The Yummy Mummy (37 page)

“And he can fix you up with some glasses,” Mum says brightly, as if this might clinch my affection for good.

Fifty-five

AS MUM SAID, I’VE GOT TO FIGHT FOR MY LIFE. AND
Ameeting with Pippa always feels like a medieval joust. The scraper is taller than I remember, the city dirtier, on a different scale to the upholstered houses and playgrounds that I’ve spent the last few months of my shrink-to-fit life in. The huge panes of glass reflect a clutter of concrete, cars, lots of cars, and clouds cut like they’ve been through a shredder. Crossing the main road, people move fast, running late, in heels, slurping impossibly large coffees and looking like they haven’t had enough sleep. Office complexions, I’d forgotten those.

I walk to the reception desk and try to look officious. It’s hard to pull off when accessorized by a pram. Busy well-dressed women in the foyer eye Evie with airs of amused curiosity. It is obvious I am someone on a maternity leave visit. Not quite in the game. “Amy Crane, I work, er, used to work here.”

“You have an appointment?” drawls the receptionist, a bored-looking woman with a face shaped like a fifty-pence piece and Starbucks breath.

“Yes, Pippa Price, Nest PR.”

She scrawls, painfully slowly, through her computer address book and dials the telephone with salaried complacency. “Someone will be down to collect you. Please take a seat.”

I try to arrange myself elegantly on the leather corner sofa without ruining the shop-fresh press of my new trousers. I feel strangely proud. Here I am, a functioning human being, sitting on a leather sofa in a corporate building, not wearing a tracksuit, prepared for battle.

After
ten
minutes—when I worked here I used to leave only unimportant people waiting ten minutes—I am summoned by the receptionist and escorted past security to the lifts by a shy intern. The tummy-curdling journey to the twenty-seventh floor, once so routine, feels like flying.

Returning to the workplace after having a baby is like returning home after a life-changing round-the-world trip. You expect everything to have changed because you have. But it hasn’t. Around the door, the same awards, the best magazine cuttings, framed. The same palm with huge fronds that always reminded me of Joe’s hands. The secretary at the front desk is new but the same as the last: young, eager, underpaid. The turnover was always high. I clatter into the main office, my pram scuffing just-delivered boxes on the floor.

Lots of double takes. “Amy, hi! Hi, hi . . .” A sea of smiling stressed faces. Quick can’t-talk-now waves from bodies glued to telephones. A thrum of old colleagues: Jemima, Sophie, and Iris. They huddle around the pram, cooing. And I say that I’m well, really well, and thank you for your kind gifts and cards and yes, I have managed to lose the baby weight, thanks.

Evie starts to grumble. Panicking that she’s about to start a fire-engine wail spectacular, I dig out an emergency bribe biscuit, which she gobbles triumphantly, then puts her hand out for another. But she’s still not appeased. Too much of a crowd, too close. Smile, Evie, smile. She doesn’t. She farts. A peal of awkward laughter.

“Oh, that’d be hard to PR!” says a posh, loud voice behind me. I turn around. A tall, gorgeous black-eyed girl with a tumble of Nigella hair. I don’t know her.

“Hi, Amy, I am Anastasia, your maternity cover.” She offers me her hand, winking with diamonds.

“Oh, er, hi.” I’m suddenly very glad I settled—at my mother’s insistence—on the heels rather than the flat ballet shoes. I need the height.

“Very much enjoyed being you,” she says, then laughs uproariously. Yes, the idea that she could ever be me, or I her, is absurd.

“I hear you’ve done a good job, thanks very much.”

“A
brilliant
job!” someone booms behind me. Toxic Pippa, hard bodied as a tailor’s dummy in her trademark Dolce & Gabbana suit. “Hi, Amy, nice to see you. Met our Anastasia, I see.”

Our
Anastasia?

“So this is baby Eva?” Pippa inspects Evie with mild curiosity. Pippa never wanted children. She has four Burmese cats and a Mercedes convertible instead. “What can she say?”

“Oh, not much, ‘dada’ mostly. She’s not hugely advanced.” I mean this as a joke but it isn’t taken as one. Pippa frowns. This is a selling environment.

“And how is her handsome daddy?” shrills Pippa. “Bearing up to the nappies and late nights, is he? Hasn’t done a runner yet?”

She can’t know? Of course not. “Um, er, he’s fine.” Sound more confident, look her in the eye.

