I Don't Know How She Does It Read online

  Client threatening to drop us on account of worrying dip in fund performance. Spun them a line about Edwin Morgan Forster asset managers being like Bjorn Borg: brilliant baseline stayers playing percentage shots and aiming for consistent victories over the long term, not flashy burnout artists going for quick profits and then double-faulting. Seemed to buy it. God knows why.

  Kept popping out of Bengt Bergman boardroom to executive washroom, locking self in cubicle and using mobile to call pet shops in Walthamstow. Up until three days ago, Emily’s letters to Santa made no mention of hamster, now suddenly upgraded to Number One item.

  Swedish clients all have names like a bad hand of Scrabble. Sven Sjostrom kept spearing rollmops off my plate at lunch and saying he was a passionate believer in “closer European union.”

  Trust me to get only non-PC man in Scandinavia. Yeurk, K8 xxxxx

  * * *

  To: Kate Reddy

  From: Candy Stratton

  Sven Will I See U Again?

  Sven Will We Share Precious Moments?

  go for it, hon, it will relax you! luv Cystitis xxx

  * * *

  To: Candy Stratton

  From: Kate Reddy

  That is not funny. Remember, I am a happily married woman. Well, I’m married anyway.

  * * *

  To: Kate Reddy

  From: Debra Richardson

  Have just had unspeakable humiliation at hands—or rather mouth—of hateful school secretary at Piper Place (i know, i know, should stop this education madness). Yes, Ruby could be assessed for a place for 2002, “But I must warn you, Mrs. Richardson, that there are over a hundred little girls on our list and we have a strong siblings policy.”

  Do you have any Semtex? These smug cows have got to be stopped.

  What’s new??

  * * *

  To: Debra Richardson

  From: Kate Reddy

  Have not put Em down for school yet. By the time I get round to it, will probably have to have sex with the headmaster to have any chance of getting her in....More pressing problem: 2 days to wean Ben off dummy ’cause mother-in-law thinks this sucking device is tool of the devil, only used by gypsies or chain-smoking lowlifes who “park children in front of the video.” What else to do with children in Yorkshire?

  Have found hamster for Emily. Apparently female hamsters v. bad-tempered and sometimes bite or eat their young. Now why would that be?

  * * *

  2:17 A.M. Blizzard. Flight home delayed. Precious seconds set aside for last-minute shopping in London being eaten up. Scour Stockholm airport shop for Christmas presents. Which would Rich prefer, wind-dried reindeer or seasonal video entitled Swedish Teen Honeys in the Snow? Still refusing to buy Emily vulgar messy Baby Wee-Wee as seen on breakfast TV. Compromise on the local Swedish Barbie-type doll—wholesome individual, probably a Social Democrat, wearing peacekeeper khaki.

  * * *

  CHRISTMAS EVE. OFFICES OF EDWIN MORGAN FORSTER. I should have known where my pay negotiations were going when Rod Task came round the back of my chair, air-patted my shoulder three times like a vet preparing a cat for a jab and described me as “a highly valued member of the team.” It was midafternoon, the dregs of the day, and the sky over Broadgate was the color of tea.

  Rod explained that there would be no bonus this year—the bonus I have been counting on to finish the building work on the house and for so much else. Times were tough for everybody, he said, but the really great news was they were giving me a major new challenge.

  “We think you’re the person to do client servicing, Katie, ’cause you do it so damn well. Anyways, you got the best legs.”

  A burly and curly Aussie, with a voice other guys use to get the attention of a bartender, when Rod first heaved his bulk over from Sydney to join EMF as Director of Marketing three and a half years ago—brought in to put some lead in the English firm’s propelling pencil—I really thought I’d have to leave. His inability to look me in the eye—and not just because I’m two inches taller—the way he would comment on parts of my body as though they were on special offer, his habit of ending every meeting with an injunction to “Get out there and kick the fucking tires!” After a few weeks, when Candy sweetly asked Rod for an English translation of this phrase, he looked perplexed for a few seconds, then gave a broad grin. “Screw the client for every penny you can!”

