Candy comes in waving Touche Eclat Concealer and starts to dab it on my neck.
“Hey, did Slow Richard give you a hickey? That’s terrific, honey.”
“No, the teething baby did. My darling husband slept through it all. But I nearly bit him to wake him up.”
Back in Task’s office, my male colleagues are doing what they like doing best: they are having a meeting. If this meeting goes really well, if they drag it out long enough, then they can reward themselves with another meeting tomorrow. With luck, the lack of progress in Meeting One can be reviewed in Meetings Three, Four, and Five. When I first arrived as a trainee in the City, I assumed that meetings were for making decisions; it took a few weeks to figure out that they were arenas of display, the Square Mile equivalent of those gorilla grooming sessions you see on wildlife programs. Some days, watching the men maneuver for position, I reckon I can actually hear the bedside whisper of David Attenborough commenting on the beating of chests and the picking of nits:
And here, in the very heart of the urban jungle, we see Charlie Baines, a young ape from the US Desk, as he approaches the battle-scarred head of the group, Rod Task. Observe Charlie’s posture, the way he indicates his subservience while desperately seeking the senior male’s approval....
Most women I know around here have a very low tolerance for this kind of politicking. For obvious reasons, we miss out on the willy waving that goes on at the corporate urinals, and seeking out some dandruffed drone to flatter him in a wine bar after work does not appeal— frankly, who has the energy? Like the good diligent girls we were at school, we still think that if we do our very best and get our work done on time, then (a) merit will have its own reward and (b) we can be home by seven.
Well, it doesn’t. And we can’t.
A light vibration from the phone in my jacket pocket tells me a text message has landed. I press VIEW. It’s from Candy.
Q: Hw many men
ds it tk
to scrw in
a lightbulb?
A: One.
He just holds it
& waits for the
world to
revolve arnd him.
My snort of laughter attracts hostile stares from everyone around the table except Candy, who is pretending to take furious notes on Charlie Baines’s suggestions for something he calls organizational amelioration.
The review of monthly reports goes on and on. Am losing my battle with unconsciousness again when I suddenly notice that Rod’s computer is still displaying his Christmas screen-saver. It shows a snowman gradually disappearing in a blizzard. I think how restful it would be to be buried in snow, how delicious to slip into its cold accepting nothingness. Think of Captain Oates at the South Pole: “I’m going out now. I may be some time.”
“You’ve only just come back in, Katie,” snaps Rod, aiming his MontBlanc pen at me like a dart.
Realize I must have spoken thoughts aloud like crazy woman who wanders streets dressed in bin bags, giving running commentary of her paranoid inner world.
“Sorry, Rod, it’s Captain Oates. I was just quoting him.”
A roomful of fund managers swivel eyes in unison. At the far end of the table, within licking distance of Rod, my assistant Guy’s equine nostrils flare appreciatively at the first whiff of humiliation.
“You remember Captain Oates.” I prompt my boss. “The one who walked out of a tent to certain death on the Scott expedition to the South Pole.”
“Typical bloody Pom.” Rod snorts. “Meaningless self-sacrifice. What do they call that, Katie, honor?”
They’re all looking at me now; wondering how I’m going to get out of this one. Come on! Kate to brain, Kate to brain, are you receiving me?
“Actually, Rod, the South Pole expedition is not a bad management model. How about we apply it to our worst-performing fund, the one that’s sapping our resources? Maybe the worst fund needs to take a walk in the snow.”
At the suggestion of cost-cutting, Rod’s eyes take on a viscous piggy gleam. “Huh. Not bad, Katie, not bad. Look into it, Guy.”
Eyes swivel away. That was a close one.
7:23 P.M. Crawl home only to find Paula in a huff. A nanny huff can descend as suddenly as sea mist and be twice as treacherous. Can tell this is a bad one because she is actually clearing up the kitchen. What I really want to do is collapse on the sofa with a glass of wine and figure out if any characters I recognize are still alive in EastEnders, which I haven’t seen since June—enough time for entire dynasties to have fallen in Albert Square and for Phil Mitchell to have spawned at least two more love children with his late brother’s ex-wives. Instead, I have to navigate with extreme care around the events of the day. I praise the nutritious contents of Emily’s lunch box, I promise to pick up some name tags tomorrow, saying it’s really no trouble (as if); then I try blatant cultural suck-up by mentioning a soap star who has just given birth and is featured across seven whole pages in Paula’s new copy of Hello!
