How Hard Can It Be?

by Allison Pearson

  Looking around at my thirty-something colleagues, heads bowed over their workstations, I have to suppress a bitter laugh. A woman my age, who has taken seven years out of her career, is not welcome here, but it’s knowledge of family and kids that helped me win Bella Baring over today. I believe that. Sure, I know how to handle a financial crisis, but I also understand what it’s like for a client to get married, to lose a parent, to have miscarriages, to divorce, for kids to struggle and for parents to be scared for them. Even the rich are scared for their kids, and they have plenty to be scared about. Clients like Bella are concerned about our fund’s performance, of course they are, but once they know their money’s safe what they really want is to talk about the problems in their lives and to be heard. It would take me a thousand years to teach Troy to do that. Is London Business School running a course in empathy and feminine intuition? Not a chance.

  The Rock Widow’s problems are cushioned, soothed and stroked by money, but never solved. I think ruefully of my own, like finding a decent care home 160 miles away and a non-existent PlayStation and getting myself ready for an office party tomorrow night, which I would actually pay to get out of because the only face I want to see won’t be there, oh, and attending Ben’s carol concert in the afternoon and drumming up some new business and … what did Sally call it again? Before I leave for home, I go to my System Preferences, then prepare to change the password from Imposter42. Type in the new one, twice. Sandwichwoman50.

  18

  THE OFFICE PARTY

  7.08 am: Funny, isn’t it? You spend the first five years of a child’s life praying they will go to sleep and stay asleep. When they become a teenager, you spend every morning trying to wake them up. Today begins, as most days begin, with a battle to get Ben out of bed.

  ‘Donwunna. Goway!’

  ‘Ben, please. I’m not doing this for my benefit. Remember, you’ve got your Christmas concert this afternoon.’ I draw the curtains, which only prompts further groans.

  ‘Goway.’

  ‘I’ve hung a clean shirt on your wardrobe door, darling, and there’s a nice clean jumper here. Need to look smart, OK? Wear your black shoes, not your trainers. You’ll be on stage.’

  With great reluctance, he hauls himself from the horizontal. ‘Don’t have to come, Mum.’

  ‘Of course I’m coming, darling. I wouldn’t miss your concert.’

  ‘You’re in London. S’nothing special. Not worth coming all the way home for.’

  ‘It’s special to me, Ben. Omigod, look at those toenails. Where are my scissors?’

  ‘Get off! Mummy, get offfffffff me.’

  Having cut at least an inch off Ben’s gross camel hooves and deposited the shards in the bathroom bin, I pop my head around Emily’s door. The room is in chaos. The window blind is broken and has been left to dangle, half-closed. Discarded clothes, bags and shoes shipwrecked across the floor. The bedside lamp has been knocked over by the accumulated wall of Diet Coke cans. I can see some of her school books, coated with dust, under the bed. If a space gives you a clue to a person’s state of mind, then my daughter is in trouble. It upsets me to see it, it really does, but any attempt to tidy is seen as criticism not help.

  At least, since the party, things have been better between us. Still feel like I’m walking on eggshells, scared that with my throat-choking worry about her emotional state she’ll just shut me out again if I do or say the wrong thing. Debra says Ruby’s exactly the same, so I try not to take it personally. Emily stirs in the bed, pulls her chrysalis tighter about her, but does not wake. For a while, her features were too big in her face and I thought she had lost her beauty, but lately she has grown and the face has realigned and is in proportion again. When she complained that her nose was too big – she wanted a nose like Lizzy’s – I told her that the girls with the teeny neat features now often look bland and characterless when they’re older. She didn’t believe me, but it’s true.

  My secret pleasure is to come in and look at my daughter when she’s asleep; I can see the five-year-old in her face so clearly.

  7.27 am: Piotr has lifted all the floorboards in the kitchen. It’s even worse than I feared. The copper pipes are so old they have turned to turquoise dust.

  ‘Oh, great. Another bloody expenditure in your marvellous period bargain, Kate. How much is that going to cost?’

  Richard is addressing both Piotr and myself with what feels uncomfortably like dislike.

  ‘Is possible not expensive,’ says Piotr cautiously. ‘I have boiler friend …’

  ‘I’m sure you do,’ says Richard rudely. ‘I’ll be late tonight, Kate.’

