I Don't Know How She Does It

by Allison Pearson

  Reason to Give Up Work: Because I can’t afford to go out to work anymore!

  When do we get to the fun bit of our lives? The bit where you say, “Ah! so this is what the struggle and pain was all for!”

  Lunch Thurs?????

  PS: Must try to put more positive spin on life. I do know there are people out there living in abject poverty w no shoes etc.

  * * *

  To: Debra Richardson

  From: Kate Reddy

  Well, I’m GLAD she’s gone. Good for you confronting her. You’ll find someone soon—don’t panic! Aussie girls are very good, I hear. Will send numbers of agencies and ask Paula if she knows anyone looking for job. Today am top dog in office. Total fluke.

  If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

  And sell the second as though it were the first

  —THEN you can be a Woman, my girl!

  And my reward? Trip to Germany on cut-price flight—airline called Go or Slo or No or something.

  Auf Wiedersehen, pet. Can we rearrange lunch? Sorry, all love K xxxxx

  * * *

  To: Kate Reddy

  From: Candy Stratton

  O fuck. Am pregnant.

  * * *

  I immediately look across the office to where Candy sits. Sensing my glance she looks up from her work and gives a little wave. It’s like a child’s wave, funny and sad at the same time.

  * * *

  CANDY IS PREGNANT. Not just late, but pregnant. Four and a half months gone at least, according to the clinic in Wimpole Street where she went yesterday. Her cycle had been pretty irregular for a couple of years—the drugs, most probably—and she hadn’t noticed anything unusual, except a little extra weight and a tenderness in her breasts which she put down to some ambitious sex with Darren, the black-run specialist from Treasury, on her recent skiing trip.

  “I’m gonna get rid of it.”

  “Fine.”

  We are in Corney and Barrow, perched on our usual stools overlooking the arena where the ice rink sits in winter. Candy has a flute of champagne, I have a bottle of Evian.

  “Don’t do that agreeing shit when you don’t mean it, Katie.”

  “I’m just saying I’ll support whatever decision you take.”

  “Decision? It’s not a decision, honey, it’s a fucking disaster.”

  “I just think—well, a late abortion, it’s not much fun.”

  “And bringing up a kid by yourself for twenty years, that’s fun?”

  “It’s not impossible, and you’re thirty-six.”

  “Thirty-seven on Tuesday, actually.”

  “Well, you’re running out of time.”

  “I’m getting rid of it.”

  “Fine.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I know your nothings, Kate.”

  “It’s just that I think you could really regret it, that’s all.”

  She grinds out her cigarette and lights up another. “There’s this place in Hammersmith. Not cheap, but they do them real late, no questions asked.”

  “Fine. I’ll come with you.”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’m not letting you go by yourself.”

  “It’s not a baby shower, it’s a fucking abortion.”

  I study my friend’s face. “What if it cries?”

  “What are you, Katie, some kind of pro-life nut?”

  “It has been known for a fetus to cry at that stage of development. I know you’re tough, but that would kill me.”

  “Can we get another glass over here?” She gestures to the barman. “So, go on, explain it to me.”

  “What?”

  “Kids.”

  “I can’t. You have to feel it for yourself.”

  “Come on, Kate, you can sell anything to anybody. Try.”

  The look on her face. Such a Candy look, defiant and bruised at the same time, the look of a seven-year-old who has fallen out of a tree she’s been told not to climb and doesn’t want to cry even though it really hurts. I want to put my arms round her, but she’d bat a hug away rather than let on how much she needs it. The only way to get her to buy anything is to make it sound like an opportunity she’d be a fool to turn down.

  “You know the two days when I gave birth to my babies?”

  She nods.

  “Well, if I could only keep two days from the whole of my life, those are the days I would keep.”

  “Why?”

  “Awe.”

  “Awe?” Candy detonates one of her big bad laughs. “You can’t drink, you can’t smoke, you can’t go out nights, your tits look like two dead rodents, your pussy’s stretched wider than the fucking Holland Tunnel and she offers me awe. Jeez, what are the other highlights, Mom?”

  No deal. “I have to go now, Cand. E-mail me the date and time and I’ll meet you there.”

  “I’m getting rid of it.”

