I Don't Know How She Does It

merciful instant death.

Should be just enough to cover the cake, anyway. It takes eight minutes to pound the icing rock to dust. Careful not to add too much warm water, then eke in the teeniest drop of yellow coloring. This produces a shade of pale lemon: a bit mimsy, a bit — how can I put this? — a bit head-boy’smother’s-dress at prep-school speech day. Need something cheerier for a birthday: egg-yolk yellow, Van Gogh yellow. Emboldened, I add a couple of drops more. The color is now both watery and intense like a rank urine specimen. I add a further two drops and stir furiously.

I am tearfully contemplating the contents of the basin when Rich comes into the kitchen talking about some documentary on child development. “Do you know that babies identify their gender roles from three months? Probably why Ben spends all day sitting on the potty reading the sports pages. Like father, like — Christ, Kate, what’s that?”

Rich has spotted the icing. The icing is now a color which, if you were being kind, could be described as Safari Yellow. It is disturbingly reminiscent of one of Ben’s more challenging nappies.

Richard laughs, that unforgivable liberated laugh that escapes when you’re just so fantastically grateful someone else has screwed up, not you. “Don’t worry, honey,” he says. “Let’s work the problem. We have icing the color of dung, so we will make — a cow cake! Got any white chocolate buttons?”

SUNDAY, 7:19 P.M. The party went pretty well, if you discount Joshua Mayhew throwing up in the hall and the moment when I brought in the cake and started the singing.

“Happy birthday, dear Emily, happy birthday to you!”

“But, Mummy, I don’t want brown icing,” she wailed.

“It’s not brown, darling, it’s yellow.”

“I don’t want yellow. I want pink.”

When all eighteen guests have departed, I set about clearing up the debris: juice cartons like collapsed lungs, Barbie paper plates, twenty-six untouched egg sandwiches (there to make the parents feel better; no self- respecting child would even nibble anything so free of additives). Earlier today, I sent an e-mail to Jack Abelhammer suggesting that, under the circumstances, it might be better if I handed over his fund to a colleague. My feelings for him — it started as a minor crush and now I feel as though I’m lying under a steamroller — have made our professional relationship hard to handle. The tone of my message was friendly but firm. For a couple of hours afterwards, I felt the steady glow of having acted responsibly: the brightest bulb in the maternal firmament. Since then, though, the bulb has blown. Either that, or I have tripped over the lead and unplugged myself from the mains — no juice, no flow of energy, certainly no current affairs. Have already checked my Inbox five times for his reply. Come on, Kate, grow up; stop acting like a lovesick teenager.

In my self-denial, I have so far eaten two chocolate Barbie rolls and a bowl of Twiglets and poured a half- bottle of gin into the homemade lemonade I bought at Marks & Spencer and decanted into a pink jug to pass off as my own.

It’s a hot night: viscous, thirsty for rain. The fan I dug out from under the stairs is no use; it sits on the kitchen table, sluggishly stirring the soupy air. There was an attempt at thunder earlier, just as we were leaving the swimming baths around four, but it was more like a ripping of brown paper than the full-throated roar we need to scare off the heat. Christ, the heat! And the smell! I am out in the garden scraping the rug over which Joshua Mayhew threw up. The oatmeal vomit is studded with pastel minarets of Iced Gems.

I did notice Josh looking pale and clammy during Pass the Parcel and managed to get him out into the hall, but as I was struggling with the front door he deposited his birthday tea on the runner. When his mother turned up, she shrieked, “What has happened to poor little Joshey?”

I managed to suppress the obvious reply: What has happened is that little Joshey has carpet-bombed five hundred pounds’ worth of Uzbekistan kelim. If it had been the contents of my child’s stomach, I would have been down on my knees proffering a checkbook. But Imogen Mayhew, a person so wholesome her entire being seems to have been woven from chamomile, just demanded to know if Joshua had been allowed to have “excess sugar.”

I laughed a tinkly hostess laugh and said that sugar was a traditional staple of birthday parties, but Imogen did not join in the laughter. She left with a look which suggested I can expect imminent litigation against my Nigella fairy cakes. Then, as soon as she was out of the door, I had another encounter with Angela Brunt, who was kneeling by the coats and scraping strawberry Frube off Davina’s green velvet. “Have you got Emily in anywhere yet, Kate?”

“No.”

“Well, Davina has a guaranteed place at Morton’s, but her second interview at Piper Place is on Thursday and that’s the one we’re holding out for because it opens the door to so many other things, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, doesn’t it.”

After washing my hands to try and remove the smell of vomit, I go into the sitting room where Richard has crashed out on the sofa, a Sunday Review section tented over his face. Every time he breathes out, he inflates the breasts of Madonna, whose picture is on the cover above a feature entitled FROM VIRGIN TO BLESSED MOTHER. Perhaps I should call Madonna for a mum-to-mum chat about how to sponge vomit from a kelim? Presumably at her daughter’s parties she has a designated sick-wrangler. How much do I hate the celebrity Having-It-All Mother who boasts about how fulfilled she is when you just know she has a fleet of substitute mothers doing it all for her?

“Rich?”

“Hmmmmm?” The paper slides down onto the bridge of his nose.

“We have to get Emily down for Piper Place.”

“Why?”

“Because it opens so many doors.”

“You’ve been talking to Angela Brunt again.” His sigh is so big it’s practically a yawn.

“No.”

“Katie, that woman’s poor kid is so pressurized she’s going to end up as the neighborhood crack dealer.”

“But she can play the oboe.”

“All right, the neighborhood’s oboe-playing crack dealer. Your daughter knows all of Mary Poppins by heart. Give her a break, OK?”

Richard spent most of Emily’s swimming party in the deep end with Mathilde, mother of Laurent, who is in Em’s class at school. I was in the shallows, pulling ten screaming children round on a snake made of orange tubing. On the way home in the car, Rich sighed and said, “Frenchwomen do keep themselves in good nick, don’t they?”

He sounded exactly like his mother.

“Mathilde doesn’t work,” I said crossly.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“After the age of thirty, body maintenance is a full-time job. And I already have one of those, in case you haven’t noticed.”

For a second, he rested his head on the steering wheel. “It wasn’t a criticism of you, Kate. Not everything’s a criticism of you, you know.”

After the kitchen is clean and I’ve crawled the length of the hall pinching up orange Wotsit dust with my thumb and forefinger — if I use the Hoover it’ll wake them — I sit down for five minutes to watch TV. An hour later I’m woken by the phone. It’s Barbara, my motherin-law. “I hope you don’t think I’m talking out of turn, Katharine, but Richard did sound awfully fed up when I spoke to him earlier. It’s not my place to say anything, of course, but let things go in a certain department and before you know where you are — well, the whole shop closes down.”

“Yes, Barbara, but it’s been Emily’s party and—”

“Anyway, Richard’s father and I are coming down on Saturday to take in that marvelous show at the Royal Academy.”

I realize that the pause indicates I should say something. “Oh, that’s nice, Barbara. Where will you be