I Don't Know How She Does It

compasses. I’m holding still and you’re sweeping around me, OK? You’re not gonna fall. I’ve got you. Just let go.”

So I just let go. We skated for an hour and I’m not sure what we wrote on the ice. You’d have to be a bird — one of my pigeons — or sitting high up in my boss’s office to see what we wrote that day. Love or Goodbye or both.

He wanted to buy me a hot chocolate, but I said I had to go.

The smile never faltered. “Must be an important date?”

“Very. A man I used to know.”

SURPRISING HOW QUICKLY you can forget how to hold someone, even your husband. Maybe especially your husband. It takes a certain absence from touching to make you fully appreciate the geometry of the hug: the precise angle of your head in relation to his. Should it be roosted in under the neck, as pigeons do, or nose pressed to his chest? And your hands: cupped in the small of his back or palms laid flat along the flanges of his thighs? When Richard and I met that lunchtime outside Starbucks, we both meant to deliver a peck on the cheek, but it felt too silly, the kind of kiss you could only give to an aunt, so we splayed awkwardly into the hug. I felt as gauche, as painfully observed, as when my dad first took me shuffling round the floor at a dinner dance. Richard’s body shocked me by being a body: his hair and its smell, the bulk of shoulder under his jumper. The hug wasn’t that dry click of bones you get holding someone when the passion has drained away. It was more like a shadow dance: I still wanted him and I think he wanted me, but we hadn’t touched in a very long time.

“Hey, you’re glowing,” Rich says.

“I’ve been ice skating.”

“Ice skating? On a work morning?”

“Sort of client liaison. A new approach.”

RICH AND I have arranged a meeting to talk things over. We have seen each other almost every day since he “left.” As he promised, he has collected Em from school and then often stayed to have tea with both children. Starbucks feels like the right sort of place to negotiate a peace — a modern no-man’s-land, one of those businesses which dresses itself up to look like the home we’re all too busy to go to. It’s surprisingly quiet in here, but the meeting has all the anxieties of a first date — will he, won’t he? — only now they’re attached to divorce — won’t he, will he?

We find a couple of big squashy velvet chairs in a corner and Rich goes to get the drinks. I have requested a skinny latte; he comes back with the hot chocolate I want and need.

The small talk feels unbearably small: I am impatient to get on to the big talk, so it can be over, one way or the other.

“How’s work, Kate?”

“Oh, fine. Actually, I may soon be leaving my job. Or rather my job may soon be leaving me.”

Rich shakes his head and smiles. “They’d never fire you.”

“Oh, under certain circumstances they might.”

He gives me that man-in-the-white-coat look. “We’re not talking about meaningless self-sacrifice, Mrs. Shattock, are we, by any chance?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“Just that I’m old enough to remember your Cyclists Against the Bomb phase.”

“I’ve given the firm everything, Rich. Time that belonged to you and the children.”

“And to you, Kate.”

Once I could read his face like a book; now the book has been translated into another language. “I thought you’d approve. Breaking away from the system.” He looks younger since he left me. “Your mother thinks I’ve let myself go.”

“My mother thinks Grace Kelly let herself go.” We both laugh, and for a moment Starbucks is filled with the sound of Us.

I start to tell Rich about the story Winston told me.

“Who’s Winston?”

“He’s the one from Pegasus Cars, but it turns out he’s a philosopher.”

“A philosopher driving a minicab. That sounds safe.”

“No, he’s fantastic, really he is. Anyway, Winston told me the story about this general who found a tribe by a waterfall, and the head of the tribe—”

“Cicero.”

“No—”

“Cicero. It’s by Cicero.” My husband breaks a chocolate cookie in half and hands one piece to me.

“Let me guess. Someone dead for a long time that I’ve never heard of because I went to a crap comprehensive, but who forms a vital part of every civilized person’s education?”

“I love you.”

“So, you see, I was thinking of moving away from the waterfall to see if I could hear better.”

“Kate?”

He pushes his hand across the table so it’s near mine. The hands lie next to each other as if waiting for a child to draw round them. “There’s nothing left to love, Rich, I’m all hollowed out. Kate doesn’t live here anymore.”

The hand is on mine now. “You were saying about moving away from the waterfall?”

“I thought if I — if we moved away from the waterfall we could hear again and then we could decide if —”

“If it was the noise that stopped us hearing or the fact that we didn’t have anything to say to each other anymore?”

Do you know those moments — the sheer merciful relief of there being someone in the world who knows what you’re thinking as you think it? I nod my grateful acknowledgment. “My name is Kate Reddy and I am a workaholic. Isn’t that what they have to say at those meetings?”

“I didn’t say you were a workaholic.”

“Why not? It’s true, isn’t it? I can’t ‘give up’ work. That makes me an addict, doesn’t it?”

“We need to buy ourselves some time, that’s all.”

“Rich, do you remember when Em tried to climb into the TV to save Sleeping Beauty? I keep thinking about it.”

He grins. One of the best things about having children is that it enables you to have the same loving memories as another person — you can summon the same past. Two flashbacks with but a single image. Is that as good as two hearts that beat as one?

“Daft kid. She was so upset that she couldn’t save that stupid princess, wasn’t she?” Rich says, with that exasperated pride Em provokes in us.

“She’d really like you to come home.”

“And you?How about you, Kate?”

The option to say something proud and defiant hangs there waiting to be picked like a ripe fruit. I leave it hanging and say, “I’d like to come home too.”

Sleeping Beauty was always Emily’s favorite, the first video she really noticed. When she was two years old she became obsessed with it, standing in front of the TV and shouting, “Wind it, wind it!”

She always shouted at the part where Aurora, with her stupefied doll face, makes her way up the long staircase to the attic pursued by a raven’s shadow and a bad fairy cackle. For a long time, Richard and I couldn’t work out what was making Emily so furious; then it clicked. She wanted us to rewind the tape so that the Princess wouldn’t make it to the attic, so she never would prick her finger on the old woman’s spindle.

One day, Emily actually tried to climb inside the TV set: I found her standing on a chair attempting to insert her red-shoed foot through the screen. I believe she had plans to grab the hapless Princess and stop her from meeting her fate. We had a long talk — well, I talked and she listened — about how you had to let things like that