Postcards From Berlin (32 page)

“Yes, of course,” I tell her.

There’s a little silence. The policeman clears his throat.

“Well, then,” says my mother. She’s run out of things to say, to keep us there. The tentative light goes out in her. It’s
as though she shrinks, withdraws into herself.

“I’m sorry that we had to leave like this,” I tell her.

She shrugs a little. “Story of my life,” she says. “I never was very lucky.”

She moves her hands apart, palms outward, as though to show how empty they are.

“Don’t think too badly of me, darling,” she says.

Daisy holds up her face and my mother kisses her cheek. I see again how the warmth that she can’t quite manage with me comes
easily with Daisy.

“Now, see you get yourself well, Daisy,” she says. “Do that for me, won’t you?”

Daisy says she will.

My mother straightens up. “Well, no point in hanging about,” she says.

I put my hands on her shoulders. She pats my arms. We hold each other briefly. I smell her scent of Marlboros and lily of
the valley.

“All right, then,” she says.

The policeman opens the door. I pick up our bags, and my mother follows us out onto the landing and presses the timer switch.

“You’d better be quick,” she says. “You’ll find the light won’t last.”

On the plane, they give us seats together. Daisy seems exhausted: She slumps sideways into me, so I feel her warm weight against
me. Soon after takeoff she falls asleep. There are thunderstorms over Hanover and a lot of turbulence. The pilot warns us
about this, says he’s flying ten thousand feet lower to try and avoid the turbulence, but the plane still shudders and lurches,
and some of the passengers catch one another’s eyes and raise an eyebrow and smile with a determined, bright bravado. But
Daisy sleeps through everything, in the crook of my arm.

S
HE’S WAITING AT PASSPORT CONTROL
; I see her immediately. She must have seen a photograph — she’s coming straight to us; she knows who we are. She’s in her
fifties, rather severe, with neat gray academic hair. She shakes hands, introduces herself. She says that she is from the
Child Protection Unit; she has a copy of the order in her hand.

“So this must be Daisy?”

I nod.

She bends and says hello to Daisy.

Now it’s really happening, I feel a kind of heavy hope-lessfiess, everything weighing down on me, so I can scarcely move.

I kiss Daisy, bury my face in her hair.

“It won’t be for long,” I tell her.

The woman takes her hand. Daisy’s face is stiff, set. I see the struggle in her — how near to tears she is, and how afraid
of crying in this public place.

“She’ll be well looked after,” says the woman brightly.

“When can I ring?”

“I should leave it till nine,” she says. “Give her a little while to settle in.”

Daisy’s eyes move from me to the woman and back again, widening. Suddenly, it’s real to her. Her face crumples. She starts
to sob, noisily. She snatches her hand away from the woman; she clings to me, she wraps herself around me, I can feel her
whole body trembling.

“It’s best if we just get on with this,” says the woman. She takes Daisy’s hand again and pulls her away.

I watch as they go. Daisy’s shoulders are shaking. I’m worried because the woman is letting Daisy carry the bag and it’s too
heavy for her. Perhaps I should go after them and tell her. I wait till they get to the corner, to see if Daisy will turn,
but the woman is pulling at her and they don’t stop walking. I stand there, scaring after her. Long after they’ve gone from
sight, the sound of her crying tears at me.

I take a taxi home. The driver is friendly, but I can’t talk. The journey takes an age. The things I see seem remote, unreal,
the streets, the lines of traffic, as though there’s a wall of glass between me and the rest of the world.

We drive along the road by the park, and I start to think about Richard. I see us in the drawing room, Richard leaning against
the mantelpiece, looking at me with that uncomprehending look, me trying to explain. Picturing him, I rummage around in my
mind for my love for him, but somehow I can’t find it. I work out what to say. I will tell him that I’m sorry if I frightened
him. That maybe I acted in haste, but I felt I didn’t have a choice. That I felt cornered, helpless. But that now I am quite
determined to fight this diagnosis all the way, and I have found a solicitor, and, if he is still opposed, I shall instruct
her myself, with my mother’s money.…

But when I get home, his car isn’t there. It must have been raining; the tracks in the gravel where his car is normally parked
are filled with water. There are no lights on in the house.

