The Perfect Mother

CHAPTER 7

I have never seen Dr Carey before; she must be new, or a locum. She’s wearing a crisp red jacket with shiny buttons, and she has short elfin hair and upward-tilting eyebrows. She seems earnest, conscientious, pretty in a wholesome schoolgirl way—someone who’d always be top of the class and make lots of neat notes.

She greets Daisy as well as me. She has an open smile. I immediately like her.

We sit by the desk, Daisy in an armchair, clutching Hannibal. It’s pleasant in here, for a surgery: the walls are blue, and there are toys on the window sill, and on the doctor’s desk a jug of marbled lollipops in cellophane, bright-coloured as balloons.

Dr Carey looks at me expectantly.

‘Daisy’s been ill for four weeks,’ I tell her. ‘She went to school today, but that’s only the second time this term. It started with flu and she’s never really recovered.’

‘Oh, dear. How horrid for you,’ says Dr Carey to Daisy.

Daisy shrugs, embarrassed.

I breathe out a little; I feel that we are cared for. This doctor is kind, gentle, warm to Daisy. This time at least we will be understood.

‘Well, Daisy,’ she says, ‘we’d better have a look at you.’

Daisy lies on the couch and Dr Carey feels her lymph glands and her stomach.

‘Well done,’ she says. ‘That’s excellent. That’s absolutely fine.’

Then Daisy stands on the scales and is measured and weighed.

Dr Carey sits back at her desk, gets out a weight chart. A little frown pinches the skin between her eyes. I suddenly imagine how she’ll look when she is older, with stern lines round her mouth and glasses on a chain.

‘Daisy’s really rather underweight,’ she says. ‘She’s on the lowest percentile.’

‘I don’t know what that means.’

‘I’ll show you.’ She turns the chart towards me, points at it with her pen. ‘The average is here,’ she says, ‘and Daisy’s right at the bottom.’

‘She must have lost lots of weight since she’s been ill,’ I tell her. ‘She isn’t eating—she feels too ill to eat.’

Dr Carey leans towards me. Her immaculate hands are tightly clasped together.

‘What does she eat exactly?’

‘Today, she had a piece of toast for breakfast and she didn’t have any lunch.’ I know—I’ve looked in her lunchbox. ‘Yesterday was better. She had a bit of rice and some gravy for tea.’

I want to make it clear I’m not a worrier: that I know that children are tougher than we think, as the other GP told me; that rice and gravy really isn’t too terrible.

Still the pinched little frown.

‘Just rice?’ she says. ‘She should be eating meat. She needs her protein.’

‘Of course she does. But rice and gravy was better than before.’

‘We’re fortunate to have a nutritionist working in this practice,’ she says. ‘I think I should refer you to her for advice about what Daisy should be eating.’

‘But I know what she should be eating. Of course I do.’ I think of all the books I’ve bought on bringing up children, books with cheerful covers and energising titles—Eco Baby, Creating Kids Who Can. ‘It’s just that she won’t, she can’t. She feels too sick to eat. She hasn’t eaten properly since Christmas.’

She shakes her head a little. I feel this conversation slipping away from me.

She turns to Daisy, looks at her; there’s something she’s working out. She fiddles with the wisps of hair that grow in front of her ears.

‘Daisy, I wonder if you could tell me a bit about school?’ she says then. ‘Is it all right? D’you like it?’

‘It’s OK,’ says Daisy.

‘Is anything worrying you?’

Daisy shakes her head.

‘You’re sure?’ says Dr Carey. ‘Sometimes it’s hard to talk about these things.’

Daisy frowns. I see how she’d like to help, to give the answer that Dr Carey wants, but she can’t think of anything. She twists her fingers in Hannibal’s greying wool. He’s dirty; she’ll never let me wash him in case he loses his smell. Here in this blue sterile place, I find his greyness embarrassing. I worry that Dr Carey will think that I never wash things properly, that I am messy, sluttish, not a proper mother. Daisy doesn’t say anything.

Dr Carey turns to me. ‘You know, Mrs Lydgate, I’m wondering whether we should treat all this as psychological. ’ She says this with a kind of finality, as though it is an achievement.

