Any suggestions how to do this without mentioning the words (a) child or (b) leave?
LOVE K8 xxxx
PS: What is SX? Rings vague bell.
* * *
To: Kate Reddy
From: Candy Stratton
hon, U gotta cut domstic goddss crap. look other moms in the eye & say, I’m Busy & I’m Proud or U will be ded.
tell rod task U have major mens2ruashn si2ashn. Ozzies even more freakd by womens trouble than Brits.
CUL8R xxxxxx
* * *
I glance across the office and see Candy swigging from a can, which she hoists aloft in a cheery toast to me. Until recently, Candy’s diet was confined to Coke—the Diet kind and the other kind—which left her pencil-thin with prominent breasts; this got her plenty of lovers but not a lot of love. A year older than me, at thirty-six Candy is congenitally single and sometimes I envy her ability to do the most fantastic things like going to have a drink after work or visiting the bathroom at weekends unaccompanied by a curious five-year-old or coming in to work hollow-eyed after being up all night having sex instead of coming in to work hollow-eyed after being up all night with the wailing product of sex. Candy did get engaged a couple of years back to a consultant from Anderson’s. Unfortunately, she was so busy working on a final for a German pension fund that she stood him up three dates in a row. The third time Bill was waiting for her in a restaurant at Smithfield and he got talking to a nurse from St. Bart’s at the next table. They were married in August.
Candy says she’s not going to worry about her fertility, though, until Cartier starts making a biological clock.
To: Debra Richardson, Addison Pope
From: Kate Reddy, EMF
Dear D, so late in this am can’t write much now. no way am i canceling lunch.
Y is truthful Woman’s Excuse always less acceptable than false Man’s Excuse? puzzled, K8
* * *
To: Kate Reddy
From: Debra Richardson
Because they don’t want to be reminded that you have a life, stupid.
C U friday. D xx
* * *
I decided not to approach Rod Task in person over the question of leaving work early to get to Emily’s nativity play. Better to tag it on casually as a PS to some work e-mail. Make it look like a fact of life, not a favor. Just got a reply.
To: Kate Reddy
From: Rod Task
Jesus, Katie, only seems like yesterday you had your own nativity.
Sure, take the time you need, but we should talk c. 5:30. And I need you to go to Stockholm to hold Sven’s hand again. Is Friday good for you, Beaut?
Cheers, Rod
* * *
No, Friday is not good for me. I can’t believe he expects me to do another trip before Christmas. Means I will miss the office party, have to cancel lunch with Debra again, and lose the shopping time I was counting on.
Our office is open-plan but the Director of Marketing has one of two rooms with walls; the other belongs to Robin Cooper-Clark. When I march in to Rod to make my protest, the office is empty, but I stay a few moments anyway to take in the view through the floor-to-ceiling window. Directly below is the Broadgate rink, a dinner plate of ice set in the middle of staggered towers of concrete and steel. At this hour, it’s empty save for a lone skater, a tall dark guy in a green sweatshirt, carving out what at first I think are figures of eight but, as he makes the long downward stroke, realize is a large dollar sign. With the fog unfurling, the City looks as it did during the Blitz, when smoke from the fires dispersed, magically revealing the dome of St. Paul’s. Turn in the opposite direction and you see the Canary Wharf tower winking like a randy Cyclops.
Coming out of Rod’s room, I run smack into Celia Harmsworth, although no injury is done to either party because I simply bounce off Celia’s stupendous bust. When Englishwomen of a certain background reach the age of fifty, they no longer have breasts, they have a bosom or even, depending on acreage of land and antiquity of lineage, a bust. Breasts come in twos, but a bust is always singular; the pliant pair meld into a fiberglass monopod sloping gently downward like a continental shelf. The bust denies the possibility of cleavage or any kind of jiggling. Where breasts say, Come and play, the bust, like the snub nose of a bumper car, says, Out of my way! The Queen has a bust and so does Celia Harmsworth.
