How Hard Can It Be?

by Allison Pearson

  4.44 pm: I had to get back to the office, but he insisted we had afternoon tea first, downstairs under a chandelier so big it looked like the world’s pushiest stalactite. There was a pianist noodling on the baby grand in the corner, playing standards from The Great American Songbook. I said I didn’t want anything to eat, just Earl Grey would be fine, but now I am polishing off all the teeny crustless sandwiches the waiter had brought. Egg and cress stacked on honey-roast ham stacked on cucumber stacked on smoked salmon and cream cheese. Sandwich Woman cannot live on passion alone.

  Jack sits there, watching the ravenous woman opposite him with obvious amusement, while asking me questions about work. I want to tell him everything because there is no one I can rely on more to reflect me back at me, no one whose honest advice I would rather have. But if I tell Jack that I lied about my age to get a job he will know that I feel vulnerable about my age and then he will know that I’m older, maybe even older than he thinks, and then I will be diminished in his eyes too, which will be unbearable.

  ‘I lied about my age.’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘To get a job. A headhunter wouldn’t put me forward for a non-exec directorship because he said that I was ‘‘outside the cohort parameter’’. Which is code for being almost …’ Say it, Kate. ‘Basically, I will be fifty in March and, apparently, that makes me unemployable, well, in the City anyway.’

  Jack passes me the scones. ‘You’re kidding me, right? You can do a better job than five guys put together.’

  ‘Thank you. But the fact is I took time out to look after my mum and my kids while doing bits and pieces of financial advice, and that doesn’t look great on a CV. So, I knocked seven years off my age, because I thought I could pass for younger, and I managed to get this job on my old fund.’

  ‘The one you came to sell to me?’

  ‘Yes, that one. And it’s not such a great job, but it pays the bills, which is what I need right now because my husband is retraining and I am the breadwinner. And the guy running the fund, Jay-B, he’s thirty.’

  Jack hands me the clotted cream. ‘Let me guess. Asshole who doesn’t know who McEnroe’s doubles partner was?’

  ‘You may laugh, Jack, but I need the job, I really need it. And it’s hard pretending that I have kids who are eleven and eight or ten and seven or whatever they are because I keep almost making mistakes, and one day I really will make a mistake, and the Boy who is my boss will find out and I’ll be fired and …’

  ‘Listen.’ He puts a finger to his lips, indicating that I should shush.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Listen, Kate.’ Jack gestures towards the piano.

  Did he plan this? I recognise it at once and very softly start to sing along. ‘The very thought of you and I forget to do, the little or-di-na-ry things that everyone ought to do.’

  For one perfect afternoon, they were playing our song.

  It couldn’t last.

  21

  MADONNA AND MUM

  10.35 am: Until you start trying to conceal your age you have no idea how many ways there are to give it away. Teen idols, pop stars, fashionable restaurants, famous football matches, Olympics, moon landings, children’s TV programmes, historical knowledge, having seen any movie made before Pulp Fiction, being able to spell. Each and every one of them is a potential trap for a woman pretending to be seven years younger.

  Since I’ve been back at work, I’ve done really well avoiding the question of how old I am. For example, I’ve learned not to call the GP’s surgery from my desk to make an appointment because they always ask for your date of birth, and that is the one thing I must never speak aloud. When my young colleagues were raving about Kate Bush’s live concert comeback, I was careful not to reveal how much I loved ‘Wuthering Heights’, Bush’s debut single, when it came out in the prehistoric mists of 1978. There was one close shave, though, when Alice spotted Parenting Teens in the Digital Age in my bag.

  ‘But your kids aren’t teenagers for ages, Kate,’ she said.

  ‘Be prepared is my motto,’ I said, ducking under the desk to put something in the bin and hide my consternation. I feel particularly bad deceiving Alice who, I suspect, sees me as something of a role model. If only she knew.

  At this morning’s meeting, however, the topic of age was unavoidable. Madonna fell backwards down some stairs last night, cracking her head and her back with a sickening thump. Most people would have lain there in a crumpled heap, crying with pain and shame; I know I would have. But Madonna got to her feet and resumed a staggeringly athletic dance routine. Instead of receiving the universal awe and plaudits that were her due, jokes about old ladies were soon trending on social media. Sure enough, in our first meeting of the day, Jay-B told me to look into companies manufacturing stairlifts.

