The Perfect Mother (34 page)

Richard shakes his head.

‘Right, then,’ says Phil. ‘We’ll need to do a core assessment, and Lauren will visit weekly while that’s being carried out. You should all get notes within forty-eight hours. And I’d like to reconvene in three weeks, by which time hopefully we’ll have the second opinion. Are there any comments?’

Meera puts her hand on my wrist. ‘Are you OK with that?’

I nod.

She turns to Phil. ‘I think the social work visits are regrettable and unnecessary, but my client will accept them.’

Dr McGuire frowns. ‘I’d like to put my reservations on record,’ he says. ‘Though of course I have no choice but to go along with the conference decision.’

Phil turns to me. ‘How soon do you want to fetch Daisy?’

‘Now,’ I say. ‘I want to fetch her now.’

He says he’ll ring the unit straight away.

My eyes meet Richard’s and he smiles and a warmth
of relief washes through me. And I think how everything is put right now, how it will all be healed: how Daisy is given back to us and she will be diagnosed and treated and we will all live together happily in the house that I love. I think how stupid I’ve been, to be so afraid, to feel it was all so fragile, that it could fall apart. My passion for Fergal shames me. I push it away from me, think how it was just a temporary thing, an aberration, mistaking friendship and transient attraction for something solid and real. It’s my life with Richard I want: the life that plays out in front of me now, in all its vivid precision. I see us at the dining table, enjoying something lavish that I’ve cooked for Sunday lunch, Daisy eating greedily, healthily, all of us laughing at some story of Sinead’s; or in the living room in the evening, just Richard and me together in a companionable silence, with a fire in our grate and our plum-coloured curtains drawn against the dark. All these things are there in the tumbling kaleidoscope of my imaginings, in the time it takes for him to make his way round the table towards me, weaving between the other people, who are gathering up their folders and putting on their jackets and who suddenly don’t matter any more. It’s this that I want, that I have always wanted. For Daisy to be well and all of us living together in our wide rooms full of sunlight and the smells of flowers and spices: a fortunate life, secure within the thickness of our walls.

CHAPTER 42

‘H
appy?’ he says.

I nod. ‘I’m going to get her.’

‘Come and have coffee,’ he says. ‘She won’t be ready straight away. Phil’s got to ring them and everything. And there’s sure to be paperwork to do at the other end.’ He’s talking rather rapidly. ‘There’s a machine in the corridor.’

He has his hand on my shoulder.

There’s a drinks machine and a snack machine. He gets coffee for both of us. We watch silently as the liquid spatters
into the plastic cups. The coffee is covered with bubbles that taste of water and a little indeterminate bitterness.

‘I didn’t have any breakfast.’ I fumble in my bag for a coin.

‘I’ve got plenty of change,’ he says.

He buys me a Twix. I fold the paper down and take a bite. My hands are warm and the chocolate is sticky already.

He glances at me, then away. He’s smoothing back his hair.

‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ he says.

I stand there, the coffee in one hand, the melting Twix in the other. There’s something about his voice, a tremor he can’t control. This scares me.

‘Not now, Richard. Surely it can wait.’ I want to push all this away, not let it happen. ‘Really, I need to go. Daisy needs me.’

‘I want to tell you now,’ he says.

And I know he is going to say what he has to say. I see the shadowed house, the murky water, the windmills turning in a shiver of wind.

He isn’t looking at me. A nervous, mirthless smile flickers across his face. ‘I mean, there’s no good way of saying this, so I might as well get straight to the point—but I’m moving out,’ he says.

I stare at him. He thinks I don’t understand.

‘I’m telling you I’m leaving you, Catriona.’

My heart lurches, my mouth dries up. Everything falls apart in front of me, our life together, the children, our house, our garden, our holidays and Christmases
and all the hopes I had. I see all these losses passing dizzyingly before me.

‘Are you all right?’ he says.

I shake my head.

‘You can’t be surprised,’ he says.

‘No, I’m not surprised.’

But I put out a hand to steady myself. Now it’s actually happening, it takes my breath away, this unravelling of all these intimate entanglements—so rapidly and completely, in a bland corridor, over a plastic cup of bitter coffee.

‘I think it’s for the best,’ he says.

‘Best for who?’

He doesn’t reply. His silence enrages me.

‘How can you do this?
Now?
When everything’s so difficult? When all this is happening with Daisy?’

‘We can’t carry on,’ he says. ‘You know that.’ Quite cool, as though he’s recovered his composure, now he’s told me. As though this is all fact—like a weather forecast or a tax statement. ‘After the things you’ve done. I mean, how could I ever trust you? We can’t possibly live together any more. I’d have thought that was blindingly obvious.’

