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Acclaim for Margaret Leroy’s The Perfect Mother A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

“It’s a premise familiar from some of Hitchcock’s best

movies: seemingly upright people, through no fault of

their own, see their lives unravel before their eyes. Margaret

Leroy’s [The Perfect Mother] taps the compelling emotions inherent in that storyline.”

—Seattle Times

“Written with a wonderfully convincing authority…

I was eager to find out what happened next. I dreaded the

worst and I hoped for the best – and I won’t tell

you which happens.”

—New York Times

“The novel reads like a thriller and is brilliant at portraying

the slow, steady disintegration of a seemingly ordinary life

when secrets are unearthed and dark suspicions spread.”

—Baltimore Sun

“As Cat becomes ever more driven, Leroy gives her daily

life a lurking undertone of menace that adds an element

of psychological mystery…creating delicious

uncertainty about the heroine.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“This is a gripping medical mystery from an assured

writer who could be the next Minette Walters.

Highly recommended.”

—Library Journal

“Written with the intense pace of a thriller and the brooding

concealment of a mystery novel…Leroy ultimately plumbs

the complicated depths of motherly instinct to deliver a

novel of great suspense. Did Cat intentionally hurt her

daughter to get attention? The answer will be a hard-won

surprise readers won’t soon forget.”

—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“With wonderfully descriptive writing and psychological

insight, Leroy crafts a mesmerising tale of love and fear.”

—www.wordsmitten.com

Acclaim for Margaret Leroy’s The Drowning Girl

“Margaret Leroy’s eerily lovely novel [The Drowning Girl] is one of those rare books you’ll sit with till your bones ache.”

—Oprah Magazine

“This is a really special book. Sylvie’s vulnerability is so

powerfully drawn, so flesh-and-blood real, that you want

to reach into the pages and protect her yourself.”

—Louise Candlish

“Every once in a blue moon, a masterful writer dives into

Gothic waters and emerges with a novel that – like Daphne

du Maurier’s Rebecca, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, or, more recently, Patrick McGrath’s Asylum – simultaneously celebrates and transcends the genre. Welcome Margaret Leroy to the clan. Haunted and haunting, [The Drowning Girl] is a wonderfully original, deliciously suspenseful mystery.”

—Publishers Weekly

“This book is perfect for anyone wanting an intriguing

story which is also well-written and moving.”

—Adele Geras

“This book was compelling from the first chapter…

Margaret Leroy’s twists are carefully orchestrated

so Grace had my sympathy and understanding. It

is a book I will never forget…Read it – it is such

a refreshing change from the ususal frothy stories.”

—Candis

“A stunning, engaging and enlightening tale of motherly

love…Gothic fiction at its best.”

—Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Clearly the work of an accomplished writer – a haunting

book and a tantalising read.”

—Providence Journal

The Perfect Mother
Margaret Leroy

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am deeply grateful to my wonderful editor, Catherine Burke, for her intelligence, warmth, and commitment to my writing, and to the marvellously dynamic team at MIRA, especially Oliver Rhodes; also to my agent Kathleen Anderson for all her tireless work on my behalf, to my UK agent, Laura Longrigg, for so much empathy and insight, and to Judy Clain, my editor at Little, Brown and Company, New York. Thanks to Lucy Floyd for her perceptive comments on the book. Mick, Becky and Izzie sustained me with their love and encouragement, as always.

I am indebted to the National Children’s Bureau, UK, for permission to quote from Trust Betrayed?, edited by Jan Horwath and Brian Lawson. Among the other books I read, there were two that I found particularly valuable: Hurting for Love, by Herbert A Schreier and Judith A Libow, and The Pindown Experience and the Protection of Children, the moving and disturbing report of the Staffordshire Child Care Inquiry conducted by Allan Levy, QC, and Barbara Kahan.

CHAPTER 1

Daisy hears them first: the crunch of feet on the gravel, the resonant clearing of throats outside our living-room window.

She darts to the window, tugs at the curtain.

‘They’re here,’ she says.

She kneels on the sofa, presses her face to the glass. Her warm breath mists the pane.

I turn off the light, so the room is lit by the dancing red of the firelight, and go to stand beside her, pulling the curtain open. My head is close to hers; I smell the musky sweetness of her hair. Sinead hangs back, fiddling with her new velvet choker, an early Christmas present from her mother. She’s reached that age when enthusiasms have to be carefully concealed; and anyway hip-hop is really more her thing.

