The Perfect Mother (32 page)

Next, after the beep, a quick high-pitched cough. ‘This
is Lauren Burns from Social Services for Catriona and Richard Lydgate.’ Her voice is brisk and sibilant: it resonates in the emptiness of the hall. ‘Just a reminder that the case conference on Daisy is tomorrow morning—at ten-thirty at the Infirmary, in the conference suite. I very much hope you’ll both be able to make it.’ I stop the machine for a moment and write the details down.

Then Gina. ‘My dears, I was just wondering how things were. I trust you’re over the worst with Daisy. Anyway—give me a ring.’

And at last the message I’m looking for. ‘This is Meera Williams from Braisby and Jones, for Catriona. Listen, Catriona—I’m going to give you my home phone number. You can ring me any time this evening…’

Before I take off my jacket, I ring.

‘Meera speaking.’

‘This is Catriona.’

‘Catriona. Excellent,’ she says. There’s warmth in her voice. ‘Now, Fergal said a bit about what’s been happening.’

I tell her about the case conference.

‘Goodness. They were quick off the mark,’ she says. ‘I think I should come with you. How would it be if we meet up first, so you can fill me in?’

We agree to meet at nine-thirty next morning, in the hospital entrance.

And then there’s nothing more to do. I take off my jacket and leave it where it falls. I have an unnerving sense of not quite being at home here, that if I called out,
the voice of someone strange to me might reply. I don’t go upstairs: I can’t bear to pass Daisy’s door, to see all the things that will make me feel her absence still more vividly. The scene at the airport plays out again and again in my head—her face collapsing, the sound of her crying, the woman pulling her away. Wanting her is a physical thing, like a constant ache or hunger. I can still smell the scent of her hair.

I go into the living room. It’s been tidied since I left. The paeonies that I’d kept there though they were dripping petals have all been cleared away. In the evening light, the room has a tenuous quality, as though it might dissolve, or blend into something else entirely. Like a room in a dream, where you’re wandering through some vast house, looking for some indeterminate thing you think you’ve lost or forgotten, moving through many interconnecting rooms, not knowing how big this place is or what its boundaries are or who it belongs to; whether it is yours, why you are there at all. The white mask gleams in the remnants of the light; the black one seems to draw back into the shadow, so you can’t quite make out whether there’s a face there. I see exactly why Daisy’s friends used to find them so frightening.

I’m far too anxious to rest here. I wander through to the kitchen. Things have been put away, but not in their usual places. It takes me a while to find the coffee, which is not in the cupboard where I always keep it. I wait for the kettle to boil, resting my hands on the sill. Outside, the garden is just as it was when we went, in all its
summer sprawl and lavishness: the amber roses opening, the flowers loosening, easing apart, and the poppies bright as carnival in the herbaceous border. You can just make out the shape of the stone frog through the blue of the irises. Somehow this surprises me, that all is as it was: I realise I expected everything to be further on, some things over and dying, new things opening out, as though we’d been away for many days. Long braided shadows reach across the grass, and the sky is the colour of cornflowers. A fox moves out from the pool of black under the birch tree. He’s still for a moment, poised, his sharp sad face angled towards me in the window: staring at the house then turning away, as if he can’t find what he’s looking for, and sidling off into the intricate dark at the back of the border.

There is no reason to stay. My bag, still packed, is in the hall. I don’t know if I’ll need it but I take it anyway. I pick up the bag and my jacket and go out to my car.

He answers the doorbell at once, as though he is expecting me.

The words tumble out. ‘Richard isn’t at home and Daisy’s in the unit and I didn’t know where to go…’

He reaches out and puts his arms round me. I rest my head on his shoulder.

He takes me through to the back room. Jazz is playing and through the open window you can smell the rich night scents of the gardens.

‘Did you speak to Meera?’ he says, before I’ve sat down.

‘Yes. She seemed good. Thank you. There’s a case conference tomorrow.’

‘And Daisy? Have you rung to see how Daisy is?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Ring them now,’ he says.

‘They said not to ring till nine.’

‘I think you should do it now.’

He brings me the phone.

A woman answers. I explain who I am. She seems surprised I’ve rung.

‘Oh. I’ll get someone,’ she says.

