I stop scouring the sink aggressively and grab Rufus, hugging him tight to me, stroking his hair and delighting in its musty unwashed smell. Poor mite, to be so squeezed by me and to be so like me. I kiss the hair that he inherited, which I have always hated on myself and on him is breathtakingly beautiful—so many shades on every shaft, all with names from nature like ginger, conker and nut. Despite its glory, it’s Gabe’s hair that always gets patted in shops, those thick dark curls with their strange blond highlights (“Are they natural?” people are always asking, as if I go to the hairdresser with my two-year-old and ask for a half head of foils). It’s Gabe that smiles at strangers, while Rufus is not so good on eye contact, and like all middle-class parents I went through a phase of thinking he might be autistic. He and I are underdogs, but I vow to make sure he’ll never feel it.
“Happy birthday, sorry it’s a week late,” says Becky, giving me the well-reviewed biography of a dead female writer. It’s our fortnightly Monday lunch and I’m so very glad.
“Wow, it’s quite long given that she died young, isn’t it?” I say, looking at the book’s don’t-drop-it-on-your-foot proportions.
“Do you know, she was only thirty-eight.”
“She can join my ‘talented women who died in their thirties’ club. Jemima tells me that she always checks how old celebrities were when they had their first child, while my parents are obsessed with working out death ages in obituaries. I wonder which camp I fall into?”
“Death ages, definitely,” says Becky.
“Thanks.” I pick up the book again and flick through the photographs of a woman doing all that I have done and so much more. “Thirty-eight you say? Only two years off. How depressing.”
“That she topped herself?”
“No,” I say, “that she should have achieved so much in such a short time. My biography at thirty-eight would only be a pamphlet.” Unless, I think, I could patent my revolutionary marriage-value-calculating list to both fortune and acclaim.
“What would you like to achieve?” asks Becky. I love that she asks me questions like that. I feel that she’s the only person with whom I talk about things other than my children and my day-to-day tasks and expectations. Even at work, I never seem to get beyond the discussions about what we watched last night and where everyone else is going out for the evening.
“I don’t know.” I love that she asks me such questions, but it doesn’t mean that I know how to answer them.
“Come on,” she says firmly. “Don’t tell me you’ve achieved all that you want to in life?”
“OK. I stress about where Rufus will go to secondary school, so I guess I want him to go somewhere good, or at least right for him. I want Gabe to be potty-trained.”
Becky looks like she’s going to bring up her seafood wrap. “Come on, Maz, what about you? What about your career? What are your goals?”
“I’m not sure I have a career anymore. I’ve got a job. I’m not making excuses but it’s quite hard to have a career when you work part-time.”
“Well, work full-time then.”
“Again, not making excuses…”
“Cue excuse…”
“But it’s quite hard to work full-time when you’ve got small children.”
“Really? Because I see quite a lot of MPs, lawyers, scientists, whatevers working full-time, and some of them have even more children than you do.”
“Hard in TV then. Filming is irregular, on location, in the evening and if I went back into the bits of the job I find interesting I might have to go back into short-term contracts, which is a nightmare in terms of continuity of childcare. I could have done it with just the one, maybe, but two throws the whole thing out. If I end up having to pay for childcare for evenings as well as days, I’ll really be out of pocket. I have sometimes been there—when Joel’s away filming and I’ve got some work thing in the evening and it costs me ₤50 in babysitting and his work can’t really pay and nor can mine, but at the same time, why are we having to stump up for the pleasure of working outside office hours?”
“OK then, by the time you’re thirty-eight, they’ll both be at school, won’t they? That will bring down your costs. What then?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. Stop getting at me.”
She smiles apologetically. “I’m not getting at you, love, especially not when we’re celebrating your birthday. It’s not you, really, it’s a general thing I’m seeing and it’s depressing me.”
“What?”
“The wasted potential of women,” she says. “Like something out of the 1950s, when I thought we’d be beyond all of that now. I have clients or clients’ wives who don’t work.”
