How Hard Can It Be?

by Allison Pearson

  We have started walking again now, down the other side of the hill and along the path that skirts the ploughed field; the leaves underfoot are chocolate brown, the size and the shape of hands. The colour in the trees is still glorious, because we have had such a dry autumn, Sally says, but in a few days the branches will be bare. Walking ahead of me, in single file with Coco, Sally says she hates those drop-down things travel companies make you do, where you have to scroll down till you reach your year of birth.

  ‘Just seeing how far the years go back, to 1920, and already how far I have to go back to get to me – to 1953. And I suppose you can see a time when your own date of birth will be pushed further and further down the chart, as the years behind it gradually disappear, and the people with them.’ She turns and grins at me. ‘Goodness, that’s a cheerful thought. Shall we talk about something else?’

  I realise that I’m hesitant about mentioning Perry to Sally. Stupid really. After all, she must have gone through the whole damn business herself. But it still feels taboo somehow. Why can’t we be honest about this huge change in our bodies? I mean, I know why you wouldn’t want to tell a man; they recoil from women’s bits at the best of times. But I haven’t even talked about it to a single friend, except Candy on email. It’s almost as if we fear admitting to other females that we’ve lost sexual power, that we’re out of the contest we’ve been in since our teens. Surely, I can talk to Sally?

  ‘I’ve been feeling pretty grim lately,’ I say with a pre-emptive grin. ‘Think it’s probably that boring old Time of Life thing.’

  Sally turns to look at me. ‘Oh, poor you. No need to suffer in silence, Kate. I’ll give you the number of a gynaecologist I went to on Harley Street. I felt absolutely dreadful at your age and he put me on HRT.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t want to take HRT,’ I say quickly. ‘It’s not that bad, I’m OK, I can manage – honestly.’

  ‘He’ll make you feel much better,’ Sally says, tugging Coco away from a pile of dried horse poo. ‘They call him Dr Libido, I believe.’

  ‘Oh God, he’d have to be an Antarctic explorer to find my libido. It’s probably in the same pack ice as Shackleton’s ship. Let me buy you a coffee, Sal?’

  ‘No, my turn. Wasn’t it Shackleton who said, “Difficulties are just things to overcome, after all?” Now, let’s go to the caff and you can tell me more about what you’re wearing tomorrow. I haven’t been in an office for so long I can hardly remember what you do.’

  Sometimes, when Sally is talking about her years at the Spanish bank, I glimpse a different woman. Clearly, it wasn’t easy in what was a highly macho environment, even by banking standards. They deliberately sent her to the Middle East a lot when Will and Oscar were still really small.

  ‘I used to go back to my hotel room and cry. I think my boss sent me there expecting me to fail, so they could get rid of me after I had the boys, but I was determined to make a success of it and I did bring in a lot of business, which surprised them.’ She mentions a Spanish colleague from the bank who was with her in Egypt, and in Lebanon. ‘They thought I needed a man to chaperone me, but those countries were much more liberal then. You never saw women wearing the veil, certainly not in the cities. Beirut was idyllic, so sophisticated, we absolutely loved it.’ She takes out her phone and shows me a picture of a gamine brunette, a look of Audrey Hepburn about her, wearing shorts and a white broderie anglaise top tied in a double knot on her tiny, tanned waist. She’s standing on a wall next to the sea and she is giving the camera a look of such impish glee. ‘I think that must have been Jiyeh, maybe 1985 or ‘86.’

  Of course. The woman is Sally. It took me a few seconds to connect that joyful sprite with the woman sitting opposite in the fleece and squidgy dog-walking hat. Sal is sixty-one now.

  ‘You look insanely happy,’ I say and she nods.

  ‘I adore the heat.’

  We’ve only just taken a seat in the café, a low wooden structure tucked in the lee of the hill, when Sally’s phone starts ringing and dinging. Texts and voice messages demanding her attention. There’s no reception further up so they all come at once.

  ‘Do you mind if I check those, Kate? Sorry, I bet it’s the kids.’ She says there’s one from Will, no, two from Will, asking what he can do about his lost passport and where will he find clean underpants. Oh, and there’s a text from Oscar: he’s suffering from post-traumatic stress after being dumped by his long-term girlfriend, and he didn’t get into work on time, so they fired him. And there’s one from Antonia. Sally reads it out to me: ‘Mum, can you find my brown boots please? Probs bottom my wardrobe. Love you x’.

