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.

CHAPTER 4

I wake in the night and immediately all the sleepiness falls from me. I hear the night sounds, the clock at St Agatha’s emptily striking three, a siren, the staccato bark of a fox as he ranges along the backs of the houses. Beside me, Richard snores softly.

There in the cold darkness, my mind is clear, free of the day’s clutter, like a quiet pool. I’m alert, taut: I could run with the fox for miles. In that clarity, I start to add up all the food that Daisy has eaten for the last few days. Yesterday: a packet of crisps and about three spoonfuls of rice with gravy at tea-time. The day before yesterday: two water biscuits and half a packet of crisps. The day before that, I can’t quite remember: perhaps it was a piece of apple and half a chocolate crispy cake from a whole batch I made.

I’ve tried so hard to tempt her, cooked all her favourite things, offered them to her with that warm abundant feeling that fills you when you make good food for your children. Tomato soup from fresh tomatoes, ripe to the point of sweetness, with fennel and herbs for their green flavour, just a few so there wouldn’t be lots of leafy bits, and a swirl of cream on top. Fried chicken and noodles, her favourite, and a sponge cake with a lavish filling of strawberry conserve. Daisy helped me, sieving the icing sugar on top, making an intricate pattern of crescents she said she couldn’t get right, postponing the moment of eating; then, when I cut her a slice, she crumbled it up and left it. Chocolate crispy cakes, with a slab of organic Green and Black’s I found in the delicatessen. I tasted it when I’d melted it: it was velvet on my tongue, its scented richness making me sneeze. Normally Daisy would come and scrape the bowl, greedy and bright-eyed as some small animal, eagerly licking the dark congealing sweetness from the spoon, but she said she wouldn’t bother, she needed to finish her drawing. When the cakes were done, still warm, sticky, I put one on a plate for her. She took a bite and left it.

‘Sweetheart, don’t you like it? Perhaps I used the wrong chocolate.’

‘It’s fine, Mum,’ she said. ‘Really. I’ll have it later.’

When Sinead came in from school, the house still smelt seductively of chocolate. She came straight to the kitchen, drawn by the smell; her nose and fingers were red with cold. ‘Oh, yum,’ she said, putting her hand to the plate.

I told her she could only have one, they were for Daisy; that I was sorry, that seemed so mean, but we had to get Daisy well; that I’d make another batch for her.

Daisy looked up from her drawing.

‘I don’t mind, Sinead,’ she said. ‘You eat them. I’m not hungry.’

In that moment in the three o’clock dark, I see that all these things I’ve made are about as much use as nourishment as the offerings of milk or olives that peasants leave by the hearth—to avert catastrophe, perhaps, or please the household spirits. Fear lays cold fingers on my skin.

Guiltily, I whisper in Richard’s ear.

‘Richard, wake up.’

He mutters something I can’t make out, moves suddenly.

‘What is it?’ There’s a splinter of panic in his voice. I’ve startled him, or intruded into some alarming dream.

He opens his eyes.

I suddenly remember he has an important meeting tomorrow. I feel ashamed.

‘I shouldn’t have woken you. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s a bit late for that,’ he says. The words are slurred, thick with sleep.

‘I’ve been worrying about Daisy. I was going through everything she’d eaten for the last few days.’

‘She’s fine,’ he says. ‘She’ll be better soon.’

He inches in closer, moves his hand on my breast. I’m cold, and my nipple is taut against his palm.

‘Richard, she’s hardly eating anything.’

‘Kids can last for ages without much food as long as they’re drinking,’ he says.

‘I’m worried she’s going to starve.’

‘Darling, don’t let’s go getting all melodramatic,’ he says. There’s an edge of exasperation in his voice. ‘If you’re worried, you’ll just have to take her back to the doctor.’

‘He wasn’t any use before,’ I say.

I took her to the GP last week—two weeks into term, and she’d scarcely been to school. He looked at Daisy’s ears and tonsils, said everything was fine and she probably had post-viral fatigue and she could go to school but she shouldn’t run around. I said, ‘She’s feeling sick,’ and he said nausea isn’t anything to worry about, nausea doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong. I said she wasn’t eating. ‘She’ll eat again in her own good time,’ he said. ‘Children are tougher than we think, Mrs Lydgate.’

‘But what can he do?’ I say to Richard. ‘She hasn’t got an infection or sore throat or anything. She doesn’t need antibiotics.’

‘You don’t know that,’ he says.

‘And if it’s a post-viral thing, you just have to wait for it to get better, don’t you?’

‘Well, at least it might put your mind at rest,’ he says.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Honestly,’ he says, ‘what on earth is the point of lying here worrying if you refuse to do anything about it?’

‘But I know he’ll just say, “Come back in a fortnight.”’

‘Maybe you should ask for her to be referred,’ he says.

‘To the hospital?’ This surprises me.

‘Well, if you’re worried. You could ask to see a specialist.’

‘But I can’t just ask the GP to do that.’

‘Of course you can. For God’s sake, isn’t that what we pay our taxes for? It’s like you never feel you have a right to anything,’ he says, quite affectionately.

I can feel him hard against my thigh; I move my hand down, encircle him. I feel I owe him this, now I’ve woken him. He’s pushing up my nightdress.

‘Take this thing off,’ he says.

I pull it over my head. I turn the bedside light on; Richard likes to look. He runs his hand down me, eases his finger inside me.

‘You’re not very wet,’ he says.

