The Perfect Mother

‘OK,’ he says. ‘You stay. It’s a damn shame, though, when they’ve paid for the tickets and everything. Especially when Mother hasn’t been well.’

I think of them: Adrian, his affable father; and Gina, his mother, who favours a country casual look, although they live in chic urbanity in Putney, who reads horticultural magazines and cultivates an esoteric window box, who reminisces at some length about her job as an orthodontist’s receptionist. There’s something about Gina I find difficult: I feel colourless, passive, beside her. It’s not anything she says; she’s always nice to me, says, ‘You and Richard are so good together.’ Sometimes I feel there’s a subtext that I’m so much more satisfactory than Sara, Richard’s highly assertive first wife. But it’s almost as though it’s hard to breathe around her, as if she uses up all the air.

‘Daisy can write them a letter when she’s well,’ I say.

‘It’s not the same,’ he says, frowning.

Richard’s intense involvement with his parents fascinates me. I know that’s how it must be for most people, to have your parents there and on your side, to worry about them and care what they think about you; yet to me this is another country.

Sinead comes down when I’m making breakfast, still in her dressing gown but fully made-up, with her iPod. She takes one earpiece out to talk to me.

‘Cat, I really need your opinion. D’you think I look like a transvestite?’

‘You look gorgeous.’ I put an arm around her.

It’s part of my role with her, to be a big sister, a confidante, to be soft when Richard is stern.

‘Are you sure my mascara looks all right?’ she says. ‘I’m worried my left eyelashes look curlier than my right ones.’

‘You’re a total babe. Look, I’ve made you some toast.’

‘How is she?’ she says then.

‘I don’t think she can come.’

She sits heavily down at the table, a frown like Richard’s stitched into her forehead.

‘Do I have to go, then?’ she says.

She’s cross. She’s too old to go to the pantomime without her little sister. Daisy was the heart of today’s outing, its reason and justification: without her it doesn’t make sense.

I put my arm round her. ‘Just do it, my love. To please Granny and Grandad.’

‘Snow fucking White,’ she says. ‘Jesus.’

I overlook this. ‘You never know, you might enjoy bits of it.’

‘Oh, yeah? You know what it’ll be like. There’ll be a man in drag whose boobs keep falling down and lots of EastEnders jokes, and at the end they’ll throw Milky Ways at us and we’re meant to be, like, grateful.’

She puts her earpiece back in without waiting for my response.

They leave at twelve, Sinead now fully dressed in jeans and leather jacket and the Converse trainers she had for Christmas, resigned. I go to Daisy’s room. She’s sitting up, writing something, and I briefly wonder if Richard was right and I was too soft and I should have made her go. But she still has that stretched look.

She waves her clipboard at me. She’s made a list of breeds of cats she likes, in order of preference.

‘I still want one,’ she says.

‘I know.’

‘When can we, Mum?’

‘One day,’ I tell her.

‘You always say maybe or one day,’ she says. ‘I want to really know. I want you to tell me exactly.’

I rearrange her pillows so she can lie down, and I read to her for a while, from a book of fairy tales I bought her for Christmas. There’s a story about a princess who’s meant to marry a prince, but she falls in love with the gardener; and he shows her secret things, the apricots warm on the wall, the clutch of eggs, blue as the sky, that are hidden in the pear tree. I read it softly, willing her to sleep, but she just lies there listening. She’s pale, almost translucent, with shadows like bruises under her eyes. Maybe it’s my attention that’s keeping her awake. Eventually I tell her I’m going to make a coffee.

When I look in on her ten minutes later, she’s finally drifted off, arms and legs flung out. There’s a randomness to it, as though she was turning over and was suddenly snared by sleep. I put my hand on her forehead and she stirs but doesn’t wake. I feel a deep sense of relief, knowing the sleep will heal her.

This is an unexpected gift: an afternoon with nothing to do, with no one needing anything; a gift of time to be slowly unwrapped and relished. I stand there for a moment, listening to the quiet of the house, which seems strange, so soon after Christmas, when these rooms have so recently been full of noise and people; it’s almost as though the house is alive and gently breathing. Then I go up to the attic, moving slowly through the silence.

