The Perfect Mother

by Margaret Leroy

  She feels my eyes on her. She turns, speaks to the man again. They come towards me. Kate’s mother and Natalie’s mother move away.

  He smiles at me. His eyes are grey and steady. Nicky puts her hand on my arm.

  ‘Meet Fergal,’ she says. ‘Our latest recruit. A tenor. Tenors are like gold dust. I love my tenors to bits.’

  I smile. He says hello. I remember how much I like Irish voices.

  She takes her last bite of apple-cake and licks her sugary fingers. ‘Catriona, your cooking is out of this world. I have to have more of this.’

  Sinead walks past with a plate. Nicky lunges after her.

  My boots have high heels and my eyes are just on a level with his. We look at one another and there’s a brief embarrassed pause.

  ‘I liked the carols,’ I tell him. Then think how vacuous this sounds.

  ‘Well,’ he says, and shrugs a little. ‘It’s been fun.’

  I note the past tense. I rapidly decide that he’s not the sort of man who’d like me. I know how I must seem to him, a privileged sheltered woman.

  ‘Nicky’s good at arranging things,’ I say. ‘Making things happen.’

  He nods vaguely. He’s looking over my shoulder—I’ve bored him already.

  But then I see he is looking at my picture—the painting of poppies that I hung on the wall. It’s just behind me.

  ‘Who did the painting?’ he says.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘I wondered if it was you,’ he says. ‘I like it.’

  I feel a little embarrassed, but acknowledge to myself that I am quite pleased with this painting. The petals are that dark purple that is almost black, yet there’s a gleam on them.

  ‘I don’t do much,’ I say. ‘It just makes a nice break. I can hide away in my attic and the girls know not to disturb me. I suppose it’s a bit conceited to put it up on the wall.’

  ‘D’you always do that?’ he says.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Run yourself down like that?’

  ‘Probably. I guess it’s irritating.’

  We both smile.

  ‘When you paint, is it always flowers?’ he says.

  ‘Always. I can’t do people. I’m really limited.’

  He looks at me quizzically. His eyes are full of laughter.

  ‘OK, I know I’m doing it again,’ I say. ‘But it’s true. And I can’t draw out of my head either. It has to be something I can put on the table in front of me. I can only paint what I see.’

  ‘D’you sell them?’ he says.

  I nod, flattered he should ask. ‘There’s a gift shop in town that takes them sometimes.’

  He turns to look at it again. ‘It’s not very cheerful. For a flower. It’s kind of ominous. All that shadow around it.’

  ‘Really. How can you read all that into a picture?’ But I’m pleased. There’s something rather trivial about doing paintings of flowers and selling them in a gift shop alongside scented candles and boxed sets of soap. I like that he can see a kind of darkness in it.

  I realise I am happy. My body fluid and easy with the wine, my room hospitable, beautiful, this man with the Irish lilt in his voice approving of my picture; this is easy, this is how things should be.

  He’s looking at me with those steady grey eyes. There’s something in his look that I can’t work out: sex, or something else, more obscure, more troubling.

  ‘I know you,’ he says suddenly. ‘Don’t I?’

  I laugh politely. ‘I don’t think so.’

  Someone is leaving. The door opens, the cold and the night come in.

  ‘I do,’ he says. ‘I’m sure I know you. I recognise your face.’

  He’s staring at me, trying to work it out. It sounds like a come-on, but his look is puzzled, serious. The fear that is never far from me lays its cold hand on my skin.

  ‘Well, I don’t know where you could have seen me.’ My voice is casual, light. ‘Perhaps the school gate at St Mark’s? Daisy goes there.’ But I know this isn’t right, I know I’d have noticed him. ‘Nicky says that’s where your little boy goes,’ I add, trying to drag the conversation away to somewhere safe.

  He shakes his head. ‘Jamie doesn’t start till after Christmas.’

  ‘You’ll like it,’ I tell him. ‘Daisy’s eight, she’s in year three, she has the nicest teacher…’

  But he won’t let it rest. ‘Where d’you work?’ he says.

  ‘I don’t.’ Then, biting back the urge to apologise for my life, which must sound so passive—‘I mean, not outside the home. I used to work in a nursery school before I got married. But that’s ages ago now.’

