, pancreas. It was as though Jill’s energy — she was the most prodigiously energetic person I’ve ever met — was being used against her; as if the life force itself could be hijacked and redeployed in the fell purposes of death. The last time I saw her was at the annual Edwin Morgan Forster party, a zillion-dollar bash on an Arabian theme with real sand and an angry camel. Wearing a turban to hide her tufted baldness, Jill was, as usual, making me laugh.
“Slash and burn, Kate, you’d hardly believe how bloody primitive the treatment is. I feel like a medieval village they’re razing to the ground. Only one would rather be pillaged by Vikings than an oncologist, don’t you think?”
Before the treatment, Jill had dense, springy auburn hair and that Celtic top-of-the-milk skin with a sprinkling of cinnamon freckles. Three babies — all hefty boys — had not managed to weigh down the coltish body of the sometime netball Goal Attack. Robin said that to get the full measure of his wife you had to see her tennis backhand: just when you thought it was all over, when there was no possibility of the ball being returned, she would uncoil and whip it down the line. I watched her do it at the Cooper-Clark place in Sussex two summers ago, and when she struck the ball, Jill let out a defiant, joyous, “Ha!” I think we were all waiting for her to pull that stroke on the cancer.
Jill is survived by her three sons and by her husband, who has just stepped out of the lift. I hear the smart rap of his black Lobbs across the central square of beech that might be used for tea-dancing if this were another, gentler, kind of business. We are both in the office appallingly early, Robin to catch up, me to get ahead. He rustles around in his room, coughing, opening and closing a drawer.
I take him in a mug of tea and he starts. “Oh, hello, Kate. Look, I’m so sorry, leaving you to manage alone. I know how much hassle it is and on top of the Salinger stuff. But after the funeral I’ll be all yours.”
“Don’t worry. Everything’s under control.” A lie. I want to ask how he is, but that early-warning system of his, the one that sees off painful personal questions, is on red alert. So I ask something else. “How are the boys?”
“Well, we’re luckier than a lot of people,” says Robin, switching smoothly into Head of Investment mode. “You know Tim’s at Bristol now, Sam’s doing GCSEs and Alex is nearly nine. It’s not as though they’re little boys anymore who really — um, need a mother in the way that younger boys do actually need their mothers.” And then he makes a noise that no one has ever heard in the offices of Edwin Morgan Forster before. Halfway between a bark and a moan, it is barely human — or maybe all too human — and I never want to hear it again.
He pinches the bridge of his nose for a few furious seconds and then turns back to me. “Jill left this,” he says, handing over a sheaf of paper. Twenty pages of close-typed script, it bears the title YOUR FAMILY: HOW IT WORKS!
“Everything’s in there,” he says, shaking his head in wonder. “She even tells me where to find the bloody Christmas decorations. You’d be amazed how much there is to remember, Kate.”
No, I wouldn’t.
FRIDAY, 12:33 P.M. If I leave the office now, I will make it to Jill’s funeral in Sussex at three o’clock with plenty of time to pick up a sandwich on the way to the station. Momo and I are going through some stuff for another final. Momo asks if I knew Mr. Cooper-Clark’s wife and I tell her Jill was an amazing person.
Momo wrinkles her little nose. “But she didn’t work, did she?”
I look at Momo’s face — what is she: twenty-four, twenty-five? Young enough not to know what women put up with before her; young enough to take her own freedom for granted. Calmly I say, “Jill was fast-track civil service until Sam, her second, was two years old. She’d have been running the Home Office by now, but she decided to run her own home instead. She just didn’t think that she and Robin could both have ballbreaking jobs without the children being affected. She said she tried to believe it was possible, but her heart wouldn’t let her.”
Momo bends down to put something in the bin and out of the window I can see the pigeon, her feathers puffed out like a crinoline over the eggs. Daddy pigeon is nowhere to be seen. Where is he?
“Oh, how sad,” says Momo. “I mean, what a waste to end up doing nothing with your life.”
1:11 P.M. If I leave the office right this minute, I should make it to the train.
