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

When she responds, it’s as though the sun were in her eyes. “That’s awful,” she says. “Your father. I’m really sorry.”

“Don’t be. Be sorry for the losers. Now let’s run through that part where you hand me the list of clients again.”

The phone rings, and for a second neither of us recognizes its plaintive foreign bleat. It’s Rod with a few last-minute suggestions. When I’ve hung up, I turn to Momo.

“All right, guess what he said.”

She furrows her brow and pretends to be thinking before answering in her best crystal Cheltenham Lady, “Go out and kick the fucking tires?”

Suddenly I feel a lot less worried about her. “OK, you got the job. Rod’s not bad, you know, once you learn how to handle him. If you make him think everything you want to do is his idea, he’ll be happy as a clam.”

Momo frowns. “When you talk about the men at work, Kate, it’s as though we were their mothers.”

“We are their mothers. I have people hanging on to my skirt in the office and then I have them hanging on to my skirt when I go home. You’d better get used to it. Right, let’s try the beginning one more time.”

The phone rings again. It’s Paula, just calling to say she located my personal organizer in the salad drawer. Ben has started hiding things in the fridge. All the information I have needed over the past twelve hours has been with the celery. Meanwhile, Emily is on antibiotics for her urinary infection. Her temperature is still up, but she’d like to talk to me, if that’s OK.

Emily comes on the line, at once pipingly eager and breathily shy. Whenever I hear my daughter’s voice on the phone, I feel as though I’m hearing it for the first time; it seems implausible that something I grew inside myself so recently should be able to converse with me, let alone bounce off a satellite.

“Mummy, are you at America?”

“Yes, Em.”

“Like Woody and Jessie in Toy Story 2 ?”

“Yes, that’s right. And how are you feeling, sweetheart?”

“Fine. Ben got a bump. There was loads and loads of blood.”

At this, I feel my own blood just stop, as if someone took a flash photo of my whole being. “Em, can I speak to Paula again? Please ask Paula to come to the phone now, there’s a good girl.”

I try to keep my voice calm and raise the matter of Ben’s bump casually when what I feel like doing is appearing in a ball of fire in my own kitchen with maternal fangs glittering and a headful of hissing snakes.

“Oh, that,” Paula says dismissively. “He just hit his head on the table.”

The metal table with the retina-perforating corners I banished to the cellar in case Ben fell on it? That’s the one. Hey, but these things happen, Paula is telling me and, her tone says, Anyway, you weren’t here so who are you to criticize? Besides, she doesn’t think Ben needs stitches.

Stitches? My God. I clear my throat and try to find that sweet liberal register where an order sounds like a suggestion. Perhaps Paula could take Ben to the surgery? Just in case. A deep sigh and then suddenly she is telling Ben to put something down. At this distance, my children’s carer sounds sardonic, detached. Most distressing of all, she sounds like someone who is not me. I can just about hear Ben — he must be over by the window — making those yelps which sound like pain but are just his way of recording the fierce pleasure of discovery. Paula is saying there was something else. Alexandra Law called about a Parent Teachers meeting at school. Will I be attending?

“What?”

“Can you go to the PTA meeting?”

“I really can’t think about that now.”

“So I’ll tell her no?”

“No. Tell her I’ll call her. . after.”

To: Kate Reddy

From: Debra Richardson

Q: Why is it difficult to find men who are sensitive, caring and good-looking?

A: They all have boyfriends already.

How U?

To: Debra Richardson

From: Kate Reddy

Completely mental. Literally. Life of the body a distant memory. Am now just brain on a stick. About to pitch for $$$$$$ account with terrified trainee who thinks Geoffrey Chaucer is rap artist. Plus Emily sick and Ben nearly decapitated while Pol Pot busy listening to Kiss FM.

Don’t want to be grown-up anymore. When did we start having to be the grown-ups? K xxx

2:57 P.M.Our prospective client’s offices are decorated in a style I immediately identify as Corporate Cozy. Plaid wing chairs, a lot of teak and ethnic hangings bought by the mile. The look says: We mean business but, hey, you can do a yogic headstand in here if the mood takes you.

Momo and I are shown into the meeting room by the largest female I have ever seen. Carol Dunstan is clearly a major beneficiary of Workplace Diversity, Fattist Section. The walk from the lobby has made her breathless; just looking at her is to wonder what manner of distress it is that requires so much comfort eating. She makes the introductions, taking us through the eighteen faces round the table. I hear Momo decline a drink. That’s my girl. “And last, but certainly not least, our distinguished colleague from the Salinger Foundation. Mr. Abelhammer sits on the state board of trustees, Ms. Reddy.”

And truly there he is. In the farthest corner, marked out from the other suits by a posture of almost insolent relaxation and a broad grin. Simultaneously, the person I least want to see and the only person I want to see. Jack.

THE PRESENTATION GOES WELL. Too well, maybe. Halfway through and I can practically taste the healing sting of gin and tonic on the plane home. I have tried to ignore the fact that my e-mail lover is actually physically here in the room, although I have felt his presence as you feel the sun on your skin.

I talk our prospective clients through the booklet containing mug shots of the guys who manage portfolios back in London. It’s a gallery of City types pretty much unchanged for three hundred years: well-lunched Hogarth squires, thrusting runts. Men whose last wisps of hair have been blown dry to form a spun-sugar web over a pink saucer of scalp. Heart-attack candidates, their eager prep-school faces buried in the landslide of middle age. Young men with the waxy, stunned look that comes from long obedient hours in front of a screen. With particular pride, I point out hotshot manager Chris Bunce, whose coke habit has given him the eyes of a laboratory rat and the manners to match. At the front, there is a photograph of Robin Cooper-Clark — tall as a birch, quizzical, half smiling. He looks like God would look, if God had his shirts made at Turnbull & Asser.

Carol Dunstan clears her throat. “Ms. Reddy, New Jersey has recently signed up to the McMahon Principles. Would that be a problem to your asset allocation?”

OK, Kate, let’s not panic. Let’s think. Think! “No. I’m sure that if we were given a list of stocks that were governed by the Mc — um — Mahon Principles—”

“We don’t have a list, Ms. Reddy,” says the big woman curtly. “Naturally, we would expect Edwin Morgan Forster to provide a list that abides by the McMahon Principles. Principles with which you are, of course, familiar.”

Eighteen faces in the room fixed on me. Nineteen, including Momo, who looks up with trusting spaniel eyes. I have never heard of McMahon or his sodding principles. Seconds which normally pass silently, modestly, happy to go unnoticed, are suddenly long, loud and merciless. I can feel the blood surge to my throat and chest — a raspberry flush that can only be triggered by sex or shame. The exhalation of the air-conditioning unit sounds like a woman parted from her lover. No. Don’t think about lovers. Think about McMahon, whoever he is. Probably some self-righteous little Celt wanting to take his revenge on the Anglo-Saxon capitalist oppressors. I avoid looking down the far end of the table where Jack is sitting.