I swallow hard. ‘I know I shouldn’t have taken her—I know that. But I couldn’t bear her going to that place, I felt I didn’t have a choice.’ I’m fighting now, striving to pull us back from the brink. ‘I’m sorry if I frightened you.’

‘It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it?’ he says.

I want to touch him—to put my hand on his, remind him that once he loved me, make him understand—but my hands are full with the coffee and Twix and I can’t work out how to do it.

‘Please, Richard—if you have to go…Surely it doesn’t have to be now. Can’t we just kind of stay together for a bit—now we’ve got Daisy back?’ My voice is steadier now; it’s all very rational, a business proposition. ‘We can work together on this, we won’t be pulling against each other anymore. We know what we’re doing, I’ve found a doctor who could help her. Don’t go now. We could lead separate lives if you want. But just to keep that safety for the children…’

He hears me out but he doesn’t respond, except to shake his head.

‘It’s not the right time, Richard.’

I drop the Twix on the window sill, put my hand on his arm. He stiffens and pulls away. I see I’ve marked the sleeve of his suit with chocolate.

‘I’ll want Sinead, of course,’ he says. ‘Once we’ve worked everything out. But for the moment she’ll have to stay with you.’ He’s looking into his coffee cup. ‘There isn’t room at Francine’s.’

‘Francine’s?’

‘You heard.’

‘So…how long exactly?’

‘We’ve been close for a while,’ he says, as though this is the most routine thing in the world.

I hear a voice in my head, quite clearly: my mother’s voice, nicotine-stained, full of self-justification, talking about my father and how he left her. ‘I have to say he could have chosen better when he left…Well, she was there…conveniently to hand…’ I feel a sense of overwhelming weariness.

He takes a little card from his pocket. It has her address, all ready for this moment, written in purple pen, in writing I don’t recognise. That seems cruel to me, that he didn’t take the time to do it himself, that it’s written in her writing. I take the postcard, vaguely register an address in Twickenham. I put the card in my handbag.

‘There’s something I need to know,’ I say. Slowly, struggling with it. ‘Everything was fine till Daisy got ill. Wasn’t it? I just want to know, to get clear about this in my head. It would be hard for anyone, what we’ve been through—hard for any couple to cope with. But we were all right till Daisy got ill. Weren’t we?’

He doesn’t reply.

The Jennifer Norton Unit is on an old site that’s now largely disused. I drive round the perimeter road. There are separate blocks like big houses with patches of grass and empty car parks between them. Most of the blocks look Victorian; they are built of brick, now blackened, with cupolas and gables. When they were built, I guess the style of them looked Italianate, elegant—but now it inevitably suggests an asylum. Nothing much seems to happen here. I pass one or two outpatient clinics, and signs to an eye unit and to Adult Psychology. The chapel is boarded up. Some of the windows I pass have children’s tissue-paper pictures still Sellotaped to the glass, but the windows open onto empty rooms.

I follow the signs to the Jennifer Norton, down a drive between ragged verges. It’s another Victorian building,
drab in spite of the coloured curtains at the upstairs windows, with peeling window frames and neglected ivies in wan pots by the door. To the side there is a play area, enclosed within wire-mesh fencing, with a park bench and some footballs and grass that hasn’t been mown.

The door is locked. I ring the bell. The door is opened by a young woman with a label on her lapel that says Receptionist. She has very long purple fingernails with a pattern on.

I say I’ve come for Daisy. I have to sign in, and to give my car registration number. She indicates the chairs in the waiting area. I don’t sit down.

‘I want to see her now,’ I say. ‘There’s been a case conference. I can take her home.’

‘I’ll get someone,’ she says, a little wearily.

A charge nurse comes. He says he is Terence. He’s fifty-ish, in a cardigan, smelling of oversweet aftershave.

‘I’m Mrs Lydgate. I’ve come for Daisy.’

‘Ah. Yes,’ he says. ‘We heard the conference decision.’ He looks me up and down; he doesn’t smile.

‘I’ve come to take her home. I want to see her now.’

‘I understand,’ he says. ‘I’ll just get everything organised.’