“Katharine Reddy, always in such a hurry,” she scolds. As head of Human Resources, Celia is effortlessly one of the least human people in the building; childless, charmless, chilly as Chablis, she has this knack of making you feel both useless and used. When I went back to work after Emily was born, I found out that Chris Bunce, hedge-fund manager and EMF’s biggest earner for the past two years, had put a shot of vodka in the expressed breast milk I was storing in the office fridge next to the lifts. I approached Celia and asked her, woman to woman, what course of action she suggested taking against a jerk who, when confronted by me in Davy’s Bar, claimed that putting alcohol into the food intended for a nine-week-old baby was “’Avin’ a bit of a larf.”
I can still remember the moue of distaste on Celia’s face, and it wasn’t for that bastard Bunce. “Use your feminine wiles, dear,” she said.
Celia tells me she is delighted that I can talk to the trainees at lunchtime. “Rod said you could do the presentation in your sleep. Just slides and a few sandwiches, you know the drill, Kate. And don’t forget the Mission Statement, will you?”
I make a quick calculation. If the induction lasts an hour including drinks, say, that will leave me thirty minutes to find a cab and get across the City to Emily’s school for the start of the nativity play. Should be enough time. I can make it so long as they don’t ask any damn questions.
* * *
1:01 P.M. “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Kate Reddy and I’d like to welcome you all to the thirteenth floor. Thirteen is unlucky for some, but not here at Edwin Morgan Forster, which ranks in the top ten money managers in the UK and in the top fifty globally in terms of assets, and which, for five years running, has been voted money manager of the year. Last year, we generated revenue in excess of &Bembo.xa3;300 million, which explains why absolutely no expense has been spared on the fabulous tuna sandwiches you see spread out before you today.”
Rod’s right. I can do this sort of stuff in my sleep; in fact, I pretty much am doing it in my sleep as the jet lag takes hold and the crown of my skull starts to tighten and my legs feel as though someone is filling them with iced water.
“You will, I’m sure, already be familiar with the term ‘fund manager.’ Put at its simplest, a fund manager is a high-class gambler. My job is to study the form of companies round the world, assess the going rate in the markets for their products, check out the track record of jockeys, stick a big chunk of money on the best bet, and then hope to hell that they don’t fall at the first fence.”
There is laughter around the room, the overgrateful laughter of twentysomethings caught between arrogance at securing one of only six EMF traineeships and wetting themselves at the thought of being found out.
“If the horses I’ve backed do fall, I have to decide whether we shoot them right away or whether it’s worth nursing that broken leg back to health. Remember, ladies and gentlemen, compassion can be expensive, but it’s not necessarily a waste of your money.”
I was a trainee myself twelve years ago, sitting in a room just like this one, crossing and uncrossing my legs, unsure whether it was worse to look like the Duchess of Kent or Sharon Stone. The only woman recruit in my year, I was surrounded by guys, big animal guys at ease in their pinstriped pelts. Not like me: the black crepe Whistles suit I had spent my last forty quid on made me look like a Wolverhampton schools inspector.
This year’s bunch of novices is pretty typical: four guys, two girls. The guys always slouch at the back; the girls sit upright in the front row, pens poised to take notes they will never need. You get to know the types after a while. Look at Mr. Anarchist ov
er there with the Velcro sideburns and the Liam Gallagher scowl. In a suit today, but mentally still wearing a leather jacket, Dave was probably some kind of student activist at college. He read economics the better to arm himself for the workers’ struggle while morally blackmailing all the kids on his corridor into buying that undrinkable Rwandan coffee. Right now, he’s sitting there telling himself he’s just going to do this City shit for two years, five tops. Get some serious dough behind him, then launch his humanitarian crusade. I almost feel sorry for him. Seven years down the line, living in some modernist mausoleum in Notting Hill, school fees for two kids, wife with a ruinous Jimmy Choo habit, Dave will be nodding off in front of Friends like the rest of us, with a copy of the New Statesman unopened in his lap.
The other guys are pink-gilled landed types with prep-school partings. The one called Julian has an Adam’s apple so overactive it’s practically making cider. As usual, the girls are unmistakably women, whereas the men are barely more than boys. Between them, EMF’s two female trainees cover the spectrum of womanhood. One is a doughy Shires girl with a kindly bun face and a velvet headband, the daytime tiara of her class. Clarissa somebody. Glance down the list of potted biographies and see that Clarissa is a graduate in Modern Studies from the University of Peterborough. Pure back-office material. Must be a niece of one of the directors; you don’t get into EMF with a degree like that unless you’re a blood relative of money.
