The Perfect Mother

by Margaret Leroy

  ‘You mean like going to a therapist or something?’ This irritates me, yet I know he’s only being caring. ‘It’s sweet of you, but really, I’m OK.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that exactly. I meant help in the home.’

  ‘What’s wrong with our home? I thought I was coping fine. It still looks OK, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘You always run the house beautifully. That isn’t quite what I meant.’

  ‘Really, it isn’t necessary,’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ he says again. ‘Anyway, I rang an au pair agency today. It seems an ideal solution.’

  I put down the saucepan I’m drying.

  ‘No. I don’t want an au pair.’

  ‘It really doesn’t cost a lot,’ he says. ‘And there might be spin-offs—it might help Sinead with her languages.’

  ‘And where were you planning this person would live, exactly?’

  He isn’t looking at me; he turns a little away. ‘There’s masses of space in the attic.’

  ‘No.’ A sudden hot anger flares in me. ‘No. The attic’s my place. She couldn’t live there. Richard, I don’t want this.’

  He sighs. ‘This always happens. Whenever I try to help, you just get so emotional.’

  I sit down heavily at the table. I rub my face with my hands.

  ‘No, Richard. I couldn’t share the house like that. I couldn’t. I don’t know how people do it. I’d hate to have some other woman here all the time. Hate it.’

  ‘There’s really no shame in having help,’ he says. ‘Most people have someone living in—a nanny or au pair or someone. They couldn’t manage without it. Even your mate Nicky has an au pair.’

  ‘Nicky’s different from me.’

  ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Well, thank goodness. I’d rather have you.’ He’s smiling, trying to be mollifying. ‘But all the same—I’ve never quite understood why you haven’t wanted those things.’

  I think of the years I spent living with strangers—everything worn, tattered, smelling of other people, scuffed and shiny with the pressure of other people’s bodies, of never having a place to be my secret separate self. And then of the joy of having this house that belongs to me, lived in by those I love, held and protected by its steep tiled roof and stone dogs and thick hedges, where every wall in every room is washed in a colour I’ve chosen. I couldn’t have a stranger here—to look, to judge, to know about me, to be there even in my most intimate moments, with Richard, with my children. Surely he knows this. Surely.

  ‘Was that why you came home early?’ I say. ‘To ask me this?’

  He puts his hand on my shoulder. There’s a stale rubbery smell to his skin, from the washing-up gloves. The smell is briefly, sharply, repellent. I turn my face away.

  ‘Cat, do something for me. Promise you’ll at least think about it. I really believe it could make things easier for you.’

  I don’t understand why he’s being so insistent.

  I shake my head.

  ‘I don’t want to be watched all the time,’ I tell him.

  The words fall like little stones into the space between us.

  CHAPTER 22

  On Saturday, there’s another postcard.

  I’m making our morning coffee when the postman rings. There’s a music magazine for Richard that won’t go through the letterbox, and a heap of catalogues, bills and offers of cheap insurance. The postcard is sandwiched between the Boden catalogue and the telephone bill. It shows a marble statue of a woman who’s reading a book and wearing voluminous clothes. The caption says it is the personification of History on the plinth of Schiller’s monument in the Gendarmenmarkt.

  I turn it over.

  Darling, Well, it’s spring time here and the pink oleanders are out at the café in the Tiergarten. You’d love this city in the spring, Trina, I know you would, you always were very artistic! Berlin is changing so fast now, it’s a different city, my darling, not what you’d expect. They say the guidebooks are all out of date now!

  Don’t leave it too long to get in touch, my darling, my health is not what it was. Much love, as ever.

  Her writing evokes her. I see her vividly for a moment, smell her smell of Marlboros and lily of the valley, hear the faint jangle of her gilded bracelets.

  I read it through again. ‘You always were very artistic.’ That fills me with a sour anger. What right has she to claim to know what I’m like, to know anything about me? I put the card in the recycling bin.

  I take Richard his coffee and the Financial Times. Sinead is up and dressed already, in jeans and a cut-off top that says in sparkly letters, ‘Never judge a girl by her T-shirt’. She’s going out with a gang of friends, to ice-skate at Queensway and eat Dim Sum and buy stickers and notepaper with cartoon animals on from the shops in Chinatown.

