I Don't Know How She Does It

Epilogue What Kate Did Next

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To: Kate Reddy

From: Jack Abelhammer

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

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

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

Yours forever, Jack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then, a couple of Fridays ago, I got a call from Julie. It was a crackly mobile, but I could tell she was in tears. For a second I thought Mum! and my stomach went down a mine shaft, but it wasn’t that; the factory where Jules does piecework had gone bust. Manager done a bunk, receivers called in. They were putting padlocks on the doors. All the women who had still been at their machines were now shivering out in the yard. Could I come down?

No, I said. Ben needed his lunch and, besides, I really didn’t know what use I could be. When Julie answered, it was in a voice I recognized from childhood, the one my little sister had when she asked if she could get into bed with me as the raging voices of our mother and father came through the floorboards. “But I’ve told everyone you’re a businesswoman, Kath, and you’ll be able to tell us what’s what.”

Combed my hair, put some lipstick on and dug out Armani jacket from the wardrobe in the spare room. I wanted to look like the woman Julie had described to her colleagues. When I slipped the jacket on, it was like being back in uniform: the gray wool impregnated with the smell of power, of money being made and things getting done. I wrestled Ben into the baby seat and drove down to the industrial estate. It wasn’t hard to find Julie’s place. The notice on the fence said TRADITIONAL ENGLISH DOLLS’ HOUSES and over that was a sticker: Liquidation Sale — Everything Must Go! In the yard, there were about forty seamstresses, many wearing the most amazing saris. They parted as I arrived, and it was like walking through a flock of tropical birds. I waved my old Platinum Amex at the guy standing by a side door, told him I’d come up from London and was looking to buy some stuff. Inside, the dollhouses were abandoned in mid-decoration: tiny sofas, footstools, velvet pelmets, porcelain toilets awaiting their wooden seats, grand pianos the size of a powder compact.

“What can we do, Kath?” asked Julie when I came out.

Absolutely nothing. “I’ll try and find out what’s happened.”

The next day, I dropped Em at school, left a delighted Ben with his equally delighted grandmother and got the train down to London. Cab across town to Companies House: it didn’t take long to get the dollhouse people’s accounts for the last five years. You should have seen them. The business was a wreck: disappearing margins, no investment, piles of debt, a complete financial basket case.

On the train back up north, I tried to read the paper, but the type wouldn’t stay still. There were plenty of ethical funds out there under instruction to invest in women-only companies; I knew that better than anyone. Money for the taking, really. But when the train shuddered to a halt at Chesterfield, it shook some sense into me.

Kate Reddy, I can’t believe you are even having this thought. Take on something like that? You’d have to be out of your mind, woman. Out of your bloody mind.

7:37 P.M. Bedtime. Brush teeth, four recitations of Goodnight Moon, three Owl Babies, visits to the bathroom (four), attempts on potty (two), time taken till lights out: forty-eight minutes. Must improve.

8:37 P.M. Call to Candy Stratton in New Jersey to discuss mail-order market and distribution with view to global dollhouse business.

“I knew it,” she hollers.

“I’m making inquiries for a friend.”

“Yeah, right. Tell her to wear that red bra when she goes to get the financing.”

9:11 P.M. Call to Gerry at Dickinson Bishop in New York. Sussing out funds specifically designated to invest in women-only companies. Gerry says it’s a steal. “Ethical’s the new Viagra, Katie.”

10:27 P.M. Ben has accident in bed. Change sheet. Try to find pull-up nappy. Where are nappies?

11:48 P.M. Wake Momo Gumeratne at home to talk about possibility of wooden dollhouse frames being made by workers employed by Sri Lankan aid agency she’s been advising.

“Kate,” she says, “can I do it with you?”

“I’m not doing anything. Go back to sleep.”

MIDNIGHT. Take glass of water up to Emily. The great gray eyes stare up at me in the dark.

“Mummy, you’re thinking,” she says accusingly.

“Yes, love, it’s allowed, you know. How would you like to help Mummy build a palace?”

“Yes, but it’s got to have a tower where Beauty sleeps.”

“It absolutely does.”

1:01 A.M. Still time to go over the figures from the factory — what is required is a proper marketing plan and some diversification. How about a range of buildings instead of the traditional Georgian townhouse? A New York brownstone, maybe, a cottage, offices, castles, ships, Emily’s palace. Richard could design them.

1:37 A.M. “Kate, what do you think you’re doing? It’s two o’clock in the morning.”

My husband Richard is standing in the doorway of the kitchen: Rich, with his acres of English reasonableness and his invincible kindness.

“Darling,” he says, “it’s so late.”

“I’m just coming.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing.”

He squints curiously at me in the light. “What kind of nothing?”

“Oh, I was just thinking about, you know, homemaking.”

He raises an eyebrow.

“Don’t worry. Warm my side of the bed, I’m just coming.”

The kiss he plants on my forehead is a question as much as a gift.

Seeing my husband go upstairs, I long to follow him but I can’t leave the kitchen in this state. I just can’t.

The room bears signs of heavy fighting; there is Lego shrapnel over a wide area. In my absence, three apples and four satsumas have been added to the big glass bowl, but no one has thought to discard the old fruit beneath and the pears at the bottom have started weeping a sticky amber resin. As I throw each pear in the bin, I worry about the cost. After washing and drying the bowl, I carefully wipe any stray amber goo off the apples and put them back. All I need to do now is get Emily’s lunch box ready for the morning, check the time for Ben’s appointment at the surgery, see if I can get from there to the bank to talk to my manager, convene a meeting of workers at the factory, call the receivers and still get back in time for school pickup. Chicken out of freezer. Chicken out of PTA meeting. Emily wants horse. Over my dead body; who will end up cleaning out the stable? Rich’s birthday — surprise dinner? Bread. Milk. Honey. And there was something else. I know there was something else.

What else?