1:27 P.M. Am running out of the office when Robin’s secretary hands me Jill’s family memo; he’s forgotten it. I sprint to Cannon Street. By the time I reach the river, lungs are hoarse, beads of sweat cascading over my breasts like a broken necklace. Stumble on steps to the station and gash left knee of tights. Damn. Damn. Dash across station concourse, skid into Knickerbox and grab first pair of black tights I see. Tell startled girl to keep the change. At the barrier, the guard grins and says, “Too late, love.” Swerve round the barrier, board accelerating train pursued by guard. Through the window, London recedes with surprising speed, its gray circuitry soon blurring into deep country. I can hardly bear to look at the spring: so ear-splittingly green, so childishly hopeful.
I buy a cup of coffee from a passing trolley and open my briefcase to take out some work. On the top of the pile is Jill’s family memo. I shouldn’t read it, but I really want to read it. I want to hear my friend again, even if it’s only her words written down. Maybe if I just look at one page?
When you supervise Alex’s bath, don’t forget to do in between his fingers, there’s usually a load of black fluff in there and the odd raisin! Must put Oilatum (turquoise bottle, white writing) in the water for his eczema. Please pretend it’s bubble bath, he hates being reminded about his skin.
Alex will tell you he doesn’t like pasta. He does like pasta, so persist. Persist gently. Yes, he can have a Cheese Whirl — hideous, Day-Glo, no cheese — but only if he eats a real piece of cheese as well. No, he can’t live on sweet corn. Suggest family switch to Red Bush tea (cancer prevention, apparently).
I promised Sam he could have contact lenses for his fifteenth birthday. Whenever you’re about to shout at him, count silently to ten and think testosterone. He won’t be revolting for long, I promise. Remember all the grief we had with Tim and how well he worked out? Timmy’s current girlfriend is Sharmila — lovely, v. bright, from Bradford. Her parents disapprove of slacker white boy — ours — so could you invite them to the house and do your charm thing? (Father, Deepak, is keen golfer: both parents vegetarian.) Tim will pretend to hate it when you ask him but be chuffed when it happens.
Your mother’s favorite perfume is Diorissima. Tapes are always a good bet. Anything by Bryn Terfel except Oklahoma, which we gave last year. Also Alan Bennett books and Turkish Delight. My mother likes anything by Margaret Forster or Antonia Fraser. You might like to give Mummy my rings, or maybe you should hold on to them as one of the boys might want for an engagement ring in due course?
Your godchildren are Harry (Paxton), Lucy (Goodridge) and Alice (Benson). Their birthdays are marked on the calendar next to the fridge. In the present drawer — bottom of study filing cabinet — are gifts marked with their initials which should take you through to the Christmas after next. Simon and Clare’s marriage is a bit shaky, so you might take Harry out and let him know you’re there if he needs you. Don’t forget Lucy’s confirmation in September.
1. How to work washing machine. In emergencies, you may need to know this. See Brown Book. NB: temperature for your wool socks.
2. Bin bag sizes. Ditto.
3. Cleaner — Mondays and Thursdays. Eight pounds an hour plus we help Jean out with bigger bills and holidays. Single mother. Daughter is Aileen. Wants to be a nurse.
4. Baby-sitters — numbers in Green Book. Not Jodie who had sex with boyfriend in our bed while we were at Glyndebourne.
5. Arnica for bruises (bathroom cabinet).
6. Ignatia for grief (yellow bottle, my bedside table).
7. Postman called Pat (really); paperboy is girl (Chloe). Dustmen come Tuesday morning, won’t take garden stuff. Xmas tips in Brown Book — be generous!
8. After the funeral, the boys could see Maggie, counselor at the hospice. A bit alternative for your taste, but I think the boys would really like her and they may say things to her that they wouldn’t to you for fear of upsetting you, my darling. Kiss them for me and don’t stop just because they get taller than you, will you?
It’s all there, for page after page: the minutiae of the children’s lives, the rhythm of their days. I wince when I think how badly qualified I would be to write such a memo for Richard. On the Birthdays page, there is a stain the size of a cup. Something oily with a scab of flour. Jill must have been baking as she wrote.
Want to read on but prevented by blur of tears. Pick up the Telegraph instead and flick to the Obituaries page. Today there is an eminent biologist, a man who ran IBM in the sixties and a platinum showgirl, name of Dizzy, who “romanced” Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and the Aga Khan. No Cooper-Clark to be seen. Jill’s kind of life doesn’t get recorded for posterity. What was it Momo called it: “a waste”? How can all that love go to waste?
