Richard is still collapsed on top of me when the children come shrieking into the bedroom. Emily’s first reaction on seeing that I’m back is of uncomplicated joy, complicated seconds later by a pout and an Othello-green stare. Ben is so delighted he bursts into tears and plumps down onto his nappy-cushioned bottom, that small body barely able to support the strength of his feelings. When the two of them climb onto the bed, Emily straddles Rich’s chest and Ben lies in the damp cruciform his father has left on my naked body. Face level with mine, he starts to point at my features one by one.
“Ayze.”
“Eyes, good boy.”
“Nows.”
“Nose, that’s right, Ben, clever boy. Have you been learning words while Mummy’s been away?”
His index finger, slender as a pencil, comes to rest between my breasts.
“And that, young man,” says Richard, leaning over and gently removing his son’s hand, “is the female bosom, of which your mother has a particularly lovely example.”
“Mummy looks like me, doesn’t she?” demands Emily, climbing aboard and budging Ben down onto the belly whose soft dome still carries the memory of carrying them both. “Me!” chimes Ben happily. “Me, me, me!” the children cry as the mother disappears under her own flesh and blood.
* * *
ANY WOMAN WITH A BABY has already committed a kind of adultery, I think. The new love in the nest is so voracious that all the old one can do is wait patiently, hoping for any crumbs the intruder does not consume in its cuckoo greed. A second child squeezes the adult love even harder. The miracle is that passion survives at all, and too often it dies in those early, early-rising years.
During the hours and days after I first get back from a trip, I always promise myself it’s my last time away. The story I live by—that working is just one of a range of choices I could make that will not affect my children—is exposed for what it is: a wishful fiction. Emily and Ben need me, and it’s me that they want. Oh, they adore Richard, of course they do, but he is their playmate, their companion in adventure; I’m the opposite. Daddy is the ocean; Mummy is the port, the safe haven they nestle in to gain the courage to venture farther and farther out each time. But I know I’m no harbor; sometimes when things are really bad I lie here and think, I am a ship in the night and my children yell like gulls as I pass.
And so I get out my calculator and do the sums again. If I stop work we could sell the house and clear the mortgage and the home-improvement loan that ran out of control when we first found rising damp and a bad case of descending house. (“You need underpinning, love,” said the builder. Damn right I did.) Move out of London, buy a place with a decent garden, hope Rich could pick up some more architectural work, see if I could work part-time. No foreign holidays. Economy-size everything. Bring the shoe habit to heel.
At times, I can almost be moved to tears by the picture of the thrifty responsible homemaker I could and would become. But the idea of not having an income after all these years makes me so fearful. I need my own money the way I need my own lungs. (“What your poor mum never had was Running Away Money,” Auntie Phyllis said, dabbing my face with her hankie.) And how would I be, left alone with the kids all day? The need of children is never-ending. You can pour all your love and patience into them, and when is it all right to say when? Never. You can never say when. And to serve so selflessly, you have to subdue something in yourself. I admire the women who can do it, but the mere thought makes me sick with panic. I could never admit this to anyone, but I think giving up work is like becoming a missing person. One of the domestic Disappeared. The post offices of Britain should be full of Wanted posters for women who lost themselves in their children and were never seen again. So when my two bounce on the body they sprang from shouting me, a voice within me keeps repeating, Me, me, me.
7:42 A.M. Complete hell trying to get out of the house. Emily reports that all three changes of clothes I have offered her are unacceptable. Yellow is her new favorite color, apparently.
“But all your clothes are pink.”
“Pink’s silly.”
“Come on, darling, let Mummy pull your skirt up. Such a pretty skirt.”
She swats me away. “I don’t want pink. I hate pink.”
“Don’t talk to me in that tone of voice, Emily Shattock. I thought you were going to be six next birthday, not two.”
“Mummy, that’s not a very nice thing to say.”
