I Don't Know How She Does It

by Allison Pearson

  2

  Work

  6:37 A.M. “Oh, come let us a-door him. Oh, come let us a-door him. Oh, come let us a-door hi-mmm!” I am stroked, tugged and, when that doesn’t work, finally Christmas-caroled awake by Emily. She is standing by my side of the bed and she wants to know where her present is. “You can’t buy their love,” says my mother-in-law, who obviously never threw enough cash at the problem.

  I did once try to come home empty-handed from a business trip, but on the way back from Heathrow I lost my nerve and got the cab to stop at Hounslow where I dived into a Toys “R” Us, adding a toxic shimmer to my jet lag. Emily’s global Barbie collection is now so sensationally slutty, it can only be a matter of time before it becomes a Jeff Koons exhibit. Flamenco Barbie, AC Milan Barbie (soccer strip, dinky boots), Thai Barbie—a flexible little minx who can bend over backwards and suck her own toes—and the one that Richard calls Klaus Barbie, a terrifying über-blonde with sightless blue eyes in jodhpurs and black boots.

  “Mummy,” says Emily, weighing up her latest gift with a connoisseur’s eye, “this fairy Barbie could wave a wand and make the little Baby Jesus not be cross.”

  “Barbie isn’t in the Baby Jesus story, Emily.”

  She shoots me her best Hillary Clinton look, full of noble this-pains-me-more-than-you condescension. “Not that Baby Jesus.” She sighs. “Another one, silly.”

  You see, what you can buy from a five-year-old when you get back from a client visit is, if not love or even forgiveness, then an amnesty of sorts. Entire minutes when the need to blame is briefly overcome by the need to rip open a package in a tantrum of glee. (Any working mother who says she doesn’t bribe her kids can add Liar to her CV.) Emily now has a gift to mark each occasion of her mother’s infidelity—playing away with her career—just as my mum got a new charm for her bracelet every time my father played away with other women. By the time Dad walked out when I was thirteen, Mum could barely lift the golden handcuff on her wrist.

  Am lying here thinking things could be a lot worse—at least my husband is not an alcoholic serial adulterer—when Ben toddles into the bedroom and I can hardly believe what I’m seeing.

  “Oh, God, Richard, what’s happened to his hair?”

  Rich peers over the top of the duvet, as though noticing his son, who will be one in January, for the first time. “Ah. Paula took him to that place by the garage. Said it was getting in his eyes.”

  “He looks like something out of the Hitler Youth.”

  “Well, it will grow back, obviously. And Paula thought, and I thought too, obviously, that the whole Fauntleroy ringlet thing—well, it’s not how kids look these days, is it?”

  “He’s not a kid. He’s my baby. And it’s how I want him to look. Like a baby.”

  Lately, I notice Rich has adopted a standard procedure for dealing with my rages. A sort of bowed-head in-the-event-of-nuclear-attack submissive posture, but this morning he can’t suppress a mutinous murmur.

  “Don’t think we could arrange an international conference call with the hairdresser at short notice.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It just means you’ve got to learn to let go, Kate.” And with one practiced movement, he scoops up the baby, swipes the gangrenous snot from his tiny nose and heads downstairs for breakfast.

  7:15 A.M. The change of gears between work and home is so abrupt sometimes that I swear I can hear the crunch of mesh in my brain. It takes a while to get back onto the children’s wavelength. Brimming with good intentions, I start off in Julie Andrews mode, all tennis-club enthusiasm and mad singsong emphases.

  “Now, children, what would you like for break-fast to-day?”

  Emily and Ben humor this kindly stranger for a while until Ben can take no more of it and stands up in his high chair, reaches out, and pinches my arm as though to make sure it’s me. Their relief is plain as, over the next frazzled half hour, the ratty bag they know as Mummy comes back. “You’re having Shreddies and that’s it! No, we haven’t got Fruitibix. I don’t care what Daddy let you have.”

  Richard has to leave early: a site visit with a client in Battersea. Can I do the handover with Paula? Yes, but only if I can leave at 7:45 on the dot.

