How Hard Can It Be?

by Allison Pearson

  With more than two hours to kill till I’m expected at EM Royal, I head for Michael’s café by Petticoat Lane market. Candy and I used to escape there to jump-start our weary brains with pungent shots of Turkish coffee and flirt with Michael’s three Cypriot sons, who had a winning combination of outsize biceps and long, feminine eyelashes. The café is far enough from the office and sufficiently scruffy that it won’t be patronised by anyone likely to be interviewing me. I walk up and down the street searching for it. I could have sworn I could find it in my sleep, but it’s hard to get my bearings. The newsagent’s and the greengrocer next door have been replaced by a Starbucks and one of those temporary ‘pop-up’ shops selling ‘artisanal vegan food’ – whatever that is. Turnip root covered in sun-baked organic mud presumably.

  ‘Roy, have I got the address right? I’m sure Michael’s was here. How can I have forgotten? Can you remind me, please?’

  Secretly, I’m looking forward to old man Michael and the boys recognizing me, saying I haven’t changed, espresso on the house for the beautiful lady! They always made Candy and me feel like queens; indiscriminate waiters’ flattery, it meant nothing, but I could do with some of that particular soul-tonic brand of nothing this morning. Roy dawdles back from the map room and says the café is six shops along from The Queen Victoria pub, on the corner of the market. That’s what I thought. I’m not going mad. I retrace my steps and end up standing outside the galvanised-steel windows of what looks like a stage set for a miniature French flea-market, full of quaint bric-a-brac, statues speckled with age, bird cages. The sign over the window says ‘Pierrot le Food’. Peering through the glass, I spot a marble counter and an espresso machine.

  Once inside, I instantly get what kind of place this is; a cross between a diner and a carefully curated museum. Richard would love it. There’s a small selection of fashionable salads – kale, broccoli, pomegranate seeds, chickpeas – all made from ingredients which were previously only fed to cattle, but have since been elevated to ‘happy’ foods favoured by the rich and miserable. For breakfast, you can get dairy-free and gluten-free porridge with chia seeds – it’s surely only a matter of time till they perfect the first porridge-free porridge – and a glass of coconut water costs six quid. Pretty steep for a slug of chilled semen.

  The coconut water and chia seeds of my youth were aloe vera and aduki beans, but that was long ago when fat was still the enemy, not sugar. Now, you’re encouraged to eat butter only you’re not allowed bread to spread it on, which is a bit like saying you can hug Ryan Gosling without using your arms.

  I ask the dark-haired girl behind the counter if she can direct me to Michael’s. ‘So silly of me, I know it’s around here, just can’t seem to find it.’

  The girl shrugs and shouts, ‘Goran?’ From behind a tall display of porcelain toilet bowls and African violets, a man emerges and talks to the girl in a foreign language – Latvian? Slovenian?

  ‘Michael’s was ’ere, this place, but close-ed,’ he says to me, making ‘closed’ two words. ‘Gone maybe five year. Owner he die-ed, maybe, am not sure.’

  It’s worse than the senility I feared; time has trodden on my memories and erased them. I thank the guy and turn for the door, nearly knocking over a polystyrene bust of Venus de Milo. It’s too depressing to stay in this exorbitant place where so much has been spent trying to confect a charm that money can’t buy. Michael’s had it for free. That’s the story of twenty-first-century London: gut all the old places with character, then pay some designer mega bucks to put it back again. Well, I’m so ancient I can now look at a shop-front and see its previous incarnations; I know what the palimpsest of history would show for this place, and the fact I’m one of the few left who carries that knowledge fills me with sadness. I hurry away from that thought, straight across the street and back towards Broadgate where I’ll be just two minutes from the interview.

  Why were you expecting things to have stayed the same, Kate? You know full well the financial district is one big pop-up shop; places and people are cruelly culled when they’ve outlived their usefulness, or don’t make money any more. Beneath this very pavement is a Roman villa where wealthy women wearing the finest togas had a healthy eating plan based around baked dormice, until the next fad came along. Poor Michael. He was probably finished off by a catastrophic rent-hike in a city where even the scuzziest area is no longer safe from becoming desirable and a Full English Breakfast comes with a side order of irony.

