Postcards From Berlin

by Margaret Leroy

“While I’ve been drawing, the world has changed. There are sounds of water and a wet smell, and our breath smokes white in the raw air. As we stand at the door, there’s a noise from the roof like tearing cloth, and a lump of snow slides off and spatters on the gravel.

  “Nice Christmas?”

  “Great, thanks,” I say routinely.

  Her hair is very short and in the dim light she has an androgynous, classical look: Diana hunting with her dogs, perhaps, or some figure from a Greek frieze that I saw once with Richard in Athens, a taut young runner bringing news of slaughters and defeats.

  “These came for you while we were away,” she says.

  She thrusts two envelopes at me. I glance down at them: One is for Daisy, with a local postmark, probably a school friend, a child who was away at the end of term and missed the school postbox; the other comes from abroad and I recognize the writing. I have to control an urge to thrust this letter straight back at Monica.

  She watches me. Perhaps she sees some trouble in my face that she misreads as criticism.

  “We’ve been away,” she says again, a bit apologetic. “Or I’d have brought them round earlier.”

  “No, no. It’s fine. They’re just Christmas cards, anyway.”

  “It wasn’t our usual postman,” she says.

  She’s moving from one foot to the other, wired up and keen to be off. The dogs skulk and circle at the foot of the steps, vivid and nervy, damp mouths open.

  “Thanks anyway,” I tell her.

  “We must have coffee sometime,” she says. As we always say.

  “I’d like that.”

  And she’s off, jogging down the steps, pounding across the damp gravel, the dogs streaming out in front of her.

  I put Daisy’s card on the hall stand. I’ll take it to her when she wakes.

  I go into the kitchen, sit at the table, hold the other envelope out in front of me. My heart is noisy. It enters my head that this is why Daisy is ill: as though everything is connected, as though this letter brings ill fortune with it, clinging like an unwholesome smell of past things, a smell of mothballs and stale cigarettes and old discarded clothing.

  The house has lost its atmosphere of ease; it feels alert, edgy. I hear the little kitchen noises, a drumming like fingertips in the central heating, the breathing of the fridge, and outside the creak and drip of the thaw. I tear at the envelope.

  It’s a perfectly ordinary card: a Christmas tree, very conventional, with “Season’s Greetings” in gilt letters in German and French and English.

  I open it. At the top, an address, printed and underlined. The handwriting is careful, rather childlike.

  “Trina, darling. ‘Someone we know’ gave me your address. What a stroke of luck!! The above is where I’m living now. Please PLEASE write.”

  There’s an assumption of intimacy about the way it isn’t signed that I resent and certainly don’t share. Like the way a lover will say on the phone, It’s me.

  I look at my hands clasped tight on the table in front of me. I notice them dispassionately, the way the veins stick out, the pale varnish that is beginning to peel, the white skin. I feel that they have nothing to do with me.

  I sit there for a while, then I get up and put the card in the paper-recycling bin, tucked under yesterday’s Times, where it can’t be seen.

  I long for Richard to be here, but they won’t be back for hours; it’s only four o’clock — they’ll still be in the theater. It’s the interval, perhaps; they’ll be talking politely and eating sugared popcorn. I want Richard to hold me. Suddenly I hate the way we’ve let our love leak away through a hundred little cracks, like this morning, the irritation, the disagreements over Calpol; and my fantasy about Fergal O’Connor embarrasses and shames me. Stupid to think such things, when I love and need Richard so much. Without him I feel thin, etiolated, as though I have no substance. As though I’m a cardboard cutout, a figure in that Nativity scene on the mantelpiece: intricately detailed, looking, in a dim light, almost solid, yet two-dimensional, with no substance, nothing to weigh me down. Only Richard can hold me and make me real.

