The Perfect Mother (30 page)

This amazes me.

‘You used to sound so angry with him.’

‘Well, I was, of course.’

‘Why wouldn’t you ever talk about him properly? I used to long for you to talk about him.’

‘Did you, darling?’

Outside, the sky is deepening, and there are white fairy lights at the cafés, caught like luminous little fish in the shadowy nets of the trees. The music floats in through the open window. The song has changed; it’s older, wilder, in some unknown language, with many high notes so the singer’s voice sounds like the voice of a woman: a lament, a song of infinite yearning, Slavic, perhaps, or Yiddish, I don’t know how to tell.

‘He was out of my league, if I’m honest,’ she says, after a while. ‘He had such nice manners. Classy.’ She inhales deeply. ‘Though I have to say he could have chosen better when he left. A right little tramp, she was,’ she says, with satisfaction. ‘And definitely on the podgy side. Well, she was there, I suppose, conveniently to hand, so to speak.’

‘What did he look like, my father?’

‘I used to have a photograph,’ she says. ‘I kept it all these years but when I moved in with Karl I threw it away. Didn’t I ever show you?’

I shake my head. I have a sensation of loss so bitter it’s like a taste on my tongue.

‘Tell me,’ I say.

She shrugs a little. ‘Tall, good-looking, everything you’d want. Strong-looking, though appearances can be deceptive. His health really wasn’t all that good when I met him. Trouble with this and that…But a big bull of a man—you wouldn’t know it to look at him.’

I start to ask what kind of trouble, but she doesn’t seem to hear, she’s wandering off along some track of her own.

‘You look back, and you think how it might have been
different,’ she says. ‘Well, you can’t help thinking these things. That if this man or that man had stayed with you, it might all have worked out…I expect you think I’m hopeless, don’t you, Trina? That I’ve got dreadful taste in men—that my life’s been a bit of a failure…’

I don’t say anything.

‘That’s what you think, though, isn’t it? I know what you’re thinking, Trina. You might as well come out with it.’

And then all the hidden anger flares in me.

‘Why did you do it?’ My voice is harsh, loud. ‘Why did you send me to that place?’

‘I wasn’t doing you any good,’ she says. ‘I knew I wasn’t coping. It was all beyond me…’

‘But we could have managed. We could have got by…Nothing could have been worse than that place. Nothing.’

It’s as if she’s flinching, pulling back into herself, as though she’s scared I’ll hit her; but she doesn’t turn away.

‘I thought I couldn’t look after you,’ she says. ‘I thought you’d have a better life. I knew I wasn’t getting it together…Trina, it was hard for me too. It was a hard life.’

The anger surges through me, threatens to sweep me away.

‘You should never have let it happen. It was wrong, what you did.’

‘But that Brian Meredith. He was nice enough, wasn’t he? He was very well turned-out.’

‘He was abusive. He was a cruel man.’

‘He was always very nice to me,’ she says. A bit hurt, as though it’s mean of me to question her opinion.

‘He hit us round the head. He knew how to hit you so there wouldn’t be a mark on you. If you did something wrong—just the stupidest little thing—you got shut in this room for weeks, you thought you’d lose your mind.’

‘Those are terrible things to say, Catriona,’ she says. As though it’s the saying that’s terrible, not the fact that these things happened.

‘That’s how it was. That’s where you sent me.’

‘I didn’t know,’ she says. ‘How was I to know? Why didn’t you tell me?’

This enrages me. ‘You never know anything. “It wasn’t me. I wasn’t there. I didn’t know.” That’s your cop-out. So nothing is ever your fault.’ Suddenly I can’t sit still: I get up, pace the floor. ‘You never loved me.’ My voice is shrill, the voice of a child. It echoes in the big room. ‘Not like a mother should.’

I want her to deny this, to still the echoes: Of course I love you, of course I do. She doesn’t say anything.

She’s looking away from me, staring down into the street.

‘Perhaps there was something missing in me,’ she says then. Slowly, feeling her way towards the words. ‘I never quite felt that thing you were supposed to feel—you know, when I had you. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I was fond of you, of course; and I was proud of you because you were so cute, and people would say, “What a pretty little thing,” “What a pretty baby…” But those feelings you’re meant to get, when your baby’s put in your arms…’ She shakes her head. ‘Maybe there’s something wrong with me,’ she
says. ‘If you could do it again, you might want to do it differently…’

‘You stopped visiting,’ I say. ‘You couldn’t even be bothered to visit me.’

