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

“Yes, with my money.”

Three days later, Bunce signed over the cash. Swaggering in from lunch that afternoon, he told his deputy, Veronica Pick, that she should pay attention to his amazing coup; this was where men scored over women, acting decisively, scenting a great opportunity and not getting bogged down in the fine print.

“Oh, you did your due diligence, did you?” asked Veronica sweetly.

“What d’you mean?” said Bunce.

“Due diligence,” said Veronica. “Checking the directors’ credentials are what they say they are, sussing out plant and production viability, veracity of bank references….But I’m sure I don’t need to tell you about any of that.”

“If I need your advice I’ll ask for it,” said Bunce.

Nor could he resist gloating to me the next morning as we gathered in the conference room, one hand massaging his manhood as though it were Aladdin’s lamp. “Found this brilliant new nappy product, Kate. Gonna make us a shitload of money — geddit? Shitload! Just your kind of thing, Mum, pity I got there first.”

I bestowed upon him my most maternal smile.

The money Bunce invested was enough to cover the business’s debts and therefore to pay off my father’s creditors. No sooner had it landed in J. R. Powers’s account than it was gone. As I had predicted, neither that nor Momo’s formal complaint of sexual harassment was quite sufficient to sink Bunce for good at EMF.

That was taken care of a few days later when an interview that Edwin Morgan Forster’s Head of Venture Capital had given to the investigative TV journalist Alice Lloyd appeared in a national tabloid newspaper under the headline PORN AGAIN! (HOW CITY’S MR. BIG KEEPS IT UP).

Alice had taken Bunce to a favorite media haunt in Soho. After ingesting quantities of drugs legal and illegal, he became very forthcoming, and the sighting of a young soap star across the room sent him over the edge. “I’d like to have her on my website,” he told Alice. “Actually, I’d like to have her anywhere she likes it.”

Boasting about his ability to pick winners, Bunce cited a recent investment in a certain biodegradable nappy, which he reckoned was “gonna be bigger than fucking Viagra.”

The City can always act to neutralize bad smells within the Square Mile, but when the stench reaches beyond, to the sensitive nostrils of clients and opinion-formers, retribution is swift and merciless.

The morning after the article appeared, Candy and I stood and watched as Chris Bunce was called into Robin Cooper-Clark’s office, escorted by two security guards to his desk, which he was given three minutes to clear, and then finally marched out of the building.

“Anybody got that falconer’s number?” shouted Candy. “There’s a rat in the street.”

In the ladies’ washroom a few minutes later, I found Momo Gumeratne crying, her face buried in the roller towel. “Happy crying,” she insisted, between hiccups.

And me? I was glad he was gone, of course. But without noticing it, I had started to find Bunce more sad than bad.

At lunchtime, Momo and I took a cab to Bond Street. I told her it was important work-related business, which it was.

My assistant was puzzled. “What are we doing in a shoe shop, Kate?”

“Well, we’re looking for a glass slipper that can take the highest possible pressure per square millimeter and doesn’t fall off at midnight. Failing that, we’ll take these, and these — oh, and those brown boots are great. Excuse me, do you have these in a four?”

“Are your feet size 4?” asks Momo dubiously.

“No, yours are.”

“But I can’t possibly.”

Twenty minutes later, we were standing at the cash desk with four boxes. Faced with the choice between the tan kitten heels and the navy slingbacks, we chose both. And then we took the black stilettos because they were too beautiful not to own and the toffee boots, which were a total bargain.

“I love the black ones,” she says, “but I can’t actually walk in them.”

“Walking isn’t really the point, Momo. Walking tall is the point. And if the worst comes to the worst you can always use one of the heels to puncture Guy’s carotid artery.”

The smile vanishes. “Where will you be?”

“I’m going away for a while.”

“No,” she says. “I don’t want a goodbye present.”

“You’re going to be fine.”

“How do you know?”

“Hey, who trained you?…Anyway, you’ve stopped saying sorry, so I know you’re ready.”

“No,” says Momo. And she looks at me sideways. “Only one of us can ever be Reddy, Kate.” Then she puts a hand on my shoulder and kisses me on the cheek.

On the way back in the taxi, a mountain range of shoes at our feet, she asked me why I was leaving and I lied. Told her I needed to move to be nearer my mother, who was ill. Some things you can’t say even to the women you love. Even to yourself.

1. Because I have got two lives and I don’t have time to enjoy either of them.

2. Because twenty-four hours are not enough.

3. Because my children will be young for only a short time.

4. Because one day I caught my husband looking at me the way my mother used to look at my father.

5. Because becoming a man is the waste of a woman.

6. Because I am too tired to think of another because.

THE NEXT DAY, before I resigned, I had a bit of tidying up to do. The pigeon family was long gone — the two chicks finally flew the nest when spring was easing into summer — but the books that had hidden mother and babies from the City hawk were still in place. This time, I didn’t risk the ledge. I called Gerald up from Security to give me a hand forcing open the window. The books had all survived quite well, except The Ten Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management: Proven Strategies for Increased Productivity and Inner Peace. It looked like the floor of a cave, with little stalagmites of white pigeon shit obscuring its uplifting cover slogans.

When I went into Rod’s office I found him sitting at his desk behind the Equality Now! trophy, a set of scales with a tiny bronze figure of a female in one of the pans. In the other, Rod had put a handful of jelly beans.

He took the news of my leaving pretty badly. So badly, in fact, that the noise traveled through the wall to Robin Cooper-Clark next door.

“Katie’s doing a runner,” Rod announced, as the Head of Investment put his head round the door to establish the source of the roar.

Robin called me into his office, as I knew he would.

“Is there anything I can do to persuade you to change your mind, Kate?”

Only changing your world, I thought. “No, really.”

“Maybe part-time?” he ventures, with that ghost of a smile.

“I’ve seen what happens when a woman tries to go part-time, Robin. They say she’s having her days off. And then they cut her out of the loop. And then they take her funds away from her, one by one, because everyone knows that managing money’s a full-time job.”

“It is hard to manage money less than five days a week.”

I don’t say anything. He tries another tack. “If it’s a question of money?”

“No, it’s time.”

“Ah. Sed fugit interea, fugit inreparabile tempus. ”

“If that means you shouldn’t waste thirty years staring at a screen, then yes.”

Robin comes round to my side of the desk and stands there with that awkwardness they call dignity. “I’m going to miss you, Kate.”

By way of reply I give him a hug, perhaps the first ever administered in the offices of Edwin Morgan Foster.

Then I go home, taking care to run across the grass.