  ‘Cat, is my lipliner OK?’

  ‘Of course it is. You look gorgeous.’

  ‘I don’t. I look really rank today.’

  I put my arm round her. ‘Nonsense. You look like a supermodel. See you have some breakfast before you go.’

  ‘What is it about breakfast? Daisy never eats breakfast.’

  ‘That has nothing to do with anything,’ I tell her.

  Richard is still asleep, his face pressed into the pillow. The air is thick and sour, used up with our breathing. I part the curtains a little. This morning our red-walled room oppresses me, with its darkly varnished floor, its heavy curtains patterned with lilies; in the cool morning light it seems stagey and overdone. I have a sudden impulse to redecorate it, to paint it white and green and fill it with light.

  I put the coffee down, but I don’t wake him.

  When I go back to the kitchen, Sinead is perched on the table, eating a KitKat. I’m about to protest that this isn’t exactly what I meant by breakfast, when I see she has the postcard in her hand.

  ‘D’you mind if I take this, Cat? For my Weimar Republic project?’

  My heart thuds. I don’t know what to say.

  Anxiety darkens her face. She’s trying to read me.

  ‘I mean—not if you want to keep it. But I thought you didn’t want it, Cat. You’d put it in the bin.’

  I take a deep breath, keep my voice easy, level. ‘Of course you can have it.’

  She’s holding it out between finger and thumb in front of her. I think for a moment that she will turn it over. My pulse skitters off: I don’t want to have to explain.

  But then the caption catches her eye.

  ‘The personification of history. Teachers love all that stuff. It’s, like, symbolic.’

  She finishes the KitKat and licks her fingers lavishly. As she goes out through the hall she puts the postcard in her school bag.

  Richard and Daisy both spend the morning in bed. Richard has his newspaper, Daisy has a new video game and some colouring-in from school. She’s started on an RE worksheet, a Where’s Wally?-style picture with lots of Biblical figures. It says, ‘Jesus is lost in Jerusalem. Can you find him?’

  I go up to the attic. There’s a frame I have bought, on impulse passing an art shop: simple, of stained black wood. I choose one of my pictures, selecting it almost at random. There are three children, imprisoned behind bars; they have distorted faces and large shadowed eyes. The bars are made from a woven texture of spiky lines like briars. At the edge of the picture, the lines are delicate, evanescing into nothing, but they’re solid, immutable, in the centre, where the children are. I slip the picture into the frame. Immediately it looks different. The thought enters my mind that this is a good drawing, perhaps the best I have done. I take it downstairs and nail it to the wall in the drawing room, beside the flower painting.

  The phone rings and I worry automatically that it’s Sinead, that she’s stranded at a bus-stop somewhere, or she’s broken her ankle skating.

  ‘Catriona, darling.’ Gina’s resonant voice. She sounds more nasal over the phone. ‘Nothing special,’ she says. ‘I’m just ringing for a chat. How are things?’


  ‘OK.’

  ‘And how’s my little Daisy?’

  ‘She’s much the same. Still quite poorly.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ says Gina. She sounds rather hurt, as though we have let her down. ‘I was really hoping she’d be better by now.’

  ‘Well, we all were. It just goes on and on.’

  ‘Is she eating any better?’

  ‘Not really. It’s quite a struggle.’

  ‘You ought to give her a nice English breakfast before she goes to school,’ she says. ‘Bacon and eggs. You really should try it. You don’t want to listen to all that nonsense about cholesterol. I’m a very great fan of bacon and eggs.’

  ‘I don’t think she’d eat it.’

  ‘You don’t know that unless you try, Catriona,’ she says.

  I feel a surge of irritation. I want to let her know how bad things are, to make her understand.

  ‘She still retches a lot,’ I tell her. ‘And sometimes she forgets things. That frightens me.’

  ‘Everyone forgets things sometimes, Catriona,’ she says.

  ‘Yes. But not like this. She says she can’t remember the words for things. Really familiar things. Like the names she’s given her cuddlies.’