  ‘Madonna’s gonna need one now, so it figures the share price’s gonna go up,’ he said with hand-rubbing glee. Like most posh boys of his generation, Jay-B talks like a drug dealer from Baltimore, rather than a nicely brought-up boy from Bushey, Herts. (Real name: Jonathan Baxter, if you please.) This makes me want to (a) smack him on his Rolexed wrist and (b) tell him to lose the glottal stop and pronounce the endings of his words properly, but as his junior (in status if not in years) that’s not possible.

  ‘Madonna’s not an old lady just because she fell,’ objected Alice, eyes flicking my way for moral support. ‘It was some stupid backing dancer who pulled her over. It was really mean of Radio 1 to say they wouldn’t play Madonna’s new song because she’s too old. How old’s Mick Jagger, for heaven’s sake? No one says the Rolling Stones are sad leathery old gits, and they’re absolutely ancient.’

  ‘Madonna is bloody old,’ said Jay-B, swivelling on one of his ridiculous, pointy shoes towards me. ‘What is she, Kate? Must be sixty or something?’

  Careful, Kate.

  ‘Oh, she must be somewhere in her mid-fifties,’ I said vaguely, as if being in one’s fifties was as remote from me personally as Nova Scotia or the Falkland Islands. ‘Though you’d never be able to tell how old she is,’ I added, suddenly ashamed of my unsisterly cowardice. ‘After all, Madonna is the Queen of Reinvention.’

  ‘Queen of Reincarnation, more like,’ cackled Troy. ‘Old trout. Give me Taylor Swift any day. She’s hot.’

  ‘Anyone got the inside track on HSBC?’ asked Jay-B, moving on.

  I know her age. Of course, I know her age. Fifty-six. I’ve always been grateful to Madonna. Not just for getting me through my college finals with ‘Into the Groove’ – the works of Jane Austen will forever be confused, in one mind at least, with Desperately Seeking Lady Susan – but for being older than me. No matter how old I am, Madonna will always be six years older. There is a certain comfort in that. If she can walk down the red carpet in a crazy, black-lace matador’s outfit with her pert white bum showing, like a little girl who came out of the lavatory with her dress tucked in her knickers, then I can’t be that ancient, can I? That’s one reason I still miss the Princess of Wales. We will never know how Diana would have navigated middle age, and how fascinating that would have been to watch. We rely on older women to walk through the minefield ahead of us, so we know where it’s safe to step, and not to step. I like the fact Madonna refuses to watch where she puts her foot. If, sometimes, she takes a tumble, so what?

  When I was a kid, fifty was considered old. Nanny Nelson, my mother’s mum who’d been in an iron lung as a girl and walked for the rest of her life with a limp, had her old-lady uniform picked out by the time she was my age. A floral-print dress worn over a full-length, flesh-coloured slip, comfy M&S cardie in a pastel shade, tan stockings so thick they looked like cake batter, zip-up sheepskin ankle booties that she wore as house slippers as well as for going outside to bring in the coal they stored in a brick outhouse. And she never dyed her grey hair; dyeing your hair was for frivolous, wanton women, Jezebels who stole husbands and touched themselves Down There.

  No one expected a fifty-year-old to be having wild, imag
inative sex or getting ‘bikini ready’ or holding down a demanding full-time job or mastering Snapchat or getting her midriff bulge sucked out by a Hoover in her lunch hour. You bought a Playtex girdle for special occasions, slapped on some Pond’s Cold Cream, a spot of lipstick, a spritz of Elizabeth Arden’s Blue Grass, and that was that. Nanny Nelson got through the menopause sitting in a high-backed chair next to an open window, drinking pint-glasses of Lemon Barley Water and watching Crown Court on the telly. But that was an eternity ago, when Nan was still an elderly person, not an Indian bread.

  I won’t lie. There are days when menopause makes me want to curl up and die, but the HRT Dr Libido prescribed is definitely starting to make a difference. Joints not aching, skin no longer dry, juices flowing, feeling that I can manage stuff again, the skies over air-traffic control that much clearer. My afternoon with Abelhammer suggests that my libido is in reasonable working order, and I can’t wait to try again, just to make sure. Dr L also gave me some thyroxine, which means I don’t have to fight falling asleep every afternoon. Curling up isn’t an option, and neither is dying. Nor is being fifty, or letting my hair be its natural colour, whatever that is. I won’t let it take me over. I can’t.