  7:57 A.M. And here she comes, flourishing the multiple excuses of the truly unapologetic. The traffic, the rain, the alignment of the stars. You know how it is, Kate. Indeed I do. I cluck and sigh in the designated sympathy pauses while my nanny makes herself a cup of coffee and flicks without interest through my paper. Pointing out that in the twenty-six months Paula has been our children’s carer she has managed to be late every fourth morning would be to risk a row, and a row would contaminate the air that my children breathe. So no, there won’t be a row. Not today. Three minutes to get to the bus, eight minutes’ walk away.

  8:27 A.M. I am going to be late for work. Indecently, intrepidly late. Bus lane is full of buses. Abandon bus. Make lung-scorching sprint down City Road and then cut across Finsbury Square, where my heels skewer into the forbidden grass and I attract the customary loud Oy! from the old guy whose job it is to shout at you for running across the grass.

  “Oy, miss! Cancha go round the outside like everyone else?”

  Being shouted at is embarrassing, but I am beginning to worry that a small shameful part of me really likes being called miss in a public place. At the age of thirty-five and with gravity and two small children dragging you down, you have to take your compliments where you can. Besides, I reckon the shortcut saves me maybe two and a half minutes.

  8:47 A.M. One of the City’s oldest and most distinguished institutions, Edwin Morgan Forster stands at the corner of Broadgate and St. Anthony’s Lane; a nineteenth-century fortress with a great jutting prow of twentieth-century glass, it looks as though a liner has crashed into a department store and come out the other side. Approaching the main entrance, I slow to a trot and run through my kit inspection:

  Shoes, matching, two of? Check.

  No baby sick on jacket? Check.

  Skirt not tucked into knickers? Check.

  Bra not visible? Check.

  OK, I’m going in. Stride briskly across the marble atrium and flash my pass at Gerald in Security. Since the revamp eighteen months ago, the lobby of Edwin Morgan Forster, which used to look like a bank, now resembles one of those zoo enclosures designed by Russian constructivists to house penguins. Every surface is an eyeball-shattering arctic white except the back wall, which is painted the exact turquoise of the Yardley gift soap favored by my Great-aunt Phyllis thirty years ago, but which was described by the designer as an “oceangoing color of vision and futurity.” For this piece of wisdom, a firm which is paid to manage other people’s money handed over an unconfirmed seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

  Can you believe this building? Seventeen floors served by four lifts. Divide by four hundred and thirty employees, factor in six button-pushing ditherers, two mean bastards who won’t hold the door, and Rosa Klebb with a sandwich trolley, and you either have a possible four-minute wait or take the stairs. I take the stairs.

  Arrive on Floor 13 with fuchsia face and walk straight into Robin Cooper-Clark, our pinstriped Director of Investment. The clash of odors is as immediate as it is pungent—me: Eau de Sweat, him: Floris Elite with under-notes of Winchester and walnut dashboard.

  Robin is exceptionally tall, and it is one of his gifts that he manages to look down at you without actually looking down on you—without making you feel in any way small. It came as no surprise to learn in an obituary last year that his father was a bishop with a Military Cross. Robin has something both saintly and indestructible about him; there have been times at EMF when I have thought I would die if it weren’t for his kindness and lightly mocking respect.

  “Remarkable color, Kate, been skiing?” Robin’s mouth is twitching up at the corners and on its way to a smile, but one bushy gray eyebrow arches incredulously towards the clock above the dealing desk.

  Can I r
isk pretending that I’ve been in since seven and just slipped out for a cappuccino? A glance across the office tells me that my assistant, Guy, is already smirking purposefully by the watercooler. Damn. Guy must have spotted me at exactly the same moment because, across the bowed heads of the traders, phones cradled under their chins, over the secretaries and the European desk and the Global Equities team in their identical purple Lewin’s shirts, comes the Calling-All-Superiors voice of my assistant. “I’ve put the document from Bengt Bergman on your desk, Katharine,” he announces. “Sorry to see you’ve had problems getting in again.”