  ‘Darling, I told you. Remember, I have the office party tonight and it’s Ben’s concert this afternoon. I’ll see you there. And can you try and be back for the kids tonight because I may be late? Please?’

  Fastening his helmet, Rich says, ‘Why are you going to the party? Bunch of City wide boys getting off their heads on Bollinger. Can’t think of anything worse.’

  How about not being able to pay our mortgage or our bills, which will happen if I lose my job – isn’t that worse, Richard? This I think but do not say. Instead, I deploy my best client smile. ‘You know, I’d really rather not go, darling, but it’s important I show my face. The chairman will be there and the whole boss class basically. I need to network.’ As I say this, I realise that it’s actually true. Over the years, I’ve seen so many women do a brilliant job, often outshining and outperforming their colleagues, but then, when it’s redundancy time, they’re always first out the door because they didn’t bother to build alliances with men they disliked. That was my attitude in the past, but I can’t afford to be choosy now.

  ‘Well, OK,’ Richard concedes, as though he’s doing me a huge favour, ‘but Emily and Ben can get their own dinner. I’ll try to be back by nine.’

  ‘But I’ll see you at the concert anyway?’

  ‘Yes, oh yes.’

  Piotr and I watch him mount his bike and cycle off through the gate, already picking up speed.

  ‘Richard, he is wasp, I think,’ says Piotr.

  ‘No, not wasp, Piotr. Bee. In English, we say busy as a bee.’

  ‘No, Kate,’ Piotr says, narrowing his eyes. ‘Is correct. Richard is wasp, I think.’

  11.07 am: If Monica Bellucci can become a Bond Girl at the age of fifty, then I have no reason to fear going to the office party tonight at the age of forty-nine and three quarters, do I? It’s all over the news. Amidst the general astonishment that a female so ancient could be cast opposite 007, I notice no one points out that the actress is entirely age-appropriate for Daniel Craig, who is forty-seven. I guess that, according to Debra’s principles of Internet dating, a forty-seven-year-old male movie star can never fall for anyone over thirty-five. Monica Bellucci should presumably consider herself lucky to play Bond’s arthritic mother-in-law.

  Spend morning at my desk doing ‘research for clients’ whilst obsessively studying website pictures and comparing Monica today with the young Monica in her first modelling shots. Thirty-two years ago, her astounding eighteen-year-old beauty struggled to make itself known through layers of make-up and a hairstyle that was part poodle, part Jennifer Beals in Flashdance. Somehow, it’s really comforting to know that even Monica Bellucci had an awful Eighties perm. Most girls in my year at college obediently got one, following fashion like the style sheep we were. Major error. The Eighties perm looked like pubic hair on steroids.

  Bitter Irony of Being a Woman No. 569: when you are young and beautiful – because, let’s face it, youth is beauty – you seldom know how to make the best of yourself. (Look at Emily, a size six hiding in a sludge-grey, baggy ‘boyfriend’ jumper and never ever showing her legs unless you count those terrible ripped jeans. Sorry, ‘vintage distressed’ jeans.) By the time you’ve figured out what works, youth has got its coat on and is hurrying out the door, and you spend your time and money finding lotions and potions and procedures that will strive to recreate the effe
ct that Mother Nature bestowed for free. The one that you took totally for granted. For instance, my bathroom cabinet at home is a shrine to the Goddess of Anti-Ageing. Let’s call her Dewy. Pots and vials of serums and moisturisers, all promising to put the clock back to the year when my ‘beauty regime’ consisted of Anne French deep cleansing milk in the white bottle with the nubby blue top, which I used to wipe the oil off my skin. The self-same oil that I must now jealously guard to stop me becoming a dried-up old prune.

  ‘What the fuck? Can’t believe they chose a granny to be a Bond girl.’

  I swivel my chair and my nose almost ends up in the pinstriped crotch of Jay-B. He is standing very close, looking over my shoulder at the screen and giving the divine Monica a crude, appraising stare.

  ‘Not bad for an old bird, though,’ he admits with some reluctance.

  ‘I would,’ sniggers Troy.

