I Don't Know How She Does It

by Allison Pearson

  * * *

  TRY TO DOZE OFF AGAIN, but I can’t sleep for thinking how Richard and I have changed. First time we met was fifteen years ago at university; I was picketing Barclays Bank and he was opening an account there. I shouted something about South Africa—How dare you invest in brutality?—and Rich walked over to our righteous huddle and I handed him a leaflet, which he studied politely.

  “My, that does sound bad,” he said, before inviting me for coffee.

  Richard Shattock was the poshest man I had ever met. When he spoke, he sounded as though Kenneth Branagh had swallowed Kenneth More. Forearmed with the knowledge that all public schoolboys were emotionally stunted berks, I was unclear what to do when it became clear that this one was capable of more affection than I had ever known. Rich didn’t want to save the world like my idealistic friends; he just made it a better place simply by being in it.

  We made love for the first time six days later in his college room under the eaves. The sun was falling in a dusty gold column through the skylight as he solemnly unpinned my Cyclists Against the Bomb badge and said, “I’m sure the Russians will sleep more soundly, Kate, for knowing you have passed your Cycling Proficiency Test.”

  Had I ever laughed at myself before? Certainly the sound that came out that night was rusty with lack of use, a stopped-up spring gurgling into life. “Your Bournville chocolate laugh,” Richard called it, “because it’s dark and bitter and northern and it makes me want to eat you.” It’s the sound I still like best: the sound of when we were us.

  I remember how much I loved his body, but even more I loved the way my body felt in relation to his—for every straight edge a curve—the vertebrae down his back like rocky steps down into a cave of pleasure. By day we cycled across the Fens and shouted “Hill!” whenever we felt the slightest incline, but at night we explored another terrain.

  When Rich and I first started sleeping together—I mean actually sleeping, not having sex—we would lie in the middle of the bed face-to-face, close enough to feel the gusts of each other’s warm nighttime breath. My breasts would be pushed against his chest and my legs—I still can’t figure this out—disappeared over and under his like a mermaid’s tail. When I think of us in bed back then, I think of the shape of a sea horse.

  Over time we began to face outwards. You could probably date that, our first separation, to the purchase of a king-size bed in the late eighties. And then, with the arrival of our first child, the battle for sleep began. Bed became a place you sank into rather than dived into. We who had slipped in and out of consciousness as easily as we slipped in and out of each other—entrances and exits blurred by kissing—were now jealously guarding our place of rest. My body shocked me by bristling at anything that threatened to take away its remaining strength. A stray knee or elbow was enough to spark a boundary war. I remember starting to notice how loud Rich’s sneezes were, how eccentrically articulated. Har-chew! he went. Har-chew!

  When we were still students we had traveled round Europe by train, and one night we wound up in a small hotel in Munich where we collapsed in giggles on the bed. It looked like a double, but when you pulled the cover back it turned out to be two mattresses, divided and united by a thin wooden strip which made any meeting in the middle an effort rather than an inevitability. It all felt so Teutonic. “You be East Germany and I’ll be West,” I remember saying to Rich as we lay there on our separate halves in the light of the streetlamp. We laughed, but in time I came to wonder whether the Munich arrangement was the true marriage bed: practical, passionless, putting asunder what God had joined together.

  7:41 A.M. After breakfast, Ben, wearing a bib like a Jackson Pollock, is terribly clingy. Paula peels him off me when Winston arrives to drive me to work. “All right, sweetheart, it’s all right,” I hear Paula say as I pull the door behind me.

  Sitting in the back of Pegasus, I try to read the FT to bring myself up to speed for my presentation, but I can’t concentrate. There is music playing, a jazz piano arrangement of something I can almost place—“Someone to Watch Over Me”? It sounds as though the pianist has smashed the tune into a thousand pieces and keeps throwing them into the air to see which way they land. The riffs are like a man shuffling a pack of cards, only instead of paper the cards are made of sound. Winston hums along, holding the main line of the tune and occasionally letting out a little whoop to salute the pianist for a particularly cunning resolution. This morning, my driver’s ease and pleasure feels like an insult, a rebuke. I want him to stop.

