Postcards From Berlin (21 page)

I worry too about Sinead, worry that she is neglected: She’s more closed up, more silent, chewing the sides of her fingernails.
I try to make time for her. Her school will be doing
The Tempest
for their summer production, and she so longs to be Ariel; we choose a speech together for the audition. And in art they’re
doing city streets, and she wants to photograph a car that someone has abandoned round the corner and a hole that’s been dug
in the pavement where pipes are exposed.

“Come with me, Cat,” she says. “It’s embarrassing.”

The car is a gray Sierra. Someone has put a brick through the back window, and the windscreen is cracked all over, as though
it is crusted with frost. Sinead takes lots of photographs.

When we go to the hole in the pavement, a woman comes out of her house.

“Excuse me, but are you complaining about the hole?”

She’s very clean, with crisp gray curls.

“No, sorry,” I tell her. “It’s for a school art project.”

“Oh.” She looks dejected. “I complained about it, you know, I rang the council, but they said, It’s not our hole. Seeboard
dug it and they smelt gas, so they rang the gas board, and the gas board men came and made a little camp and sat in it drinking
tea.… It’s dangerous; the mothers can’t get past it with their buggies.”

Sinead is assiduously photographing, ignoring the woman.

“Sorry,” I say, “we’re just looking for an interesting picture.”

“You think it’s artistic? I’m disappointed in you.” She waves, goes back to her house.

When the photographs are developed, Richard shows Sinead how to manipulate them on the computer, playing around with the colors.
He’s very patient with her, and the results are lovely. The lines in the cracked glass are like a spider’s ordered threads
or a patterning of veins. We all admire these patterns. Sinead glows, a little surprised, as though this rarely happens, to
have so much attention.

We make an appointment with Nicky’s cranial osteopath. He’s bearded and intense, and he has a consulting room with framed
charts of the body showing the meridians, and on his desk a little plastic skeleton. There’s a dual carriageway outside: When
a lorry roars past, the skeleton shakes. He asks for Daisy’s birth details and announces that she has stomach trouble because
she was born by Ventouse extraction. He lies her down on his couch and moves his hands on her head. Afterward, some of the
tension has eased out of her face, and she says she feels less sick — but in the morning, when she wakes, she’s pale and ill
again.

In Waterstone’s, I look at a book of spells, the one that Nicky uses. The magic seems harmless enough — it’s all about candles
and scented oils and wishing people well. Maybe I should become a witch, like Nicky. There’s a spell for healing. You make
a circlet of ivy and a pentangle from ribbon, and you write the name of the person you want to heal on a piece of scented
paper, and burn a green candle and think of her being healthy. I would like to try this. I don’t exactly believe in it, but
I would like to try. The only thing that stops me from buying the book is the fear of Richard finding it and the thought of
the look on his face.

I do a drawing that I’m especially pleased with. It’s a child, alone, with around her a lavish texture of lines that circle
and swirl to the margins of the page. The child reaches out of the picture: Her hands are huge and angular; you can see the
lines on her palms. When I’ve finished it and look at it, I see how ambiguous it is, this gesture that she’s making — reaching
out to someone, or pushing some one away. There’s part of me that would like to show the drawing to Fergal, just as he suggested,
but when I think of this I feel a kind of fear.

Spring comes to our garden. There are lilacs, and flimsy purple irises round the pond, and a single water lily, its petals
thick and perfect, as though it is fashioned from wax, and a blue smoke of rosemary flowers in the herb bed. But everything
is neglected; I never seem to get out there anymore. The daffodils need tying up, their leaves are brown and broken, and there
are weeds in the rose bed.

One afternoon when Daisy is off school, I wrap her up in her fleece — she always seems so cold — and we go into the garden.
There’s a smell of wet earth and lilac. She sits on the patio step, her arms wrapped round herself. Her hair is dull, tangled.

I tug at the the couch grass under the rose bushes. It’s tough; it won’t come up. She’s watching me.

“There was this man who was cutting his hedge,” she says, “and he found a gold ring.”

“Wow. Is that really true, d’you think, or just a story?”

“It’s true. I saw it on
Antiques Roadshow
.”