2:57 P.M. In doll-size train loo, remove laddered tights and execute Houdini wriggle into new black pair. Back in the corridor, am surprised to attract a whistle of approval from the steward. Look down and see that black tights have Playboy rabbits picked out in diamante up back of legs. Swear I can hear Jill laughing.
3:17 P.M. ST. BOTOLPH’S, GREENGATE. I arrive in time to hear the vicar invite the congregation to thank God for the life of Jillian Cordelia Cooper-Clark. I didn’t know she was a Cordelia — it suits her, principled and defined by love.
I can see Robin and the boys in the front pew. Robin is so tall that he has to stoop when he bends to kiss his youngest son’s auburn head. Alex is trembling slightly in his new suit, his first suit. Jill told me they’d come up to London together to pick it out; she must have known when he’d wear it for the first time.
We sing “Lord of All Hopefulness,” her favorite hymn. The tune has a Scottish melancholy to it I hadn’t noticed before. As it fades away, there is an outbreak of suppressed coughing and the vicar, a birdlike man with a crest of fair hair, asks the congregation to spend a few moments in silence remembering Jill.
Close my eyes and rest my hands on the back of the pew in front, and instantly I’m back in a wood outside Northampton. August. Two months after Emily was born and James Entwhistle — he was my boss before Rod — had organized a shoot on some country estate for clients. He insisted that I attend, even though I can’t shoot and I was barely capable of remembering where Germany was, let alone schmoozing a bunch of Frankfurt bankers. Anyway, by lunchtime I felt as though I had burning rocks strapped to my chest. Breasts screaming to be emptied. There was only one loo, a portable thing hidden in the trees. I locked myself in the cubicle, undid my blouse and started to squirt milk into the toilet. Breast milk is different from cows’ milk — finer, less creamy, it has the bluish aristocratic pallor of porcelain; when mine hit the green chemical in the steel bowl it made an opaque soup.
But at first the milk was reluctant to come. To keep it going I had to visualize Emily, her smell, her huge eyes, the touch of her skin. Hot and panicky, I became aware of coughing on the other side of the door. A queue was building up and I hadn’t even emptied the left side and the right still to do. Then I heard a woman’s voice speaking quite briskly, a voice which derived authority from its warmth. “Well, gentlemen, why don’t you all run along and avail yourselves of the bushes outside? That’s one of the natural advantages you enjoy over us ladies. I suspect that Miss Reddy’s need of the lavatory is greater than yours. Thank you so much.”
When I got outside about ten minutes later, Jill Cooper-Clark was sitting on a log in the clearing. Seeing me, she waved and from a cooler produced a bag of ice which she held aloft in triumph. “I seem to remember this is the best thing for sore boobs.”
I had noticed her before at corporate events — Henley Regatta, some rain-soaked beano at the Cheltenham Gold Cup — but I had taken her for just another golfing wife: the sort who buttonhole you about tennis court maintenance or how hard it is to get a little man round to deal with the swimming pool.
Jill asked about my baby — the only person connected with work to have done so — and then confessed that Alex, who had just celebrated his fourth birthday, had been her present to herself. Everyone said it was crazy to go back for a third when you were finally clear of all the nappies and broken nights, but she felt she’d missed out on Tim and Sam’s babyhoods by working. “I don’t know, I felt that time had been stolen from me and I wanted it back.”
Because we were in confessional mood, I told her I was afraid of letting myself feel too much. I didn’t know how I could go back to the job without hardening my heart.
“The thing is, Kate,” Jill said, “they treat us as though they’re doing us a great favor by letting us work after we’ve had a child. And the price we pay for that favor is not making a fuss, not letting on how life can never be the same for us again. But always remember it’s us who are doing them the favor. We’re perpetuating the human race, and there’s nothing more important than that. Where are they going to get their bloody clients from if we stop breeding?”
There was a sound of gunshots and Jill laughed. She had this wonderful liberating laugh; it seemed to blow away all the stupidity and mean-mindedness of the world. And you know something else? She was the only person who never said, I don’t know how you do it. She knew how you did it, and she knew what it cost.
“Dearly beloved, let us say together the words which Jesus taught us: Our Father, who art in Heaven.”