I sit on one of the chairs. Silence falls over me like a blanket. I think how I hate all waiting rooms, their rubber plants, worn toys, goldfish, out-of-date copies of
Prima,
their thick muffling heat, the fear I feel in them. Through the open door beside the reception desk I can see a corridor, stairs to the dormitories, a plasterboard partition, a fire
door. The silence is briefly broken by a sudden screaming shout from down the corridor, a high girl’s voice, a fusillade of swearing. ‘You fucking bitch, you fucking—’ abruptly cut off as somebody shuts a door. The receptionist studies her fingernails intently. Silence falls again.

Panic grows in me, a fierce unreasoning panic that Daisy has disappeared. That she is lost or has run away, that they can’t find her. I see her on that afternoon in the New Forest when she was two or three, running and running, my fear that she would be taken from me, that she might vanish in the brightness of the light.

I can’t sit still. I go to the receptionist.

‘Why is it taking so long?’

She looks at me pityingly.

‘We do have a discharge procedure, you know,’ she says. ‘We have to go through the proper procedures. We can’t cut the corners just because someone’s in a hurry.’

I sit down again. I flick through a magazine, seeing nothing. Waiting there unprotesting is one of the hardest things that I have done.

There are footsteps. I turn. Daisy is there with the charge nurse in the cardigan.

I put out my arms, but it’s not as I expected. She comes towards me, but her face is set. I put my arms around her; she turns her head away from me. I see the charge nurse watching this, as though he is noting it down.

I take her bag. ‘Have you got everything, sweetheart?’ It’s just a meaningless question to get us out of here.

She nods.

‘OK, young lady,’ says the charge nurse to Daisy. He ruffles her hair. ‘Well, let’s just hope we’re doing the right thing for you.’ She doesn’t say anything. ‘Bye, then, Daisy. See you again, maybe.’

I take her hand and go.

We don’t speak on the way back to the car. I can tell how tired she is; her hand is limp and cold.

As we drive out between the unkempt verges I look in the mirror. She’s staring unseeing out of the window; her face is white, stiff.

‘Sweetheart, I’m so happy to have you back.’

She makes a little noise in her throat.

‘I’ve missed you so terribly,’ I tell her.

I watch her in the mirror. She still has that stiff look, but she’s turned towards me. Her eyes are fixed on my eyes in the mirror.

‘Daisy, talk to me. I know you’re cross…’

Her eyes blaze at me. ‘Why did you let me go there, Mum?’ Her face is fierce with anger. ‘You shouldn’t have let me go there. It was horrible.’ The words tumbling out now. ‘I didn’t sleep at all. There was this girl who kept shouting and shouting—she wouldn’t shut up.
And
they made me eat cornflakes. I felt so sick. You shouldn’t have let them take me. You should have stopped them.’

It hurts.

I brake the car, there in the road, turn round to face her. I reach out my hands to her.

She resists, but only for a moment. Then she wrenches off her seat belt and starts to cry and falls into my arms.

CHAPTER 43

I
t’s hot in the hospital, far too hot for sleep. My bed is by the window; I push the curtain aside and open the window a little, trying to be quiet, though Daisy, under her sheet with its pattern of red giraffes, shows little sign of waking. Her arm is flung out over the top of the sheet. You can see the canula in her wrist, through which some of her medicine is given. It was put in by a cheerful male nurse called Jason, who wore a Wall-E T-shirt under his white coat, and kept up an easy flow of talk right through the procedure. ‘Look, it’s a little man, this is his bed,’ he said, tucking the cotton wool under the tap on the
canula. It was suited, really, to a much younger child, but it distracted her; it did what was needed.

Our room looks over an inner courtyard of the hospital, which is full of the flues and pipes of the heating and air-conditioning system. As I push the window open the sound of it roars at me. I think the noise will wake her, but she doesn’t stir. In the dim light from the corridor that comes through the curtained window in our door, you can make out the shapes of things in this little room, though the colour is taken from everything; it’s shades of brown, like an old photograph. The ward is divided into these rooms, each with a high metal bed for the child and a foldout bed for the parent. On one side of us there’s an Afghani woman and her toddler, on the other an older man with a pallid teenage son. There’s a television in our room, and labelled bins for different kinds of rubbish, and a basin with pink Hibiscrub, which has a wholesome smell and dries your skin. Down the corridor there is a kitchen, with snacks for parents, and some of the foods that children can have before a colonoscopy—jelly, juice, ice lollies. When we came here, the day before yesterday, Jason told me apologetically that they seemed to be clean out of lollies. You could get them, he said, from a newsagent’s down the street. This surprised me, somehow, that the outside world was so near you could bring a lolly back without it melting. This place feels cloistered, apart—as though its walls are thick as the walls of castles, as though you’d have to cross a moat, a drawbridge, to come here.