In the car, Em kicks the back of the passenger seat with absentminded fury. No point telling her off; she barely knows what she’s doing. Sometimes a five-year-old’s feelings are simply too big for their body.
“Mama, I gotta idea.”
“What’s that, sweetheart?”
“How about if da weekends were weeks and da weeks were weekends.”
As I wait for the lights to change, I have a scratchy sensation in my chest, as though a bird were in there trying to escape.
“Den all da mummies and daddies could be wid dere children more.”
“Emily, will you please talk properly? You’re not a baby anymore.”
In the rearview mirror, I catch her eye and look away.
“Mummy, my tummy hurts. Mummy, will you put me to bed tonight? Are you putting me to bed tonight?”
“Yes, I promise.”
I CANNOT IMAGINE what I was thinking when I let Alexandra Law, Abbess among Mother Superiors, sign me up for the Parent Teachers Association. No, that’s not true, I know exactly what I was thinking: I was thinking that just for one hour in some underlit overheated classroom I could pretend that I’m like any other mother. When the chair makes a reference to the absentee caretaker, I want to give a knowing little smile. I want to groan when someone brings up the matter of the summer fete — that time of year again already! — and I want to breathe that fuggy companionable air. And afterwards, when we’ve voted on a computer levy and plans to improve the sports facilities, I want to clasp my fingers round a white plastic cup containing a boiling orange beverage and I want to refuse a Hobnob, patting my waist significantly, and then I’ll say, “Oh, go on then!” as though succumbing to a chocolate biscuit was the most reckless, heady thing I’d done for a very long time.
But, realistically, what were the chances of my making the PTA meeting at 6:30 on a Wednesday night? Alexandra described 6:30 as “after work,” but what kind of work lets you go before 6:30 these days? Teaching, obviously, but even teachers have Himalayas of marking to do. When I was a child, there were fathers who still came home in time for the family’s evening meal, dads who, in the summer months, would mow the lawn while it was still light and water the sweet peas in the dusk. But that age — the age of working to live instead of living to work — feels far away in a land where district nurses arrive by Morris Traveller and televisions glow like embers at the back. I don’t know anyone at the office who eats with their kids during the week now.
No, it really wasn’t realistic to sign up for the PTA, and three months after joining I have yet to attend a single meeting. So when I drop Emily off at school I try to avoid bumping into Alexandra Law. Easier said than done. Alexandra is harder to avoid than the NatWest Tower.
“Oh, Kate, there you are.” She barrels across the room. Her dress this morning is so densely floral it looks as though she has run into an armchair at speed. “We were thinking of sending out a search party. Ha-ha-ha! Still working full-time? Gosh. I don’t know how you do it. Oh, Diane, I was just saying, we don’t know how she does it, do we?”
Diane Percival, mother of Emily’s classmate Oliver, extends a thin tanned hand with a sapphire the size of a sprout on the second finger. I immediately recognize the type. One of those wives, tensed like longbows, who have a full-time career keeping in shape for their husbands. They exercise, they get their hair done twice a week, they wear full makeup to play tennis and, when that is no longer enough, they willingly submit to the surgeon’s knife. “Those rich stay-home mums are jogging for their lives,” Debra says, and she’s right. These women are not in love, they are in fear — fear that the husband’s love will slip away and land on some replica of their younger selves.
Like me, they are in asset management, but my assets are most of the world’s resources and their asset is themselves — a lovely product but threatened with diminishing returns. Don’t get me wrong. When the time comes I’ll probably have my neck lifted to the back of my ears and, like the Dianes of this world, I’ll have it done to please someone; the difference is, that someone will be me. However much I sometimes don’t want to be Kate, I really really don’t want to be Diane.
I have never actually spoken to Diane Percival before, but this does not stop me going cold at the very thought of her. Diane is the mother who sends notes. Notes to invite your child to a play date, notes to thank your child for coming to a play date (It was nothing, really). Last week, in a spectacular burst of note one-upmanship, Diane actually sent a note from Oliver thanking Emily for an invitation to tea. In what kind of life is it possible to send a note acknowledging an event of almost no significance, which will feature fish fingers and peas and has yet to take place? Deprived of office hierarchies, many of the mothers at my daughter’s school have set about inventing meaningless tests whose sole purpose is that other mothers with better things to do can be seen to fail them.
“Thank you for your thank-you note. I look forward to receiving your note acknowledging receipt of my note. Thank you and get lost.”
8:19 P.M. NOVALIS HOTEL, FRANKFURT. Shit. I won’t be able to put Emily to bed tonight after all. Meeting with German client was brought forward and I had to get on the next plane. It went as well as can be expected. I blagged and blagged and I think I bought us a couple more months, by which time we may have been able to turn around the fund’s performance. Back at the hotel, I pour myself a large drink and have just got into the bath when the phone rings. Christ, what now? For the first time in my life, I pick up the bathroom extension: a cream phone in its cradle on the wall next to the towel rail. It’s Richard. There is something different about his voice. “Darling, I’m afraid I have some sad news. Robin just rang.”
26 Death of a Mother
JILL COOPER-CLARK DIED PEACEFULLY at home in the small hours of Monday morning. She was forty-seven. Diagnosed just after the children broke up from school last summer, the cancer swept through her like a forest fire. The surgeons went in first, and after them a SWAT team of pharmacologists and radiotherapists, all trying to contain the blaze. But the cancer was unquenchable: breasts, lungs, pancreas. It was as though Jill’s energy — she was the most prodigiously energetic person I’ve ever met — was being used against her; as if the life force itself could be hijacked and redeployed in the fell purposes of death. The last time I saw her was at the annual Edwin Morgan Forster party, a zillion-dollar bash on an Arabian theme with real sand and an angry camel. Wearing a turban to hide her tufted baldness, Jill was, as usual, making me laugh.
“Slash and burn, Kate, you’d hardly believe how bloody primitive the treatment is. I feel like a medieval village they’re razing to the ground. Only one would rather be pillaged by Vikings than an oncologist, don’t you think?”
Before the treatment, Jill had dense, springy auburn hair and that Celtic top-of-the-milk skin with a sprinkling of cinnamon freckles. Three babies — all hefty boys — had not managed to weigh down the coltish body of the sometime netball Goal Attack. Robin said that to get the full measure of his wife you had to see her tennis backhand: just when you thought it was all over, when there was no possibility of the ball being returned, she would uncoil and whip it down the line. I watched her do it at the Cooper-Clark place in Sussex two summers ago, and when she struck the ball, Jill let out a defiant, joyous, “Ha!” I think we were all waiting for her to pull that stroke on the cancer.