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

“Nice cup of tea. And I’ll do some sandwiches, shall I? Ham all right?” Mum is busying herself with the kettle in the kitchen of the flat. More an alcove than a kitchen; there’s room for only one person in there.

I never want to eat the sandwiches, but a couple of years ago I had one of those maturity leaps when I realized that eating wasn’t the point. My mother’s sandwiches were there to give her something she could do for me, when there is so much she can’t do anymore. Overnight her need to be needed seemed more important than my need to get away. I sit down at the Formica table with the fold-down flaps, the table that sat in all the kitchens of my childhood. (It has a black scab gouged out of the side by a furious Julie after a row with Dad over finishing her rutabaga.) As I eat, Mum puts up the ironing board and starts to work her way through the basket of clothes at her feet. The room is soon filled with the drowsy, comforting smell of baked water. The iron makes little exasperated puffs as it travels the length of a blouse or gets its snout into a tricky cuff.

My mother is a champion ironer. It’s a pleasure to watch her hand move an inch or so ahead of the little steam train, smoothing its path. She smooths and smooths and then she snaps the cloth taut like a conjurer and finally she folds. Arms of a shirt folded behind like a man under arrest. As I watch her, my eyes go swimmy: I think that after she’s gone there’ll be no one who will ever do that for me again — no one who will iron my clothes taking such infinite pains.

“What’s that over your eye, love?”

“Nothing.”

She comes over and lifts my fringe to get a better view of the eczema and I blink back the tears. “I know your nothings, Katharine Reddy.” She laughs. “Have you got some cream off the doctor for it?”

“Yes.” No.

“Have you got it anywhere else?” “No.” Yes, in a flaming itching belt around my middle, behind my ears, behind my knees.

In my pocket, the mobile begins to thrum. I take it out and check the number. Rod Task. I switch the phone off.

“What have I told you about looking after yourself? I don’t know how you manage with work on at you the whole time”—Mum jabs her finger in the direction of the mobile—“and the kiddies as well. It’s no life.”

Back behind the ironing board, she says, “And how’s our Richard keeping?”

I give a crumby mumble. I’ve come all the way up here to tell her that Rich has gone. I hated the idea of leaving the kids with Paula so soon after getting back from the States, but if I put my foot down I can do the journey here and back in a day. And I didn’t want Mum to find out that Richard and I were separated, as I did, down the phone. But now I’m here I can’t quite find the words: Oh, by the way, my husband left me because I haven’t paid attention to him since 1994. She’d think I was joking.

“Richard’s a good man,” she says, trapping a pillowcase on the curved end of the board. “You want to hang on to him, love. They don’t come much better than Richard.”

In the past, I have taken my mother’s enthusiasm for my man as a sign of its opposite for me. Her exclaiming over another of his supposedly miraculous virtues (his ability to make a simple meal, his willingness to spend time with his children) always seemed to draw attention to my matching vices (my reliance on cook-chill food, my working weekends in Milan). Now, sitting here in my mother’s home, I hear her praise for what it is: the truth about someone who has Mum’s gift for putting others before themself.

We had tea in this room the first time I brought Rich back to meet her. I was so determined not to be ashamed of where I came from that by the time we got here, after a hot and dogged ride from London, I had stoked myself up into a defiant take-us-as-you-find-us mood. So what if we don’t have matching cutlery? What if my mother says settee instead of sofa? Are you going to make something of it, are you, are you?

Rich made nothing of it. A natural diplomat, he soon had Mum eating out of his hand merely by tucking into heroic quantities of bread and butter. I remember how big he looked in our house — the furniture was suddenly doll’s furniture — and how gently he negotiated all the no-go areas of my family’s past. (Dad had walked out by then, but his absence was almost as domineering as his presence had been.) Panicked by the idea of Kath’s posh boyfriend, my mum, who always goes to too much trouble, had, on that occasion, gone to too little. But Rich volunteered to go to the shop on the corner for extra milk and came back with two kinds of biscuit and an enthusiasm for the hills whose sooty shoulders you could glimpse from the end of the street.

“Julie said that some men have been round here asking for money that Dad owes them.”

With one hand my mother pats her helmet of gray curls. “It’s nothing. She’d no need to go bothering you with that. All sorted now. Don’t go fretting yourself.”

I must have pulled a face because she adds, “You shouldn’t be too hard on your father, love.”

“Why not? He was hard on us.”

Chuuuussh. Chuuuuussh. The iron and my mother chide me simultaneously with their soft sighs.

“It’s not easy for him, you know. He’s that bright but he’s not had the outlets, not like you. In your dad’s family, there was no question of going on to college. Always liked the sound of medicine, but it was years of studying and there just wasn’t the money.”

“If he’s that clever, why does he keep getting himself into trouble?”

My mother ends conversations she isn’t keen on with a non sequitur. “Well, he was always very proud of you, Kath. I had to stop him showing your GCSE certificates to everyone.”

She folds the sleeves behind the last blouse and adds it to the basket. There is no sign of the two I bought her last year in Liberty’s for her birthday, or of other gifts. “Have you worn that red cardigan I got you, Mum?”

“But it’s cashmere, love.”

Since I’ve been working, I’ve bought my mother lovely clothes — I wanted her to have them, I needed her to have them. I wanted to make things all right for her. But she always puts everything I bring her away for best, best being some indeterminate date in the future when life will at long last live up to its promise.

“Can I get you some cake?”

No. “Yes, lovely.”

On the sideboard, next to the carriage clock purchased a quarter of a century ago with Green Shield stamps, there is a photograph of my parents taken in the late fifties. A seaside place, they’re laughing, and behind them the sky is flecked with gulls. They look like film stars: Dad doing his Tyrone Power thing, Mum with her inky Audrey Hepburn eyes and those matador pants that end at the calf and a pair of little black pumps. When I was a child that photograph used to taunt me with its happiness. I wanted the mother in the picture to come back. I knew that if I waited long enough she would come back. She was just saving herself for best.

Next to the picture is a silver frame containing one of Emily on her second birthday, lit up with glee. Mum follows my glance.

“Gorgeous, isn’t she?”

I nod happily. No matter how battered family relations, a baby can make them new. When Emily was born and Mum came to see us in hospital and laid her hand, speckled with age, on the newborn’s, I understood how having a daughter could help you to bear the thought of your own mother’s death. I wondered then, but never dared ask, whether it helped Mum to bear the idea of leaving Julie and me.

There is a clatter of pans from the kitchen. “Mum, please come and sit down.”

“You just put your feet up, love.”

“But I want you to sit down.”