How are you supposed to deal with a child who within twenty seconds can drop her impersonation of John McEnroe in favor of the ethical rigor of Dame Mary Warnock? On the way out, I shout up to an invisible Rich, asking if he can get a man to take a look at the dishwasher. I hand Paula a list of stuff we need plus all of my cash and make sure to say please four times. Then, just as I reach the door, Emily crumples into tears at the foot of the stairs. From this end of the hall, she looks less like a winged fury than a very small sad girl. Feel my anger deflate into remorse. Go back and cuddle her, removing jacket first to avoid snail trail of snot.
“Mummy, did you go to the Egg Pie Snake Building?”
“What?”
“I want to go to the Egg Pie Snake Building with you. It’s at America.”
“Oh, the Empire State Building. Yes, love, Mummy will take you one day, when you’re a bigger girl.”
“When I’m seven?”
“Yes, when you’re seven.” And her face clears fast as the sky after a sudden shower.
To: Kate Reddy
From: Jack Abelhammer
Big consultants powwow here in May. Stop.
Urgently require presence of amazing British fund mgr. Stop.
Great oyster bar Grand Central Station. Stop.
Can you swallow a dozen oysters? I can’t. Stop.
* * *
2:30 P.M. At King’s Cross, I board the train to York for a conference. Am only allowing myself to think about Jack twice an hour, an act of incredible self-discipline slightly compromised by the fact that I have used up my allocation before we even pull out of the station. When I remember kissing him and him kissing me back at the Sinatra Inn, it has a molten effect on my core. I feel full of gold.
The train shudders and groans from its berth and I spread my stuff out on the table: for once I have a chance to sit down in peace and relax with the papers. Headline on page 2: WHY A SECOND BABY CAN KILL YOUR CAREER. Definitely not reading that. Since Emily was born, I swear to God that every month there’s been some new research proving that my child wrecks my work prospects or, more painfully, my work wrecks my child’s prospects. Go back to your job promptly and they say, “What kind of mother are you?” If you take your full entitlement of maternity leave and ask to go part-time, they say, “What kind of an executive are you?” Every way you look, you stand condemned.
Turn to Women’s Page instead and start to fill in something called a Stress Quiz.
Do you find you suffer from any of the following?
a. Sleeplessness
b. Irritability
For God’s sake, what is it now? Damn mobile. It’s Rod Task from the office.
“Katie, I hear the final with Moo Moo went great.”
“Momo.”
“Right. Think you girls should stick together, go after some more ethical accounts.”
Rod says he needs to access a Salinger file but he can’t get into my computer. Wants my password.
“Ben Pampers.”
“Pampas? Didn’t know you had a thing for the Argies, Katie.”
“What?”
“Pampas. South American grasslands, right?”
“No. P A M P E R S. It’s a kind of—er, cosmetic.”
When did you last find time to read a book?
a. Within the last month
b. Not since—
Mobile again. My mother. “Is it a busy time, Kath love?”
“No, it’s fine, Mum.”
I lie back on the headrest and prepare for a long conversation. Can hardly tell my mother
that busy no longer means what busy meant in her day. Busy isn’t a morning with the washtub and a cheese sandwich for lunch before collecting the kids from school. Busy has got busy since my childhood; busy has gone global.
My mother thinks some disaster has happened if I don’t return a phone call from her within twenty-four hours. It’s hard to explain that the only chance to return the call will be when a disaster isn’t happening, stormy being the prevailing climate, with surprise outbreaks of calm.
Mum says she just rang to check how Emily’s getting on at school since her friend Ella left.
Bad moment. I had no idea Ella had left. Haven’t been in to school since I started preparing for the final. “Oh, fine. Really, she’s been great about it. And she’s doing brilliantly at ballet.” Enter a tunnel. Line cuts out.
The tightening knot in my stomach makes it hard to focus on the Stress Quiz. When did I start lying to my mother? I don’t mean the obligatory daughter-mother falsehoods—“Eleven at the latest; never tried it; three Cokes; but everyone’s wearing them; he slept on the floor; yes, a friend of Deb’s; no, not overdrawn; in the sale, yes, an absolute bargain; fine, couldn’t be better.”
Those lies aren’t really lies at all but mutual protection. When you’re young your mother shields you from the world because she thinks you’re too young to understand, and when she’s old you shield her because she’s too old to understand—or to have any more understanding inflicted on her. The curve of life goes: want to know, know, don’t want to know.
