Am anxious to slip away and call the office, but there is no avoiding Alexandra Law, who is accepting rave notices for Genevieve’s Virgin Mary and for her own Bavarian Liebkuchen. Alexandra picks up one of my mince pies, jabs a dubious fingernail into the hill of icing sugar on top before pushing the whole lot into her mouth and announcing her verdict through a shower of crumbs. “Sen-say-sh’nul mince pies, Kate. Did you soak the fruit in brandy or grappa?”
“Oh, a dash of this and that, Alex, you know how it is.”
She nods. “I was thinking of asking everyone to make stollen for next year. What d’you think? Do you have a good recipe?”
“No, but I know a supermarket that does.”
“Ha-ha-ha-ha! Very good. Ha! Ha! Ha!”
Alexandra is the only woman I know who laughs as though it was written down. Mirthless, heaving Ted Heath shoulders. Any second now she will ask me if I’ve gone part-time yet.
“So, are you working part-time now? No? Still full-time. Good heavens! I don’t know how you do it, honestly. I say, Claire, I was just saying to Kate, I don’t know how she does it. Do you?”
* * *
7:27 P.M. The strain of being an angel has taken its toll on Emily. She is so exhausted that I calculate I can turn over three pages of the bedtime story without her noticing. Must get on with that e-mail backlog. But just as I am skipping the pages, a suspicious eye snaps open.
“Mummy, you made a mistake.”
“Did I?”
“You left out the bit where Piglet jumps in Kanga’s pocket!”
“Oh, dear, did I?”
“Never mind, Mummy. We can just start at the beginning again.”
8:11 P.M. The answerphone that sits on the table next to the TV is full. Play messages. A West Country burr informs me that KwikToy is returning my call about undelivered Christmas presents. “Unfortunately, owing to unprecedented demand, the items will not now be with you until the New Year.”
Christ. What’s wrong with these people?
A message from my mother comes next and takes up most of the tape. Nervous of the technology, Mum still leaves pauses for the person at the other end to reply. She rang to say not to worry, she will manage fine without us over Christmas; somehow her reassurance is more piercing than any complaint could be. It’s the knockout one-two that mothers have perfected down the centuries: first they make you feel guilty, and then you feel resentful at being made to feel guilty, which makes you feel even worse.
“I’ve put some books for Emily and Ben in the post and a little something for you and Richard. I hope they’ll be the right sort of thing.” She is afraid of not pleasing, in this as in so much else.
After my mother’s wan reproachfulness, it’s a relief to hear the voice of Jill Cooper-Clark wishing me a happy Christmas. Sorry she hasn’t got organized with cards this year, been a bit dicky—laughter—although at least her new doctor looks like Dirk Bogarde. Sends her love and asks me to give her a call sometime.
Finally, I hear a voice so drained of warmth I barely recognize it: Janine, a former broker friend. Janine gave up work last year when her husband’s firm floated on the stock market and Graham came into the kind of wealth that buys you a yacht called Tabitha, once owned by a cousin of Aristotle Onassis. When Janine was still working, we used to enjoy the battle-weary camaraderie of running a home while trying to make it across Man’s Land avoiding sniper fire. These days, Janine does afternoon classes at the Chelsea Physic Garden on how to get the most out of your seasonal window box. She has winter and summer covers for her sofas, which get changed at the correct time of year, and lately she has arranged all the family photographs in padded albums, which sit on the coffee table in her drawing room exuding the mellow smells of leather and contentment. Last time I asked Janine what she was up to, she gave a little trill and said, “Oh, you know, just pottering.” No, I don’t know. Pottering and me, I don’t think we’ve been introduced.
Janine is ringing to check if we’re coming to their New Year’s Eve dinner. She’s sorry to bother us. She doesn’t sound sorry. She sounds spitty with the indignation of a hostess scorned.
What New Year’s dinner? A few minutes of excavating the hall table—tandoori leaflets, dead leaves, a single brown mitten—turns up an unopened pile of Christmas post. I riffle through the envelopes till I get to the one addressed in Janine’s careful copperplate. Inside is a card photomontage of Graham, Janine, and their perfectly untroubled children plus an invitation to dinner. RSVP by December tenth.
