Postcards From Berlin (17 page)

“What did Dr. Carey make of all this?” he asks.

“She said she thought it was a wrong diagnosis. But she seemed to think we ought to go along with what he was suggesting or
he’d just be even more convinced he’s right. That’s like blackmail, isn’t it?”

“Blackmail?”

Why can’t he see?

“It’s like a trap,” I tell him. “If you say he’s wrong and won’t do what he wants, it only proves he’s right, so either way
you lose.”

“Darling, you make it sound like some kind of battle,” he says. “I mean, I know you’re very opposed to the psychological approach.
But what if there’s something in it? They must have seen so many of these cases. And lots of illnesses are thought to be psychosomatic,
aren’t they?”

“Not Daisy’s illness. It started with flu, for God’s sake. She’s a happy child. I’d
know
if she wasn’t — I’d just know if something was wrong. And look at us. I mean, we’re happy, aren’t we? We’re a happy family.…”

He doesn’t instantly reply. There’s a little silence between us. There’s a rushing sound in my ears: the chill movement of
air, the windmills turning.

But then he smiles. “Of course we are,” he says. “Of course. Well, that goes without saying.”

“I mean, what am I doing wrong exactly?” The injustice of it all seizes me. “I try to find food she’ll eat, I take her to
the doctor, I try to get her to take the medicines, but she can’t; I’m always hunting around for people we can go to, people
who might help.… What’s wrong with that exactly? What do they expect?”

“Darling, I had wanted to say …” He’s turned away from me, profiled darkly against the apricot sky. “Well, maybe now’s not
quite the time to raise this. And it’s your thing — I don’t like to interfere. But some of the people you’ve taken Daisy to
have been rather iffy.”

“Helmut Wolf, you mean? But Nicky said he was good.”

He shrugs. “Exactly,” he says.

Sinead is walking around upstairs. There’s a blare of ferocious rap from her room, and the bang of the bathroom door.

“Richard.” My voice is a whisper; I don’t want her to hear. “They want us to see a psychiatrist.”

He nods. “OK. But I’ll need a bit of warning so I can schedule it in.”

“But I don’t think we should go. I don’t see why you’re just accepting it like that. This is all wrong, Richard. Daisy needs
someone to make her well — she doesn’t need a psychiatrist.”

“Sweetheart, I know what you think. But I guess they’re just asking — is there anything going on in the home that could be
adding to the problem? And that’s a perfectly valid question: you know, if one stands back a little, gets some kind of distance.
Sometimes it helps to stand a little outside things.”

The tears that I’ve been holding back start spilling down my face.

At last he comes and sits on the sofa beside me and puts his arm around me. I cling to him, his warmth, the rich smell of
his aftershave, wanting to hide in him.

He strokes my wet face. “You’re shaking,” he says. “You seem so frightened. There’s nothing to be frightened of.”

“Richard, it’s serious,” I say through my tears. I wipe my eyes. “These are really serious things they’re saying. It’s a really
serious allegation.”

“Only if we let it be,” he says.

______________

He’s ready for his rehearsal, but he’s a little reluctant.

“Will you be all right?” he asks. “Maybe I should give it a miss this once.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”

He gets his violin and goes to say good-bye to Daisy, the violin case in his hand. She’s propped up in bed, her hot-water
bottle clutched to her stomach.

“Dad, play me something,” she says.

“Daisy, Dad has to go now,” I tell her.

“No, that’s OK,” he says. He takes out his violin.

“Play ‘The Long and Winding Road,’” she says.

This always impresses her so much — not the dazzling ripples of notes in the pieces he practices for his string quartet, but
that he can call up any tune she chooses. He plays and she watches raptly: It’s the wide-eyed, wondering look she’d have for
a magician who conjures rabbits and pigeons out of swirls of magenta silk. The tension in her face begins to ease away.

When he’s finished, she reaches out and plucks a string with her finger. He kisses the top of her head.

We go downstairs.

“She doesn’t seem too bad,” he says, as he puts on his jacket.

“I don’t know,” I say.

He touches my shoulder. “Cat, are you sure I shouldn’t stay? You look quite shaky,” he says.

“Really, I’ll be OK.”