  “Do you think we could avoid the New North lights, Winston, and cut round the back? I’m not convinced this is the quickest way.”

  He doesn’t answer for a while but allows the track to finish. Then, with the final chord still thrumming in the air, he says, “You know, lady, where I come from it takes a long time to do things suddenly.”

  “Kate, my name is Kate.”

  “I know what your name is,” he says. “Way I see it, rushing around just a waste of time. Fly too fast, lady, and you pass your nest.”

  The laugh I laugh sounds darker than usual. “Well, I’m afraid that is the more leisurely perspective afforded to the driver of the minicab.”

  Winston doesn’t bite back at my snottiness, he just gives it a long gaze in the mirror and says thoughtfully, “You think I want to be you? You don’t even want to be you.”

  That’s it. “Look, I don’t pay you for psychotherapy. I pay you to get me to Broadgate in the shortest time possible, a feat which seems increasingly beyond you. If you don’t mind, I’ll get out here. It’s quicker to walk.”

  As I hand over the twenty and Winston digs into his pocket for change, he begins to sing:

  “There’s a somebody I’m longing to see

  I hope that he

  Turns out to be

  Someone to watch over me.”

  8:33 A.M. OFFICES OF EDWIN MORGAN FORSTER. Shoot out of lift straight into Celia Harmsworth.

  “Something on your jacket, dear?” smirks the head of Human Resources.

  “Just back from the cleaners, actually.” I glance down at my shoulder to see a smeary mess, an epaulette of Ben’s banana porridge. No, God, how can you do this to me?

  “I’m amazed how you manage this job, Katharine,” coos Celia, clearly delighted at further proof that I can’t.

  (Celia is one of those spinsters who adored being the only woman in a man’s world; it was a license to feel pretty before girlies like me showed up and ruined her monopoly.)

  “Must be such a struggle with all those kiddies,” she offers helpfully. “I was saying to Robin Cooper-Clark when you were away for—half term, was it?—I don’t know how she does it.”

  “Two.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Two. All those kiddies. I have two of them. That’s one less than Robin has.”

  Turn on my heel, walk over to desk, shrug off stained jacket, shove in bottom drawer. Incredible noise from the window. Out on the ledge, the pigeons have decided to move in together. The male is sitting there with a twig in his mouth looking faintly foolish and disbelieving. I recognize the expression. It’s the look Rich gives when I bring home a flatpack of shelves for self-assembly. The female, meanwhile, is busy forming a heap of other twigs into a raftlike structure roughly the size of a dinner plate. Oh, this is great, now they’re building a nest.

  “Guy, did you get onto the Corporation about the hawk man? Damn pigeons are about to start a breeding program out there.”

  I check my neck in handbag mirror for any Ben bites—no, all clear—and then I stalk coolly into meeting with Robin Cooper-Clark and other senior managers to begin my presentation. It goes remarkably well. All eyes in the room are glued on me, especially those of the bastard Chris Bunce. Am obviously starting to command serious respect: the tactic of behaving like a man, never mentioning the children, etc., is clearly paying off.

  As I switch from slides to overheads, it suddenly occurs to me that I am the only person in the
room without a penis. Not a good thought to have right now, Kate. Can we not think about dicks in a gathering of seventeen men? Talking of which, do they have to stare at me quite so intently? Look down. Am wearing red Agent Provocateur demitasse bra under white voile shirt, grabbed from chest of drawers in half-dark at 4:30. Oh, Jesus, I look like Pamela Anderson at the Oscars.

