My heart sinks. “That’s good.”
Evie’s foot is caught in a hoop hanging from her play mat and she starts to wail.
“Excuse me, one sec. Sorry. Baby.” I unhook her. “Yes, sorry about that. Pippa?”
“Still here! Now I wanted to run something past you quickly,” says Pippa, her voice quickening. She hates the sound of crying babies. “There are a few accounts I’m not entirely sure what to do with right now. A fabulous new pottery company, makes ceramic cutlery. Another doing divine garden tools for the
Desperate Housewives
generation. Well, they’re kind of gestating with Anastasia and I’m wondering whether I should let them grow with her . . .” She lets the thought hang on the wire. “Or prepare the clients for the fact they may soon be moving.”
Help. I need a translator, a code-breaker. I’ve forgotten the secret language of offices. The silences, the omissions.
“And I was wondering . . . when you might be thinking of coming back, unofficially, just to give me an idea.”
“Gosh, Pippa. Um, I really don’t know. Can you give me some time to think about it?”
“Nine months not enough? I’d have thought you’d be gagging to get back into the civilization of an office after all those nappies and nipples. Never saw you as the Earth Mother type.”
“I need to think things through.”
“Amy . . .” Pippa pauses for just too long to be comfortable. “Anastasia is very good. That’s all I’m saying. Think about it.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Now I insist you bring Evie into the office, so we can all get a look at this tiny new client of yours that’s getting all the preferential treatment.”
I laugh weakly. “Sure. Yes, should do. Thanks, Pippa.”
“Look forward to hearing from you very soon, yes?”
“Yes. Bye. Thanks.”
I slam the phone down. Shit, shit, shit. Don’t want to think about work. Can’t even imagine it. Nicola. Need to see Nicola.
“WHAT THE FUCK DO I DO, NIC?”
Nicola squishes a blunt knife down onto soggy carrot cake. “Eat this. I’m afraid it’s a Nicola Smith creation. Hope you survive it.” She dumps a lump of cake on my plate. It is the ugliest bit of cake I’ve ever seen, baked ineptly by the worst cook in northwest London, but somehow, served up in Nicola’s warm yellow West Hampstead kitchen during a blood sugar slump, it’s appetizing.
“Why pay those ridiculous bijou bakery prices?” she jokes.
“You’ll be joining the Women’s Institute next.”
“Just watch me.” Nicola shovels cake into her mouth. “Now . . . that annoying itch that won’t go away.”
“Work?” I lean back into a wicker kitchen chair and stab my elbows on Nicola’s old pine table. They stick. Nicola’s also the world’s worst cleaner. “You know, at times I yearn for it but part of me, well, I recognize that life has gone, Nic. Going to work ain’t gonna bring it back.”
“What do you mean?”
“A life. And that person. The one who strode off to work, got paid, and spent her money on clothes and holidays and bars. That’s over, isn’t it? My income will go toward a new nappy bag or something.”
“Tragic.”
“And part of the fun of my job was not knowing what was going to happen next. You know, being sent off on foreign assignments, meeting new clients . . . the possibility of getting poached. Funny, those once sexy uncertainties now terrify me. What if toxic Pippa tries to send me abroad or something? Nightmare. Who’d look after Evie?”
Nicola laughs. “Whoa! Amy, no one is about to send you abroad. And if they do, I’ll be scrunching myself into your suitcase. Gosh, you’re just buzzing with anxieties. . . .”
“No sleep again.”
Nicola nods. She understands completely. This is why it’s so much easier hanging out with fellow mums. “Okay, let’s work through it. Cons first, then.”
“Easy. Evie. Miss her already just thinking about it. Then there’s the commute down there. Hideous. Tube journeys with constant fear of being blown up by a terrorist or the breakfast breath of fellow passengers.” Nicola nods. “Then, I get to work. I don’t want to spend forty hours of my life, Evie’s precious life, every week, in a skyscraper.”
“Hmmm.” Nicola’s unconvinced. “But the freedom. Imagine, no more sandpits in the rain, no more—”
“The lifts. I hate those lifts. They have sensors that instruct them to miss a floor if I’m standing on it. They’re crammed full of office people with waxy air-con complexions and bad shoes talking inanely about sandwich fillings and their flu symptoms.” Then it hits me. The truth. “Working in an office, well, it’s a bit crappy, isn’t it?”
Nicola smiles dryly. “It’s work, that’s why you get paid. You’re not stacking shelves.”
“No, but choosing Evie’s booties in the morning brings on existential crisis. How can I PR ceramic cutlery? I’ll end up impaling myself on a designer watering can.”
