I Don't Know How She Does It

by Allison Pearson

  Five minutes later, when we’re stuck in our usual jam, he asks me if I know the story of Scipio. I shake my head.

  “OK, so this Roman general Scipio he had a dream. And in it he found a village which was built right next to this big waterfall. The sound from the waterfall was so bad you had to shout to make yourself heard. ‘How do you live with that sound all day?’ Scipio asked the head of the village over the roaring of this water. ‘What sound?’ the puzzled guy said.”

  Pegasus shudders forward a couple of inches, and when Winston hits the brake there is a sound like a cow dying.

  “And the moral of the story, please sir?”

  In the mirror, I see his grin, sly and full of relish. “Well, it’s like I think we all of us have this background noise and we’re so used to it we can’t hear it. But if you move far enough away you can hear again and you think, Jesus, that waterfall was making one helluva racket. How’d I live with that noise?”

  “Are you saying I have a waterfall, Winston?”

  He lets out that deep grainy laugh that I love. “Kate, girl, you got Niagara fucking Falls.”

  “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question, Winston?”

  As he shakes his head, the cab is filled with that gold dust once more. “Am I your main client?”

  “You the only one.”

  “I see. And how many drivers does Pegasus Cars have? Let me guess. You the only one?”

  “Yah. Gonna finish cabbing soon, though. Got my exams to do.”

  “Mechanical engineering?”

  “Philosophy.”

  “So you’re by way of being my chauffeur, my very own winged horse?”

  He honks the horn in joyous acknowledgment that this is so.

  “Did you know that chauffeurs are tax deductible and child care isn’t, Winston?”

  Another honk on the horn startles a group of suits on the pavement; they scatter like pigeons. “It’s a crazy fucking world out there, man.”

  “No, it’s a crazy fucking man’s world out there. Have you got change?”

  As I’m walking away from the cab, I’m just thinking how much I’m going to miss him when I hear a voice shout after me. “Hey, you need a getaway car, lady?”

  10:08 A.M. A call from Reception. They say there’s a man called Abelhammer waiting for me downstairs, and my heart actually tries to punch a hole through my chest wall. When I get downstairs, he is standing there with a large grin and two pairs of ice skates.

  I’m shaking my head as I move across the floor towards him. “No. I can’t skate.”

  “Yeah, but I can. Enough for both of us.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Later, when we are making our fourth circuit of the rink, Jack says, “All you have to do is lean on me, Kate. Is that so hard?”

  “Yes. It’s hard.”

  “Jesus, woman. If you just lean on me here—remember your John Donne, think of us as a pair of compasses. I’m holding still and you’re sweeping around me, OK? You’re not gonna fall. I’ve got you. Just let go.”

  So I just let go. We skated for an hour and I’m not sure what we wrote on the ice. You’d have to be a bird—one of my pigeons—or sitting high up in my boss’s office to see what we wrote that day. Love or Goodbye or both.

  He wanted to buy me a hot chocolate, but I said I had to go.

  The smile never faltered. “Must be an important date?”

  “Very. A man I used to know.”

  * * *

  SURPRISING HOW QUICKLY you can forget how to hold someone, even your husband. Maybe especially your husband. It takes a certain absence from touching to make you fully appreciate the geometry of the hug: the precise angle of your head in relation to his. Should it be roosted in under the neck, as pigeons do, or nose pressed to his chest? And your hands: cupped in the small of his back or palms laid flat along the flanges of his thighs? When Richard and I met that lunchtime outside Starbucks, we both meant to deliver a peck on the cheek, but it felt too silly, the kind of kiss you could only give to an aunt, so we splayed awkwardly into the hug. I felt as gauche, as painfully observed, as when my dad first took me shuffling round the floor at a dinner dance. Richard’s body shocked me by being a body: his hair and its smell, the bulk of shoulder under his jumper. The hug wasn’t that dry click of bones you get holding someone when the passion has drained away. It was more like a shadow dance: I still wanted him and I think he wanted me, but we hadn’t touched in a very long time.