Daisy settles more quickly tonight. I stay for a while and watch her sleeping. Her face is soft, easy, now she’s asleep, and
the light from her lamp in its terra-cotta shade makes her skin look warmer, healthier. A strand of hair, dark blond like
wet sand, has fallen over her face. Her hair needs washing, but she hates to have it washed, and I haven’t the heart to do
it when it’s not important. One arm is flung out on top of the duvet, as if she was reaching out to somebody just as she fell
asleep. The braided friendship bracelet of tatty wool is still wrapped round her wrist. I feel a surge of love for her: so
strong, I believe for a moment that it could make her well, that it’s like an amulet or a witch’s circle of fire, to drive
away whatever is harming her. I kiss her gently so as not to wake her.

Sinead is watching
ER
in her room. There are urgent voices, and monitors going off.

I take the rest of the bottle of wine and my glass and go up to the attic. I don’t turn on the light: There’s still a little
brightness in the sky. The pictures I’ve been drawing are there on the table. More children. They’re trapped or imprisoned
or seeking to find their way through twisty labyrinths, and some of them have chains on their hands and feet. I look at them
for a moment. I don’t know if they’re any good — though Sinead assures me that Mr. Phillips, her adored art teacher, would
like them: He likes weird stuff, she says. There’s a paradox in these pictures — the images themselves, the sense of limitation
and constriction, and the freedom and flow with which they seem to emerge from my pen. But I know that won’t happen tonight.
It’s not even worth trying tonight; I know I couldn’t draw.

I lean on the windowsill, looking out. I can see down into Monica’s garden, where in the shadowed places under the apple trees
the darkness is dense and absolute as ink. I hear the sound of foxes, screeching at one another, the noise they make when
they fight. When we first came here and I heard their screeching, I rushed out into the garden, not knowing what had happened,
afraid I might find some maimed or slaughtered creature.

I feel the wine loosening me. I drink and think about things. I remember Daisy’s story about the voodoo dolls, the girl who
was given a doll for bad luck and broke her ankle. I wonder if someone has cursed us. Is that possible? Can such things be?
I think about the letters from Berlin, about my mother: who knows where I live, who warns me to visit her. I see I am afraid
of her — as though she has some occult power over us, as though her knowledge of me and of Daisy could harm us. I don’t want
us to be there in her mind — even if now, as she claims, she wishes us well: I fear she could harm us just by thinking about
us. As if all this has happened because of her. And I think about the letter from Dr. McGuire that’s downstairs in the pocket
of my jacket. I feel his hostility reaching out to me from the letter, as if his words could hurt me. Words, phrases, graze
me — saying that I am demanding and overprotective and aggressive.

The apricot fades from the sky and the shadows lengthen and night comes into my room. I’m wandering through the maze in my
mind, the paths that don’t take you anywhere. Dead ends, confusions, curses. Outside, the trees are a deeper darkness against
the sky and there are spiky stars and a thin, fine moon.

The alcohol eases into my veins, making everything simple. I feel a sudden certainty.

I go downstairs, quickly, purposefully, although my steps are unsteady. I get some matches from the kitchen and a big glass
ashtray that we never use. There’s that sound in my ears again, the windmills caught in the wind. I take Dr. McGuire’s letter
from my jacket pocket and go back to the top of the house.

I don’t turn on the light. I glance at the letter, but there’s only the light of the moon and I can’t read the words. I strike
a match and hold it to the pages; the paper flares. I drop it in the ashtray so as not to burn my fingers, the brief heat
searing my skin. It happens so quickly: the transient, fierce brightness, rapidly extinguished, the last few scraps of paper
edged with beads of flame. Then the final sparks go out, but the sudden dark is full of the scent of burning.

There in the darkness, my certainty seeps away.

I take the ashtray downstairs — carefully, with my hand across it, so the ashy scraps of paper won’t blow everywhere. I go
to the kitchen and wash the ashtray out in the sink. I see myself reflected in the window: My eyes are narrowed, my face is
relaxed from the drink and somehow wary; for a moment my face reminds me of my mother’s. I rinse all the smudges of ash from
the sink, so no one could ever guess what I have done, as though this is a crime I have committed.

I
TAKE DAISY SOME TOAST
to eat in bed. She’s sitting up watching television, with Hannibal tucked in the crook of her arm. She’s only just woken;
she has a bewildered look. Her blue eyes follow me as I put out her school clothes on her chair, and her face crumples a little,
but she doesn’t say anything. Today I am determined to get her into school.

