I Don't Know How She Does It

to put my arms round her, but she’d bat a hug away rather than let on how much she needs it. The only way to get her to buy anything is to make it sound like an opportunity she’d be a fool to turn down.

“You know the two days when I gave birth to my babies?”

She nods.

“Well, if I could only keep two days from the whole of my life, those are the days I would keep.”

“Why?”

“Awe.”

“Awe?” Candy detonates one of her big bad laughs. “You can’t drink, you can’t smoke, you can’t go out nights, your tits look like two dead rodents, your pussy’s stretched wider than the fucking Holland Tunnel and she offers me awe. Jeez, what are the other highlights, Mom?”

No deal. “I have to go now, Cand. E-mail me the date and time and I’ll meet you there.”

“I’m getting rid of it.”

“Fine.”

25 Back to School

7:41 A.M. “Okay, Emily, let’s go. Quick now. Mummy’s going to be late. Lunch box? Good. Library books? No. No, you can’t have plaits. Just no. Teeth? Oh, for heaven’s sake. Quickly do teeth please. Hurry up. And take the toast out of your mouth first. It’s not toast? I don’t want you eating Easter egg. . Well, Daddy shouldn’t have said that. I am not horrible. OK, let’s go.”

First day back after the school holidays and the children are as bolshie and febrile as ponies before a gymkhana. Emily is using that goo-goo baby talk she regresses to when I’ve been away or am about to go again. It drives me mad.

“Mama, who’s your best character in Bear an da Big Blue House?”

“I don’t know. Er, Tutter.”

“But Ojo is my bestest.” Emily crumples in disbelief at my treachery.

“People don’t have to like the same things, Em. It’s good to like different things. For instance, Daddy likes silly Zoe on breakfast TV, and Mummy really doesn’t care for Zoe at all.”

“She’s not called Zoe, she’s Chloe,” says Rich, not bothering to look up from the TV. “And for your information, Chloe has a degree in anthropology.”

“Is that why she feels the need to go naked from the waist up?”

“But why don’t you like Ojo, Mama?”

“I do like Ojo, Em, I think he’s totally fantastic.”

“She’s not naked, she just has remarkable self-supporting breasts.”

“She’s not a boy. Ojo’s a girl.”

8:01 A.M. I am bundling Em out of the house when Rich, who is still in a T-shirt and boxers, mooches into the hall and wonders when it would be convenient for him to go on a five-day wine-tasting course in Burgundy.

Burgundy? Five days? Leaving me alone with the children and the markets bucking like the Disneyland roller coaster?

“I can’t believe you’re asking me that now, Rich. Where on earth did you get such an idea?”

“You. You gave it to me for Christmas, Katie. My present, remember?”

Oh, God, it’s all coming back to me now. A moment of intense guilt masquerading as generosity. Must learn to suppress those till the impulse passes. I tell Rich that I’ll think about it, smile and file under TO BE FORGOTTEN.

In the car, Em kicks the back of the passenger seat with absentminded fury. No point telling her off; she barely knows what she’s doing. Sometimes a five-year-old’s feelings are simply too big for their body.

“Mama, I gotta idea.”

“What’s that, sweetheart?”

“How about if da weekends were weeks and da weeks were weekends.”

As I wait for the lights to change, I have a scratchy sensation in my chest, as though a bird were in there trying to escape.

“Den all da mummies and daddies could be wid dere children more.”

“Emily, will you please talk properly? You’re not a baby anymore.”

In the rearview mirror, I catch her eye and look away.

“Mummy, my tummy hurts. Mummy, will you put me to bed tonight? Are you putting me to bed tonight?”

“Yes, I promise.”

I CANNOT IMAGINE what I was thinking when I let Alexandra Law, Abbess among Mother Superiors, sign me up for the Parent Teachers Association. No, that’s not true, I know exactly what I was thinking: I was thinking that just for one hour in some underlit overheated classroom I could pretend that I’m like any other mother. When the chair makes a reference to the absentee caretaker, I want to give a knowing little smile. I want to groan when someone brings up the matter of the summer fete — that time of year again already! — and I want to breathe that fuggy companionable air. And afterwards, when we’ve voted on a computer levy and plans to improve the sports facilities, I want to clasp my fingers round a white plastic cup containing a boiling orange beverage and I want to refuse a Hobnob, patting my waist significantly, and then I’ll say, “Oh, go on then!” as though succumbing to a chocolate biscuit was the most reckless, heady thing I’d done for a very long time.

But, realistically, what were the chances of my making the PTA meeting at 6:30 on a Wednesday night? Alexandra described 6:30 as “after work,” but what kind of work lets you go before 6:30 these days? Teaching, obviously, but even teachers have Himalayas of marking to do. When I was a child, there were fathers who still came home in time for the family’s evening meal, dads who, in the summer months, would mow the lawn while it was still light and water the sweet peas in the dusk. But that age — the age of working to live instead of living to work — feels far away in a land where district nurses arrive by Morris Traveller and televisions glow like embers at the back. I don’t know anyone at the office who eats with their kids during the week now.

No, it really wasn’t realistic to sign up for the PTA, and three months after joining I have yet to attend a single meeting. So when I drop Emily off at school I try to avoid bumping into Alexandra Law. Easier said than done. Alexandra is harder to avoid than the NatWest Tower.

“Oh, Kate, there you are.” She barrels across the room. Her dress this morning is so densely floral it looks as though she has run into an armchair at speed. “We were thinking of sending out a search party. Ha-ha-ha! Still working full-time? Gosh. I don’t know how you do it. Oh, Diane, I was just saying, we don’t know how she does it, do we?”

Diane Percival, mother of Emily’s classmate Oliver, extends a thin tanned hand with a sapphire the size of a sprout on the second finger. I immediately recognize the type. One of those wives, tensed like longbows, who have a full-time career keeping in shape for their husbands. They exercise, they get their hair done twice a week, they wear full makeup to play tennis and, when that is no longer enough, they willingly submit to the surgeon’s knife. “Those rich stay-home mums are jogging for their lives,” Debra says, and she’s right. These women are not in love, they are in fear — fear that the husband’s love will slip away and land on some replica of their younger selves.

Like me, they are in asset management, but my assets are most of the world’s resources and their asset is themselves — a lovely product but threatened with diminishing returns. Don’t get me wrong. When the time comes I’ll probably have my neck lifted to the back of my ears and, like the Dianes of this world, I’ll have it done to please someone; the difference is, that someone will be me. However much I sometimes don’t want to be Kate, I really really don’t want to be Diane.

I have never actually spoken to Diane Percival before, but this does not stop me going cold at the very