“Small children?”
“Yes, some of them. But what frustrates me is that there is no expectation that they will ever work again. It’s like getting married to a rich man and having his children is the same as having been disabled in a workplace accident, so they should be on benefits for the rest of their lives. When the government tries to get single mothers off benefits and back into work, they make out that it’s not for economic reasons, oh no, it’s because they want to raise these women’s self-esteem. So why’s it different for these rich, divorced women? Does having money mean you don’t need your self-esteem? Do they get their self-esteem from pedicures or something? It’s incredibly patronizing and misogynist, but it’s like, because these are benefits paid by their husbands, nobody makes a fuss about it.”
I can’t help but think of Mitzi, who of course has a “divine” woman in the West End who is such a specialist that she only does pedicures. She has another great find who only does brows, one for her pores, another for hair removal. “Rich men supporting their wives,” I say. “Are you surprised that no one’s rushing to their defense?”
“Often they’re not particularly rich. And anyway, it’s not them I worry about, it’s the women, the ex-wives, these…” she searches for a suitably disdainful word, “… chattels. They feel like they’ve hit the jackpot, but they haven’t because they’ll never know the value of work.”
“It’s kind of fine for you to know the value of work, because you have an interesting job. But lots of jobs don’t make people feel valuable,” I try to argue, knowing that her legal mind makes resistance futile. And I know she’s right, in a way—if I didn’t escape the house to work I might feel even more oppressed by the tide of filth. “And I know it sounds weird and anti-feminist of me to say, but at the same time, if those wives didn’t work while their children were small and then ran the home so that their husbands could earn lots of money—”
Becky hurrumphs. Nobody hurrumphs quite like Becky. “Ran the home? I’m sorry, I didn’t realize we were meeting for lunch in Edwardian England. I know, I know, it really is a full-time job organizing the servants, writing thank-you notes and planning the dinner-party menus.”
“Do you want a coffee? I’ll get them.”
As I stand in the line at the counter, I find myself fingering the bracelet I’m wearing. Rufus made it for me at school, and its beads made of painted penne pasta become a sort of rosary as I say a prayer for a good argument to use with Becky. I love her, but she has a knack for making me feel so inefficient.
“Don’t you ever think it would be nice to have a wife, Becky?” I say when I return to the table with our hot drinks. “An old-fashioned one who picked up your suits from the dry cleaner?”
“I never dreamed of having a wife as much as I dreamed about being good at my job. I’m not sure it’s a coincidence that of all of us who went to university together, the woman with the most successful career should be the only gay one. Even when I thought I was straight, I knew I’d always support myself.”
“What do you mean? It’s not like all of us have got married or had kids and stuff. We’ve got loads of single friends from that time.”
“But they would have made their career choices with the expectation that they would have a get-out clause somewhere along the line,” she says. �
��The fact that they haven’t ended up with a man who could partially support them is beside the point. Subconsciously or otherwise, they—all of you—thought that you would have the option of stepping off the career track for a few years and rethinking or retraining.”
“Becoming a teacher, acupuncturist or psychotherapist,” I say, thinking of the second-wave careers of the mothers from Rufus’s school. “Or opening a shop selling hand-knitted children’s jumpers. Or a child-friendly café.”
“Exactly!” Becky bangs the table and the soy froth on my coffee bounces. “I’m so depressed by the wastage I see in my profession, in both the female lawyers and the clients. And do you know what I blame?”
I shrug.
“I blame improved maternity rights. You know, your extended maternity leaves and your flexible working rights, your part-time jobs and I must leave the office at 5 p.m.s.”
“What?” I’m genuinely shocked. “That’s heresy, Becky. You talk about women fighting for the right to work but we’ve fought just as hard for the right to maternity pay. You can’t seriously blame them for… I don’t know, what do you blame them for?”
“Do you know that almost all the top family lawyers at the moment are women?”