‘I knew you were angry with me,’ she says. ‘I guess I gave up really. I thought you wouldn’t want to see me. Well, you didn’t, did you? Be honest, Trina. Not the way I was then…And by the time I got myself together, it was all too late.’ Her voice thickens; the coughing starts again. ‘Story of my life,’ she says, through the cough. ‘I’ve never been lucky.’

The cough is her enemy: it has her in its grip now. She shakes with it; I can tell it hurts her. This frightens me—I fear that it will choke her. I get her some water, my anger all spent suddenly. I sit beside her.

Eventually it stops. She wipes her mouth and looks across at me.

‘I’m ill,’ she says.

‘Yes.’

‘Cancer. Too many fags.’ She sounds quite matter-of-fact, but her face is troubled, darkened. ‘Nobody knows…’

‘Not even Karl?’

She shakes her head. ‘I didn’t want to worry him. He’s got a lot on his mind. I said I had a little problem with my lungs.’

I think how she and I tell lies routinely, how we believe that we are kept safe by these lies.

‘You ought to tell him. You can’t go through this on your own.’

She shrugs.

‘But, darling, you know, he’s younger than me. He wouldn’t want to be hitched to a sick old woman. People don’t always stick by you when you’re ill…I can tell you because you’re family.’ She taps her cigarette on the edge of the ashtray. A little ash drifts down. ‘Things are as they are,’ she says. ‘There’s nothing you can do.’

We’re very still, we just drink for a while, sitting there by the window. The rich smells of the summer city—pollen, exhaust, decay—drift round us like a profound nostalgia. I look down into the street. At the Café Esposito the tables are all full now. A girl is laughing, flinging back her hair, and lovers kiss under the lime trees, but the singer with the tambourine has gone.

‘I don’t pull down the blinds,’ she says. ‘Not since they told me—you know, about the illness. I never pull down the blinds. I like to see out of the window—to see as far as I can.’

There’s a look of such loss in her face.

I get up and go and put my arms around her shoulders. She feels frail, sparrow-boned, like a child or someone very old. And I know, as I touch her, her absolute weakness and helplessness: that something in her has died already; that she has given up. This knowledge shocks me. That all this time, for all these years, I have felt her to have such a hold over me, to have such power to shape and devastate me—and here she is in my arms, this tiny shrunken woman.

She rests her head against me for a moment.

‘Well,’ she says.

She raises her hand and puts it over mine. Awkwardly, as though it’s a gesture she doesn’t quite know how to do.

On the sofa, Daisy stirs. The beading hanging from the lamp casts broken patterns across her, lines of shadow stitching. We watch as she turns over, flings one arm out on top of the eiderdown.

‘Daisy,’ says my mother. ‘It’s such a pretty name…I’ve always liked flower names. I wanted to give you a flower name, you know—I was going to call you Lily. But Christopher didn’t like it—he wanted to call you Catherine. That’s how we came up with Catriona. I wasn’t having Catherine. I thought it was rather plain.’ She pats my hand. ‘Not nearly special enough—not for my baby.’

CHAPTER 38

I
wake to the hollow chiming of a distant church clock and the high sweet sound of swifts and the awareness, unnerving at first, in the confusion of half-wakefulness, that I am far from home. I put on my dressing gown and go quietly into the living room. My mother is there already, in a thin robe with a tatty boa collar. She puts her finger to her lips: Daisy is still asleep, the duvet rising gently with her even breath. We go to the kitchen and make coffee, not saying much. I feel awkward with my mother again, easily irritated, last night’s intimacies blotted away by the white illusionless morning light. I
drink my coffee quickly and dress and go out to find a cashpoint, relieved to leave the flat for a while.

The street seems half asleep still. In front of the Café Esposito, the furniture is all stacked up, and the waiter is tipping water from a bucket and brushing it over the pavement, so the flags shine in the bleached light. A smell of disinfectant catches at my throat. I glance down a side street, where there’s a patch of waste ground, and beyond it the blank windowless end wall of a block of tenements. The wall is all blue-painted and right in the middle someone has written Ende, high up, in immaculate white brush-strokes. A little movement of air shivers the leaves of the lime trees.

