I Don't Know How She Does It

29 The Supermarket Shop

EMILY’S BIRTHDAY ALWAYS MEANS the start of summer for me. When my waters broke six years ago and I took a cab to the hospital, there were people sitting at café tables on the pavements and spilling into the street and it felt as though the whole city was in carnival for the arrival of my child.

The day before her party, I do the supermarket shop with Ben. Do the supermarket shop. Who could imagine that such a small sentence could contain so much pain: an Oresteia of suffering.

First off, I try to liberate one of the extra-wide trolleys, which is in coitus with the trolley outside the store; I pull and push with one hand, holding on to runaway toddler with the other.

An aviary on wheels, the extra-wide trolley is roughly as maneuverable as the Isle of Wight. I try to persuade Ben to sit in the baby seat. He declines, preferring to ride in the cargo hold where he can eject any purchase he disapproves of. In desperation, I crack open a box of Mini Milks and give him two; while both his hands are full of lolly, I slip him into the seat and snap the clips (bad, bad, bribing mother). Now all that remains is to track down the thirty-seven items on my list. After I threw the radio at him this morning, Richard said he thought the whole birthday thing was perhaps stressing me out a little. Why didn’t I take a break and he’d do the supermarket shop? Impossible, I said, he would buy all the wrong things.

“But there’s a list, Kate,” he reasoned, in his man-in-a-white-coat voice. “How could I possibly go wrong?”

What every woman knows and no man can ever grasp is that even if he brings home everything on the list, he will still not have got the right things. Why? Because the woman truly believes that if she had gone to the supermarket she would have made better choices: a plumper chicken from a more luxuriantly pastured region of France, a yummier yogurt, the exact salad leaf she has yearned for and whose precise name had, until the epiphany in front of the Healthy Eating cabinet, eluded her. Men make lists to order the world, to tie it down; for women, lists are the start of something, the coordinates by which we plot our journey to freedom. Don’t get me wrong here: I’m not claiming that any of this is fair. When a woman buys an item not on the list which turns out to be inedible, this is called “an experiment”; when a man does the same thing, it is “a waste of money.”

3:31 P.M. Join the checkout queue. Am sure I have forgotten something vital. What?

3:39 P.M. Oh, great. Ben has a dirty nappy. As I’m wondering how long I can hang in here and defy the astounded nostrils of nearby customers, my son puts his hand, the one holding what’s left of the second Mini Milk, down his shorts. When he withdraws the hand it is marbled with ice cream and excrement. I want to faint with misery. Instead, holding the boy aloft like a grenade with the pin out, I sprint the length of the store to the baby-changing facility.

4:01 P.M. Rejoin queue. Sixteen minutes. Estimate Ben has now eaten at least one-twelfth of the party food. As he munches happily, I grab a magazine from the rack by the till and try to lower my blood pressure by reading my horoscope.

Jupiter is now transiting your ninth house, which is truly one of the most beneficial things it can do for you. Your consciousness is lifted and your perspective grows. You find yourself imbued with loving feelings towards everyone — even children who have been impossible to control. The most positive effect of this moment is that your rage level sinks to an all-time low. The trick will be to hold on to this feeling of serenity once the euphoria wears off.

“Excuse me, madam?”

I look up, expecting that it’s my turn to put items on the conveyor belt. Instead, the checkout girl informs me that I have been queuing in a regular aisle through which the Isle of Wight cannot pass. “Sorry, madam. If you could just move to one of the designated wider aisles.”

“Sorry? Sorry doesn’t exactly cover it, does it?” For five seconds I go very quiet, then drive my fist into a twelve-pack of Hula Hoops. The bang brings a security guard vaulting over the barrier. Ben bursts into tears, as does every other child in the immediate area. Am imbued with loving feelings towards everyone.

4:39 P.M. The checkout person is so slow she may as well be underwater. Even worse, she is helpful and friendly.

“You know if you buy another one of those you get one free?”

“Sorry?”

“Fromage frais. Doncha want one free?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Having a party, are ya?”

No, I am buying eighty mini sausages, twenty-four Barbie chocolate rolls and a bumper bag of Iced Gems for my own consumption because I am a deranged bulimic. “My daughter. She’s six tomorrow.”

“Ah, lovely. Gotta reward card?”

“No, I—”

“You want one with this lot, doncha? Save yourself a bit, love.”

“Actually, I haven’t got time to—”

“Cash back?”

“No, really, I just have to go—”

“Inshee lovely.”

“Sorry?”

“Your little gel. Inshee lovely!”

“He. He’s a boy.”

“Oh, wouldn’t know it with all them curls. You wanna tell your mum to getcha ’aircut, little man.”

Why can’t supermarkets designate a Working Mother Aisle where you can be served by surly superefficient androids? Or French people. The French would be perfect.

9:43 P.M. Everything is under control. Both children are in bed. Pass the Parcel took a mere one hour and forty-five minutes to assemble. Debra warned me that you’re not allowed to have just one gift in the middle like we used to have when we were little. These days, there has to be a present in each layer in an attempt to convince kids that life is fair. Why? Life is not fair; life is layers of wrapping with one broken squeaker in the middle.

Next door, Richard is filling party bags in front of the TV. In theory, I disapprove of the escalation of gifts that kids expect to take home: like the arms race, it can only lead to mutually assured ruination. In practice, I am too cowardly to hand over the balloon and piece of cake I feel would be more than sufficient. The Muffia would take out a contract on me.

Unfortunately, the supermarket was unable to swap the pink-iced birthday cake I had ordered for a yellow one at short notice. Pink used to be Emily’s favorite color, then it became yellow. When I ordered the cake, pink was once more in the ascendant, but yellow made an overnight comeback while I was away last week. Never mind. I have bought a Victoria sponge and will now ice it myself in a wobbly but loving manner: the mother’s touch that means so much. Oh, shit, where is the icing sugar?

11:12 P.M. I finally find the box wedged at the back of a cupboard under a weeping bottle of soy sauce. A year past its sell-by date, the icing sugar comes out of the packet in one piece. It looks a lot like one of those Apollo moon rocks my dad cooked up thirty years ago. Or fifty pounds’ worth of crack cocaine. Luckily it is not the latter, otherwise would consume entire piece by myself and lie down on kitchen floor awaiting merciful instant death.

Should be just enough to cover the cake, anyway. It takes eight minutes to pound the icing rock to dust. Careful not to add too much warm water, then eke in the teeniest drop of yellow coloring. This produces a shade of pale lemon: a bit mimsy, a bit — how can I put this? — a bit head-boy’smother’s-dress at prep-school speech day. Need something cheerier for a birthday: egg-yolk yellow, Van Gogh yellow. Emboldened, I add a couple of drops more. The color is now both watery and intense like a rank urine specimen. I add a further two drops and stir furiously.

I am tearfully contemplating the contents of the basin when Rich comes into the kitchen talking about some documentary on child development. “Do you know that babies identify their gender roles from three months? Probably why Ben spends all day sitting on the potty reading the sports pages. Like father, like — Christ, Kate, what’s that?”

Rich has spotted the icing. The icing is now a color which, if you were being kind, could be described as Safari Yellow. It is disturbingly reminiscent of one of Ben’s more challenging nappies.

Richard laughs, that unforgivable liberated laugh that escapes when you’re just so fantastically grateful someone else has screwed up, not you. “Don’t worry, honey,” he says. “Let’s work the problem. We have icing the color of dung, so we will make — a cow cake! Got any white chocolate buttons?”

SUNDAY, 7:19 P.M. The party went pretty well, if you discount Joshua Mayhew throwing up in the hall and the moment when I brought in the cake and started the singing.

“Happy birthday, dear Emily, happy birthday to you!”

“But, Mummy, I don’t want brown icing,” she wailed.

“It’s not brown, darling, it’s yellow.”

“I don’t want yellow. I want pink.”

When all eighteen guests have departed, I set about clearing up the debris: juice cartons like collapsed lungs, Barbie paper plates, twenty-six untouched egg sandwiches (there to make the parents feel better; no self-respecting child would even nibble anything so free of additives). Earlier today, I sent an e-mail to Jack Abelhammer suggesting that, under the circumstances, it might be better if I handed over his fund to a colleague. My feelings for him — it started as a minor crush and now I feel as though I’m lying under a steamroller — have made our professional relationship hard to handle. The tone of my message was friendly but firm. For a couple of hours afterwards, I felt the steady glow of having acted responsibly: the brightest bulb in the maternal firmament. Since then, though, the bulb has blown. Either that, or I have tripped over the lead and unplugged myself from the mains — no juice, no flow of energy, certainly no current affairs. Have already checked my Inbox five times for his reply. Come on, Kate, grow up; stop acting like a lovesick teenager.

In my self-denial, I have so far eaten two chocolate Barbie rolls and a bowl of Twiglets and poured a half-bottle of gin into the homemade lemonade I bought at Marks & Spencer and decanted into a pink jug to pass off as my own.

It’s a hot night: viscous, thirsty for rain. The fan I dug out from under the stairs is no use; it sits on the kitchen table, sluggishly stirring the soupy air. There was an attempt at thunder earlier, just as we were leaving the swimming baths around four, but it was more like a ripping of brown paper than the full-throated roar we need to scare off the heat. Christ, the heat! And the smell! I am out in the garden scraping the rug over which Joshua Mayhew threw up. The oatmeal vomit is studded with pastel minarets of Iced Gems.

I did notice Josh looking pale and clammy during Pass the Parcel and managed to get him out into the hall, but as I was struggling with the front door he deposited his birthday tea on the runner. When his mother turned up, she shrieked, “What has happened to poor little Joshey?”

I managed to suppress the obvious reply: What has happened is that little Joshey has carpet-bombed five hundred pounds’ worth of Uzbekistan kelim. If it had been the contents of my child’s stomach, I would have been down on my knees proffering a checkbook. But Imogen Mayhew, a person so wholesome her entire being seems to have been woven from chamomile, just demanded to know if Joshua had been allowed to have “excess sugar.”

I laughed a tinkly hostess laugh and said that sugar was a traditional staple of birthday parties, but Imogen did not join in the laughter. She left with a look which suggested I can expect imminent litigation against my Nigella fairy cakes. Then, as soon as she was out of the door, I had another encounter with Angela Brunt, who was kneeling by the coats and scraping strawberry Frube off Davina’s green velvet. “Have you got Emily in anywhere yet, Kate?”

“No.”

“Well, Davina has a guaranteed place at Morton’s, but her second interview at Piper Place is on Thursday and that’s the one we’re holding out for because it opens the door to so many other things, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, doesn’t it.”

After washing my hands to try and remove the smell of vomit, I go into the sitting room where Richard has crashed out on the sofa, a Sunday Review section tented over his face. Every time he breathes out, he inflates the breasts of Madonna, whose picture is on the cover above a feature entitled FROM VIRGIN TO BLESSED MOTHER. Perhaps I should call Madonna for a mum-to-mum chat about how to sponge vomit from a kelim? Presumably at her daughter’s parties she has a designated sick-wrangler. How much do I hate the celebrity Having-It-All Mother who boasts about how fulfilled she is when you just know she has a fleet of substitute mothers doing it all for her?

“Rich?”

“Hmmmmm?” The paper slides down onto the bridge of his nose.

“We have to get Emily down for Piper Place.”

“Why?”

“Because it opens so many doors.”

“You’ve been talking to Angela Brunt again.” His sigh is so big it’s practically a yawn.

“No.”

“Katie, that woman’s poor kid is so pressurized she’s going to end up as the neighborhood crack dealer.”

“But she can play the oboe.”

“All right, the neighborhood’s oboe-playing crack dealer. Your daughter knows all of Mary Poppins by heart. Give her a break, OK?”

Richard spent most of Emily’s swimming party in the deep end with Mathilde, mother of Laurent, who is in Em’s class at school. I was in the shallows, pulling ten screaming children round on a snake made of orange tubing. On the way home in the car, Rich sighed and said, “Frenchwomen do keep themselves in good nick, don’t they?”

He sounded exactly like his mother.

“Mathilde doesn’t work,” I said crossly.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“After the age of thirty, body maintenance is a full-time job. And I already have one of those, in case you haven’t noticed.”

For a second, he rested his head on the steering wheel. “It wasn’t a criticism of you, Kate. Not everything’s a criticism of you, you know.”

After the kitchen is clean and I’ve crawled the length of the hall pinching up orange Wotsit dust with my thumb and forefinger — if I use the Hoover it’ll wake them — I sit down for five minutes to watch TV. An hour later I’m woken by the phone. It’s Barbara, my motherin-law. “I hope you don’t think I’m talking out of turn, Katharine, but Richard did sound awfully fed up when I spoke to him earlier. It’s not my place to say anything, of course, but let things go in a certain department and before you know where you are — well, the whole shop closes down.”

“Yes, Barbara, but it’s been Emily’s party and—”

“Anyway, Richard’s father and I are coming down on Saturday to take in that marvelous show at the Royal Academy.”

I realize that the pause indicates I should say something. “Oh, that’s nice, Barbara. Where will you be staying?”

“Now don’t go to too much trouble, will you? You know Donald and me: hot water and a clean bed and we’ll be right as rain.”

9:40 P.M. Upstairs, Emily is still awake but wild-eyed with tiredness after her big day. She has shucked off both duvet and nightie as usual and lies there on the sheet, her body casting a mother-of-pearl sheen in the darkened room. Over the past year — can it really be a whole twelve months since she turned five? — her distended baby’s potbelly has disappeared; her tummy dips now and rises towards the contours of the woman she will become. More beautiful for not knowing she is beautiful. Want to love and protect and never ever hurt her. Make silent vow to be a better mother.

“Mummy?”

“Yes, Em.”

“Next birthday, I will be seven! Then I will be eight, nine, ten, ’leven, twelve, fourteen, twenty!”

“That’s right. But you don’t want to grow up too soon, sweetheart.”

“I do.” She juts that chin of hers. “When you’re a adult you can go to Morantic.”

“What’s Morantic?”

She rolls her eyes in incredulity, my world-weary sophisticate of six. “You know, Morantic. It’s a country where adults go out to dinner and kiss.”

“Oh. Romantic.”

She nods, pleased I’ve heard of it. “Yes, Morantic!”

“Who told you about Morantic?”

“Hannah. And anyway you have to go with boys, only sometimes they’re too naughty.”

I stand here in the thick hot dark thinking of all the conversations we will have on this subject in the years ahead and of the ones we won’t have, because she will need to have secrets in order to grow away from me and I will need to have secrets to keep her close. As I bend to kiss her, I say, “Morantic is a fantastic country. And you know what? When you’re ready to go there, Mummy and Emily will choose some lovely dresses together and we’ll pack you a bag.”

