The Perfect Mother (13 page)

Richard is impatient to get to bed: he has a crucial meeting tomorrow.

‘Mother phoned,’ he says, as he’s putting on his pyjamas.

‘Is she OK?’

‘She’s fine,’ he says. ‘They’re both fine. We were talking about Daisy. She thinks Daisy needs to get back her confidence with food.’ There’s an air of finality to the way he says this, as though it is the answer.

‘I don’t know what that means,’ I say. ‘Food makes her feel sick. It isn’t to do with her attitude. This isn’t in her head, Richard.’

He has a pained look. ‘I thought it was at least worth thinking about,’ he says.

He buttons up his pyjama jacket. He always seems so much older when he takes off his formal clothes.

‘And she said she thinks we’ve got to get a grip,’ he says. ‘That staying off school can get to be a habit.’

I’m too tired to be patient.

‘Why d’you listen?’ I say. ‘Why d’you always think she’s right about everything?’

‘Cat, she’s got all those years of experience.’

‘That doesn’t mean she knows what’s wrong with Daisy.’

‘She’s very concerned,’ he says. His face darkens with irritation. ‘For Chrissake, she’s only trying to help. I’d have thought you’d be
grateful.
’

On Friday we have the appointment with Helmut Wolf. He has a Quaker look, contemplative, white-haired. He has a cluttered consulting room with pictures of Japanese mountains, and shelves that are stacked with bottles of
Chinese herbs. They have a thick green complicated smell, of ferns and disinfectant. He brings out a tray of tiny glass phials of various foods. Daisy has to touch them one at a time with one finger, while he presses on her other arm to test her muscle strength. He says she’s allergic to wheat, milk, sucrose, chocolate—and she must give them up, at least for several months. I am appalled. This seems to leave out the only things she’ll eat.

But I do as he says; I go to the health-food shop and buy wheat-free flour and rice cakes from a wan and earnest assistant. I tell Richard that I’m trying Daisy on a diet, though I can’t bring myself to tell him how much she’ll have to give up.

On the first day of the diet, I offer her prawns, carrot sticks, rice cakes, corn spaghetti, chicken and chips, crisps, and some cup-cakes I made with a recipe from the health shop. She eats some crisps and an apple. The second day, she eats a packet of crisps and two small lumps of chicken, and she’s so hungry, she lies on the floor and cries. I make her a thick jam sandwich: I know that we can’t carry on.

We go to the hospital for the barium meal. We sit in the waiting room and a nurse with a wide white smile and lots of earrings comes to talk to us. There’s stuff to drink, she says, which shows up on the X-ray so they can tell if everything’s working properly. It’s not exactly a McDonald’s milkshake.

In the X-ray room, I have to wear a lead apron and promise I am not pregnant. At first they can’t get Daisy
to drink the barium. The radiologist is impatient, says maybe they’ll have to give up. Another nurse comes and talks Daisy through it again, this one too explaining that it’s not exactly a McDonald’s milkshake. They give her a straw and she sips and starts to retch. But they say she may have swallowed enough to show up on the X-ray. I watch her oesophagus on the screen. Aha, says the radiologist, she has reflux, as though it is all explained. I ask what does that mean and she says it means that stomach acid is coming up into her mouth; and I think how we knew that anyway. I ask what should we do about it, but she tells us to discuss it with the paediatrician.

I read the book that Nicky gave me and try to do what it says. I make up some affirmations and repeat them inside my head. I write them out and keep the paper in the attic. I try to imagine them happening as I write them. In the mornings I speak them into the bathroom mirror, quietly so the girls can’t hear: Daisy is well again; Daisy is happy and smiling and energetic and well. I think how strange I look, doing this.

There is a Sunday afternoon when we go to Kew Gardens. It’s a perfect day, liquid light pouring down over everything, and I decide the exercise will be just what Daisy needs. Sinead is persuaded to join us. She’s reaching the age when family outings can start to seem embarrassing, but she’s yearning for an excuse to wear her new ripped jeans. I tell myself that this is a new beginning. For the first time for weeks, I tie up my hair and
put on lots of make-up. I will be vibrant and positive, just like Nicky’s book.