‘Lick your hand. I’ll be fine. I’m just a bit tired, that’s all.’

He moves his wet finger on me.

I’m dragging a net through my mind, trawling for sex, conjuring up images that are more and more extreme, bits of Anaïs Nin, scenes from Secretary, things I’ve read, things I’ve done, but I can’t hold onto them. Like fish in a wide-meshed net they flicker and fade and dive away into darkness. Instead of sex, I’m thinking about this morning, when we’d run out of our usual mineral water, we only had Vittel, not Evian, and Daisy said she couldn’t drink it because it tasted like milk. I left her in the house on her own, with strict instructions not to answer the door, drove to the nearest Waitrose through heavy traffic, and bought the kind of Evian she likes best, with a sports cap. It took me forty-five minutes.

I gave her the bottle of water. She took a sip, frowned, pushed the bottle away.

‘Sorry, Mum,’ she said.

I knelt beside her.

‘Daisy, you’ve got to drink something. You’ve got to drink halfway down this bottle by lunchtime or I shall call the doctor.’

I put a mark on the bottle. Slowly, through the morning, she drank her way down to the mark.

Richard’s cock in my hand is hard and full and his breathing is heavy; and he needs to sleep and he’s got that meeting today. I’m not being fair to him, making him wait like this. I lift his hand away from me.

‘I don’t think I can come tonight,’ I say. ‘Don’t worry.’

I roll over on top of him.

‘Well, if you’re sure,’ he says.

I kneel astride him and he slides into me. He reaches up lazily to touch my breasts. I don’t quite like this. Since the months of breastfeeding Daisy, I sometimes don’t like to have my breasts touched; the feeling seems to move from irritating to intense with nothing in between, as though there’s some short-circuit in me. I don’t let this show.

He moves rapidly, comes with a sigh.

I slide off him, turn over, with him tucked into my back. He sinks rapidly into sleep, his breath warm on my shoulder; I haven’t even turned off the light.

I lie there for a while, but sleep feels far from me. The light of the lamp falls on the bedroom walls, which are ragrolled and opulently red; the hatstand and the hat with a plume that I bought in a junk shop cast extravagant shadows. I had a fantasy in mind when I planned and painted this room, as though it were an opera set, perhaps for La Traviata, which Richard once took me to see. We have a French cherrywood bed with a scrolled head and feet, the floor is darkly varnished, the red of the walls is rich by lamplight, though rather oppressive by day; and there are heavy curtains patterned with arum lilies, and a poster from an exhibition of designs for the Ballet Russe, that we went to see when Sinead was doing a ballet project. The poster shows a kind of erotic dance, and when I bought it, just glancing at it quickly and knowing I liked it, I thought there were two figures there, entwined in some sexual ritual; though when I got it home and took it out to frame it I saw it was really a solitary figure, neither male nor female, at once muscled and voluptuous, bejewelled and draped in lavish folds of cloth—and the other shape was a scarf red as flame that twisted and curved close, gauzy, without substance, yet moving like the body of a lover.

I get up silently, and take Richard’s dressing gown from the foot of the bed and wrap it round me. Mine is silk, and in this weather putting it on just makes you feel colder.

I go down to the kitchen. I make some toast, but the butter is hard and won’t spread. There’s some wine left in the bottle we drank with dinner: Richard is keeping to his resolution to drink less whisky in the evening. I pour myself a glass; in the cold, it has no scent, but I feel a sudden easing as it glides into my veins.

The room is untidy, the girls’ things scattered around—Sinead’s flower scrunchies and copies of Heat, and drawings Daisy has done, sketches of injured animals, and her box of magnetic fridge poetry. She hasn’t done a new poem for weeks; her pre-Christmas offering is still on the door of the fridge. ‘The gold witch crept to the top.’ In the stillness and cold, untidy but with nobody there, the kitchen has the look of a room abandoned in a hurry, by people who’ve been warned of some disaster or called away. When I see myself in the mirror over the fireplace I realise I haven’t washed my hair for a week.

There’s a holiday brochure that came in the post, showing villas in Tuscany. I sip the wine and flick through, seeking to lose myself in these fields of sunflowers and cities of blond towers, but worry has its claws in me, it can’t be pushed away. With a sudden resolve I take a piece of paper that’s lying there and a purple felt-tip of Daisy’s. I write ‘To Do for Daisy’ at the top of the page, then ‘1. Go to GP. 2. Make a food diary—allergies? 3. Clear out her room—take away all rugs, cuddlies etc. Dust mites? 4. Homeopathy/herbalism—ask Nicky.’ Nicky got to know lots of alternative people during her transient passion for aromatherapy; tomorrow I shall ring her. I stick the list up on the fridge, next to Daisy’s poem. I am in control again: there’s so much I can do. I tell myself that Richard was right, that I have been over-emotional, that it will soon be over, and Daisy will be well. I picture myself chatting about it with Nicky at the Café Rouge over some nice Pinot Grigio. Honestly, I was sure that Daisy had something serious—but look at her now… I gulp down the rest of the wine and feel the fear edge away from me.

On the way back to bed I look in on Daisy. She’s sleeping quietly now, the duvet pulled up high and lifting with her breathing. Her room feels warmer than the rest of the house; above her there’s a glimmer of stencilled stars. Nothing can harm her here.

I go back to our bedroom and slip in beside Richard, and lie awake and hear the bark of the fox, moving rapidly across the long line of gardens, careless of hedges and fences, as though this whole wide territory were his.

