The Perfect Mother

by Margaret Leroy

  Last week I had another letter from Berlin. But not in my mother’s handwriting, so I knew what was in it before I opened it up. It was from Karl. She’d been rushed into hospital, he said; she died in her sleep, it was all very sudden. The funeral was on Thursday. If I wanted to come, he could pick me up at Tegel Airport. PS. She had told him about Daisy’s illness, and he hoped she was feeling better. I wrote back straight away. I said I was sorry that I couldn’t come, but I had to go into hospital with Daisy; I knew he would understand. I said that, as he probably knew, my mother and I hadn’t always had a very good relationship, but I was glad I’d come to see her and that we had been reconciled. I added that I knew she was happy with him—that in many ways her life had been hard, but her years with him had been her happiest. Maybe this too, I thought as I wrote, like so much else in my life and my mother’s, was a lie or an evasion, but on balance I thought there was something in it and I wanted to give him comfort.

  I go back to our room. Daisy is stirring, saying something incomprehensible, with her eyes still closed. I stroke her back and she drifts down deeper into unconsciousness.

  I get into bed and don’t expect to sleep. I lie there a while, staring at the light reflecting on the ceiling. But the noise through the window soothes me, like the massive breathing of some great resting animal, and I go to sleep and dream.

  This is the dream.

  It’s winter, in a wide white empty landscape, like a scene from a Russian epic. There are no people here or roads or houses, and it’s high and far and bitter in the cold. The shadows lengthen and snow lies over everything, and yet more snow is falling on the wind. A woman walks alone through the empty land. Her head is bent against the driving sleet. And in the dream I see this is my mother. She’s wearing a flimsy coat and lots of gilded bracelets and her gloves are pastel cotton with ruched wrists, and her boots have high slender heels, so she stumbles in the snowdrifts. I think how typical this is—that she goes on even this unguessable journey in such unsuitable shoes. Night presses in; the cold light thickens so she can scarcely see. She moves on through the bitter drizzle of sleet: there’s somewhere she has to get to. The journey is long but she just keeps walking, one foot in front of the other.

  At last she comes to a house set deep in a shadowed valley. The house is tall, substantial, built of stone, but looking shut-up, empty; nails have been driven into the shutters to seal them against the storm. In the dream I seem to feel her dread. It’s a place to make you afraid, a place of desolation. She puts out a hand and pushes against the door. And it yields to her touch and she steps inside and it’s not as she expected: she sees what she could not see from the other side of the door. For there is light and warmth here, the lamps are lit, a stove glows on the hearth, heat wraps itself around her. Someone was here before her; she is expected, welcomed. A pot of food is simmering on the hob; a good smell wafts towards her. The door in the front of the stove has been pulled open, to let the air flow in. Inside there’s a red blaze of coals. She takes off her sodden gloves and flings them to the floor. The snowflakes melt, run off them. She kneels on the floor in front of the stove and holds out her hands to the blaze.

  Read all about it…

  MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK

  QUESTIONS FOR YOUR READING GROUP

  1 How have Catrionas childhood experiences shaped the person she is now?

  2 Did your attitude to Catriona change through the book? Were you suspicious of her?

  3 How did you react to Catrionas own mother? Did you find it as hard to forgive her as Catriona does?

  4 What was it about Richard that so attracted Catriona to him? What do you think would have happened to their relationship if Daisy hadn’t been ill?

  5 Catriona takes Daisy to a succession of doctors and these encounters invariably go wrong. How far is this Catrionas fault? Should she have behaved differently?

  6 What does Catrionas art, and the way it changes in the course of the story, reveal about her?

  7 Why is her time working at the nursery school so important to Catriona?

  8 Do you think Catriona is wise to attempt to conceal her past from Jane Watson, the psychiatrist? What would you have done in her position?

  9 How is Catriona affected by seeing her mother again? How far does this meeting free Catriona from her past?

  INSPIRATION

  The story began when we took our daughter to our local hospital. She’d been ill for weeks – nauseous, not eating, sometimes unable to remember the words for things. The doctor took the history and then sent her to play in the waiting-room. “Is there anything else you want to tell me?” he said. I could sense what he wanted – for me to say that our marriage was in trouble or that she was being bullied. I said, “Really, there’s nothing—I don’t think it’s psychological.” “I think it is,” he said. I protested. He said there were things that worried him—that I’d spoken for my daughter and sometimes I’d interrupted him. I felt a surge of rage. He remarked that I seemed to be getting angry and that just made him more sure he was right.