  Gina is brisk. ‘It sounds like she knows just how to wind her mother up.’

  I’ve had enough.

  ‘I’ll get Richard for you,’ I tell her.

  For lunch I cook spaghetti. I make this often now—it’s one of the few things Daisy will sometimes eat. I make a sauce of tomatoes and onions and peppers, and sieve it thoroughly, so there won’t be bits in it. I leave out the garlic, but it still smells good, a Tuscan smell of basil and warm olive oil.

  Richard comes down. He’s showered, his hair is damp. He looks into the saucepan, raises his eyebrows.

  ‘Spaghetti again? Pushing the envelope, are we?’

  ‘It’s Daisy’s favourite. I’ll cook you something else.’

  ‘No, no, that’s fine,’ he says.

  I call Daisy. She’s wearing some new Marks & Spencer dungarees, that I chose because they wouldn’t press on her stomach. I went for the six-year-old size, but they still look baggy on her. I tell myself that Marks & Spencer sizes are always generous.

  It feels too quiet, sitting down to lunch without Sinead. I always miss her when she’s away, out with her friends or staying over at Sara’s. Today, I’m very aware how we depend on her—to be a little sardonic, to shift the mood.

  I put out a small portion of lunch for Daisy.

  ‘That looks delicious,’ she says. But she doesn’t pick up her cutlery.

  ‘Shall I cut up your spaghetti?’

  ‘That’s babyish,’ she says.

  ‘There’s no one but us to see. Why not if it makes it easier?’

  She shrugs. ‘OK,’ she says.

  I cut it up into very small pieces.

  She spends a long time attempting to get exactly the right bit of food on her fork: the spaghetti keeps falling off. I try not to watch.

  Finally she puts the fork in her mouth. She chews very slowly, puts the fork down again.

  ‘Mum, d’you mind if I leave this?’ she says. ‘I’m not that hungry right now.’

  ‘Just try,’ I tell her. ‘Just one more bite.’

  I can feel how Richard is watching me. In the pale washed light that floods the kitchen, the pupils of his eyes are contracted, just little specks of dark. He doesn’t say anything.

  ‘Please, sweetheart.’ Her wrist that rests on the edge of the table is so thin, sparrow thin. There’s pleading in my voice. I know that this is pointless, that nothing will make her eat, but I can’t stop myself. ‘I know it’s an effort, but you’ve got to eat something.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she says.

  ‘Let’s think of something else then. What about jelly? I could make you some jelly. Could you eat that, d’you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says.

  I hate the way he’s looking at me, that hardened narrow look. There’s anger in my head, a brief searing rage. I want to shout at him—You bloody deal with it, then. See if it’s all so fucking easy, what I have to do.

  Suddenly I can’t bear to stay in the house. I leave my meal, push back my chair.

  ‘Let’s go out,’ I say to Daisy. My voice is bright, brittle. ‘You and me. While Dad does his music practice. I’ll make some jelly and then we’ll walk to the petshop. You could manage that, couldn’t you? And if I put the jelly in the freezer it’ll be exactly ready when we get back. Shall we do that?’

  ‘Could we look at the kittens?’

  ‘Of course we could.’

  We walk there slowly through the paintbox dazzle of spring. The scents from people’s gardens brush against us. There’s a magnolia with flowers like gentle, pale hands, cupped to hold something precious. Horses and riders from the riding school in the park go past us, indolently slow, in the middle of the road, holding up the traffic. The horses’ luxuriant tails are golden, they glisten in the light. The sun is warm on our skin.

  The pet shop is in the main road. On the pavement outside there are baskets heaped up with huge knuckle bones for dogs, red and raw and savage. Daisy likes to look at these. Inside, the shop has a smell of warm straw, shot through with something hot and wild, like the smells of zoos or circuses.

  There is a grey African parrot; it has a cruel beak, but the colour of its feathers is soft as smoke. It whistles its jungle whistle and splashes drinking-water out at us as we pass. And there’s an adder in a glass tank, its glossy coils heaped up against the glass; its discarded skin lies beside it like creased translucent paper.