A man comes to the phone—he says he is Terence, a charge nurse. His voice is soft, deliberate. He is Daisy’s

key worker, he says. I try to imagine him, this soft-voiced

Terence, this stranger, who is now my daughter’s main

care-giver—try not to immediately hate him. He answers all my questions with a rather exaggerated patience. Yes, Daisy is asleep now. No, she was a bit too tired to eat anything. Well, she seemed OK, perhaps a bit subdued, but I must appreciate that children do take a while to settle. I say to tell her I’m thinking about her all the time.

‘There’s nothing more you can do,’ says Fergal. ‘Not for today.’

‘No.’ I lean back on the sofa, slip off my shoes. I am exhausted but restless.

He brings me wine and sits in the chair opposite me.

‘So tell me,’ he says.

I tell him the story of what has happened. About my mother, and what I learned about my father. About the
police, about Daisy being taken away. He listens, doesn’t say much. Sometimes he nods a little.

When I’ve finished we sit in silence for a moment.

‘You look different,’ he says.

‘Is that good, I wonder?’

He smiles, but doesn’t reply.

It’s getting darker: outside, a yellow moon is rising over the gardens. The moon has a pattern on it; you can see why, when you were a child, you half believed there was a face there. It’s soothing, sitting there in the quiet darkening room. I feel that I can breathe now.

He turns on a table-lamp. In its amber light I notice things about him—the line of his jaw, accentuated by shadow, his rather square hands and bitten fingernails. When he looks at me, his eyes lingering on me, I feel that I am being told a secret.

The wine slides warmly into my veins.

‘I feel as though I’ve been away for years,’ I tell him. ‘When I got back to the house, it was strange—as though I hadn’t been there for ages. Almost as though it wasn’t mine any more…’

I yawn. A great weariness overwhelms me.

He’s looking at his hands.

‘You can stay if you like,’ he says. ‘You don’t have to go back there and be on your own.’

I don’t know what to say.

‘I mean, whatever you want,’ he says.

I look away from him. I’m scared to sleep with him. And I see it isn’t the thought of Richard that stops me—
as though my connection with him has become too tenuous, too frayed, for this to matter, and this shocks me. The fear is a deeper, more primeval thing—some superstitious sense of justice—that if I make love to Fergal I won’t get Daisy back.

‘Look,’ he says, reading my mind, ‘the bed’s made up in the spare room.’

‘Yes. That would be best probably.’

But when I get up, I go to him, reach out, moving my hands across his face, his head, like somebody blind, learning about him. He wraps himself around me. I press my mouth into his, closing my eyes.

In the little whitewashed spare room, under the People Tree bedspread, I think at first that I will be awake for ever. But something has been soothed in me, and I slip down rapidly into sleep. In my dream I am walking the cobbled streets of Prenzlauer Berg in the dappled afternoon, and I pass the greying block where the stucco is peeled away, revealing the naked brick, and I see the little girl high up on the balcony by the empty birdcage, the girl in the taffeta dress; and in my dream she seems to look like Daisy. I wave but she doesn’t seem to see me; she is looking away. I try to call but no sound comes, and she turns and goes back into the darkness of the house, leaving me desolate.

CHAPTER 40

I
n the morning, Fergal wakes me with coffee. Before I go to the case conference, I ring the number that he has, the doctor at Great Ormond Street. I speak to the doctor’s secretary; I explain that we need a second opinion, half expecting that she will say this is impossible. But she makes a provisional appointment, as though my request is the most natural thing. All she will need, she says, is a letter from Daisy’s GP.

Then I ring the Jennifer Norton Unit and ask to speak to Daisy. A different person comes to the phone, a woman. Terence is off till twelve, she tells me, and Daisy
is eating her breakfast, she doesn’t want to disturb her. I feel a little flare of rage, but there’s nothing I can do. She agrees to give Daisy my love.

I drive to the hospital through the clear bright day. Heat lies across the car park in pools of glimmering haze.

A woman comes up to me in the entrance. She has baggy purple trousers and gentle eyes and riotous dark hair.

‘Catriona?’

I nod.

‘I’m Meera.’ Her whole face creases as she smiles. ‘I thought it must be you.’

She looks more like an infant teacher than a solicitor. I immediately like her.

‘I guess we need to pitch straight in,’ she says.

We sit in Outpatients’ reception and she opens up her briefcase.

‘OK,’ she says. ‘You’d better tell me.’