Perhaps seeing something sorrowful in my expression, my daughter reaches out and takes my hand in her small one; it triggers a flicker, no more, of holding my own mother’s hand, its coolness, the meshing of its bones.

“You can come to Morantic too, Mummy,” she says. “It’s not very far.”

“No, love,” I say, leaning down to extinguish the Cinderella light. “Mummy’s too old.”

To: Kate Reddy

From: Jack Abelhammer

Dearest Katharine,

Perfectly understand your reservations about our meeting again in this life and appreciate the suggestion that your esteemed colleague Brian Somebody might take over the handling of my business. Weirdly, I find myself unwilling to do without you, Kate. Reddiness is all.

Good news, however. Found this great restaurant in a parallel universe. No veal and they can do us a corner table. How are you fixed?

love, Jack

To: Jack Abelhammer

From: Kate Reddy

The twelfth of Never looks good for me. Can we sit by the window?

K xxxxx

Out in the garden, through a night as dense and soft as cloth, I swear I can hear Jack calling to me. When I was young I left men like I left clothes, in heaps on the floor. It seemed better that way. You see, I had figured out that it was hard for someone to leave you when you’d gone already. Emotionally, I always had my suitcase packed. A therapist, if I ever had time to consult one, would probably say it was something to do with my dad walking out on us. Besides, I took the Groucho Marx line: Why would I want to be in a relationship with anyone dumb enough to be in a relationship with me? It took Richard to show me that love could be an investment, something which could silently accrue and promised long-term returns instead of a gamble that would leave you broke and broken.

Before Richard, and before children, leaving was easy. Leaving now would be nothing but grief. To the kids, Richard and I are an all-purpose love hybrid called mum’n’dad. To split that unit in half, to teach them there are two people they must learn to love separately — I just don’t feel I have the right to ask my children to do that. Men leave their children because they can; women, in general, don’t leave because they can’t. A mother’s life is no longer her own to leave.

To be with Jack, I would have to go into exile from my homeland. To find the courage to do it, I would need to be so unhappy that staying was harder than jumping. And I’m not there yet.

Debt you owe to your children. Debt you owe to yourself. Figure out how to reconcile the two. Minutes of meeting to be written up (Secretary Lorraine says she’s off sick, but Lorraine always off sick in heat wave). Self-tan must; look like Morticia Adams’s younger sister. Grovel to clients over completely disastrously hideous performance for May (–9 percent versus index of –6 percent). May has wiped out all hard work for previous four months; great results now drowned in sea of red. Suggest to clients that performance is only temporary and am taking measures to address it. Think of measures to address it. Deflate bouncy castle, confront Rod over shameful sexist/racist treatment of Momo. Stair carpet??? Book stress-busting spa day, including protein facial as recommended by ace Vogue beauty woman. Wedding anniversary. When is wedding anniversary? Oh, God.

30 The Patter of Tiny Feet

THURSDAY, 11:29 P.M. Impending visit from the parents-in-law fills the air with apprehension like the thunder of distant wildebeest. “Don’t go to any trouble, darling,” says my husband. “What have you got planned for Sunday lunch?”

“Don’t go to any trouble, Katharine,” says Barbara, calling for the third time. So then you don’t go to any trouble and she takes one look in the fridge when they arrive, tugs on her string of pearls as though it were a rosary and drags Donald out to the car. They return with the entire contents of Sainsbury’s, “So we have a bit in for emergencies.”

Everything is under control this time, however. I will not be found wanting. There are clean sheets on the guest bed and clean white towels snatched up in M&S at lunchtime. I have even put a nodding sprig of lily of the valley in a bedside vase for that graceful, womanly touch of the sort practiced by Cheryl, my über-housewife sister-in-law. Also I must remember to dig out and display in prominent positions all Donald and Barbara’s presents from down the years:

Watercolor of sunset over Coniston by “the celebrated local artist Pamela Anderson” (no relation, alas)

Royal Worcester egg coddlers (4)

Electric wok

Dick Francis novel in hardback

Beatrix Potter commemorative cake stand

Also—

There was definitely another also.

Swab down the kitchen worktop, then check Em’s book bag ready for the morning. Inside, slotted among the pages of Lily the Lost Dog, is a note from school. Could parents please contribute an example of food typical to their child’s cultural background and bring it in for World Feast Day?

No, parents could not. Parents are very busy earning a living, thank you, and happy for school to do the job for which it is paid. I read down to the bottom of note. Great Feast is tomorrow. All welcome! Next to this threatening injunction, Emily has inscribed in her fiercest pressed-down writing: My Mummy Is a verray gud kuk much betaa than Sofeez mum. Oh, hell.

Start to search the cupboards. What qualifies as English ethnic for heaven’s sake? Roast beef? Spotted Dick? I find a jar of English mustard, but it has a disgusting rubbery collar of ancient gunge, like Mick Jagger lips, pouting around the lid. Fish and chips? Good, but no fish and never made chips in my life. Could take in McDonald’s large fries wrapped in newspaper, but just imagine the faces of the whole-food Nazis led by Mother Alexandra Law. At the back of the cereal shelf, I discover two jars of Bonne Maman jam. Strawberry preserve is an excellent example of the indigenous culinary arts, except this stuff is made in France.

Brilliant idea. Boil the kettle. Picking up one jar and then the other, I hold them over the steam till the label wilts and slips off. In the freezer-bag drawer, I find some new labels and on them I write, in rounded bucolic lettering, Shattock Strawberry Jam. Overconfident now, I attempt to draw a luscious strawberry in the corner of the label. It looks like an inflamed pancreas. Glue labels onto jars. Et voilà! Je suis une bonne maman!

“Kate, what are you doing? It’s gone midnight.” Rich has come into the kitchen in boxers and T-shirt carrying a Furby. I detest the Furby. The Furby is a hideous cross between a chinchilla and Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Both Furby and husband squint dubiously at me through the half-light.

“I’m making jam. Actually, I’m remaking jam, if you must know. Emily’s school is having this ethnic feast tomorrow and she has to take in something English.”

“Couldn’t you just buy something in the morning?”

“No, Rich, I couldn’t.”

His sigh is almost a shout. “God, how many times do we have to go through this? I’ve told you, you have to learn to let go. When women are working as hard as you are, Kate, other people are just going to have to accept that you can’t do all the stuff your mothers did.”

I want to tell him that even if other people accept it, I’m not sure I ever will. But the Furby gets there before me, breaking the silence with a crooning chirrup, and Rich disappears upstairs.

12:39 A.M. Too tired for sleep. I put the Furby in a black bin bag and tie a knot in the neck. In the dark kitchen, I open my laptop and sit here bathed in its milky metallic light. I call up the Salinger file. The figures on-screen comfort me — the way they do my bidding so readily, the fact that I cannot lie to them. Whereas at home, I’m a forger, a faker. I’m not ashamed of it; I don’t see any alternative. A good mum makes her own jam, doesn’t she? Secretly, we all know that. When they start naming preserves Jet Lag Maman or Quality Time Mum, when bread comes in wrappers marked Father’s Pride, it will be safe for us bad, exhausted mothers to come out with our hands up.

FRIDAY, 7:10 A.M. Richard raised his voice. I’ve never known him to raise his voice before, only ask me to lower mine. But there we were sitting in the kitchen at breakfast with the kids jabbering away and you should have heard him bite Emily’s head off.

“Mummy, can I have a baby sister?”

“No, darling.”

“But I want one. Daddy, can we have a baby sister?”

“No, you cannot!”

“Why?”

“Because to make a baby sister mummies and daddies have to have time together in the same room.” Rich is watching the TV with the volume turned down, his eyes glued to the crescent pout of Chloe-Zoe.

“Don’t, Richard.”

“And your mummy and daddy never have time, Emily. Mummy is just about to go to New York again, so under those circumstances it will be particularly hard to make a baby sister. Or maybe Mummy would like me to get a man in for her. Isn’t that what Mummy always asks Daddy to do when the lights go out? Get a man in.”

“I said don’t.”

“Why not, Kate? Never lie to her, isn’t that what you said?”

“Mu-um, Daisy’s got a baby sister.”

“And you’ve got a baby brother, Em.”

“But he’s a boy.”

8:52 A.M. For once, I drop Emily off at school myself. I called work and said I had to see the doctor; in the hierarchy of excuses, poor health is better than a needy small girl. Em is thrilled to have me there with the other mummies; she parades me before her friends like a show horse, patting my rump and pointing out my good features.

“My mummy’s lovely and tall, isn’t she?”

I was hoping to slip in my World Feast contribution unnoticed, but there is a table bang in the middle of the school hall groaning with ethnic offerings. One mother appears to have brought along an entire curried goat. Kirstie’s mum has done haggis clad in genuine stomach. Christ. Quickly hide my strawberry jam behind a crenellated fortress of soda bread.

“Kate, hello! Have you gone part-time, yet?” booms Alexandra Law, unveiling a trifle the size of an inverted Albert Hall.

“No. I’m afraid where I work they don’t really do part-time. To be honest, they think full-time is skiving.”

The other mothers laugh, all except Claire Dalton, senior partner at Sheridan and Farquhar. Claire, I notice, is trying to sneak a small bowl of green jelly onto World Feast altar. She is holding the jelly very still so as not to give away the fact that it is unset.

12:46 P.M. Candy is keeping the baby. She refuses to talk about it, but her belly has made her intentions increasingly clear. The Stratton wardrobe, always on the challenging side of slinky, is now straining to contain her. So today I have brought in a bag of maternity clothes, one or two nice pieces she can wear for work and a couple of useful sacks for later on. I hand the bag to her without comment over lunch in Pizza Navona. She lifts out a taupe shift dress and holds it up incredulously.

“Hey, brown-paper packages tied up with string. These are a few of my favorite things!”

“I thought they might come in useful, that’s all.”

“What for?”

“For your pregnancy.”

“Jesus Christ, what’s this?” Candy takes out a white broderie-anglaise nightie and flaps it like a flag to the amusement of the group of guys at the next table. “I surrender, I surrender,” she pleads.

“Look, it has an easy opening for feeding.”

“Why would I want to eat anything wearing a — oh, God, you mean someone feeding off me. That’s sooo disgusting.”

“Yes, well, it’s been pretty common practice for the past hundred and fifty thousand years.”

“Not in New Jersey, it hasn’t. Kate?”

“Yes?”

“It’s not gonna be needy, is it?”

I study Candy’s face closely. She’s not joking. “No, it won’t be needy. I promise.” Not after the first eighteen years, I should add, but for my friend’s sake I hold my tongue. She isn’t ready yet.

3:19 P.M. A State of Emergency. Roo is missing. Paula calls and says she knows for definite that he was in the buggy when she took Ben to Little Stars music group this morning, and she’s pretty sure Roo came back with them. But then, when she went to put Ben down for his afternoon nap, they couldn’t find him. Ben was devastated. Screamed and screamed for his toy while Paula searched the house. High and low, but there was no kangaroo to be seen. I can hear Ben hiccuping with grief in the background.

What was she doing taking Roo out of the house in the first place? I can’t believe Paula could be so stupid when she knows how awful it would be if he got lost. I voice this thought out loud and, instead of snapping back, she just sounds culpable and sad.

“Do you think we can find another one, Kate?”

“I’ve no idea what the market in used kangaroos is like, Paula.”

3:29 P.M. Call Woolworth’s, where Roo came from originally. Assistant says sorry, but she believes they are out of kangaroos. Would I like to speak to the manager? Yes.

Manager says that kangaroos been discontinued. “There’s been a big trend away from the softer animals towards plastic novelty creatures, Mrs. Reddy. Would you perhaps be interested in a Mr. Potato Head?”

No. I already work with a dozen of those.

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 motherin-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 motherin-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.

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. Damn. 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.”)

Observing that I am the only colleague not to join in the cooing approbation, Andrew shrugs helplessly and says, “You know how it is, Kate.” Slips into his jacket and out of the room.

Indeed, I do know how it is. Man annnounces he has to leave the office to be with his child for short recreational burst and is hailed as selfless doting paternal role model. Woman announces she has to leave the office to be with child who is on sickbed and is damned as disorganized, irresponsible, and Showing Insufficient Commitment. For father to parade himself as a Father is a sign of strength; for mother to out herself as a Mother is a sign of appalling vulnerability. Don’t you just love equal opportunities?

To: Debra Richardson

From: Kate Reddy

Just chaired meeting where fellow manager announced he had to leave to attend daughter’s swimming gala. Practically knighted on the spot for services to parenthood. If I tried that, Rod would have me executed and my dripping bloody head stuck on the ramparts of Bank of England as a warning to other women slackers.

It’s sooooo unfair. Am coming to conclusion that career-girl bollocks is one-generation-only trick. We are living proof that it can’t work, aren’t we?

Forget higher education. Think we should send our girls to catering college where they can learn to make decorative floral centerpieces and a delicious supper for two. Then they can marry a man who will pay for them to stay at home and have pedicures.

URGENT: Pls remind me what was drawback to that way of life again???

To: Kate Reddy

From: Debra Richardson

Once upon a time, in a land far away,

a beautiful, independent, self-assured princess

happened upon a frog as she sat

contemplating ecological issues

on the shores of an unpolluted pond

in a verdant meadow near her castle.

The frog hopped into the princess’s lap and said:

Sweet lady, I was once a handsome prince,

until an evil witch cast a spell on me.

One kiss from you, however,

and I will turn back into the dapper young prince that I am.

Then, my sweet, we can marry

and set up house in yon castle

where you can prepare my meals,

clean my clothes, bear my children,

and forever feel grateful and

happy doing so.

That night, dining on a repast of lightly sauteed frogs’ legs,

The princess chuckled to herself and thought:

I don’t fucking think so.

Men today can only be better fathers than their fathers. Simply by knowing how to change a nappy or figuring out which hole you stick the bottle in — these things mark them out as more capable parents than any previous generation. But women can only be worse mothers than our mothers, and this rankles because we are working so very very hard and we are doomed to fail.

At Edwin Morgan Forster, the desks of men with children are dense with photographs of their offspring. Before you get to the computer and the blotter, you have to negotiate a three-day-event course of family portraits: leather frames, mottled crocodile frames, double steel frames with a copper hinge, witty Perspex cubes. A missing tooth here, a soccer goal there; that skiing trip in February where Sophie wrapped her red scarf around Dad’s neck and they both turned to face the camera with Steinway smiles. A man is allowed to advertise the fact that he is a father; it’s a sign of strength, a sign he is a good provider. The women in the offices of EMF don’t tend to display pictures of their kids. The higher they go up the ladder, the fewer the photographs. If a man has pictures of kids on his desk, it enhances his humanity; if a woman has them it decreases hers. Why? Because he’s not supposed to be home with the children; she is.

