There is no possible reply to that, and into my silence Paula murmurs, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything here. Ben and Em will be fine. It’s going to be all right, Kate, really it is.”
After I’ve put the phone down, I forget how to breathe for a few seconds. Suddenly the mechanics of taking in air seem complicated and strenuous; I have to heave my diaphragm up and then pump my chest out, heave and pump again.
When I’m a little steadier, I call Jack and leave a message on his mobile canceling dinner. Then I get undressed and take a shower. The towels are that hopeless Italian kind; thin and frugal as an altar cloth, they pat the water round your skin rather than absorbing it. I need a towel that can hug me.
Catching sight of myself in the bathroom mirror, I am startled to see that I look much as I did the last time I looked. Why isn’t my hair falling out? Why aren’t my eyes weeping blood? I think of my children asleep in their beds and of how far I am from them, how unbelievably far. From this distance, I see my little family as a small encampment on a hillside and the winds are lashing round them and I have to be there to tie everything down. I have to be there.
I climb into bed, between the stiff white sheets, and move my hand over my body. My body and, for so long, Richard’s body. With this body I thee worship. I try to think of the last time I saw him. Saw him properly, I mean, not just the way you see a blur in the rearview mirror. In the past few months, I go out and he takes over or he leaves and I take over. We swap instructions in the hall. We say Emily has eaten a good lunch, so don’t worry too much about her tea. We say Ben needs an early night because he wouldn’t take a nap this afternoon. We say bowel movements have been successful or are still pending and perhaps some prunes would help. Or else we leave notes. Sometimes we barely meet each other’s eyes. Kate and Richard, like a relay team where each runner suspects the other of being the weaker link, but the main thing is to keep running round the track so the baton can be exchanged and the race can go on and on.
“Mummy, I know why you get cross with Daddy,” Emily said to me the other morning.
“Why?”
“Because he does wrong things.”
I knelt down beside her, so I could look straight into her eyes. It felt important to set the record straight. “No, sweetheart, Daddy doesn’t do wrong things. Mummy just sometimes gets very tired and that makes her not patient with Daddy, that’s all.”
“Patient means wait a minute,” she said.
I pick up
— The Talmud
Home. I look at the word for a long time. Home. Hear its rounded center. Picture what it means. I am married but am not a wife, have children but am not a mother. What am I?
I know a woman who is so afraid of her children’s need for her that, rather than go home after work, she sits in the wine bar to wait until they’re asleep.
I know a woman who wakes her baby at 5:30 every morning so she can have some time with him.
I know a woman who went on a TV discussion program and talked about doing the school run. Her nanny told me she barely knew where her kids’ school was.
I know a woman who heard down the phone from a baby-sitter that her baby took his first steps.
And I know a woman who found out her husband left her from a note that was read out to her by her nanny.
I lie there for a long time in the bed, maybe hours, waiting until I start to feel something. And finally it comes: a feeling both intensely familiar and shockingly strange. It takes me a few seconds to know what it is. I want my mother.
34 Home to Mum
HOWEVER HARD I SEARCH, I can’t come up with a memory of my mother sitting down. Always standing. Standing at the sink holding a pan under running water, standing by the ironing board, standing at the school gate in her good navy coat; bringing in plates of hot food from the kitchen and then clearing them away again. Common sense suggests there must have been an interval between bringing the plates in and taking them out when she sat down and ate with us, but I don’t remember it. Dishes, once they were let out of cupboards, became a “mess” to my mother, and a mess needed clearing up. You could still be in mid-forkful, but if the plate looked empty Mum would whisk it away.
My mother’s generation was born for service; it was their vocation and their destiny. The gap between school — routine, things you do because you must, bad smells — and motherhood — routine, things you do because you must, bad smells — was a matter of a few years. Those fifties girls had a window of freedom, but the window was seldom wide enough to climb through, and anyway what would become of them if they got out? Women like my mum didn’t expect much of life, and in general life did not disappoint them. Even when the men they served ran out on them or died too early from strokes and disorders of the stomach, they often stayed at their posts — preparing meals, hoovering, grabbing any ironing that was going from their children or grandchildren and never sitting down if they could possibly help it. It was as though they defined themselves in doing for others, and the loss of that definition left them blurred, confused: like the pit ponies who kept their tunnel vision long after they had been let loose in a field.
For my generation, coming to it later and sometimes too late, motherhood was a shock. Sacrifice wasn’t written into our contract. After fifteen years as an independent adult, the sudden lack of liberty could be as stunning as being parted from a limb; entwined with the intense feeling of love for your baby was a thin thread of loss, and maybe we will always ache like an amputee.
What my mum still calls Women’s Liberation had just about taken off by the time I was born, but it never reached the parts where my parents lived and, to a remarkable extent, still hasn’t. (If you live in London and read only certain newspapers, you would think that equality was a done deal, not some futuristic experiment still under scrutiny in select laboratories by men in white coats.) One summer, my mother grew her perm out and had her hair cut short in a feathery style that flattered her elfin features. Julie and I loved it, she looked so pretty and cheeky, but when my dad came in that night he said, “It’s a bit Women’s Lib, Jean,” and the style was grown out without fuss, without any more needing to be said.
As I entered my teens, it occurred to me that things were not what they seemed: although the men round our way took all the leading roles, it was the women who were running the show, but they were never allowed to be onstage. It was a matriarchy pretending to be a patriarchy to keep the lads happy. I always thought that was because where I came from people didn’t get much of an education. Now I think that’s what the whole world’s like, only some places hide it better than others.
IN THE PLAYGROUND, the children’s cries fill the air like starlings. The school is a red-brick building, with tall churchy windows, dating from an era when people had faith both in God and education. Over in the far corner, next