  By the way, since when did British City boys all have to have names like American basketball players? We know they’re really public schoolboys, married to Henriettas and Clemmies, who catch the 6.44 from Sevenoaks.

  ‘You would what?’ I ask innocently, taunting the young ape to go further.

  Troy’s face contorts into a leery grin, he leans back in his chair with his hands behind his head and his shiny shoes up on the desk. ‘I would, you know. Give her one.’

  There is that moment, you may know it, when men are loudly weighing up a woman like a piece of meat, and another woman, who is present, has to decide whether to collude with them or to keep a complicit silence and give only a mildly pained smile. In my experience, pretending to be one of the boys on such occasions is the safest strategy. Otherwise you risk being labelled humourless or feminist – probably both. But I’m not in the mood. Not today, when my Christmas to-do list is longer than the Treaty of Versailles, Ben’s carol concert is this afternoon and a woman almost exactly the same age as Monica Bellucci is in this very room pretending to be forty-two to a pair of ignorant boys.

  ‘How gallant of you, Troy,’ I say. ‘I’m sure Monica Bellucci, arguably the most beautiful actress in the world, would be thrilled to know that you’d be prepared to do her a huge favour and have sex with her.’

  Troy is uncertain how to take this. A blush spreads up his pale face till the skin around his ginger sideburns glows red and pimply. He looks at Jay-B to see what his reaction should be. There is a moment, no more than a few seconds, when it could go either way. I could be out on my ear. Then, Jay-B says, not unpleasantly: ‘Few years to go till you face the big Five–O, eh Kate? Glad to see you’ve got time to surf celebrity websites.’

  Think, Kate, think.

  ‘It’s research,’ I say quickly. ‘Anti-ageing. It could be a really big area for us. Did you know that the desire of American women to mask the signs of advancing age with creams and other beauty products is expected to grow the market to one hundred and fourteen billion dollars next year? That’s up from eighty billion three years ago. Astonishing, actually. Even in the recession, the prestige beauty products – those are the high-end creams you get in department stores – have increased by eleven per cent, according to Nasdaq. So, oil is going down, Sony Pictures is down, but moisturiser is the new gold.’

  ‘Wow,’ says Jay-B, letting out a low whistle. ‘A hundred billion on snake oil? Why do women waste their money?’

  ‘Because guys like you believe that thirty-five is the age when women check out. Because women my age have outlived our hotness, our ability to be pleasing to you, and, therefore, by some crude reckoning, our relevance and status in society are diminished, so we fake youth for as long as we possibly can. Even if it means we end up looking pickled or paralysed. Because that’s why I am rubbing oestrogen into my arm every morning, and taking a progesterone tablet every night, and occasionally putting a pea of testosterone on my inner thigh, which is called HRT, but is nothing less than youth retrieval therapy. Oh, and some of us are so desperate and crazy we even pretend we are seven years younger so we can re-enter a jobs market that treats us as a clapped-out liability.’

  Did I have the guts to say that out loud? Sadly, not.

  ‘Well done on Fozzy’s widow, by the way, Kate. Talk about horse power. See you later at the party?’ says Jay-B with what I hope is not a wink. ‘Dress to Impress.’

  I always do.

  To: Kate Reddy

  From: Candy Stratton

  Subject: Party Panic!

  Katie, do not, repeat DO NOT, get Botox for the first time on the day of the office party. You can’t risk it. You could end up with one eye closed. Not a good look unless you’re going as a pirate. The cheek stuff I told you about is more than $1,000 per shot. It’s meant to lift and restore fullness that we lose as we become wizened old hags. The goal is the apple-cheek look, not constipated chipmunk.

  Also there’s this cool new sculpting thing where you freeze the shit out of fat lumps and they vanish. Not sure how.

  Just get your hair done for the party, invest in the finest corsetry from Agent Provocateur and don’t stand in direct light. You look pretty damn amazing for 42!!

  XXO C

  From: Debra Richards

  To: Kate Reddy

  Subject: Shoot me!

  Hi hon, how’s your festive season going? With office parties, you can either conduct yourself with a dignity becoming to your professional status or end up drunk and shagging in the loos with some junior administrator from Canvey Island. With spots on his back. Eeuw. No prizes for guessing which option your very old and desperate friend went for.

