I Don't Know How She Does It

by Allison Pearson

  The smile vanishes. “Where will you be?”

  “I’m going away for a while.”

  “No,” she says. “I don’t want a goodbye present.”

  “You’re going to be fine.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Hey, who trained you?...Anyway, you’ve stopped saying sorry, so I know you’re ready.”

  “No,” says Momo. And she looks at me sideways. “Only one of us can ever be Reddy, Kate.” Then she puts a hand on my shoulder and kisses me on the cheek.

  On the way back in the taxi, a mountain range of shoes at our feet, she asked me why I was leaving and I lied. Told her I needed to move to be nearer my mother, who was ill. Some things you can’t say even to the women you love. Even to yourself.

  REASONS TO GIVE UP WORK

  1. Because I have got two lives and I don’t have time to enjoy either of them.

  2. Because twenty-four hours are not enough.

  3. Because my children will be young for only a short time.

  4. Because one day I caught my husband looking at me the way my mother used to look at my father.

  5. Because becoming a man is the waste of a woman.

  6. Because I am too tired to think of another because.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, before I resigned, I had a bit of tidying up to do. The pigeon family was long gone—the two chicks finally flew the nest when spring was easing into summer—but the books that had hidden mother and babies from the City hawk were still in place. This time, I didn’t risk the ledge. I called Gerald up from Security to give me a hand forcing open the window. The books had all survived quite well, except The Ten Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management: Proven Strategies for Increased Productivity and Inner Peace. It looked like the floor of a cave, with little stalagmites of white pigeon shit obscuring its uplifting cover slogans.

  When I went into Rod’s office I found him sitting at his desk behind the Equality Now! trophy, a set of scales with a tiny bronze figure of a female in one of the pans. In the other, Rod had put a handful of jelly beans.

  He took the news of my leaving pretty badly. So badly, in fact, that the noise traveled through the wall to Robin Cooper-Clark next door.

  “Katie’s doing a runner,” Rod announced, as the Head of Investment put his head round the door to establish the source of the roar.

  Robin called me into his office, as I knew he would.

  “Is there anything I can do to persuade you to change your mind, Kate?”

  Only changing your world, I thought. “No, really.”

  “Maybe part-time?” he ventures, with that ghost of a smile.

  “I’ve seen what happens when a woman tries to go part-time, Robin. They say she’s having her days off. And then they cut her out of the loop. And then they take her funds away from her, one by one, because everyone knows that managing money’s a full-time job.”

  “It is hard to manage money less than five days a week.”

  I don’t say anything. He tries another tack. “If it’s a question of money?”

  “No, it’s time.”

  “Ah. Sed fugit interea, fugit inreparabile tempus.”

  “If that means you shouldn’t waste thirty years staring at a screen, then yes.”

  Robin comes round to my side of the desk and stands there with that awkwardness they call dignity. “I’m going to miss you, Kate.”

  By way of reply I give him a hug, perhaps the first ever administered in the offices of Edwin Morgan Foster.

  Then I go home, taking care to run across the grass.

  40

  The Court of Motherhood

  SHE WAS NOT AFRAID of the court anymore. They had nothing left to throw at her. Nothing they could charge her with that she hadn’t accused herself of a thousand times. So there she was, feeling quietly confident, and then they said the name of the next witness and suddenly she knew it was all over. Her time was up. As she swayed forward, feeling slightly sick, her hands clutched the oak rim of the dock. Here was the one person in the world who knew her best.

  “The court calls Mrs. Jean Reddy.”

  The defendant was upset at the sight of her mother entering the witness box to give evidence against her, but there was something about the older woman’s appearance that she found oddly cheering. It took her a few seconds to place it: Mum was wearing red cashmere, the cardigan Kate had given her for Christmas, over the Liberty’s floral blouse she had bought her for the birthday before last. The things kept for Best were getting their first outing.

  “State your full name, please.”

  “Jean Katharine Reddy.”

  “And your relation to the defendant?”

