The Perfect Mother (21 page)

We make an appointment with Nicky’s cranial osteopath. He’s bearded and intense, and he has a consulting room with framed charts of the body showing the meridians,
and on his desk a little plastic skeleton. There’s a dual carriageway outside; when a lorry roars past, the skeleton shakes. He asks for Daisy’s birth details, and announces that she has stomach trouble because she was born by Ventouse extraction. He lays her down on his couch and moves his hands on her head. Afterwards some of the tension has eased out of her face, and she says she feels less sick—but in the morning, when she wakes, she’s pale and ill again.

In Waterstones, I look at a book of spells, the one that Nicky uses. The magic seems harmless enough—it’s all about candles and scented oils and wishing people well. Maybe I should become a witch, like Nicky. There’s a spell for healing. You make a circlet of ivy and a pentangle from ribbon, and you write the name of the person you want to heal on a piece of scented paper, and burn a green candle and think of them being healthy. I would like to try this. I don’t exactly believe in it, but I would like to try. The only thing that stops me from buying the book is the fear of Richard finding it, and the thought of the look on his face.

I do a drawing that I’m especially pleased with. It’s a child, alone, with around her a lavish texture of lines that circle and swirl to the margins of the page. The child reaches out of the picture; her hands are huge and angular, you can see the lines on her palms. When I’ve finished it and look at it, I see how ambiguous it is, this gesture that she’s making—reaching out to someone, or pushing someone away. There’s part of me that would like to
show the drawing to Fergal, just as he suggested, but when I think of this I feel a kind of fear.

Spring comes to our garden. There are lilacs, and flimsy purple irises round the pond, and a single waterlily, its petals thick and perfect as though it is fashioned from wax, and a blue smoke of rosemary flowers in the herb bed. But everything is neglected; I never seem to get out there any more. The daffodils need tying up, their leaves are brown and broken, and there are weeds in the rose bed.

One afternoon when Daisy is off school I wrap her up in her fleece—she always seems so cold—and we go into the garden. There’s a smell of wet earth and lilac. She sits on the patio step, her arms wrapped round herself. Her hair is dull, tangled.

I pull up the couch grass under the rose bushes; it’s tough—it hurts your hands. She’s watching me.

‘There was this man who was cutting his hedge,’ she says, ‘and he found a gold ring.’

‘Wow. Is that really true, d’you think, or just a story?’

‘It’s true. I saw it on
Antiques Roadshow
.’

There are tiny rust-coloured spiders on the paving slabs. She pokes at one with a stick. If you crush them they leave a reddish smear, like dried blood. ‘It was really really old,’ she says. ‘It came from the Anglo-Saxons. His wife thought it was a ring from a Christmas cracker.’

‘Imagine that,’ I say. ‘Imagine just poking around in your hedge and finding a beautiful thing.’ I’m trying to pull up a dock, but its tap root is deep; it hurts my hands as I pull. ‘Some people have all the luck,’ I say, thoughtlessly.

Daisy looks at me. She is so pale, so serious.

‘Why can’t I be lucky?’ she says.

I wish I hadn’t said what I said. I sit back on my heels; I struggle with this, not knowing what to say.

‘Maybe luck kind of comes in cycles,’ I tell her. ‘I mean, you’ve had a horrid time this year, but maybe soon you’ll have good times again with lots of luck.’

‘I don’t need lots of luck,’ she says. ‘I just want to wake up in my bed and feel fine.’

One day when I go down to make my morning coffee, Richard hands me a letter. There’s a wariness about him. He looks me up and down.

I take it. It’s from the hospital.

An appointment has been made for you to discuss Daisy’s illness with Dr Jane Watson, Consultant Child Psychiatrist. This appointment is for Mr and Mrs Lydgate only, without Daisy. All patients are given individual appointment times so please arrive in good time. If you arrive late it may not be possible for the clinician to see you. On arrival, please report to the receptionist in Outpatients, who will direct you to the clinic.

He turns back to the mirror, smoothing out his tie.

‘I’ve had a look in my diary,’ he says. ‘I’ve got something in for the morning, but I’ll get Francine to sort it out. It’s such a help to have a really efficient PA.’

‘You mean—we’re just going to go along with it?’

‘Well, what else do you suggest?’ It’s his work voice—cool, brisk, as though he’s chairing a meeting.

