The Perfect Mother (7 page)

I take my wine into the living room. It’s cold in here tonight: the heating’s been off for most of the day, and the house won’t seem to warm up. I pull the curtains, shutting out the night, but chill air seeps up through the gaps in the floorboards.

I don’t turn on the main light, just the lamps on the little
tables on either side of the fireplace. There is darkness in the corners of the room. The masks we brought back from Venice are lit from below, so the lines of the pottery are etched in shadow. I chose them because they charmed me, with their hints of a seductive world of carnival and disguise. But when Daisy was little, and mothers and children were always coming for coffee, I had to take them down; children seem to be often afraid of heads apart from bodies—it’s probably something primal—and there were toddlers who’d burst into tears if they saw them. The black one is a little macabre, sinister in an obvious way—it’s the fairytale crone, Baba Yaga perhaps, the glossy surface recreating the sagging folds of old flesh—but tonight I see it’s the white one that is more frightening: it’s simpler, almost featureless, a face that is an absence.

I sip my wine and go back over the conversation with Dr Carey. I don’t understand why she wouldn’t take Daisy’s illness seriously. I must have done something wrong. Should I have cried? Should I have sounded more desperate? Maybe I was too assertive; or not assertive enough? Perhaps there’s a code I don’t know about, some goodmother way of behaving. I once heard a famous female barrister speaking on the radio. If she was defending a woman accused of murder, she said, she’d urge her to wear a cardigan to court, ideally angora and fluffy, so no one would think her capable of committing a terrible crime. Maybe there’s a dress code for taking your child to the doctor that’s unknown to me: a frock from Monsoon perhaps, with a pattern like a flowerbed, or a tracksuit and pink lipstick.

There’s a clatter from the hall—Richard closing the door behind him, putting his briefcase down. Relief washes through me: I’m always so glad when he’s home. He comes in, and I see he’s tired; he’s somehow less vivid than when he left in the morning, as though the dust of the day has settled on him and blurred him. He’s brought me flowers, blue delphiniums, wrapped in white paper, with a bow of rustling ribbon. He’s good at choosing things—orchids, silver bracelets; his gifts are always exact.

‘Thanks. They’re so lovely.’ They’re an icy pale blue, like a clear winter sky, the flowers frail, like tissue. I hold them to my face; they have the faintest smoky smell.

He kisses my cheek.

‘There’s pollen on you,’ he says. He rubs at my nose with a finger.

‘Was the meeting OK?’

He shrugs. ‘So so,’ he says.

I’m not sure this is true: he looks strained, older.

‘D’you want to eat?’

He shakes his head.

‘I’ll get you a drink,’ I tell him.

‘Thanks. Scotch would be good. Just tonight.’

I smile. ‘It was that bad?’

He shakes his head. ‘It was fine. Really.’

He has a still face; he’s always hard to read. I don’t pursue it, don’t know the right questions. There are parts of his life that are opaque to me.

I get him a large glass of Scotch, with ice, the way he
likes it. He doesn’t sit, he’s restless—as though the uneasy energy that’s built up through the day won’t leave him. He leans against the mantelpiece, sipping his drink.

In the silence between us I hear Sinead upstairs, the clumping of her slippers and water from the shower running away. I’m worried she will wake Daisy. I’ve become alert again to all the noises of the house—like when you have a baby and skulk round like a conspirator, and every creak on every stair is marked on a map in your mind.

‘We went to the doctor,’ I tell him.

‘Good,’ he says. ‘How was it?’

‘We saw someone new. A woman. She was rather young, I thought.’

‘And was it OK?’

‘Sort of. Well, Daisy liked her.’

‘Excellent,’ he says. ‘There. I told you it would be all right.’

‘I’m not sure. I wasn’t happy really.’

‘What is it?’ he says, solicitous. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I told her that Daisy wasn’t eating and she said I needed nutritional advice. It felt so patronising. Like she couldn’t really hear what I was saying. I keep worrying I handled it all wrong—you know, said the wrong thing or something. D’you think sometimes I don’t express myself right—d’you think I’m not assertive enough, perhaps?’

I want him, need him, to say, Of course not, of course you didn’t handle it wrong—it’s nothing to do with you.

‘Darling, you do rather brood on things,’ he says.