  Notice that use of the word “again,” the drop of poison on the tip of the dagger. Little creep. When we funded Guy Chase through the European Business School three years ago, he was a Balliol brain ache with a four-piece suit and a personal hygiene deficit. He came back wearing charcoal Armani and the expression of someone with a Master’s in Blind Ambition. I think I can honestly say that Guy is the only man at Edwin Morgan Forster who likes the fact that I have kids. Chicken pox, summer holidays, carol concerts—all are opportunities for Guy to shine in my absence. I can see Robin Cooper-Clark looking at me expectantly now. Think, Kate, think.

  IT IS POSSIBLE to get away with being late in the City. The key thing is to offer what my lawyer friend Debra calls a Man’s Excuse. Senior managers who would be frankly appalled by the story of a vomiting nocturnal baby or an AWOL nanny (mysteriously, child care, though paid for by both parents, is always deemed to be the female’s responsibility) are happy to accept anything to do with the internal combustion engine.

  “The car broke down/was broken into.”

  “You should have seen the”—fill in scene of mayhem—“at”—fill in street.

  Either of these will do very well. Car alarms have been a valuable recent addition to the repertoire of male excuses because, although displaying female symptoms—hair-trigger unpredictability, high-pitched shrieking—they are attached to a Man’s Excuse and can be taken to a garage to be fixed.

  “YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN the mess at Dalston Junction,” I tell Robin, composing my features into a mask of stoic urban resignation and, with outstretched arms, indicating a whole vista of car carnage. “Some maniac in a white van. Traffic lights out of sync. Unbelievable. Must have been stuck there—oh, twenty minutes.”

  He nods. “London driving almost makes one grateful for Network Southeast.”

  There is a heartbeat of a pause...a pause in which I try to ask about the health of Jill Cooper-Clark, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in the summer. But Robin is one of those Englishmen equipped from birth with an early-warning system which helps them to intercept and deflect any incoming questions of a personal nature. So even as my lips are forming his wife’s name, he says, “I’ll get Christine to book a lunch for us, Kate. You know they’ve converted some cellar by the Old Bailey—serving up lightly grilled witness, no doubt. Sounds amusing, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, I was just wondering how—”

  “Splendid. Talk later.”

  By the time I reach the haven of my desk, I’ve regained my composure. Here’s the thing: I LOVE MY JOB. It may not always sound like it, but I do. I love the blood-rush when the stocks I took a punt on deliver the goods. I get a kick out of being one of the handful of women in the Club Lounge at the airport, and, when I get back, I love sharing my travel horror stories with friends. I love the hotels with room service that appears like a genie and the prairies of white cotton that give me the sleep I crave. (When I was younger I wanted to go to bed with other people; now that I have two children my fiercest desire is to go to bed with myself for a whole twelve hours.) Most of all I love the work: the synapse-snapping satisfaction of being good at it, of being in control when the rest of life seems such an awful mess. I love the fact that the numbers do what I say and never ask why.

  9:03 A.M. Switch on my computer and wait for it to connect. The network is so slow this morning it would be quicker to fly to Hong Kong and pick up the Hang bloody Seng in person. Type in my password—Ben Pampers—and go straight into Bloomberg to see what the markets have been up to overnight. The Nikkei is steady, Brazil’s Bovespa is doing its usual crazy samba, while the Dow Jones looks like the printout on a do-not-resuscitate patient in intensive care. Baby, it’s cold outside, and not just on account of the fog nuzzling the office blocks outside my window.

  Next, I check currencies for any dramatic movements, then type in TOP to call up all the big corporate news stories. The main one is about Gayle Fender, a bond trader or, rather, an ex-trader. She’s suing her firm, Lawrence Austen, for sex discrimination because male colleagues got far bigger bonuses than she did for less good results. The headline reads: ICE MAIDEN COOLS TOWARDS MEN. As far as the media is concerned, City women are all either Elizabeth I or a resting lap dancer. That old virgin-and-whore thing wrapped up in the Wall Street Journal.