CHAPTER 5

There’s a postcard for me. At first, I don’t see it: it’s hidden under a letter from Richard’s parents, thanking Sinead and Daisy for their thank-you letters. I’m smiling to myself, at these flower-chains of gratitude and obligation that could go on for ever, when my eye falls on the postcard. I pick it up with care, as though it could hurt me. I’m glad that Richard has gone to work already. He doesn’t need to know.

There are four pictures. I look at them for a moment, not wanting to turn the card over. They’re conventional, touristy scenes. I read the captions. The Reichstag. Charlottenburg Castle. Kurfürstendamm. Unter den Linden. These places sound familiar, though I don’t know how to pronounce them. Charlottenburg Castle is white and opulent under a vast summer sky; Kurfürstendamm and Unter den Linden are shown by night, with lots of neon. The caption says, ‘I love Berlin.’ The dot of the ‘i’ in Berlin is a little red heart.

My heart pounds. I turn the card over. I can see the thought that went into this, how it was undoubtedly all planned, composed on a piece of rough paper, then copied out so carefully in this neat, rather childish handwriting.

Darling, I do wish you’d write. It’s been so very very long. And I hear you’ve got a lovely little girl of your own, now. It’s honestly no exaggeration to say that I would adore to see her.

And then the address, as before.

Darling. Like a lover. Like somebody who loves.

I have a brief moment of hope, a hope as glittery and enticing as a shard of coloured glass: you could cut yourself on it. Then rage that this comes now—rage at this wretched timing, when Daisy is ill, when I’m so full of this desperate anxiety. I hide the card at the bottom of the bin.

CHAPTER 6

Daisy is a little better. She dresses, eats some toast. When she cleans her teeth, she sounds as though she’s going to be sick, but we take some deep breaths together and the worst of the feeling passes. She doesn’t cry on the way to school, though she’s limping and she says her legs are hurting.

My confidence of last night is still with me: I’m sure I can solve this. I do all the things on my list. I ring the GP and make an appointment for this afternoon after school. I spend the morning cleaning Daisy’s room, moving all her cuddly animals out, as you’re meant to do if your child has asthma, and taking away her rug in case it’s been treated with pesticides, and steam-cleaning the mattress to immolate the dustmites. A sense of virtue opens out in me; I know her room is safe and pure and clean.

At lunchtime I ring Nicky.

‘I’ve got just the guy for you,’ she says, when I tell her about Daisy. ‘Helmut Wolf. He’s a kinaesiologist—you have to hold these little glass bottles and he tests your muscle strength to see if you’re allergic. It’s weird but it works. He was wonderful with my migraines. Trust me, he can help Daisy.’

I write his number down.

‘Neil thinks he’s nuts, of course,’ she says.

Somehow this makes me less sure about Helmut Wolf, though that’s certainly not her intention.

We talk about her boys. Max is doing brilliantly with his reading; his teacher is starting to hint he may be gifted. And Callum came downstairs last night wearing nothing but Nicky’s silver sandals and announced he was Postman Pat. Nicky herself is feeling rather smug: she’s given up smoking again and is on a detox diet. She says I wouldn’t believe the things she can do with a chickpea.

‘And how are—things generally?’ I say then, using one of those carefully vague phrases we use to hint at that separate, secret part of her—which for now means Simon at Praxis, and the illicit e-mails.

‘Fantastic.’ Her voice is lowered, with a whisper of risk. ‘But, look, I can’t talk now.’

We fix a date for a drink at the Café Rouge.

At three-thirty, I park down the road from the school gate. I open the car door and the rain comes down. I don’t have my umbrella. At first I fight against it, turning up my collar, but soon I’m soaked, so I lift up my face and let it fall on me, and it feels surprisingly pleasant, drenching me through. The whole street is musical with water, and outside the church on the corner the daffodils that are just opening around the war memorial are beaten down and ragged from the storm. The church noticeboard is advertising some course they’re running till Easter, enticing you in with the promise that you will discover life’s meaning. The wet air smells seductively of spring.

I join the group of parents at the gate, their open umbrellas like a flock of bright-winged birds alighting. Toddlers in buggies fight against the transparent rainshields spread across them, angry fists distending the plastic, wailing with red open mouths. Daisy was always like that: she’d fight and fight, she couldn’t bear to be shut in. Well, I can understand.

The bell rings, the caretaker opens the gate. Inside, the paving stones are slick with wet.

People around me are talking about their children.

‘Yeah, well, we’ve had them a few times, girls have this long hair and they put their heads together and whisper…My mother used to put malt vinegar on my hair…’

‘Ellie was off with a sore throat, and it was really expensive because I had to buy Liam some Lego to bribe him to go into school. It was five pounds, I ask you…’

One of the teachers is leaving already—Mrs Nicholls, who sometimes takes Daisy for music. She sees me there, half smiles in my direction, comes towards me.

‘Mrs Lydgate. I’ve heard about your troubles with Daisy.’ Her face is close to mine, she’s speaking in an undertone, as though this is something of which I may be ashamed. ‘I did want to say—I really do feel you’re doing the right thing in making her come in.’

‘I don’t know,’ I say.

‘It’s awful if your child’s unhappy at school,’ she says. ‘I had a lot of trouble with my daughter once—she wouldn’t go to school. We found it was friendship problems.’

‘I really don’t think it’s that,’ I say. ‘Daisy’s had flu, it’s like she can’t get over it.’