I drink my coffee in the kitchen. Outside, there’s a sepia water-laden light and a pearl of rain at the end of each twig of
the silver birch and tense white buds on the pear tree. Through the half-open window I hear the shiny song of a blackbird.

Sinead is cramming felt tips into her pencil case and trying to make space in her bag for her Weimar Republic project, which
she’s covered in red paper. She smells of hair mousse, a sugary chemical smell. She’s frowning.

“What if it’s mufti again?” she says. “I’d die.”

“It won’t be mufti,” I tell her. “They’d have sent a letter home if it was mufti.”

“It’s a Friday; it could be. Maybe it is, and they didn’t tell me.”

“Sinead, it won’t be. Trust me.”

She goes off, looking doubtful.

Eventually, I hear Daisy coming downstairs. She’s dressed for school. She holds on to the banister and puts both feet together
on each step, moving cautiously, seriously, as though her shoes are heavy, as though a line has been drawn around her that
she must move within.

“My legs are all stiff,” she says. “They feel funny. My kneecaps feel funny.”

“You’re my brave girl.”

I give her a hug as she gets to the bottom of the steps. She resists a little.

“Megan will be so pleased to see you,” I tell her.

She shakes her head. Her eyes mist over as she pulls away from me. “Sometimes I wish I had someone else’s life,” she says.

I brush her hair. Her eyes are wet and full. I keep up a stream of bright chatter, trying not to leave her any space to say
how ill she feels. Her hair is tangled because she’s been off sick for two days and I haven’t brushed it: I always forget
to do it when she stays in bed, though it’s probably the kind of thing that sensible, ordinary women do routinely. I’ve brushed
out the tangles and I’m holding a clump of hair in one hand and a scrunchie in the other, poised to fix her ponytail, when
the phone goes. I curse whoever it is in my head and fix the hair in a hasty, lopsided clump and hurry to the phone, unable
to let it ring — though it’s probably just someone wanting to sell me a kitchen.

“Could I speak to Mrs. Lydgate?”

“Yes. Speaking.” My voice is curt: I’m waiting for the sales pitch.

“Ah. Good morning, Mrs. Lydgate. It’s the surgery here.” I place her then, the brisk Glaswegian accent. “I’m sorry to bother
you. Dr. Carey tells me she gave you a letter to read in reception yesterday — a letter from the hospital.”

She stops there, waiting, requiring something of me.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“The letter seems to have gone missing, Mrs. Lydgate.”

“Oh.”

“Are you quite sure you handed it back?”

“Absolutely.”

“We were just wondering if you had perhaps taken it by mistake.” Her voice is silky.

“No.” I try to remember, to think up something plausible. “I gave it to the other receptionist — the one with the blue cardigan.”

“Carolyn? Well, I’ve asked her, of course. She says she’s sure you didn’t.”

“No, I did, really. Maybe it got put back in the wrong folder.”

“We’ll have another look,” she says. “But perhaps you could also have a look at home. We can easily get a duplicate, of course.
It’s just that Dr. Carey is very keen to find out what happened to the original.”

“I gave it back,” I tell her.

“Right, then, Mrs. Lydgate.”

There’s a knowingness to her voice. I can tell she suspects me.

Daisy is sitting on the sofa, hunched over, her head in her hands, the way an old person might sit.

“Shall we do your hair again?”

She shakes her head dully.

“I can’t be bothered,” she says.

We put on our coats and I take her hand and we go out to the car through the brownish light. It’s raining more heavily now.
There are smells of petrol fumes and wet lilac.

“You’re shaking, Mum,” she says. “Why are you shaking?”

“I’m all right,” I tell her.

The traffic is heavy and sluggish, everything slowed by the rain. At the gate, she wants me to stay with her till the bell
rings, but then goes in without protest. I wait there for a moment once she’s left me, my eyes holding on to her as she walks
in, poised and careful, through the gate.

The bookshop is in the shopping center. There’s a fountain lined with turquoise tiles and smelling faintly of chlorine, and
jazzed-up Vivaldi over the sound system, and cheerful shops selling flimsy, exuberant clothes to teenage girls. Last time
I came here it was to do the Christmas shopping. I spent hours hunting for perfect things, presents for the girls’ stockings,
beaded bags and Viennese truffles and tiny soaps smelling of flowers. It seems so long ago now, that world of pleasant ordinariness
— when I thought myself unfortunate if the queue was slow in the Body Shop and I got a parking ticket.