3:51 P.M. Try Harrods. Surely, they must have a Roo. They have everything, don’t they? A woman in the toy department says she may have something; she’ll just go and check in the next room if I can hang on. When she gets back, she describes something, but it sounds all wrong.
“No, I can’t have one with a baby. It’s an emergency....Australian, yes....I need one about eight inches long for tonight.”
“Kate, I didn’t know you cared.” I look up to see Rod Task leering down at me. Oh, God. “Sorry, Rod, I’m just looking for a kangaroo.”
“Great. I never thought you’d ask.”
There is a nasty snicker from Guy two desks away. When Rod is out of earshot, I tell him to get onto the Internet and start researching toy marsupials right away.
9:43 P.M. It takes two hours and forty-three minutes to persuade my son to go to sleep. All the substitute comforters I offer—lamb, polar bear, purple dinosaur, each of the Teletubbies in rotation—are hurled in a fury out of the cot.
“Roo,” he wails. “Roo!”
To get him to settle, I have to let him hold my electric toothbrush and then we sit in the blue chair with him sprawled over me, clutching my shirt like a baby monkey. At the bottom of each boy breath there is a sticky catch, like a tiny gate being opened in his lungs. Please God, let me find another Roo.
* * *
EVERYTHING WAS GOING WELL during Barbara and Donald’s visit—suspiciously well, I see that now. To the best of her ability, Barbara had complimented me on the kitchen. “I’m sure it will be lovely when it’s finished,” she said. But I smiled graciously throughout, even during tea with the children when Barbara turned to Donald and said, “Isn’t it funny? Emily looks like Richard when she smiles and Kate when she frowns!”
For dinner that night, we were having Italian. I had washed and dried a pile of arugula, the red peppers had been charred and then peeled with the same lavish care I used to bring to a scab on the knee in infants school. At the top of the oven, there was a leg of lamb, and at the bottom the potatoes, suffused with rosemary from my very own garden, were hunkering down nicely. I had even squeezed in a bath after the kids’ bedtime and put on a clean blouse and velvet skirt over which I wore the wipable Liberty print apron the in-laws gave me for Christmas.
Yes, I thought, surveying the scene at dinner, this is one of those rare times when life approaches the condition of color magazine. The domestic goddess entertaining her admiring parents-in-law in her lovely stylish home. Barbara had just asked me for the peppers recipe and then I saw it. Moving across the oak floor, the plump suede rear of a rat.
Etiquette books are unnaturally silent on the subject of rats at dinner parties. Do you
a. Laugh gaily and pretend the rat is a treasured pet?
b. Exclaim, Ah, there’s the main course! Nigel Slater says rodent’s the coming thing. Very good done the Vietnamese way, apparently?
c. Invite your guests to adjourn upstairs, ply them with as much drink as possible and put on a Burt Bacharach CD to drown out the sound from the kitchen where your husband is pursuing the rodent with your daughter’s Mary Poppins umbrella?
Richard and I went for c.
Downstairs, the rat holed up in the baby’s playpen, perhaps hoping to pass for a soft toy. Before long, though, it was doing frisky circuits of the kitchen. Barbara said that, come to think of it, she remembered feeling something running across her feet: she would need to take some aspirin immediately and go and lie down. Nobody was in the mood for my amaretto peaches in raspberry coulis. I suddenly had a very bad feeling about the clumps of raisins that had been appearing on the kitchen floor.
“Don’t get hysterical,” said Richard, after he had got the rat out of the patio door and into the garden. “Remember they’re more afraid of you than you are of them.”
This seemed unlikely. The rat triggered what I can only call rat dread—that back flip of the stomach every time you open a cupboard, not knowing whether you will come face-to-face with a face. That night, whiskers and paws scurried through my dreams.
* * *
MONDAY, 9:38 A.M. I have been fired by my own cleaner. In the annals of domestic humiliation, how high does that rate? When I came down this morning, I found Barbara and Juanita in an accusing huddle. My mother-in-law was tutting audibly as my cleaner mimed a rat scurrying along the worktop and pointed to parts of the kitchen made impassable by newspapers and toys. “It’s no wonder,” said Barbara. Although my mother-in-law is not a Spanish speaker, she was able to communicate with Juanita in the international female language of Disapproval.
