The Perfect Mother Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 frontof 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
    T he 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’tquite 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