The Perfect Mother (23 page)

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

A
nother 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 exuberant 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

T
here’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.

We sit down and she switches on her voice recorder.

‘So—how are things?’ she says.

I tell her how Daisy has been.

She nods and murmurs something sympathetic.

She talks to Richard, for a while, about Sinead and Sara. It sounds, she suggests, as though they’ve worked out an excellent modus vivendi; it’s an achievement, not everybody can manage this. I sit quietly while they talk, feeling a sense of reprieve.

But then she turns towards me, her face serious, intent.

‘I’ve been thinking about our session last week,’ she says. She leans back in her chair, in that pose she likes, her elbows on the arms of the chair, her fingertips lightly touching. ‘We talked about your mother’s death, Catriona, and I realised I was left feeling quite unsure how that affected you…’

She leaves a little space, for me to fill.

‘It’s a while ago now,’ I tell her.

‘Of course,’ she says. ‘But the loss of your mother is always a huge event in anyone’s life. Perhaps one way in would be for you to tell me what your mother was like when you were a child, how you remember her.’

I hesitate. It’s such an obvious question, but I have nothing to say.

‘I know this will be painful for you, Catriona.’ Her voice is silkily empathic. ‘That when we talk about somebody we’ve lost, in a sense we’re reliving that loss.’

I try to shrug, as if this is nothing to me. My back is rigid, set.

‘It’s not that. It’s just that there’s nothing special to say.’

I realise I am sweating. I wonder if she can see the spike of my pulse in my wrist.

‘What kind of a woman was your mother?’ she says.

‘She was…quite pretty.’ I flail around. ‘She was always very suntanned. She liked jewellery…’

There’s silence for a moment; this isn’t what she wants.

‘D’you see anything of her in yourself? Are there ways in which you feel you’re like her?’ she says.

‘No. Not at all,’ I tell her. Too readily, too quickly.

She has a rather deliberate puzzled expression, an expression that’s asking us to help her understand.

‘Richard, perhaps I could ask you what you think,’ she says. ‘Whether you’d say there are ways in which Catriona reminds you of her mother?’

‘Well, I’ve never met her,’ he says.

The present tense panics me.

Her green eyes flick across our faces.

‘Perhaps you have some memories of her that you could share?’ she says to me.

Images of my mother crowd my mind. Putting on her make-up, all the glittery coloured sticks, putting on
her bangles and gloves and going out for the evening and leaving me alone. Drunk, her speech slurred, weeping about her life and how it had all turned out, dark mascara streaking her face, eating mayonnaise from the jar with a spoon. Coming to The Poplars, bringing me the rabbit with the stitched-on heart. Just give me a bit of time. Karl and me have got to get ourselves sorted…

‘She—always worked.’

Jane Watson nods encouragingly.

‘What did she do?’

‘She was a waitress.’ I keep my voice quite level.

‘Tell me some more,’ she says. ‘Just any memories. Anything that comes into your head.’

But nothing comes, nothing that’s safe. I feel a flicker of panic. I dredge down into my mind, trying to find something, anything, that will satisfy her.

There’s a sharp brittle sound as Richard clears his throat. He turns to me, and relief washes through me. Thank God, I think, he’s going to rescue me.

He reaches out and puts his hand on mine.

‘Darling, don’t you think we should be a little more open?’ he says.

I stare at him.

He turns towards Jane Watson and takes his hand away.

‘The fact is, Jane, there are things we haven’t told you,’ he says. His tone is friendly, conversational. ‘Catriona had a very difficult childhood, more difficult than we’ve said. Didn’t you, darling?’

My heart thuds.

I glance at Jane Watson. She’s sitting very still, as though there’s some rare wild animal she’s worried she’ll frighten off. There are shiny spots of colour in her cheeks.

‘Don’t you think we should talk about that?’ he says to me.

I hear the sudden blare and jingle of an ice-cream van from the road outside—an ordinary sound, as though nothing has changed, as though things are just as they were. Jane Watson nods very slightly.

‘Isn’t that for me to decide?’ I say. But I know this isn’t true, that now I don’t have a choice.

Jane Watson leans forward. ‘You seem very angry with Richard, Catriona,’ she says. Her voice so tender, careful. ‘Yet to me it seems that he’s trying to help you here—trying to make things more open, more trusting, between us. And all my instincts tell me there’s something here we need to open up.’

‘It’s my life,’ I say, pointlessly. ‘It’s up to me what I say about it.’

‘Of course,’ she says. ‘Of course, in the end it’s your choice. But you do have a sick child, Catriona. We mustn’t let ourselves lose sight of why we’re here.’ And, when I don’t respond, ‘Richard, perhaps you could help Catriona out here, just fill me in a little on what happened.’

‘Catriona’s mother couldn’t care for her,’ he says.

Jane nods almost imperceptibly. ‘Yes,’ she says, quietly, encouragingly.

‘Catriona was put in a children’s home when she was thirteen. I mean, surely we should talk about that, darling?’ he says to me.

I look at him. He’s smiling slightly, a smile that’s an echo of hers, and his hair is flattened against his head by the rain. For a strange dizzying moment, he’s someone I don’t know.