I pay the taxi driver and go to unlock the door. I half expect a smell of whiskey to hit me, to find Richard sitting in darkness
at the kitchen table, drunk and full of talk; half hope for this because it might make it easier.

“Richard!”

There’s no reply. I am so geared up for this confrontation, its absence unnerves me.

The little red light on the answerphone is flashing in the hall. I press Play. Nicky’s voice. “Hi, Cat. Just checking everything’s
OK. Ring me! Lots or love.” Next, after the beep, a quick high-pitched cough. “This is Lauren Burns from Social Services for
Catriona and Richard Lydgate.” Her voice is brisk and sibilant; it resonates in the emptiness of the hall. “Just a reminder
that the case conference on Daisy is tomorrow morning — at ten-thirty at the infirmary, in the conference suite. I very much
hope you’ll both be able to make it.” I stop the machine for a moment and write the details down. Then Gina. “My dears, I
was just wondering how things were. I trust you’re over the worst with Daisy. Anyway — give me a ring.…” And at last the message
I’m looking for. “This is Meera Williams from Braisby and Jones, for Catriona. Listen, Catriona — I’m going to give you my
home phone number. You can ring me any time this evening.…”

Before I take off my jacket, I ring.

“Meera speaking.”

“This is Catriona Lydgate.”

“Catriona. Excellent,” she says. There’s warmth in her voice. “Now, Fergal said a bit about what’s been happening.”

I tell her about the case conference.

“Goodness. They were quick off the mark,” she says. “I think I should come with you. How would it be if we meet up first,
so you can fill me in?”

We agree to meet at nine-thirty next morning, in the hospital entrance.

And then there’s nothing more to do. I take off my jacket and leave it where it falls. I have an unnerving sense of not quite
being at home here, that if I called out, the voice of someone strange to me might reply. I don’t go upstairs. I can’t bear
to pass Daisy’s door, to see all the things that will make me feel her absence still more vividly. The scene at the airport
plays out again and again in my head — her face collapsing, the sound of her crying, the woman pulling her away. Wanting her
is a physical thing, like a constant ache or hunger. I can still smell the scent of her hair.

I go into the living room. It’s been tidied since I left. The peonies that I’d kept there though they were dripping petals
have all been cleared away. In the evening light, the room has a tenuous quality, as though it might dissolve, or blend into
something else entirely. Like a room in a dream, where you’re wandering through some vast house, looking for some indeterminate
thing you think you’ve lost or forgotten, moving through many interconnecting rooms, not knowing how big this place is or
what its boundaries are or whom it belongs to; whether it is yours, why you are there at all. The white mask gleams in the
remnants of the light; the black one seems to draw back into the shadow, so you can’t quite make out whether there’s a face
there. I see exactly why Daisy’s friends used to find them so frightening.

I’m far too anxious to rest here. I wander through to the kitchen. Things have been put away, but not in their usual places.
It takes me a while to find the coffee, which is not in the cupboard where I always keep it. I wait for the kettle to boil,
resting my hands on the sill, Outside, the garden is just as it was when we went, in all its summer sprawl and lavishness:
the amber roses opening, the flowers loosening, easing apart, and the poppies bright as carnival in the herbaceous border.
You can just make out the shape of the stone frog through the blue of the irises. Somehow this surprises me, that all is as
it was: I realize I expected everything to be further on, some things over and dying, new things opening out, as though we’d
been away for many days. Long braided shadows reach across the grass, and the sky is the color of cornflowers. A fox moves
out from the pool of black under the birch tree. He’s still for a moment, poised, his sharp, sad face angled toward me in
the window: staring at the house then turning away, as if he can’t find what he’s looking for, and sidling off into the intricate
dark at the back of the border.

There is no reason to stay. My bag, still packed, is in the hall. I don’t know if I’ll need it, but I take it anyway. I pick
up the bag and my jacket and go out to my car.

He answers the doorbell at once, as though he is expecting me.

The words tumble out. “Richard isn’t at home and Daisy’s in the unit and I didn’t know where to go.…”

He reaches out and puts his arms round me. I rest my head on his shoulder.