  So I was going to have to leave. But then Emily hit the Terrible Twos and I bought a book called Toddler Taming. It was a revelation. The advice on how to deal with small angry immature people who have no idea of limits and were constantly testing their mother applied perfectly to my boss. Instead of treating him as a superior, I began handling him as though he were a tricky small boy. Whenever he was about to do something naughty, I would do my best to distract him; if I wanted him to do something, I always made it look like it was his idea.

  Anyway, Rod says that from today I assume responsibility for the Salinger Foundation. Based in New York, chief executive by the name of Jack Abelhammer, two-hundred-million-dollar business, needs someone of my caliber. I’ll be able to familiarize myself with the portfolio over the holidays, of course, plus I will continue to baby-sit all my old clients while Rod finds the right person to take over from me.

  I ask Rod what Abelhammer is like.

  “Good swing.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Short game needs work.”

  “Oh. Golf.”

  “Whatcha think I’m talking about, Katie, sex?”

  The holiday doesn’t strictly begin till close of play today, but the office is practically deserted; unofficially, we are now in the limbo between boozy lunch and alcoholic tea. When I get back to my desk, Candy is perched on the heater under the window with her legs stretched out and resting on top of my chair. She is wearing an amazing cantilevered scarlet blouse and purple fishnets and there is gold tinsel in her hair.

  “OK, let me guess,” she says. “He took a crap on you and you offered to wipe his ass.”

  “Excuse me.” I grab her ankles and spin her feet off the chair. “Actually, things went very well. Rod thinks my client-handling skills are a major asset, so as a vote of confidence they are giving me this big foundation all to myself.”

  “Right.” When Candy laughs you get a glimpse of a mouthful of enviable American teeth.

  “Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Kate, a major vote of confidence round here always comes with at least four zeros on the end of it, you know that. What else’d he say?”

  I don’t have time to reply because Candy puts a finger to her lips as Chris Bunce, bastard in residence, sways past us on his way to the Gents with a long lunch under his belt. A major cokehead, Bunce manages to look both skinny and bloated. Since I made it clear to him, quite politely, that I wasn’t interested in the contents of his boxers, the sexual tension between us has given way to teasing skirmishes with occasional rounds of live ammunition being fired when I get a deal he wants. (Guys like Bunce see rejection as an insult that must be repaid with compound interest—like the Third World debt.)

  Candy tips her head towards his retreating figure. “Lot of dirt getting into EMF one way and another. D’you offer to clean the office for them too?”

  “What do you take me for? Rod said no one was getting a bonus.”

  “And you believed him?” Candy closes her eyes and sighs a smile. “That’s what I love about you, Kate. Smartest female economist since Maynard Keynes, and you still think when they mug you they’re doing you a favor.”

  “Candy, Maynard Keynes was a man.”

  She shakes her head and the tinsel sends out prickles of light. “He was not. He was a fruit. Way I see it, we women have to claim all the guys in history with a strong feminine side as ours.”

  * * *

  6:09 P.M. Packing the car for the journey up north to my parents-in-law takes at least two hours. There is the first hour during which Richard pieces together a pleasing jigsaw o
f baby belongings in the boot. (Louis XIV traveled lighter than Ben.) Then comes the moment where he has to find the key that unlocks the luggage box that sits like an upturned boat on our roof. “Where did we put it, Kate?” After ten minutes of swearing and emptying every drawer in the house, Richard finds the key in the pocket of his jacket.

  After Rich has told me to get the kids in the car “right now,” there follows twenty minutes of frantic unloading as he “just makes sure” he has packed the sterilizer, which he “knows for a fact” he wedged next to the spare tire. This is followed by a furious repacking, punctuated by fuck-its, when items are squidged on top of one another any old how and the remnants are jammed into all available foot space front and back. The Easi-wipe changing mat, the Easi-clip portable high chair with its companion piece, the vermilion Easi-assemble porta-cot. Bibs, melamine Thomas the Tank Engine bowls, sleep suits. Emily’s blankie—a tragic hank of yellow wool that looks as though it has been run over several times by a heavy goods vehicle. An entire bestiary of nocturnal comforters: Ben’s beloved Roo, a sheep, a hippopotamus in a tutu, a wombat that is an eerie Roy Hattersley double. Ben’s dummies (to be hidden from Richard’s parents at all costs). Emily’s surprise hamster is stashed in the boot.