  ‘D’you think it hurts snakes when they shed their skins?’ says Daisy.

  I think how it might feel, that sleek new slippery skin. ‘Maybe they’re glad to,’ I tell her.

  We come to the cage of kittens. They have short dark velvet fur. Daisy is entranced. One of them comes up to her and presses against the cage.

  ‘That kitten really likes me,’ she says.

  The kitten pushes its paws through the bars. Daisy laughs. It’s her old laugh: breathy, with a catch in it. For a moment we are happy.

  We’ve come just to look round, but we’ve spent so long here I feel we have to buy something, so we choose a book about how to look after your cat. The boy at the till has a filthy cold; he coughs into his hands and wipes his nose on a piece of used tissue. This alarms me: I’ve become so afraid of the simplest things, of other people’s colds and viruses, anything Daisy might catch. My credit card won’t go through at first, and he blows on it to try and make it work. Later, when we get home, I shall wipe it with Milton bleach.

  On the way back, she slows. She’s walking in that careful way, with small deliberate steps.

  ‘Are your legs hurting?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’ll just walk very slowly, then.’

  Her hand is loose in mine. I see that she is limping. The afternoon starts to feel tired, oppressive, in spite of the loveliness of the soft spring light.

  ‘When can I have my kitten, Mum?’

  ‘We’ll think about it.’

  ‘You always say that,’ she says.

  ‘We need to get you well first. Before we take on looking after a kitten.’

  She’s cross. She tries to kick a can on the pavement, but the movement hurts her, she flinches. She’s suddenly near to tears.

  ‘If God loves you so much, why does he give you all these illnesses?’ she says.

  ‘I don’t know, sweetheart. Nobody knows.’ I put my arm round her but she shrugs it off.

  When we get home, she lies on the sofa, white and drained. I feel so guilty: I shouldn’t have taken her out, shouldn’t have tried to behave as though everything was normal. Richard is practising his violin. It’s music I don’t recognise. It might be Bach, it’s often Bach, but I have no way of telling; there’s so much knowledge he has that I don’t share. The music is pure and stern and feels like a reproach, reminding me austere
ly of how little I know.

  I take the jelly out of the freezer. There’s a crusted rim of white ice-crystals round the edge of the bowl. I spoon out some from the middle, where it isn’t icy, and go to give it to Daisy; but she says it’s too cold, she leaves it in the bowl.

  I dream I am back at The Poplars again. I can see it, sense it, so vividly in the dream. I am sitting on the sofa with broken springs, waiting for something, smelling the overcooked cabbage and Jeyes fluid. And in the dream I feel as I did then—constricted, as though a heavy weight is pressing on my chest.

  I wake from the dream and feel the dark around me, hear Richard’s breathing and the thin chime of St Agatha’s—four o’clock; but the sense of pressure in my chest won’t leave me.

  I lie there for what feels like a long time. I hear the birds begin, the dull low sound of a rook, then many smaller birds, their spiky glittery songs. I ease myself out of bed; light is splintering round the edges of the curtains. I go quietly downstairs.

  The kitchen is bleak in the cold morning light and it smells of last night’s dinner, but through the window the sky is a colour that cannot be described or painted, a dark lavish colour, depth on depth of blue, with a narrow moon, still a crescent, and a delicate stitching of stars.

  I unlock the door, go out into the garden. The paving slabs are gritty under my bare feet. I step across the patio and down onto the lawn. The air is like blue gauze, like a sheen of smoke over everything, and the shadow is black under the pear tree. There are no flower scents, all the flowers are closed up, the daffodils drained of colour, the tight buds of the pear blossom pale and grey; there’s just the smell of wet grass, wet earth, and the whole garden shivers with birdsong.

  The grass is chilly with dew; the cold tightens my skin. I stand there for a long time. It’s all blue and cold and beautiful and has nothing to do with people, nothing to do with me: I am a stranger in my own garden. In some unguessable way, this soothes me.

  When I go back inside, my feet are completely wet, as though I have walked through water, leaving perfect prints on the kitchen tiles. The blue air is inside me, like something I’ve drunk in, and my heartbeat is slow and gentle and I know what I will do.