  ‘It wasn’t there. Forget it. It doesn’t matter.’

  But I’m upset and he knows it. He tries to carry on, he asks what I’m painting now, but the mood is spoilt, it can’t be restored or recovered. As soon as he decently can, he leaves me. All evening I feel troubled: even when the singers have gone, calling out their thanks and Christmas wishes, setting off into the snow which is falling more thickly now, casting its nets over everything, under the chill thin light of the moon of beginnings.

  We stand there in the suddenly quiet room. It looks banal now. There are cake crumbs on the carpet, and every glass has a purplish, spicy sediment.

  ‘I’ll do the washing-up,’ says Richard.

  Normally I’d say, No, let me, you sit down, but tonight I give in gratefully. Sinead goes to help him.

  I turn off the light again, and the firelight plays on every shiny surface. My living room seems like a room from another time. I stretch out on the sofa. Daisy comes and folds herself into me. Her limbs are loose, heavy, her skin is hot and dry; I feel her tiredness seeping into me.

  ‘Did you enjoy it?’ I ask her.

  To my surprise, she shakes her head. In the red erratic firelight, her face looks sharper, thinner. Little bright flames glitter in her eyes. Suddenly, without warning, she starts crying.

  I hug her. ‘It’s ever so late,’ I tell her. ‘You’ll be fine in the morning.’ She rubs her damp face against me.

  I don’t want her to go to sleep unhappy. I can never bear it when she’s sad—which is silly really, I know that, because children often cry, but I always rush in to smooth things over, want to keep everything perfect. So I try to distract her with shadow shapes, the animal patterns I learnt how to make from a booklet I bought from the toyshop in Covent Garden. I move my hands in the beam of light from the open door to the hall, casting shadows across the wall by the fireplace. I make the seagull, flapping my hands together; and the crab, my fingers hunched, so it sidles along the mantelpiece; and the alligator, snapping at the board games on the bookshelf. Daisy wipes her face and starts to smile.

  I make the shape of the weasel; we wait and wait, Daisy holding her breath: this is her favourite. And just when you’ve stopped expecting it, it comes, the weasel’s pounce, down into some poor defenceless thing behind the skirting board.

  She lets out a brief thrilled scream, and even I start a little. Yet these animals, these teeth, this predatoriness: these are only the shadows of my hands.

  CHAPTER 2

  Sinead comes into our bedroom in her dressing gown, her face and hair rumpled with sleep.

  ‘Cat. Dad. Daisy’s ill.’

  I’m reluctant to leave the easy warmth of bed, and Richard, still asleep, curving into me. It’s one of those quiet days after Christmas, the turn of the year, when all the energy seems withdrawn from the world. A little light leaks round the edges of the curtains. I turn back the duvet, gently, so as not to wake him, and pull down my nightdress, which is long and loose, like a T-shirt, the kind of thing I started to wear when Daisy needed feeding in the night, and then got rather attached to.

  I go to Daisy’s room. The stars glimmer on her ceiling in the glow from the lamp I leave on all night. I push back the curtain. Thin gilded light falls across the floor, where various soft toys and yesterday’s clothes are scattered. Her favourite cuddly sheep, Hannibal, is flung to the foo
t of her bed. He owes his name to Sinead, who once saw The Silence of the Lambs illicitly at a friend’s house, having promised they were borrowing 27 Dresses. Daisy is still in bed, but awake. She has a strained, stretched look on her face, and her eyes are huge, dilated by the dark.

  ‘I feel sick,’ she says.

  ‘What a shame, sweetheart.’ I put my hand on her forehead, but she feels quite cool. ‘Especially today.’

  ‘What day is it?’ she says.

  A little ill-formed anxiety worms its way into my mind.

  ‘It’s the pantomime. Granny and Grandad are taking us.’

  ‘I don’t want to go,’ she says.

  ‘But you were so looking forward to it.’ Inside I’m cursing a little, anticipating Richard’s reaction. ‘Snow White. It’s sure to be fun.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘I can’t, Mum. I feel sick and my legs hurt.’

