A
SUCCESSFUL BUSINESSWOMAN SEEKS ADVICE
My
name is Sarah Jennings. I am a successful businesswoman. After university, I
worked for two merchant banks (the second one head-hunted me from the first) in
order to acquire experience and basic capital, which I then invested in a small
art gallery that I bought from its ageing owner on his retirement, having
helped him organise exhibitions in my spare time. Two years were enough to
double the turn-over and quadruple the profits, whereupon I sold the gallery to
my major competitors for an inflated price and moved into consultancy. My aim
is to carry on investing in under-capitalised businesses, build them up, sell
them and move on, while my activities as a consultant provide me with income,
information and experience. For the past four years I have been in a stable
relationship with a male partner. It is our mutual decision not to have
children.
The
way I present myself may strike you as aggressive. It is not. It is forthright
and clear, since these are qualities I value and try to develop in myself and
others with whom I come into contact. That is why I am telling you about what
happened to me last Christmas. I make no apologies for doing so. I had enough
of apologies as a child. The way my mother said sorry was designed to make you
feel guilty. She used it on the rent-man, on the landlord himself, and on our
social worker. "I'm sorry, but we haven't any money left." What she
actually meant was that she had given it to my father, her ex-husband, who beat
her, with impartial consistency, whether she gave him money or not. Her
apologies didn't work on him, but then nothing would have. His unrepentant and
unselfconscious, almost animal, egoism had a curious charm to which even I
succumbed when I visited him in hospital during his last illness. He smoked,
drank and ruined other people's lives, so perhaps the lung cancer was a kind of
judgement. I had brought him two hundred duty-free cigarettes one misty
November afternoon with a malicious sense that I was shortening his days, but
he received them with a conspiratorial wink and a suggestive cough, hid them in
his bedside locker and whispered, "I won't tell your mother, if you
don't."
All
the while I was supporting her, I had the strong suspicion that he was getting
a rake-off. She refused to move out of the house that had been her first
married home. Since I had spent my childhood there, I refused to revisit it,
and always met her somewhere neutral, like the tea-room of one of the big West
End department stores. When she died of a stroke, less than a month after my father
and relatively young, I was not surprised to find that the house, whose
freehold I thought I had purchased for her, had been split up into separate
flats and let and sub-let in bewildering ways, just as it had been when I spent
my childhood there.
While
I could leave the sorting out of her affairs to my lawyer, I reluctantly
concluded that I had to sort out her effects myself. Christmas offered the
ideal opportunity. My partner felt obliged, as every year, to spend time with
his parents and his brothers and sisters and their increasingly numerous
families. My own memories of Christmas were not such that I set special store
by the event. It had always been a time of apologies and excuses. Even when my
mother had managed to scrape together enough money to buy presents, she often
had to conceal them until Christmas was over, in case my father called in, saw
them, and concluded that she could spare him some cash for his drinking. One
year, he simply took them and sold them in an impromptu auction in the pub.
The
house in Camden Town was large and dingy, without any signs of Christmas,
visible or audible. Knowing my mother's habits of depressive economy, I arrived
with a six-pack of hundred-watt light-bulbs, for which I was duly grateful.
While I did not like what I saw, I regarded the fact that I could at least see
it as positive. I also brought a torch,
since I knew that, although there were another five families living there, she
had retained the use of the loft for storage purposes, though what she might
have had left to store there I could not readily imagine.
There
were hardly any clothes. It was as though she had never valued herself enough
to want to dress properly. Drawer upon drawer was full of laddered stockings
and laddered tights that she must have thought she could somehow mend. The
underwear, in which I had never seen her although we had necessarily lived in
great closeness, was ragged to the point of disintegrating. For myself, I
always insist on the very best and throw it away at the first sign of wear.
This is especially true when my outer clothes are deliberately scruffy.
There
was a suitcase full of photographs: myself when young, thin, gangly, shy and
anaemic; my father, handsome, dashing, devil-may-care, usually with a glass in
his hand, often with his arm round a woman who wasn't always my mother;
finally, a very small number of photographs of my mother herself, almost all
from before her marriage, wide-eyed, innocent, helpless, usually on holiday at
the seaside. The only later ones were those that I had taken during our
meetings and sent her copies of - just to have a record of the way time passed,
just to bear witness that I had, after all, not neglected her entirely. She had
dated them carefully on the back, and equally carefully I avoided doing the
appropriate calculations.
In
one of the drawers there was a big brown envelope marked "Love
Letters" which I put unopened into my bag out of prudery, embarrassment or
sheer bloody-mindedness. That seemed to be all the intimacy there was in the
single room to which her life had become confined, so I made my way to the
loft. A spicy cooking smell came from one of the doors I passed, and the
strains of Asian pop-music from another.
