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

“And to you, Kate.”

Once I could read his face like a book; now the book has been translated into another language. “I thought you’d approve. Breaking away from the system.” He looks younger since he left me. “Your mother thinks I’ve let myself go.”

“My mother thinks Grace Kelly let herself go.” We both laugh, and for a moment Starbucks is filled with the sound of Us.

I start to tell Rich about the story Winston told me.

“Who’s Winston?”

“He’s the one from Pegasus Cars, but it turns out he’s a philosopher.”

“A philosopher driving a minicab. That sounds safe.”

“No, he’s fantastic, really he is. Anyway, Winston told me the story about this general who found a tribe by a waterfall, and the head of the tribe—”

“Cicero.”

“No—”

“Cicero. It’s by Cicero.” My husband breaks a chocolate cookie in half and hands one piece to me.

“Let me guess. Someone dead for a long time that I’ve never heard of because I went to a crap comprehensive, but who forms a vital part of every civilized person’s education?”

“I love you.”

“So, you see, I was thinking of moving away from the waterfall to see if I could hear better.”

“Kate?”

He pushes his hand across the table so it’s near mine. The hands lie next to each other as if waiting for a child to draw round them. “There’s nothing left to love, Rich, I’m all hollowed out. Kate doesn’t live here anymore.”

The hand is on mine now. “You were saying about moving away from the waterfall?”

“I thought if I — if we moved away from the waterfall we could hear again and then we could decide if—”

“If it was the noise that stopped us hearing or the fact that we didn’t have anything to say to each other anymore?”

Do you know those moments — the sheer merciful relief of there being someone in the world who knows what you’re thinking as you think it? I nod my grateful acknowledgment. “ My name is Kate Reddy and I am a workaholic. Isn’t that what they have to say at those meetings?”

“I didn’t say you were a workaholic.”

“Why not? It’s true, isn’t it? I can’t ‘give up’ work. That makes me an addict, doesn’t it?”

“We need to buy ourselves some time, that’s all.”

“Rich, do you remember when Em tried to climb into the TV to save Sleeping Beauty? I keep thinking about it.”

He grins. One of the best things about having children is that it enables you to have the same loving memories as another person — you can summon the same past. Two flashbacks with but a single image. Is that as good as two hearts that beat as one?

“Daft kid. She was so upset that she couldn’t save that stupid princess, wasn’t she?” Rich says, with that exasperated pride Em provokes in us.

“She’d really like you to come home.”

“And you?How about you, Kate?”

The option to say something proud and defiant hangs there waiting to be picked like a ripe fruit. I leave it hanging and say, “I’d like to come home too.”

Sleeping Beauty was always Emily’s favorite, the first video she really noticed. When she was two years old she became obsessed with it, standing in front of the TV and shouting, “Wind it, wind it!”

She always shouted at the part where Aurora, with her stupefied doll face, makes her way up the long staircase to the attic pursued by a raven’s shadow and a bad fairy cackle. For a long time, Richard and I couldn’t work out what was making Emily so furious; then it clicked. She wanted us to rewind the tape so that the Princess wouldn’t make it to the attic, so she never would prick her finger on the old woman’s spindle.

One day, Emily actually tried to climb inside the TV set: I found her standing on a chair attempting to insert her red-shoed foot through the screen. I believe she had plans to grab the hapless Princess and stop her from meeting her fate. We had a long talk — well, I talked and she listened — about how you had to let things like that happen, because even when you got to a scary bit the story knew where it was heading and it couldn’t be stopped no matter how much you wanted it to be. And the good thing was you knew it would turn out happily in the end.

But she shook her head sadly and said, “No. Wind it, Mummy, wind it!” Soon after, my daughter transferred her allegiance to Barney the Dinosaur, whose Great Adventure featured no deeds of darkness that required her personal intervention.

Adults want to rewind life too. It’s just that along the way we lose the capacity to shout it out loud. “Wind it, wind it.”

Edwin Morgan Forster, one of the City’s oldest financial institutions, triumphed at the fifth annual Equality Now awards on Tuesday night, winning the category for Most Improved Company for its commitment to diversity.The firm scored highly in an annual benchmarking survey conducted by Equality Yes! an organization committed to gender parity whose members include 81 percent of the FTSE 100 companies.The judges were particularly impressed by the volume of business generated by Katharine Reddy, EMF’s youngest female manager, and Momo Gumeratne, a twenty-four-year-old Sri Lankan graduate of the London School of Economics. Unfortunately, the two women were unable to attend the ceremony, but the award was collected by Rod Task, EMF Head of Marketing. In his acceptance speech, Task said, “There is a good deal of evidence that mixed gender teams are critical to effective team functioning. EMF is at the forefront of bringing women into major roles in the financial community.”Striking a less positive note on the evening was Catherine Mulroyd, chair of Women Mean Business. “These awards are not telling the whole story,” said Mulroyd. “It’s hard enough to reach a position of real influence as a woman in the Square Mile without wrecking your career by opening your mouth to criticize the culture. Equality for women remains a marginal issue for most City firms. It seems pointless for banks to spend vast sums on training female recruits, only to lose them because they do not have flex time or any of the things that could keep mothers on board.”Asked if the old-boy culture was a thing of the past, Task pointed out that he was from Australia and was therefore very much part of the new-boy network: “The girls have done just great this year and I’m proud of them.”

My father gave the performance of his life during the presentation to Chris Bunce of the biodegradable nappy. Debra, who was present throughout in her capacity as legal adviser, told me that Dad was not only sober but clearly relished the part of maverick inventor. His master stroke, Deb said, came when Bunce offered to write a check there and then and Joe, who had spent a lifetime trying to wheedle checks out of people, said that he and his lawyer would be meeting a number of interested parties over the coming days, but naturally they would keep EMF informed.

I had explained to Dad that I thought I had found some venture capital for his invention, but it would require him to pretend to be someone else and to tell some minor untruths. In almost any other father-daughter relationship, this would have been a bizarre exchange, but for us it felt like the natural culmination of years of pretense, an acknowledgment that forgery is woven into the Reddy DNA along with blue eyes and a facility with numbers.

“He’s a brilliant guy, your dad,” said Winston, who acted as chauffeur for the nappy entrepreneur in a black BMW with tinted windows that he had borrowed from a man he described as his uncle. “Joe’s a really great tipper.”