“Well, at least she’s a pretty girl, not one of those babies you go, ‘Oh, isn’t she pretty’ because you have to but who really look like prawns. Do you remember Abby’s little girl?”

Sophie and Iris roll their eyes at me behind Pippa’s back. So, nothing’s changed then. Pippa is as vile and tactless as ever.

“Thanks. She’s a much-improved version of both of us,” I say, trying to talk in plural, to sound like a family. Being Left isn’t going to help my cause.

“Waaaaaaah.”

“Oh.” Pippa steps back. “That’s loud.”

Not now, darling Evie. I feel myself tense, prickles of sweat on my neck. Evie’s eyes plead with me to remove her from the assault of this alien air-con environment.

“Why is it crying?” Pippa is offended.

“Um, it’s not always a cause and effect thing.” I unstrap Evie and lift her out of the pram. This is like taking the lid off a perfume bottle. Except it isn’t perfume.

“Eew! What’s that
smell
?” Pippa recoils.

Lamb mash and clementines. A humdinger. Where the hell do I change her? The ladies’. Sophie bravely accompanies me. She stares in mesmerized horror as I scrabble on the floor with a sludge of orange poo, Evie’s furious feet kicking out at the indignity of the cold hard tiles, dipping her heels in the soiled nappy. Sophie asks why I haven’t been in touch all these months and I apologize and say that I’ve been knee deep in all sorts of shit. She laughs and says she’s missed me and makes me promise to come out for a drink with her and Iris next week. I say that I’d love to and mean it and feel that I’m finally ready to pick up my social life where I left off. Time to face the world.

Anastasia waits for me by the pram. “Let me take her,” she says, smiling, confident as a Norland nanny. “Give you a bit of peace. You go and have your little chat with Pip.”

Pip? I reluctantly pass Evie, trailing a poo miasma smell, into her manicured hands. Whimper, Evie. Whimper. But she doesn’t. Evie stares at Anastasia’s pore-perfect face and grins.

“Don’t tell me Anastasia’s good with kids,
too
?” exclaims Pippa. “Come on, Amy, let’s have a chat, a quick one before Evie demands to be adopted.”

I look back over my shoulder. Anastasia has sat down on
my
old chair at
my
desk with Evie on her knee. Funny to think that was where I sat pregnant, swollen feet resting on the waste bin, thinking about baby names and booties and breathing techniques, blissfully unaware.

I follow the flash of Pippa’s Christian Louboutin scarlet soles to the glass orchid-bedecked cube that is her office. She nods for me to sit down on her red sofa. I cross my legs neatly, my I-don’t-normally-wear-these shoes dangling, somewhat self-consciously. Pippa shakes out her shaggy blond do with her fingers and cracks a tight-lipped smile. She’s had her teeth whitened.

“Great to see you looking so unmumsy,” she says, slashing open a stiff white envelope with a blood-red fingernail and checking her mail casually. “So you’re not tempted to do the whole nouvelle housewife bit and stay at home full-time, then?”

I shuffle on the seat. “No, not for me.”

“You’ve been off work a while. Sally was back at her desk after three months, you know. And she had twins.” She sighs dramatically, like my presence exhausts her. “Obviously this job, your old job . . .” It’s meant to
still
be mine. “It’s demanding. It requires 110 percent.” She twists the lid off a “superfood algae” bottle, tosses two large capsules down her throat, and gulps.

“Of course, Pippa.”

“I’m not going to be able to make any allowances for babies. Nursery pick-up times, sickness . . . all that kind of thing. Anastasia has really galvanized your account. She’s at the desk until eight o’clock most evenings.” Pippa arches one threaded eyebrow and checks me for signs of surrender. “
If
you do decide to come back, I’d like to keep her on.”

“That’s great.” I crack a fake smile and hope the Botox will keep me looking serene.

“In fact, because she’s more flexible, can do the evening functions, et cetera, I think it best that you report to her.” Pippa nonchalantly waters her orchid with Evian and waits for my reaction.

“Report to Anastasia? You want to make her my boss?” Never.

“I want to make this easy for everyone, considering your change of circumstances. But, of course, if you tell me you are available to do evening functions any night of the week with a couple of hours’ notice . . .”

“I will do my best.” Who the hell would look after Evie? I’d never see her.

Pippa throws back her large nose and laughs. “Oh, come on, Amy. That’s not good enough. Perhaps your boyfriend will look after her. That seems to be Sally’s arrangement. But it’s got to be a firm commitment. Can you promise me that?”