I
had found my way to the loft once or twice as a child and thought of it as a
kind of secret world, where I was safe. As an adult, I found it dark and dirty,
but there was still a kind of magic in the way the light streamed up through
the hatch and failed to make any impact on the darkness under the eaves. There
were three large cardboard boxes that must have cost my mother considerable
effort to get up there, and I decided to take them and investigate them one at
a time.
The
first contained my A- and O-level certificates, the programmes of speech-days at which I had been awarded prizes,
the programmes of school plays in which I had acted, my school reports from
secondary school, duty letters from university, postcards from my first
independent holidays. I had never imagined she would have kept such things. If
I asked, she said, "Oh, no, dear, clutter, all of it, clutter, can't be
doing with clutter, you know!" There were things I had missed, things that
had been special to me, John Davey's autograph on the programme when I'd played
Lady Macbeth to his Macbeth, and I'd thought they were gone for ever, but here
they were. Why had she never said that she'd kept these things? I didn't want
to look at them here, I wanted to take them back to my own home, so I lugged
the box out to my car and went straight back up to the loft for the next piece
of treasure-trove.
As
I struggled down the final flight of stairs with it, I saw a young girl
hovering in the shadows of the hall, where I hadn't bothered to change the
bulbs.
"Would
you mind helping me by opening the door?" I asked. She stared up at me
shily. She looked about six, thin, tall for her age and rather pale.
"Please," I added, and she held the door open while I staggered
through, then stayed in the doorway, waiting.
"Come
in," I said, "maybe there's something in here for you." There
was. The box contained all kinds of things that might once have been presents
for me, hidden away, unused, never reclaimed, as though it would have been
tempting fate to actually give them to me. Here was proof of my mother's love,
and proof that she didn't quite dare to demonstrate it. There were things I
could have sworn she'd shown me and told me she'd bought to send to my cousins
who lived at the other end of the country and that we never saw.
Near
the top was a colouring-book and an untouched tin of coloured pencils. I gave
them to the little girl, nodded towards the empty table and carried on
rummaging. After three-quarters of an hour I was at the bottom and could hardly
wait to go and get the next box. I went across to the little girl and realised
that she hadn't been colouring any of the pictures at all. She'd just been
quietly turning the pages and looking at them.
"It's
yours," I said, "it's yours," and I put my hands on her
shoulders. She began crying, very quietly at first, then great racking sobs
started to shake her whole body. Looking back now, I'm quite surprised, but at
the time I knew just what to do. I put an arm round her shoulders, knelt down,
slipped another arm under her, picked her up, carried her back to the couch,
and sat down with her on my lap, cuddled close to me. Then I began to cry as
well, till you couldn't have told whose face was wet from whose tears.
After
a while, the little girl sniffed, rubbed at her eyes with her hands, and said,
"It's all right." And I said, "That's what I was going to say to
you," and I kissed her on the cheek and put her down, and took her back to
the table, where I opened the tin of pencils and said, "It's yours, it's
all yours, to colour in as you please. Why don't you write your name in
it?" She looked up at me, gave another almighty sniff, and began carefully
selecting the colour of pencil she wanted to use.
When
I came back down, the door to my mother's room was ajar, so I backed through it
and set the third box down on the floor. The little girl was gone, and she had
left the book and tin of pencils behind on the table. I checked my handbag and
purse. They were untouched. Locking my mother's room, I went knocking at the
doors of the other flats in the house, certain that the little girl couldn't
have slipped in from outside. Four of the families were at home, and they were
all Asian, Pakistani was my guess. The fifth was out, but a card on the door
said their name was Patel. Back in my mother's room, it occurred to me to look and
see whether the little girl had really written her name in the colouring book I
had given to her. She had. There it was, inside the first page in crimson lake
and carefully joined-up writing: Sarah Jennings.
I
went out into the hall and looked up the stair-well to where I could just see
the square of darkness that led into the loft. Then I called, three times, very
softly, "Sarah." I put the
colouring-book and the tin of pencils down on the stairs and went back into my
mother's room, closing the door behind me. After I had gone through the third
box, which didn't take more than ten minutes, because it was full of carefully
moth-balled baby clothes, I went out into the hall again. Book and pencils were
gone. I loaded the remaining two boxes into my car, took them home and hid them
away in the attic, threw some clothes into a suitcase, drove like fury and
surprised my partner by arriving in time for Christmas Eve present-giving at
his parents. Thank God for late opening at Brent Cross shopping centre, even if
it isn't where I'd normally choose to go!
That
night, I flushed the rest of my supply of the Pill down the loo. I took no
other contraceptive measures and I am now, so far as I can tell, three months
pregnant. Knowing that you need advice is almost as good as knowing what to do.
I need advice. I have come to you to get some. How do I tell Mark that I want
the baby?
Mike
Rogers 9th December 1998 8.30 pm to 11.05 pm