  “Fine.”

  25

  Back to School

  7:41 A.M. “Okay, Emily, let’s go. Quick now. Mummy’s going to be late. Lunch box? Good. Library books? No. No, you can’t have plaits. Just no. Teeth? Oh, for heaven’s sake. Quickly do teeth please. Hurry up. And take the toast out of your mouth first. It’s not toast? I don’t want you eating Easter egg. . . . Well, Daddy shouldn’t have said that. I am not horrible. OK, let’s go.”

  First day back after the school holidays and the children are as bolshie and febrile as ponies before a gymkhana. Emily is using that goo-goo baby talk she regresses to when I’ve been away or am about to go again. It drives me mad.

  “Mama, who’s your best character in Bear an da Big Blue House?”

  “I don’t know. Er, Tutter.”

  “But Ojo is my bestest.” Emily crumples in disbelief at my treachery.

  “People don’t have to like the same things, Em. It’s good to like different things. For instance, Daddy likes silly Zoe on breakfast TV, and Mummy really doesn’t care for Zoe at all.”

  “She’s not called Zoe, she’s Chloe,” says Rich, not bothering to look up from the TV. “And for your information, Chloe has a degree in anthropology.”

  “Is that why she feels the need to go naked from the waist up?”

  “But why don’t you like Ojo, Mama?”

  “I do like Ojo, Em, I think he’s totally fantastic.”

  “She’s not naked, she just has remarkable self-supporting breasts.”

  “She’s not a boy. Ojo’s a girl.”

  8:01 A.M. I am bundling Em out of the house when Rich, who is still in a T-shirt and boxers, mooches into the hall and wonders when it would be convenient for him to go on a five-day wine-tasting course in Burgundy.

  Burgundy? Five days? Leaving me alone with the children and the markets bucking like the Disneyland roller coaster?

  “I can’t believe you’re asking me that now, Rich. Where on earth did you get such an idea?”

  “You. You gave it to me for Christmas, Katie. My present, remember?”

  Oh, God, it’s all coming back to me now. A moment of intense guilt masquerading as generosity. Must learn to suppress those till the impulse passes. I tell Rich that I’ll think about it, smile and file under TO BE FORGOTTEN.

  In the car, Em kicks the back of the passenger seat with absentminded fury. No point telling her off; she barely knows what she’s doing. Sometimes a five-year-old’s feelings are simply too big for their body.

  “Mama, I gotta idea.”

  “What’s that, sweetheart?”

  “How about if da weekends were weeks and da weeks were weekends.”

  As I wait for the lights to change, I have a scratchy sensation in my chest, as though a bird were in there trying to escape.

  “Den all da mummies and daddies could be wid dere children more.”

  “Emily, will you please talk properly? You’re not a baby anymore.”

  In the rearview mirror, I catch her eye and look away.

  “Mummy, my tummy hurts. Mummy, will you put m
e to bed tonight? Are you putting me to bed tonight?”

  “Yes, I promise.”

  * * *

  I CANNOT IMAGINE what I was thinking when I let Alexandra Law, Abbess among Mother Superiors, sign me up for the Parent Teachers Association. No, that’s not true, I know exactly what I was thinking: I was thinking that just for one hour in some underlit overheated classroom I could pretend that I’m like any other mother. When the chair makes a reference to the absentee caretaker, I want to give a knowing little smile. I want to groan when someone brings up the matter of the summer fete—that time of year again already!—and I want to breathe that fuggy companionable air. And afterwards, when we’ve voted on a computer levy and plans to improve the sports facilities, I want to clasp my fingers round a white plastic cup containing a boiling orange beverage and I want to refuse a Hobnob, patting my waist significantly, and then I’ll say, “Oh, go on then!” as though succumbing to a chocolate biscuit was the most reckless, heady thing I’d done for a very long time.

  But, realistically, what were the chances of my making the PTA meeting at 6:30 on a Wednesday night? Alexandra described 6:30 as “after work,” but what kind of work lets you go before 6:30 these days? Teaching, obviously, but even teachers have Himalayas of marking to do. When I was a child, there were fathers who still came home in time for the family’s evening meal, dads who, in the summer months, would mow the lawn while it was still light and water the sweet peas in the dusk. But that age—the age of working to live instead of living to work—feels far away in a land where district nurses arrive by Morris Traveller and televisions glow like embers at the back. I don’t know anyone at the office who eats with their kids during the week now.

