Then, there was the December we brought baby Emily here. I know exactly when it was: 1997, because Em will soon be seventeen. There was snow on the hills, and it felt magical to be bringing this new person to meet her grandparents. At the first sight of the perfect rosebud in her pink bonnet and matching matinee jacket, Barbara welled up. She only had sons, which was difficult, I suspect, for such an immensely feminine woman. Although she never did soften towards me, she has been Emily’s champion ever since and won’t hear a word against her.
‘Nearly there. No need to hold onto the seat, Kate,’ says Donald. I relax my grip and do my best not to be alarmed that my father-in-law drives not with one hand, but with one finger on the wheel. I suppose he has known this road for longer than I’ve been alive.
It’s a shock when he unlocks the back door and we step straight into the farmhouse kitchen. Barbara’s kingdom, from which she ruled her family as a benign despot, looks like a student bedsit. Every surface is covered with crockery, saucepans, utensils, cans of food. My nostrils twitch at the pungent stink of wee. I look towards the dog basket for the culprit. The basket is still there, next to the range, but, I suddenly remember, they had to have Jem put down in the spring; the Collie’s back legs had gone.
‘Look who I’ve brought to see you, love. Kate’s come to see us, isn’t that marvellous?’
Barbara sits in a high-backed, checked armchair that used to live in the sitting room. I recognise other bits of furniture from the rest of the house in here. It’s like a junk shop.
‘She’s having a good day today, aren’t you Barbara?’ Donald speaks loudly, partly for my benefit, partly for his own, perhaps, and partly to get a response out of the old lady. Barbara is unrecognizable from the summer, when we all had a week together in Cornwall. The speed of the deterioration is terrible. Her hair, always immaculately curled after a weekly visit to the hairdresser, lies flat on her scalp.
‘Say hello, Barbara. Poor Kate will be thinking you don’t know her! She’s come all this way to see us.’
Not knowing what else to do, I sit on the stool by her knee and hold Barbara’s hand; it’s curled in on itself like a claw. She stares at me with a look of childlike curiosity, her eyes like those misty marbles I coveted at school.
‘I’ll make us a nice cup of tea, shall I? Barbara, I’m saying to Kate, I’ll make us a Nice Cup of Tea? Or would you prefer coffee, Kate? I know Richard used to drink coffee before he started having all those peculiar teas to go with his new ideas. Camomile, is it?’
‘Tea’d be lovely, Donald. Just normal, thanks. Richard’s really sorry he couldn’t be here, but he’s on a training course.’ So glad he didn’t come. I flinch to think of what Rich would feel seeing his parents amidst the ruins of their life.
‘I can see you looking at Jem’s basket, Kate. I should chuck it out, but it’s … Well, Barbara sometimes thinks Jem’s still with us, don’t you, love? Sixteen years we had him. Couldn’t ask for a better companion. I do miss our walks,’ he says. ‘Gets you out the house does a dog. But it wouldn’t be kind to take on another animal. Not at our time of life.’
I take my mug of tea from Donald and look for an empty place to set it down, but there isn’t one. Another memory: Barbara with a dishcloth, remorseless as a windscreen wiper, always cleaning the work surface, and woe betide you if you put so much as a toast plate down for a few seconds or a wine glass without a coaster. She didn’t like anything on her worktops. It made it so hard bringing the kids here when they were little; clearing up instantly because the slightest spillage upset Grandma.
Donald notices me looking for a place to put the mug. ‘We thought, Kate, as Barbara doesn’t always know which cupboard things are in any more that it would be helpful to put everything on the work surface so she can see it. If she needs a pan for soup, she doesn’t have to think which cupboard it’s in, it’s right there.’
‘Oh, what a good idea,’ I say. ‘What a good idea, Barbara, putting things on the top so you know where they are. Does that help you find what you need, Barbara? I could do with that in our house to be perfectly honest with you.’
‘Margaret, the new carer, she’ll be here in a minute,’ Donald says. ‘I say Margaret’s coming, Barbara, you like Margaret, don’t you?’ The old lady smiles.
