Now she says, “She should have been nicer, Mum. I’m going to be very nice to
my
children.”
We watch as the sugar deepens to a lavish acorn brown.
“Why do things change when you heat them?” Daisy asks.
“I don’t know, sweetheart. Isn’t that awful? There are so many things I don’t know. I should have listened better at school.
D’you want to put in the butter?”
“OK.”
It sputters noisily, frothing, as she stirs it in.
I pour the caramel sauce on the apples and cut out a circle of pastry and tuck it down round the apples and put the pan in
the oven, the heat brushing my skin. When it’s cooked and I turn it out, tenderly, meticulously, the apples will be golden
pink and glossy.
There’s a whispering outside the window, the first raindrops falling. Thunder growls in the distance.
“We might see lightning,” I say.
“I know all about that. It’s electricity,” says Daisy. “We did electricity at school. You have to use a light bulb and lots
of wires. I liked electricity.”
“Maybe you should be a scientist when you grow up.”
“I want to be a vet,” she says. “Or have a pet shop.”
It’s such a heavy storm it demands attention; there’s a thrill to it. We stand at the window and watch.
“Sinead will be drowned,” says Daisy.
I look at my watch; she really should be home by now. We try to remember whether she took her raincoat.
The rain turns to hail, big hailstones that bounce exuberantly on the patio and knock all the thistledown off the dandelions
in the lawn and rip the blossoms off the pear tree so there’s a white sleet of petals. Behind us, hailstones rattle down the
chimney and burst out onto the hearth; they have an oily coating of soot, and they leave black smears where they fail. I go
to get newspaper to protect the floor, but in the time it takes to spread it, the storm has eased, just gentle rain falling
onto the wreck of the garden, the leaves of the birches lush, wet, holding their darkness to them, the lawn covered in drifts
of snowy petals and the bedraggled skirts of the dandelions.
Daisy goes upstairs to play Nintendo. I wash up, tidy the kitchen. Still Sinead doesn’t come. I ring her mobile, but I get
put through to voice mail. I tell myself she’s with friends or she’s gone shopping, but the usual visions are there in my
head — accidents, abductions — as though there’s a film reel that switches on automatically if she’s twenty minutes late.
Since Daisy’s been ill, everything feels so fragile.
At the sound of the front door opening, I feel such relief I could cry. I go to the hall. She’s soaked; her hair is sleek
and glossy as seaweed, as though she’s been hauled from the sea. The washed, cool air comes in with her.
“Sinead. Thank goodness.”
I put my arms lightly round her. Her hair smells like a sweet canned drink from the mousse she uses.
“What happened?” I ask her.
She shrugs.
“I went to McDonald’s with Kerry,” she says.
“Why didn’t you ring?”
“I thought you wouldn’t notice.”
“I’ve been really worried.”
She peels off her soaked denim jacket and lets it fall to the floor. I don’t say anything. She goes through into the living
room, collapses on the sofa in front of the television, arms and legs flung out. I see how long her legs are, how her shirt
looks suddenly too small. She’s grown, she’s almost a woman, and I hadn’t realized, I was looking the other way.
I want to do something for her.
“D’you want something to eat?”
She shakes her head without looking at me.
“There’s tarte tatin. It’s nearly ready.”
“I went to McDonald’s,” she says. “I just told you.”
She flicks through the channels, finds some quiz show. Her skirt below where her jacket came is wet; it clings to her legs.
“Sinead, you ought to change. You’re soaked; you’ll get a cold. I’ll run you a bath.”
She doesn’t move. Drips run down her parting.
“I didn’t get it,” she says. “Thanks for asking.”
For a moment, I don’t understand.
“The part. I didn’t get it,” she says again.
“Oh, sweetheart, I’m so sorry.
The Tempest
. I forgot.”
“You do that,” she says.
“I’m sorry. We’ve had a horrible day. I’ve been worried about Daisy.”
She pulls a face. “Yeah, well. So what’s new?”
She turns back to the television.
The tarte tatin tastes good, but I can’t eat it. My throat is clogged up with the things I need to say.
“Richard — I’ve been thinking. About what happened with Jane Watson.”
He puts down his spoon and looks across at me warily.