There is a loud scuffle, the sound of nails on wood. “Miaaoow.”
“Here, Hasselhoff! My beauty.”
Hasselhoff, Nicola’s fat old tom, slobs into the kitchen. Evie and Thomas squeal with delight. Evie’s chubby little fingers paw at the air for a woosh of tail. Nicola fills a cereal bowl with carrot cake and gives it to the cat. He gobbles noisily.
“Try and ignore Hassie. He eats with his mouth open. Now, back to the nine-to-five dilemma. What are the pros?”
“Money. I’ve worked harder than I’ve ever worked in my life looking after Evie and haven’t earned a penny. And she never says thank you. And I did love my job, at times. And I was bloody good at it. It would be good to be good at something again.” I sigh and think of my grandma, who so wanted to work but Granddad wouldn’t allow it. “And I know this sounds a bit silly, but I think I’d feel a bit of a traitor if I gave it all up to bake cakes. After Dad left, Mum worked in crappy jobs, boring clerical jobs, to pay for us all, help us through college, so that I could get a better life and a decent career. She did it without complaining, worked her way up, harder than any man, she always said.”
“Aha! She was a bra-burner?”
I laugh. “God no. She would never leave the house without peach-satin scaffolding. No, Mum just got on with it.”
“So it’s about the sisterhood?” says Nicola a little archly.
I laugh. “Hmmm. Or maybe it’s more that I fancy a holiday from the grind. Expenses. Discounts. The chance to spend the day e-mailing my friends.”
“Sounds like you could go back seven days a week now.”
“No way. Having time off has just brought home to me that I never felt wholly fulfilled by work.”
“Don’t worry, only the tragic ones are. Perhaps subconsciously you were waiting to have a baby.”
“Hmmm, don’t think so.” I chew vigorously on Nicola’s cake, concerned about my fillings. “Thing is, I’m not wholly fulfilled by motherhood either. So I suspect I fail rather spectacularly both as a career woman and as a mother. I’d feel less of a freak if I did want to ‘have it all.’ ”
“No, no, you have mixed feelings. There’s your answer,” declares Nicola. “You must return part-time. Work will sort out your head. Sounds to me like you’re just in a housewife tizz. You need some structure to your life. Christ, I know I do.”
“Part-time? There’s not been a good precedent for that. Poor old Abby got fired soon after that ‘experiment,’ as Pippa called it. They said she couldn’t fit five days’ work into three and demanded she work four, and when she refused . . . off with her head!”
Nicola laughs and picks a hair out of her mouth. It came from the cake. “Oh rubbish. You’ll be fine. You’re brilliant. And besides, the law has changed. They’re watching their arses, paranoid they’ll dirty their name and be forced to give you a wacking great payout. More cake?”
“No thanks.”
Nicola goes to the loo. I glare at Hasselhoff, who is slitting his eyes at Evie, periscoping his tail.
“Hasselhoff, she’s a
baby
. She didn’t mean to pull your ear,” I chide, sounding uncannily like my mother. The cat sulkily drags its belly along the floor and leaps onto a chair, spitting dribble on impact. The chair creaks. The fan in the window rattles. The fridge hums. It’s a noisy kitchen. Busy on the eye, too: a kind of archaeological dig of a house, piles of matter stratified by books, papers, nappies. Chewed photographs flap on the fridge: A flushed Nicola and Sam holding a newborn Thomas; Nicola and Sam kissing on a pebbly rainy beach. Joe and I have no pictures of us up in the house. They sit in boxes, always ready to be framed but somehow never making the framers. Maybe we don’t want reminding.
Rat-a-tat-tat.
“Who can that be? This is London, no one drops round,” shouts Nicola from the loo. “Can you get that, Amy? I’m mid-pee.”
“Too much information. . . .”
The stained glass of the door tessellates a large figure. The postman? I fiddle with the locks ineptly. I hear someone tutting. A throaty smell of rain hitting dust.
Sue glowers from the step, baby Oliver slung across her body like a third bosom. “Amy, what are you doing here?”
“Oh, just popped round.”
“You’re not coming mother and baby swimming, too?” she asks anxiously. “I didn’t book for you as I wasn’t informed. If I’d been informed I’d . . .” Sue doesn’t enjoy spontaneity. She’s one of those women who compensates for the swirling vortex of baby chaos by scheduling and neatly Tupperwaring up the rest of her life.
Nicola rushes into the hall, still buttoning her trousers. “Shit, shit. I completely forgot. Head of scrambled egg. Sorry, Sue.”