  Strapped into their seats in the back of the car like cosmonauts awaiting blastoff, Emily and Ben’s contented bickering soon gives way to hand-to-hand combat. In a moment of weakness—when do I have a moment of strength?—I have opened the chocolate Santa dispenser meant for Christmas morning and given them a couple of foil-wrapped pieces each to keep them quiet. As a result, Emily, who fifteen minutes ago was wearing white pajamas, now looks like a dalmatian, with a dark-brown muzzle around her mouth and cocoa smudges everywhere else.

  Richard, who has a heroic indifference to the cleanliness and general presentation of his offspring for eleven and a half months of the year, suddenly asks me why Ben and Emily look such a mess. What’s his mother going to think?

  Swipe at children with moist travel tissues. Four hours on the A-1 motorway lie ahead of us. Car is so overloaded it sways like a ship.

  “Are we still in England?” demands an incredulous voice from the back.

  “Yes.”

  “Are we at Grandma’s house yet?”

  “No.”

  “But I want to be at Grandma’s house.”

  By Hatfield, both children are performing a fugue for scream and whimper. Crank up the Carols from Kings tape and Rich and I sing along gustily. (Rich is the descant specialist while I take the Jessye Norman part.) Near Peterborough, eighty miles out of London, a small nagging thought manages to wriggle its way clear from the compost heap that presently comprises the contents of my head.

  “Rich, you did remember to pack Roo?”

  “I didn’t know I was meant to be remembering Roo. I thought you were remembering Roo.”

  Like any other family, the Shattocks have their Christmas traditions. One tradition is that I buy all the presents for my side of the family and I buy all the presents for our children and our two godchildren and I buy Richard’s presents and presents for Richard’s parents and his brother Peter and Peter’s wife Cheryl and their three kids and Richard’s Uncle Alf, who drives across from Matlock every Boxing Day and is keen on rugby league and can only manage soft centers. If Richard remembers, and depending on late opening hours, he buys a present for me.

  “What have we got for Dad, then?” Rich will inquire on the drive up to Yorkshire. The marital we which means you which means me.

  I buy the wrapping paper and the Sellotape and I wrap all the presents. I buy the cards and a large sheet of second-class stamps. By the time I have written all the cards and forged Rich’s signature and written something warm yet lighthearted about time flying and how we’ll definitely be in touch in the New Year (a lie), it is too late for second-class mail, so I join the queue at the post office to buy first-class stamps. Then I fight my way through Selfridge’s food hall to buy cheese and those little Florentines that Barbara likes.

  And then, when we get to Barbara and Donald’s house, we unpack the stuff from the car and we put all the presents under the tree and the food and the drink in the kitchen, and they chorus, “Oh, Richard, thank you for getting the wine. You shouldn’t have gone to all that trouble.”

  Is it possible to die of ingratitude?

  MIDNIGHT MASS, ST. MARY’S, WROTHLY. The grass on the village green is so full of ice tonight it’s almost musical: we clink and chink our way from the Shattocks’ old mill house to the tiny Norman church. Inside, the pews are full, the air dense and dank and flavored with winey breath. I know you’re meant to disapprove of the drunks who only come to church this one time in the year, but standing here next to Rich, I think how much I like them, envy them even. Their noisy attempts at hush, the sense they’ve come in search of heat and light and a little human kindness.

  I hold it together, I really do, until we get to that line in “O Little Town of Bethlehem” when I have to press both gloves to my eyes:

  “Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by.”

  4

  Christmas Day

  SATURDAY, 5:37 A.M. WROTHLY, YORKSHIRE. It’s still dark outside. The four of us are in bed together in a sprawling tentacular cuddle. Emily, half mad with Santa lust, is tearing off wrapping paper. Ben is playing peepo with the debris. I give Richard a packet of wind-dried reindeer, two pairs of Swedish socks (oatmeal), a five-day wine-tasting course in Burgundy, and How to Be a Domestic Goddess (joke). Barbara and Donald give me a wipable Liberty print apron and How to Be a Domestic Goddess (not joke).