  Thank goodness the Broadgate Champagne Bar is still open, and there’s a notice on a stand outside saying it does breakfast. That’s new. I should probably eat something to calm my churning, interview stomach. I am shown to a table overlooking the ice rink, which they built to emulate the one at Rockefeller Center and also to give the illusion that people who work round here might be allowed to have fun. As soon as I sit down I realise what a bad idea this is. Why didn’t I think about it before, or was I letting my subconscious do the driving?

  The last time I saw Jack we skated together here. The very last time. This memory is so strong I don’t need Roy’s help to fetch that one. It comes crowding in, breathless and laughing, just like Jack turning up at the office with two pairs of skates and insisting I join him. Me protesting that I couldn’t skate, him saying he was skater enough for the both of us and all I had to do was lean on him. ‘You’re not gonna fall, Kate. I’ve got you. Just let go.’

  Jack. Six years and nine months since I saw him. Who’s counting? They say that time’s a great healer, don’t they? I expect they mean well, but I’m afraid they’re lying through their teeth.

  The waiter puts a cafetière in front of me and I ask if he can bring cold not hot milk, then I turn to look at the ice where a young couple are doing delighted circuits, just as we did.

  I was determined to hate Jack Abelhammer at first sight. Isn’t that how all the best love stories begin? This American client had been handed to me by my boss, Rod Task, as a kind of booby prize. The other team leaders at EMF all got bonuses that year – bonuses which my highly successful fund paid for, I might add – but I got Abelhammer instead. I was furious. Like so many women I always entered salary negotiations full of resolve to be properly rewarded for my performance this time and somehow, twenty minutes later, left the room with twice the work and no extra money. There has to be a word for that, doesn’t there? Apart from WTF, I mean.

  Anyway, my initial contact with Jack was almost comically terrible. First, he yelled at me down the phone on Boxing Day because some Japanese stock we’d bought for him had gone through the floor. (And a very Merry Christmas to you too, you rude, workaholic Yank!)

  After that first debacle, I referred to him as the Appalling Abelhammer. When the Japanese stock recovered a few weeks later, he did send me a polite, somewhat contrite email but, unfortunately, Candy emailed me at exactly the same moment suggesting we had a girls’ night out to drown our sorrows. ‘I don’t need to be drunk to be disorderly,’ I replied. Except it wasn’t Candy’s email I was replying to, was it? Too late, I’d already pressed Send. TFD. Total Fucking Disaster. Back then, the kids were still small and waking me two or three times a night and the days at work were stressful and long. I was a dead woman walking, basically. Making silly mistakes, such as accidentally promising a major client you’ve never met a wild, alcohol-fuelled night, was par for the course.

  My life felt like one damn absurdity after the next. So it was no great surprise, when I finally got to meet the Appalling Abelhammer in his vast corner-office in New York, that our nanny should text me during the meeting to say that Emily and Ben had nits. Of course they had nits! I started scratching immediately, and couldn’t stop. We had dinner that evening, Jack and I, at a seafood restaurant in the East Village and I had visions of these lice abseiling down my hair – it was long back then – into Abelhammer’s clam chowder. Do I really remember what he ate?

  Oh, I remember everything. Even when I am old and grey and full of sleep and sitting in one of tho
se high-backed plastic chairs in a care home with a too-loud TV and the sweet stench of urine, I know that every moment I spent breathing the same air as Jack Abelhammer will be vivid bright, stored in some time capsule of memory that the passing of the years cannot corrode. Age shall not wither what I felt for him.