I glance at Richard. He folds his Times and turns towards the window. In the shadowed room and the flickering of the firelight, I can’t see if he’s smiling.

‘Look,’ says Daisy. ‘They’ve got snowflakes on their eyelashes.’

There are ten of them in the darkness by the steps to our front door. They’re bundled in coats and scarves, the everyday colour leached from their clothes and faces by the torchlight. Their breath is thick, there are siftings of snow on their shoulders. They move around and shuffle into position. Nicky is there, in a woollen hat that hides her crisp black hair, with little reindeer dangling from her ears. She looks up at Daisy, grins and blows her a kiss. The earrings shiver.

The others have their eyes down; they’re fumbling through their music books with clumsy wet-gloved fingers. There are women I recognise from Daisy’s class at school, Kate’s mother, Natalie’s mother—women I only know by the names of their children—and men from the choir at the church round the corner, and two or three teenage children. The torches they carry suffuse their faces with red: a myriad little torches glimmer in their eyes. Next to Nicky there’s a man I don’t recognise. He has unruly fair hair, a darkly gleaming leather jacket; I can just make out his heavy eyebrows and the line of his jaw. Above them a nail-paring moon shines briefly through the cloud. Nicky knows what this moon is meant to mean: she’s been through Feng Shui and aromatherapy and her current passion is witchcraft—the kind of bland designer witchcraft you can read about in lavish books with pastel velour covers—and she says that the moons have names, and this is the birch moon—the first moon of the year, the moon of beginnings.

The snow began this morning, with a perfect, theatrical sense of timing. In our garden, there’s a milky skin of ice on the pond, and the dangling tendrils of forsythia are white knotted strands of wool, and the stone frog fountain has a hat of snow. We played snowballs, Sinead and Daisy and me, staying out far too long, not realising how chilled we were, and when we finally came back into the warmth of the kitchen Daisy’s fingers were red and shiny in spite of her gloves, and she cried as the blood came back into them. I told her they hurt because they were getting better, warming up, but it didn’t help to know that, she couldn’t stop crying. In the cold the foxes are getting bolder, coming close to the house. This afternoon I saw them on the patio, looking in at the French window then shying away, mangy, thin, golden, one with a paw that it couldn’t touch to the ground, quite silent yet leaving perfect footprints. Since then more snow has fallen, blotting out the foxes’ footprints and our own, so our back garden looks as though no one has ever been there. If you went out there now, you would feel a thing you rarely feel in London, a sense of how high the sky is, of the immensity of the night.

The singers clear their throats and start to sing. Their faces are lifted, eager, their breath like smoke. Singing voices sound different outside, fragile, thinner, half their resonance swallowed up by the air; yet so precise and perfect. I see the ships in my mind’s eye: they’re like the ships in a toddler’s picture book, with rainbow-painted prows and many silken sails, playful, gaudy, cresting the curled waves.

Daisy gives a little sigh and rests her head against me. Sinead comes close, sits on the arm of the sofa. They’re both thoroughly irreverent, they have their own salacious parodies of carols, picked up in the playground, yet they’re held, stilled, by the song. The room smells of cinnamon and warm wine, of the forest freshness of juniper, of the apple-cake that is cooling in the kitchen, moist and sweet and crusted on top with sugar. I want to hold this moment, to make it last for ever, the scents and the singing and firelight and Daisy’s head against me.

There’s a long still moment after the end of the song, like a held breath. Then Daisy applauds extravagantly, and I turn on the lights and hurry to the door and open it wide.

There are seven stone steps up to our door. Nicky comes first, bounding up two at a time. She’s pinkskinned, eager-eyed.

‘Catriona—you look so good.’

I kiss her; her face is cold.

‘Were we brilliant?’ she says.

‘You were wonderful.’

She pulls off her hat, shakes out her spiky hair. Wetness sprays from her, the reindeer earrings dance. She holds out the Christian Aid tin, rattles it hopefully. Daisy puts in our money, with a satisfactory clatter.

The others follow her, noisily talking; they are themselves again, separate, banal, the braid of music that bound them together unwoven. They shrug off their wet heavy clothes; the powdering of snow on their hair is melting already. They stretch out their arms and relish the warmth. The house is suddenly full of noise, of energy.