  Chapter 3

  THE HOUSE HAS A FRESH JANUARY FEEL, everything swept and gleaming. All the decorations, which sometime after Christmas lost their gloss, as though their sheen had actually tarnished over, have been packed away in boxes in the attic. There are daffodils in a blue jug on the kitchen table; they’re buds still, green but swelling. Tomorrow they will open, and already you can smell the pollen through the thin green skin. And we have all made resolutions: Sinead to stop biting her nails, Richard to drink wine instead of whiskey, Daisy to have a cat — though Sinead protested at this, as she felt it didn’t quite qualify as a resolution — and I have resolved to take my painting more seriously. And to that end, today, the first day of term, I am going, all on my own, to an exhibition that I read about in the paper, at the Tate Modern. It is called Insomnia and this is its final week. It is a series of sketches by Louise Bourgeois, done in the night, fantastical — dandelion clocks, and tunnels made of hair, and a cat with a high-heeled shoe in its mouth. And I shall buy a catalogue, like a proper artist, and be inspired, perhaps, and start to draw quite differently: not just flowers but pictures from my mind.

  I am dressed to go straight to the station after dropping Daisy at school. I have a new long denim coat, stylishly shabby, that I chose from an austere, expensive shop in Covent Garden with unsmiling scented assistants and very few clothes on the rails: my Christmas present from Richard. It’s cunningly shaped, clinging to the body then flaring toward the hem, and almost too long, so you’d trip without high-heeled shoes, and it’s dyed a smudgy black, like ink, and the fabric feels opulently heavy. Not the sort of thing I’d ever normally wear to the school gate, but today I shall wear it. The thought of my outing gives me a fat, happy feeling.

  I make toast. Sinead is packing her bag in the hall, cursing under her breath. Yesterday we had the usual end-of-holiday panic: She’d just come back from Sara’s and she suddenly thought of an essay that had to be done, on something complex to do with the growth of fascism in the thirties and therefore requiring major parental input. Richard was provoked into a rare outburst of irritation with her.

  “For God’s sake, Sinead. How the hell did this happen? You’ve had the whole bloody holiday.”

  She shrugged, immaculately innocent, with an expression that said this was nothing to do with her.

  “I forgot,” she said.

  Then Daisy, who’s now recovered from her flu, though still not eating properly, decided we had to go shopping: There were girls who’d given her Christmas presents and she’d had nothing for them. Even at eight, that intricate web of female relationship, of things given and owed, of best friends and outsiders, is beginning to be woven. So we bought some flower hair clips from Claire’s Accessories and found an obliging Internet site so Sinead could write her essay, and today we are organized: clothes washed, lunch boxes packed, everything as it should be.

  It’s a windy, busy morning. Large pale-brown chestnut leaves torn from the tree in Monica’s garden litter our lawn. The letterbox keeps rattling as though there are many phantom postmen. When this happens, I jump.

  Daisy comes downstairs, dressed for school, tidy and precise, but her face is white. I put some toast in front of her.

  “D’you want honey?”

  “I’m not hungry,” she says.

  She sits neatly in front of it, her hands in her lap, looking at the toast but never touching it.

  “Try and eat something,” I say.

  “I don’t want anything,” she says.

  I can’t send her to school with nothing inside her.

  “Perhaps a Mars bar — just this once?” I’m a bit conspiratorial, expecting gratitude.

  “I don’t want one,” she says.

  Sinead leaves to catch her bus, her body misshapen from the weight of the bag she carries on her shoulder. She wears her uniform according to the girls’ illicit dress co
de: her skirt rolled at the waistline so it’s far too short, karma bracelets hidden under her cuffs, her socks pushed down and tucked inside her shoes.

  I brush Daisy’s hair in front of the big mirror that hangs over the fireplace. Her fair hair is thick, lavish, the brush won’t go right through it. I’ve washed it with shampoo that smells of mangoes: A faint fruit scent hangs round her.

  “Will you be at home today?” she asks.

  “No, sweetheart, I’m going to an exhibition.”

  “Oh,” she says. Her face collapses a little, as though she is going to cry. I run my hand down her cheek. Her skin is cold.

  We go out to the car. The wind sneaks under the collars of our coats. Above the roofs of the houses, dark birds are swirled around like leaves in the millstream of the sky.

  There’s a sudden ferociousness to the traffic now term has started. Daisy sits quite silently in the car.

  “I wonder what Megan had for Christmas,” I say cheerfully.