  That first night, we talked about anything and everything – how great Tom Hanks was in Apollo 13; a particular part of Provence Jack loved which has its own micro-climate so you can sit outside in a T-shirt in winter; his steadfast devotion to hideous, American plastic cheese, despite a gourmet palate; the matchless, breathy vocals of Chet Baker; the mysterious allure of Alan Greenspan. With his $2,000 suit and salt ’n’ pepper buzz-cut Jack was cartoon-perfect Central Casting for your classic Harvard Business School product. I’d met plenty of those and they all spoke the same stunted language of money. Their speeches were like prefabricated sections of a chicken coop, one business cliché bolted onto the next. Jack was different. Irish on his mother’s side (I’m Irish on my father’s), he had the hereditary gift of the gab and a matchless frame of reference for everything under the sun, from highbrow to lowbrow, quoting reams of movies and poetry, flatteringly expecting me to get the references, which mainly I did. It was exhilarating trying to keep up; I felt parts of me that had been dormant since college begin to wake, as bulbs start to murmur and stir when the sun strikes the frozen earth. Almost anything was material for Jack’s wry, dark wit – facts and figures, personal tragedies and disappointments, all brought to their knees in service of whatever laugh he hoped to extract at the end of a story. His mother, he told me, was the classic all-American homemaker, but bright with it. A cleverness which led first to boredom, then bourbon – copious amounts in the afternoon so she was often plastered by the time Jack got home from high school, once heating up a meat pie for dinner, which turned out to be apple.

  Even this he made into comedy, but I have a theory about men who, as small boys, have witnessed their mother’s distress, and been unable to help her. Ever after they are afraid of female emotion, of getting too close to it, so they wall themselves in and pull up the drawbridge. Maybe that explained why there didn’t seem to be a Mrs Abelhammer, or any kids. I didn’t probe too deeply because I was enjoying the fierce kick of being with Jack and chose not to mention my own children that night. Shameful, in a way, but I hadn’t felt so alive, so powerfully myself for a long long time. Over coffee, Jack said that he’d got it, he knew who I reminded him of.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Samantha in Bewitched.’

  Of all the heroines in all the world, he had to choose mine. Bewitched was the first US show, along with Scooby-Doo, that I saw as a child. Samantha was a typical American housewife who just happened to have supernatural powers, sanity, the perfect home, luscious blonde hair, a certain buoyant, insouciant can-do smile and the ability to always get her way. Although her husband, the hapless Darrin, thought he was running the show, events were actually manipulated by a witchy twitch of Samantha’s nose. But only when she needed it as a Hail Mary pass if her wit, diplomacy, and feminine wiles came up short that time. Looking back, I can see how I was captivated by a woman using her subversive, secret powers to take control of her life in a way my own downtrodden mother never did. So great and so enduring was the influence of Bewitched that I actually thought about calling my baby girl Tabitha, like Samantha, but Richard swiftly vetoed it, saying it was a stray cat’s name.

  ‘But I loved Samantha,’ I exclaimed, as Jack asked the waiter if he could get the check.

  ‘How could you not love Samantha?’ he said.

  He had a slow-release George Clooney smile that reached his eyes before the mouth was fully engaged. Eyes which glistened with amusement as we talked. He made me feel funnier and more beautiful than I had any right to feel. Bewitched?

  ’Fraid so.

  I wasn’t looking for anyone. Are you joking? I was a working mother who needed at least twenty-seven hours in a day to get through all her chores and duties, instead of the frankly pitiful and inhumane allocation of twenty-four. Richard and I still had sex back then, and when we did it was good, but not sufficiently amazing that I wouldn’t have preferred an extra hour’s sleep. I had a crazy demanding job and two children I adored but saw too little of. When I was at work I felt guilty about the kids and when I was at home I felt guilty about work. Time off for myself felt like stealing, so I rarely took it. Like every other mother on the planet, I was doing the jigsaw of family life in my head whilst living with a husband who thought that collecting the dry cleaning and taking his offspring to the park on Sunday merited a Purple Heart/Victoria Cross. As Debra used to joke, the only good thing about our situation was we were Far Too Knackered to Commit Adultery. I repeat, the last thing I needed was a love interest.

