demitasse bra under white voile shirt, grabbed from chest of drawers in half-dark at 4:30. Oh, Jesus, I look like Pamela Anderson at the Oscars.
11:37 A.M. Sit in ladies’ loo with cheek pressed up against the cubicle wall to cool furious blush. Tiled in black marble riddled with white stars, the wall is like a map of the universe. I feel as though I’m being sucked into deep space and more than happy to go there. How about disappearing into a black hole for a few millennia till the memory of public humiliation fades? I used to smoke in here when things got desperate; since I gave up I sing under my breath. “I am strong. I am invincible. I am Woman.”
It’s a Helen Reddy song from when I was at school. I loved the fact that she had the same name as me and she sounded — well, just so full of it, so confident that you could deal with anything life threw at you. At college, when Debra and I were getting ready for a night out, we used to play the record over and over to psych ourselves up. Dance round the room, playing catch with Deb’s Action Man. (After his leg broke off, Deb said we’d have to call him Inaction Man “after all our useless husbands.”)
Do I believe in equality between the sexes? I’m not sure. I did once, with all the passionate certainty of someone very young who knew absolutely everything and therefore nothing at all. It was a nice idea, equality — noble, indisputably fair. But how the hell was it supposed to work? They could give you good jobs and maternity leave, but until they programmed a man to notice you were out of toilet paper the project was doomed. Women carry the puzzle of family life in their heads, they just do. As a mother, I see that more and more clearly. Every night on the way home from the City, I watch the women scurrying along in the Lucozade light of the streetlamps, bags of shopping balancing briefcases, or twitching at bus stops like overwound clockwork toys.
Not long ago, my friend Philippa told me that she and her husband had drawn up a will. Phil said she wanted a clause stipulating that, in the event of her death, Mark would promise to cut the children’s fingernails. He thought she was joking. She wasn’t joking.
One Saturday last autumn, I got back from a Boston trip to find Richard in the hall, all set to take our two out to a party. Emily, hair uncombed, appeared to have a dueling scar on one cheek — it was ketchup from lunch. Ben, meanwhile, was bent double, wearing something very small and dotted in apricot that I didn’t recognize. On closer inspection, it turned out to be an outfit belonging to one of Emily’s dolls.
When I suggested to my husband that our offspring looked as though they were going out to beg on the Underground, Rich said that if I was going to be critical I should do it myself.
I was going to be critical. I would do it myself.
To: Candy Stratton
From: Kate Reddy
Simply marvelous day so far. Have just shown breasts in error to head of investment & the troops. Chris Bunce came up to me afterwards and said:
“You were a total pro in there, Kate, with knobs on.” Laughed like a drain and said something about putting me on his website. WHAT WEBSITE??
Plus Abelhammer has invited me for rendezvous in New York.
Why men all bull and cock?
To: Kate Reddy
From: Candy Stratton
Hon, don’t worry, U hve trrifc tits. Penis Envy is So Yesterday. Hallo Boob Envy!
Bunce is piece of shit. His website will be Jerkoff Central.
Hope U R going to meet up with the Hammer Man in NYC. He sounds Gr8.
I H8 U when U act British. Candida Thrush xxx
1:11 P.M. Lunch with Robin Cooper-Clark and a new client, Jeremy Browning, at Tartuffe. Located in the penthouse of a building overlooking Royal Exchange, the restaurant has the kind of hush that, outside a monastery, only money can buy. This must be the silence they call golden. The low seats are scooped out of toffee leather and the waiters arrive on castors. The menu is my least favorite kind: chops for chaps with no concessions to the female palate. When I ask our waiter if there’s a salad I could have he says, “Mais oui, madame,” and offers me something with
I nod uncertainly and Robin gives a little cough and says, “Roast throat, I believe.” How can anyone swallow a throat?
I say that I’d like the salad, but could they please hold the throats. On Robin’s lips there is an Alec Guinness ghost-of-a-smile, but the waiter is not amused. Red blood is the currency of the neighborhood.
“Any relation of the Worcestershire Reddys?” Jeremy asks, as Robin consults the wine list. Our client must be in his early fifties, but he’s in good shape and he knows it: ski-bronzed from the neck up, gym-bulked shoulders, succulent with success.
“No. I shouldn’t think so. I’m from a bit farther north.”
“The Borders?”
“No, more Derbyshire and Yorkshire. We moved about.”
“Ah, I see.”
Having established that I am no one worth knowing and no one who will know anyone worth knowing, our new client feels safe to blank me. Over the past decade, my country has become a classless society, but the news has been slow to reach the people who own it. For men like Jeremy, England still ends at Hyde Park, and then there is Scotland, where they go to kill things in August. The North, that great expanse of land between SW1 and Edinburgh which is best crossed by plane or at night in the sleeper car of a fast train, is a foreign country to them. Jeremy Browning’s forebears may have conquered India, but you wouldn’t get them going to anywhere as remote as Wigan.
Robin would never — could never — treat me as Jeremy does, but then he’s spent the last twenty years with Jill, who knows in her bones that snobs are a joke and that, in every sense, women mean business. I get a real kick out of watching my boss on these occasions. Convivial, clubbable and effortlessly smarter than any of his clients, he nonetheless has a way of making them feel as though they’re the captain of the winning team. Seeing me sidelined by the Browning version of events, he gently but firmly tries to draw me back into the conversation. “Now, Kate here is the high priestess of monetary policy; she’s really the person you need to explain the mysterious workings of the Federal Reserve.” And then, a few minutes later, when our guest has a mouth full of squab: “Actually, Jeremy, Kate’s funds delivered our best returns in the past six months, at what’s been a pretty bumpy time for equities by any standards, wouldn’t you say so, Kate?”
I love him for it, but it’s no use. There are some men who will always prefer to deal with another man, any man, rather than a woman, and Jeremy Browning is one of them. I can see him struggling to place me: I’m not married to him, clearly I’m not his mother, I didn’t go to school with his sister and I’m sure as hell not going to go to bed with him. So what, he must be asking himself as he chews on his pigeon, is this girl doing here? What is she
I’ve been observing this for more than ten years now and still I’m not sure I understand. Fear of the unknown? After all, Jeremy was packed off to a boys’ school at the age of seven; he went to one of the last all-male colleges; his wife, call her Annabel, stays home with the sons and heirs and, privately, he thinks anything else is some kind of crime against the natural order of things.
“Sorry, could I possibly have my wine back?”
Jeremy is tapping me on the sleeve. I realize that I have been pushing my neighbor’s glass towards the center of the table to prevent accidental spillage: a reflex from being with Emily and Ben.