  She places her palm briefly on her forehead as though checking her temperature. ‘I despair,’ she says. Will, aged thirty-one, is still wandering around thinking he has a future as a war reporter, or maybe a professional cricketer; meanwhile he’s living at home with Sally and Mike working in Clink and Son, the estate agents. Oscar, who is twenty-nine, has done two degrees and endless postgraduate work in International Relations and Conflict Resolution, and is currently living in a vile flat in Forest Gate, smoking far too much weed, which is causing him acute anxiety (although he denies it), and is expecting his parents to supplement his income as a Deliveroo biker. ‘Although it sounds like he’s even lost that job now.’

  Antonia is the most academic of the three. She graduated with a 2:1 in Spanish and History and is now on her third (maybe it’s her fourth) internship, where she basically pays some PR agency to give them the opportunity to exploit her.

  After a bad blip in her second year of college – probably a series of panic attacks, Sally thinks, though nobody’s quite sure – Antonia is on anti-depressants (really helpful once they kicked in). She recently announced on Facebook that she is bisexual, which Sally is fine about, except there’s no sign that she’s having sex of any kind with anyone, male or female, and her mother does fret about that at 3 am, the hour when mothers wake and wonder if their children are happy.

  ‘Honestly, Kate, I sometimes think I’ve produced a trio of wimps,’ Sally grimaces. (Her face is becoming more animated as she knows me better. I think back to the dormouse I first saw at Women Returners.) ‘They really should be independent by now, shouldn’t they? Not texting me every day saying, ‘Mum, I’ve got a cold.’

  She takes a sip of coffee and pushes the carrot cake towards me. ‘I hear so many parents saying the same thing. Where did we go wrong? Half of the boys’ mates are still drifting, can’t settle to anything. None of them are married. It’s like we were on their cases the whole time when they were growing up, in a way our parents never were on ours – never had the time or the inclination to be, quite frankly. And then, when we try to get off their case, they get anxious and they can’t cope and we end up resenting it because part of us is thinking, “Excuse me, this is My Time now, young man”. Is that horribly selfish of me?’

  I push the cake back at her, but not before inhaling a heavenly waft of the fragrant icing. ‘Of course it’s not selfish. You’ve done so much for them, Sal. Life just seems to be harder than when we were starting out. We always knew we could get a job, didn’t we, and a flat didn’t cost twenty times your salary.’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, Kate,’ Sally says, ‘they’re great kids.’ She passes me her phone. The screensaver is a picture taken at a recent family wedding. ‘That’s Will in the middle, he’s got his arm around, well, obviously, that’s Osky on the left, and Antonia, look at her, she’s a real titch compared to the boys.’

  The two brothers, fair and broad like a pair of Norwegian oarsmen, are so alike they could be twins. ‘Oh, Sal, wow! Look at them. Tall, blond and handsome. Is Mike fair, then?’

  Her husband used to be fair like the boys, Sally confirms, but he’s grey now.

  ‘And Antonia, what a beauty. She’s dark like you, Sal. Look at those brows. Emily spends ages painting in her brows to get them that dark. She’s the spitting image of that actress. Oh, what’s her name?’ (**‘Roy, can you take a
look in Movie Stars for me, please? Willowy, dark actresses?’) ‘You know the one. She’s in lots of those, that director, his films. I love them. You know. What’s she called?’

  ‘Some people say Antonia’s a bit like Keira Knightley?’ Sally prompts.

  ‘No, darker, the actress I’m thinking of is much darker. It’ll come to me.’

  7.19 pm: Homework. No, not school homework – that guerrilla war between parents and kids which makes our involvement in Iraq look like tea at Claridge’s. If I had a pound for every time I’ve coaxed and cajoled and yelled and threatened the kids to please even track down the bag where their homework might be hiding, I wouldn’t need a full-time job. Sadly, there isn’t a minimum wage for the Homework Monitor. When I think of the wages of Motherhood, I see that jar on the kitchen windowsill in my mum’s house, full of 1ps and 2ps with the occasional silver 10p winking among the copper – the small change of a life lived for others. Even when she had next to nothing, my mum always put coins in that jar for charity.