  “Kath—Katharine’s my daughter. I’m her mother.”

  The prosecuting counsel is not just on his feet, he is standing on tiptoes with excitement. “Mrs. Reddy, your daughter is accused of putting her job before the welfare of her children. Is that an accurate description of the situation you have observed firsthand?”

  “No.”

  “Speak up, please!” bellows the judge.

  Mum tries again. Clearly nervous, she is tugging on her charm bracelet. “No. Katharine is devoted to her children and she is very hardworking, always has been. Keen to get on and better herself.”

  “Yes, yes,” snaps the Prosecution, “but do I understand she is not presently living with her husband, Richard Shattock, who left her after he said that she had ‘ceased to notice he was there’?”

  The woman in the dock makes a low moaning sound. Her mother doesn’t know that Richard has left her.

  Jean Reddy takes the news like a boxer taking a blow and fires back magnificently. “No one’s saying it’s easy. Men want looking after, and it’s hard for a woman when she’s got her work as well. Kath’s got that many calls on her time, I’ve seen her make herself ill with it sometimes.”

  “Mrs. Reddy, are you familiar with the name Jack Abelhammer?” says the Prosecution, with a quick tight smile.

  “No, no!” The defendant has climbed over the side of the dock and is standing in front of the judge in an XXXL Gap T-shirt with a dachshund motif. “All right, what do you want me to say? Guilty? Is that what you want me to say? There really are no lengths you won’t go to, to prove I can’t live my life, are there?”

  “Silence!” booms the judge. “Mrs. Shattock, one more interruption and I will find you in contempt of court.”

  “Well, that’s fine, because I am in utter contempt of this court and every man in it.” And then she starts to cry, cursing herself as she does so for her weakness.

  “Jean Reddy,” resumes the Prosecution, but the witness is not listening to him. She too has left her place and moves towards the weeping woman, whom she gathers in her arms. And then the mother turns on the judge. “And how about you, your honor? Who’ll be getting your tea tonight? It’s not you, is it?”

  “For God’s sake,” splutters the judge.

  “People like you don’t understand anything about women like Katharine. And you think you can sit in judgment on her. Shame on you,” says Jean Reddy quietly, but with the force that generations of children heard in her voice when she was rebuking a playground bully.

  * * *

  ON THE DAY THAT Seymour Troy Stratton entered the world, a coup in Qatar sent oil prices spiraling and equities plunged around the globe, helped by an unprecedented rate hike from the mighty Federal Reserve. In the UK alone, twenty billion was wiped off the value of the FTSE 100. A minor earthquake outside Kyoto caused further shock waves in an already shaken global environment. None of this had an adverse effect on mother and baby, who dozed peacefully in their curtained cubicle on the third floor of the maternity wing off Gower Street.

  As I walk down the corridor towards them, I am returned powerfully to my memories of this place: the midwives in their blue pajamas, the gray doors behind which the great first act of life is performed over and over by small women and tall women and a woman whose waters br
oke one lunchtime on the escalator at Bank. Place of pain and elation. Flesh and blood. The cries of the babies raw and astounded; their mothers’ faces salty with joy. When you are in here you think you know what’s important. And you are right. It’s not the pethidine talking, it’s God’s own truth. Before long, you have to go out into the world again and pretend you have forgotten, pretend there are better things to do. But there are no better things. Every mother knows what it felt like when that chamber of the heart opened and love flooded in. Everything else is just noise and men.

  “I just want to look at him,” Candy says. Propped up on pillows, my colleague has undone every button on my white broderie anglaise nightdress to give her son access to her breasts. The nipples are like dark fruit. She uses the palm of her right hand to cup his head while his mouth sucks hungrily. “I don’t want to do anything except look at him, Kate. That’s normal, right?”

  “Perfectly normal.”

  I have brought a Paddington Bear rattle for the baby, the one with the red hat that Emily always loved, and a basket of American muffins for his mom. Candy says she needs to get the weight off right away and then, because her hands are full, I feed morsel after morsel into her unprotesting mouth.