Donald takes me aside. I’m not sure why as Barbara can’t hear us and, even if she could, she probably wouldn’t understand. Margaret, he says, is a very nice woman. Better than Edna, the foreign one, who Barbara didn’t get along with at all.
‘Erna?’
‘That’s her. Quite abrasive, she was. A smoker.’
Barbara seems to like Margaret, in so far as anyone can tell what Barbara likes any more, and I think back to the heated exchange I had with the woman at Wrothly Social Services about providing a new carer. At least I’ve been of some small help in what I now realise is a dire situation, much worse than Donald could bring himself to say on the phone.
It’s a relief when Margaret arrives in person and creates a cheery bustle, taking Barbara off for a shower and instructing Donald to go and fetch a prescription from the chemist. I’d like to call Richard to tell him what I’ve found here, but there’s no mobile signal. Nor can I find the house phone. Instead, I fetch the Hoover and a mop, fill a bucket with hot water and Flash, and I begin to clean, furiously, just as Barbara would clean, if she were here.
‘They can’t go on like this much longer,’ Margaret says when she’s putting her coat on, about to leave. ‘Donald’s wonderful with her, but it’s not fair on him. If they sell this place they’ll have enough to go somewhere decent where they’ll both be looked after. Need to get it on the market, but it wants tidying up first. You will tell your husband?’
The next morning, Donald insists on driving me to the station, although I don’t want him to leave Barbara, not even for ten minutes. He lugs the case to the barrier and plants a wet, whiskery kiss on my cheek. ‘Not a great deal to be said for old age,’ he says, speaking normally, now he doesn’t have to megaphone for Barbara as well. ‘We’ve probably had enough, Barbara and me. Make the most of being young, Kate, love,’ he says.
‘I’m not young,’ I protest, but the old gentleman has turned away and is walking towards the car park, the collar of his tweed coat pulled up high against the bitter wind. On the train to my mother’s, the hills a blur of green through the window, I find myself thinking that I could never have imagined a time when I would miss Barbara condescending to me, and finding fault. But I do miss her. Seeing her as she is, missing presumed alive while squarely in the centre of her own domain, is like beholding the Ghost of Christmas Future and it’s frightening. Resolve to make the most of my time with Mum, even when she’s infuriating me with her dithering over carpets.
That’s the thing about parents, isn’t it? They drive you mad for years with their tedious Groundhog Day anecdotes about Joy in the post office whose Dachshund, Dookie, is losing his hair. And did I tell you the funny story about Michael Fish the weatherman? Yes, seven hundred times, actually.
And you think, I don’t know Joy in the post office from Adam and perhaps Dookie the bald Dachshund has delighted us long enough and might go and play in the traffic. Then, one day, something happens, something that changes everything. A fall, a stroke, some tiny cog in the brain thrown out of whack and, all at once, you find yourself nostalgic for those boring, infuriating anecdotes. The years when things would go on as they always had and always would. The years before you knew what comes next.
One of the privileges of youth is that knowledge is kept from you. And so it should be, if you ask me, because it’s just so fucking sad.
Haven’t been able to check my emails since Donald collected me from the station yesterday. The signal is better now. Glance down the Inbox. One from Candy. Two from Debra (Subject: Shoot Me!). One from Emily demanding to know where I’ve put her black suede boots. (My suede boots, Madam!) One from Ben asking if I can collect him from football. (Has he even noticed I’m
not there?) One from Richard saying he and his annoying colleague are organising a meditation retreat in Anglesey in December (What? They’ll bloody freeze.) One from a hypoallergenic dog-food supplier: ‘We miss you!’ One about my dire Experian Credit Rating. One from the phone company about ‘unusual levels of spending’. What unusual spending? (‘Roy, didn’t I ask you to get onto this?’) Another email promises to help me conquer the ‘dread of exposing your bingo wings as we enter the festive season’. Thanks for that. Oh, and, finally, finally, one from Claire Ashley. The one I’ve been waiting for. Go on, open it, Kate. Get it over with.