There are tiny rust-colored spiders on the paving slabs. She pokes at one with a stick. If you crush them they leave a reddish
smear, tike dried blood. “It was really, really old,” she says. “It came from the Anglo-Saxons. His wife thought it was a
ring from a Christmas cracker.”

“Imagine that,” I say. “Imagine just poking around in your hedge and finding a beautiful thing.” I’m trying to pull up a dock,
but its taproot is deep; it hurts my hands as I pull. “Some people have all the luck,” I say thoughtlessly.

Daisy looks at me. She is so pale, so serious.

“Why can’t I be lucky?” she says.

I wish I hadn’t said what I said. I sit back on my heels. I struggle with this, not knowing what to say.

“Maybe luck kind of comes in cycles,” I tell her. “I mean, you’ve had a horrid time this year, but maybe soon you’ll have
good times again with lots of luck.”

“I don’t need lots of luck,” she says. “I just want to wake up in my bed and feel fine.”

One day when I go down to make my morning coffee, Richard hands me a letter. There’s a wariness about him. He looks me up
and down.

I take it. It’s from the hospital.

“An appointment has been made for you to discuss Daisy’s illness with Dr. Jane Watson, consultant child psychiatrist. This
appointment is for Mr. and Mrs. Lydgate only, without Daisy. All patients are given individual appointment times, so please
arrive in good time. If you arrive late, it may not be possible for the clinician to see you. On arrival, please report to
the receptionist in Outpatients, who will direct you to the clinic.”

He turns back to the mirror, smoothing out his tie.

“I’ve had a look in my diary,” he says. “I’ve got something in for the morning, but I’ll get Francine to sort it out. It’s
such a help to have a really efficient PA.”

“You mean — we’re just going to go along with it?”

“Well, what else do you suggest?” It’s his work voice — cool, brisk, as though he’s chairing a meeting.

“But Richard — what if they find out about me, about my childhood?”

“I don’t for a moment suppose they’ll bother with that — I mean, that’s all in the past.”

“But surely you see.” I wonder if I should have shown him the book I bought. But it’s never seemed the right moment. “They
think that if you have that sort of childhood, it means you must be disturbed. That you can’t be a good parent.”

“You worry so much,” he says routinely. He slips on his jacket. I notice that he’s wearing a different aftershave. It has
a rather thick aromatic smell, like a cold cure.

“They mustn’t know,” I say. “They must never, ever find out.”

“OK,” he says. “If that’s what you really want.”

He goes. He doesn’t kiss me.

I
T’S A BARE GRAY ROOM
: thinly upholstered armchairs arranged with studied casualness, a clock on the wall with a loud metallic tick, a desk with
a few framed photographs. In the corner there’s a rubber plant, so glossy and symmetrical it seems to be made of plastic,
although in fact it is real. There’s nothing on the table in the space between the chairs except a box of Kleenex. The air
is thick and warm.

She is quietly dressed, in a sweater and skirt. She has elegant pale legs and high boots made of snakeskin.

“I’m Jane Watson.” She’s shaking hands with both of us; her hand is cool and firm. “Thankyou for coming in. Are you happy
if we use Christian names?”

“Sure,” says Richard.

Her hair is blond and neatly tied, and she’s wearing a sandalwood scent, and she has a vivid, practiced smile that doesn’t
reach her eyes. We sit, and she crosses her long pale legs. Her skirt is short: It eases up her thigh.

“I like to tape my sessions with clients,” she says. “Are you happy with that?”

“Sure,” says Richard again. He’s affable, relaxed; he seems at ease here.

The clinic is in an annex at the edge of the hospital site. The windows are thick, and you can only hear the faintest sound
of traffic; the outside world seems very far away.

She turns on her cassette player and leans back in her chair; her elbows are on the arms of the chair, her fingertips just
touching. The whole room smells of her scent.

“We’re here to talk about you and Daisy,” she says. Her voice is sleek as Vaseline. “To try and find out whether there are
any psychological issues here that might be making her ill.”