  I never wanted that life. I saw what it did to her, totally dependent on my father, who was a drunk with a whim of iron. Whatever happened, I would always make sure I had my own money, not something called ‘housekeeping’ counted out onto the blue Formica table on a Friday night before Dad went down the pub. Mum’s awful gratitude, the little pantomime of coquetry as she went to take the cash and put it in her purse and received a pat on the bottom from him, The Almighty Provider.

  So for more than twenty years I worked and I was paid well for that work, and I stood on my own two feet. Never thinking what it would feel like to have your legs pulled out from under you. People talk about giving up work as if it’s a holiday or a change of scene, but in my experience it was more like a death – a small death, but a profound loss nonetheless. When you don’t have a pay cheque, a month feels very different – contourless, void. After I finally left Edwin Morgan Forster, and we moved to Yorkshire for Richard’s job, the vicar handed me an application form to fill in to become Treasurer of the Parish Church Council. First question: ‘What is your personal income for the past year?’ I hesitated – seconds, days – before circling ‘None’.

  I waved goodbye to the vicar and drove down the lane to collect Emily and Ben from school, but I couldn’t see for crying. Pulled over into a lay-by and wailed, proper big, ploppy tears like I hadn’t wept since my grandfather died. Tears that pooled at my breastbone and leaked into my bra. None. It was such a humiliation to actually write it down. To see it in writing. None. How had I got to this strange, frightening place where my personal income was nothing?

  Focus, Kate. You’ve got homework to do. Tonight, it’s me I have to nag to start revising. Interview tomorrow for a lowly job with the investment fund that I started all those aeons ago. Mustn’t mention that detail of course, or the fact that the fund is now worth about £200 million less than when I ran it. I am a humble supplicant with an impressive, if mainly fictional, CV. With a little help from Women Returners, and from Candy, Debra and Sally, I have managed to perfect a cover story for the six and a half years when I took ‘time out’. Also, I have a new age – the age that I was when I left that very office, funnily enough. Must Remember: I am forty-two. (‘Roy, I hope you’re getting this; we can’t afford to make any slip-ups, OK?’)

  Plus, I’ve got a crib sheet of all the new acronyms that have been coined since I left EMF, for example:

  SANE

  Which countries: South Africa, Algeria, Nigeria, Egypt.

  What does it tell us: what were considered the African continent’s most likely growth powerhouses.

  ‘What’s SANE?’ snorts Richard, standing by the dining-room table and peering over my shoulder. ‘There’s nothing sane about where you used to work, darling. They’re all certified madmen. We’re seeing a lot of them seeking counselling now. Big growth area, burnt-out capitalists.’

  ‘Needs must.’ I smile and touch his hand. It feels essential to avoid the ‘As you’re becoming a counsellor paid in aduki beans and string someone needs to earn enough to pay the mortgage’ argument. Not tonight.

  ‘Emily, can you please lay the table and don’t disturb Mummy. She’s revising for her interview.’ Richard, who is dressed in the stripy butcher’s pinny I bought him for his birthday, said he would cook dinner to give me time to prepare. A typically kind, thoughtful gesture that causes more work than if he’d done nothing at all.

  You see, when Rich cooks he can’t be Delia, or even Nigella; he is Raymond Blanc – stock made from bones bought at the butcher, complicated sauces with three stages each. Even frozen peas have to be done with onion and pancetta. The result is always an absolutely delicious dinner that takes ten minutes to eat and three days to clear up. I do my best not to resent this, really I do.

  9.35 pm: Ben is in his pyjamas and testing me. He will do anything to avoid going to bed – apart from his homework, of course.

  ‘OK, what’s PIIGS, Mum?’

  ‘Um, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain.’

  ‘Cor-rect!’ My son beams encouragement. ‘Why are they pigs?’

  ‘Because they were the Eurozone’s weakest, most debt-laden economies when we had this really bad financial crisis a few years ago. It’s very hard to make a currency like the Euro work when it’s used by strong countries like Germany and also by much poorer ones like the PIIGS.’

  ‘Are we PIIGS?’ he asks anxiously.

  ‘No, love, we’re sort of DOGS. Debt-ridden but overall good strategy for recovery. Woof-woof!!’

  Ben barks back and leans in for a hug. A rare concession these days. I still remember the little boy who shouted with astonished joy when I told him I was leaving my job at EMF. ‘Are you going to be A Real Mummy now?’ he asked. Had I not been a real mummy to him while I worked?

