The Learning Curve by Melissa Nathan Page B

Especially by someone who got her kids to do hers most of the time anyway.
    It wasn’t long before Nicky’s extra workload started to affect her private life. Exhausted by a relentless week full of resentful teachers, she now needed to be in bed on a Saturday night sometimes as early as nine o’clock. Then she would use all of Sunday morning – starting as early as 8 a.m. – to finish off preparing for the week ahead, when she used to do all her cleaning, before a much-needed Sunday-afternoon rest, preferably spent horizontally watching an oldJohn Wayne film with the sound down (she found them more interesting that way). She had to do most of her cleaning on weekday mornings now instead of Sundays, which was just possible if she woke a quarter of an hour earlier, and then she squeezed in the vacuuming during John Wayne, which, intriguingly, didn’t seem to spoil her enjoyment of the film. She ironed in the evenings if she wasn’t too tired, and soon stopped buying clothes that needed ironing.
    When the clocks went back and the days shrank, it made a bigger impact on her than it had ever done before. Maybe she was getting old, maybe she had more work to do than ever before. Either way, she now found that she was tired most of the time. She started saying yes to Claire’s offer of Sunday lunch because it was the only way she’d get to eat – there was certainly no time to cook for herself on a Sunday – and no to looking after Claire’s girls the rest of the day. She simply didn’t have the time or energy.
    It did occur to her that maybe she wasn’t cut out for this level of work and that there was a reason more men made it to management level, namely that they had wives at home cooking their food, cleaning their homes, preparing their sandwiches and generally saying ‘Aah’ at the right moments.
    On top of everything else, she had a host of new responsibilities now she was Management. Rob and she both had to sort out assemblies – a relentless task; daily timetables for the entire school – a hellish task; and the school council – a complete nightmare, as well as organising all the teaching assistants and dinner ladies’ rotas.
    But first there was Parents’ Evening to organise.
    And it was Parents’ Evening which next drew Oscar to Nicky’s attention. As the term progressed, she was growing fonder and fonder of her pupils. This year’s Class 6 were just as enthusiastic and as much fun as she’d expected. Usually by this stage of the year, there were a couple of children who stood out from the others. Sometimes it was nothing morethan Nicky feeling a special affection for them or, conversely, an awareness that it would take time and work for that to happen. But with Oscar it was something else. She felt a new sort of affinity with him; as if she could see right through the disguise of childhood to his essence: she could see all of him at once; the baby, the boy, the man.
    Oscar seemed to possess in his eye the look of an adult. His face could express or hide everything, depending on his mood, and his mood was as changeable as the English weather. When he laughed his eyes watered, as if they might overflow. And the skin around them was so stretched it was almost translucent, allowing the finest of blue veins to peep through. His emotions seemed stretched too, taut as a tightrope which he might topple off at any moment.
    A sign of the times was that most classes nowadays had at least one set of twins, sometimes a set of triplets, due to the unpredictability of late mothers’ ovulation or IVF treatment. There were also more than two languages spoken in the classroom. Also, by Year 6, almost half the class only saw their dads at weekends. Often, a teacher was able to tell the rest of the staff, within weeks of the new school year, which kids’ parents they believed would be divorced by Year 6. Some of the less scrupulous ones had been known to place bets on it. Usually the teacher was right. Sometimes