He’s standing just outside the circle of light from the lamp. Half his face is in shadow and I can’t see what he’s thinking.

‘And then she launched into this thing about how it was all psychological,’ I tell him.

There’s a little pause.

‘Well, maybe there’s something in that,’ he says then.

For a moment I can’t speak. The smoky smell of the flowers he’s brought clogs up my throat.

‘But how can there be?’

‘Look, darling,’ he says, ‘you do worry a lot. Maybe that affects Daisy in some way.’

‘I’m worrying because she’s ill. How could that make her ill? I don’t understand. Is that so bad, to worry?’

‘Well, I guess it’s not ideal,’ he says. ‘But with your background, it’s maybe not so surprising.’

I hear a sound of splintering in my head. There’s a sense of shock between us. He shouldn’t have said this, we both know that. But instead of taking it back, he tries to explain.

‘You know, all those things you went through. It’s bound to affect you…’

He turns a little away from me. I see his face in the mirror, but his reflected image is strange to me, reversed and subtly wrong. The darkness reaches out to me from the corners of the room.

‘You’re a bit of a perfectionist,’ he says. ‘We both know that. You want everything to be just right, you can’t just
go with the flow. That’s understandable. It’s perhaps one of the effects of…’ His voice tails off.

‘One of the effects of what?’ My voice is small in the stillness.

‘Darling,’ he says. ‘You know I think you’re a wonderful mother. No one could care for those girls better than you. But maybe sometimes you try almost too hard.’

His eyes are narrow: for a moment he looks at me as though I am a stranger.

‘How can you try too hard?’ I say.

‘All I mean is—of course it’s a worrying situation. But you get worried perhaps a bit more than you need to. And maybe in some ways that makes things worse. Maybe you expect things to go wrong.’

There’s a sense of pressure in my chest, like something pushing into me, making it hard to breathe.

‘I just don’t see how that could make Daisy ill,’ I say.

He hears the catch in my voice. He comes to sit beside me.

‘Cat,’ he says, ‘now don’t go getting upset.’

He ruffles my hair, as though I am a child. His hand on me soothes me, as he knows it will.

‘What about the hospital?’ he says.

‘We’re getting the referral.’

‘Well, that’s all that matters really,’ he says.

‘What if she puts it in the letter—that she thinks it’s psychological? They won’t take Daisy seriously. If they think that, no one’ll bother to try and find out what’s wrong.’

‘Of course she won’t put it in the letter,’ he says. ‘I
mean, these are the experts, aren’t they? She’ll leave them to make up their own minds. None of this adds up to anything,’ he says, and puts his arm around me. Yet still I feel that something has been broken.

CHAPTER 9

T
here’s a road I won’t go down. Poplar Avenue. A harmless name, a name like any other. There’s a house in that road, a wide-fronted house set well back from the street. There are rooms in that house with glass-panelled doors, the panels covered over with brown paper. Richard started to drive down Poplar Avenue once, by mistake, when we were coming home from Gina and Adrian’s, and a car crash in the one-way system had caused a massive tailback. He turned round when he realised: he knows, I’ve told him some of it, and he read about it in the papers during
the inquiry. But nobody knows all of it, except those of us who were there.

I was thirteen when I went there. My mother couldn’t cope with me—or so she told the social worker, as I lurked behind the bead curtain in the squalid kitchen of our tiny flat, that I’d tried to clean up, knowing the social worker was coming, hearing everything. ‘I need a break,’ said my mother. ‘Just for a month or two. To get myself together.’

The social worker said she admired my mother’s honesty, and it probably was for the best. She asked if there was anyone I could go to. ‘No,’ said my mother, ‘we only have each other.’ The social worker said not to worry, she was pretty sure that there was a place at The Poplars. And I wouldn’t even need to change schools, so really it didn’t have to be too disruptive.