  “…What if the doctor had accused me of actually making my daughter ill?…”

  Months later, after our daughter’s illness had been diagnosed and treated at Great Ormond Street Hospital, I thought back to that consultation. What if the doctor had gone one step further and accused me of actually making my daughter ill? I imagined how trapped you would feel, because everything you did could be seen as proof of your guilt. And what if this happened to a woman who had a dark, complicated past, a past she was desperate to keep hidden because it might be taken as further evidence against her? What if even those close to her started to suspect her? I knew this was a story I wanted to tell.

  But a novel only really takes shape for me when I have the right setting for it. And one day I passed a house that I loved. It had seven steps up to the front door and stone dogs guarding the steps. I couldn’t see round the back of the house, but I conjured up a little enclosed garden, with a rose bed and children playing on the lawn. Then I thought of the foxes that haunt these London gardens, scavenging in dustbins and generally behaving as though these ordered lawns and flowerbeds were theirs. This house and its garden with its flowers and wild foxes seemed perfect for the woman in my story.

  A CLOSER LOOK AT MÜNCHAUSEN’S SYNDROME BY PROXY

  Münchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy is a diagnosis that covers a range of parental behaviour, from exaggerating or inventing symptoms, to falsifying the results of tests, to poisoning or otherwise injuring a child in order to induce illness. It was first described by paediatrician Roy Meadow. It’s a highly controversial diagnosis and has been associated with some serious miscarriages of justice, where women have had their children taken away or have themselves been imprisoned after wrongfully being found guilty of harming or killing their children.

  More information…

  BBC News

  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/medical_notes/3528517.stm

  Mothers Against Münchausen Allegations:

  www.msbp.com

  Further reading about Münchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy…

  Hurting for Love by Herbert A Schreier and Judith A Libow

  Trust Betrayed? edited Jan Horwath and Brian Lawson

  MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

  Margaret Leroy grew up in the New Forest and studied music at St Hildas College, Oxford. She has worked as a music therapist, teacher and psychiatric social worker.

  Her first book, Miscarriage, was published in 1987 and Aristotle Sludge, a story for children, was published in 1991. She then wrote two books about women and relationships—Pleasure: The truth about female sexuality and Some Girls Do: Why women do and don’t make the first move. Both were serialised in the Daily Express.

  For two years she wrote an agony aunt column for Options magazine and her articles and short stories have been published in the Observer, the Sunday Express and the Mail on Sunday.

  Shas has writtien four novels.
The first, Trust, was televised by ITV1 as Loving You and starred Douglas Henshall and Niamh Cusack, reaching an audience of eight million. She has appeared on numerous radio and TV programmes and her books have been translated into ten languages. Margaret is married, has two daughters and lives in Surrey.

  WHY I WRITE…

  I wrote constantly as a child – rather fey fantasies. But I was also into music and, from about age twelve, my piano-playing became all-consuming and I stopped writing till I was in my early twenties. I started writing again when I was studying Music Therapy. A session with an autistic boy went badly wrong and I went home, disconsolate, and started writing poems to comfort myself. After that, I never stopped writing again – though I never wrote any more poems. But I only gave up my day job as a psychiatric social worker after the birth of our younger daughter. I found that writing while looking after small children is difficult, but not impossible, though you do have to be very focused, so that the moment your baby falls asleep, you start writing. That’s a great discipline – and perhaps the reason why women who write while bringing up children never seem to get writer’s block.

  “…the moment your baby falls asleep, you start writing…”

  Q&A ON WRITING

  What do you love the most about being a writer?

  The most pleasurable part comes some way into writing a book, when I’ve created a world that I can then re-enter every time I sit down to write – when I know what that world looks like, sounds like, smells like.

  Where do you go for inspiration?

  The seed of a story can come from anywhere – a news report, a television programme, something that happened to someone I know, something that happened to me. A sense of the place where the story is set will come very early in the process, often when the characters are still quite unformed, as happened with The Perfect Mother: once I saw a house that seemed exactly right for my heroine, the world of the story immediately felt more real.

  “…the seed of a story can come from anywhere…”

  What one piece of advice would you give to a writer wanting to start a career?

  Keep notebooks. Make a note of anything that interests you – even a scrap of overheard conversation. That way you’ll have a rich source of material to dip into again and again.

  Which book do you wish you had written?

  I’d love to have written Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea saga. Her sentences are so beautiful and it must be wonderful to create a whole new world and its landscapes, myths and magical creatures.

  How did you feel when your first book was signed?