“Great…”
“And do you know who the top ones in ten or fifteen years’ time will be? Men, they’ll all be men.”
“And you.”
“Yes, and me, thanks. I shouldn’t complain about the elimination of competition, but it’s so frustrating to see all this talent slip away.”
“But surely improved maternity rights keep talent in? If mothers didn’t have the chance of taking a year’s maternity leave and then working flexibly afterward, then maybe they’d leave the profession altogether.”
“The lightweights would, yes, and many of them still do. But the rest would have worked full-time after three months off and it would have been bloody hard for a few years but then they’d have a brilliant and interesting career for when the children go to school.”
“They’re only at school for six hours a day…” I try to interject.
“That’s just the sort of defeatist talk I get all the time from colleagues. Feminism is about equal pay for equal work and if you’re not working flat out then you shouldn’t be paid flat out.”
“Maybe it’s not working mothers who should change, but the system. It’s such a male-created structure. Why should anybody work flat out?”
“Don’t be daft, Mary. I can’t charge clients ₤300 an hour and then swan off for long weekends.”
“We don’t ‘swan off.’ If only. Jeez, Becky, what’s brought this on?”
“Nothing. The political isn’t the personal in this case.” She sighs. “I suppose I’ve been thinking about children a bit, because of the polycystic ovaries and all that, and what I would do, work-wise, if I had them. I would work full-time, you see, and I’d go back after a short maternity leave. I’m damn well not letting those smug men I work with climb the ladder ahead of me.”
“I’ve been thinking about all that. Here,” I open my bag up and pull out a sheet of A4. “I know you were skeptical but I did you a flow chart of all your decisions and how they feed off each other. It might help a bit.”
Becky smiles. “Bless. Thanks, Mary. I think.”
“Where have you got to with the baby idea?”
“I don’t know.” She presses her fingers to her temples and looks as uncertain as I’ve ever seen her.
“Whether you want a baby or not?”
“Whether I want a baby, can I even have one if I do want one, do I want one with Cara, do I want a baby more than I want to be with Cara, do I want to be with Cara at all, does Cara want to be with me?”
“That’s what I was trying to express.” I point at the piece of paper. It looks pathetically inadequate in the face of such life-changing decisions, but I wanted to help and it was the only way I knew how.
She looks down at it. “This is really great, you know—all these issues are all dependent on each other. I can’t answer any of them before answering the others, and round and round in circles I go. Anyway, how’s your plan to divorce Joel for not polishing the silver?”
“Ha ha.”
“That depresses me too. Your marriage. You and Joel could be asking really interesting questions about what the heterosexual marriage means in the twenty-first century, you could be reinventing the institution entirely. But instead, you’re bickering about the washing-up. It’s so retro.”
“You sound like Ursula.”
“Thank you. I’ll take that as a compliment.”
I return to the office. As the new production gets underway, it becomes populated. Where once just Lily and I sat, now a chattering rabble of researchers, celebrity bookers and directors teem.
“Mazza,” one of them whines at me, while simultaneously surfing his iPhone. “When’s the archive researcher going to start?” His name is Jude and he wears T-shirts with a very low V to reveal a hairless chest. I don’t know if his torso baldness is because he waxes or because he’s too young to have grown body hair.
“Beginning of March, assuming we find one.”
“But I’m having to do too much of that shit now.”
“Well, talk to the exec about it.”
“But he’s not here. Why isn’t the archive person starting now? We really need one otherwise we’re going to get behind. Why aren’t they starting yet, why?”
Count to three and breathe. “Because that’s what’s in the budget.”
“Why?”
“Because it is,” I say, my voice emphasizing the full stop of my statement.
“But why? Why have you got a director starting already and no archive researcher? Why?”
I am being dragged there, the place of no return, the place I do my best to avoid when at home with the boys: the cul de sac of why.
“Because I say so,” I shout and escape to the loo, hoping that the hordes of new and thankfully temporary employees won’t mess up the office or play with scissors in my absence. I lock myself into a cubicle. A pair of scarily high boots clips past the bottom of the toilet door. This lot are undeniably well heeled; how, I’m not sure, given their measly rates of pay.