Two pregnancies have wrecked my short-term memory but left me with freakish instantaneous recall of the names of all celebrity babies. Knowing the offspring of, say, Demi Moore and Bruce Willis (Rumer, Scout, Tallulah) or Pierce Brosnan (Dylan; also the name of the Zeta-Jones/Michael Douglas first sprog and of Pamela Anderson’s second) may not be of any immediate professional use, but it has lifted my stock with Paula on several critical occasions.
“Dylan’s getting to be a very popular name now,” observes Paula.
“Yes,” I say, “but think of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow’s little girl. She was called Dylan and got to the age of eleven and wanted to change her name.”
Paula nods. “And they called the other one something stupid too, didn’t they?”
“Satchel!”
“Yeah, that’s it.” Paula laughs and I join her: the limitless folly of stars being one of the great democratic pleasures. Can see the huff is starting to lift when I stupidly push my luck and ask Paula if she managed to find a Teletubbies cake.
“I Can’t Remember Everything,” she says, and sweeps out with a swish of her invisible black cape. While the front door is still reverberating, I discover the cause of the huff lying open on the worktop. The Evening Standard has a story about how much London nannies are paid and their incredible perks: top-of-the-range car, private health care, gym membership, use of jet, use of horse.
Horse? Thought we were doing OK by letting Paula use my car while I take the bus. Whatever happens, I am not going to be blackmailed into paying out more money. We are at our absolute limit already.
8:17 P.M. Tell Richard we will have to give Paula a pay rise. Plus possible riding lessons. A terrible row follows in which Rich points out that, after we have paid her tax and National Insurance, Paula actually takes home more than he does.
“Whose fault is that?” I say.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Nothing.”
“I know your nothings, Kate.”
Over supper, we sit within a few centimeters of each other at the kitchen table, simmering quietly. Richard has cooked spaghetti and put together an avocado and tomato salad. We start a cautious conversation about the children—Ben’s huge appetite, Emily’s new fixation with Mary Poppins—and I am starting to like him again when, twiddling some spaghetti onto his fork, he casually mentions that he made the pesto himself this afternoon. This is simultaneously admirable and horribly demoralizing. I can’t bear it.
“How did you find time to make pesto? And the plates? I suppose you’ll be taking up pottery next. Why the hell can’t you do something that needs doing? How about replacing the parking permit, for instance?”
“The new parking permit is in the car,” he says, “if madam would take a few seconds out of her schedule to look.”
“Oh, we are the ideal husband, aren’t we?”
There is a screech of metal on wood as Rich scrapes his chair away from the table. “I give up, Kate. You ask me to do things to help out, and then when I
do them you despise me for it.”
Somehow I can’t formulate a reply to this. It seems both an incredibly brutal thing to say and impossible to argue with. Women often joke that they need a wife to take care of them, and they mean it: we all need a wife. But don’t expect us to thank the men who sign up for the role of homemaker for taking it away from us.
“Kate, we have to talk.”
“Not now, Rich, I need a bath.”
STILL OUT OF BATH OILS, I find an old packet of lavender salts at the bottom of the airing cupboard. It promises to “soothe and motivate”: I add some of Ben’s Pirate Pete bubbles, which turn the water school-uniform navy.
