The Perfect Mother

by Margaret Leroy

  I’ve tried so hard to tempt her, cooked all her favourite 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 flavour, just a few so there wouldn’t be lots of leafy bits, and a swirl of cream on top. Fried chicken and noodles, her favourite, 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, with a slab of organic Green and Black’s 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 smelt 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.’

  In that moment in the three o’clock dark, I see that all these things I’ve made are about as much use as nourishment as the offerings of milk or olives that peasants leave by the hearth—to avert catastrophe, perhaps, or please the household spirits. 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.

  ‘I shouldn’t have woken you. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s a bit late for that,’ he says. The words are slurred, thick with sleep.

  ‘I’ve been worrying about Daisy. I was going through everything she’d eaten for the last few days.’

  ‘She’s fine,’ he says. ‘She’ll be better soon.’

  He inches in closer, moves his hand on my breast. I’m cold, and my nipple is taut against his palm.

  ‘Richard, she’s hardly eating anything.’

  ‘Kids can last for ages without much food as long as they’re drinking,’ he says.

  ‘I’m worried she’s going to starve.’

  ‘Darling, don’t let’s go getting all melodramatic,’ he says. There’s an edge of exasperation in his voice. ‘If you’re worried, you’ll just have to take her back to the doctor.’

  ‘He wasn’t any use before,’ I say.

  I took her to the GP last week—two weeks into term, and she’d scarcely been to school. He looked at Daisy’s ears and tonsils, said everything was fine and she probably had post-viral fatigue and she could go to school but she shouldn’t run around. I said, ‘She’s feeling sick,’ and he said nausea isn’t anything to worry about, nausea doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong. I said she wasn’t eating. ‘She’ll eat again in her own good time,’ he said. ‘Children are tougher than we think, Mrs Lydgate.’

  ‘But what can he do?’ I say to Richard. ‘She hasn’t got an infection or sore throat or anything. She doesn’t need antibiotics.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ he says.

  ‘And if it’s a post-viral thing, you just have to wait for it to get better, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, at least it might put your mind at rest,’ he says.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Honestly,’ he says, ‘what on earth is the point of lying here worrying if you refuse to do anything about it?’

  ‘But I know he’ll just say, “Come back in a fortnight.”’

  ‘Maybe you should ask for her to be referred,’ he says.

  ‘To the hospital?’ This surprises me.

  ‘Well, if you’re worried. You could ask to see a specialist.’

  ‘But I can’t just ask the GP to do that.’

  ‘Of course you can. For God’s sake, isn’t that what we pay our taxes for? It’s like you never feel you have a right to anything,’ he says, quite affectionately.

  I can feel him hard against my thigh; I move my hand down, encircle him. I feel I owe him this, now I’ve woken him. He’s pushing up my nightdress.

  ‘Take this thing off,’ he says.

  I pull it over my head. I turn the bedside light on; Richard likes to look. He runs his hand down me, eases his finger inside me.

  ‘You’re not very wet,’ he says.

  ‘Lick your hand. I’ll be fine. I’m just a bit tired, that’s all.’

  He moves his wet finger on me.

  I’m dragging a net through my mind, trawling for sex, conjuring up images that are more and more extreme, bits of Anaïs Nin, scenes from Secretary, things I’ve read, things I’ve done, but I can’t hold onto them. Like fish in a wide-meshed net they flicker and fade and dive away into darkness. Instead of sex, I’m thinking about this morning, when we’d run out of our usual mineral water, we only had Vittel, not Evian, and Daisy said she couldn’t drink it because it tasted like milk. I left her in the house on her own, with strict instructions not to answer the door, drove to the nearest Waitrose through heavy traffic, and bought the kind of Evian she likes best, with a sports cap. It took me forty-five minutes.

  I gave her the bottle of water. She took a sip, frowned, pushed the bottle away.

  ‘Sorry, Mum,’ she said.

  I knelt beside her.

  ‘Daisy, you’ve got to drink something. You’ve got to drink halfway down this bottle by lunchtime or I shall call the doctor.’

  I put a mark on the bottle. Slowly, through the morning, she drank her way down to the mark.

  Richard’s cock in my hand is hard and full and his breathing is heavy; and he needs to sleep and he’s got that meeting today. I’m not being fair to him, making him wait like this. I lift his hand away from me.

  ‘I don’t think I can come tonight,’ I say. ‘Don’t worry.’

  I roll over on top of him.

  ‘Well, if you’re sure,’ he says.

  I kneel astride him and he slides into me. He reaches up lazily to touch my breasts. I don’t quite like this. Since the months of breastfeeding Daisy, I sometimes don’t like to have my breasts touched; the feeling seems to move from irritating to intense with nothing in between, as though there’s some short-circuit in me. I don’t let this show.

  He moves rapidly, comes with a sigh.