He takes me through to the back room. Jazz is playing, and through the open window you can smell the rich night scents of
the gardens.

“Did you speak to Meera?” he asks, before I’ve sat down.

“Yes. She seemed good. Thank you. There’s a case conference tomorrow.”

“And Daisy? Have you rung to see how Daisy is?”

“Not yet.”

“Ring them now,” he says.

“They said not to ring till nine.”

“I think you should do it now.”

He brings me the phone.

A woman answers. I explain who I am. She seems surprised I’ve rung.

“Oh. I’ll get someone,” she says.

A man comes to the phone — he says he is Terence, a charge nurse. His voice is soft, deliberate. He is Daisy’s key-worker,
he says. I try to imagine him, this soft-voiced Terence, this stranger, who is now my daughter’s main caregiver: try not to
immediately hate him. He answers all my questions with a rather exaggerated patience. Yes, Daisy is asleep now. No, she was
a bit too tired to eat anything. Well, she seemed OK, perhaps a bit subdued, but I must appreciate that children do take a
while to settle. I say to tell her I’m thinking about her all the time.

“There’s nothing more you can do,” says Fergal. “Not for today.”

“No.” I lean back on the sofa, slip off my shoes. I am exhausted but restless.

He brings me wine and sits in the chair opposite me.

“So tell me,” he says.

I tell him the story of what has happened. About my mother, and what I learned about my father. About the police, about Daisy
being taken away. He listens, doesn’t say much. Sometimes he nods a little.

When I’ve finished, we sit in silence for a moment.

“You look different,” he says.

“Is that good, I wonder?”

He smiles but doesn’t reply.

It’s getting darker: Outside, a yellow moon is rising over the gardens. The moon has a pattern on it; I can see why, when
I was a child, I half believed there was a face there. It’s soothing, sitting there in the quiet, darkening room. I feel that
I can breathe now.

He turns on a table lamp. In its amber light, I notice things about him: the line of his jaw, accentuated by shadow, his rather
square hands and bitten fingernails. When he looks at me, his eyes lingering on me, I feel that I am being told a secret.

The wine slides warmly into my veins.

“I feel as though I’ve been away for years,” I tell him. “When I got back to the house, it was strange — as though I hadn’t
been there for ages. Almost as though it wasn’t mine anymore …”

I yawn. A great weariness overwhelms me.

He’s looking at his hands.

“You can stay if you like,” he says. “You don’t have to go back there and be on your own.…”

I don’t know what to say.

“I mean, whatever you want,” he says.

I look away from him. I’m scared to sleep with him. And I see it isn’t the thought of Richard that stops me — as though my
connection with him has become too tenuous, too frayed, for this to matter, and this shocks me. The fear is a deeper, more
primeval thing, some superstitious sense of justice — that if I make love to Fergal I won’t get Daisy back.

“Look,” he says, reading my mind, “the bed’s made up in the spare room.”

“Yes. That would be best, probably.”

But when I get up, I go to him, reach out, moving my hands across his face, his head, like somebody blind, learning about
him. He wraps himself around me. I press my mouth into his, closing my eyes.

In the little whitewashed spare room, under the Traidcraft bedspread, I think at first that I will be awake forever. But something
has been soothed in me, and I slip down rapidly into sleep. In my dream, I am walking the cobbled streets of Prenzlauer Berg
in the dappled afternoon, and I pass the graying block where the stucco is peeled away, revealing the naked brick, and I see
the little girl high up on the balcony by the empty birdcage, the girl in the taffeta dress, and in my dream she seems to
look like Daisy. I wave, but she doesn’t see me; she is looking away. I try to call, but no sound comes, and she turns and
goes back into the darkness of the house, leaving me desolate.

I
N THE MORNING
, Fergal wakes me with coffee.

Before I go to the case conference, I ring the number that he has, the doctor at Great Ormond Street. I speak to the doctor’s
secretary; I explain that we need a second opinion, half expecting that she will say this is impossible. But she makes a provisional
appointment, as though my request is the most natural thing. All she will need, she says, is a letter from Daisy’s GP.