  She doesn’t reply. I look at her in the rearview mirror: She is crying silently, slow tears edging down her white face.

  “Sweetheart, what’s the matter?”

  “I feel sick,” she says.

  “Are you worried about something?”

  She shakes her head.

  “You’ll be fine once you get there. You’ll see Abi and Megan, catch up with everything.”

  Her tears always bring a lump to my throat, and then a kind of worry that she has such power over me, a feeling that this shouldn’t be, that it’s weak, ineffectual. I know I’m overprotective, that I find it hard to tolerate my child being unhappy. That I’m not like other women, with their anoraks and certainty. I know this is a flaw in me.

  We park down the road from school. I give her a tissue and she wipes her eyes.

  “Is my nose red?” she asks.

  “You look great,” I tell her.

  “You didn’t answer my question, Mum,” she says.

  In the road outside school, there’s the usual standoff, two lines of traffic facing each other. There are parents who persist in dropping their children here, optimism triumphing over experience; they hoot futilely, but nobody can move. Children mill round in padded winter coats, some of them newly purchased and a little too large; they’re moving fast and anarchically, as though the wildness of the weather is inside them. People have changed over the holiday. One child looks cute in new glasses; another has visibly grown. Natalie’s mother, who so liked my house, is pulling at a frenetic puppy. Someone else, hugely pregnant in December, has her immaculate baby in a sling. The baby still has that translucent, unfinished look, so you feel if you held his hand to the light, perhaps you would see straight through. The sight pulls at women’s eyes, and the same expression crosses all their faces, eyes widening, as though this is still a surprise. Crocuses are coming up in the lawn in front of the school. They have the tender colors of paint mixed with too much water, a fragile buttery yellow, and purple, pale as the veins inside a woman’s wrist. It’s only been a fortnight, and there’s so much that is new.

  We’re holding hands as we walk toward the gate; Daisy’s hand is tightening in mine. I look down at her: Her face is set, taut.

  “D’you want me to wait with you till the bell goes?”

  I offer this as a choice, though really I have no choice: Her hand is wrapped around mine like a bandage. She nods but doesn’t speak.

  We stand there together by the gate as the other children surge forward. The wind blows my hair into my mouth, but I’m holding Daisy with one hand and her lunch box with the other, and I can’t push it back. My black denim coat, though stylish, is a little too light for the day. We hear broken-off bits of conversation blown round us like fallen leaves. Someone is making a complicated arrangement for tonight involving tea and maths and ballet classes; someone else had fifteen to dinner for Christmas and honestly, it was like a military operation.…

  Over the heads of the children, I see the back of a man’s neck, his leather-jacketed shoulders, his rumpled head. It’s Fergal, with his little boy. He must have walked straight past me. This makes me uncomfortable. I don’t know if he’s forgotten me or simply hasn’t seen me. I start to feel unreal with no one to talk to.

  And then Nicky is there, her children tugging at her, the ends of her stripy scarf streaming out behind her. Her smile warms me through.

  “Wow!” she says. “So this is the coat. Fabulous! I am green.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  As always, she’s rushing, everything on the most feverish of schedules, dropping off the boys before jumping into her car and heading off to her other life at Praxis, the advertising agency. But she sees that Daisy is troubled and she ruffles her hair with her hand.

  “Not feeling too good, lamb chop?” she asks. “Trust me, you’re not the only one. I hate the first day of term. Neil had to positively kick me out of bed.”

  She pats Daisy’s shoulder; Daisy doesn’t turn to her. The boys pull at her, and she’s off, her scarf fringes flapping.

  The bell rings.

  “There we go,” I say, bending to kiss the top of Daisy’s head.

  She wraps herself around me.

  “Come on, sweetheart.”

  I try to prize her fingers away from my hand, but they stick like pieces of Elastoplast.

  “Mum, I can’t do this,” she says. “Don’t make me.”

  I cannot disentangle her from me. I know this is ridiculous, but I can’t.

  People are looking at us with unconcealed curiosity. There are all these warnings in my head, slogans from the war between parents and children: They do try it on.… Give them an inch … And I hear Gina at her most dogmatic, pronouncing on the pitfalls of modern parenting: You don’t want to go the brown-rice-and-sandals route; you’ve got to show them who’s boss.…

  “Sweetheart, you’ll be fine when you get into class.”