  Daisy always gets nauseous when she gets ill. They each have their own fingerprint of symptoms. Sinead, when she was younger, would produce dazzling high temperatures, epic fevers, when she’d suddenly sit up straight in bed and pronounce in a clear bright shiny voice, the things she said as random and meaningless as sleep-talk, yet sounding full of significance. Daisy gets sickness and stomach aches. She’s been like that from a baby, when she used to get colic in the middle of the night, and I’d walk her up and down the living room with the TV on, watching old black and white films, or in desperation take her into the kitchen, where the soft thick rush of the cooker hood might soothe her at last into sleep.

  I go downstairs to make coffee; I’ll take a cup to Richard before I tell him. It’s a blue icy day, the ground hard and white, a lavish sky; but the fat glittery icicles that hang from the corner of the shed are iridescent, starting to drip. Soon the thaw will set in. It’s very still, no traffic noise: the sunk sap of the year. With huge gratitude, I feel the day’s first caffeine sliding into my veins.

  When I go back upstairs with the coffee, Sinead has drifted off to her bedroom and her iPod.

  Richard opens one eye.

  ‘Daisy’s ill,’ I tell him.

  ‘Christ. That’s just what we needed. What’s wrong?’

  ‘Some sort of virus. I’m not sure she can come.’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, she’s only got to sit through a pantomime.’

  ‘She’s not well, Richard.’

  ‘They were really looking forward to it.’

  ‘So was she. I mean, she’s not doing this deliberately.’

  He sits up, sprawls back on the pillow and yawns, disordered by sleep, his face lined by the creases in the pillowslip. He looks older first thing in the morning, and away from the neat symmetries of his work clothes.

  ‘Give her some Calpol,’ he says. ‘She’ll probably be fine.’

  ‘She feels too sick,’ I tell him.

  ‘You’re so soft with those children.’ There’s an edge of irritation to his voice.

  I feel I should at least try. I get the Calpol from the bathroom cabinet, take it to her room and pour it into the spoon, making a little comedy act of it. Normally she likes to see this, the sticky recalcitrant liquid that won’t go where you want it to, that glops and lurches away from you. Now she watches me with a slightly desperate look.

  ‘I can’t, Mum. I feel too sick.’

  I take the spoon to the bathroom and tip it down the sink.

  Richard has heard it all.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, let me do it,’ he says.

  He gets up, pulls on his dressing gown, goes to get the Calpol. But when he sees her pallor, he softens a little.

  ‘Dad, I’m not going to,’ she says. ‘Please don’t make me.’

  He ruffles her hair. ‘Just try for me, OK, munchkin?’

  I watch from the door as she parts her lips a little. She’s more willing to try for him; she’s always so hungry to please him. He eases the spoon into her mouth. She half swallows the liquid, then noisily retches it up.

  He steps smartly back.

  ‘Sorry, sweetheart. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.’

  He wipes her mouth and kisses the top of her head, penitent. He follows me back to the bathroom.

  ‘OK,’ he says. ‘You stay. It’s a damn shame, though, when they’ve paid for the tickets and everything. Especially when Mother hasn’t been well.’

  I think of them: Adrian, his affable father; and Gina, his mother, who favours a country casual look, although they live in chic urbanity in Putney, who reads horticultural magazines and cultivates an esoteric window box, who reminisces at some length about her job as an orthodontist’s receptionist. There’s something about Gina I find difficult: I feel colourless, passive, beside her. It’s not anything she says; she’s always nice to me, says, ‘You and Richard are so good together.’ Sometimes I feel there’s a subtext that I’m so much more satisfactory than Sara, Richard’s highly assertive first wife. But it’s almost as though it’s hard to breathe around her, as if she uses up all the air.

  ‘Daisy can write them a letter when she’s well,’ I say.

  ‘It’s not the same,’ he says, frowning.

  Richard’s intense involvement with his parents fascinates me. I know that’s how it must be for most people, to have your parents there and on your side, to worry about them and care what they think about you; yet to me this is another country.

  Sinead comes down when I’m making breakfast, still in her dressing gown but fully made-up, with her iPod. She takes one earpiece out to talk to me.

  ‘Cat, I really need your opinion. D’you think I look like a transvestite?’

  ‘You look gorgeous.’ I put an arm around her.

