I take the washing-up gloves and a rubbish sack and go out to the garden. There’s a smell of rottenness, rich and meaty and foul. The fox is quite small—smaller than the foxes I usually see in the garden—just a cub really. There’s a trail of blood that leads back round the side of the house: it was knocked over by a car perhaps and slunk round here to die, looking for a hidden dark place, but only reaching this far. Its face is contorted by its death throes, the mouth pulled back from the teeth, and its legs are stuck out stiffly as though it keeled over where it stood and died before it fell.
I put on the washing-up gloves, holding my breath as I approach so I won’t breathe in the smell. Even with the gloves on I don’t pick it up directly, I hold it through the plastic of the rubbish bag. The body is rigid as wood. When I’ve manoeuvred it into place, I tie up the bag and put it in the dustbin. You can still smell it, but faintly, and the dustmen come tomorrow. I get some Cif and scrub away the blood; it leaves a paler bleached mark there in the middle of the patio. I throw away the rubber gloves and the scrubbing brush and go inside and wash and wash my hands. It leaves me with a troubled feeling; as though it’s a malevolent act, something that has been done to me.
There’s a knock at the door. I wipe my hands and go to open it, expecting the postman; or Nicky, on her way back from school, perhaps; or even Monica from next door, to fix up that coffee we’re always going to have.
It’s Dr Carey. She’s wearing a decorous little jacket with buttons bright as coins.
‘I just thought I’d drop in on spec,’ she says. ‘I was visiting in Ferndale Road, and I thought I could fit in a quick visit and see how things were going.’
She’s studiedly casual and friendly, as though this is the most natural thing, for her to call on me.
I stand aside to let her in. ‘You’ll be able to see Daisy, she didn’t make it into school today.’
‘Right,’ she says.
I take her into the living room. It’s fresh in the morning light that falls through the wide windows, and there are irises on the mantelpiece, in the Chinese vase.
She looks round appraisingly, eyes widening.
‘It’s a lovely house,’ she says.
I can tell this room and its elegance have impressed her: as though my tasselled tie-backs and pelmets edged with plum-coloured braid have somehow strengthened my case. I despise her for this, but I’m also grateful for it.
‘Well, we’re lucky to live here,’ I say.
Her eyes skim over everything, come to rest on my drawing on the wall, the one I’ve just put up: the children who peer between bars that are woven from a texture of spiky lines like briars.
‘Who’s the artist?’ she says.
‘I am,’ I tell her. It’s some unexamined impulse, to show there are things I can do, wanting to say, Look, I can draw, I have another life, there’s a bit of an artist in me, I’m not just a demanding hostile overprotective mother.
‘I wondered,’ she said.
She has her head on one side, looking at the picture.
‘It’s very dark,’ she says. Though whether she means the colour or the subject, I don’t know.
‘I paint all sorts of things,’ I tell her. ‘Gardens mostly. Flowers.’
‘Really, it’s quite sinister in a way,’ she says. ‘The children look so scared. What’s the meaning of it, would you say?’
‘The meaning?’
‘You know—what do you think you were trying to say?’
‘I don’t really think about it like that.’ I’m struggling to find the right words. ‘I mean, I don’t plan it. The picture just comes to me kind of complete, in my head.’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I see.’ She looks as though she wants to say more, as though she’s trying to formulate a question that evades her. She shakes her head a little. ‘To be honest,’ she says, ‘art isn’t really my thing.’
She looks at the picture for a moment longer. I start to feel uncomfortable.
‘Let me get Daisy for you.’
She turns to me. ‘Let’s not disturb her,’ she says. ‘If there isn’t any change. Really, it was you I wanted to see. Just to find out how things were going…You went to see Dr Watson?’
I nod.
‘And how did you get on?’
‘Fine,’ I say. ‘She seemed pleasant.’