What I’m talking about here is the lies to my mother about being a mother. I tell her Emily has coped well with the departure of her best friend, even though I haven’t heard about it. I’d rather Mum thought I was a failure at work than a stranger to my children. She thinks I have it all and she’s so pleased for me. I can’t tell her, can I? It would be like finding out that after Cinderella got to live in the palace, the Prince put her back on hearth-cleaning duty.
7:47 P.M. THE CLOISTERS HOTEL, YORK. I ring my mother back. She sounds breathless. With a little gentle prompting from me she admits that, yes, she has been feeling a bit under the weather lately, which, translated from Motherspeak, means she has lost all feeling in her limbs and her vital organs are shutting down. Oh, God.
I don’t even bother to replace the handset before keying in the number of my sister, Julie, who lives just round the corner from Mum. Steven, Julie’s eldest, answers the phone. He reports that his mum’s watching The Street, but he’ll get her.
Julie’s tone still takes me by surprise: the adoring lisp of my little sister has been supplanted in recent years by something tense and grudging; whenever we speak these days, she seems to be spoiling for a fight about a grievance that’s too painful to have a name.
I got away and Julie didn’t. Julie fell pregnant and got married when she was twenty-one and had three kids by the time she was twenty-eight and I didn’t. Julie’s husband is an electrician and mine is an architect. Julie lives a mile away from our mother and tries to look in every other day and I don’t. Julie, who is good with her hands, brings in a bit of extra cash by making tiny curtains and bits of furniture for a local dolls’ house company and I, who am good with my head, don’t. (In fact, I probably invest my clients’ money indirectly in the Far Eastern sweatshops that are driving Julie’s employer out of business.) Julie has been abroad once—Rimini, unlucky with the weather—whereas it is not unknown for me to go twice in a single week. And none of this is anybody’s fault, but we exist now, my sister and I, in an atmosphere of guilt and blame.
I ask Julie if she thinks Mum should go and see a doctor, and her sigh blows across the Pennines, flattening trees in its path. “Mum won’t listen to me,” she says. “If you’re that bothered, why don’t you get up here and tell her yourself?”
I’m explaining what my schedule has been like when Julie jumps in: “Anyway, it’s not physical. She’s had some bother with men coming round to the flat. Said they were after money Dad owed them.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
From my sister’s living room floats the mournful theme tune of Coronation Street. Julie and I both loved that soap when we were kids; there was a period when we fought furiously over the affections of Ray Langton, a mechanic with dark wavy hair, until he got squashed under one of his own cars. I haven’t seen it in twenty years.
“I’ve left a couple of messages on that machine, Kath,” says my sister, “but you’re never there, are you?”
8:16 P.M. The conference is for dot.com entrepreneurs, or what’s left of them. The guys who persuaded the City that they could read the future turned out to have been talking crystal balls. You wouldn’t believe how much venture capital has been thrown at firms who were going to sell designer clothes on the Net. But guess what? People prefer to go to shops and try stuff on. Women fund managers were a lot less badly burned in the meltdown: as always, we were better at evaluating risk–reward; we spent far less on untried stock than our male colleagues. People said we were lucky; I don’t agree. I think it’s innate. Women like to have some reliable staples in the cupboard, to keep those small mouths fed when the saber-toothed tiger is blocking the entrance to the cave.
Unpacking my suitcase before going down to dinner, I find a large envelope marked DO NOT OPEN TILL SUNDAY! in Richard’s handwriting. I open it: my Mother’s Day cards. One is a print of Ben’s hands in red paint. I half-smile half-grimace at the thought of the mess that must have attended its making. Emily’s has a drawing of me on the front. I am wearing a crown and holding a green cat and I am so tall I dwarf my nearby palace. Inside, she has written: I love my Mummy. Love is speshal it makes my hart sparKle and tresha appea.
I can’t believe it. Have forgotten Mother’s Day. Mum will never forgive me. Dial Reception. “Can you get me a number for Interflora?”
To: Kate Reddy
From: Jack Abelhammer
Will you come to NYC? Or should I. Stop.
