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

When we were still students we had traveled round Europe by train, and one night we wound up in a small hotel in Munich where we collapsed in giggles on the bed. It looked like a double, but when you pulled the cover back it turned out to be two mattresses, divided and united by a thin wooden strip which made any meeting in the middle an effort rather than an inevitability. It all felt so Teutonic. “You be East Germany and I’ll be West,” I remember saying to Rich as we lay there on our separate halves in the light of the streetlamp. We laughed, but in time I came to wonder whether the Munich arrangement was the true marriage bed: practical, passionless, putting asunder what God had joined together.

7:41 A.M.After breakfast, Ben, wearing a bib like a Jackson Pollock, is terribly clingy. Paula peels him off me when Winston arrives to drive me to work. “All right, sweetheart, it’s all right,” I hear Paula say as I pull the door behind me.

Sitting in the back of Pegasus, I try to read the FT to bring myself up to speed for my presentation, but I can’t concentrate. There is music playing, a jazz piano arrangement of something I can almost place—“Someone to Watch Over Me”? It sounds as though the pianist has smashed the tune into a thousand pieces and keeps throwing them into the air to see which way they land. The riffs are like a man shuffling a pack of cards, only instead of paper the cards are made of sound. Winston hums along, holding the main line of the tune and occasionally letting out a little whoop to salute the pianist for a particularly cunning resolution. This morning, my driver’s ease and pleasure feels like an insult, a rebuke. I want him to stop.

“Do you think we could avoid the New North lights, Winston, and cut round the back? I’m not convinced this is the quickest way.”

He doesn’t answer for a while but allows the track to finish. Then, with the final chord still thrumming in the air, he says, “You know, lady, where I come from it takes a long time to do things suddenly.”

“Kate, my name is Kate.”

“I know what your name is,” he says. “Way I see it, rushing around just a waste of time. Fly too fast, lady, and you pass your nest.”

The laugh I laugh sounds darker than usual. “Well, I’m afraid that is the more leisurely perspective afforded to the driver of the minicab.”

Winston doesn’t bite back at my snottiness, he just gives it a long gaze in the mirror and says thoughtfully, “You think I want to be you? You don’t even want to be you.”

That’s it. “Look, I don’t pay you for psychotherapy. I pay you to get me to Broadgate in the shortest time possible, a feat which seems increasingly beyond you. If you don’t mind, I’ll get out here. It’s quicker to walk.”

As I hand over the twenty and Winston digs into his pocket for change, he begins to sing:

“There’s a somebody I’m longing to see

I hope that he

Turns out to be

Someone to watch over me.”

8:33 A.M. OFFICES OF EDWIN MORGAN FORSTER.Shoot out of lift straight into Celia Harmsworth.

“Something on your jacket, dear?” smirks the head of Human Resources.

“Just back from the cleaners, actually.” I glance down at my shoulder to see a smeary mess, an epaulette of Ben’s banana porridge. No, God, how can you do this to me?

“I’m amazed how you manage this job, Katharine,” coos Celia, clearly delighted at further proof that I can’t.

(Celia is one of those spinsters who adored being the only woman in a man’s world; it was a license to feel pretty before girlies like me showed up and ruined her monopoly.)

“Must be such a struggle with all those kiddies,” she offers helpfully. “I was saying to Robin Cooper-Clark when you were away for — half term, was it? — I don’t know how she does it.”

“Two.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Two. All those kiddies. I have two of them. That’s one less than Robin has.”

Turn on my heel, walk over to desk, shrug off stained jacket, shove in bottom drawer. Incredible noise from the window. Out on the ledge, the pigeons have decided to move in together. The male is sitting there with a twig in his mouth looking faintly foolish and disbelieving. I recognize the expression. It’s the look Rich gives when I bring home a flatpack of shelves for self-assembly. The female, meanwhile, is busy forming a heap of other twigs into a raftlike structure roughly the size of a dinner plate. Oh, this is great, now they’re building a nest.

“Guy, did you get onto the Corporation about the hawk man? Damn pigeons are about to start a breeding program out there.”

I check my neck in handbag mirror for any Ben bites — no, all clear — and then I stalk coolly into meeting with Robin Cooper-Clark and other senior managers to begin my presentation. It goes remarkably well. All eyes in the room are glued on me, especially those of the bastard Chris Bunce. Am obviously starting to command serious respect: the tactic of behaving like a man, never mentioning the children, etc., is clearly paying off.

As I switch from slides to overheads, it suddenly occurs to me that I am the only person in the room without a penis. Not a good thought to have right now, Kate. Can we not think about dicks in a gathering of seventeen men? Talking of which, do they have to stare at me quite so intently? Look down. Am wearing red Agent Provocateur demitasse bra under white voile shirt, grabbed from chest of drawers in half-dark at 4:30. Oh, Jesus, I look like Pamela Anderson at the Oscars.

11:37 A.M.Sit in ladies’ loo with cheek pressed up against the cubicle wall to cool furious blush. Tiled in black marble riddled with white stars, the wall is like a map of the universe. I feel as though I’m being sucked into deep space and more than happy to go there. How about disappearing into a black hole for a few millennia till the memory of public humiliation fades? I used to smoke in here when things got desperate; since I gave up I sing under my breath. “I am strong. I am invincible. I am Woman.”

It’s a Helen Reddy song from when I was at school. I loved the fact that she had the same name as me and she sounded — well, just so full of it, so confident that you could deal with anything life threw at you. At college, when Debra and I were getting ready for a night out, we used to play the record over and over to psych ourselves up. Dance round the room, playing catch with Deb’s Action Man. (After his leg broke off, Deb said we’d have to call him Inaction Man “after all our useless husbands.”)

“Oh, yes, I am wise,

But it’s wisdom born of pain,

Yes, I’ve paid the price,

But look how much I’ve gained!

I am strong. I am in-vin-ci-ble.

I am Woman.”

Do I believe in equality between the sexes? I’m not sure. I did once, with all the passionate certainty of someone very young who knew absolutely everything and therefore nothing at all. It was a nice idea, equality — noble, indisputably fair. But how the hell was it supposed to work? They could give you good jobs and maternity leave, but until they programmed a man to notice you were out of toilet paper the project was doomed. Women carry the puzzle of family life in their heads, they just do. As a mother, I see that more and more clearly. Every night on the way home from the City, I watch the women scurrying along in the Lucozade light of the streetlamps, bags of shopping balancing briefcases, or twitching at bus stops like overwound clockwork toys.

Not long ago, my friend Philippa told me that she and her husband had drawn up a will. Phil said she wanted a clause stipulating that, in the event of her death, Mark would promise to cut the children’s fingernails. He thought she was joking. She wasn’t joking.