The Perfect Mother (27 page)

‘There’s been a unit on the site for quite some years,’ she says. ‘It’s named after a psychiatrist who was superintendent there for a while. She lectured on our course when I was a student—a rather wonderful woman. She died suddenly in her forties.’ Her face is briefly poignant. ‘A stroke, so terribly sad—and they renamed the unit in her memory.’ She hands the leaflet to Richard. ‘Before the name was changed they called it Avalon Close,’ she says.

She’s showing Richard the easiest places to park, but her voice is thin, remote from me, as though she’s speaking from very far away.

In the car on the way to the station I can scarcely speak. But Richard seems perfectly at ease. He takes out his diary, starts flicking through.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I guess we should fix up a time to go and look at this place,’ he says.

‘Richard, I’m not going to let her go there.’

A motorbike pulls out sharply in front of me. I only just see it in time. I swerve violently.

‘For Chrissake,’ he says. ‘Calm down, or you’ll get us both killed.’

‘Daisy is
not
going there.’

He sighs. ‘I wish you’d stop acting like this is some major tragedy,’ he says.

‘Richard, she’s only eight.’

‘Oh, come on,’ he says. ‘Loads of kids go to boarding school at eight. I did.’

‘You hated it.’

He shrugs. ‘It was fine. It didn’t do me any harm.’

‘That’s not the line you usually take. Anyway, you weren’t ill.’

‘For God’s sake,’ he says. ‘This whole bloody place is geared up for children who are ill.’

‘No. Not ill like Daisy.’ The car is full of the thick cough-sweet smell of his aftershave: it makes it hard to
breathe. ‘Richard, there are girls with anorexia there—very disturbed girls, and they’ve probably got kids who cut themselves—a lot of those girls do. I used to know girls who did…Daisy can’t even manage
school.
’

‘I just don’t get it,’ he says. ‘You worry yourself sick about Daisy, and then when they offer you help you won’t take it. I mean, this has been dragging on for months, and you take her to see all these weird mates of Nicky’s and we don’t seem to be getting anywhere. Somebody’s got to find out what’s going on.’

‘Richard, she is not going there. I’m not going to let this happen.’

I pull up outside the station. He puts his diary away, clicks his briefcase shut with a sharp little sound like the breaking of a bone. But he doesn’t get out of the car.

He turns to me. ‘Well, what do you propose to do exactly?’ There’s a kind of controlled rage in his voice.

‘There is another way. We could get a lawyer. We could fight.’

He shakes his head slowly—as though I exhaust him, as though I am someone he is very weary of.

‘Please,’
he says. ‘Not all that again. What on earth is the point of wrecking our relationship with the very people who are trying to help us?’

He gets out of the car; he isn’t looking at me.

‘There’s a dinner after work tonight.’ He’s speaking to the dashboard. ‘A leaving do. I shouldn’t wait up—I could be really late.’

CHAPTER 33

I
sit beside Daisy and stroke her back. She’s white, retching. These evenings make me so desperate, because I cannot help her. The nausea exhausts her, but she can’t get to sleep. I read to her from the book of Celtic tales. I don’t hear a word I read.

At last her eyelids flicker extravagantly and close. I stay beside her for a while, waiting till she’s deeply asleep to put her pillows flat. All I can hear is her breathing, and the faintest sound from Sinead’s television, some frenetic soap she’s watching, and in the distance a siren, blaring then abruptly cut off. I sit there in the middle of the
silence, trying to trace out a path, to find a way through. I could ask for Daisy to see another doctor—but she’d need to be referred by Dr Carey. I could go to a solicitor on my own—but I have no money that is mine. If Richard is happy for Daisy to go to this place, and the doctors will use the law if I try to prevent it, do I have any power to stop it happening? I wish I knew about these things. I’m like a child, so ignorant of the world. And I spell out what they have on me—the lost letter, the lies I have told, my secret history, my wish to be alone in the house with my child: everything on my charge sheet. Despair washes through me. Every turn I take, it seems the way is closed to me.