On the corner there’s a snack bar called Japan-Imbiss, which has a narrow window crammed with advertisements for Lucky Lights, and next to it a bank with a cashpoint. The bank is shut still. I go to the cashpoint, put in my Visa card, select my language, tap in my PIN number, trying to work out how much money I need. But the wrong display comes up: it doesn’t seem to recognise my card. Maybe I can’t use my card abroad after all, yet I’m sure this is possible; I know I’ve used it in Italy. There’s someone behind me; I hear the rustle of the plastic bag they’re holding, and how they move from foot to foot. The presence of this unseen waiting person makes me nervous, yet if I turned and tried to explain they wouldn’t understand me. I wonder how many goes you get before the machine eats your card. I take the card out of the slot and start all over again. The same display comes up. I take
the card and put it in my bag. Suddenly, London is real to me again: our drawing room, the vase of paeonies on the table by the telephone…and the postcard—where did I leave the postcard? I see it in my mind—the picture of the monument, the woman in white marble—and on the back my mother’s address and phone number. I see myself about to dial, putting it down by the phone where I could see the number. Then after the call, rushing around to pack, calling the taxi, speaking to Daisy, feverish, a little high—it’s all a blur now. I can’t remember where I put the postcard.

I turn, walk past the woman who’s waiting there with a plastic bag of vegetables, whose rustling made me nervous. I tell myself, Everything’s fine, it’s just a problem with the credit card. Later, when the bank is open, I will get everything sorted. The cashier will smile, will explain to me in careful precise English exactly what has happened. It’s just some kind of mistake. I tell myself this over and over. Nothing has happened, it’s just a computer error. Everything will be fine. But when I get back to the flats where my mother lives and push against the door handle, I find my hands are slippery with sweat.

Daisy spends the morning on the sofa, watching television. She feels sick, she says. She is tired, her eyes stained with shadow. I help my mother tidy the kitchen, though there’s scarcely enough to do to occupy two people. Daisy’s illness frustrates my mother.

‘I thought we could go out,’ she says. ‘I thought we could go to the Tiergarten. We could have a chocolate
muffin at the Café am Neuen See.’ Her German is careful, ponderous. ‘We could take a boat on the lake. A little rowing boat. Daisy would like that…’

She’s somehow unable to cope with this change in her plans. She tries to talk to me about England, about my life and all the things I have done, but there’s a fog in my mind and I can’t talk easily. In the end we sit and drink more coffee and watch the television with Daisy. It’s a dubbed comedy, set in some English country house, which bizarrely stars Ricki Lake who mostly appears in full hunting rig.

Lunch, which we eat early, is much like yesterday’s supper; bread and sausage, and the now fully thawed sachertorte. Daisy eats some bread. After lunch she says she wants to get up.

My mother and I take the plates to the kitchen and my mother stacks them in the bowl. Through the narrow window beside the sink you can see down into the courtyard, the worn grey wall, the hydrangeas. It all looks shabby, neglected, in the harsh noon light. The hydrangeas are nearly over, some of the flowerets brown and crumpled like paper. It’s the empty time, when everything feels flat and meaningless: the sun has gone in, the vitality has all seeped out of the day. A wave of despair washes through me. I wonder what on earth I thought I’d find, in coming here.

I hear Daisy go to the bathroom. She’s left the door half open. She must be trying to clean her teeth—I hear her start to retch.

My mother turns to me, eyes widening.

‘That’s Daisy?’

‘Yes.’

‘Poor little scrap.’ She shakes her head. She puts on hand cream and then her rubber gloves, and runs water into the washing-up bowl. I find a tea towel in the drawer of the dresser. ‘That takes me back. Christopher used to do that,’ she says. ‘That weird dry retching.’

‘Like Daisy?’

She nods. ‘Christopher had a lot of health problems, you see, darling. Like I said, you wouldn’t have thought it to look at him. But he used to get so ill sometimes and nobody knew what it was. The doctor didn’t know what to make of it—well, he said it was probably stress.’

‘My father.’

‘Yes. Of course, darling. Your father.’

‘You never told me.’

‘Didn’t I? Well, I guess it never seemed important.’ But she turns to me then. Her eyes are wide, as though something has surprised her. ‘But it might be, mightn’t it? D’you think it might be important?’

‘Yes.’

‘Maybe it’s in the blood. That happens with illnesses, doesn’t it? Things get passed on, down the generations.’