‘But, Richard—what if they find out about me, about my childhood?’

‘I don’t for a moment suppose they’ll bother with that—I mean, that’s all in the past.’

‘But surely you see.’ I wonder if I should have shown him the book I bought. But it’s never seemed the right moment. ‘They think that if you have that sort of childhood it means you must be disturbed. That you can’t be a good parent.’

‘You worry so much,’ he says, routinely. He slips on his jacket. I notice that he’s wearing a different aftershave. It has a rather thick aromatic smell, like a cold cure.

‘They mustn’t know,’ I say. ‘They must never ever find out.’

‘OK,’ he says. ‘If that’s what you really want.’

He goes. He doesn’t kiss me.

CHAPTER 25

I
t’s a bare grey room: thinly upholstered armchairs arranged with studied casualness, a clock on the wall with a loud metallic tick, a desk with a few framed photographs. In the corner there’s a rubber plant, so glossy and symmetrical it seems to be made of plastic, although in fact it is real. There’s nothing on the table in the space between the chairs except a box of tissues. The air is thick and warm.

She is quietly dressed, in a sweater and skirt. She has elegant pale legs and high boots made of snakeskin.

‘I’m Jane Watson.’ She’s shaking hands with both of
us; her hand is cool and firm. ‘Thank you for coming in. Are you happy if we use Christian names?’

‘Sure,’ says Richard.

Her hair is blonde and neatly tied, and she’s wearing a sandalwood scent, and she has a vivid, practised smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. We sit, and she crosses her long pale legs. Her skirt is short; it eases up her thigh.

‘I like to tape my sessions with clients,’ she says. ‘Are you happy with that?’

‘Sure,’ says Richard again. He’s affable, relaxed; he seems at ease here.

The clinic is in an annexe at the edge of the hospital site. The windows are thick; you can only hear the faintest sound of traffic—the outside world seems very far away.

She turns on her cassette player and leans back in her chair; her elbows are on the arms of the chair, the fingertips just touching. The whole room smells of her scent.

‘We’re here to talk about you and Daisy,’ she says. Her voice is sleek as Vaseline. ‘To try and find out whether there are any psychological issues here, that might be making her ill.’

‘I really don’t think there are,’ I say immediately, then wish I hadn’t spoken. Be careful, be careful, says something inside me. I take a slow deep breath. I say to her what I said to Dr McGuire. That Daisy’s happy at school. That there haven’t been any big changes in our lives. That no one’s died or anything…

She looks at me appraisingly. Her eyes are green as
ferns. She has a quiet casual beauty, the sort of beauty that makes a man think, Only I have seen this.

‘But you see, children do react differently to adults,’ she says. ‘Children can be very sensitive to atmospheres, for instance.’

‘Could you explain that for us, Jane?’ says Richard. I’m aware of the warmth in his voice.

‘Well, if perhaps there’s tension in the home,’ she says. ‘Maybe quite subtle tensions in the family. Sometimes children pick up on atmospheres and somatise their feelings—that means, they turn them into physical symptoms. To take a common example—today’s children are very aware of the possibility of divorce.’

‘But we get on fine,’ I tell her.

She doesn’t respond. My protestation hangs in the air between us, glaring and conspicuous. I feel my face go hot.

‘Perhaps you could tell me who is in the family,’ she says. ‘I believe there are the two of you and Daisy, and also your daughter, Richard, by your first marriage?’

Richard nods.

‘In one of our later sessions,’ says Jane Watson, ‘I may want to see you together, the whole family.’

‘I’d rather not, really,’ I tell her. ‘I’d rather not put Daisy under any more stress.’

‘So you would agree that Daisy is under stress at the moment—for whatever reason?’

I feel a hot red flicker of rage. ‘Only because she’s ill.’

The anger is there in my voice. Richard glances at me.

‘Yes. Well, of course, that’s what we’re here to try
and understand,’ Jane Watson says in her soothing Vaseline voice.

She settles back in her chair and uncrosses her legs, the narrow pale thighs sliding over one another. Out of the corner of my eye, I see how Richard watches.

‘Perhaps we could go back to the beginning, when you became pregnant with Daisy,’ she says. ‘Perhaps you could tell me how you felt when you found you were pregnant?’

‘I was thrilled,’ I tell her.

Her green eyes rest on me.