‘I used to send my daughter in with a nice snack for break time. One of those muesli bars, or a packet of raisins. She seemed to find it a comfort. Perhaps you could try that with Daisy.’

‘It’s a good idea,’ I say politely. ‘It’s just such a problem finding anything that she’ll eat.’

‘Well, keep up the good work,’ she says, and weaves her way out through the mass of parents. I feel uneasy, as though I have been reprimanded, although I’m sure she was only trying to be helpful. The rain collects in my parting and splashes down my face like falling tears.

In front of me the women shift and move. I see Fergal, just ahead of me, the unruly fair hair at the back of his head, the dark wet gleam of his jacket. He has a large umbrella that says Assisted Evolution.

I edge forward. He turns and sees me, eyes widening with recognition. I admit to myself that this is what I meant to happen. He makes a slight beckoning gesture with his head. With a huge sense of inchoate relief I move in under his umbrella.

‘Catriona.’ He smiles. I feel that something in me amuses him.

We have to stand close to stay out of the wet. He’s chewing gum: I can smell his wet hair and skin. I’m suddenly aware of how pink my face must be, of my hair all plastered down, that I’m wearing my oldest coat and the cuffs are fraying.

‘I don’t often see you here,’ he says.

Maybe, I think, he has been looking for me. I remember that fantasy I had, of moving my hands across his face and his head. My skin is suddenly hot.

‘I’m not here very often,’ I tell him. ‘Daisy’s ill.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I don’t know. Nobody seems to know.’

He’s listening, waiting.

‘Richard tells me not to worry—he thinks it’s just flu—you know, some kind of virus.’

He looks me up and down, taking me in.

‘It makes it harder really,’ I tell him. ‘I know this must sound stupid—but the more he says I mustn’t worry, the worse I seem to feel.’

‘Poor kid,’ he says. ‘Poor you.’

He puts his hand on my arm, leaves it there perhaps a second too long. A hunger opens out in me. I would like to peel back my wet sleeve and feel his hand warm on my skin.

We stand there for a moment, watching the children, while the rain beats down like a drumming of many fingers.

‘By the way,’ he says then, ‘I know why I know you.’

‘Oh.’ I feel that I am falling.

‘Aimee Graves,’ he says. His tone is easy, as if it’s the most natural thing.

He hears my quick intake of breath.

‘I’m right, then,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry—perhaps I shouldn’t have talked about it here.’

He turns toward me: he has a frown like a question.

For a moment, I don’t answer, I don’t know what I think. There are two things at once: this fear that makes my pulse so thin and fast and jagged, and a strange voluptuous sense of relief, of wanting to open myself up to him completely.

‘You know her?’ I say.

‘I met her once,’ he says. ‘It was a story I was researching.’

‘She’s alive, then, she’s OK?’

‘She’s OK,’ he says.

‘So you know all about me,’ I say, quite lightly.

‘I didn’t say that,’ he says.

I can see Daisy coming; it’s the end of the conversation. Daisy is with Megan, who has her arm around her. She looks so pale, so different from the other girls. She says goodbye to Megan and comes to me. I hug her, she sinks her face into me. Fergal pulls away a little, but holds his umbrella above us.

‘OK?’ I say, my mouth in her hair.

‘Mmm.’ She’s trembling a little.

I take her bag, as you might with a much younger child. She doesn’t protest at this indignity.

‘Catriona, if you want to talk some time,’ says Fergal. ‘I mean, I could explain.’

I nod. He moves off to find Jamie.

The rain is easing up now. There’s a gleam of sunlight between the patchy clouds, and a rainbow flung across the sky behind us. I point out the rainbow to Daisy, but she doesn’t turn.

We walk back to the car. I feel shaken.

I open the car door for her. ‘Look, I brought Hannibal for you. He’s missed you,’ I tell her.

‘Honestly, Mum, he’s a cuddly toy,’ she says. ‘And what if somebody sees?’

‘Nobody can see,’ I tell her.

She tucks him under her arm.

I watch her in the mirror.

‘So was it OK today?’ I ask her.

‘My stomach hurt,’ she says. ‘I wanted to come home but Mrs Griffiths wouldn’t let me. She said, “Well, what should I do? I can’t send you home when you’re hardly ever here.”’

We drive to the doctor’s through the white shine of the puddles.

‘Did anything interesting happen?’ I say.

‘We had to do our New Year wishes,’ she says.

‘So what did you put?’

‘I put world peace and a cat. We all put world peace, and Kieran put, “For my Dad to get his new kidney.” Mrs Griffiths said if we put world peace we should put it first, but when we came to Kieran she said, “Well, which do you think is the more important?”’

There’s a lump in my throat, but I don’t know why. There are so many things to cry for.

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.