The girl next to her looks more interesting. Born and brought up in Sri Lanka but educated at Cheltenham Ladies and the London School of Economics, one of those granddaughters of Empire who end up more English than the English—the sweetness of their courtesy, the decorum of their grammar. With catlike composure and remarkable leaf-shaped eyes that gaze steadily out through tortoiseshell specs, Momo Gumeratne is so pretty she should only enter the Square Mile with an armed guard.
The trainees return my appraising stare. I wonder what they see. Blondish hair, decent legs, in good enough shape not to be pinned for a mother. They wouldn’t guess I was northern, either (accent ironed out when I came to study down south). They may even be a little scared of me. The other day Rich said I frightened him sometimes.
“Now, I’m sure everyone here will have seen that line they put in tiny bottom-row-of-the-optician’s-chart print on your bank and building society accounts? ‘Remember that the value of your investment can go down as well as up.’ Yes? Well, that’s me. If I pick ’em wrong, the value goes down, so at EMF we do our very best to ensure that doesn’t happen and most of the time we succeed. I find it useful to bear in mind when I’m selling three million dollars of airline stock, as I did this morning, that ours is the only flutter in the world which can leave a little old lady in Dumbarton without a pension. But don’t worry, Julian, trainees are limited in the size of the deal they can make. We’ll give you fifty grand for starters, just to get some practice.”
Julian’s cheeks flush from smoked trout to strawberry and the doughy girl’s hand shoots up. “Can you tell me why you sold that particular stock today?”
“That’s a very good question, Clarissa. Well, I had a four-million-dollar holding and the price was up and was continuing to rise, but we’d made a lot of money already and I knew from reading the trade papers that there was bad news coming about airlines. The job of fund manager is to get our clients’ money out before the price weakens. All the time, I’m trying to balance the good things that might happen against the Act of an Almighty Pissed-Off God that may be lurking just around the corner.”
In my experience, the biggest test for any Edwin Morgan Forster trainee is not the ability to grasp the essentials of investment or to secure a pass for the car park. No, the thing that shows what you’re really made of is if you can keep a straight face the first time you hear the firm’s Mission Statement. Known internally as the five pillars of wisdom, the Mission Statement is the primest corporate baloney. (By what freak of logic did hard-core capitalists of the late twentieth century end up parroting slogans first chanted by Maoist peasants who were not even permitted to own their own bicycles?)
“Our Five Pillars of Wisdom are (1) pulling together, (2) mutual honesty, (3) best results, (4) client care and (5) commitment to success!”
I can see Dave struggling manfully to suppress a smirk. Good boy. Glance up at the clock. Shit. Time to go. “Now, if there are no more questions—”
Damn. The other girl has her hand up now. At least you can rely on the men not to ask a question—even when they don’t know anything, like this lot, and especially not of someone at my level, when asking a question means admitting that there are still things in the world that are beyond you.
“I’m so sorry,” the young Sri Lankan begins, as though apologizing for some error she has yet to commit. “I know that EMF has—well, as a woman, Ms. Reddy, can you tell me honestly, how do you find working in this job?”
“Well, Ms.—?”
“Momo Gumeratne.”
“Well, Momo, there are sixty fund managers here and only three of us are women. EMF does have an equal opportunities policy and as long as trainees like you keep coming through we’re going to make that happen in practice.
“Secondly, I understand that the Japanese are working on a tank where you can grow babies outside the womb. They should have that perfected by the time you’re ready to have children, Ms. Gumeratne, so we really will be able to have the first lunch-hour baby. Believe me, that would make everyone at Edwin Morgan Forster very happy.”
I assume that will stop the questions dead, but Momo is not as mousy as I thought. Her coffee skin suffused with a blush, she puts up her hand again. As I turn to pick up my bag, indicating that the session is over, she starts to speak.
