The Perfect Mother

‘Of course.’

As we pass the bus stop she drops it in a bin.

CHAPTER 8

Daisy can’t sleep; she says she feels too sick. I sit her up, and prop her against the pillows and smooth her hair. ‘We’ll crack this,’ I tell her. ‘We’ll get you better. I promise. Soon it’ll be over.’

I read to her from the fairy-tale book, the story of Rapunzel, who was trapped in a tower by the witch, her mother, and let down her hair to a prince. Sometimes Daisy spits in a tissue.

Sinead comes to the door. She needs me to test her on her homework.

‘It’s false friends. For crying out loud. How can any word of French be your friend?’

‘I’ll come when Daisy’s asleep,’ I tell her.

I read till Daisy’s head is drooping, as you might with a very young child. Her eyelids are shut, but flickery, tense; she could so easily wake. Sinead looks round the door again. I put a warning finger to my lips. She mouths melodramatically, ‘My vocab, my vocab.’ I whisper she’ll have to wait. Eventually Daisy’s breathing slows and she sinks down into the pillows. I slip off my shoes and creep out like a thief. I sit with Sinead and test her on the words. She isn’t very confident, but it’s nearly ten, she’ll never learn them now. I tell her to go to bed.

Richard has his meeting and he won’t be back till late. I pour myself some wine, and try to imagine him there. When I think of it, this world of his that’s so mysterious to me, I always see men in suits all sitting round a shiny mahogany table, and heaps of papers in front of them covered in cryptic figures, and the coffee brought in by Francine, his glamorous PA. I met Francine once at a party at Richard’s office; she was wearing a rather impressive dress, demure in front, right up to her neck, but almost completely backless.

I take my wine into the living room. It’s cold in here tonight: the heating’s been off for most of the day, and the house won’t seem to warm up. I pull the curtains, shutting out the night, but chill air seeps up through the gaps in the floorboards.

I don’t turn on the main light, just the lamps on the little tables on either side of the fireplace. There is darkness in the corners of the room. The masks we brought back from Venice are lit from below, so the lines of the pottery are etched in shadow. I chose them because they charmed me, with their hints of a seductive world of carnival and disguise. But when Daisy was little, and mothers and children were always coming for coffee, I had to take them down; children seem to be often afraid of heads apart from bodies—it’s probably something primal—and there were toddlers who’d burst into tears if they saw them. The black one is a little macabre, sinister in an obvious way—it’s the fairytale crone, Baba Yaga perhaps, the glossy surface recreating the sagging folds of old flesh—but tonight I see it’s the white one that is more frightening: it’s simpler, almost featureless, a face that is an absence.

I sip my wine and go back over the conversation with Dr Carey. I don’t understand why she wouldn’t take Daisy’s illness seriously. I must have done something wrong. Should I have cried? Should I have sounded more desperate? Maybe I was too assertive; or not assertive enough? Perhaps there’s a code I don’t know about, some goodmother way of behaving. I once heard a famous female barrister speaking on the radio. If she was defending a woman accused of murder, she said, she’d urge her to wear a cardigan to court, ideally angora and fluffy, so no one would think her capable of committing a terrible crime. Maybe there’s a dress code for taking your child to the doctor that’s unknown to me: a frock from Monsoon perhaps, with a pattern like a flowerbed, or a tracksuit and pink lipstick.

There’s a clatter from the hall—Richard closing the door behind him, putting his briefcase down. Relief washes through me: I’m always so glad when he’s home. He comes in, and I see he’s tired; he’s somehow less vivid than when he left in the morning, as though the dust of the day has settled on him and blurred him. He’s brought me flowers, blue delphiniums, wrapped in white paper, with a bow of rustling ribbon. He’s good at choosing things—orchids, silver bracelets; his gifts are always exact.

‘Thanks. They’re so lovely.’ They’re an icy pale blue, like a clear winter sky, the flowers frail, like tissue. I hold them to my face; they have the faintest smoky smell.

He kisses my cheek.

‘There’s pollen on you,’ he says. He rubs at my nose with a finger.

‘Was the meeting OK?’

He shrugs. ‘So so,’ he says.

I’m not sure this is true: he looks strained, older.

‘D’you want to eat?’

He shakes his head.

‘I’ll get you a drink,’ I tell him.

‘Thanks. Scotch would be good. Just tonight.’

I smile. ‘It was that bad?’

He shakes his head. ‘It was fine. Really.’

He has a still face; he’s always hard to read. I don’t pursue it, don’t know the right questions. There are parts of his life that are opaque to me.

I get him a large glass of Scotch, with ice, the way he likes it. He doesn’t sit, he’s restless—as though the uneasy energy that’s built up through the day won’t leave him. He leans against the mantelpiece, sipping his drink.

In the silence between us I hear Sinead upstairs, the clumping of her slippers and water from the shower running away. I’m worried she will wake Daisy. I’ve become alert again to all the noises of the house—like when you have a baby and skulk round like a conspirator, and every creak on every stair is marked on a map in your mind.

‘We went to the doctor,’ I tell him.

‘Good,’ he says. ‘How was it?’

‘We saw someone new. A woman. She was rather young, I thought.’

‘And was it OK?’

‘Sort of. Well, Daisy liked her.’

‘Excellent,’ he says. ‘There. I told you it would be all right.’

‘I’m not sure. I wasn’t happy really.’

‘What is it?’ he says, solicitous. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I told her that Daisy wasn’t eating and she said I needed nutritional advice. It felt so patronising. Like she couldn’t really hear what I was saying. I keep worrying I handled it all wrong—you know, said the wrong thing or something. D’you think sometimes I don’t express myself right—d’you think I’m not assertive enough, perhaps?’

I want him, need him, to say, Of course not, of course you didn’t handle it wrong—it’s nothing to do with you.

‘Darling, you do rather brood on things,’ he says.

He’s standing just outside the circle of light from the lamp. Half his face is in shadow and I can’t see what he’s thinking.

‘And then she launched into this thing about how it was all psychological,’ I tell him.

There’s a little pause.

‘Well, maybe there’s something in that,’ he says then.

For a moment I can’t speak. The smoky smell of the flowers he’s brought clogs up my throat.

‘But how can there be?’

‘Look, darling,’ he says, ‘you do worry a lot. Maybe that affects Daisy in some way.’

‘I’m worrying because she’s ill. How could that make her ill? I don’t understand. Is that so bad, to worry?’

‘Well, I guess it’s not ideal,’ he says. ‘But with your background, it’s maybe not so surprising.’

I hear a sound of splintering in my head. There’s a sense of shock between us. He shouldn’t have said this, we both know that. But instead of taking it back, he tries to explain.