I Don't Know How She Does It

to the climbing frame, there is a woman in a navy three-quarter coat bending down. When she straightens up, I can see she is holding a handkerchief which is attached to the bloody nose of a small girl.

My mother is a nursery school assistant. She’s been here for years now and basically she runs the place, but they still call her an assistant. Because they can get away with it — Mum doesn’t like to make a fuss — and because it means they can pay her less. The money’s terrible. When she told me how much I shouted with dismay; I could blow it on cab fares in three days. But if you use words like exploitation, my mother just laughs. Says she likes the job, it gets her out of the house. Besides, she has a way with children. If your three-year-old had a bleeding nose, believe me, you’d want my mother to be the one holding her hand. Jean Reddy is one of those souls who exude comfort like a human hot-water bottle.

When she looks across the yard, she knows it’s me instantly, but it takes another second before the pleasure floods into her face. “Oh, Kathy, love,” she says, coming over with the wounded tot in tow, “what a lovely surprise. I thought you were in America.”

“I was. Got back a couple of days ago.”

When I kiss her cheek, it’s apple cold. “Now, Lauren,” my mother says, addressing the sniffling child, “this is my little girl. Say hello!”

The ringing bell signals the end of Mum’s shift and we go indoors to fetch her bag from the staff room. In the corridor, she introduces me to Val, the headmistress of the primary school. “Oh, yes, Katharine, we’ve heard so much about you. Jean showed me the cutting in the paper. You’ve done very well for yourself, haven’t you?”

I’m eager to get out of here, but my mother enjoys showing me off. The hand she puts on my arm as she steers me between colleagues reminds me of Emily at World Feast Day parading Mummy in front of her friends.

Parked in front of the school, the Volvo is filled with kids’ stuff. “How are they?” Mum asks as we climb in. I tell her they’re fine and with Paula. On the drive to the flat, we pass my old school and she sighs. “Did you hear about Mr. Dowling? Terrible.”

“He took early retirement, didn’t he?”

“Yes. A lass. Can you imagine a young lass doing something like that, Kath?”

Mr. Dowling was my head of history twenty years ago, a blinky soft-spoken man with a vast enthusiasm for Elizabethan England and the poetry of the First World War. A few months ago, some little cow in the fifth form punched his glasses into his face and he took early retirement soon after. Mr. Dowling, an archetypal grammar- school boy, had become one of the casualties of the comprehensive system — a doctrine of equality which means that all the kids round here who want to learn something are in classes with kids who don’t.

“They’ll expect you to have read widely, Katharine, but we’ve very little time,” Mr. Dowling said to me when he was preparing me for Cambridge entrance. I was the only one in my year, the only one for as long as anyone could remember except Michael Brain, who got to Oxford to read law and was now at the Bar, which we were told had nothing to do with pubs. It was after school, in Mr. Dowling’s office off the library, with the electric fire with just one bar working. I loved being in there with him, reading and hearing the click of the filaments. We did the Chartists in a day, the First World War in a weekend. “You won’t know everything, but I think we can give an impression of you knowing the ground,” my teacher said. But I had the famous Reddy memory; England under the Tudors and Stuarts, the Ottoman Empire, witchcraft. I had the dates of battles down pat, the way my father memorized the pools: Corunna, Bosworth, Ypres — Raith Rovers, Brechin City, Swindon Town. We could wing anything, Dad and me, if we thought it would pay. Walking up the steps to take my seat alone in the exam room I knew I could do it, if I could only hold the knowledge in there for long enough. Must remember.

“Nice cup of tea. And I’ll do some sandwiches, shall I? Ham all right?” Mum is busying herself with the kettle in the kitchen of the flat. More an alcove than a kitchen; there’s room for only one person in there.