Climb into the scalding blue lagoon and lie back with my favorite reading matter—in recent years, let’s be honest, my only reading matter. Better than any fiction, Jameson’s “Country Property Guide” is a glossy brochure crammed with photographs of desirable properties for sale around the British Isles. We could exchange the Hackney Heap for, say, a converted mill in the Cotswolds or a pocket-size castle in Peeblesshire. (Where is Peeblesshire? Sounds a bit far.) The pictures are fabulous, but what I really like are the specifications. On page 18, there is a house in Berkshire with annex study with a barreled ceiling and gardens full of mature fruit trees. What is a barreled ceiling? I’m not quite sure, but I want one. And mature fruit trees! I picture myself wafting through a wood-paneled library where there would be freshly cut blossoms in tall vases on the way to the country kitchen boasting a blend of traditional cupboards and up-to-the-minute appliances. Standing next to the Aga—not for cooking in, I would be using the Neff double oven for that—I would write dates on the labels of the jelly made from apples picked from mature fruit trees in extensive gardens while my children played contentedly in the recessed nook upholstered in tasteful fabrics.
“Kate’s porn.” That’s what Richard calls the Jameson’s brochure when he comes across a copy stashed guiltily under my side of the bed. He’s got a point. All the mouth-watering pictures, laid out for my viewing pleasure, allow you to take possession of those lives without having to go through the trouble of actually leading them. The more depressed I get in my own house, the more consuming my property lust.
Thinking of Rich reminds me of our pesto fight and I wince at my part in it. His very kindness and sanity are enough to inspire the opposite in me. Why? Richard thinks that I indulge Paula, that I let her get away with things no employee you give generous pay and conditions to should be allowed to get away with. He thinks she’s a reasonably bright twenty-five-year-old girl from Kent who, while being pretty nice to our kids, tries to take us for every penny she can. He thinks she’s lazy, moody and shrinks his socks if he asks her to do anything outside her job description. He thinks she has too much power in our house. He’s right. But Rich doesn’t worry about child care the way I worry; men think about child care with their wallets, women feel it in their wombs. Every twist in the relationship with the person minding your young is a tug on the umbilical. Phones may have become cordless, but mothers never will.
Me, I look at Paula and I see the person who is with my children all the hours I’m not, a person I have to rely on to love and to cherish and to watch out for the first symptoms of meningitis. If she leaves the place in a mess, if she makes a petty point of not putting the dishwasher on because it contains adult as well as junior crockery, if she never gives me the correct change from the supermarket and “loses” all the receipts, then I’m not going to make a fuss.
People say the trouble with professional women of my generation is that we don’t know how to behave with servants. Wrong. The trouble with professional women of my generation is that we are the servants—forelock-tuggingly grateful to any domestic help, for which we pay through the nose, while struggling to hold down the master’s job ourselves.
When I first went back to work, I put my four-month-old daughter into day care. There’s a nursery about ten minutes’ walk from us, and I liked the sunny, resilient Scotswoman who ran it. But gradually things started to get to me. The Baby Room was small and lined with twelve cots. I’d persuaded myself it was cozy when we first went to look round, but every day I dropped Emily off it looked more like a Romanian orphanage styled by Habitat. When I asked Moira how the little ones could take a nap with all the noise from the big kids next door, she shrugged and said, “Och, they get used to it in the end.” And then there were the fines. If you picked up your child any later than 6:30 from Children’s Corner, they charged you ten quid for the first ten minutes, fifty pounds for any longer. I was always later than 6:30. Shame sloshed around like bile in my stomach on the sprint from the Tube to collect her.
Surrounded by thirty other kids, Emily picked up every infection going. Her first winter cold ran from October through March and her baby nose was encrusted with verdigris. Having provided the bacteria for the infection, the nursery was always extremely keen that you keep your sick child at home, with no reduction in fees. I can remember hours on the phone at work pretending to be calling clients, talking to temp agencies or begging help from friends. (And I hate asking for favors: hate the feeling of being indebted.) Then, one bitter morning, I had to drop a feverish Em off at the house of someone who knew someone in my postnatal mother and baby group who lived in Crouch End. At the end of the day, the woman reported that Emily had cried constantly, save for an hour, when they had watched a video of Sleeping Beauty that seemed to comfort her. That day my daughter formed her first sentence: “Want go home.” But I was not there to hear it, nor was I at the home where she so badly wanted to go.
So, no, Paula is not ideal. But what is ideal? Mummy staying at home and laying down her life for small feet to walk over. Would you do that? Could I do that? You don’t know me very well if you think I could do that.