I bring the saucepan from the kitchen and dole the wine into tumblers. Daisy and Sinead hand the glasses round, carrying them like precious things, holding them right at the top so as not to burn their fingers. I see their heads as they weave their way through the crush: Sinead with hair that’s dark and thick like her mother’s, pulled back and fastened with a flower scrunchie; and Daisy, blonde like me.

Nicky, passing, whispers in my ear: ‘D’you like my new recruit?’ She gestures rather obviously towards the man in the leather jacket.

I nod.

‘Fergal O’Connor. He’s a sweetie—bringing up his little boy on his own. Jamie goes to St Mark’s, I think. Remind me to introduce you.’

She moves off to talk to Richard.

I chat for a while to Kate’s mother and Natalie’s mother. They drink eagerly, cradling the tumblers between their hands to warm them.

Natalie’s mother looks greedily round the room.

‘Nice house,’ she says.

Her teeth are already stained purple by the wine.

I shrug a little. ‘Well, we’re so lucky to live here.’

‘I’ll say.’ Her fervour isn’t quite polite.

They talk about their children: about homework, what a pain, quite honestly you end up having to do it yourself; and the eleven-plus and how ghastly it is, last year some girls were so nervous, they puked up before they went in; and whether eight is really too young for your child to have her first mobile.

These themes are familiar and I only half join in. I look round the room, feeling a warm sense of satisfaction, seeing it with Natalie’s mother’s eyes, recognising what I have achieved here. Because any woman might look at it now in that greedy appraising way. Yet when Richard and I first came here, and walked between the stone dogs and up the seven steps, and the woman from Foxton’s unlocked and ushered us in, I felt such uncertainty. It was empty; it smelt musty, unused, and there were green streaks of damp, and horrible flowered wallpaper. But it still had a kind of grandeur, with its parquet floors and cornices and mantelpieces of marble, suggesting to me a whole way of life that I’d probably gleaned from TV costume drama: men taking a rest from empire building who warm their backs at the fire, port, political conversations. I couldn’t begin to imagine that I could feel at home in these imposing spaces. I walked round the edge of this room, my footsteps echoing in the emptiness, and felt flimsy, insubstantial, as though I might float to the ceiling, as though nothing weighed me down. Richard put his arm round me—he did that often then—and I felt his warmth, his weight, his opulent smell of cigars and aftershave, grounding me, making me real. And the estate agent, a pleasant woman, canny about such things, read my hesitation. ‘Let me show you something,’ she said. She took us through the French windows and into the garden. It was big for a town garden, and secluded, with a round rose bed, badly neglected, just a few tattered rags of roses still clinging to the gangly blood-red stems, and a pond, empty of water, with weeds growing up from the concrete. The starlings in the birch tree were puffed up with the cold, like fruit ready to fall. There were wormcasts in the grass and water lying on the lawn and it all terribly needed tending. But the lovely shapes of it were there—the rosebed and the pond and the way the trees leaned in around the lawn, encircling it with a kind of intimacy. And I saw how it could be, saw the stone frog spewing water from his wide cheerful mouth, saw the lily pads and the old-fashioned roses, palest pink and amber, single flowers not lasting long but scented, clambering up the wall.

From that moment it was easy. We bought it and moved in, and I knew just what to do with it, decorating most of it myself. I seemed to expand to fill the space; it started to feel right for me. And now it is all as it should be, elegant, established, with velvet curtains and tiebacks with tassels and heavy pelmets edged with plum-coloured braid. Our things look right here, in this setting, everything seems to fit: Richard’s Chinese vases and his violin, and the two ceramic masks, one white, one black, that we brought back from our honeymoon, and a little painting I did of a poppy, that I thought was maybe good enough to frame and go up on the wall; and on the mantelpiece there’s a cardboard Nativity scene, intricate, in rich dark colours, that I bought from Benjamin Pollock’s toyshop in Covent Garden. The Nativity scene was my choice, not the girls’; they’d probably have gone for something more contemporary and plastic. But I love traditional things—I’m always hunting them out, in junk shops and on market stalls: things made to old designs, or with a patina of use, a bit of history. Like when I’d decorated Daisy’s room, the floors stripped and varnished to a pale honey colour, the ceiling night-sky blue with a stencilling of stars, and I knew there was something missing. It needed something old, loved, a teddy bear to sit in the cane chair, an old bear with bits of fur worn off, like people sometimes keep in trunks in their attics. And I wondered what it would be like to have had a childhood that left such traces—old toys, photos perhaps—things that are worn with use, with loving, to store away then come upon years later and show to your own children, with a little stir of sentiment or mildly embarrassed amusement or nostalgia. In the end I found a bear in a department store: it had old-fashioned curly fur and was dressed in Edwardian clothes, but it smelt of the factory. I bought it anyway. It was the best I could do.