Panic seizes me.

‘But nothing traumatic has happened to Daisy. It started when she had flu.’

‘But, you see, she looks so miserable,’ she says. ‘She looks all pale and hunched up.’

‘She’s unhappy because she’s ill,’ I tell her.

Dr Carey ignores this, leans a little towards me. ‘Tell me, Mrs Lydgate, is everything all right at home?’ Her voice is hushed, confiding: as though she thinks that Daisy won’t be able to hear.

‘Everything’s fine,’ I tell her.

‘You’re living with your husband?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how do you both get on?’

‘We get on fine,’ I tell her.

My coat is damp from the rain: I am chilled through.

‘You’re sure? You don’t have awful shouting matches in front of Daisy?’

‘No, we don’t. We don’t have awful shouting matches at all.’

I’m trying not to get angry; I know that if I get angry she won’t believe what I say.

‘Because if you do,’ she says, ‘Daisy’s sure to react.’

‘Really,’ I say again, ‘we get on fine. It’s nothing like that. I just know Daisy’s ill.’ I take a deep breath, try to keep my voice level. ‘I want her to be referred to the hospital.’

There’s a pause, as though this is entirely unexpected. She looks unsure; I see how young she is.

‘Please,’ I say. ‘She isn’t eating, she always feels so tired. I think we should see a paediatrician.’

‘All right, then,’ she says, but with reluctance, as though she’s been constrained.

She’s writing in her notes now. ‘I’ll refer you to Dr McGuire at the General,’ she says. ‘They’ll write to you with the appointment. I’m afraid there’s quite a waiting list. In the meantime, we’ll get all the blood tests done. You can come in on Thursday and the nurse will take the blood.’

As we go she gives Daisy a lollipop from the jug on her desk.

We walk back to the car, which is parked down the end of the road. There are green fresh smells of spring but the rainbow has faded.

‘She was really nice, wasn’t she, Mum?’ says Daisy.

‘I’m glad you liked her.’

‘I did,’ she says. ‘She was kind.’

She starts to unwrap the lollipop; I have to take Hannibal. We stop for a moment because it’s hard to do; the paper is firmly stuck to the sugary surface. The lollipop is veined with purple and red, the colour intense as nail varnish. I think of additives but don’t say anything.

She rips off the last scrap of cellophane.

‘There,’ she says with satisfaction.

She takes one careful lick. We walk on for a bit, the lollipop held in front of her, like some precious thing.

‘Is it all right if I leave this, Mum?’ she says then.

‘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.

‘You know, all those things you went through. It’s bound to affect you…’

He turns a little away from me. I see his face in the mirror, but his reflected image is strange to me, reversed and subtly wrong. The darkness reaches out to me from the corners of the room.

‘You’re a bit of a perfectionist,’ he says. ‘We both know that. You want everything to be just right, you can’t just go with the flow. That’s understandable. It’s perhaps one of the effects of…’ His voice tails off.

‘One of the effects of what?’ My voice is small in the stillness.

‘Darling,’ he says. ‘You know I think you’re a wonderful mother. No one could care for those girls better than you. But maybe sometimes you try almost too hard.’

His eyes are narrow: for a moment he looks at me as though I am a stranger.

‘How can you try too hard?’ I say.

‘All I mean is—of course it’s a worrying situation. But you get worried perhaps a bit more than you need to. And maybe in some ways that makes things worse. Maybe you expect things to go wrong.’

There’s a sense of pressure in my chest, like something pushing into me, making it hard to breathe.

‘I just don’t see how that could make Daisy ill,’ I say.

He hears the catch in my voice. He comes to sit beside me.

‘Cat,’ he says, ‘now don’t go getting upset.’

He ruffles my hair, as though I am a child. His hand on me soothes me, as he knows it will.

‘What about the hospital?’ he says.

‘We’re getting the referral.’

‘Well, that’s all that matters really,’ he says.

‘What if she puts it in the letter—that she thinks it’s psychological? They won’t take Daisy seriously. If they think that, no one’ll bother to try and find out what’s wrong.’