There was one man called Marco, whom she met through a Lonely Hearts column in the local paper. He was, or claimed to be, Italian. She always said she liked a man with an accent. He moved in with us; he was smooth, flash, with lots of chest hair and gold jewellery. The flat was clean and tidy while Marco was with us; sometimes I heard my mother singing as she worked. When he left, taking all her savings and even the money from the gas meter, and she realised she’d been conned, that all his protestations of love were just an elaborate charade, something seemed to die in her. That was when she started buying sherry instead of wine. She lost her job. Sometimes she’d be virtually insensible when I came in from school, and I’d have to take off her outer clothes and tuck her up in bed. One day I came home all excited, bursting to tell her I’d won the second-year Art prize: it was one of those moments when life feels full of promise and shiny, like a present just ready and waiting for you to unwrap. But my mother was snoring on the sofa, the front of her blouse hanging open, and there was no one to tell. Sometimes she’d be coherent but maudlin, full of platitudes, weeping and saying again and again how she’d tried to give me a good life but it had all gone wrong, and eating Hellmann’s Mayonnaise from the jar with a tablespoon. I started taking money from her purse, to buy food. I spilt nail varnish on her skirt and she hit me with a clothes-hanger. When I got into a stupid fight at school, she turned up drunk and belligerent in the school office, demanding to see the headmistress, and had to be seen off the premises by the caretaker.

That was when the social worker started visiting. The third time she came, she told me to pack and took me out to her car.

The Poplars. It’s the smell I remember: disinfectant, cabbage, adolescent sweat. And the texture of it, everything rough, worn, frayed. Lino, and thin blankets, and flabby white bread and corned beef, and having to ask for every sanitary towel. The sofas had the springs sticking through, and when Darren Reames in one of his moods ripped off some of the wallpaper, it stayed like that for months, with a great gaping tear. There weren’t enough electric points: you had to unplug the fridge to watch the television, so the milk was usually sour. There was never enough to eat. Once I said I was hungry and Brian Meredith told me not to talk because talking wasted energy.

Brian Meredith ran the place; he’d been in the SAS. He was short, dapper, smart in his red or blue blazers, and pleasant to visiting social workers, who liked his ready handshake and his friendly yellow Labrador stretched out on the floor by his desk. He looked like everyone’s favourite uncle—and he knew how to hit without leaving a mark on you. Looking back, I can see why he got away with it: he took the really difficult kids, that nobody else would touch. Girls with shiny, sequiny names—Kylie, Demi, Sigourney—and wrecked lives. Boys who set fires, who used knives. All of them lashing out at the people who tried to help them with what I see now was the terrible rage of those who have nothing to lose: children who couldn’t be consoled. Like Darren, who’d set fire to his school and then to his house with his grandfather in it. Or Jason Oakley, who said his dad had interfered with him, who kicked a care worker in the stomach when she was pregnant, so she miscarried: though in the end even Brian Meredith couldn’t cope with Jason, and he was sent to Avalon Close, an adolescent psychiatric unit with a grim reputation. Girls like Aimee Graves, whose father had held her head in the loo and flushed it, who came into Care and had seventeen foster placements, Aimee who was so misnamed, for no one loved her. Except me, for a while. Except me.

Brian Meredith solved some big problems for the council. He did what he liked, and his methods were all his own. Two rooms on the second floor. The secret of his success. Pindown. Each room with a bed, a table, a flimsy electric fire, and the glass-panelled door, the glass screened with brown paper. There were no locks, no keys, but saucepans were hung on the outside of the door handle, and someone was always there, the other side of the door. If you misbehaved or ran away, that’s where they put you. They took your clothes and shoes: you had to wear your pyjamas. If you wanted to go to the toilet, you had to knock on the door. They sat you at the table to write down the wrong things you’d done. The rules were stuck on the wall, a list with lots of ‘no’s: no smoking, TV, radio, books; and no communicating out of the window without permission—because you could see the woman who lived in the flat next door, her sitting room was level with your window, you could see right in. You’d watch her dusting, watching television, sitting on the arm of the sofa and having a quiet smoke, and you’d want to bang on your window, to see if she might wave to you. Sometimes you felt she was your only friend.

Most of the staff were young. Some were doing it for experience, they wanted to get on courses and become proper social workers, the kind who sat in offices and went to case conferences, and visited places like The Poplars then drove away in their cars. Some of them just couldn’t get anything better. Most of them wanted to help, really. They wore denim and had piercings and said how much they liked the music we listened to and tried to get us to talk about our feelings. You could see when they talked to you, trying to get near you, how they yearned for some kind of revelation—that you would give them the gift of some confidence, a disclosure or confession about your family and what had been done to you, they were longing for your trust, though not knowing what the hell to do with it if you gave it. They were OK, most of them. Only Brian Meredith hit us. But they all used Pindown.

Lesley was the nicest. She arrived soon after me. She was perhaps ten years older than me, twenty-three to my thirteen. Lesley became my key worker. She was different from the others, rather awkward and clumsy, with feet too big for her body, but her eyes were quiet when they rested on you.

Lesley was very conscientious. She took me off for individual sessions. We sat on the square of carpet in the staffroom—the only bit of carpet in the place—and did exercises from a ringbound manual she had, called Building Self-Esteem. She drew a self-esteem tree on a big piece of paper with felt tips; there were fruit on the branches, and you had to write something about yourself that you liked in each of the fruit. I remember the dirty cups on the coffee table, and the smell of Jeyes from the corridor where someone had been sick. I couldn’t think of much to write in the fruit. She turned a page of her book. ‘If I could wave a magic wand, what would you wish for?’ she said. ‘When you’re grown-up and all this is behind you, what would you want to have?’ I sat there in the smell of cabbage and disinfectant. ‘Close your eyes,’ she said. I closed my eyes, and saw it all, clear, vivid. Perhaps it was the tree she’d drawn, triggering something in me. I saw lots of trees, a garden; I saw a house and children and a husband, all these images welling up in me, precise as though I’d drawn them. ‘I’d like to have children,’ I said. ‘I’d like to have a family of my own. And a place to live, just us and nobody else.’ I saw, heard it all in my head: a lawn, a lily pool, the splashing of a fountain in the pool, the laughter of children. In a moment of hope that warmed me through, there on the thin frayed carpet: I will have them, I thought, these things.