“The rat man is on his way,” I announced loudly, to alert them to my presence and stop the exchange of further examples of my sluttishness.
At the sound of the pest’s name, Juanita unleashed a machine-gun burst of woe.
“If you leave food out, it will attract vermin,” volunteered Barbara.
“I do not leave food out,” I said, but she was already in the hallway where Donald was assembling the luggage. He gave me a rueful little wave.
When they had gone, Juanita told me she was very sorry, but she couldn’t take it anymore. This all communicated via operatic arm gestures and sobs. Here at long last was my chance to point out that one of the reasons the house was in such a mess was because my cleaner had been unable to clean it for the past two years, owing to a succession of ailments which I had reacted to with enormous sympathy because—oh, probably because I am from a background where you don’t expect to have anyone else tidying up after you and some sneaking shame is attached to the fact that you’re a woman who can’t keep her own house clean. (“Kate may be a whiz with figures,” Cheryl my sister-in-law once said, “but you should see the state of her skirting boards!”)
So did I give Juanita a piece of my mind there and then? Not exactly. I gave her all the cash I had in my purse, promised to send more in the post and said I would recommend her to some friends in Highgate who were looking for a cleaner.
MUST REMEMBER
Chase RAT MAN again! Hire new cleaner! Replacement Roo MUST. Proxy voting policy to be agreed with clients. Complete quarterly performance questionnaire. Meeting minutes do myself (Secretary Lorraine still off sick in heat wave). Prospect for gaining client in final just done with Momo blown by bloody awful June performance. Check competitors’ performance—perhaps theirs even worse? Conference call with Japanese office to discuss stocks. Sandals for Emily—or will be questioned by NSPCC over foot cruelty. Sugar Puffs, Panadol Extra. Cancel spa day.
31
Nanny Crisis
6:27 A.M. It’s still very early, but sitting out here in the garden I can tell it’s going to be a hot day. The air is glassy with the promise of heat. When I was away in the States, no one took care of the plants, so the snails have hoovered up my hosta and the pansies in the terra-cotta pots are practically desiccated. If you touch one it turns to purple ash. I planted that kind especially, too; it’s called heartsease. One day, when I have time, the garden will be beautiful. I am going to grow lobelias and camellias and bay and jasmine, and there will be carved stone troughs overflowing with heartsease.
I hear a yelp escape from a window high up the house. Like me, the children are finding it hard to sleep these warm nights. Ben already woke screaming around five when I was in the middle of some awful dream. You even dream differently in summer: fevered, tentacular dreams that pull you down towards thoughts you’d rather stayed buried. Anyway, when I went into his room, he was slithery with sweat, poor baby: slid through my arms like a seal pup. Took him into the bathroom, sponged him down—he’s suddenly afraid of his Piglet flannel for some reason—then changed him. Offered him a beaker of water and he was furious. “App-ul,” he demanded. “App-ul!”
How many times have I told Paula that he’s not allowed juice? In my mind, composed a major nanny bollocking, but Paula has been complaining of “women’s trouble” lately so could easily pull a sickie and the holidays are the worst possible time to find cover. D
amn. Damn.
7:32 A.M. I could tell right away from Paula’s voice that she wasn’t coming in. And me chairing the Global Asset Allocation Committee today because Robin Cooper-Clark’s away with his boys and Emily and Ben with no school or nursery to occupy them and the nanny’s not coming in. Great.
Traditionally a period of pleasure and relaxation, the summer holidays are the very worst time of the year for a working mother. Warm weather and careless days act as a constant rebuke. There are outings you wish you could join, cool paddling pools you would like to slip off your shoes and step into, ice-cream cones whose vanilla tributaries you would be more than happy to lick.
Paula exhales a long complicated sigh. Says she’s not been feeling that well for a while and the rat thing, of course, has been very upsetting. But she didn’t want to worry me because I Know You’re Busy, Kate. A classic nanny tactic, this: landing a preemptive strike before your own more powerful grievance has a chance to leave the ground. Even as I murmur mmm’s of sympathy, I am riffling through my mental Rolodex searching for someone who can take the children just for today (Richard is away presenting plans for a Sunderland crafts yurt).