  Still, I was mighty relieved we got through the Madonna conversation with my own cover story intact. As far as Jay-B was concerned, Kate was only forty-two, and a viable employee, not an old trout like the Queen of Pop. It was then that the door to the meeting room swung open and in came a trolley followed by Rosita.

  ‘Oh, hullo, Kate!’ The woman bringing our coffee was beaming, clearly delighted to see me.

  My blood ran cold. Rosita worked in the canteen when I was here in 2008. We bonded when they insisted on taking photographs of Rosita sitting behind a desk because they wanted to feature some non-white employees in the corporate brochure to prove how committed EMF was to ‘diversity’ (untrue, insulting and quite possibly illegal, but they did it anyway). There’s been such a turnover of staff in the interim that I haven’t seen a single soul I knew back then since I started here in October. Not one. I didn’t think there was anyone left who could recognise me and give the game away.

  ‘So happy to see you, Katie,’ said Rosita. ‘What you doing here?’

  ‘Oh, hi. Uhmmmhhmm.’

  ‘Kate works here,’ said Jay-B irritably. ‘You two know each other?’

  Do you believe in divine intervention? I’m not sure I do, but at that exact moment Claire from Human Resources appeared at the door, behind Rosita. ‘I’m so sorry to interrupt, Jay-B,’ she said. ‘Kate, I’m afraid it’s your mother. She’s had a fall. Your sister called the switchboard.’

  Kate to Richard

  Mum’s had a fall. Suspected broken hip. Julie’s with her at the hospital. I’ve jumped on a train. Please don’t say anything to the kids till I know what’s happening. Lasagne and green beans for dinner in the fridge. Lenny’s food is in the utility. Give him wet and dry and fill up his water bowl. Expecting a delivery of tiles tomorrow for our shower. Please sign for them. Emily needs to get on with her revision. Can you remind her gently? K xx

  4.43 pm, Beesley Cottage Hospital: Last time I was up here visiting my mum, I confiscated her high heels and hid them at the back of the wardrobe. Most women in their mid-seventies don’t need to be told that flat shoes are the sensible option. They slide unprotesting into slip-ons; with good grace, they accept that tottering along in stilettos is no longer wise. Not my mother. When she came down for Christmas, I took her to a small shoe-shop on the edge of town, and when the girl brought back a selection of robust, age-appropriate footwear, Mum held up one pair and said loudly, ‘They look like rubber Cornish pasties, do these.’

  ‘We find our older ladies like the grip and the stability that this particular shoe provides,’ soothed the sales assistant.

  ‘I’m not elderly,’ objected my mother.

  Now, here she is lying on a bed in a side-ward, much whiter than the sheets, having fallen down some steps whilst wearing what she calls ‘my good day-shoes’. She found the ones I’d hidden. Black patent with a gold buckle. One shoe, its two-inch heel bent back to one side, sits forlornly on a chair with Mum’s clothes beside it.

  She’s asleep. I kiss her cheek and hold her hand, her crêpey hand, gnarled now with arthritis, probably from all those vegetables she peeled, the dishes she washed. Even at Christmas she was busy doing, always asking, ‘What can I do next?’ Never happy sitting down. I can feel the sparrow bones beneath the loose skin. The first hand that held mine.

  ‘You didn’t need to come all that way, love.’ Her eyes are open now, a milky film across the left one.

  ‘I heard you’d been out dancing again.’

  She smiles. ‘Is it Tuesday?’

  ‘No, Mum, it’s Thursday.’

  ‘Is it?’ She’s still confused after her operation, the nurse said.

  ‘Emily and Ben?’

  ‘They’re good. Really good.’

  ‘Beautiful children. Such beautiful children. The nurse says I fell over.’

  ‘Yes, you cracked your hip. But you’re all right now, thank goodness. Julie and I’ll look after you.’

  ‘Is it Tuesday?’ Agitated now. Upset.

  ‘Yes. Yes. It’s Tuesday, Mum. Don’t worry.’

  ‘Are you stopping, love?’

  ‘Of course I am. I’ll be right here. Where else am I going to be, silly?’

