The Perfect Mother (31 page)

‘Yes, that happens.’ I feel excitement prickle along my skin. I put the tea towel down. ‘Tell me about it. Anything you can remember.’

‘There’s not that much to say, really. There was this diet he tried…’

‘Tell me.’

‘I can’t remember exactly, darling. He got it out of a book. I had to use this funny flour—he couldn’t have wheat, you see. It was quite a pain to be honest. I bet she didn’t do it, the little tramp he went off with,’ she adds with satisfaction. ‘I shouldn’t think she bothered for a moment…’

I feel a surge of rage with her, with the way she’s always sidetracked by her own concerns. ‘Please try and remember. Please.’

‘I’m trying, darling. Now don’t go getting all cross with me,’ she says. ‘I’m doing my best. It’s all so long ago now.’

The sound of the intercom buzzer makes me start. I swear under my breath, can’t bear this interruption.

‘Leave that. Please,’ I tell her.

‘But of course I can’t just leave it, darling.’ She peels off her rubber gloves. ‘I don’t know who it is…’ She goes to lift the receiver.

She speaks in halting German, turning to face me as she talks. Her eyes are wide, alarmed, fixed on my face as though she’s signalling something.

‘Yes,’ she says then, switching to English. ‘They are. Well, you’d better come up. We’re on the fifth floor. There’s a light switch by the door—it’s on a timer.’

She puts down the receiver, comes to me. The little lines deepen between her eyes.

‘Trina.’ She’s speaking in an urgent whisper. ‘It’s the police.’

‘Oh, my God.’

‘They wanted to know if you and Daisy were here.’

‘No. No.’

‘They want to see you and Daisy.’

‘No. And you let them in.’

She flinches from my anger.

‘Well, what could I do? They were going to come up anyway. Trina, are you in some kind of trouble, darling?’

‘Yes.’

My mother is frightened. Her hands move in front of her face, fluttering like birds.

My heart is pounding in my chest. I shout for Daisy.

‘Get your jacket on. We’ve got to go.’

She appears at the bedroom door.

‘We can’t go, Mum. We’ve only just got here…’

‘Just do it.’

A shadow darts across her face. I’m rarely cross with her. She goes rapidly back to the bedroom.

I turn to my mother. ‘There’s a fire escape, isn’t there?’ My mind is racing. I will grab Daisy and go, find a way out of the back of the flats. We will run, hide. ‘I’m sure I saw a fire escape. Where’s the door? Show me.’

‘It’s on the landing,’ says my mother. ‘But, Trina, you can’t go that way…’

I rush out onto the landing. A blind fierce panic seizes me: I will take my child and flee. The fire escape is behind some stacked boxes. I slip behind the boxes, push at the door. It’s locked; I can’t move it.

My mother follows me, helpless. ‘Trina, they’re coming now…’

A desperate rage fills me. I beat my fists on the door.

‘Trina, they’ll hear you…’

My hands hurt, and the wild mood leaves me. I hear their feet on the stairs. I follow my mother back into her flat. Despair overwhelms me. I see with a sudden terrible clarity just what I have done in running away with Daisy, in coming here: that I have confirmed their worst suspicions about me.

Daisy has her jacket on. She looks at me warily, nervous of my mood.

‘Daisy.’ I kneel down, wrap my arms around her. ‘There are people coming. They’re from the police. They want to speak to us.’

‘Mum, why are you squeezing me like that? I can’t breathe.’

‘I think it’s to do with that hospital—the one I told you about.’

‘Oh,’ she says. Her face is clouded, all this is unreal to her.

If they arrest me, I don’t want her to see.

‘Sweetheart, why don’t you go and brush your hair. See if you can find the butterfly hairclip—it’s in the bag somewhere…’

She goes to my mother’s bedroom.

‘Listen,’ I tell my mother. ‘I want to change my mind. About the money.’

At first, she doesn’t know what I mean. She stares at me.

They are here. There are heavy footsteps, voices, on the landing, then someone bangs on the door. My mother turns; I grab her arm.

‘No, please don’t. Not yet. Leave them.’

‘Trina, what can I do? I don’t want my door kicked in.’

‘The money,’ I say again. ‘The money you wanted to give me. I’m going to need it now.’

‘Oh. Why didn’t you say so?’ She’s looking anxiously at the door, but she gets her cheque book from the dresser. ‘Just a moment,’ she shouts towards the door. She writes a cheque, hands it to me. I stare, I’m amazed by how much it is.