  “The baby will suck all the fat out of your saddlebags, Cand.”

  “Hey, that’s terrific. How long can I keep nursing, twenty years?”

  “Unfortunately, after a while they come round and arrest you. I sometimes think they’d send the social services in if they knew how passionately I feel about Ben.”

  “You didn’t tell me.” She rebukes me with a tired smile.

  “I did try. That day in Corney and Barrow. But you can’t know until you know.”

  Candy lowers her face and smells the head of her son. “A boy, Kate. I made one. How cool is that?”

  Like all newborn things, Seymour Stratton seems ancient, a thousand years old. His brow is corrugated with either wisdom or perplexity. It is not yet possible to speculate on what manner of man he will grow up to be, but for now he is perfectly happy as he is, in the encircling arms of a woman.

  Epilogue

  What Kate Did Next

  I THINK AN ENDING may be out of the question. The wheels on the bus go round and round, all day long.

  A lot happened, though, and some things stayed the same. Three months after Seymour’s birth, Candy went back to work at EMF and put the baby into a day-care place near Liverpool Street that charged more than the Dorchester. Candy reckoned each diaper change cost her twenty dollars. “That’s a helluva lot for a dump, right?”

  On the phone, she sounded like the same old Candy, but I knew that that Candy, the Candy Before Children, had gone. Sure enough, the long brutal hours she had worked uncomplainingly all her adult life soon seemed to her stupid and unnecessary. She minded that when she tried to leave at 6:30, Rod Task called it “lunchtime.” She minded not seeing her son in daylight. When Seymour was seven months old, Candy walked into Rod’s office and told him she was very sorry, but she was going to have to let him go. She was having some problems with his level of commitment: it was too high.

  Back in New Jersey, she stayed for a while with her mom until she found a place of her own: Candy said Seymour had made her understand what her mother was for. Soon after, she spotted a hole in the booming mail-order market and established a business which in a short time saw her tipped as one of Fortune magazine’s Faces to Watch. All Work and No Play was a range of sex toys for the female executive who has everything except time for pleasure. A box of samples was shipped to me in England, and it was opened on our breakfast table during a visit from Barbara and Donald. Richard, in what many consider to be the finest half hour of our marriage, pretended the vibrators were a range of kitchen utensils.

  My beloved Momo stayed on at EMF, where she flew up the ladder, barely touching the rungs. That touch of steel in her nature I had noticed at our first meeting proved invaluable, as did her ability to listen and absorb what clients wanted. Occasionally, she would call me for advice in the middle of the day from the ladies’ washroom, her whispers half drowned by flushing. In the summer, she snatched a couple of days off and came up to stay with us. For the first time in her life, Emily was impressed with me. At long last, her mother had produced a real princess. “Are you Princess Jasmine from Aladdin?” Em asked.

  “Actually, more Sleeping Beauty,” Momo said. “I was sort of asleep and then your mummy woke me up.”

  Debra discovered that Jim was having an affair with a woman in Hong Kong. They got divorced and Deb arranged to work a four-day week at her law firm. Soon, she found some of her biggest clients were taken away from her, but she let it pass. The time for fighting back, she told herself, would come when Felix and Ruby were older. Deb and I are planning a weekend break together at a spa and so far we have canceled only four times.

  Winston went on to take his degree in philosophy at the University of East London, and his ethics dissertation “How Do We Know What Is Right?” achieved the highest mark in the year. To pay his final-year fees, he sold Pegasus, which seamlessly entered a new career in stock-car racing.

  Flourishing a guilty and therefore glowing reference from me, Paula landed a job as nanny to the B-movie action star Adolf Brock and his wife, a former Miss Bulgaria. The family lived for a while at the Plaza in New York, until Paula, whose room overlooked Central Park, announced that she was feeling cramped, whereupon the Brocks moved obediently to Maine.