  11:37 A.M. Sit in ladies’ loo with cheek pressed up against the cubicle wall to cool furious blush. Tiled in black marble riddled with white stars, the wall is like a map of the universe. I feel as though I’m being sucked into deep space and more than happy to go there. How about disappearing into a black hole for a few millennia till the memory of public humiliation fades? I used to smoke in here when things got desperate; since I gave up I sing under my breath. “I am strong. I am invincible. I am Woman.”

  It’s a Helen Reddy song from when I was at school. I loved the fact that she had the same name as me and she sounded—well, just so full of it, so confident that you could deal with anything life threw at you. At college, when Debra and I were getting ready for a night out, we used to play the record over and over to psych ourselves up. Dance round the room, playing catch with Deb’s Action Man. (After his leg broke off, Deb said we’d have to call him Inaction Man “after all our useless husbands.”)

  “Oh, yes, I am wise,

  But it’s wisdom born of pain,

  Yes, I’ve paid the price,

  But look how much I’ve gained!

  I am strong. I am in-vin-ci-ble.

  I am Woman.”

  Do I believe in equality between the sexes? I’m not sure. I did once, with all the passionate certainty of someone very young who knew absolutely everything and therefore nothing at all. It was a nice idea, equality—noble, indisputably fair. But how the hell was it supposed to work? They could give you good jobs and maternity leave, but until they programmed a man to notice you were out of toilet paper the project was doomed. Women carry the puzzle of family life in their heads, they just do. As a mother, I see that more and more clearly. Every night on the way home from the City, I watch the women scurrying along in the Lucozade light of the streetlamps, bags of shopping balancing briefcases, or twitching at bus stops like overwound clockwork toys.

  Not long ago, my friend Philippa told me that she and her husband had drawn up a will. Phil said she wanted a clause stipulating that, in the event of her death, Mark would promise to cut the children’s fingernails. He thought she was joking. She wasn’t joking.

  One Saturday last autumn, I got back from a Boston trip to find Richard in the hall, all set to take our two out to a party. Emily, hair uncombed, appeared to have a dueling scar on one cheek—it was ketchup from lunch. Ben, meanwhile, was bent double, wearing something very small and dotted in apricot that I didn’t recognize. On closer inspection, it turned out to be an outfit belonging to one of Emily’s dolls.

  When I suggested to my husband that our offspring looked as though they were going out to beg on the Underground, Rich said that if I was going to be critical I should do it myself.

  I was going to be critical. I would do it myself.

  To: Candy Stratton

  From: Kate Reddy

  Simply marvelous day so far. Have just shown breasts in error to head of investment & the troops. Chris Bunce came up to me afterwards and said:

  “You were a total pro in there, Kate, with knobs on.” Laughed like a drain and said something about putting me on his website. WHAT WEBSITE??

  Plus Abelhammer has invited me for rendezvous in New York.

  Why men all bull and cock?

  * * *

  To: Kate Reddy

  From: Candy Stratton

  Hon, don’t worry, U hve trrifc tits. Penis Envy is So Yesterday. Hallo Boob Envy!

  Bunce is piece of shit. His website will be Jerkoff Central.

  Hope U R going to meet up with the Hammer Man in NYC. He sounds Gr8.

  I H8 U when U act British. Candida Thrush xxx

  * * *

  1:11 P.M. Lunch with Robin Cooper-Clark and a new client, Jeremy Browning, at Tartuffe. Located in the penthouse of a building overlooking Royal Exchange, the restaurant has the kind of hush that, outside a monastery, only money can buy. This must be the silence they call golden. The low seats are scooped out of toffee leather and the waiters arrive on castors. The menu is my least favorite kind: chops for chaps with no concessions to the female palate. When I ask our waiter if there’s a salad I could have he says, “Mais oui, madame,” and offers me something with gésiers in it.

  I nod uncertainly and Robin gives a little cough and says, “Roast throat, I believe.” How can anyone swallow a throat?

  I say that I’d like the salad, but could they please hold the throats. On Robin’s lips there is an Alec Guinness ghost-of-a-smile, but the waiter is not amused. Red blood is the currency of the neighborhood.