Daisy is sleeping deeply now. I ease her onto her pillows; she scarcely stirs. I stand and my shadow looms across her and halfway to the ceiling, huge, stretched out, the shadow of my hair like a fall of black water against the blue of the wall. And I think, for a moment, my darkness falling across her: but what if they are right—these people who suspect me? What if, as Jane Watson seemed to be saying, I am the environment from which Daisy needs to be removed? I’ve striven to be the perfect mother, wanting to create a perfect childhood for my child, a safe, encircled place of tenderness and picnics, a childhood that would be so different from mine. Yet something has gone wrong. Maybe I am not like other people. Maybe, as Richard says, I try too hard, am too protective; or perhaps there is some knowledge other people have that is denied me—some mothering art that I don’t understand.
And all these experts look at me and see this—the profound unnamed thing that is missing in me. Or there is perhaps something subtly, secretly wrong with me—bad thoughts, bad blood, the passing on of some psychological taint. A blight, a contagion, handed down in the genes. And so I must surrender to them and let her go to this place, which to me is the worst thing. For I was shut away, and now it is going to happen to my child.

I have the dream again—the one where I am back at The Poplars, waiting on the broken sofa, smelling the disinfectant and the stale vegetable smell. I wake, or surface a little, at least, into some state between sleep and waking, still with the feeling that I had in the dream, a feeling of being trapped by some great soft heavy weight that presses into me, so I can’t move, can’t even call or cry. Instinctively, I reach out to Richard, but the bed beside me is empty. I hear St Agatha’s striking one o’clock. I turn on the bedside lamp to try and dispel the feeling, and the light falls on the red of the walls, the stiff heavy folds of the curtains, the solitary dancer—but all these things are less real to me than the dream.

I close my eyes and sink back into sleep, and I am again in the room I shared with Aimee. Now, it’s night in the dream. The edge of the washed-out candlewick bedspread has ridden up over the sheet, it’s crisp against my face, smelling of detergent, and the light from the street lamp filters through the curtains with their patterning of leaves, and falls across my bed and Aimee’s bed and the
restless heap of her body under the bedclothes. She’s wide awake; light glints in her open eyes. As I watch, she throws her covers back. She stands, rips off her nightshirt; the orange glow falls across her rangy urgent body and her pale arms with their intricate tattoos. There’s so little flesh on her, I can see the bones through the skin. There’s darkness under her shoulder blades and in the hollows in the small of her back; leaf shadows dapple the white planes of her body. She pulls on her knickers, her sweatshirt, the jeans that have a razor sewn into the hem; she pushes her feet in her trainers, runs her hands through her flame-red hair, in a vain attempt to sort it. From under the bed she pulls out the school bag she never uses because she doesn’t go to school. She flings a few things in: a couple of T-shirts, the Tommy Hilfiger rip-off that she nicked from the Northcote Road market—I was with her, I had to keep the stall-holder talking while she did it—and some greying underwear, KitKats she’s nicked from Woolworths and stashed behind her chest of drawers, a bit of change, cigarettes, a lighter some man gave her, a crumpled dog-eared photo of her mother. She knows I am awake: she turns to me. I see her milk skin, her acute features, the way her flaming hair falls over her face. It’s as if she wants to tell me something, but the dream is soundless, I don’t know what she says. She’s happy, I think, full of hope: her eyes are laughing, eager. She sits down on the bed and ties the laces of her trainers. She’s sharp, alert, relentless: ready to run.

CHAPTER 34

I
t’s a clear bright morning, light splashing around as I push back the bedroom curtains, and the sky is blue and vast and full of promise. I go downstairs; I am all purpose.

Richard is standing in front of the mirror, smoothing his tie.

‘You must have been very late last night,’ I say to his reflection, keeping my voice quite level, behaving absolutely normally, as though this is a perfectly ordinary day. ‘I didn’t even hear you get into bed.’

His face, the wrong way round, looks subtly different.

‘It was a leaving do,’ he says. ‘I told you.’

He’s defensive, as though I have accused him of something; but really I’m not thinking about him, I just don’t want him here.

‘I went to bed early,’ I tell him. ‘It wasn’t a problem.’

He seems relieved, as though he expected a scene.

‘We went to a restaurant,’ he says. ‘Lebanese.’

‘Was it good?’

‘Very good,’ he says. ‘It’s one of Francine’s discoveries. She’s really into ethnic food.’

‘Right,’ I say. I wonder briefly if she wore her backless dress. ‘I’m glad it was a good evening,’ I tell him.

It’s how we are together now—formal, polite, restrained.

He picks up his bag, opens the door. Noise from the road surges in; there’s a dustbin lorry outside, holding up the traffic.

‘OK, then,’ he says. He doesn’t kiss me.