“You forgot? Oh well. We’ll have to wait a few minutes anyhow. For Hermione. Her routine doesn’t allow her to come out just yet.”
“She’s not still doing the dreaded Gina Ford to the letter?” Nicola asks somewhat incredulously. Gina Ford is the author of
The Contented Little Baby Book,
a hugely influential tome that advises new mothers to run their lives as a kind of baby boot camp in order to get their babies sleeping through the night. Many mothers swear by it. Others, such as Michelle, think it’s close to abuse. Nicola and I thought we’d give it a try but couldn’t bear to wake our happily sleeping babies, or ourselves, for the rigid schedule. No, we stumbled into a more freewheeling bohemian approach and have the bags under our eyes to prove it.
We walk through to the kitchen, Sue clocking each scuffed plank of wood, every fur-balled tile and dirty light switch on the way.
“It’s very, er, homey,” she notes. “You have animals?”
“A cat,” says Nicola.
“Oh. With a baby. That’s brave,” Sue says, as if Nicola admitted to breeding rottweilers. She glances at Evie and Thomas, contentedly sitting side by side in their car seats, great viewing platforms for the big game. “Well, it seems they’re surviving it,” she adds quickly. “Still, I wouldn’t leave them too long in those seats. New research says that it can compress their spines and cause all manner of damage.”
Nicola bristles. “Thomas is happier in a car seat than anything else. As long as it’s not in the car, of course. Yes, I know, he’s eccentric. He hates BabyBjorns with a passion, car motion, baby bouncers.”
“Still, I’ve read . . .”
“If it works . . .”
Sue sits at the table and carefully swipes away the crumbs in front of her with the side of her palm and snowbanks them beside the teapot. She leans back—the chair groans—and fixes me with a watery eye. “Your eyebrows? Have you had an accident?”
“Yes, at the hands of a beautician with a vision-impairing sty a couple of weeks ago. But I thought they’d grown back.”
“A sty!” Sue recoils back into her chair, rolls of flesh rising between the chair spindles like unbaked baguettes. “Isn’t that contagious?” She pulls Oliver deeper into the valley of her lap. When she picks up the cup of tea that I’ve made her, she swivels the cup round and doesn’t touch the handle. “Interesting cake, Nicola. Right, girls, what’s news?”
“We were just discussing work. What Amy should do. Came to the conclusion she should go back part-time.”
“Hmmm,” says Sue, fat pink fingers busy with Oliver’s cradle cap. “Tough one. I’ll go back to teaching eventually, but only when I’m ready. Alan’s very good like that. He’s been saving. Not everyone has Alan’s foresight, mind you. I’m sure Joe would have done the same had it occurred to him.” Any money Joe and I had was frittered on holidays and meals out and good wine. “What about you, Nicola?”
Nicola’s eyes are drilling into her cup of tea. It’s a dangerous moment. We cannot look at each other or we’ll start giggling. And the guilt we feel for giggling makes the giggles worse. No, Sue doesn’t really deserve it. She may be tactless, interfering, and idly competitive, but she means well. While we certainly wouldn’t have hung out in any other circumstances—we’re only thrown together because our labor dates coincided, after all—we’ve learned to rub along. The days are very long otherwise.
“Back to work. Full-time. Probably in the not-too-distant future,” says Nicola, guardedly.
Sue puts down her cup loudly. “Really, Nicola?
You?
I would never have guessed,” she says, as if Nicola had just come out as a swinger. “And a newspaper, too? That
must
mean long hours. Gosh, imagine having to write all those upsetting stories about murdered children and harassing grieving parents for quotes.”
“Sue. I’m a subeditor. I sit at a desk and edit copy.”
“That poor little boy. He’ll miss you so much, Nicola,” says Sue, an expert at the disturbing backhanded maternal compliment.
“He’ll be fine.” Nicola is putting a brave face on things because she has to.
“But Nic . . .”
“We’ve got a two-income mortgage here,” points out Nicola, exasperated. “And I actually happen to like my job. Full-time motherhood will never be for me. I’d be miserable.”
The crackle of social static is broken by a knock on the door. It is Hermione. Tiny, pretty in a floral Boden jacket, she shakes the rain off her hair and removes her doll-baby from her sheepskin papoose.
“Sorry I’m a bit late. Amelia was in doze time.”
“Carrot cake?”
“Is it organic?”
Nicola shakes her head. Hermione declines. Sue fills her in on the disastrous revelation and locks Hermione into a conspiratorial we-must-save-her gaze.
“Oh Nic,” whines Hermione. “I’m sorry.”