I Don't Know How She Does It

Chuuuussh. Chuuuuussh. The iron and my mother chide me simultaneously with their soft sighs.

“It’s not easy for him, you know. He’s that bright but he’s not had the outlets, not like you. In your dad’s family, there was no question of going on to college. Always liked the sound of medicine, but it was years of studying and there just wasn’t the money.”

“If he’s that clever, why does he keep getting himself into trouble?”

My mother ends conversations she isn’t keen on with a non sequitur. “Well, he was always very proud of you, Kath. I had to stop him showing your GCSE certificates to everyone.”

She folds the sleeves behind the last blouse and adds it to the basket. There is no sign of the two I bought her last year in Liberty’s for her birthday, or of other gifts. “Have you worn that red cardigan I got you, Mum?”

“But it’s cashmere, love.”

Since I’ve been working, I’ve bought my mother lovely clothes — I wanted her to have them, I needed her to have them. I wanted to make things all right for her. But she always puts everything I bring her away for best, best being some indeterminate date in the future when life will at long last live up to its promise.

“Can I get you some cake?”

No. “Yes, lovely.”

On the sideboard, next to the carriage clock purchased a quarter of a century ago with Green Shield stamps, there is a photograph of my parents taken in the late fifties. A seaside place, they’re laughing, and behind them the sky is flecked with gulls. They look like film stars: Dad doing his Tyrone Power thing, Mum with her inky Audrey Hepburn eyes and those matador pants that end at the calf and a pair of little black pumps. When I was a child that photograph used to taunt me with its happiness. I wanted the mother in the picture to come back. I knew that if I waited long enough she would come back. She was just saving herself for best.

Next to the picture is a silver frame containing one of Emily on her second birthday, lit up with glee. Mum follows my glance.

“Gorgeous, isn’t she?”

I nod happily. No matter how battered family relations, a baby can make them new. When Emily was born and Mum came to see us in hospital and laid her hand, speckled with age, on the newborn’s, I understood how having a daughter could help you to bear the thought of your own mother’s death. I wondered then, but never dared ask, whether it helped Mum to bear the idea of leaving Julie and me.

There is a clatter of pans from the kitchen. “Mum, please come and sit down.”

“You just put your feet up, love.”

“But I want you to sit down.”

“In a minute.”

I can’t tell her about Richard. How can I tell her?

JULIE LIVES TEN MINUTES’ DRIVE from my mum. Streets in this type of estate were always named after plants and trees, as though that might in some way make amends to the natural environment that had been torn up to build them. But Orchard Way and Elm Drive and Cherry Walk look like cruel taunts now, pastoral notes in a symphony of cement and reinforced glass. My sister’s house is in Birch Close, a horseshoe of sixties semi-detached houses hemmed in by properties from succeeding decades, all full of good ideas from town planners for restoring a sense of community so carefully destroyed by town planners.

As I pull up in the Volvo, a group of kids who are kicking around on the pavement let out a noise between a cheer and a jeer, but as soon as I climb out and glare at them they scarper — even the thugs lack conviction up here. The front garden of Number 9 has a circle of earth carved out in the center of the lawn with one skinny rhododendron surrounded by clumps of that tiny white flower I always think of as being England’s answer to edelweiss. Parked with one wheel on the ribbed concrete drive, there is a trike that must have been abandoned when Julie’s kids were small; in its rusty yellow seat there is a dark compote of leaves and rain.

The woman who answers the door is well into middle age, with a listless pageboy haircut, although she is three years and one month younger than me, a fact I will never forget because my very first memory is of being carried into my parents’ bedroom to see her the night she was born. The wallpaper was green; the baby was red and wrapped in a white shawl I had watched my mother knit in front of the stove. She made funny snuffling sounds, and when you gave her your finger she wouldn’t let go. She was called a sister. I told Mum her name should be Valerie after my favorite TV presenter. So, thinking they might be spared some jealousy if I had an investment in the new arrival, my parents christened her Julie Valerie Reddy and she has never let me forget it.

“You’d best come in, then,” my sister says. Spotting the car over my shoulder, she tuts and says, “They’ll have the tires off that. Do you want to bring it up the drive? I can clear this stuff.”

“No, it’ll be fine really.”

We squeeze through the narrow hall with its white wrought-iron stand overflowing with spider plants.

“Plants are doing well, Julie,” I say.

“Can’t kill them if you try.” She shrugs. “There’s tea in the pot, do you want a cup? Steven, get your feet off the settee, your Auntie Kath’s here from London.”

A good-looking small boy trapped in the body of a lunk, Steven lollops through to greet me while his mum fetches some cups.

I am bringing the news that my husband has left me as a gift to my sister, a peace offering. Julie, who grew up wearing my clothes, who used to overhear teachers comparing her with the other Reddy girl, the one who got to Cambridge, and who has never ever had anything nicer than I have in her whole life. Well, now her big sister has failed to keep her man and in this, the oldest contest of all, I can concede defeat.

“Place is a tip,” Julie says by way of description, not apology, before she clears some magazines off the settee and kicks Steven’s soccer kit towards the door.

She sits me down in the armchair next to the gas fire. “Come on, then, what’s up with you?”

“Richard’s left me,” I say, and it’s the first time I’ve cried since Paula told me on the phone. There were no tears when I explained to Emily that Daddy would be living in a different house for a while because there was no way I wanted to share my distress with a six-year-old whose idea of men is founded on the prince in Sleeping Beauty, and no tears either when, three nights ago, Richard and I had a civilized exchange on the doorstep about arrangements for the children. We are always discussing arrangements for the children, only the conversation usually ends with me running out the door and saying I have to go; this time it was Richard who walked down the steps and away, yanking over his shoulders the gray sweater I bought him to match his eyes two birthdays ago.

“Well, a right useless bugger he turned out to be,” Julie says. “All you’ve got on your plate, and he hops it.” Without my noticing, she has knelt down in front of me and has an arm around my neck.

“It’s my fault.”

“Like hell it is.”

“No, it is, it is; he left a note for me.”

“A note? Oh, that’s great, that is. Bloody men. Either they’re too clever to feel owt or they’re like our Neil and they’re too thick to say owt.”

“Neil’s not thick.”

When Julie laughs, the little girl I once knew is there in the room — full of fun and not afraid. “No, but you’d have more clue how the hamster’s doing than Neil, quite frankly. Has he got another woman, then, your Richard?”

It hadn’t even occurred to me. “No, I don’t think so, I think it’s me that’s another woman. The one he married isn’t there anymore. He said he couldn’t get through to me, that I don’t listen to him.”

Julie smooths my hair. “Well, you’re working too hard to keep him in pencils.”

“He’s a very good architect.”

“It’s you who keeps the show on the road, though, paying all the bills and whatnot.”

“I think that’s hard for him, Jules.”

“Aye, well if the world was run according to what men found hard to take we’d still be walking round in chastity belts, wouldn’t we? Are you having sugar?”

No. “Yes.”