My mother visited, occasionally, erratically, dressed up, but not for me. Always in a hurry, as though there was somewhere else she needed to be. Like someone at a party, looking over your shoulder for the person they want to talk to, and shifty, as though she was implicated in some guilt by merely being there. Sometimes she brought presents: exuberant cuddly toys, large fluffy rabbits with satin hearts on their chests. I put the toys on the window sill of the room I shared with Aimee. Sometimes my mother was drunk when she came, sentimental, and full of self-pity; saying over and over how she’d done her best for me, done everything she could.

‘When can I come home?’

‘Soon. Very soon, Trina.’ Smoking her Marlboros, fiddling with her rings. ‘I just need to get myself together. You’re OK in here, then, are you?’

‘I hate it.’

‘Oh,’ she’d say. ‘They seem nice enough.’

Afterwards Lesley would sit on my bed and talk to me.

‘How do you feel about your mum, my love? How does it all make you feel?’

I never knew how to answer these questions.

During the week we were meant to go to school. The others mostly didn’t; they’d go off to the towpath, where they’d sit on rubber tyres and inhale lighter fuel and throw stones into the water; or to the Glendale Centre, where when they got bored they’d steal things from the shops. I was the only one who went on going to school.

It was a sprawling comprehensive, full of children I envied, with homes to go to and trainers that were regularly replaced. I didn’t do well: I was always rather hungry and distracted. I went because of the art: because the art rooms were always open at lunchtime. You could mess about with pens and paints and do whatever you wanted and nobody bothered you. It was quiet, in a way that The Poplars never was—just Capital Radio playing, and a few other girls softly talking, and the drumming of the rain on the mezzanine roof: it always seemed to be raining, that’s how it is in my memory, the windows clouded with condensation so no one could see in. And there I discovered this sweet surprising thing—that with a pen or paintbrush in my hand, there was a flow to my life, and I could draw things that pleased me, and the other girls would stop and look as they passed. However tired I was, however hungry, this flow and freedom still happened, till The Poplars faded away, to a smoky blur on the edges of my mind, and I entered a different place, a place of shapes, of colours, viridian and cobalt and burnt sienna, where I felt for a while a secret guarded joy.

There was a teacher called Miss Jenkins who took an interest in me. She had an ex-hippy air—she wore hoops in her ears and liked embroidered cardigans. She never asked me how I felt or wanted to talk about me. She must have known where I came from, but it didn’t seem to matter. She showed me things—a book of Impressionist paintings; a postcard of a picture by Pisanello that I adored, of a velvety dark wood studded with birds like jewels; a book of botanical drawings she’d bought at Kew. She gave me pictures to copy, to explore; and suggested materials I could try—fine pens, oil paints, acrylics, and plaster to make a 3-D picture—which they only used in class at A-level. I was privileged, I knew, and at moments like these I felt rich. So I went on going to school, for the quiet hours in the art room and the complicated sweet scent of acrylic paint that I could still smell hours afterwards, and Miss Jenkins whose first name I never knew.

I never got to know the other girls. I kept myself a little apart, not wanting them to find out about me. I saw this as a temporary thing. When things are OK, when this bad bit is over, when I’m back with my mother, I thought—then I will talk to them, make friends, be one of them. Not till then. Aimee at The Poplars was my only friend.

She was wild, Aimee: a sharp, knowing face, hair like fire, tattoos all down her arm. She had a razor-blade sewn into the hem of her jeans. For emergencies, she said. She never went to school.

Aimee got picked on a lot by the staff at The Poplars. They told her she was trouble. She wasn’t like me, she wouldn’t just go along with things and bide her time. I’ve always been able to do this—blend into the background, not be conspicuous, not be seen—but Aimee couldn’t or wouldn’t: there was something in her, some flame that wouldn’t be quenched. Brian Meredith hit her more than the others—for nicking stuff and getting into fights and being lippy. She used to call him Megadeath. ‘He’s got it coming,’ she’d say. ‘I’ll do him over. Just you wait. One day.’ Once he kept her for three weeks in Pindown. When she came out she’d ripped all the skin from the sides of her fingernails and sometimes she’d shout in her sleep.

She ran away often. Sometimes she took me with her. She showed me how to do it, how to travel on a train without a ticket by hiding in the toilet, how to steal. We’d plan it all together in the room we shared, the street light leaking through the thin curtains onto the battered candlewick of our bedspreads. Each time it was like falling in love: each time we thought this was the day, the time, the Real Thing. Usually, we’d head for Brighton, where Aimee had heard you could live in a squat and find some people who’d help you. Brighton was our promised land. We knew how it would be. We’d sell jewellery, those little leather thongs with stones on, we’d live on chips, read fortunes: we’d be like the older girls you saw there on the seafront, with their impossible glamour, their ratty ribboned hair and Oxfam coats and thin thin bodies and wide, generous smiles.

We’d pack our bags with a change of clothes and Kit Kats we’d nicked from Woolworths or mini-packs of Frosties, and put on our trainers and go. And maybe we’d get there, and sleep on the beach by the pier, and the police would come and pick us up, and we’d be put in Pindown.

