The Perfect Mother. Margaret Leroy

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