The Perfect Mother

by Margaret Leroy

  ‘Why do things change when you heat them?’ says Daisy.

  ‘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 blossom 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; they leave black smears where they fall. 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 on her PlayStation. I wash up, tidy the kitchen. Still Sinead doesn’t come. I ring her mobile, but I get put through to voicemail. 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 styling foam 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 looks 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 says.

  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 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 Münchausen thing. Somebody’s hare-brained 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 withdrawa
l, 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 if 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 saying these words makes something seem real, possible; perhaps 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 pyjamas. 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 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 mis-guided: 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 airbed that the girls use on holiday. It has a pattern of palm trees, Sinead chose it in a shop on the beach at Tirenia; the last time we used it was in a Tuscan swimming pool. The footpump 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 one another.’

  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.

  CHAPTER 31

  All that week we 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…

  I nod, sipping my wine. I notice how her hair needs washing, how everything about her seems to droop. As if she trails a kind of sadness around like a scent of dying flowers.

  ‘He’s a strange guy really,’ she says. ‘You know that thing that happens—that the better you get to know a person, the weirder they start to seem?’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ I tell her.

  There’s jazz over the sound system, Ella Fitzgerald, that voice like a skein of silk. We listen for a moment.

  ‘And you, Cat?’ she says. ‘How’s it going?’

  I shrug; I don’t say anything.

  ‘Hey.’ She leans towards me across the table, as if she’s only just seen me properly. ‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it? Daisy? Richard?’

  ‘Richard,’ I tell her, but a little reluctantly.

  ‘Oh, Cat. Want to talk about it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ It’s as though to talk about it would be to make it real, something you couldn’t turn back from. ‘Sorry.’

  She looks at me warily. ‘It’s probably just a bad patch,’ she says. ‘Everyone has bad patches. It must be so tough with Daisy ill and everything.’

  She waits for a moment, watching me, to see if I want to say more. I shake my head a little.

  ‘Cat, any time you want to talk…Well, you know that.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say.

  She fills my glass to the brim. By the way, she says, she’d been meaning to tell me—someone at Praxis knows this totally brilliant homeopath. Would I like his number? I take it down, but only because it would seem impolite to refuse.

  We eat toasted chicken sandwiches, and listen to Ella Fitzgerald singing ‘Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall,’ but somehow it’s hard to keep the conversation going, and at ten she says
she’s sorry but she feels so terribly tired and she really ought to get home.

  The lights are off in the house, Richard must be in bed already. I think that maybe tonight I’ll stay up for a while, try lying down really late to see if that helps me sleep through. I’ll sit downstairs and watch Newsnight and some predictable thriller, and only go to bed when I’m almost falling asleep.

  But when I go into the kitchen to get a drink of water, a hot smell of whisky hits me. I turn on the light.

  He’s slumped at the table. In front of him there is a nearly empty bottle of Glenfiddich.

  ‘Richard. What the hell are you doing?’

  He looks up slowly, as though his head is heavy.

  ‘Would you mind terribly turning off the light?’ he says. His speech is careful, slurred.

  For a moment I don’t do anything.

  ‘Turn the fucking light off.’

  I do as he says, but I switch on the light in the cooker hood.

  ‘Richard, for God’s sake. What’s happened? Are the girls OK? Is Daisy asleep?’

  He looks at me with his eyes half open; in the thin light, his eyelids look swollen as though he’s suffered some injury.

  ‘It’s always,’ he says carefully, ‘the girls. The bloody girls. What about me? Do I count any more? Do I? Or is it just the bloody girls?’

  I sit at the table beside him.

  ‘Of course.’ I put my hand on his. ‘Of course you count. It’s just that it’s all such a strain, with Daisy ill and everything…’

  He ignores me.

  ‘There’s something I want to know. Do I have a place in your fucking universe, Catriona? Do I mean anything?’

  ‘You know you do. Don’t be an idiot.’ It’s the way I might speak to a child—light, encouraging. ‘You know that. Don’t be silly.’

  ‘Do I count at all?’ he says again. The words are difficult, amorphous things he struggles to master. ‘Sometimes I wonder. Whether I count at all.’

  ‘Richard, you’ve drunk too much. Come to bed now.’

  He shakes his head, too many times.

  ‘I don’t know that I do,’ he says. ‘I don’t know that I do count.’