Thinking about you. Stop.
* * *
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
Don’t. Stop.
* * *
MUST REMEMBER
Get dishwasher fixed. Stair carpet? Fund transitions to be arranged—no fuck-ups! Call Jill. Application form for nursery for Ben? Emily schools NOW! Remind Rich to get cash out for baby-sitter. Pay JUANITA! Change computer password. Paula’s birthday, damn! George Michael tickets? Book spa treatment. Call Dad and tackle about his debts. Visit Mum! Buy Sinatra CD. Ginseng for better memory or ginko thingy?
20
The Way We Were
3:39 A.M. Woken by the doorbell. It’s Rob, our neighbor from three doors down. Says he heard a noise and saw a group of lads by our car, but he shouted and they ran off. Richard goes out to inspect the damage. Side window completely smashed in, forked-lightning crack across the back one. Of course, the car alarm didn’t go off. The car alarm, usually triggered by a cat’s breath, is hopelessly mute when actual burglary is taking place.
Rich goes out to tape up the windows while I get on the phone to Prontoglass 24-Hour Service.
“Sorry, your call is held in a queue. Due to demand. Please hold while we try to connect you.”
Demand? What demand? It’s four o’clock in the bloody morning.
“If you know the extension you require, please press one. If you wish to speak to an operator, please press two.”
I press 2.
“Please hold while we try to connect you; your call will be answered shortly. Thank you for choosing Prontoglass! If you wish to speak to an operator, please press three.”
I press 3.
“Sorry, your call cannot be taken at the moment. Please try later!”
Think of all the time that must be wasted every day in those echoing antechambers where calls wait. Hell, contrary to what Sartre said, is not other people, hell is trying to get through to other people while listening to seven minutes of Vivaldi played on panpipes. I decide to get dresse
d and crack in early to some work. This is a good time of day to talk to Tokyo. But as I’m fumbling with my blouse buttons in the still-dark bedroom, there is a yell from above. When I go up, the baby is standing in his cot remonstrating with the monster who has dragged him from sleep. He jabs a debater’s accusing forefinger at his invisible assailant.
“I know, sweetheart, I know. Some bad men have woken us all up.”
Ben is so spooked he won’t go back to sleep. I lift him onto the sofa bed which is just next to the cot and lie down beside him.
“Roo,” he moans. “Roo.” So I get up and fetch the scruffy little kangaroo and tuck it under his arm.
Babies have this magic spot between their brows. If you stroke your finger down over it, and along the ridge of the nose, their eyes close automatically like a human roller blind. My boy hates sleep; it separates him from the life he relishes, but he starts to drift off, the indigo eyes emptying of thought. I lie there contemplating the cracks on the ceiling around the light fitting where bits of plaster are starting to peel off. Even my ceiling has stress eczema. I imagine a finger stroking my own brow and, clothes wrinkling around me, I tumble into a crowded dream.
6:07 A.M. Richard comes into Ben’s room to relieve me. Baby is splayed flat out like a puppy. We talk in whispers.
“I did say buying the Volvo was a bad idea, Kate.”
“Some little bastards break into our car and it’s my fault?”
“No, just that round here it’s clearly a provocation, isn’t it?”
“Come off it, Rich, even Tony Benn doesn’t think property’s theft anymore.”
He laughs. “And who was it who once said crime is the just punishment for an unjust society?”
“I never said that. When did I say that?”
“Shortly before taking possession of your first open-top Golf, Mrs. Engels.”
My turn to laugh. Encouraged, Rich starts kissing my hair and puts an exploratory hand down my front. Even when you’re not in the mood, startling how quickly nipples stiffen to iced gems. Rich is just pulling me down onto the Winnie the Pooh rug when Ben sits bolt upright, gives his parents a how-could-you look and then points to himself. (Did I mention that babies are antisex too? You’d think they’d have some nostalgia for the act that made them; instead they appear to have an alarm to see off the threat of rivals, wailing on cue as though their cry was wired up to your bra clasp.) Rueful Rich sweeps up his son and goes down to an early breakfast.
I Don't Know How She Does It Page 18