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

SHE WAS NOT AFRAID of the court anymore. They had nothing left to throw at her. Nothing they could charge her with that she hadn’t accused herself of a thousand times. So there she was, feeling quietly confident, and then they said the name of the next witness and suddenly she knew it was all over. Her time was up. As she swayed forward, feeling slightly sick, her hands clutched the oak rim of the dock. Here was the one person in the world who knew her best.

“The court calls Mrs. Jean Reddy.”

The defendant was upset at the sight of her mother entering the witness box to give evidence against her, but there was something about the older woman’s appearance that she found oddly cheering. It took her a few seconds to place it: Mum was wearing red cashmere, the cardigan Kate had given her for Christmas, over the Liberty’s floral blouse she had bought her for the birthday before last. The things kept for Best were getting their first outing.

“State your full name, please.”

“Jean Katharine Reddy.”

“And your relation to the defendant?”

“Kath — Katharine’s my daughter. I’m her mother.”

The prosecuting counsel is not just on his feet, he is standing on tiptoes with excitement. “Mrs. Reddy, your daughter is accused of putting her job before the welfare of her children. Is that an accurate description of the situation you have observed firsthand?”

“No.”

“Speak up, please!” bellows the judge.

Mum tries again. Clearly nervous, she is tugging on her charm bracelet. “No. Katharine is devoted to her children and she is very hardworking, always has been. Keen to get on and better herself.”

“Yes, yes,” snaps the Prosecution, “but do I understand she is not presently living with her husband, Richard Shattock, who left her after he said that she had ‘ceased to notice he was there’?”

The woman in the dock makes a low moaning sound. Her mother doesn’t know that Richard has left her.

Jean Reddy takes the news like a boxer taking a blow and fires back magnificently. “No one’s saying it’s easy. Men want looking after, and it’s hard for a woman when she’s got her work as well. Kath’s got that many calls on her time, I’ve seen her make herself ill with it sometimes.”

“Mrs. Reddy, are you familiar with the name Jack Abelhammer?” says the Prosecution, with a quick tight smile.

“No, no!” The defendant has climbed over the side of the dock and is standing in front of the judge in an XXXL Gap T-shirt with a dachshund motif. “All right, what do you want me to say? Guilty? Is that what you want me to say? There really are no lengths you won’t go to, to prove I can’t live my life, are there?”

“Silence!” booms the judge. “Mrs. Shattock, one more interruption and I will find you in contempt of court.”

“Well, that’s fine, because I am in utter contempt of this court and every man in it.” And then she starts to cry, cursing herself as she does so for her weakness.

“Jean Reddy,” resumes the Prosecution, but the witness is not listening to him. She too has left her place and moves towards the weeping woman, whom she gathers in her arms. And then the mother turns on the judge. “And how about you, your honor? Who’ll be getting your tea tonight? It’s not you, is it?”

“For God’s sake,” splutters the judge.

“People like you don’t understand anything about women like Katharine. And you think you can sit in judgment on her. Shame on you,” says Jean Reddy quietly, but with the force that generations of children heard in her voice when she was rebuking a playground bully.

ON THE DAY THAT Seymour Troy Stratton entered the world, a coup in Qatar sent oil prices spiraling and equities plunged around the globe, helped by an unprecedented rate hike from the mighty Federal Reserve. In the UK alone, twenty billion was wiped off the value of the FTSE 100. A minor earthquake outside Kyoto caused further shock waves in an already shaken global environment. None of this had an adverse effect on mother and baby, who dozed peacefully in their curtained cubicle on the third floor of the maternity wing off Gower Street.

As I walk down the corridor towards them, I am returned powerfully to my memories of this place: the midwives in their blue pajamas, the gray doors behind which the great first act of life is performed over and over by small women and tall women and a woman whose waters broke one lunchtime on the escalator at Bank. Place of pain and elation. Flesh and blood. The cries of the babies raw and astounded; their mothers’ faces salty with joy. When you are in here you think you know what’s important. And you are right. It’s not the pethidine talking, it’s God’s own truth. Before long, you have to go out into the world again and pretend you have forgotten, pretend there are better things to do. But there are no better things. Every mother knows what it felt like when that chamber of the heart opened and love flooded in. Everything else is just noise and men.

“I just want to look at him,” Candy says. Propped up on pillows, my colleague has undone every button on my white broderie anglaise nightdress to give her son access to her breasts. The nipples are like dark fruit. She uses the palm of her right hand to cup his head while his mouth sucks hungrily. “I don’t want to do anything except look at him, Kate. That’s normal, right?”

“Perfectly normal.”

I have brought a Paddington Bear rattle for the baby, the one with the red hat that Emily always loved, and a basket of American muffins for his mom. Candy says she needs to get the weight off right away and then, because her hands are full, I feed morsel after morsel into her unprotesting mouth.

“The baby will suck all the fat out of your saddlebags, Cand.”

“Hey, that’s terrific. How long can I keep nursing, twenty years?”

“Unfortunately, after a while they come round and arrest you. I sometimes think they’d send the social services in if they knew how passionately I feel about Ben.”

“You didn’t tell me.” She rebukes me with a tired smile.

“I did try. That day in Corney and Barrow. But you can’t know until you know.”

Candy lowers her face and smells the head of her son. “A boy, Kate. I made one. How cool is that?”

Like all newborn things, Seymour Stratton seems ancient, a thousand years old. His brow is corrugated with either wisdom or perplexity. It is not yet possible to speculate on what manner of man he will grow up to be, but for now he is perfectly happy as he is, in the encircling arms of a woman.

I THINK AN ENDING may be out of the question. The wheels on the bus go round and round, all day long.

A lot happened, though, and some things stayed the same. Three months after Seymour’s birth, Candy went back to work at EMF and put the baby into a day-care place near Liverpool Street that charged more than the Dorchester. Candy reckoned each diaper change cost her twenty dollars. “That’s a helluva lot for a dump, right?”

On the phone, she sounded like the same old Candy, but I knew that that Candy, the Candy Before Children, had gone. Sure enough, the long brutal hours she had worked uncomplainingly all her adult life soon seemed to her stupid and unnecessary. She minded that when she tried to leave at 6:30, Rod Task called it “lunchtime.” She minded not seeing her son in daylight. When Seymour was seven months old, Candy walked into Rod’s office and told him she was very sorry, but she was going to have to let him go. She was having some problems with his level of commitment: it was too high.

Back in New Jersey, she stayed for a while with her mom until she found a place of her own: Candy said Seymour had made her understand what her mother was for. Soon after, she spotted a hole in the booming mail-order market and established a business which in a short time saw her tipped as one of Fortune magazine’s Faces to Watch. All Work and No Play was a range of sex toys for the female executive who has everything except time for pleasure. A box of samples was shipped to me in England, and it was opened on our breakfast table during a visit from Barbara and Donald. Richard, in what many consider to be the finest half hour of our marriage, pretended the vibrators were a range of kitchen utensils.