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

JILL COOPER-CLARK DIED PEACEFULLY at home in the small hours of Monday morning. She was forty-seven. Diagnosed just after the children broke up from school last summer, the cancer swept through her like a forest fire. The surgeons went in first, and after them a SWAT team of pharmacologists and radiotherapists, all trying to contain the blaze. But the cancer was unquenchable: breasts, lungs, pancreas. It was as though Jill’s energy — she was the most prodigiously energetic person I’ve ever met — was being used against her; as if the life force itself could be hijacked and redeployed in the fell purposes of death. The last time I saw her was at the annual Edwin Morgan Forster party, a zillion-dollar bash on an Arabian theme with real sand and an angry camel. Wearing a turban to hide her tufted baldness, Jill was, as usual, making me laugh.

“Slash and burn, Kate, you’d hardly believe how bloody primitive the treatment is. I feel like a medieval village they’re razing to the ground. Only one would rather be pillaged by Vikings than an oncologist, don’t you think?”

Before the treatment, Jill had dense, springy auburn hair and that Celtic top-of-the-milk skin with a sprinkling of cinnamon freckles. Three babies — all hefty boys — had not managed to weigh down the coltish body of the sometime netball Goal Attack. Robin said that to get the full measure of his wife you had to see her tennis backhand: just when you thought it was all over, when there was no possibility of the ball being returned, she would uncoil and whip it down the line. I watched her do it at the Cooper-Clark place in Sussex two summers ago, and when she struck the ball, Jill let out a defiant, joyous, “Ha!” I think we were all waiting for her to pull that stroke on the cancer.

Jill is survived by her three sons and by her husband, who has just stepped out of the lift. I hear the smart rap of his black Lobbs across the central square of beech that might be used for tea-dancing if this were another, gentler, kind of business. We are both in the office appallingly early, Robin to catch up, me to get ahead. He rustles around in his room, coughing, opening and closing a drawer.

I take him in a mug of tea and he starts. “Oh, hello, Kate. Look, I’m so sorry, leaving you to manage alone. I know how much hassle it is and on top of the Salinger stuff. But after the funeral I’ll be all yours.”

“Don’t worry. Everything’s under control.” A lie. I want to ask how he is, but that early-warning system of his, the one that sees off painful personal questions, is on red alert. So I ask something else. “How are the boys?”

“Well, we’re luckier than a lot of people,” says Robin, switching smoothly into Head of Investment mode. “You know Tim’s at Bristol now, Sam’s doing GCSEs and Alex is nearly nine. It’s not as though they’re little boys anymore who really — um, need a mother in the way that younger boys do actually need their mothers.” And then he makes a noise that no one has ever heard in the offices of Edwin Morgan Forster before. Halfway between a bark and a moan, it is barely human — or maybe all too human — and I never want to hear it again.

He pinches the bridge of his nose for a few furious seconds and then turns back to me. “Jill left this,” he says, handing over a sheaf of paper. Twenty pages of close-typed script, it bears the title YOUR FAMILY: HOW IT WORKS!

“Everything’s in there,” he says, shaking his head in wonder. “She even tells me where to find the bloody Christmas decorations. You’d be amazed how much there is to remember, Kate.”

No, I wouldn’t.

FRIDAY, 12:33 P.M.If I leave the office now, I will make it to Jill’s funeral in Sussex at three o’clock with plenty of time to pick up a sandwich on the way to the station. Momo and I are going through some stuff for another final. Momo asks if I knew Mr. Cooper-Clark’s wife and I tell her Jill was an amazing person.

Momo wrinkles her little nose. “But she didn’t work, did she?”

I look at Momo’s face — what is she: twenty-four, twenty-five? Young enough not to know what women put up with before her; young enough to take her own freedom for granted. Calmly I say, “Jill was fast-track civil service until Sam, her second, was two years old. She’d have been running the Home Office by now, but she decided to run her own home instead. She just didn’t think that she and Robin could both have ballbreaking jobs without the children being affected. She said she tried to believe it was possible, but her heart wouldn’t let her.”

Momo bends down to put something in the bin and out of the window I can see the pigeon, her feathers puffed out like a crinoline over the eggs. Daddy pigeon is nowhere to be seen. Where is he?

“Oh, how sad,” says Momo. “I mean, what a waste to end up doing nothing with your life.”

1:11 P.M.If I leave the office right this minute, I should make it to the train.

1:27 P.M.Am running out of the office when Robin’s secretary hands me Jill’s family memo; he’s forgotten it. I sprint to Cannon Street. By the time I reach the river, lungs are hoarse, beads of sweat cascading over my breasts like a broken necklace. Stumble on steps to the station and gash left knee of tights. Damn. Damn. Dash across station concourse, skid into Knickerbox and grab first pair of black tights I see. Tell startled girl to keep the change. At the barrier, the guard grins and says, “Too late, love.” Swerve round the barrier, board accelerating train pursued by guard. Through the window, London recedes with surprising speed, its gray circuitry soon blurring into deep country. I can hardly bear to look at the spring: so ear-splittingly green, so childishly hopeful.

I buy a cup of coffee from a passing trolley and open my briefcase to take out some work. On the top of the pile is Jill’s family memo. I shouldn’t read it, but I really want to read it. I want to hear my friend again, even if it’s only her words written down. Maybe if I just look at one page?

When you supervise Alex’s bath, don’t forget to do in between his fingers, there’s usually a load of black fluff in there and the odd raisin! Must put Oilatum (turquoise bottle, white writing) in the water for his eczema. Please pretend it’s bubble bath, he hates being reminded about his skin.

Alex will tell you he doesn’t like pasta. He does like pasta, so persist. Persist gently. Yes, he can have a Cheese Whirl — hideous, Day-Glo, no cheese — but only if he eats a real piece of cheese as well. No, he can’t live on sweet corn. Suggest family switch to Red Bush tea (cancer prevention, apparently).

I promised Sam he could have contact lenses for his fifteenth birthday. Whenever you’re about to shout at him, count silently to ten and think testosterone. He won’t be revolting for long, I promise. Remember all the grief we had with Tim and how well he worked out? Timmy’s current girlfriend is Sharmila — lovely, v. bright, from Bradford. Her parents disapprove of slacker white boy — ours — so could you invite them to the house and do your charm thing? (Father, Deepak, is keen golfer: both parents vegetarian.) Tim will pretend to hate it when you ask him but be chuffed when it happens.

Your mother’s favorite perfume is Diorissima. Tapes are always a good bet. Anything by Bryn Terfel except Oklahoma, which we gave last year. Also Alan Bennett books and Turkish Delight. My mother likes anything by Margaret Forster or Antonia Fraser. You might like to give Mummy my rings, or maybe you should hold on to them as one of the boys might want for an engagement ring in due course?