  Richard gives me: (1) Agent Provocateur underwear—red bra with raised black satin spots and demitasse cup over which nipples jut like helmeted medieval warriors peeking above parapet; also, a suspender/ knicker device apparently trimmed with trawlerman’s netting, and (2) Membership of National Trust.

  Both fall into category of what I think of as PC presents: Please Change. Emily gives me a fantastic travel clock. Instead of an alarm, it has a message recorded by her: “Wake up, Mummy; wake up, sleepyhead!”

  We give Emily a hamster (female, but to be called Jesus), a Barbie bike, a Brambly Hedge doll’s house, a remote-control robot dog and a lot of other stuff made out of plastic that she doesn’t need. Emily is thrilled with the Peacekeeper Barbie I snatched up in Stockholm Duty Free until she opens Paula’s present: Baby Wee-Wee, which I have expressly forbidden.

  Risking hysteria, we try to get most of the kids’ gifts unwrapped upstairs so that my parents-in-law will not be appalled by reckless metropolitan surfeit (“Throwing your money about”) and the outrageous spoiling of the younger generation (“In my day, you counted yourself lucky to get a doll with a china head and an orange”).

  Some things are harder to keep quiet. It’s difficult to pretend to grandparents, for instance, that your child is just an occasional video watcher when, during breakfast, she gives a word-perfect rendition of every song from The Little Mermaid, adding brightly that the DVD version has an extra tune. At the table, I sense another source of conflict when I remind Emily to stop playing with the salt.

  “Emily, Grandpa asked you to put that down.”

  “No, I didn’t,” says Donald mildly. “I told her to put it down. That’s the difference between my generation and yours, Kate: we told, you ask.”

  A few minutes later, standing by the Aga stirring scrambled egg, I am suddenly aware of Barbara hovering by my side. She finds it hard to conceal her disbelief at the contents of the saucepan. “Goodness, do the children like their eggs dry?”

  “Yes, this is the way I always do them.”

  “Oh.”

  Barbara is obsessed with the food intake of my family, whether it’s the children’s lack of vegetables or my own strange unwillingness to plow through three three-course meals a day. “You need to build your strength up, Katharine.” And no Shattock family gathering would be complete without my mother-in-law pressing me into the Afri
can violet nook next to the pantry and hissing, “Richard looks thin, Katharine. Isn’t Richard looking thin?”

  When Barbara says thin it immediately becomes a fat word: hefty, breathless, accusing. I shut my eyes and try to summon reserves of patience and understanding I don’t have. The woman standing before me equipped my husband with the DNA that gave him the lifelong figure of a Biro refill, and thirty-six years later she blames me. Is this fair? I rise above such slights on my wifeliness, what there is of it.

  “But Richard is thin,” I protest. “Rich was skinny when we met. That’s one of the things I loved about him.”

  “He was always slim,” concedes Barbara, “but now there’s nothing left of him. Cheryl said as soon as she saw him get out of the car, ‘Doesn’t Richard look run down, Barbara?’”

  Cheryl is my sister-in-law. Before she married Peter, Richard’s accountant brother, Cheryl was something in the Halifax building society. Since she had the first of her three boys in 1989, Cheryl has become a member of what my friend Debra calls the Muffia—the powerful stay-at-home cabal of organized mums. Both Cheryl and Barbara treat men as though they were livestock who need careful husbandry. No Christmas in the Shattock family would be complete without Cheryl asking me if my Joseph cashmere roll-neck is from JCPenney, or if it’s really all right that Rich should be upstairs bathing the children by himself.

  Peter is a lot less help with the family than Richard, but over the years I have come to see that Cheryl enjoys and even encourages her husband’s uselessness. Peter plays the valuable role in Cheryl’s life of the Cross I Have to Bear. Every martyr needs a Peter who, given time, can be trained up to not recognize his own underpants.

  Things I take for granted at home in London are viewed up here as egalitarianism gone mad. “Somme,” says Richard in grim triumph, walking through the kitchen holding aloft a bulging nappy sack whose apricot scent is fighting a losing battle to subdue the stink within. (Rich has evolved a classification system for Ben’s nappies—a minor incident is a Tant Pis, an average load is a Croque Manure, while an all-out seven-wipes job is a Somme. Once, but only once, there was a Krakatoa. Fair enough, but not in a Greek airport.)