  No, it really wasn’t realistic to sign up for the PTA, and three months after joining I have yet to attend a single meeting. So when I drop Emily off at school I try to avoid bumping into Alexandra Law. Easier said than done. Alexandra is harder to avoid than the NatWest Tower.

  “Oh, Kate, there you are.” She barrels across the room. Her dress this morning is so densely floral it looks as though she has run into an armchair at speed. “We were thinking of sending out a search party. Ha-ha-ha! Still working full-time? Gosh. I don’t know how you do it. Oh, Diane, I was just saying, we don’t know how she does it, do we?”

  Diane Percival, mother of Emily’s classmate Oliver, extends a thin tanned hand with a sapphire the size of a sprout on the second finger. I immediately recognize the type. One of those wives, tensed like longbows, who have a full-time career keeping in shape for their husbands. They exercise, they get their hair done twice a week, they wear full makeup to play tennis and, when that is no longer enough, they willingly submit to the surgeon’s knife. “Those rich stay-home mums are jogging for their lives,” Debra says, and she’s right. These women are not in love, they are in fear—fear that the husband’s love will slip away and land on some replica of their younger selves.

  Like me, they are in asset management, but my assets are most of the world’s resources and their asset is themselves—a lovely product but threatened with diminishing returns. Don’t get me wrong. When the time comes I’ll probably have my neck lifted to the back of my ears and, like the Dianes of this world, I’ll have it done to please someone; the difference is, that someone will be me. However much I sometimes don’t want to be Kate, I really really don’t want to be Diane.

  I have never actually spoken to Diane Percival before, but this does not stop me going cold at the very thought of her. Diane is the mother who sends notes. Notes to invite your child to a play date, notes to thank your child for coming to a play date (It was nothing, really). Last week, in a spectacular burst of note one-upmanship, Diane actually sent a note from Oliver thanking Emily for an invitation to tea. In what kind of life is it possible to send a note acknowledging an event of almost no significance, which will feature fish fingers and peas and has yet to take place? Deprived of office hierarchies, many of the mothers at my daughter’s school have set about inventing meaningless tests whose sole purpose is that other mothers with better things to do can be seen to fail them.

  “Thank you for your thank-you note. I look forward to receiving your note acknowledging receipt of my note. Thank you and get lost.”

  8:19 P.M. NOVALIS HOTEL, FRANKFURT. Shit. I won’t be able to put Emily to bed tonight after all. Meeting with German client was brought forward and I had to get on the next plane. It went as well as can be expected. I blagged and blagged and I think I bought us a couple more months, by which time we may have been able to turn around the fund’s performance. Back at the hotel, I pour myself a large drink and have just got into the bath when the phone rings. Christ, what now? For the first time in my life, I pick up the bathroom extension: a cream phone in its cradle on the wall next to the towel rail. It’s Richard. There is something different about his voice. “Darling, I’m afraid I have some sad news. Robin just rang.”

  26

  Death of a Mother

  JILL COOPER-CLARK DIED PEACEFULLY at home in the small hours of Monday morning. She was forty-seven. Diagnosed just after the children broke up from school last summer, the cancer swept through her like a forest fire. The surgeons went in first, and after them a SWAT team of pharmacologists and radiotherapists, all trying to contain the blaze. But the cancer was unquenchable: breasts, lungs, pancreas. It was as though Jill’s energy—she was the most prodigiously energetic person I’ve ever met—was being used against her; as if the life force itself could be hijacked and redeployed in the fell purposes of death. The last time I saw her was at the annual Edwin Morgan Forster party, a zillion-dollar bash on an Arabian theme with real sand and an angry camel. Wearing a turban to hide her tufted baldness, Jill was, as usual, making me laugh.

  “Slash and burn, Kate, you’d hardly believe how bloody primitive the treatment is. I feel like a medieval village they’re razing to the ground. Only one would rather be pillaged by Vikings than an oncologist, don’t you think?”