  I slide off him, turn over, with him tucked into my back. He sinks rapidly into sleep, his breath warm on my shoulder; I haven’t even turned off the light.

  I lie there for a while, but sleep feels far from me. The light of the lamp falls on the bedroom walls, which are ragrolled and opulently red; the hatstand and the hat with a plume that I bought in a junk shop cast extravagant shadows. I had a fantasy in mind when I planned and painted this room, as though it were an opera set, perhaps for La Traviata, which Richard once took me to see. We have a French cherrywood bed with a scrolled head and feet, the floor is darkly varnished, the red of the walls is rich by lamplight, though rather oppressive by day; and there are heavy curtains patterned with arum lilies, and a poster from an exhibition of designs for the Balle
t Russe, that we went to see when Sinead was doing a ballet project. The poster shows a kind of erotic dance, and when I bought it, just glancing at it quickly and knowing I liked it, I thought there were two figures there, entwined in some sexual ritual; though when I got it home and took it out to frame it I saw it was really a solitary figure, neither male nor female, at once muscled and voluptuous, bejewelled and draped in lavish folds of cloth—and the other shape was a scarf red as flame that twisted and curved close, gauzy, without substance, yet moving like the body of a lover.

  I get up silently, and take Richard’s dressing gown from the foot of the bed and wrap it round me. Mine is silk, and in this weather putting it on just makes you feel colder.

  I go down to the kitchen. I make some toast, but the butter is hard and won’t spread. There’s some wine left in the bottle we drank with dinner: Richard is keeping to his resolution to drink less whisky in the evening. I pour myself a glass; in the cold, it has no scent, but I feel a sudden easing as it glides into my veins.

  The room is untidy, the girls’ things scattered around—Sinead’s flower scrunchies and copies of Heat, and drawings Daisy has done, sketches of injured animals, and her box of magnetic fridge poetry. She hasn’t done a new poem for weeks; her pre-Christmas offering is still on the door of the fridge. ‘The gold witch crept to the top.’ In the stillness and cold, untidy but with nobody there, the kitchen has the look of a room abandoned in a hurry, by people who’ve been warned of some disaster or called away. When I see myself in the mirror over the fireplace I realise I haven’t washed my hair for a week.

  There’s a holiday brochure that came in the post, showing villas in Tuscany. I sip the wine and flick through, seeking to lose myself in these fields of sunflowers and cities of blond towers, but worry has its claws in me, it can’t be pushed away. With a sudden resolve I take a piece of paper that’s lying there and a purple felt-tip of Daisy’s. I write ‘To Do for Daisy’ at the top of the page, then ‘1. Go to GP. 2. Make a food diary—allergies? 3. Clear out her room—take away all rugs, cuddlies etc. Dust mites? 4. Homeopathy/herbalism—ask Nicky.’ Nicky got to know lots of alternative people during her transient passion for aromatherapy; tomorrow I shall ring her. I stick the list up on the fridge, next to Daisy’s poem. I am in control again: there’s so much I can do. I tell myself that Richard was right, that I have been over-emotional, that it will soon be over, and Daisy will be well. I picture myself chatting about it with Nicky at the Café Rouge over some nice Pinot Grigio. Honestly, I was sure that Daisy had something serious—but look at her now… I gulp down the rest of the wine and feel the fear edge away from me.

  On the way back to bed I look in on Daisy. She’s sleeping quietly now, the duvet pulled up high and lifting with her breathing. Her room feels warmer than the rest of the house; above her there’s a glimmer of stencilled stars. Nothing can harm her here.

  I go back to our bedroom and slip in beside Richard, and lie awake and hear the bark of the fox, moving rapidly across the long line of gardens, careless of hedges and fences, as though this whole wide territory were his.

  CHAPTER 5

  There’s a postcard for me. At first, I don’t see it: it’s hidden under a letter from Richard’s parents, thanking Sinead and Daisy for their thank-you letters. I’m smiling to myself, at these flower-chains of gratitude and obligation that could go on for ever, when my eye falls on the postcard. I pick it up with care, as though it could hurt me. I’m glad that Richard has gone to work already. He doesn’t need to know.

  There are four pictures. I look at them for a moment, not wanting to turn the card over. They’re conventional, touristy scenes. I read the captions. The Reichstag. Charlottenburg Castle. Kurfürstendamm. Unter den Linden. These places sound familiar, though I don’t know how to pronounce them. Charlottenburg Castle is white and opulent under a vast summer sky; Kurfürstendamm and Unter den Linden are shown by night, with lots of neon. The caption says, ‘I love Berlin.’ The dot of the ‘i’ in Berlin is a little red heart.

  My heart pounds. I turn the card over. I can see the thought that went into this, how it was undoubtedly all planned, composed on a piece of rough paper, then copied out so carefully in this neat, rather childish handwriting.

