The Perfect Mother (17 page)

‘Darling, I had wanted to say…’ He’s turned away
from me, profiled darkly against the apricot sky. ‘Well, maybe now’s not quite the time to raise this. And it’s your thing—I don’t like to interfere. But some of the people you’ve taken Daisy to have been rather iffy.’

‘Helmut Wolf, you mean? But Nicky said he was good.’

He shrugs. ‘Exactly,’ he says.

Sinead is walking around upstairs; there’s a blare of ferocious hip-hop, and the bang of the bathroom door.

‘Richard.’ My voice is a whisper; I don’t want her to hear. ‘They want us to see a psychiatrist. You and me.’

He nods. ‘OK. But I’ll need a bit of warning so I can schedule it in.’

‘But I don’t think we should go. I don’t see why you’re just accepting it like that. This is all wrong, Richard. Daisy needs someone to make her well—she doesn’t need a
psychiatrist
.’

‘Sweetheart, I know what you think. But I guess they’re just asking—is there anything going on in the home that could be adding to the problem? And that’s a perfectly valid question: you know, if one stands back a little, gets some kind of distance. Sometimes it helps to stand a little outside things.’

The tears that I’ve been holding back start spilling down my face.

At last he comes and sits on the sofa beside me and puts his arm around me. I cling to him, his warmth, the rich smell of his aftershave, wanting to hide in him.

He strokes my wet face. ‘You’re shaking,’ he says. ‘You seem so frightened. There’s nothing to be frightened of.’

‘Richard, it’s serious,’ I say through my tears. I wipe my eyes. ‘These are really serious things they’re saying. It’s a really serious allegation.’

‘Only if we let it be,’ he says.

He’s ready for his rehearsal, but he’s a little reluctant.

‘Will you be all right?’ he says. ‘Maybe I should give it a miss this once.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.’

He gets his violin and goes to say goodbye to Daisy, the violin case in his hand. She’s propped up in bed, her hot-water bottle clutched to her stomach.

‘Dad, play me something,’ she says.

‘Daisy, Dad has to go now,’ I tell her.

‘No, that’s OK,’ he says. He takes out his violin.

‘Play
“The Long and Winding Road”
,’ she says.

This always impresses her so much—not the dazzling ripples of notes in the pieces he practises for his string quartet, but that he can call up any tune she chooses. He plays and she watches raptly; it’s the wide-eyed wondering look she’d have for a magician, who conjures rabbits and pigeons out of swirls of magneta silk. The tension in her face begins to ease away.

When he’s finished she reaches out and plucks a string with her finger. He kisses the top of her head.

We go downstairs.

‘She doesn’t seem too bad,’ he says as he puts on his jacket.

‘I don’t know,’ I say.

He touches my shoulder. ‘Cat, are you sure I shouldn’t stay? You look quite shaky,’ he says.

‘Really, I’ll be OK.’

Daisy settles more quickly tonight. I stay for a while and watch her sleeping. Her face is soft, easy, now she’s asleep, and the light from her lamp in its terracotta shade makes her skin look warmer, healthier. A strand of hair, dark blonde like wet sand, has fallen over her face. Her hair needs washing, but she hates to have it washed, and I haven’t the heart to do it when it’s not important. One arm is flung out on top of the duvet, as if she were reaching out to somebody just as she fell asleep. The braided friendship bracelet of tatty wool is still wrapped round her wrist. I feel a surge of love for her so strong: I believe for a moment that it could make her well, that it’s like an amulet or a witch’s circle of fire, to drive away whatever is harming her. I kiss her quietly so as not to wake her.

Sinead is watching
House
in her room. There are urgent voices, and monitors going off.

I take the rest of the bottle of wine and my glass and go up to the attic. I didn’t turn on the lights: there’s still a little brightness in the sky. The pictures I’ve been drawing are there on the table. More children. They’re trapped or imprisoned or seeking to find their way through twisty labyrinths, and some of them have chains on their hands and feet. I look at them for a moment. I don’t know if they’re any good—though Sinead assures me that Mr Phillips, her adored art teacher, would like
them: he likes weird stuff, she says. There’s a paradox in these pictures, the images themselves, the sense of limitation and constriction, and the freedom and flow with which they seem to emerge from my pen. But I know that won’t happen tonight. It’s not even worth trying tonight; I know I couldn’t draw.