At Kew, there are few trees yet in leaf, but whole vast lawns of crocuses, white and purple, dazzle in the sun as though they themselves are a source of light; and the orange buds of the crown imperials are fattening and opening out, their imposing shapes like the patterns of damask or Victorian anaglypta, and in the bare brown borders fritillaries hang their heads, their petals softest purple or green as leaves. Moorhens with gangly legs like twigs peck in the golden grass.

Daisy is teasing Sinead about some soap star.

‘You
do
fancy him. You
do.
I can
tell
.’

Sinead, riled, gives chase. Daisy runs off across the grass, scattering moorhens, the sunlight stitching yellow threads in her hair. I watch her running and tell myself: Maybe everything’s fine, like in my affirmations. I turn to Richard.

‘Look!’ I mouth.

He nods and smiles; his face is smooth today, as though the sun has eased away some tension in him.

Sinead gives up her attempt to catch Daisy and comes back to join us.

‘People think she’s so blonde and innocent,’ she says, through gasping breaths. ‘And really she’s
Hitler.
’

By the lake, the big willow tree is colouring up for spring, its fabulous green-gold droop caught in the shining water. Planes roar above us, but the gardens are full of the whistle and shimmer of birdsong. We hunt for
tiny things for Daisy’s sponsored matchbox; we find a seed-case, an acorn, a feather the size of your thumbnail and pale grey like a pearl.

Richard puts his hand on my arm.

‘Darling, are you OK?’ he says.

‘I’m fine.’

‘I’ve been a bit preoccupied with work,’ he says. ‘Maybe I haven’t always given you quite the support you needed.’ He’s reaching out to me: this makes me happy. ‘You do such a wonderful job,’ he says. ‘You know I think that, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I say.

He puts his arm around me. I feel the thick wool of his jacket against the back of my neck. I am safe, protected.

Daisy wants to go in the glasshouses, to see the plants that eat insects. We pass through the ante-room of desert plants and cacti, and push at a door and enter a different world, smelling of the tropics, wet and oppressive. The air is thick with moisture and Sinead’s hair instantly frizzes. The steps are slippery under our feet, and every surface is covered in weed and moss and mould. You feel if you stayed still for too long here, green tendrils might sprout from your skin. There are bromeliads, with leaves sharp-edged as knives, their centres full of water and redstained as if they’ve bled, and there are blotchy orchids, ugly and intricate, like deformed faces, and everywhere green earthy smells and the sounds of waterfalls. The girls take off their coats and give them to me to carry, and
move on ahead to look at the fat koi carp that ripple indolently through the murky pools.

Now, I think, now is the moment: when he’s so warm, so open.

‘Richard, there’s something I need to tell you.’

He hears the shake in my voice, stops walking, turns to me.

‘My mother’s been writing to me.’

He stares at me. I think for a moment that he will be angry with me.

‘Your mother.’ His eyes are small and narrowed against the light.

‘Yes.’

‘Shit. Where is she?’

‘In Berlin.’

His face relaxes. ‘Well, at least she won’t be turning up on our doorstep.’ He pats my arm, the way you might comfort a child. ‘Poor you. What a total pain. Can’t you just tell her to stop?’

‘I don’t want to write to her. I don’t want anything to do with her.’

‘OK,’ he says. ‘You’re right, that’s probably best.’

I feel a surge of relief. Now it is all out in the open I’m so much less afraid.

We go to the room of carnivorous plants. There’s a glass case full of pitcher plants, bulbous and intricate, purple like meat, or pallid and speckled as though they are diseased. There’s a sign that says, ‘They have no set meal times’. We stand and stare. They have a sinister look.

Behind us a woman says gleefully to her small children, ‘These are the ones the security man warned us about. These are the ones he said, “Careful they don’t eat you…’”

Sinead has found the sundews, which have shining wet hairs on their leaves. A fly is stuck to one: it’s still alive, it’s struggling but can’t escape.

‘That is
gross
,’ says Daisy.

Richard gives the girls a little lecture, explaining about the sticky stuff on the sundew, and how the fly is trapped and all the different ways that plants eat insects. He likes to teach them. Sinead has a special expression, sardonic, long-suffering, for when he tries to explain things. Daisy listens for a moment, briefly attentive, then she’s off along some inner path of her own.

‘Natalie’s sister has a friend,’ she says, ‘and she has some voodoo dolls from when she went on holiday.’ Her voice is slightly reverent and hushed. ‘And the girl with the voodoo dolls gave Natalie’s sister one for wealth and after that their father got ten thousand pounds because he was doing a good job at his work.’