Jill’s grave is at the bottom of a hill that falls away sharply from the back of the church. At the top are the towering Victorian headstones — plinths and tombs and catafalques heavy with attendant angels — but the farther you crunch down the gravel path and the nearer to the present you get, the smaller and more modest the memorials become. Our forefathers knew they had a reserved seat, even a box, for the afterlife; we put in a tentative request for any returns.
Jill’s spot looks out across a valley. The hills opposite have mascara smudges of fir trees along their ridges, and in the green bowl beneath hangs a dense silver vapor. As the vicar intones the liturgy and Robin steps forward to drop a handful of earth on his wife’s coffin, I look away quickly and with washed eyes focus on the headstones all around us. DEVOTED SON. FATHER AND GRANDFATHER. PRECIOUS ONLY CHILD OF. BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER. SISTER. WIFE. MOTHER. MOTHER. In death, we are not defined by what we did or who we were but by what we meant to others. How well we loved and were loved in return.
All things must pass, mankind is grass
My mother saying my name
Kissing a child’s cold cheeks
Return phone calls
Courtship takes place during the spring and summer, and in Europe breeding continues from April to late autumn. During courtship, the males coo loudly, display before the females, and indulge in display fights. Pigeons can live to 30 years of age. They are monogamous and tend to mate for life, a feature remarkable in birds so strongly gregarious.A pair of courting pigeons may be silent for hours on end, while one of the pair, usually the male but sometimes the female, gently runs its beak through the feathers of its mate.For about five or six months, before it is fully adult, the cooings of the male have a dull and melancholy sound, these having replaced the feeble and rather nasal calls of the adolescent. The cooings eventually take on a richer quality when the bird is mated.
— From The Habits of the Pigeon
It’s quiet out here on the ledge. You can hear the hoots and the snarls of the City below, but they are muffled by height, smothered in a duvet of air.
I am very near the pigeon now. I can see her and she can see me. She is making a low chirruking sound and there is a fierce shuddering in her neck. Every instinct is telling her to fly away; every one except the one that tells her to stay with her chick. One of the eggs hatched while I was down in Sussex. It was hard to see the baby from inside the office, but this close I get a good view. You simply can’t believe that this little creature will ever be capable of flight. It doesn’t look like a bird, more like an anguished sketch towards a bird. Shriveled and bald, like all newborn things it seems ancient, a thousand years old.
I did try to open the window and reach out to the nest, but there’s so much triple-glazing you can’t budge any of the panels: there was nothing for it, I would have to climb out. So now, on hands and knees, I edge my collection of big books along the ledge. The volumes have been carefully chosen for size and durability:
The Square Meal: A Guide to the City’s
Restaurants
Brokers’ Predictions for 2000
CFBC’s Global Directions for 1997, 1998, and 1999
A Review of the Pharmaceutical Industry
A Linguarama book for the Italian course I started and never finished
The Warren Buffett Way
The Ten Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management: Proven Strategies for Increased Productivity and Inner Peace
The birds can definitely have that last one. Just in case these are not up to the task, I have included A Handbook of Financial Futures, a manual with all the depth and interest of a breeze block. The idea is to build a protective wall around the pigeon and her nest. On the way back from Jill’s funeral, I got a call from Guy. Good news, he said. A man from the Corporation had returned his call and told him the falconer would be along tomorrow. It was me who insisted that the hawk show up and now I very urgently want him to stay away.
Down in the piazza, thirteen floors below, I’m attracting a bit of a crowd — the first commuters pointing up at the woman on the ledge. Probably wondering if I’m a casualty of the recession or of the heart. A broker threw himself under a train at Moorgate the other morning and he missed: fell into the pit under the rails instead and got pulled out by an emergency team. Everyone kept saying what a miracle it was, but I wondered what it would be like to feel so bad you try to end it all and then fail at that too. Would it feel like rebirth or a living death?
Behind me, from inside the office, floats the voice of Candy, droll as ever but streaked with anxiety.
“Kate, don’t do it, get back in here.”
“I can’t.”
“Honey, these things are often a cry for help. We all love you.”
“I am not crying for help, I am trying to hide the pigeon.”
“Kate?”
“I’ve got to help her.”
“Why?”
“There’s a hawk coming.”
