Rich, I notice, no longer looks at me as though I am merely mad. A certain sideways flicker to the eyes and corrugating of the brow suggests he is now weighing up how long he should leave it before calling the ambulance.
“Everything’s a competition for you, isn’t it, Kate?”
“Everything is a competition, Rich, in case you hadn’t noticed. Someone wanting to smash your conker, someone wanting a prettier special-edition Barbie, someone wanting to take your biggest client away just to prove you couldn’t handle it.” As I unload the dishwasher, I think of Fay and her daft mantra. What was it? “If we compete, we are not complete.” She should try that one in the offices of Edwin Morgan Forster. “If we do not compete, we are out on the street. In the sheet.”
“Mummy, can I watch a bideo? Pleeese can I watch a bideo?” Emily has climbed up onto the granite worktop and is attaching a Barbie slide to my hair.
“How many times have I told you, we don’t watch bideo — Jesus, video—at breakfast time.”
“Kate, seriously. What you need is to slow down.”
“No, Richard, what I need is a helicopter. I’ve got an appointment at the doctor’s for which I am going to be ten minutes late, making me even later for my conference call with Australia. The Pegasus minicab number’s on the board, can you ring? And tell them not to send that weirdo in the Nissan Sunny.”
RICHARD IS A NICER person than me, anyone can see that. But in suffering, in bitter experience, I am his superior and I carry that knowledge like a knife. Why am I so much tougher on Emily? Because I guess I’m scared that Rich would bring up our children to live in an England that doesn’t exist. A place where people say “After you” instead of “Me first,” a better and a kinder place, for sure, but not one that I have ever lived or worked in.
Rich had a happy childhood, and a happy childhood is terrific preparation — indeed, the only known apprenticeship — for being a happy adult. But happy childhoods are no bloody good for drive and success; misery and rejection and standing in the rain at bus stops are the fuel for those. Consider, for instance, Rich’s tragic lack of guile, his repeated undercharging of clients he feels sorry for, his insane optimism up to and including the recent purchase of erotic underwear for a wife who, since the birth of her first child, has come to the nuptial bed in a Gap XXXL T-shirt with a dachshund motif.
Children do that to you, don’t they? He is Daddy and I am Mummy and finding the time to be Kate and Richard — to be You and Me — well, it slipped down the agenda. Sex now comes under Any Other Business, along with parking permits and a new boiler. Emily — she can barely have been three then — once found us kissing in the kitchen and turned on her parents like Queen Victoria discovering a footman with his finger in the port.
“Don’t do that. It gives me a tummy ache,” she hissed.
So we didn’t.
8:17 A.M. Despite my specific request, Pegasus Cars has once again sent round the Nissan Sunny. The back seat is so damp you could start a mushroom farm in there. Tensing both thigh muscles and buttocks and hiking up my Nicole Farhi gray wool skirt, I do my best to squat an inch or two above the mildew.
When I ask the driver if he could possibly find a quicker route to the surgery, he responds by turning up the volume on the tape deck so high my cheekbones start to shiver in gale-force music. (Is this gangsta rap?)
After my attempt to be friendly to Winston before Christmas, I have no plans to talk to him again. But as I am fighting my way out of the car door, he turns round and, on an exhalation of yellow smoke, says: “I hope they got something strong enough in there to treat you with, lady.”
Bloody cheek. What does he mean by that? Things don’t improve when I get in to see the GP and ask for my annual supply of the Pill. Dr. Dobson taps his computer and the screen starts to flash a green hazard light as though I am some devious criminal mastermind wanted by the CIA.
“Ah, Mrs. Shattock, I see you haven’t had a smear test for… how long is it now?”
“Well, I did have one in ’96 and you broke the slide. I mean, they wrote and said it had broken in transit and could I come in again. But, obviously, I’d already been in and time is very tight, so if I could please just have my pills?”
“And there has been no time in the last four years when you could drop in for another test?” A basset hound in human form, Dr. Dobson has that wet-eyed solicitude common to dogs and caring professionals.
“Well, no. I mean you have to ring for an appointment and hang on for ages because they never seem to answer the phone, and…”
His finger moves to a date halfway down my notes. “And on one occasion you failed to cancel. March twenty-third of last year.”
“Taiwan.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I was in Taiwan. Hard to cancel when it’s the middle of the night in another hemisphere and you haven’t got an hour to hang on the phone hoping the receptionist in Drayton Lane will pick up out of idle curiosity.”
The doctor tugs anxiously on his tie — it is beige and apparently woven from Shreddies. “I see, I see,” he says, clearly not seeing at all. “Well, I don’t think it would be sensible for me to prescribe you another year’s worth of Microgynon until you’ve had your smear, Mrs. Shattock. The Government, as you may have heard, is taking a very proactive role in cervical health.”
“The Government thinks it would be better for me to have another baby?”
He shakes his head sadly. “I wouldn’t put it that way. The Government is merely keen to encourage women to avoid a life-threatening illness with a simple test.”
“Well, if I have another baby I really will be dead.” God, I can’t believe I just said that. What do you mean by that, Kate?
“There’s no need to get upset, Mrs. Shattock.”
“I am not upset,” I insist, rather too shrilly. “I’m just a very busy woman who doesn’t need any more children right at the moment if you don’t mind. So if you could please let me have my pills.”
The doctor takes a slow, careful note with an ancient Biro that has a clump of ink snot on its nose. It gives every word it writes a presmudged outline. He asks me if I have any other symptoms.
“But I’m not ill.”
“Are you sleeping properly? How is your sleep?”
For the first time since Loopy Fay arrived at six this morning, my features relax enough to form a smile. “Well, I have an eleven-month-old son with teeth coming through. Sleep doesn’t really go with the territory, does it?”
Dr. Dobson returns my smile, but with wary creases at the edges — creases that act like inverted commas around the smile. I realize that the look on his face can properly be described as long-suffering. Who is long in suffering if not a doctor? The amount of pain he must see. Anyway, he tells me to come in any time I feel I need to. Any time at all. Says he will ring down to the nurse right away and see if she can fit me in for a smear now. “You can surely spare ten minutes?”
I surely can’t, but I do.
9:06 A.M. OFFICES OF EDWIN MORGAN FORSTER. Arrive late and dying to go to the loo. Will have to wait. Need to submit nine fund reports, having talked to twelve different managers by Wednesday. Also must present in-depth briefing on Japanese Toki Rubber Company fiasco by Wednesday. Then Rod Task pitches up at my desk and tells me I have to go and salvage my career by giving blow job to Jack Abelhammer in New York on — why, Wednesday. Not sure the term blow job was actually used, but he definitely said “on your knees, honey.”