“Daisy is all that matters,” I tell him. “Somehow we have to get focused on Daisy again.”
“I thought that was exactly what I was trying to do.”
His voice is a little too loud. I go to close the door: Sinead is watching TV in her room and Daisy should be sleeping, but
I want to be sure they can’t hear.
His eyes are on me.
“Listen,” I tell him. “This is where we go from here. We’ll ask to see another doctor. I think we have the right to that.
Everyone has the right to a second opinion. I’ve got a name — a doctor at Great Ormond Street. And we have to get a lawyer.”
He looks intently at me. I can see the red flecks in his eyes.
“Who have you been talking to?” he asks.
I flush. “I haven’t been talking to anyone.” I can’t quite look at him.
“Well, this idea of yours, wherever it comes from — it simply doesn’t make sense,” he says. “Getting a lawyer is exactly the
wrong way to go about this. I thought we’d already agreed about that. It’s so confrontational.”
“You don’t understand. Today changes everything. What you did.”
“Look,” he says. “I know what you think about what I did. Would it be too much to ask for you to just stop going on about
it?”
“They’ll think I’m guilty, after what you said. People make assumptions about the kind of person you are.”
“Not necessarily,” he says. His voice is hard and dry. “That depends on the person.”
“They’ll think I’m disturbed. They’ll think all this proves them right. Don’t you see? They’ll think I’m some terribly damaged
person who’s damaging her child.”
He says nothing.
“Richard. Sometimes I feel …” My voice is small, shaky. “Sometimes I feel that even you don’t trust me.”
It’s suddenly so quiet. From outside I hear the drip of water falling from the gutter onto the lid of a dustbin. It’s far
too loud in the sudden silence, as though it’s here in the room.
Then he shakes his head.
“How could you possibly think that? Of course I trust you,” he says. “All that stuff’s nonsense, of course. The Munchausen
thing. Somebody’s harebrained scheme, some student with a theory. But this idea that maybe there are psychological elements
to what’s happening — that’s a quite different proposition. And I do think maybe there’s something in that. As you know.”
“You just don’t get it, do you?”
“What don’t I get?”
I take a deep breath. “That we could lose Daisy.”
“Oh, come
on
,” he says. “That’s just crazy talk.”
“Richard, they could take her into Care. They do that. It happens.” A door bangs upstairs; there are footsteps. I know I should
stop, but I can’t. “I don’t understand why you won’t see …”
“What I see,” he says, “is that people try to help you and you just won’t let them.” His voice is sharp with exasperation.
“You just create issue after issue … Like Jane says, you’re always so angry; you’ve got a lot of anger in you.…”
“I don’t give a fuck what Jane says.”
“She’s the expert, Catriona.”
“She doesn’t know the first thing about me.”
He says nothing. He shrugs a little. I wish he would get angry, shout at me. Anything but this cold withdrawal, the raising
of his eyebrows, the hardening of his eyes.
“Just because you fancy her.” I’m almost shouting now. I know this is pointless, juvenile, but I can’t stop. “Is that why
you did what you did — because you wanted to please her?”
“For God’s sake,” he says.
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” he says. “I know exactly why you don’t like her.”
“Which is?”
“Because she’s right.”
“She’s
right?
”
He gets up, moves to the window. There’s an uneasy yellow glare of light in the garden: The storm will start again soon. He
has his back to me now. He’s looking out at the garden and blotting out the light.
“Well, you are damaged, of course,” he says. “By what happened.” His voice is quite matter-of-fact — as though he’s commenting
on my clothes. “I mean, I’ve always known that; I’ve made allowances.”
Anger tightens my throat.
“Richard, how can we possibly carry on if you say these things, if that’s how you see me?”
And immediately, I wish I hadn’t said that: as though just saving these words makes something seem real, possible; as though
I have opened a door that cannot again be shut.
He turns and looks at me with narrowed eyes.
“Well, if that’s how you feel,” he says.
The door swings back: It’s Daisy, in her frog pajamas. Her hair is curled against her head where she’s been lying, and her
eyes are huge and shadowed, dilated with the dark.
“It’s so noisy,” she says. She looks at us sternly. “I can’t possibly get to sleep with all that noise.”