I now do what I always do on such occasions: I blame Richard. (It doesn’t have to be his fault, but someone has to be landed with the blame, or how is life to be tolerated?) Kneeling on the kitchen floor, Rich is making Ben a reindeer out of cardboard and what looks like the missing brown mitten. I tell him we are no longer even capable of turning down the events we will be unable to attend: our social ostracism is nearly complete. Am suddenly overcome with longing to be one of those women who reply promptly to invitations on thick creamy notepaper with a William Morris border. And in fountain pen, not some drought-stricken jade felt tip I have raided from Emily’s pencil case.
Rich shrugs. “Come off it, Kate. You’d go mad.”
Perhaps, but it would be nice to have the choice.
11:57 P.M. The bath. My favorite place on earth. Leaning over the empty tub, I clear out the Pingu toys and the wrecked galleon, unstick the alphabet letters which, ever since the vowels got flushed down the loo, have formed angry Croat injunctions around the rim (scrtzchk!). I peel off the crusty half-dry Barbie flannel that has started to smell of something I vaguely remember as tadpole; and then, starting at one corner, I lift up the nonslip mat, whose suction cups cling for a second before yielding with an indignant burp.
Next, I ransack the cabinet, looking for a relaxing bath oil—lavender, sea cucumber, bergamot—but I am always out of destressors and have to settle for something with bubbles called Vitality in nuclear lime. Then I run the water hotter than you can bear, so hot that when I climb in my body momentarily mistakes it for cold. Lie back, nostrils flaring over the surface like an alligator. I look at the woman rapidly vanishing in the steamy mirror by my side and I think this is her time, her time alone, save for the odd overlooked Barney the dinosaur bobbing up suddenly between her knees with its serial-killer grin.
The bath is ancient, its porcelain riddled with gray-blue veins. We ran out of money after doing the kitchen so the house is in ascending order of crud: the higher up you go the lower the standards. Kitchen by Terence Conran, sitting room by Ikea, bathroom by Fungus the Bogeyman. But with my contact lenses out and in candlelight, the bathroom’s leprous peeling speaks to me of some vestal Roman temple rather than five grand’s worth of absent damp course.
As the bubbles evaporate on my hands, scaly pink islets are revealed along the knuckles. It’s already got behind my right ear. Stress eczema, the nurse at work called it. “Can you think of any way to relieve some of the pressures in your life, Kate?” Oh, let’s see now: a brain transplant, a lottery win, my husband reprogrammed to figure out that things left at the bottom of the stairs usually need to be carried to the top of the stairs.
Can’t see how I can go on like this. Can’t see how to stop, either. Can’t help wondering if I was too hard on that Sri Lankan girl at the induction today, Momo Somebody. Seemed sweet enough. She asked me to be honest. Should I have been? Told her that the only way to get on at EMF is to act like one of the boys, and when you act like one of the boys they call you abrasive and difficult, so you act like a woman, and then they say you’re emotional and difficult. Difficult being their word for everything that’s not them. Well, she’ll learn.
If I’d known at her age what I know now, would I ever have had children? Close my eyes and try to imagine a world without Emily and Ben: like a world without music or lightning.
Sink back under the water to let my thoughts float free, but they feel stuck to my brain like barnacles.
MUST REMEMBE
R
Talk with Paula outlining firm new approach to children’s haircuts, timekeeping, etc. Talk with Rod Task outlining firm new approach to role with clients, i.e., I am not their emergency geisha! Pay rise: repeat after me, I will not accept extra work without extra money! Get quote for new stair carpet. Buy Christmas tree and stylish lights (John Lewis or Ikea?). Present for Richard (How to Be a Domestic Goddess?), In-laws (cheese barrel or alpine plants advertised in S. Times color supplement: where did I put the cutting?). Stocking fillers for E&B. Fruit jellies Uncle Alf. Travel sick sweets? Ask Paula collect dry cleaning. Personal shopper how much? Pelvic floor squeeeeze. Make icing for Christmas cake: too late, buy roll-on stuff. Cards stamps First class × 30. Wean Ben off dummy! Remember Roo!! Ring KwikToy useless bloody present co and threaten legal action. Nappies, bottles, Toy Story video, Smear test!!! Highlights. Hamster?