‘Wow,’ I say. Sinead too is listening, momentarily impressed. She loves this kind of thing; the magazines she reads are full of runes and horoscopes.

‘But then Natalie’s sister and the girl with the voodoo dolls broke up.’ Daisy is solemn as she tells her story. ‘And the girl gave Natalie’s sister a doll for hate, and next day Natalie’s sister broke her ankle.’

‘Spooky,’ says Sinead.

‘You don’t want to listen to that kind of nonsense,’ says Richard briskly.

Daisy shrugs. ‘I wasn’t scared,’ she says.

Downstairs there are aquariums. We see black catfish that move through the water like shadows or absences, and a grey spangled piranha, and tiny platys with ripply rainbow tails. Daisy climbs up on the railing. The flickery lights from the tank are in her eyes.

‘They’re so gorgeous—the rainbow ones, the platys,’ I say. ‘All their colours.’

Richard turns to me. His face is close to mine, the smell of the aftershave that I gave him for Christmas, musky, rich, is all round me. I curve in towards him.

‘I love it when you get excited about things,’ he says. He pushes his hand through my hair. ‘You look so pretty this afternoon,’ and he kisses me with considerable seriousness, right there by the aquarium in front of several people.

On the way out we buy ice creams from the kiosk—traditional creamy ones in cones, with no E-numbers.

‘This is delicious,’ says Daisy, taking a first lick.

We wander past the crocus lawn again with our ices, drinking in the lavishness of the flowers.

Sinead and I have nearly finished, but Daisy has a lot of ice cream left.

‘Get a move on, Daisy, or it’s going to melt,’ says Richard.

A large drip lands on her foot. She holds the ice cream well out in front of her. I wrap a tissue round the cone.

‘Actually, Mum, d’you mind if I leave this?’ she says.

‘No, of course not, sweetheart.’

I take the ice cream and drop it in the nearest bin. I glance at Daisy; her face is white as wax.

We sit quietly in the car going home.

‘Well, that was a nice outing, wasn’t it?’ The brightness in my voice sounds forced, even to me.

No one says anything.

‘Mum, Daisy’s retching,’ says Sinead then.

Dread washes through me. I turn to Daisy, reach back to stroke her knee.

‘Maybe the ice cream wasn’t such a clever idea,’ I say.

My optimism of earlier seems pointless, stupid, worse than stupid, as though with my transient, febrile cheerfulness, like the girl with the voodoo dolls, I have provoked ill fortune.

CHAPTER 16

A
nother postcard comes. It’s Checkpoint Charlie, taken in summer; the sky is wide and clear. There’s a kind of cabin that’s been preserved, presumably for tourists, a notice that says ‘U.S. Army Checkpoint’, a large framed picture of a soldier—Russian, I think, in khaki uniform—stuck up in the street. You can tell from people’s clothes that the photo was taken recently: a woman in jeans and a vest top ambles along the pavement, a man in combat trousers is walking across the road. Beside the hoarding that says ‘You are
leaving the American sector’, there’s now a traffic light and a shop selling sunglasses.

She’s written her address and telephone number at the top.

Darling, Just in case you lost my address!! I know you must be so busy, with your little girl and everything. And how old is she now, I wonder, your little one.

Hope you like the picture and that all is going well! Perhaps you could lift the phone? My number is as above. Just whenever you can, my darling, in one of those spare moments! Well, I’m sure you don’t have many of those! But I’d be so happy to hear from you. This comes with all my love.

CHAPTER 17

D
aisy and I sit by the pile of board books in the clinic. Daisy is afraid.

‘What will he say about the medicines, Mum? Will he tell me off?’

‘Of course he won’t. You really tried to take them.’

But now we’re here, waiting to see him, I wish we’d tried again.

It’s clear but cold. Through the glass doors the playground is full of light, so the colours of the plastic toys look pallid, faded. There’s no one on the GameCube, but Daisy isn’t interested today.

The nurse with the gentle face is weighing a teenage girl, saying how much weight she’s put on, and how fantastic this is. Everyone glows—the nurse, the girl, the mother. I feel so envious of them.

‘I wish Dad would come,’ says Daisy.

‘Me, too.’