I Don't Know How She Does It

motherhood full-time. But I know you’ll be back. Hail the conkering heroine….

Rod said you left London. Remember what your dad called Sinatra? The Patron Saint of Unrequited Love.

The great thing about unrequited love is it’s the only kind that lasts.

Yours forever, Jack

Richard and I sold the Hackney Heap, moved up to Derbyshire near my family, and bought a place on the edge of a market town with a view and a paddock. (I’d always wanted a paddock and now I had one I had no idea what to do with it.) The house needs loads of work, but there are a couple of good rooms and the rest can wait. The kids love having the space to run around in and Richard is in his element. When he’s not working on the arts center, he’s building a dry-stone wall, and every five minutes he asks me to come and look at it.

Not long after I resigned, I got a call from Robin Cooper-Clark asking if I’d come in with him on a hedge fund. Part-time work, minimal foreign travel, all promises that I knew would be scorched away in the heat of the chase. It was tempting: with the money he was offering I could have bought half the village and things are pretty tight for us with just the one income, but when Emily heard me say Robin’s name, she stiffened and said, “Please don’t talk to him.” Cooper-Clark is a name she associates with the years Mummy went missing.

I know my daughter a little better these days. A couple of months after leaving work, I realized that all those carefully timetabled bedtime chats had told me nothing about what was really going on in Em’s head. That stuff comes out spontaneously; you can’t force it. You just have to be around when it happens. As for her brother, his sweetness grows in direct proportion to his capacity for mischief. Recently, he discovered Lego, with which he builds a wall, and every five minutes he asks me to come and look at it.

Richard and I took both kids down to meet Sally Cooper-Clark. She was as kind and warm as Robin had described and I could see how she gave him back his ease and elasticity, not to mention his immaculate shirts. On the drive back, I left Rich and the kids in a pub garden for ten minutes and I walked across to the church and down the hill to Jill Cooper-Clark’s grave.

Weird, isn’t it, how you want to seek out the physical place where someone is buried? If Jill is anywhere, now, she’s everywhere. But I stood there anyway, in front of the neat white headstone with the soft gray lettering. At the bottom it says: SHE WAS WELL LOVED.

I didn’t actually speak aloud — this was Sussex, for heaven’s sake — but I thought all the things that I wanted Jill to know about. They say that women need role models and I suppose we do, but high achievement is not confined to high flyers. There is a currency we were never called upon to trade in at EMF, and in that Jill was the richest person I’ve ever met.

And me? Whatever happened to me? Well, I spent some time with myself, a pretty unsatisfactory companion. I loved walking Emily to the local school and standing at the gate to collect her; the puddles are iced over this time of year and we love to stand on them and wait for the creak before the crack. During schooltime, Ben and I pottered around the house and hung out at coffee mornings with other mums with small kids. I was bored to the point of manslaughter. My eczema cleared up but my cheeks ached from trying to keep my face looking friendly and interested. Queuing in the local bank, I would find myself sneaking looks at the foreign exchange rates. I have an awful feeling they thought I was planning a robbery.

Then, a couple of Fridays ago, I got a call from Julie. It was a crackly mobile, but I could tell she was in tears. For a second I thought Mum! and my stomach went down a mine shaft, but it wasn’t that; the factory where Jules does piecework had gone bust. Manager done a bunk, receivers called in. They were putting padlocks on the doors. All the women who had still been at their machines were now shivering out in the yard. Could I come down?

No, I said. Ben needed his lunch and, besides, I really didn’t know what use I could be. When Julie answered, it was in a voice I recognized from childhood, the one my little sister had when she asked if she could get into bed with me as the raging voices of our mother and father came through the floorboards. “But I’ve told everyone you’re a businesswoman, Kath, and you’ll be able to tell us what’s what.”

Combed my hair, put some lipstick on and dug out Armani jacket from the wardrobe in the spare room. I wanted to look like the woman Julie had described to her colleagues. When I slipped the jacket on, it was like being back in uniform: the gray wool impregnated with the smell of power, of money being made and things getting done. I wrestled Ben into the baby seat and drove down to the industrial estate. It wasn’t hard to find Julie’s place. The notice on the fence said TRADITIONAL ENGLISH DOLLS’ HOUSES and over that was a sticker: Liquidation Sale — Everything Must Go! In the yard, there were about forty seamstresses, many wearing the most amazing saris. They parted as I arrived, and it was like walking through a flock of tropical birds. I waved my old Platinum Amex at the guy standing by a side door, told him I’d come up from London and was looking to buy some stuff. Inside, the dollhouses were abandoned in mid-decoration: tiny sofas, footstools, velvet pelmets, porcelain toilets awaiting their wooden seats, grand pianos the size of a powder compact.

“What can we do, Kath?” asked Julie when I came out.

Absolutely nothing. “I’ll try and find out what’s happened.”

The next day, I dropped Em at school, left a delighted Ben with his equally delighted grandmother and got the train down to London. Cab across town to Companies House: it didn’t take long to get the dollhouse people’s accounts for the last five years. You should have seen them. The business was a wreck: disappearing margins, no investment, piles of debt, a complete financial basket case.

On the train back up north, I tried to read the paper, but the type wouldn’t stay still. There were plenty of ethical funds out there under instruction to invest in women-only companies; I knew that better than anyone. Money for the taking, really. But when the train shuddered to a halt at Chesterfield, it shook some sense into me.

Kate Reddy, I can’t believe you are even having this thought. Take on something like that? You’d have to be out of your mind, woman. Out of your bloody mind.

7:37 P.M. Bedtime. Brush teeth, four recitations of Goodnight Moon, three Owl Babies, visits to the bathroom (four), attempts on potty (two), time taken till lights out: forty-eight minutes. Must improve.

8:37 P.M. Call to Candy Stratton in New Jersey to discuss mail-order market and distribution with view to global dollhouse business.

“I knew it,” she hollers.

“I’m making inquiries for a friend.”

“Yeah, right. Tell her to wear that red bra when she goes to get the financing.”

9:11 P.M. Call to Gerry at Dickinson Bishop in New York. Sussing out funds specifically designated to invest in women-only companies. Gerry says it’s a steal. “Ethical’s the new Viagra, Katie.”

10:27 P.M. Ben has accident in bed. Change sheet. Try to find pull-up nappy. Where are nappies?

11:48 P.M. Wake Momo Gumeratne at home to talk about possibility of wooden dollhouse frames being made by workers employed by Sri Lankan aid agency she’s been advising.

“Kate,” she says, “can I do it with you?”

“I’m not doing anything. Go back to sleep.”

MIDNIGHT. Take glass of water up to Emily. The great gray eyes stare up at me in the dark.

“Mummy, you’re thinking,” she says accusingly.

“Yes, love, it’s allowed, you know. How would you like to help Mummy build a palace?”

“Yes, but it’s got to have a tower where Beauty sleeps.”

“It absolutely does.”

1:01 A.M. Still time to go over the figures from the factory — what is required is a proper