I actually hear Candy’s snort. “There’s always a fucking hawk coming. I can’t believe we’re having this conversation about some stupid bird. Get in here this minute, Kate Reddy, or I’m gonna call security.”
Through the glass, a group of EMF colleagues are monitoring my progress, giving an ironic little cheer as another volume is shunted into position. As I pick up Warren Buffett, I catch sight of my hand, its wedding ring glinting, the ridge of eczema across the knuckle, and I think of what would happen to it if I fell — bones, skin, blood. No, don’t think about it, let’s just finish the fortification with The Ten Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management. Edging back along the ledge, I can see Candy leaning out of the window and Guy hovering behind her. My assistant’s face is touched not by fear but something that looks ominously like hope.
To: Kate Reddy
From: Debra Richardson
Jim is away for second weekend in a row. Not sure if I’ll murder the kids before they murder me. Has left me to organize his fortieth birthday party — told me to invite “the usual suspects.” How come he can clear his head of everything to do with home when he has a big deal on and I can’t?
As I think you will have gathered, am just a teensy bit fucking pissed off with him.
Know any gorgeous single men. . NO DON’T ANSWER THAT QUESTION.
To: Debra Richardson
From: Kate Reddy
Q: What should you do if you see your ex-husband rolling around on the ground in pain?
A: Shoot him again just to make sure.
You have got to take Tough Line with Jim — tell him your job is not a hobby, must do his share, etc. Mind you, Richard is very helpful, but I end up having to do everything again after he’s done it. . So maybe better to do it yourself in first place???Am worried about you.
Am worried about Candy too. Did I tell you she’s pregnant? Won’t even talk about it. Pretends it’s not happening to her. Also worried about me. Been feeling pretty crazy since Jill’s funeral. Have just consolidated reputation as Office Madwoman by climbing out on window ledge to save baby pigeon.
What is Meaning of Life? Please Advise Soonest
12:17 P.M. So Momo and I did it. Rod got the news late last night. We won the New Jersey final. Momo is so excited that her feet leave the ground — like Emily, she literally jumps for joy.
“You did it, Kate, you did it!”
“No, we did it. We. You and me together.”
Rod takes the whole team out to lunch to celebrate at a place in Leadenhall Market. It’s changed a lot since I was here before. Limestone was clearly last year’s material; now it’s all opaque glass forming faux Japanese bridges over streams full of gaping carp, who can’t decide whether they’re art or lunch.
Rod hauls himself onto the stool next to me; Chris Bunce is opposite Momo. I don’t like the look he gives her — avid, sly, lip-moistening — but she seems to be enjoying herself flirting with him, trying out the power that her new confidence brings. I find myself mentioning the Salinger Foundation several times, just for the pleasure of saying Jack’s name aloud. I love hearing and seeing his name — on the side of vans, over the front of shops. Jack Nicholson, Jack in the Beanstalk, Jack of Hearts. Even the Foreign Secretary has become a more attractive man since he was called Jack.
“Katie, what’s with the fucking pigeon?” demands Rod, as the lobster arrives. “You gonna race it or roast it?”
“Oh, it’s a kind of affirmative action. Part of my new brief to be friendlier to the environment.”
“Jeez,” my boss says, tearing a granary roll in half, “taking things a bit far, aren’t you?”
By the way, Rod says he has some business he wants Momo and me to pitch for. Stone something. “One Stone with two birds, geddit?”
I say fine, but we will need more resources.
“Can’t increase the head count, Katie,” says Rod. “You just gotta get out there and kick the fucking tires, kid.”
SO I RUSH HOME FROM WORK and when I get through the door I call out, but there’s no reply. There are squeals coming from the sitting room and my first thought is pain — they’re in pain — and my heart flubs over and I go in and there’s Paula on the sofa with Emily and Ben, all snuggled up together with Toy Story on the TV and giggling uncontrollably.
“What’s so funny?” I say, but they’re laughing too much to answer. Emily’s laughing so much she’s crying. And seeing the way they are, so snug and happy there, I suddenly think, You’re paying for this, Kate. You’re literally paying for this. For another woman to sit on your sofa and cuddle your children.
So I ask Paula if she hasn’t got something better to be getting on with, and I hate the sound of my voice: priggish, pious, lady of the bloody manor. And they all look at me, eyes widening in amazement, and then they start giggling again. Can’t help it. Giggling at the silly lady who’s come in and tried to stop the fun. As though you could turn fun off just like that.