  “Hey, you’re glowing,” Rich says.

  “I’ve been ice skating.”

  “Ice skating? On a work morning?”

  “Sort of client liaison. A new approach.”

  RICH AND I have arranged a meeting to talk things over. We have seen each other almost every day since he “left.” As he promised, he has collected Em from school and then often stayed to have tea with both children. Starbucks feels like the right sort of place to negotiate a peace—a modern no-man’s-land, one of those businesses which dresses itself up to look like the home we’re all too busy to go to. It’s surprisingly quiet in here, but the meeting has all the anxieties of a first date—will he, won’t he?—only now they’re attached to divorce—won’t he, will he?

  We find a couple of big squashy velvet chairs in a corner and Rich goes to get the drinks. I have requested a skinny latte; he comes back with the hot chocolate I want and need.

  The small talk feels unbearably small: I am impatient to get on to the big talk, so it can be over, one way or the other.

  “How’s work, Kate?”

  “Oh, fine. Actually, I may soon be leaving my job. Or rather my job may soon be leaving me.”

  Rich shakes his head and smiles. “They’d never fire you.”

  “Oh, under certain circumstances they might.”

  He gives me that man-in-the-white-coat look. “We’re not talking about meaningless self-sacrifice, Mrs. Shattock, are we, by any chance?”

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “Just that I’m old enough to remember your Cyclists Against the Bomb phase.”

  “I’ve given the firm everything, Rich. Time that belonged to you and the children.”

  “And to you, Kate.”

  Once I could read his face like a book; now the book has been translated into another language. “I thought you’d approve. Breaking away from the system.” He looks younger since he left me. “Your mother thinks I’ve let myself go.”

  “My mother thinks Grace Kelly let herself go.” We both laugh, and for a moment Starbucks is filled with the sound of Us.

  I start to tell Rich about the story Winston told me.

  “Who’s Winston?”

  “He’s the one from Pegasus Cars, but it turns out he’s a philosopher.”

  “A philosopher driving a minicab. That sounds safe.”

  “No, he’s fantastic, really he is. Anyway, Winston told me the story about this general who found a tribe by a waterfall, and the head of the tribe—”

  “Cicero.”

  “No—”

  “Cicero. It’s by Cicero.” My husband breaks a chocolate cookie in half and hands one piece to me.

  “Let me guess. Someone dead for a long time that I’ve never heard of because I went to a crap comprehensive, but who forms a vital part of every civilized person’s education?”

  “I love you.”

  “So, you see, I was thinking of moving away from the waterfall to see if I could hear better.”

  “Kate?”

  He pushes his hand across the table so it’s near mine. The hands lie next to each other as if waiting for a child to draw round them. “There’s nothing left to love, Rich, I’m all hollowed out. Kate doesn’t live here anymore.”

  The hand is on mine now. “You were saying about moving away from the waterfall?”

  “I thought if I—if we moved away from the waterfall we could hear again and then we could decide if—”

  “If it was the noise that stopped us hearing or the fac
t that we didn’t have anything to say to each other anymore?”

  Do you know those moments—the sheer merciful relief of there being someone in the world who knows what you’re thinking as you think it? I nod my grateful acknowledgment. “My name is Kate Reddy and I am a workaholic. Isn’t that what they have to say at those meetings?”

  “I didn’t say you were a workaholic.”

  “Why not? It’s true, isn’t it? I can’t ‘give up’ work. That makes me an addict, doesn’t it?”

  “We need to buy ourselves some time, that’s all.”

  “Rich, do you remember when Em tried to climb into the TV to save Sleeping Beauty? I keep thinking about it.”

  He grins. One of the best things about having children is that it enables you to have the same loving memories as another person—you can summon the same past. Two flashbacks with but a single image. Is that as good as two hearts that beat as one?

  “Daft kid. She was so upset that she couldn’t save that stupid princess, wasn’t she?” Rich says, with that exasperated pride Em provokes in us.