3
Happy Holidays
I CAN GET MYSELF and two children washed and dressed and out of the house in half an hour, I can juggle nine different currencies in five different time zones, I can make myself come with quiet efficiency, I can prepare and eat a stand-up supper while on the phone to the West Coast, I can read Guess How Much I Love You? to Ben scanning the prices on Teletext, but can I get a minicab to take me to the airport?
As part of an ongoing program of cutbacks, Edwin Morgan Forster will no longer send a car to deliver me to Heathrow. I must order my own. Last night I booked a local minicab, which this morning failed to show. When I rang to protest, the guy at the other end said he was very sorry but the soonest they could get a car to me was half an hour.
“It’s a busy time of day, love.”
I know it’s a busy time of day. That’s why I prebooked last night.
Says he thinks he may be able to get me something in twenty minutes. Hotly reject this insulting offer and slam phone down. Immediately regret it as all the other companies I call either don’t have a car available or suggest an even more disastrous waiting time.
Am in despair when I spot a dirty bronze card sticking out from under the doormat. It’s for a taxi company I’ve never heard of: Pegasus—Your Winged Driver. When I dial the number, the guy at the other end says he’s coming right over. Relief is short-lived. This being Hackney, what turns up at the door is Pegasus—Your Stoned Driver. Parked at almost 45 degrees to the curb, Pegasus’s chariot is a Nissan Sunny of impenetrable gloom hung about with veils of nicotine and hash. Climb in, but it’s technically impossible to breathe in cab, so try to roll down window and stick head outside like a dog.
“Window he’s not working,” volunteers the driver, factually and without regret.
“And the seat belt?”
“Not working.”
“You do realize that’s illegal.”
In the rearview mirror, Pegasus shoots me a pitying look that instructs me to get a life.
The cab not turning up made me so tense I had this stupid, stupid row with Richard. He found Paula’s Xmas bonus check, which I’d hidden in Emily’s lunch box. Said he simply couldn’t understand why I spent more on the nanny’s Christmas present than on the rest of the family put together.
I tried to explain. “Because if I don’t keep Paula happy she will leave.”
“Would that really be so bad, Katie?”
“Frankly, it would be easier if you left.”
“Ah. I see.”
Shouldn’t have put it like that. Damned tiredness. Always makes you say what you don’t mean to say, even if you feel it at the time. After that, Rich sat at the kitchen table pretending to have found something fascinating to read in Architectural Digest while managing to look like Trevor Howard at the end of Brief Encounter—all chin-up decency and glittery eyes.
Wouldn’t even look at me when I said goodbye. Then Ben stood up in his high chair and started yodeling for a hug. No. Sorry. Not in a clean suit: the state of him! Smeared with jam and apricot fromage frais, like his own personal sunrise.
The cab stops and starts and stops again along the Euston Road. If this is one of London’s main arteries, then London needs a coronary bypass. Its citizens sit in their cars, hearts furring up with fury.
Once we’re past King’s Cross, I open my post. There’s a card from Mum enclosing a magazine’s Yuletide supplement,“26 Recipes for a Magical Stress-Free Christmas!” Flick through pages in mounting disbelief. How can anything stress-free involve caramelizing a shallot?