  In other news, Felix got suspended. School says he was caught sharing Fat German Hookers porn! More worryingly, he has run up £1,800 charges because phone company collects my monthly payment for his phone, but they now claim they don’t have to inform me of any other payments made on that card. I’m a lawyer and even I don’t know if that’s legal. Don’t have time to spend all day on phone yelling at them.

  Felix is fucked. His mother is fucked. By spotty Kyle from Canvey Island. Kids are going to spend Christmas in Hong Kong with their father and perfect Wifey No. 2. Hate hate.

  BTW what are we doing for our 50ths? Am finding that whole concept very scary as am well on the way to whiskery hagdom with no man in sight. Did you say the divine Abelhammer was back on the scene? Tell me all your guilty secrets. I need cheering up.

  Am sending you virtual Christmas card and we need a big catch-up soonest.

  Love love Deb xx

  From: Kate Reddy

  To: Debra Richards

  Subject: Shoot me!

  Please please come for Christmas, darling. I can offer you an exciting selection of demented elderly relatives, a practically vegan husband who is more hairless than either of us, two non-speaking teenagers and a total bitch of a sister-in-law. You would be doing me a huge favour if you came and jollied everyone along. Please say Yes. Spotty Kyle would be most welcome too if he doesn’t have a better offer.

  Sorry to hear about Felix. Aren’t all boys watching that stuff? After Emily’s belfie nothing surprises me any more.

  Am DEFINITELY not doing anything for my 50th. Don’t wish to advertise my cronedom, thanks very much. EM Royal thinks that I’m 42 and they can’t find out my real age or I’ll lose my job. Got to keep it hush hush.

  Nothing to report about Abelhammer. Stupidly, I replied to his email and haven’t heard a thing back. He’s probably trolling all the women from his past. Hate, hate!

  Please let’s do something fun for YOUR 50th? I’ll book the stripping fireman.

  Huge hug,

  K xx

  PS Fat German Hookers – is that really a thing?

  4.23 pm: Ben’s concert just ended, and it was a triumph. To think I was actually resenting the time it would take me to get the train back home for the school concert, then turn around and head straight back to London for the office party. Nine days till Christmas and I reckon I have approximately fifteen days’ worth of tasks to do. Would it really hurt to miss the Christma
s concert just this once? Richard would be there for Ben, wouldn’t he?

  Come on, who was I kidding? Emily still remembers the single ballet recital I missed in the summer of 2004 when she played the part of a dancing vegetable. It is inscribed in indelible ink in the Ledger of Maternal Neglect and will, no doubt, be raised on the Day of Judgement.

  Just as well I went to the concert because it was Richard who wasn’t there. He texted me to say that he’d forgotten he had an important mindfulness meeting. How about being mindful about his own bloody child? Rich’s college is literally ten minutes from Ben’s school, as opposed to my workplace, which is at least an hour and twenty minutes away but, somehow, I made it and he didn’t.

  One change for the better since I was last in full-time employment is that parents are allowed, almost encouraged, to leave the office to attend children’s special events. At least firms try to appear flexible and family friendly now because, if you’re tagged as a Neanderthal outfit, you won’t attract the brightest graduates. The free market, as Milton Friedman said, does work, even in favour of decency and compassion on occasion. Though, I notice no one at EM Royal dares to work part-time.

  When I told Jay-B that I was popping to my son’s Christmas concert, I thought about all those times I lied to Rod Task if I needed to be at a school meeting or a Nativity play. Always coming up with a ‘male excuse’ about the traffic or something. Being a working mother back then was to be a double agent: you lied for a living. A male colleague who announced he was off to his son’s rugby match was a hero; a woman who did exactly the same was Lacking in Commitment. At any moment, she could be diverted onto the Mummy Track, that career path to paperclips and irrelevance. I fought that relegation with every fibre of my being. I would not have it that being a mum made me less good at my job. I was great at my job, really I was. In the end, what made me quit EMF was the thought that my kids were suffering from the punishingly long – unnecessarily long, stupidly, inhumanely long – hours I spent away from them. They needed me, yes, but it turned out I needed them too. And our family was running on empty and the only person who could fill that emptiness was me.