  “She’d really like you to come home.”

  “And you?How about you, Kate?”

  The option to say something proud and defiant hangs there waiting to be picked like a ripe fruit. I leave it hanging and say, “I’d like to come home too.”

  * * *

  Sleeping Beauty was always Emily’s favorite, the first video she really noticed. When she was two years old she became obsessed with it, standing in front of the TV and shouting, “Wind it, wind it!”

  She always shouted at the part where Aurora, with her stupefied doll face, makes her way up the long staircase to the attic pursued by a raven’s shadow and a bad fairy cackle. For a long time, Richard and I couldn’t work out what was making Emily so furious; then it clicked. She wanted us to rewind the tape so that the Princess wouldn’t make it to the attic, so she never would prick her finger on the old woman’s spindle.

  One day, Emily actually tried to climb inside the TV set: I found her standing on a chair attempting to insert her red-shoed foot through the screen. I believe she had plans to grab the hapless Princess and stop her from meeting her fate. We had a long talk—well, I talked and she listened—about how you had to let things like that happen, because even when you got to a scary bit the story knew where it was heading and it couldn’t be stopped no matter how much you wanted it to be. And the good thing was you knew it would turn out happily in the end.

  But she shook her head sadly and said, “No. Wind it, Mummy, wind it!” Soon after, my daughter transferred her allegiance to Barney the Dinosaur, whose Great Adventure featured no deeds of darkness that required her personal intervention.

  Adults want to rewind life too. It’s just that along the way we lose the capacity to shout it out loud. “Wind it, wind it.”

  39

  Endgame

  AN ARTICLE FROM THE NOVEMBER ISSUE OF INSIDE FINANCE

  Edwin Morgan Forster, one of the City’s oldest financial institutions, triumphed at the fifth annual Equality Now awards on Tuesday night, winning the category for Most Improved Company for its commitment to diversity.

  The firm scored highly in an annual benchmarking survey conducted by Equality Yes!, an organization committed to gender parity whose members include 81 percent of the FTSE 100 companies.

  The judges were particularly impressed by the volume of business generated by Katharine Reddy, EMF’s youngest female manager, and Momo Gumeratne, a twenty-four-year-old Sri Lankan graduate of the London School of Economics. Unfortunately, the two women were unable to attend the ceremony, but the award was collected by Rod Task, EMF Head of Marketing. In his acceptance speech, Task said, “There is a good deal of evidence that mixed gender teams are critical to effective team functioning. EMF is at the forefront of bringing women into major roles in the financial community.”

  Striking a less positive note on the evening was Catherine Mulroyd, chair of Women Mean Business. “These awards are not telling the whole story,” said Mulroyd. “It’s hard enough to reach a position of real influence as a woman in the Square Mile without wrecking your career by opening your mouth to criticize the culture. Equality for women remains a marginal issue for most City firms. It seems pointless for banks to spend vast sums on training female recruits, only to lose them because they do not have flex time or any of the things that could keep mothers on board.”

  Asked if the old-boy culture was a thing of the past, Task pointed out that he was from Australia and was therefore very much part of the new-boy network: “The girls have done just great this year and I’m proud of them.”

  My father gave the performance of his life during the presentation to Chris Bunce of the biodegradable nappy. Debra, who was present throughout in her capacity as legal adviser, told me that Dad was not only sober but clearly relished the part of maverick inventor. His master stroke, Deb said, came when Bunce offered to write a check there and then and Joe, who had spent a lifetime trying to wheedle checks out of people, said that he and his lawyer would be meeting a number of interested parties over the coming days, but naturally they would keep EMF informed.

  I had explained to Dad that I thought I had found some venture capital for his invention, but it would require him to pretend to be someone else and to tell some minor untruths. In almost any other father-daughter relationship, this would have been a bizarre exchange, but for us it felt like the natural culmination of years of pretense, an acknowledgment that forgery is woven into the Reddy DNA along with blue eyes and a facility with numbers.