The women are reminiscing about their children’s toy obsessions. Natalie’s mother, who has four children, remembers Tamagotchis, these pocket computer animals that you had to feed and care for; the mothers had to look after them while the children were at school. I’m only half listening. Over their shoulders I can see Richard talking to somebody’s teenage daughter. He looks too smart for the company in his jacket and tie—he isn’t very good at casual dressing. The girl is perhaps eighteen, just a little younger than I was when he met me. She’s wearing a sleeveless top despite the snow, showing off her prettily sloping shoulders. Her arms are thin and white and her hair is watered silk and she has a big gleamy smile. I can tell he’s charming her; he comes from that privileged class of men who are always charming—perhaps most charming—with strangers. And Richard likes young women; it’s what he was drawn to in me, that new gloss. I know I’m not like I was when first we met: I don’t have that sheen any more.

Nicky is next to Richard, talking to the man with the unruly hair. She’s getting in close—not surprising, really, he’s quite attractive. Now that she’s taken off her coat, she looks like a picture from a magazine. There’s something altogether contemporary about Nicky. She loves biker boots and little tartan skirts, and she works at an advertising agency, where, in spite of—or maybe because of—the niceness and easygoingness of Neil, her husband, who is an inventive cook and a devoted parent, she exchanges erotic e-mails with the creative director. ‘You see, we’re not like you and Richard,’ she says to me sometimes, leaning across the table at the Café Rouge towards me. ‘You two are so transparently everything to each other. I mean, it’s wonderful if you can be like that—if you’ve got that kind of marriage—what could be lovelier? But Neil and I aren’t like that, especially since the kids. I don’t think I’m built to be completely faithful, it’s just not in my genes…’

She feels my eyes on her. She turns, speaks to the man again. They come towards me. Kate’s mother and Natalie’s mother move away.

He smiles at me. His eyes are grey and steady. Nicky puts her hand on my arm.

‘Meet Fergal,’ she says. ‘Our latest recruit. A tenor. Tenors are like gold dust. I love my tenors to bits.’

I smile. He says hello. I remember how much I like Irish voices.

She takes her last bite of apple-cake and licks her sugary fingers. ‘Catriona, your cooking is out of this world. I have to have more of this.’

Sinead walks past with a plate. Nicky lunges after her.

My boots have high heels and my eyes are just on a level with his. We look at one another and there’s a brief embarrassed pause.

‘I liked the carols,’ I tell him. Then think how vacuous this sounds.

‘Well,’ he says, and shrugs a little. ‘It’s been fun.’

I note the past tense. I rapidly decide that he’s not the sort of man who’d like me. I know how I must seem to him, a privileged sheltered woman.

‘Nicky’s good at arranging things,’ I say. ‘Making things happen.’

He nods vaguely. He’s looking over my shoulder—I’ve bored him already.

But then I see he is looking at my picture—the painting of poppies that I hung on the wall. It’s just behind me.

‘Who did the painting?’ he says.

‘I did.’

‘I wondered if it was you,’ he says. ‘I like it.’

I feel a little embarrassed, but acknowledge to myself that I am quite pleased with this painting. The petals are that dark purple that is almost black, yet there’s a gleam on them.

‘I don’t do much,’ I say. ‘It just makes a nice break. I can hide away in my attic and the girls know not to disturb me. I suppose it’s a bit conceited to put it up on the wall.’

‘D’you always do that?’ he says.

‘Do what?’

‘Run yourself down like that?’

‘Probably. I guess it’s irritating.’

We both smile.

‘When you paint, is it always flowers?’ he says.

‘Always. I can’t do people. I’m really limited.’

He looks at me quizzically. His eyes are full of laughter.

‘OK, I know I’m doing it again,’ I say. ‘But it’s true. And I can’t draw out of my head either. It has to be something I can put on the table in front of me. I can only paint what I see.’

‘D’you sell them?’ he says.

I nod, flattered he should ask. ‘There’s a gift shop in town that takes them sometimes.’

He turns to look at it again. ‘It’s not very cheerful. For a flower. It’s kind of ominous. All that shadow around it.’