We continue to crawl westwards, over the flyover and past the brick-pink semis, like mile upon mile of gaping dentures. When I used to live in a house like that, Christmas was still a pretty simple affair. It was a tree, a pimply turkey, satsumas trapped in an orange net, maybe some dates clinging gummily together in a palm-tree canoe and a bumper tin of Quality Street eaten by the whole family in front of Morecambe and Wise. Your big present was always waiting for you downstairs next to the tree—a doll’s house, roller skates, maybe a bike with training wheels or a bell—and there was a stocking whose thrilling misshapen weight your feet discovered at the end of the bed. But Christmas, like everything else, has moved up a gear. Now it’s productions of The Nutcracker (book tickets in August) and Kelly Bronze. When I first heard the name, I assumed Kelly was one of those inflatable Baywatch babes, but she turns out to be the only kind of turkey that’s worth eating anymore. And once you’ve spent an hour on the phone being held in a queue in order to beg the supermarket to put you on the waiting list for Kelly, you have to get the bird home and stuff her. According to my Yuletide supplement, stuffing, which was once stale bread crumbs with diced onion and a spoonful of fusty sage, has evolved into “porcini butter with red rice and cranberry to revive jaded palates.”
I don’t believe we had palates in the seventies; we had sweet teeth and heartburn that you eased by sucking lozenges the color and texture of gravestones. It’s a good joke when you think about it, isn’t it? Just as women were fleeing the role of homemaker in their millions, there was suddenly food that was worth cooking. Think of all the great stuff you could be making, Kate, if you were ever in your kitchen to make it.
8:43 A.M. Pegasus has chosen a “quick” back route to Heathrow. So, with one hour twenty-two minutes to takeoff, we are sitting outside a row of halal butchers in Southall. Feel my heart revving, foot jammed on an invisible accelerator.
“Look, can’t you go any faster? I absolutely have to make up time.”
A young guy in white cotton pajamas steps out into the road in front of us, a lamb the size of a child slung over his shoulder. My driver brakes suddenly and from the front of the car comes a laconic drawl. “Last time I looked, lady, running people over still against the law.”
Close eyes and concentrate on calming down. Things will feel much more under control if I make efficient use of the time: call KwikToy (“Round the Clock Fun!”) on mobile to complain about no-show of vital Christmas presents.
“Thank you for choosing KwikToy. We are sorry, you are held in a queue. Your call will be answered shortly.” Typical.
Start to work my way through torn-out Yellow Pages list of north London pet shops. It comes as no surprise to learn there is a national shortage of baby hamsters, though there might be one left in Walthamstow. Am I interested? Yes.
When I finally get through to KwikToy, clueless operative seems reluctant to admit they have any record of my order. Tell him I am a major shareholder in his company and we are about to review our investment.
“Awright,” he concedes, “there have been some delivery difficulties owing to unprecedented demand.”
I point out that the demand can hardly be described as unprecedented.
“The birth of the little baby Jesus. Been celebrating that one for two thousand years. Toys and Christmas, Christmas and toys. Ring any bells?”
“Would you be asking for a voucher, miss?”
“No, I would not be asking for a voucher. I am asking for my toys to be delivered immediately so my children will have something to open on Christmas Da
y.”
There is a pause, a beep and an echoey shout: “Oy, Jeff, some posh tart’s doing her nut on the phone about the Goldilocks porridge set and the push-along sheepdog. Whatmygonnatella?”
9:17 A.M. Arrive at Heathrow with time to spare. Decide to try to make it up to the driver for yelling. Ask his name.
“Winston,” he offers suspiciously.
“Thanks, Winston. That was a really good route. I’m Kate, by the way. Such a great name, Winston. As in Churchill?”
He savors the moment before replying: “As in Silcott.”
9:26 A.M. Barging through a choked Departure Lounge, remember something else I have forgotten. Need to call home. Mobile not in service. Why not? Try pay phone, which eats three pound coins and fails to connect me while repeating the message: “Thank you for choosing British Telecom.”
Finally get through on credit-card phone next to the boarding desk, watched by three members of staff in navy uniforms.
“Richard, hello? Whatever you do, don’t forget the stockings.”
“Lingerie?”
“What?”
“Stockings. Is there a lingerie angle here, Katie? Suspenders, black lace, three inches of creamy thigh, or are we talking boring old Santa gift receptacle?”
“Richard, have you been drinking?”
“It’s an idea, certainly.” As he puts the phone down, I swear I can hear Paula offering Emily a Hubba Bubba.
My daughter is not allowed bubble gum.
To: Candy Stratton
From: Kate Reddy in Stockholm
I Don't Know How She Does It Page 4