  After that morning on the ice rink, I never saw Jack Abelhammer again. I changed my e-mail address because I knew that my willpower was not strong enough to stop me returning a message from him. I also knew that my marriage would only have a fighting chance if I let go of my fantasy lover: if Jack was the place I went to play, what did that make Richard? Even so, every time I log on, part of me still expects to see his name in the Inbox. People say that time is a great healer. Which people? What are they talking about? I think some feelings you experience in your life are written in indelible ink and the best you can hope for is that they fade a little over the years.

  I never went to bed with Jack—a regret the size of a continent—but the bad food and the great songs in the Sinatra Inn were the best sex I never had. When you’ve felt that much about a man and he disappears from your life, after a while you start to think it was just some foolish illusion on your part and that the other person walked clean away, no scar tissue. But maybe the other person felt the same. I still have the last message he sent me.

  To: Kate Reddy

  From: Jack Abelhammer

  Kate,

  I didn’t hear from you in quite a while, so I’m working on the theory that you took up conkers and motherhood full-time. But I know you’ll be back. Hail the conkering heroine....

  Rod said you left London. Remember what your dad called Sinatra? The Patron Saint of Unrequited Love.

  The great thing about unrequited love is it’s the only kind that lasts.

  Yours forever, Jack

  * * *

  Richard and I sold the Hackney Heap, moved up to Derbyshire near my family, and bought a place on the edge of a market town with a view and a paddock. (I’d always wanted a paddock and now I had one I had no idea what to do with it.) The house needs loads of work, but there are a couple of good rooms and the rest can wait. The kids love having the space to run around in and Richard is in his element. When he’s not working on the arts center, he’s building a dry-stone wall, and every five minutes he asks me to come and look at it.

  Not long after I resigned, I got a call from Robin Cooper-Clark asking if I’d come in with him on a hedge fund. Part-time work, minimal foreign travel, all promises that I knew would be scorched away in the heat of the chase. It was tempting: with the money he was offering I could have bought half the village and things are pretty tight for us with just the one income, but when Emily heard me say Robin’s name, she stiffened and said, “Please don’t talk to him.” Cooper-Clark is a name she associates with the ye
ars Mummy went missing.

  I know my daughter a little better these days. A couple of months after leaving work, I realized that all those carefully time-tabled bedtime chats had told me nothing about what was really going on in Em’s head. That stuff comes out spontaneously; you can’t force it. You just have to be around when it happens. As for her brother, his sweetness grows in direct proportion to his capacity for mischief. Recently, he discovered Lego, with which he builds a wall, and every five minutes he asks me to come and look at it.

  Richard and I took both kids down to meet Sally Cooper-Clark. She was as kind and warm as Robin had described and I could see how she gave him back his ease and elasticity, not to mention his immaculate shirts. On the drive back, I left Rich and the kids in a pub garden for ten minutes and I walked across to the church and down the hill to Jill Cooper-Clark’s grave.

  Weird, isn’t it, how you want to seek out the physical place where someone is buried? If Jill is anywhere, now, she’s everywhere. But I stood there anyway, in front of the neat white headstone with the soft gray lettering. At the bottom it says: SHE WAS WELL LOVED.

  I didn’t actually speak aloud—this was Sussex, for heaven’s sake—but I thought all the things that I wanted Jill to know about. They say that women need role models and I suppose we do, but high achievement is not confined to high flyers. There is a currency we were never called upon to trade in at EMF, and in that Jill was the richest person I’ve ever met.

  And me? Whatever happened to me? Well, I spent some time with myself, a pretty unsatisfactory companion. I loved walking Emily to the local school and standing at the gate to collect her; the puddles are iced over this time of year and we love to stand on them and wait for the creak before the crack. During schooltime, Ben and I pottered around the house and hung out at coffee mornings with other mums with small kids. I was bored to the point of manslaughter. My eczema cleared up but my cheeks ached from trying to keep my face looking friendly and interested. Queuing in the local bank, I would find myself sneaking looks at the foreign exchange rates. I have an awful feeling they thought I was planning a robbery.