I used to have a photo of Ben and Emily on my desk. Rich snapped it just after the baby had learned to sit up. Em was sitting behind, clutching him round the middle with fierce pride. He was bubbling up as though life was one big joke and he’d just heard the punch line for the first time. I kept the photo on my desk for a few weeks, but each time I caught the children looking at me I had the same thought: you are providing for them, but you are not bringing them up. So the picture’s in the drawer now.

Last year, I went to this lecture by an American chief executive at the London Business School. She said she was going to train her daughters up as geishas; the real future for women was as nurturers and men-pleasers. There was nervous laughter in the room: she was joking, wasn’t she? She was beautiful and she was incredibly smart and I don’t think she was joking.

All I knew was that I didn’t want my mother’s life. I didn’t need a role model to teach me that being dependent on some man was debilitating, maybe even dangerous. But will Emily really want my life? When she looks at her Mummy, who does she see? (If she ever sees her Mummy.) Back in the seventies, when they were fighting for women’s rights, what did they think equal opportunities meant: that women would be entitled to spend as little time with their kids as men do?

12:46 P.M. Chowzat! is the hi-tech cafeteria installed by EMF last year in the basement as part of its attempt to look less like a bank and more like a nightclub. The café is meant to have a funky postindustrial ambience, but the effect is a lot like an airport coffee lounge. I am still lightly stoned after the joint accepted in a moment of madness this morning. What could I be thinking of? As I was getting out of the car, Winston invited me to join him at a concert a fortnight on Sunday. Might find it not totally my scene, he said, the music was a bit overwhelming, but he thinks it would do me good. As the proud-fortress fund manager composed her polite but frosty refusal, I opened my mouth and out fell the word yes. Presumably, I now have a date at a rave with my new drug dealer. What the hell am I going to tell Richard?

As the weed wears off, I feel both nauseous and ravenous. Weigh up the rival merits of the Jumbo Blueberry Muffin and its dainty lo-cal sister, Lemon and Sesame Seed. Buy both. Am stuffing alternate fistfuls into my mouth when I look up and see familar brick-red features glowering down at me.

“Jesus, Katie. You’re not eating for two, are you? Got enough trouble in that department with Candy.”

Rod Task.

“Ygno.” I splutter, shooting blueberry bullets across the table.

Rod tells me he needs me to go to New York to do a pitch to some brokers on Wednesday. Wants me to give them “a little TLC.” This information followed by a grotesque wink.

“Next Wednesday?”

“Sure. As in the day after tomorrow.”

“Actually, Rod, my nanny is off sick and I have to find a temporary to—”

He cuts me off with a karate slice of the hand. “Are you telling me you can’t make it, Kate? If you can’t, I’m sure Guy can handle it.”

“Nyes. Of course I can, it’s just that—”

“Great. And can you take a look at this for me, sweetie? Thanks.”

I study the photocopy in the lift on the way back to the thirteenth floor. It’s an article from Investment Manager International under the headline THE GENDER EQUALITY PENNY IS FINALLY DROPPING!

Investment management firms are increasingly jumping on the bandwagon of gender equality as they realize that a more welcoming attitude towards women employees makes good business sense. Herbert George and Berryman Lowell have recently won laurels for their efforts in this area. Julia Brooking, a vice-president at Herbert George, says: “The City offers fabulous opportunities for women. More are being promoted every year. Most firms have now appointed diversity coordinators.”

Many institutions lament, however, that while they offer great careers for women, preconceptions of antisocial working hours and macho culture are still deterrents to female applicants.

“Puncturing the stereotype of old-boy cronyism associated with the Square Mile is not easy,” admits Celia Harmsworth, Head of Human Resources at Edwin Morgan Forster.

Well, she should know. Seeing Celia’s name in an article on gender equality is like finding Heinrich Himmler conducting a guided tour of a synagogue.

Harmsworth announced that EMF, formerly considered to be one of the City’s more old-fashioned outfits, has recently appointed a diversity coordinator, Katharine Reddy.

What?

Thirty-five-year-old Reddy, the youngest senior director at EMF, has been tasked with identifying gender-issue obstacles in the business culture.

I notice that Rod has circled the phrase “gender-issue obstacles.” Next to it he has scrawled, What the fuck is this?

To: Debra Richardson

From: Kate Reddy

hello hello from yr borderline psychotic friend. Do you think postnatal depression can last up to 18 months after the birth? If so, when does it go away?

Did I mention we have RATS. One ran across the floor when the in-laws were staying. OH, AND MY CLEANER HAS FIRED ME. Came in to work to discover 61 e-mails, pitch to do in NYC, nanny “sick,” only available temp is close relative of Slobodan Milosevic. Plus I am EMF’s new “Diversity Coordinator.” Have to take urgent steps to redress the firm’s gender imbalance. Any idea where I can purchase some kind of automatic weapon?

Can we PLS do that lunch? name a day xxxx

To: Kate Reddy

From: Debra Richardson

Believe that postnatal depression can last up to 18 YEARS after the birth and then we have a hysterectomy and start watching old episodes of Friends from red rubber old-lady chairs in gated retirement community.

Don’t worry, rats now v. middle class. No stylish home dare be seen without one. Felix has been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. Think that’s what his dad suffers from too, but that could be because he’s having an affair???

Too knackered to care. Read in Good Housekeeping that half of all working mothers are worried relationship with husband is suffering because of a terrible “time famine.” What are the other half doing, 30-second blow jobs?

What news of the gorgeous unsuitable Abelhammer? You do realize that, as my oldest friend, your sole role is to give me reasons to envy and disapprove of you.

Lunch nxt Tues or Thurs? xxxxx

6:35 P.M. I collect Emily and Ben from Alice’s house. They fall on me like famished things. Alice’s nanny, Jo, is incredibly nice and says what great kids they are. How thoughtful and imaginative Emily is. Feel a burst of pride and pang of shame simultaneously as I realize how often I see them as a problem to be dealt with rather than something to be enjoyed.

Must appoint a temporary nanny tonight, unless I can persuade Richard to work from home or Paula makes miracle recovery. I have a total horror of asking favors on my own or my children’s behalf — reminds me of when Dad pushed me towards a woman at the bus station in Leeds one Christmas and told me to ask if she could let us have a fiver to get home because we’d run out of petrol. We didn’t even have a car. But the lady was so nice about it; she gave me the money and a packet of Jelly Tots for myself. The sweets stuck inside my hot cheeks like ulcers.

Jo says Ben has been clingy all day and she thinks he has some kind of rash on his chest. Has he had chicken pox? No, he hasn’t. But he can’t have it now. Am booked on 8:30 a.m. flight to New York.

10:43 P.M. I can’t believe it. I stand on the landing outside the bathroom draped in a tiny towel screaming for Richard.

“There’s no hot water.”

“What?” He stands halfway up the stairs from the hall, his face in shadow. “Oh, they turned the water off today when the rat guy was checking the pipes. Must have flicked the switch.”

“I have to have my bath.”

“Darling, be reasonable.” His voice is parched with weariness. “I’ll put it on now and it’ll be hot in twenty minutes.”

“Now. I need a bath now.”

“Kate—” He stops, looks at me as if about to say something, but then just tightens his lips and stares at me, shaking his head.

“What? What is it?” I snap.

“Kate. We…can’t go on like this.”

“Too right we can’t. I have no hot water. I have rats. I have a house that is a complete tip and no one to clean it. I needed to be asleep an hour ago and I really really really would like there to be some hot water, Richard. I work all the hours God sends and I live in conditions of medieval squalor. Is a bath too much to ask for?”

Rich reaches out an arm, but I bat it away. My tears are alarmingly hot — the temperature of the bath I’m not going to have. Must try to calm down. My husband looks wild-eyed. Why hasn’t he shaved?

Just now, from over our heads, comes a voice. “Roo,” it whimpers. “Roo.”

32 I Went Back Too Soon

1:05 A.M. Have you ever thought how much time you waste falling asleep? Falling sounds satisfactorily fast, but you don’t fall, do you? I find I have to sort of sidle up on sleep and ask if it could please let me in, like someone in the queue for a club trying to catch the eye of a doorman who is always looking the other way. Seven minutes of pillow-plumping and hollowing, the obligatory tussle with the duvet (Richard likes one leg hooked outside, which pins it down like a groundsheet and leaves me barely covered), I take a herbal sleeping tablet to summon instant shut-eye.

3:01 A.M. Can’t sleep for worrying that the sleeping tablet is so strong I will sleep through my alarm and miss the flight from Heathrow. I switch on the bedside light and read the paper. Next to me, Rich grunts and turns over. The foreign pages have more on the story of the American chief executive who went back to work four days after her twins were born. She chaired a meeting via speaker phone from her hospital bed. Her name is Elizabeth Quick. No, seriously. Sister to Hannah Haste and Isabel Imperative, presumably. “Liz Quick has become a poster woman for working mothers,” the article says, “but opponents say motherhood will distract her from her job.”

I can feel my whole body crumple. Do people like Ms. Quick have any idea how their valiant effort to act as though nothing has changed can be used as a stick to beat other women?

God knows, I can’t talk. I went back to work too soon after Emily. I didn’t know — how can you? — that this new life will be almost as strange to you as it is to them. Mother and baby: newborns both. Before Children — a woman’s existence is divided into BC and AC — when I still had time to go to the National Gallery on Sunday afternoons, I used to like to sit in front of that Bellini Madonna, the one where she’s in the foreground of a kind of farm, baked by the sun, gazing down at the lovely infant in her lap. I’d always thought it was serenity in her eyes. Now I see only exhaustion and mild puzzlement. “Christ, what have I done?” Mary asks the son of God. But he’s sleeping, full of milk, one plump arm flung in abandon over his mother’s blue dress.

I was the first woman on the investment floor at Edwin Morgan Forster to get pregnant: six months gone when James Entwhistle, Rod Task’s predecessor, called me into his office and said he couldn’t guarantee there would be a job for me when I got back from maternity leave. “You know how fast things move on with clients, Kate. It’s nothing personal.”

Civilized, decent, erudite James. I suppose I could have quoted the legislation at him, but there’s nothing they hate more than being reminded of their family-friendly policy. (EMF’s family-friendly policy exists so they can say they have a policy, not so people with families can invoke it. No man would ever use it anyway, so neither can any woman who wants to be taken seriously.) “Of course, the baby won’t make any difference, James,” I heard myself saying. He made a note on the jotter with his gold Cartier pen. Commitment? he wrote and underlined it twice.

“Would I be wanting to scale back my foreign clients?” Of course not.

I didn’t know.

At thirty-two weeks, I went to see the consultant at University College Hospital. Routine appointment. I’d missed the last one (Geneva, conference, fog). The consultant steepled his long white fingers like a cardinal and told me he was signing me off work because I was under too much pressure during the crucial weeks of fetal brain development. I said that was out of the question; I planned to work up to my due date so I could have some time at home with the baby afterwards.

“I’m not really worried about you, Mrs. Shattock,” he said coolly. “I worry about the child you’re carrying and the damage you could cause it.” I was crying so hard that when I stepped out onto Gower Street I was nearly run over by a milk cart.

So I took it easy. I took it easier. Technically, I had to stop flying at seven months, but a taupe shift dress saw me through till eight. Bump got so damned big by the end I had to do a three-point turn to get out of the lift. When jokes were made in meetings about needing to reinforce the office floor to support Kate’s weight, I laughed louder than anyone. Every time I walked past the dealing desk, Chris Bunce used to sing the Elephant March from Jungle Book under his breath—“Hup two three four, Keep-it-up two three four!” Bastard.

Sitting at the computer one afternoon, stomach so stretched my skin felt it was crawling with ants, I felt a few Braxton-Hickses, those practice contractions that sound like a retired colonel living in Nether Wallop. By the end, I used to dream of Colonel Hicks coming to my aid. He would carry my briefcase and, when I was standing at the bus stop on City Road nearly keeling over with exhaustion, he would hold out a hand and say, “Will you step aboard, madam?”

I did enroll in a prenatal class but could never make it there for the 7:30 start. Ended up going to a birthing weekend in Stoke Newington run by Beth: oat biscuits, whale music, a pelvis made out of a coat hanger and a baby from a stocking pulled over a tennis ball. Beth invited us to have a conversation with our vaginas. I said I wasn’t on speaking terms with mine and she thought I was joking. Laugh like a moose down a well.

Richard loathed the class. He couldn’t believe he had to take his shoes off, but he liked the bit with the stopwatch. You could swear he was going to be officiating at the Monaco Grand Prix.

“Knowing you, Kate,” he said, “you’ll have the fastest contractions in history.”

Beth said if you did those panting little breaths she taught us it was a way of mastering the pain. So I practiced them religiously. I practiced them secularly — at checkouts, in the bath, before bed. I didn’t know.

My waters broke on the escalator at Bank, splashing the Burberry of a Japanese futures analyst who apologized profusely. I canceled my client lunch on the mobile and took a cab straight to the hospital. They offered me an epidural, but I didn’t take it. I was the bitch who had endangered her baby’s brain development; not having drugs was my way of showing how sorry I was, showing the baby there was something its mother would bear for it. There was an ocean of pain and I dived into it again and again. The water was as hard as wood. It smacked you like a wave hitting a deck, and each time you got to your feet it smacked you again.

After twenty-five hours of labor, Rich put the stopwatch down and asked the midwife if we could see a consultant. Now. Down in the operating theater, during my emergency cesarean, I heard the surgeon say, “Nothing to worry about, this will feel a bit like I’m doing the washing-up in your tummy.” It didn’t. It felt like the baby was an oak being pulled up by the roots from claggy November earth: tug and wrench and tug again. Finally, one of the junior doctors climbed onto the operating table, straddled me and yanked her out by the heels. Held her up like a catch, a thing from the sea, a mermaid marbled with blood. A girl.

Over the next few days a number of bouquets arrived, but the biggest came from Edwin Morgan Forster. It was the kind of baroque arrangement that can only be commanded by war memorials or a City expense account. There were priapic thistles, five feet high, and giant lilies that filled the air with their pepper and made the baby sneeze. A card was attached with a message written by a florist who couldn’t spell: One down, free to go!

God, I hated those flowers: the way they stole our air, hers and mine. I gave them to the day midwife, who slung them over her shoulder and took them home to Harlesden on her scooter.

After thirty-six hours, the night midwife — Irish, softer, more musical than her daylight counterpart — asked if she could take baby from me so I could get some rest. When I protested, she said, “Part of being a good mum, Katharine, is having enough energy to cope.” And she wheeled away my daughter, who furled and unfurled those frondlike hands in her little Perspex aquarium.