She listens mostly in silence, frowning a little, her dark eyes resting on me. She takes notes with a biro that’s been comprehensively chewed. As I talk her frown deepens. When I’ve finished, she sits for a moment, biting the end of her pen.

‘So today, at the conference, what would be a result for you?’

‘I want to take Daisy home.’

‘That’s the thing that matters more than anything?’

‘Yes.’

‘You see,’ she says, ‘because of the wardship we won’t
be able to undo it all at once, and they may well want to make Daisy the subject of a child protection plan.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It’s for children believed to be at risk. Really, if a professional has worries that a child is being neglected or abused, a child protection plan would be made pretty automatically. It means you’d have regular social work visits. I don’t think we can avoid that—’

‘But she isn’t—’

‘I know.’ She puts her hand on my arm. ‘Catriona, I know. But we need to focus on what we can achieve today.’

‘OK. As long as I can take her home.’

‘Catriona.’ She looks at me, her head on one side. Her eyes are harder suddenly, penetrating. ‘You’ve got to tell them exactly what’s happened with you and Daisy—how you see it. I’ll back you up, of course, but it’s best if it comes from you. Can you do that?’

‘Yes. I think so.’

‘What you say will go in the conference notes, that’s very important. It’s your chance to tell your story—to have it written down. Don’t worry about trying to say the right thing, or how you might be seen. You mustn’t think you can help Daisy by being polite and quiet. You’ve got to speak out. D’you think you can do that?’

My mother is there in my mind, with all her lies and evasions, the discarded photograph, the things she wouldn’t say. And I see how costly my own secrecy has been, the secrecy I learnt from her, all my attempts at concealment—the burnt letter, hiding my history. How my silences have not protected me, not protected Daisy.

‘Yes. I think I can.’

I glance over her shoulder. I start. Richard is there, the distinctive outline of his back, his shoulders. My confidence seeps away. I’m shocked to see him; I never imagined him being here this morning. Yet of course he would have got the message from Lauren Burns, would know what was happening. He’s walking away from me.

‘Richard.’

He doesn’t seem to hear.

I call his name again. People stare.

He turns, nods, comes to us. He doesn’t seem surprised. It enters my mind that he knew already that I was here with Meera—that he saw as he came in and just walked on. I notice his shirt is crumpled.

‘Where were you?’ I say. ‘I went back to the house, I couldn’t find you. You’d just disappeared…’

‘I might say the same of you,’ he says drily. He looks quizzically at Meera. ‘And this is…?’

I do the introductions, stumbling over the words, furtive, uncertain, as though I am guilty of some crime. He raises one eyebrow a little, but shakes Meera’s hand with elaborate politeness.

Meera closes her briefcase.

‘I guess it’s time we got going,’ she says, with a tentative smile. ‘I know the way to the conference room. I’ll show you.’

We walk there awkwardly, the three of us together, down a corridor that smells of antiseptic, Richard, who is always so good with strangers, talking lightly about the weather.

CHAPTER 41

I
t’s one of those featureless hospital rooms, with neutral walls and grey acrylic carpet; it’s chilly with air-conditioning. Dr Carey is there, looking flushed and anxious, and Jane Watson, in a black linen dress with a slit in the side of the skirt, and Dr McGuire, with his sleeves rolled up. He doesn’t look at me. A man with earnest glasses comes and shakes my hand. He says he is Phil Hardy, and he will be chairing the meeting.

There’s a table down the middle, and upright chairs with padded seats arranged around the table. I sit where there are two empty chairs together, and Meera sits beside
me. Richard takes the remaining spare chair on the other side of the circle.

‘We need to introduce ourselves,’ says Phil. ‘I imagine we’ll all be happy with Christian names?’

There’s a murmur of assent.

We go round the circle and people say who they are. Next to Phil there is a woman in a dress patterned with poppies who is an administrative assistant; she will be taking the notes. There are people who are new to me: a solicitor from the Civic Centre; a policewoman from the Child Protection Unit; a social worker with pulled-back hair and a practised expression of concern—she says her name is Lauren Burns and, turning to me, that she will be key worker on the case. So now it seems we are a case—Daisy and Richard and me. And there’s a man with a sparse, sandy beard and perpetual slight frown, who says he is from the Jennifer Norton Unit. I study his face, try to read him. I want to press him with questions—How is she? Tell me, tell me everything. Did she eat any breakfast? Has she cried? But I know too well just how that would be seen.