Donald pushed his specs up his nose and helped himself to parsnips, which I know he can’t stand. Barbara put her hand to her throat as though to cover the puce flush of shock spreading beneath. It couldn’t have been worse if I had announced breast implants or lesbianism or not liking Alan Bennett. All upsets in the natural order.
Rich, meanwhile, was making valiant efforts to pretend I had said bread sauce instead of breadwinner and was dispensing lumps of that porridgey glue to his relatives. “The trouble with you, Kate,” he told me later in our room, as he sat on the bed while I packed a bag for my crisis meeting in London, “is you think that if people have the correct data they will buy your analysis. But they don’t want your data. People — parents — they get to an age when new information is frightening, not helpful. They don’t want to know that you earn more than me. For my father it’s literally unthinkable.”
“And for you?”
He looks down at his shoelaces. “Well, to be honest, I have a pretty hard time with it myself.”
MONDAY, DECEMBER 27, 1:06 P.M. The heating has burst on the train down to London, the windows of the empty carriage are iced up; it’s like traveling inside a giant Fox’s glacier mint. I join the queue at the buffet. My fellow Christmas refugees are all eager for alcohol. Either they have no family or are in flight from too much family, both of them lonely and exhilarating conditions.
I purchase four miniatures — whisky, Bailey’s, Bailey’s, Tia Maria. Back in my seat for just a few seconds when I hear the mobile chirrup in my bag. Can see from the number that it’s Rod Task. Before answering, I take the precaution of holding the phone away from my ear.
“OK, can you explain how we bought this shitload of stock in some fucking Jap outfit that makes fucking mattresses that fucking kill kids? Jesus wept, Katie. Do you hear me?”
I tell Rod I wish I could hear him, but sadly he’s breaking up and the train’s about to go into a tunnel. Press CANCEL. As I’m mixing the second Bailey’s with the whisky, it occurs to me that maybe the reason I got Salinger as a client was because someone knew that Toki Rubber was about to go belly-up and unloaded it onto me. That bastard Bunce, probably.
A few seconds later, Rod rings back so that he and I can have a conference call with the appalling Abelhammer in New York. Delivering the customary reassurances to a client 3,500 miles away, I watch my words rising up in steamy rings of hot air. With a gloved finger, I scratch one word on the frosted window: RICH.
“Hoping for a lottery win are you, love?” the Scouse steward says, pointing at the window when he comes along later to collect my empties.
“What? Oh, Rich isn’t money,” I say. “He’s a man. Rich is my husband.”
Adjust work — life balance for healthier, happier existence.
Get up an hour earlier to maximize time available.
Spend more time with your children.
Learn to be self with children.
Don’t take Richard for granted!
Entertain more — Sunday lunch & so on.
Relaxing hobby??
Learn Italian.
Take advantage of London: theaters, Tate Modern, etc.
Stop canceling stress-busting treatments.
Start a present drawer like proper organized mother.
Attempt to be size 10. Personal trainer?
Call friends, hope they remember you.
Ginseng, oily fish, no wheat.
Sex?
New dishwasher.
Helena Rubinstein Autumn Bonfire?
6 The Court of Motherhood
A DENSE CHURCHY hush fills the oak-paneled room. In the dock stands a blonde in her mid-thirties dressed in a white cotton nightie with a red bra clearly visible underneath. The woman looks exhausted yet defiant. As she faces the gentlemen of the court, she tilts her head like a gun dog that has got the scent. Occasionally, though, when she scratches behind her right ear, you could be forgiven for thinking she is close to tears.
“Katharine Reddy,” booms the judge, “you appear before the Court of Motherhood tonight charged with being a working mother who overcompensates with material things for not being at home with her children. How do you plead?”
“Not guilty,” says the woman.
The prosecuting counsel jumps to his feet. “Can you please tell the court, Mrs. Shattock — I believe that is your correct name — can you tell the court what you gave your children, Emily and Benjamin, for Christmas?”
“Well, I can’t remember exactly.”
“She can’t remember,” sneers the Prosecution. “But it would be fair to say, would it not, that presents approaching the value of four hundred pounds were purchased?”
“I’m not quite sure—”
“For two small children, Mrs. Shattock. Four… hun… dred… pounds. Am I also to understand that, having explained to your daughter Emily that Santa Claus would buy her either a Barbie bicycle or a Brambly Hedge doll’s house or a hamster in a cage with a retractable water bottle, you then went ahead and gave her all of the three aforementioned items plus a Beanie Baby she had expressed interest in during a brief stop in a petrol station outside Newark?”
“Yes, but I bought the doll’s house first and then she wrote to Santa and said she wanted a hamster—”
“Is it also true that when your motherin-law, Mrs. Barbara Shattock, asked you if Emily liked broccoli you said that she absolutely loved it, even though you were at that time unsure of the answer?”
“Yes, but I couldn’t possibly tell my husband’s mother that I didn’t know whether my child liked broccoli.”
“Why not?”
“It’s the kind of thing mothers know.”
“Speak up!” demands the judge.
“I said mothers know that kind of thing.”
“And you don’t?”
The woman can feel her throat constricting and when she swallows she gets no moisture in her mouth but a thin cardboardy coating. This, she thinks, is what it would taste like if you were forced to eat your words. When she starts to speak again, it is very softly.
“Sometimes I don’t know what the children like,” she admits. “I mean, the things they like change from day to day, hour to hour even. Ben couldn’t stand fish and then suddenly. . You see, I’m not always there when they change. But if I told Barbara that she’d think I wasn’t a proper mother.”
The Prosecution turns to the jury, his long vulpine face twitching with the addition of a tight little smirk. “Will the court please note that the defendant prefers to tell a lie rather than suffer any embarrassment.”
The woman shakes her head fiercely. She appeals to the judge. “No, no, no. That is so unfair. It’s not embarrassment, your honor. I can’t describe it. It feels like shame, a deep animal shame, like not being able to pick out your own hands or face. Look, I know there’s no way that Richard — he’s my husband — well, there’s no way that Richard would know whether Emily liked broccoli or not, but him not knowing seems normal. The mother not knowing, it feels unnatural. . ”
“Quite so,” says the judge, jotting down the words “unnatural” and “mother” and underlining them.
“Obviously,” the woman says quickly, fearing she may already have said too much, “obviously, I don’t want to spoil my children.”
We see her stop speaking. She appears to be thinking. Of course, she wants to spoil her children. Desperately. She needs to believe that, in this way at least, they’re better off for her not being with them. She wants Emily and Ben to have all the things she never had. But she can’t tell the men in the court that. What do they know about turning up on your first day at junior school in the wrong shade of gray jersey, because your mum bought yours at the Oxfam shop and everyone else in the class was in the new gunmetal range purchased from Wyatt & Moore? Nothing. She knows they know nothing about what it is to have nothing.