The third time, they let me out after a week of Pindown. I was quiet and sensible and sat at the table and wrote down the wrong things I’d done. But Aimee was kept there for fifteen days, and when she came out she had a chest infection. They’d taken the fuse out of the fire because she’d been stroppy, she said.

I woke that night to see her sitting up in bed, the bedspread pulled up to her chin, her fists all bone, clasping it so tightly. The orange light through the curtains made her skin look sickly.

‘I’m going to tell,’ she said, through her coughs. ‘What it’s like here. What he does, that motherfucking bastard.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You mustn’t. You can’t.’

‘Just watch me,’ she said.

Her social worker from the Civic Centre, Jonny Leverett, was a pallid man who wore heavy-metal sweatshirts. The next time he came, he took her out in his Skoda, and they were gone for hours.

‘Well?’ I said, when she came back.

‘I told him,’ she said. Tearing at the skin at the sides of her fingernails. ‘They’ll have to do something now. They’ll have to come and get Megadeath. They’ll have to lock him up. Life would be too short for him.’

Two days later there was a case conference in the staffroom. The car park was full of smart cars and Lesley served coffee in the china cups that were kept for visiting professionals. Jonny Leverett came to take Aimee in.

I was watching television when she found me.

‘I’m going to Avalon Close,’ she said. Defiant still, but her eyes were far too bright.

‘You can’t be,’ I said. ‘For Chrissake, they’re all nutters in there.’

She shrugged. ‘It’s got to be better than here.’

She kicked a Pepsi can that was lying on the floor, sent it ricocheting across the room, her flaming red hair flying. But I could see she was frightened: there was shaking at the edges of her smile. I’d never seen her frightened.

‘What about Megadeath?’

‘They didn’t believe me,’ she said.

The day she went, she cut her wrists—with the blade she’d kept for emergencies. Lesley told me, when I got back from school. She was all right now, said Lesley, they’d stitched her up in Casualty. Lesley said not to worry too much about her, that Avalon Close would be right for her as she clearly needed help.

I think back to that sometimes. I try not to, but I still do, even now. Because I know there were things I could have done to help her. I could have gone to the police or phoned the Civic Centre and told them Aimee was telling the truth—that someone was lying, but it wasn’t her. I didn’t have the courage. Only silence seemed safe.

I missed Aimee terribly. What I could bear before, I couldn’t bear without her. Sometimes when I’d wake in the night, I’d think for a moment she was there in the other bed beside me; then with a lurch of cold I’d see it was Jade Cochrane, my new roommate—who was sad and mousey and never laughed at all.

My mother came again. She had a dark tan and new jewellery. She brought me an extra-big rabbit, with a satin heart on his chest that said ‘Yours 4 Ever’.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘I was going to wrap it up,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t have any paper.’

She was excited, skittish, pleased with herself. She smelt of alcohol but I didn’t think she was drunk. She looked different. This was it, I knew. At last. The time had come.

‘I’m living with Karl now,’ she said. ‘He comes from Dresden. I always did like a man with a nice accent. Karl’s an entrepreneur.’ She pronounced this carefully. ‘We’ve got a new flat in Haringey.’

‘I can come and live with you, then,’ I said.

‘Just give me a bit of time,’ she said. ‘Karl and me have got to get ourselves sorted. We’re just getting the flat together.’

Afterwards Lesley sat on my bed, asked how I was feeling. Really, I thought, she doesn’t need to bother any more, I won’t be here much longer.

‘My mum’s all right now,’ I said. ‘She’s got this flat with Karl. I’m going to go and live with them. Any day now.’

Lesley put her arm round me. Her voice was gentle, hesitant.

‘Catriona, my love, that’s not what she’s saying to us.’

My mother never came again.

They tried to get me foster parents. They were going to advertise in the Evening Standard, they said.

Lesley took the photograph with her smart new Polaroid.

‘Smile!’ she said. ‘Give me a lovely big smile. That’s wonderful—you look like Meg Ryan.’

I stood there, smiling my most important smile ever. I tried to make my whole self smiley, the corners of my mouth ached with smiliness.

Lesley showed me the ad. It said, ‘Catriona is a bright, pretty teenager with a real artistic talent. Her record of school attendance is excellent. Because of her troubled past, Catriona can be rather demanding at times. Catriona needs firm and consistent parenting.’

I thought about this, lying in bed at night in the orange light of the streetlamps, chilly under the candlewick, missing Aimee. I let myself think, just for a moment, about my foster family, what they might be like: nice food and lots of it, gentleness, and a soft bed with a duvet that tucked in at the back of your neck. And I wondered what it meant to be demanding.

No one was interested; no one even enquired about me. No one wants to adopt a fourteen-year-old girl who can be rather demanding, however bravely she smiles. I told myself I’d never thought it would happen, really, but there was a messy secret shame in admitting that I’d hoped.

I left the day I was sixteen. Two months before my birthday, Kevin from the Leaving Care team came to see me. My mother had been asking about me, he said. She’d moved abroad but she wanted to make contact, and did I want to see her. I said I didn’t, really. It was my decision, he said. He sorted out my benefit, found me a flat above a chip shop in Garratt Lane, and a furniture grant from a charity.

My birthday was Lesley’s day off, but she came to say goodbye. She held me close for a moment, a quick, hard, awkward hug. It embarrassed me; I wanted her to let go of me. But then, when she’d let go of me, I wished that she’d hold me again.

