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

Shoes, matching, two of? Check.

No baby sick on jacket? Check.

Skirt not tucked into knickers? Check.

Bra not visible? Check.

OK, I’m going in. Stride briskly across the marble atrium and flash my pass at Gerald in Security. Since the revamp eighteen months ago, the lobby of Edwin Morgan Forster, which used to look like a bank, now resembles one of those zoo enclosures designed by Russian constructivists to house penguins. Every surface is an eyeball-shattering arctic white except the back wall, which is painted the exact turquoise of the Yardley gift soap favored by my Great-aunt Phyllis thirty years ago, but which was described by the designer as an “oceangoing color of vision and futurity.” For this piece of wisdom, a firm which is paid to manage other people’s money handed over an unconfirmed seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

Can you believe this building? Seventeen floors served by four lifts. Divide by four hundred and thirty employees, factor in six button-pushing ditherers, two mean bastards who won’t hold the door, and Rosa Klebb with a sandwich trolley, and you either have a possible four-minute wait or take the stairs. I take the stairs.

Arrive on Floor 13 with fuchsia face and walk straight into Robin Cooper-Clark, our pinstriped Director of Investment. The clash of odors is as immediate as it is pungent — me: Eau de Sweat, him: Floris Elite with under-notes of Winchester and walnut dashboard.

Robin is exceptionally tall, and it is one of his gifts that he manages to look down at you without actually looking down on you — without making you feel in any way small. It came as no surprise to learn in an obituary last year that his father was a bishop with a Military Cross. Robin has something both saintly and indestructible about him; there have been times at EMF when I have thought I would die if it weren’t for his kindness and lightly mocking respect.

“Remarkable color, Kate, been skiing?” Robin’s mouth is twitching up at the corners and on its way to a smile, but one bushy gray eyebrow arches incredulously towards the clock above the dealing desk.

Can I risk pretending that I’ve been in since seven and just slipped out for a cappuccino? A glance across the office tells me that my assistant, Guy, is already smirking purposefully by the watercooler. Damn. Guy must have spotted me at exactly the same moment because, across the bowed heads of the traders, phones cradled under their chins, over the secretaries and the European desk and the Global Equities team in their identical purple Lewin’s shirts, comes the Calling-All-Superiors voice of my assistant. “I’ve put the document from Bengt Bergman on your desk, Katharine,” he announces. “Sorry to see you’ve had problems getting in again.”

Notice that use of the word “again,” the drop of poison on the tip of the dagger. Little creep. When we funded Guy Chase through the European Business School three years ago, he was a Balliol brain ache with a four-piece suit and a personal hygiene deficit. He came back wearing charcoal Armani and the expression of someone with a Master’s in Blind Ambition. I think I can honestly say that Guy is the only man at Edwin Morgan Forster who likes the fact that I have kids. Chicken pox, summer holidays, carol concerts — all are opportunities for Guy to shine in my absence. I can see Robin Cooper-Clark looking at me expectantly now. Think, Kate, think.

IT IS POSSIBLE to get away with being late in the City. The key thing is to offer what my lawyer friend Debra calls a Man’s Excuse. Senior managers who would be frankly appalled by the story of a vomiting nocturnal baby or an AWOL nanny (mysteriously, child care, though paid for by both parents, is always deemed to be the female’s responsibility) are happy to accept anything to do with the internal combustion engine.

“The car broke down/was broken into.”

“You should have seen the”— fill in scene of mayhem —“at”— fill in street .

Either of these will do very well. Car alarms have been a valuable recent addition to the repertoire of male excuses because, although displaying female symptoms — hair-trigger unpredictability, high-pitched shrieking — they are attached to a Man’s Excuse and can be taken to a garage to be fixed.

“YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN the mess at Dalston Junction,” I tell Robin, composing my features into a mask of stoic urban resignation and, with outstretched arms, indicating a whole vista of car carnage. “Some maniac in a white van. Traffic lights out of sync. Unbelievable. Must have been stuck there — oh, twenty minutes.”

He nods. “London driving almost makes one grateful for Network Southeast.”

There is a heartbeat of a pause…a pause in which I try to ask about the health of Jill Cooper-Clark, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in the summer. But Robin is one of those Englishmen equipped from birth with an early-warning system which helps them to intercept and deflect any incoming questions of a personal nature. So even as my lips are forming his wife’s name, he says, “I’ll get Christine to book a lunch for us, Kate. You know they’ve converted some cellar by the Old Bailey — serving up lightly grilled witness, no doubt. Sounds amusing, don’t you think?”

“Yes, I was just wondering how—”

“Splendid. Talk later.”

By the time I reach the haven of my desk, I’ve regained my composure. Here’s the thing: I LOVE MY JOB. It may not always sound like it, but I do. I love the blood-rush when the stocks I took a punt on deliver the goods. I get a kick out of being one of the handful of women in the Club Lounge at the airport, and, when I get back, I love sharing my travel horror stories with friends. I love the hotels with room service that appears like a genie and the prairies of white cotton that give me the sleep I crave. (When I was younger I wanted to go to bed with other people; now that I have two children my fiercest desire is to go to bed with myself for a whole twelve hours.) Most of all I love the work: the synapse-snapping satisfaction of being good at it, of being in control when the rest of life seems such an awful mess. I love the fact that the numbers do what I say and never ask why.

9:03 A.M.Switch on my computer and wait for it to connect. The network is so slow this morning it would be quicker to fly to Hong Kong and pick up the Hang bloody Seng in person. Type in my password — Ben Pampers — and go straight into Bloomberg to see what the markets have been up to overnight. The Nikkei is steady, Brazil’s Bovespa is doing its usual crazy samba, while the Dow Jones looks like the printout on a do-not-resuscitate patient in intensive care. Baby, it’s cold outside, and not just on account of the fog nuzzling the office blocks outside my window.

Next, I check currencies for any dramatic movements, then type in TOP to call up all the big corporate news stories. The main one is about Gayle Fender, a bond trader or, rather, an ex-trader. She’s suing her firm, Lawrence Austen, for sex discrimination because male colleagues got far bigger bonuses than she did for less good results. The headline reads: ICE MAIDEN COOLS TOWARDS MEN. As far as the media is concerned, City women are all either Elizabeth I or a resting lap dancer. That old virgin-and-whore thing wrapped up in the Wall Street Journal.

Personally, I’ve always fancied the idea of becoming an Ice Maiden — maybe you can buy the outfit? Trimmed in white fur, stalactite heels with matching pickax. Anyway, Gayle Fender’s story will end how those stories always end: with a No comment as, eyes lowered, she leaves a courtroom by a side door. This City smothers dissent: we have ways of making you not talk. Stuffing people’s mouths with fifty-pound notes tends to do the trick.