“Two hours’ notice might be a bit tricky. But that would be exceptional, Pippa, I’d usually get a lot more. . . .”

“Evening functions were always part of your job,” snaps Pippa. “So what you’re really saying to me is that you won’t be able to do your job to its full capacity as you did before, which makes me think that it would be best for all concerned if you reported to Anastasia.”

Don’t take it. Don’t take it lying down. “I’m not comfortable with that. That’s a demotion. I worked extremely hard building my account.”

“Excuse me?” Pippa says, as if she’d misheard. I’m not playing ball. And having not worked here for a while I lack the necessary subservience she instills in her staff through hierarchical terror games.

“I’ll do those hours, if that’s what the job requires. But”—deep breath—“I’d like to discuss a three-day week.”

Pippa glances at her Hermes watch stagily. “Well, that took five and a half minutes to surface,” she laughs. “Amy, we both know these ridiculous, sorry, new laws mean you
can
request to work part-time. In your case, because you’re good, I won’t
necessarily
contest it. But it’s got to work for both of us. Otherwise negotiating this is going to be a long, drawn-out bloody business. I don’t want another maternity court case on my hands.”

“Which means?” I say, trying to smile.

“Reporting to Anastasia.”

“As my boss?”

Pippa silently pulls together some papers on her desk and opens her diary, mentally moving on to the next task in hand. “Better contact HR for the next step,” she says breezily. Dismissed.

How dare she? I’m a mother. I won’t be treated like this. I’ve got bigger things to be scared of now. “Pippa, I will check it out with HR and my lawyer, if you don’t mind.”

She looks up at me sharply. “You’re the first woman I’ve worked with to come back from maternity leave with attitude.
Most
women are pleased to be offered a compromise solution.”

“I appreciate that, but I’m not accepting a demotion, part-time or not. I can delegate. I’ll make it work, Pippa.”

She glares at me, chewing the end of her pen, weighing up. One maternity court case is to be expected. Two looks careless. “You better,” she says. And I practically fall off my chair.

Back in the main office Sophie mouths, “How did it go?” and I give her a thumbs-up. Then it hits me. I’ll be here, a soaring twenty-seven floors up, against the thrum of telephones, the self-expanding blink of 360-degree windows, the sound of business being done. No nappies! No park! My days will once again have a beginning, a middle, and an end. I can get my legs waxed at lunchtimes, rejoin my yoga class! There will be someone to notice if I do a job well. And instead of discussing sleep patterns and primary schools, it’ll be Kate Moss’s and Sienna Miller’s love affairs. And, most important, I will get paid.

“Oh no! Evie!” yelps Anastasia loudly. I swivel round. Anastasia is stabbing at her computer keyboard and staring at the screen in open-pouted horror.

“I don’t believe it. Please tell me this isn’t true. . . .”

I run over to my old corner. Evie’s happily gurgling on Anastasia’s lap, little fingers coiled around the keyboard wires. “What’s happened?”

“Your baby, she’s just . . . just”—words catch on her lip gloss—“SMASHED her fist onto my keyboard and deleted my whole document. Two weeks’ work gone, fucking gone. . . .”

That’s my girl.

Fifty-six

I SEE THE BICYCLE FIRST. A STREAK OF RAINBOW STRIPES
through the living room window. Evie looks at me quizzically. We exchange glances. No, it can’t be. Slamming the door behind me, I thump down the street, rolling back gracelessly on the sloping soles of my MBTs, unsure where I am going, warily pleased about work, sad that I can’t discuss it with Joe.

A screech of brakes. It’s Josh, flushed, tousled, and grinning. “Hey babe, I was trying to find your house,” he says casually, like we see each other every day. “Where you going?”

“Just a walk.”

He swings off his bike and wheels it beside me, still grinning. “You’re not going to get very far with that pram.”

“It’s fine. Something jammed in the wheel. Been there forever, it’s the sound of Evie’s universe.”

“A bit noisy. Do you want me to look at it? I’m good at things like that.”

I should have known Josh would turn up when least expected, twist back into my life like a difficult yoga position. I stop and turn to face him. “What do you want?”

“Just came to see that you were okay. I heard a rumor, that Joe, he’d left or something. . . .

“Very big-hearted of you.” I start walking again. Evie gurgles happily from the pram, entranced by the spin of Josh’s bike wheels.

“Let’s go and grab a coffee or something, have a chat.”

“No thanks. Evie needs some fresh air.”