  It’s part of my role with her, to be a big sister, a confidante, to be soft when Richard is stern.

  ‘Are you sure my mascara looks all right?’ she says. ‘I’m worried my left eyelashes look curlier than my right ones.’

  ‘You’re a total babe. Look, I’ve made you some toast.’

  ‘How is she?’ she says then.

  ‘I don’t think she can come.’

  She sits heavily down at the table, a frown like Richard’s stitched into her forehead.

  ‘Do I have to go, then?’ she says.

  She’s cross. She’s too old to go to the pantomime without her little sister. Daisy was the heart of today’s outing, its reason and justification: without her it doesn’t make sense.

  I put my arm round her. ‘Just do it, my love. To please Granny and Grandad.’

  ‘Snow fucking White,’ she says. ‘Jesus.’

  I overlook this. ‘You never know, you might enjoy bits of it.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? You know what it’ll be like. There’ll be a man in drag whose boobs keep falling down and lots of EastEnders jokes, and at the end they’ll throw Milky Ways at us and we’re meant to be, like, grateful.’

  She puts her earpiece back in without waiting for my response.

  They leave at twelve, Sinead now fully dressed in jeans and leather jacket and the Converse trainers she had for Christmas, resigned. I go to Daisy’s room. She’s sitting up, writing something, and I briefly wonder if Richard was right and I was too soft and I should have made her go. But she still has that stretched look.

  She waves her clipboard at me. She’s made a list of breeds of cats she likes, in order of preference.

  ‘I still want one,’ she says.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘When can we, Mum?’

  ‘One day,’ I tell her.

  ‘You always say maybe or one day,’ she says. ‘I want to really know. I want you to tell me exactly.’

  I rearrange her pillows so she can lie down, and I read to her for a while, from a book of fairy tales I bought her for Christmas. There’s a story about a princess who’s meant to marry a prince, but she falls in love with the gardener; and he shows her secret things, the apricots warm on the wall, the clutch of eggs, blue as the sky, that are hidden in the pear tree. I read it softly, willing her to sleep,
but she just lies there listening. She’s pale, almost translucent, with shadows like bruises under her eyes. Maybe it’s my attention that’s keeping her awake. Eventually I tell her I’m going to make a coffee.

  When I look in on her ten minutes later, she’s finally drifted off, arms and legs flung out. There’s a randomness to it, as though she was turning over and was suddenly snared by sleep. I put my hand on her forehead and she stirs but doesn’t wake. I feel a deep sense of relief, knowing the sleep will heal her.

  This is an unexpected gift: an afternoon with nothing to do, with no one needing anything; a gift of time to be slowly unwrapped and relished. I stand there for a moment, listening to the quiet of the house, which seems strange, so soon after Christmas, when these rooms have so recently been full of noise and people; it’s almost as though the house is alive and gently breathing. Then I go up to the attic, moving slowly through the silence.

  I push open the door. The scents of my studio welcome me: turps, paint, the musty, over-sweet smell of dying flowers. From one of the little arched windows I can see across the roofs towards the park. I lean there for a moment, looking out. There’s a velvet bloom of dust on the sill; I rarely clean in here. I can see the tall bare trees and their many colours, pink, apricot, purple, where the buds are forming at the ends of their branches, and the dazzling sky with a slow silent aeroplane lumbering towards Heathrow.

  I put on the shirt I always wear up here. Richard doesn’t like to see me in it; he hates me in baggy clothes. But I welcome its scruffiness and sexlessness, the way it says Now I am painting—the way it defines me as someone who is engaged in this one thing.

  Here is everything I need: thick expensive paper, and 4B pencils that make soft smudgy lines, and acrylic paints, and watercolours with those baroque names that I love—cadmium yellow and prussian blue and crimson alizarin. And there are things I’ve collected, postcards and pictures torn from magazines, a print I cut from a calendar—a Georgia O’Keeffe painting of an orchid, very sexualised; I laughed when Sinead stared at it and raised one eyebrow and said, ‘She might as well have called it, “Come on in, boys.”’ And there are pebbles from the beach at Brighton, and bits of wood from the park, and a vase of lilies I brought here when the petals started to fall.