Postcards From Berlin (2 page)

The women are reminiscing about recent toy obsessions — Furbies, and Pokémon, and Tamagotchis, the pocket computer animals
that you have to feed and care for. Natalie’s mother saw a woman at a school concert who had three Tamagotchis hanging round
her neck, so she could look after them: Now, that is going too far; I mean, she was really under the thumb. 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 chose
me. She’s wearing a sleeveless top in spite of 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 anymore.

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 has leather skirts and boots with molded rubber soles 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 toward 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; maybe we couldn’t ever be. 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 toward me. Kate’s mother and Natalie’s mother move
away.

He smiles at me: His eyes are gray 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.

Nicky 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 each other 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 wail. It’s just behind me.

“Who did the painting?” he asks.

“I did.”

“I wondered if it was you,” he says. “I like it.”

I feel a little awkward, 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 asks.

“Do what?”

“Run yourself down like that?”

“Probably. I guess it’s irritating.”

“We both smile.

“When you paint, is it always flowers?” he asks.

“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?”

I nod, flattered he should ask. “There’s a gift shop in Kingston that takes them sometimes.”

He looks 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 realize 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 gray 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 recognize 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 Saint 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 asks.

“I don’t.” Then, biting back the urge to apologize for my life, that must sound so passive — “I mean, not outside the home.
I used to work in a nursery school. 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 tells me a bit about his work: He’s a journalist, he says. And he
asks what I’m painting now and where my ideas come from. But the mood is spoiled, 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. 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 learned how to make from a booklet I bought at the toy shop 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 favorite. And just when you’ve stopped
expecting it, it comes, the weasel’s pounce, down into some poor defenseless 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.

S
INEAD 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 Richard, 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 her Nintendo and various Beanies and yesterday’s clothes are scattered. Her
favorite 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
Hideous Kinky
. 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 asks.

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

“It’s the pantomime. Granny and Granddad 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. Each of the girls has her 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 stomachaches: 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 irridescent, 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 Walkman.

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 pillow slip.
He looks older first thing in the morning, and without 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 the medicine 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.”