‘Really. How can you read all that into a picture?’ But I’m pleased. There’s something rather trivial about doing paintings of flowers and selling them in a gift shop alongside scented candles and boxed sets of soap. I like that he can see a kind of darkness in it.

I realise I am happy. My body fluid and easy with the wine, my room hospitable, beautiful, this man with the Irish lilt in his voice approving of my picture; this is easy, this is how things should be.

He’s looking at me with those steady grey eyes. There’s something in his look that I can’t work out: sex, or something else, more obscure, more troubling.

‘I know you,’ he says suddenly. ‘Don’t I?’

I laugh politely. ‘I don’t think so.’

Someone is leaving. The door opens, the cold and the night come in.

‘I do,’ he says. ‘I’m sure I know you. I recognise your face.’

He’s staring at me, trying to work it out. It sounds like a come-on, but his look is puzzled, serious. The fear that is never far from me lays its cold hand on my skin.

‘Well, I don’t know where you could have seen me.’ My voice is casual, light. ‘Perhaps the school gate at St Mark’s? Daisy goes there.’ But I know this isn’t right, I know I’d have noticed him. ‘Nicky says that’s where your little boy goes,’ I add, trying to drag the conversation away to somewhere safe.

He shakes his head. ‘Jamie doesn’t start till after Christmas.’

‘You’ll like it,’ I tell him. ‘Daisy’s eight, she’s in year three, she has the nicest teacher…’

But he won’t let it rest. ‘Where d’you work?’ he says.

‘I don’t.’ Then, biting back the urge to apologise for my life, which must sound so passive—‘I mean, not outside the home. I used to work in a nursery school before I got married. But that’s ages ago now.’

‘It wasn’t there. Forget it. It doesn’t matter.’

But I’m upset and he knows it. He tries to carry on, he asks what I’m painting now, but the mood is spoilt, it can’t be restored or recovered. As soon as he decently can, he leaves me. All evening I feel troubled: even when the singers have gone, calling out their thanks and Christmas wishes, setting off into the snow which is falling more thickly now, casting its nets over everything, under the chill thin light of the moon of beginnings.

We stand there in the suddenly quiet room. It looks banal now. There are cake crumbs on the carpet, and every glass has a purplish, spicy sediment.

‘I’ll do the washing-up,’ says Richard.

Normally I’d say, No, let me, you sit down, but tonight I give in gratefully. Sinead goes to help him.

I turn off the light again, and the firelight plays on every shiny surface. My living room seems like a room from another time. I stretch out on the sofa. Daisy comes and folds herself into me. Her limbs are loose, heavy, her skin is hot and dry; I feel her tiredness seeping into me.

‘Did you enjoy it?’ I ask her.

To my surprise, she shakes her head. In the red erratic firelight, her face looks sharper, thinner. Little bright flames glitter in her eyes. Suddenly, without warning, she starts crying.

I hug her. ‘It’s ever so late,’ I tell her. ‘You’ll be fine in the morning.’ She rubs her damp face against me.

I don’t want her to go to sleep unhappy. I can never bear it when she’s sad—which is silly really, I know that, because children often cry, but I always rush in to smooth things over, want to keep everything perfect. So I try to distract her with shadow shapes, the animal patterns I learnt how to make from a booklet I bought from the toyshop in Covent Garden. I move my hands in the beam of light from the open door to the hall, casting shadows across the wall by the fireplace. I make the seagull, flapping my hands together; and the crab, my fingers hunched, so it sidles along the mantelpiece; and the alligator, snapping at the board games on the bookshelf. Daisy wipes her face and starts to smile.

I make the shape of the weasel; we wait and wait, Daisy holding her breath: this is her favourite. And just when you’ve stopped expecting it, it comes, the weasel’s pounce, down into some poor defenceless thing behind the skirting board.

She lets out a brief thrilled scream, and even I start a little. Yet these animals, these teeth, this predatoriness: these are only the shadows of my hands.

CHAPTER 2

Sinead comes into our bedroom in her dressing gown, her face and hair rumpled with sleep.

‘Cat. Dad. Daisy’s ill.’

I’m reluctant to leave the easy warmth of bed, and Richard, still asleep, curving into me. It’s one of those quiet days after Christmas, the turn of the year, when all the energy seems withdrawn from the world. A little light leaks round the edges of the curtains. I turn back the duvet, gently, so as not to wake him, and pull down my nightdress, which is long and loose, like a T-shirt, the kind of thing I started to wear when Daisy needed feeding in the night, and then got rather attached to.