  She is crying openly now, shivering with it. She doesn’t even seem to hear me.

  “Come on, let’s go in together.”

  I try to move toward the gate, but the whole weight of her body is pressed against me.

  “I can’t, Mum,” she says again.

  Fergal passes, coming out. He looks at me and nods but doesn’t smile, recognizing my difficulty. Embarrassment washes hotly across my skin.

  Something gives way inside me.

  “OK. We’ll go home,” I tell her.

  I bend and hug her, burying my face in the mango smell of her hair. Immediately, she stops crying, though she’s shivering still. I have a sudden doubt: If only I’d pushed a little harder, I could have got her into class. I feel a pang for the exhibition, for the cat with the high-heeled shoe and the tunnels made of hair. Now I will never see them. But it’s done; we can’t go back. The front of my new black denim coat is damp where she’s been crying against me.

  Chapter 4

  I WAKE IN THE NIGHT. Immediately, all the sleepiness falls from me. I hear the night sounds: the clock at St. Agatha’s emptily striking three, a siren, the staccato bark of a fox as he ranges along the backs of the houses. Beside me, Richard snores softly.

  There in the cold darkness, my mind is clear, free of the day’s clutter, like a quiet pool. I’m alert, taut; I could run with the fox for miles. In that clarity, I start to add up all the food that Daisy has eaten in the last few days. Yesterday: a packet of crisps and about three spoonfuls of rice with gravy at teatime. The day before yesterday: two water biscuits and half a packet of crisps. The day before that, I can’t quite remember: perhaps it was a piece of apple and half a chocolate crispy cake from a whole batch I made.

  I’ve tried so hard to tempt her, cooked all her favorite things, offered them to her with that warm, abundant feeling that fills you when you make good food for your children. Tomato soup from fresh tomatoes, ripe to the point of sweetness, with fennel and herbs for their green flavor, just a few so there wouldn’t be lots of leafy bits, and a swirl of cream on top. Fried chicken and n
oodles, her favorite, and a sponge cake with a lavish filling of strawberry conserve. Daisy helped me, sieving the icing sugar on top, making an intricate pattern of crescents she said she couldn’t get right, postponing the moment of eating; then, when I cut her a slice, she crumbled it up and left it. Chocolate crispy cakes, made with a slab of organic Green & Black’s chocolate I found in the delicatessen. I tasted it when I’d melted it: It was velvet on my tongue, its scented richness making me sneeze. Normally, Daisy would come and scrape the bowl, greedy and bright-eyed as some small animal, eagerly licking the dark congealing sweetness from the spoon; but she said she wouldn’t bother, she needed to finish her drawing. When the cakes were done, still warm, sticky, I put one on a plate for her. She took a bite and left it.

  “Sweetheart, don’t you like it? Perhaps I used the wrong chocolate.”

  “It’s fine, Mum,” she said. “Really. I’ll have it later.”

  When Sinead came in from school, the house still smelled seductively of chocolate. She came straight to the kitchen, drawn by the smell; her nose and fingers were red with cold. “Oh, yum,” she said, putting her hand to the plate.

  I told her she could only have one, they were for Daisy; that I was sorry, that seemed so mean, but we had to get Daisy well; that I’d make another batch for her.

  Daisy looked up from her drawing.

  “I don’t mind, Sinead,” she said. “You eat them. I’m not hungry.”

  Now, in the three o’clock dark, I see that all these things I’ve made are much like the milk or olives that peasants leave by the hearth: to avert catastrophe, perhaps, or to please the household spirits. Symbolic offerings, no use at all to Daisy. Fear lays cold fingers on my skin.

  Guiltily, I whisper in Richard’s ear.

  “Richard, wake up.”

  He mutters something I can’t make out, moves suddenly.

  “What is it?” There’s a splinter of panic in his voice. I’ve startled him, or intruded into some alarming dream.

  He opens his eyes.

  I suddenly remember he has an important meeting tomorrow. I feel ashamed.