  That seems to calm her. She shuts her eyes and allows sleep to carry her off. My mother looks so small and shrunken in her hospital gown. Julie’s gone home to pick up a nightie and some toiletries for her. As I knew she would, my sister is already using the accident to redouble her campaign for me ‘making a bigger contribution’ and generally getting at me. We quarrelled. In the car park, just after I’d got to the hospital. Ancient rancours rankled. Julie drove off, her parting shot hanging in the air like gunsmoke: ‘If Mum goes home it’s not you who’ll be taking care of her, is it, Kate?’

  I am sitting here, by the bedside, willing my mother to get better, to be her old self again, and that is because I want her to be well, more than anything I do, but also because Julie’s right. I can’t stay with her, not for much longer. I play the voicemail left for me by Jay-B. This is the second time I’ve listened to it. Says he’s ‘extremely sympathetic to your situation, Kate, but do keep us posted’.

  Translation: you have two days more out of the office tops before we start looking for someone else. It would be slightly different if I had a proper job, but I’m just maternity cover. The last thing EM Royal wants is to find cover for the person who’s covering. My position there is as precarious as my mother in her patent heels.

  I pull the chair closer to the bed and switch my phone off. About time I started following the advice from Parenting Teens in the Digital Age. I don’t want any messages from work, or from anybody else. I want to give my mother my full attention. I listen to her breathe in and out, watch the hospital gown gently rise and fall.

  Despite her tumble, Mum’s face still bears signs of being carefully made up: foundation, powder, her hair freshly washed and curled this morning before she went out to her ‘do’. ‘Make the best of yourself’, she always said to Julie and me. It was her mantra. How she hated it when I came home from college that time in a pair of washed-out green dungarees. (‘What in the name of heaven do you think you’re wearing, young lady?’) My mother’s generation, their role was domestic, maternal, ornamental. Femininity, womanly self-image was vital, a matter of survival because, if you couldn’t attract a mate and hang onto him, society had precious little use for you. No wonder she always judged my appearance harshly. I see it clearly now. Mum wasn’t putting me down, she was arming me for battle the only way she knew how. No wonder my life – a life not lived by, through and for a man – seems so mystifying to her.

  Aren’t I guilty of something similar with Emily? I am careful not to comment on her weight, of course I am, but I hate pretty much all of her clothes except the ones I b
ought; is there some hardwired thing that makes you scold your daughter if she doesn’t look presentable enough to attract the opposite sex? Are all mothers secretly Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, fretting about their girls’ marriageability? Times change, but not the imperative to pass on your genes.

  ‘Jooo.’ Mum is talking in her sleep. ‘Jooo.’ For a moment, I think she’s calling my dad. I lean over and put my hand on her cheek. ‘It’s OK, you’re all right, nothing to worry about.’

  She loved him, despite everything – she could never stop herself. For Julie and me, Dad was an open wound, an embarrassment who only featured in our lives when he needed a loan. (‘Can you sub me till Saturday, love?’) He even turned up at my office in the City once asking for investment in one of his crazy schemes. Security thought he was a tramp. I’ve never felt the gap between where I came from and the place I’d got to so acutely. At least my kids have got a loving father they can rely on, even if Rich has been a bit elusive lately.

  I remember the evening my first boyfriend, David Kerney, put two and two together and worked out that he and my father belonged to the same table-tennis club. ‘Oh, your old man’s a right ladies’ man,’ he said. ‘He’s got Elaine and Christine both on the go.’

  I must have been fourteen – Ben’s age – and it was a shock to realise that the world would have a view on my parents, and not necessarily a favourable one. That tingle of shame stayed with me; I can feel it now.

  For Mum it was different; Dad was her first and, I’m guessing, her only lover. We can hardly comprehend what that would mean to a person now, those of us who can count our sexual partners on two hands or more, and may even have forgotten some altogether. As for Emily’s generation having virtual sex on a phone with people they’ve never even met; what does that spell for human intimacy and commitment?

  Mum stirs again and I find myself thinking: what would she make of Jack? Well, she’d recognise the irresistible charm, that’s for sure. But, no. I give my head a shake to dislodge the idea. Jack doesn’t belong IRL. Impossible to imagine him meeting my mum, Julie, seeing my home town. I’m not ashamed of it – I was when I was young and insecure – but, still, it would be like taking Cary Grant to KFC. With that incongruous image in mind, I lay my head down on the bed, next to my mother’s hand, and drift away.