I Don't Know How She Does It

no employee you give generous pay and conditions to should be allowed to get away with. He thinks she’s a reasonably bright twenty-five-year-old girl from Kent who, while being pretty nice to our kids, tries to take us for every penny she can. He thinks she’s lazy, moody and shrinks his socks if he asks her to do anything outside her job description. He thinks she has too much power in our house. He’s right. But Rich doesn’t worry about child care the way I worry; men think about child care with their wallets, women feel it in their wombs. Every twist in the relationship with the person minding your young is a tug on the umbilical. Phones may have become cordless, but mothers never will.

Me, I look at Paula and I see the person who is with my children all the hours I’m not, a person I have to rely on to love and to cherish and to watch out for the first symptoms of meningitis. If she leaves the place in a mess, if she makes a petty point of not putting the dishwasher on because it contains adult as well as junior crockery, if she never gives me the correct change from the supermarket and “loses” all the receipts, then I’m not going to make a fuss.

People say the trouble with professional women of my generation is that we don’t know how to behave with servants. Wrong. The trouble with professional women of my generation is that we are the servants — forelock-tuggingly grateful to any domestic help, for which we pay through the nose, while struggling to hold down the master’s job ourselves.

When I first went back to work, I put my four-month-old daughter into day care. There’s a nursery about ten minutes’ walk from us, and I liked the sunny, resilient Scotswoman who ran it. But gradually things started to get to me. The Baby Room was small and lined with twelve cots. I’d persuaded myself it was cozy when we first went to look round, but every day I dropped Emily off it looked more like a Romanian orphanage styled by Habitat. When I asked Moira how the little ones could take a nap with all the noise from the big kids next door, she shrugged and said, “Och, they get used to it in the end.” And then there were the fines. If you picked up your child any later than 6:30 from Children’s Corner, they charged you ten quid for the first ten minutes, fifty pounds for any longer. I was always later than 6:30. Shame sloshed around like bile in my stomach on the sprint from the Tube to collect her.

Surrounded by thirty other kids, Emily picked up every infection going. Her first winter cold ran from October through March and her baby nose was encrusted with verdigris. Having provided the bacteria for the infection, the nursery was always extremely keen that you keep your sick child at home, with no reduction in fees. I can remember hours on the phone at work pretending to be calling clients, talking to temp agencies or begging help from friends. (And I hate asking for favors: hate the feeling of being indebted.) Then, one bitter morning, I had to drop a feverish Em off at the house of someone who knew someone in my postnatal mother and baby group who lived in Crouch End. At the end of the day, the woman reported that Emily had cried constantly, save for an hour, when they had watched a video of Sleeping Beauty that seemed to comfort her. That day my daughter formed her first sentence: “Want go home.” But I was not there to hear it, nor was I at the home where she so badly wanted to go.

So, no, Paula is not ideal. But what is ideal? Mummy staying at home and laying down her life for small feet to walk over. Would you do that? Could I do that? You don’t know me very well if you think I could do that.

I GET OUT of the bath, apply some aqueous cream to scaly pink patches on hands, back of knees and ears, wrap myself in a robe and go into the study to check messages before bed.

To: Kate Reddy

From: Jack Abelhammer

Katharine, I don’t remember mentioning drink, but disorderly sounds great. Bed for a week could be a problem: may need to reschedule the diary. Perhaps we should make it an oyster bar?

love Jack

Love? From major client? Oh, God, Kate. Now see what you’ve gone and done.

MUST REMEMBER

Cut Ben’s nails, Xmas thank-you letters? also letter bollocking council about failure to remove Christmas tree, humiliate ghastly Guy in front of Rod to show who’s boss, learn to send txt messages, Ben birthday — find Teletubbies cake, present — dancing Tinky Winky or improving wooden toy? Dancing Tinky Winky and improving wooden toy. Emily shoes/schools/teach her to read, call Mum, call Jill Cooper-Clark, must return sister’s call — why Julie sounding so pissed off with me; only person in London not seen brill new film — Magic Tiger, Puffing Dragon? Half term when/what? Invite friends for Sunday lunch. Buy pine nuts and basil to make own pesto, cookery crash course (Leith’s or similar). Summer holiday brochures. Get Jesus an exercise ball. Quote for stair carpet? Lightbulbs, tulips, lip salve, Botox?

9 The First Time I Saw Jack

7:03 A.M. I am hiding in the downstairs loo with my suitcase to avoid Ben. He is next door in the kitchen, where Richard is giving him breakfast. I am desperate to go in, but tell myself it’s not fair to snatch a few selfish minutes of his company and then leave an inconsolable baby. (The book says children get over Separation Anxiety by two years, but no age limit given for mothers.) Better he doesn’t see me at all. Squatting in here on the laundry basket, I have time to study the room and notice swags of gray fluff drifting down the window, like witch’s curtains. (Our cleaner, Juanita, suffers from vertigo, and quite understandably cannot clean above waist height.) Also the mermaid mosaic splashback was left half-tiled by our builder when we refused to give him any more cash, so is all tits and no tail. In the Bible, Jehovah sent floods and plagues of locusts to punish mankind for their vanity; at the end of the twentieth century, he saves time and sends round a plasterer and a couple of brickies.

Through the closed door I can make out muffled brum-brums, followed by Ben’s gluey Sid James cackle. Rich must be pretending that spoonfuls of Shreddies are advancing cars to get him to open his mouth. A honk from outside announces the arrival of Pegasus.

Am slipping out of my own house like a thief when there is an accusatory “Woo-hoo” from the Volvo parked across the street: Angela Brunt, ringleader of the local Muffia. Face like a Ford Anglia, with protuberant headlamp peepers set in a triangular skull, Angela is heroically plain. It’s barely seven o’clock; what’s she doing out? Probably just back from taking Davina to Pre-Dawn Japanese. Give Angela thirty seconds and she’ll ask me if I’ve got Emily into a school yet.

“Hello, Kate, long time no see. Have you got Emily into a school yet?”

Five seconds! Yes, and Angela has beaten her own world record for Educational Paranoia. Tempted to tell her we’re considering the local state primary. With any luck will induce massive on-the- spot coronary. “I think St. Stephen’s is still a possibility, Angela.”

“Really?” The headlamps do a startled circuit of their sockets. “But how are you going to get her in anywhere decent at eleven? Did you read the inspectors’ latest report on St. Stephen’s?”

“No, I—”

“And you do realize state school pupils are two point four years behind the independent sector after eighteen months, rising to three point two by age nine?”

“Gosh, that does sound bad. Well, Richard and I are going to look round Piper Place, but it sounds a bit pressurized. What I really want is for Emily to — you know — be happy while she’s still so little.”

Angela shies at the word happy like a horse at a rattlesnake. “Well, I know they’ve all got anorexia in the sixth form at Piper Place,” she says brightly, “but they do offer a terrific well-rounded education.”

Great. My daughter will become the world’s first well-rounded anorexic. Admitted to Oxford weighing