Allison Pearson - I Don't Know How She Does It

I open the dishwasher and notice that the supposedly clean dishes have a tide mark of gray sediment. Damn machine must be on the blink. “It may have escaped your notice, Rich, but I have a major presentation—”

“For it to have escaped my notice, I would have to have been embalmed in Ulan Bator.”

“I do this for us, you know.”

“What us, Kate? The kids haven’t seen you since we got back from Wales. Maybe you should become a TV presenter. At least they’d catch you once a day on-screen.”

Standing in the doorway, watching my husband’s baffled misery from a long, long way off, I think how I know this situation so well and I know the ways out of it — either leave for the airport in the morning with a frost on the ground and hope it has melted by the time I get back, or take my clothes off right now and remind both of us that love is something you can make. Am so exhausted my body feels like a carcass; no, it feels like a living body carrying a dead one on its back. But I can’t bear to leave him like this, and some kinds of sex take less time and energy than others.

“Please be on my side, Rich,” I say to him, as I get to my feet a few minutes later. “It’s me by myself in the office, against them: I can’t be on my own at home as well.”

1:01 A.M.Have almost finished transferring all the information I need into the Pocket Memory when there is a cry from upstairs.

4:17 A.M.Emily up three times already. Wrestling with her duvet, damp hair drying in crusty tendrils on her pale cheek. Can’t tell me what’s wrong. How can she do this to me tonight of all nights? I have to leave for the airport in three hours.

Immediate stab of guilt for even thinking such a thought. Then, just when I’ve decided this is a preemptive punishment for leaving her — like a cat, Emily senses a departure before the suitcase is brought down — she finally moans, “Mummy, my wee-wee hurts.”

Pour her a large cup of cranberry juice and spend the next twenty minutes on the phone trying to get through to an emergency doctor. He suggests I give her Calpol and take a urine sample into the surgery first thing. Downstairs, I try to find the nearest thing to a specimen bottle — something watertight but big enough for her to pee into. Only thing I can find is Barbie flask. It will have to do. Back upstairs, kneeling next to the toilet, I have no luck coaxing a wincing Em to perform into the flask.

“Mummy?”

“Yes, love.”

“Can I have a swimming party?”

“Of course, sweetheart.” Flask is instantly filled to the brim.

NOON. JFK AIRPORT, NEW YORK.A hulking Customs inspector bearing a strong resemblance to Sipowicz in NYPD Blue rifles through my hand luggage. Totally unconcerned, I look on as he takes out my mobile, spare tights and Percy the Puppy book. Dips his meaty hand in a side pocket and brings out the Barbie flask. Omigod. Was supposed to leave that on the kitchen table. If flask is here, where is Pocket Memory?

Customs inspector unscrews Barbie container and sniffs. “Ma’am, how would you describe this liquid?”

“It’s my daughter’s urine.”

“Ma’am, I think you’d better come with me.”

Absolutely Bloody Everything.

WEDNESDAY, FAIRWEATHER INN, SHANKSVILLE, NEW JERSEY.Awake since 4:00 a.m., trapped in the revolving door of jet lag. Room service doesn’t start till 6:00 so I get a rank metallic coffee from machine in the hallway and add a slug of miniature from the minibar. Whisky gives a sustained top note to the hell brew. Catch sight of old woman in the bathroom mirror. Look away.

This morning, I dress for battle in full Armani armor — it is incredibly comforting pulling on a crisp white blouse and a digestive-biscuit-brown jacket and skirt with seams so sharp you could perform surgery with them. Shoes are fudge-colored LK Bennett pencil heels with white stitching and a groin-piercing toe. The look I’m aiming for is Katharine Hepburn Kicks Ass.

Two hours before the final and Momo joins me in the room. She is wearing a blue silk suit, and her dark hair is scraped back and pinned up. She may be nervous within, but she looks so mysteriously serene that a religion ought to be founded in her name.

Today, I have to be confident for both of us, exuding the gale-force bonhomie of a game-show host who knows his contract is up for renewal. We’ve been through the presentation fifty times already, but there’s no harm reprising all the don’ts.

“If they offer you a drink, don’t take it, OK? Don’t call them by their first names whatever you do. This is an ethical fund; these people like to think of themselves as the kind of people who like to be Gregged and Hannahed, but if you try it they’ll suddenly realize how much they prefer to be deferred to. They’re thinking about trusting us with an awful lot of money, so it’s sir and ma’am all round. And remember, we are the suitors.”

Momo looks surprised. “It’s a flirtation?”

“Yes, only we don’t flirt. It’s like courtly love.”

“The one who was married to Kurt Cobain?”

“ Courtly love, Momo. Courtly . Did you ever read any Chaucer at school?” She shakes her head. God, what are they teaching them these days?

“No? Well, we protest our undying devotion. Desperate to please the beloved, we’d walk a million miles for one of their files: that kind of thing. And the key is to keep reminding them that although we have hundreds of white guys behind us who practically invented banking, we also have an unparalleled commitment to diversity. Ethical funds want decent returns. They want diversity, but they don’t want Third World. So we can give them the best of British with a rainbow gloss, which is where you and I come in.”

“Isn’t that sort of unethical, Kate?”

Weeks of exposure to my radioactive cynicism and she can still ask that question? What am I going to do with this child? “If we told the truth, Momo, we’d lose, which would have the virtue of being extremely ethical. But if we bluff our way through and we win, then two women — one of them not white — will have landed a three-hundred-million-dollar account for Edwin Morgan Forster, which means diversity really does pay, and that means that one day, instead of being window dressing, we may get a crack at running the store. Which will be altogether ethical and also mean we can buy ourselves a lot of excellent shoes. Next question.”

“So, lying in a final isn’t wrong?”

“Only if you do it badly.”

Momo gives a laugh that is too big for her slight frame; it propels her back onto the bed, and one shoe slips off and thumps onto the floor. (Must remember to do something about her shoes: navy flatties, they do nothing for her feet, which are as tiny and articulated as a ballerina’s.) Lying there on the swirly orange counterpane, she looks up at me and sighs. “I don’t understand you, Kate. Sometimes I think you think it’s all the most terrific bullshit, and then it seems as though you really really want to win.”

“Oh, I really really do. Just watch me. When I was little I used to hide a Monopoly hotel down my sock. If I landed on Park Lane, I’d smuggle the hotel out. My dad caught me one Christmas and hit me with the nutcracker for being a cheating little cow.”

I can see Momo struggling to place this Dickensian episode in the polite well-ordered childhood that is the birthright of every middle-class girl. She hasn’t worked out that I’m traveling on a false passport — why would she? These days even I’d struggle to spot myself as the imposter in a City lineup.