‘Thank you.’

‘I was going to leave it to you,’ she says. ‘If, you know, anything happened…Trina, look, I’m going to open that door.’

There are two of them, a man and a woman, in brown and khaki uniforms. They walk straight in. They seem too big, too urgent, for the room. The man immediately places himself in front of the window, as though he thinks I might fling myself through. They ask in exact, evenly accented English for Daisy and Catriona Lydgate.

‘I’m Catriona Lydgate,’ I tell them.

It’s hard to breathe, as though the room is filling up with water.

‘We need to see Daisy Lydgate,’ says the woman. ‘Daisy is here?’

‘Of course she’s here. She’s my daughter.’

‘We need to see her, please. We have to send Daisy back to England. She has been made a ward of court. We have copies of the documents if you wish to see them. I need to see her now.’

I call her. She comes from the bedroom. I put my arm around her, afraid they will immediately take her from me.

‘You are Daisy Lydgate?’ she says.

Daisy nods. She looks much younger suddenly.

‘Your police in England have asked me to find you,’ she says. ‘They want you to be in a special hospital in England.’

Daisy nods but doesn’t speak. I feel how she presses into me.

They say they will take her to the airport and put her on the flight and that a social worker will meet her at Heathrow.

‘I’m going with her,’ I tell them.

They say they can take me to the airport along with Daisy, but first I should check if I can transfer my ticket. I am obsequiously grateful, though I know it’s just that they want me out of the country.

My mother’s telephone is in her bedroom. I ring the airport; it’s arranged. And then I find Fergal’s number, in my wallet. I can’t work out what time it will be in England, whether he’ll be picking Jamie up from school. It’s his answering machine. I leave a message, tell him what has happened, and that we are coming back to England, and that I will need a solicitor.

I start to pack. They tell me to hurry. There’s a crazy part of me that yearns to shout at them, to scream out that I am not a child abductor, that I am simply a mother trying to do her best for her child, that all this is so cruelly unjust. But I don’t say these things, I just get on with the packing, sorting everything, putting Daisy’s things in her hand luggage, so we won’t have to reorganise it all at Heathrow.
The man and the woman sit at my mother’s table. She offers them coffee but they refuse it. My mother is anxious, placating, her hands fluttering. She tries to make small talk, tries to tell them about Daisy, how happy she has been to see her grandchild at last. Do they have children? If they do they will surely understand…Mostly they ignore her.

I put our bags together in the hallway. The policeman pushes at the door.

My mother comes towards us.

‘I need to say goodbye to my daughter,’ she tells the policeman.

To my surprise, he shrugs.

She turns to me. We stand there for a moment. Awkward, not knowing whether to put our arms around each other.

‘We never got to the Tiergarten, then,’ says my mother.

‘No, I’m sorry,’ I say.

‘Daisy would have loved it,’ she says. ‘A muffin and a rowing boat on the lake. We’ll do it next time?’

‘Yes. Of course we will.’

‘And we’ll go to the KaDeWe, where your teddy bear came from, Daisy. Everyone has to go to the KaDeWe. The toys are wonderful there: it’s got a worldwide reputation.’ Pride briefly fattens her voice. ‘They had an animated display, when I went to buy your teddy bear. A cat that played the violin and a monkey on the drums. And we’ll have some cake in the wintergarden and look out over the city.’

‘That sounds lovely,’ I say.

‘We’ll do it when you come again. We’ll do it next time.’

‘Yes,’ I tell her. ‘Next time.’

‘There’s so much to see here,’ she says. ‘You wouldn’t believe how much.’ She spreads it out before us like a magic carpet, this fantasy city. Her face seems briefly younger, more alive. ‘This woman I know said she took her little boy to the Märkisches Museum, and in the garden at the back they found a family of bears. Just imagine that, Daisy. A family of bears.’

Daisy’s eyes gleam.

‘Real brown bears?’ she says.

‘Real bears,’ says my mother. ‘A family of bears. We’ll go there when you come again. We’ll go and see the bears.’

‘Can we, Mum? Say we can.’

‘Yes, of course,’ I tell her.

There’s a little silence. The policeman clears his throat.

‘Well, then,’ says my mother. She’s run out of things to say, to keep us there. The tentative light goes out in her. It’s as though she shrinks, withdraws into herself.