“I’m really sorry, Ms. Reddy, but may I ask if you have children of your own?”
No, she can’t. “Yes, the last time I looked there were two of them. And may I suggest, Ms. Gumeratne, that you don’t start your sentences with I’m sorry. There are a lot of words you’ll find useful in this building, but sorry isn’t one of them. Now, if that’s all I really must go and check the markets—winners to pick, money to manage! Thank you for your attention, ladies and gentlemen, and please do come up if you see me round the building, and I’ll test you on our Five Pillars of Wisdom. If you’re really lucky, I’ll give you my personal Pillar Number Six.”
They look at me dumbly.
“Pillar Number Six: If money responds to your touch, then there’s no limit to what a woman can achieve in this City. Money doesn’t know what sex you are.”
2:17 P.M. You can always pick up a cab from the rank outside Warburg’s. Any day except today. Today the cabbies are all at some dedicated Make Kate Late rally. After seven minutes of not being hysterical at the curbside, I hurl myself in front of a taxi with its light off. The driver swerves to avoid me. I tell him I’ll double the fare on the clock if he takes me to Emily’s school without using his brakes. Lurching around in the back as we weave through the narrow, choked streets, I can feel the pulse points in my neck and wrist jumping like crickets.
2:49 P.M. The wood-block floor in Emily’s school hall was obviously installed with the express purpose of exposing late-arriving working mothers in heels. I tick-tock in at the moment when Angel Gabriel is breaking the big news to the Virgin Mary, who starts pulling the wool off the donkey sitting next to her. Mary is played by Genevieve Law, daughter of Alexandra Law, form representative and a Mother Superior—in other words, defiantly nonworking. There is serious competition among the Mothers Superior to secure leading roles in the production for their young. Trust me, they didn’t give up that seat on the board or major TV series for little Joshua to play the innkeeper’s brother in a Gap polo neck.
“A sheep was perfect for him last year,” they cry, “but this Christmas we really feel he could tackle something a little more challenging!”
As the Three Wise Men—a wispy red-haired boy propelled by two little girls—walk across the stage with their presen
ts for the Baby Jesus, the hall door opens behind us with a treacherous squeal. A hundred pairs of eyes swivel round to see a red-faced woman with a Tesco’s carrier bag and a briefcase. Looks like Amy Redman’s mum. As she edges, cringing and apologetic, into the back row of seats, Alexandra Law shushes her noisily. My instinctive sympathy for this fellow creature is outweighed almost immediately by an ugly swelling of gratitude that, thanks to her, I am no longer the last to arrive. (I don’t want other working mothers to suffer unduly, truly I don’t. I just need to know we’re all screwing up about the same amount.)
Up on stage, a wobbly wail of recorders heralds the final carol. My angel is third from the left in the back row. On this big occasion, Emily has the same inky-eyed concentration, the same quizzical pucker of the brow she had coming out of the womb. I remember she looked round the delivery room for a couple of minutes, as if to say, No, don’t tell me, I’ll get it in a minute. This afternoon, flanked by fidgety boys, one of whom plainly needs the loo, my girl sings the carol without faltering over any of the words, and I feel a knock of pride in my rib cage.
Why are infants performing “Away in a Manger” in a headlong rush so much more affecting than the entire in-tune King’s College Choir? I dig down into a bosky corner of my coat pocket and find a hankie.
3:41 P.M. At the festive refreshments, there are a handful of fathers hiding behind video cameras, but the hall is aswarm with mothers, moths fluttering round the little lights of their lives. At school functions, other women always look like real mothers to me; I never feel I’m old enough for that title, or sufficiently well qualified. I can feel my body adopting exaggerated maternal gestures like a mime artist. The evidence that I am a mother, though, is holding tightly on to my left hand and insisting that I wear her halo in my hair. Emily is clearly relieved and grateful that Mummy made it; last year I had to drop out at the last minute when deal negotiations hit a critical phase and I had to jump on a plane to the States. I brought her a musical snow shaker of New York, snatched up in Saks Fifth Avenue, as a consolation present, but it was no consolation. The times you don’t make it are the ones children remember, not the times you do.
I Don't Know How She Does It Page 3