  I kiss the top of his head. ‘Hey, bed now, Mister! You know I probably won’t get this job, don’t you?’

  ‘You will,’ he says, turning away so I can’t see his face. ‘You’re really clever, Mum.’

  10.10 pm: Have carefully laid out clothes for the morning on the laundry basket in the bathroom. Tights not laddered? Check. Shoes, two of, matching. Check. New, flattering, indigo, velvet jacket from M&S. (I allowed myself one new item of clothing for morale boost.) Check.

  The mirror reveals that Project Get Back To Work has already trimmed some flesh off my saddlebags and I can see a waist, though, sadly, not the one I had in 2002. An improvement, definitely, but I still need some extra help. Cutting open the packet with nail scissors, I slide out my new Shaper Suit. It looks like some macabre garment stitched from dead human flesh by a serial killer in a Hannibal Lecter film. Cost a hundred quid, insanely, but it does feature a ‘zoned-compression option’. Not quite sure what that is, but I want one.

  Wriggle head-first into elasticated, calamine-lotion-coloured sack, but it’s so tight I can’t pull it down over my hips. It feels like I’m trying to stuff too much meat back inside a sausage skin. Can’t move in here. Or find opening for arm. Starting to panic.

  Don’t panic, Kate! You are in your own bathroom and therefore perfectly safe. I need both arms to tug the Shaper Suit down over my rear end. Unfortunately, one arm is stuck by my side as cannot find a second armhole. Where is it? Must be here somewhere. I can feel the sweat starting to pour down inside the Shaper Suit and gather where the garment has got stuck on my stomach, just above the C-section scar. Perhaps the zoned-compression option is too compressed? I decide to take the suit off and start again, but I can’t. Am trapped. Literally can’t move. Just wondering whether I should call for help when I hear Emily’s voice close by, in the bathroom. She must be right next to me.

  ‘Mu-um? Urrgh. What are you wearing? Like that’s totally weird. I can only see your pubes. Where are you?’

  ‘Hernneuf.’

  ‘Da-ad, come and see Mum, she’s like stuck in like this weird straitjacket like a crazy person. It’s hilarious. Is that your Halloween costume? Oh, where’s my phone, I need
to get a picture of this.’

  After a combined rescue effort by my husband and daughter, I escape from the Shaper Suit. It’s not easy explaining to your slender-as-a-wand teenager why Mummy would want to squeeze into a punishment corset belonging to a less emancipated era. But squeeze I must.

  I manage to get the Shaper Suit on properly the second time and the navy Paule Ka dress and jacket fit like a glove. Only it’s so tight that breathing is optional. Think about what long-term damage to vital organs is being inflicted by my vanity/fear. Also, how on earth will I manage to go to the loo?

  None of that matters. The only thing that matters, right now, at this decisive moment in my personal history, is that I look the part. For tomorrow, Kate Reddy is back in uniform and ready for covert operations.

  7

  BACK TO THE FUTURE

  Thursday, 7.25 am: I got to the station early. Interview isn’t until 11.30. Journey to Liverpool Street on semi-fast train takes forty-eight minutes. Estimated walk from Liverpool Street to offices of EM Royal, approximately six minutes. Time allowed for safe arrival at office, including total collapse of rail network, unforeseen major weather event, terrorist attack, snow, ladder in tights necessitating emergency stop at M&S plus Any Other Disasters: four hours and five minutes. Should be enough.

  As I step off the train, I am hit by the twin sensations of smell – that signature London elixir of ambition and grime with prickly top-notes of sweat – and speed – even though the train has stopped, the capital is forging ahead, insisting that you leap aboard or get trampled by the hordes. I’m overwhelmed. It’s as if, after being locked in a cellar where I’ve mushroomed into middle age and grown accustomed to the dark, I am now suddenly released into all this light and noise and energy. In the country, I curse other drivers for pootling along, for their tragic indecisiveness at junctions; here it’s me who’s the dithery slowcoach. For one paralysed second, I think I might turn around and go straight back home again, but I’m swept along in the great tide of commuters, powerless to move any way but forward, towards the ticket barrier. My eyes narrow and grow watery in the searing brightness of this world outside the cellar. The City’s adrenalin used to course through my veins when I was young and hungry, but can it ever be my lifeblood again?