‘She’s very approachable, isn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘She’s extremely well respected in child psychiatry circles,’ she says. ‘She has some inpatient beds at the Jennifer Norton Unit. That’s a psychiatric unit for children—you might have heard of it?’
‘No, I haven’t,’ I tell her.
‘It’s very well regarded,’ she says. ‘Dr Watson has done some notable work with anorexics there.’
‘Right.’
‘So, Mr. Lydgate came as well?’ she says.
‘Yes,’ I tell her. ‘Yes, he was happy to come.’
I sense that she wants to talk about our marriage, like when I first took Daisy to see her, but she doesn’t know how to start or what to say. Here, on my own territory, the balance has shifted a little: I see how uncertain she is. It’s different from the surgery, as though the normal rules of courtesy operate here.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever met Mr Lydgate,’ she says.
‘Well, he isn’t often ill.’
She nods and waits. She wants me to say more. We sit for a moment in an awkward silence.
‘Oh,’ she says then. ‘By the way. That letter from Dr McGuire.’
‘The receptionist rang me,’ I say.
‘You managed to read it, did you?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘We didn’t ever find it,’ she says. ‘Never mind. We got another copy from Dr McGuire’s secretary.’
She picks up her black bag and goes towards the door. There’s a vague dissatisfaction about her, as though she hasn’t got what she came for.
Outside, at the top of the steps, she turns towards me. I wonder if she can smell the stench of decay from the dustbin. Her face looks harder, older in the brightness of the light.
‘It’s crucial for you to be straight with me, Mrs Lydgate,’ she says. Her eyes are narrowed against the sun and I can’t read her expression. ‘You see, I really can’t help you and Daisy unless you’re straight with me…’
She turns and goes before I can reply.
CHAPTER 27
I see, driving there through the grey afternoon, how lavish all the borders are, after so much rain and sun, how even the tidiest gardens look overgrown.
I stand on his doorstep and ring the bell and the grey warm air wraps round me. There’s a musky, intimate smell, where the hawthorn has been rained on. I’m suddenly afraid: there’s part of me that hopes there’ll be no answer. I’m turning round to go when he opens the door.
He’s wearing one of those baggy shirts, and his hair is unruly, as though he’s just run his hands through it. He looks at me; he doesn’t smile. He doesn’t seem surprised.
I suddenly feel I have no right to be here. ‘I’m sorry—are you busy?’
‘I’m writing a rather worthy piece on the politics of coffee.’
‘I won’t come in, then…’
‘Of course you’ll come in,’ he says, standing aside to let me through. ‘Trust me, I can handle this kind of interruption.’
I follow him through to the back room. On this clouded afternoon, it seems more ordinary and smaller than before.
I go to the window. Jamie and a friend of his are somersaulting on the climbing frame. Everything’s further on since last I came here. There’s a ragged mist of thistledown on the lawn, and in the borders under the prunus a tangle of docks and bluebells; the flowers are a soft faded blue, as though they’ve been soaked in water.
‘It all needs cutting back,’ he says. ‘There are things in that lawn that really shouldn’t be there.’
‘I like it as it is.’
He smiles at me and pushes up his
shirt-sleeves. I’m very aware of his skin, of the fine fair hairs on his arms.
‘This is great timing,’ he says, as though my presence here is the most natural thing. ‘I was going to give you a ring—I’ve got that name for you.’
‘The doctor?’
He nods. ‘A gastro-enterologist who specialises in children. You’ll have to get your GP to refer you.’ He rifles through a heap of papers on top of the bookcase. ‘Here.’
He’s written the name on an envelope, someone from Great Ormond Street. I put it in my bag.
‘I’m really grateful,’ I tell him.
‘It seemed the least I could do.’
‘Thank you.’
‘We’ll have some wine,’ he says.
I notice that he doesn’t ask if I want it, as though we already have our rituals, the ways we usually do things. As though he knows what I want.
He goes to the kitchen, brings a bottle and glasses. As he hands me mine our fingers touch around the cool bowl of the glass.