‘I hope you get them,’ she said. ‘Your wishes, the things you wanted. I’m wishing them for you, too.’

That evening, in my flat in Garratt Lane, I sat at my flimsy new table and such loneliness washed through me, and I briefly longed to be back at The Poplars, just to have people there.

But slowly I put some kind of a life together. I did some temping—I’d learnt to type at school. There were always boyfriends. I guess I was attractive enough: I wore my skirts short and my blonde hair long and did whatever they wanted. I used to worry that my clothes, my skin even, stank of the chip shop, but the men didn’t seem to care. I was, I suppose, promiscuous: I needed company in the evenings; I could only sleep through the night with somebody beside me. And if some of them were married—well, I reckoned, that was their responsibility. I never told them about myself and if they asked I made up something, recasting my life as unexceptional. After a month or two they usually drifted off, sensing I guess something in me that would for ever elude them. But from time to time there’d be one who said he loved me, and then I’d stop returning his calls, or say I was washing my hair, and after a while, he’d drift away, however keen he’d been.

Sometimes I thought I’d ring Kevin, and go and find my mother. I’d start to picture a reconciliation: her welcome, her apology, wrapping me in her arms and her scent of Marlboros and lily of the valley. But then I’d think how she’d neglected me and lied to me, and such rage would flare in me, and I knew I wouldn’t do it. So the days dragged on: a life of offices, all looking much the same, and vaguely unsatisfactory sex that was paid for with meals at Pizza Express and shots of tequila. It was lonely, but it was better than I was used to.

There are moments when everything changes. I believe that. Moments of destiny, of serendipity. And one hot summer evening much like any other, when I’d just got off the bus in Garratt Lane, I bumped into Miss Jenkins.

‘Catriona. What a nice surprise.’

She still had the hoops and the hippy cardigan, and she seemed so pleased to see me. She asked what I was doing. I shrugged a little, told her about the temping, though not the men.

She stood there for a while, her steady eyes on me. There was this school, she said. A nursery school, in Chelsea: private, expensive. Not really the sort of thing she approved of: nursery education ought to be free for everyone. But the headmistress was a friend of hers, they’d been at college together, and she happened to know they had a post going. I reminded her that I only had three GCSEs. She said it didn’t matter, it was a nursery assistant post, they needed someone who could help with the art. The reference wasn’t a problem, she said, she’d be more than happy to be my referee. I felt cool air against my face; I remember that, a sudden shift in the weather. We neither of us had anything to write on, so I borrowed her biro and scribbled the number on the back of my hand.

CHAPTER 10

The school was in a hushed street off King’s Road. There was a cottage, old and rather crooked, at the turn of the road, and a little arched door in the wall. I rang and the door opened: children’s noise rushed out into the stillness of the street. Miss Parry, the headmistress, introduced herself; she was tall, gangly, flatfooted as a heron, with vivid bird-like eyes. She took me through the cloakroom, where every peg had a different hand-painted picture—a duck, a tulip, a blue umbrella. This amazed me, the generosity of it, such detail lavished on every child, every name. And we went through the airy playroom, and out into the garden at the back, a storybook garden, a secret between high walls, with a labyrinth of twisty stone paths and trampled scraps of lawn, and, in the middle, steps down to an old well—now filled in, of course, said Miss Parry—where there grew an old catalpa tree with leaves as wide as hands; and over there by the sandpit, she said, the two mossy stones set into the lawn were Carolingian graves. The whole place was exuberant with children, and messy with the tumbled detritus of their play, plastic animals faded by the sunlight, and the tyres and boxes and blankets they used to make castles and dens; anarchic and disorderly, but the disorder held and contained by the walls of yellow London brick, and the narrow bright beds of hollyhocks and lupins that fringed the edges of the garden.

She showed me round, asked a few obvious questions, then left me in the playroom to see what I’d do. Cast adrift in that sea of children, I did what made me feel safest, and sat in the art corner drawing extravagant pictures, of flamboyant animals with wings and wicked fangs. The children gathered round, adding their own details, colouring in. After a while my self-consciousness fell away. I was surprised to turn and see Miss Parry behind me. She reached out to touch a doleful tiger I’d drawn. ‘I think you’ll do quite nicely here,’ she said.

It wasn’t perfect. There was a lot of drudgery, toilets to be cleaned, floors to be swept and swabbed, little plastic bits of things to sort and put back into boxes. And it was physically exhausting, particularly demanding perhaps because it was so unstructured, all these children who tugged at your sleeve with their urgency and demands. The pay was minimal—enough to pay the rent on my flat and to buy a bit of food, though mostly I lived on what I ate at the nursery, the lunches of sausage or stew followed by jelly and bland glossy custard; and just about enough for mascara, and bleach for my long hair, and occasionally a new pair of clingy jeans or a faded knitted top with rainbow beading from one of the second-hand stalls in King’s Road market. But mostly I was happy there. I found I had a skill with children, that I could join in their play, enter their worlds: I don’t know where it came from, this easy instinctive ability—it seems surprising given the fractured nature of my childhood. But for me there was something so satisfying in the company of these children, with their openness and freshness and unanswerable questions. Where was I before I was born? Are the birds cross? Why do winds in cartoons have faces? Maybe I had some sense that this was what I needed—these years spent eating toad-in-the-hole and playing and reading picture books in a place that was kind and generous, where every child was so precious they had their very own picture next to their peg. It was perhaps a kind of healing for me: a reliving or a recovering of childhood.