The Perfect Mother

‘We’ve been away,’ she says again, a bit apologetic. ‘Or I’d have brought them round earlier.’

‘No, no. It’s fine. They’re just Christmas cards anyway.’

‘It wasn’t our usual postman,’ she says.

She’s moving from one foot to the other, wired up and keen to be off. The dogs skulk and circle at the foot of the steps, vivid and nervy, damp mouths open.

‘Thanks anyway,’ I tell her.

‘We must have coffee some time,’ she says. As we always say.

‘I’d like that.’

And she’s off, jogging down the steps, pounding across the damp gravel, the dogs streaming out in front of her.

I put Daisy’s card on the hall stand; I’ll take it to her when she wakes.

I go into the kitchen, sit at the table, hold the other envelope out in front of me. My heart is noisy. It enters my head that this is why Daisy is ill, as though everything is connected, as though this letter brings ill fortune with it, clinging like an unwholesome smell of past things, a smell of mothballs and stale cigarettes and old discarded clothing.

The house has lost its sense of ease; it feels alert, edgy. I hear the little kitchen noises, a drumming like fingertips in the central heating, the breathing of the fridge, and outside the creak and drip of the thaw. I tear at the envelope.

It’s a perfectly ordinary card: a Christmas tree, very conventional, with ‘Season’s Greetings’ in gilt letters in German and French and English.

I open it. At the top, an address, printed and underlined. The handwriting is careful, rather childlike.

Trina, darling. ‘Someone we know’ gave me your address. What a stroke of luck!! The above is where I’m living now. Please PLEASE write.

There’s an assumption of intimacy about the way it isn’t signed that I resent and certainly don’t share. Like the way a lover will say on the phone, ‘It’s me.’

I look at my hands clasped tight on the table in front of me. I notice the way the veins stick out, the pale varnish that is beginning to peel, the white skin. I feel that they have nothing to do with me.

I sit there for a while, then I get up and put the card in the paper recycling bin, tucked under yesterday’s Times, where it can’t be seen.

I long for Richard to be here, but they won’t be back for hours; it’s only four o’clock—they’ll still be in the theatre. It’s the interval perhaps; they’ll be talking politely and eating sugared popcorn. I want Richard to hold me. Suddenly I hate the way we’ve let our love leak away through a hundred little cracks, like this morning, the irritation, the disagreements over Calpol; and my fantasy about Fergal O’Connor embarrasses and shames me. Stupid to think such things, when I love and need Richard so much. Without him I feel thin, etiolated as though I have no substance. As though I’m a cardboard cutout, a figure in that Nativity scene on the mantelpiece: intricately detailed, looking, in a dim light, almost solid—yet two-dimensional, with no substance, nothing to weigh me down. Only Richard can hold me and make me real.

CHAPTER 3

The house has a fresh January feel, everything swept and gleaming. All the decorations, that some time after Christmas lost their gloss, as though their sheen had actually tarnished over, have been packed away in boxes in the attic. There are daffodils in a blue jug on the kitchen table; they’re buds still, green but swelling. Tomorrow they will open, and already you can smell the pollen through the thin green skin. And we have all made resolutions: Sinead to stop biting her nails; Richard to drink wine instead of whisky; Daisy to have a cat—though Sinead protested at this, as she felt it didn’t quite qualify as a resolution; and I have resolved to take my painting more seriously. And to that end, today, the first day of term, I am going, all on my own, to an exhibition that I read about in the paper, at the Tate Modern. It is called Insomnia and this is its final week. It is a series of sketches by Louise Bourgeois, done in the night, fantastical—dandelion clocks, and tunnels made of hair, and a cat with a high-heeled shoe in its mouth. And I shall buy a catalogue, like a proper artist, and be inspired, perhaps, and start to draw quite differently: not just flowers, but pictures from my mind.

I am dressed to go straight to the station after dropping Daisy at school. I have a new long denim coat, stylishly shabby, that I chose from an austere expensive shop, with unsmiling scented assistants and very few clothes on the rails: my Christmas present from Richard. It’s cunningly shaped, clinging to the body then flaring towards the hem, and almost too long so you’d trip without high-heeled shoes, and it’s dyed a smudgey black, like ink, and the fabric feels opulently heavy. Not the sort of thing I’d ever normally wear to the school gate; but today I shall wear it. The thought of my outing gives me a fat happy feeling.

I make toast. Sinead is packing her bag in the hall, cursing under her breath. Yesterday we had the usual end-of-holiday panic: she’d just come back from Sara’s, and she suddenly thought of an essay that had to be done, on something complex to do with the growth of fascism in the thirties, and therefore requiring major parental input. Richard was provoked into a rare outburst of irritation with her.

‘For God’s sake, Sinead. How the hell did this happen? You’ve had the whole bloody holiday.’

She shrugged, immaculately innocent, with an expression that said this was nothing to do with her.

‘I forgot,’ she said.

Then Daisy, who’s now recovered from her flu though still not eating properly, decided we had to go shopping: there were girls who’d given her Christmas presents and she’d had nothing for them. Even at eight that intricate web of female relationship, of things given and owed, of best friends and outsiders, is beginning to be woven. So we bought some flower hairclips from Claire’s Accessories, and found an obliging Internet site so Sinead could finish her essay, and today we are organised: clothes washed, lunchboxes packed, everything as it should be.

It’s a windy busy morning. Large pale brown chestnut leaves torn from the tree in Monica’s garden litter our lawn. The letterbox keeps rattling as though there are many phantom postmen. When this happens, I jump.

Daisy comes downstairs dressed for school, neat and precise, but her face is white. I put some toast in front of her.

‘D’you want honey?’

‘I’m not hungry,’ she says.

She sits neatly in front of it, her hands in her lap, looking at the toast but not touching it.

‘Try and eat something,’ I say.

‘I don’t want anything,’ she says.

I can’t send her to school with nothing inside her.

‘Perhaps a Mars Bar—just this once?’ I’m a bit conspiratorial, expecting gratitude.

‘I don’t want one,’ she says.

Sinead leaves to catch her bus, her body misshapen from the weight of the bag she carries on her shoulder. She wears her uniform according to the girls’ illicit dress code: her skirt rolled at the waistline so it’s far too short, bracelets of peace beads hidden under her cuffs, her socks pushed down and tucked inside her shoes.

I brush Daisy’s hair in front of the big mirror that hangs over the fireplace. Her fair hair is thick, lavish, the brush won’t go right through it. I’ve washed it with shampoo that smells of mangoes; a faint fruit scent hangs about her.

‘Will you be at home today?’ she says.

‘No, sweetheart, I’m going to an exhibition.’

‘Oh,’ she says. Her face collapses a little, as though she is going to cry. I run my hand down her cheek. Her skin is cold.

We go out to the car. The wind sneaks under the collars of our coats. Above the roofs of the houses, dark birds are swirled around like leaves in the millstream of the sky.

There’s a sudden ferociousness to the traffic, now term has started. Daisy sits quite silently in the car.

‘I wonder what Megan had for Christmas,’ I say cheerfully.

She doesn’t reply. I look at her in the rear-view mirror; she is crying silently, slow tears edging down her white face.

‘Sweetheart, what’s the matter?’

‘I feel sick,’ she says.

‘Are you worried about something?’

She shakes her head.

‘You’ll be fine once you get there. You’ll see Abi and Megan, catch up with everything.’