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

The store has an immediate consoling effect. I take the little lift to the top floor, where I spot an evening dress. I don’t need an evening dress. I try it on. Black and floaty with a fragile braid of diamante fixed down each side and in a plunging V under the bust, it’s the kind of dress they once danced the Charleston in. I just about have the figure for it; I just don’t have the life. My life is the wrong size; there’s no room in it for a dress this beautiful. But isn’t that part of the thrill, buying a dress and hoping the life to go with it will follow soon like a must-have accessory? When the girl at the till hands me the chit to sign, I don’t even check the amount.

3:00 P.M.The hotel room is like a hundred I’ve stayed in before. The wallpaper is beige embossed on beige; the curtains, in bold contrast, look like an explosion in a herbaceous border. I check the minibar for emergency chocolate and then the drawer of the bedside table: there is the Gideon Bible and — a more contemporary touch — a collection of sayings from the World’s Great Religions.

I check my watch. The time difference with England is five hours. If I call now, it should be around the kids’ bedtime. I’m expecting to hear Richard’s voice, but it’s Paula at the other end. She says Rich has asked her to stay over a couple of nights until I get back and left a note for me that he made her promise to deliver in person.

Where the hell is he? I ask Paula to open the note and read it to me. Just look at the time. I think of all the things my husband could be doing to help out while I’m not there as our nanny starts to read his words aloud.

“I’ve been trying to talk to you for a while now, but I find it increasingly hard to get your attention.”

“Yes, but does it say what time he’ll be back?”

“Kate, can you hear me? Are you listening?”

“Of course I can hear you, Paula.”

“No, that’s Richard. In the note. He says, Kate, can you hear me? Are you listening? ”

“Oh, right, sorry. Go on.”

“I am so sorry, my darling, that we have reached this terrible imp—”

“What imp?”

“—ass.”

Oh, for heaven’s sake. “How do you spell it?”

Paula announces each letter carefully: “I-m-p-a-s-s-e.”

“Oh, impasse. I see. It’s, you know, it’s French for…well, anyway, what else?”

Paula sounds dubious. “I’m not sure I should be doing this, Kate.”

“No, please carry on. I have to know what his plans are.”

“He says, If you need to get hold of me I will be staying at David and Maria’s for a few nights until I find a place of my own. He says, Don’t worry, I’ll still go and pick Emily up from school. ”

So it really can happen, then. In real life. A thing you’ve seen in bad TV drama and turned over because it’s so implausible. Only this time there is no turning over and maybe no turning back. One moment the world is pretty much as it should be — rocky and a little barren, perhaps, but still the world as you know it — and then suddenly you have the sensation of the ground giving way beneath your feet. My husband, Richard the rational, Richard the reliable, Richard the rock, has left me. Rich — who in the letter he gave me the day before our wedding wrote I’m Ever and you’re Reddy; here’s to long life, my darling —has walked out and I have been paying so little attention that our nanny has ended up breaking the news.

During the long pause, Paula’s breathing has got heavier; there is a wheeze of anxiety coming down the line. “Kate,” she asks, “are you OK?”

“Yes, I’m fine. Please, Paula, sleep in our bed”—as I say the words it occurs to me that it may be my bed now, not ours—“the children go there first in the morning. I know this is asking an awful lot, Paula, but if you could just hold the fort. And if you can please tell Emily and Ben that Mummy will be back as soon as she can tomorrow.”

Paula doesn’t reply at once, and I think if she lets me down now I don’t know what I’ll do.

“Is that all right, Paula?”

“Oh — sorry, Kate, I’ve just seen there’s a PS on the other side. Richard says, I know I can never stop loving you because, believe me, I’ve tried.

There is no possible reply to that, and into my silence Paula murmurs, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything here. Ben and Em will be fine. It’s going to be all right, Kate, really it is.”

After I’ve put the phone down, I forget how to breathe for a few seconds. Suddenly the mechanics of taking in air seem complicated and strenuous; I have to heave my diaphragm up and then pump my chest out, heave and pump again.

When I’m a little steadier, I call Jack and leave a message on his mobile canceling dinner. Then I get undressed and take a shower. The towels are that hopeless Italian kind; thin and frugal as an altar cloth, they pat the water round your skin rather than absorbing it. I need a towel that can hug me.

Catching sight of myself in the bathroom mirror, I am startled to see that I look much as I did the last time I looked. Why isn’t my hair falling out? Why aren’t my eyes weeping blood? I think of my children asleep in their beds and of how far I am from them, how unbelievably far. From this distance, I see my little family as a small encampment on a hillside and the winds are lashing round them and I have to be there to tie everything down. I have to be there.

The water is wide, I cannot get o’er,

And neither have I wings to fly.

I climb into bed, between the stiff white sheets, and move my hand over my body. My body and, for so long, Richard’s body. With this body I thee worship. I try to think of the last time I saw him. Saw him properly, I mean, not just the way you see a blur in the rearview mirror. In the past few months, I go out and he takes over or he leaves and I take over. We swap instructions in the hall. We say Emily has eaten a good lunch, so don’t worry too much about her tea. We say Ben needs an early night because he wouldn’t take a nap this afternoon. We say bowel movements have been successful or are still pending and perhaps some prunes would help. Or else we leave notes. Sometimes we barely meet each other’s eyes. Kate and Richard, like a relay team where each runner suspects the other of being the weaker link, but the main thing is to keep running round the track so the baton can be exchanged and the race can go on and on.

Oh, Love is handsome and love is kind,

And love’s a jewel when it is new.

But when it is old, it groweth cold,

And fades away like morning dew.

“Mummy, I know why you get cross with Daddy,” Emily said to me the other morning.

“Why?”

“Because he does wrong things.”

I knelt down beside her, so I could look straight into her eyes. It felt important to set the record straight. “No, sweetheart, Daddy doesn’t do wrong things. Mummy just sometimes gets very tired and that makes her not patient with Daddy, that’s all.”

“Patient means wait a minute,” she said.

I pick up Sayings of the World’s Great Religions from the bedside table and flick through it. There are sections on Belief, Justice and Education. I pause at the one on Marriage.

I have never called my wife “wife,” but “home.”

— The Talmud

Home. I look at the word for a long time. Home. Hear its rounded center. Picture what it means. I am married but am not a wife, have children but am not a mother. What am I?

I know a woman who is so afraid of her children’s need for her that, rather than go home after work, she sits in the wine bar to wait until they’re asleep.