There’s a little silence. I don’t know where we go from here. With relief I remember the picture.
‘I brought a drawing, like you said.’ I take it out of my bag. I glance at it for a moment, the child with the angular hands who’s reaching out of the picture. I’m not sure now why I wanted him to see it; it seems raw, unfinished. I feel a kind of shame, that I could presume to imagine that anyone would like it. But it’s too late to turn back now. ‘This is the kind of thing I’m doing now. I guess they’re rather weird.’
He takes it, smoothing out the creases at the corners. I watch his hands moving across my picture.
‘It’s very different to what you did before.’
Perhaps he doesn’t like it, the way he liked the flower. I glance away from him, looking along the bookshelves, nervously reading off the titles of the books. I feel opened up, exposed. He holds my picture in front of him and looks at it. This seems to take an age.
‘It’s very powerful,’ he says.
Powerful. No one ever called my drawing that before. In spite of everything, I feel a surge of pleasure.
He props it up on his mantelpiece. It’s oddly intimate, to see my drawing there, surrounded by his things.
‘Now we can see it properly,’ he says.
He’s right: it looks different there. I see it now as someone else might see it, see how acute the child’s face is, how urgent and alive.
‘Can I keep it?’ he says.
I’m surprised. ‘Yes. Yes, of course. I’ve done lots of them.’
‘There’s someone I know,’ he says, ‘who has a gallery. I’d like to show it to him.’
There’s a brief astonishing thrill—like the glitter of a fish I once saw in a summer river, leaping right out of the water and into the sun. But then the old familiar doubts crowd in.
‘But he wouldn’t be interested, surely? I mean, I’ve never had any training—I just did a bit of drawing at school…’
He’s looking at me, his head on one side, a little smile at my self-deprecation playing across his face. I bite back all the things I was going to say. I let myself smile too.
‘I’d love you to,’ I tell him.
‘I’ll give him your number, then—is that OK?’
‘Of course. You take me so seriously.’
‘Yes,’ he says.
We sit for a while in silence. The children shout in the garden. Light from the window falls across his body: his strong pale arms, the curve of his hand round the glass.
‘What’s happening with the doctors?’ he says then.
‘We’re seeing the psychiatrist.’
He frowns. ‘You decided to go?’
‘I couldn’t see a way out.’
His face is serious now. He shakes his head.
‘I hate it,’ I tell him. ‘I feel she’s always judging me.’
‘I’m sure she is,’ he says.
‘I feel so trapped. That for Daisy’s sake we have to do as we’re told. That if I protest, it’ll only make things worse for her…’ I see how his mouth turns down when I say this. I wish I had his certainty: that I weren’t so afraid. ‘Everything seems so simple to you,’ I say, a little accusingly.
‘That’s probably true,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Richard thinks she’s good. He just won’t listen to me.’ I sense Fergal’s eyes on my face, but I don’t look at him. I’m talking on, thinking about Richard, talking to myself really.
‘I thought I really knew him. I mean, I’ve always felt our marriage was so strong…’ My voice is very low. ‘A bit traditional, rather old-fashioned perhaps. But that it all worked fine.’
‘Yes,’ says Fergal quietly.
‘I just don’t get it—why he never listens.’
There’s a kind of clarity here, in this still room, as though I can see further than before.
‘Maybe…’ My voice fades. ‘Maybe I don’t understand him as well as I thought I did. Maybe there are things I don’t know about him…’
Fear moves across my mind like smoke from a hidden fire, making new shapes that I don’t want to look at. He senses this perhaps; for a while he doesn’t say anything, just fills up my glass. He waits for me to say more. I shake my head a little. Outside the boys are quiet for a moment. Birdsong spirals down from the warm wide sky.
‘Tell me how Daisy is,’ says Fergal then.