  “He’s a brilliant guy, your dad,” said Winston, who acted as chauffeur for the nappy entrepreneur in a black BMW with tinted windows that he had borrowed from a man he described as his uncle. “Joe’s a really great tipper.”

  “Yes, with my money.”

  Three days later, Bunce signed over the cash. Swaggering in from lunch that afternoon, he told his deputy, Veronica Pick, that she should pay attention to his amazing coup; this was where men scored over women, acting decisively, scenting a great opportunity and not getting bogged down in the fine print.

  “Oh, you did your due diligence, did you?” asked Veronica sweetly.

  “What d’you mean?” said Bunce.

  “Due diligence,” said Veronica. “Checking the directors’ credentials are what they say they are, sussing out plant and production viability, veracity of bank references....But I’m sure I don’t need to tell you about any of that.”

  “If I need your advice I’ll ask for it,” said Bunce.

  Nor could he resist gloating to me the next morning as we gathered in the conference room, one hand massaging his manhood as though it were Aladdin’s lamp. “Found this brilliant new nappy product, Kate. Gonna make us a shitload of money—geddit? Shitload! Just your kind of thing, Mum, pity I got there first.”

  I bestowed upon him my most maternal smile.

  The money Bunce invested was enough to cover the business’s debts and therefore to pay off my father’s creditors. No sooner had it landed in J. R. Powers’s account than it was gone. As I had predicted, neither that nor Momo’s formal complaint of sexual harassment was quite sufficient to sink Bunce for good at EMF.

  That was taken care of a few days later when an interview that Edwin Morgan Forster’s Head of Venture Capital had given to the investigative TV journalist Alice Lloyd appeared in a national tabloid newspaper under the headline PORN AGAIN! (HOW CITY’S MR. BIG KEEPS IT UP).

  Alice had taken Bunce to a favorite media haunt in Soho. After ingesting quantities of drugs legal and illegal, he became very forthcoming, and the sighting of a young soap star across the room sent him over the edge. “I’d like to have her on my website,” he told Alice. “Actually, I’d like to have her anywhere she likes it.”

  Boasting about his ability to pick winners, Bunce cited a recent investment in a certain biodegradable nappy, which he reckoned was “gonna be bigger than fucking Viagra.”

  The City can alw
ays act to neutralize bad smells within the Square Mile, but when the stench reaches beyond, to the sensitive nostrils of clients and opinion-formers, retribution is swift and merciless.

  The morning after the article appeared, Candy and I stood and watched as Chris Bunce was called into Robin Cooper-Clark’s office, escorted by two security guards to his desk, which he was given three minutes to clear, and then finally marched out of the building.

  “Anybody got that falconer’s number?” shouted Candy. “There’s a rat in the street.”

  In the ladies’ washroom a few minutes later, I found Momo Gumeratne crying, her face buried in the roller towel. “Happy crying,” she insisted, between hiccups.

  And me? I was glad he was gone, of course. But without noticing it, I had started to find Bunce more sad than bad.

  At lunchtime, Momo and I took a cab to Bond Street. I told her it was important work-related business, which it was.

  My assistant was puzzled. “What are we doing in a shoe shop, Kate?”

  “Well, we’re looking for a glass slipper that can take the highest possible pressure per square millimeter and doesn’t fall off at midnight. Failing that, we’ll take these, and these—oh, and those brown boots are great. Excuse me, do you have these in a four?”

  “Are your feet size 4?” asks Momo dubiously.

  “No, yours are.”

  “But I can’t possibly.”

  Twenty minutes later, we were standing at the cash desk with four boxes. Faced with the choice between the tan kitten heels and the navy slingbacks, we chose both. And then we took the black stilettos because they were too beautiful not to own and the toffee boots, which were a total bargain.

  “I love the black ones,” she says, “but I can’t actually walk in them.”

  “Walking isn’t really the point, Momo. Walking tall is the point. And if the worst comes to the worst you can always use one of the heels to puncture Guy’s carotid artery.”