Sometimes I think Paula’s too close to them; it’s not healthy. Mostly, I’d do anything for her to stay. A teacher at Emily’s school told me she’s known mothers who sack the child minder every six months, so the children don’t get too attached. I mean, how selfish can you get? Denying them a familiar loving presence just because you want it to be you and it can’t be you.
Of course, I sometimes find myself worrying that she doesn’t talk to the children as I would talk to them. When I was a kid, I used to say dinner for lunch and tea for dinner, but now I’ve joined the professional classes I teach my kids lunch and dinner, and then Paula comes along and teaches them dinner and tea. I can’t complain, can I? Richard corrects them. “Loo,” he says firmly, as Emily demands once again to go to the toilet, but to be honest I feel more comfortable with the common words myself. I know Paula lets them watch quite a bit of TV, but in other ways I can see she’s much better than I would be — consistent, more patient. After a weekend with them, I’m screaming to be let out of the house, but with Paula it’s steady as she goes. Never raises her voice. A lot that’s good in their characters comes from her.
When I went in to school for a meeting with the teacher the other night, the headmistress took me aside and said that if Emily was going to have any hope of getting into Piper Place she would need — how to put this? — more of the right kind of stimulation at home. Children with mothers who didn’t go out to work were being taken on regular visits to museums; they had a broader perspective. Even if they ate Alphabetti Spaghetti, it was always in sodding Latin. Whereas homes with both parents out at work? “Well, there can be a tendency to rely on the te-le-vis-i-on,” said Miss Acland, getting five syllables out of the dreaded word. “Emily,” she said, “seems to have a quite remarkable knowledge of Walt Disney videos.”
This was her way of telling me Paula wasn’t good enough.
“Emily,” continued Miss Acland, “will need to show a wide range of interests to secure a place at a good secondary school. Competition in London is very fierce, as you know, Mrs. Shattock. I suggest an instrument — not the violin, too common now; perhaps the clarinet, which has plenty of personality — and you could consider one of the more unusual sports.” Rugby for girls, she believed, was gaining in popularity.
“Emily needs a CV at the age of six?”
Maybe I should have tried to keep the incredulity out of my voice.
“Well, Mrs. Shattock, in certain home situations where neither parent is present, these kinds of things can, shall we say, slip. Did you learn an instrument yourself as a child?”
“No, but my father sang a lot to us.”
“Oh,” she said, the kind of Oh that kind of woman holds in a pooper-scooper.
Hideous money-grubbing education witch.
In her last job, the one before us, Paula worked for a family in Hampstead. Julia, the mother, said the kids weren’t allowed to watch TV.
“And Julia worked in telly, making all this crap for Channel 5,” Paula told me one day, laughing loudly at the memory. “And it’s like her kids weren’t allowed telly because it’s evil!” At the weekends, Julia and her husband Mike stayed in bed while the kids were downstairs watching videos. Paula found this out because Adam, the youngest, told her one Monday when she caused a row by trying to switch the TV off. When I think of that story, I can feel myself redden. Aren’t I guilty of the same double standard? I tell Paula that Ben must have water not juice and then, at the weekend, if he asks me for apple juice, I give in quickly to buy myself some peace and quiet. And because I see him so little, I want our times together to be happy. So I want my nanny to be a better mother than I would ever be: I expect her to love my two like they’re her own, and then, when I come home and find her loving them like her own, they’re suddenly My Children and to be loved by nobody except me.
As I unload the dishwasher and start to wash by hand all the plates that aren’t properly clean, I can see Paula looking at me from the other end of the kitchen. She’s brushing Emily’s hair and really looking at me. I wish I knew what she thought. She said to me once that she would never have a nanny if she had kids of her own; she knew too much about what went on — the girls who suck up to the mums and then, as soon as they’re out the door, it’s on the mobile calling their mates.
Emily lets out a cry as the brush snags on a tangle. “Hush now,” Paula chides, “princesses have to have their hair brushed a hundred times every night, don’t they, Mummy?” She looks across the room, seeking an act of conciliation and consent.
No, I don’t want to know. If I knew what she really thought, it would probably kill me. Still, a part of me wishes I knew what she thought.