From: Claire Ashley
To: Kate Reddy
Subject: EM Royal Vacancy
Dear Kate, I am delighted to inform you …
She’s delighted? Imagine how I feel. Oh, thank you, thank you. Quickly scan the rest: the money’s good, better than I thought. The job is Maternity Cover, for six months in the first instance, with the possibility of staying on should my performance prove satisfactory. Start date: immediately, if it’s convenient.
Yes, oh, yes, that is most convenient.
From: Kate Reddy
To: Candy Stratton
Cc: Debra Richards, Sally Carter
Subject: Older Female in New Job Shock
Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyy!
*Yentl. Roy is pretty sure that’s the film where Barbra Streisand dresses as a boy.
**Roy thinks the actress Sally’s daughter reminds me of is Penélope Cruz.
9
GENUINE FAKE
Monday, 7.44 am: Like a Time Traveller, I step out of the lift into my former workplace. It feels so strange, simultaneously familiar and disorientating. As I follow Claire Ashley past the serried rows of desks, I am quite sure everyone on the floor must be staring at me, reading the anxious tickertape of thoughts scudding across my brain. Looking me up and down, thinking, ‘Wow, she’s changed, and not for the better. Rough couple of years, huh?’
Luckily, I know that’s not true. There are no familiar faces here. They’ve gone, all of them. After changing hands twice in the years since I left, Edwin Morgan Forster is technically no more – new owners, new branding, new name – but the fund I set up is still the same. Ironically, it’s for my own fund that I will be working, although my new boss and his team have no idea about the connection, and I intend to keep it that way. I have landed this job on false pretences – the firm believes I am the same age I was when I left here almost seven years ago (who says you can’t hold back Time?). There’s a risk, a very small one, that someone could come out of the woodwork and identify me. What the hell, I’m going to hold my nerve and PUA: Proceed Until Apprehended.
Claire gestures through the vast wall of glass to the square, seven storeys beneath us. A lot has changed, but I see the skating rink, the champagne bar and the serrated Victorian arches of Liverpool Street station, where my train got in over an hour ago. I killed some time in one of the thirty coffee shops which have sprouted up since I left, the new girl about to start school with butterflies in her tummy. Making sure I had my pens, my pencil case, my lipstick in the damson Mulberry bag – a knock-off Debra brought back from holiday in Turkey last summer. She took a picture of the proud sign outside the bag shop: ‘Genuine Fakes’. You’d never guess that the bag’s not the real thing. Nor me, I hope.
Everyone in here looks so much younger than I remember; perhaps it’s just that I’m not young myself any more and don’t realise it. After the financial crisis of 2008, they cleared out most of the older guys, and the rest, seeing the writing on the wall, jumped before they were pushed. Some of them moved to smaller firms, nicely distant from the lingering stench of risky lending, or they used their redundancy money to seed start-ups in St James’s, making sure they had an office to go to. They couldn’t possibly be at home (who knows what went on at home?).
It’s as though this place went through a great war – a vast, man-made disaster really – and an entire generation was wiped out (and, with them, trillions of dollars). The faces I see are too fresh to recall any of it. And that suits me just fine. Funnily enough, I feel like a veteran of my own war coming back to the battlefield, peering through the smoke of time at the ghosts of people I used to work with.
Claire has paused by a horseshoe-shaped arrangement of desks and starts making the introductions. A strikingly pretty blonde with princess-length hair, maybe late twenties, Alice Someone, is immediately friendly and welcoming. I am shown to a seat next to her. A couple of guys – Troy? Jamie? – who are studying a screen nod at me then look away. Another thing that’s sprouted since I was last here is facial hair. Never would have predicted the Great Beard Revival, not in a million years. All of the young guys have one, or long, sculpted sideburns. Claire hails a burly, bespectacled chap with a thatch of curly red hair who is dashing past. She introduces Gareth, the Welsh head of Research, who has the short, stocky build of his coal-mining ancestors. ‘You’ll be working closely with Gareth, of course. Oh, and here’s Jay-B now; he’s been looking forward to meeting you, Kate.’