Headlong, I fell down a mine shaft of exhaustion. It could have been hours later — it felt like seconds — that I heard her crying. Up till that moment, I didn’t know I knew my baby’s cry, but when I heard it I knew I would always know it, would be able to pick it out from any other cry in the world. From somewhere down a brown corridor, she summoned me. Hitching the catheter over one arm and guarding my stitches with the other, I started to hobble towards her, guided by that sonar which had come as a free gift with motherhood. By the time I got to the nursery, she had stopped yelling and was staring, enthralled, at a paper ceiling lantern. I have never experienced joy and fear in such a combination before: impossible to tell where the pain stopped and the love began.

“You’ll have to name her,” the smiling midwife chided. “We can’t keep calling her baby, it’s not right.”

I’d thought about Genevieve but it suddenly seemed too big for the intended owner. “Emily was my grandmother’s name. She always made me feel safe.”

“Oh, Emily’s lovely — let’s try it.”

So we tried it and she turned her head towards her name, and it was settled.

Three weeks later, James Entwhistle rang and offered me a job in strategy, a nothing job going nowhere. I accepted it gratefully and put down the phone. I would kill him later. Later, I would kill all of them. But first I had to bathe my daughter.

Nine weeks to the day of the cesarean, I was back in the office. That first morning my mind was so disconnected that I actually dialed a number and asked if I could speak to Kate Reddy. A man said he didn’t think Kate was back yet, and he was right. I reckon she wasn’t really back for a year, and the old Kate, the one Before Children, never returned. But she did a great impersonation of being back, and maybe only a mother could have seen through her disguise.

Five days later, work told me I had to fly to Milan and I was still breastfeeding. All weekend, I tried to get Emily to accept a bottle. Coaxed and pleaded and finally paid a woman from Fulham a hundred quid to come and wean my daughter off me. I can remember the baby yodeling, lungs raw with fury, and Richard standing out in the garden smoking.

“She’ll take the bottle when she’s really starving,” the woman explained and, yes, she herself would prefer cash. Sometimes I think Emily has never really forgiven me.

On the drive to the airport, the cab radio started playing that Stevie Wonder song, “Isn’t She Lovely?” The one where you hear the baby crying at the start. And my blouse was soaked suddenly with milk.

I didn’t know.

33 The Note

11:59 P.M. SHERBOURNE HOTEL, NEW YORK. Unbelievable. Plane got in on time and I took a cab to the Herriot off Wall Street. The plan was to swot up for tomorrow’s presentation and get a decent night’s rest before strolling across the road to the World Financial Center. I should have known. The reception clerk — hopelessly young, trying to give himself a little authority in a cheap shiny blazer — was having trouble meeting my eye. Finally he said, “I’m afraid we have a problem, Ms. Reddy.” A conference. Overbooking. “I am happy to offer you free accommodation at the Sherbourne — midtown, great location, opposite our world-renowned Museum of Modern Art.”

“Sounds delightful, but I’m here to do business, not get a headache staring at early Cubists.”

Ended up yelling at him, of course. Totally unacceptable, frequent customer, blah blah blah….Could see his eyes darting around for a superior to save him from the crazy Brit. As though I were mad — and I’m not mad, am I? It’s these people driving you crazy with their inefficiency, wasting my precious time.

The manager was incredibly apologetic but there was absolutely nothing he could do. So by the time I get to the new hotel, it’s nearly midnight. Called Richard, who was ready with a list of queries. Thank God Paula’s better, so we don’t have to get a temp. It’s Emily’s first day back at school tomorrow.

Had I done the name tapes?

Yes.

Had I got new gym shoes?

Yes. (In her navy gym bag on the peg under the stairs.)

Where would he find her reading books?

Red library folder, third shelf of bookcase.

Had I bought a new coat? (The old one now comes up to her waist.)

Not yet; she will have to make do with Gap raincoat till I get back.

Then I dictated the contents of her lunch box — pita bread, tuna and corn, no cheese; she’s decided she hates cheese — and told him to remember the check for ballet, the amount’s written in the diary. And he needs to give Paula money to get Ben some new trousers, he’s just had a growth spurt. Richard tells me that Em was upset going to bed; she said she wanted Mummy to take her to school because it’s a new teacher.

Why does he feel he needs to share that with me when there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it? Says he’s had an exhausting day.

“Tell me about it,” I say back, and ching down the phone.

No time to go through notes for my presentation, so I will have to wing it. Tomorrow’s shaping up to be a total nightmare.

To: Kate Reddy

From: Debra Richardson

Just got yrs to say yr canceling lunch. AGAIN. The first 49 times it was funny. I realize you have the most disgustingly demanding job on the planet, but if we don’t make time for friendship what hope is there?

Are we next going to meet after our deaths? How is the afterlife looking for you, Kate?

Oh, hell. No time to reply.

WEDNESDAY, 8:33 A.M. Been standing outside the hotel for at least fifteen minutes now. It’s impossible to get a cab and the journey downtown will take at least twenty-five. Am going to be late. Still, my senses quicken at the prospect of seeing Jack tonight; it’s months since I last saw him and I’m having trouble calling his face to mind. When I think of him all I get is a broad smile and a general impression of ease and happiness.

It’s a fabulous morning, one of those glittering New York days that hurt your heart. Incredible rain last night has given everything a remarkable windscreen-wiped clarity. As we reach the bottom of Fifth, I see the buildings of the financial district quiver with the slight watery shimmer that comes from the play of condensation and light and glass.

8:59 A.M. Brokers Dickinson Bishop are on the twenty-first floor. My stomach does an Olga Korbut flick-flack in the elevator on the way up. Gerry, a beaming fellow with a broad Irish face and straggly red sideburns, meets me at the landing. I tell him I need forty-five minutes and a place to show slides.

“Sorry, you got five, lady. Things are pretty crazy in there.”

He heaves open a thick wooden door and unleashes the sounds of an average day at the Coliseum, plus phones. Men bawling into receivers, fighting to make themselves heard, or shouting out instructions across the room. Just as I’m wondering whether to make a run for it, a message comes over the PA: “OK, listen up, you guys, in two minutes Miss Kate Reddy of London, England, will be talking to you about international investing.”

About seventy brokers gather round, mastiff-necked New Yorkers in those terrible shirts with the white collars and the marquee stripes. They lean back against the desks, arms crossed, legs apart, the way that kind of man stands. Some carry on trading but pull down their headpieces to lend me half an ear. There is no way I’m going to be seen or heard down here, so I take a split-second decision to stand on a desk and shout my wares.

“Good morning, gentlemen. I’m here to tell you why you must buy my fund!”

Cheers, whistles. The closest I’ll ever get to being a pole dancer, I guess.

“Hey, miss, anyone ever tell you you look like Princess Di?”

“Is your stock as good as your legs?”

What strikes me about these Masters of the Universe is how hopelessly, helplessly boyish they are. In 1944 they would have been landing on the beaches of Normandy, and here they are gathered round me as if I were their company commander.

I give them the big speech about the money — the way it’s awake when I’m asleep, the way it moves around the world, its amazing power.

Then they fire questions at me. “Whaddaya think about Russia, ma’am? Isn’t Russia money the pits?” “Did you see a Euro yet?”

It’s gone well, unbelievably well. At the lift, a grinning Gerry tells me the guys normally only get that fired up for a Knicks game. I should really go back to the hotel and pick up my messages, but I walk for a while along Wall Street, feeling plugged into the power supply. On the corner of Maiden Lane and Broadway, I hail a cab and take it uptown to Barney’s for some post-traumatic shopping.

The store has an immediate consoling effect. I take the little lift to the top floor, where I spot an evening dress. I don’t need an evening dress. I try it on. Black and floaty with a fragile braid of diamante fixed down each side and in a plunging V under the bust, it’s the kind of dress they once danced the Charleston in. I just about have the figure for it; I just don’t have the life. My life is the wrong size; there’s no room in it for a dress this beautiful. But isn’t that part of the thrill, buying a dress and hoping the life to go with it will follow soon like a must-have accessory? When the girl at the till hands me the chit to sign, I don’t even check the amount.

3:00 P.M. The hotel room is like a hundred I’ve stayed in before. The wallpaper is beige embossed on beige; the curtains, in bold contrast, look like an explosion in a herbaceous border. I check the minibar for emergency chocolate and then the drawer of the bedside table: there is the Gideon Bible and — a more contemporary touch — a collection of sayings from the World’s Great Religions.

I check my watch. The time difference with England is five hours. If I call now, it should be around the kids’ bedtime. I’m expecting to hear Richard’s voice, but it’s Paula at the other end. She says Rich has asked her to stay over a couple of nights until I get back and left a note for me that he made her promise to deliver in person.

Where the hell is he? I ask Paula to open the note and read it to me. Just look at the time. I think of all the things my husband could be doing to help out while I’m not there as our nanny starts to read his words aloud.

“I’ve been trying to talk to you for a while now, but I find it increasingly hard to get your attention.”

“Yes, but does it say what time he’ll be back?”

“Kate, can you hear me? Are you listening?”

“Of course I can hear you, Paula.”

“No, that’s Richard. In the note. He says, Kate, can you hear me? Are you listening?”

“Oh, right, sorry. Go on.”

“I am so sorry, my darling, that we have reached this terrible imp—”

“What imp?”

“—ass.”

Oh, for heaven’s sake. “How do you spell it?”

Paula announces each letter carefully: “I-m-p-a-s-s-e.”

“Oh, impasse. I see. It’s, you know, it’s French for…well, anyway, what else?”

Paula sounds dubious. “I’m not sure I should be doing this, Kate.”

“No, please carry on. I have to know what his plans are.”

“He says, If you need to get hold of me I will be staying at David and Maria’s for a few nights until I find a place of my own. He says, Don’t worry, I’ll still go and pick Emily up from school.”

So it really can happen, then. In real life. A thing you’ve seen in bad TV drama and turned over because it’s so implausible. Only this time there is no turning over and maybe no turning back. One moment the world is pretty much as it should be — rocky and a little barren, perhaps, but still the world as you know it — and then suddenly you have the sensation of the ground giving way beneath your feet. My husband, Richard the rational, Richard the reliable, Richard the rock, has left me. Rich — who in the letter he gave me the day before our wedding wrote I’m Ever and you’re Reddy; here’s to long life, my darling—has walked out and I have been paying so little attention that our nanny has ended up breaking the news.

During the long pause, Paula’s breathing has got heavier; there is a wheeze of anxiety coming down the line. “Kate,” she asks, “are you OK?”

“Yes, I’m fine. Please, Paula, sleep in our bed”—as I say the words it occurs to me that it may be my bed now, not ours—“the children go there first in the morning. I know this is asking an awful lot, Paula, but if you could just hold the fort. And if you can please tell Emily and Ben that Mummy will be back as soon as she can tomorrow.”

Paula doesn’t reply at once, and I think if she lets me down now I don’t know what I’ll do.

“Is that all right, Paula?”

“Oh — sorry, Kate, I’ve just seen there’s a PS on the other side. Richard says, I know I can never stop loving you because, believe me, I’ve tried.

There is no possible reply to that, and into my silence Paula murmurs, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything here. Ben and Em will be fine. It’s going to be all right, Kate, really it is.”

After I’ve put the phone down, I forget how to breathe for a few seconds. Suddenly the mechanics of taking in air seem complicated and strenuous; I have to heave my diaphragm up and then pump my chest out, heave and pump again.

When I’m a little steadier, I call Jack and leave a message on his mobile canceling dinner. Then I get undressed and take a shower. The towels are that hopeless Italian kind; thin and frugal as an altar cloth, they pat the water round your skin rather than absorbing it. I need a towel that can hug me.

Catching sight of myself in the bathroom mirror, I am startled to see that I look much as I did the last time I looked. Why isn’t my hair falling out? Why aren’t my eyes weeping blood? I think of my children asleep in their beds and of how far I am from them, how unbelievably far. From this distance, I see my little family as a small encampment on a hillside and the winds are lashing round them and I have to be there to tie everything down. I have to be there.

The water is wide, I cannot get o’er,

And neither have I wings to fly.

I climb into bed, between the stiff white sheets, and move my hand over my body. My body and, for so long, Richard’s body. With this body I thee worship. I try to think of the last time I saw him. Saw him properly, I mean, not just the way you see a blur in the rearview mirror. In the past few months, I go out and he takes over or he leaves and I take over. We swap instructions in the hall. We say Emily has eaten a good lunch, so don’t worry too much about her tea. We say Ben needs an early night because he wouldn’t take a nap this afternoon. We say bowel movements have been successful or are still pending and perhaps some prunes would help. Or else we leave notes. Sometimes we barely meet each other’s eyes. Kate and Richard, like a relay team where each runner suspects the other of being the weaker link, but the main thing is to keep running round the track so the baton can be exchanged and the race can go on and on.

Oh, Love is handsome and love is kind,

And love’s a jewel when it is new.

But when it is old, it groweth cold,

And fades away like morning dew.

“Mummy, I know why you get cross with Daddy,” Emily said to me the other morning.

“Why?”

“Because he does wrong things.”

I knelt down beside her, so I could look straight into her eyes. It felt important to set the record straight. “No, sweetheart, Daddy doesn’t do wrong things. Mummy just sometimes gets very tired and that makes her not patient with Daddy, that’s all.”

“Patient means wait a minute,” she said.

I pick up Sayings of the World’s Great Religions from the bedside table and flick through it. There are sections on Belief, Justice and Education. I pause at the one on Marriage.

I have never called my wife “wife,” but “home.”

— The Talmud

Home. I look at the word for a long time. Home. Hear its rounded center. Picture what it means. I am married but am not a wife, have children but am not a mother. What am I?

I know a woman who is so afraid of her children’s need for her that, rather than go home after work, she sits in the wine bar to wait until they’re asleep.

I know a woman who wakes her baby at 5:30 every morning so she can have some time with him.

I know a woman who went on a TV discussion program and talked about doing the school run. Her nanny told me she barely knew where her kids’ school was.

I know a woman who heard down the phone from a baby-sitter that her baby took his first steps.

And I know a woman who found out her husband left her from a note that was read out to her by her nanny.

I lie there for a long time in the bed, maybe hours, waiting until I start to feel something. And finally it comes: a feeling both intensely familiar and shockingly strange. It takes me a few seconds to know what it is. I want my mother.

34 Home to Mum

HOWEVER HARD I SEARCH, I can’t come up with a memory of my mother sitting down. Always standing. Standing at the sink holding a pan under running water, standing by the ironing board, standing at the school gate in her good navy coat; bringing in plates of hot food from the kitchen and then clearing them away again. Common sense suggests there must have been an interval between bringing the plates in and taking them out when she sat down and ate with us, but I don’t remember it. Dishes, once they were let out of cupboards, became a “mess” to my mother, and a mess needed clearing up. You could still be in mid-forkful, but if the plate looked empty Mum would whisk it away.