‘I’m sorry that we had to leave like this,’ I tell her.

She shrugs a little. ‘Story of my life,’ she says. ‘I never was very lucky.’

She moves her hands apart, palms outwards, as though to show how empty they are.

‘Don’t think too badly of me, darling,’ she says.

Daisy holds up her face and my mother kisses her cheek. I see again how the warmth that she can’t quite manage with me comes easily with Daisy.

‘Now, see you get yourself well, Daisy,’ she says. ‘Do that for me, won’t you?’

Daisy says she will.

My mother straightens up. ‘Well, no point in hanging about,’ she says.

I put my hands on her shoulders. She pats my arms. We hold each other briefly. I smell her scent of Marlboros and lily of the valley.

‘All right then,’ she says.

The policeman opens the door. I pick up our bags and my mother follows us out onto the landing and presses the timer switch.

‘You’d better be quick,’ she says. ‘You’ll find the light won’t last.’

On the plane, they give us seats together. Daisy seems exhausted: she slumps sideways into me, so I feel her warm weight against me. Soon after take-off she falls asleep. There are thunderstorms over Hanover and a lot of turbulence. The pilot warns us about this, says he’s flying ten thousand feet lower to try and avoid the turbulence, but the plane still shudders and lurches and some of the passengers catch each other’s eyes and raise an eyebrow and smile with a determined, bright bravado. But Daisy sleeps through everything, in the crook of my arm.

CHAPTER 39

S
he’s waiting at passport control; I see her straight away. She must have seen a photograph—she’s coming straight to us; she knows who we are. She’s in her fifties, rather severe, with neat grey academic hair. She shakes hands, introduces herself. She says that she is from the Child Protection Unit, she has a copy of the order in her hand.

‘So this must be Daisy?’

I nod.

She bends and says hello to Daisy.

Now it’s really happening, I feel a kind of heavy hopelessness,
everything weighing down on me, so I can scarcely move.

I kiss Daisy, bury my face in her hair.

‘It won’t be for long,’ I tell her.

The woman takes her hand. Daisy’s face is stiff, set. I see the struggle in her—how near to tears she is, and how afraid of crying in this public place.

‘She’ll be well looked-after,’ says the woman brightly.

‘When can I ring?’

‘I should leave it till nine,’ she says. ‘Give her a little while to settle in.’

Daisy’s eyes move from me to the woman and back again, widening. Suddenly, it’s real to her. Her face crumples. She starts to sob, noisily. She snatches her hand away from the woman; she clings to me, she wraps herself around me. I can feel her whole body trembling.

‘It’s best if we just get on with this,’ says the woman. She takes Daisy’s hand again and pulls her away.

I watch as they go. Daisy’s shoulders are shaking. I’m worried because the woman is letting Daisy carry the bag and it’s too heavy for her. Perhaps I should go after them and tell her. I wait till they get to the corner, to see if Daisy will turn, but the woman is pulling at her and they don’t stop walking. I stand there, staring after her. Long after they’ve gone from sight, the sound of her crying tears at me.

I take a taxi home. The driver is friendly, but I can’t talk. The journey takes an age. The things I see seem remote,
unreal, the streets, the lines of traffic, as though there’s a wall of glass between me and the rest of the world.

We drive along the road by the park, and I start to think about Richard. I see us in the drawing room, Richard leaning against the mantelpiece, looking at me with that uncomprehending look, me trying to explain. Picturing him, I rummage around in my mind for my love for him, but somehow I can’t find it. I work out what to say. I will tell him that I’m sorry if I frightened him. That maybe I acted in haste, but I felt I didn’t have a choice. That I felt cornered, helpless. But that now I am quite determined to fight this diagnosis all the way, and I have found a solicitor, and, if he is still opposed, I shall instruct her myself, with my mother’s money…

But when I get home, his car isn’t there. It must have been raining: the tracks in the gravel where his car is normally parked are filled with water. There are no lights on in the house.

I pay the taxi driver and go to unlock the door. I half expect a smell of whisky to hit me, to find Richard sitting in darkness at the kitchen table, drunk and full of talk—half hope for this, because it might make it easier.

‘Richard!’

There’s no reply. I am so geared up for this confrontation, its absence unnerves me.

The little red light on the answering machine is flashing in the hall. I press Play. Nicky’s voice. ‘Hi, Cat. Just checking everything’s OK. Ring me! Lots of love.’