“Mary,” says the voice above the expensively shod feet, feet that are topped by skinny jeans and even skinnier legs. “What time does the dev meeting start?”
“Why don’t you check Calendar?” I shout through the cubicle door. I know exactly when the development meeting starts.
“Oh, right. Good plan,” says Poppy or Posy or Rosie.
How did she even know it was me in here? I look down at my feet and see the pair of flat, scuffed boots that would have been visible under the door.
I get my papers together and start touring the desks of my fellow employees. “Everybody, meeting, five minutes’ time, are you ready?”
“Oh, man,” Jude says. “I am so busy.”
“Have you got a pen and paper? Well, get one from the stationery cupboard. You too,” I say to the girl whose name I don’t remember. “Where’s Lily?”
“Think she had to go somewhere after lunch.”
“Right, I’ll text her. She’s supposed to have printed out and distributed the agenda. I’ll do it. Can you round up everyone else? I want this to start on time for once.”
I bustle them into the meeting room where we wait for our creative director, Matt, to arrive. He is someone who emphasizes the creative part of his job title and seems to think it gives him license to arrive late for everything. When he finally turns up, Lily is nowhere to be seen, so I end up taking the notes and writing the abbreviation AP for Action Point next to my initials more than is ideal.
“Right,” says Matt toward the end of our allotted slot. “We need more commissions.” There’s a collective groan. We always need more commissions. “I’ve got some pitch meetings lined up next month so I need as many basic format ideas as possible.”
“I think we should do something that n
eeds filming in the Caribbean,” says Jude, at which the class sniggers.
“Do you know what?” says another pretty girl whose name doesn’t seem worth me remembering. “There’s not enough fashion on TV.”
“Almost every single fashion show that’s ever been broadcast hasn’t worked,” I say. “I think there’s something intrinsically unfashionable about TV. You know, like your dad dancing to rave.”
“Nothing wrong with dad dancing,” says Matt in an attempt at self-mocking humor, with which the girls in the room enthusiastically agree. Joel and he occasionally go out for a drink together to talk about work, when, according to Joel, Matt actually tells him in forensic detail exactly what he’d like to do to the various young women in the office, before going into sentimental reveries about just how much he loves being a father.
“I think the problem is that the programs haven’t ever decided whether they want to be street or high fashion and so fall somewhere in between,” I say, aware that this meeting needs to get moving if I’m to leave on time. “If you could make a quite low-budget, grungier, more handheld sort of show for one of the digital channels, then that might work better.”
“Yeah, good. Flo, why don’t you have a think about that. Any other ideas?”
“Yes.” I am surprised at myself. The things that Becky said at lunch have triggered thoughts both professional and personal. “I keep seeing shows about the history of feminism, but I don’t see anything about its future and where we are at the moment with sexual relations.”
Jude sniggers.
“Gender politics. Not the top-level stuff about equal pay and quotas for board members or politicians, but more in the domestic sphere.” Somebody yawns. “I was reading the other day that even when a woman works outside the home, the amount of housework her partner does doesn’t increase. I’m sure there must be a way to explore this in a documentary, but in a fun way.”
“A fun look at housework?” asks Matt.
“I know, I know. But everybody does it, even if nobody talks about it. I thought you could take a variety of different household setups—single parent, working mother, non-working mother, house husband—and monitor what they think they do and what they actually do. Then we could question the participants to see if there was a direct correlation between marital satisfaction and equal participation in household chores. Even if there was a link between that and how much sex they have. There could be some tests common to all of them, like a mug left in the sink, how many minutes it stays there before the various different participants clean it or whether they notice it at all. I remember there was a documentary about sexual attraction once, where they had these cameras which could track the gaze of men and women, something like that. You could keep upping the ante, with more and more extreme traps left for those men, or women, who never notice.”
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