I turn off the light and lean on the window sill, looking out. I can see down into Monica’s garden, where in the shadowed places under the apple trees the darkness is dense and absolute as ink. I hear the sound of foxes, screeching at one another, the noise they make when they fight. When first we came here and I heard their screeching, I rushed out into the garden, not knowing what had happened, afraid I might find some maimed or slaughtered creature.

I feel the wine loosening me. I drink and think about things. I remember Daisy’s story about the voodoo dolls, the girl who got given a doll for bad luck and broke her ankle. I wonder if someone has cursed us. Is that possible? Can such things be? I think about the letters from Berlin, about my mother: who knows where I live, who wants me to visit her. I see I am afraid of her—as though she has some occult power over us, as though her knowledge of me and of Daisy could harm us. I don’t want us to be there in her mind—even if now, as she claims, she wishes us well: I fear she could harm us just by thinking about us. As if all this has happened because of her. And I think about the letter from Dr McGuire, that’s downstairs in the pocket of my jacket. I feel his hostility
reaching out to me from the letter, as if his words could hurt me. Words, phrases, graze me—that I am demanding and overprotective and hostile and aggressive.

The apricot fades from the sky and the shadows lengthen and night comes into my room. I’m wandering through the maze in my mind, the paths that don’t take you anywhere. Dead ends, confusions, curses. Outside, the trees are a deeper darkness against the sky and there are spiky stars and a thin fine moon.

The alcohol eases into my veins, making everything simple. I feel a sudden certainty.

I go downstairs, quickly, purposefully, although my steps are unsteady. I get some matches from the kitchen, and a big glass ashtray that we never use. There’s that sound in my ears again, the windmills caught in the wind. I take Dr McGuire’s letter from my jacket pocket, and go back to the top of the house.

I don’t turn on the light. I glance at the letter but it’s too dark by the light of the moon to read the words. I strike a match, and hold the match to the page; the paper flares. I drop it in the ashtray so as not to burn my fingers, the brief heat searing my skin. It happens so quickly: the transient fierce brightness, rapidly extinguished, the last few scraps of paper edged with beads of flame. Then the final sparks go out, but the sudden dark is full of the scent of burning.

There in the darkness, my certainty seeps away.

I take the ashtray downstairs—carefully, with my hand across it, so the ashy scraps of paper won’t blow everywhere.
I go to the kitchen and wash the ashtray out in the sink. I see myself reflected in the window—my eyes are narrowed with the dark, my face is relaxed from the drink and somehow wary; for a moment my face reminds me of my mother’s. I rinse all the smudges of ash from the sink, so no one could ever guess what I have done, as though this is a crime I have committed.

CHAPTER 21

I
take Daisy some toast to eat in bed. She’s sitting up watching television, with Hannibal tucked in the crook of her arm. She’s only just woken; she has a bewildered look. Her blue eyes follow me as I put out her school clothes on her chair, and her face crumples a little, but she doesn’t say anything. Today I am determined to get her into school.

I drink my coffee in the kitchen. Outside, there’s a sepia water-laden light and a pearl of rain at the end of each twig of the lilac and tense white buds on the pear
tree. Through the half-open window I hear the shiny song of a blackbird.

Sinead is cramming felt tips into her pencil case and trying to make space in her bag for her Weimar Republic project, which she’s covered in red paper. She smells of some hair styling product, a sugary chemical smell. She’s frowning.

‘What if it’s mufti again?’ she says. ‘I’d die.’

‘It won’t be mufti,’ I tell her. ‘They’d have sent a letter home if it was mufti.’

‘It’s a Friday, it could be. Maybe it is, and they didn’t tell me.’

‘Sinead, it won’t be. Trust me.’

She goes off, looking doubtful.

Eventually I hear Daisy coming downstairs. She’s dressed for school. She holds onto the bannister, and puts both feet together on each step, moving cautiously, seriously, as though her shoes are heavy, as though a line has been drawn around her that she must move within.

‘My legs are all stiff,’ she says. ‘They feel funny. My kneecaps feel funny.’

‘You’re my brave girl.’

I give her a hug as she gets to the bottom of the steps. She resists a little.

‘Megan will be so pleased to see you,’ I tell her.

She shakes her head. Her eyes mist over as she pulls away from me. ‘Sometimes I wish I had someone else’s life,’ she says.

