I Don't Know How She Does It

Yrs Wrothly,

K8 xxxxxxx

I am about to hit SEND, but instead I press DELETE. There’s only so much you can confess, even to your dearest friend. Even to yourself.

3:57 A.M. Emily is sick. Excitement, I think: too much Tweenies chocolate plus large and unaccustomed helping of Mummy. Just got off the phone to Japanese rubber company and am slipping into bed next to a snoring Richard when there is a cry from the neighboring room, as though an animal were being hunted in a dream. I go in and find Em sitting up in bed, cupping her left ear. There is sick everywhere: over her nightie, her duvet — oh, God, Barbara’s duvet — her blankie, her sheep, her hippopotamus, even her hair. She looks up at me with beseeching horror; Emily hates any loss of dignity.

“I feel sick, Mummy, don’t let me be sick again,” she pleads.

I carry her across the landing to the bathroom and hold her over the toilet, arching her clear of the rim as my mother always did for me. I feel my palm cool on her forehead; feel her stomach stiffen suddenly and then relax as what’s left in there comes out. Then, when I have undressed us both, we take a silent bath together and I comb the cranberries from her hair.

After finding clean nightwear, changing the bed linen and tucking Em in, I scrape the Russian salad gunk as best I can from Barbara’s duvet cover and leave it to soak in the bath. Then I lie on the floor next to my child’s bed and estimate the losses if Abelhammer is so furious that the Salinger Foundation quits Edwin Morgan Forster. Two-hundred-million-dollar account. Heads will roll. And my head is not even highlighted. No time. Emily presented me with a drawing of myself yesterday.

“Oh, is Mummy wearing a lovely brown hat?” I exclaimed.

“No, silly, the top of your hair is brown and the bottom is yellow.”

Surprised to feel big little-girl tears start to roll down my cheeks and drip warmly into my ears.

8:51 A.M. Surface. Feel like a diver in lead boots. Emily is still asleep. Touch her forehead: much cooler. Downstairs, Barbara is tight-lipped and shooting charged glances at the kitchen clock.

“Katharine, I hope you don’t think I’m speaking out of turn, but you want to put a bit of makeup on before you come downstairs. Don’t want Richard thinking we’ve stopped making an effort, do we? They soon cotton on to that sort of thing, do men.”

I tell her I’m sorry, but I’ve been up half the night with Emily and haven’t really slept. I sense her eyes on me: that cool, appraising stare she gave when Rich first brought me home: the way you might look at a heifer in a show ring.

“Oh, I know you look very peaky at the best of times, love,” she owns cheerfully. “But a spot of rouge can work wonders. Personally, I can’t speak too highly of Helena Rubinstein’s Autumn Bonfire. Cup of tea?”

I didn’t mean to describe myself as the main breadwinner at Boxing Day lunch. It just came out that way. There was a general conversation around the table about New Year’s resolutions, and Donald — upright but wistful, like Bernard Hepton in Colditz—said perhaps Katharine could work a bit less in the coming twelve months. That would have been fine — gallant, sweet, caring even — if my sister-in-law hadn’t added with a snort, “So the kids can pick her out in an identity parade.”

Ooof. Clearly Cheryl had had one glass of red wine too many, and what was required of me was to rise above it. But after three days of enforced wifely humility, I didn’t feel able to rise above anything. And that was when I began a sentence with the words, “As the main breadwinner in our house—” A sentence I would never finish as it happens because, when I looked at the startled faces round the table, it seemed safer to let it die away like a bugle call.

Donald pushed his specs up his nose and helped himself to parsnips, which I know he can’t stand. Barbara put her hand to her throat as though to cover the puce flush of shock spreading beneath. It couldn’t have been worse if I had announced breast implants or lesbianism or not liking Alan Bennett. All upsets in the natural order.

Rich, meanwhile, was making valiant efforts to pretend I had said bread sauce instead of breadwinner and was dispensing lumps of that porridgey glue to his relatives. “The trouble with you, Kate,” he told me later in our room, as he sat on the bed while I packed a bag for my crisis meeting in London, “is you think that if people have the correct data they will buy your analysis. But they don’t want your data. People — parents — they get to an age when new information is frightening, not helpful. They don’t want to know that you earn more than me. For my father it’s literally unthinkable.”

“And for you?”

He looks down at his shoelaces. “Well, to be honest, I have a pretty hard time with it myself.”

MONDAY, DECEMBER 27, 1:06 P.M. The heating has burst on the train down to London, the windows of the empty carriage are iced up; it’s like traveling inside a giant Fox’s glacier mint. I join the queue at the buffet. My fellow Christmas refugees are all eager for alcohol. Either they have no family or are in flight from too much family, both of them lonely and exhilarating conditions.

I purchase four miniatures — whisky, Bailey’s, Bailey’s, Tia Maria. Back in my seat for just a few seconds when I hear the mobile chirrup in my bag. Can see from the number that it’s Rod Task. Before answering, I take the precaution of holding the phone away from my ear.

“OK, can you explain how we bought this shitload of stock in some fucking Jap outfit that makes fucking mattresses that fucking kill kids? Jesus wept, Katie. Do you hear me?”

I tell Rod I wish I could hear him, but sadly he’s breaking up and the train’s about to go into a tunnel. Press CANCEL. As I’m mixing the second Bailey’s with the whisky, it occurs to me that maybe the reason I got Salinger as a client was because someone knew that Toki Rubber was about to go belly-up and unloaded it onto me. That bastard Bunce, probably.

A few seconds later, Rod rings back so that he and I can have a conference call with the appalling Abelhammer in New York. Delivering the customary reassurances to a client 3,500 miles away, I watch my words rising up in steamy rings of hot air. With a gloved finger, I scratch one word on the frosted window: RICH.

“Hoping for a lottery win are you, love?” the Scouse steward says, pointing at the window when he comes along later to collect my empties.

“What? Oh, Rich isn’t money,” I say. “He’s a man. Rich is my husband.”

MUST REMEMBER: NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS

Adjust work — life balance for healthier, happier existence.

Get up an hour earlier to maximize time available.

Spend more time with your children.

Learn to be self with children.

Don’t take Richard for granted!

Entertain more — Sunday lunch & so on.

Relaxing hobby??

Learn Italian.

Take advantage of London: theaters, Tate Modern, etc.

Stop canceling stress-busting treatments.

Start a present drawer like proper organized mother.

Attempt to be size 10. Personal trainer?

Call friends, hope they remember you.

Ginseng, oily fish, no wheat.

Sex?

New dishwasher.

Helena Rubinstein Autumn Bonfire?