I Don't Know How She Does It

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 motherin-law pressing me into the African 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.)

“Of course, in our day the fathers didn’t pitch in at all,” says Barbara, flinching. “You wouldn’t get Donald going near a nappy. Drive a mile to avoid one.”

“Richard’s fantastic,” I say carefully. “I couldn’t manage without him.”

Barbara takes a red onion and quarters it fiercely. “You’ve got to look after them a bit, men. Delicate flowers,” she muses, pressing the blade down till the onion cries softly to itself. “Can you give that gravy a stir for me, Katharine?” Cheryl comes in and starts defrosting cheese straws and vol-au-vent cases for tomorrow’s drinks party.

I feel so alone when Barbara and Cheryl are twittering together in the kitchen, even though I’m standing right there. I reckon this must be how it was for centuries: women doing the doing and exchanging conspiratorial glances and indulgent sighs about the men. But I never joined the Muffia; I don’t know the code, the passwords, the special handshakes. I expect a man — my man — to do women’s work, because if he doesn’t I can’t do a man’s work. And up here in Yorkshire, the pride I feel in managing, the fact that I can and do make our lives stay on track, if only just, curdles into unease. Suddenly I realize that a family needs a lot of care, a lubricant to keep it running smoothly, whereas my little family is just about bumping along and the brakes are starting to squeal.

Richard walks back into the kitchen, minus nappy, puts his arms round my waist, hoists me up onto the rail of the Aga, rests his head in the crook of my neck and starts to twiddle my hair. Just like Ben does.

“Happy, sweetheart?”

It sounds like a question, but really it’s an answer. Rich is happy here, I can tell, with the womanly bustle and the fug of baking and me not on the phone every five minutes. “He’s a real homebody is our Richard,” says Barbara proudly.

I tell Rich, and I’m only partly joking, that he would have been better off marrying some nice Sloane with a super line in mince pies.

“Well, I didn’t, because I would have died of boredom. Anyway,” he says, stroking my cheek and tucking a stray tendril of hair behind my ear, “if we need mince pies I know this incredible woman who can fake them.”

12:03 P.M. Barbara has put me on nuts duty — cashews, pistachios, peanuts for the older kids. As I fill the little glass bowls, I think how grateful I am to be useful, while a more complicated feeling brings a pain to my chest. Like heartburn, only I haven’t eaten yet. Christmas at the Shattocks is hard for me. Here I am in the bosom of a relatively functional family, and every cruel Yule from my childhood reverberates in my bones. I only have to hear Harry Belafonte singing “Mary’s Boy Child” on Radio 2 and I’m there, with Dad lurching into the kitchen, back from the pub, bearing some peace offering for my mother — a frothy lace nightie in the wrong size, a gold watch he’s had off a mate on the market. My father always made an entrance like a star, sucking up all the available air in the room. Julie and I were left breathing shallowly behind the settee, praying that she’d forgive him again, that she’d have him back so we could have the kind of Christmas that families were meant to have, the kind Richard’s family has.

I take some nuts through to the big L-shaped sitting room with the French windows onto the garden. Today is the Shattocks’ annual drinks party. A beaming Donald takes my arm and presents me to one of his golf chums. Somewhere in his sixties, the man is wearing a sports jacket and red shirt with a tie only marginally less busy than the Test Card.

“Jerry, can I introduce my daughter-in-law Katharine. Katharine’s a career lady, you know. Kept her own name. Very modern.”

Jerry perks up. “Do you travel with your work, then, Katharine?”

“Yes, I go to the States a lot and—”

“So who looks after Richard when you’re away?”

“Richard. I mean, Richard looks after Richard. And the children. And we have a nanny who looks after the children, and. . well, it all works somehow.”

Jerry nods distractedly as though I’m bringing him news of some Minoan aqueduct. “Oh, that’s marvelous. Do you know Anita Roddick, love?”

“No, I—”

“You’ve got to hand it to her, haven’t you? All that hair. Very striking for her age. And not a spare ounce on her. They often let themselves go at that time of life, don’t they?”

“Who?”

“Italians.”

“I didn’t know Anita Roddick was Italian—”

“Oh, aye. There’s a woman up our road, spit of the young Claudia Cardinale before the macaroni cheese had her. What line did Donald say you were in?”

“I’m a fund manager, sort of investing money on behalf of pension funds and companies in—”

“Can’t go far wrong with the Bradford and Bingley, I always say. Thirty-day deposit account, instant access.”

“That sounds good.”

“I suppose it’s your lot want us in the ruddy Euro, is it?”

“No—”

“Before you know it, Katharine, Gordon Brown’ll have us going down the Feathers with a pocket of Krautmarks. What did we win the war for, answer me that.”

There is a point during these Yuletide conversations when the person you are for the rest of the year, struggling to come up for air through the layers of wrapping paper and saturated fats, finally bursts out like the alien from John Hurt’s chest.