First thought: Angela Brunt, my neighbor and leader of local Muffia. I start dialing her number but suddenly picture Angela’s Ford Anglia face, headlamps on full gleam, when it becomes clear that the “high flyer” across the road is emerging from the burning fuselage of her own selfishness to beg for help. No. Can’t possibly give her the satisfaction. Instead, I call Alice, my TV producer friend, and ask a favor. Could her nanny Jo possibly have Emily and Ben? I wouldn’t ask only I have this big meeting, and taking time off from EMF is practically illegal, and—
Alice cuts me off with a raucous I’ve-been-there yelp. Says it’s fine so long as I have no objections to Jo taking the kids swimming with her boys. At this point, I have no objection to Ben and Emily going parascending in Borneo, so long as I can get into the City and start preparing for my meeting.
7:43 A.M. Call Pegasus. Winston answers the phone. Why? Doesn’t Pegasus have any other drivers? I’m starting to wonder what kind of racket he’s running.
Winston says he’ll be fifteen minutes; I tell him I need him in four.
“See what I can do,” he says coolly.
I have a sudden and impossible longing to climb onto the lap of a large comforting person and be held there for—oh, twenty-five years should probably do the trick.
“Mummy?”
“What is it, Em?”
“Heaven’s a nice place, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Heaven’s a very nice place.”
“Is there a McDonald’s?”
“Where?”
“In Heaven?”
“God, no. I need to pack Ben’s wings.”
“For Heaven?”
“What? No. Water wings. You’re going swimming. You remember Nat and Jacob, don’t you?”
“Why doesn’t Heaven have McDonald’s, Mum?”
“Because. I’ve no idea. Because dead people don’t need to eat anything.”
“Why don’t dead people eat anything?”
“Ben, no. No, Benjamin. Sit down. Mummy will fetch you that juice in a—not on my dress!”
“Mummy, can I have my next birthday party in Heaven?”
“Emily, will you please be quiet.”
7:44 A.M. Winston has pulled up outside the house in a new chariot—new to him, practically fossilized to the rest of us. The Nissan Primera is hidden behind a cloud of its own dirt, but at least when you open the door it doesn’t rain rust on your clothes. I load the children into the back, clasp Ben on my knee, and with the free hand call a nanny agency on the mobile. A Sloaney girl, her voice designed to carry across stag-rich moors, says she would really like to help, but it’s a particularly bad time for temps.
“It’s the school holidays, you know.”
Yes, I know.
Everyone’s been snapped up ages ago, only she does have this new girl on the books. Croatian. Eighteen. English not her best thing, but really keen. Likes children.
Well, that’s a start. Rack brain trying to remember which side Croatia was on in Balkan massacres. Think they sided with the Nazis in the war and are the good guys now; maybe it’s the other way round. I say OK, I’ll interview her tonight. What’s her name?
“Ratka.”
Of course it is. Must remember to call rat man. Why didn’t he show up? Emily pats my leg urgently. She has been deep in conversation with our driver.
“Mummy, Winston says the nice thing about being in Heaven is if you’re hungry you can lean over and bite off a bit of cloud. Like candy floss. The angels make it.” She looks far happier with this explanation than any I have managed to come up with.
Alice lives in a gentrified house on the edge of Queen’s Park: she bought in the area before a four-bedroom terraced cost more than Colorado. Once inside, my daughter wanders off happily to play with Nat and Jake, but Ben takes one look at the unfamiliar Brio set and clings to my right leg like a sailor lashing himself to the mast in a Force 10. I need to get out of here fast, but I have to spend a few minutes humbling myself before Jo the nanny. Can see her eyeing the hysterical toddler and wondering what she’s got herself into. I end up having to shake him off me and run out of the room with his screams at my back.
Sitting in the back of Pegasus, I try to read the FT to bring myself up to speed for the meeting, but I can’t concentrate. Shake head fiercely to dislodge memory of Ben’s tears. I can see Winston studying me in the rearview mirror. We are at the Old Street roundabout before he finally speaks.
“How much they paying you, lady?”
“None of your business.”
“Fifty? A hundred?”
“Depends on my bonus. But this year there isn’t going to be any bonus. After June’s performance be lucky to keep my job, frankly.”
Winston bangs the sheepskin steering wheel with both hands. “You gotta be kidding. They got you every second of every minute of every day. You their slave, girl.”