  But whatever spark was lit that night in New York would not die down. When I got back to London, Jack emailed me almost hourly. I’d never been addicted to anything in my life – having an alcoholic for a father will do that to you – but I became hooked on seeing the name Abelhammer in my Inbox. Actually got tetchy withdrawal symptoms if I didn’t hear from him for half a day. (They say that the dopamine response fires up in the brain with the receipt of keenly anticipated emails in the same way it does for heroin, and I’m not surprised.) Oddly, the lack of physical proximity meant we became closer than if I’d been able to touch him. We got to know each other through an old-fashioned epistolary courtship, albeit the letters were electronic. I guess we were among the first humans in history to establish such instant intimacy while thousands of miles apart, and it was seductive – God, it was amazing, actually – the way, with just a few keystrokes, he could make me want him. And the fact he seemed to admire and want me in return gave me a confidence I’d never had before, nor since really.

  One morning at the Hackney house, I got up really early and switched on the computer. There was a very brief email from Jack. Subject: Us. It said: ‘Houston, we have a problem.’

  He didn’t need to spell out what the problem was. We had fallen in love and that was hellishly difficult – as implausible and impossible as bringing a broken spacecraft back safely to Earth, even if Tom Hanks was at the controls.

  We were fine, Jack and I, so long as we existed in that rarefied atmosphere where lovers live, and the world goes away. But I was the mother of young children, responsible for their happiness, married to a lovely man I couldn’t imagine hurting. Our relationship, Jack’s and mine, would burn up on re-entry to real life, I was sure of that; even our love, invincible as it felt, would not be a shield against all the pain and anger that would be unleashed if we tried to be together. Turned out I was neither selfish enough, nor brave enough, to obey my heart’s anguished instructions.

  So, I left my job at Edwin Morgan Forster, made a huge effort to put things right with Richard, moved up North, away from the city to which I had given my youth, oh, and I changed my email address because I knew I wouldn’t have the willpower to resist if I ever saw his name in my Inbox. You know, I saved Jack’s last email, couldn’t bear to delete it – the one after he knew that it was over, that I’d gone for good. I half expected him to be angry and reproachful; instead he was encouraging, dammit. Said he couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t return to work in triumph one day. He did allow himself one bittersweet quip: ‘The great thing about unrequited love, Kate, is it’s the only kind that lasts.’

  He was right, in a way. Separation ends a relationship, but not unrequited love, which struggles on in the survivor’s mind, asking, ‘What if?’

  ‘You’re not gonna fall, Kate. I’ve got you. Just let go.’ Should have? Could have? Would have? I felt such loyalty to Richard, to his love for me and the children, to that family I believed we were creating together. I couldn’t walk away, not even for that testosterone-rich burst of springtime that was the aptly named Abelhammer. I never found out about the hammer, but, oh, how I longed to find out! Instead, I stayed to lay more bricks in the fortress called home.
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  Too often, now, I find myself thinking I’ve been bricklaying solo. For a man so scoldingly self-righteous about being ‘present’ all the time, Richard has been notably absent. Where does he go? When he is there, he seems distant, on his invisible bike pedalling away from me. I played it safe, for all the right reasons, and maybe I lost. What if? What if Jack skated up to this window right now, tapped on the glass and beckoned me to come with him …

  ‘Can I get the check?’ I say to the waiter. ‘Oh, sorry. May I have the bill, please?’

  As I walk across the piazza towards my old and – please God, let it be – my new workplace, a voice within me keeps repeating: forty-two, forty-two, forty-two. I must remember to be exactly the same age that I was six years and nine months ago, when I walked out of this glass tower for what I thought was the last time. Forget time, Kate. Wipe it out. Be who you were.

  Easier said than done. Just as I’m struggling to wind back the clock, another voice, hidden and unbidden, comes to my aid. I know it at once, like a warm whisper in my ear. Jack. ‘C’mon, Katharine. How hard can it be?’