I go to Daisy’s room. The stars glimmer on her ceiling in the glow from the lamp I leave on all night. I push back the curtain. Thin gilded light falls across the floor, where various soft toys and yesterday’s clothes are scattered. Her favourite cuddly sheep, Hannibal, is flung to the foot of her bed. He owes his name to Sinead, who once saw The Silence of the Lambs illicitly at a friend’s house, having promised they were borrowing 27 Dresses. Daisy is still in bed, but awake. She has a strained, stretched look on her face, and her eyes are huge, dilated by the dark.

‘I feel sick,’ she says.

‘What a shame, sweetheart.’ I put my hand on her forehead, but she feels quite cool. ‘Especially today.’

‘What day is it?’ she says.

A little ill-formed anxiety worms its way into my mind.

‘It’s the pantomime. Granny and Grandad are taking us.’

‘I don’t want to go,’ she says.

‘But you were so looking forward to it.’ Inside I’m cursing a little, anticipating Richard’s reaction. ‘Snow White. It’s sure to be fun.’

‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘I can’t, Mum. I feel sick and my legs hurt.’

Daisy always gets nauseous when she gets ill. They each have their own fingerprint of symptoms. Sinead, when she was younger, would produce dazzling high temperatures, epic fevers, when she’d suddenly sit up straight in bed and pronounce in a clear bright shiny voice, the things she said as random and meaningless as sleep-talk, yet sounding full of significance. Daisy gets sickness and stomach aches. She’s been like that from a baby, when she used to get colic in the middle of the night, and I’d walk her up and down the living room with the TV on, watching old black and white films, or in desperation take her into the kitchen, where the soft thick rush of the cooker hood might soothe her at last into sleep.

I go downstairs to make coffee; I’ll take a cup to Richard before I tell him. It’s a blue icy day, the ground hard and white, a lavish sky; but the fat glittery icicles that hang from the corner of the shed are iridescent, starting to drip. Soon the thaw will set in. It’s very still, no traffic noise: the sunk sap of the year. With huge gratitude, I feel the day’s first caffeine sliding into my veins.

When I go back upstairs with the coffee, Sinead has drifted off to her bedroom and her iPod.

Richard opens one eye.

‘Daisy’s ill,’ I tell him.

‘Christ. That’s just what we needed. What’s wrong?’

‘Some sort of virus. I’m not sure she can come.’

‘For goodness’ sake, she’s only got to sit through a pantomime.’

‘She’s not well, Richard.’

‘They were really looking forward to it.’

‘So was she. I mean, she’s not doing this deliberately.’

He sits up, sprawls back on the pillow and yawns, disordered by sleep, his face lined by the creases in the pillowslip. He looks older first thing in the morning, and away from the neat symmetries of his work clothes.

‘Give her some Calpol,’ he says. ‘She’ll probably be fine.’

‘She feels too sick,’ I tell him.

‘You’re so soft with those children.’ There’s an edge of irritation to his voice.

I feel I should at least try. I get the Calpol from the bathroom cabinet, take it to her room and pour it into the spoon, making a little comedy act of it. Normally she likes to see this, the sticky recalcitrant liquid that won’t go where you want it to, that glops and lurches away from you. Now she watches me with a slightly desperate look.

‘I can’t, Mum. I feel too sick.’

I take the spoon to the bathroom and tip it down the sink.

Richard has heard it all.

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, let me do it,’ he says.

He gets up, pulls on his dressing gown, goes to get the Calpol. But when he sees her pallor, he softens a little.

‘Dad, I’m not going to,’ she says. ‘Please don’t make me.’

He ruffles her hair. ‘Just try for me, OK, munchkin?’

I watch from the door as she parts her lips a little. She’s more willing to try for him; she’s always so hungry to please him. He eases the spoon into her mouth. She half swallows the liquid, then noisily retches it up.

He steps smartly back.

‘Sorry, sweetheart. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.’

He wipes her mouth and kisses the top of her head, penitent. He follows me back to the bathroom.

‘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.

‘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.’

Her tears always bring a lump to my throat, and then a kind of worry that she has such power over me, a feeling that this shouldn’t be, that it’s weak, ineffectual. I know I’m overprotective, that I find it hard to tolerate my child being unhappy. That I’m not like other women, with their anoraks and certainty. I know this is a flaw in me.

We park down the road from school. I give her a tissue and she wipes her eyes.

‘Is my nose red?’ she says.