My mother was drinking three bottles of sherry a day. It had crept up on us gradually, through the years of living in rented flats, or in rooms at the tops of pubs where she worked behind the bar. I knew the story of how we came to be in this predicament—or, at least, the part of it she chose to tell. Her family had been reasonably well-off—her father was a cabinet-maker—but they’d been Plymouth Brethren, very strict and excluding. She’d always chafed against it—the beliefs, the extreme restrictions. She’d truanted a lot, left school to travel round Europe with an unemployed actor, ten years older than her, who smoked a lot of dope. Her family had rejected her totally—wouldn’t see her again. In the Vondel Park
in Amsterdam, the man had drifted off. She’d wandered back to London, existed for a while on the edge of some rather bohemian group, people who squatted, who liked to call themselves anarchists, who had artistic pretensions. She wore cheesecloth blouses, worked as a waitress. It was the pinnacle of her life, the time to which she always yearned to return. She was still only nineteen when she met my father. She fell pregnant almost immediately. He went off with somebody else when I was six months old; my mother was just twenty. She never talked about him, except to say that she wasn’t going to talk about that bastard. I only knew he’d been part of that arty group, and that his name was Christopher.

It was OK when I was younger. She had standards then, she was quite particular: she talked a lot about manners; she always laid the table properly for tea. We were happy, I think, happy enough, though there was never much money, and often she left me alone in the evenings, even when I was young. I remember how as a little girl I’d sit on the bed and watch her getting ready, perhaps for her evening shift behind the bar, or maybe for a night out on the town with one of her long succession of temporary men. She’d be all sheeny and glossy, with high heels, and a gold chain round her ankle, her skin a sun-kissed brown from her weekly session at the Fake It tanning studio, with the smell that was then so comforting, so familiar, of Marlboros and Avon Lily of the Valley. I’d sit on the bed amid the heaps of her clothes and accessories, her belts and bangles and gloves and floaty
scarves. She had a particular passion for gloves, in pastel cotton or silk, with little pearl buttons or ruched wrists. It was eccentric, perhaps, giving her an air of spurious formality, but she liked to hide her hands, which were always rough and reddened from the work she did, all the washing of glasses in the sink at the bar. I’d watch how she’d choose from her glittery sticks of cosmetics, how she’d do her mouth, first drawing the outline with lippencil, making her narrow lips a little more generous, then the lipstick, coral bright, eased on straight from the stick. She’d press her lips together to spread the colour out. I thought she was so beautiful. Yet my pleasure in these moments was always shot through with fear, that one day she’d go and leave me and somehow forget to return. Or maybe the fear of abandonment is something I’ve added since, thinking back, laying my knowledge of what happened later over my memory of those moments, as frost lies over leaves.

There was one man called Marco, whom she met through a Lonely Hearts column in the local paper. He was, or claimed to be, Italian. She always said she liked a man with an accent. He moved in with us; he was smooth, flash, with lots of chest hair and gold jewellery. The flat was clean and tidy while Marco was with us; sometimes I heard my mother singing as she worked. When he left, taking all her savings and even the money from the gas meter, and she realised she’d been conned, that all his protestations of love were just an elaborate charade, something seemed to die in her. That was when
she started buying sherry instead of wine. She lost her job. Sometimes she’d be virtually insensible when I came in from school, and I’d have to take off her outer clothes and tuck her up in bed. One day I came home all excited, bursting to tell her I’d won the second-year Art prize: it was one of those moments when life feels full of promise and shiny, like a present just ready and waiting for you to unwrap. But my mother was snoring on the sofa, the front of her blouse hanging open, and there was no one to tell. Sometimes she’d be coherent but maudlin, full of platitudes, weeping and saying again and again how she’d tried to give me a good life but it had all gone wrong, and eating Hellmann’s Mayonnaise from the jar with a tablespoon. I started taking money from her purse, to buy food. I spilt nail varnish on her skirt and she hit me with a clothes-hanger. When I got into a stupid fight at school, she turned up drunk and belligerent in the school office, demanding to see the headmistress, and had to be seen off the premises by the caretaker.

That was when the social worker started visiting. The third time she came, she told me to pack and took me out to her car.

The Poplars. It’s the smell I remember: disinfectant, cabbage, adolescent sweat. And the texture of it, everything rough, worn, frayed. Lino, and thin blankets, and flabby white bread and corned beef, and having to ask for every sanitary towel. The sofas had the springs sticking through, and when Darren Reames in one of his moods ripped off some of the wallpaper, it stayed like that for months, with
a great gaping tear. There weren’t enough electric points: you had to unplug the fridge to watch the television, so the milk was usually sour. There was never enough to eat. Once I said I was hungry and Brian Meredith told me not to talk because talking wasted energy.