I brush her hair; her eyes are wet and full. I keep up a
stream of bright chatter, trying not to leave her any space to say how ill she feels. Her hair is tangled because she’s been off sick for two days and I haven’t brushed it: I always forget to do it when she stays in bed, though it’s probably the kind of thing that sensible ordinary women do routinely. I’ve brushed out the tangles and I’m holding a clump of hair in one hand and a scrunchie in the other, poised to fix her ponytail, when the phone goes. I curse whoever it is in my head and fix the hair in a hasty lopsided clump and hurry to the phone, unable to let it ring—though it’s probably just someone wanting to sell me a kitchen.

‘Could I speak to Mrs Lydgate?’

‘Yes. Speaking.’ My voice is curt: I’m looking for the sales pitch.

‘Ah. Good morning, Mrs Lydgate. It’s the surgery here.’ I place her then, the brisk Glaswegian accent. ‘I’m sorry to bother you. Dr Carey tells me she gave you a letter to read in Reception yesterday—a letter from the hospital.’

She stops there, waiting, requiring something of me.

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘The letter seems to have gone missing, Mrs Lydgate.’

‘Oh.’

‘Are you quite sure you handed it back?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘We were just wondering if you had perhaps taken it by mistake.’ Her voice is silky.

‘No.’ I try to remember, to think up something plausible.
‘I gave it to the other receptionist—the one with the blue cardigan.’

‘Carolyn? Well, I’ve asked her, of course. She says she’s sure you didn’t.’

‘No, I did, really. Maybe it got put back in the wrong folder.’

‘We’ll have another look,’ she says. ‘But perhaps you could also have a look at home. We can easily get a duplicate, of course. It’s just that Dr Carey is very keen to find out what happened to the original.’

‘I gave it back,’ I tell her.

‘Right, then, Mrs Lydgate.’

There’s a knowingness to her voice. I can tell she suspects me.

Daisy is sitting on the sofa, hunched over, her head in her hands, the way an old person might sit.

‘Shall we do your hair again?’

She shakes her head dully.

‘I can’t be bothered,’ she says.

We put on our coats and I take her hand and we go out to the car through the brownish light. It’s raining more heavily now. There are smells of petrol fumes and wet lilac.

‘You’re shaking, Mum,’ she says. ‘Why are you shaking?’

‘I’m all right,’ I tell her.

The traffic is heavy and sluggish, everything slowed by the rain. At the gate, she wants me to stay with her till the bell rings, but then goes in without protest. I wait there for a moment once she’s left me, my
eyes holding onto her as she walks in, poised and careful, through the gate.

The bookshop is in the shopping centre. There’s a fountain lined with turquoise tiles and smelling faintly of chlorine, and jazzed-up Vivaldi over the sound system, and cheerful shops selling flimsy exuberant clothes to teenage girls. Last time I came here it was to do the Christmas shopping. I spent hours hunting for perfect things, presents for the girls’ stockings, beaded bags and Viennese truffles and tiny soaps smelling of flowers. It seems so long ago now, that world of pleasant ordinariness—when I thought myself unfortunate if the queue was slow in the Body Shop and I got a parking ticket.

Inside the bookshop it’s warm and bright and hushed, with the thick, slightly scorched smell of new carpet. I wander round the shelves with a rather deliberate nonchalance. There are few people here: some women with protesting children in buggies, one or two older people in taupe mackintoshes. The medical section is near the back. It seems well stocked; students from the hospital must come here. There’s no one else in this part of the shop except an elderly man in a jacket the colour of mud, who’s looking at military history. The other side of the bookshelf, a man I can’t see is talking into his mobile. ‘Of course I love you. Why would I say it if I didn’t?’ A private voice, but irritable. ‘Well, there you are, then…’

The books are mostly weighty-looking, substantial. I read through the titles on the spines, finding that half of
them are words I don’t understand. It seems there’s nothing here that will help me; perhaps I was stupid to come. I’m just about to go when my eye falls on a book called
Trust Betrayed.
It’s a grey paperback. I pull it out; the subtitle takes up half the cover:
Münchausen Syndrome By Proxy, Inter-agency Child Protection and Partnership with Families.
I open it. It’s obviously written for professionals, but the print is quite big and it doesn’t look too technical and it seems like a book that I could understand.