  Darling, I do wish you’d write. It’s been so very very long. And I hear you’ve got a lovely little girl of your own, now. It’s honestly no exaggeration to say that I would adore to see her.

  And then the address, as before.

  Darling. Like a lover. Like somebody who loves.

  I have a brief moment of hope, a hope as glittery and enticing as a shard of coloured glass: you could cut yourself on it. Then rage that this comes now—rage at this wretched timing, when Daisy is ill, when I’m so full of this desperate anxiety. I hide the card at the bottom of the bin.

  CHAPTER 6

  Daisy is a little better. She dresses, eats some toast. When she cleans her teeth, she sounds as though she’s going to be sick, but we take some deep breaths together and the worst of the feeling passes. She doesn’t cry on the way to school, though she’s limping and she says her legs are hurting.

  My confidence of last night is still with me: I’m sure I can solve this. I do all the things on my list. I ring the GP and make an appointment for this afternoon after school. I spend the morning cleaning Daisy’s room, moving all her cuddly animals out, as you’re meant to do if your child has asthma, and taking away her rug in case it’s been treated with pesticides, and steam-cleaning the mattress to immolate the dustmites. A sense of virtue opens out in me; I know her room is safe and pure and clean.

  At lunchtime I ring Nicky.

  ‘I’ve got just the guy for you,’ she says, when I tell her about Daisy. ‘Helmut Wolf. He’s a kinaesiologist—you have to hold these little glass bottles and he tests your muscle strength to see if you’re allergic. It’s weird but it works. He was wonderful with my migraines. Trust me, he can help Daisy.’

  I write his number down.

  ‘Neil thinks he’s nuts, of course,’ she says.

  Somehow this makes me less sure about Helmut Wolf, though that’s certainly not her intention.

  We talk about her boys. Max is doing brilliantly with his reading; his teacher is starting to hint he may be gifted. And Callum came downstairs last night wearing nothing but Nicky’s silver sandals and announced he was Postman Pat. Nicky herself is feeling rather smug: she’s given up smoking again and is on a detox diet. She says I wouldn’t believe the things she can do with a chickpea.

  ‘And how are—things generally?’ I say then, using one of those carefully vague phrases we use to hint at that separate, secret part of her—which for now means Simon at Praxis, and the illicit e-mails.

  ‘Fantastic.’ Her voice is lowered, with a whisper of risk. ‘But, look, I can’t talk now.’

  We fix a date for a drink at the Café Rouge.

  At three-thirty, I park down the road from the school gate. I open the car door and the rain comes down. I don’t have my umbrella. At first I fight against it, turning up my collar, but soon I’m soaked, so I lift up my face and let it fall on me, and it feels surprisingly pleasant, drenching me through. The whole street is musical with water, and outside the church on the corner the daffodils that are just opening around the war memorial are beaten down and ragged from the storm. The church noticeboard is advertising some course they’re running till Easter, enticing you in with the promise that you will discover life’s meaning. The wet air smells seductively of spring.

  I join the group of parents at the gate, their open umbrellas like a flock of bright-winged birds alighting. Toddlers in buggies fight against the transparent rainshields spread across them, angry fists distending the plastic, wailing with red open mouths. Daisy was always like that: she’d fight and fight, she couldn’t bear to be shut in. Well, I can understand.

  The bell rings, the caretaker opens the gate. Inside, the paving stones are slick with wet.

  People around me are talking
about their children.

  ‘Yeah, well, we’ve had them a few times, girls have this long hair and they put their heads together and whisper…My mother used to put malt vinegar on my hair…’

  ‘Ellie was off with a sore throat, and it was really expensive because I had to buy Liam some Lego to bribe him to go into school. It was five pounds, I ask you…’

  One of the teachers is leaving already—Mrs Nicholls, who sometimes takes Daisy for music. She sees me there, half smiles in my direction, comes towards me.

  ‘Mrs Lydgate. I’ve heard about your troubles with Daisy.’ Her face is close to mine, she’s speaking in an undertone, as though this is something of which I may be ashamed. ‘I did want to say—I really do feel you’re doing the right thing in making her come in.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say.

  ‘It’s awful if your child’s unhappy at school,’ she says. ‘I had a lot of trouble with my daughter once—she wouldn’t go to school. We found it was friendship problems.’

  ‘I really don’t think it’s that,’ I say. ‘Daisy’s had flu, it’s like she can’t get over it.’

  ‘I used to send my daughter in with a nice snack for break time. One of those muesli bars, or a packet of raisins. She seemed to find it a comfort. Perhaps you could try that with Daisy.’

  ‘It’s a good idea,’ I say politely. ‘It’s just such a problem finding anything that she’ll eat.’

  ‘Well, keep up the good work,’ she says, and weaves her way out through the mass of parents. I feel uneasy, as though I have been reprimanded, although I’m sure she was only trying to be helpful. The rain collects in my parting and splashes down my face like falling tears.