I never want to eat the sandwiches, but a couple of years ago I had one of those maturity leaps when I realized that eating wasn’t the point. My mother’s sandwiches were there to give her something she could do for me, when there is so much she can’t do anymore. Overnight her need to be needed seemed more important than my need to get away. I sit down at the Formica table with the fold-down flaps, the table that sat in all the kitchens of my childhood. (It has a black scab gouged out of the side by a furious Julie after a row with Dad over finishing her rutabaga.) As I eat, Mum puts up the ironing board and starts to work her way through the basket of clothes at her feet. The room is soon filled with the drowsy, comforting smell of baked water. The iron makes little exasperated puffs as it travels the length of a blouse or gets its snout into a tricky cuff.

My mother is a champion ironer. It’s a pleasure to watch her hand move an inch or so ahead of the little steam train, smoothing its path. She smooths and smooths and then she snaps the cloth taut like a conjurer and finally she folds. Arms of a shirt folded behind like a man under arrest. As I watch her, my eyes go swimmy: I think that after she’s gone there’ll be no one who will ever do that for me again — no one who will iron my clothes taking such infinite pains.

“What’s that over your eye, love?”

“Nothing.”

She comes over and lifts my fringe to get a better view of the eczema and I blink back the tears. “I know your nothings, Katharine Reddy.” She laughs. “Have you got some cream off the doctor for it?”

“Yes.” No.

“Have you got it anywhere else?” “No.” Yes, in a flaming itching belt around my middle, behind my ears, behind my knees.

In my pocket, the mobile begins to thrum. I take it out and check the number. Rod Task. I switch the phone off.

“What have I told you about looking after yourself? I don’t know how you manage with work on at you the whole time”—Mum jabs her finger in the direction of the mobile—“and the kiddies as well. It’s no life.”

Back behind the ironing board, she says, “And how’s our Richard keeping?”

I give a crumby mumble. I’ve come all the way up here to tell her that Rich has gone. I hated the idea of leaving the kids with Paula so soon after getting back from the States, but if I put my foot down I can do the journey here and back in a day. And I didn’t want Mum to find out that Richard and I were separated, as I did, down the phone. But now I’m here I can’t quite find the words: Oh, by the way, my husband left me because I haven’t paid attention to him since 1994. She’d think I was joking.

“Richard’s a good man,” she says, trapping a pillowcase on the curved end of the board. “You want to hang on to him, love. They don’t come much better than Richard.”

In the past, I have taken my mother’s enthusiasm for my man as a sign of its opposite for me. Her exclaiming over another of his supposedly miraculous virtues (his ability to make a simple meal, his willingness to spend time with his children) always seemed to draw attention to my matching vices (my reliance on cook-chill food, my working weekends in Milan). Now, sitting here in my mother’s home, I hear her praise for what it is: the truth about someone who has Mum’s gift for putting others before themself.

We had tea in this room the first time I brought Rich back to meet her. I was so determined not to be ashamed of where I came from that by the time we got here, after a hot and dogged ride from London, I had stoked myself up into a defiant take-us-as-you-find-us mood. So what if we don’t have matching cutlery? What if my mother says settee instead of sofa? Are you going to make something of it, are you, are you?

Rich made nothing of it. A natural diplomat, he soon had Mum eating out of his hand merely by tucking into heroic quantities of bread and butter. I remember how big he looked in our house — the furniture was suddenly doll’s furniture — and how gently he negotiated all the no-go areas of my family’s past. (Dad had walked out by then, but his absence was almost as domineering as his presence had been.) Panicked by the idea of Kath’s posh boyfriend, my mum, who always goes to too much trouble, had, on that occasion, gone to too little. But Rich volunteered to go to the shop on the corner for extra milk and came back with two kinds of biscuit and an enthusiasm for the hills whose sooty shoulders you could glimpse from the end of the street.

“Julie said that some men have been round here asking for money that Dad owes them.”

With one hand my mother pats her helmet of gray curls. “It’s nothing. She’d no need to go bothering you with that. All sorted now. Don’t go fretting yourself.”

I must have pulled a face because she adds, “You shouldn’t be too hard on your father, love.”

“Why not? He was hard on us.”