My mother’s generation was born for service; it was their vocation and their destiny. The gap between school — routine, things you do because you must, bad smells — and motherhood — routine, things you do because you must, bad smells — was a matter of a few years. Those fifties girls had a window of freedom, but the window was seldom wide enough to climb through, and anyway what would become of them if they got out? Women like my mum didn’t expect much of life, and in general life did not disappoint them. Even when the men they served ran out on them or died too early from strokes and disorders of the stomach, they often stayed at their posts — preparing meals, hoovering, grabbing any ironing that was going from their children or grandchildren and never sitting down if they could possibly help it. It was as though they defined themselves in doing for others, and the loss of that definition left them blurred, confused: like the pit ponies who kept their tunnel vision long after they had been let loose in a field.

For my generation, coming to it later and sometimes too late, motherhood was a shock. Sacrifice wasn’t written into our contract. After fifteen years as an independent adult, the sudden lack of liberty could be as stunning as being parted from a limb; entwined with the intense feeling of love for your baby was a thin thread of loss, and maybe we will always ache like an amputee.

What my mum still calls Women’s Liberation had just about taken off by the time I was born, but it never reached the parts where my parents lived and, to a remarkable extent, still hasn’t. (If you live in London and read only certain newspapers, you would think that equality was a done deal, not some futuristic experiment still under scrutiny in select laboratories by men in white coats.) One summer, my mother grew her perm out and had her hair cut short in a feathery style that flattered her elfin features. Julie and I loved it, she looked so pretty and cheeky, but when my dad came in that night he said, “It’s a bit Women’s Lib, Jean,” and the style was grown out without fuss, without any more needing to be said.

As I entered my teens, it occurred to me that things were not what they seemed: although the men round our way took all the leading roles, it was the women who were running the show, but they were never allowed to be onstage. It was a matriarchy pretending to be a patriarchy to keep the lads happy. I always thought that was because where I came from people didn’t get much of an education. Now I think that’s what the whole world’s like, only some places hide it better than others.

IN THE PLAYGROUND, the children’s cries fill the air like starlings. The school is a red-brick building, with tall churchy windows, dating from an era when people had faith both in God and education. Over in the far corner, next to the climbing frame, there is a woman in a navy three-quarter coat bending down. When she straightens up, I can see she is holding a handkerchief which is attached to the bloody nose of a small girl.

My mother is a nursery school assistant. She’s been here for years now and basically she runs the place, but they still call her an assistant. Because they can get away with it — Mum doesn’t like to make a fuss — and because it means they can pay her less. The money’s terrible. When she told me how much I shouted with dismay; I could blow it on cab fares in three days. But if you use words like exploitation, my mother just laughs. Says she likes the job, it gets her out of the house. Besides, she has a way with children. If your three-year-old had a bleeding nose, believe me, you’d want my mother to be the one holding her hand. Jean Reddy is one of those souls who exude comfort like a human hot-water bottle.

When she looks across the yard, she knows it’s me instantly, but it takes another second before the pleasure floods into her face. “Oh, Kathy, love,” she says, coming over with the wounded tot in tow, “what a lovely surprise. I thought you were in America.”

“I was. Got back a couple of days ago.”

When I kiss her cheek, it’s apple cold. “Now, Lauren,” my mother says, addressing the sniffling child, “this is my little girl. Say hello!”

The ringing bell signals the end of Mum’s shift and we go indoors to fetch her bag from the staff room. In the corridor, she introduces me to Val, the headmistress of the primary school. “Oh, yes, Katharine, we’ve heard so much about you. Jean showed me the cutting in the paper. You’ve done very well for yourself, haven’t you?”

I’m eager to get out of here, but my mother enjoys showing me off. The hand she puts on my arm as she steers me between colleagues reminds me of Emily at World Feast Day parading Mummy in front of her friends.

Parked in front of the school, the Volvo is filled with kids’ stuff. “How are they?” Mum asks as we climb in. I tell her they’re fine and with Paula. On the drive to the flat, we pass my old school and she sighs. “Did you hear about Mr. Dowling? Terrible.”

“He took early retirement, didn’t he?”

“Yes. A lass. Can you imagine a young lass doing something like that, Kath?”

Mr. Dowling was my head of history twenty years ago, a blinky soft-spoken man with a vast enthusiasm for Elizabethan England and the poetry of the First World War. A few months ago, some little cow in the fifth form punched his glasses into his face and he took early retirement soon after. Mr. Dowling, an archetypal grammar-school boy, had become one of the casualties of the comprehensive system — a doctrine of equality which means that all the kids round here who want to learn something are in classes with kids who don’t.

“They’ll expect you to have read widely, Katharine, but we’ve very little time,” Mr. Dowling said to me when he was preparing me for Cambridge entrance. I was the only one in my year, the only one for as long as anyone could remember except Michael Brain, who got to Oxford to read law and was now at the Bar, which we were told had nothing to do with pubs. It was after school, in Mr. Dowling’s office off the library, with the electric fire with just one bar working. I loved being in there with him, reading and hearing the click of the filaments. We did the Chartists in a day, the First World War in a weekend. “You won’t know everything, but I think we can give an impression of you knowing the ground,” my teacher said. But I had the famous Reddy memory; England under the Tudors and Stuarts, the Ottoman Empire, witchcraft. I had the dates of battles down pat, the way my father memorized the pools: Corunna, Bosworth, Ypres — Raith Rovers, Brechin City, Swindon Town. We could wing anything, Dad and me, if we thought it would pay. Walking up the steps to take my seat alone in the exam room I knew I could do it, if I could only hold the knowledge in there for long enough. Must remember.

“Nice cup of tea. And I’ll do some sandwiches, shall I? Ham all right?” Mum is busying herself with the kettle in the kitchen of the flat. More an alcove than a kitchen; there’s room for only one person in there.

I never want to eat the sandwiches, but a couple of years ago I had one of those maturity leaps when I realized that eating wasn’t the point. My mother’s sandwiches were there to give her something she could do for me, when there is so much she can’t do anymore. Overnight her need to be needed seemed more important than my need to get away. I sit down at the Formica table with the fold-down flaps, the table that sat in all the kitchens of my childhood. (It has a black scab gouged out of the side by a furious Julie after a row with Dad over finishing her rutabaga.) As I eat, Mum puts up the ironing board and starts to work her way through the basket of clothes at her feet. The room is soon filled with the drowsy, comforting smell of baked water. The iron makes little exasperated puffs as it travels the length of a blouse or gets its snout into a tricky cuff.

My mother is a champion ironer. It’s a pleasure to watch her hand move an inch or so ahead of the little steam train, smoothing its path. She smooths and smooths and then she snaps the cloth taut like a conjurer and finally she folds. Arms of a shirt folded behind like a man under arrest. As I watch her, my eyes go swimmy: I think that after she’s gone there’ll be no one who will ever do that for me again — no one who will iron my clothes taking such infinite pains.

“What’s that over your eye, love?”

“Nothing.”

She comes over and lifts my fringe to get a better view of the eczema and I blink back the tears. “I know your nothings, Katharine Reddy.” She laughs. “Have you got some cream off the doctor for it?”

“Yes.” No.

“Have you got it anywhere else?” “No.” Yes, in a flaming itching belt around my middle, behind my ears, behind my knees.

In my pocket, the mobile begins to thrum. I take it out and check the number. Rod Task. I switch the phone off.

“What have I told you about looking after yourself? I don’t know how you manage with work on at you the whole time”—Mum jabs her finger in the direction of the mobile—“and the kiddies as well. It’s no life.”

Back behind the ironing board, she says, “And how’s our Richard keeping?”

I give a crumby mumble. I’ve come all the way up here to tell her that Rich has gone. I hated the idea of leaving the kids with Paula so soon after getting back from the States, but if I put my foot down I can do the journey here and back in a day. And I didn’t want Mum to find out that Richard and I were separated, as I did, down the phone. But now I’m here I can’t quite find the words: Oh, by the way, my husband left me because I haven’t paid attention to him since 1994. She’d think I was joking.

“Richard’s a good man,” she says, trapping a pillowcase on the curved end of the board. “You want to hang on to him, love. They don’t come much better than Richard.”

In the past, I have taken my mother’s enthusiasm for my man as a sign of its opposite for me. Her exclaiming over another of his supposedly miraculous virtues (his ability to make a simple meal, his willingness to spend time with his children) always seemed to draw attention to my matching vices (my reliance on cook-chill food, my working weekends in Milan). Now, sitting here in my mother’s home, I hear her praise for what it is: the truth about someone who has Mum’s gift for putting others before themself.

We had tea in this room the first time I brought Rich back to meet her. I was so determined not to be ashamed of where I came from that by the time we got here, after a hot and dogged ride from London, I had stoked myself up into a defiant take-us-as-you-find-us mood. So what if we don’t have matching cutlery? What if my mother says settee instead of sofa? Are you going to make something of it, are you, are you?

Rich made nothing of it. A natural diplomat, he soon had Mum eating out of his hand merely by tucking into heroic quantities of bread and butter. I remember how big he looked in our house — the furniture was suddenly doll’s furniture — and how gently he negotiated all the no-go areas of my family’s past. (Dad had walked out by then, but his absence was almost as domineering as his presence had been.) Panicked by the idea of Kath’s posh boyfriend, my mum, who always goes to too much trouble, had, on that occasion, gone to too little. But Rich volunteered to go to the shop on the corner for extra milk and came back with two kinds of biscuit and an enthusiasm for the hills whose sooty shoulders you could glimpse from the end of the street.

“Julie said that some men have been round here asking for money that Dad owes them.”

With one hand my mother pats her helmet of gray curls. “It’s nothing. She’d no need to go bothering you with that. All sorted now. Don’t go fretting yourself.”

I must have pulled a face because she adds, “You shouldn’t be too hard on your father, love.”

“Why not? He was hard on us.”

Chuuuussh. Chuuuuussh. The iron and my mother chide me simultaneously with their soft sighs.

“It’s not easy for him, you know. He’s that bright but he’s not had the outlets, not like you. In your dad’s family, there was no question of going on to college. Always liked the sound of medicine, but it was years of studying and there just wasn’t the money.”

“If he’s that clever, why does he keep getting himself into trouble?”

My mother ends conversations she isn’t keen on with a non sequitur. “Well, he was always very proud of you, Kath. I had to stop him showing your GCSE certificates to everyone.”

She folds the sleeves behind the last blouse and adds it to the basket. There is no sign of the two I bought her last year in Liberty’s for her birthday, or of other gifts. “Have you worn that red cardigan I got you, Mum?”

“But it’s cashmere, love.”

Since I’ve been working, I’ve bought my mother lovely clothes — I wanted her to have them, I needed her to have them. I wanted to make things all right for her. But she always puts everything I bring her away for best, best being some indeterminate date in the future when life will at long last live up to its promise.

“Can I get you some cake?”

No. “Yes, lovely.”

On the sideboard, next to the carriage clock purchased a quarter of a century ago with Green Shield stamps, there is a photograph of my parents taken in the late fifties. A seaside place, they’re laughing, and behind them the sky is flecked with gulls. They look like film stars: Dad doing his Tyrone Power thing, Mum with her inky Audrey Hepburn eyes and those matador pants that end at the calf and a pair of little black pumps. When I was a child that photograph used to taunt me with its happiness. I wanted the mother in the picture to come back. I knew that if I waited long enough she would come back. She was just saving herself for best.

Next to the picture is a silver frame containing one of Emily on her second birthday, lit up with glee. Mum follows my glance.

“Gorgeous, isn’t she?”

I nod happily. No matter how battered family relations, a baby can make them new. When Emily was born and Mum came to see us in hospital and laid her hand, speckled with age, on the newborn’s, I understood how having a daughter could help you to bear the thought of your own mother’s death. I wondered then, but never dared ask, whether it helped Mum to bear the idea of leaving Julie and me.

There is a clatter of pans from the kitchen. “Mum, please come and sit down.”

“You just put your feet up, love.”

“But I want you to sit down.”

“In a minute.”

I can’t tell her about Richard. How can I tell her?

JULIE LIVES TEN MINUTES’ DRIVE from my mum. Streets in this type of estate were always named after plants and trees, as though that might in some way make amends to the natural environment that had been torn up to build them. But Orchard Way and Elm Drive and Cherry Walk look like cruel taunts now, pastoral notes in a symphony of cement and reinforced glass. My sister’s house is in Birch Close, a horseshoe of sixties semi-detached houses hemmed in by properties from succeeding decades, all full of good ideas from town planners for restoring a sense of community so carefully destroyed by town planners.

As I pull up in the Volvo, a group of kids who are kicking around on the pavement let out a noise between a cheer and a jeer, but as soon as I climb out and glare at them they scarper — even the thugs lack conviction up here. The front garden of Number 9 has a circle of earth carved out in the center of the lawn with one skinny rhododendron surrounded by clumps of that tiny white flower I always think of as being England’s answer to edelweiss. Parked with one wheel on the ribbed concrete drive, there is a trike that must have been abandoned when Julie’s kids were small; in its rusty yellow seat there is a dark compote of leaves and rain.

The woman who answers the door is well into middle age, with a listless pageboy haircut, although she is three years and one month younger than me, a fact I will never forget because my very first memory is of being carried into my parents’ bedroom to see her the night she was born. The wallpaper was green; the baby was red and wrapped in a white shawl I had watched my mother knit in front of the stove. She made funny snuffling sounds, and when you gave her your finger she wouldn’t let go. She was called a sister. I told Mum her name should be Valerie after my favorite TV presenter. So, thinking they might be spared some jealousy if I had an investment in the new arrival, my parents christened her Julie Valerie Reddy and she has never let me forget it.

“You’d best come in, then,” my sister says. Spotting the car over my shoulder, she tuts and says, “They’ll have the tires off that. Do you want to bring it up the drive? I can clear this stuff.”

“No, it’ll be fine really.”

We squeeze through the narrow hall with its white wrought-iron stand overflowing with spider plants.

“Plants are doing well, Julie,” I say.

“Can’t kill them if you try.” She shrugs. “There’s tea in the pot, do you want a cup? Steven, get your feet off the settee, your Auntie Kath’s here from London.”

A good-looking small boy trapped in the body of a lunk, Steven lollops through to greet me while his mum fetches some cups.

I am bringing the news that my husband has left me as a gift to my sister, a peace offering. Julie, who grew up wearing my clothes, who used to overhear teachers comparing her with the other Reddy girl, the one who got to Cambridge, and who has never ever had anything nicer than I have in her whole life. Well, now her big sister has failed to keep her man and in this, the oldest contest of all, I can concede defeat.

“Place is a tip,” Julie says by way of description, not apology, before she clears some magazines off the settee and kicks Steven’s soccer kit towards the door.

She sits me down in the armchair next to the gas fire. “Come on, then, what’s up with you?”