  “Any relation of the Worcestershire Reddys?” Jeremy asks, as Robin consults the wine list. Our client must be in his early fifties, but he’s in good shape and he knows it: ski-bronzed from the neck up, gym-bulked shoulders, succulent with success.

  “No. I shouldn’t think so. I’m from a bit farther north.”

  “The Borders?”

  “No, more Derbyshire and Yorkshire. We moved about.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  Having established that I am no one worth knowing and no one who will know anyone worth knowing, our new client feels safe to blank me. Over the past decade, my country has become a classless society, but the news has been slow to reach the people who own it. For men like Jeremy, England still ends at Hyde Park, and then there is Scotland, where they go to kill things in August. The North, that great expanse of land between SW1 and Edinburgh which is best crossed by plane or at night in the sleeper car of a fast train, is a foreign country to them. Jeremy Browning’s forebears may have conquered India, but you wouldn’t get them going to anywhere as remote as Wigan.

  Robin would never—could never—treat me as Jeremy does, but then he’s spent the last twenty years with Jill, who knows in her bones that snobs are a joke and that, in every sense, women mean business. I get a real kick out of watching my boss on these occasions. Convivial, clubbable and effortlessly smarter than any of his clients, he nonetheless has a way of making them feel as though they’re the captain of the winning team. Seeing me sidelined by the Browning version of events, he gently but firmly tries to draw me back into the conversation. “Now, Kate here is the high priestess of monetary policy; she’s really the person you need to explain the mysterious workings of the Federal Reserve.” And then, a few minutes later, when our guest has a mouth full of squab: “Actually, Jeremy, Kate’s funds delivered our best returns in the past six months, at what’s been a pretty bumpy time for equities by any standards, wouldn’t you say so, Kate?”

  I love him for it, but it’s no use. There are some men who will always prefer to deal with another man, any man, rather than a woman, and Jeremy Browning is one of them. I can see him struggling to place me: I’m not married to him, clearly I’m not his mother, I didn’t go to school with his sister and I’m sure as hell not going to go to bed with him. So what, he must be asking himself as he chews on his pigeon, is this girl doing here? What is she for?

  I’ve been observing this for more than ten years now and still I’m not sure I understand. Fear of the unknown? After all, Jeremy was packed off to a boys’ school at the age of seven; he went to one of the last all-male colleges; his wife, call her Annabel, stays home with the sons and heirs and, privately, he thinks anything else is some kind of crime against the natural order of things.

  “Sorry, could I possibly have my wine back?”

  Jeremy is tapping me on the sleeve. I realize that I have been pushing my neighbor’s glass towards the center of the table to prevent accidental spillage: a reflex from being with Emily and Ben.

  “Gosh, I’m terribly sorry. When you have children you always think people are going to knock things over.”
>
  “Oh, you have children?”

  “Yes, two actually.”

  “Not planning any more, I hope.”

  This hangs in the air—this presumption that my fertility is part of his fiefdom, that he’s paying me to be his alone, not to be carrying the young of a rival male. I feel like returning the compliment and kicking him so hard under the table that he’s unable to have any more kids of his own. But the phrase “crushed balls” tends not to look good on the client report.

  “Naturally,” I say, clearing a throat from my lettuce. “You will be my top priority, Jeremy.”

  To: Kate Reddy

  From: Jack Abelhammer

  Further to your communication on borrowing limits, I attach some thoughts on LOANS. Not my thoughts, I’m afraid, although they come pretty close to some of my own about the person who manages my fund.

  It is no gift I tender,

  A loan is all I can;

  But do not scorn the lender;

  Man gets no more from man.

  Oh, mortal man may borrow

  What mortal man can lend;

  And ’twill not end tomorrow,

  Though sure enough ’twill end.

  If death and time are stronger,

  A love may yet be strong;

  The world will last for longer

  But this will last for long.

  * * *

  To: Jack Abelhammer

  From: Kate Reddy