‘You look great,’ I tell her.

‘You didn’t answer my question, Mum,’ she says.

In the road outside school, there’s the usual stand-off, two lines of traffic facing one another. There are parents who persist in dropping their children here, optimism triumphing over experience; they hoot futilely but nobody can move. Children mill round in padded winter coats, some of them newly purchased and a little too large; they’re moving fast and anarchically, as though the wildness of the weather is inside them. People have changed over the holiday. One child looks cute in new glasses, another has visibly grown. Natalie’s mother, who so liked my house, is pulling at a frenetic puppy. Someone else, hugely pregnant in December, has her immaculate baby in a sling. The baby still has that translucent unfinished look, so you feel if you held his hand to the light, perhaps you would see straight through. The sight pulls at women’s eyes and the same expression crosses all their faces, eyes widening, as though this is still a surprise. Crocuses are coming up in the lawn in front of the school; they have the tender colours of paint mixed with too much water, a fragile buttery yellow, and purple, pale as the veins inside a woman’s wrist. It’s only been a fortnight, and there’s so much that is new.

We’re holding hands as we walk towards the gate; her hand is tightening in mine. I look down at her. Her face is set, taut.

‘D’you want me to wait with you till the bell goes?’

I offer this as a choice, though really I have no choice: her hand is wrapped around mine like a bandage. She nods but doesn’t speak.

We stand there together by the gate as the children surge forward. The wind blows my hair in my mouth, but I’m holding Daisy with one hand and her lunchbox with the other, and I can’t push it back. My black denim coat, though stylish, is a little too cold for the day. We hear broken-off bits of conversation, blown round us like fallen leaves. Someone is making a complicated arrangement for tonight, involving tea and maths and ballet classes; someone else had fifteen to dinner for Christmas, and honestly it was like a military operation…

Over the heads of the children, I see the back of a man’s neck, his leather-jacketed shoulders, his rumpled head. It’s Fergal with his little boy. He must have walked straight past me. This makes me uncomfortable. I don’t know if he’s forgotten me, or simply hasn’t seen me. I start to feel unreal with no one to talk to.

And then Nicky is there, her children tugging at her, the ends of her stripy scarf streaming out behind her. Her smile warms me through.

‘Wow!’ she says. ‘So this is the coat. Fabulous! I am green.’

‘Thanks,’ I say.

As always she’s rushing, everything on the most feverish of schedules, dropping off the boys before jumping into her car and heading off to her other life at Praxis, the advertising agency. But she sees that Daisy is troubled and she ruffles her hair with her hand.

‘Not feeling too good, lambchop?’ she says. ‘Trust me, you’re not the only one. I hate the first day of term. Neil had to positively kick me out of bed.’

She pats Daisy’s shoulder; Daisy doesn’t turn to her. The boys pull at her, and she’s off, her scarf fringes flapping.

The bell rings.

‘There we go,’ I say, bending to kiss the top of Daisy’s head.

She wraps herself around me.

‘Come on, sweetheart.’

I try to prise her fingers away from my hand, but they stick like pieces of Elastoplast.

‘Mum, I can’t do this,’ she says. ‘Don’t make me.’

I cannot disentangle her from me. I know this is ridiculous, but I can’t.

People are looking at us with unconcealed curiosity. There are all these warnings in my head, slogans from the war between parents and children. They do try it on…Give them an inch…And I hear Gina at her most dogmatic, pronouncing on the pitfalls of modern parenting: You don’t want to go the brown rice and sandals route, you’ve got to show them who’s boss…

‘Sweetheart, you’ll be fine when you get into class.’

She is crying openly now, shivering with it. She doesn’t even seem to hear me.

‘Come on, let’s go in together.’

I try to move towards the gate, but the whole weight of her body is pressed against me.

‘I can’t, Mum,’ she says again.

Fergal passes, coming out. He looks at me and nods but doesn’t smile, recognising my difficulty. Embarrassment washes hotly across my skin.

Something gives way inside me.

‘OK. We’ll go home,’ I tell her.

I bend and hug her, burying my face in the mango smell of her hair. Immediately she stops crying, though she’s shivering still. I have a sudden doubt: if only I’d pushed a little harder, I could have got her into class. I feel a pang for the exhibition, for the cat with the high-heeled shoe and the tunnels made of hair. Now I will never see them. But it’s done, we can’t go back. The front of my new black denim coat is damp where she’s been crying against me.