“Richard’s left me,” I say, and it’s the first time I’ve cried since Paula told me on the phone. There were no tears when I explained to Emily that Daddy would be living in a different house for a while because there was no way I wanted to share my distress with a six-year-old whose idea of men is founded on the prince in Sleeping Beauty, and no tears either when, three nights ago, Richard and I had a civilized exchange on the doorstep about arrangements for the children. We are always discussing arrangements for the children, only the conversation usually ends with me running out the door and saying I have to go; this time it was Richard who walked down the steps and away, yanking over his shoulders the gray sweater I bought him to match his eyes two birthdays ago.

“Well, a right useless bugger he turned out to be,” Julie says. “All you’ve got on your plate, and he hops it.” Without my noticing, she has knelt down in front of me and has an arm around my neck.

“It’s my fault.”

“Like hell it is.”

“No, it is, it is; he left a note for me.”

“A note? Oh, that’s great, that is. Bloody men. Either they’re too clever to feel owt or they’re like our Neil and they’re too thick to say owt.”

“Neil’s not thick.”

When Julie laughs, the little girl I once knew is there in the room — full of fun and not afraid. “No, but you’d have more clue how the hamster’s doing than Neil, quite frankly. Has he got another woman, then, your Richard?”

It hadn’t even occurred to me. “No, I don’t think so, I think it’s me that’s another woman. The one he married isn’t there anymore. He said he couldn’t get through to me, that I don’t listen to him.”

Julie smooths my hair. “Well, you’re working too hard to keep him in pencils.”

“He’s a very good architect.”

“It’s you who keeps the show on the road, though, paying all the bills and whatnot.”

“I think that’s hard for him, Jules.”

“Aye, well if the world was run according to what men found hard to take we’d still be walking round in chastity belts, wouldn’t we? Are you having sugar?”

No. “Yes.”

A little later, Julie and I go for a walk up to the recreation ground at the top of the estate. The path is choked with ferns and there is a burnt-out Fiesta threaded with foxgloves. When we get to the swings, we find a couple of schoolgirl mothers sitting there on the bench. Teenage pregnancy ranks as a hobby round here. These two are pretty typical: waxy with tiredness and caked in makeup, they look like cadavers with their young jumping up and down on them, full of rude life.

Julie tells me that the breathlessness and the pains in our mother’s chest date from a few months back when a couple of Dad’s creditors turned up at the door. Mum explained that Joseph Reddy didn’t live there anymore, had not in fact lived there for many years, but the men came in anyway and looked over the furniture, the carriage clock, the silver frames I’d given her for the children’s photographs.

Younger than me and not cursed with the elder child’s desperate need for approval, Julie managed to stay outside the immediate blast area of Dad’s charm and for most of our lives has observed him coldly and without fear of side effects. I tell her about the day he came to see me at the office, and she explodes with indignation.

“Bloody typical, that is. Not worried about embarrassing you in front of your boss. What does he think he’s playing at?”

“He’s designed a biodegradable nappy.”

“Him? He’s never seen a baby’s bum in his life.”

And we both start to laugh, my sister and I, great snorts of laughter escaping through our mouths and our noses and finally running in tears down our cheeks. From a corner of my coat pocket, I produce a hanky crusty with use; Julie volunteers one in a similar condition but spotted with blood.

“Emily’s carol concert.”

“Steven’s rugby match.”

We turn and look out across the town. Its ugliness is draped in a ludicrous Vivienne Westwood sunset, all knicker-pink tulle and scandalous purples. The skyline is dominated by large chimneys, but only a few are still active — they let out quick small puffs like furtive smokers. “You didn’t give Dad owt, I hope,” Julie says, and, when I don’t reply, “Oh, bloody hell, Kath, you’re a soft touch.”

“City Ice Maiden,” I announce in my Radio 4 voice.

“Ice Maiden that melts pretty easily,” snaps my sister. “You’ve got to get over Dad, you know. He’s not worth it. There’s millions of crap dads out there, we’re nothing special. Remember the way he used to send you to the door when they came round asking for the rent money? You remember that, don’t you?”

“No.”

“You do remember, I know you do. That’s no way to treat a kid, Kathy, getting them to lie for you. And he thumped Mum when things weren’t going his way.”

“No.”

“No? Who was it that went downstairs to distract him when they were beating the shit out of each other? Little girl name of Katharine. Ring any bells?”

“Jules, what were those ice lollies with the hundreds and thousands on them called?”

“Don’t change the bloody subject.”

“Do you remember?”

“’Course I do. Fabs. But you never had them. Always saved your pocket money and bought the Cornish Mivvi. Mum said you always had to have the best of everything from when you could stand up. ‘Champagne tastes on beer money, that’s our Kath.’ So you went and made the money for champagne, didn’t you?”

“It’s not that great,” I say, studying my wedding band.

“Bubbly?” Julie looks at me as though she really wants to know.

How can I tell my sister that money has improved my life, but it hasn’t deepened it or eased it? “Oh, you spend most of your money trying to buy yourself time to make money to pay for all the things you think you need because you’ve got money.”

“Yes, but it’s better than that.” Julie gestures across the recreation ground to the child mothers. She speaks angrily, but when she says it again it sounds like a blessing. “It’s got to be better than that, love.”

THERE WAS A MR. WHIPPY VAN that used to go round our estate playing a hectic version of “Greensleeves.” One day during the summer holidays, Annette and Colin Terry were buying an ice cream from the van when their kitten ran out and got caught in the back wheel. We yelled, but the driver didn’t hear us and the van started pulling away. I remember it was boiling hot — the tarmac was rearing up in the road and it stuck in clumps on the bottom of our sandals like rabbit droppings. And I remember the way Annette screamed and I remember the music and the sense of something infinitely gentle being broken as the wheel spun round.

The Terrys lived two doors down from us. Carol Terry was the only mother we knew who went out to work. She started off doing some bar work for pin money and soon after she got a full-time job in the accounts office of a metals factory. Dissecting their neighbors over elevenses, my mother and Mrs. Frieda Davies decided that Carol spent her wages on going to the hairdresser and other things that came under the category of “enjoying herself.” They couldn’t have been more delighted when Annette failed her Eleven-plus. Well, what can you expect with no one at home to get the poor child a cooked tea?

Me, I remember Carol wearing lipstick and laughing a lot and seeming younger than my mother, whose birthday she shared.

The day of the accident, Mum heard our screams and ran out and took us all inside while the Mr. Whippy man tried to clear up the mess. I had dropped my strawberry Cornish Mivvi on the road. Mum calmed Annette down, made orange squash for everyone and found Colin a plaster (he had no graze or cut, but he needed a plaster). And then she gave the Terrys their tea while we all waited for their mum to get home from work.

Carol arrived late and flustered with shopping bags. She had got Mum’s phone message, but she had been unable to get away any quicker. When I think back to how it was when Carol came into the kitchen, and us all sitting at the Formica table, I can remember the heat hanging there like wet towels and Colin spilling his squash and how Annette wouldn’t look at her mum, but I can’t remember if it went unsaid, the thing everyone was thinking.

Did anyone say it? “But if you’d been here, the kitten wouldn’t be dead.”

35 No Answers

6:35 P.M. “And, furthermore, there is a good deal of evidence that mixed gender teams are critical to effective team functioning.”

“Jesus, Katie, I never thought I’d hear you say anything like that.” Rod Task is unimpressed, and he’s not the only one; the place is full of people who’d rather be in the wine bar than being addressed by me in my new capacity as diversity coordinator. I feel like a vegan at an abbatoir.

Chris Bunce lies back in his chair with his feet up on the conference table. “I’m all for mixing genders,” he says, stifling a yawn.

“Can we get the hell out of here now?” asks Rod.

“No,” says Celia Harmsworth. “We need to produce a mission statement.”

As the room groans, there is an answering thrum from the phone in my pocket. A text message from Paula. Ben ill come now

“I’ve got to go,” I say. “Urgent call coming in from the States. Don’t wait for me.”

I call Paula from the cab on the way home. She fills me in. Ben fell downstairs. “You know that dodgy bit of carpet near the top of the stairs by his room, Kate?”

Please God, no. “Yes, I do.”

“Well, he caught his foot somehow and he fell and bumped his head this morning. It came up a bit, but he seemed as right as rain. Then he was sick a bit ago and he went all limp.”

I tell Paula to keep him warm. Or should she be keeping him cool? Numb, my fingers feel like stumps as I dial Richard’s mobile number. I pray for it to be him, but it’s the voice of that damned announcer, saying please leave a message.

“Hello. I don’t want to leave a message. I want you to be here. It’s me, Kate. Ben’s had a fall and I’m going to take him to the hospital. I’ll have my phone with me.”

Next, I call Pegasus Cars and ask for Winston to be waiting when I get home. Need to get Ben to hospital.

8:23 P.M. How long is too long to wait for your child to be seen? Ben and I are told to take a seat in the rows of gray plastic chairs. Next to us are a couple of public schoolboys who are off their heads on something. Ecstasy, probably. “I’ve got no feelin’ in my fingers,” wails one over and over, pretending he has no idea why. I don’t care: I want to tell him to get back to whatever overprivileged swamp he came from and expire quietly. The idea that this kind of jerk is wasting hospital time is so disgusting I want to slap him.

Winston, who has gone to park Pegasus, returns and approaches the reception desk. Seeing me drained, he stands in and becomes the pushy one. “Excuse me, miss, we got a baby here needs some attention. Thank you kindly.”

After an eternity — maybe five minutes — Ben and I are ushered in to see the doctor. Half-slept and unshaven since last Thursday, the young houseman is seated in a cubicle cut off from the busy corridor by a thin apricot curtain. I start to explain Ben’s symptoms, but he silences me with a hand while he studies the notes on the desk in front of him.

“Hmmm, I see, I see. And how long has the little boy had a temperature, Mrs. Shattock?”

“Well, I’m not entirely sure. He was very hot up till an hour ago.”

“And earlier today?”

“I don’t know.”

The doctor moves to put his hand on Ben’s forehead, who mews slightly as I relax my grip on him. “Sickness, vomiting in the past twenty-four hours?”

“I think he was sick yesterday afternoon, but Paula thought — she’s my nanny — we thought it was just a bad tummy.”

“Bowel movement since then?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know.”

“So you didn’t see him at all yesterday?”

“Yes. No. I mean, I try to get home in time to put him in bed, but not last night, no.”

“And not the night before.”

“No, I had to go to Frankfurt. You see, Ben fell down the stairs this morning and he seemed to be fine, but then Paula got really worried and he became limp, so—”

“Yes, I see.” I don’t think he sees. I must try to talk calmly and slowly so he sees.

“Can you undress baby for me?”

I slip him out of his Thomas the Tank sleep suit, undo the poppers at the crotch of his vest and pull it over his head. The skin is so fair it’s almost translucent and through the rack of ribs you can see the tiny bellows of his lungs.

“And the baby’s weight. What does he weigh now, Mrs. Shattock?”

“I’m not entirely sure. He must be about twenty-eight or thirty pounds, I think.”

“When did you last have him weighed?”

“Well, he had his eighteen-month check, but you know he’s my second and you’re not as worried about things like weight with the second so long as they’re—”

“And at the eighteen-month check, his weight was?”

“As I said, I’m not sure, but Paula said he was absolutely fine.”

“And Benjamin’s date of birth — you are familiar with that, I presume?”

The insult is so biting that the tears jump to my eyes as if I had walked out into snow. I do really well in tests. I know the answers, but I don’t know these answers and I should know. I know I should know.

Ben was born on the twenty-fifth of January. He is very strong and very happy and he never cries. Only if he is tired or if his teeth hurt. And his favorite book is Owl Babies and his favorite song is “The Wheels on the Bus” and he is my dearest sweetest only son and if anything happens to him I will kill you and then I will burn down your hospital and then I will kill myself. “The twenty-fifth of January.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Shattock. Now, little man, let’s take a look at that chest.”

12:17 A.M. I don’t know how I would have managed without Winston. He stayed all the time with us at the hospital, fetching sweet tea for me from the machine, holding Ben when I had to go to the loo and only showing any sign of upset when I offered to pay him for his time. As he helps me and the sleeping baby out of the cab, I can just make out a figure on the steps of our house. I think that if it’s a mugger I won’t be responsible for my actions, but a few steps nearer and I realize that it’s Momo. Can’t bear to see anyone from work. Not now.

“Whatever it is, surely it could have waited till morning?” I say, stabbing the key in the lock.

“I’m sorry, Kate.”

“Sorry doesn’t really cover it, I’m afraid. I’ve just got back with Ben from the hospital. He’s been under observation. It’s been a long night. If the Hang Seng fell 10 percent, I don’t give a shit, frankly, and you can tell Rod that in those precise words….Oh, God, what is it?”

In the blade of light that the opening door casts into the street, I suddenly see that Momo has been crying. It’s a shock to find that perfect face puffed up with misery.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and can say nothing else because speaking has triggered a fresh bout of crying. I get her inside and sit her in the kitchen while I take Ben up to his cot. A viral rash, the doctor called it. Unconnected to his fall; we just have to be sure to keep baby’s fluids up for the next twenty-four hours and keep an eye on his temperature. Turning the corner to the flight of stairs that leads up to the kids’ rooms, I see the patch of worn carpet where Ben tripped. I hate that carpet, I hate the fact I didn’t get a quote for a new one, I hate the fact that finding the time to call someone out to measure my stairs seemed like an impossible luxury when it was a necessity all along. Triage — the order of urgency — I got it wrong. Things that could harm the children come first; everything else can wait. Looking in on Emily, I find her curled around Paula, who has fallen asleep on the bed. I go in and switch off the Cinderella light and cover them both with the duvet.

Back downstairs in the kitchen, I make a pot of mint tea and try to get some sense out of Momo. Ten minutes later, I understand why she is having trouble explaining the problem. She simply doesn’t have a vocabulary crude enough to describe what she has seen.

After work tonight Momo went to 171, a bar opposite Liverpool Street, with a bunch of people from the US desk. Later, she dropped by the office to collect some files for our forthcoming final. Chris Bunce was there with a group of guys all gathered round his screen, laughing and making raucous comments. They included her friend Julian, who joined EMF the same day Momo did last year. The men didn’t hear her come in and they didn’t notice until too late that she had come over to look at what they were looking at.

“Pictures of a woman — you know, Kate, wearing nothing. I mean worse than nothing.”

“But they download that stuff all the time, Momo.”

“You don’t understand, Kate, they were pictures of me.”

2:10 A.M. I have helped Momo upstairs, found her some night clothes and tucked her up in the guest bed. Floundering in my Gap XXXL T-shirt with the dachshund motif, she looks about eight years old. Calmer now, she manages to tell me the whole story. Apparently, she screamed at the top of her voice when she saw the pictures on the screen, demanding to know who had done this.