“I can’t do very much about it, Winston. I’m what’s technically known as the main breadwinner.”
“Whoa.” He stamps on the brake to avoid a nun on a zebra crossing. “How your man feel about that? Kind of thing tend to make the guys feel a little small in the Johnson department.”
“Are you seriously suggesting that the size of my salary is shrinking my husband’s penis?”
“Well, it would account for why no one out there can’t make no babies no more, wouldn’t it? Fertility rate was doing just fine till women went out to work.”
“I think you’ll find that’s down to estrogen in the water.”
“I think you’ll find that’s down to estrogen in the office.”
Even from the back seat, I can tell he is grinning broadly, because his cheeks are stretched so taut they have rumpled up the skin under his ears.
“For God’s sake, Winston, this is the end of the twentieth century.”
He shakes his head and a sprinkling of gold dust fills the cab. Like a fairy godmother, Emily said, when she saw it. “Don’t matter what century it is,” he growls. “The clock in men’s head always set to the same time. Pussy time.”
“I thought we’d all grown up and got over that caveman nonsense.”
“That’s where people like you got it all wrong, lady. The women they outgrew it and the guys they just went along so they could keep getting the women to have sex with them. The guy, he just ask himself, What tune she want me to play now? and he play it. Here, try one of these.”
Winston chucks a tin at me. I recognize the round bronze container from childhood: travel sweets. Julie and I preferred the frosted pears, the ones that tasted the way bells would taste if you licked bells, but we always got given these—barley sugars. Mum swore that barley sugars kept motion sickness at bay. So for me the taste of barley sugar is now the taste of being sick—the paper bag with its grim cargo, the lurch onto the roadside, the wiping your hands on
the dead brown grass.
We have entered the City proper now, sweeping through the glass canyons where the heat hangs in a lilac haze. I open the sweets tin. Inside are six neatly rolled joints. Clearing my throat, I adopt the tone of a Radio 4 announcer. “Company policy is quite clear that the consumption of any illegal drugs on the premises of Edwin Morgan Forster is specifically forbidden. And...we’re nearly there so I’d better hurry up. Have you got a light, Winston?”
11:31 A.M. Research for my meeting hampered because the typeface of the Wall Street Journal refuses to keep still. All squirmy black lines, the Market Returns Page looks like the Ugly Bugs’ Ball.
Completely pathetic. Feel like a maiden aunt after a schooner of vicarage sherry. Motherhood—or abstinence brought on by motherhood—has wrecked my capacity to enjoy drugs of any kind except the occasional desperate slug of Calpol. I manage to walk into the meeting room OK, but once I’m inside the walls keep receding into infinite reflections of themselves like an Escher print. Every time I stand up to change a slide, I have to grab the edge of the table and tip my head slightly to one side to steady the horizon. Feel like a human spirit level.
When I open my mouth to address the twelve fund managers around the table, the voice that comes out sounds confident enough. But then I discover I have only a vague idea who’s talking and none at all about what she’s going to say next. It’s like being a ventriloquist of myself. Nonetheless, a profound feeling of relaxation enables me to disregard the opinions of my colleagues and make the investment choices that will become policy for the entire company starting tomorrow.
Bonds or equities? No problem. UK or Japan? Hell, only a fool would hesitate over that one.
Halfway through the meeting, Andrew McManus—Scots, rugger bugger, shoulders like a Chesterfield sofa—gives a self-important little cough and announces that he hopes all present will forgive him, but he has to slip away early because Catriona, his daughter, has this swimming gala and he promised her that Daddy would be there. Everyone around the table reacts as though this is the most normal thing in the world. The younger guys who think they may one day get around to having kids, but only when the Porsche Boxter comes complete with a nappy-changing shelf, don’t flinch. The other fathers bask in conspiratorial new-dad smugness. I see Momo, who is single and knows no better, mouth, “Sweeeet.” Even Celia Harmsworth composes her Wicked Queen features into an approximation of a smile and says, “Oh, how marvelous, Andrew! You’re so hands on!” as though McManus had singlehandedly driven the Dow up 150 points. (This is the same woman who, in December, tried to have me court-martialed following my trip to a school carol concert “during client time.”)
I Don't Know How She Does It Page 26