‘Of course she won’t put it in the letter,’ he says. ‘I mean, these are the experts, aren’t they? She’ll leave them to make up their own minds. None of this adds up to anything,’ he says, and puts his arm around me. Yet still I feel that something has been broken.

CHAPTER 9

There’s a road I won’t go down. Poplar Avenue. A harmless name, a name like any other. There’s a house in that road, a wide-fronted house set well back from the street. There are rooms in that house with glass-panelled doors, the panels covered over with brown paper. Richard started to drive down Poplar Avenue once, by mistake, when we were coming home from Gina and Adrian’s, and a car crash in the one-way system had caused a massive tailback. He turned round when he realised: he knows, I’ve told him some of it, and he read about it in the papers during the inquiry. But nobody knows all of it, except those of us who were there.

I was thirteen when I went there. My mother couldn’t cope with me—or so she told the social worker, as I lurked behind the bead curtain in the squalid kitchen of our tiny flat, that I’d tried to clean up, knowing the social worker was coming, hearing everything. ‘I need a break,’ said my mother. ‘Just for a month or two. To get myself together.’

The social worker said she admired my mother’s honesty, and it probably was for the best. She asked if there was anyone I could go to. ‘No,’ said my mother, ‘we only have each other.’ The social worker said not to worry, she was pretty sure that there was a place at The Poplars. And I wouldn’t even need to change schools, so really it didn’t have to be too disruptive.

My mother was drinking three bottles of sherry a day. It had crept up on us gradually, through the years of living in rented flats, or in rooms at the tops of pubs where she worked behind the bar. I knew the story of how we came to be in this predicament—or, at least, the part of it she chose to tell. Her family had been reasonably well-off—her father was a cabinet-maker—but they’d been Plymouth Brethren, very strict and excluding. She’d always chafed against it—the beliefs, the extreme restrictions. She’d truanted a lot, left school to travel round Europe with an unemployed actor, ten years older than her, who smoked a lot of dope. Her family had rejected her totally—wouldn’t see her again. In the Vondel Park in Amsterdam, the man had drifted off. She’d wandered back to London, existed for a while on the edge of some rather bohemian group, people who squatted, who liked to call themselves anarchists, who had artistic pretensions. She wore cheesecloth blouses, worked as a waitress. It was the pinnacle of her life, the time to which she always yearned to return. She was still only nineteen when she met my father. She fell pregnant almost immediately. He went off with somebody else when I was six months old; my mother was just twenty. She never talked about him, except to say that she wasn’t going to talk about that bastard. I only knew he’d been part of that arty group, and that his name was Christopher.

It was OK when I was younger. She had standards then, she was quite particular: she talked a lot about manners; she always laid the table properly for tea. We were happy, I think, happy enough, though there was never much money, and often she left me alone in the evenings, even when I was young. I remember how as a little girl I’d sit on the bed and watch her getting ready, perhaps for her evening shift behind the bar, or maybe for a night out on the town with one of her long succession of temporary men. She’d be all sheeny and glossy, with high heels, and a gold chain round her ankle, her skin a sun-kissed brown from her weekly session at the Fake It tanning studio, with the smell that was then so comforting, so familiar, of Marlboros and Avon Lily of the Valley. I’d sit on the bed amid the heaps of her clothes and accessories, her belts and bangles and gloves and floaty scarves. She had a particular passion for gloves, in pastel cotton or silk, with little pearl buttons or ruched wrists. It was eccentric, perhaps, giving her an air of spurious formality, but she liked to hide her hands, which were always rough and reddened from the work she did, all the washing of glasses in the sink at the bar. I’d watch how she’d choose from her glittery sticks of cosmetics, how she’d do her mouth, first drawing the outline with lippencil, making her narrow lips a little more generous, then the lipstick, coral bright, eased on straight from the stick. She’d press her lips together to spread the colour out. I thought she was so beautiful. Yet my pleasure in these moments was always shot through with fear, that one day she’d go and leave me and somehow forget to return. Or maybe the fear of abandonment is something I’ve added since, thinking back, laying my knowledge of what happened later over my memory of those moments, as frost lies over leaves.