Bunce, naturally, toughed it out. Turned to Momo and said, “Well, now the real thing is here, perhaps she’d like to show us what she can do, guys?”

They all laughed at that, but when she started crying they left the office pretty quickly. Only Julian hung around and tried to calm her down. Eventually, she yelled at him until he told her Bunce had taken head shots of Momo from the EMF website — the ones the firm was using in its brochure to illustrate its commitment to diversity — and digitally spliced them onto other women’s bodies that are freely available on the Net. “Bodies with no clothes on,” Momo repeats, and her primness makes it doubly painful.

Momo says she stopped looking when she saw her own head giving head. There were captions to go with the pictures, but she found it hard to make them out because she dropped her glasses and they cracked on the trading floor.

“There was something about Asian Babes, I think.”

“There would be.”

“What are we going to do?” she asks, and the we feels both presumptuous and entirely right.

Nothing is what we’re going to do. “We’ll think of something.”

I put the main light out and leave the bedside lamp on. Next to it in a vase is a desiccated sprig of lily of the valley, left over from Donald and Barbara’s visit.

“I don’t understand, Kate,” Momo says. “Why would Bunce do that? Why would anyone want to do that?”

“Oh, because you’re beautiful and you’re female and because he can. It’s not very complicated.”

For a second, she ignites with anger. “Are you saying what Chris Bunce did to me was nothing personal?”

“No. Yes.” I suddenly feel exorbitantly tired, as though my veins were filled with lead. The terror of there being something wrong with Ben and now this. Why do I always have to explain things to Momo, important things, when I’m at my most stupid? I lay my hand on her cool brown one and will the words to come. “I’m saying that there was all history and now there’s us. There’s never been anything like us before, Momo. Century after century of women knowing their place — and suddenly it’s twenty years of women who don’t know their place, and it’s scary for men. It’s happened so fast. Chris Bunce looks at you and he sees someone who’s supposed to be an equal. We know what he wants to do to you, but he’s not allowed to touch anymore, so he fakes pictures of you that he can do what he likes with.”

Under the duvet, she shakes, the shudder of a still-fresh shame, and tightens her grip on my fingers.

“Momo, do you know how long they reckon it took for early man to stand upright?”

“How long?”

“Between two and five million years. If you give Chris Bunce five million years he may realize that it’s possible to work alongside women without needing to take their clothes off.”

I can see the opal precipitate of tears in her eyes. “You’re telling me we can’t do anything, Kate, aren’t you? About Bunce. I just have to put up with it because that’s what they’re like and there’s no use trying to change anything.”

That’s exactly what I’m saying. “No, I wouldn’t put it quite like that.”

AS MOMO SIGHS and winces her way to sleep, I go downstairs to switch off the lights and lock up. I miss Richard all the time, but this is the time I miss him most. Locking up is his job and the bolt feels less safe when I draw it across, the creaking in the window frames more ghostly. As I close the shutters, I keep thinking of what will happen over the next few days. In the morning, Momo Gumeratne will make a formal complaint about the behavior of Christopher Bunce to her line manager, Rod Task. Task will refer the complaint to Human Resources. Momo will then be suspended on full pay pending an internal inquiry. At the first meeting of the inquiry, which I will be invited to attend, it will be publicly noted that Momo Gumeratne is of previously impeccable character. It will be silently noted that Chris Bunce is our leading performer who last year moved 400 million pounds of business. Quite soon, the offense against Momo will be referred to as “a bad business” or simply “that Bunce business.”

After three months at home — enough time for her to start feeling anxious and depressed — Momo will be called into the office. A financial settlement will be offered. The Cheltenham Lady in her will stand up straight and say she cannot be bought off; all she wants is to see justice done. The inquiry panel will be shocked. They too want justice to be done; it’s just that the nature of the evidence is — how shall we say? — problematic. Casually, imperceptibly, it will be implied that Momo’s career in the City could be over. She is a young woman of exceptional promise, but these things have a way of being misinterpreted. No smoke without fire, all tremendously unfortunate. If news of the pornographic computer images, say, were to get out to the media….

Two days later, Momo Gumeratne will settle out of court for an undisclosed sum. When she walks down the steps of Edwin Morgan Forster for the last time, a woman reporter from the TV news will poke a microphone in her face and ask her to give details of what happened. Is it true that they called her an Asian Babe and ran porno pictures of her? Lowering her lovely head, Momo will decline to comment. Next day, four newspapers will run a story on page 3. One headline reads asian babe in city porn pics storm. Momo’s denial will appear in the second-to-last paragraph. Soon after, she will take a job abroad and pray to be forgotten. Bunce will hold on to his job and the black mark against his character will be erased by a steady tide of profits. And nothing will change. That much is certain.

As I’m reaching for the light switch, I notice a new picture stuck to the fridge under the Tinky Winky magnet. It’s a drawing of a woman with yellow hair; she is wearing a stripy brown suit and her heels are as high as stilts. The glare from the light means it’s hard to make out the writing in pencil underneath. I go up close. The artist is Emily, and with the help of a teacher she has written, My Mummy goes out to work, but she thinks about me all day long.

Did I really say that to her? Must have. Em remembers absolutely everything. I heave open the freezer and force my face into its arctic air. The impulse to get in and keep walking is immense. I’m going in now; I may be some time.

Back upstairs, I look in on Momo. Her lids are closed, but the eyes beneath them flutter like moths. Dreaming, poor baby. I’m turning the lamp off when the eyes open and she whispers, “What are you thinking, Kate?”

“Oh, I was just thinking about what I said to you the day we first met.”

“You said that I had to stop saying sorry.”

“Too damn right you do. And what else?”

She stares up at me with that trusting spaniel look I saw at the final all those eons ago. “You said that compassion, although expensive, is not necessarily a waste of money.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You did.”

“God, how appalling. I’m such a cow. What else did I say?”

“You said that money can’t tell what sex you are.”

“Exactly.”

“Exactly?” she echoes uncertainly.

“Where does it hurt them most, Momo? Where can we hurt them most?”

ALL THAT NIGHT, I couldn’t sleep. I kept creeping into Ben’s room, checking his breathing as I used to check Emily’s when I first brought her home and I worried she would never wake. Ben slept on and on, but there was nothing to be afraid of. He was sleeping like a baby.

Richard rang about two. He was in Brussels pitching for a Euro grant for a northern arts center and had only just got my message. He asked me if I was OK and I said no. He said we needed to talk and I said yes.

At 5:30, I rang Candy, who I knew was being woken early by the baby kicking her in the ribs. Told her about the pictures of Momo on the system. I had no idea what we could do about it, but I thought she might, with her background in Internet companies. Between 5:50 and 6:30, she wrote a program that would seek and destroy all files containing references to Momo Gumeratne.

“It’ll be hard tracking down any stuff that’s gone out of the building,” she said, “but I can nix anything still held in the EMF system.” We agreed that she should keep one copy of the pictures for evidence.

At 6:00, Momo came into the kitchen and held something up. “I found this in my bed. Does it belong to anybody?”

I went across and hugged her. “That’s Roo. He’s a member of the family.”

Giving her a cup of tea to take back to bed, I walked up with her and went into Ben’s room. Still fast asleep. I tucked Roo next to his cheek. In a very short time one little boy was going to be happier than Christmas.

Going into my own bedroom, I opened the wardrobe and ran my hand along the rail until I got to my finest Armani armor: a crow-black suit. From the rack beneath I chose a pair of patent heels with snakeskin toes — heels it was impossible to walk in, but walking wasn’t really the point today. As I got dressed, I went through all the resources I could draw on, the forces I could muster. I wanted Richard to come home and I knew now that I would do whatever it took to make that happen, but first Mummy had to finish her work.

Destroy Bunce.

36 The Sting

IT WAS GENERALLY AGREED that the business plan for Power’s Biodegradable Nappy was an exceptional document. Over thirty handsome pages of A4, it featured details of the target market for the miracle new nappy and the projected growth rate. There was an impressive rundown on the competition, a review of the environmental advantages and a detailed implementation plan. The figures were excellent without being unduly optimistic. The CVs of the management team were first rate, particularly that of the inventor himself, Joseph R. Power, who, it was noted, had enjoyed connections with the Apollo space program and subsequent lucrative spinoffs. The patent for the biodegradable nappy was still pending, but the patent application — which described the product in crystalline detail — left you in no doubt of its success. Under the circumstances, it seemed a pity that only one person would get to see the document. The target market for Power’s Biodegradable Nappy was not a billion leaky babies but a Mr. Christopher Bunce.

Bunce was now the head of EMF’s Venture Capital Unit. This was good news in two ways. First, it made it easier to get him to take a huge punt on my dad’s crappy nappy; gambling on exciting new products before anyone else got to them was part of the job. Second, Veronica Pick, the number two on Venture Capital who had been expecting to get the top job herself and was furious at having to make way for a novice in the area, could be relied upon not to steer her new boss clear of any minefields — might indeed be persuaded to guide him towards one with a friendly smile.

FRIDAY NOON. THE SUCKLING CLUB.

“OK, so let’s go through this one more time.”

Candy is not even attempting to hide her scorn. “Your dad, a guy who can’t remember the name of his own kids and has never, to anyone’s knowledge, seen their tushes, has invented a diaper that’s gonna change the face of world diaperdom, except that we know the diaper doesn’t work because you have tried the prototype on your son, Benjamin, and when Benjamin took a—”

“Candy, please.”

“All right, when Ben needed to go to the bathroom, the diaper fell apart. So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna sell the diaper project to the new chief of our own Venture Capital unit who, being an arrogant cocksucker and knowing even less than your dad about little kids, will invest thousands of dollars in the Great Diaper Adventure and will then lose all that money because…remind me of the because, Kate.”

“Because my father’s company is heavily in debt and the money EMF invests will be claimed by his creditors and the nappy company will immediately go into liquidation and Bunce will lose his shirt, his socks and his poxy boxers and be exposed for the appalling chancre he is. Do you have any problem with the plan, Candy?”

“No, it sounds great.” She sniffs the air as though testing a new perfume. “I just need to hear from you how we are gonna keep our jobs when I’m about to become a single mom and, until Slow Richard returns to the Reddy ranch, you are a de facto single mom.”

“Candy, there’s a principle at stake here.”

She looks momentarily alarmed. “Oh, I get it. It’s our old friend Oates.”

“Who?”

“The snowman. The one you told Rod about? Pardon me, gentlemen, I’m goin’ out now and I may be some fucking time. That’s not a plot, Katie, that’s a noble act of meaningless self-sacrifice. Very British, but you know in the States we have this really weird thing where we like the good guys to be alive at the end of the movie.”

“Not all self-sacrifice is meaningless, Candy.”

My friend detonates her big laugh, and everyone in the club turns to stare nervously at the pregnant woman. “Whoa,” she says. “You’re beautiful when you’re ethical.”

“Look, there will be nothing to link you to the nappy deal, I promise.”

“So all roads will lead to Reddy? You know that after this no one’s gonna employ you ever again, Kate. Nobody. You’re not gonna get hired to change the fucking fax paper.”

With this dire warning, Candy reaches across, takes my hand and guides it onto the swell of her bump. Through the drum-taut skin, I feel the unmistakable jab of a heel. This is the first time she has acknowledged the baby as something permanent, not disposable, and I know better than to say anything mushy.

“Is it kicking a lot?”

“Uh-huh. When I’m taking a bath, you can see her going crazy in there. It’s like some goddam dolphin show.”

“It’s not necessarily a girl, Cand.”

“Hey, I’m a girl, she’s a girl. OK?” Candy clocks my smile and quickly adds, “’Course, I can still get her adopted.”

“Of course.”

I seem to recall it was Candy’s idea that seven women meeting in secret in the City would look less conspicuous in a lap-dancing club than in, say, a restaurant where people were wearing clothes. Sitting here, I wish I had a Polaroid camera to capture the expressions on the faces of my friends as they enter the venue. In the case of Momo, good breeding immediately conquers shock and she sweetly inquires of the blonde at the desk, “Oh, how long have you been open?”

We are not the only women in the Suckling Club, a gentlemen’s entertainment emporium located within easy reach of the world’s premier financial district, but we are the only ones with unexposed breasts. Everyone who has turned up this lunchtime has important work to do. I already know that Chris Bunce is greedy and ambitious enough to plow money into a project without running it by anyone on his team. Why would he want to share the credit if he can take it all himself?

But I also know that we will have to do a highly professional job on the biodegradable nappy to get him to buy it. Dad’s drawing of a winged pig has to be upgraded. There needs to be a brochure, knowledge of the market and production, plus input from a top commercial lawyer. When I called Debra, I was scared she would say no — our string of canceled lunches over the past year had stretched our friendship to twanging point — but she didn’t need to be asked twice. Without ever having met Chris Bunce, Deb knew instantly what manner of man he was and what we had to do to him.

So, our merry band consists of Candy, me, Debra and Momo and Judith and Caroline from my old Mother and Baby Group. We’re still waiting for Alice. (It was vital for Alice, who’s a TV producer, to help us out, but I didn’t hear back from her so I assumed she wanted no part in it. Luckily, she phoned me this morning. Said she’d been away filming, and she’d be delighted to join us, although she’d be late.)

A patent agent before becoming a full-time mum, Judith has written the patent application for the nappy and made it so convincing I want to order a truckload for Ben immediately. In her cool marshaling of language and science, I see a side to Judith I have never known. Caroline, the graphic designer, has come up with a brochure which stresses the nappy’s eco-friendliness and has featured an irresistible picture of her own baby, Otto, sitting on a potty made of lettuce leaves.

Debra is handling the legal side of things. She tells me that EMF will have no comeback against my father. “Look, this isn’t fraud. It’s naughty, but it’s not illegal. And it’s a clear case of caveat emptor — if the buyer doesn’t take care over what he’s buying, then that’s his lookout.”

Deb will be acting as my dad’s lawyer during the meeting he will need to have with Chris Bunce, which we have arranged to be held in a suite at the Savoy.

“You have no idea how brilliant I am at this,” Deb exclaims, as she takes me through the documentation. “What are we going to call ourselves, the Seven Deadly Sisters?”

“Deb, this is serious.”

“I know, but I haven’t had so much fun since Enid Blyton. God, Kate, I’ve missed fun, haven’t you?”

Momo has been given the task of researching the global nappy market. In a few short days she has become an incredible bore on urine dispersal and olfactory containment. “I’m sorry, Kate, but are you aware of how many insults the average nappy can sustain?”

“I can get that stuff at home, thank you.”

My assistant looks anxious. “It won’t work, will it?”

“The plan?”

“No, the nappy.”

“Of course it won’t.”

