The room we meet in is in the modern annexe of the old town library. What it lacks in atmosphere it makes up for in strenuous attempts to remove actual books from what one poster depressingly calls ‘The Reading Experience’. Why is everything in here on a screen? I remember how Emily and Ben adored their bedtime stories, then gulped down Harry Potter, even making us queue up at midnight outside the local bookshop to buy the latest instalment. Now they are practically soldered to their keyboards. Emily might still pick up a novel from time to time and breeze through seventy pages before something more compelling intervenes – usually a make-up tutorial on YouTube by Zooella or Cruella or someone. She’s obsessed with make-up. Ben is wary of anything too long to be read on the screen of a phone.
The decor in here is that folksy Scandinavian look which seems to have taken over all British public spaces. There is a noisy pale-wood floor and uncomfortable, sloping bony chairs with leaf-print cushions and matching pale-wood arms. The coffee from the machine by the entrance is disgusting, so people pick one up from Caffè Nero next door. Sally brings a flask and so does Elaine Reynolds (mum of belfie-tracker Josh). We’ve been meeting here every Wednesday afternoon for five weeks now. There were fifteen of us to begin with, but two women swiftly decided it wasn’t for them and then, a fortnight ago, a third dropped out because her daughter was hospitalised with anorexia after failing to meet her weekly outpatients’ target of 0.5 kg weight gain.
‘Of course, it doesn’t rule out Sophia going to Oxford,’ Sadie said, as though there might actually be someone among us who urgently needed reassurance on that score. Sophia was already garlanded with 10 A*s at GCSE, as we’d been told several times, and her mother clearly saw the girl’s stint in an eating disorders unit as a minor bump on the road to academic glory, rather than a possible hint that it was precisely that route which had brought about her recent crash.
‘They can still sit their exams in there,’ Sadie continued. ‘There’s no problem with that. I’m making sure Soph gets her AS coursework in on time. Compare Atonement with The Go-Between. It’s not exactly Shakespeare, is it? I’m reading both novels, of course, so I can help the poor darling as much as I can.’
Everything about Sadie, from her figure to her dark bobbed hair, from her matching taupe bag and loafers to her South African accent, was clipped, with no unnecessary waste. The person she most reminded me of was Wallis Simpson – immaculate without being in any way appealing. Or human. I found myself wondering what it must be like to have such a controlled and controlling creature as a mother. Looking across the circle, I could see that Sally was having exactly the same thought. She rolled her lips back and forth as if she were setting lipstick on an invisible tissue, and her eyes glistened with what might easily be mistaken for concern, but was actually closer to disdain.
To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure about joining the Returners. I mean, I’ve never cared for the lazy assumption that women have shared preoccupations and views, like we’re some kind of endangered minority group. There are good, decent and feeling women, sure, millions of them, but there are also Sadies who would leave your child for dead by the side of the road if it meant getting an advantage for her kids. Why do we insist on pretending otherwise? Just because she has ovaries and a vagina (probably steam cleaned), doesn’t make Sadie my ‘sister’, thanks very much.
Like so many of the all-female events that I’ve attended, there is something mildly apologetic about Women Returners. With no men in the room, we are free to be ourselves, but maybe we are so out of practice that we tend to overshoot and end up giggling like nine-year-olds or, inevitably, talking about the kids we actually have. Women get so easily bogged down in anecdote; instinctive novelists, we make sense of our lives through stories and characters. It’s wonderful, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t make us any good at single-mindedness, at shutting out the day-to-day stuff and going for what we want. Imagine a group of men ending up talking about their wife’s mother’s heart bypass. Never happen, would it?
Today will be different, however, because a man, a well-known employment consultant called Matthew Exley, is here to talk to us about how best to market our skills. ‘Call me Matt’ is clearly enjoying being the only ram in a flock of ewes. He begins with some research. Studies show, Matt says, that if ten criteria are listed for an advertised job and a man has seven of them, the man would be willing to ‘have a go’. By contrast, if a woman has eight, she will say, ‘No, I can’t possibly apply for the job because I don’t meet two of the criteria.’
