thought of her. Diane is the mother who sends notes. Notes to invite your child to a play date, notes to thank your child for coming to a play date (It was nothing, really). Last week, in a spectacular burst of note one-upmanship, Diane actually sent a note from Oliver thanking Emily for an invitation to tea. In what kind of life is it possible to send a note acknowledging an event of almost no significance, which will feature fish fingers and peas and has yet to take place? Deprived of office hierarchies, many of the mothers at my daughter’s school have set about inventing meaningless tests whose sole purpose is that other mothers with better things to do can be seen to fail them.
“Thank you for your thank-you note. I look forward to receiving your note acknowledging receipt of my note. Thank you and get lost.”
8:19 P.M. NOVALIS HOTEL, FRANKFURT. Shit. I won’t be able to put Emily to bed tonight after all. Meeting with German client was brought forward and I had to get on the next plane. It went as well as can be expected. I blagged and blagged and I think I bought us a couple more months, by which time we may have been able to turn around the fund’s performance. Back at the hotel, I pour myself a large drink and have just got into the bath when the phone rings. Christ, what now? For the first time in my life, I pick up the bathroom extension: a cream phone in its cradle on the wall next to the towel rail. It’s Richard. There is something different about his voice. “Darling, I’m afraid I have some sad news. Robin just rang.”
26 Death of a Mother
JILL COOPER-CLARK DIED PEACEFULLY at home in the small hours of Monday morning. She was forty- seven. Diagnosed just after the children broke up from school last summer, the cancer swept through her like a forest fire. The surgeons went in first, and after them a SWAT team of pharmacologists and radiotherapists, all trying to contain the blaze. But the cancer was unquenchable: breasts, lungs, pancreas. It was as though Jill’s energy — she was the most prodigiously energetic person I’ve ever met — was being used against her; as if the life force itself could be hijacked and redeployed in the fell purposes of death. The last time I saw her was at the annual Edwin Morgan Forster party, a zillion-dollar bash on an Arabian theme with real sand and an angry camel. Wearing a turban to hide her tufted baldness, Jill was, as usual, making me laugh.
“Slash and burn, Kate, you’d hardly believe how bloody primitive the treatment is. I feel like a medieval village they’re razing to the ground. Only one would rather be pillaged by Vikings than an oncologist, don’t you think?”
Before the treatment, Jill had dense, springy auburn hair and that Celtic top-of-the-milk skin with a sprinkling of cinnamon freckles. Three babies — all hefty boys — had not managed to weigh down the coltish body of the sometime netball Goal Attack. Robin said that to get the full measure of his wife you had to see her tennis backhand: just when you thought it was all over, when there was no possibility of the ball being returned, she would uncoil and whip it down the line. I watched her do it at the Cooper-Clark place in Sussex two summers ago, and when she struck the ball, Jill let out a defiant, joyous, “Ha!” I think we were all waiting for her to pull that stroke on the cancer.
Jill is survived by her three sons and by her husband, who has just stepped out of the lift. I hear the smart rap of his black Lobbs across the central square of beech that might be used for tea-dancing if this were another, gentler, kind of business. We are both in the office appallingly early, Robin to catch up, me to get ahead. He rustles around in his room, coughing, opening and closing a drawer.
I take him in a mug of tea and he starts. “Oh, hello, Kate. Look, I’m so sorry, leaving you to manage alone. I know how much hassle it is and on top of the Salinger stuff. But after the funeral I’ll be all yours.”
“Don’t worry. Everything’s under control.” A lie. I want to ask how he is, but that early-warning system of his, the one that sees off painful personal questions, is on red alert. So I ask something else. “How are the boys?”
“Well, we’re luckier than a lot of people,” says Robin, switching smoothly into Head of Investment mode. “You know Tim’s at Bristol now, Sam’s doing GCSEs and Alex is nearly nine. It’s not as though they’re little boys anymore who really — um, need a mother in the way that younger boys do actually need their mothers.” And then he makes a noise that no one has ever heard in the offices of Edwin Morgan Forster before. Halfway between a bark and a moan, it is barely human — or maybe all too human — and I never want to hear it again.
He pinches the bridge of his nose for a few furious seconds and then turns back to me. “Jill left this,” he says, handing over a sheaf of paper. Twenty pages of close-typed script, it bears the title YOUR FAMILY: HOW IT WORKS!
“Everything’s in there,” he says, shaking his head in wonder. “She even tells me where to find the bloody Christmas decorations. You’d be amazed how much there is to remember, Kate.”
No, I wouldn’t.
FRIDAY, 12:33 P.M. If I leave the office now, I will make it to Jill’s funeral in Sussex at three o’clock with plenty of time to pick up a sandwich on the way to the station. Momo and I are going through some stuff for another final. Momo asks if I knew Mr. Cooper-Clark’s wife and I tell her Jill was an amazing person.
Momo wrinkles her little nose. “But she didn’t work, did she?”
I look at Momo’s face — what is she: twenty-four, twenty-five? Young enough not to know what women put up with before her; young enough to take her own freedom for granted. Calmly I say, “Jill was fast-track civil service until Sam, her second, was two years old. She’d have been running the Home Office by now, but she decided to run her own home instead. She just didn’t think that she and Robin could both have ballbreaking jobs without the children being affected. She said she tried to believe it was possible, but her heart wouldn’t let her.”
Momo bends down to put something in the bin and out of the window I can see the pigeon, her feathers puffed out like a crinoline over the eggs. Daddy pigeon is nowhere to be seen. Where is he?
“Oh, how sad,” says Momo. “I mean, what a waste to end up doing nothing with your life.”
1:11 P.M. If I leave the office right this minute, I should make it to the train.
1:27 P.M. Am running out of the office when Robin’s secretary hands me Jill’s family memo; he’s forgotten it. I sprint to Cannon Street. By the time I reach the river, lungs are hoarse, beads of sweat cascading over my breasts like a broken necklace. Stumble on steps to the station and gash left knee of tights. Damn. Damn. Dash across station concourse, skid into Knickerbox and grab first pair of black tights I see. Tell startled girl to keep the change. At the barrier, the guard grins and says, “Too late, love.” Swerve round the barrier, board accelerating train pursued by guard. Through the window, London recedes with surprising speed, its gray circuitry soon blurring into deep country. I can hardly bear to look at the spring: so ear-splittingly green, so childishly hopeful.
I buy a cup of coffee from a passing trolley and open my briefcase to take out some work. On the top of the pile is Jill’s family memo. I shouldn’t read it, but I really want to read it. I want to hear my friend again, even if it’s only her words written down. Maybe if I just look at one page?
When you supervise Alex’s bath, don’t forget to do in between his fingers, there’s usually a load of black fluff in there and the odd raisin!
Alex will tell you he doesn’t like pasta. He does like pasta, so persist.
I promised Sam he could have contact lenses for his fifteenth birthday. Whenever you’re about to shout at him, count silently to ten and think