“How can you be sure, Kate? If Bunce made a killing, I couldn’t bear it.”

“Well, my dad designed it, so it’s an odds-on catastrophe. Plus I took a prototype home and put it on Ben.”

“And?”

“It’s so biodegradable it falls apart at the first poo.”

Alice arrives late at the club from a meeting with the BBC at White City. Over the throbbing music, she points at the girls onstage and mouths, “Are we auditioning?”

Alice’s role begins after Bunce has invested in the nappy. It’s a pincer movement of the kind deployed by generals in all those battles I used to know the names of: attack him on one flank and then cut off his route of escape. Evidence that Bunce has recklessly thrown away money on a duff product may not be enough to get Edwin Morgan Forster to sack him; but if he says embarrassing things in an interview which Alice records and gets into print then he’ll become a liability with the clients, and basically he’s hanging from a meat hook in Smithfield’s.

Shouting over the bass track, Alice tells us she has already called Bunce and invited him to appear in a major BBC2 series on MoneyMakers — the City made sexy for the person on the couch.

“How did he take it?” asks Momo, who is more nervous than the rest of us.

Alice grins. “He practically came down the phone. I don’t think I’ll have any trouble persuading him to talk.”

I try to call the meeting to order, but I am competing with “Mamma Mia.” Instead, I hand round a photocopy of what everyone needs to know, plus a picture of Chris Bunce which Candy has lifted from the EMF website. I excuse myself and head for the ladies’ room.

In the corner booth at the back, next to the exit, is a dark-haired figure I vaguely recognize. A little closer and I know exactly who it is.

“Jeremy! Jeremy Browning!” I greet my client with a warmth and volume that will sing in his soul forever. “Well, fancy seeing you here,” I enthuse. “And this must be…it’s Annabel, isn’t it?”

The girl sitting on my client’s left thigh gives a look that is smirk, sneer and smile combined. It says that unfortunately she is not Mrs. Browning but wouldn’t say no if offered the chance.

I extend a friendly hand towards the girl, but it is Jeremy who grasps it eagerly. “Gosh, Kate,” he says, “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“Well I’m doing some research into expanding my leisure portfolio. Maybe you can give me some pointers? This sector is new to me. Fascinating, isn’t it? Well, must go, lovely to meet you…?”

“Cherelle.”

“Lovely to meet you, Cherelle. Look after him for me.”

I walk away, confident that I have at least one man in my power for all eternity. When I get back to the table, Candy is busy pointing out which of the girls onstage she believes to have had a boob job — and how successful it has been.

“Christ, look at the poor kid with the red hair. I thought they were gonna remove all nuclear weapons from British soil.”

“You should have seen the state of my tits when I had twins,” says Judith, who is on her third Mai Tai.

I watch in horror as the dancer in question leaves the stage and advances upon us, cupping her breasts in the way a dog breeder holds up puppies for inspection.

“Now that’s what I call juggling,” shouts Alice. “The work-life balance — what d’you reckon, Kate?”

“Her pelvic floor must be in good shape,” says Caroline, pointing to another dancer, who is making Mr. Whippy motions as though trying to give birth to an ice cream.

“What’s the pelvic floor?” ask Candy and Momo together.

When I explain, Candy, who thinks prenatal classes are all run by Communists, doesn’t hide her disgust. “But the pelvic thingy goes back into place after the birth, right?”

And the dance floor shudders, and the women around the table laugh and laugh and the men in the club look uncomfortable in the way that only women’s laughter can make them uncomfortable.

I raise my glass. “Screw our courage to the sticking-place, and we’ll not fail!”

“Die Hard 2?” asks Momo.

“No, Lady Macbeth.” What are they teaching them these days?

37 Lunch with Robin

WHEN ROBIN COOPER-CLARK is ill at ease, he looks like a man trying to arrest himself — one arm clasped tight around his own chest, the other hooked around his neck. This is how uncomfortable he looks on our walk to Sweetings, three days after the meeting in the Suckling Club. The restaurant is quite a distance from the office, but Robin is absolutely insistent that we eat there, so as he marches out with his seven-league stride I scurry along, taking three paces to his one.

Sweetings is a City institution. A fish place that wants to look like a fishmonger’s — lots of cheery shouting, bustle, marble slabs — it’s like a Billingsgate for the moneyed classes. There are counters at the front where people can sit on high stools and pick at crab, and at the back there is a room with long tables like a school canteen. Looking around, it strikes me that there are men in here who have moved from prep to public school to Oxbridge and then on to the City or the Bar and never had any contact with the world as everyone else knows it. If privilege is another country, Sweetings is its corner café.

Robin and I are seated at the far end of one of the long communal tables.

“Bad business, this Bunce thing,” he mutters, studying the menu.

“Mmm.”

“Momo Gumeratne seems a good thing.”

“She’s terrific.”

“And Bunce?”

“Toxic.”

“I see. Now, what are we going to have?” The waiter stands there, pen at the ready, and for the first time I notice what a mess Robin is: the right wing of his shirt collar is furrowed like a brow and there are commas of shaving foam in his ears. Jill would never have let him out of the house looking like that.

“Ah, yes. I think something ferocious with teeth for the lady and an endangered species for me. Turtle soup, perhaps, or is it cod that’s been fished to death by the bloody Spaniards? What d’you reckon, Kate?”

I’m still laughing when Robin says, “Kate, I’m getting married again,” and it’s as though the noise in the room is turned off at the tap. The diners around me mouth mutely like the fish they’re about to consume.

And suddenly I know why he’s brought me here, to this restaurant, to this room. It’s a place where you can’t shout in anger or cry out in pain: a place indeed for sweeting, for bonhomie, for a mild bollocking at worst, a man’s kind of place. How many souls have been grilled at these tables with a smile, how many politely encouraged to step down or step aside over a surprisingly decent glass of Chablis? Now I feel as though it’s Jill Cooper-Clark who’s been let go and me who has to do the decent thing. Look interested, pleased even, instead of upending the table and leaving the men gaping with their napkins and their bones. Only six months dead.

I become aware that Robin has started to tell me about someone called Sally: lovely, incredibly kind, used to boys — got two of her own. Not quite Jill’s speed, but then who is? (Helpless shrug.) And she has so many qualities, this Sally, and the boys need — well, Alex, he’s just ten — he still needs a mother.

“And you,” I say, finding some words in the dry vault of my mouth. “You need her?”

“Mmmh. I need a woman, yes, Kate. We’re not much good on our own, you know.” He waves away the proffered tartar sauce. “I can see how you might find that—”

“What?”

“Feeble, I suppose.” He lowers his glass and pinches the bridge of his nose. “No one can ever replace her, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Then why replace her if she’s irreplaceable? That’s what I’m thinking. I feel caved in with sadness, as I did that day at Jill’s funeral. I always knew where to find Robin; he always seemed so rooted and so reliable. Looking at him now across the table, it’s a shock to see a lost boy. Men without wives might as well be men without mothers; they are more orphans than widowers. Men without wives, they lose their spines, their ability to walk tall in the world, even to wipe the shaving foam from their ears. Men need women more than women need men; isn’t that the untold secret of the world?

“I’m so glad for you,” I say. “Jill would be really pleased. I know she couldn’t bear the idea of you not managing.”

Robin nods, grateful to get the news out of the way, glad to pull up the drawbridge once more. With the plates cleared away, we turn to the menu again and study it like an exam paper. “How about a treacle tart with two spoons?” says Robin. “Have you heard they’re looking for a new name for Spotted Dick, Kate?”

“Chris Bunce.”

“Sorry?”

“Spotted Dick. Bunce is the venereal disease champion of the office. Ask any of the secretaries.”

Robin dabs his mouth with his napkin. “It makes you very angry, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it does.”

For a moment, I consider telling him about the plan. But as my superior he would be obliged to veto it and as my friend and mentor he would probably do the same. Instead, I say, “I don’t think someone should be allowed to go on being a shit because it’s not convenient to stop him.”

Robin semaphores to the waiter for the bill. “Jill always said you can get a man to do anything so long as he doesn’t notice he’s being made to do it.”

“Did she do that to you?”

“I never noticed.”

3:13 P.M. I leave Robin at the corner of Cheapside. Next, I call Guy on the mobile and tell him I won’t be back this afternoon: I have an urgent appointment with conkers.

“Conquers?”

“It’s a leisure group I’m thinking of investing heavily in. Need to check out the consumer angle.”

When I get home, the kids are so startled to see me they don’t react at first. I tell Paula to take the rest of the day off and I get Emily and Ben into their coats and we walk to the park. Or at least Em and I do: Ben refuses to walk anywhere, preferring to run until he falls over. It’s been an Indian summer and the leaves, still green and stippled with apricot, look mildly surprised to find themselves on the ground. We spend — I honestly don’t know how long we spend — kicking around in them.

Ben likes rushing into the leaves just for the rustle, for the pleasure of the noise. Emily loves to tell him off while clearly finding him adorable. The deal between my girl and boy is that he can be naughty so she can enjoy being good. Watching them screech after each other, I wonder if that isn’t a variation on the game that boys and girls have always played.

Farther along the path, under the horse chestnuts, we find the conkers. Some of the spiky cases have split on impact and we prise the glowing nuts from their pithy hollow.

“You can make the conkers harder,” I say to Em.

“How?”

“I don’t know exactly, we’ll have to ask Daddy.” Damn, didn’t mean to mention him.

Emily looks up in bright expectation. “Mummy, when will Daddy come back to live in our house?”

“Daddy,” chirps Ben. “Daddy.”

BACK HOME, I put the boy down for his nap and let Em choose a video while I start to prepare a bolognese sauce for dinner. I can’t find the garlic press and where is the grater? I suggest watching Sleeping Beauty, which was always the great sedative when Em was little, but I am way out of date. My daughter is talking about something with a warrior princess I have never heard of.

“What’s warrior, Mum?”

“A warrior is a brave fighter.”

“Do you know what Harry Potter’s about?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Harry Potter’s about braveness and loveness.”

“That sounds good. Have you decided what we’re watching?”

“Mary Poppins.”

“Again?”

“Oh, please, Mu-um.”

When I was Emily’s age, we saw a film or two a year: one at Christmas, one in the long summer holiday. For my children, the moving image will be the main vehicle of their memories.

“She’s a suffer jet.”

“Who?”

“Jane and Michael’s mummy is a suffer jet.”

I’d forgotten that Mrs. Banks was a suffragette. It’s not the bit of the film you remember. I go over and curl up on the sofa with Em. And there she is on-screen — the lovely daffy Glynis Johns, back from a rally and marching up and down the great white house singing:

“Our daughters’ daughters will adore us,

And they’ll sing in grateful chorus,

Well done! Well done! Well done, Sister Suffragette!”

“What’s a suffer jet?” I knew that was coming.

“Suffragettes were special women, Em, who a hundred years ago went out and marched in London and protested and tied themselves to railings so they could persuade people that women should be allowed to vote.”

She nods and sinks back onto me, nestling her head in under my breasts. It’s only when Mary and Bert and the kids have jumped into the chalk picture on the pavement that she says: “Why didn’t women be allowed to vote, Mum?”

Oh, where is the Fairy Godmother of explanations when you need her? “Because back then, in the olden days, women and men were — well, girls stayed at home and it was thought that they were less important than boys.”

My daughter gives me a look of furious astonishment. “That’s silly.”

“Yes, I know, love, but the suffer — the suffragettes had to show people it was silly.”

We lie there together. Em knows every song; she even breathes when the actors breathe. Now that I’m watching as an adult, Mary Poppins looks different. I had forgotten that Mrs. Banks, who wants to make the world a better place for women, is dizzily oblivious to her own children. That Jane and Michael are sad and rebellious until the nanny shows up and brings both consistency and excitement into their lives. Mr. Banks, meanwhile, works too hard — his name alone tells you that this man is his job — and is a stranger to his children and his wife, until he gets sacked and is confronted in his own drawing room by Bert the chimney sweep, who warns him in song:

“You’ve got to grind grind grind at that grindstone

Though childhood slips like sand through a sieve,

And all too soon they’ve up and grown

And then they’ve flown

And it’s too late for you to give…

Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”

Emily and I join in, our voices twining round each other in a silvery helix. Suddenly, I have the most disturbing feeling that the film is talking to me, which is when Emily announces, “When I have babies, Mummy, I’m going to look after them myself till they’re an adult. No nannies.”

Has she made me watch Mary Poppins so she can say that? Is it her way of telling me? I search her face, but there is no sign of calculation; she doesn’t appear to be watching for a reaction.

“Maaa-aaaa.” The baby monitor crackles into life. Ben must be waking up. Before I go upstairs, I sit Em on my knee.

“I thought you and I could go on a special outing together. Would you like that?”

She wrinkles her nose the way Momo does when she’s excited. “Where?”

“The Egg Pie Snake Building.”

“Where?”

“The Egg Pie Snake Building. Do you remember that’s what you called the Empire State Building?”

“I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did, love.”

“Mum-my,” says Emily, dragging out my title with maximum scorn,“that’s a baby way of talking. I’m not a baby anymore.”

“No, darling, you’re not.”

IT GOES SO QUICKLY, doesn’t it? One day they’re saying all those funny little things you promise yourself you’ll write down and never do, and then they’re talking like some streetwise kid or, even worse, they’re talking just like you. I will my children to grow up quicker and I mourn every minute I have missed of their infancy.

After I have fed them and bathed them and dried their hair and read Owl Babies and gone to fetch her a glass of water, I finally go downstairs and sit by myself in the dark and think of all the irretrievable time.

To: Debra Richardson

From: Kate Reddy

This afternoon was spent in Illicit Mummy Time. The most profitable few hours of the financial year to date. How much per hour do you think I can bill clients for kicking leaves and watching Mary Poppins?

Sneaking time with the kids feels like what an affair must feel like: the same lies to get away for the tryst, the same burst of fulfillment and, of course, the guilt.

Think I have forgotten how to waste time and I need the kids to remind me how to do it.

Don’t hate me if I stop work, will you? I know we said how we all need to keep going to prove it can be done. It’s just that I used to think maybe my job was killing me and now I’m scared I died and didn’t notice.

Our daughters’ daughters will adore us and they’ll sing in grateful chorus, Well done, well done, well done, sister suffragette!

all my love K xxxxxxxxxxxxx

38 The Waterfall

7:54 A.M. As I wait for the knock at the door, I realize how much I have been looking forward to telling Winston about the plan. Finally, here is something I can impress Pegasus with: proof that I am not just some blinkered lackey of the capitalist system. But after I’ve blurted out all the stuff about Dad’s nappy and Alice’s interview with Bunce, Winston doesn’t say anything except a curt, “You gotta remember you got two babies to feed.”

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 fact 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

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 always 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.”

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.

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 broke 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.