I Don't Know How She Does It

half doing, 30-second blow jobs?

What news of the gorgeous unsuitable Abelhammer? You do realize that, as my oldest friend, your sole role is to give me reasons to envy and disapprove of you.

Lunch nxt Tues or Thurs? xxxxx

6:35 P.M. I collect Emily and Ben from Alice’s house. They fall on me like famished things. Alice’s nanny, Jo, is incredibly nice and says what great kids they are. How thoughtful and imaginative Emily is. Feel a burst of pride and pang of shame simultaneously as I realize how often I see them as a problem to be dealt with rather than something to be enjoyed.

Must appoint a temporary nanny tonight, unless I can persuade Richard to work from home or Paula makes miracle recovery. I have a total horror of asking favors on my own or my children’s behalf — reminds me of when Dad pushed me towards a woman at the bus station in Leeds one Christmas and told me to ask if she could let us have a fiver to get home because we’d run out of petrol. We didn’t even have a car. But the lady was so nice about it; she gave me the money and a packet of Jelly Tots for myself. The sweets stuck inside my hot cheeks like ulcers.

Jo says Ben has been clingy all day and she thinks he has some kind of rash on his chest. Has he had chicken pox? No, he hasn’t. But he can’t have it now. Am booked on 8:30 a.m. flight to New York.

10:43 P.M. I can’t believe it. I stand on the landing outside the bathroom draped in a tiny towel screaming for Richard.

“There’s no hot water.”

“What?” He stands halfway up the stairs from the hall, his face in shadow. “Oh, they turned the water off today when the rat guy was checking the pipes. Must have flicked the switch.”

“I have to have my bath.”

“Darling, be reasonable.” His voice is parched with weariness. “I’ll put it on now and it’ll be hot in twenty minutes.”

“Now. I need a bath now.”

“Kate—” He stops, looks at me as if about to say something, but then just tightens his lips and stares at me, shaking his head.

“What? What is it?” I snap.

“Kate. We…can’t go on like this.”

“Too right we can’t. I have no hot water. I have rats. I have a house that is a complete tip and no one to clean it. I needed to be asleep an hour ago and I really really really would like there to be some hot water, Richard. I work all the hours God sends and I live in conditions of medieval squalor. Is a bath too much to ask for?”

Rich reaches out an arm, but I bat it away. My tears are alarmingly hot — the temperature of the bath I’m not going to have. Must try to calm down. My husband looks wild-eyed. Why hasn’t he shaved?

Just now, from over our heads, comes a voice. “Roo,” it whimpers. “Roo.”

32 I Went Back Too Soon

1:05 A.M. Have you ever thought how much time you waste falling asleep? Falling sounds satisfactorily fast, but you don’t fall, do you? I find I have to sort of sidle up on sleep and ask if it could please let me in, like someone in the queue for a club trying to catch the eye of a doorman who is always looking the other way. Seven minutes of pillow-plumping and hollowing, the obligatory tussle with the duvet (Richard likes one leg hooked outside, which pins it down like a groundsheet and leaves me barely covered), I take a herbal sleeping tablet to summon instant shut-eye.

3:01 A.M. Can’t sleep for worrying that the sleeping tablet is so strong I will sleep through my alarm and miss the flight from Heathrow. I switch on the bedside light and read the paper. Next to me, Rich grunts and turns over. The foreign pages have more on the story of the American chief executive who went back to work four days after her twins were born. She chaired a meeting via speaker phone from her hospital bed. Her name is Elizabeth Quick. No, seriously. Sister to Hannah Haste and Isabel Imperative, presumably. “Liz Quick has become a poster woman for working mothers,” the article says, “but opponents say motherhood will distract her from her job.”

I can feel my whole body crumple. Do people like Ms. Quick have any idea how their valiant effort to act as though nothing has changed can be used as a stick to beat other women?

God knows, I can’t talk. I went back to work too soon after Emily. I didn’t know — how can you? — that this new life will be almost as strange to you as it is to them. Mother and baby: newborns both. Before Children — a woman’s existence is divided into BC and AC — when I still had time to go to the National Gallery on Sunday afternoons, I used to like to sit in front of that Bellini Madonna, the one where she’s in the foreground of a kind of farm, baked by the sun, gazing down at the lovely infant in her lap. I’d always thought it was serenity in her eyes. Now I see only exhaustion and mild puzzlement. “Christ, what have I done?” Mary asks the son of God. But he’s sleeping, full of milk, one plump arm flung in abandon over his mother’s blue dress.

I was the first woman on the investment floor at Edwin Morgan Forster to get pregnant: six months gone when James Entwhistle, Rod Task’s predecessor, called me into his office and said he couldn’t guarantee there would be a job for me when I got back from maternity leave. “You know how fast things move on with clients, Kate. It’s nothing personal.”

Civilized, decent, erudite James. I suppose I could have quoted the legislation at him, but there’s nothing they hate more than being reminded of their family-friendly policy. (EMF’s family-friendly policy exists so they can say they have a policy, not so people with families can invoke it. No man would ever use it anyway, so neither can any woman who wants to be taken seriously.) “Of course, the baby won’t make any difference, James,” I heard myself saying. He made a note on the jotter with his gold Cartier pen. Commitment? he wrote and underlined it twice.

“Would I be wanting to scale back my foreign clients?” Of course not.

I didn’t know.

At thirty-two weeks, I went to see the consultant at University College Hospital. Routine appointment. I’d missed the last one (Geneva, conference, fog). The consultant steepled his long white fingers like a cardinal and told me he was signing me off work because I was under too much pressure during the crucial weeks of fetal brain development. I said that was out of the question; I planned to work up to my due date so I could have some time at home with the baby afterwards.

“I’m not really worried about you, Mrs. Shattock,” he said coolly. “I worry about the child you’re carrying and the damage you could cause it.” I was crying so hard that when I stepped out onto Gower Street I was nearly run over by a milk cart.

So I took it easy. I took it easier. Technically, I had to stop flying at seven months, but a taupe shift dress saw me through till eight. Bump got so damned big by the end I had to do a three-point turn to get out of the lift. When jokes were made in meetings about needing to reinforce the office floor to support Kate’s weight, I laughed louder than anyone. Every time I walked past the dealing desk, Chris Bunce used to sing the Elephant March from Jungle Book under his breath—“Hup two three four, Keep-it-up two three four!” Bastard.

Sitting at the computer one afternoon, stomach so stretched my skin felt it was crawling with ants, I felt a few Braxton-Hickses, those practice contractions that sound like a retired colonel living in Nether Wallop. By the end, I used to dream of Colonel Hicks coming to my aid. He would carry my briefcase and, when I was standing at the bus stop on City Road nearly keeling over with exhaustion, he would hold out a hand and say, “Will you step aboard, madam?”