  Before the treatment, Jill had dense, springy auburn hair and that Celtic top-of-the-milk skin with a sprinkling of cinnamon freckles. Three babies—all hefty boys—had not managed to weigh down the coltish body of the sometime netball Goal Attack. Robin said that to get the full measure of his wife you had to see her tennis backhand: just when you thought it was all over, when there was no possibility of the ball being returned, she would uncoil and whip it down the line. I watched her do it at the Cooper-Clark place in Sussex two summers ago, and when she struck the ball, Jill let out a defiant, joyous, “Ha!” I think we were all waiting for her to pull that stroke on the cancer.

  Jill is survived by her three sons and by her husband, who has just stepped out of the lift. I hear the smart rap of his black Lobbs across the central square of beech that might be used for tea-dancing if this were another, gentler, kind of business. We are both in the office appallingly early, Robin to catch up, me to get ahead. He rustles around in his room, coughing, opening and closing a drawer.

  I take him in a mug of tea and he starts. “Oh, hello, Kate. Look, I’m so sorry, leaving you to manage alone. I know how much hassle it is and on top of the Salinger stuff. But after the funeral I’ll be all yours.”

  “Don’t worry. Everything’s under control.” A lie. I want to ask how he is, but that early-warning system of his, the one that sees off painful personal questions, is on red alert. So I ask something else. “How are the boys?”

  “Well, we’re luckier than a lot of people,” says Robin, switching smoothly into Head of Investment mode. “You know Tim’s at Bristol now, Sam’s doing GCSEs and Alex is nearly nine. It’s not as though they’re little boys anymore who really—um, need a mother in the way that younger boys do actually need their mothers.” And then he makes a noise that no one has ever heard in the offices of Edwin Morgan Forster before. Halfway between a bark and a moan, it is barely human—or maybe all too human—and I never want to hear it again.

  He pinches the bridge of his nose for a few
furious seconds and then turns back to me. “Jill left this,” he says, handing over a sheaf of paper. Twenty pages of close-typed script, it bears the title YOUR FAMILY: HOW IT WORKS!

  “Everything’s in there,” he says, shaking his head in wonder. “She even tells me where to find the bloody Christmas decorations. You’d be amazed how much there is to remember, Kate.”

  No, I wouldn’t.

  FRIDAY, 12:33 P.M. If I leave the office now, I will make it to Jill’s funeral in Sussex at three o’clock with plenty of time to pick up a sandwich on the way to the station. Momo and I are going through some stuff for another final. Momo asks if I knew Mr. Cooper-Clark’s wife and I tell her Jill was an amazing person.

  Momo wrinkles her little nose. “But she didn’t work, did she?”

  I look at Momo’s face—what is she: twenty-four, twenty-five? Young enough not to know what women put up with before her; young enough to take her own freedom for granted. Calmly I say, “Jill was fast-track civil service until Sam, her second, was two years old. She’d have been running the Home Office by now, but she decided to run her own home instead. She just didn’t think that she and Robin could both have ballbreaking jobs without the children being affected. She said she tried to believe it was possible, but her heart wouldn’t let her.”

  Momo bends down to put something in the bin and out of the window I can see the pigeon, her feathers puffed out like a crinoline over the eggs. Daddy pigeon is nowhere to be seen. Where is he?

  “Oh, how sad,” says Momo. “I mean, what a waste to end up doing nothing with your life.”

  1:11 P.M. If I leave the office right this minute, I should make it to the train.

  1:27 P.M. Am running out of the office when Robin’s secretary hands me Jill’s family memo; he’s forgotten it. I sprint to Cannon Street. By the time I reach the river, lungs are hoarse, beads of sweat cascading over my breasts like a broken necklace. Stumble on steps to the station and gash left knee of tights. Damn. Damn. Dash across station concourse, skid into Knickerbox and grab first pair of black tights I see. Tell startled girl to keep the change. At the barrier, the guard grins and says, “Too late, love.” Swerve round the barrier, board accelerating train pursued by guard. Through the window, London recedes with surprising speed, its gray circuitry soon blurring into deep country. I can hardly bear to look at the spring: so ear-splittingly green, so childishly hopeful.