I go to put my arms around her.
“Come back to bed,” I tell her. “I’ll come and sit with you while you go to sleep.”
I take her upstairs.
“My chest hurts,” she says, as she gets into bed. She spits stomach acid into a tissue. I prop her up with three pillows behind
her. She turns away from me and I stroke her back, pushing aside the soft mass of her hair so my fingers don’t snag in it.
I keep doing this for what seems like a very long time.
It’s raining again, lashing against the glass on the other side of the blind. I can hear a little torrent gushing down the
wall of the house, where the gutter is blocked, perhaps, splashing onto the rubbish sacks in the alley. In this drenching
rain, our house feels less substantial. I worry that the rain will get in, will find some hole or crack, some space between
the tiles. The roof needs mending, we know that, the building society said as much when we moved here, but it costs a lot
and we’ve kept on putting it off. I see how wrong we were, how terribly misguided: We should have had it mended while there
was time. I see it in my mind, the place where the rain gets in, in the darkness of the roof space, at first just a drip,
then a tiny stream of water, steadily encroaching, easing its way between joist and plank, making its smells, its stains.
It’s happening now; it’s happening at this moment, rotting timber, softening plaster, damp fingers reaching out and down and
silently weakening what once was solid and strong. How could any house withstand such force of rain?
Daisy’s shoulders sink, the shape of her body under the duvet softens, eases down, her breathing deepens. I’m so impatient
to go back to Richard, to make everything all right, but I force myself to wait a while, till she’s securely asleep, then
I slip off my shoes and creep out of her room.
As I close her door, very quietly, I see Richard on the stairs that lead up to the attic. Under his arm he has the air bed
that the girls use on holiday. It has a pattern of palm trees, Sinead chose it in a shop on the beach at Tirrenia: The last
time we used it was in a Tuscan swimming pool. The foot pump is in his hand.
I stare at him. “What are you doing?”
“Isn’t it obvious what I’m doing?” His cold, still voice.
I remember what happened with Sara, what he told me at dinner at Mon Plaisir, when we were falling in love: how he moved out
of their bed and they never had sex again. Panic seizes me.
“You can’t sleep up there. Richard.
Please
.” My voice is shrill, the words all tumbling out. “We’ve got to sort this out; we won’t get anywhere if we just go on quarrelling.
That doesn’t solve anything.”
“I wasn’t the one who started this,” he says.
“We’ve got to talk. We’ve got to understand each other.”
He shrugs. “Wouldn’t you say it’s a little bit late for that?”
There’s the click of a latch behind me. I turn, bite back the things I was going to say. Sinead is at her door. She looks
from one to the other of us. She looks smaller, younger, in her dressing gown. She’s trying to look hard and cold, but there’s
a child’s fear in her face. I want to tell her, Don’t worry, it’ll all be OK, it’s just a bad patch, sweetheart, we’ll sort
this out.… But my mouth won’t move.
We all stand there silently for a moment. Then she goes back into her room and bangs her door behind her.
A
LL THAT WEEK
Richard and I treat each other with formal, unsmiling politeness. But at night I always wake at three, sensing at once from
the heaviness in my body and the furred thickness of the dark that it is still very early, and I lie there for hours, alone
in the wide, empty bed, hearing the birds start to sing, first some rook or jackdaw, then the growing and mingling of all
their metallic songs, and the hourly chime of St. Agatha’s.
On Thursday evening I’m meeting Nicky at the Café Rouge. It’s a still, hot evening; it’s hard to breathe, as though the air
is all worn out or used up. I’m early and she isn’t there. I sit in the window, looking out onto the pavement. People’s shadows
fall in front of them as they pass. I try to guess what people are like from their shadows.
Eventually, she comes — so sorry to be late, yet she has a vacant, distracted look, as though part of her is somewhere else
entirely. I ask about Simon, but knowing what she’ll say, because the shine has gone from her. It’s only little things, she
says. He’s kind of evasive, saying how busy he is, and at this after-work party, he spent a long time talking to this woman
who had rather tarty shoes and a very appealing cleavage. But then, why shouldn’t he? Perhaps she’s being paranoid.…