  Personally, I’ve always fancied the idea of becoming an Ice Maiden—maybe you can buy the outfit? Trimmed in white fur, stalactite heels with matching pickax. Anyway, Gayle Fender’s story will end how those stories always end: with a No comment as, eyes lowered, she leaves a courtroom by a side door. This City smothers dissent: we have ways of making you not talk. Stuffing people’s mouths with fifty-pound notes tends to do the trick.

  Click on e-mails. Forty-nine arrivals in my Inbox since I left on Thursday. Skim down them, sorting out the junk first.

  Free trial of a new investment magazine? Trash.

  You are invited to a conference on globalization on the shores of Lake Geneva catered by the world-famous chef Jean-Louis....Trash.

  Human Resources wants to know if I will appear in the new EMF corporate video. Only if I get my own trailer with John Cusack tied to the bed.

  Will I sign a card for some poor bugger in Treasury who’s been made redundant? (Jeff Brooks is going voluntarily, they say, but the compulsories will start soon.) Yes.

  The message at the very top of the Inbox is from Celia Harmsworth, head of Human Resources. It says that my boss Rod Task has had to pull out of the induction talk for EMF’s trainees this lunchtime and could I please step in? “We would be very glad to see you in the thirteenth-floor conference room from 1 p.m.!”

  No, no, no! I have nine fund reports to write by Friday. Plus I have a very important nativity play to attend at 2:30 this afternoon.

  With work memos out of the way, I can get to the real e-mails, the ones that matter: messages from friends, jokes and stories handed around the world like sweets. If it’s really true what they say, that mine is the time-famished generation, then e-mail is our guilty snack, our comfort food. It would be hard to explain how much sustenance I get from my regular correspondents. There’s Debra, my best friend from college, now mother of two and a lawyer with Addison Pope, just across the way from the Bank of England and about ten minutes’ walk from Edwin Morgan Forster. Not that I ever get down there to see her. Might as well work on Pluto. And then there’s Candy, foul-mouthed fellow fund manager, World Wide Web whiz and proud export of Rockaway, New Jersey, Candace Marlene Stratton. My sister-in-arms and a woman in the vanguard of the latest developments in world corsetry. My favorite character in literature is Rosalind in As You Like It; Candy’s favorite character in literature is the guy in Elmore Leonard who wears a T-shirt that says YOU’VE OBVIOUSLY MISTAKEN ME FOR SOMEONE WHO GIVES A SHIT.

  Candy sits right over there, next to the pillar, fifteen feet away, and yet we scarcely exchange more than a few words out loud during an average day. On-screen, though, we’re in and out of each other’s minds like old-fashioned neighbors.

  To: Kate Reddy, EMF

  From: Candy Stratton

  K8,

  Q:Why are married women heavier than single women?

  A:Single women come home, see what’s in the fridge, and go to bed. Married women come home, see what’s in bed, and go to the fridge.

  How U? Me: Cystitis. Too much SX xxxx

  * * *

 
To: Kate Reddy, EMF

  From: Debra Richardson, Addison Pope

  Morning,

  How was Swdn & NYC? Poor you. Felix fell off table and broke his arm in 4 places (didn’t think there were 4 places to break). Nightmare. Spent six hours in Casualty. Good old NHS! Ruby announced ystdy that she loves her nanny, her daddy, her rabbit, her brother, all the Teletubbies, and her mummy in that order. Nice to know it’s all worthwhile, no?

  Rmbr LUNCH on Friday? Tell me yr not canceling. Deb xxxx

  * * *

  To: Candy Stratton

  From: Kate Reddy

  Another relaxing few days. Stockholm, New York, Hackney. Up till dawn forging mince pies for Emily’s carol concert—don’t even ask.

  Plus Pol Pot has given Ben a hideous Nazi haircut and I daren’t complain because I was away and being away means you surrender all rights to maternal authority. Plus, I have to remind Rod “Task” Master that I need to leave early today for the concert.