I Don't Know How She Does It

you confessed to your colleague, a Miss Candace Stratton, that you felt a surge of what you termed ‘almost orgasmic relief’ at leaving your family after half term and returning to the office. How do you answer that?”

She laughs, a dark, bitter laugh. “That’s incredibly unfair. Of course, it’s nice to be in a place where you’re not being followed around all the time by someone shouting ‘Mummy, poo!’ I don’t deny that. At least people in the office can see that you’re busy and don’t ask you for toast or lollies or to pull their knickers up. If it’s wrong to find that a relief, then I’m sorry: guilty as charged.”

“Did you say guilty?” The judge has perked up.

“In my defense,” she continues, “I’d like to have it taken into account that I did build three sand castles at St. Davids and I did let Emily plait my hair with the bits of crab she said were mermaid’s jewels. And I did all the songs and all the sandwiches. I made two kinds every day, even though they only ever eat the crisps—”

“Mrs. Shattock, please confine yourself to the charges!” roars the judge. “Guilty or not guilty? The business of the Court of Motherhood is not seaside activities.”

The woman cocks her head to one side and you can see something mischievous, almost mutinous, enter her eyes. “Is there a Court of Fatherhood, m’lud? Stupid question, really. Think how long it would take to process the backlog of cases. All those blokes who just popped into the pub on the way home and didn’t make it back for the bedtime story for, what shall we say, three thousand years?”

“Silence! Silence, I say. If you continue in this manner, Mrs. Shattock, I shall have you taken to the cells.”

“Sounds lovely. I could get some sleep.”

The judge pounds his gavel on the bench. He is getting larger by the minute and his old white face suffuses with scarlet like a syringe taking in blood. The defendant, meanwhile, is growing smaller and smaller. No bigger than a Barbie doll, she scrambles up onto the edge of the dock and balances there precariously in high heels. When she starts to shout at the judge, her voice is a gerbil squeak.

“All right, you really want to know the truth? Guilty. Unbelievably, neurotically, pathologically guilty. Look, I’m sorry, but I have to go. For heaven’s sake, just look at the time.”

19 Love, Lies, Bleeding

CAN YOU SMELL treachery on your lover? I am convinced Richard can. He’s been all over me since I got back from New Jersey, perching on the edge of the bath while I tried to soak away the journey, insisting on washing my back, complimenting me on a hairstyle that hasn’t changed in three years. And staring and staring, as though trying to place something he can’t quite put his finger on, then looking quickly away when our eyes meet. For the first time, there is a shyness between us; as carefully polite as dinner-party guests, we will have been married seven years at the end of July.

While Rich is locking up downstairs, I jump into bed and simulate deep slumber to avoid reunion sex. Lying next to him with my eyes closed, a montage of guilt, work, desire and shopping flickers across my lids: bread, rice cakes, Jack’s smile, canned tuna, check cash level of funds, apple juice, Alphabite potato thingies — ask Paula, spreadsheets, the word kiss spoken in an American accent, cucumbers, blancmange rabbit, green jelly for grass.

At first light, when Rich and I finally make love — with the children starting to stir in their beds overhead — there is something driven and possessive about it, as though my husband were acting out some deep territorial impulse to plant his flag and reclaim me. And, in a way, I am grateful to be reclaimed; less scary than setting out for a foreign land with its curious habits, its unknown banners.

Richard is still collapsed on top of me when the children come shrieking into the bedroom. Emily’s first reaction on seeing that I’m back is of uncomplicated joy, complicated seconds later by a pout and an Othello-green stare. Ben is so delighted he bursts into tears and plumps down onto his nappy-cushioned bottom, that small body barely able to support the strength of his feelings. When the two of them climb onto the bed, Emily straddles Rich’s chest and Ben lies in the damp cruciform his father has left on my naked body. Face level with mine, he starts to point at my features one by one.

“Ayze.”

“Eyes, good boy.”

“Nows.”

“Nose, that’s right, Ben, clever boy. Have you been learning words while Mummy’s been away?”

His index finger, slender as a pencil, comes to rest between my breasts.

“And that, young man,” says Richard, leaning over and gently removing his son’s hand, “is the female bosom, of which your mother has a particularly lovely example.”

“Mummy looks like me, doesn’t she?” demands Emily, climbing aboard and budging Ben down onto the belly whose soft dome still carries the memory of carrying them both. “Me!” chimes Ben happily. “Me, me, me!” the children cry as the mother disappears under her own flesh and blood.

ANY WOMAN WITH A BABY has already committed a kind of adultery, I think. The new love in the nest is so voracious that all the old one can do is wait patiently, hoping for any crumbs the intruder does not consume in its cuckoo greed. A second child squeezes the adult love even harder. The miracle is that passion survives at all, and too often it dies in those early, early-rising years.

During the hours and days after I first get back from a trip, I always promise myself it’s my last time away. The story I live by — that working is just one of a range of choices I could make that will not affect my children — is exposed for what it is: a wishful fiction. Emily and Ben need me, and it’s me that they want. Oh, they adore Richard, of course they do, but he is their playmate, their companion in adventure; I’m the opposite. Daddy is the ocean; Mummy is the port, the safe haven they nestle in to gain the courage to venture farther and farther out each time. But I know I’m no harbor; sometimes when things are really bad I lie here and think, I am a ship in the night and my children yell like gulls as I pass.

And so I get out my calculator and do the sums again. If I stop work we could sell the house and clear the mortgage and the home-improvement loan that ran out of control when we first found rising damp and a bad case of descending house. (“You need underpinning, love,” said the builder. Damn right I did.) Move out of London, buy a place with a decent garden, hope Rich could pick up some more architectural work, see if I could work part-time. No foreign holidays. Economy-size everything. Bring the shoe habit to heel.

At times, I can almost be moved to tears by the picture of the thrifty responsible homemaker I could and would become. But the idea of not having an income after all these years makes me so fearful. I need my own money the way I need my own lungs. (“What your poor mum never had was Running Away Money,” Auntie Phyllis said, dabbing my face with her hankie.) And how would I be, left alone with the kids all day? The need of children is never-ending. You can pour all your love and patience into them, and when is it all right to say when? Never. You can never say when. And to serve so selflessly, you have to subdue something in yourself. I admire the women who can do it, but the mere thought makes me sick with panic. I could never admit this to anyone, but I think giving up work is like becoming a missing person. One of the domestic Disappeared. The post offices of Britain should be full of Wanted posters for women who lost themselves in their children and were never seen again. So when my two bounce on the body they sprang from shouting me, a voice within me keeps repeating, Me, me, me.

7:42 A.M. Complete hell trying to get out of the house. Emily reports that all three changes of clothes I have offered her are unacceptable. Yellow is her new favorite color, apparently.

“But all your clothes are pink.”

“Pink’s silly.”

“Come on, darling, let Mummy pull your skirt up. Such a pretty skirt.”

She swats me away. “I don’t want pink. I hate pink.”