‘She’s just the same.’ I see her in my mind as she was when I left her, thin and still and unhappy. ‘You know—sometimes I have these mad thoughts. That someone’s cursed us—that someone’s got it in for us. Such things aren’t possible, are they?’
I think he may laugh at me. But he’s quite serious, thinking about this. ‘No. But I can see how you might think that.’
‘I mean, I can really understand…like people a long time ago, when they had a miscarriage or their cow died, and they thought it was a curse. Crazy thinking, really.’
He’s quiet for a moment, considering this.
‘If someone was cursing you,’ he says then, ‘who might it be?’
And, when I hesitate, ‘Catriona, I didn’t mean to upset you—you really don’t have to answer.’
But I’ve answered it already, here in the silence, smelling her nicotine and lily of the valley, hearing the jangle of her gilded bracelets.
He reaches out and touches me, his hand just brushing the bare skin of my arm.
‘You look so sad,’ he says. ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’
His touch confuses me.
I pick up my bag. ‘I think I ought to go.’
‘You don’t have to,’ he says.
‘I’m keeping you from your work…’
‘Believe me, I can cope with that,’ he says.
I get up anyway.
He follows me to the hall. We’re standing close together; the hall is narrow. His eyes are on my face, his gaze pulls at me. I’m looking anywhere but at him. If I look at him, I think, something will happen, something irrevocable.
‘Catriona.’
I lift my eyes to his. He reaches out and takes my hand and raises it to his mouth. Very slowly, he kisses the palm of my hand. I hear myself gasp: the sensation shakes me; all the nerve-endings in my body are in the skin of my hand. His eyes are on me—his look has an absolute seriousness. And as he looks he kisses the tips of my fingers, pressing my fingers against and into his half-opened mouth. The quick thin heat runs through me. Just for a moment, I forget everything.
There’s nothing to be said now. I go without saying goodbye.
In the car driving home past the blue disordered gardens, I feel the sensations of making love to him, his mouth pressed into mine, the thrill as he eases into me, as though this is something I remember. It has a vividness beyond what can be imagined, as though it has happened already.
CHAPTER 28
Another postcard comes. It’s a picture from before the Wall came down. The Wall is in the foreground. It’s covered with graffiti—trolls and exubera
nt monsters and spotted cartoon snakes, in pinks and yellows. And there are lots of slogans in German that I don’t understand, apart from ‘Soldarität’, and, in little white letters on the dark rim at the top, ‘God loves you’. Behind the wall, there’s a wide desolate space, a no-man’s-land of mud and earth and tarmac, with very tall lamps like in a sports arena. In the distance, against the cloudy sky, there are tenements like grey boxes.
Under her phone number she’s written an e-mail address, and ringed it in purple pen.
So how are you, my darling? Every time the phone goes, I think it might be you. Well, I’m sure one day it will be!
You’ll see I’ve gone on e-mail now. Quite keeping up with the times. Do you have e-mail, darling? Well, I’m sure you do. I must say, I’m really quite a convert. It’s the easiest thing in the world to send someone a line!
I chose the picture for your little girl. I hope she likes the animals! Thinking of you, as ever.
The picture would be perfect for Sinead’s cities project, but I bury it at the bottom of the bin.
CHAPTER 29
There’s a sudden massing of clouds as tall as towers; then, just as we get to the clinic, the rain begins, spattering on the gravel in the car park. I have an umbrella. Richard runs ahead and waits for me in the entrance. His hair is wet, sleeked down. He pushes it back from his forehead with his hand. Raindrops fall from it.
We wait in the bland waiting room, among the copies of Hello, and I watch Jane Watson’s door, and feel the beat of my heart. Exactly on time, she opens her door and ushers us into her room. Today her hair is loose, just grazing her shoulders. She takes our coats and hangs them on her door, on top of a smart black trenchcoat that is presumably hers. We talk about the weather—is it climate change that is causing these heavy storms? As she moves her hair swings out, and her sandalwood smell brushes against me.
The Perfect Mother Page 18