‘Now, ladies, what do we think this is telling us?’ Matt beams encouragingly at his flock. ‘Yes, Karen?’
‘I’m Sharon,’ says Sharon. ‘It’s telling us that women tend to undersell themselves. We underrate our capabilities.’
‘Spot on, Sharon, thank you,’ says Matt. ‘And what else can we deduce? Yes, the blonde lady over there?’
‘That men generally assume they’ll be good at things they’re rubbish at because their experience of the workplace proves that mediocre men are consistently given positions beyond their capabilities, while highly able women have to be twice as good as a man to have any chance of being given a senior position for which they are infinitely better qualified?’
Every so often at Women Returners, I’m sorry to report that a cynical, world-weary and, quite frankly, abrasive voice ruptures the happy bubble of feelgood reinvention and shared sisterhood.
‘Ah.’ Matt looks to Kaylie for support in dealing with this party pooper.
‘C’mon, Katie,’ smiles Kaylie valiantly with her too-white teeth. (You guessed it was me, didn’t you?) ‘I think you’re kinda taking all the negatives onboard. We’ve talked before about how women are tough on themselves. I know how perfectionist you are, Katie. What Matt is trying to say is that we need to give ourselves permission to think that, even if we’re not the perfect candidate for a job, then being a seven or eight instead of a ten may be good enough.’
‘That’s right,’ says Matt with obvious relief. ‘Your CV doesn’t need to be a perfect fit to have a shot at a job.’
‘Sorry, but I think what Kate was trying to say …’ It’s Sally speaking now. The group turns with interest to its shyest and most tongue-tied member. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think what Kate was saying is that the reason men have a lot of confidence applying for jobs is because the odds were, and to some extent still are, heavily stacked in their favour. They think they have more chance of succeeding because they actually do. You can’t really blame older women for having low self-confidence when that reflects the opinion the world has of us.’
‘I hear you, Sally,’ says Matt.
(In my experience, ‘I hear you’ is a phrase used only by those who are completely deaf to any sound but their own voice.)
‘But things are much better than they were even five years ago,’ he goes on. ‘Employers are much more aware of the qualities that women returners can bring to the office. You will all have noticed that work–life balance has moved up the political agenda and many firms are beginning to see that a more, shall we say, enlightened approach to taking on older females, who have taken time out from their careers, may not damage their business. Quite the contrary, in fact!’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ says Sally uncertainly. ‘My friend’s daughter took nine months off work from an investment fund with her second baby and no one batted an eyelid. That would have been unheard of when I was at the bank. Even four months’ maternity leave … Well, your job might still be there when you got back, but someone else would have the title. You might be allowed to assist him. My bank sent me to the Middle East when my boys were very small, to see if I would give up, probably.’
‘When I told my boss I was pregnant with my second,’ Sharon chips in, ‘he went fucking mental. He said, “But, Sharon, sweetheart, you’ve already had a baby.”’
Everyone laughs. The secret, subversive laughter of the servants below-stairs at Downton Abbey discussing thei
r masters’ funny little ways.
‘Listen, guys,’ says Kaylie, ‘I think Katie is being way too pessimistic. Like Matt says, firms are more open than ever to the idea that activities outside of the office can give you transferable skills. Seriously, the Mum CV is now a big thing in recruitment.’
I look around the circle at the women’s eager faces. They nod and smile at Matt, grateful for his assurances that the employment they left during the years of raising children will welcome them back, that the ‘skills’ of nurturing and running a small country called Home are transferable. Maybe that’s true if you’ve been out of the loop three years, five max. Privately, I think the ones who are in the worst position are those who kept no work going at all, who gave up every last bit of personal independence. When the chicks fly the nest, at eighteen, they take with them their mother’s reason for being. And the women turn to look at the men they’ve lived with for the past twenty-four years and they realise the only thing they have in common any more is the kids, who have just left home. The child-rearing years are so busy, so all-consuming it’s easy to ignore the fact your marriage is broken because it’s buried under the Lego and the muddy dungarees and the PE bags. Once the kids are gone there’s no place for your relationship to hide. It’s brutal.