  Thrilled and rather scared. Scared because I sold it on the basis of the outline – it was a self-help book, on miscarriage – and I still had to write the book!

  Where do your characters come from and do they ever surprise you as you write?

  I build my characters as I build my story and a particular story will seem to require a particular character. Catriona’s life-story is in a way a fairytale – a rags to riches tale – as she moves from a wretched childhood with a neglectful mother to a fortunate adult life with the house and garden and children she has always dreamt of. But as in all fairytales there’s a cost to achieving her heart’s desire. Her world is actually quite fragile and that’s in part because of the kind of person she is.

  ‘…I’ll build my main characters as I build my story…”

  Do you have a favourite character that you’ve created and what is it you like about that character?

  Aimee, Cat’s friend in the children’s home, is one of my favourite characters – even though she only appears quite briefly. She’s rather wild and always full of hope and I love the way she fights against the limitations of her life and absolutely will not be kept down. I felt she wanted to come back, which is why at a crucial point in the story she reappears in Cat’s dream.

  What kind of research goes into the writing process?

  To write Cat’s story, I used my past experience as a social worker and I also read a lot of books – most memorably, the report of the inquiry into Pindown, a cruel method of disciplining children which was used in children’s homes in Staffordshire in the 1980s. It’s very disturbing to read. And I spent a magical couple of days in Berlin, wandering the streets of what used to be the East, choosing settings for my story.

  As a mother, how much has your own experience shaped your writing about parenthood?

  Being a mother has shaped my writing tremendously – and especially so in this book. This is probably the most autobiographical of my novels – though Cat isn’t me and Daisy isn’t my daughter! And I also drew on my time working at a nursery school very like the one where Cat is employed. It was an enchanting place and I loved the idea of Cat spending time in that garden of children and in some way recovering her lost childhood.

  “…being a mother has shaped my writing tremendously…”

  A WRITER’S LIFE

  Paper and pen or straight onto the computer?

  I’m a very low-tech person – I use unlined paper and pencil. I don’t like working directly onto the keyboard as I need to see my crossings-out.

  PC or laptop?

  Laptop.

  Music or silence?

  I crave silence when I’m writing. I hate hammers and electric drills, and I love my noise-reduction headphones.

  Morning or night?

  I’m absolutely a morning person. I keep the less creative stuff like typing for the afternoon.

  “…I keep the less creative stuff…for the afternoon…”

  Coffee or tea?

  Very strong coffee in little green French-café cups.

  Your guilty reading pleasure?

  Re-reading The Lord of the Rings. It makes me feel guilty because I’ve read it so often I practically know it by heart.

  The first book you loved?

  Shadow the Sheepdog by Enid Blyton.

  The last book you read?

  The Other Hand by Chris Cleave.

  A DAY IN THE LIFE

  We live on the edge of town, near the Thames, and sometimes I’m woken by the lovely wild sound of geese flying over. I’m a great believer in breakfast – it’s usually bacon and egg. Then I drive my younger daughter, Izzie, to school. My beloved Ford Escort is twenty years old now and I’m always listening out for new and ominous rattles. The traffic is horrible and I arrive back home with a slight sense of triumph that we’ve survived another rush hour.

  I write in bed—which, I’m convinced, is good for creativity, because you’re so much more relaxed than when you sit at a desk. Typically I’ll be surrounded by a sprawl of paper. I don’t mind a bit of untidiness around me—if things look too neat, it means there’s nothing going on. My filing system is a pot of coloured paper-clips.

  “…I write in bed – which, I’m convinced, is good for creativity…”

  What form the writing takes will depend on the stage of the book that I’ve reached. I start with lots of brainstorming, then I’ll put together quite a detailed plot: I can’t just head off into my story without knowing where I’m going. Once I’ve sketched out the plot, I try to get the whole story down very quickly, scarcely looking back at all. Then I’ll go through it lots of times, rewriting and developing. This is much the longest stage of writing a book for me and the part I really love. How well I work varies hugely and I try to have simpler tasks like research or typing lined up for those days when the writing doesn’t flow. But if it’s going well, I’m completely happy.

  Lunch is fried rice and vegetables. I always cook the same thing: I’m hopeless at cooking, but my husband, thank goodness, is a brilliant cook, so we don’t starve. While I eat, I read, something I can just dip into, maybe poetry; at the moment it might be Lavinia Greenlaw or Alice Oswald. Any work done after lunch is a bonus, and – perhaps because it’s marked the end of my working day for so long – I tend to switch off around the time that school ends, even when no-one needs picking up.