My new boss is the physical opposite of Welsh Gareth. Spare and reedy, he wears a Tintin quiff in his hair which is as black and shiny as his conquistador beardlet and his very pointy Prada shoes. I recognise the type immediately. Self-styled hipster, metrosexual, spends a fortune on scruffing products and Tom Ford Anti-Fatigue Eye Treatment. Probably got a penthouse in Clerkenwell – no, it’s Shoreditch these days, isn’t it? – with a built-in vivarium where he keeps fastidious small reptiles like himself. I think Claire mentioned that Jay-B is thirty, which means that he was born the year that I went to university. That can’t be right. I mean it’s not natural, is it?
I realise I was sold to Jay-B as a well-spoken blonde who, despite being forty-two (memo to Roy: Do Not forget we are forty-two!) still presents well and could be useful in marketing and business development, selling to high-net-worth individuals and private family offices. A notoriously tough sell. It’s the young wide boys who market to chains of stockbrokers and make the big bucks. I’ll be courting the old buffers, family trusts and some of the new-money brigade, the up-and-comers still regarded with suspicion. Still, if I do well, it’s decent money and money is what we need right now. Our family is experiencing its own liquidity crisis. I think of Emily’s face when she said that Lizzy was going with Bea and Izzy to the Taylor Swift concert. After I wrote that cheque for ninety pounds to Cynthia Knowles to pay for Em’s ticket, Emily said that Everyone was giving thirty-quid Topshop vouchers to the birthday girl.
‘Really? Thirty each? On top of the concert ticket?’
‘You can’t get much in Topshop for less than that,’ Emily said, staring at her shoes, not wanting to look at me, knowing it was too much, but also daring me to query the price of admission to Lizzy’s club. I remember being her age, the agony of exclusion, the need to belong, as urgent as the need to urinate. Julie and I, we never had the right clothes or the right toys when we were growing up. Once, I was invited to play tennis with three girls from the nicer part of town and all I had was this racquet Mum got with Green Shield Stamps – a stick with a bit of plastic netting basically. The other girls’ racquets made a satisfying pock when they struck the ball; mine gave a defeated twang like a busted bluegrass guitar. I never ever want my daughter to feel she’s not just as good as anyone else.
‘So, Kate – take a seat.’ Jay-B ushers me into his corner office, floor-to-ceiling windows on both sides. Am I imagining it? No, I’m not. This was once the mighty Rod Task’s lair. My old boss. I can still hear the abrasive Australian yelling at me to ‘Get out there and kick the fucking tyres, Katie!’ He was a nightmare – sexist, racist, think of any bad ‘ist’ you can mention and that was dear old Rod. Last thing I heard from Candy, Rod was back in Sydney and had been involved in a bull-shark attack on the Great Barrier Reef. Significant blood loss and heavy biting, but the poor, stunned shark was expected to recover.
Jay-B sees me glance outside.
‘Helluva skyline. Shard’s the fourth tallest building in Europe now. That whole area down by London Bridge, you wouldn’t recognise it. Couple of the big accountants moved down there. Next to Borough Market. Great foodie place.’
I suddenly remember that a fox was living at the top of the Shard when it was being built. Imagine his – or her – terror as their home got higher and higher. Hope they didn’t have cubs. My new boss glances down at what I presume are notes from the interview panel.
‘O-kay, I see you’ve built strong client relationships in the past. That’s what we’ve brought you in for, Kate. Some of the team, they’re great sales people, but they haven’t always got the life experience that enables them to handle some of our, well, our more mature investors. We’ve got a couple of merry widows, for example, who need their hands holding.’
‘Oh, I’m great with old ladies,’ I say, thinking of Barbara in her high-backed chair gripping my fingers. Thinking of my mother, still trying to choose between green and beige carpets.
‘Fantastic. Fantastic. And it says here you’ve got two kids.’ Jay-B has raised one impeccably waxed eyebrow, as though children were some kind of exotic perversion. ‘How old are they, then?’
‘Oh, they’re sixte—’
NO! What are you thinking? Remember you’re forty-two, for heaven’s sake. Emily can’t be sixteen going on seventeen. That means you would have had her when you were twenty-five. Round here that makes you a child bride.
How Hard Can It Be? Page 15