At least my freelance stuff gave me a slender handrail to hold onto in a rapidly changing jobs market. Plus, I’m one of the younger ones here, and even I will have to lie about how old I am to stand a chance of getting back into my industry.
I think of how I felt sitting in Gerald Kerslaw’s office with my own ‘Mum CV’. Watching his eyes flick down my activities outside the office for the past six and a half years. Work for the school, work for the community, for the church, backbone of society, carer for young and old. I felt small. I felt diminished, irrelevant, unregarded. Worst of all, I felt foolish. Maybe ‘Call me Matt’ is right and attitudes are changing, but, in my line of business, a forty-nine-year-old who’s been out of the game for seven years might as well walk through the Square Mile ringing a bell and shouting, ‘Chlamydia!’
Matt asks for one final question and I raise my hand. Bravely, he picks me. ‘As ageism is clearly a major problem in the workplace, whether we like it or not, would you ever recommend that those of us who are in our forties, fifties and sixties should lie on our CV?’
His brow puckers, not with genuine thoughtfulness but in that mature frown which men adopt to indicate that they are busy pondering. If he had been wearing glasses he would have pushed them to the end of his nose and looked over them in my direction.
‘Lie?’ Nervous neigh of laughter. ‘No. Although I wouldn’t necessarily foreground your age. There’s no requirement to write down a date of birth any more. Put it this way, I certainly wouldn’t make your age an issue if it doesn’t need to be. Or the particular years when you were at school and university; people can count, you know. Anyway,’ (a consoling smile), ‘I wish you all the very best of luck.’
I’m putting my card in the machine to pay for the car park, when I feel a hand on my arm. ‘I just wanted to say well done in there.’ It’s Sally the mouse.
‘Oh, thank you. You’re very sweet, but I was awful. Much too cynical. Kaylie’s trying to give us all a boost and there’s me sounding off about institutionalised sexism like Gloria Steinem with rabies. Just what everyone needs.’
‘You were telling the truth,’ Sally says, cocking her head to one side in that intelligent, birdlike way I’ve noticed.
‘Maybe, but who wants the truth? Highly overrated, in my experience. It’s just … Oh, look, I went to a headhunter in London the other day to see if he could come up with anything for me. It was … Well, he made me feel like some hideous old peasant woman turning up to flog goat turds in Fortnum & Mason. It was terrible. Funny thing is, I didn’t even want to come to our group in the first place. You know that saying about not wanting to belong to any club that would have you as a member? I thought it was all a bit pathetic. I mean, Women Returners?’
‘Revenant,’ says Sally.
‘Sorry?’
‘The French for ghost is un revenant, which literally means ‘a returner’. One who comes back. As in, from beyond,’ she says.
I told her that was spooky. She laughed. She said ghosts generally are spooky. I said, ‘No, I meant it’s such a coincidence because I was only thinking earlier that returners made us sound like we were back from the dead; I didn’t know it was French for ghost.’ She said her French was rusty – shameful really when she had half a degree in it. I said, ‘Don’t worry, you sound like Christine Lagarde to me.’ I said sometimes I felt like the ghost of my former self. There was no way back to that person I used to be. That it was all over for me. ‘Not for you, Kate,’ she said. And we kept talking and talking, and we would have liked to have gone for tea at some point, but it turned out we both had dogs we had to get back for and then it turned out that we walked our dogs in the same country park and so we went and collected the dogs and walked them on our favourite walk together and sat on our favourite bench at the top of the hill. And that was how Sally Carter became my very dear friend.
5
FIVE MORE MINUTES
7.44 am: ‘Mum, have you seen Twelfth Night?’ Emily looks pale and her hair needs a wash.
‘I think you had it in the living room last night, love, when you were doing your homework. Or it could be in that pile on the chair under Lenny’s toys. Are you going to take a shower?’
‘Haven’t got time,’ she shrugs, ‘got choir practice then we’re getting our revision timetable.’