* * *
I GET OUT of the bath, apply some aqueous cream to scaly pink patches on hands, back of knees and ears, wrap myself in a robe and go into the study to check messages before bed.
To: Kate Reddy
From: Jack Abelhammer
Katharine, I don’t remember mentioning drink, but disorderly sounds great. Bed for a week could be a problem: may need to reschedule the diary. Perhaps we should make it an oyster bar?
love Jack
* * *
Love? From major client? Oh, God, Kate. Now see what you’ve gone and done.
MUST REMEMBER
Cut Ben’s nails, Xmas thank-you letters? also letter bollocking council about failure to remove Christmas tree, humiliate ghastly Guy in front of Rod to show who’s boss, learn to send txt messages, Ben birthday—find Teletubbies cake, present—dancing Tinky Winky or improving wooden toy? Dancing Tinky Winky and improving wooden toy. Emily shoes/schools/teach her to read, call Mum, call Jill Cooper-Clark, must return sister’s call—why Julie sounding so pissed off with me; only person in London not seen brill new film—Magic Tiger, Puffing Dragon? Half term when/what? Invite friends for Sunday lunch. Buy pine nuts and basil to make own pesto, cookery crash course (Leith’s or similar). Summer holiday brochures. Get Jesus an exercise ball. Quote for stair carpet? Lightbulbs, tulips, lip salve, Botox?
9
The First Time I Saw Jack
7:03 A.M. I am hiding in the downstairs loo with my suitcase to avoid Ben. He is next door in the kitchen, where Richard is giving him breakfast. I am desperate to go in, but tell myself it’s not fair to snatch a few selfish minutes of his company and then leave an inconsolable baby. (The book says children get over Separation Anxiety by two years, but no age limit given for mothers.) Better he doesn’t see me at all. Squatting in here on the laundry basket, I have time to study the room and notice swags of gray fluff drifting down the window, like witch’s curtains. (Our cleaner, Juanita, suffers from vertigo, and quite understandably cannot clean above waist height.) Also the mermaid mosaic splashback was left half-tiled by our builder when we refused to give him any more cash, so is all tits and no tail. In the Bible, Jehovah sent floods and plagues of locusts to
punish mankind for their vanity; at the end of the twentieth century, he saves time and sends round a plasterer and a couple of brickies.
Through the closed door I can make out muffled brum-brums, followed by Ben’s gluey Sid James cackle. Rich must be pretending that spoonfuls of Shreddies are advancing cars to get him to open his mouth. A honk from outside announces the arrival of Pegasus.
Am slipping out of my own house like a thief when there is an accusatory “Woo-hoo” from the Volvo parked across the street: Angela Brunt, ringleader of the local Muffia. Face like a Ford Anglia, with protuberant headlamp peepers set in a triangular skull, Angela is heroically plain. It’s barely seven o’clock; what’s she doing out? Probably just back from taking Davina to Pre-Dawn Japanese. Give Angela thirty seconds and she’ll ask me if I’ve got Emily into a school yet.
“Hello, Kate, long time no see. Have you got Emily into a school yet?”
Five seconds! Yes, and Angela has beaten her own world record for Educational Paranoia. Tempted to tell her we’re considering the local state primary. With any luck will induce massive on-the-spot coronary. “I think St. Stephen’s is still a possibility, Angela.”
“Really?” The headlamps do a startled circuit of their sockets. “But how are you going to get her in anywhere decent at eleven? Did you read the inspectors’ latest report on St. Stephen’s?”
“No, I—”
“And you do realize state school pupils are two point four years behind the independent sector after eighteen months, rising to three point two by age nine?”
“Gosh, that does sound bad. Well, Richard and I are going to look round Piper Place, but it sounds a bit pressurized. What I really want is for Emily to—you know—be happy while she’s still so little.”
Angela shies at the word happy like a horse at a rattlesnake. “Well, I know they’ve all got anorexia in the sixth form at Piper Place,” she says brightly, “but they do offer a terrific well-rounded education.”
I Don't Know How She Does It Page 9