‘It’s strange when you say that,’ she says, her voice so emollient, so understanding, ‘because what I notice is that you don’t sound thrilled, you sound a little unsure.’

The tick of the clock is loud, intrusive, as though it’s right inside me. I can’t work out what to say.

‘Well—it’s a long time ago now,’ I say. ‘But really, I was very happy. I wanted to be pregnant more than anything.’

‘And Richard, what about you?’ she says.

‘We were both delighted,’ he says. ‘Though, quite honestly, Jane, I guess I’m not much good at showing things like that. I’m just your average emotionally impaired male. You know—I need to retire to my cave from time to time.’

A brief smile flickers across Jane Watson’s face: she likes this. But then she turns to me again.

‘And so, Catriona, did you feed her yourself?’

The coyness of this surprises me.

‘Breast-feeding, you mean? Yes. I loved it.’

‘Can you tell me what you loved especially? What was so special for you?’

‘Being so needed,’ I tell her.

Her look is acute, intense. I know that she is filing this away.

‘It’s very special for you to feel needed?’ she says gently.

I nod, but have a sudden doubt, a fear that I have said something rash, dangerous.

‘And of course later that would have changed,’ she says, ‘as Daisy grew up. As she became more independent, and went to school. And perhaps you found that she didn’t need you then in quite the same way…’

‘Of course. Well, I enjoyed that part of it too.’ I hear the shake in my voice.

‘Now, a baby’s arrival always means big changes in the family,’ she says. ‘How did that affect you, would you say? I mean, there will always be losses as well as gains.’

‘I wasn’t aware of any losses,’ I tell her.

‘There’s such an expectation today that parenthood will be a fulfilling experience,’ she says. ‘It makes it difficult to acknowledge that there were things that were hard.’

I try to think of something. I see Daisy and me on our afternoons at the farm park, Daisy in a knitted hat that she had, petting the goats and laughing at their insistence, her face glowing, healthy, everything sunlit, tulip-coloured. A feeling like grief tugs at me.

‘Darling,’ says Richard. He reaches across and rests his hand on mine. It slips into my mind that this gesture is really aimed at her, to show how empathic he is. ‘You were quite tearful in the days after Daisy was born. Don’t you remember?’

‘But everyone’s like that.’ There’s an edge to my voice.
I move my hand from under his. ‘That’s perfectly normal—it doesn’t mean anything.’

‘I think Richard is trying to help you here, Catriona,’ says Jane Watson.

‘But I mean—the baby blues,’ I say. ‘Everyone has that. It’s just a hormone thing. I adored her right from the beginning.’

‘Perhaps I could give you a little feedback here,’ she says. ‘Because when you spoke to Richard then, I saw you move away from him a little. And now you’ve got your arms crossed in front of you, as though you’re defending yourself from something, or protecting yourself. I’m wondering what you feel you need to protect yourself from.’

I uncross my arms. Be careful, be careful, says the voice in my head. ‘I just think my reaction was perfectly normal,’ I tell her.

‘It may very well have been,’ she says. ‘I don’t deny that. What I do see is how you react when Richard reaches out to you. Sometimes it’s very hard for us to accept help.’

I don’t know what to say to this. There’s nothing I can say.

‘Perhaps you could tell me about your childcare arrangements when Daisy was little. Now—what work were you doing before you had Daisy?’

‘I worked in a nursery school.’

‘And after Daisy was born?’

‘I’ve never gone back to work.’

‘It can be very demanding,’ she says. ‘Spending all day with a small child. Children can be very demanding.’

‘I always enjoyed it,’ I tell her. ‘I didn’t want to work. I never considered going back, to be honest. I thought I was just incredibly lucky.’

‘Lucky?’ She looks at me quizzically.

‘It was what I’d always wanted.’

I see myself on the carpet at The Poplars, the smell of disinfectant all around me, and Lesley sitting there with her self-esteem tree drawn out in coloured felt tip, asking what I would choose if I could wave a magic wand. I remember the picture as I saw it in my head: the lawn, the lily pond, the laughter of children. And how when I met Richard, when we came to the house with the seven stone steps and the green front door—and then, when Daisy was born—I knew the answer to her question. I thought, This. This is what I would choose, what I have always wanted.

‘Daisy wasn’t demanding at all,’ I tell Jane Watson. ‘She was just always good fun. I like being with children—I think they’re often more interesting than adults. You know, the things they come out with: I love that.’