‘What, already? You’ve barely started the course. That’s a bit soon?’
‘Yeah, I know, but Mr Young said two kids in the year above got Bs last year and they don’t want that happening again.’
‘Well, you should wash your hair before you go in. Make you feel fresher, sweetheart. It looks a bit …’
‘I know.’
‘Em, darling, I’m just trying to …’
‘I know, I know, Mum. But it’s like I’ve got so much on.’ As she turns to go out of the door I notice that her school skirt has got tucked in her knickers at the back, revealing a ladder of nasty cuts up her thigh.
‘Emily, what’s wrong with your leg?’
‘S’nothing.’
‘You’ve hurt yourself, darling. It looks horrid. Come here. What happened?’
‘S’nothing.’ She tugs furiously at the back of her skirt.
‘What do you mean nothing? I can see it’s bleeding from here.’
‘I fell off my bike, Mum. OK?’
‘I thought you said your bike was being mended.’
‘Yeah, I rode Daddy’s.’
‘You rode Bradley Wiggins to school?’
‘Not that one. The old, cheaper one. It was in the garage.’
‘You fell off?’
‘Mmmmmm.’
‘What happened?’
‘There was gravel on the road. I skidded.’
‘Oh, no. And you hurt your poor leg. And you’ve grazed the other one. Lift your skirt up again so I can see properly. Why didn’t you tell me, love? We need to get some Savlon on that. It looks nasty.’
‘Please stop, Mum, OK?’
‘Just let me take a look. Hold still a minute. Pull the skirt up, I can’t see properly.’
‘GO A-WAY. JUST STOP. PUHLEEEASE!’ Emily lashes out wildly, knocking my glasses off and sending them flying to the floor. I bend down to pick them up. The left lens has popped out of its frame.
‘I can’t stand it,’ Emily wails. ‘You always say the wrong thing, Mum. Always.’
‘What? I didn’t say anything, my love. I just want to look at your leg, darling. Em. Emily, please don’t walk out of the room. Emily, please come back here. Emily, you can’t go to school without eating anything. Emily, I’m talking to you. EMILY?’
As my daughter exits the house trailing sulphurous clouds of reproach and leaving me to wonder what crime I have committed this time,
Piotr enters. He is standing just inside the back door with his bag of tools. I blush to think of him hearing our screaming match and seeing Emily knock my glasses off. I can’t believe she actually hit me. She didn’t mean to hit me. It was an accident.
‘Sorry. Is bad time, Kate?’
‘No, no, it’s fine. Really. Come in. Sorry, Piotr. It’s just Emily had an accident, she fell off her bike, but she thinks I’m making a fuss about nothing.’
Without being asked, he takes the glasses out of my hand, retrieves the missing lens which is on the floor next to Lenny’s basket, and begins to work it back into its frame. ‘Emily she is teenage. Mum she’s always say wrong things, isn’t it?’
Despite wanting rather badly to cry, I find myself laughing. ‘That’s so true. A mother’s place is in the wrong, Piotr. Wrong is my permanent address at the moment. Would you like some tea? I’ve got some proper tea today, you’ll be pleased to hear.’
In his new spiritual incarnation, Richard has acquired a wide range of tranquillity teas. Rhubarb and Rosemary, Dandelion, Lemon, Nettle and Manuka Honey, and something in a urine-coloured box called Camomindfulness. On the recommendation of Joely at the counselling centre, in February he presented me with Panax Ginseng, said to be good for hot flushes and night sweats. A thoughtful present although, if you were being picky, perhaps not totally ideal for the red-hot lover’s message of Valentine’s Day. (After receiving a set of Jamie Oliver saucepans for Christmas I thought we’d reached a low point in the history of Rich’s gifts to me, but clearly there is plenty of floor below that to fall through.) It takes a lot to perturb Piotr, whose temperament feels as generous and easy as his countenance, but even he recoiled when I said we had run out of builders’ tea and offered him Dandelion instead.
How Hard Can It Be? Page 8