I take Daisy some toast. She scarcely looks at me; she’s lying on her pillows, watching a weather forecast. I kiss the top of her head, breathe in her smell of mangoes and warm skin.

‘I thought we’d give school a miss today,’ I tell her.

‘I couldn’t manage it anyway, Mum,’ she says. ‘I can’t do my work when I feel sick.’

I go back to the kitchen to make coffee. Sinead is in front of the mirror, doing something complex with her hair, involving several scrunchies. She has her weekend case with her: it’s half-term tomorrow, and Sara will pick her up from school.

‘Cat,’ she says, her head on one side, wheedling.

‘Yes?’

‘Is Daisy going to school?’

‘No.’

‘Well, you wouldn’t take me in, would you?’ She puts in the final scrunchie and looks at herself appraisingly in the mirror. ‘I’m so-o-o late, and we’ve got a maths test.
And
I’ve got my bags.’

‘I can’t, Sinead, I’m sorry. Not today.’

‘Oh,’ she says. She’s surprised—I usually do what she asks. She waits a moment, hoping I’ll change my mind, then shrugs, puts on her jacket. ‘OK. Is everything all right?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘Your voice sounds kind of weird.’ She hauls her bags up, one over each shoulder. ‘Bye, then.’

I reach out and wrap my arms around her; it’s awkward, because of the bags. She hugs me back briefly, colouring a little.

‘I hope today goes really really well,’ I tell her.

‘Cat, don’t overdo it,’ she says. ‘It’s only an algebra test. I’m not, like, having major surgery.’

She slips away from me.

Once the door closes behind her, I go straight to her room, feeling strangely weightless, as if gravity doesn’t pull on me. I rifle around on her desk, through all the rainbow clutter—pages about popstars, a scrumpled Julius Caesar essay, Korean notepaper, astrological supplements. The Weimar Republic project is hidden inside a copy of
Heat
; the postcard showing the Schiller monument has
been stuck to the cover with Prittstick. I ease up one corner of the postcard. I can see all the digits of the number except one. I try to lift it off the page, but it’s comprehensively stuck, I have to tear it. A bit of paper is still stuck down, obscuring the number; it flakes off when I scratch at it.

I use the phone in the living room, shutting the door so Daisy won’t be able to hear. I put the postcard down on the phone table, where there’s a vase of paeonies. I sit there for a moment, tracing a path with my finger through the fallen paeony petals. I feel quite cool as I dial, but I see that my hand is shaking. It seems to ring for ages. I hear the thud of my heart and the sound of the phone at the other end of the line.

She gives the number in German, but I know her voice the way I know my own.

‘It’s me.’ It’s hard to form the words: my mouth is stiff and dry. ‘It’s Catriona. I’m ringing from London.’

There’s a pause.

‘Who is this?’ she says.

‘Catriona.’

‘Catriona?’ Her voice is tight with suspicion.

‘It’s
me
,’ I say again. ‘I want to come and see you like you said.’

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Oh.
Trina.
Oh, I’m sorry, darling—it’s just that I wasn’t expecting this. Darling, that’s wonderful.’ The words tumbling out now. ‘You don’t sound like you used to—well, of course you wouldn’t, how silly of me, you’ll be much bigger now. I don’t know what to say. It’s just so sudden. And when were you thinking of?’

‘I want to come today.’

Another little silence, like an intake of breath.

‘Today?’

I sense her hesitation and feel a quick flicker of anger: that she’s pleaded with me to visit her, and now I’ve said I’m coming, and suddenly it’s all too much and yet again she’s pushing me away.

‘Yes. Today. It has to be today.’

Another pause.

‘That will be wonderful, darling,’ she says then. ‘Wonderful.’

‘It’ll probably be late afternoon. I don’t know when exactly. I’ve got to book the flight. You’ll just have to expect us when you see us.’

‘
Us
, darling?’

‘I’m bringing my little girl. Daisy.’

‘Daisy,’ she repeats. ‘How wonderful to see her. Tell me, how old is Daisy?’

‘She’s eight.’

‘How lovely. Eight. It’s such a lovely age. And you’ll be staying over?’

‘If we may.’

‘Karl’s away,’ she says. ‘A business trip. So that’s really very convenient. Sometimes you feel that things are just meant to happen.’ As though her moment of reluctance had never been. ‘The only thing is, darling, there are just two bedrooms…’