“I really don’t think there are,” I say immediately, then wish I hadn’t spoken. Be careful, be careful, says something inside
me. I take a slow, deep breath. I say to her what I said to Dr. McGuire. That Daisy’s happy at school. That there haven’t
been any big changes in our lives. That no one’s died or anything …

She looks at me appraisingly. Her eyes are green as ferns. She has a quiet, casual beauty — the sort of beauty that makes
a man think, Only I have seen this.

“But you see, children do react differently to adults,” she says. “Children can be very sensitive to atmospheres, for instance.”

“Could you explain that for us, Jane?” says Richard. I’m aware of the warmth in his voice.

“Well, if perhaps there’s tension in the home,” she says. “Maybe quite subtle tensions in the family. Sometimes children pick
up on atmospheres and somatize their feelings — that means they turn them into physical symptoms. To take a common example:
Today’s children are very aware of the possibility of divorce.”

“But we get on fine,” I tell her.

She doesn’t respond. My protestation hangs in the air between us, glaring and conspicuous. I feel my face go hot.

“Perhaps you could tell me who is in the family,” she says. “I believe there are the two of you and Daisy, and also your daughter,
Richard, by your first marriage?”

Richard nods.

“In one of our later sessions,” says Jane Watson, “I may want to see you together, the whole family.”

“I’d rather not, really,” I tell her. “I’d rather not put Daisy under any more stress.”

“So you would agree that Daisy is under stress at the moment — for whatever reason?”

I feel a hot red flicker of rage. “Only because she’s ill.”

The anger is there in my voice. Richard glances at me.

“Yes. Well, of course, that’s what we’re here to try and understand,” Jane Watson says in her soothing Vaseline voice.

She settles back in her chair and uncrosses her legs, the narrow pale thighs sliding over each other. Out of the corner of
my eye, I see how Richard watches.

“Perhaps we could go back to the beginning, when you became pregnant with Daisy,” she says. “Perhaps you could you tell me
how you felt when you found you were pregnant?”

“I was thrilled,” I tell her.

Her green eyes rest on me.

“It’s strange when you say that,” she says, her voice so emollient, so understanding, “because what I notice is that you don’t
sound thrilled, you sound a little unsure.”

The tick of the clock is loud, intrusive, as though it’s right inside me. I can’t work out what to say.

“Well — it’s a long time ago now,” I say. “But really, I was very happy. I wanted to be pregnant more than anything.”

“And Richard, what about you?” she asks.

“We were both delighted,” he says. “Though, quite honestly, Jane, I guess I’m not much good at showing things like that. I’m
just your average emotionally impaired male. You know — I need to retire to my cave from time to time.”

A brief smile flickers across Jane Watson’s face: She likes this. But then she turns to me again.

“And so, Catriona, did you feed her yourself?”

The coyness of this surprises me.

“Breast-feeding, you mean? Yes. I loved it.”

“Can you tell me what you loved especially? What was so special for you?”

“Being so needed,” I tell her.

Her look is acute, intense. I know that she is filing this away.

“It’s very special for you to feel needed?” she asks gently.

I nod but have a sudden doubt, a fear that I have said something rash, dangerous.

“And of course later that would have changed,” she says, “as Daisy grew up. As she became more independent and went to school.
And perhaps you found that she didn’t need you then in quite the same way.…”

“Of course. Well, I enjoyed that part of it too.” I hear the shake in my voice.

“Now, a baby’s arrival always means big changes in the family,” she says. “How did that affect you, would you say? I mean,
there will always be losses as well as gains.”

“I wasn’t aware of any losses,” I tell her.

“There’s such an expectation today that parenthood will be a fulfilling experience,” she says. “It makes it difficult to acknowledge
that there were things that were hard.”

I try to think of something. I see Daisy and me on our afternoons at the farm park, Daisy in a knitted hat that she had, petting
the goats and laughing at their insistence, her face glowing, healthy, everything sunlit, tulip colored. A feeling like grief
tugs at me.

“Darling,” says Richard. He reaches across and rests his hand on mine. It slips into my mind that this gesture is really aimed
at her, to show how empathic he is. “You were quite tearful in the days after Daisy was born. Don’t you remember?”

“But everyone’s like that.” There’s an edge to my voice. I move my hand from under his. “That’s perfectly normal, it doesn’t
mean anything.”