I push open the door. The scents of my studio welcome me: turps, paint, the musty, over-sweet smell of dying flowers. From one of the little arched windows I can see across the roofs towards the park. I lean there for a moment, looking out. There’s a velvet bloom of dust on the sill; I rarely clean in here. I can see the tall bare trees and their many colours, pink, apricot, purple, where the buds are forming at the ends of their branches, and the dazzling sky with a slow silent aeroplane lumbering towards Heathrow.

I put on the shirt I always wear up here. Richard doesn’t like to see me in it; he hates me in baggy clothes. But I welcome its scruffiness and sexlessness, the way it says Now I am painting—the way it defines me as someone who is engaged in this one thing.

Here is everything I need: thick expensive paper, and 4B pencils that make soft smudgy lines, and acrylic paints, and watercolours with those baroque names that I love—cadmium yellow and prussian blue and crimson alizarin. And there are things I’ve collected, postcards and pictures torn from magazines, a print I cut from a calendar—a Georgia O’Keeffe painting of an orchid, very sexualised; I laughed when Sinead stared at it and raised one eyebrow and said, ‘She might as well have called it, “Come on in, boys.”’ And there are pebbles from the beach at Brighton, and bits of wood from the park, and a vase of lilies I brought here when the petals started to fall.

I feel a kind of certainty. There’s a clear dark purpose at the heart of me, a seriousness; today I will be able to work well.

I pick up a piece of bark, and see, in the thin golden light, that its soft dull brownness is made of many colours. I take out the pastel crayons and start to draw, using the blues and reds I see there, melding them together. I love this—how you can look intently at the quiet surfaces of things, and see such vividness.

There’s a part of my mind that is focused, intent, and part that is floating free. Images drift through my mind, faces: Sinead in her new Christmas make-up, pretty and troubled; Richard, thin-lipped, annoyed with me and with Daisy. They’ll be at the pantomime by now. Snow White will be a soap star in a blonde extravagant wig, and the Queen perhaps a man in taffeta and corsets, playing it for laughs. Yet she can be so scary, this Queen, like in the Disney film Snow White I saw when I was a child; I remember her shadow, sharp as though cut with a blade, looming and filling the screen. And I see Nicky at the carol-singing, her eager face and her dancing reindeer earrings; and thinking of Nicky I think, too, of Fergal O’Connor. And as I think of him, immediately I’m touching him, putting out my hands and moving them over his face, his head, feeling the precise texture of his skin. He is quite still, watching me. I feel the warmth of him through the palms of my hands. This shocks me, the precision of this picture—when I wasn’t sure I even liked him.

I draw on, in the suspended stillness. The drawing takes shape, but I don’t know yet if it pleases me. For the moment, I’m not judging it or wondering whether it’s any good or whether people will like it, just moving my hand on the page. There’s a compulsion to it, as though I don’t have a choice. Soon the light will dim; already pools of shadow are collecting in the corners. I draw quickly, with rapid little strokes in many colours, wanting to get it finished before it’s dark.

When the doorbell rings, I jump, I’m so lost in my own world, and the crayon makes a random jagged mark across the page. My first impulse is not to go, it’s such a long way down. But then it rings again, and I worry that Daisy will wake, requiring drinks and comfort, so I run down the two flights of stairs, through the gathering dark of the house.

It’s Monica, our neighbour.

‘Sorry to disturb you,’ she says.

She’s wearing a tracksuit and running shoes: she’s off for a jog in the park. Her two red setters are with her, milling around at the foot of the steps. She’s bright-eyed and virtuous, and the cold has already brought a flush to her cheeks.

‘That’s OK,’ I tell her. ‘I was up in the attic.’

While I’ve been drawing the world has changed. There are sounds of water and a wet smell, and our breath smokes white in the raw air. As we stand at the door there’s a noise from the roof like tearing cloth, and a lump of snow slides off and spatters on the gravel.

‘Nice Christmas?’

‘Great, thanks,’ I say routinely.

Her hair is very short and in the dim light she has an androgynous, classical look: Diana hunting with her dogs, perhaps, or some figure from a Greek frieze that I saw once with Richard in Athens, a taut young runner bringing news of slaughters and defeats.

‘These came for you while we were away,’ she says.

She thrusts two envelopes at me. I glance down at them: one is for Daisy, with a local postmark, probably a school friend, a child who was away at the end of term and missed the school postbox; the other comes from abroad and I recognise the writing. I have to control an urge to thrust this letter straight back at her.

She watches me. Perhaps she sees some trouble in my face, that she misreads as criticism.